True Crime

4

Warren Russel was dead. I hadn’t thought of that. I fumbled for a cigarette, my hands shaking. He would’ve been twenty, three years ago. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be dead. Proof positive of my superstition, but a blow just the same. I brought out my plastic lighter and struck it-three times before I got a flame. I pressed the flame hard against the cigarette end to keep it steady.

We were in Mrs. Russel’s apartment now. Night was at the open windows. Standing lamps cast a low yellow light across a sparsely furnished room. A dining table by an ancient kitchenette. A lamp stand crowded with framed photographs. Photographs and greeting cards taped to white walls. White walls with a mapwork of cracks in the plaster.

I sat on the murk-colored cushion of a sprung love seat. I sat on the edge, hanging over an old oval of carpet: scrupulously clean, like the fabric of the seat, but worn paper thin. I pulled on my cigarette hungrily.

Angela Russel put a cup of coffee on the end table beside me. A butter cookie was wedged neatly between the saucer and the cup. She set an ashtray next to it, then retreated; sat at the dining table with a cup of her own. She stretched out in her chair, sipped her coffee. She regarded me coolly, waiting. Her grandson was dead. How was I going to prove Beachum’s innocence now? How was I going to tell this fortress of a woman what I suspected?

A small alarm clock on the kitchen counter ticked loudly. It was ten past eight.

“So, uh … how …?” I managed to say, the smoke trailing out of me.

She tilted her head to one side. “Well, you know. Drugs. They stabbed him one night. Out by the park. The police came and told me. Showed me the picture on his driver’s license. ‘This your boy?’ Like they’d found a lost dog. I knew it was something. I was hoping he’d been arrested. But they got him out by the park.”

All this she said in a toneless voice, so freighted, I thought, with sadness, that the expression was simply flattened out of it. She shook her head, looking down.

“Was he … I mean, he used drugs,” I said.

She snorted again, shifted backward in her chair. Glancing off to one side as if to share a joke with some invisible onlooker.

“Yeah,” she said-you pasty moron, she might’ve added. “Yeah. He used drugs.”

My cigarette in my mouth, my eyes narrowed against the smoke, I reached for the coffee cup on the end table. My finger slipped through the loop of the handle-and I found myself sitting there, like that, staring at it, at my hand, at the handle, at the cup. At the pattern of ridges on the white five-and-dime-store china. My mind seemed gloomy and still. There were flashes of light and thought in it, but I was too tired to follow or fan them. Was he on drugs? Did he own a gun? Where was he on July Fourth six years ago? How would she know? And what good was any of it without the man himself to back it up? Maybe it would make a good interview sometime, maybe later sometime, a good backgrounder for an investigation. I could write it up for the feature page and Bonnie Beachum could clip the article out and put it in her scrapbook. She could wave it at the television cameras when she petitioned the governor to clear her husband’s name. Posthumously.

Where were you? she had said to me, clutching the bars of the Death House cage. It’s too late now. Where were you all this time?

“I think your grandson killed a woman,” I heard myself say as I stared at the cup. I tugged the cigarette from my lips and massaged my eyes with my fingers. “I think he killed a woman six years ago.”

When I looked up again, Mrs. Russel had not moved. She was still sitting slouched in her chair, one arm resting on the table, one in her lap. Watching me. Sneering at me, I thought, though her lips had barely curled.

“There’s a man on death row,” I told her. “He’s going to be executed tonight for shooting the counter-girl in a grocery store. A woman named Amy Wilson. I think your grandson did it.”

She did smile now, wearily. Her shoulders lifted and fell. Her voice was not toneless anymore-it dripped with irony. “Now why would you think a thing like that?”

“Because he was the only other person there,” I said, and I knew I was lying, and I knew I would be caught out in the lie. “And I think the man they’re going to kill is innocent.”

“And I would just bet,” said Mrs. Russel slowly. “You tell me if I’m wrong, but I would just bet that this innocent man is white.”

I sighed. I had known that was coming too-and all the rest of it. “Yeah,” I said. “He is white.”

“And there wasn’t no one else at this grocery store that day but this innocent white man and my Warren?”

I nodded-then I gave up, shook my head. “Two witnesses. There were two witnesses also.”

“But they were white too.”

“Probably. I know one was. He was an accountant.”

“Oh. An accountant.”

“The other was a housewife.”

“And they don’t kill people.”

“They don’t generally hold up grocery stores, no.”

“But black boys do,” said Mrs. Russel.

“Look, I …”

“Black drug fiends-they hardly have time for anything else.”

I spread my hands. “I know how it sounds.”

“Well, that’s good. Then we both know.”

“What can I say?”

“Beats me, Mr. Everett. What can you say?” She frowned again, more deeply now, and though she looked away from me I could see the tempests raging in her bulging eyes.

I made a stab at it anyway. “Did your grandson own a gun?” I asked her.

She answered quickly, sharply. “Oh, they all got guns, Mr. Everett. Don’t you know that? All those black drug-fiend boys got guns.”

I was silent.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “You got any proof? You got any proof to come around here saying this to me about that poor dead child?”

I began to answer-stopped. “No,” I said then. “Not proof. Not really.”

“Not really,” she said slowly, running her fingernail along the edge of her teacup, pointing her large bald features directly at me now. “So what then? This white man called you up. He said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”

“No. I spoke to him. I went to the prison.”

“You went to the prison.”

“I went there today. Yes.”

“And you looked at this man. Is that it? You saw his face.”

“Yes.”

“You saw his face and it looked like your face. So you thought, Well, this man must be innocent. Must be some black boy did it.”

“I didn’t know your grandson was black until I got here. It’s just that there are flaws-there are flaws in the story.”

This time, she laughed outright, dark, flat laughter. “I had a cousin they electrocuted last year down in Florida, Mr. Everett. There were all kinds of flaws in that story.”

I closed my eyes. Opened them. Crushed out my cigarette in the ashtray. “Maybe there were. I wasn’t assigned to that one. This man is innocent.”

“Mm,” said Mrs. Russel. “You weren’t assigned to that one. No one was assigned to that one.” She lifted the hand from her lap. She reached up and fingered the locket around her neck, fingered it gently, wistfully. In the lamplight, I could see her initials inscribed in the gold surface, letters made lovingly ornate, surrounded by a decorative border like lace. “But then you didn’t look at my grandson’s face either, did you? And then my grandson’s face, it didn’t look like yours anyway. That’s all. ‘Is this your boy?’ Like they found some dog in the street.” She wrapped her hand around the locket tightly. “Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Everett. He was a loving child. My Warren. I seen all kinds of children, and my Warren was a loving child.” With a grimace, she let the locket go, let it fall against her skin. She lowered her hand into her lap again. She looked down at the rug between us. “So you got anything else to say to me this evening?”

I just sat there, on the edge of the sofa, feeling the busted spring digging into my butt. Did I have anything else to say?

“Then I think you better go back to your newspaper,” said Mrs. Russel. “This neighborhood can get dangerous at night.”

For another moment, I went on sitting there. I put my hands up, cupped them around my mouth and nose and breathed into them, smelling the cigarette on my breath. I was tired. My mind was still and gloomy and I was tired and I didn’t know if I had anything else to ask or say. I pushed off my knees and stood up. Mrs. Russel slouched in her chair with her slippered feet out before her. I took my card out of my wallet and laid it on the table next to her saucer. She didn’t stir, didn’t glance at it or at me.

“He’s … a decent guy, I think,” I said. “If it matters to you. He has a wife, a kid. I don’t think he did it. I think maybe your grandson did it. If I’m right, then I think maybe you would know. If you know, then you can’t let this happen.”

She lifted her eyes to me and the storm in there was raging. “Go on home, Mr. Everett,” she said.

“They’re going to kill him at midnight. He’s innocent, Mrs. Russel. My number’s on the card.”

I stepped toward the door.

Behind me, Mrs. Russel said, “Everybody’s guilty of something.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I spun back around to face her. “For God’s sake,” I said.

As I put my hand on the knob, I heard her voice again. Toneless again. Flattened out by the weight on it. “Anyway, I seen a lot of innocent folks get killed in this part of town,” she said. “But it’s funny. I ain’t never seen you here before.”