And others too, out there, in the night: cameramen, reporters, photographers; a small clutch of them on the sidewalk just beyond the grass. The squeal of my tires as I came into view made them all turn toward me. The two reporters gossiping in the street leapt back onto the grass border. The rest huddled together, watching me warily, as I careened toward them.
Pressing against the steering wheel to keep myself upright, I stomped down on the brake. The tires locked. The Tempo slid toward the parked cars. I was thrown forward against the wheel. And then the Tempo stopped.
I belched.
I didn’t park. I left the car right there in the road. Rolled out through an open door and swung to my feet, going three steps sideways before I straightened out.
I heard the journalists chuckle as I staggered toward them through the sultry air. I saw teeth in smiles, and glints on camera lenses and glasses. “Hey, Ev,” one guy called, “you been habben ne carvenson?” That’s what it sounded like to me, but it made the others laugh.
I stumbled right into them. Felt the pressure of their bodies around me, against me. Smelled some woman’s perfume, rousing and sickening at the same time.
“I gotta talk to the Robertsons,” I said, pushing through.
“They’re not seeing anyone,” a woman answered. “They’re seeing me,” I said.
“Whoa, Ev!”
I shoved through the little crowd. I felt hands on my sleeves and felt them fall away as I moved toward the lawn.
“They said they’d give a statement after it’s over,” someone called behind me.
“They’re seeing me now,” I said, and barreled on over the grass toward the house.
I approached the cop as steadily as I could. His large silhouette grew larger, darker, as I marched on. I was drunk, all right, but some part of my mind kept fighting to come into focus. Its voice was very solid, very loud. Just take this step, it would say, and then it would say, Just take this next step, that’s all. Man; drunk, I would tell it. Less than an hour, Can’t do it, can’t do it all in less than an hour. If you can just get through this next step, the voice would answer, then you can rest a while. Gonna kill him, can’t stop it, gonna kill him, I’d say. Rest time’s over, here’s another step … And I reached the cop and stood before him.
Or stood beneath him. Because he was standing up on the front step and he was very tall and he loomed over me. A husky black soldier with a slick moustache and a big hand resting on the billy in his belt.
“I need to see the Robertsons,” I said—I did everything I could to keep my voice steady, the words clear, but they came out too steady, too clear, like any drunken man’s.
The officer raised his big arms in a friendly gesture. “They’re not seeing anyone right now.”
“Thish—this—is an emergency,” I said. I had started swaying on my feet. And then—it suddenly seemed to be a good idea—I started screaming. “An emergency! Emergency!” I cupped my hands around my mouth and bellowed at the house’s lit windows. “I need to see the Robertsons! It’s an emergency!”
“Hey,” said the cop. And now he raised his hand at me in a not-so-friendly gesture. “Go back to your friends. The Robertsons’ll be out to make a statement in a little while.”
“Listen,” I said, breathing hard, blinking hard to clear my vision. I moved closer to him as he watched me, shaking his head. “I know they would want to talk to me if they …” And I made my move: dodging to the side, leaping onto the step, thrusting out my hand, I jammed my fingers against the doorbell button, screaming, “Emergency! Emergency! Mr. Robertson!”
The cop jostled me back, braced his forearm against my chest and shoved. I tumbled off the step hard, my arms thrashing. I stumbled two long strides, fighting to keep my feet. When I managed to steady myself, I straightened—and there was the cop. He was coming down after me.
We confronted each other on the edge of the lawn. He placed a finger lightly against my sternum.
“Let’s have a little quiz,” he said quietly. His brown eyes were pellucid and still. “I’m a police officer; you’re a drunken asshole. If we tangle, who do you think is going to get hurt?”
“I need to speak to the Robertsons!” I screamed, cupping my hands around my mouth again.
“Do you want me to make this multiple choice?”
“Officer …” I was gasping now. I was still swaying, but the excitement had steadied my brain a little. “I can see you’re a good guy. But there’s no time to …”
The front door opened. Mr. Robertson looked out. I recognized him from the television show I’d seen that afternoon. The tie and the studio makeup were gone—he was wearing a light blue polo shirt that bulged at the belly—but I recognized the frowning granite face beneath the white widow’s peak.
The cop turned at the sound of the opening door and I grabbed the chance and ducked around him. I was up the front step so fast that Robertson backed away, edging the door forward, narrowing the gap.
But I got there before he closed it. I got my face in front of his.
“Please,” I said. His nose wrinkled as he caught the whiff of booze. “Describe the locket.”
“What? What the hell do you want?”
“Amy’s locket. The one the killer stole. A heart? Gold? AR with a fringe around it.”
He went blank, surprised. “Yeah. Yeah,” he said automatically. “And AW inside. She had her married initials done on the inside.”
“She …” My mouth hung open, but no more words came out. AW inside. She had her married initials engraved inside. Then Mrs. Russel knew. Warren’s grandmother—she had to know. If she hadn’t known before, she knew now. She knew after talking to me.
A strong hand took hold of my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mr. Robertson,” I heard the cop say behind me. He started to pull me back, away from the house.
“Frank Beachum didn’t kill your daughter, Mr. Robertson,” I said.
On the instant, the man’s face darkened—I could almost see the shadow fall across him like an axe. “What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t …”
“Horseshit. Bullshit,” he said. “Who are you? Get the fuck outta here. Get this drunk the fuck offa my lawn.”
The cop tugged at me harder. I grabbed hold of the doorframe. I stared into Robertson’s hard eyes. “I’m telling you …” I said.
With a short, sharp shove, Robertson slammed the door onto my fingers—bang—and jerked it back again. I screamed. Hugged my hand to my chest. Reeled back as the cop tightened his grip and hauled me off the step.
This time, I stumbled; fell. Felt the jarring shock go through my skull. Felt the dewy grass seep cold through my pants leg. I clambered to my feet in a second, quick as I could. Clutching my own hand against me. I was clearheaded enough now. Sober enough now.
“Fuck you!” said Robertson, jabbing his finger at me from the doorway. And then the sight of him was blotted out by the shape of the big cop as he moved in.
“All right,” I said. “All right, I’m going.”
Hunched and ready, his hand on his club, the cop kept moving toward me.
“I said I’m going. But he’s innocent.”
“Get the fuck outta here,” Robertson shouted.
I turned my back on both of them and hurried away across the lawn. In front of me, I saw the clutch of journalists. Their faces big, watching me, wide-eyed, as I came on. A camera went up over their heads. A flash snapped against the night background. Blue spots spiraled in my vision as I kept walking toward them.
I heard the cop call after me—not a shout—his voice still cool and even.
“And lose that vehicle, mister,” he said. “You operate that vehicle drunk and I’ll have every badge in St. Louis on your ass.”
I wheeled round recklessly, screaming. “Are they flying jets? Cause if they ain’t flying jets, pal, they ain’t gonna catch me!”
And I wheeled back, blindly at first, but fixing my trajectory on the cluster of journalists,
bulling my way toward them, toward my car.
“What is he, crazy?” I heard the cop say. “He’s driving a fucking Tempo.”
I threw back my head as I walked, and laughed like a madman.
3
I never knew the names of the executioners. For security reasons, they were never released. I understand they were two men from within the Corrections Department. Volunteers, trained on the lethal injection equipment. One—call him Frick—was a clerical worker of some type: stooped, crewcut and bug-eyed; an insane but intellectual demeanor. I hear he was given to delivering somewhat pedantic discourses on capital punishment—its history, its methods, the biological effects of its various tools—but that these were enlivened by a certain panting fervency he couldn’t quite seem to conceal. The other men on the execution team seemed to detest him, though no one ever said worse to me about him than that he was “some piece of work, all right.” So that was Frick.
Executioner Frack, on the other hand, was more to the general taste. A former guard would be my guess. A big, rollicking man in his fifties who generally talked baseball with the gang before he pressed the button. “I’ve got no qualms about it” was his only remark when asked. “It’s like erasing a mistake.”
The two had been trained on the machine by Reuben Skycock, who had been trained himself by the manufacturer. Their job was essentially to push a button, but it was not quite as simple as that. The machine had two buttons on its control panel. When the time came, each man would put his thumb on one of the buttons. At a nod from Luther, Executioner Frack would count out loud to three. At three, both men simultaneously would slowly depress their buttons. When the buttons clicked, they would slowly slide their thumbs off until the buttons clicked back into place. Only one of the buttons was actually operational. Only one would start the timed automatic sequence in which stainless steel plungers in the delivery module on the wall would be lowered into the canisters of chemicals, pushing their fluids down through the tubes and into Frank Beachum’s vein: the sodium pentothal, then, one minute later, pancuronium bromide and, after another full minute’s delay, the potassium chloride. A computer inside the module scrambled the circuits at random so that the two executioners would never know which of their buttons had really done the trick.
At exactly eleven-thirty—when Frank Beachum was being swiftly strapped to the gurney in his cell—Deputy Superintendent Zachary Platt ushered these two men into the death chamber down the hall. Dr. Smiley Chaudrhi and nurse Maura O’Brien were there, as well as two guards who weren’t involved in the Strap-down procedure. All four of them looked up as Platt and the executioners entered, and all four of them just as quickly looked away, running their eyes over clipboards and light fixtures and over the white walls. Platt led Frick and Frack through the chamber quickly and into the supply room where the killing equipment was.
Arnold McCardle was there, standing by the shelf of phones. The fat man nodded at the others when they came in, but he didn’t smile or offer them his hand. Reuben Skycock was stationed by the delivery module in its steel box up on the wall. He did shake hands with the executioners. Executioner Frick, the brainy one, slid a wet palm through Skycock’s grasp and then clasped his two damp hands together in front of him—nodding and smiling fatuously all the while as if trying to think of a gambit to start the conversation. Executioner Frack slapped a big mitt into Skycock’s, pumped it once and said, “Reuben. How ya doin? Been watching those Cards?”
Skycock, whose moustachioed face had grown chalky over the last hour or so, only nodded vaguely. Then he turned his back on both of them.
Executioner Frick and Executioner Frack stood together after that in a corner of the supply room. They stood in silence, as no one else would talk to them and they had nothing to say to each other.
And at about that time, just around eleven-thirty, I turned the corner onto Knight Street again. It had been a crazy drive there, crazy and intense. My front fender devouring the road. Green lights, red lights, vanishing overhead. No brake under my feet, the other cars before and around and behind me imagined out of existence, imagined into pure space, as my whole being focused through them on the night beyond the windshield and my will shielded me from the eyes of the police.
And so I made it. I turned the corner onto Knight Street. Sick now. Exhausted. Woozy and dull. There was a ceaseless, painful pulsebeat in my skull. My right hand was stiff and swollen. I could barely hold my head erect, my eyes open. Drunkenness came over me in green splashes that made my gorge rise. And yet, for all that, I was thinking more clearly now than before, seeing things more clearly. There’s nothing quite like having your hand crushed in a door to straighten out your senses in a big hurry.
I made the turn and slowed the car sharply. I cruised into the shadow of the slum. The streetlamps were busted there, and the line of grimy brick buildings seemed to hunch back from the highway into the night. Paper and soda cans crunched under my tires as I pulled the Tempo up against the curb.
I killed the engine. The street around me was empty but it felt threatening all the same. Alleys and recesses deep black. Music with jackhammer rhythms drifting down from the upper stories. A staring presence somewhere—somewhere—in a window above me. And voices from a side street, young men’s voices, laughing harshly, angry, secret. Traces of whispering congregations. And everyone but me was black on these streets, and I was afraid.
I glanced down at the dashboard clock. That’s when I saw it was eleven-thirty. Lowenstein lived—not far from my house—in a mansion on Washington Terrace. Twenty minutes away for a mortal Ford, fifteen, maybe ten, for me and the Tempo. My belly bleak, my mind panicked and desperate, I told myself that I could phone him if I had to. I could phone Alan to get the unlisted number, and then phone Lowenstein and make my case. But the thought almost made me laugh: to bring him around on my say-so, to get him to risk his friendship with the governor, to get him to beg for a delay of the execution—I knew it wasn’t going to happen unless I walked through his door with that locket, and probably with Mrs. Russel in tow as well.
I leaned over and looked out the passenger window, looked up at the building in which she lived. The lights were out in there from top to bottom.
I gathered my strength. My body felt like a dead weight carried on the shoulder of my will. I threw the weight against the car door and stepped out into the street.
By then, by eleven-thirty, Bonnie Beachum was, I guess, technically insane. Sitting alone in a visitors’ waiting room—a bare white room in the prison’s main building—sitting in one of the tube chairs around a long wooden table, her hands folded on her skirt, her bagged, sunken eyes staring at nothing.
Since she had left Frank’s cell that evening, she had spent most of her time in her motel room, praying. She had prayed aloud at first, in a low voice, on her knees by the bed, her elbows on the mattress, her red hands clasped under her chin. She had prayed till her voice was raw and then she had prayed in a whisper. She had driven back to the prison at eleven, only her lips moving as she drove, the words inaudible. And now, as she sat, unmoving, as she gazed far away, she had worked herself into a kind of hysteria, a kind of madness, a silent frenzy of supplication.
Later, when it was all over, when she had more or less recovered from the emotional collapse that followed, she did not remember much about these last minutes. It seemed to her she had been carried, disembodied, over vast distances on a torrent of wild words. She had been a child again, at times, in her childhood places, hiding in the milk farm grass giggling, working in the kitchen with her fretful mother, in her childhood shift or naked under the Missouri sky and the holy, bloodred sun to which she prayed. At other times—or was it simultaneously—she had stood stripped almost to the bone before the cloudy bar of heaven with great grim patriarchs strung above her as she raved up at them with primitive, glottal cries. As she sat, her hand strayed vaguely to her chest, she scratched softly at the space below and between her breasts, because in her mind she was tear
ing her whole torso open with both clawed hands, ripping her wifehood from out her ribs to hurl it gory on the altar of the Lord who could not, surely, kill her husband, let her husband die, if he saw that, if he knew that, if he only knew …
Then there was blackness sometimes, a low mewl of petition, almost restful, and yet terrifying, because she was aware of the time passing even then. But she was aware of it also in her interior visions. And sometimes, with a stagnant, deathly clarity, she saw the clock, the real clock on the wall. Eleven. Eleven-twenty. Eleven twenty-seven. And then she began praying again—if prayer is what it was—and she was borne away to that country, which is not our country, that world, which is not our world, where love and innocence are arguments in favor of a better life.
When Tim Weiss, one of Frank’s lawyers, walked into the waiting room at eleven thirty-one, the sight of her stopped him in his tracks, turned him cold and made his mouth go dry. He had not seen her for six weeks, and the change in her struck him hard. She was haggard, emaciated, frenzied in her depths—he perceived all that in a second and went pale.
Weiss was only around my age, thirty-five or so, but he was bald with a frizzy fringe of silver hair, and his face looked as if it had been made for old age. The flesh saggy, the lips slack and damp, the eyes sad. He put an unsteady hand on Bonnie’s shoulder. She raised her eyes to him. He tried to swallow but couldn’t. “Unseeing,” was the word that came into his mind.
“How are you holding up, Bonnie?” Weiss said.
She looked away again and if she gave any answer, she did not give it to him.
Weiss was almost relieved when, at eleven thirty-five, the guard came in and told them it was time to go to the witness room outside the death chamber.
Then I walked across the deserted street. I climbed the stoop to Mrs. Russel’s door. There was the graffito-slashed mailbox again. The blue name carefully inscribed beneath the splash of brown paint. I pressed the buzzer. I stood, blinking and dull-witted. I heard an angry bass-line throbbing out of a radio far away. I pressed the buzzer again. I lifted my head. Though I couldn’t see her window from that position, I stared up along the grime-dark, night-dark bricks. I pressed the buzzer again and then I pressed it again, jabbing my thumb against the button. Again and again, breathing harder and harder. And then a sudden gush of rage coursed through me. I hit the door, hammered the frame once with the side of my swollen fist. The shock of pain went up my arm and up my neck. I cursed, angrier still. I kicked the bottom of the door, then I slammed the heel of my left hand against the edge of it. “Come on!” I growled. Then I kicked it again, hammered it with my hurt fist again, ignoring the pain, hammering it again and slugging it again with the heel of my left palm, kicking the base of it again and again, throwing my whole body into the blows now, my face contorted, my lips drawn back over my teeth, the shouts of frustration caught in my throat, bursting from my throat in choked gutturals as I hammered and slugged and kicked at the goddamned thing. The goddamned, fucking thing …
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