Andrew Klavan - True Crime

His name was Clarence Hagen. He was handsome in a pretty way, with a lot of coiffed hair and a rakish smile that said: Sure I’m full of shit but ain’t I cute? He sat at Michelle’s table, bought her drinks and disparaged the flaccid-faced clientele until Michelle let loose. Then, expertly, he alternately knit his brows with interest and reeled back in his chair at the clarity of her concepts. Encouraged, the drunken girl unleashed the flood of her wisdom, explained the culture of a continent to him in the comfortable, eager, machine-gun patter of her lost college days. Oh, Michelle knew he was a son-of-a-bitch. She was smart enough for that. But she thought that knowing gave her the upper hand. She felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care, powerful in her freedom as she toyed with the man. She felt much better than she had since Alan had killed her sidebar, that was for certain.

She and Hagen left the club together, his arm around her shoulders, her hip rubbing comfortably against his thigh. They got into their separate cars and headed out to University City, where Hagen lived. Michelle tagged after his Trans Am in her Datsun. She had to fight to keep the wheel steady and to keep her eyes open as she drove. After about twenty minutes, they parked in front of the three-story mock Tudor that the intern shared with two other young medical men. Young Clarence escorted Michelle inside.

And there, he fucked her, pistonlike, quickly, in a bedroom downstairs. Michelle was so drunk by then that she started to fade even while he was still pumping away. She wafted to the ocean bed of her own mind and lay there with some other man on some future day when life would be simple and she would be loved. After a while, she noticed that Clarence, finished, was snoring on top of her. She struggled out from under him and curled up at the edge of the bed, as far from him as she could. She told herself that she still felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care and that Alan Mann could go to hell and so there. She told herself that this was Life; then she passed out.

And that was how the reporter for the St. Louis News spent the night before her death row interview with Frank Beachum.

Around six-thirty the following morning-just as Beachum was awaking from his dream-Michelle forced her crusted eyelids apart and wished, as Beachum wished, that she was in any other place. She recoiled from the sleeping Hagen as if he were a slug and stumbled, naked, into the bathroom, to piss and wash her face. She leaned over the toilet for a while, thinking she might vomit. When she didn’t, she stood up trembling violently. She was not a crier, but now she had to force herself not to cry.

Hagen awoke as she was dressing. He sat up in bed, his head in his hands. Michelle buttoned herself up quickly. She could not think of anything he could say to her that wouldn’t make her want to kill him.

“You want some coffee?” he mumbled.

“Just shut up,” she said.

“Hey!” he said. “What did I do?” As she walked out, he muttered a curse after her and waved good riddance. Then he dropped back onto the sheets with his arms wide, and his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

Michelle walked out through the kitchen where Clarence’s roommates greeted her with a pair of sleepy leers that incinerated her spirit. She slammed out the front door and wobbled down the path to her car.

She drove until she found a nearby McDonald’s. She got her coffee there and drank it in the parking lot, pacing up and down the Datsun’s length. She cursed Hagen and his manhood first, but it simply wouldn’t serve. Stupid! she told herself finally. How can you be so smart and be so stupid? A truck driver, roaring past on the boulevard, shouted an obscene remark at her-something about putting his head under her short skirt. It made Michelle feel filthy and horrible and she climbed back in behind the wheel of the car.

And there, at last, she did begin to cry. Her face just crumpled like a child’s and, like a child, she despaired. She wept and moaned aloud, her throat contracting until she felt she would choke on her own tears. She held her head and bowed it, and shook it back and forth, her black hair whipping her face. Despair, despair. Alone, so terribly alone. No boyfriend since high school. No friends since college. No real friends there; she was too above them. Her social life was all errors in judgment. Her career-on which she relied for self-respect-was in a pit. She knew everything about everything and nothing about anything and she could not get a handle on how she was supposed to live her life. So, in her wisdom, she believed.

“My life is shit,” she spat out angrily, hurting herself, crying. “My life is such shit.”

By about 7:05 A.M., she had cried herself out and felt better. Sniffling, she threw the empty coffee cup into the backseat: into the landfill of empty coffee cups back there, and fast food containers and yellowing newspapers and notebooks and press releases. With a shuddering sigh, she pushed the little red car into drive. She had come to a decision, she told herself. She knew what she was going to do. The car screeched out onto the road, weaving wildly.

Someone probably should have stopped her then. God knows, the cops have a hard job of it on the road; they can’t be everywhere. Still in all, someone probably should have pulled her over the night before, driving out there, drunk as she was. And she wasn’t much better this morning. Her head felt feverish and thick. Her sinuses were jammed up. Her stomach felt like an upside-down volcano. Her vision was gamy and blurred, what with all the booze and dope and all that crying. Even she knew she was thinking with rusted cogs; thinking slowly, reacting slowly. But hell, she’d driven home like this before. She’d done it plenty of times. She’d never had an accident yet. She figured it was going to be all right this time too.

It was all right-at first, on the broad boulevard leading back to the city’s edge. The Monday morning traffic was fast, but it was still pretty sparse. Michelle attached her gaze to the red taillights of the car in front of her, let them draw her along like the stare of a vampire, sped after them in a nodding trance. She was thinking about her decision. She was nodding to herself, her lips pressed together tight. She was going to stay at the paper, she thought. It was what she was born for; she knew it, and she wouldn’t let any of them make her quit. She was smarter than they were-Alan, Bob, me-she was smarter than all of them and she was going to be better than all of them put together. They didn’t have to like her, she announced to herself, they just had to put her into print.…

She grimaced as her bowels roiled. She needed to go to the bathroom badly, but she didn’t want to stop. She wanted to get home and shower her own idiocy off her and start again and make it right and make Alan Mann eat her pieces word by word. She was going to go on talking to Everett, she thought. Everett was going to teach her. He was the best of them, bastard that he was, and she was going to make him teach her everything he knew. Then he could make his stupid jokes. Then he could watch her dust. She pressed the gas down. The high rises passed, the parkland, gas stations, quaint little enclaves of brick cafes. They all went by in a vague, peripheral jumble. Michelle’s large eyes glowed with determination. Her lips turned upward in a determined smile. Yes , she thought.

And then she hit Dead Man’s Curve.

That’s what the locals always called it. The newspapers called it that sometimes too. It was not a very original name, I guess, but it was accurate enough. Here, just at the city border, the road swept left in a long, wide sudden arc. The speeding traffic wheeled round it in a seemingly endless swing onto the parkway, with nothing but a gas station car lot to the right where the turn reached its apex. Lots of cars had spun out of control there. There’d been two fatals on the very spot within the last year and a half. Michelle hit the curve at full speed, her mind elsewhere. She was squinting, with only one hand on the steering wheel, while the other massaged her belly.