True Crime Read Free Page A

Findley’s respect for her talents. She had a press ticket to witness the execution and had even somehow managed to wangle a last-minute face-to-face interview with the condemned. That interview—I have to say that inspired my respect right there. It violated the prison’s protocol, which cut off press contact with the prisoner even by phone after 4:00 P.M . on the last day. I’d had dealings with Osage’s warden, Luther Plunkitt, and had found him about as flexible on such rules as a brick wall. Michelle must have stripped naked to get permission for that interview, which she would’ve done too; she was thoroughly unscrupulous. I like that in a person.
    The evening before she was scheduled to go down to the prison—that Sunday evening—Michelle strode across the city room to my desk for a professional conference on some of the angles of the case. She tapped her elegant fist against the surface of my desk and smiled with that brand of wry fury that made strong editors quail.
    “Fuck ’em,” she quipped.
    I sighed. I had had a long weekend—people kept shooting each other—and was looking forward to taking tomorrow off. I had just been leaning back in my chair for one lastviolation of the paper’s no-smoking policy before heading home to the little woman. I reached under my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. I did not have the energy for a serious journalistic discussion.
    “I’m through with this,” Michelle went on. “I’m serious.” She paced once, back and forth in the aisle behind me. “I’m going back to school. I’m going to get my Ph.D. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to write things that matter.”
    “Michelle,” I said, “I hate to break this to you, but you’re twenty-three: you don’t know anything that matters.”
    That wry smile again, but she laughed in spite of herself. “And fuck you, Ev,” she said.
    I laughed in spite of her too. I really did like Michelle. “All right,” I said, “what did they do?”
    “He. Alan. Mann.” Three sentences for one guy. She was plenty mad. “The Great White Male of the Universe. He killed my sidebar on the Beachum case. I worked on it for two weeks. He just overrode Bob. Just—overrode him. It was the best thing about the story.”
    I tried to look sympathetic. It wasn’t easy. I’d snuck a look at that sidebar of hers in the computer. It was dyed-in-the-wool Michelle Fire, all right. The angle was that we were only covering Beachum’s execution so closely because he was white and thus we were obscuring the large number of blacks on death row while also deifying Beachum’s pregnant victim in order to mask the patriarchal culture which had created the violence that killed her in the first place. Well, don’t look at me; that was the angle. Personally, I thought Alan had shown unusual restraint by merely killing it. I would’ve tortured it first.
    Michelle stood there, glaring at me, waiting for me to respond, her fist pressed against my desktop again. Finally, to cheer her up, I said, “Well, at least you still get to watch the execution. That’s always kind of a kick.”
    She flushed. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth: her signal that I had transgressed beyond the bounds of human understanding.
    “No, I mean it,” I said. “I did one once in Jersey. They’re exciting. And, hell, considering the people they do it to, you know, it’s really good clean fun.”
    Her mouth still closed, her knuckles rapped against my desk. “I don’t know. Why. I keep talking to you,” she said, as if she had broken a resolution to refrain from that pleasure. “I don’t know why I keep talking to you at all.”
    Whereupon, with a deep breath to still her fury, she left me and went zigzagging off between the city room desks.
    I put my feet up on my own desk and went on smoking. To be honest, I didn’t know why she kept talking to me either. But she did. I suppose it was yet another of life’s many mysteries.
    Michelle