True Crime

1

At about ten-thirty, Luther Plunkitt, the Superintendent of Osage Correctional Facility, walked into the Deathwatch cell. The duty officer stood up behind his typewriter. A new guard since eight: Benson, in his thirties, a veteran of these procedures. A good man; took his job seriously. Luther nodded at him and turned toward the cage, toward the prisoner.

Beachum was sitting at his small table now behind the wall of bars. A lone, small, stark figure against the white cinderblock background. Several blank sheets of paper lay on the table with a Bic pen lying slantwise across them. Beachum’s hands rested at the pages’ edge, encircling a Styrofoam coffee cup. A cigarette, held between two of his fingers, sent a zigzag of smoke to the ceiling. His face was lifted to Luther. Drawn, mournful. The eyes, deep and steady, meeting Luther’s eyes.

Funny, Luther thought, gazing through the bars. Funny the look that comes into their faces.

He recognized the prisoner’s expression. He remembered it, always the same, from other executions, from Nam, from Hue. The warden had known a lot of men who died at Hue and every one of them, before it happened, before they even caught the slug-they got that look. Their mouths slackened just a little and something came into their eyes, down deep, something slow and torpid, something weirdly willing somehow. As if Death had already risen up like a cobra in their minds and mesmerized them. After you saw that look on a man’s face, it didn’t matter what you did for him. You could try to cover him, take him off point, surround him, send him to the rear. The shell found him, or the mine or whatever. One boy had even drowned in an old crater that had filled up with mud.

Luther Plunkitt and Frank Beachum looked at each other steadily through the bars, and Luther knew as surely as he stood there that Beachum was not going to be reprieved tonight.

Luther smiled, a bland smile, his usual bland smile. He was a man in his sixties. A small man in his natty black Sunday suit, no more than five foot six or seven, but husky and solid with a little too much flesh on him if anything. He had a square, doughy face capped with silver hair. That meaningless smile rarely left it. The smile drew attention away from the marbly gray eyes set deep in the spongy folds beneath his brow. In fact, with his smile, with his soft, amiable manner, people sometimes didn’t notice those marbly eyes at all. But after fifteen years in the military, after ten years with the state police, after seventeen years working one prison or another, Luther, believe me, could be a marbly kind of a guy.

“Morning, Frank,” he said.

“Mr. Plunkitt,” said Beachum softly. He continued to hold himself very still. He did not bring his cigarette or his coffee to his lips. He held them loosely as if he hadn’t the energy to grip or lift them.

“Anything I can get for you? Anything you need?” Luther asked.

“No,” said Beachum. “Not that I can think of.”

Luther had one hand in his pants pocket. It was holding on hard to his keys. He gestured easily with the other as he spoke. No one, he knew, could have told what he was feeling. “I hear you got your wife and daughter coming in again today.”

Beachum nodded. “Yeah.”

“That’s good. Bonnie her name is, your wife?”

“Yeah.”

“And the little girl is …?”

Beachum coughed, cleared his throat. “Gail.”

“Gail. Very pretty, very nice name.” Beachum didn’t answer. Luther couldn’t blame him. He pressed his lips together, pressed on. “Well, anything you need for them you just let me know,” he said. “You let the CO know and we’ll take care of it for you.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Plunkitt,” Beachum said quietly. “Thank you.”

For a second, in the pause that followed, Luther’s glance fell to the prisoner’s cigarette. The ash had grown long. And now, it dropped to the table of its own weight. And still, Beachum didn’t raise the cigarette, didn’t move his hands at all.

It bothered Luther somehow. He had to look away. He forced his voice to sound brisk and businesslike. He stepped forward toward the cage bars, his thin smile in place, his open hand moving.

“There’s some matters I gotta discuss with you,” he said. “Figure we do it first thing, get it out of the way.”

Beachum nodded. “All right.”

“Your dinner tonight, for one thing. Anything special you want? It can be pretty much anything you want.”

“Steak …” Beachum cleared his throat. “Steak and french fries, I guess,” he said. “A beer would be nice.”

Luther inclined his chin. “No problem. We’ll see what we can do.” He took another small step forward. He was within reach of the cage bars now. A more intimate distance. He lowered his voice. “Now about your personal effects and belongings …”

Luther’s eyes flicked down to the prisoner’s hands again as another ash fell from his cigarette, unattended. His damn coffee must be cold by now, Luther thought, annoyed with himself for feeling so shaken.

“My wife’ll take em,” said Beachum.

“And your remains? Does that go for your remains too?” Luther asked. “If she can’t afford the funeral expenses …”

“No. No. Her church raised some money. It’s all right.”

“So your wife will be claiming your remains then.”

Drawing a breath, Beachum straightened slowly in his plastic chair. It was the first sign he’d given of what had to be going on inside him. That little movement-that rattled Luther too. He felt a weight in his stomach, felt it twist and drag.

“Yes, sir, that’s right,” said the prisoner.

“Okay.” Luther felt his hand-the one in his pocket, on his keys-growing warm and damp. He brought it out and laced it with the other, hanging them both before him like a preacher at a graveside. He went into the next order of business, speaking briskly as before.

“I want to give you some idea here of what’s going to happen tonight so there are no surprises,” he said. This was a standard part of the protocol now. In one of the discussions they held after each procedure, the Osage execution team had decided it would help matters along to keep the condemned man thoroughly informed. Otherwise, with everyone so jumpy as the hour of execution approached, any little deviation from what the prisoner expected would tend to startle him, and might cause trouble. “We’ll have to ask your visitors to leave at six P.M.,” Luther went on. “So you might want to inform them of that in case they’re expecting to stay till ten. You’ll be given your dinner and a fresh set of clothes. There’s a sort of plastic underwear thing we have to ask you to put on. No one’ll be able to see it or anything but we need it for sanitary purposes. We’ll make certain that it’s removed before your wife claims your body. After about ten-thirty tonight, you’ll be able to have your spiritual advisor down here with you if you want, which I believe you’ve requested.”

The prisoner tried to answer, but couldn’t. He closed his eyes a moment and swallowed. Luther went on.

“The gurney is actually brought right down here to the cell, oh, about half an hour before the procedure. You’ll be taken into the procedure room and they’ll hook an EKG up to you and the intravenous lines at that time. But nothing’s gonna happen early or anything. We start at 12:01 and right up to then, we’ll be monitoring the phones and we got open lines to the attorney general and the governor and those’ll be checked right through to make sure they’re in working order. You got any questions about any of that?”

Beachum let out his breath as if he’d been holding it. “No.”

The superintendent shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Now, there’s just one more thing, and then I’ll leave you in peace here. It’s about the sedative.”

Beachum stiffened. His lips went thin and the line of smoke coming up from his cigarette smeared as his hand shook. “I don’t want any sedative.”

“The sedative is completely optional,” Luther told him quickly. “I would just like to strongly advise you that it can make things a lot easier.” Here, he slipped into an open, man-to-man tone. He had given these speeches enough times now so that his changes of inflection came more or less automatically. “Hell, Frank, it’s as much for me as for you,” he said. “Having this thing go smoothly is gonna be in the best interest of everybody concerned in the long run. This sedative they give you, it’ll make …”

“I don’t want it,” said Beachum tightly. Then, because you don’t have much leverage when you’re in a cage, he seemed to force himself to go on more reasonably: “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Plunkitt, but I wanna be clear in my mind.” He averted his eyes and added: “I want to be able to see my wife, all right? I’m not gonna make any trouble, I just wanna be clear for that.”

“Fair enough.” Luther knew when to let it alone. “It’s your choice. If you change your mind, just let the duty officer know or let me know. I just wanted to give my little sales talk, that’s all.”

The prisoner kept his eyes lowered, looking at his hands. His cigarette had burned down nearly to the filter now. It was making Luther antsy as hell. Finally, Beachum reached out and crushed it in the tinfoil ashtray beside him. Luther sighed with relief.

The warden stood another moment, watching the condemned man through the bars. His business was done. He had nothing more to say. He lingered, as Beachum’s hand returned to the coffee cup. Beachum swallowed as if there were a bad taste in his mouth. Then he lifted his face to the warden again.

Plunkitt nodded once, quickly, and turned away. He walked to the door, feeling the prisoner’s eyes on his back. Those dead man’s eyes, that face.

Walking down the hall to his office, Luther was still angry at himself. He could still see the prisoner’s face. He imagined it, as it would look tonight, staring up at him from the gurney. It was a hell of a way to be thinking, he thought. Pretty soon, he was going to start talking like one of those sisters of mercy who turned up in the death cells from time to time. Or like one of those solemn lunkheads from the TV news who thought they were the first to discover that condemned men were human beings too. Gosh agony, they would announce into their minicams, these people have intelligence, some of them, and personalities and problems and senses of humor-and they’re going to kill one of them. Gosh agorry. Film at eleven.

Luther nodded and winked at a passing secretary. His gait was relaxed and steady. His smile was bland. No one could have known what he was feeling. But he knew. That weight in his stomach. It was as if a number seven sinker were tied to his innards by a twelve-pound test line. It had been there ever since Beachum’s death warrant had arrived. And it made him angry at himself.

He had been working with criminals a long time now. Dangerous, dangerous men. He knew they could be appealing characters. Smart, funny, thoughtful, some of them. They could run a million games on you, play you like an instrument, a million scammy riffs. And, sure, they were men just as he was and some of them had had rough lives. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it. They were men. And men made choices. That’s what a man is. A man is the creature who can say no. And if you chose to do murder, to end the life of some mother’s child in agony and fear, to blackwash a dozen other lives with grief and anger, then it was your humanity itself which condemned you, wasn’t it? Because you could’ve said no. A man can always say no.

Luther looked ahead as he walked, and his features softened a little. Arnold McCardle, fat as life and fatter, was waiting for him outside his office door.

McCardle sank deep into Luther’s leather sofa. His white shirt bellied wide out of his gray jacket. The arc of it made his red tie fall so far short of his belt buckle that it looked, Luther thought, like a clown’s tie. Sure enough, the deputy superintendent was a right jolly fellow, with sparkling eyes in a great block of a face. Round his bulbous, beer-veined nose, his puffed cheeks glowed as he blew across the rim of his coffee mug. The mug was nearly hidden by the huge paw that held it. His other hand tapped a manila folder absently against his knee.

Luther, with a mug of his own, tilted back behind his great mahogany desk. He dipped his bland smile into the steam of the coffee.

“I got a feeling,” he said, “it’s gonna be a real asshole of a day.”

“Can’t see why not,” said Arnold with a wink.

“Any surprises last night?”

“Nary a one, no sir. Prisoner watched a movie, fell asleep round midnight. Slept soundly till about six. I don’t think he’ll give us any trouble.”

“I hope not,” said Luther. Then he changed the subject. “Skycock in?”

“I think he stopped off in execution block. To nurse his baby,” Arnold added dryly. Reuben Skycock was the prison’s maintenance engineer. He was responsible for the lethal injection equipment and he did tend to fuss at the thing like a mother hen. The day before, they had run through the whole procedure, using CO Allen as the prisoner because he matched Frank Beachum’s size and weight. Allen made the usual nervous jokes, lying there strapped onto the gurney, but Reuben never even cracked a smile. Checking his toggles, his stopwatch, his signal lights. His head bobbing from one of them to the other-just like a mother hen.

“Rehearsal went well though,” Luther said, finishing the thought aloud.

“Oh, yeah.” Arnold gave another of his trademark winks. “I promised Allen we’d give him a Christian burial.”

Luther let his smile broaden. Arnold settled his vast beam this way and that on the sofa, working out an itch in his ass.

“How about the state?” Luther said after a while. “They got their act together finally?”

Arnold drew a page out of his manila folder and slipped it onto the desk. “Guest list all finalized. Security passes made up. Duty roster-Whelan asked off it, did I tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“Says his wife doesn’t like it.”

Arnold smirked, but Luther, looking over the guest list now, said: “Fair enough. My Daisy’s not too fond of it herself.”

“The badges’ll go down to the gate at nine,” Arnold went on. “Got the witness list. What else? Roadblocks are up. There’ll be some demonstrators out there, pro and con, but just the usual.”

Luther let the page drop onto his blotter, raised his eyes. “We ever decide about that mining road?”

“Yup,” said Arnold. “You were right. It comes into sight when you widen the perimeter. It’s all secure.”

They sat quietly then for a while. The McCardle mountain expanded as he drew a contemplative breath, as he glanced down at his folder, holding it half open in one hand. “I guess we got it pretty much covered here, Mr. P,” he said finally. “Even have Debbie Does Dallas for the troops.” He snapped the folder shut.

Luther snorted. Debbie Does Dallas. It was SOP on execution nights to play a few soft-core porno films on the cell-block TVs. Give the inmates something else to think about, keep them from getting crazy. They didn’t really show Debbie Does Dallas, but Arnold liked to say that. He liked the sound of the title. He thought it was a hoot.

“How about the phones?” said Luther then. But he said it hazily, and he didn’t listen to the answer. His mind had traveled back to the prisoner again. He was picturing him, instead of CO Allen, strapped to the gurney. He was picturing Beachum’s mournful, craggy face.

Arnold was still talking about the phone checks when Luther said, “He have his medical and everything? The prisoner, I mean.”

“Oh yeah. Last night. Doc says he’s fit as a fiddle.”

“And his visitors all squared away.”

“Wife, kid, minister. Your girlfriend from the newspaper too-she’s coming in at four.”

Luther lifted his chin a little, lifted one corner of his mouth. “Mea culpa,” he said, not for the first time on this subject. “Don’t know what came over me.” He swiveled a half turn away in his high-backed chair. Until he could see the photo of his son, Fred, on the cabinet behind him. Grinning, crewcut, thin as a stick. Seeming to shine in his uniform, his dress whites.

“Musta been love,” said Arnold.

“She was pretty persuasive. She kind of looked like she knew my darkest secret and was gonna tell if I didn’t play along.”

Arnold said something, but Luther missed it. Sad thing about visitors, he was thinking. Not much of a comfort to the dead man usually. When it got right down to it, in fact, the final visits were usually the hardest part of the Death Watch for the prisoner to bear. Luther had seen a man once-William Wade, Billy the Kid Wade, not two years ago-Luther had seen him fall to his knees and sob when his mother had to end her last visit to him. Fall to his knees and stretch out his two hands to her like a child being left on his first day at school. The tears streaming down his cheeks. “Mama! Mama!” Then, five hours later, when the gurney was rolled in, he was a cowboy again; he was Billy the Kid again. Shook hands with everyone, shook hands with Luther and clicked his tongue jauntily against his teeth. And hopped onto the table to be strapped down like a man hopping over a fence. It wasn’t the dying that got to you, Luther thought. In the end, when all hope was gone, when all bets were off, dying was something a man could accept. The dying was nothing like half so hard as the saying good-bye.

Luther sipped at his coffee, looking at his son’s photo. He sure hoped Fred could get that leave in November. Brenda and the kids would come down. Have Thanksgiving with the whole family together. Go out to the woods, him and Fred, and hunt up some deer. Luther was never a happier man on this earth than when he was out hunting or fishing with his boy.

“Let me ask you something, Arnold,” he heard himself say suddenly then-say before he had a chance to stop himself. He swung back around to face the fat man on the sofa. “What do you think of this Beachum fellow?”

Arnold drew back, almost comically-his fleshy face seemed to fold into itself like one of those rubber masks when you flatten it. It was such an uncharacteristic thing for Luther to say. But Arnold considered himself a man of the world and he thought: What the hell. The emotional side of this business got to all of them sometimes, even Luther. You couldn’t be too macho about it, bottle it up inside you. It’d give you a goddamned heart attack.

So, frowning sagely, the fat man considered his answer for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think about Frank Beachum at all, Plunk. Sometimes I think about that little pregnant girl he shot dead over something like fifty dollars. But mostly, I think about doing my job.”

For the first time that morning, Luther let himself smile wide enough to show some teeth. Yes, he thought. Of course. That’s right.

You could always count on Arnold to keep your mind steady.