The breath hissed out of me. Jesus, I thought. A-1 Sauce. Jesus. And yet it was true. I was sure it was true.
“And you paid Amy for it at the counter,” I said.
“Yeah.”
My hand went automatically to my cigarettes again. I drew one out. “And she mentioned the money, didn’t she? The money she owed you. Did she mention that?”
At first, he seemed unable to answer, to speak. His mouth opened and he gestured but there were no words. Then: “She said she was … you know. Trying to get it together. The money. I told her … I told her not to worry about it. I knew they were struggling. That’s why I did the car for them. I only charged her for parts in the first place. I told them all this at the trial. They didn’t believe me. Even my lawyer …” His voice trailed away. He shook his head.
But I believed him. He had talked with Amy about the money. That was what Porterhouse heard before he went into the bathroom.
I put the fresh cigarette in my mouth. It bobbed up and down as I talked. “Well, somebody shot her, my friend. That’s true, that’s a fact. That girl is dead and someone shot her. So if it wasn’t you, it was someone else.”
“You got five minutes over there,” said Benson behind me. His tone was dark now, threatening. We paid no attention to him. We went right on as if he hadn’t spoken.
Frank nodded, dazed. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
“Sure,” I said. I lifted my lighter. “Like who?”
“What?”
“Who could’ve done it?”
“I don’t … I don’t know.”
“Not Porterhouse,” I said. “He’s no shooter. I talked to him. He didn’t do anything. But I’ll tell you something else: he didn’t see anything either. And he’s their only witness.”
At that, Mrs. Beachum gasped. That’s the word for it. A short, wet, sobbing gasp. I didn’t look at her. I blocked out the heat of her gaze.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Beachum wearily. He looked away sadly, defeated.
“Come on, man,” I whispered. “What about the woman? The woman in the car.”
The condemned man gave a quick shake of his head as if I were annoying him now. “No … No …”
“Why didn’t she hear the shot?”
“I don’t …”
“Why didn’t she see that you had no gun? It was the steak sauce in your hand, wasn’t it?”
“Oh God!” Mrs. Beachum cried.
I made myself ignore her. “It was the bottle, wasn’t it? In your hand? Tell me.”
Beachum seemed now like a man half-asleep, a man too suddenly awakened. “Yeah,” he said dully. “Yeah. The bottle. I told them that. It was in my right hand, so she couldn’t see it. She backed into the other side of me. The left side. She didn’t see, she didn’t have a clear view.”
“All right. So it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Porterhouse. It wasn’t you.” I heard Mrs. Beachum start to cry. I didn’t care. I am not a caring person. I am a reporter. This was my story. This was all I knew how to do. “Who else was there? That’s what I want to know. Who the hell else was there?”
But he was too tired. His shoulders slumped. He looked down at the table. Dropped the smoldering butt of his cigarette into the ashtray there. “No one.”
I plucked the unlit cigarette from my mouth. “Somebody. That’s a fact.”
“The place was empty cept for me. The accountant guy. Amy.”
I threw the cigarette down. I wanted to grab him by the shirt-front, shout in his face. “But it wasn’t empty,” I said. “She didn’t shoot herself, did she?”
He opened his mouth a little, looked miserably down at the table. He didn’t answer.
“Somebody,” I said again. “There must’ve been somebody. Somebody coming in as you left maybe. That would explain why she didn’t hear the shot. If it was right after you left. Didn’t you see anyone?”
“No, I … I don’t know. I didn’t see. I was just buying … steak sauce. I had to get home. For the picnic. We were having a picnic. Bonnie ran out of steak sauce. It was Independence Day.”
I heard a chair scrape behind me. “All right,” said Benson quickly. “That’s it.”
“No!” It was Mrs. Beachum. She was off the bed. She flung herself off it. She flung herself against the bars of the cage, gripping them until the knuckles whitened afresh on her small, red, dishwater hands. “No, please,” she said again. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her face was mottled and ugly. “You believe us. Don’t you? Do you believe us?”
I finally had to face her. But her grief, her desperation left me silent. Benson stepped up on my left side and put his hand on my arm. A man used to moving people around as he saw fit, was our Benson. He didn’t pull me up, but I felt the pressure and stood.
“All right, all right,” I said to him.
“Let’s go,” he said. “… upsetting people …”
“All right.”
Mrs. Beachum clung to the bars without restraint, without dignity. Her teeth were bared, as mine had been, as if she were some kind of animal. She growled the words out from deep in her throat. “Do … you … believe us?”
“Don’t, Bonnie,” Beachum murmured. “Don’t.”
“Come on, damn it,” Benson said.
I looked at that woman’s terrible face in the cage. She seemed to strain through the gaps toward me.
“Yes,” I said finally. “I believe you. For Christ’s sake. You only have to look at him.”
She closed her eyes—thank God for that; I couldn’t stand them anymore. She rested her forehead against the bars and her shoulders shook with crying.
“No one. Not even the lawyers,” she said. “No one else …”
Benson tugged me toward the door. I yanked my arm away from him. “All right,” I said. “Damn it.”
“Coming in here, upsetting people,” he said tightly. “Don’t you think these people have enough? What do you think this is?”
“All right,” I said. I walked to the door. Benson hurried around me to signal the guard outside. The door opened.
But I stopped on the threshold. I glanced back at the cage. Beachum sat as he had, his eyes lowered to the table, his mouth pulled down in a distant, almost dreamy frown. But his wife had now lifted her head again, the marks of the bars white on her brow. She was watching me through the steel, through her tears, the way you’d look at a child who had just done something incredibly thoughtless, thoughtlessly cruel.
“Where were you?” she said softly, her voice breaking. “It’s too late now.” She sniffled thickly. “Dear God, where were you? All this time.”
Benson put his hand on my arm again, but for another second or two I resisted the pressure toward the door.
“It wasn’t my story,” I told her. “There was an accident … Dead Man’s Curve … It wasn’t supposed to be my story.”
Then I was pushed out into the hall.
3
Luther Plunkitt was waiting for me when I returned to the visitor’s entrance. This, I understood, was not a good sign. Life gets tense in a prison on execution day. Prisoners are angry, guards are nervous, security is tight and everyone’s stomach is jumpy. Plunkitt would have been informed on the double that I’d started a small disturbance in the Deathwatch cell. Questions had been asked, voices had been raised. It would not have made him a happy guy.
But that was the eerie thing about Plunkitt. You couldn’t really tell if he was happy or not. He greeted me with an outstretched hand, with a small, thin-lipped smile frozen on his face. The wrinkled putty of his features seemed genial enough and every silver hair was in place. Only those gray eyes, set way down in the clay under his strong brow, were metallic and expressionless. I didn’t know whether he was about to shake my hand or rip my throat out. There was no question in my mind that he was capable of doing either. He shook my hand, in the event. “Everett,” he said.
“Superintendent,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
“I’ll
walk you to your car.”
He put his hands casually in the pockets of his pants. We walked side by side through the glass doors, out into the parking lot. The heat of the sun hit me at once. The suffocating stillness of the air closed over me more slowly. All the same, it was good to be out of the prison. I could hear cicadas singing loudly from all around the lot and a pair of swallows swooped and dived over by the walls, above the barbed wire. It was good.
Plunkitt smiled up into the blenched sky, spoke up at the cloudless blue. “Sorry to hear about Ms. Ziegler. Any word on her is there?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I’ve heard. She’s still in a coma.”
“That’s a shame, that’s a shame. These cars nowadays. All you gotta do is breath on em …”
I nodded. We crossed the baking asphalt toward my Tempo.
“You get your interview all right?” he asked me.
“I did, yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. The paper appreciates it.”
He seemed to give this remark a good thinking over, scanning the distance now, reviewing the gray walls of the prison, the gates, the guardtowers.
“You know,” he said musingly, “Ms. Ziegler gave me to understand that she was interested in talking to Beachum about, you know, his feelings, his emotions, before his execution. Human interest stuff. That was what we agreed to beforehand. Cause otherwise, you know, we do most press interviews by phone at this point. There’s less risk of upsetting the prisoner.”
I nodded. I understood. I had been rebuked. But gently. Plunkitt was a man who measured his words carefully. He wanted to maintain his good relations with the press. He wouldn’t have spoken to me like this unless he was genuinely angry. I could only hope he wouldn’t call Bob to complain.
I felt the sun beating down on my head and curling up from beneath my feet. I felt the sweat gathering in my sideburns, under the wire arms of my glasses. I pushed them back to keep them from sliding down my nose. “Well, you know, I was put on this story kind of at the last minute,” I said. “With the accident and everything.” Squeezing every drop of charity I could from him. “I probably wasn’t as prepped as I should’ve been. I hope I haven’t thrown a wrench into the works or anything.”
“No, no, no,” he said amiably enough. And, as we reached the edge of my car, he put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze. We faced each other by the Tempo’s fender.
“But you know how it is,” he said in a conversational tone. Smiling. “People come in here, the press. The prisoners tell em things. They’re in a position, you know, to say all kinds of heart-wrenching things. And us—we got a job to do, so we come across as the hard guys. And then that’s what we read the next day in the paper. It can get pretty frustrating, that’s all. Times like this, everyone’s a little extra sensitive to it. That’s all.” His thin, empty smile widened slightly, a red slice in the putty. “This isn’t easy on us either, you know. We have to do what the state tells us. The state has to do what the people want and so on.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
“And, you know, it goes through a lot of processes, trial, appeal and so on before it gets to us. Makes it a little tough on us here if we’re going to show up in the newspaper as bloodthirsty murderers or anything like that.” He chuckled flatly.
“No, yes, of course not, no,” I said, or words to that effect.
“Anyway, I know you’re a smart guy, Steve,” he said. “I read your stuff. You always get it pretty much right so I’m not too concerned. I just haven’t seen you in a while, thought I’d come out and say hello.”
“Right. I understand. I’m glad you did,” I lied. “It’s good to see you.”
We stood there another second or two, smiling at each other, the heat turning our flesh to paste. He was sweating too, I noticed gratefully, clean crystal beads of it glistening in the folds of his forehead, on his temples.
A vee of ducks passed over us, quacking, but neither of us raised our eyes. I began to notice that this silence of ours was stretching out a very long time. Was there something else he wanted to say? I wondered. But there was no clue in the gemmy emptiness of his gaze.
“Well …” he said.
And the thought hit me suddenly, out of nowhere: He knows! Jesus. He knows too.
It was a dreadful idea, and I shook it off. I told myself it was my imagination. How could he know? How could he bear it if he knew. If he knew, and had to pull the trigger just the same.
Plunkitt slapped my shoulder again. “You drive safely now,” he said.
And I stood watching, my lips parted, as his back receded from me toward the prison doors.
4
Plunkitt walked back to the Death House. He came down the corridor to the Deathwatch cell, but he didn’t stop there. He went on until he reached another corner. He turned, and headed down another hall. There was another door with another guard stationed there. The guard’s name was Haggerty. A paunchy older man, a pasty Irishman. A veteran tough guy who’d come down here after the layoffs in Jeff City.
“Hal,” Luther said to him quietly. “You’re looking sharp.”
Haggerty grinned acidly with one side of his mouth—it was the only grin he had. He unlocked the door for the superintendent and held it open, grinning. Luther went inside.
The room he entered looked pretty much like a doctor’s examining room, which is what it had once been. Its white cinderblock walls were scrubbed clean. There was a white sink in the corner and a white folding screen spread against the lefthand wall. There was a metal door on the right that led into a neighboring storage closet. And there was a hospital gurney standing in the center of the floor.
There were straps on the gurney, heavy leather straps. There was a window against the back wall with white blinds that could be pulled down over it. There was a mirror on the right: a one-way glass so you could stand in the storage closet and look through. And beneath the mirror, there was a hole in the wall. Tubes ran out of the hole from the storage closet and were draped over an IV stand attached to one corner of the gurney.
Luther crossed the threshold and stopped. He stood where he was with his hands in his pockets. He smiled blandly down at the gurney. He heard the door shut at his back. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t change. He looked down at the gurney and, after a moment or two, he removed one hand from his pocket. There was a handkerchief gripped in the hand. He wiped his face with it and it came away damp. He considered the damp handkerchief, its sweat-gray fabric. This heat, he thought. I do hate this goddamned heat.
But the room was cool enough and Luther was thinking about Arnold McCardle. A half hour ago, Arnold McCardle had come into his office. The fat man had cantilevered enormously through the doorway, his big paw gripping the frame. “Your friend from the News just caused a minor shitstorm down in Deathwatch,” Arnold had said. “He told Beachum he thinks he’s innocent. Made like he was gonna crusade for him. The wife is all upset.”
“All right,” Luther had said with a sigh. “I’ll handle it.”
So he had gone down to the visitors’ entrance to meet me. And he had spoken to me. He had handled it.
And now, here, alone, in the execution chamber, he thought about Arnold McCardle leaning in at his door, and he thought about me. He replaced the handkerchief in his pocket. He gazed down at the gurney again. He sniffed, and he had to admit to himself that he was angry. Innocent, he thought. Man. That Everett. These journalists, some of them. Sleazy, empty little men. He was definitely going to phone the paper and complain about this. He shook his head. Innocent. What did Everett think this was? A TV show? A movie? These reporters. After a while, they always started to confuse the stories they wrote with real life. Because that was what was at stake here. A life. A human life. The people at Osage were sweating bullets trying to do this thing as professionally as possible, as humanely as possible. It didn’t help anyone for the prisoner to be upset or given false hope like this. Maybe it helped Everett. Maybe it helped his story. But it
helped the prisoner not at all.
Goddamned reporters, thought Luther Plunkitt. He worked so hard to treat them decently. No one could blame him for getting angry sometimes. In the end, they always thought their stories were more important than real life.
He stood there with his hands in his pockets a long time. He gazed down at the gurney. After a while, he imagined Frank Beachum’s face. Frank Beachum’s long, sad face gazing up at him. Innocent, he thought. He drew out his handkerchief again and ran it again across his forehead.
Man, he thought. This goddamned heat.
5
In the Deathwatch cell, Frank Beachum didn’t move. He sat as he had sat since I’d walked out, his hand lying slack on the table, his mouth turned down, his eyes cast down, his gaze fixed and empty.
Bonnie, standing by him, still clasped the bars of the cage. Then, slowly, she let her grip relax. A strange feeling had come over her. A strange calm, strangely electric. Everything in the room seemed very clear to her. Clear and bright. The clock, the guard, the chairs, the bars. Her husband at his table. The thoughts in her mind—they seemed clearer to her than they had in weeks.
Because suddenly she knew it was hopeless. Suddenly she understood, grasped in the visceral way, that there was no chance of pardon or reprieve. Somehow, the fact that I believed in Frank’s innocence had brought this home to her. No one had ever believed in his innocence before. Not the jury, not his own lawyers, not the press. Not even the Reverend Harlan Flowers, who simply refrained from judgment. And now I had come, and I had believed, and she had cried out to me: It’s too late! And in crying out, she had realized the truth of it. It was too late. No one could save her husband now. She was going to lose him. They were going to put poison in his arm and kill him. He was going to die.
Her tears stopped falling. Her hands lowered to her sides. With this new clarity, she looked around her, almost amazed. She saw the duty officer on the other side of the bars. Benson—he was watching her. Moving back to his desk, running his hand up through his shiny hair, he was giving her the side-eye as if he thought she might do something terrible. He sat down at his chair and picked up the telephone. He spoke into it in a low murmur. Frowning at her dangerously all the while, all the while watching her. In her strange envelope of queer, sizzling, hopeless calm, Bonnie nearly smiled at him. He’s frightened of me, she thought. That big strong man. He’s frightened of a hundred-and-ten-pound woman locked in a cage. She felt, in her clear thoughts, that she understood why this was so. She felt almost as if Benson’s mind had been revealed to her as she stood there. And he was afraid of her, she thought, because he was doing evil before her eyes. The killing of another person, a helpless person, was evil. No excuses; it was evil. In the heart of every human being, where the quiet mind could hear, there spoke a voice that said that it was evil, and the voice was never untrue. Bonnie knew this and she thought the guard knew it but did not want to know it and so he was afraid of her. Because the guard wanted to do his job without knowing. He wanted to collect his pay, and feed his family, and do his job. His boss, the warden, had told him to do this. The courts had told the warden. The lawmakers of the state of Missouri had told the courts. And most of the people of the United States of America agreed with the lawmakers and elected them to do what they had done. So the guard wanted to think: it must be right to do it. But he knew that was not the truth. Truth, Bonnie thought in her electric calm; Truth is not a democracy. All the people of the earth crying out for Evil with one voice could not drown out that other voice, that still, small voice that spoke within the quiet heart. And so the guard knew. They all knew. And they were afraid before her eyes.
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