True Crime (8 page)

“Morning all,” I said, and then laughed once—“heh!”—idiotically. I cleared my throat.

There was no answer, not for a long time. Bob watched me. Jane March watched him and then me again. She was a small, stoop-shouldered woman in her forties with an anxious, saggy face. She had been at the
News
for a good many years. She was our living morgue, and an anchor for a staff of younger folks who tended to move on too quickly.

Bob drew a breath, a long breath, before he spoke at last. “You got my message.”

I nodded as remorsefully as I could. “Yeah.”

He tossed his papers down on the desk in front of him. “Michelle Ziegler’s been in a car wreck,” he said.

He said it bluntly like that, cruelly, as if it served me right, as if it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in bed with Patricia. But, at first, it didn’t register. I was so fixed on the other thing between us. And then, for a crazy second, I thought it might be some nasty joke made for spite.

“What? Michelle?”

“She’s in a coma,” Bob went on coldly. “The doctors think she’s going to die.”

“Oh! Oh no!” I felt it now. A weakness in my knees, a chill in my groin. “She’s twenty-three or something. She’s just out of school. She’s … she just got out of school.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, and his voice was sad now, steadfastly decent as he was. “I guess that doesn’t count for much when you go full speed into a wall.”

“Dead Man’s Curve,” said Jane March.

“Aw, no,” I said. “Up by the parkway? That turn up there. Jesus. And they think she’s gonna die?”

“Right now that’s how it looks,” said Bob.

“Man oh man! That dumb broad. That poor kid. Jesus. She just got out of school.”

So, for a moment, the little unpleasantness concerning my dick and Bob’s wife was washed aside by the image of Michelle. I could see her graceful body shattering against the windshield. I could feel the impact in my icy crotch. What the hell had she been doing? I thought. Drinking with her intellectual friends. Laughing with them, satirizing her ignorant colleagues till dawn. Too sure of herself to stay out of her car. Too stubborn to pull off the road. I wanted to shake her for being so stubborn, so sure. I wished I had shaken her the night before. Go home, I should’ve said to her. Stay home, write a better story. Make some calls, get
some facts. Write them up so well they
have
to print it. And she’d have done it too. She’d have listened to me. I don’t know why, but she always did. After she finished cursing me for a fascist and a pig and a this and that, she always came back and listened. I should’ve grabbed her by her stupid blouse front and shaken her till her eyes rattled.

But now, the moment passed. Bob and Jane sat watching me and the whole situation crystallized in my mind. I lifted my glasses with one hand and massaged my brow. I understood the whole ridiculous business, and I felt sick.

“All right,” I said. I sighed. “That stinks. That really stinks.”

Bob nodded, frowned.

I straightened. “So what do you need?”

He went on watching me, his own thoughts moving behind the passionless features. I just felt sick. How had he found out? Why had he had to find out? I wished he would curse me for it. I wished I had never seen his goddamned wife at all. I wished for the days when we could’ve gone outside and shot at each other. Pistols in the
Bois de Boulogne
at dawn. It would’ve been easier to bear than this.

“Michelle had an interview scheduled today with Frank Beachum,” Bob said finally.

“Frank Beachum,” I repeated. I was thinking again about Michelle’s slender limbs, her brittle bones; Patricia’s long, strong figure; her breast beneath my hand. All the while, Bob’s steady gaze burned into me. I forced the images down. “Right,” I said, blinking once. “Right. Frank Beachum. The guy they’re gonna juice today. Right. I remember. Michelle had a seat for the show.”

“She also had an interview with him. At four, face-to-face in the Deathwatch cell.”

“Right. Okay. I remember that.”

“Alan wants you to cover for her,” Bob said.

“Alan. Right,” I said. I was beginning to focus again. I got the message. Alan wanted me to cover for Michelle. Alan wanted me, Bob didn’t. What Bob wanted was burbling like hot tar at the bottom of his unwavering stare. I stood before him stupidly for a second or two. I tried to think how to answer. I tried to think of what I would’ve said if I
hadn’t
been sleeping with his wife. If I were just a reporter being called in for a pickup assignment on his day off. “So, uh … Beachum,” I said. “What did he …? This was before my time. He killed some girl or something.”

“A pregnant woman,” said Bob in his quiet, controlled voice. “A college student. Amy Wilson. She was working the summer in a grocery in Dogtown. She owed Beachum money, fifty dollars or something, for some repairs he’d done on her car. He shot her dead.”

“Okay. Anything special about him?”

Bob lifted one shoulder slightly. “He was a mechanic over at that Amoco station on Clayton. That’s about it.”

“He’s one of these born-again crazies,” Jane March chimed in.

I was relieved—I was delighted—for the excuse to turn away from Bob, to turn my attention to her. Still, I could feel his stare, his eyes, like two tiny sets of teeth, gnawing on my profile as I faced her.

“Yeah, they all get born again on death row,” I said. “That place has the highest birth rate in the country.”

“Now, now, now,” said Jane. “Don’t be such a cynical boy. He was born again before all this started. He’d been a drifter or something. From Michigan, I think. Broken home, alcoholic mother. He’d been in jail a couple of times for violent assaults, barroom fights, that sort of thing. And then I think he did three years in MSP for beating up a state trooper who tried to give him a ticket.”

“Sounds like a reasonable sort of fellow.”

“But he was clean for something like four years before
the Wilson killing. He got out of slam and met his wife, Bunny or Bonnie or Bipsy or something. She’s one of these born-againers too. I guess she’s the one who led him to Jesus.”

“Yeah, I know these prison groupie types,” I said. “Boy meets girl, girl saves boy’s soul, boy and girl go on interstate kill spree.”

“Cynical, cynical.” Jane March pursed her lips primly. “They were very nice. They had a daughter together. They bought a house in Dogtown. He had his mechanic job. She took care of the baby. They were the all-American family. The guy was totally clean for like three, four years. Then, one July fourth, he walks into the grocery store, this Pocum’s in Dogtown. Amy Wilson is working the register. She says she hasn’t got the money she owes him …”

“And old Frank just kind of lost that nasty temper of his.”

“Looks like it.”

“Tsk, tsk. I hope he expressed his remorse, at least.”

“Well, no, he’s been a little slow there,” said Jane March. “He still says he just went to the store to get some A-1 steak sauce for his Fourth of July picnic.”

“Hey, convincing story.”

“That’s what the jury thought. It didn’t help much that a guy in the store saw him run out with the smoking gun. And then some poor woman who had no idea what was going on nearly bumped into him in the parking lot.”

I laughed. “A-1 Sauce. I like that. That’s good.”

“What Michelle wanted on this story …” Bob’s soft, contained, penetrating voice brought me back around to face him, brought my mind back around to the sickly heat between us and the conversation we were not having as Jane March looked on. “What
I
want on this story,” he said, holding up his hand, explaining in that schoolteacher way of
his, “is the human interest. All right? What it’s like on death row on the final day. Don’t overload it with the details of the case. We’ve already covered the case, and all the appeals and all that. I want what the cell looks like, and what Beachum looks like, and what’s going on inside his mind. A human interest sidebar, that’s what I want. All right?”

“Right. Sure,” I said. I adjusted my glasses which had slipped on the sweaty bridge of my nose.
This is almost over
, I told myself.
It isn’t going to be too bad. Not yet, not now
. First, we would deal with the story. That was Bob’s way. Professional, ordered, calm. We would deal with the story first, and all the rest would come later. All I had to do for now was keep my mouth shut and my head down; do the job, do the work, and we would get through today without the full-blown disaster that was surely coming. We would get through today, and tomorrow—well, maybe the world would end. Who knows? I could get lucky. “Human interest sidebar,” I repeated. “Righty-oh.”

I thought I saw a grimace of distaste twist Bob’s mouth for a second. But then the round, youthful face was still again, and the expression calm, and the blue eyes black to their depths. “I’m sorry to call you in on your day off,” he said, with no inflection in his voice at all.

“Hey … hey … I mean … hey. No problem. It’s an emergency,” I said.

“Yes,” said Bob. “It is.”

Jane March watched him, then me, then him again. She would get at the truth before long, I was certain. Everyone in the damn building would get at the truth before too long. And as for my wife, as for Barbara … I didn’t want to think about that.

“Okay. Hokey-dokey. Right,” I said. “I’ll be … I’ll get … right on that.”

Silently, I sang me a hallelujah when, at last, I could
turn away from him and head toward my desk. I felt the basilisk at my back, but I knew that if I just kept going it would be all right. I would get to my chair. I would bury my head in the story. I would hand in my copy at the end of the day, and then go home and move away without leaving a forwarding address. Something. I would think of something. I felt the clenched fist of my stomach starting to loosen as I hurried up the aisle.

Three steps. I got three steps. And then I pulled up short.

Shit
, I thought. A question had occurred to me. On a normal day, it would have been a simple thing to turn around and ask my question of the city editor. It did not seem a simple thing to do today. My stomach clenched right up again. I imagined the sweat on my back made my white shirt gray as Bob stared at it. I imagined he didn’t want me to turn around again any more than I wanted to turn around again. I told myself not to turn around. I told myself to forget my question, to go to my desk and get to work.

Then I turned around. I saw Bob’s lips press together hard.

“Uh … why didn’t she hear the shots?” I asked.

I saw Bob’s lips turn white. “The shots,” he said softly.

I felt my face get hot, I felt a prickling under my hairline. “Sorry, I just … The woman in the, in the—what-chamacallit—the parking lot. Jane said she didn’t know what was going on but … I mean, if she was right outside, she must’ve heard the … the shots …” My voice trailed away. A lump of nauseous fear corkscrewed from my stomach to my throat.

Bob’s cheeks had reddened.

You have to understand. The Reddening of Bob Findley’s Cheeks was a phenomenon regarded with terror by every single member of the city room staff. They had good
reason too. When Bob’s cheeks turned red, it meant that you had enraged him. Despite his lifework of calm, his caring, his ever-best efforts at fairness and decency, you and you alone had managed to throw a match into the gas tank of his wrath. This was not a happy thing. There were stories. About what he did to people, the people who enraged him. These were not stories about explosions or tirades. Bob did not explode. He didn’t shout or throw furniture. But if you enraged him—if you enraged him often enough, or deeply enough—he would get you for it. Quietly, surely. He would erase you from the Book of Life. Newspaper lore held that it had actually happened once—to a tough woman veteran who had continually questioned his youthful judgment. The old folks said she was now a television reviewer in Milwaukee, though maybe they exaggerated to get the full horror-story effect. No one wanted to find out for sure, though—and neither me, especially under the circumstances. When Bob’s cheeks flared their deep scarlet now, my teeth clamped shut. My head jerked back a little as if a grenade had burst at my feet.

And Bob, quiet, red-faced, practically vibrated in his chair. Slowly, very slowly, he said: “I don’t know, Steve. I don’t know if she would’ve heard the shots or not. Maybe she did. I don’t know. What I would like you to do please is to get an interview with Frank Beachum about his feelings today. Then I would like you to write that interview up as a human interest sidebar. Do you think you can just do that please?”

“Yup, yeah, absolutely, you bet, sure Bob, right,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Bob.

He took up the papers on his desk again and studied them, dismissing me. Jane March, wide-eyed, puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath as much as to say, “Wow!”

Me, I pivoted on my heel and zipped right back up that aisle again.

“Right,” I murmured as I beelined for my desk. “Human interest sidebar. Okey-dokey, absolutely, right away, sure, right.”

I
dropped thankfully into my swivel chair and punched on my terminal. While the lights came up, my hand strayed to my shirt pocket. I drew my cigarettes halfway out before I thought to resist the urge. The no-smoking policy. Bob had helped to institute the no-smoking policy. He was very caring about our health, was Bob. I did not think I would violate the no-smoking policy today.

I tapped
Beachkil
into the keyboard. The file popped up on the screen. There was a selection of stories, from the first day through the trial. I scrolled through them quickly, picking out the basics. This was what I came up with:

On July fourth, six years ago, a twenty-year-old coed named Amy Wilson was shot in the throat with a .38 as she stood behind her counter at Pocum’s grocery in Dogtown. She was six months pregnant at the time. Both she and the baby died. A scholarship sophomore at Washington University, she had been married to a law student, Richard Wilson, and was working at the grocery for the summer to help support them.

Just before the shooting took place, Dale Porterhouse, a certified public accountant who was passing through the neighborhood, had asked to use the grocery’s bathroom. Later, he testified at Frank Beachum’s trial. As he was entering the bathroom, he said, he had heard Amy Wilson tell Beachum that she could not pay him the fifty dollars she
owed him for some work he had done on the carburetor of her aging Impala. Moments later, from inside the bathroom, Porterhouse said he heard Amy scream out, “Please not that!” The scream was followed by a single gunshot. Porterhouse had zipped up his pants and run to the entryway at the rear of the store just in time to see Frank Beachum racing out the front, he said. Beachum, he said, was clutching a pistol in his right hand. Porterhouse picked him out of a police lineup that same day.