True Crime

by Andrew Klavan

  But today he looked strange to her. Black and strange. And she hadn’t the strength to overcome the feeling; she only wished, wearily, it would go away. It was the same, sometimes, when she sat in his church on a Sunday. Sat there, white, in a pew toward the rear. And the minister churned the soul-bed of the congregation with a voice like measured thunder, with rhythmic, passionate invocations, drawing groans and cries from the upturned faces. Hallelujah. Yes, Lord. Hallelujah. Amen. All those brown faces, with accents that were not like hers, from lips that were not like hers. Everything was so strange and she was so very distant from it, so very far away. How she ached sometimes to be among her own, and the things she knew. How she longed for the old days, and the way her life had been with Frank.

  The minister stepped over the threshold and closed the door softly behind him. Gail went on drawing, pressing down hard, clutching the crayon in her fist. She didn’t look up until Flowers spoke.

  “You ready?” he said. “We better go.” Even speaking normally, he had a grumbling bass.

  Gail raised her face quickly—a small, pinched face with large, deep brown eyes. “Is it time to go see Daddy?” she asked, excited.

  Flowers tried to smile at her, but his dark brown features only flinched uncomfortably. “It sure is, sweetheart.”

  “Yes!” said Gail. She jumped to her feet. “I’m drawing a picture for him of green pastures. See?”

  She held the newsprint up by one corner so that it curled and dangled askew. Flowers could only see a diagonal swath of the picture, but he could tell it was a collection of her usual, painfully inept scribbles. Harsh splotches of muddy color, lollipop trees, lopped cottages, people with big shoulders but no arms. Gail loved to draw—she was always drawing. But Flowers had seen five-year-olds who could do better—he had even seen some modern artists who could do better—and it hurt him inside when she showed her work to him.

  He gave another uncomfortable smile. “That’s fine, Gail. Your daddy’s gonna love that.” He turned back to Bonnie as soon as he felt he could. The false heartiness dropped from his voice. “We should get started, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie was already standing. Reaching for her purse on the bureau. “Get your things together, Gail,” she said, over her shoulder. She spoke in a high, hoarse Show-me twang that cracked musically.

  She flicked the clasp of the purse open and brought out her lipstick. Leaned toward the bureau mirror in the pale light from a nearby lamp. Her reflection pained her. Her face, she thought, had lost its sweetness; had been cheated of its sweetness. She had never, she thought, been pretty. But her small pert features were so lined now, the cheeks so dragged downward, that she could have been fifty instead of thirty-three. She didn’t look at the image too closely and drew her lips in with automatic strokes.

  She dropped the lipstick back into her purse and snapped the purse shut. In the mirror, she saw her daughter kneeling on the floor again. Not moving. Bonnie turned around.

  “Come on now, Gail. We need to hurry.”

  Gail had put her crayons back in the box and was holding the box in one hand. In her other, she still held the corner of her picture of green pastures. “Where’s green?” she said. “I can’t find green, Mommy.”

  Bonnie and Flowers glanced at each other. Then both lowered their heads, scanning the floor. There were no loose crayons in sight.

  Bonnie rubbed her forehead. “Well, I guess we’ll have to do without green, sweetheart. We have to go.”

  Gail raised her eyes. Her lips were already beginning to tremble. “But I need green. It’s green pastures. I have to have green.”

  The two adults exchanged another look, more serious now. Bonnie swallowed.

  “Well, look around for it. It has to be …”

  “Maybe I can …” Flowers said. He crouched down and began to move his eyes slowly along the floor.

  “It’s gone,” said Gail hollowly. “It’s lost. I can’t find it anywhere!” Her voice rose higher—then broke. Tears started down her cheeks. “It isn’t here anymore!”

  “I’m sure Daddy won’t mind what colors you use,” said Flowers.

  He was still peering over the carpet when, suddenly, Gail wheeled on him. He bucked back, startled, as she started shrieking.

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand! It’s ruined without green, it’s green pastures, the whole thing is ruined!” The tears coursed more heavily down her cheeks. She was moaning. Her face was contorted and ugly.

  Bonnie stood and stared at her. She couldn’t trust herself to speak. She hated that look. She hated Gail when she got like this. It made her so furious. It lit a hot, clenched ball of anger at her center. Weren’t things bad enough, for God’s sake? She took a step and stood over the child, her body humming like a plucked string. One fist clenched and unclenched at her side.

  But, when she spoke, her voice was soft. Still gentle and twangy and mild. “Now don’t talk to the reverend that way, sweetheart. It’ll be all right. We’ll all try to find it togeth …”

  “We can’t find it! You don’t understand! It’s lost, it’s gone and I can’t make green pastures, it’s all ruined!”

  The girl went on sobbing, groaning horribly. She was shrieking her words so loudly now that Bonnie thought of the other people in the motel, listening to this. What would they think? She clutched her purse tightly in front of her. Over a crayon, for heaven’s sake. Over nothing, she thought, and now of all times. It made her want to give her daughter a good swift kick, kick her clear across the room. “Please, Gail,” she said, even more gently than before. “Please just calm down. We’ll find the crayon.”

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, it isn’t anywhere, it isn’t …!”

  “Wait a minute,” said Flowers. He was on his hands and knees now. He crawled forward and lifted the tasseled edge of the bedspread. The green Crayola was there, lying underneath it. He picked it up and handed it to Gail.

  “There you go,” he said.

  Gail took it from him with a trembling hand. She was still sniffling; the tears still ran. But her hysteria had ceased on the instant. “Thank you,” she said sulkily.

  Bonnie took a deep breath, thinking, Thank you, God, thank you.

  Then Gail frowned up at her, a deep frown. She narrowed her eyes making a bitchy, angry look she had learned from the movies. “And it isn’t over nothing, Mommy,” she said darkly. “Daddy likes my pictures.”

  Gail nodded slightly. “I know he does, sweetheart. He loves your pictures,” she managed to say. She hadn’t the energy to feel guilty anymore—for the things she thought, for the things Gail heard even when she managed not to speak them. She could not even apologize to God anymore. She was just too miserable. It was just too big a feeling for her even to hope for relief. She was only dully grateful that she had managed to keep her temper yet again. And that they had found the crayon. “I know he does,” she repeated softly. “Put your shoes on now, so we can go.”

  Flowers was climbing slowly to his feet. He stood next to Bonnie. Singing quietly to herself, Gail moved to the far wall to fetch her shoes. The two adults watched her.

  Flowers’s hand encircled Bonnie’s elbow. He squeezed her arm. “Christ is here, Bonnie,” he murmured, almost whispered. “Even in this room. Hold on to that.”

  She glanced at him quickly, almost angrily. She stared at the dark chocolate color of his cheeks, the flat Negro nose, the wide nostrils, the lips thick underneath. Who was this? she wondered. Why was he here? What did he have to do with her? Oh, she supposed she believed him—about Christ—about His being here. Of course He was here.

  She swallowed, shifting her angry gaze. Christ was here, all right, she thought. It was she, Bonnie, who was elsewhere. She was endless distances elsewhere. She was separated by black expanses from Christ and Flowers and her own child and all the strangers around her, and everyone.

  Everyone except Frank.

  2

  By the time the Tempo skidded to the c
urb before my apartment house, I had dismissed the Potato Chip Factor as ridiculous. I hadn’t even read the witness’s testimony. Maybe he’d been standing somewhere else. And the store must’ve changed in six years. And maybe they were low on potato chips that day. And maybe a million things that I wasn’t going to take time to check out when I had to be nice to my wife and take my son to the goddamned zoo. It wasn’t as if I thought Frank Beachum was innocent, after all. He wasn’t innocent, I was sure of that. He shot that girl; I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I’ve covered a lot of arrests and a lot of courtrooms, and the sad old truth is that nine hundred and ninety-nine of every thousand people who come to trial are guilty as hell. Because the cops arrest criminals, that’s why. If it’s a drug crime, they bust a dealer; if a wife’s dead and her husband’s a felon, they haul him in. They get bank robbers for bank robberies, and gang members for drive-by shootings. They may not be Hercule Poirot, but the cops have seen every crime ever committed and they know who the players are and they’re right ninety-nine percent of the time—about as often as reporters who play at being cops are wrong. Frank Beachum was an angry, violent man and Amy Wilson owed him fifty dollars and he shot her for it. Potato chips, my ass.

  I killed the Tempo’s engine and listened to its death rattle. I stepped out into the street and slammed the door. I was annoyed with myself. I knew what I was doing with all this potato chip business. All this malarkey about why-didn’t-Nancy-Larson-hear-the-shots. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see how my mind was working. I was looking desperately for a big score, a big story—so I could make up for the fact that I’d cheated on my wife again. And gotten caught again. And was probably going to lose her and my son—and my job too just as I did in New York. I’d been assigned a human interest sidebar on a condemned man and I was trying to transform it into a last-minute rescue of an innocent from the jaws of death. So that I’d be a hero. So that Bob couldn’t fire me. So that Barbara wouldn’t divorce me and Davy would think I was neat.

  Potato chips! I stalked around the front of the car and headed up the walk.

  My building was on the corner, a glowering pile of acid-blackened brick with a columned portico thrust out aggressively onto the lawn. Broad-branched maples flanked it, and the rattle of the cicadas in the leaves laced the hot air. Our place was on the second floor. As I moved toward the door, I glanced up at it and saw Barbara at the bedroom window.

  She had pushed a white curtain back and was watching me through it, watching through the maple leaves. Our eyes met. She did not smile. She let the curtain fall closed.

  I was twenty minutes late.

  I sighed, went in and headed up the stairs.

  She opened the apartment door just as I reached the landing. She stood without saying a word, showing me the tight mouth and the deep blue eyes. As I stood at the other end of the hall, I raised my hands in apology. She did not react.

  I sighed and headed toward her.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I got held up.”

  She stiffened. I kissed her, catching the right quarter of her compressed lips. Our eyes met again, and then she turned away.

  She had been a beauty when I married her. She was beautiful still. Small and slender and well formed. With strands of silver in her short black hair and the first worry-lines of motherhood softening what had been a haughty, patrician face. She was a New Yorker, Manhattan-born; Upper East Side and the right schools. Her parents had been divorced when she was ten, but her father was a big-wheel investment banker and always supplied her with plenty of cash. When I met her, five years ago, she was running a state-funded job training program for single mothers. Managing a staff of about a dozen people—suited-up, fiery women; mild, reedy, benevolent men—most of them like her, I guess, with bright ideas and good intentions and trust funds. She had had to give that up when we moved here to St. Louis.

  I don’t suppose I loved her anymore. I’m not really sure I ever did. I think I just thought I was supposed to, to love somebody, to make something work right in my life. And she was smart and kindly and hardworking—as well as humorless and severe—and I was the first man who ever really reached her in bed, which made me proud. I felt I should’ve been able to love her, I still felt that way. She was a worthwhile person, and I didn’t want to lose her, even now. And the boy. If I loved anyone, I loved the boy. I didn’t want to lose Davy.

  He was sitting in front of the TV in the living room. As soon as I came through the door, he looked up and saw me. His round, chubby face blossomed in a wreath of smiles. Quickly, he worked his two-year-old body off the floor and climbed to his feet. “Are we … are we … are we …” he cried, too excited to think of the words. He ran to me and jumped around, throwing his arms up and down.

  “Davy!” I said. “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!”

  “Are we … we are going … we are going to … to the zoo!” he finally managed to shout.

  I reached out and rumpled his yellow hair. “Hooray,” I said.

  “A hippopotamus is there.”

  “No. Really?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, really.”

  “Oh boy,” I said, “I can’t wait.”

  He reached out and took my hand in both of his. “We’ll go now,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to put your shoes on first?” “Oh yeah.”

  He let me go and ran crazily around the room, hoping to fall over his shoes, I guess. I glanced up and saw Barbara watching him. With that melted expression, that wry and dreamy smile that she reserved for Davy alone.

  Then, lifting her chin, she made the effort, and spoke to me for the first time.

  “They’re in the nursery,” she said. “I’ll get them.”

  As she left the room without a backward glance, I wondered if she already knew about Patricia. Knew, or suspected, or guessed. But no, I thought. Not yet. It was just that I was late. It was just that.

  I clapped my hands. “Dave!” I said. “Davester! McDave!”

  He stopped running in circles and lifted his arms urgently. “I can’t find my shoes anywhere!” he said.

  “Mama’s going to get them. Why don’t you turn off the tape.”

  “Yeah!”

  He liked doing that; he was proud of knowing how. He squatted low on his haunches in front of the VCR. He guided his fat finger toward the power button with painstaking care. With a flash, the squealing face of Miss Piggy vanished. In its stead, as the regular TV took over, there appeared the squealing face of Wilma Stoat, the city’s morning talk show queen.

  “The death penalty!” she shrieked sincerely. “An urgent issue! What’s your opinion? We’re talking to Murder Victim’s Dad Frederick Robertson and president of the Anti-Capital Punishment Task Force Ernest Tiffin.”

  I snorted. Funny that should be on just at this moment, I thought. It was another second before I realized that the man now before the camera was Amy Wilson’s father.

  Frederick Robertson. He was an impressive figure in close-up: a thick, oval face; a frown worn into the granite; the hard, tired countenance of a lifelong working man. The caption Murder Victim’s Dad was shown over his cheap necktie as he listened grimly to a question from the audience.

  Davy crouched on his haunches, mesmerized as always by the images on the screen. I stood where I was, thinking, Tenderloin; sirloin; T-bone.

  “The way it seems to me,” said Frederick Robertson in a gruff, slow voice, “the law makes a deal with the public.”

  Porterhouse, I thought. That was the name of the witness. Dale Porterhouse.

  “The law says to us—the public: you be nonviolent; you don’t take justice into your own hands—and in return the government is gonna make sure that the guilty party is found and the government is gonna carry justice out in your place.”

  I had stepped to the end table by the sofa; I had picked up the phone before I’d even thought about doing it. I pressed the buttons.

  Davy’s head swiveled around. His mouth opened in a worried frown. “No,
no, Daddy,” he said. “Don’t talk on the phone! Let’s go to the zoo now.”

  “We’re going to the zoo just as soon as you get your shoes …”

  “Information, what city please?”

  “In St. Louis,” I said. “Dale Porterhouse.”

  “I fulfilled my part of that bargain,” Frederick Robertson said on the TV screen. “I been a hardworking, honest citizen my whole life. But I would not have fulfilled the bargain if I thought Frank Beachum would not have to pay for my daughter’s life with his life.”

  A recorded voice came over the phone with Dale Porterhouse’s number. I whispered the suffix to myself, holding the prefix in my mind as I pressed the buttons again.

  My wife strode back into the room carrying Davy’s sneakers and socks. The little boy ran to her, reaching up.

  “Oh, what now?” Barbara said, glaring at me.

  I held a finger up at her.

  Davy bounced on his toes. “Put my shoes on now, Mommy,” he said. “Then Daddy will not talk on the phone.”

  “I don’t think anyone who hasn’t gone through it,” said Frederick Robertson (Murder Victim’s Dad) to the studio audience, “can understand what happens to a family when a child is taken away from it—not by sickness or an act of God—but by another human being acting for whatever motives—by a murderer.”

  “Jello.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Jello?”

  “Oh. Hello. Is Mr. Porterhouse there please?”

  Shaking her head with exasperation, Barbara marched over to the cushioned chair by the window. Her dark eyes continued to hurl thunderbolts at me as she sat down, as she hoisted Davy up into her lap.

  “My life, my family’s life, has been ruined,” said Amy Wilson’s father. “We spend every day angry. Every day full of rage.”

  “Meester Putterhus ees not to be in,” said the woman on the other end of the phone. “Ee ees to be at work now.”