Andrew Klavan - True Crime

He opened his mouth a little, looked miserably down at the table. He didn’t answer.

“Somebody,” I said again. “There must’ve been somebody. Somebody coming in as you left maybe. That would explain why she didn’t hear the shot. If it was right after you left. Didn’t you see anyone?”

“No, I … I don’t know. I didn’t see. I was just buying … steak sauce. I had to get home. For the picnic. We were having a picnic. Bonnie ran out of steak sauce. It was Independence Day.”

I heard a chair scrape behind me. “All right,” said Benson quickly. “That’s it.”

“No!” It was Mrs. Beachum. She was off the bed. She flung herself off it. She flung herself against the bars of the cage, gripping them until the knuckles whitened afresh on her small, red, dishwater hands. “No, please,” she said again. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her face was mottled and ugly. “You believe us. Don’t you? Do you believe us?”

I finally had to face her. But her grief, her desperation left me silent. Benson stepped up on my left side and put his hand on my arm. A man used to moving people around as he saw fit, was our Benson. He didn’t pull me up, but I felt the pressure and stood.

“All right, all right,” I said to him.

“Let’s go,” he said. “… upsetting people …”

“All right.”

Mrs. Beachum clung to the bars without restraint, without dignity. Her teeth were bared, as mine had been, as if she were some kind of animal. She growled the words out from deep in her throat. “Do … you … believe us?”

“Don’t, Bonnie,” Beachum murmured. “Don’t.”

“Come on, damn it,” Benson said.

I looked at that woman’s terrible face in the cage. She seemed to strain through the gaps toward me.

“Yes,” I said finally. “I believe you. For Christ’s sake. You only have to look at him.”

She closed her eyes-thank God for that; I couldn’t stand them anymore. She rested her forehead against the bars and her shoulders shook with crying.

“No one. Not even the lawyers,” she said. “No one else …”

Benson tugged me toward the door. I yanked my arm away from him. “All right,” I said. “Damn it.”

“Coming in here, upsetting people,” he said tightly. “Don’t you think these people have enough? What do you think this is?”

“All right,” I said. I walked to the door. Benson hurried around me to signal the guard outside. The door opened.

But I stopped on the threshold. I glanced back at the cage. Beachum sat as he had, his eyes lowered to the table, his mouth pulled down in a distant, almost dreamy frown. But his wife had now lifted her head again, the marks of the bars white on her brow. She was watching me through the steel, through her tears, the way you’d look at a child who had just done something incredibly thoughtless, thoughtlessly cruel.

“Where were you?” she said softly, her voice breaking. “It’s too late now.” She sniffled thickly. “Dear God, where were you? All this time.”

Benson put his hand on my arm again, but for another second or two I resisted the pressure toward the door.

“It wasn’t my story,” I told her. “There was an accident … Dead Man’s Curve … It wasn’t supposed to be my story.”

Then I was pushed out into the hall.

Luther Plunkitt was waiting for me when I returned to the visitor’s entrance. This, I understood, was not a good sign. Life gets tense in a prison on execution day. Prisoners are angry, guards are nervous, security is tight and everyone’s stomach is jumpy. Plunkitt would have been informed on the double that I’d started a small disturbance in the Deathwatch cell. Questions had been asked, voices had been raised. It would not have made him a happy guy.

But that was the eerie thing about Plunkitt. You couldn’t really tell if he was happy or not. He greeted me with an outstretched hand, with a small, thin-lipped smile frozen on his face. The wrinkled putty of his features seemed genial enough and every silver hair was in place. Only those gray eyes, set way down in the clay under his strong brow, were metallic and expressionless. I didn’t know whether he was about to shake my hand or rip my throat out. There was no question in my mind that he was capable of doing either. He shook my hand, in the event. “Everett,” he said.

“Superintendent,” I said. “Good to see you again.”

“I’ll walk you to your car.”

He put his hands casually in the pockets of his pants. We walked side by side through the glass doors, out into the parking lot. The heat of the sun hit me at once. The suffocating stillness of the air closed over me more slowly. All the same, it was good to be out of the prison. I could hear cicadas singing loudly from all around the lot and a pair of swallows swooped and dived over by the walls, above the barbed wire. It was good.

Plunkitt smiled up into the blenched sky, spoke up at the cloudless blue. “Sorry to hear about Ms. Ziegler. Any word on her is there?”

“No,” I said. “Not that I’ve heard. She’s still in a coma.”

“That’s a shame, that’s a shame. These cars nowadays. All you gotta do is breath on em …”

I nodded. We crossed the baking asphalt toward my Tempo.

“You get your interview all right?” he asked me.

“I did, yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. The paper appreciates it.”

He seemed to give this remark a good thinking over, scanning the distance now, reviewing the gray walls of the prison, the gates, the guardtowers.

“You know,” he said musingly, “Ms. Ziegler gave me to understand that she was interested in talking to Beachum about, you know, his feelings, his emotions, before his execution. Human interest stuff. That was what we agreed to beforehand. Cause otherwise, you know, we do most press interviews by phone at this point. There’s less risk of upsetting the prisoner.”

I nodded. I understood. I had been rebuked. But gently. Plunkitt was a man who measured his words carefully. He wanted to maintain his good relations with the press. He wouldn’t have spoken to me like this unless he was genuinely angry. I could only hope he wouldn’t call Bob to complain.

I felt the sun beating down on my head and curling up from beneath my feet. I felt the sweat gathering in my sideburns, under the wire arms of my glasses. I pushed them back to keep them from sliding down my nose. “Well, you know, I was put on this story kind of at the last minute,” I said. “With the accident and everything.” Squeezing every drop of charity I could from him. “I probably wasn’t as prepped as I should’ve been. I hope I haven’t thrown a wrench into the works or anything.”

“No, no, no,” he said amiably enough. And, as we reached the edge of my car, he put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze. We faced each other by the Tempo’s fender.

“But you know how it is,” he said in a conversational tone. Smiling. “People come in here, the press. The prisoners tell em things. They’re in a position, you know, to say all kinds of heart-wrenching things. And us-we got a job to do, so we come across as the hard guys. And then that’s what we read the next day in the paper. It can get pretty frustrating, that’s all. Times like this, everyone’s a little extra sensitive to it. That’s all.” His thin, empty smile widened slightly, a red slice in the putty. “This isn’t easy on us either, you know. We have to do what the state tells us. The state has to do what the people want and so on.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

“And, you know, it goes through a lot of processes, trial, appeal and so on before it gets to us. Makes it a little tough on us here if we’re going to show up in the newspaper as bloodthirsty murderers or anything like that.” He chuckled flatly.