Andrew Klavan - True Crime

Luther, with a mug of his own, tilted back behind his great mahogany desk. He dipped his bland smile into the steam of the coffee.

“I got a feeling,” he said, “it’s gonna be a real asshole of a day.”

“Can’t see why not,” said Arnold with a wink.

“Any surprises last night?”

“Nary a one, no sir. Prisoner watched a movie, fell asleep round midnight. Slept soundly till about six. I don’t think he’ll give us any trouble.”

“I hope not,” said Luther. Then he changed the subject. “Skycock in?”

“I think he stopped off in execution block. To nurse his baby,” Arnold added dryly. Reuben Skycock was the prison’s maintenance engineer. He was responsible for the lethal injection equipment and he did tend to fuss at the thing like a mother hen. The day before, they had run through the whole procedure, using CO Allen as the prisoner because he matched Frank Beachum’s size and weight. Allen made the usual nervous jokes, lying there strapped onto the gurney, but Reuben never even cracked a smile. Checking his toggles, his stopwatch, his signal lights. His head bobbing from one of them to the other-just like a mother hen.

“Rehearsal went well though,” Luther said, finishing the thought aloud.

“Oh, yeah.” Arnold gave another of his trademark winks. “I promised Allen we’d give him a Christian burial.”

Luther let his smile broaden. Arnold settled his vast beam this way and that on the sofa, working out an itch in his ass.

“How about the state?” Luther said after a while. “They got their act together finally?”

Arnold drew a page out of his manila folder and slipped it onto the desk. “Guest list all finalized. Security passes made up. Duty roster-Whelan asked off it, did I tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“Says his wife doesn’t like it.”

Arnold smirked, but Luther, looking over the guest list now, said: “Fair enough. My Daisy’s not too fond of it herself.”

“The badges’ll go down to the gate at nine,” Arnold went on. “Got the witness list. What else? Roadblocks are up. There’ll be some demonstrators out there, pro and con, but just the usual.”

Luther let the page drop onto his blotter, raised his eyes. “We ever decide about that mining road?”

“Yup,” said Arnold. “You were right. It comes into sight when you widen the perimeter. It’s all secure.”

They sat quietly then for a while. The McCardle mountain expanded as he drew a contemplative breath, as he glanced down at his folder, holding it half open in one hand. “I guess we got it pretty much covered here, Mr. P,” he said finally. “Even have Debbie Does Dallas for the troops.” He snapped the folder shut.

Luther snorted. Debbie Does Dallas . It was SOP on execution nights to play a few soft-core porno films on the cell-block TVs. Give the inmates something else to think about, keep them from getting crazy. They didn’t really show Debbie Does Dallas , but Arnold liked to say that. He liked the sound of the title. He thought it was a hoot.

“How about the phones?” said Luther then. But he said it hazily, and he didn’t listen to the answer. His mind had traveled back to the prisoner again. He was picturing him, instead of CO Allen, strapped to the gurney. He was picturing Beachum’s mournful, craggy face.

Arnold was still talking about the phone checks when Luther said, “He have his medical and everything? The prisoner, I mean.”

“Oh yeah. Last night. Doc says he’s fit as a fiddle.”

“And his visitors all squared away.”

“Wife, kid, minister. Your girlfriend from the newspaper too-she’s coming in at four.”

Luther lifted his chin a little, lifted one corner of his mouth. “Mea culpa,” he said, not for the first time on this subject. “Don’t know what came over me.” He swiveled a half turn away in his high-backed chair. Until he could see the photo of his son, Fred, on the cabinet behind him. Grinning, crewcut, thin as a stick. Seeming to shine in his uniform, his dress whites.

“Musta been love,” said Arnold.

“She was pretty persuasive. She kind of looked like she knew my darkest secret and was gonna tell if I didn’t play along.”

Arnold said something, but Luther missed it. Sad thing about visitors, he was thinking. Not much of a comfort to the dead man usually. When it got right down to it, in fact, the final visits were usually the hardest part of the Death Watch for the prisoner to bear. Luther had seen a man once-William Wade, Billy the Kid Wade, not two years ago-Luther had seen him fall to his knees and sob when his mother had to end her last visit to him. Fall to his knees and stretch out his two hands to her like a child being left on his first day at school. The tears streaming down his cheeks. “Mama! Mama!” Then, five hours later, when the gurney was rolled in, he was a cowboy again; he was Billy the Kid again. Shook hands with everyone, shook hands with Luther and clicked his tongue jauntily against his teeth. And hopped onto the table to be strapped down like a man hopping over a fence. It wasn’t the dying that got to you, Luther thought. In the end, when all hope was gone, when all bets were off, dying was something a man could accept. The dying was nothing like half so hard as the saying good-bye.

Luther sipped at his coffee, looking at his son’s photo. He sure hoped Fred could get that leave in November. Brenda and the kids would come down. Have Thanksgiving with the whole family together. Go out to the woods, him and Fred, and hunt up some deer. Luther was never a happier man on this earth than when he was out hunting or fishing with his boy.

“Let me ask you something, Arnold,” he heard himself say suddenly then-say before he had a chance to stop himself. He swung back around to face the fat man on the sofa. “What do you think of this Beachum fellow?”

Arnold drew back, almost comically-his fleshy face seemed to fold into itself like one of those rubber masks when you flatten it. It was such an uncharacteristic thing for Luther to say. But Arnold considered himself a man of the world and he thought: What the hell. The emotional side of this business got to all of them sometimes, even Luther. You couldn’t be too macho about it, bottle it up inside you. It’d give you a goddamned heart attack.

So, frowning sagely, the fat man considered his answer for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think about Frank Beachum at all, Plunk. Sometimes I think about that little pregnant girl he shot dead over something like fifty dollars. But mostly, I think about doing my job.”

For the first time that morning, Luther let himself smile wide enough to show some teeth. Yes , he thought. Of course. That’s right .

You could always count on Arnold to keep your mind steady.

For a long time after the warden left, Frank sat at his table, the sheets of paper blank in front of him. His hand shook weakly as he reached to pick up the pen. Plunkitt’s words- your remains … the procedure … the funeral … thrummed in his head. The clock on the wall above CO Benson went on turning, and Frank felt it turn. Flinging the minutes away like chicken feed. It was hard to focus his mind, hard to think.

But he had to. They would be there soon. His wife and daughter. It was nearing eleven now and they would come at one. He had to do this, he had to get it done before they arrived. He put the pen’s tip to the paper-not for the first time that morning. And not for the first time, he held it there motionless. He had written this letter over and over in his mind a hundred times, for six years he had been composing it. But it was not so easy to set it down now in ink. It mattered too much to him. No real words could do what he wanted them to do. In his mind, the phrases were eloquent, even wise. They were charged with his desperate feeling. On the page, they were ashes. He might just as well have burned the paper and left that to his little girl.