Andrew Klavan - True Crime

“I got caught in the supply room boffing a seventeen-year-old desk assistant.”

She reared off me. “No!”

“She turned out to be the daughter of the paper’s owner.”

Her mouth opened in mock horror. “You bad man!”

“He blackballed me.”

“I don’t blame him. What did your wife say?”

I winced, grimaced at the memory. There is nothing quite like that first time your wife discovers you’ve cheated on her. Somehow, you always think she knows or suspects or something. You don’t realize how much she trusted you until you see the coldcocked hollowness of betrayal in her eyes.

“Well,” I said. “We’d just had the kid, you know. It was tough on her, but she wanted to keep us together. And when Alan said he’d take me on, I guess she figured, you know, another town, another chance.” My backstory.

“You bad man,” Patricia said again. Shaking her head, she returned her cheek to my chest. I held her and breathed the summer’s air. “I don’t know about you,” she said after a moment. “First the owner’s daughter, now the editor’s wife.”

“You left out a few.”

“I’ll just bet I did. The mayor’s sister maybe? The police chief’s secretary?”

“The prosecutor’s.”

“I’m beginning to detect some sort of hostility against authority figures here.”

“Yeah. Plus a hard-on that won’t quit. It’s a dangerous combination.”

She laughed-Hmmm-and murmured. Ran her hand down my body. Shifted against me, so she could look at my face.

“And is that what you’re going to say about me?” she asked. “In the next city, with someone else.” She made her voice deep, imitation-macho. “ ‘Oh, I got caught boffing the editor’s wife. You know how that is. Ho ho ho.’ ”

I turned onto one shoulder so I could wrap my arms around her, press my face to hers. “Listen,” I said, “if I get caught boffing you, I don’t know how many more cities will have me.”

“Ooh,” she said huskily, rubbing her nose against mine, “that makes it all sound very danger-”

The phone rang, a startling blast from the other table, the one on her side of the bed. She sighed. “Yuch,” she said. She reached backward for the receiver. I released her. She settled onto her back, the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

She didn’t make any other sound-she didn’t gasp or anything-she was much too cool for that. But I heard the disaster happening all the same. There was some rhythm in her hesitation, some desperate impatience in her voice that gave it away.

“All right,” she said. “Yes, yes-yes. All right.”

She set the phone down again without saying good-bye. She lay back next to me and closed her eyes. The pause was dramatic enough, which was maybe what she was going for. I can never tell, in these emotional situations, how much is real and how much is played for effect.

“You won’t believe this,” she said. And then she delivered the punch line on an upturning note of surprise. “That was my husband.”

“Bob?” I asked stupidly.

She turned her head on the pillow and gazed at me. “He was looking for you.”

At about ten-thirty, Luther Plunkitt, the Superintendent of Osage Correctional Facility, walked into the Deathwatch cell. The duty officer stood up behind his typewriter. A new guard since eight: Benson, in his thirties, a veteran of these procedures. A good man; took his job seriously. Luther nodded at him and turned toward the cage, toward the prisoner.

Beachum was sitting at his small table now behind the wall of bars. A lone, small, stark figure against the white cinderblock background. Several blank sheets of paper lay on the table with a Bic pen lying slantwise across them. Beachum’s hands rested at the pages’ edge, encircling a Styrofoam coffee cup. A cigarette, held between two of his fingers, sent a zigzag of smoke to the ceiling. His face was lifted to Luther. Drawn, mournful. The eyes, deep and steady, meeting Luther’s eyes.

Funny , Luther thought, gazing through the bars. Funny the look that comes into their faces .

He recognized the prisoner’s expression. He remembered it, always the same, from other executions, from Nam, from Hue. The warden had known a lot of men who died at Hue and every one of them, before it happened, before they even caught the slug-they got that look. Their mouths slackened just a little and something came into their eyes, down deep, something slow and torpid, something weirdly willing somehow. As if Death had already risen up like a cobra in their minds and mesmerized them. After you saw that look on a man’s face, it didn’t matter what you did for him. You could try to cover him, take him off point, surround him, send him to the rear. The shell found him, or the mine or whatever. One boy had even drowned in an old crater that had filled up with mud.

Luther Plunkitt and Frank Beachum looked at each other steadily through the bars, and Luther knew as surely as he stood there that Beachum was not going to be reprieved tonight.

Luther smiled, a bland smile, his usual bland smile. He was a man in his sixties. A small man in his natty black Sunday suit, no more than five foot six or seven, but husky and solid with a little too much flesh on him if anything. He had a square, doughy face capped with silver hair. That meaningless smile rarely left it. The smile drew attention away from the marbly gray eyes set deep in the spongy folds beneath his brow. In fact, with his smile, with his soft, amiable manner, people sometimes didn’t notice those marbly eyes at all. But after fifteen years in the military, after ten years with the state police, after seventeen years working one prison or another, Luther, believe me, could be a marbly kind of a guy.

“Morning, Frank,” he said.

“Mr. Plunkitt,” said Beachum softly. He continued to hold himself very still. He did not bring his cigarette or his coffee to his lips. He held them loosely as if he hadn’t the energy to grip or lift them.

“Anything I can get for you? Anything you need?” Luther asked.

“No,” said Beachum. “Not that I can think of.”

Luther had one hand in his pants pocket. It was holding on hard to his keys. He gestured easily with the other as he spoke. No one, he knew, could have told what he was feeling. “I hear you got your wife and daughter coming in again today.”

Beachum nodded. “Yeah.”

“That’s good. Bonnie her name is, your wife?”

“Yeah.”

“And the little girl is …?”

Beachum coughed, cleared his throat. “Gail.”

“Gail. Very pretty, very nice name.” Beachum didn’t answer. Luther couldn’t blame him. He pressed his lips together, pressed on. “Well, anything you need for them you just let me know,” he said. “You let the CO know and we’ll take care of it for you.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Plunkitt,” Beachum said quietly. “Thank you.”

For a second, in the pause that followed, Luther’s glance fell to the prisoner’s cigarette. The ash had grown long. And now, it dropped to the table of its own weight. And still, Beachum didn’t raise the cigarette, didn’t move his hands at all.

It bothered Luther somehow. He had to look away. He forced his voice to sound brisk and businesslike. He stepped forward toward the cage bars, his thin smile in place, his open hand moving.

“There’s some matters I gotta discuss with you,” he said. “Figure we do it first thing, get it out of the way.”

Beachum nodded. “All right.”

“Your dinner tonight, for one thing. Anything special you want? It can be pretty much anything you want.”