True Crime

3

The city room, as I entered, was not an encouraging sight. I hesitated in the doorway, peered unhappily across the low brown desktops with their outcroppings of off-white monitors. The early workers had trailed in. There were a couple of reporters pecking at their computers, the Trends editor was scrolling copy in her corner carrel. I could hear the snicker of their keyboards and the low murmur of the TVs on the high shelves above them. But to me, just then, the place seemed immense and all but empty, all but silent. Only one feature of the landscape commanded my attention, loomed like a glowering black tor in the distance. That was the figure of Bob Findley. The paper’s city editor, my boss, and my lover’s husband.

He was sitting at the long city desk on the far side of the room. He was pretending to study the papers in his hand. But he was watching the doorway really. He was watching me.

And what did he see? I hated to think about it, but I couldn’t help it. I imagined what I looked like to him. I am not tall, but I am thin-waisted and broad-shouldered and muscular from lifting weights. At thirty-five, I still have the face of a smart-assed undergraduate, youthful and arch with short, curly, blue-black hair, with wicked, sharply angled brows and a wicked, sharply angled smile. My eyes, behind wire-rimmed spectacles, are green. I am told they always seem to be laughing at you, and I believe this to be the case. In short, I look like just the sort of son-of-a-bitch you’d want to keep your wife away from. Bob, I thought, must’ve wanted to put his fist right through the whole collection.

Or maybe that’s unfair to him. Maybe that’s just what I would’ve wanted in his place. All the same, his expression must have altered when he saw me walk in, or the color of his cheeks must have changed, because, a second later, Jane March followed his surreptitious gaze, turned and looked over her shoulder in my direction. Her brows knitted. I could almost hear her wonder what the hell was going on.

I swallowed and let out a low whistle. There’s just no way to keep a secret in a newsroom.

Hands in my pockets, as casually as I could, I came forward, weaving from aisle to aisle, toward the city desk. It seemed a very long way. Bob, pretending to study his papers, never took his eyes off me. His blue eyes. They had the angry depths of dungeons, I thought, though his features never lost their steely composure.

The endless walk ended. I stood before the desk. Bob lifted his face and pinned me with those oubliette eyes. Jane March looked up at me, then back at Bob, then back at me, without saying a word. Though the room was air-conditioned, I felt the sweat spread over the back of my shirt. I felt the dread spread through my center like a stain.

“Morning all,” I said, and then laughed once-“heh!”-idiotically. I cleared my throat.

There was no answer, not for a long time. Bob watched me. Jane March watched him and then me again. She was a small, stoop-shouldered woman in her forties with an anxious, saggy face. She had been at the News for a good many years. She was our living morgue, and an anchor for a staff of younger folks who tended to move on too quickly.

Bob drew a breath, a long breath, before he spoke at last. “You got my message.”

I nodded as remorsefully as I could. “Yeah.”

He tossed his papers down on the desk in front of him. “Michelle Ziegler’s been in a car wreck,” he said.

He said it bluntly like that, cruelly, as if it served me right, as if it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in bed with Patricia. But, at first, it didn’t register. I was so fixed on the other thing between us. And then, for a crazy second, I thought it might be some nasty joke made for spite.

“What? Michelle?”

“She’s in a coma,” Bob went on coldly. “The doctors think she’s going to die.”

“Oh! Oh no!” I felt it now. A weakness in my knees, a chill in my groin. “She’s twenty-three or something. She’s just out of school. She’s … she just got out of school.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, and his voice was sad now, steadfastly decent as he was. “I guess that doesn’t count for much when you go full speed into a wall.”

“Dead Man’s Curve,” said Jane March.

“Aw, no,” I said. “Up by the parkway? That turn up there. Jesus. And they think she’s gonna die?”

“Right now that’s how it looks,” said Bob.

“Man oh man! That dumb broad. That poor kid. Jesus. She just got out of school.”

So, for a moment, the little unpleasantness concerning my dick and Bob’s wife was washed aside by the image of Michelle. I could see her graceful body shattering against the windshield. I could feel the impact in my icy crotch. What the hell had she been doing? I thought. Drinking with her intellectual friends. Laughing with them, satirizing her ignorant colleagues till dawn. Too sure of herself to stay out of her car. Too stubborn to pull off the road. I wanted to shake her for being so stubborn, so sure. I wished I had shaken her the night before. Go home, I should’ve said to her. Stay home, write a better story. Make some calls, get some facts. Write them up so well they have to print it. And she’d have done it too. She’d have listened to me. I don’t know why, but she always did. After she finished cursing me for a fascist and a pig and a this and that, she always came back and listened. I should’ve grabbed her by her stupid blouse front and shaken her till her eyes rattled.

But now, the moment passed. Bob and Jane sat watching me and the whole situation crystallized in my mind. I lifted my glasses with one hand and massaged my brow. I understood the whole ridiculous business, and I felt sick.

“All right,” I said. I sighed. “That stinks. That really stinks.”

Bob nodded, frowned.

I straightened. “So what do you need?”

He went on watching me, his own thoughts moving behind the passionless features. I just felt sick. How had he found out? Why had he had to find out? I wished he would curse me for it. I wished I had never seen his goddamned wife at all. I wished for the days when we could’ve gone outside and shot at each other. Pistols in the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. It would’ve been easier to bear than this.

“Michelle had an interview scheduled today with Frank Beachum,” Bob said finally.

“Frank Beachum,” I repeated. I was thinking again about Michelle’s slender limbs, her brittle bones; Patricia’s long, strong figure; her breast beneath my hand. All the while, Bob’s steady gaze burned into me. I forced the images down. “Right,” I said, blinking once. “Right. Frank Beachum. The guy they’re gonna juice today. Right. I remember. Michelle had a seat for the show.”

“She also had an interview with him. At four, face-to-face in the Deathwatch cell.”

“Right. Okay. I remember that.”

“Alan wants you to cover for her,” Bob said.

“Alan. Right,” I said. I was beginning to focus again. I got the message. Alan wanted me to cover for Michelle. Alan wanted me, Bob didn’t. What Bob wanted was burbling like hot tar at the bottom of his unwavering stare. I stood before him stupidly for a second or two. I tried to think how to answer. I tried to think of what I would’ve said if I hadn’t been sleeping with his wife. If I were just a reporter being called in for a pickup assignment on his day off. “So, uh … Beachum,” I said. “What did he …? This was before my time. He killed some girl or something.”

“A pregnant woman,” said Bob in his quiet, controlled voice. “A college student. Amy Wilson. She was working the summer in a grocery in Dogtown. She owed Beachum money, fifty dollars or something, for some repairs he’d done on her car. He shot her dead.”

“Okay. Anything special about him?”

Bob lifted one shoulder slightly. “He was a mechanic over at that Amoco station on Clayton. That’s about it.”

“He’s one of these born-again crazies,” Jane March chimed in.

I was relieved-I was delighted-for the excuse to turn away from Bob, to turn my attention to her. Still, I could feel his stare, his eyes, like two tiny sets of teeth, gnawing on my profile as I faced her.

“Yeah, they all get born again on death row,” I said. “That place has the highest birth rate in the country.”

“Now, now, now,” said Jane. “Don’t be such a cynical boy. He was born again before all this started. He’d been a drifter or something. From Michigan, I think. Broken home, alcoholic mother. He’d been in jail a couple of times for violent assaults, barroom fights, that sort of thing. And then I think he did three years in MSP for beating up a state trooper who tried to give him a ticket.”

“Sounds like a reasonable sort of fellow.”

“But he was clean for something like four years before the Wilson killing. He got out of slam and met his wife, Bunny or Bonnie or Bipsy or something. She’s one of these born-againers too. I guess she’s the one who led him to Jesus.”

“Yeah, I know these prison groupie types,” I said. “Boy meets girl, girl saves boy’s soul, boy and girl go on interstate kill spree.”

“Cynical, cynical.” Jane March pursed her lips primly. “They were very nice. They had a daughter together. They bought a house in Dogtown. He had his mechanic job. She took care of the baby. They were the all-American family. The guy was totally clean for like three, four years. Then, one July fourth, he walks into the grocery store, this Pocum’s in Dogtown. Amy Wilson is working the register. She says she hasn’t got the money she owes him …”

“And old Frank just kind of lost that nasty temper of his.”

“Looks like it.”

“Tsk, tsk. I hope he expressed his remorse, at least.”

“Well, no, he’s been a little slow there,” said Jane March. “He still says he just went to the store to get some A-1 steak sauce for his Fourth of July picnic.”

“Hey, convincing story.”

“That’s what the jury thought. It didn’t help much that a guy in the store saw him run out with the smoking gun. And then some poor woman who had no idea what was going on nearly bumped into him in the parking lot.”

I laughed. “A-1 Sauce. I like that. That’s good.”

“What Michelle wanted on this story …” Bob’s soft, contained, penetrating voice brought me back around to face him, brought my mind back around to the sickly heat between us and the conversation we were not having as Jane March looked on. “What I want on this story,” he said, holding up his hand, explaining in that schoolteacher way of his, “is the human interest. All right? What it’s like on death row on the final day. Don’t overload it with the details of the case. We’ve already covered the case, and all the appeals and all that. I want what the cell looks like, and what Beachum looks like, and what’s going on inside his mind. A human interest sidebar, that’s what I want. All right?”

“Right. Sure,” I said. I adjusted my glasses which had slipped on the sweaty bridge of my nose. This is almost over, I told myself. It isn’t going to be too bad. Not yet, not now. First, we would deal with the story. That was Bob’s way. Professional, ordered, calm. We would deal with the story first, and all the rest would come later. All I had to do for now was keep my mouth shut and my head down; do the job, do the work, and we would get through today without the full-blown disaster that was surely coming. We would get through today, and tomorrow-well, maybe the world would end. Who knows? I could get lucky. “Human interest sidebar,” I repeated. “Righty-oh.”

I thought I saw a grimace of distaste twist Bob’s mouth for a second. But then the round, youthful face was still again, and the expression calm, and the blue eyes black to their depths. “I’m sorry to call you in on your day off,” he said, with no inflection in his voice at all.

“Hey … hey … I mean … hey. No problem. It’s an emergency,” I said.

“Yes,” said Bob. “It is.”

Jane March watched him, then me, then him again. She would get at the truth before long, I was certain. Everyone in the damn building would get at the truth before too long. And as for my wife, as for Barbara … I didn’t want to think about that.

“Okay. Hokey-dokey. Right,” I said. “I’ll be … I’ll get … right on that.”

Silently, I sang me a hallelujah when, at last, I could turn away from him and head toward my desk. I felt the basilisk at my back, but I knew that if I just kept going it would be all right. I would get to my chair. I would bury my head in the story. I would hand in my copy at the end of the day, and then go home and move away without leaving a forwarding address. Something. I would think of something. I felt the clenched fist of my stomach starting to loosen as I hurried up the aisle.

Three steps. I got three steps. And then I pulled up short.

Shit, I thought. A question had occurred to me. On a normal day, it would have been a simple thing to turn around and ask my question of the city editor. It did not seem a simple thing to do today. My stomach clenched right up again. I imagined the sweat on my back made my white shirt gray as Bob stared at it. I imagined he didn’t want me to turn around again any more than I wanted to turn around again. I told myself not to turn around. I told myself to forget my question, to go to my desk and get to work.

Then I turned around. I saw Bob’s lips press together hard.

“Uh … why didn’t she hear the shots?” I asked.

I saw Bob’s lips turn white. “The shots,” he said softly.

I felt my face get hot, I felt a prickling under my hairline. “Sorry, I just … The woman in the, in the-what-chamacallit-the parking lot. Jane said she didn’t know what was going on but … I mean, if she was right outside, she must’ve heard the … the shots …” My voice trailed away. A lump of nauseous fear corkscrewed from my stomach to my throat.

Bob’s cheeks had reddened.

You have to understand. The Reddening of Bob Findley’s Cheeks was a phenomenon regarded with terror by every single member of the city room staff. They had good reason too. When Bob’s cheeks turned red, it meant that you had enraged him. Despite his lifework of calm, his caring, his ever-best efforts at fairness and decency, you and you alone had managed to throw a match into the gas tank of his wrath. This was not a happy thing. There were stories. About what he did to people, the people who enraged him. These were not stories about explosions or tirades. Bob did not explode. He didn’t shout or throw furniture. But if you enraged him-if you enraged him often enough, or deeply enough-he would get you for it. Quietly, surely. He would erase you from the Book of Life. Newspaper lore held that it had actually happened once-to a tough woman veteran who had continually questioned his youthful judgment. The old folks said she was now a television reviewer in Milwaukee, though maybe they exaggerated to get the full horror-story effect. No one wanted to find out for sure, though-and neither me, especially under the circumstances. When Bob’s cheeks flared their deep scarlet now, my teeth clamped shut. My head jerked back a little as if a grenade had burst at my feet.

And Bob, quiet, red-faced, practically vibrated in his chair. Slowly, very slowly, he said: “I don’t know, Steve. I don’t know if she would’ve heard the shots or not. Maybe she did. I don’t know. What I would like you to do please is to get an interview with Frank Beachum about his feelings today. Then I would like you to write that interview up as a human interest sidebar. Do you think you can just do that please?”

“Yup, yeah, absolutely, you bet, sure Bob, right,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Bob.

He took up the papers on his desk again and studied them, dismissing me. Jane March, wide-eyed, puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath as much as to say, “Wow!”

Me, I pivoted on my heel and zipped right back up that aisle again.

“Right,” I murmured as I beelined for my desk. “Human interest sidebar. Okey-dokey, absolutely, right away, sure, right.”