True Crime (35 page)

“It was her maiden name,” I was mumbling, drool spilling down the side of my mouth. “Her father gave it to her when she was sixteen. Mr. Robertson. It was her maiden name. A.R. And Russel wanted it for his grandmother.”

I grabbed hold of Neil with both hands now as the two men righted me.

“I could do it with the locket, Neil,” I said. “I could show that to Lowenstein. If I could prove it’s Amy’s, if I could prove Warren gave it to his grandmother. That would do it. That would be just enough.”

“Awright, pal, awright, but now you gotta sit down.”

Neil had me by one arm, the other guy was taking hold of the other. The floor beneath my feet seemed an open drain with all the barroom swirling down into it.

But all the same, I broke away from them. My violent twisting movement took them by surprise, my gym-trained muscles broke their hold on me. I stumbled into the center of the room and swung around to face them. The two men moved in on me, poised to spring. I backed away from them toward the door. I righted my glasses.

“All true,” I said breathlessly.

“You cannot drive, man,” said Neil.

“Gotta try,” I said.

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“Innocent. Guy’s innocent. Gonna kill him, Neil-o,” I said. “Gotta. Gotta.”

“Ev, listen …” said Neil. He moved toward me. The other guy reached for my arm, but I swung it out of his way.

“Else I’m nothing,” I said. “Else I’m just nothing.”

I turned my back on them. I was at the door in two strides. I grabbed the brass handle and yanked it open. The door’s edge smacked into my forehead.

“Ow, shit!” I commented, reeling backwards, clutching my face.

“Ev!” Neil shouted.

But I didn’t let him get me. I charged at the door again, holding my forehead with one hand, grabbing the handle with the other.

I felt the blood, viscous and warm, seep down from my brow and between my fingers, as I staggered across the threshold and out into the night.

F
our guards escorted the gurney to the door of the Deathwatch cell. Luther Plunkitt led them. When he reached the door, he paused and gestured to them to wait. The guards stood where they were, two on each side of the gurney. They were heavy men and each carried a black plastic riot shield strapped to his arm, each had a long rubber truncheon dangling from his belt. The men were called the Strap-down Team. They were there to get Beachum dressed; get him onto the gurney and belt him down; and roll him back into the death chamber.

The lead guard was carrying a brown paper package. Tilting his head at the door, Luther tapped the guard on the chest with one knuckle. Then he nodded at the Deathwatch guard and the door was opened. Luther went in and the guard with the package followed him. The other three waited outside with the gurney.

Beachum was sitting on the edge of his cot, his head hung down. Reverend Flowers was on the chair beside him, leaning toward him, hanging over him, murmuring steadily in a low, mournful voice.

“You gotta put your hand in God’s hand,” the reverend was saying. “God is with you, look to Jesus and you can face this thing. He will walk with you, He will walk with you to glory …”He murmured without thinking, the words burbling up from a tarry anguish inside him, a mindless
litany with which he nearly succeeded in hypnotizing himself.

Beachum’s hands kept coming up to his face to wipe his dry lips, kept dropping back between his legs again, coming up again. He stared at the floor, shaking his head. “1 swear to God I didn’t do anything, Harlan,” he kept repeating. “Nothing. I swear it. You gotta tell them. Jesus. My Bonnie. Gail My little girl. I didn’t even
do
anything.”

Long minutes ago, they had both passed the point of reason.

Now the door snapped open, and Beachum made a small, terrified noise; bolted upright as if a jolt of current had gone through him. His eyes darted back and forth between the clock and the door as Luther Plunkitt came in. Eleven, only eleven, it wasn’t time yet, he thought wildly. There was still an hour—a whole hour—left to go.

With a brief nod at Benson, Luther approached the cage. His step was firm, his expression was set in that meaningless smile of his. He was determined, he knew his duty and his mind had entered a zone in which there was only action. It was something he could count on himself to do at times like this: in battle, under pressure, in charge. For the next hour or so, he would be nothing more than the things he had to say, the things he had to do. He would become his job, and he would do his job.

He moved close to the bars. He saw Beachum get to his feet, the reverend beside him get to his feet. He spoke the words he had to speak in the tone of compassionate necessity that he deemed to be the voice of the state of Missouri.

“Frank. I’m gonna ask the reverend here to leave for a few moments, so that you can change your clothes and take care of some things. Then he’ll be able to come back in.”

And he nodded at the reverend, smiling blandly. But he
registered, in some sequestered part of his brain, the prisoner’s terror-bright eyes, his mouth working like an insect’s mouth: the dull, scared, weirdly acquiescent countenance of every dead man he had ever seen. And he was dimly aware of the low boil of dread bubbling in his own unillumined recesses. But he ignored it, as he knew well how to do.

The cage bars slid back. Flowers clasped Beachum by the shoulder. “I’ll be right outside, Frank. I’ll come back as soon as they let me.” The words came out of him steadily, but he hardly knew what he was saying.

Beachum spun on him, like a blind man, spun toward the sound of his voice. The condemned man’s eyes were so bright, so full of desperate pleading that it seemed he was trying to hold Flowers to the spot by the sheer strength of his stare alone. Flowers could not wait to get out of there, just for a minute, just to breathe for a minute. Hating himself, he was still glad of the necessity to tear himself from Beachum’s gaze and step out of the cage.

He walked quickly to the door, had to force himself to pause there and look back with a reassuring smile. Then the door was opened and he stepped through.

Coming out of the cell was like surfacing from his own grave: his relief was that great. And yet the moment he entered the hall, he saw the gurney, with its heavy leather straps; its suffocating presence; and the Strap-down guards with their stances relaxed, professional and implacable. So he could not sag or gasp in the freer air of the hall. Reverend Flowers made himself walk past these men with all the grave dignity he could muster.

He went down the hallway to the barred checkpoint and was allowed through into the medical section. There he asked for admittance to a men’s room and was shown the way by a nurse.

It wasn’t until he stood before the urinal that he could
let the tension stream out of him. He leaned his head against the cinderblock wall, his dick in his fingers, his piss draining. He closed his eyes and breathed through his open mouth. “Lord, Lord, Lord,” he whispered. “Why do you let us do this to each other?”

In the cage, the Strap-down guard dropped his package on the table. To Beachum, it seemed to make a loud noise when it fell—
whap
—and he started. He leaned away from the package in almost mystic horror of it, staring at the smooth brown paper as if the parcel might suddenly explode.

The warden was talking to him. It was just a sound to Frank, an inexorable mutter, like the hum and motion of the clock, nudging him to the next step in the proceedings. He hadn’t done anything, and yet it just would not stop.

“Frank,” the warden said, “we’ve brought you a change of clothes, like I told you we were going to. I’m gonna ask you now to put those clothes on, including the special underpants that are provided for hygienic reasons. This is required and I have to ask you if you’re going to give me any problems about this.”

The sense of the words seemed to come to Frank moments after they were spoken, like a translation spoken over earphones. When the meaning did reach him, so many possible answers, possible reactions played themselves out in his mind that it seemed a single second couldn’t hold them all: it was the condensed time of dreams. He saw himself rebelling, screaming, hurling himself at the guard, maybe killing the guard, maybe forcing the guards to strip him naked by sheer force, maybe even breaking past them and running into the night to find Bonnie, to run off with Bonnie hand in hand … And at the same time, just as in a dream, he felt too weak even to move, even to speak, his muscles limp with fear, his will withered and yellow. Yet even now, before he had decided what he would do, before he felt he had the
strength, he was coming forward, he was reaching for the package. It was just a change of clothes, that’s all; it wasn’t the thing yet, the thing itself.

So his hand closed on the brown paper and it felt as if he had made a pact between himself and this next stage, just this stage, this changing of clothes. He would do this but he was not committing to the next stage after it, the next step. He knew—but did not let himself know—that it would be like that from now on: agreeing not to the whole of the process, but to each stage, each step, step by step, in the hope that the next step would bring rebellion or rescue when, in fact, all the decisions had already been made. It would go on this way to the end.

He picked up the package, still staring at it.

“Good,” he heard the warden say.

It was the best Luther Plunkitt could do; the least he could do and the most. The official protocol required all four of the Strap-down guards to enter the cage at this point, to surround the prisoner and ensure that he put on the fresh clothes and the hygienic diaper. The message was supposed to be sharp and overwhelming: either dress yourself or we’ll do it for you. But Luther didn’t like to handle it that way. A man ought to be allowed some dignity, he felt, even if it put security at risk. A man ought to be allowed to make his own decisions whenever possible. Luther had made the professional judgment that Beachum, in the end, would decide to be a man about it and do what he had to do.

Now Luther was speaking again, not by rote, but fluently, hardly needing to think about the words, just saying what he had to say next. “It would be wise at this point, Frank, if you took the opportunity to use the toilet. For your own comfort, since there might not be an opportunity later on.”

Frank, holding the package, staring off at nothing, nodded.

Luther gestured to the Strap-down guard. The guard came out of the cage and the bars slid shut.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Luther. “The guard’ll call me when you’re done.”

Frank Beachum sat on the steel toilet in its nook in the cage. He kept his pants on, down around his ankles: it would have made him feel too naked and helpless to take them off completely. And he did not want to see himself either. Even as it was, now, when he looked down at his penis, it gave him a queasy feeling. It was shriveled to the size of a thumb joint, his scrotum so tight that his balls were almost invisible underneath. The sight made him hate himself.

There were all kinds of stories at Osage, in the cells, in the yard, about how they let you fuck your woman in Death-watch. At least you get a last piece of nookie before you go, the prisoners said. Frank didn’t know whether this was true or not. Even when Bonnie had been there, he had never felt less like having sex in his life. And now the urge was gone from his completely, gray ice where the steady red ember of it had been. He could remember, all right, as if it had happened to another man, his own past, the sweat-sheened faces of women, the gray-white ridges of sheets, the shapes of headboards, the colors of walls. He could remember sliding into some Kansas cowgirl with hilarious pleasure, ramming some Badlands bitch bone to bone in a snarling rage, looming over Bonnie like a solid sky, like nothing could rain through him and touch her, harm her: it seemed as if it had all been good, it had all been life which was good. And it was all gone, everything tangible gone. The sight of his shrunken dick made him hate himself for not having it in him anymore, for being a sickly, flaccid, castrated piece of flesh ordered to shuffle through the stages of his own death.
Even his imagination had lost its visceral powers. To conjure the smell, the taste of pussy—once one of the pleasures of his leisure time—was simply beyond him now. Which sickened him like fever, a nausea of helplessness. The way the piss only dribbled and spurted out of him—that said it—that damned him in his own mind, and made him feel more sickly still.

Just like a man with a fever, weakly, he stood, and pulled up his pants. He yanked his shirt up over his head and unfolded the pressed white T-shirt from the parcel on the table. He put this on and then removed his pants. He had to swallow a wad of distaste and humiliation as he stepped into the plastic underwear. The last article—the loose green trousers—he drew over his legs so quickly that he fumbled and nearly fell over: he wanted to cover the diaper as fast as he could. All the same, with the trousers on too, he could feel the plastic against his skin, a reminder of how shriveled and childlike and helpless he was, his manhood gone.

When he was dressed, when he stood with his shoulders slumped, and his chin lowered, and his mouth half open and his eyes gazing dully at the floor, the door opened and the warden reentered. He came toward the cage bars and nodded at the prisoner.

“Good,” he said again.

Around eleven-fifteen, Luther came out of the cell and told Flowers he could go back in. Flowers was standing in the hall behind the gurney, trying not to look at the gurney but looking anyway from time to time and feeling a macabre and hateful thrill. He moved around it to the door now and he and Luther passed each other just outside the threshold. The tall minister with his black, solid head, his monumental gravity, his sad, yellowing eyes glanced at the smaller man with his silver hair and his face of putty and its small deep-set pair of gray marbles, and the warden glanced back. At that moment,
Flowers felt closer to Plunkitt than to Beachum, than to anyone else. He recognized a fellow sufferer, saw in the warden’s look the feeling he acknowledged in his own heart: Thank God, they were almost through it. It was almost done.