True Crime (3 page)

Today, however, the place only depressed her further. As the yellow stripes of the sinking sun withdrew into the slits of the venetian blinds and faded away, she sucked her reefer and peered through the smoke at those boxes strewn everywhere. Boxes filled with loose papers and notebooks and crumpled documents. Overflowing with details, with facts, with the forgotten minutiae of the stories she worked on. Scraps that she collected with the helpless instinct of an autumn squirrel. They had her buried in them, she told herself. Alan Mann. Bob Findley. They had her drowning in details, petty facts, minutiae. When she thought about the things she had written in college … Big things that mattered. Theories that had made her the star of the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley. Harridan and Eunuch University, I used to call it, when I wanted to get a rise out of her. She had felt brilliant there. Dissecting racism and patriarchy; exposing the oppressiveness of European culture; expounding on Foucault—sweet Foucault!—and the inner tyranny of free societies. In those bygone days, she had felt that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors. And now she was swamped and stuck and sinking in these boxes, these scraps, these meaningless, sweepless details.

And what depressed her most, what made her sick at heart as she lay toking on the bed, was that she had begun to realize—had begun, at least, to half suspect—that this was the very reason she had taken the job at the
News
. She had begun to half confess to herself that she loved these boxes, their crumpled pieces of paper, their insignificant and disparate
facts—these
stories
—more than she loved the Women’s Studies Department at dear old Harridan and Eunuch U.

So she sat in the loft for about three hours, brooding and smoking, until her forehead felt acres wide and her brain was floating in it. Then, no less nervy than she’d been before, she jumped up and headed out the door into the empty urban territories of Sunday night.

She drove her little red Datsun down to Laclede’s Landing by the river, hoping to find some activity there, some life. For the next half hour or so, she haunted the cobbled lanes between the red-brick buildings, wandering from old-fashioned streetlamp to streetlamp, sniffing loftily at the passing shadows of tourists and their children: the Great American Ignorant, who did not know what she knew. At last, she alighted in a jazz joint that had remained open for just this degraded trade. She set herself up alone at a small round table and started drinking bourbon with a fine chaser of melancholy. At the front of the room, a trio of elderly white men seemed to be playing “St. Louis Blues” over and over again. She shook her head at them with detached superiority and went on drinking.

She was not alone for long. A young man spotted her, a medical intern who had been on the prowl all night. He stood at the bar, a scotch in his hand, and ran his eyes over her. Michelle had now unbuttoned the top of her blue blouse. Her navy skirt ended high on her thighs. The intern knew his business and sensed her mood. He detached himself at once from the bar’s brass railing and sharked his way toward her across the nearly empty room.

His name was Clarence Hagen. He was handsome in a pretty way, with a lot of coiffed hair and a rakish smile that said: Sure I’m full of shit but ain’t I cute? He sat at Michelle’s table, bought her drinks and disparaged the flaccid-faced clientele until Michelle let loose. Then, expertly, he
alternately knit his brows with interest and reeled back in his chair at the clarity of her concepts. Encouraged, the drunken girl unleashed the flood of her wisdom, explained the culture of a continent to him in the comfortable, eager, machine-gun patter of her lost college days. Oh, Michelle knew he was a son-of-a-bitch. She was smart enough for that. But she thought that knowing gave her the upper hand. She felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care, powerful in her freedom as she toyed with the man. She felt much better than she had since Alan had killed her sidebar, that was for certain.

She and Hagen left the club together, his arm around her shoulders, her hip rubbing comfortably against his thigh. They got into their separate cars and headed out to University City, where Hagen lived. Michelle tagged after his Trans Am in her Datsun. She had to fight to keep the wheel steady and to keep her eyes open as she drove. After about twenty minutes, they parked in front of the three-story mock Tudor that the intern shared with two other young medical men. Young Clarence escorted Michelle inside.

And there, he fucked her, pistonlike, quickly, in a bedroom downstairs. Michelle was so drunk by then that she started to fade even while he was still pumping away. She wafted to the ocean bed of her own mind and lay there with some other man on some future day when life would be simple and she would be loved. After a while, she noticed that Clarence, finished, was snoring on top of her. She struggled out from under him and curled up at the edge of the bed, as far from him as she could. She told herself that she still felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care and that Alan Mann could go to hell and so there. She told herself that this was Life; then she passed out.

And that was how the reporter for the
St. Louis News
spent the night before her death row interview with Frank Beachum.

*   *   *

Around six-thirty the following morning—just as Beachum was awaking from his dream—Michelle forced her crusted eyelids apart and wished, as Beachum wished, that she was in any other place. She recoiled from the sleeping Hagen as if he were a slug and stumbled, naked, into the bathroom, to piss and wash her face. She leaned over the toilet for a while, thinking she might vomit. When she didn’t, she stood up trembling violently. She was not a crier, but now she had to force herself not to cry.

Hagen awoke as she was dressing. He sat up in bed, his head in his hands. Michelle buttoned herself up quickly. She could not think of anything he could say to her that wouldn’t make her want to kill him.

“You want some coffee?” he mumbled.

“Just shut up,” she said.

“Hey!” he said. “What did I do?” As she walked out, he muttered a curse after her and waved good riddance. Then he dropped back onto the sheets with his arms wide, and his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

Michelle walked out through the kitchen where Clarence’s roommates greeted her with a pair of sleepy leers that incinerated her spirit. She slammed out the front door and wobbled down the path to her car.

She drove until she found a nearby McDonald’s. She got her coffee there and drank it in the parking lot, pacing up and down the Datsun’s length. She cursed Hagen and his manhood first, but it simply wouldn’t serve.
Stupid!
she told herself finally.
How can you be so smart and be so stupid?
A truck driver, roaring past on the boulevard, shouted an obscene remark at her—something about putting his head under her short skirt. It made Michelle feel filthy and horrible and she climbed back in behind the wheel of the car.

And there, at last, she did begin to cry. Her face just crumpled like a child’s and, like a child, she despaired. She
wept and moaned aloud, her throat contracting until she felt she would choke on her own tears. She held her head and bowed it, and shook it back and forth, her black hair whipping her face. Despair, despair. Alone, so terribly alone. No boyfriend since high school. No friends since college. No real friends there; she was too above them. Her social life was all errors in judgment. Her career—on which she relied for self-respect—was in a pit. She knew everything about everything and nothing about anything and she could not get a handle on how she was supposed to live her life. So, in her wisdom, she believed.

“My life is shit,” she spat out angrily, hurting herself, crying. “My life is such shit.”

By about 7:05
A.M
., she had cried herself out and felt better. Sniffling, she threw the empty coffee cup into the backseat: into the landfill of empty coffee cups back there, and fast food containers and yellowing newspapers and notebooks and press releases. With a shuddering sigh, she pushed the little red car into drive. She had come to a decision, she told herself. She knew what she was going to do. The car screeched out onto the road, weaving wildly.

Someone probably should have stopped her then. God knows, the cops have a hard job of it on the road; they can’t be everywhere. Still in all, someone probably should have pulled her over the night before, driving out there, drunk as she was. And she wasn’t much better this morning. Her head felt feverish and thick. Her sinuses were jammed up. Her stomach felt like an upside-down volcano. Her vision was gamy and blurred, what with all the booze and dope and all that crying. Even she knew she was thinking with rusted cogs; thinking slowly, reacting slowly. But hell, she’d driven home like this before. She’d done it plenty of times. She’d never had an accident yet. She figured it was going to be all right this time too.

It was all right—at first, on the broad boulevard leading
back to the city’s edge. The Monday morning traffic was fast, but it was still pretty sparse. Michelle attached her gaze to the red taillights of the car in front of her, let them draw her along like the stare of a vampire, sped after them in a nodding trance. She was thinking about her decision. She was nodding to herself, her lips pressed together tight. She was going to stay at the paper, she thought. It was what she was born for; she knew it, and she wouldn’t let any of them make her quit. She was smarter than they were—Alan, Bob, me—she was smarter than all of them and she was going to be better than all of them put together. They didn’t have to like her, she announced to herself, they just had to put her into print.…

She grimaced as her bowels roiled. She needed to go to the bathroom badly, but she didn’t want to stop. She wanted to get home and shower her own idiocy off her and start again and make it right and make Alan Mann eat her pieces word by word. She was going to go on talking to Everett, she thought. Everett was going to teach her. He was the best of them, bastard that he was, and she was going to make him teach her everything he knew. Then he could make his stupid jokes. Then he could watch her dust. She pressed the gas down. The high rises passed, the parkland, gas stations, quaint little enclaves of brick cafes. They all went by in a vague, peripheral jumble. Michelle’s large eyes glowed with determination. Her lips turned upward in a determined smile.
Yes
, she thought.

And then she hit Dead Man’s Curve.

That’s what the locals always called it. The newspapers called it that sometimes too. It was not a very original name, I guess, but it was accurate enough. Here, just at the city border, the road swept left in a long, wide sudden arc. The speeding traffic wheeled round it in a seemingly endless swing onto the parkway, with nothing but a gas station car lot to the right where the turn reached its apex. Lots of cars
had spun out of control there. There’d been two fatals on the very spot within the last year and a half. Michelle hit the curve at full speed, her mind elsewhere. She was squinting, with only one hand on the steering wheel, while the other massaged her belly.

At the height of the bend, the Datsun’s rear tires lost their grip on the road. Michelle felt the back of the car fly wide behind her. She jerked awake, afraid, swung the wheel in the opposite direction—just the wrong thing to do. The car zigzagged violently and, as the road continued to curve, the Datsun sailed on straight ahead. It jumped the curb and skimmed over the sidewalk into the car lot. The stretch of asphalt there was slick with runoff from the gas pumps. The Datsun started to spin. It seemed to pick up speed. Michelle wrestled desperately with the steering wheel. It had no effect. The car came full around. The white wall of the gas station garage grew huge in the windshield.

Michelle let out one high-pitched scream: “Please!”

The car smashed headlights-first into the wall.

Michelle was fired out of her seat like a rocket. She smashed into the windshield and the glass exploded. Her flesh ripped apart by the impact, her bones snapping like twigs, her bowels and bladder releasing, she lost consciousness. Her body thumped onto the crumpled hood like a laundry sack. Her blue blouse was quickly soaked with red.

She lay there, still, as smoke and steam hissed up around her.

I
t was almost 10:00
A.M
. when Bob Findley got the call at the city desk. He set the phone down and sat for a moment, gazing out at the quiet room. It was a vast maze of brown desks with tan computer terminals rising from them. It was lit with a bland, hazy light by the fluorescents hidden behind the white plastic panels of the ceiling.

Bob took a deep breath, arranging his inner self. He was not sure, at first, how he wanted to react. Findley had a reputation for self-control and that reputation was very important to him. He was both young and in charge of the place and he wanted the staff to see him as the ultimate in calm. He never raised his voice or spoke faster than he could reason, especially in an emergency or under deadline. He liked to make quiet, ironical remarks in the midst of chaos so that anyone who was feeling frantic would trust he had the situation well in hand. Most of the time he did have it in hand. He was a good city editor. Smart, knowledgeable. A little inexperienced but ready to listen to advice. If anything, I guess, some of us sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t a little
too
contained. He had a round, pink, boyish face and it would grow bright red when he was angry, even as he went on speaking in his gentle tones. Some of us sometimes wondered whether it was just going to blow right off his neck one day like a pricked balloon.

But along with appearing calm, it was also important to
Bob to be nice: caring, he called it. He was very caring. He worked hard at it. He even managed to look the part somehow: slender, soft-bodied, soft-featured under a bowl of brown hair. Always in a pressed shirt—a blue workshirt or a dressier pink—with a cheerful tie and no jacket; slacks. Casual, but serious; thoughtful; nice. Caring. His editorial stance, like his personal opinions, was always on the humane, liberal side of any issue. He thought that everyone would be humane and liberal if they would just take the time to think things through. That was our Bob.