True Crime

3

I never knew the names of the executioners. For security reasons, they were never released. I understand they were two men from within the Corrections Department. Volunteers, trained on the lethal injection equipment. One-call him Frick-was a clerical worker of some type: stooped, crewcut and bug-eyed; an insane but intellectual demeanor. I hear he was given to delivering somewhat pedantic discourses on capital punishment-its history, its methods, the biological effects of its various tools-but that these were enlivened by a certain panting fervency he couldn’t quite seem to conceal. The other men on the execution team seemed to detest him, though no one ever said worse to me about him than that he was “some piece of work, all right.” So that was Frick.

Executioner Frack, on the other hand, was more to the general taste. A former guard would be my guess. A big, rollicking man in his fifties who generally talked baseball with the gang before he pressed the button. “I’ve got no qualms about it” was his only remark when asked. “It’s like erasing a mistake.”

The two had been trained on the machine by Reuben Skycock, who had been trained himself by the manufacturer. Their job was essentially to push a button, but it was not quite as simple as that. The machine had two buttons on its control panel. When the time came, each man would put his thumb on one of the buttons. At a nod from Luther, Executioner Frack would count out loud to three. At three, both men simultaneously would slowly depress their buttons. When the buttons clicked, they would slowly slide their thumbs off until the buttons clicked back into place. Only one of the buttons was actually operational. Only one would start the timed automatic sequence in which stainless steel plungers in the delivery module on the wall would be lowered into the canisters of chemicals, pushing their fluids down through the tubes and into Frank Beachum’s vein: the sodium pentothal, then, one minute later, pancuronium bromide and, after another full minute’s delay, the potassium chloride. A computer inside the module scrambled the circuits at random so that the two executioners would never know which of their buttons had really done the trick.

At exactly eleven-thirty-when Frank Beachum was being swiftly strapped to the gurney in his cell-Deputy Superintendent Zachary Platt ushered these two men into the death chamber down the hall. Dr. Smiley Chaudrhi and nurse Maura O’Brien were there, as well as two guards who weren’t involved in the Strap-down procedure. All four of them looked up as Platt and the executioners entered, and all four of them just as quickly looked away, running their eyes over clipboards and light fixtures and over the white walls. Platt led Frick and Frack through the chamber quickly and into the supply room where the killing equipment was.

Arnold McCardle was there, standing by the shelf of phones. The fat man nodded at the others when they came in, but he didn’t smile or offer them his hand. Reuben Skycock was stationed by the delivery module in its steel box up on the wall. He did shake hands with the executioners. Executioner Frick, the brainy one, slid a wet palm through Skycock’s grasp and then clasped his two damp hands together in front of him-nodding and smiling fatuously all the while as if trying to think of a gambit to start the conversation. Executioner Frack slapped a big mitt into Skycock’s, pumped it once and said, “Reuben. How ya doin? Been watching those Cards?”

Skycock, whose moustachioed face had grown chalky over the last hour or so, only nodded vaguely. Then he turned his back on both of them.

Executioner Frick and Executioner Frack stood together after that in a corner of the supply room. They stood in silence, as no one else would talk to them and they had nothing to say to each other.

And at about that time, just around eleven-thirty, I turned the corner onto Knight Street again. It had been a crazy drive there, crazy and intense. My front fender devouring the road. Green lights, red lights, vanishing overhead. No brake under my feet, the other cars before and around and behind me imagined out of existence, imagined into pure space, as my whole being focused through them on the night beyond the windshield and my will shielded me from the eyes of the police.

And so I made it. I turned the corner onto Knight Street. Sick now. Exhausted. Woozy and dull. There was a ceaseless, painful pulsebeat in my skull. My right hand was stiff and swollen. I could barely hold my head erect, my eyes open. Drunkenness came over me in green splashes that made my gorge rise. And yet, for all that, I was thinking more clearly now than before, seeing things more clearly. There’s nothing quite like having your hand crushed in a door to straighten out your senses in a big hurry.

I made the turn and slowed the car sharply. I cruised into the shadow of the slum. The streetlamps were busted there, and the line of grimy brick buildings seemed to hunch back from the highway into the night. Paper and soda cans crunched under my tires as I pulled the Tempo up against the curb.

I killed the engine. The street around me was empty but it felt threatening all the same. Alleys and recesses deep black. Music with jackhammer rhythms drifting down from the upper stories. A staring presence somewhere-somewhere-in a window above me. And voices from a side street, young men’s voices, laughing harshly, angry, secret. Traces of whispering congregations. And everyone but me was black on these streets, and I was afraid.

I glanced down at the dashboard clock. That’s when I saw it was eleven-thirty. Lowenstein lived-not far from my house-in a mansion on Washington Terrace. Twenty minutes away for a mortal Ford, fifteen, maybe ten, for me and the Tempo. My belly bleak, my mind panicked and desperate, I told myself that I could phone him if I had to. I could phone Alan to get the unlisted number, and then phone Lowenstein and make my case. But the thought almost made me laugh: to bring him around on my say-so, to get him to risk his friendship with the governor, to get him to beg for a delay of the execution-I knew it wasn’t going to happen unless I walked through his door with that locket, and probably with Mrs. Russel in tow as well.

I leaned over and looked out the passenger window, looked up at the building in which she lived. The lights were out in there from top to bottom.

I gathered my strength. My body felt like a dead weight carried on the shoulder of my will. I threw the weight against the car door and stepped out into the street.

By then, by eleven-thirty, Bonnie Beachum was, I guess, technically insane. Sitting alone in a visitors’ waiting room-a bare white room in the prison’s main building-sitting in one of the tube chairs around a long wooden table, her hands folded on her skirt, her bagged, sunken eyes staring at nothing.

Since she had left Frank’s cell that evening, she had spent most of her time in her motel room, praying. She had prayed aloud at first, in a low voice, on her knees by the bed, her elbows on the mattress, her red hands clasped under her chin. She had prayed till her voice was raw and then she had prayed in a whisper. She had driven back to the prison at eleven, only her lips moving as she drove, the words inaudible. And now, as she sat, unmoving, as she gazed far away, she had worked herself into a kind of hysteria, a kind of madness, a silent frenzy of supplication.

Later, when it was all over, when she had more or less recovered from the emotional collapse that followed, she did not remember much about these last minutes. It seemed to her she had been carried, disembodied, over vast distances on a torrent of wild words. She had been a child again, at times, in her childhood places, hiding in the milk farm grass giggling, working in the kitchen with her fretful mother, in her childhood shift or naked under the Missouri sky and the holy, bloodred sun to which she prayed. At other times-or was it simultaneously-she had stood stripped almost to the bone before the cloudy bar of heaven with great grim patriarchs strung above her as she raved up at them with primitive, glottal cries. As she sat, her hand strayed vaguely to her chest, she scratched softly at the space below and between her breasts, because in her mind she was tearing her whole torso open with both clawed hands, ripping her wifehood from out her ribs to hurl it gory on the altar of the Lord who could not, surely, kill her husband, let her husband die, if he saw that, if he knew that, if he only knew …

Then there was blackness sometimes, a low mewl of petition, almost restful, and yet terrifying, because she was aware of the time passing even then. But she was aware of it also in her interior visions. And sometimes, with a stagnant, deathly clarity, she saw the clock, the real clock on the wall. Eleven. Eleven-twenty. Eleven twenty-seven. And then she began praying again-if prayer is what it was-and she was borne away to that country, which is not our country, that world, which is not our world, where love and innocence are arguments in favor of a better life.

When Tim Weiss, one of Frank’s lawyers, walked into the waiting room at eleven thirty-one, the sight of her stopped him in his tracks, turned him cold and made his mouth go dry. He had not seen her for six weeks, and the change in her struck him hard. She was haggard, emaciated, frenzied in her depths-he perceived all that in a second and went pale.

Weiss was only around my age, thirty-five or so, but he was bald with a frizzy fringe of silver hair, and his face looked as if it had been made for old age. The flesh saggy, the lips slack and damp, the eyes sad. He put an unsteady hand on Bonnie’s shoulder. She raised her eyes to him. He tried to swallow but couldn’t. “Unseeing,” was the word that came into his mind.

“How are you holding up, Bonnie?” Weiss said.

She looked away again and if she gave any answer, she did not give it to him.

Weiss was almost relieved when, at eleven thirty-five, the guard came in and told them it was time to go to the witness room outside the death chamber.

Then I walked across the deserted street. I climbed the stoop to Mrs. Russel’s door. There was the graffito-slashed mailbox again. The blue name carefully inscribed beneath the splash of brown paint. I pressed the buzzer. I stood, blinking and dull-witted. I heard an angry bass-line throbbing out of a radio far away. I pressed the buzzer again. I lifted my head. Though I couldn’t see her window from that position, I stared up along the grime-dark, night-dark bricks. I pressed the buzzer again and then I pressed it again, jabbing my thumb against the button. Again and again, breathing harder and harder. And then a sudden gush of rage coursed through me. I hit the door, hammered the frame once with the side of my swollen fist. The shock of pain went up my arm and up my neck. I cursed, angrier still. I kicked the bottom of the door, then I slammed the heel of my left hand against the edge of it. “Come on!” I growled. Then I kicked it again, hammered it with my hurt fist again, ignoring the pain, hammering it again and slugging it again with the heel of my left palm, kicking the base of it again and again, throwing my whole body into the blows now, my face contorted, my lips drawn back over my teeth, the shouts of frustration caught in my throat, bursting from my throat in choked gutturals as I hammered and slugged and kicked at the goddamned thing. The goddamned, fucking thing …

I collapsed against it. The anger sizzled out of me, dissipated in the warm night air. What was the use? I leaned against the door and my shoulders slumped, my legs went slack. I pressed my forehead against the wood of the frame. I felt the pressure of it against my wound, against the drying, sticky blood. I felt the uneven, splintery surface against my skin. I stayed there, breathing hard, and closed my eyes tight. I groaned. A single tear broke out from under my eyelid, touched my cheek and fell. I sobbed once-in frustration more than anything-and then just leaned there, slumped, my eyes closed, my body propped against the door.

I was finished, and I knew it.

Because there’s only so much a man can do. Isn’t there? Isn’t there a point where you have pushed it to the limit? With all the will in the world, with all the power of desperation inspiring you, isn’t there, anyway, an end to the thing, an end to anything? When you have done your best? When no one can accuse you? Accuse you? What the hell would they say? Hey, you still had twenty-five minutes? You should’ve found another lead? You should’ve found another suspect? I mean, it wasn’t even supposed to be my fucking story, man. It was supposed to be my fucking day off, all right? I mean, you don’t like my work, fucking fire me, you shithead! You scumbug! I don’t even know how I fucking got here, what I’m fucking doing here! It was all an accident! A woman in a car. Too fast. A bad curve.

With another strangled sob, I lifted my hand, thumped it once against the door and let it fall limply to my side again.

It was not supposed to be my fucking story.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

The Reverend Flowers walked down the hall behind the gurney. He held the book open before him in his two hands but he could not read the words and spoke them by rote.

“I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.”

The psalm, the rhythms of the psalm, no longer comforted him. They seemed to be consumed by the roiling sickness in his stomach which was no longer stilled. Not enough, he thought with swelling urgency as he read, as he walked behind the gurney. It’s not enough. And there was no time left. No time.

Ahead of him, the four Strap-down guards shuttled the gurney along, two on the front end, two pushing it from behind. They moved quickly, smoothly. Luther Plunkitt strode quickly ahead of them to the open door of the death chamber.

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” Flowers said. “Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” It was not enough.

When he glanced up over the book, he could see Frank Beachum between the bodies of the guards. A sheet was pulled over Beachum’s body, covering the straps that held him down, covering him to the chin. Only his face was visible above it, the thin face stretched, it seemed, even thinner now, his cheeks sunken and gaunt, his eyes wide, white, bulging. His eyes darted back and forth as the gurney rolled to the doorway. They darted over the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, over the cinderblock walls, strained down to see the faces of the Strap-down guards and the minister walking behind them. When they met Flowers’s eyes, the minister felt the urgency in him flame into desperation and his voice rose higher.

“Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked. Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation.”

Warden Plunkitt stopped at the chamber doorway, positioned himself to the side of it to let the gurney pass. Smiling blandly, he nodded to one of the lead guards.

“Escort the padre to the witness room,” he said.

The guard peeled off and came back toward Flowers.

“There shall no evil befall thee …” Flowers called out wildly-and then his voice broke and he looked up. Looked up and saw the guard coming for him. The gurney was at the door now. It was over. His time was over. There was no more time and it was not enough. The knowledge seemed to erupt in him, cover him from within, blacken him within. He had failed-he had failed completely. Whatever his mission had been, his ministry in this place, it was not done, it was not accomplished. By his own fault, by his own grievous fault, he had not done enough. He stared with desperate penitence at the man strapped to the rolling table.

Before he knew what he was doing, his hand shot out. He clutched at the shape of Beachum’s foot beneath the sheet.

“Tell em for me, Frank!” he said thickly. “Tell em I try to walk the walk!”

The guard took his arm gently. Beachum’s foot was pulled from his grasp as the gurney rolled away from him and through the death chamber door.

And the door opened. I heard the click of the latch, and straightened just a moment before it was pulled in. I stood back on the stoop and peered into the darkness of the brown-stone’s entryway.

Mrs. Russel was there, standing there, peering back.

That large, imposing black face of hers was scored with tears. One hand was at her throat, clutching the locket. The other held the door. The same shapeless housedress she had worn earlier spilled down around her thick body, leaving the big arms bare, the legs bare. She frowned out of the darkness at me, her stormy eyes raging, her whole great form seeming to shudder and vibrate with emotion.

I stood on her stoop like a beggar, my shoulders slumped, my own cheeks wet, my mouth open weakly.

She spoke in a hard, solid voice that did not quaver.

“I was hoping you’d come back,” she said. “I swear it to Jesus. I was hoping you’d come back.”

I lifted my hand to her. My voice was not as steady as hers, it was barely more than a whisper. “Come on, then,” I said. “We haven’t got much time.”

She came forward, not looking at me, looking past me. She let me take her arm. I felt the rough skin of her elbow as I walked her down the stoop to the street.

She seemed to walk beside me boldly to the car, striding almost fiercely, staring straight ahead. I opened the Tempo’s door for her, held it as she lowered herself onto the passenger seat. I shut the door and walked around the front.

I was not so bold. My legs felt weak under me. My heart was beating hard. I did not dare to think. It seemed to take an effort even to breathe. I opened the driver’s door and slid in behind the wheel.

Mrs. Russel sat beside me, very straight, very stiff, very still. She gazed out through the windshield. Her broad shoulders heaved once as her tears continued to fall.

“They’re gonna kill that man at twelve o’clock,” she said quietly. “How do you expect we’re going to do anything now?”

I put the key in the ignition and turned it over. The Tempo’s engine kicked and sputtered and sparked itself alive.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” I said.