True Crime (30 page)

I closed my eyes. Opened them. Crushed out my cigarette in the ashtray. “Maybe there were. I wasn’t assigned to that one.
This
man is innocent.”

“Mm,” said Mrs. Russel. “You weren’t assigned to
that
one. No one was assigned to
that
one.” She lifted the hand from her lap. She reached up and fingered the locket around her neck, fingered it gently, wistfully. In the lamplight, I could see her initials inscribed in the gold surface, letters made lovingly ornate, surrounded by a decorative border like lace. “But then you didn’t look at my grandson’s
face
either, did you? And then my grandson’s face, it didn’t look like yours anyway. That’s all. ‘Is this your boy?’ Like they found some dog in the street.” She wrapped her hand around the locket tightly. “Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Everett. He was a loving child. My Warren. I seen all kinds of children, and my Warren was a
loving
child.” With a grimace, she let the locket go, let it fall against her skin. She lowered her hand into her lap again. She looked down at the rug between us. “So you got anything else to say to me this evening?”

I just sat there, on the edge of the sofa, feeling the busted spring digging into my butt.
Did
I have anything else to say?

“Then I think you better go back to your newspaper,”
said Mrs. Russel. “This neighborhood can get dangerous at night.”

For another moment, I went on sitting there. I put my hands up, cupped them around my mouth and nose and breathed into them, smelling the cigarette on my breath. I was tired. My mind was still and gloomy and I was tired and I didn’t know if I had anything else to ask or say. I pushed off my knees and stood up. Mrs. Russel slouched in her chair with her slippered feet out before her. I took my card out of my wallet and laid it on the table next to her saucer. She didn’t stir, didn’t glance at it or at me.

“He’s … a decent guy, I think,” I said. “If it matters to you. He has a wife, a kid. I don’t think he did it. I think maybe your grandson did it. If I’m right, then I think maybe you would know. If you know, then you can’t let this happen.”

She lifted her eyes to me and the storm in there was raging. “Go on home, Mr. Everett,” she said.

“They’re going to kill him at midnight. He’s innocent, Mrs. Russel. My number’s on the card.”

I stepped toward the door.

Behind me, Mrs. Russel said, “Everybody’s guilty of something.”

“Oh
,
for God’s sake!”
I spun back around to face her. “For God’s sake,” I said.

As I put my hand on the knob, I heard her voice again. Toneless again. Flattened out by the weight on it. “Anyway, I seen a lot of innocent folks get killed in this part of town,” she said. “But it’s funny. I ain’t
never
seen you here before.”

A
s I drove back over the boulevard toward the city, I thought of all the things I should have said to her. I should’ve told her about the potato chips and my instinct that Porterhouse was lying. I should’ve told her about the way the car backed into Beachum’s left side. I should’ve drawn her a map and showed her. Sometimes you have to go on instinct, I should have said. And as for the sins of society, blacks and whites and bigotry and unfairness … all I know about are the things that happen, I should’ve said. Someone held the gun, someone pulled the trigger. Those were the facts. Amy Wilson was murdered and the wrong man was going to die for it. That’s all I knew. That’s what I should have told her.

I was cruising through University City now, cruising through the dark. Driving slowly, for me, driving just above the speed limit anyway, with nowhere special to go. The radio was on; the news station was playing, the self-important rhythms of the news were murmured low. I was passing the McDonald’s where—as I found out later from the police report—Michelle Ziegler had had her cup of coffee that morning, had sat and cried about a lousy one-night stand, before weaving off toward Dead Man’s Curve.

I should have said
something
, I thought as I passed it. I should have said anything that came to mind. It probably wouldn’t have made much difference, but now, as things stood, there was nothing left. Nothing else to do, no one else
to talk to, no other leads to run down. It was after eight. With less than four hours to the execution, I didn’t have a single piece of evidence I could bring to the publisher, to Lowenstein, nothing to make him get on the phone to the state-house and buy Beachum a little time, enough time.

I suppose I should have been working on that. Racking my brains, trying to come up with a fresh angle, a new lead. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t even get myself to think about it for any stretch of time. Whenever I tried, my mind drifted away to other things. My job, for instance. Without this story to raise my stock, how the hell was I going to get Bob off my case, how was I going to convince him to let me keep my job? And Barbara. She would find out the truth when they fired me. She would find out the truth one way or another anyway. Then she’d be gone. And Davy would be gone with her. And I loved Davy, if I loved anyone, and I didn’t want to grow old alone. If I just could’ve gotten this story, I kept thinking. If I just could have played the hero on this one and come through, maybe I could’ve turned things around, maybe I could’ve made a case for myself. At the paper. With my wife. Maybe. Somehow.

The boulevard streetlights came toward me, flashed over me. I passed the park, then the long stretch of low garages, fast food restaurants, parking lots. I reached the border of the city and saw Dead Man’s Curve ahead. I came round it slowly in the flow of the scant Monday-night traffic. As I went, I cast a quick look through the window in the direction of the filling station. The broken husk of Michelle’s red Datsun had been towed away, but the black mark of the crash was still smeared over the garage’s white wall. I could see it in the high station sodium lights. On the asphalt, in the glow, shards of glass still twinkled.

“Dumb broad,” I murmured, and my heart hurt for her, and for Beachum, and for myself.

I was just coming out of the bend, when I heard his name, Beachum’s. I heard it spoken by the newsman on the radio. I pushed up the volume, listened as the road straightened out before me.

“Frank Beachum,” the solemn newscaster said, “the St. Louis man scheduled to go to his death by lethal injection at midnight, has reportedly confessed to his crime.”

I
pulled the Tempo over to the side of the road. The newsman continued: “Television station KSLM is now reporting that a source close to the governor’s office says Beachum has expressed remorse over the murder of Amy Wilson, the pregnant woman he shot dead six years ago.”

I gripped the wheel hard, my mouth open. I leaned forward until my brow was pressed against the wheel’s hard plastic.

“The source refused to be named and the confession has not been confirmed by officials at the prison, but the source told KSLM that Beachum said he was sorry for the grief he had caused the victim’s family. Mrs. Wilson’s father, Frederick Robertson says sorry is not enough.”

I leaned against the wheel. I stared down at the floor, unseeing. Frederick Robertson spoke on the radio.

“Sure he’s sorry. Now he’s facing his punishment I’m sure he’s sorry as hell. But that doesn’t bring my daughter back. That doesn’t bring her baby back, my grandchild.”

“The governor,” added the newsman, “has already said he will not call off the execution.”

I lifted my head. I looked around me, dazed.
Confessed?
I thought. I saw the gas station where Michelle Ziegler had crashed just behind me. I put the Tempo into reverse and backed over the curb into the lot. I felt dizzy and sick. I felt as if a black ooze was spreading through me. Depression.
Nausea. Spreading through me. And something else too. Relief. I hated to admit it, but I felt relief. The man had confessed. It was over. I was off the dime.

I slowed the Tempo behind a line of parked cars and stopped it there. The newscaster had now gone on to other things. I turned off the radio. I sat gripping the wheel, shaking my head, reswallowing the contents of my stomach.
Confessed
, I thought. Confessed. It was over.

I put a cigarette in my mouth, hoping to calm my gut. Strangely enough, I believed the story completely, believed it thoroughly the moment I heard it. Beachum had confessed. He was guilty. It seemed to me to make sense of everything. It seemed to make all the pieces of the long day fall into place. There was no innocent man on death row. There was no last-minute race for justice. It had been a dream. I had known all along, deep down, it was a dream. But I had dreamed on. And now he had confessed.

I punched the steering wheel with the heel of my palm. How could I have deceived myself like that? How, knowing that I might deceive myself, had I deceived myself notwithstanding? But I knew the answers to these questions too. I could trace it back clearly over the day. It had started with the phone call from Bob. His phone call to Patricia. I had known from that moment what was going to happen: the end of my job, the end of my marriage. Just like in New York, only worse. And I was desperate not to go through it all again. I had seized on this story—the Beachum story—the second it had come into my hands. I had seized on it crazily in the wild hope of saving myself. Insignificant details—nonsense details—the gunshot Nancy Larson didn’t hear, the rack of potato chips, the accountant’s self-doubting eyes, a black kid buying a soda in the parking lot outside—I had seized on them all and tried to turn them into high-drama in my mind. I had turned them into a dream, a dream of salvation, of a last-minute reprieve for me and Beachum both.

But I was not dreaming anymore. He had confessed. I could see the whole business clearly. I could see I had nothing. I had nary a damn thing even to suggest that Beachum was innocent of the crime. How could I have? In one day? After a police investigation? After press coverage. After a trial, after six years of appeals. Could anyone—could anyone less desperate to salvage his miserable life—could anyone anywhere believe that the American justice system would make a fatal mistake so simple that it could suddenly be put right by a single man in a single day?

I laughed at that. I had to laugh. I lit my cigarette and sucked the smoke and laughed. What an asshole I was. Thirty-five years on the face of the earth and still as deluded about life as a college kid.

I switched off the engine. I kicked the door open, got out and slammed it shut. I walked across the lot to a phone booth that stood beside the gas station wall.

I called the paper first, but Alan had left for the day. I called him at home. He answered the phone breathless. I could hear Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald singing in the background. “Stompin’ at the Savoy.” I could hear Alan’s wife singing along with them at the top of her lungs. “What?” said Alan, gasping.

“It’s Everett.”

“Ev! You dumb shit! He confessed.”

“I just heard.”

“Even Bob laughed.”

“I hope you took pictures.”

“Look,” he said, coughing a little as his breath came back. “It might not be so bad. Mrs. Bob called after you left. Bob went home to her. Maybe they’ll work things out. Maybe he’ll forgive you.”

I blew smoke at the booth’s glass wall. “I don’t think Bob ever forgave anybody anything in his entire life.”

“Oh yeah. Good point,” Alan said. “Well, sorry. You’re screwed.”

“I guess.”

“I can’t lose him.”

“No.”

“Lowenstein loves the guy. Everybody loves the guy.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe you could file a grievance or something. I mean, look, we all know it’s personal. He’s blowing this Beachum interview out of proportion.”

“No, no. That’d drag it out,” I said. “I don’t want to do that to Barbara.”

There was a pause. “Well, my friend …”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll get you a month’s notice. I’ll call some friends at other papers. I’ll do what I can do.”

“I know you will, pal. Dance on.”

“Amen, brother.”

I broke the connection, fed another quarter into the slot and called my wife. She answered as she always did: abrupt, annoyed, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of a million chores.

“It’s me,” I said. “Has the kid gone to bed yet?”

“Not yet,” she said brusquely. “I was just getting him ready.”

“Keep him up another fifteen minutes, willya? So I can say goodnight to him.”

For a moment, she didn’t answer and in the silence I felt as if a fist had squeezed my heart.

“All right,” she said quietly then. “Fifteen minutes. Will you be here?”

“I’ll be there,” I answered. “I’m finished. I’m through. I’m coming home.”

W
hen Reverend Stanley B. Shillerman walked into Luther Plunkitt’s office, the warden was sitting in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk. Luther could not keep his eyes from moving down the man, from his beatific face, to his open white shirt, to his jeans, to his brown loafers. Luther examined them all with a gaze of steel.

The warden was not a man who hated many people. He prided himself on his tolerance, on watching the human comedy from a wry, forgiving point of view. With a firm sense of right and wrong, he’d found, you could make your way from cradle to tomb downright calmly, if you worked at it. You did your job, you protected your own square mile and you let the villains and fools fend for themselves. That was his philosophy. So even he was not prepared for the throat-clogging rush of rage he felt against the Reverend Stanley B. He felt it rising to the surface of him, shining like light through the pores of his skin, coming off him in waves. He could imagine the waves, breaking against the other man, battering him, swallowing him, dragging him under. He could not remember the last time he had been so angry.

“Reverend,” he said, leaning forward, folding his hands neatly on his desk blotter.

Shillerman fashioned an expression of sober benevolence on his face but, as their eyes met, Luther spotted a
flush of color come into the preacher’s soft cheeks. The gentle creases of the skin there looked clammy. Luther was glad. Shillerman could feel the waves of anger coming off him too. Luther nodded, satisfied. He smiled blandly.