True Crime (39 page)

The gun
, I thought, pressing the gas even deeper into the floor.
Yes, it’s enough. It will be enough
.

And at that, the world went red—red and white and full of howling—a siren howling like a wild wolf at the sky—drowning out the engine and the wind and my sense of time—drowning out everything but the answering howl of fear from the core of me.

I couldn’t look up at the rearview. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road. But I could see the flashers at the edge of my vision—I could see them splash and whirl on my mirror, on my windows all around.

I knew that the cops were after me.

Suddenly, Luther realized that the moment had come. That moment he had dreaded the whole day long. He was standing at the foot of the gurney. It was eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds. It seemed as if it had been eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds for about an hour and a half. The second hand of the clock seemed to have gotten mired in the gray space between one black stroke on the dial’s perimeter and another. Worse, the room, this cramped rectangular box with its white cinderblock walls sealing it from the world around, seemed to have broken loose somehow from the planet’s mooring. Luther knew that Arnold McCardle was only a room away, watching the proceedings through the mirror on his right. He knew the witnesses were gathering behind the blinds of the window just in front of him. And yet he felt that they and the rest of the medical unit, the rest of the prison, the rest of the earth had fallen away from this place, that the death chamber had sailed off from them into deep space and was floating and tumbling end over end, connected to nothing. He felt dizzy and hollow as the room sailed and spun. And he felt alone. All alone, at eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds, with the condemned man, with Frank Beachum.

He saw Frank Beachum’s face. That’s what he had dreaded, what he had dreamed. He was confronting the face
of the man on the gurney and, for all he had feared that, the actual sight of it took him by surprise. It was not what he expected. It was much more terrible somehow. He had imagined he would see the man as he had been these last six years—no matter that he knew better. He had imagined he would see the strong, sad, controlled features, the thoughtful eyes, the thin, expressive, intelligent mouth—the face that had, over all this time, communicated the unthinkable thing to him with slow insistence. He had imagined—he had dreaded—that he would see that face, that man, accusing him with his evident innocence. But that face, that man, was entirely gone.

The man on the gurney was just a container now, a person-shaped vessel brimful of mortal fear. Frank’s mouth was slack with it, and it had erased the lines of his features, of his cheeks and brow: the skin there seemed almost like a baby’s, that blank, that clean. Beneath the hairline, Frank’s bright eyes moved and moved as if disconnected from the rest of him, and all that was left of his life was in those eyes, all the white energy, the white fear.

But it was his hair—oddly enough—it was his hair that somehow struck Luther as the most awful feature: the jaunty, masculine tangle of it on his forehead as he lay there pinned down and covered to the chin. You could imagine him brushing his hair in the morning, jerking it out of his eyes with a twitch of his head, laughing out from under it—and it seemed weirdly extraneous now. It was as if someone had stuck a man’s wig on him, to taunt him, to mock him in his helplessness.

So for all his experience and expectation, the sight of Frank’s face took Luther Plunkitt off guard. It rocked him. It penetrated his professional purpose, struck through the depth of his craft to the human awareness beneath. He was like an actor, thoroughly immersed in a role, who suddenly realized the theater is on fire. He found he had to talk to
himself, the warden to the man, to keep himself straight, to fight off that sense of drifting dizziness.

Now lookit
, he thought, and his lips worked fitfully as he looked down at the man on the gurney.
There was a girl too. There was a pregnant girl and people loved her. A father, a mother, a husband—loved her. There was a child inside her—a daughter, a son, a grandchild—who would have been in her arms, against her breast, would’ve looked up into her face. And this man—this Frank of yours, good old Frank here—he killed her, he killed all that Shot her in the throat, left her choking, dying. For some money, for a little loan—doesn’t matter what the reason was. Doesn’t matter what his life was like before, or the state his mind was in at the time. He had no goddamned right. He’s a man, like me. He had a choice, like I do. He didn’t have to do it and he did. That’s what a man is, after all, in the end. A man is the creature who can say “No.” A man … damn it
.

To his amazement, Luther felt his right hand begin to tremble against his pants leg. That had never happened to him before. He slipped the hand into his pocket. For some reason this little lecture of his had only made matters worse. He had to open his mouth to breathe now. He felt the room spinning around him, spinning off through chartless depths. His fingers curled in his pocket into a fist as he tried to hold himself in place, hold the whole room, the whole operation in place, repeating, chanting determinedly against the giddy sensation:

A man is the creature who can say “No.”

“Noooooo!”
I shrieked, as the cruisers closed in on me. There were two of them now: the second had come skidding out of a McDonald’s parking lot as if alerted by the first. They were both behind me, closing in to the left and the right. I jammed my foot down so hard against the gas that my whole body was pushed straight against the back of the
seat, my arms stretching out to reach the wheel. My face must have looked like a skull, the skin was pulled that tight around the bone in my openmouthed desperation and fear. In front of me, the traffic was disappearing as the cars slashed off to either side to avoid the howling sirens and the whipping lights. The Tempo flew down the black highway like an arrow, like a bullet. And still, the bastards were gaining on me.

“Stop! For Jesus’ sake!”
cried Mrs. Russel. “
Let them help us!”

But I did not think they would help us—there was no time to make them understand—and I did not stop.

I drove on and, for a wild stretch of seconds, there was nothing but the sound of sirens and the flashing red and the hood of the Tempo crashing endlessly through the wall of night.

Then one siren changed pitch and the first cruiser zigged out to the side and overtook me.

“Pull over! Stop the car and pull over!”

The voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker was like a thunder god’s. I glanced that way and saw the side of the cop’s car edge closer to mine. If I tried to outrace him, he would dash ahead and cut me off. If I tried to swerve and avoid him, I would lose control and die. There was no choice. I took my foot off the gas.

The Tempo’s speed broke at once. The car slowed quickly. The cruiser slipped ahead of me. Sidled in front of me, filling my windshield with red light. I saw its brake lights flare and glanced into my mirror to see the second cruiser pulling in tight behind me.

“Thank God,” Mrs. Russel said with a breath.

I hauled the wheel to the left and stomped down on the gas. The Tempo shot forward. Its front fender sliced away from the lead cruiser’s rear, found a wisp of empty air and dove into it, pulling past the cops’ left side. We were sucked
into the dark road ahead and I was in front of them again. I was shooting away.

“Shit, you’re crazy!”
Mrs. Russel roared.

I pushed the Tempo back up to its limit. The cop cars shuddered, then howled into pursuit behind me.

“You’re a crazy man!”

“They’ll stop us!”
I screamed.

And, without thinking, I turned to look at her.

She was pushed so far back into her seat that she seemed to be trying to meld with it. Her face, slapped by the flashers as the cruisers closed in, was pulled taut, wrapped tight around a high-pitched scream.

“Watch out, watch out, watch out!”
she cried.

I was already turning back to the windshield, following the white line of her wide-eyed stare. It seemed to take forever, that turning back. I could feel my head go round and the slow throb of the ache inside my head, and the weight of the alcohol squatting on my brain, and the weariness in my arms and legs, the pain behind my eyes—I could feel all of it in the slim edge of an instant. And I was aware of the first cruiser pulling up beside me again, the other car drilling through the little distance to my rear. I saw a splash of searing brightness ahead of me. I heard Mrs. Russel let fly a mindless yell.

And then the Tempo burned over the straight edge of the boulevard and tore full speed, shrieking, into Dead Man’s Curve.

I
t would be nice to think Frank Beachum had some vision at the end. In that last quarter of an hour, say, as the minute hand edged up over the closing arc of the hour’s circle. It would be nice to think some revelation came to him, some solid piece of understanding. Christ, say, might’ve floated beneath the fluorescent lights with open arms. The heavens might have opened and angels sung. Or, more believably, in those final fifteen minutes, in the maw of death, an incomprehensible but perfect calm of faith and understanding might have washed over his soul like warm bathwater. Although, in that case, I guess, someone would’ve seen him smile.

So maybe he had a more modern, more literary, vision, though Frank was not a modern, not a literary, man. Still, you know the kind of thing I mean: the moments might have stretched out until he realized each one was eternal, or Life might have revealed itself to him in pristine clarity until he saw that it was perfect as it was, and everything was All Right, if one only knew it. I don’t know what-all; that shit’s in books; you can read them.

But if you’re interested in the impressions of this reporter—and I guess you are, you’ve gotten as far as this—I would say that none of these visions, these clotures, were written in his eyes, and none were going on in his mind. He had, I think, in the end, reached that stage of fear in which self-awareness is gone and the entire body—and the soul
too, if you want—becomes an organ of perception, sensation meditating on sensation. Frank had not gone mad or anything. Life had not been merciful enough to send him mad. But he wasn’t thinking either, not the way we think of thought. He was seeing, merely: seeing the rough ridges between the white cinderblocks of the wall, seeing the clock and the sweep of the hands over the circle of the clock, the faces hovering over him, Luther, Maura, the guard, the saline running invisibly through the clear tube into his arm—he was turning his eyes from one of these to the next unable to stay with any because each successive sight ignited in him that instinctive jolt of horror that a serpent would, for instance, if you suddenly found it in your cereal bowl. So he was seeing, and he was feeling fear, there on the gurney in the small, white room. And, at the same time, or in the minuscule interstices, he was remembering; not in words or jointed impressions—but in bursts of sensation: the smell of grass, the worry lines at the corners of Bonnie’s mouth, the gush of blood and matter in which his Gail had squeezed from between her mother’s legs, the heat of summer, the taste of beer—these memories hatched and vanished in his head in the split seconds between the sight of one thing and the next, and with each he was immersed in a bottomless depth of sorrow, a vast subaqueous plain of loneliness and mourning.

And that was all for him. The warden, after a word to the guard, was stepping out of the room now to greet the witnesses behind the wall. His deputy, Zach Platt, was in the corner, murmuring into his headset. The guard stood with hands folded over his chest, gazing down speculatively at the condemned man beneath his sheet. And Frank lay there waiting as the circle of the hour moved toward completion, his eyes darting, his body held motionless by the thick leather straps. Whatever attempts he might once have made to understand his life, his death, were over now. And for Frank
Beachum, at eleven forty-five that Monday night, there was nothing but memory and terror and sadness—and the things that happened.

For Mr. Lowenstein, on the other hand, there was Debussy.
“Clair de lune,”
to which he had always been partial. He had it playing softly on the CD player and the clear, watery lilt of the piano made a mellow background noise in the small sitting room where he liked to work at night. It was a good place to work. He had his wing chair there, with the muted floral upholstery, and the low antique ottoman on which his slippered feet could rest. There was a small Persian rug on the floor, nicely faded, and a dainty escritoire by the window with pigeonholes for his writing supplies. There were books—the wonderful, muted colors of the bindings of old books on every wall. And Mrs. Lowenstein was there, bent over her needlework in an old-fashioned armless sewing chair, silent but companionable.

The owner and publisher of the
St. Louis News
was a tall, fit man in his sixties, with a full head of coiffed, silver hair. He had a grave, sage, handsome face, deep-browed and not unkind. He was working now in his wing chair with a Mont Blanc pen on a yellow legal pad. He had never used a word processor in his life and did not intend to. He was writing a letter to his employees, offering his thoughts and condolences on the tragic death of Michelle Ziegler, one of their own. He had already written a letter to the family, and a special note for the editorial page. Both of them had taken him a long time to finish.

This letter too was not an easy chore. Mr. Lowenstein was a scrupulously honest man and he had not liked Michelle very much. He had kept her on staff—as he had kept me—because Alan defended her, and he trusted Alan to the core. For himself, he thought she was a supercilious and unpleasant person, much too full of herself for one so young.
At the same time, he felt that his personal likes and dislikes didn’t amount to very much now, at the end of things. So he was choosing his words with kindness and generosity—though, still, with a niggling regard for the truth.