True Crime (16 page)

But then that’s how they would’ve remembered him—raging, crying—and it would’ve been no good for them forever. There would’ve been no peace. This would be better, he thought. So he kept on.

“Hey, we’re not sad here,” he said again and again. “I’m going to the good place, Bonnie, you know that, we’re not sad.”

It worked, anyway, eventually. After a few moments, some energy seemed to return to Bonnie’s body. He could feel it. She managed to loosen her grip on him. She tilted back from him and tried to smile up at him through her tears.

“Can we be a little sad?” she said.

Frank made a noise that he hoped sounded like an easy laugh. “Well. Just a little. Cause I’m such a great guy and we’ll miss me for a little while.”

The answer made her shake her head, made her strive toward him with her eyes, trying to tell him with her eyes just what a great guy she thought he was. But that was no good. She would lose it again, if that kept on. So he let go of her. Left only one hand gripping her shoulder, and turned to look down at Gail. The child’s pinched, worried face was pushed up at him as she held her picture open in front of her with both hands.

“Now, let’s take a look at this picture here,” he said. “What is it again?”

“Green pastures. It’s not finished yet,” said Gail, holding up her grim scribbles, lifting the sheet of newsprint toward him.

Frank was about to squat down for a better look. But the phone rang on Benson’s desk again. Frank and Bonnie both turned to look at it, their lips going tight. Gail followed their gazes.

“I’ll just let my secretary get that,” said Frank. He spoke through a tight throat.

“Maybe it’s the appeal,” said Bonnie. The tone of her voice made Frank wince. As if the appeal would make it all right, as if that’s just what they’d been waiting for. “It must be,” she said. “Don’t you think? It must be Weiss or Tryon. Maybe it’s the, it’s the appeal, the stay. Don’t you think?”

“No, no, Bonnie. Bonnie, listen …” said Frank.

“Your lawyer again, Frank,” said Benson. He was walking toward the cage, the receiver in his outstretched hand.

Frank turned to his daughter. “Hold that picture right there, monster. I just gotta talk to my lawyer a minute. This place—the action never stops, right?”

The little girl smiled at her daddy’s joke. Bonnie stood staring at the receiver, staring like a woman shipwrecked at what might be motion in the fog. Frank went to the bars. As he reached through to take the phone, his glance met Benson’s. The duty officer’s rough, handsome features remained impassive, but Frank connected with him. He felt for a moment that the two of them understood—understood the situation, the procedure, the way it would all go down, businesslike, step by step, everyone doing his job. Benson and he—they were there, they were in it together. Not like Bonnie and Gail.

He leaned toward the bars and brought the phone to his ear.

“Yeah,” he said.

“S’Hubert, Frank. We lost it.”

For all he knew it was coming, his stomach dropped like a hanged man. He cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said.

“It came in right after I hung up with you. They didn’t go for any of it. And the Hererra ruling has just killed us everywhere.” Frank heard Tryon sigh. He closed his eyes, leaning his shoulder against the bars. “We’re still trying to find a way into the U.S. Supreme but … And Tom’s going to the governor in a few hours.”

“Yeah” was all Frank could say. “Okay.”

“Yeah,” Tryon answered in his high voice. “I’m sorry, Frank. You’re gonna have to brace yourself for the worst. I won’t lie to you.”

“No,” said Frank thickly. In a black haze, he was trying to tell himself it was real, it was really going to happen, trying to force the knowledge home. But he was also thinking:
There’s still the governor. We’ve still got the governor
. Not because he believed it, but because the dead, hanging weight inside him was impossible to sustain. “Okay,” he said after a long silence. “Thanks.”

“I’m really sorry, Frank.”

“Yeah.”

He handed the phone back to Benson. He stood at the bars, with his back to his family. He watched the duty officer carry the receiver slowly back across the cell, the coiled wire going lax, trailing over the floor. He hoped some of the blood would return to his face before he turned around. He had felt it drain out when Tryon gave him the news.

Then he did turn. Bonnie stood, still staring, staring at him now, wet-eyed, hopeful. Their daughter’s small, concerned gaze went back and forth between them, sensing an event. Frank wished again they’d never come, that he wasn’t
married at all, that he had no child, that he could go through this alone. Step by step. Everyone doing his job. Alone, it seemed to him, it would have been easy. He hoisted a corner of his mouth.

“Sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I’m a popular guy here, what can I say?”

“Is there anything …?” said Bonnie.

He waved his hand. “No, no, nothing yet. These legal things, you know. They take forever.”

Bonnie bit her lip and nodded. Frank came forward, still smiling his forced smile. He squatted down in front of his little girl. She straightened, her face lifting. She adjusted her grip on the corner of her picture, holding it before him.

“Now,” Frank said, “let’s get a look at this artwork here.”

T
he Pussy Man was standing on the corner of Pine. A dark figure shambling through the downtown corridors of red brick and white concrete and imageless glass. A middle-aged black in a filthy gray overcoat—even in this weather, the overcoat, stained and worn. He reeked of wine and urine. His stubbly face was hangdog and his eyes were yellow and streaked with red. But he was alert in a feral way: his head, his glance, darted here and there. And he kept up a steady stream of patter to the last of the lunch-hour pedestrians.

When men walked by, he demanded their money. “Gimme some of your money,” he said. “You got money. You got money on toast. I don’t got no money, gimme some of your money, you got money on toast, man, I see you with your money …” on and on like that. And when women passed—when they hurried by him with their lips pressed together in anger and disgust—he demanded sex the same way. “Gimme some of that pussy, baby, I want some of that pussy you got, you got pussy on toast, baby, what’re you saving that pussy for, I need some pussy on toast, baby, gimme some of your pussy on toast.”

I had parked my car in a garage nearby and was hurrying toward the Bread Factory. The Pussy Man spotted me as I approached the corner. His mouth widened in a predatory grin, showing his gray teeth.

“Steve!” he said. “Steve! Is that you, newspaper man?
Is that the newspaper man? Now, I
know you
got my money, Steve. I know you got money on toast. Gimme some of that money.”

I came within range of his stench as he moved closer, his head bent down, his hand extended. My son’s miserable cries were still in my head, and an all-too-familiar sickness with myself swirled inside me like green gas. I was in no mood for the Pussy Man. For the smell of piss on him and the cloud of vomit and alcohol on his breath. For the looks on the women’s faces as they went by, not only the winces of disgust and anger, but the fear I saw as their footsteps quickened. I hated the bum. He made my gorge rise.

“Gimme some of that money, Ste …” he said, but then a working girl in a polka-dot dress tried to sneak past his blind side. She clutched her purse close, hewing to the restaurant window. But the Pussy Man spotted her. “Hey, sister,” he said—he called her sister because she was black too. “Hey, sister, I know
you
got some sweet pussy, you got some sweet pussy on toast, gimme some of that pussy.”

“Here,” I said. “Shut the fuck up.”

He swiveled back to me and his sister angled by with her mouth puckered almost to nothing. I had my wallet out and was flicking through the bills. I always gave the bastard a five when I saw him. Because it got him off the street. The minute he had five he went for a bottle and was gone for hours, guzzling and puking behind some alley Dumpster somewhere.

“There’s that money,” he said, hanging over my wallet like a jumpy vulture. “Gimme five, gimme ten, gimme twenty, twenty dollars, Steve, twenty dollars on toast.”

I plucked out a fiver and stuck it out at him, turning my face to avoid his breath. “Don’t spend it on food, asshole,” I said.

His pocked hand made a fist, and the bill was gone. “Five dollars?” he said. “That’s all you gonna give
me? Five lousy dollars? You could give me twenty. You could give me a hundred dollars you got so much money. You got money on toast, Steve.”

But he was already edging away, talking back at me over his shoulder. Folding the bill into halves and then quarters and slipping it into his overcoat pocket clutched in his fist. In another moment, he was walking down the sidewalk with his head hung down in silent concentration, ignoring the passersby, ignoring everything but the golden dream of the liquor store at journey’s end. I hoped he got drunk enough to stagger out in front of a truck.

Grimacing, I took the last few steps to the Bread Factory.

It was a colorful fast food spot on the corner, wrapped in glass. I shouldered the door in and the smell of sourdough came to me, washing away the reek of the Pussy Man. The lunch crowd had thinned, but the people behind the counter were still doling out round loaves of bread and broad plates of salad. Customers still sat munching here and there among the wood-rimmed linoleum tables. I scanned the room and spotted Porterhouse in a corner. Sitting alone at a table for two with an empty cup in front of him. He saw me and lifted a diffident salute.

He looked like his voice. A lot of people don’t—you learn that as a reporter, on the phone all the time. But he was a dead ringer for his own hesitant tremolo. In his early forties. Small and bald, with a head as round as a nickel, with a thin moustache hiding a weak, pale mouth and eyes like prey, flitting and frightened, behind the large square frames of his glasses. I didn’t like him on the spot. But at that moment, in that mood, I might not have liked anyone.

I raised a finger to him across the room, asking him to wait. I was hungry on top of everything else and, as the last customer carried his tray from the counter, I stepped up and ordered a loaf of sourdough and some coffee.

I brought them to the corner table. Set them down and offered the little man my hand. He shook it. His palm was clammy. I sat down across from him.

“Sorry to eat while we talk,” I said, waving vaguely at the bread loaf. “I missed lunch.”

It was a lie though. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t care. What was it to him if I ate while we talked? Little mousy dickhead dragging me away from my kid at the zoo. Sure, it was my fault, but blaming him made me feel better and he didn’t look big enough to stop me. I picked up the sourdough and ripped into it, chomping loudly, swigging some coffee to wash it down.

Porterhouse tried not to watch me. His fingers fidgeted round his cup. His glance went here and there.

“I guess being a reporter is a very busy life,” he said after a moment.

I swallowed hard. Gave him an accusing glare. “Yeah, and this is my day off,” I said.

He looked as if he might apologize. He licked his lips. The bottom rim of his paper cup rattled against the linoleum. Then maybe it occurred to him he ought to assert himself. He looked like the sort of fellow to whom that might occur from time to time.

“So I … I have a pretty busy schedule myself, Mr. Everett,” he said almost firmly. “How can I help you?”

I gave him another dark stare across my coffee. But I could hear my kid going on in my head again.
We were going to the zoo!
I could hear his mournful wail. Self-disgust wrestled with anger in my breast and it was self-disgust in three straight falls. I dropped back against the canework of my flimsy tube chair. I sighed. The poor bastard, I thought as I watched Porterhouse, as I watched his Adam’s apple working in his throat.

“Right,” I said finally, setting the paper cup down in front of me. I pushed my wire-rims back on my nose. Interlaced
my fingers on the linoleum tabletop. I took a deep breath. “I appreciate your coming to talk to me. I guess I just wanted to get an idea of how you’re feeling today, you know. Now that Beachum’s going to be executed. With his conviction based on your testimony and all. Does it bother you?”

I suppose that was the sort of question he was expecting. He seemed ready for it anyway. He tilted his chin and looked thoughtful and sort of noble for a moment. Then he recited a speech he must’ve been composing in his head ever since he’d gotten my message. I took another bite of bread while he talked, another sip of coffee. I suppose I should have taken out my notebook or something, pretended to write some of it down. But it was pretty ridiculous stuff, and I figured I could always reconstruct it at the office if I had to.

“A man has a responsibility to his neighbors,” said Porterhouse. “You can’t just consider your own feelings. It’s very important that justice be done according to the laws of the land, you know …” And so on. The usual shit.

When he was done, he licked his lips again. Gestured nervously with one of his small pink hands. “Aren’t you going to take notes or record me or something?” he asked. “Usually when I’ve talked to reporters … I mean …”

“Oh … I … I have a photographic memory,” I said. It sounded stupid even to me, so I put the bread down and pulled a thin notebook out of my back pocket. I slapped it onto the table beside the loaf, opened it to an empty page. Pulled a Bic from my pocket and uncapped it. And I said: “So you never have any doubts? About your testimony? You ever think you might have made a mistake?”

Porterhouse swaggered—sitting there in his chair. He rolled his narrow shoulders around under his gray pinstripes and showed me a swaggering smile at one corner of his mouth. “I guess you might say I’m not the sort of person
who gives way to doubts too easily,” he said. “ ‘Make sure you’re right, then go ahead,’ that’s my motto.”

I wrote his motto in my pad. “Sort of like Davy Crockett,” I said.

He gave a breathy laugh, rubbed his two hands together slowly. “Yeah. I guess you could say that.” He was already imagining tomorrow’s banner.
Downtown Accountant a Modern Crockett
. Me—I was imagining my Davy, my son. Jumping around when I came in, too excited to get the words out.
Going to the—to the zoo!
I didn’t want to be here anymore, talking to this guy about nothing. It was for nothing, it was futile—and I’d known it would be before I came.