True Crime Read online

  “TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE HAVING FUN, WAITING TO DIE, OR READING TRUE CRIME, ANDREW KLAVAN’S NERVE-PLUCKING SUSPENSE NOVEL.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  HIGH PRAISE

  FOR ANDREW KLAVAN’S “TOUR DE FORCE”*

  TRUE CRIME

  “A CLASSIC … True Crime moves like a tornado, its plot turning in tighter and tighter circles until it explodes in an ending that will leave readers exhausted.… His characters are vivid and compelling, his observations on the human condition perceptive, and his darkly humorous prose masterful.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “The most suspenseful and exciting novel I have read in the last couple of years. The adrenaline was flowing so strongly near the end, I actually thought my heart might give out. A wonderful, funny, heartbreaking, powerful book.”

  —John Lescroart, author of Guilt

  “SIMULTANEOUSLY INTENSE AND FUNNY AND HARROWING, TEEMING WITH PRECISE AND MEMORABLE CHARACTER STUDIES, TOPPED OFF WITH A SURPRISE ENDING.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune*

  “THE NARRATIVE PLUNGES ON AT BREAKNECK SPEED … a literate, heartfelt, and suspenseful novel of the rough friction of life. I enjoyed the hell out of it.”

  —Newsday

  “A PAGE-TURNING THRILLER … A suspense-filled story with vivid characters and a stunning portrayal of contemporary time and place.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “BIG, SCARY FUN. Fill up the coffee pot and lock the doors before beginning.”

  —Stephen King

  “AN INGENIOUS, WICKEDLY COMIC, AND PAINFULLY SENSITIVE ROLLER COASTER … HAS YOU GASPING FOR AIR … [Klavan] does give you pockets of repose, with somber, heart-wrenching scenes on Death Row juxtaposed with Everett’s bumper-car race to the truth.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “WARNING: Andrew Klavan has an astonishing gift: he can patch his characters into your spine. You’ll be reading this brilliant, riveting, dangerous novel, and suddenly you’ll find that Beachum’s Deathwatch cell has become your own, and there’s no way out of here, you’re not going anywhere until the hour of your own execution, until Klavan’s finished with you. So say your prayers before you open this book.”

  —George Dawes Green, author of The Juror

  “A BREAKNECK ONE-DAY DEATH-ROW COUNTDOWN … [KLAVAN] INCINERATES IMPROBABILITIES WITH BRAVURA BRAVADO.”

  —Toronto Sun

  “A TERRIFIC READ … Klavan is simply shameless in serving the suspense.… For that, and much else, we’d like to thank him.”

  —Daily News

  “True Crime gives the most compelling fictional tour yet of the last mile … readers won’t stop turning pages … Klavan presents with chilling precision and a gift for language the results of his research.”

  —People

  “THE BEST THRILLER OF THIS YEAR … THE MOST INTRIGUING AND ARTFUL I HAVE EVER READ.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “THIS IS ONE NOVEL YOU WON’T PUT DOWN UNTIL THE LAST TWIST HAS BEEN UNRAVELED AND THE LAST OH-SO-SATISFYING PAGE HAS BEEN TURNED.”

  —Associated Press

  “Life shuts down while you’re immersed in this book … it’s a keeper.”

  —Chattanooga Free Press

  “I’ve admired Andrew Klavan’s work for years. But this book offers more suspense—and more surprises—than his other books put together! Readers always ask me which authors I find most chilling. After reading True Crime, Andrew Klavan is at the top of my list.”

  —R.L. Stine

  By the same author

  AS ANDREW KLAVAN

  Son of Man

  Darling Clementine

  Face of the Earth

  Don’t Say a Word

  The Animal Hour

  Corruption

  AS KEITH PETERSON

  The Scarred Man

  Rough Justice

  The Rain

  There Fell a Shadow

  The Trapdoor

  SCREENPLAY

  A Shock to the System

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 1995 by Amalgamated Metaphor, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79121-4

  Reprinted by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  v3.1

  This book is for Bob and Adrienne Hartman

  “Good people are always so sure they’re right.”

  Barbara Graham, on entering California’s gas chamber, where she was executed, some say unjustly, June 3, 1955. (Quoted in Until You Are Dead: The Book of Executions by Frederick Drimmer)

  “I’ll tell you briefly what I think about newspapermen: the hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.”

  Nothing Sacred. Screenplay by Ben Hecht.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Part One - On Dead Man’s Curve Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two - Potato Chips Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Three - A Hippopotamus and Green Pastures Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Four - Editorial Guidance Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Five - Tempo Fugit Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Six - The Guy Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Seven - Frank Beachum’s Confession Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Eight - Philosophical Conversations Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Nine - Strap-Down Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Ten - Ninety-Seven Seconds too Goddamned Late Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  This is not one of those modern works that mingle fact with fiction. All the events and conversations I’ve described here were either witnessed by me or reported to me by one or more of the participants. That said, the reader will quickly become aware that I have not restricted myself to the description of events and conversations alone. This story would not be complete without at least some reference—and sometimes a lot of references—to people’s inner thoughts, feeli
ngs and motives. And, where I’ve sought to describe such things, I confess a certain amount of deduction has necessarily come into play. That is, I’ve had to guess sometimes at what was going on in people’s heads.

  The reason for this is obvious. Excluding maybe God, there’s only ever one witness to a person’s inner life. When that witness is not self-aware or is untrustworthy or is deceased, it becomes very difficult to get at the truth about his emotional world. So with the blind, the dishonest and the dead—and I encountered all three in researching this—I’ve recorded my own impressions. Sometimes I’ve made these deductions explicit, often I hoped the context made them so. In the end, the reader will have to measure the degree to which my understanding of individual human nature is biased or flawed.

  All this, I should add, I take to be a serious breach of the rules of journalism. I’m a newspaperman, a day-to-day reporter. My job, as I see it, is to record what I witness and what people tell me. I try to save my brilliant insights and perceptions for the barroom, where I can impress members of the opposite sex with my depth and sensitivity. But writing a book is different from writing a news story. A book ought to be about something. And wherever I’ve deviated from my usual methods of reporting—wherever I’ve played fast and loose with the literal truth—it had to do with what I think this book is about, and what it’s not about.

  It is not, first of all, about the “issue” of capital punishment. My opinion on that—and on the concept of “issues” in general—is expressed early on in the text, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say, I leave the whole question to those writers who are done impressing the opposite sex and still have some brilliant insights left over.

  Second of all, this book is not about the law. The legal ins and outs of the Frank Beachum case are well detailed in two books by the attorneys involved. Tim Weiss and Hubert Tryon’s The Jaws of Death gives a passionate description of the authors’ efforts for the defense. Prosecutor Walter Cartwright’s The Thirteenth Juror takes a different approach and attacks American journalism in general, and yours truly in particular, for using cheap emotionalism to distort the public’s view of the facts in an attempt to supplant the courts in their proper function. My personal feelings about Cartwright aside, I must admit he makes an excellent argument. In any event, all three of these authors know a lot more about the law than I do, and all three were much closer to that aspect of the story than I ever was.

  Finally, and most important, this book is not a detailed examination of the murder of Amy Wilson. The series of articles I wrote for the St. Louis News and the piece I wrote for The New Yorker that was based on the News articles have pretty well exhausted me on those subjects. Nor will I attempt to refute the recent attacks on my “character” by certain self-styled minority leaders and by columnists on both the religious right and the feminist left. I haven’t tried to hide my “character”—read what follows and I promise you’ll get a face full of it—but my many faults don’t change the facts of the case in the least.

  So that’s what the book is not about. What is it about? It’s about Monday, July 17, of last year: one brutally hot day, and what happened on that day, the day Frank Beachum was rolled into the death chamber at Osage State Correctional Facility.

  The reader might well ask why—when there are such important matters as capital punishment, the law and murder to discuss—why I would choose to tell such a simple story and a story—that of the last hours before a condemned man’s execution—that’s been told so many times before both in journalism and fiction. Well, partly it’s because it’s true and I was there and they paid me to do it. But also, on this day, in these hours, under these circumstances, I found myself an eyewitness to a remarkable confrontation between a number of people—their ideas, their theories, their feelings and perceptions—and an incontrovertible outward reality: Death, destroyer of worlds, jolly muncher of our philosophies. In a business—in a society—so overwhelmed with images and words, with pundits, spin-doctors, experts and jumped-up cultural interpreters of all persuasions, I find it important to remember that such an outward reality exists, that such confrontations do occur, and that even our best ideas, theories, perceptions and feelings may count for exactly nothing in the big old scheme of things.

  So, as I say, I have tried to understand the ideas and perceptions of as many of the participants in this drama as I could in order to show how they were tested. Frank Beachum, of course, was chief among them. He was the one, with his faith in traditional Christianity, and his old-fashioned notions of manhood, who was carried direct into the crucible. But there is also his wife, Bonnie, his jailer, Luther Plunkitt, his minister, Harlan Flowers, assorted pols and lawyers and journalists—and me, naturally, last and, for all I know, least.

  Again, I leave it to the reader to decide how all of us weathered our midnight confrontation with the undeniable.

  I wish to thank all the people who so generously agreed to be interviewed for this book, both those mentioned in the text and others, too numerous to name, who provided background.

  I wish to thank my agent, Barney Karpfinger, for his unfailing support.

  And I wish to thank the Ford Motor Company.

  —Steven Everett

  PART ONE

  ON

  DEAD

  MAN’S

  CURVE

  1

  Frank Beachum awoke from a dream of Independence Day. His last dream before the hour, a cruel dream, really, in a sleep that had been strangely sound, considering. He had been in his backyard again, before his trip to the grocery, before the picnic, before the police had arrived to take him away. The heat of the summer’s morning had come back to him. He had heard the sound of the lawn mower again. He had felt the mower’s handle pressed against his palms and even smelled the mown grass. He had heard her voice too, Bonnie’s voice, as she called to him from the screen door. He had seen her face, her face the way it had been, pert and compact under short, tawny hair, pale—not pretty, she was never pretty—but given luster by her large, tender and encouraging blue eyes. He saw her holding the bottle up, the bottle of A-1 Sauce. She had been waggling it back and forth to show that it was empty. He had stood in his backyard under the hot sun, and his little girl, Gail, had been a baby again. Sitting in her sandbox again, the plastic one shaped like a turtle. Whacking the sand with her shovel and laughing to herself, to the world in general.

  It had all been to Frank as if he were really there. It hadn’t seemed like a dream at all.

  For several moments after he awoke, he lay as he was, on his side, his eyes closed, facing the wall. His mind gripped at the dream, held on to it with terrible longing. But the dream dissolved mercilessly and, bit by bit, the Death-watch cell came back to him. He became aware of the cot beneath his shoulder, the white cinderblock wall just in front of his face. He turned over—half-hoping.… But there were the bars of the cage door. There was the guard on the other side, sitting at his long desk, typing up the chronological: 6:21—prisoner awakes. The clock hung high on the wall above the guard’s bowed head. Seventeen hours and forty minutes were left before they strapped Frank down on the gurney, before they wheeled him into the execution chamber for the injection.

  Frank lay back on the cot and blinked up at the ceiling. The wise Chinaman says that when a man seems to dream of being a butterfly, he may truly be a butterfly dreaming he’s a man. But the wise Chinaman is wrong. Frank knew the difference, all right; he always knew. This leaden weight that encased him like his skin, this inner tonnage of sadness and terror: this was the real stuff; he knew it was the living stuff. He closed his eyes and for another aching second or two, he could still smell the mown grass. But not like he could feel the movement of the clock’s hands, not like his nerve-ends picked up the passing of time.

  He clenched his fists at his sides. If only Bonnie wouldn’t come, he thought. It would be all right, if Bonnie wouldn’t come to say good-bye. And Gail. She was no baby anymore; she was seven now. She drew
him pictures of trees and houses with her Crayolas. “Hey,” he’d say, “that’s really good, sweetheart.”

  That was going to be the worst of it, he thought. Sitting with her, with them, the time passing. That, he was afraid, would be more than he could bear.

  Slowly, he sat up on the edge of his cot. He put his hands over his face as if to rub his eyes, and then kept them there a long moment. That damned dream had made him heartsore with longing for the old days. He had to steady himself or the longing would weaken him. That was his greatest fear. That he would go weak now. If Bonnie saw him break at the end—or, God help him, if Gail did.… It would be with them their whole lives. It would be their memory of him forever.

  He sat up and drew breath. He was a six-foot man, slim and muscular in his loose green prison pants and his baseball shirt stenciled CP-133. He had shaggy brown hair that fell on his brow in a jagged shock. His face was lean and furrowed and he had close-set eyes that were brown, deep and sad. He dragged his thumb across his lips, wiping them dry.

  He felt the guard’s gaze on him and glanced over. The guard had raised his eyes from the typewriter and was looking Frank’s way. Reedy was the guard’s name. A wiry boy with a severe white face. Frank remembered hearing that he had worked at the local drugstore before coming to Osage. He seemed nervous and embarrassed today.

  “Morning, Frank,” he said.

  Frank nodded at him.

  “Can I get you anything? Some breakfast?”

  Frank’s stomach felt bad, but he was hungry all the same. He cleared his throat to keep from sounding hoarse. “If you got a roll and some coffee, I’ll take that,” he said. His voice trembled just a little at the end.