True Crime

1

Oh, ye Tempo of the Gods! You car! You car of cars! I ask you: Is there anything on earth a man can’t accomplish when he and his automobile become one? That drive down to Osage Prison-I tell you, it was the best thing that had happened to me all day. It was the first good thing that had happened to me at all since I had left Patricia. The wind at the windows. The music on the radio. The cigarettes-no end of cigarettes and each one tasting better than the last. And the speed. Mostly the speed. I had less than fifty minutes to make the hour-long drive and, once I climbed onto the highway, I just floored it. And the old bird flew. It took a while to work up to it, I admit. But after that-it flew. Traffic didn’t matter. There was traffic just outside the city, lots of semis rumbling cab to cab like elephants on parade. But it didn’t matter. I went past them, between them, never slowing, going faster, so fast sometimes I felt I must have vaporized and traveled right through the bulk of them, the Tempo’s atoms vibrating between theirs. And the cops didn’t matter. Where were the cops? It was sixty miles of open road; speed traps everywhere-there must have been. But where were they? The cops with their dark glasses, with their radar? They were nowhere to be found. Because they couldn’t see me. That’s why. Their radar guns couldn’t pick me up. They just registered a zip as I went past, just a little green breath of electronic light. Must’ve been the wind, they said to themselves. Must have been dust blowing by in the wind.

I switched on an easy listening station. A secret vice of mine, that music. Like treacle, like warm mushy stew on a windy day. I love it. Andy Williams, yes; Perry Como; Eydie Gorme. I sang along with them. I sang “I Wish You Love” at the top of my lungs. It poured out of me. Smoke and song poured out of me together, filled the car. “Love Is Funny,” I sang. And the crowd went wild. Mile after mile, cigarette after cigarette, song after song. “It Must Be Him.” “Close to You.” The classics. And no one to say me nay. No one to ask how I could listen to that music? And how many cigarettes was that? Whoops-there was no one there to ask me that either. Or how I could drive so fast. Or how I could cheat on my wife or neglect my kid. Or whether Frank Beachum was really innocent or whether Bob’s marriage was ruined by my fault. People at the side of the road might have wondered these things, they might have wanted to ask, they might have raised their hands to catch my attention. But I was gone already. Zippo. I was a memory. They didn’t stand a chance.

And I couldn’t have seen them anyway. They would have been part of the general blur, the blur of the roadside, the scenery, a changing texture merely, a shifting smear of colors at the window, slums, suburbs, farmlands blending one into the next. Hardly scenery at all. It hardly had time to be scenery. It was just seen … and then history. Only ahead of me, the raveling road, the lane markings gobbled furiously by my front fender, stayed visible, kept up the pace of the driving eye.

Finally, in the jet-fire of my wake I guess, it all just melted down and I was surrounded as I drove by a running bland absence: the white flats surrounding the prison. The first roadblock shot up out of the vanishing point and filled the windshield an instant later. I had arrived. As Jack Jones and I finished our rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” I glanced down at the clock on the dash. It was ten minutes to four o’clock. I had made the drive in forty minutes. I had averaged, by my figuring, approximately six hundred and seventy-two thousand miles per hour. But maybe it was just one of those Einstein things: maybe I had arrived before I even left town.

The prison came over the horizon-line, looking, at first, like a feature of the white stone, some chance-in-a-million formation. The low gray walls, the high gray towers. As if the rock had thrown up some sorcerer’s castle from the Europe of fantasy. Then the walls were surrounding me. The guards in their towers were passing over me with their slow, swiveling gazes. The barrels of their guns were passing over me. I had arrived.

I parked in the wide visitors’ lot in the corner reserved for press and tossed my beeper in the glove compartment so I wouldn’t have to hand it over inside. As I stepped out of the car, a man in a dark jacket and slacks materialized beside me. A tall man with a thick moustache. He was a case officer, he said. He would lead the way.

I followed him. I was excited now. The drive had cleared my mind and I was excited the way I had been at Pocum’s. This was it, I told myself as we went through the visitor’s checkpoint. This is the real stuff. The prison. The Death House. As in Death. Execution. Brrrrrrr. God, I love journalism.

We didn’t go through the cell blocks. We went down white halls, past office doors. But I could feel the prison around me. I could feel the thick walls hemming me in. I could feel I was descending into the place, like a man being lowered into deep water. We entered a stark corridor. A gate of bars slid open before us as a guard watched from a booth nearby. We passed through and the bars slid closed behind us with a clanking thud and I could feel the jolt of it in my belly. Deeper and deeper. No free air to breathe, no fast way out. The prison seemed to be closing over our heads. I tried to look nonchalant about it, but it was all very thrilling indeed.

The case officer led me through more bars and then through a heavy door and into a little courtyard smothered with the afternoon heat. We crossed the yard into another building. The Death House, I thought. Death Row. The Last Mile. Brrrrr.

We traveled down a hall of windows to another row of bars. We passed through and down another hall where every door pulsed at me with significance. I noticed I had to go to the bathroom now but I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to interrupt the moment. We came before a door with a guard sitting outside. This is it, I thought. Deathwatch. I tried to look jaded and nonchalant.

I glanced up wryly at my moustachioed guide. “Nice place,” I said. “Remind me never to commit a violent crime.”

My companion looked down at me deadpan. “They lie, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“The prisoners. That’s what they do. Every word they say is a lie.”

I nodded. “Everyone lies, pal,” I said. “I’m just here to write it down.”

The guard stood up and opened the Deathwatch door.