True Crime

4

Just before Bonnie and Gail arrived, the phone rang in Death-watch. Benson answered it. Frank Beachum watched him. Frank was sitting at his table, eating his lunch. A ham sandwich. Ham on white bread with mustard. He chewed it, staring at Benson. It didn’t taste like anything to him.

At his desk outside the cell, Benson sat with the receiver to his ear for a moment. “Right,” he said. He stood up and came toward the bars, holding the receiver out toward Frank. The cord vibrated as it stretched the length of the room.

Frank had to stand up, had to put his hand out through the bars to take the receiver. He had to lean his head close to the metal cage to listen.

“Your lawyer,” said Benson, walking back to his desk. Frank nodded curtly. “Yeah,” he said quietly into the phone. He tried to brace himself, but it was no good. He tried not to hope, but that was no good either. He knew there was, in fact, no hope, but whenever the phone rang, whenever the lawyer called, he felt a coppery spurt of fear come up his throat onto his tongue and his spine ached and tightened. Then he knew he had been holding on to hope just the same.

The tense, youthful and, Frank thought, hapless voice of Hubert Tryon came over the line. “Frank?”

Frank closed his eyes and answered nothing. He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.

“It hasn’t come down yet,” Tryon went on. “But the clerk says it’ll be any minute now. I didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten you.”

Frank glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost one o’clock, but it didn’t register with him. He just stared at the clock reflexively and saw nothing.

“Frank?” said Tryon.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.” The ache in his back worsened as he relaxed. He was relieved that the appeal had not been answered yet. There was still some hope. He could still feel, at least, as if there were some hope.

“How you holding up?” the lawyer asked.

“Okay. Okay. You know,” said Frank.

“Yeah,” Tryon said. “Well, lookit. I gotta tell ya, Frank. Tom asked me to tell ya. I gotta be honest. We don’t have much to look for here. All right? There’s always a chance, all right? But the eighth’s heard this before and it doesn’t look good. So Tom wanted you to be advised of that.”

Frank swallowed the copper taste. “Yeah. I know.” “Tom’s got his meeting with the governor at five o’clock.”

“All right.”

There was a pause. Frank could feel Tryon’s discomfort over the wire.

Then Tryon blurted out, “Frank, it doesn’t look good. Even with the governor. You’ve gotta be prepared for that. You’ve gotta get your mind set for the worst.”

“Yeah,” said Frank again. He found it difficult to say much more. He wouldn’ve like to, but each word seemed to weigh a ton. “I’m prepared. Much as I can be.”

A pause again as poor Hubert wound himself up to go on. “Tom says … Tom says the governor’s in a bad spot. You know, there’s all the feeling about the girl. And, you know, he’s always promising to be tough on crime. There’s not much to work with. You’re not … Tom says if he could tell him about how remorseful you feel …” Tryon sighed; he had finally said it.

Frank hoisted out the heavy words. “I didn’t do it.”

“I understand, I understand, and Tom understands,” Tryon said quickly. Tryon was careful, Frank noticed, not to say he believed him. All the lawyers had always been careful about that. “But the governor’s gonna look at this like, ‘Hey, the man was convicted, what’s the problem?’ You know? I’m just telling you: that’s going to be his position. No one wants you to confess to something you didn’t do, but I’m just telling you: that’s what Tom’s going to be up against.”

He would be home tomorrow, thought Frank. After this was all over. Hubert Tryon would be at home in Jefferson City with his wife. Her name was Melinda and they would sit at the kitchen table with the light coming in through the windows. Talking about it, talking about him, or talking about how Hubert felt about him. “Boy,” Hubert would say, “it’s really a downer when you lose one.” And his wife would reach over and take his hand. And then, bit by bit, they would not talk about him anymore. The subject of his death would slowly move away from them, in time as the hours passed, in space as it was pushed aside by the day’s mail and phone calls and television shows and choices of what to eat for lunch. Listening to his voice, to Tryon’s voice, Frank could feel all that, could feel Tryon’s world, a green and bright expanse, connected to him by the spiraling phone cord. And he could see the dreadful cell around him, stark and white, and every atom of it chained, like men to a mill wheel, to the turning, turning hands of the clock. How many yards were there between one place and the other, Tryon’s place and his? Not much. You could walk the distance pretty quickly if the walls were gone. Listening to the lawyer’s voice, Frank could feel how very close the man was with his life and his freedom. And if he thought he could have spoken some word-any word, true or false-and so crossed the boundary from the closing world of his own death watch to a kitchen table by an open window, he felt pretty sure he would have done it. Confessed? Expressed remorse? Hell, yes; yeah, sure. What the hell was it to him whether what he said was true or not? What was that worth compared to ten minutes at the kitchen table with Bonnie? With her pouring coffee or something. Talking about the bedroom wallpaper or something.

But Frank knew-he had been over this in his mind, and he knew almost for certain that, no matter what he said, the governor would let him die anyway. He’d talked to the lead lawyer, Tim Weiss, about it once, and even Tim agreed: this was not a governor who let convicted killers live because they said they were sorry. And if Frank confessed and they killed him, what would he be left with then? What would Bonnie and Gail be left with? Not only his confession, but his cowardice. His pitiful attempt to save himself. The child’s uncertainty about what was true …

“I didn’t do it,” he said into the phone. “I can’t say I’m sorry about something I didn’t do.”

That was all he said. The weight of the words was too much for him to say more. Besides, if he explained his reasons to the lawyer, the lawyer would argue with him, try to persuade him to take the main chance, the only chance they had. That was what lawyers did; they did it by rote, by instinct. And Frank didn’t know if he could stand up to persuasion just now. So that was all he said.

“No, sure, okay,” Tryon answered. “Listen, I’ll call back when the appeal comes down. Should be about half an hour like I said. Meanwhile, if you need anything, you’ve got my beeper number and …”

Tryon went on talking but Frank didn’t hear him anymore. He was watching Benson now. Benson had risen from his desk again. He was walking over to the door of the Deathwatch cell. The door of the Deathwatch cell was opening. Frank held the phone in his hand and heard the sound of the lawyer’s voice but there was no sense in it; he didn’t catch the sense. The door opened a little farther and Gail came into the room, her eyes seeking him out eagerly. Bonnie followed and then Reverend Flowers.

Frank wished he had had more time to prepare for them, for the sight of them; more time to prepare his mind. But though he had seen them yesterday and the day before, he didn’t know if he would ever have been able to brace himself for this, the way it hit him this last time. Gail broke into an excited smile when she saw him and ran to the bars of the cage. Bonnie followed with unsteady steps, holding his eyes with hers, trying to smile, already crying.

“Okay,” said Frank into the phone. He didn’t know what he was saying. “Okay.” And he held the receiver away from him, out through the bars.

“I’ll be just outside if you need me,” Flowers said. No one paid any attention to him. He backed out through the door and was gone.

Bonnie and Gail were at the bars of the cage.

“Hi, Daddy, I brought you a picture,” said Gail.

Frank didn’t know when Benson took the receiver from him, but in the next moment or two, he was clutching the cage bars with both hands and peering out at his two girls, fighting back tears and thinking strength, strength, strength, trying to remind himself, and saying, “Hey, that’s great, monster. Just a minute and they’ll let you in and I can take a better look.”

Benson moved, it seemed, painfully slowly. Disengaging the electrical lock on the wall, strolling to the bars to undo the mechanical. Bonnie never took her eyes off Frank and he yearned at her through the cage. But he kept thinking, strength, strength. If he let himself go too far with them, there would be no end of tears.

Finally, the bars slid back and Gail burst in, wrapping herself around Frank’s legs. Bonnie kept smiling as she stepped in, but she was crying hard now, her lips working, her worn face mottled.

Frank put his hands on his daughter’s head and for a moment he was dizzy with imagined smells: of grass and charcoal smoke and fresh air. He could almost hear the baby Gail whapping her shovel against the sandbox sand. Then the girl disengaged herself, backed away.

“Look at my picture, Daddy,” she said.

Bonnie came to him, put her arms around him, lay her face against his shoulder and broke down. He held her as she cried. Gail, holding up her picture, piped on: “Look. It’s green pastures, Daddy. See? This is the blue sky. I made it at the motel. It’s not finished yet.” She tapped her foot impatiently as Frank held her crying mother.

Frank pushed his daughter’s voice into the mental distance for a few moments as he pressed his wife against him, his hands tightening on her soft shoulders. He could feel her body slacken and her chest heave as she cried. He knew that she only did this with him, she let herself go only when she was with him. The rest of the time she used all her strength to hold the strings of their lives together, hers and Gail’s.

This’ll get better, Frank thought, holding her. It would get better for her when it was finished. The suspense would be over. And the distraction. There would be no more need for her to nag the lawyers and write to the senators and the governor’s men. The strain of keeping their marriage ties alive through the bars would fade away. After tonight, in the weeks after tonight, it would slowly come to be over. There had been times when it had bothered him, angered him, that she would get to live, that she would go on living when he had to die. But it didn’t anger him now. As he had with the lawyer Tryon, he could see her for a second as she would be. In some bright living room, maybe, in some future time without him. Saying, “My late husband.” Raising a coffee cup to her lips. Saying, “My first husband,” without crying about it anymore. That would be better, he thought. He fought back his own tears with a nearly wild power, with a wild prayer: let him behave so she could remember him well, no matter what he felt. Le him behave so that, when it was over, she would get better.

“Come on, old girl, come on,” he said, patting her back.

“Look, Daddy. See my picture,” said Gail. “It’s not finished yet.”

He forced a wink at her over her mother’s shoulder. He murmured into Bonnie’s ear. “Come on, come on. I’m just going to the land of dreams, baby. I’m gonna set the table for you, that’s all. We’re not sad about this,” he lied to her softly, “we’re not afraid, right? Cause we know where I’m going. I’m gonna be holding you guys a place at the table. Right?”

He kept this up, a steady murmur. He knew his wife. He knew that, when she could, she would try to feel what she was supposed to feel instead of what she felt in fact. She was supposed to feel that he was going to heaven and so it was all right, and he knew she would try her best to feel that when he reminded her. He figured that would get her through these next few rotten hours anyway. So he murmured the words again and again. He could feel they were the right words. He thought that God was telling him what to say to her. But it did make him terribly lonely. To have her here, to hold her, to want to tell her everything that was in his heart-and to jolly her along like this instead. It was worse than before she’d come. The loneliness; it was unbearable, holding her like this. He was in a cage with the only people he had ever loved in this world and talking this way made him feel as distant from them as if he were an astronaut cut adrift. Black, black space inside him. A black sea of space. Nothing to do but wait in vacuous immensity for the air to run out. He held her hard. If he could have wept on her shoulder, if he could have hugged both the woman and the child to him and sobbed out how he loved them and told them how afraid he was and raged against the unfairness of it … If they could’ve all sobbed and raged honestly together, he felt they might have crossed the intolerable distance between his condemned body and their living ones. Then at least he could’ve spent this last time truly with them.

But then that’s how they would’ve remembered him-raging, crying-and it would’ve been no good for them forever. There would’ve been no peace. This would be better, he thought. So he kept on.

“Hey, we’re not sad here,” he said again and again. “I’m going to the good place, Bonnie, you know that, we’re not sad.”

It worked, anyway, eventually. After a few moments, some energy seemed to return to Bonnie’s body. He could feel it. She managed to loosen her grip on him. She tilted back from him and tried to smile up at him through her tears.

“Can we be a little sad?” she said.

Frank made a noise that he hoped sounded like an easy laugh. “Well. Just a little. Cause I’m such a great guy and we’ll miss me for a little while.”

The answer made her shake her head, made her strive toward him with her eyes, trying to tell him with her eyes just what a great guy she thought he was. But that was no good. She would lose it again, if that kept on. So he let go of her. Left only one hand gripping her shoulder, and turned to look down at Gail. The child’s pinched, worried face was pushed up at him as she held her picture open in front of her with both hands.

“Now, let’s take a look at this picture here,” he said. “What is it again?”

“Green pastures. It’s not finished yet,” said Gail, holding up her grim scribbles, lifting the sheet of newsprint toward him.

Frank was about to squat down for a better look. But the phone rang on Benson’s desk again. Frank and Bonnie both turned to look at it, their lips going tight. Gail followed their gazes.

“I’ll just let my secretary get that,” said Frank. He spoke through a tight throat.

“Maybe it’s the appeal,” said Bonnie. The tone of her voice made Frank wince. As if the appeal would make it all right, as if that’s just what they’d been waiting for. “It must be,” she said. “Don’t you think? It must be Weiss or Tryon. Maybe it’s the, it’s the appeal, the stay. Don’t you think?”

“No, no, Bonnie. Bonnie, listen …” said Frank.

“Your lawyer again, Frank,” said Benson. He was walking toward the cage, the receiver in his outstretched hand.

Frank turned to his daughter. “Hold that picture right there, monster. I just gotta talk to my lawyer a minute. This place-the action never stops, right?”

The little girl smiled at her daddy’s joke. Bonnie stood staring at the receiver, staring like a woman shipwrecked at what might be motion in the fog. Frank went to the bars. As he reached through to take the phone, his glance met Benson’s. The duty officer’s rough, handsome features remained impassive, but Frank connected with him. He felt for a moment that the two of them understood-understood the situation, the procedure, the way it would all go down, businesslike, step by step, everyone doing his job. Benson and he-they were there, they were in it together. Not like Bonnie and Gail.

He leaned toward the bars and brought the phone to his ear.

“Yeah,” he said.

“S’Hubert, Frank. We lost it.”

For all he knew it was coming, his stomach dropped like a hanged man. He cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said.

“It came in right after I hung up with you. They didn’t go for any of it. And the Hererra ruling has just killed us everywhere.” Frank heard Tryon sigh. He closed his eyes, leaning his shoulder against the bars. “We’re still trying to find a way into the U.S. Supreme but … And Tom’s going to the governor in a few hours.”

“Yeah” was all Frank could say. “Okay.”

“Yeah,” Tryon answered in his high voice. “I’m sorry, Frank. You’re gonna have to brace yourself for the worst. I won’t lie to you.”

“No,” said Frank thickly. In a black haze, he was trying to tell himself it was real, it was really going to happen, trying to force the knowledge home. But he was also thinking: There’s still the governor. We’ve still got the governor. Not because he believed it, but because the dead, hanging weight inside him was impossible to sustain. “Okay,” he said after a long silence. “Thanks.”

“I’m really sorry, Frank.”

“Yeah.”

He handed the phone back to Benson. He stood at the bars, with his back to his family. He watched the duty officer carry the receiver slowly back across the cell, the coiled wire going lax, trailing over the floor. He hoped some of the blood would return to his face before he turned around. He had felt it drain out when Tryon gave him the news.

Then he did turn. Bonnie stood, still staring, staring at him now, wet-eyed, hopeful. Their daughter’s small, concerned gaze went back and forth between them, sensing an event. Frank wished again they’d never come, that he wasn’t married at all, that he had no child, that he could go through this alone. Step by step. Everyone doing his job. Alone, it seemed to him, it would have been easy. He hoisted a corner of his mouth.

“Sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I’m a popular guy here, what can I say?”

“Is there anything …?” said Bonnie.

He waved his hand. “No, no, nothing yet. These legal things, you know. They take forever.”

Bonnie bit her lip and nodded. Frank came forward, still smiling his forced smile. He squatted down in front of his little girl. She straightened, her face lifting. She adjusted her grip on the corner of her picture, holding it before him.

“Now,” Frank said, “let’s get a look at this artwork here.”