True Crime (2 page)

So, as I say, I have tried to understand the ideas and perceptions of as many of the participants in this drama as I could in order to show how they were tested. Frank Beachum, of course, was chief among them. He was the one, with his faith in traditional Christianity, and his old-fashioned notions of manhood, who was carried direct into
the crucible. But there is also his wife, Bonnie, his jailer, Luther Plunkitt, his minister, Harlan Flowers, assorted pols and lawyers and journalists—and me, naturally, last and, for all I know, least.

Again, I leave it to the reader to decide how all of us weathered our midnight confrontation with the undeniable.

I wish to thank all the people who so generously agreed to be interviewed for this book, both those mentioned in the text and others, too numerous to name, who provided background.

I wish to thank my agent, Barney Karpfinger, for his unfailing support.

And I wish to thank the Ford Motor Company.

—Steven Everett

F
rank Beachum awoke from a dream of Independence Day. His last dream before the hour, a cruel dream, really, in a sleep that had been strangely sound, considering. He had been in his backyard again, before his trip to the grocery, before the picnic, before the police had arrived to take him away. The heat of the summer’s morning had come back to him. He had heard the sound of the lawn mower again. He had felt the mower’s handle pressed against his palms and even smelled the mown grass. He had heard her voice too, Bonnie’s voice, as she called to him from the screen door. He had seen her face, her face the way it had been, pert and compact under short, tawny hair, pale—not pretty, she was never pretty—but given luster by her large, tender and encouraging blue eyes. He saw her holding the bottle up, the bottle of A-1 Sauce. She had been waggling it back and forth to show that it was empty. He had stood in his backyard under the hot sun, and his little girl, Gail, had been a baby again. Sitting in her sandbox again, the plastic one shaped like a turtle. Whacking the sand with her shovel and laughing to herself, to the world in general.

It had all been to Frank as if he were really there. It hadn’t seemed like a dream at all.

For several moments after he awoke, he lay as he was, on his side, his eyes closed, facing the wall. His mind gripped at the dream, held on to it with terrible longing. But
the dream dissolved mercilessly and, bit by bit, the Death-watch cell came back to him. He became aware of the cot beneath his shoulder, the white cinderblock wall just in front of his face. He turned over—half-hoping.… But there were the bars of the cage door. There was the guard on the other side, sitting at his long desk, typing up the chronological:
6:21—prisoner awakes
. The clock hung high on the wall above the guard’s bowed head. Seventeen hours and forty minutes were left before they strapped Frank down on the gurney, before they wheeled him into the execution chamber for the injection.

Frank lay back on the cot and blinked up at the ceiling. The wise Chinaman says that when a man seems to dream of being a butterfly, he may truly be a butterfly dreaming he’s a man. But the wise Chinaman is wrong. Frank knew the difference, all right; he always knew. This leaden weight that encased him like his skin, this inner tonnage of sadness and terror: this was the real stuff; he knew it was the living stuff. He closed his eyes and for another aching second or two, he could still smell the mown grass. But not like he could feel the movement of the clock’s hands, not like his nerve-ends picked up the passing of time.

He clenched his fists at his sides. If only Bonnie wouldn’t come, he thought. It would be all right, if Bonnie wouldn’t come to say good-bye. And Gail. She was no baby anymore; she was seven now. She drew him pictures of trees and houses with her Crayolas. “Hey,” he’d say, “that’s really good, sweetheart.”

That was going to be the worst of it, he thought. Sitting with her, with them, the time passing. That, he was afraid, would be more than he could bear.

Slowly, he sat up on the edge of his cot. He put his hands over his face as if to rub his eyes, and then kept them there a long moment. That damned dream had made him heartsore with longing for the old days. He had to steady
himself or the longing would weaken him. That was his greatest fear. That he would go weak now. If Bonnie saw him break at the end—or, God help him, if Gail did.… It would be with them their whole lives. It would be their memory of him forever.

He sat up and drew breath. He was a six-foot man, slim and muscular in his loose green prison pants and his baseball shirt stenciled CP-133. He had shaggy brown hair that fell on his brow in a jagged shock. His face was lean and furrowed and he had close-set eyes that were brown, deep and sad. He dragged his thumb across his lips, wiping them dry.

He felt the guard’s gaze on him and glanced over. The guard had raised his eyes from the typewriter and was looking Frank’s way. Reedy was the guard’s name. A wiry boy with a severe white face. Frank remembered hearing that he had worked at the local drugstore before coming to Osage. He seemed nervous and embarrassed today.

“Morning, Frank,” he said.

Frank nodded at him.

“Can I get you anything? Some breakfast?”

Frank’s stomach felt bad, but he was hungry all the same. He cleared his throat to keep from sounding hoarse. “If you got a roll and some coffee, I’ll take that,” he said. His voice trembled just a little at the end.

The guard paused to type the request into his chronological report. Then he stood up and talked to the other guard stationed outside the cell door. The other guard poked his head in through the door. He looked nervous, too, and pale. He seemed to receive Frank’s breakfast order with great respect and gravity. There was an air of ceremony to the whole procedure. It made Frank nauseous: one step following the next in an inevitable ritual. As the minutes followed each other.

“We’ll have that for you right away,” Reedy told him solemnly. He returned to his desk and sat down. He typed
the transaction into his report:
6:24—Breakfast order relayed to CO Drummer
.

Seated on the edge of his cot, Frank looked down at his feet now. He tried to put poor nervous Reedy out of his mind. He tried to focus his thoughts, block out everything, until he felt as if he were alone. He put his hands between his knees and clasped them. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He began to pray: his morning prayer.

It steadied him. He was always aware, every moment, that the eye of God was on him, but when he prayed, he could feel the eye, there, above him, very clearly. The eye was motionless, unblinking and dark, like those cameras in the ceilings of elevators that watch you just when you feel most secluded and alone. When he prayed, Frank remembered that he was not alone and he felt that eye watching him. Behind that eye, he told himself, there was a whole other world, a whole other system of justice, better than the state of Missouri’s. To that system, and to its judge, he appealed as he prayed.

He prayed for strength. It wasn’t for himself he was asking, he said, it was for his wife, for Bonnie, and for their little girl. He asked Jesus to take them into consideration now, on this final day. He prayed that he’d be given the strength to tell them good-bye.

After a while, he did feel stronger. The dream was half forgotten. He raised his gaze to the clock on the wall. And he felt the eye of God was ever on him.

N
ow, the eye of God and the eye of the news media are frequently mistaken for one another, especially by the news media. But whether or not Frank Beachum was being watched over by the former, one member of the latter had him firmly in her heart and mind.

Michelle Ziegler of the
St. Louis News
was a formidable creature. Young, a kid really, only twenty-three. But her insecurities didn’t show, and her good looks did, and so did an alluring, intelligent and grim hauteur that struck terror in the hearts of men and an envious disdain in the minds of women. Myself, I kind of liked her. She had a soft, oval face with a Roman nose and large brown eyes that saw enough to make you sweat. She dressed like what she was: a high-octane college girl set loose upon the world. Button-down blouses that emphasized her figure—a shape that would’ve been called graceful when grace was still a concept. And skirts so short that some of the less mature males on the
News
staff had a running pool on the color of her panties. I’d won forty dollars in it once when I hit pink three times in a row.

She was a good reporter, or was going to be one day. She had authority, and people talked to her; I think they were afraid not to. What’s more, some vast, uncompromising social vision in that big brain of hers erased whatever qualms she might’ve had about her methods. She was willing to flirt,
lie, blackmail, terrorize and steal to get her hands on information. Any information: when she was on a story, she collected every detail, every document, every quote from every involved person she could find—most of which she never referred to again but kept stored in cardboard boxes tossed around the crazy loft she lived in. She couldn’t write very well, and her college ideologies were so thick and fervent on the page that the editors who had to rewrite them had nicknamed her stories “Incoming Michelle Fire.” But once you cut all that stuff out—and luckily the editors usually did—she always got the facts, did Michelle, every single time.

She had been assigned to the Beachum case about six months before: a token of Bob Findley’s respect for her talents. She had a press ticket to witness the execution and had even somehow managed to wangle a last-minute face-to-face interview with the condemned. That interview—I have to say that inspired my respect right there. It violated the prison’s protocol, which cut off press contact with the prisoner even by phone after 4:00
P.M
. on the last day. I’d had dealings with Osage’s warden, Luther Plunkitt, and had found him about as flexible on such rules as a brick wall. Michelle must have stripped naked to get permission for that interview, which she would’ve done too; she was thoroughly unscrupulous. I like that in a person.

The evening before she was scheduled to go down to the prison—that Sunday evening—Michelle strode across the city room to my desk for a professional conference on some of the angles of the case. She tapped her elegant fist against the surface of my desk and smiled with that brand of wry fury that made strong editors quail.

“Fuck ’em,” she quipped.

I sighed. I had had a long weekend—people kept shooting each other—and was looking forward to taking tomorrow off. I had just been leaning back in my chair for one last
violation of the paper’s no-smoking policy before heading home to the little woman. I reached under my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. I did not have the energy for a serious journalistic discussion.

“I’m through with this,” Michelle went on. “I’m serious.” She paced once, back and forth in the aisle behind me. “I’m going back to school. I’m going to get my Ph.D. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to write things that matter.”

“Michelle,” I said, “I hate to break this to you, but you’re twenty-three: you don’t know anything that matters.”

That wry smile again, but she laughed in spite of herself. “And fuck you, Ev,” she said.

I laughed in spite of her too. I really did like Michelle. “All right,” I said, “what did they do?”

“He. Alan. Mann.” Three sentences for one guy. She was plenty mad. “The Great White Male of the Universe. He killed my sidebar on the Beachum case. I worked on it for two weeks. He just overrode Bob. Just—overrode him. It was the best thing about the story.”

I tried to look sympathetic. It wasn’t easy. I’d snuck a look at that sidebar of hers in the computer. It was dyed-in-the-wool Michelle Fire, all right. The angle was that we were only covering Beachum’s execution so closely because he was white and thus we were obscuring the large number of blacks on death row while also deifying Beachum’s pregnant victim in order to mask the patriarchal culture which had created the violence that killed her in the first place. Well, don’t look at me; that was the angle. Personally, I thought Alan had shown unusual restraint by merely killing it. I would’ve tortured it first.

Michelle stood there, glaring at me, waiting for me to respond, her fist pressed against my desktop again. Finally, to cheer her up, I said, “Well, at least you still get to watch the execution. That’s always kind of a kick.”

She flushed. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth: her signal that I had transgressed beyond the bounds of human understanding.

“No, I mean it,” I said. “I did one once in Jersey. They’re exciting. And, hell, considering the people they do it to, you know, it’s really good clean fun.”

Her mouth still closed, her knuckles rapped against my desk. “I don’t know. Why. I keep talking to you,” she said, as if she had broken a resolution to refrain from that pleasure. “I don’t know why I keep talking to you at all.”

Whereupon, with a deep breath to still her fury, she left me and went zigzagging off between the city room desks.

I put my feet up on my own desk and went on smoking. To be honest, I didn’t know why she kept talking to me either. But she did. I suppose it was yet another of life’s many mysteries.

Michelle went home that night in what must have been one of her blacker moods. She lay on the bed in her loft for about three hours, brooding as the last of the summer day died. After a while, she smoked a joint to loosen her clutched nerves.

Her loft, as I say, was a crazy place, huge, somber, furnished as her room in college had been with boxes, and dust balls, stacks of old newspapers and half-read books and tracts. It was on the third floor of a white brick warehouse that had been home to the
Globe-Democrat
before it went under. The newspaper’s sign with its globe logo still hung over the door outside. Only one of the other lofts in the place was occupied, and the street the building was on was a bland industrial corridor—gas stations, car lots and fast food joints—that bled up into the slums of the north. But Michelle loved that loft intensely, felt it around her intensely: because of the globe logo and because it was one block away from the
Post-Dispatch
and a block and a half from the
News
itself. Because it reeked for her with the scent, shone for her with the aura of
newspapers. Newspapers
, which had been big with romance for her in school. Agents for social change, history on the instant, battlegrounds of opinion. She had believed all that nonsense. She loved newspapers. Even now. She loved them still.