True Crime Page 3

  She grimaced as her bowels roiled. She needed to go to the bathroom badly, but she didn’t want to stop. She wanted to get home and shower her own idiocy off her and start again and make it right and make Alan Mann eat her pieces word by word. She was going to go on talking to Everett, she thought. Everett was going to teach her. He was the best of them, bastard that he was, and she was going to make him teach her everything he knew. Then he could make his stupid jokes. Then he could watch her dust. She pressed the gas down. The high rises passed, the parkland, gas stations, quaint little enclaves of brick cafes. They all went by in a vague, peripheral jumble. Michelle’s large eyes glowed with determination. Her lips turned upward in a determined smile. Yes, she thought.

  And then she hit Dead Man’s Curve.

  That’s what the locals always called it. The newspapers called it that sometimes too. It was not a very original name, I guess, but it was accurate enough. Here, just at the city border, the road swept left in a long, wide sudden arc. The speeding traffic wheeled round it in a seemingly endless swing onto the parkway, with nothing but a gas station car lot to the right where the turn reached its apex. Lots of cars had spun out of control there. There’d been two fatals on the very spot within the last year and a half. Michelle hit the curve at full speed, her mind elsewhere. She was squinting, with only one hand on the steering wheel, while the other massaged her belly.

  At the height of the bend, the Datsun’s rear tires lost their grip on the road. Michelle felt the back of the car fly wide behind her. She jerked awake, afraid, swung the wheel in the opposite direction—just the wrong thing to do. The car zigzagged violently and, as the road continued to curve, the Datsun sailed on straight ahead. It jumped the curb and skimmed over the sidewalk into the car lot. The stretch of asphalt there was slick with runoff from the gas pumps. The Datsun started to spin. It seemed to pick up speed. Michelle wrestled desperately with the steering wheel. It had no effect. The car came full around. The white wall of the gas station garage grew huge in the windshield.

  Michelle let out one high-pitched scream: “Please!”

  The car smashed headlights-first into the wall.

  Michelle was fired out of her seat like a rocket. She smashed into the windshield and the glass exploded. Her flesh ripped apart by the impact, her bones snapping like twigs, her bowels and bladder releasing, she lost consciousness. Her body thumped onto the crumpled hood like a laundry sack. Her blue blouse was quickly soaked with red.

  She lay there, still, as smoke and steam hissed up around her.

  3

  It was almost 10:00 A.M. when Bob Findley got the call at the city desk. He set the phone down and sat for a moment, gazing out at the quiet room. It was a vast maze of brown desks with tan computer terminals rising from them. It was lit with a bland, hazy light by the fluorescents hidden behind the white plastic panels of the ceiling.

  Bob took a deep breath, arranging his inner self. He was not sure, at first, how he wanted to react. Findley had a reputation for self-control and that reputation was very important to him. He was both young and in charge of the place and he wanted the staff to see him as the ultimate in calm. He never raised his voice or spoke faster than he could reason, especially in an emergency or under deadline. He liked to make quiet, ironical remarks in the midst of chaos so that anyone who was feeling frantic would trust he had the situation well in hand. Most of the time he did have it in hand. He was a good city editor. Smart, knowledgeable. A little inexperienced but ready to listen to advice. If anything, I guess, some of us sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t a little too contained. He had a round, pink, boyish face and it would grow bright red when he was angry, even as he went on speaking in his gentle tones. Some of us sometimes wondered whether it was just going to blow right off his neck one day like a pricked balloon.

  But along with appearing calm, it was also important to Bob to be nice: caring, he called it. He was very caring. He worked hard at it. He even managed to look the part somehow: slender, soft-bodied, soft-featured under a bowl of brown hair. Always in a pressed shirt—a blue workshirt or a dressier pink—with a cheerful tie and no jacket; slacks. Casual, but serious; thoughtful; nice. Caring. His editorial stance, like his personal opinions, was always on the humane, liberal side of any issue. He thought that everyone would be humane and liberal if they would just take the time to think things through. That was our Bob.

  And so now, as he hung up the phone, it was a bit difficult for him to find the proper reaction. If he was too calm, then he wouldn’t be caring. If he was too caring, then he wouldn’t be calm. After a moment, he ran a hand thoughtfully over his chin. He raised his eyebrows. “Whoo boy,” he murmured.

  The assistant city editor, Jane March, glanced up quickly from her terminal. Knowing Bob, hearing a remark like that, she figured a plane had crashed into Busch Stadium or something.

  “Is Alan in yet?” he asked her softly.

  Really curious now, she moved her head toward the hallway. “He just went for coffee.”

  Bob nodded slowly, considering. Carefully, he stood up. He walked out of the city room at a measured pace, heading down the hall in the direction of the cafeteria.

  He met up with Alan Mann in the corridor. Alan was bulling his way back to his office. He had a styro of black coffee in one hand and a huge slab of crumb cake hidden in a bag in his jacket pocket. When Bob stopped him, Alan’s free hand touched the pocket protectively.

  Alan was our editor-in-chief, a man in his fifties. At six foot two, he towered over Bob Findley. He had broad shoulders and the rest of him was fit and thin except for his belly, which stuck out above and below his belt like some kind of tumor, round as a volleyball. He had a narrow, beaked face and a big forehead with bushy eyebrows. Accipitrine—like a hawk: that was Alan.

  Bob stood close to him and spoke very quietly up at his lowering brow. “I just got a call from Michelle Ziegler’s brother.” He gestured with his open right hand, as he often did, as if admonishing everyone to stay calm. “Michelle has been in a car accident.”

  Alan scowled. “How bad?”

  “Bad,” said Bob, gesturing with his hand some more. “She’s in critical. Right now, the doctors don’t think she’s going to make it.”

  For a long moment, Alan kept glaring down at him as if he hadn’t spoken. Then, with a disgusted shake of his head, he walked right past him, right down the hall without making any answer. Bob trailed after him slowly, back into the city room.

  Jane March watched the two men closely as they went into Alan’s office. When Bob shut the door, she whispered: “Damn!” Alan had the blinds drawn over the glass walls. He had wanted to come back and eat his crumb cake without being seen. From the city desk, Jane could only make out their shadows moving on the white blinds.

  Inside the office, Alan Mann went around his desk. He still hadn’t said anything. He set his coffee on the desktop. Then he drew the crumb cake bag out of his pocket and slapped it down too with a declarative force: matters, he felt, had moved beyond such petty deceptions. He flumped into his swivel chair. He frowned darkly.

  Finally, he said: “That dumb bitch. What was she, drunk?”

  Bob gave a pained smile. Alan had hired him, Alan was his mentor, and, having seen gruff editors-in-chief on television, Bob generally assumed that Alan had a heart of gold like they did. Because of this, Bob felt he could be big enough not to despise Alan. But, all the same, secretly, he felt the world would be a more civilized place when dinosaurs like Alan Mann became extinct and everyone was more or less as caring as he was.

  “I don’t know,” Bob answered him now, gently. “It was up at that vicious turn onto the parkway. They really should do something about that.”

  Alan knew, of course, exactly how Bob thought of him and played his part to the hilt.

  “That dumb bitch,” he said again. “What was she on today?”

  Bob didn’t understand the question.

  “Do we have to cover for her?” Alan said.
“Did she have anything big on?”

  “Oh …” Bob was taken aback. Not that he hadn’t considered this, he’d just figured they would express their grief for a while before discussing it. “She had that interview with Frank Beachum at Osage.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s right. They’re putting the juice in old Frank tonight, aren’t they?” Alan chuckled. He pried the lid off his coffee cup and sat back with it in his high leather chair. He leaned his head on the headrest and gazed up at the white ceiling, thinking. “Did Ziegler have a seat for the show?”

  “Yeah. She was going to go down and do the interview, then come back, then go down again at night to witness the execution.”

  “Christ. Why me?”

  Bob laughed. “I think it’s a little worse for Michelle, Alan.”

  Alan only grumbled into his coffee.

  Bob said, “I don’t know if the warden’ll go for a replacement on the interview. Or if Beachum will, for that matter. But the witness spot is assigned to the paper; we can send anyone we want. I thought I’d take Harvey off the fraud meeting and put …”

  “Put Everett on it,” Alan said. “The interview and the execution, both. Put him on both.”

  Alan sipped his coffee, letting the blow sink deep. Drawing out the moment. He knew how Bob felt about me.

  “Steve’s not here,” Bob said, quickly, but without much hope. “He was on the cops all weekend. He’s got the day off.”

  “Not anymore he hasn’t. We need him. Whatshisname, down at Osage, the warden—Plunkitt—Steve’s dealt with him before. I can get him in. And Beachum’s not gonna care who he talks to.” He sipped his coffee again. He loved arguments like this.

  But Bob felt wary, he felt he had to be careful. He didn’t feel it would be politic to run me down. Alan Mann and I were friends, good friends; we went way back. Alan had been a professor when I first came to Columbia. Later on, he left to take a job as a city editor and, when I graduated, he helped me get a job at the paper where he worked. We were there together for five years before he returned to his native Missouri. And when he heard I’d been fired and couldn’t find a spot in New York anymore, he called me up and urged me to come join him at the News. We’d always got along, the two of us, despite the difference in our ages. We drank together after work sometimes. Our families had Sunday dinners together. All the same, Bob felt strongly about this—and he never backed away from a confrontation with anyone who scared him as much as Alan did. It was a point of honor.

  “I’m sure I can get Harvey past Plunkitt too,” he said in his soft, reasonable voice. “Plunkitt prides himself on his good relations with the press.”

  “And you think Everett’s an asshole,” Alan said.

  “I don’t think he’s an asshole …”

  “You’re wrong. He is an asshole. Trust me: I know him. A lot of people who’re good at their jobs are assholes, Bob.”

  Bob raised his hand in that calming gesture. “I know that, Alan.”

  “If I had to run this paper without assholes, it’d be a circular.”

  Bob smiled, by way of appeasement. But he wasn’t giving up. “It’s just that I think Everett is stronger on the news angles. I don’t mind him covering the execution itself. But the interview, basically, is a feature sidebar. Michelle was looking for some emotional stuff to tag her story with.”

  “Her story?” said Alan loudly. “The Incoming Michelle Fire?” He set his styro down on the desk. He was really getting into this now. “Listen. I think it stinks that Michelle’s gonna die. A girl in her twenties? If I ran the world that’d never happen, believe me. But all the same, you know Michelle’s sidebars as well as I do. She wouldn’t know a good angle if it bit her on her college-girl ass. Everett would.”

  “A news angle, but this is an issue piece.”

  Alan reared up, wide-eyed. “An issue piece? Whoa! Dog my cats! An issue piece.”

  “Come on, Alan …”

  “What’s the issue?”

  “Capital punishment is the issue. I mean, the state is putting a man to death tonight, Alan.”

  “An issue piece. Well, stone the crows.”

  “And Harvey’s much better on that kind of thing. If Plunkitt won’t let him in for the interview, we’ll do it over the phone.”

  “An issue piece.” Alan tilted back in his chair, hardly able to contain his glee.

  Bob was beginning to feel a little desperate, and a little angry too. He had his own reasons for not wanting to call me in, most of them emotional. But you know the way arguments go: he had made up some logical excuses to explain his feelings, and now he believed in them. He felt they were self-evident. He felt that anyone who disagreed was missing the point. And explaining these things to you as if you were a child was one of Bob’s personal failings.

  So he said, very deliberately, raising that open hand of his again, “Look: this guy, Beachum, he isn’t gonna give us any news. He’s not gonna tell us any information we haven’t heard before. That’s not the point. The point is—on a story like this—we want people to get the feel of what it’s like to be waiting for the state to pump poison into your arm. I mean, we execute people every couple of months in this state and it usually winds up on page three of the regional, maybe the front of the metro. Now, all right, this is a St. Louis story, which makes it bigger for us. But the only way to justify making it this big is to humanize this guy, to get at the humanity of the whole filthy thing. We want to make the reader understand that this is what capital punishment is: it’s killing another human being. And yes, I think that’s an important issue.”

  “You do, huh?” said Alan, hoisting one heavy brow. “And what about Amy Whatsherface, the pregnant broad old Frankie boy shot in the throat? What about her humanity? Is that part of the issue?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I mean, we had Everett in here all weekend because sixteen people were shot in two days—sixteen—four of them dead. What about that issue?”

  “All right, well, that’s an issue too.”

  “Michelle thought the issue was pee-pees and woo-woos, I don’t know what-all the hell she thought. So who’s gonna get to call what the issue is in this issue piece?” Practically leering, Alan came forward in his chair. He loved this, he loved it. He grabbed the greasy bag on his desk; he couldn’t resist anymore. “You want a piece of crumb cake?”

  “No,” said Bob. “No.”

  Alan pulled the cake slab out and chomped it. “Let me tell you something,” he mumbled around the mouthful. “Issues—issues are what we make up to give us an excuse to run good stories. A judge grabs an attorney’s breasts, it’s the sex discrimination issue. A nine-year-old shoots his brother with an Uzi, it’s the child violence issue. People want to read about sex organs and blood and we make issues out of them to give them an excuse. That’s what makes us a quality paper instead of a cheap tabloid: hypocrisy.”

  Bob threw up his hands and indulged in some of his gentle irony. “Well, then I guess I should call Steve,” he said softly. “That describes his attitude exactly.”

  Alan sat back again, leisurely, chewing, crumb cake in hand. His brooding, hawklike face was angled upward, eyebrows to chin. A second breakfast, a journalistic argument, a chance to dominate Bob: aside from one of his reporters getting herself killed, this was turning out to be a jolly old morning after all. “Let me tell you something about Steve Everett,” he said, brushing crumbs off his tie with his free hand. “You know why he was kicked out of New York? Do you know this story?”

  Bob admitted he didn’t.

  “He busted the mayor,” Alan said. “During the scandals? The mayor of fucking New York. Steve got hold of a secret memo on a contract bribe between hizzoner and one of the ex-borough presidents. The borough president was ready to back it up too. He didn’t care: he’d already been convicted. Steve went with it in his column. And the next morning: no column. The paper killed it. Steve comes in and raises hell and all of a sudden he finds himself called on the carpet be
fore the boys upstairs. Surprise, surprise—what do you know? It turns out the paper’s owner is in bed with the mayor. Like some kind of real estate, zoning thing; I don’t know what-all. Steve went ballistic. He says the column runs or he walks. And that’s how the mayor retired with honor and why the city of St. Louis is graced with Everett’s august presence this very day.”

  Alan popped the last hunk of crumb cake into his mouth and licked the tips of his fingers like a big, satisfied cat. Next to dancing with his wife, toying with the minds of his underlings was one of his chief pleasures in life. And with Bob especially; I guess because he was so serious, so earnest. This story about me, for instance—an honest reporter getting run out of town by dirty politicians: it was something that would happen in a movie. It would be what they call the hero’s “backstory,” the stuff that happened before the movie starts. The editor-in-chief would reveal it to the city editor about fifteen minutes in, and then you’d know the hero was a good guy, in spite of his quirks; a guy you could trust.

  Unfortunately, in my case, it was total bullshit. It never happened. Alan just made it up because he knew it would gall Bob to think of me like that, like some kind of movie hero. He knew it would make Bob squirm.

  Bob squirmed, standing there before the desk, his round, pink face a blank. Smart as he was, articulate as he was, he did love the movies, and that heroic image of me hit him hard, ate at him, left him speechless. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his khaki slacks. Alan really could be a bastard sometimes.

  “All right,” Bob said after a while—and Alan nearly cracked up watching him choke on it. “All right. Whatever you want. I’ll try and reach Everett at home.”