Benson put his hand on my arm again, but for another second or two I resisted the pressure toward the door.
“It wasn’t my story,” I told her. “There was an accident … Dead Man’s Curve … It wasn’t supposed to be my story.”
Then I was pushed out into the hall.
3
Luther Plunkitt was waiting for me when I returned to the visitor’s entrance. This, I understood, was not a good sign. Life gets tense in a prison on execution day. Prisoners are angry, guards are nervous, security is tight and everyone’s stomach is jumpy. Plunkitt would have been informed on the double that I’d started a small disturbance in the Deathwatch cell. Questions had been asked, voices had been raised. It would not have made him a happy guy.
But that was the eerie thing about Plunkitt. You couldn’t really tell if he was happy or not. He greeted me with an outstretched hand, with a small, thin-lipped smile frozen on his face. The wrinkled putty of his features seemed genial enough and every silver hair was in place. Only those gray eyes, set way down in the clay under his strong brow, were metallic and expressionless. I didn’t know whether he was about to shake my hand or rip my throat out. There was no question in my mind that he was capable of doing either. He shook my hand, in the event. “Everett,” he said.
“Superintendent,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
He put his hands casually in the pockets of his pants. We walked side by side through the glass doors, out into the parking lot. The heat of the sun hit me at once. The suffocating stillness of the air closed over me more slowly. All the same, it was good to be out of the prison. I could hear cicadas singing loudly from all around the lot and a pair of swallows swooped and dived over by the walls, above the barbed wire. It was good.
Plunkitt smiled up into the blenched sky, spoke up at the cloudless blue. “Sorry to hear about Ms. Ziegler. Any word on her is there?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I’ve heard. She’s still in a coma.”
“That’s a shame, that’s a shame. These cars nowadays. All you gotta do is breath on em …”
I nodded. We crossed the baking asphalt toward my Tempo.
“You get your interview all right?” he asked me.
“I did, yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. The paper appreciates it.”
He seemed to give this remark a good thinking over, scanning the distance now, reviewing the gray walls of the prison, the gates, the guardtowers.
“You know,” he said musingly, “Ms. Ziegler gave me to understand that she was interested in talking to Beachum about, you know, his feelings, his emotions, before his execution. Human interest stuff. That was what we agreed to beforehand. Cause otherwise, you know, we do most press interviews by phone at this point. There’s less risk of upsetting the prisoner.”
I nodded. I understood. I had been rebuked. But gently. Plunkitt was a man who measured his words carefully. He wanted to maintain his good relations with the press. He wouldn’t have spoken to me like this unless he was genuinely angry. I could only hope he wouldn’t call Bob to complain.
I felt the sun beating down on my head and curling up from beneath my feet. I felt the sweat gathering in my sideburns, under the wire arms of my glasses. I pushed them back to keep them from sliding down my nose. “Well, you know, I was put on this story kind of at the last minute,” I said. “With the accident and everything.” Squeezing every drop of charity I could from him. “I probably wasn’t as prepped as I should’ve been. I hope I haven’t thrown a wrench into the works or anything.”
“No, no, no,” he said amiably enough. And, as we reached the edge of my car, he put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze. We faced each other by the Tempo’s fender.
“But you know how it is,” he said in a conversational tone. Smiling. “People come in here, the press. The prisoners tell em things. They’re in a position, you know, to say all kinds of heart-wrenching things. And us-we got a job to do, so we come across as the hard guys. And then that’s what we read the next day in the paper. It can get pretty frustrating, that’s all. Times like this, everyone’s a little extra sensitive to it. That’s all.” His thin, empty smile widened slightly, a red slice in the putty. “This isn’t easy on us either, you know. We have to do what the state tells us. The state has to do what the people want and so on.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
“And, you know, it goes through a lot of processes, trial, appeal and so on before it gets to us. Makes it a little tough on us here if we’re going to show up in the newspaper as bloodthirsty murderers or anything like that.” He chuckled flatly.
“No, yes, of course not, no,” I said, or words to that effect.
“Anyway, I know you’re a smart guy, Steve,” he said. “I read your stuff. You always get it pretty much right so I’m not too concerned. I just haven’t seen you in a while, thought I’d come out and say hello.”
“Right. I understand. I’m glad you did,” I lied. “It’s good to see you.”
We stood there another second or two, smiling at each other, the heat turning our flesh to paste. He was sweating too, I noticed gratefully, clean crystal beads of it glistening in the folds of his forehead, on his temples.
A vee of ducks passed over us, quacking, but neither of us raised our eyes. I began to notice that this silence of ours was stretching out a very long time. Was there something else he wanted to say? I wondered. But there was no clue in the gemmy emptiness of his gaze.
“Well …” he said.
And the thought hit me suddenly, out of nowhere: He knows! Jesus. He knows too.
It was a dreadful idea, and I shook it off. I told myself it was my imagination. How could he know? How could he bear it if he knew. If he knew, and had to pull the trigger just the same.
Plunkitt slapped my shoulder again. “You drive safely now,” he said.
And I stood watching, my lips parted, as his back receded from me toward the prison doors.
4
Plunkitt walked back to the Death House. He came down the corridor to the Deathwatch cell, but he didn’t stop there. He went on until he reached another corner. He turned, and headed down another hall. There was another door with another guard stationed there. The guard’s name was Haggerty. A paunchy older man, a pasty Irishman. A veteran tough guy who’d come down here after the layoffs in Jeff City.
“Hal,” Luther said to him quietly. “You’re looking sharp.”
Haggerty grinned acidly with one side of his mouth-it was the only grin he had. He unlocked the door for the superintendent and held it open, grinning. Luther went inside.
The room he entered looked pretty much like a doctor’s examining room, which is what it had once been. Its white cinderblock walls were scrubbed clean. There was a white sink in the corner and a white folding screen spread against the lefthand wall. There was a metal door on the right that led into a neighboring storage closet. And there was a hospital gurney standing in the center of the floor.
There were straps on the gurney, heavy leather straps. There was a window against the back wall with white blinds that could be pulled down over it. There was a mirror on the right: a one-way glass so you could stand in the storage closet and look through. And beneath the mirror, there was a hole in the wall. Tubes ran out of the hole from the storage closet and were draped over an IV stand attached to one corner of the gurney.
Luther crossed the threshold and stopped. He stood where he was with his hands in his pockets. He smiled blandly down at the gurney. He heard the door shut at his back. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t change. He looked down at the gurney and, after a moment or two, he removed one hand from his pocket. There was a handkerchief gripped in the hand. He wiped his face with it and it came away damp. He considered the damp handkerchief, its sweat-gray fabric. This heat, he thought. I do hate this goddamned heat.