Oh yes, I thought, approaching the intersection with the highway, I had this situation covered, all right. I’d figured it from every angle now. Disaster would have to wake up pretty early in the old A.M. to get the drop on Mr. Steven Everett.
I arrived at Knight Street, a long and ancient lane on the border of the highway. It seemed, in fact, the last crumbling remnant of a neighborhood that the highway had plowed under. A street on the edge of a pit, it seemed, and its miserable boxes of red brick looked like headstones for the community buried beneath the six-lane blacktop. Windows darkened by grime and exhaust peered dolefully down at the rush of cars. Faces at the window openings peered down; old faces, black faces, never moving. The laundry, drooping on lines between the buildings, hung motionless too, because there was no wind. And below it, around scruffy yards littered with old beer cans and broken glass, white picket fences listed over as if drawn inexorably toward the earth.
I parked the Tempo in the gutter trash and stepped out. A couple of boys bouncing a basketball between them on the sidewalk turned to watch me as I crossed the street. Number 4331 was like the other buildings beside it: five stories; red brick blackened by dirt. A chipped, decaying stoop up to a wooden door with a cracked glass panel.
I climbed the stairs and read the row of names on the mailboxes. My nerves—my aching head, my stomach—all flared up again when I saw it there: Russel, painfully printed in blue ink, half covered by a stroke of the brown paint with which someone had swashed graffiti over the whole row.
There would be no answer, I thought, still trying to outsmart disaster. It would be a different Russel. Or someone had forgotten to change the name when he moved away. I almost wanted it to be like that. That would end the tension, the suspense. I would have an excuse to call off this ill-augured game of Beat the Clock. I pressed the buzzer, and waited.
A moment later, I heard a woman’s voice above my head.
“Who’s there?”
I had to move back, move a few steps down the stoop before I could see her. Her heavy-jowled brown face was poking out at me from a third-floor window, probing the semidarkness below her with large, slightly protuberant eyes. She frowned when she got a look at me: a buttoned-down white man shuffling hapless in the dusk. The whap of the basketball on the sidewalk had stopped and I could feel the two kids watching me too.
“Yes?” the woman above me said.
“Mrs. Russel?”
“Ye-es?” she repeated more warily.
“Mrs. Russel, my name is Steve Everett. I’m a reporter with the St. Louis News. I’m looking for Warren Russel.” She seemed to rear back a little. “Warren?”
“Yes, ma’am, is he around?”
She didn’t answer, not right away. Somewhere behind me, the basketball hit the sidewalk once—whap—then stopped.
“Just a minute,” the woman said. “I’ll come down.”
She pulled her head in and was gone.
Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I turned as casually as I could to make a quick check on the two kids behind me. They had moved toward me a little and were standing near the base of the stoop. They made no bones about it: they were staring up at me, coolly contemplating every inch of me. Two kids in baggy shorts and T-shirts, they were. Nine years old maybe, maybe ten. The one on the right was holding the basketball against his hip. It was the one on the left who had the gun. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t like the way his hand rested against the pocket of his baggy shorts, the barely perceptible cant of his body to one side as if to put an extra spring in his draw action. I’d spent the entire weekend covering gunshot victims and I told myself it had gone to my brain. All the same, if he asked me for candy change, I was going to give it to him without an argument.
Behind me, the door opened, and I turned again to look up the stoop at Mrs. Russel. She was a heavyset woman—in her fifties, I’d guess, though I find it hard to tell sometimes with blacks. She had big powerful arms and legs like pillars, both bare. In fact, there seemed something almost naked—frighteningly large and naked—about her altogether. She wore a shapeless floral housedress which ended at the shoulders and the knees: slippers on her feet, no rings on her fingers, her only adornment a gold heart pendant around her neck—and her hair tied back so severely behind her head that her face appeared enormous and seemed to jut down at me. She was a formidable sight, still frowning, with storms and flashes of anger deep behind those bulging eyes. All the same, I sensed a sort of brusque, muscular decency in her. I hoped I did. I hoped I could count on it. “Go home,” she said.
I opened my mouth to answer, then realized she was talking to the boys behind me.
“Don’t stand there gawking at the man, it’s your dinner time, go on home.”
I dared a glance back over my shoulder. The two boys were already edging away along the sidewalk with many a sulking glower back in my direction. I climbed up the stoop to stand in front of the woman at the door. I was surprised to find she was half a head shorter than I.
“You are Mrs. Russel?” I asked.
“Angela Russel,” she said quietly.
“And Warren …”
“My grandson. What does a newspaper want with him now?”
“Mrs. Russel, it’s very important that I talk to him,” I said. “It’s urgent. I need to see him tonight.”
She pulled up and snorted once through a broad, flat nose. “What could be so urgent about you talking to Warren?”
I hesitated. Those turbulent, bulging eyes thundered at me. Her big arm held the door open and her big body blocked the way and I suspected that getting past her was going to be a lot tougher than merely browbeating a confession out of her gunman grandson.
“I think,” I said slowly, “I think he would want me to say it to him directly.”
The wide face went back and forth as she shook her head. “You’re gonna have to talk to me.”
“Mrs. Russel …”
“You’re gonna have to talk to me, mister.” I lifted a hand in protest. “I just think …”
“Warren’s dead,” the woman said flatly. “Warren’s been in his grave now going on three years.”
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 sai
d 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.”
5
As I drove back over the boulevard toward the city, I thought of all the things I should have said to her. I should’ve told her about the potato chips and my instinct that Porterhouse was lying. I should’ve told her about the way
the car backed into Beachum’s left side. I should’ve drawn her a map and showed her. Sometimes you have to go on instinct, I should have said. And as for the sins of society, blacks and whites and bigotry and unfairness … all I know about are the things that happen, I should’ve said. Someone held the gun, someone pulled the trigger. Those were the facts. Amy Wilson was murdered and the wrong man was going to die for it. That’s all I knew. That’s what I should have told her.
I was cruising through University City now, cruising through the dark. Driving slowly, for me, driving just above the speed limit anyway, with nowhere special to go. The radio was on; the news station was playing, the self-important rhythms of the news were murmured low. I was passing the McDonald’s where—as I found out later from the police report—Michelle Ziegler had had her cup of coffee that morning, had sat and cried about a lousy one-night stand, before weaving off toward Dead Man’s Curve.
I should have said something, I thought as I passed it. I should have said anything that came to mind. It probably wouldn’t have made much difference, but now, as things stood, there was nothing left. Nothing else to do, no one else to talk to, no other leads to run down. It was after eight. With less than four hours to the execution, I didn’t have a single piece of evidence I could bring to the publisher, to Lowenstein, nothing to make him get on the phone to the state-house and buy Beachum a little time, enough time.
I suppose I should have been working on that. Racking my brains, trying to come up with a fresh angle, a new lead. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t even get myself to think about it for any stretch of time. Whenever I tried, my mind drifted away to other things. My job, for instance. Without this story to raise my stock, how the hell was I going to get Bob off my case, how was I going to convince him to let me keep my job? And Barbara. She would find out the truth when they fired me. She would find out the truth one way or another anyway. Then she’d be gone. And Davy would be gone with her. And I loved Davy, if I loved anyone, and I didn’t want to grow old alone. If I just could’ve gotten this story, I kept thinking. If I just could have played the hero on this one and come through, maybe I could’ve turned things around, maybe I could’ve made a case for myself. At the paper. With my wife. Maybe. Somehow.