True Crime

4

I dropped thankfully into my swivel chair and punched on my terminal. While the lights came up, my hand strayed to my shirt pocket. I drew my cigarettes halfway out before I thought to resist the urge. The no-smoking policy. Bob had helped to institute the no-smoking policy. He was very caring about our health, was Bob. I did not think I would violate the no-smoking policy today.

I tapped Beachkil into the keyboard. The file popped up on the screen. There was a selection of stories, from the first day through the trial. I scrolled through them quickly, picking out the basics. This was what I came up with:

On July fourth, six years ago, a twenty-year-old coed named Amy Wilson was shot in the throat with a.38 as she stood behind her counter at Pocum’s grocery in Dogtown. She was six months pregnant at the time. Both she and the baby died. A scholarship sophomore at Washington University, she had been married to a law student, Richard Wilson, and was working at the grocery for the summer to help support them.

Just before the shooting took place, Dale Porterhouse, a certified public accountant who was passing through the neighborhood, had asked to use the grocery’s bathroom. Later, he testified at Frank Beachum’s trial. As he was entering the bathroom, he said, he had heard Amy Wilson tell Beachum that she could not pay him the fifty dollars she owed him for some work he had done on the carburetor of her aging Impala. Moments later, from inside the bathroom, Porterhouse said he heard Amy scream out, “Please not that!” The scream was followed by a single gunshot. Porterhouse had zipped up his pants and run to the entryway at the rear of the store just in time to see Frank Beachum racing out the front, he said. Beachum, he said, was clutching a pistol in his right hand. Porterhouse picked him out of a police lineup that same day.

Porterhouse said he had run to the pregnant woman where she lay on the floor. She was convulsing and making gurgling noises, he said, though the medical examiner testified she was probably already dead. Porterhouse said there was blood pumping out of the bullet wound in her throat and her eyes were open very wide. He said she looked terribly frightened.

Nancy Larson, a housewife and mother of three, also testified for the prosecution. She had been on her way to a picnic, she said, and had pulled her blue Toyota into the lot to buy a soda from the machine against the grocery’s wall. She testified that she nearly backed right into Beachum as he ran to his car. She called out the window to apologize. He didn’t even turn around, but only lifted his hand in a wave at her. Mrs. Larson did not see Beachum’s gun, but the police found it later lying by the curb, as if it had been flung away through a car window. It was unregistered and filed clean; they could not trace its provenance.

The case, it seemed, had gotten fairly wide coverage. The neighborhood people had liked Amy. She was attractive, well-mannered and intelligent. The news stories about her murder were all written in a fine tone of moral outrage. Journalists love to express moral outrage; they think being outraged proves they are moral. Politicians are like that too. Wally Cartwright, the assistant circuit attorney who prosecuted the case, had expressed his outrage by announcing he would seek the death penalty. He made the announcement with his boss, Cecilia Nussbaum, in front of the old domed courthouse where the Dred Scot case began. Cartwright and Nussbaum wanted to make the point that capital punishment was for all criminals, black or white. The Supreme Court had recently noticed the preponderance of blacks on death row, and so had the black voters. The prosecutors somehow managed to sound outraged about Frank Beachum and Dred Scott at the same time.

That was it, that was all I needed to know. Ten minutes after I’d turned my terminal on, I clicked the Beachkil file shut and tilted back in my chair. I thought about Amy Wilson. Attractive, intelligent, well-mannered, I thought. They were not very interesting words. They didn’t exactly conjure the little girl her parents had raised or the woman her husband curled up against at night. Erased by a gunshot for fifty bucks. Please not that! I thought about Michelle and her thin bones and that windshield and how the hospital heart machine would flatline while the nurses scrambled around her uselessly. What would we write about her? I wondered. Irritating little college kid. I smiled, thinking about the way she was, and my gaze dropped idly to the spot on my desk where she had pressed her angry fist the night before. Bob Findley had put the Beachum trial transcript in a box just there, by the side of my keyboard. Idly, I stretched out a finger, hooked the box by the edge and drew it onto my lap. So how come the Larson woman didn’t hear the shots? I thought.

“Want coffee, Ev? It’s back in fashion as a late morning pick-me-up.”

Bridget Rossiter, the Trends editor, was walking past behind me. She was a compact unit of energy, with a squirrelly tangle of red hair surrounding her freckled face. Her slacks and pullover showed off her figure: She had breasts large enough to have inspired an entire subspecies of city room commentary. She was heading for the hall.

“God bless you, Bridge,” I called after her. “Make it a big one.”

“Women can fetch coffee in the office now because improved job opportunities have given us new confidence,” she called back.

“That’s great,” I said. “Make it black, will you.”

Bridget’s job had driven her insane.

I was about to start paging through the trial transcript when I noticed the time on the clock above the city desk. “Damn,” I whispered. It was nearly 11:30. “Wife, wife, wife.” She thought I was at the gym. She would be wondering where I had gotten to by now.

I snatched up the phone, tapped in my number. I wedged the handset under my ear. With one hand, I started lifting transcript pages out of the box, tossing clumps of them onto my desk. The voir dire, the opening arguments … With the other hand, without thinking, the way you do on the phone, I plucked the cigarettes full out of my pocket now and jerked one into my mouth. I was reaching for my lighter when I remembered Bob. The cigarette jerked unlit between my lips as I listened to the phone ring.

“Hello?” Barbara’s voice was mellow and deep. She always sounded busy when she answered the phone. She always sounded annoyed, as if you’d interrupted her. In the background, I could hear our son, Davy. He was singing some song he’d learned on Sesame Street about how everyone in a family had to work together.

“It’s me, sweetheart,” I said.

“Steve? Where are you?”

I let her hear a sigh-a weary, working-guy kind of a sound. “I’m at the paper. They roped me in.”

“Oh no. How’d they find you? They called here but I wouldn’t tell them where you were.”

How had Bob known where I was anyway? “I stopped off to get something on the way back from the gym,” I said. “I got caught.” It was amazing how easily the lies came out. I didn’t even have to think about them anymore. They seemed the natural language of conjugal conversation.

There was a pause. I could imagine her, my wife, with her hand on her hip, her head tilted into the handset. Not suspicious yet, just vexed that I’d come back to work after I’d been here all weekend.

In the pause, my eyes returned to the transcript on my lap. I plucked the unlit cigarette from my lips, and began paging through the testimony again, browsing through it, searching for the witness in the parking lot.

“Well,” Barbara said then, “look. You really did promise Davy you’d take him to the zoo.”

I winced. “Ah Christ. The zoo. I forgot.”

“He’s been talking about it all morning.”

I didn’t say anything. My attention was torn for a moment between the sour bath of guilt I’d just been dropped in-and the words I’d just spotted on the page:

Witness: I was just leaving the parking lot. I’d only driven in to get a Coke from the machine. There’s a vending machine there.

That’s her, I thought.

“Steve? Did you hear me? He really is expecting you. He’s been talking about it all morning.”

“What?” I said. “Yeah. Right. I know. Christ, I feel awful.”

“And you worked all weekend. He didn’t see you at all.”

“I know, I know. Um …”

CA: And you saw the defendant at the time, Mrs. Larson?

Witness: Yes, I almost backed right over him.

“I know it’s work, but I really feel it would be a bad idea to let him down like this again,” Barbara said.

“Right, right, I think you’re right.” My eyes kept running down the page. My hand automatically pulled the plastic lighter from my pocket. Without thinking, I flicked the flame to my cigarette as I read along.

Witness: He was just there all of a sudden in back of me. I guess he’d come out of the store.

Defense: Objection.

Judge: Yes, sustained. Please don’t guess, Mrs. Larson. Just tell us what you know.

“The thing is: there’s been an accident,” I thought to say. “You remember Michelle Ziegler? You met her at Christmas.”

“Oh-yes … That college girl who kept following you around.”

“Yeah. Well, she ran her car into a wall near Dead Man’s Curve.”

CA: And did you notice whether the defendant was running at that time?

Witness: Yes, I did. He was.

CA: And he continued running after you nearly struck him?

Witness: Yes. I called to him, but he hardly stopped. He didn’t even turn around.

“Oh no,” Barbara said. And she said it as if she meant it. I knew she would take it like that. She was a very compassionate woman. “Is she hurt?”

“Yeah, she really got wracked up apparently. They don’t think she’s gonna make it.”

“Oh, God, that is terrible. She was just a girl, wasn’t she?”

“Mm, yeah,” I murmured, reading the transcript. “It’s awful.”

CA: Mrs. Larson, did you notice at that time whether the defendant was holding anything in his hand?

Witness: Yes. He was. He did have something in his hand.

CA: And did you see …?

Witness: No, I couldn’t see what it was.

“You sound pretty upset,” said Barbara.

“What?” I lifted my head a moment. Upset about what? What the hell were we talking about? I tried to focus my attention on the conversation. The shots, I thought. “Oh, Well, yeah, you know, I liked her,” I said. “I like her, I mean. She was, like, a kid … she is a kid. But she was okay.”

“What do they want, you to fill in for her?”

I drew deep on my cigarette-and remembered then that I shouldn’t have lit it. But it was too good now: the balmy fog of it inside me as the sweat dried on my back. I exhaled gratefully. Through the cloud of smoke, I saw Bob sitting very still at the city desk. I saw him watching me. I hunkered down in my seat, averting my eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “She had a ticket for the execution at Osage tonight.”

There was another pause at that, an angrier pause if I was any judge. Wouldn’t she have heard the gunshots? I thought. Right out in the parking lot like that. I glanced down at the transcript again. Plucked another page off and laid it on the desk.

“Well, I suppose that’s just your sort of thing, isn’t it?” Barbara said austerely. She was a very austere woman too, my wife. “I suppose you would think that was too much fun to miss.”

“What?” I said, searching the Larson testimony.

“Well, I mean, they could get someone else, Steve. You were working all weekend.”

“Gee, I don’t know …” This was no good. I couldn’t concentrate like this. I had to get off the phone. I wanted a chance to look this transcript over. “Look …” I said. “Look, I’ll tell you what … I don’t have to be down at the prison till four. And I really have all the background I need already. I can come home and pick Davy up now, take him over to the zoo, then I’ll bring him back around three. Okay?”

“What about his nap?”

“What?”

“He’s supposed to go down for his nap right after lunch.”

I put my cigarette hand to my forehead, rubbed the flesh there, trying to think. My eyes were drawn back to the transcript.

“His nap,” I said.

CA: Now, Mrs. Larson, before the moment when Frank Beachum ran out behind you, were you aware of anything unusual?

Witness: No, I was not.

There it is, I thought. The CA’s gonna ask it himself to beat out the defense.

“He gets very cranky in the afternoon without his nap,” said Barbara.

“Oh. Right. Well. Can’t he drink some coffee or something?”

“He’s two, Steve, remember.”

“No, no, it was a joke.”

“Oh.” Barbara had no sense of humor. She sighed. It was a weary, hard-pressed-mother sort of sound. “All right. Listen …”

CA: You did not hear any gunshots, any screams? I read.

I looked up, keeping my finger on the place. My cigarette, clamped between my lips, sent a line of smoke up into my eyes, making me squint. “What?” I said.

“I said, come on home as soon as you can. He’ll just go to bed early tonight, that’s all.”

“Great. Right. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“I don’t know why you had to go in there on your day off.”

“Yeah, sorry, dumb move.”

“All right,” Barbara said sternly. “I’ll have him ready in half an hour.”

“Great. I’ll be there.”

And I dropped the phone into its cradle.

Now, finally, I tilted back fully in my chair, lifting my feet up onto the desk. I squinted down at the transcript as I chomped my cigarette.

“Coffee time!” Bridget sang out. She breezed up behind me, carrying a flimsy cardboard tray full of donuts and styros. She set one king-sized cup down on the desk beside my shoes. “Ooh,” she said, cocking her head at my cigarette. “More and more office workers are insisting on their right not to breathe secondhand smoke.”

“Yeah, well, more and more scumbags don’t care,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee. You’re a darling girl.”

She wagged a finger at me. “Sexual harassment: what are the guidelines?”

“Who can say?”

“I hate my job, Ev.”

“I know it, kid.”

With a taut smile, she started to motor off, toting her box of breakfast with her. “I thought you had the day off,” she called over her shoulder.

“I do. Can’t you see my feet on the desk?”

That made her laugh, which made her freckled cheeks go rosy, which made her look about ten years younger, poor thing. Most of the time, her frenetic, harried presence spread such a pall of stomachache over the place that no one could stand her. She even made me feel bad sometimes. But that was only because she liked me so much. And that was only because she knew absolutely nothing about human beings. She thought of me as a solid family man, a good husband and father. Being single herself, she believed that marital probity was chief among all the virtues. If someone had told her that Winston Churchill had had an affair, she’d have wanted to give Poland back to the Nazis. I would be sorry when she found out about me and Patricia. I would be sorry when they all found out.

I let out a last blast of smoke, and yanked my desk drawer open a crack to get at my secret ashtray. I was already reading the transcript again as I crushed the cigarette out with my free hand.

CA: Now, Mrs. Larson, before the moment when Frank Beachum ran out behind you, were you aware of anything unusual?

Witness: No, I was not.

CA: You did not hear any gunshots, any screams?

Witness: No. No, but I wouldn’t have.

CA: You say you wouldn’t have, but you were just outside in the parking lot. Surely, you would have heard someone screaming, the noise of a gun going off, wouldn’t you?

Yeah, I thought, wouldn’t you?

Witness: No, because it was a very hot day. I had the air conditioner on and all the windows were shut, and the radio was on too. I might have heard a car horn out on the street or something, but I don’t think I would’ve heard anything going on inside the store, no matter what it was.

CA: Thank you, Mrs. Larson.

Yes, I thought, thank you very much. The chair squeaked loudly as I brought my feet down to the floor. I packed the transcript back into its box and gave it a satisfied little pat. With a glance at my watch, I stood up. I lifted my hand in the general direction of the city desk.

“I’m going home for a while,” I called. “I’ll be down at the prison by four.”

Another baffling mystery solved, I thought, and plenty of time left to take Davy to the zoo.