True Crime (29 page)

I drove past the brick cafes, the tree-lined sidewalks of the broad boulevard—of the same boulevard Michelle had been driving on that very morning before she crashed. With one part of my mind, I monitored the news station on the
radio, listening for information about Frank Beachum. With the rest of my mind, I imagined possible scenarios of disaster in the hope that I might avoid surprise.

He would not be there, I told myself. That was the most likely prospect. Warren Russel—my prime suspect—would have moved away and left no forwarding address. Or no one would tell me where he was. Or he
would
be there and would refuse to talk to me. Or he
would
talk to me and, at my first pertinent question, would draw an AK-47 from his belt and stitch a seam of bullets from my forehead to my navel, sending me reeling down his front stoop to lie dead in the street below me. Then—and I added this just for the sake of drama—he would spit on my carcass and sneer before he slammed the door.

Or he’d be innocent. There was another possibility. He’d tell me whatever he’d told the police six years ago and it would be clear to me as it had been clear to them that he had simply driven into Pocum’s parking lot that day to buy a Coke, and that’s all.

Oh yes, I thought, approaching the intersection with the highway, I had this situation covered, all right. I’d figured it from every angle now. Disaster would have to wake up pretty early in the old
A.M
. to get the drop on Mr. Steven Everett.

I arrived at Knight Street, a long and ancient lane on the border of the highway. It seemed, in fact, the last crumbling remnant of a neighborhood that the highway had plowed under. A street on the edge of a pit, it seemed, and its miserable boxes of red brick looked like headstones for the community buried beneath the six-lane blacktop. Windows darkened by grime and exhaust peered dolefully down at the rush of cars. Faces at the window openings peered down; old faces, black faces, never moving. The laundry, drooping on lines between the buildings, hung motionless too, because there was no wind. And below it, around scruffy yards littered
with old beer cans and broken glass, white picket fences listed over as if drawn inexorably toward the earth.

I parked the Tempo in the gutter trash and stepped out. A couple of boys bouncing a basketball between them on the sidewalk turned to watch me as I crossed the street. Number 4331 was like the other buildings beside it: five stories; red brick blackened by dirt. A chipped, decaying stoop up to a wooden door with a cracked glass panel.

I climbed the stairs and read the row of names on the mailboxes. My nerves—my aching head, my stomach—all flared up again when I saw it there:
Russel
, painfully printed in blue ink, half covered by a stroke of the brown paint with which someone had swashed graffiti over the whole row.

There would be no answer, I thought, still trying to outsmart disaster. It would be a different Russel. Or someone had forgotten to change the name when he moved away. I almost wanted it to be like that. That would end the tension, the suspense. I would have an excuse to call off this ill-augured game of Beat the Clock. I pressed the buzzer, and waited.

A moment later, I heard a woman’s voice above my head.

“Who’s there?”

I had to move back, move a few steps down the stoop before I could see her. Her heavy-jowled brown face was poking out at me from a third-floor window, probing the semidarkness below her with large, slightly protuberant eyes. She frowned when she got a look at me: a buttoned-down white man shuffling hapless in the dusk. The whap of the basketball on the sidewalk had stopped and I could feel the two kids watching me too.

“Yes?” the woman above me said.

“Mrs. Russel?”

“Ye-es?” she repeated more warily.

“Mrs. Russel, my name is Steve Everett. I’m a reporter with the
St. Louis News
. I’m looking for Warren Russel.” She seemed to rear back a little. “Warren?”

“Yes, ma’am, is he around?”

She didn’t answer, not right away. Somewhere behind me, the basketball hit the sidewalk once—
whap
—then stopped.

“Just a minute,” the woman said. “I’ll come down.”

She pulled her head in and was gone.

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I turned as casually as I could to make a quick check on the two kids behind me. They had moved toward me a little and were standing near the base of the stoop. They made no bones about it: they were staring up at me, coolly contemplating every inch of me. Two kids in baggy shorts and T-shirts, they were. Nine years old maybe, maybe ten. The one on the right was holding the basketball against his hip. It was the one on the left who had the gun. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t like the way his hand rested against the pocket of his baggy shorts, the barely perceptible cant of his body to one side as if to put an extra spring in his draw action. I’d spent the entire weekend covering gunshot victims and I told myself it had gone to my brain. All the same, if he asked me for candy change, I was going to give it to him without an argument.

Behind me, the door opened, and I turned again to look up the stoop at Mrs. Russel. She was a heavyset woman—in her fifties, I’d guess, though I find it hard to tell sometimes with blacks. She had big powerful arms and legs like pillars, both bare. In fact, there seemed something almost naked—frighteningly large and naked—about her altogether. She wore a shapeless floral housedress which ended at the shoulders and the knees: slippers on her feet, no rings on her fingers, her only adornment a gold heart pendant around her neck—and her hair tied back so severely behind her head that her face appeared enormous and seemed to jut down at
me. She was a formidable sight, still frowning, with storms and flashes of anger deep behind those bulging eyes. All the same, I sensed a sort of brusque, muscular decency in her. I hoped I did. I hoped I could count on it. “Go home,” she said.

I opened my mouth to answer, then realized she was talking to the boys behind me.

“Don’t stand there gawking at the man, it’s your dinner time, go on home.”

I dared a glance back over my shoulder. The two boys were already edging away along the sidewalk with many a sulking glower back in my direction. I climbed up the stoop to stand in front of the woman at the door. I was surprised to find she was half a head shorter than I.

“You are Mrs. Russel?” I asked.

“Angela Russel,” she said quietly.

“And Warren …”

“My grandson. What does a newspaper want with him now?”

“Mrs. Russel, it’s very important that I talk to him,” I said. “It’s urgent. I need to see him tonight.”

She pulled up and snorted once through a broad, flat nose. “What could be so urgent about you talking to Warren?”

I hesitated. Those turbulent, bulging eyes thundered at me. Her big arm held the door open and her big body blocked the way and I suspected that getting past her was going to be a lot tougher than merely browbeating a confession out of her gunman grandson.

“I think,” I said slowly, “I think he would want me to say it to him directly.”

The wide face went back and forth as she shook her head. “You’re gonna have to talk to me.”

“Mrs. Russel …”

“You’re gonna have to talk to me, mister.” I lifted a hand in protest. “I just think …”

“Warren’s dead,” the woman said flatly. “Warren’s been in his grave now going on three years.”

W
arren Russel was dead. I hadn’t thought of that. I fumbled for a cigarette, my hands shaking. He would’ve been twenty, three years ago. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be dead. Proof positive of my superstition, but a blow just the same. I brought out my plastic lighter and struck it—three times before I got a flame. I pressed the flame hard against the cigarette end to keep it steady.

We were in Mrs. Russel’s apartment now. Night was at the open windows. Standing lamps cast a low yellow light across a sparsely furnished room. A dining table by an ancient kitchenette. A lamp stand crowded with framed photographs. Photographs and greeting cards taped to white walls. White walls with a mapwork of cracks in the plaster.

I sat on the murk-colored cushion of a sprung love seat. I sat on the edge, hanging over an old oval of carpet: scrupulously clean, like the fabric of the seat, but worn paper thin. I pulled on my cigarette hungrily.

Angela Russel put a cup of coffee on the end table beside me. A butter cookie was wedged neatly between the saucer and the cup. She set an ashtray next to it, then retreated; sat at the dining table with a cup of her own. She stretched out in her chair, sipped her coffee. She regarded me coolly, waiting. Her grandson was dead. How was I going to prove Beachum’s innocence now? How was I going to tell this fortress of a woman what I suspected?

A small alarm clock on the kitchen counter ticked loudly. It was ten past eight.

“So, uh … how …?” I managed to say, the smoke trailing out of me.

She tilted her head to one side. “Well, you know. Drugs. They stabbed him one night. Out by the park. The police came and told me. Showed me the picture on his driver’s license. ‘This your boy?’ Like they’d found a lost dog. I knew it was something. I was hoping he’d been arrested. But they got him out by the park.”

All this she said in a toneless voice, so freighted, I thought, with sadness, that the expression was simply flattened out of it. She shook her head, looking down.

“Was he … I mean, he used drugs,” I said.

She snorted again, shifted backward in her chair. Glancing off to one side as if to share a joke with some invisible onlooker.

“Yeah,” she said—
you pasty moron
, she might’ve added. “Yeah. He used drugs.”

My cigarette in my mouth, my eyes narrowed against the smoke, I reached for the coffee cup on the end table. My finger slipped through the loop of the handle—and I found myself sitting there, like that, staring at it, at my hand, at the handle, at the cup. At the pattern of ridges on the white five-and-dime-store china. My mind seemed gloomy and still. There were flashes of light and thought in it, but I was too tired to follow or fan them.
Was he on drugs? Did he own a gun? Where was he on July Fourth six years ago?
How would she know? And what good was any of it without the man himself to back it up? Maybe it would make a good interview sometime, maybe later sometime, a good backgrounder for an investigation. I could write it up for the feature page and Bonnie Beachum could clip the article out and put it in her scrapbook. She could wave it at the television
cameras when she petitioned the governor to clear her husband’s name. Posthumously.

Where were you?
she had said to me, clutching the bars of the Death House cage.
It’s too late now. Where were you all this time?

“I think your grandson killed a woman,” I heard myself say as I stared at the cup. I tugged the cigarette from my lips and massaged my eyes with my fingers. “I think he killed a woman six years ago.”

When I looked up again, Mrs. Russel had not moved. She was still sitting slouched in her chair, one arm resting on the table, one in her lap. Watching me. Sneering at me, I thought, though her lips had barely curled.

“There’s a man on death row,” I told her. “He’s going to be executed tonight for shooting the counter-girl in a grocery store. A woman named Amy Wilson. I think your grandson did it.”

She did smile now, wearily. Her shoulders lifted and fell. Her voice was not toneless anymore—it dripped with irony. “Now why would you think a thing like that?”

“Because he was the only other person there,” I said, and I knew I was lying, and I knew I would be caught out in the lie. “And I think the man they’re going to kill is innocent.”

“And I would just bet,” said Mrs. Russel slowly. “You tell me if I’m wrong, but I would just bet that this innocent man is white.”

I sighed. I had known that was coming too—and all the rest of it. “Yeah,” I said. “He is white.”

“And there wasn’t no one else at this grocery store that day but this innocent white man and my Warren?”

I nodded—then I gave up, shook my head. “Two witnesses. There were two witnesses also.”

“But they were white too.”

“Probably. I know one was. He was an accountant.”

“Oh. An accountant.”

“The other was a housewife.”

“And they don’t kill people.”

“They don’t generally hold up grocery stores, no.”

“But black boys do,” said Mrs. Russel.

“Look, I …”

“Black drug fiends—they hardly have time for anything else.”

I spread my hands. “I know how it sounds.”

“Well, that’s good. Then we both know.”

“What can I say?”

“Beats me, Mr. Everett. What
can
you say?” She frowned again, more deeply now, and though she looked away from me I could see the tempests raging in her bulging eyes.

I made a stab at it anyway. “Did your grandson own a gun?” I asked her.

She answered quickly, sharply. “Oh, they all got guns, Mr. Everett. Don’t you know that? All those black drug-fiend boys got guns.”

I was silent.

“Let me
ask you
a question,” she said. “You got any proof? You got any proof to come around here saying this to me about that poor dead child?”

I began to answer—stopped. “No,” I said then. “Not proof. Not really.”

“Not really,” she said slowly, running her fingernail along the edge of her teacup, pointing her large bald features directly at me now. “So what then? This white man called you up. He said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”

“No. I spoke to him. I went to the prison.”

“You went to the prison.”

“I went there today. Yes.”

“And you looked at this man. Is that it? You saw his face.”

“Yes.”

“You saw his face and it looked like your face. So you thought, Well, this man must be innocent. Must be some black boy did it.”

“I didn’t know your grandson was black until I got here. It’s just that there are flaws—there are flaws in the story.”

This time, she laughed outright, dark, flat laughter. “I had a cousin they electrocuted last year down in Florida, Mr. Everett. There were all
kinds
of flaws in
that
story.”