Andrew Klavan - True Crime

The evening before she was scheduled to go down to the prison-that Sunday evening-Michelle strode across the city room to my desk for a professional conference on some of the angles of the case. She tapped her elegant fist against the surface of my desk and smiled with that brand of wry fury that made strong editors quail.

“Fuck ’em,” she quipped.

I sighed. I had had a long weekend-people kept shooting each other-and was looking forward to taking tomorrow off. I had just been leaning back in my chair for one last violation of the paper’s no-smoking policy before heading home to the little woman. I reached under my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. I did not have the energy for a serious journalistic discussion.

“I’m through with this,” Michelle went on. “I’m serious.” She paced once, back and forth in the aisle behind me. “I’m going back to school. I’m going to get my Ph.D. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to write things that matter.”

“Michelle,” I said, “I hate to break this to you, but you’re twenty-three: you don’t know anything that matters.”

That wry smile again, but she laughed in spite of herself. “And fuck you, Ev,” she said.

I laughed in spite of her too. I really did like Michelle. “All right,” I said, “what did they do?”

“He. Alan. Mann.” Three sentences for one guy. She was plenty mad. “The Great White Male of the Universe. He killed my sidebar on the Beachum case. I worked on it for two weeks. He just overrode Bob. Just-overrode him. It was the best thing about the story.”

I tried to look sympathetic. It wasn’t easy. I’d snuck a look at that sidebar of hers in the computer. It was dyed-in-the-wool Michelle Fire, all right. The angle was that we were only covering Beachum’s execution so closely because he was white and thus we were obscuring the large number of blacks on death row while also deifying Beachum’s pregnant victim in order to mask the patriarchal culture which had created the violence that killed her in the first place. Well, don’t look at me; that was the angle. Personally, I thought Alan had shown unusual restraint by merely killing it. I would’ve tortured it first.

Michelle stood there, glaring at me, waiting for me to respond, her fist pressed against my desktop again. Finally, to cheer her up, I said, “Well, at least you still get to watch the execution. That’s always kind of a kick.”

She flushed. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth: her signal that I had transgressed beyond the bounds of human understanding.

“No, I mean it,” I said. “I did one once in Jersey. They’re exciting. And, hell, considering the people they do it to, you know, it’s really good clean fun.”

Her mouth still closed, her knuckles rapped against my desk. “I don’t know. Why. I keep talking to you,” she said, as if she had broken a resolution to refrain from that pleasure. “I don’t know why I keep talking to you at all.”

Whereupon, with a deep breath to still her fury, she left me and went zigzagging off between the city room desks.

I put my feet up on my own desk and went on smoking. To be honest, I didn’t know why she kept talking to me either. But she did. I suppose it was yet another of life’s many mysteries.

Michelle went home that night in what must have been one of her blacker moods. She lay on the bed in her loft for about three hours, brooding as the last of the summer day died. After a while, she smoked a joint to loosen her clutched nerves.

Her loft, as I say, was a crazy place, huge, somber, furnished as her room in college had been with boxes, and dust balls, stacks of old newspapers and half-read books and tracts. It was on the third floor of a white brick warehouse that had been home to the Globe-Democrat before it went under. The newspaper’s sign with its globe logo still hung over the door outside. Only one of the other lofts in the place was occupied, and the street the building was on was a bland industrial corridor-gas stations, car lots and fast food joints-that bled up into the slums of the north. But Michelle loved that loft intensely, felt it around her intensely: because of the globe logo and because it was one block away from the Post-Dispatch and a block and a half from the News itself. Because it reeked for her with the scent, shone for her with the aura of newspapers. Newspapers , which had been big with romance for her in school. Agents for social change, history on the instant, battlegrounds of opinion. She had believed all that nonsense. She loved newspapers. Even now. She loved them still.

Today, however, the place only depressed her further. As the yellow stripes of the sinking sun withdrew into the slits of the venetian blinds and faded away, she sucked her reefer and peered through the smoke at those boxes strewn everywhere. Boxes filled with loose papers and notebooks and crumpled documents. Overflowing with details, with facts, with the forgotten minutiae of the stories she worked on. Scraps that she collected with the helpless instinct of an autumn squirrel. They had her buried in them, she told herself. Alan Mann. Bob Findley. They had her drowning in details, petty facts, minutiae. When she thought about the things she had written in college … Big things that mattered. Theories that had made her the star of the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley. Harridan and Eunuch University, I used to call it, when I wanted to get a rise out of her. She had felt brilliant there. Dissecting racism and patriarchy; exposing the oppressiveness of European culture; expounding on Foucault-sweet Foucault! — and the inner tyranny of free societies. In those bygone days, she had felt that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors. And now she was swamped and stuck and sinking in these boxes, these scraps, these meaningless, sweepless details.

And what depressed her most, what made her sick at heart as she lay toking on the bed, was that she had begun to realize-had begun, at least, to half suspect-that this was the very reason she had taken the job at the News . She had begun to half confess to herself that she loved these boxes, their crumpled pieces of paper, their insignificant and disparate facts-these stories -more than she loved the Women’s Studies Department at dear old Harridan and Eunuch U.

So she sat in the loft for about three hours, brooding and smoking, until her forehead felt acres wide and her brain was floating in it. Then, no less nervy than she’d been before, she jumped up and headed out the door into the empty urban territories of Sunday night.

She drove her little red Datsun down to Laclede’s Landing by the river, hoping to find some activity there, some life. For the next half hour or so, she haunted the cobbled lanes between the red-brick buildings, wandering from old-fashioned streetlamp to streetlamp, sniffing loftily at the passing shadows of tourists and their children: the Great American Ignorant, who did not know what she knew. At last, she alighted in a jazz joint that had remained open for just this degraded trade. She set herself up alone at a small round table and started drinking bourbon with a fine chaser of melancholy. At the front of the room, a trio of elderly white men seemed to be playing “St. Louis Blues” over and over again. She shook her head at them with detached superiority and went on drinking.

She was not alone for long. A young man spotted her, a medical intern who had been on the prowl all night. He stood at the bar, a scotch in his hand, and ran his eyes over her. Michelle had now unbuttoned the top of her blue blouse. Her navy skirt ended high on her thighs. The intern knew his business and sensed her mood. He detached himself at once from the bar’s brass railing and sharked his way toward her across the nearly empty room.