True Crime

2

By the time the Tempo skidded to the curb before my apartment house, I had dismissed the Potato Chip Factor as ridiculous. I hadn’t even read the witness’s testimony. Maybe he’d been standing somewhere else. And the store must’ve changed in six years. And maybe they were low on potato chips that day. And maybe a million things that I wasn’t going to take time to check out when I had to be nice to my wife and take my son to the goddamned zoo. It wasn’t as if I thought Frank Beachum was innocent, after all. He wasn’t innocent, I was sure of that. He shot that girl; I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I’ve covered a lot of arrests and a lot of courtrooms, and the sad old truth is that nine hundred and ninety-nine of every thousand people who come to trial are guilty as hell. Because the cops arrest criminals, that’s why. If it’s a drug crime, they bust a dealer; if a wife’s dead and her husband’s a felon, they haul him in. They get bank robbers for bank robberies, and gang members for drive-by shootings. They may not be Hercule Poirot, but the cops have seen every crime ever committed and they know who the players are and they’re right ninety-nine percent of the time-about as often as reporters who play at being cops are wrong. Frank Beachum was an angry, violent man and Amy Wilson owed him fifty dollars and he shot her for it. Potato chips, my ass.

I killed the Tempo’s engine and listened to its death rattle. I stepped out into the street and slammed the door. I was annoyed with myself. I knew what I was doing with all this potato chip business. All this malarkey about why-didn’t-Nancy-Larson-hear-the-shots. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see how my mind was working. I was looking desperately for a big score, a big story-so I could make up for the fact that I’d cheated on my wife again. And gotten caught again. And was probably going to lose her and my son-and my job too just as I did in New York. I’d been assigned a human interest sidebar on a condemned man and I was trying to transform it into a last-minute rescue of an innocent from the jaws of death. So that I’d be a hero. So that Bob couldn’t fire me. So that Barbara wouldn’t divorce me and Davy would think I was neat.

Potato chips! I stalked around the front of the car and headed up the walk.

My building was on the corner, a glowering pile of acid-blackened brick with a columned portico thrust out aggressively onto the lawn. Broad-branched maples flanked it, and the rattle of the cicadas in the leaves laced the hot air. Our place was on the second floor. As I moved toward the door, I glanced up at it and saw Barbara at the bedroom window.

She had pushed a white curtain back and was watching me through it, watching through the maple leaves. Our eyes met. She did not smile. She let the curtain fall closed.

I was twenty minutes late.

I sighed, went in and headed up the stairs.

She opened the apartment door just as I reached the landing. She stood without saying a word, showing me the tight mouth and the deep blue eyes. As I stood at the other end of the hall, I raised my hands in apology. She did not react.

I sighed and headed toward her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got held up.”

She stiffened. I kissed her, catching the right quarter of her compressed lips. Our eyes met again, and then she turned away.

She had been a beauty when I married her. She was beautiful still. Small and slender and well formed. With strands of silver in her short black hair and the first worry-lines of motherhood softening what had been a haughty, patrician face. She was a New Yorker, Manhattan-born; Upper East Side and the right schools. Her parents had been divorced when she was ten, but her father was a big-wheel investment banker and always supplied her with plenty of cash. When I met her, five years ago, she was running a state-funded job training program for single mothers. Managing a staff of about a dozen people-suited-up, fiery women; mild, reedy, benevolent men-most of them like her, I guess, with bright ideas and good intentions and trust funds. She had had to give that up when we moved here to St. Louis.

I don’t suppose I loved her anymore. I’m not really sure I ever did. I think I just thought I was supposed to, to love somebody, to make something work right in my life. And she was smart and kindly and hardworking-as well as humorless and severe-and I was the first man who ever really reached her in bed, which made me proud. I felt I should’ve been able to love her, I still felt that way. She was a worthwhile person, and I didn’t want to lose her, even now. And the boy. If I loved anyone, I loved the boy. I didn’t want to lose Davy.

He was sitting in front of the TV in the living room. As soon as I came through the door, he looked up and saw me. His round, chubby face blossomed in a wreath of smiles. Quickly, he worked his two-year-old body off the floor and climbed to his feet. “Are we … are we … are we …” he cried, too excited to think of the words. He ran to me and jumped around, throwing his arms up and down.

“Davy!” I said. “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!”

“Are we … we are going … we are going to … to the zoo!” he finally managed to shout.

I reached out and rumpled his yellow hair. “Hooray,” I said.

“A hippopotamus is there.”

“No. Really?”

“Yeah! Yeah, really.”

“Oh boy,” I said, “I can’t wait.”

He reached out and took my hand in both of his. “We’ll go now,” he said.

“Don’t you want to put your shoes on first?” “Oh yeah.”

He let me go and ran crazily around the room, hoping to fall over his shoes, I guess. I glanced up and saw Barbara watching him. With that melted expression, that wry and dreamy smile that she reserved for Davy alone.

Then, lifting her chin, she made the effort, and spoke to me for the first time.

“They’re in the nursery,” she said. “I’ll get them.”

As she left the room without a backward glance, I wondered if she already knew about Patricia. Knew, or suspected, or guessed. But no, I thought. Not yet. It was just that I was late. It was just that.

I clapped my hands. “Dave!” I said. “Davester! McDave!”

He stopped running in circles and lifted his arms urgently. “I can’t find my shoes anywhere!” he said.

“Mama’s going to get them. Why don’t you turn off the tape.”

“Yeah!”

He liked doing that; he was proud of knowing how. He squatted low on his haunches in front of the VCR. He guided his fat finger toward the power button with painstaking care. With a flash, the squealing face of Miss Piggy vanished. In its stead, as the regular TV took over, there appeared the squealing face of Wilma Stoat, the city’s morning talk show queen.

“The death penalty!” she shrieked sincerely. “An urgent issue! What’s your opinion? We’re talking to Murder Victim’s Dad Frederick Robertson and president of the Anti-Capital Punishment Task Force Ernest Tiffin.”

I snorted. Funny that should be on just at this moment, I thought. It was another second before I realized that the man now before the camera was Amy Wilson’s father.

Frederick Robertson. He was an impressive figure in close-up: a thick, oval face; a frown worn into the granite; the hard, tired countenance of a lifelong working man. The caption Murder Victim’s Dad was shown over his cheap necktie as he listened grimly to a question from the audience.

Davy crouched on his haunches, mesmerized as always by the images on the screen. I stood where I was, thinking, Tenderloin; sirloin; T-bone.

“The way it seems to me,” said Frederick Robertson in a gruff, slow voice, “the law makes a deal with the public.”

Porterhouse, I thought. That was the name of the witness. Dale Porterhouse.

“The law says to us-the public: you be nonviolent; you don’t take justice into your own hands-and in return the government is gonna make sure that the guilty party is found and the government is gonna carry justice out in your place.”

I had stepped to the end table by the sofa; I had picked up the phone before I’d even thought about doing it. I pressed the buttons.

Davy’s head swiveled around. His mouth opened in a worried frown. “No, no, Daddy,” he said. “Don’t talk on the phone! Let’s go to the zoo now.”

“We’re going to the zoo just as soon as you get your shoes …”

“Information, what city please?”

“In St. Louis,” I said. “Dale Porterhouse.”

“I fulfilled my part of that bargain,” Frederick Robertson said on the TV screen. “I been a hardworking, honest citizen my whole life. But I would not have fulfilled the bargain if I thought Frank Beachum would not have to pay for my daughter’s life with his life.”

A recorded voice came over the phone with Dale Porterhouse’s number. I whispered the suffix to myself, holding the prefix in my mind as I pressed the buttons again.

My wife strode back into the room carrying Davy’s sneakers and socks. The little boy ran to her, reaching up.

“Oh, what now?” Barbara said, glaring at me.

I held a finger up at her.

Davy bounced on his toes. “Put my shoes on now, Mommy,” he said. “Then Daddy will not talk on the phone.”

“I don’t think anyone who hasn’t gone through it,” said Frederick Robertson (Murder Victim’s Dad) to the studio audience, “can understand what happens to a family when a child is taken away from it-not by sickness or an act of God-but by another human being acting for whatever motives-by a murderer.”

“Jello.”

“What?” I said.

“Jello?”

“Oh. Hello. Is Mr. Porterhouse there please?”

Shaking her head with exasperation, Barbara marched over to the cushioned chair by the window. Her dark eyes continued to hurl thunderbolts at me as she sat down, as she hoisted Davy up into her lap.

“My life, my family’s life, has been ruined,” said Amy Wilson’s father. “We spend every day angry. Every day full of rage.”

“Meester Putterhus ees not to be in,” said the woman on the other end of the phone. “Ee ees to be at work now.”

“Look, Daddy,” Davy said happily, “I have my Snoopy socks today.”

“Hey, great,” I told him.

“Jello?”

“Yes, jello, do you know his number? At work. Do you have his number?”

“Oooooh,” said the woman, “noooooo. I no hef hees number there.”

“Oh. All right. Well, thank you.”

I didn’t see much point in leaving a message. I set the phone down.

On television, an audience of housewives and retirees listened thoughtfully as Frederick Robertson’s rough voice continued. “I got other children, okay? I got a wife who depends on me emotionally and financially too. I’m foreman now at a brewery; I got workers who depend on my decisions, a boss who depends on me and so on. And for six years, all that has been … screwed up by this rage, this terrible anger I feel at what happened.”

My wife had pulled Davy’s socks on and was now unlacing his shoes. He waited patiently in her lap, laughing sometimes as she sang to him softly. Her voice was off-key, the song was something silly of her own invention. All the while she sang it, she went on glaring at me over the top of our son’s head.

It’s ridiculous, I thought. Potato chips! Let it go, let it ride.

I hauled the phone book up from the end table’s bottom shelf.

“My rage is only going to be ended by the death of my daughter’s murderer,” said Robertson. “And I don’t think anyone who was not involved, who has not been through what I’ve been through, has the right to tell me that shouldn’t happen.”

He was there, in the book. At least, I hoped it was he. Porterhouse and Stein, Certified Public Accountants. I heard Barbara make a noise deep in her throat as I began punching the buttons again. She yanked one of Davy’s sneakers open wide and slipped his foot into it.

“Mr. Robertson’s rage is, of course, understandable,” said Ernest Tiffin (Anti-Death Activist). “But society has to take a broader, more dispassionate view …”

“Porterhouse and Stein.”

“Yes,” I said eagerly. “Is Dale Porterhouse there please?”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Porterhouse has gone to lunch,” the woman drawled over the wire. Shit! I thought.

“May I ask who’s calling?” she said.

“Urn … yeah,” I said. “Yes.”

“I have my shoes on now, Daddy!” Davy leapt off his mother’s lap and ran across the rug to me, clutched at my pants leg. “Now we can go to the zoo!”

I patted his head abstractedly. “My name is Steve Everett. I’m a reporter for the St. Louis News. Would you ask Mr. Porterhouse to call me as soon as he possibly can? It’s in reference to the Beachum case.”

Davy hugged my leg tightly. “Don’t talk on the phone now, Daddy.”

“Oh yes,” said the receptionist-I could hear her interest rouse. “I’ll certainly let him know as soon as he comes in.”

I pronounced my beeper number and hung up.

“You’re not taking your beeper,” Barbara said.

“Are we going now?” said Davy.

“Let me tell you something,” said Amy Wilson’s father. “My daughter was shot in cold blood for no reason. She’d already given Beachum the money from the register. He already had his money. And while she was lying on the floor-okay? — choking to death on her own blood, this … creature, this man, pulled her wedding ring off her and tore the locket off her neck-a locket I gave her for her sweet sixteen …” Robertson couldn’t go on. He swallowed hard as his eyes began to swim. He forced out the words: “And then he left her there to die. See? See, it’s not about some morality debate on TV or some newspaper editorial or some expert and his big ideas for society. This is a fact of life, it’s a fact of my life-and I want justice to be done-in my life.”

“Woof,” I said. “Okay, Davy-boy, here we go.” I hoisted him up into my arms. “Let me just get something from the bedroom.”

“Zoo, zoo, zoo!” Davy cried.

“You’re not,” said Barbara.

I was already heading out into the hall. “I just have to ask this guy one question,” I called back to her. I rubbed my nose against Davy’s. “About potato chips!” I told him, and he laughed.

The rose-patterned curtains were neatly tied back in the bedroom. The afternoon sun poured in through the windows, embroidered by the shadows of leaves. The bed was freshly made, and the quilt’s homely birds and pineapples looked cozy and warm in the light. Barbara was not only beautiful herself, she made things precise and beautiful around her. There were Sundays, I remember, before the boy was born, when I had lain under that quilt with her in my arms and wondered how I had gotten so lucky.

Davy whapped the top of my head with his open hand as if I were a drum. Whap, whap, whap. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” he sang. I wished he had come down with some kind of small fever today so I wouldn’t have had to take him to the goddamned zoo.

“What’s that, Dad?” he said.

I had pulled the little gray box from my bedside table. “It’s Daddy’s beeper,” I said. “It goes beep, beep, beep.” I hooked it onto my belt.

“Beep, beep, beep,” said Davy, and he whapped me on top of the head again.

I carried him back down the hallway to the front door. Barbara stood just within the living room, her arms crossed fiercely beneath her breasts.

“Bye, Mommy! Bye!” Davy called to her, waving over my shoulder.

“Bye, sweetheart, have a great time,” she said.

In the background, I could hear the treacly solicitude of Wilma Stoat drip-dripping from the TV. I pulled the door open. I looked back and cocked an eyebrow at my wife. Her lips pursed and wrinkled. She turned her back on me.

“Ho boy,” I whispered.

I never should have stopped at that goddamned grocery.