True Crime

2

It would be nice to think Frank Beachum had some vision at the end. In that last quarter of an hour, say, as the minute hand edged up over the closing arc of the hour’s circle. It would be nice to think some revelation came to him, some solid piece of understanding. Christ, say, might’ve floated beneath the fluorescent lights with open arms. The heavens might have opened and angels sung. Or, more believably, in those final fifteen minutes, in the maw of death, an incomprehensible but perfect calm of faith and understanding might have washed over his soul like warm bathwater. Although, in that case, I guess, someone would’ve seen him smile.

So maybe he had a more modern, more literary, vision, though Frank was not a modern, not a literary, man. Still, you know the kind of thing I mean: the moments might have stretched out until he realized each one was eternal, or Life might have revealed itself to him in pristine clarity until he saw that it was perfect as it was, and everything was All Right, if one only knew it. I don’t know what-all; that shit’s in books; you can read them.

But if you’re interested in the impressions of this reporter-and I guess you are, you’ve gotten as far as this-I would say that none of these visions, these clotures, were written in his eyes, and none were going on in his mind. He had, I think, in the end, reached that stage of fear in which self-awareness is gone and the entire body-and the soul too, if you want-becomes an organ of perception, sensation meditating on sensation. Frank had not gone mad or anything. Life had not been merciful enough to send him mad. But he wasn’t thinking either, not the way we think of thought. He was seeing, merely: seeing the rough ridges between the white cinderblocks of the wall, seeing the clock and the sweep of the hands over the circle of the clock, the faces hovering over him, Luther, Maura, the guard, the saline running invisibly through the clear tube into his arm-he was turning his eyes from one of these to the next unable to stay with any because each successive sight ignited in him that instinctive jolt of horror that a serpent would, for instance, if you suddenly found it in your cereal bowl. So he was seeing, and he was feeling fear, there on the gurney in the small, white room. And, at the same time, or in the minuscule interstices, he was remembering; not in words or jointed impressions-but in bursts of sensation: the smell of grass, the worry lines at the corners of Bonnie’s mouth, the gush of blood and matter in which his Gail had squeezed from between her mother’s legs, the heat of summer, the taste of beer-these memories hatched and vanished in his head in the split seconds between the sight of one thing and the next, and with each he was immersed in a bottomless depth of sorrow, a vast subaqueous plain of loneliness and mourning.

And that was all for him. The warden, after a word to the guard, was stepping out of the room now to greet the witnesses behind the wall. His deputy, Zach Platt, was in the corner, murmuring into his headset. The guard stood with hands folded over his chest, gazing down speculatively at the condemned man beneath his sheet. And Frank lay there waiting as the circle of the hour moved toward completion, his eyes darting, his body held motionless by the thick leather straps. Whatever attempts he might once have made to understand his life, his death, were over now. And for Frank Beachum, at eleven forty-five that Monday night, there was nothing but memory and terror and sadness-and the things that happened.

For Mr. Lowenstein, on the other hand, there was Debussy. “Clair de lune,” to which he had always been partial. He had it playing softly on the CD player and the clear, watery lilt of the piano made a mellow background noise in the small sitting room where he liked to work at night. It was a good place to work. He had his wing chair there, with the muted floral upholstery, and the low antique ottoman on which his slippered feet could rest. There was a small Persian rug on the floor, nicely faded, and a dainty escritoire by the window with pigeonholes for his writing supplies. There were books-the wonderful, muted colors of the bindings of old books on every wall. And Mrs. Lowenstein was there, bent over her needlework in an old-fashioned armless sewing chair, silent but companionable.

The owner and publisher of the St. Louis News was a tall, fit man in his sixties, with a full head of coiffed, silver hair. He had a grave, sage, handsome face, deep-browed and not unkind. He was working now in his wing chair with a Mont Blanc pen on a yellow legal pad. He had never used a word processor in his life and did not intend to. He was writing a letter to his employees, offering his thoughts and condolences on the tragic death of Michelle Ziegler, one of their own. He had already written a letter to the family, and a special note for the editorial page. Both of them had taken him a long time to finish.

This letter too was not an easy chore. Mr. Lowenstein was a scrupulously honest man and he had not liked Michelle very much. He had kept her on staff-as he had kept me-because Alan defended her, and he trusted Alan to the core. For himself, he thought she was a supercilious and unpleasant person, much too full of herself for one so young. At the same time, he felt that his personal likes and dislikes didn’t amount to very much now, at the end of things. So he was choosing his words with kindness and generosity-though, still, with a niggling regard for the truth.

“Clair de lune” helped him think, as did the room, and his handsome, quiet wife who looked up at him and smiled from time to time. But for the last minute or so, something had been bothering him, intruding on his consciousness, interrupting his train of thought.

Sirens. It was several moments before he looked up from the yellow page and realized what it was. He glanced at the grandfather clock in the room’s far corner. It was quarter of twelve and for the last minute or so, there had been sirens going off, getting closer, half a dozen of them at least it sounded like.

“Must be something going on,” he murmured. He looked at his wife over the top of his reading glasses.

“A fire maybe,” she said, and bent to her work again. “Or another accident up on the curve.”

Mr. Lowenstein kept his head raised. He was not really a journalist-he’d made his money in hotels-but now that he’d bought the paper he liked to think of himself as a journalist, so he listened for another second or two with what he felt to be journalistic curiosity.

He was about to return to his letter when he made out another sound, separate from the sirens, closer than they were, and coming even closer now, getting even louder. It was a rumbling, clattering sound with a low sort of sizzle around it. He could not for the life of him imagine what it was.

“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein.

He set the legal pad on the small lampstand beside his chair. He stood, pulling his port-wine bathrobe closed around his silk pajamas. He moved to the window beside the escritoire and bent down to peer out over the dark hill of lawn to the empty street below.

To the fading accompaniment of sirens, that other sound grew even louder still. The rumble became a roar. The clatter grew to a hellish metallic banging. The sizzle expanded to a snaky hiss. And then, Mr. Lowenstein, tilting his head and pulling his reading glasses to the very tip of his nose, saw exactly what kind of sound it was.

It was the sound a car makes traveling at high speed when its muffler has fallen off and is dragged along beneath it, throwing two great flame-bright streams of sparks out from either side of the chassis.

Or, to be specific, it was the Temp.

Those poor cops. They had never stood a chance on that lethal turn. Something really ought to be done about that place.

We had all three gone into it together. The two cruisers flanking me, the lights, the sirens battering my sides. But only I had realized that we were never going to make it through. So I didn’t even try it. I pulled my foot off the gas and let it hang above the brake without coming down. On the instant, the two cruisers shot past me into the curve. I fought the wheel over slowly, waiting for the skid-and when it came, I kept on turning into it, the car screeching under me, spinning with me, all the way around. Through the windshield, over Mrs. Russel’s scream, I saw the world go into a carousel blur. I heard brakes in their death-throes and horns in their rage as the Tempo spun and spun, sliding sideways over the macadam. I eased down on the brake now, trying to rein the Tempo in. I caught a glimpse of the two cruisers lifting into the air as they broke across the curb. The first one slid wildly across the open space of the car lot. The second one followed, slamming broadside into the first one’s trunk. Both cars halted, smoking, with the crash. And then the Tempo was around, and they were out of sight. The road was before me again. I straightened the wheel out, and hit the gas.

And I was gone-good-bye-I was long-gone Steveroo. I looked up into my rearview as my tires grabbed hold of the boulevard and saw the cops-four of them-pouring out of their steaming cruisers and staggering round the ends of them to watch me pull away.

And then I gritted my teeth and turned my full attention to the road ahead.

I didn’t lose the muffler until right inside the terrace gate: a little redbrick princess’s castle that guards the entry to Lowenstein’s road. There was a large clocktower at the center of its three-pinnacled roof. I glanced up at it as we shot past and saw the big hand breaking through the quarter hour. So I didn’t spot the first speed bump and hit it hard. They’re an idiosyncrasy of the St. Louis rich-those bumps in the road that keep deliverymen and other hoi polloi from joyriding at high speeds past the city’s more stately mansions. The Tempo struck it and flew into the air, came bellyflopping down right on top of the second bump. The muffler crunched loudly and the Tempo began to make a noise like a giant choking on his gruel. As I pushed the car over the next bump and the next, great swaths of spark began to shoot out into the night at either side of me.

Through this flying fire and a curl of black oil smoke and the dark, I saw the Lowenstein mansion: an unassailaby huge Georgian block of red brick, its two chimneys silhouetted against the gibbous moon, the columned portico with its wrought-iron balcony jutting out at me austerely. I guided the Tempo to the curb and pressed the brake down, evenly but fast, ignoring the screech of the wheels, and the gutter of the muffler, and the last thick shower of embers arcing over the curb, onto the sidewalk.

The Tempo stopped and its engine died-like that, without a sputter, before I even touched the key.

“Jesus!” said Mrs. Russel.

“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein again.

He saw me, at the base of the stone stairway that ran down the front of his lawn to the sidewalk. I was walking around the car on clearly trembling legs, holding onto its hood for support, coming around the front as Mrs. Russel spilled out of the passenger door and pulled herself unsteadily to her feet. He saw me take the black woman’s arm. He saw the two of us climb the stairs and hurry across the grass toward his front door.

He straightened, taking the reading glasses from his nose, folding them and slipping them into the pocket of his bathrobe.

“What is it, darling?” his wife said from the chair behind him.

“It’s Steve Everett from the paper.” He turned to her with a distant, thoughtful smile.

“Oh?” she said. “One of your reporters?”

“Mm.” Mr. Lowenstein nodded. “A dyed-in-the-wool son-of-a-bitch,” he told her quietly. “But he sure does know how to drive a car.”