CA: Now, Mrs. Larson, before the moment when Frank Beachum ran out behind you, were you aware of anything unusual?
Witness: No, I was not.
CA: You did not hear any gunshots, any screams?
Witness: No. No, but I wouldn’t have.
CA: You say you wouldn’t have, but you were just outside in the parking lot. Surely, you would have heard someone screaming, the noise of a gun going off, wouldn’t you?
Yeah, I thought, wouldn’t you?
Witness: No, because it was a very hot day. I had the air conditioner on and all the windows were shut, and the radio was on too. I might have heard a car horn out on the street or something, but I don’t think I would’ve heard anything going on inside the store, no matter what it was.
CA: Thank you, Mrs. Larson.
Yes, I thought, thank you very much. The chair squeaked loudly as I brought my feet down to the floor. I packed the transcript back into its box and gave it a satisfied little pat. With a glance at my watch, I stood up. I lifted my hand in the general direction of the city desk.
“I’m going home for a while,” I called. “I’ll be down at the prison by four.”
Another baffling mystery solved, I thought, and plenty of time left to take Davy to the zoo.
5
It was now less than ninety minutes before Bonnie and Gail would come for their last visit. Frank waited for them in his cage. He had finished his letter to Gail and sealed it in an envelope. For My Darling Gail, When She Is 18 Years Old he had written across the front. He had stuffed the envelope into the back pocket of his pants. Soon after that, one of his lawyers, Hubert Tryon, had phoned, and they had talked for a while though there was no news yet about the appeal. Then, after that, there was nothing for Frank to do but wait for his wife and daughter to arrive.
So he waited, sitting at his desk, smoking cigarettes. Or sometimes he stood and paced, back and forth along the length of the bars of his cage. Sometimes he lay on his cot and stared at the white ceiling. And he prayed sometimes too. But mostly he sat. Sat at his desk with a cigarette smoking in his hand. Sat watching the clock, trying not to watch the clock. Thinking: Oh God, Oh God, I don’t think I’m going to make this.
He felt as if the seams of his skin were bursting. As if his skin could not contain the frigid ozone of suspense that filled it, the tides of grief that swelled in him and never quite receded. He felt as if he were holding his skin together by force of will. His face twisted with the effort sometimes and his fist clenched as he urged himself on. For Bonnie’s sake, for Gail’s. They were coming soon. It would be the last time they saw him. It would be what they had of him to remember, all they had. This, he told himself, is what a man does. He showed strong so that the people around him would feel unafraid. He showed unafraid, so that the people he loved would feel secure. This, he told himself, is exactly what it means to be a man.
He was startled out of his effort as the door opened. Too early—the words flashed through his mind. He was afraid he wasn’t ready for them yet. But it wasn’t Bonnie and Gail who entered. It was the prison chaplain, the Reverend Stanley B. Shillerman.
Frank Beachum felt his throat constrict in anger: to think that even one of his precious minutes was going to be wasted with this self-important little toad.
The Reverend Shillerman—the Reverend Shit-ferbrains, as Osage’s inmates called him—approached the duty officer, Benson, who rose from his table to meet him. Shillerman gave Benson’s shoulder a manly squeeze and murmured in his ear. Frank could hear the chaplain chuckle. Then Shillerman released the guard and Benson returned to his desk to type this latest visit into the chronological.
Shillerman, meanwhile, moved toward the bars of the prisoner’s cage. He stood there with his hands folded before him—as Luther Plunkitt had stood—as if to deliver a eulogy. Unlike Plunkitt, in his crisp, funereal suit, the reverend wore cowboy jeans and an open white shirt. He had placid parson features and lakewater eyes. And a voice—a softly urgent pulpit twang—full of wistful appeals to the errant sinner.
The voice was soggy with compassionate sadness now. “Good morning, Frank.”
“Chaplain,” said Frank through his teeth.
“How you making out, son?”
Frank felt a bitter taste in his mouth and nearly sneered. In his mind, he was sharing a private joke with Jesus. Might as well be shot for a hound as a hare, he was telling Christ—the joke being that he’d have liked to reach through the bars and strangle this asshole dead. “I’m doing fine,” he said quietly.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. I truly am,” said the chaplain. “I thought maybe … you know, if there’s anything I can do, if there’s anything you’d like to talk to me about—I wanted you to be aware that I’m here, I’m available.”
Slowly, Frank lifted his cigarette to his mouth. His open hand covered the lower portion of his face. He let the smoke drift out of his nostrils. “No,” he said. “Thanks. I don’t need anything.”
Shillerman tilted his head and clucked as if in sorrow. But Frank was sure he saw a nasty sort of disappointment in his eyes. He did not know a single prisoner—not one—who had ever gone to the chaplain for succor or advice. The chaplain! The man of God! The word around Osage was that the Reverend Shit-fer-brains walked with the guards. He walked like the guards, belligerent, swaggering, coolly wary. Oh, he read his Bible, and he held his services on Sunday. But more than anything, he loved the weight of the walkie-talkie on his belt, and he was especially proud when the atmosphere grew tense and he was allowed to carry a riot stick. Just like a guard.
Shillerman had spent a dozen years as pastor of a quiet little workingman’s church in St. Charles. A dozen years of gold-haired ladies bringing tuna casseroles to fund-raising picnics. Fat, flirty hausfraus in shapeless dresses clucking their inane moralisms at him. And the men; their husbands: smiling at him. Shillerman had had a dozen years of those men and their not-quite-mocking smiles. The men treated him with the same belittling gallantry they showed to their women: Those are sweet, pretty notions you got there, Preacher, but we fellows have business to conduct in the real world. A dozen years of that treatment in his suffocating little St. Charles chapel. Then he had used a relative’s influence to win the job at Osage.
Frank knew only some of this. But he understood Shillerman in his stomach, the same place he despised him. He knew just what the bastard wanted from him, just why he had come into the Deathwatch cell today. It wasn’t to bring the condemned man comfort or spiritual counseling. It wasn’t that, Frank was sure. Shillerman liked this sort of thing. The good reverend. He wanted to be part of the excitement, to sniff the solemn thrill of execution. He wanted stories to tell his fancy friends. What’s it like, Stan? they would ask him. What are they like just before they wheel them down the last mile? Sitting in his cage, regarding the preacher through the bars, through the smoke of his cigarette, Frank could imagine the man shifting in his living-room easy chair, thoughtfully rattling the ice in his scotch, gravely considering the question—and then pontificating for the guests out of his vast experience. He understood what the bastard wanted here, all right.
Reverend Shillerman’s chest expanded and he set his shoulders. He was winding up to deliver his pitch. “Frank,” he said earnestly with an earnest frown, “I understand you’re a Bible-reading man. That’s right, isn’t it?”
The clock on the cinderblock wall behind him swept along, the second hand in its unstopping circle, and Frank wanted to shoot to his feet, to shout at the man: Go on, get out, get out of here. It would be easy to do it. To let himself go. It was easy to think: Why not? Do it. What have I got to lose? Benson would be sure as hell to hustle the chaplain out of there in a hurry if it looked like the prisoner was getting upset.
But Frank did not jump up or shout out. He was afraid. He was holding on to himself so hard. Bonnie was coming, Bonnie and Gail, and all he had to give them was his unshaken face, his appearance of serenity, so they could remember it some
times and be serene. If he raised his voice now—if he lost control, he did not know if he’d be able to get it back again. He couldn’t let this windbag take his last good thing away from him. His hand shook as he slowly raised the cigarette to his lips. He replied nothing.
But Shillerman went on as if he’d answered the question in the affirmative. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s real good, Frank. That Bible-reading, that’s gonna hold you in good stead today—and ever afterwards too. But you know, Frank …” He tilted back on his heels, digging in for the long sermon. His face took on a comtemplative cast. “Just reading the Bible, that isn’t quite enough, is it? It can’t be enough, Frank. You know that as well as I do. A man can’t go to his maker with the sins on his soul unrepented of, with the hurt he’s done to folks just … you know, unrepented of.”
Sitting there, hating him, fighting to contain his anger and his panic, Frank noticed everything. The watchful calculation in the bedrock of the chaplain’s eyes. His eyebrows—he must’ve clipped them to keep them so neat. The way he used three words where one would’ve done it, and the way he tried to sound important and biblical but couldn’t quite come up with all the fancy language.
Shillerman took another step toward the cage bars. “Now, you know, no one could blame you up to now for proclaiming your innocence. Heck, you’re fighting for your life here. That’s a natural thing, I understand that, everyone does. But I don’t need to tell you that the time is drawing nigh. And there’s a lot of folks out there who would feel a whole lot better to hear that you were … remorseful for the pain you caused them. You could do a lot of good with just those words, Frank. I’m saying this for you, for your sake. I’m saying this because I don’t want you to go to God without making straight the things that can be made straight.”
Frank rolled his inner eye at the God who was always watching him. Would you get this clown out of here please, he thought.
Shillerman lifted one hand and pointed back over his shoulder at the clock. “Observe the time, Frank, and fly from evil,” he said. “That’s what the good book says.”
“Thanks.” Frank’s voice was now a hoarse whisper. “I don’t have anything to tell you.”
“Frank …”
“I want you to leave me alone,” Frank said.
The smile on Shillerman’s lips never faltered. But some subtle darkening of his expression—and Frank noticed everything—told the true measure of the preacher’s scorn. Scorn for Frank, scorn for all the prisoners whom he in his moral immensity overstrode. He must’ve known how they laughed at him behind his back. He must’ve known what they called him. Proud as he was of his walkie-talkie and his cowboy jeans, it must’ve niggled at the chaplain that he was not a real guard. He had no real power to make the inmates walk the line, and they laughed at him. In his parish in St. Charles, the men might have spoken to him as if he were a woman, but at least they treated him like a lady. Frank thought about Shillerman telling his death row tales to his admiring friends. He thought those tales must’ve needed a good deal of embellishment before they really made the grade.
“Now … son,” Shillerman said, shaking his head regretfully. “Son, I don’t need to tell you that there is gonna come a time, and I’m afraid that time is not far off, when you may wish you’d made a different decision but it’ll be too late. I don’t want to be too blunt here but there’s no sense in mincing words. I’m your chaplain, and I don’t want you to go to your death with this terrible crime on your head.”
Frank’s anger surged through him, an acid gout. Christ, if he should lose control. When Bonnie was coming, when Gail …
“Now, you know, I’m your chaplain, and anything you say to me …”
“Benson,” said Frank, very softly. Then a little louder: “Hey, Benson.”
The duty officer’s chair scraped the floor as he stood eagerly from his table. “What can I get you, Frank?”
Frank’s eyes met the Reverend Stanley B’s. He cleared his throat and measured the volume of his voice before he spoke again. Then, tightly, softly, he said, “You can get me this goddamned son-of-a-bitch out of here.” And lifting his cigarette yet again, his hand trembling so badly that the ash fell off of itself, he muttered: “Reverend Shit-fer-brains.”
The chaplain heard that. Oh yes. Oh, he knew that was his nickname, universally through the prison. Sure he did—and Frank bet that little detail didn’t figure in any of his dinner party stories. In fact, he bet it made the reverend kind of mad. Oh yes it did. It was making him mad right now. Frank could see it, with some very unchristian satisfaction, as Shillerman’s mouth twitched and his throat started working to swallow the insult down.
As the guard came up behind him, the chaplain managed to go on in that gentle, God-loves-you drawl: “Now, Frank. I’m being honest with you here. I myself would not want to be strapped to that table tonight with the wrongs I’ve done unspoken and unrepented of …”
Benson put his hand on the preacher’s shoulder. “Hey, Reverend, come on.”
“Because when they put that needle in your arm …”
“Jesus, Reverend,” Benson said. His eyes flicked at Frank, then back. “I’m telling you: come on.”
Not resisting, but not moving either, still keeping his hands clasped before him, the Reverend Stanley B. Shillerman looked at CO Benson as if down from a great height. “It may be upsetting, but I feel I have a job to do here.”
“Well, yeah, but … I mean, you know the rules, Chaplain. Spiritual counseling is strictly at the prisoner’s request.”
“Get him out of here,” Frank said.
“I’m sorry for you, Frank,” said Shillerman.
“I’m sorry too,” said Frank thickly. “Believe me.”
“Come on, Reverend,” Benson said, really nervous now, hearing the tone of Frank’s voice. “I’m serious here. We don’t want any trouble.” He even tugged at the chaplain’s arm lightly.
“All right, all right,” said the chaplain. He raised his two hands as if in benediction. He smiled his lofty blessing upon them all.
Benson kept his arm extended behind the man as they walked to the door together, as if he were afraid Shillerman would turn suddenly and make a break for the cage again. But the chaplain permitted himself only one last backward look of pity and sorrow. Then the guard at the door opened at Benson’s knock and Shillerman was gone.
Benson ran his fingers up through his slick black hair as he returned to his table. “Hey, forget it, Frankie,” he called toward the cage. “The guy’s an asshole.” He shook his head, sitting down, muttering, “Everybody wants to get in on the action, you know.”
Frank nodded. His temple pulsed as he fought for control. He crushed out his cigarette, pressing down hard to drive the energy out of his trembling hand. He dragged the back of his fist across his lips to dry them and, as he did, he looked across the cell at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Thirty minutes to the visiting hour. And he felt as if he were choking. Just as he’d feared. Now that his anger was subsiding, there was a powerful urge to release the rest of it, all of it, everything. A great pressure of anguish rose up in him and Frank wanted to tear himself open to let it out. He wanted to stand and howl and sob and cry to heaven, and beat his hands against the bars, against the air. It wasn’t right. He hadn’t done it. It wasn’t fair. And a pernicious inner whisper told him: No one could blame you. It’s what anyone would do.
Frank shut his eyes. His lips moving silently, he appealed to that ever-watching God of his. He conjured Bonnie’s face and Gail’s. If they came in now—if they saw him—raging helplessly against his fate, weeping over the unfairness of it all—boo-hoo, boo-hoo—Christ, how that would torture them—in their beds at night—they would see him like that—forever after—husband and father—impotent and sobbing—their bitterness and pain—it would haunt them their whole lives long. He clenched his fist and rapped it lightly on the tabletop, nearly chanting in his mind: If you would give me strength, if you would give me the
appearance of strength, the appearance of strength for them to remember, if you would give me the appearance of strength …
“Ach,” he said. He opened his eyes, annoyed, snarling all his passion back into its corner. He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and shoved it in his mouth and struck a match angrily. He sat at his table behind the bars of his cage and his long, sad face was still. The smoke trailed up from the cigarette in his hand. Expressionless, he waited for his wife and daughter to arrive.
This, after all, he told himself, is what a man does.
6
In my youth, I was a racer of cars. A dragster, I mean. The teenage terror of Long Island’s byways. Well, I’d seen it in old movies and it was as good a form of rebellion as any. My parents—my adopted parents—were softspoken, thoughtful and humorless attorneys, pater for a firm of environmental activists, and mater for a planning group that fought for housing for the poor. I could think of no better way to irritate them both than mindlessly vroom-vrooming jalops up and down the Guyland boulevards, pistons at the limit. My parents and I, we don’t speak much anymore, so I guess it must’ve worked.
I mention this only because the habit stuck. I drove a floppy-gutted Tempo these days. A slumping blue sad sack of a car. It could jump from zero to fifty in a generation, if you had the time. And still, I had managed to beat the bejesus out of it. Working it up to impossible speeds, screeching round corners, tatting through traffic like a lacemaker’s needle. I never had time to tune the poor machine, or wash it even. It was ratty with grime. It sputtered and popped and whined in its exertions. But I showed it no mercy, and I made it run.
I gunned it now out of the News parking lot, lanced it through a gap in the noonday stream of cars and joined the race along the boulevard. It was still twenty minutes before twelve o’clock noon. I’d promised my wife to be home by the hour, and it wasn’t going to be a problem, not the way I drove. Getting home in time seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I had a notion that this day was not going to end before word of my latest indiscretion reached Barbara’s ears. She had promised to leave me if she caught me cheating again, and I was pretty sure she meant it. Still, begging shamelessly had worked once and it might work once more. So I wanted to keep her in as good a mood as possible.