True Crime (40 page)

“Clair de lune”
helped him think, as did the room, and his handsome, quiet wife who looked up at him and smiled from time to time. But for the last minute or so, something had been bothering him, intruding on his consciousness, interrupting his train of thought.

Sirens. It was several moments before he looked up from the yellow page and realized what it was. He glanced at the grandfather clock in the room’s far corner. It was quarter of twelve and for the last minute or so, there had been sirens going off, getting closer, half a dozen of them at least it sounded like.

“Must be something going on,” he murmured. He looked at his wife over the top of his reading glasses.

“A fire maybe,” she said, and bent to her work again. “Or another accident up on the curve.”

Mr. Lowenstein kept his head raised. He was not really a journalist—he’d made his money in hotels—but now that he’d bought the paper he liked to think of himself as a journalist, so he listened for another second or two with what he felt to be journalistic curiosity.

He was about to return to his letter when he made out another sound, separate from the sirens, closer than they were, and coming even closer now, getting even louder. It was a rumbling, clattering sound with a low sort of sizzle around it. He could not for the life of him imagine what it was.

“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein.

He set the legal pad on the small lampstand beside his chair. He stood, pulling his port-wine bathrobe closed around his silk pajamas. He moved to the window beside the
escritoire and bent down to peer out over the dark hill of lawn to the empty street below.

To the fading accompaniment of sirens, that other sound grew even louder still. The rumble became a roar. The clatter grew to a hellish metallic banging. The sizzle expanded to a snaky hiss. And then, Mr. Lowenstein, tilting his head and pulling his reading glasses to the very tip of his nose, saw exactly what kind of sound it was.

It was the sound a car makes traveling at high speed when its muffler has fallen off and is dragged along beneath it, throwing two great flame-bright streams of sparks out from either side of the chassis.

Or, to be specific, it was the Temp.

Those poor cops. They had never stood a chance on that lethal turn. Something really ought to be done about that place.

We had all three gone into it together. The two cruisers flanking me, the lights, the sirens battering my sides. But only I had realized that we were never going to make it through. So I didn’t even try it. I pulled my foot off the gas and let it hang above the brake without coming down. On the instant, the two cruisers shot past me into the curve. I fought the wheel over slowly, waiting for the skid—and when it came, I kept on turning into it, the car screeching under me, spinning with me, all the way around. Through the windshield, over Mrs. Russel’s scream, I saw the world go into a carousel blur. I heard brakes in their death-throes and horns in their rage as the Tempo spun and spun, sliding sideways over the macadam. I eased down on the brake now, trying to rein the Tempo in. I caught a glimpse of the two cruisers lifting into the air as they broke across the curb. The first one slid wildly across the open space of the car lot. The second one followed, slamming broadside into the first one’s trunk. Both cars halted, smoking, with the crash. And then the
Tempo was around, and they were out of sight. The road was before me again. I straightened the wheel out, and hit the gas.

And I was gone—good-bye—I was long-gone Steveroo. I looked up into my rearview as my tires grabbed hold of the boulevard and saw the cops—four of them—pouring out of their steaming cruisers and staggering round the ends of them to watch me pull away.

And then I gritted my teeth and turned my full attention to the road ahead.

I didn’t lose the muffler until right inside the terrace gate: a little redbrick princess’s castle that guards the entry to Lowenstein’s road. There was a large clocktower at the center of its three-pinnacled roof. I glanced up at it as we shot past and saw the big hand breaking through the quarter hour. So I didn’t spot the first speed bump and hit it hard. They’re an idiosyncrasy of the St. Louis rich—those bumps in the road that keep deliverymen and other hoi polloi from joyriding at high speeds past the city’s more stately mansions. The Tempo struck it and flew into the air, came bellyflopping down right on top of the second bump. The muffler crunched loudly and the Tempo began to make a noise like a giant choking on his gruel. As I pushed the car over the next bump and the next, great swaths of spark began to shoot out into the night at either side of me.

Through this flying fire and a curl of black oil smoke and the dark, I saw the Lowenstein mansion: an unassailaby huge Georgian block of red brick, its two chimneys silhouetted against the gibbous moon, the columned portico with its wrought-iron balcony jutting out at me austerely. I guided the Tempo to the curb and pressed the brake down, evenly but fast, ignoring the screech of the wheels, and the gutter of the muffler, and the last thick shower of embers arcing over the curb, onto the sidewalk.

The Tempo stopped and its engine died—like that, without a sputter, before I even touched the key.

“Jesus!”
said Mrs. Russel.

“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein again.

He saw me, at the base of the stone stairway that ran down the front of his lawn to the sidewalk. I was walking around the car on clearly trembling legs, holding onto its hood for support, coming around the front as Mrs. Russel spilled out of the passenger door and pulled herself unsteadily to her feet. He saw me take the black woman’s arm. He saw the two of us climb the stairs and hurry across the grass toward his front door.

He straightened, taking the reading glasses from his nose, folding them and slipping them into the pocket of his bathrobe.

“What is it, darling?” his wife said from the chair behind him.

“It’s Steve Everett from the paper.” He turned to her with a distant, thoughtful smile.

“Oh?” she said. “One of your reporters?”

“Mm.” Mr. Lowenstein nodded. “A dyed-in-the-wool son-of-a-bitch,” he told her quietly. “But he sure does know how to drive a car.”

M
idnight. At the stroke precisely, the tan phone rang in the supply room. Arnold McCardle picked it up and heard the voice of Robert Callahan, the Director of the Department of Corrections.

“I have spoken to a duly designated representative of the governor,” Callahan said, speaking the formula in a stiff, stilted voice that did not go with his midwestern twang. “And no stay has been issued. You are to proceed with the execution.”

Arnold McCardle nodded his heavy head. “I read you,” he said. He replaced the tan phone in its cradle. He managed a nod at Reuben Skycock, who turned to the executioners, Frick and Frack. With a hand on each one’s elbow, Skycock guided the two toward the control panel of the lethal injection machine. By then, McCardle had turned to the small intercom on the shelf beside the phones. He pressed the talk button and said firmly, “We have a go.”

McCardle’s voice came over Zachary Platt’s headset. The deputy superintendent nodded at Luther Plunkitt. Luther held his hand steady by an iron force of will as he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and removed the folded death warrant. At the same time, Zachary Platt turned to the window behind him. Pulling the cord, he raised the blind.

*   *   *

Bonnie Beachum jerked straight on her bench, trembling, as the blind came up. There was the stark white room in front of her. And there was her husband, his face above the sheet. He was upside down to her, craning his neck back, rolling his eyes back, searching desperately for a sight of her face through the window. She leaned toward the thick glass between them. Her voice shook as she whispered, “Frank.”

The sight of him on the gurney pulled her in a moment from her visionary hysteria of prayer. She was at once entirely immersed in the effort to present her face to him, to telegraph her love, his only comfort. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she strained forward, and she had to fight off firework images of his smile at the kitchen doorway, his clunky footsteps on the stair, his hands on her shoulders: she was afraid these thoughts would kill her before she showed him what she had to show him—that his wife was there. “Frank,” she said again, crying.

Harlan Flowers reached out quickly and wrapped his big hand around hers. Bonnie squeezed it hard, held on to it for all she was worth.

“Frank Beachum, you have been found guilty of murder by the state of Missouri and sentenced to death by lethal injection.” Luther made his eyes grip the words on the page, each one, one by one, so that his voice would not falter as he read.
Let’s just get this over with
, he was thinking. And he asked: “Have you anything to say?”

Luther swallowed and looked over the top of the warrant at the face on the gurney. Frank’s head was tilted all the way back as he tried to look at the window behind his head, to see his wife’s face. Luther did not think he would speak. He did not think that he was thinking cogently enough, that there was any thought left in him that could be made into speech.

But there was. “I love you, Bonnie!” Frank cried out. “I’ve always loved you!”

Luther saw Bonnie Beachum reach her hand out to press it against the glass. She mouthed the words back at her husband: “I love you.”

Luther swallowed again, harder this time. He folded the warrant and slipped it back into his pocket. He looked up at the clock. There were twenty seconds until twelve-oh-one.

For those twenty seconds, Arnold McCardle stood still, looking through the one-way glass, waiting for Luther Plunkitt to turn to him and give the nod that would begin it. None of the people in the death chamber was moving. It looked to Arnold like a tableau: Luther at the foot of the gurney, Frank with his head stretching back, his Adam’s apple throbbing, the guard and Zach Platt standing rigid in their opposite corners. Arnold did not breathe. Even the phlegmatic fat man felt the band of tension tightening round his throat now, and he wished old Luther would just do it, just give the nod, twenty seconds early or not.

But then the red second hand reached the top of the dial, and Arnold’s big body inflated with a breath as he waited for Luther to turn. And another second passed and another—and the tableau remained all but frozen: Luther looking down, Frank stretching back; Platt in his corner, glancing nervously at the clock now, the guard in his opposite corner lifting one eyebrow.

“Come on, come on,” Arnold murmured softly.

The second hand coursed down the first arc of the new minute. Arnold shifted his eyes toward the executioners. The husky Frack stood facing him with his hand poised steadily above the silver button on the machine; the stooped, insectile little Frick was the closer, with his back half turned to him, and his body nearly bouncing on his toes, his arm nearly thrumming as he held his thumb in place.

Arnold looked out through the glass again and was shocked to see the clock’s second hand rising up the high side of the minute, continuing on around. And still Luther didn’t turn, didn’t turn, and it was all frozen in there, and no one was breathing at all anymore.

And then Luther turned.

 … a man is the creature who can say “No,”
he thought, and then he came to himself.

The Superintendent of Osage State Correctional Facility was dismayed to find his attention had wandered. He came to himself as if he had been standing there fast asleep, dreaming. He did not know where his mind had gone to, what he had been thinking about. But when he raised his head, he saw that the second hand had gone a full minute round the dial and was now edging down again toward twelve-oh-two and thirty seconds, then on.

It was a matter of pride, that’s all. These things didn’t have to be exact: they had all day to do the execution legally. But everything had been going smoothly, and everyone had been waiting on him, and he had meant to give the nod at precisely twelve-oh-one and he had—what?—
drifted off
at the crucial instant, drifted away on some line of reasoning or fantasy—he did not know, he could not remember what. He felt the whole machine, of which he was a central part, holding fire, standing still, because his cog had forgotten to turn. He was downright aggravated with himself.

It was only twelve-oh-two and thirty-seven seconds when Luther remembered to do his job. But as far as the Superintendent of Osage Prison was concerned, that was ninety-seven seconds too goddamned late.

He turned and nodded deeply to the mirror.

But by that time, the black phone was ringing.

Forever after, Reuben Skycock could raise a pretty good
laugh when he described how quickly, how gracefully the pachydermous Arnold McCardle could move when he had a mind to. Because Luther nodded and the phone rang almost together, and McCardle not only snapped the handset off its cradle with one hand but stretched enormously across the little storeroom with the other and shoved the nervous Frick away from the machine. Frack was faster and jumped back from the button the instant he heard the bell, throwing his hands into the air as if he had been placed under arrest.

Arnold McCardle listened at the black phone for a long moment, and said, “I read you.” Then, without replacing the receiver, he reached over to press the button on the intercom.

“We got a governor’s stay,” he said evenly. “We’re gonna stand down.”

“Stand down! We’re standing down!”
shouted Zachary Platt, throwing his hands up, his palms out, as if to hold them all physically from the edge of a cliff.

For a moment, Luther Plunkitt did not react, only stood where he was and smiled blandly. Then, slowly, he lifted his thumb and ran it over the smile, wiping an imperceptible drop of spittle from his lips.

What was strange, he told me later—one thing that was strange—was how long that moment lasted to him. It seemed to him that so much happened, and it seemed to him that he had time to see it all. He saw Zachary Platt shoving his palms at him, stepping out of his corner urgently, babbling, “Governor’s stay, the governor, a stay, we gay a gay, stay …” He saw Frank Beachum’s head snap forward, his entire body shudder violently beneath the sheet; Frank’s head keeled to one side as his neck went slack; he shut his eyes tight, and convulsed. Then he let out a harsh sob and began weeping, the tears squeezing out from under his lashes, running sideways over his nose, into his mouth.