Andrew Klavan - True Crime

“No, yes, of course not, no,” I said, or words to that effect.

“Anyway, I know you’re a smart guy, Steve,” he said. “I read your stuff. You always get it pretty much right so I’m not too concerned. I just haven’t seen you in a while, thought I’d come out and say hello.”

“Right. I understand. I’m glad you did,” I lied. “It’s good to see you.”

We stood there another second or two, smiling at each other, the heat turning our flesh to paste. He was sweating too, I noticed gratefully, clean crystal beads of it glistening in the folds of his forehead, on his temples.

A vee of ducks passed over us, quacking, but neither of us raised our eyes. I began to notice that this silence of ours was stretching out a very long time. Was there something else he wanted to say? I wondered. But there was no clue in the gemmy emptiness of his gaze.

“Well …” he said.

And the thought hit me suddenly, out of nowhere: He knows! Jesus. He knows too .

It was a dreadful idea, and I shook it off. I told myself it was my imagination. How could he know? How could he bear it if he knew. If he knew, and had to pull the trigger just the same.

Plunkitt slapped my shoulder again. “You drive safely now,” he said.

And I stood watching, my lips parted, as his back receded from me toward the prison doors.

Plunkitt walked back to the Death House. He came down the corridor to the Deathwatch cell, but he didn’t stop there. He went on until he reached another corner. He turned, and headed down another hall. There was another door with another guard stationed there. The guard’s name was Haggerty. A paunchy older man, a pasty Irishman. A veteran tough guy who’d come down here after the layoffs in Jeff City.

“Hal,” Luther said to him quietly. “You’re looking sharp.”

Haggerty grinned acidly with one side of his mouth-it was the only grin he had. He unlocked the door for the superintendent and held it open, grinning. Luther went inside.

The room he entered looked pretty much like a doctor’s examining room, which is what it had once been. Its white cinderblock walls were scrubbed clean. There was a white sink in the corner and a white folding screen spread against the lefthand wall. There was a metal door on the right that led into a neighboring storage closet. And there was a hospital gurney standing in the center of the floor.

There were straps on the gurney, heavy leather straps. There was a window against the back wall with white blinds that could be pulled down over it. There was a mirror on the right: a one-way glass so you could stand in the storage closet and look through. And beneath the mirror, there was a hole in the wall. Tubes ran out of the hole from the storage closet and were draped over an IV stand attached to one corner of the gurney.

Luther crossed the threshold and stopped. He stood where he was with his hands in his pockets. He smiled blandly down at the gurney. He heard the door shut at his back. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t change. He looked down at the gurney and, after a moment or two, he removed one hand from his pocket. There was a handkerchief gripped in the hand. He wiped his face with it and it came away damp. He considered the damp handkerchief, its sweat-gray fabric. This heat , he thought. I do hate this goddamned heat .

But the room was cool enough and Luther was thinking about Arnold McCardle. A half hour ago, Arnold McCardle had come into his office. The fat man had cantilevered enormously through the doorway, his big paw gripping the frame. “Your friend from the News just caused a minor shitstorm down in Deathwatch,” Arnold had said. “He told Beachum he thinks he’s innocent. Made like he was gonna crusade for him. The wife is all upset.”

“All right,” Luther had said with a sigh. “I’ll handle it.”

So he had gone down to the visitors’ entrance to meet me. And he had spoken to me. He had handled it.

And now, here, alone, in the execution chamber, he thought about Arnold McCardle leaning in at his door, and he thought about me. He replaced the handkerchief in his pocket. He gazed down at the gurney again. He sniffed, and he had to admit to himself that he was angry. Innocent , he thought. Man. That Everett. These journalists, some of them. Sleazy, empty little men . He was definitely going to phone the paper and complain about this. He shook his head. Innocent . What did Everett think this was? A TV show? A movie? These reporters. After a while, they always started to confuse the stories they wrote with real life. Because that was what was at stake here. A life. A human life. The people at Osage were sweating bullets trying to do this thing as professionally as possible, as humanely as possible. It didn’t help anyone for the prisoner to be upset or given false hope like this. Maybe it helped Everett. Maybe it helped his story. But it helped the prisoner not at all.

Goddamned reporters , thought Luther Plunkitt. He worked so hard to treat them decently. No one could blame him for getting angry sometimes. In the end, they always thought their stories were more important than real life.

He stood there with his hands in his pockets a long time. He gazed down at the gurney. After a while, he imagined Frank Beachum’s face. Frank Beachum’s long, sad face gazing up at him. Innocent , he thought. He drew out his handkerchief again and ran it again across his forehead.

Man , he thought. This goddamned heat .

In the Deathwatch cell, Frank Beachum didn’t move. He sat as he had sat since I’d walked out, his hand lying slack on the table, his mouth turned down, his eyes cast down, his gaze fixed and empty.

Bonnie, standing by him, still clasped the bars of the cage. Then, slowly, she let her grip relax. A strange feeling had come over her. A strange calm, strangely electric. Everything in the room seemed very clear to her. Clear and bright. The clock, the guard, the chairs, the bars. Her husband at his table. The thoughts in her mind-they seemed clearer to her than they had in weeks.

Because suddenly she knew it was hopeless. Suddenly she understood, grasped in the visceral way, that there was no chance of pardon or reprieve. Somehow, the fact that I believed in Frank’s innocence had brought this home to her. No one had ever believed in his innocence before. Not the jury, not his own lawyers, not the press. Not even the Reverend Harlan Flowers, who simply refrained from judgment. And now I had come, and I had believed, and she had cried out to me: It’s too late! And in crying out, she had realized the truth of it. It was too late. No one could save her husband now. She was going to lose him. They were going to put poison in his arm and kill him. He was going to die.

Her tears stopped falling. Her hands lowered to her sides. With this new clarity, she looked around her, almost amazed. She saw the duty officer on the other side of the bars. Benson-he was watching her. Moving back to his desk, running his hand up through his shiny hair, he was giving her the side-eye as if he thought she might do something terrible. He sat down at his chair and picked up the telephone. He spoke into it in a low murmur. Frowning at her dangerously all the while, all the while watching her. In her strange envelope of queer, sizzling, hopeless calm, Bonnie nearly smiled at him. He’s frightened of me , she thought. That big strong man. He’s frightened of a hundred-and-ten-pound woman locked in a cage . She felt, in her clear thoughts, that she understood why this was so. She felt almost as if Benson’s mind had been revealed to her as she stood there. And he was afraid of her, she thought, because he was doing evil before her eyes. The killing of another person, a helpless person, was evil. No excuses; it was evil. In the heart of every human being, where the quiet mind could hear, there spoke a voice that said that it was evil, and the voice was never untrue. Bonnie knew this and she thought the guard knew it but did not want to know it and so he was afraid of her. Because the guard wanted to do his job without knowing. He wanted to collect his pay, and feed his family, and do his job. His boss, the warden, had told him to do this. The courts had told the warden. The lawmakers of the state of Missouri had told the courts. And most of the people of the United States of America agreed with the lawmakers and elected them to do what they had done. So the guard wanted to think: it must be right to do it. But he knew that was not the truth. Truth, Bonnie thought in her electric calm; Truth is not a democracy. All the people of the earth crying out for Evil with one voice could not drown out that other voice, that still, small voice that spoke within the quiet heart. And so the guard knew. They all knew. And they were afraid before her eyes.