True Crime (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said again—I was speaking before I even thought of what to say. “To bother you, to disturb you, now, at a time like this.”

The old man nodded vaguely.

“Michelle was really a terrific reporter,” I said. I didn’t correct the tense this time. I put my glasses back on. The smeared lenses blurred my vision. “A top-notch reporter,” I stumbled on. “When she did a story, she … well, she got everything, every detail. See? And she kept it all here. And there’s a man—an innocent man—and they’re going to execute him. Tonight. See? And I think there may be something here, something in these papers that could save his life.”

To my surprise, that seemed to interest him. He came out of his trance. He considered me more carefully. “Something Michelle did?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yes. I came here to look for it. That’s why I …” I gestured back at the door.

He seemed to consider this, working his slack lips, bobbing his shriveled head, his eyes unfocused. I could hear the traffic going by outside. I could hear my watch ticking.

“So,” he said finally, “look.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. Thanks.”

I went to work. I could feel him still watching me as I knelt down among the dust balls. Bewildered at first by the sheer number of stacks and boxes all around me, I swiveled this way and that, searching for someplace to begin. In the end, I just grabbed the pile of newspapers closest to me. I
riffled through the top few. There was no order to them that I could see. They were just old papers. I pushed them to one side. Sweat ran into my glasses again. I took them off, tucked them into my shirt pocket. I drew my sleeve across my face as more droplets of sweat pattered into the film of dust on the floor. I reached for a cardboard box and dragged it toward me. Dug through it, plucking out notebooks, flipping through them, peering at Michelle’s small, pinched but legible hand. Most of the notes dealt with an old murder trial, a woman who’d shot her husband in the back of the head while he slept. I remembered that one. Michelle insisted it was self-defense. She almost brained me when I laughed at her. I dropped the notebooks back into the box and pushed it next to the newspapers. My face was covered with water, my lungs ached, as I crawled over the floor, as the dust balls scattered before me and stuck, in a gritty film, to my palms.

And all the while, I felt the old man, felt him above me, scrutinizing me with those damp, yellowing eyes. I caught hold of another box.

He cleared his throat. “You’re her friend,” he said then. “You said … you’re her friend.”

I glanced up at him. Without my glasses, he was an unclear figure. “Yeah. I like her a lot.” I looked down and continued to dig through the box.

“That’s nice,” he said after a while. “You seem like a nice man. Some of the men she dates …”

“No, I didn’t date her.” The box seemed to hold a random collection of clips about atrocities, America being atrocious to other countries, whites being atrocious to blacks, men being atrocious to women. “We never dated.” I tossed the atrocities back into the box and pushed it aside.

He sounded impressed. “You’re just … her friend, you mean.”

“Yeah.” I grabbed another stack of papers and went
through it only briefly before shoving it with the others. My head was beginning to feel light. I needed to open a window, get some air, but I didn’t want to waste the time. I moved closer to the bed where the old man was sitting.

“It’s nice she has a friend,” he said. “Such a smart girl, such a pretty girl, but she never … She didn’t have many friends.”

I was about to say that everyone liked her—the way you do, you know—automatically. But the lie caught in my throat and I just took hold of another box and started digging again.

“She always seemed to me,” Mr. Ziegler said slowly, “such an—
angry
person.”

I stopped what I was doing. I coughed dust. He was clearer to me now that I was closer. I could see him appealing to me through the terrible strain scored into his face.

“Yeah,” I said. I figured he was appealing for the truth of it. “Yeah, she was pretty angry, I guess.”

Swiping my face again, I dug deeper into the box.

“Why?” he said above me. “Why was she so … so
angry
all the time?”

“Well. You know. She had a lot of theories. I guess she thought the world was supposed to be a better place.”

“What made her think that?” said Mr. Ziegler.

“I dunno, sir. It always seemed about as good as it deserved to me.” I could make nothing out of the stuff in this box. Random notebooks, sheets of paper. I shoved it aside and caught hold of the next.

“Everyone … everyone seems so angry nowadays,” said the old man sadly.

“Do they?”

“Everyone.”

“I guess. But I think maybe that’s only in the newspapers. You can’t believe all that stuff. We like to write about angry people. You know: it’s exciting, makes for controversy.”
This box was foil of books. Feminist stuff mainly. A lot of books with
Syndrome
and
Trap
in the titles. I pulled a few out and saw the plastic bag foil of marijuana at the bottom. Quickly, I replaced the books to cover the bag. “Most people I think are just trying to get by.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. The walls seemed to accordion in and out around me. I pushed myself to my feet. “I gotta open a window,” I said.

I wavered on my legs a moment as the blood rushed down from my head. I was afraid I was going to faint. But the feeling passed. I made my way across the room. I raised the Venetian blind on the central window. There was no shock of light. The eastern sky above the low buildings opposite was turning a rich indigo. The sun was setting. The night was very near.

I wrestled the big window up. The air and the traffic noise came in together. The heat of the room made the air feel nearly cool. It felt fresh on my face, drying my skin. It felt good in my lungs. My head began to steady as I breathed it in. I removed my glasses from my pocket, held them to the light, pulled my shirtfront free of my pants and wiped the lenses clean before putting them back on. I wanted a cigarette pretty badly, but it seemed disrespectful to light up somehow.

Behind me, Mr. Ziegler cleared his throat loudly. “I don’t think …” he said. “I don’t think she liked men. She would write things sometimes. She would send them to her mother. I don’t think she liked men.”

Jesus Christ
, I thought,
what does he want from me?
I ran both hands up over my hair, combing out the excess water. “Yeah, well,” I said to the open window. “Men and women. You know how that is. She was angry. Like I say, she had a lot of theories. She was still very young, you know.”

I faced the room again, the discouraging piles and boxes, still so many. My gaze went over them.

“When girls … when they hate men like that, when they lump them all together like that,” said Mr. Ziegler, nodding to himself, “they’re really just talking about their fathers, aren’t they?”

“Uh … Jeeze.” I laughed weakly. If I knew anything about human nature, I wanted to say, do you think I would be a journalist? Instead I said something like: “Well … People, you know. We all make these generalizations. It’s all nonsense. Believe me, sir, I write the stuff for a living. It’s all crap.”

Struck by a stray idea, I looked over at the table to my right. At once, my eye lit on the headline:
Beachum to Die
.

Of course: It was the story she’d been working on; it was in the box nearest the table where she worked. The box was pulled up alongside the table’s legs with the cord to the laptop winding round the side of it. I wouldn’t have noticed it before, from where I was. But standing here by the window, the newspaper cutting stuck out of the box and was clear enough from across the room.

When I saw it, I felt unsteady again, my center hollow and tremulous. Slowly, I walked over and knelt by the box. I began to work my fingers through the papers inside. It was all here. All the Beachum stuff: newspapers, notebooks, loose sheets, xeroxed memoranda. And there was another box next to it full of the same.

That Michelle, I thought. She got everything. She kept everything. She would have been one of the good ones.

I settled onto the floor and began pulling the pages out, scanning them carefully before tossing them aside. I wanted to read all of it, go over everything, looking for clues, but there was no time. I could only run my eyes down each piece for a second, each graph of every memo, each page of every notebook, each story in every paper, skimming them hungrily,
searching for a name that Michelle wouldn’t even have noticed, a name I didn’t even know.

I was working down past the surface of the first box when Mr. Ziegler cried out. That is, he clenched his two hands above his knees and emitted a ragged rasp as if a thought were being physically torn from his mind.

“How can they ask a father
…?” he said.

I glanced at him. The sweat was gathering on my forehead again and I swiped at it with my sleeve to keep it off my glasses.
Damn it, damn it
, I thought.
He’s gonna blow up. I’ll never get this done
. But a moment later, his fists sank down to his thighs. His head drooped again. I turned away, back to the box. I went on with my work, pulling out another notebook.

“You try to do right by them,” he explained behind me. He seemed to be arguing now with an invisible adversary. “How do you know what they need? Do you think they come with instructions?” Then his voice fell. “ ‘Turn off the machine,’ they tell you,” he murmured. I did not look at him. I went through the papers. “Her own father.”

After that, he was quiet for a long time. The sough and rumble of traffic drifted in through the window on the air. The paper crackled as I went deeper into the box on Beachum, as I went over the pages, page by page, page after page.

Even so, as thorough as I was, I almost missed it. It would’ve been easy enough to do. It was scrawled quickly on the cardboard backing of a notebook. Something Michelle had copied off the records in some cop’s file probably. She probably hadn’t even meant to follow it up. It was just that she wrote down everything she found, always. That’s how she was. Half the time, she had no idea what it was she had come across.

But I did. I knew. It was him. It was the shooter.

Warren Russel. 17-yrs. 4331 Knight Street. Intvwd July
7th at own request. Drove to Pocum’s lot for soda as NL left. Saw nothing
.

For seconds, I just knelt there, the notebook clutched in my hand, the sweat from my fingers making the ink at the page ends run.

Michelle, god damn it
, I thought.
You idiot. You dumb, dumb broad. You would’ve been so good. You would’ve been one of the best
.

Then I read the scribbled note again. Warren Russel. Seventeen. That was him, all right. It had to be. No one else was there. If Frank Beachum was innocent, then Russel must have come in after he left and pulled the trigger. I gazed at the name on the page as the writing blurred. Warren Russel, I thought. Warren Russel. I’d found him. I’d found the bastard who gunned Amy Wilson down.

I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm myself. The air was full of dust. I could feel it coating my windpipe. I tried to think clearly. Knight Street, I thought. Knight Street. Up near Olivette. I could be there in fifteen minutes, twenty tops.

I slowly lowered my hand. My eyes roved the room aimlessly until they came to Mr. Ziegler. He was slumped once again there on the edge of the bed, his head drooping, his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped between his thighs. His mouth was moving, silently. He was talking to himself. I stared at him without really seeing him.

And then what? I thought. Once I got to Knight Street. What would I do then?

There was no question in my mind of calling in the police. I had a few friends on the force, but they weren’t going to lose their jobs for me. They wouldn’t move on something like this without the say-so of the CA. But to go there alone, confront this guy, a gunman, a killer, alone. What would I do? Wag my finger at him and say, “Come on now, boy-o, fair is fair.” On top of which, the address was
six years old. How many seventeen-year-old kids stay at one address for six years?

I worked my way to my feet, the notebook still clutched tightly in my hand. No matter, I decided. No matter what, I would have to try. What else was there for me to do? I would have to go out there and hope he was still around, and hope he wouldn’t shoot me, and hope he would confess. Or something.

It was after seven-thirty. I only had four and a half hours left. It didn’t leave me a lot of time to get creative. I would have to try.

“I found it,” I said, but the words hardly came out, hardly made a sound.

Still, Mr. Ziegler lifted his head. “Is that so much to ask?” he said, continuing his silent conversation out loud. “With all their fancy education, all their gadgets. Fancy medical big shots. Just one minute they could make her hear me. So I could
tell
her.”

I removed my glasses for a second and massaged my temples with my hand. I was getting a headache now too. “I have to go,” I said.

The energy just went out of him. His head dropped back down.

I walked to the door, pausing, bending to scoop up my tire iron as I went. I straightened then, half turned toward the bed, toward the old man. I couldn’t think what to say. I gestured with the notebook.

“I found what I needed,” I told him. He didn’t answer. “I knew she’d have it. She would’ve been a great reporter one day, she …” My voice trailed off. I stood there uselessly. I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, the cracked, filthy plaster.
Jesus
, I thought. And I thought of Luther Plunkitt. In the parking lot outside the prison. With that smile stuck on his face, with that terrible knowledge buried in his eyes.
Nobody ever really knows what’s right, but somebody always has to press the button. That’s the way of it.

“I think she would understand, Mr. Ziegler,” I said finally. The words tasted like ashes in my mouth—how did I know whether she would?—but it was all I could come up with for him. “I think she would understand.”