Creamy White Thighs

Sixteen hours earlier, Tim Flynn sat near the back of Room One-Twelve, shoulder to shoulder with the others in the audience. Most in the room watched raptly the performance of the towering ex-governor defending the scowling judge, but Flynn’s eyes barely focused on the activity up front. His ears heard the sounds but his mind didn’t bother to translate them, turned inward as it was on his own bitter thoughts. He hadn’t come here to witness the clusterfuck that was the impeachment hearing, an issue about which he gave not a rat's ass. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was being blithely dismantled by a legislative body sworn to uphold it, what was the fate of some fish-faced old judge next to that? Flynn had slipped into the hearing room only because the crowd enabled him to escape the scrutiny of the capitol security guards who'd been shadowing him since the night that House Bill Forty-Seven died on the House floor, victim of that liberal old Jew fart Weinberg and his malicious ostrich amendment—the night they dragged Flynn, shouting and kicking, from the House gallery by his upper arms.

The next day they barred him at the building's entrance, until he complained to the Secretary of State's office and threatened to sue or, worse, hold a press conference. A registered lobbyist was being barred from the Statehouse, the People's House, merely for raising his voice in defense of liberty. That was a story, boys! The security people, well attuned these days to the dangers of angry gun enthusiasts in public places, were having none of it, but the Secretary of State's people, who worked for a politician and were more attuned to the dangers of press conferences, said: Well, let's just talk about this. Flynn humbly promised to behave while in the capitol, working hard to keep the bile from his voice as he made the vow. It was, he thought, what happens when you start fucking with the Constitution: You end up with patriots scraping and bowing to bureaucrats. The Secretary of State's people ultimately overruled the security people and instructed them to let Flynn enter the building as long as he agreed there would be no further conflict. Glowering security officers had since been tailing him each time he came in, following him from a few paces back, not bothering to disguise what they were doing, even standing outside the men's room each time he went in and resuming the slow-motion chase when he emerged. They had to obey the Secretary of State's office but they didn't have to like it. The crowd in Room One-Twelve provided a respite: The security guards couldn't very well stand there glowering at him in the middle of such a crowded room.

Flynn looked at the reporters, most of them near the front of the crowd, eyes tucked into their notebooks, writing and listening and writing some more. The smart-alecky black guy and goateed slob guy and the skinny young possibly gay guy and others. Writing and listening and looking bored. They wore those blithely bored expressions all the time, Flynn now realized: the expressions of those who are too jaded and unflappable to be impressed with anything, even a frontal attack on the Second Amendment and constitutional government and freedom itself.

The reporters were the focus of Tim Flynn's bitterness today, even more so than the security guards, since his conversation in the press room lobby that morning. He went in planning to Blow the Lid off the inexcusable trickery he had witnessed in the House, Weinberg's ostrich amendment. Almost every other state in the nation allowed citizens to practice their Constitutional right—nay, their God-given right—to carry protection on their persons. And here, still, sat the People's Republic of Illinois, utterly unprotected. It was an outrage. House Bill Forty-Seven was supposed to change all that. And it had the votes to pass. And one liberal old lunatic with a burr up his ass about guns had stopped it.

Flynn didn't expect the reporters to side with him on the issue of guns, per se. He suspected that their view on even that urgent and overriding issue was, like their views on most issues, ambivalent. Flynn had watched the reporters closely now for a few years, looking for signs of the pinko-ness that everyone knew reporters harbored, and he had mostly been disappointed. He'd not found solid confirmation of liberal ideology. In fact, he'd not found any indication of any ideology at all. They weren't, as he'd once assumed, cheerleaders for the Left. They were, instead, like half-drunk bleacher bums sitting high in the stands, not particularly caring which team wins, not even particularly caring if they saw a good game, mainly just wanting something to sneer at—a broken bat, a dropped pop fly, or best of all a dugout-clearing fight. This discovery had taken some of the wind out of Flynn's sails early on. He yearned for a worthy ideological adversary for his cause and the lackadaisical, coffee-swilling cynics of the press room were a pathetic stand-in.

But he also learned the one thing that got their pulses going: when they were able to attack power. They didn't particularly care from which end of the ideological spectrum the power originated, they just liked kicking it in the shins. He'd seen it again and again, the way they encircled and attacked anyone in power who showed any sign of weakness. They were sharks, attuned to blood in the water. Apathetic, lazy, badly dressed sharks, to be sure, but sharks nonetheless. Justice Temple, or whatever the hell his name was, was only the latest victim to be ripped apart. The judge was a Republican, had he read that somewhere? That was incidental, Flynn knew. Those press room sharks were just as happy to snack on a Democrat, if one was offered up to them in such a way that they didn't have to work too hard to get to him. Flynn was going to make sure they didn't have to work too hard to get to State Representative Stuart Weinberg. Flynn hadn't cared in the least about the amendment, he'd have been glad to have the ostrich as the state bird of Illinois—who fucking cared what the state bird was?—but Representative Homer had cared enough to give up the fight. Something to do with pig farmers, which Flynn still didn't fully understand, but which Weinberg obviously did. And just like that, a bill with the votes to pass had been defeated. Because of pigs. And ostriches. And one old liberal loudmouth from Chica-aaa-go who had probably never fired a gun in his life!

Flynn told the assembled reporters in the press room: “It's a great story! You can sock it to one of the most powerful members of the House!” He knew that would fly better than trying to get them outraged about the Second Amendment. Their outrage tolerance was just too high. He said: “You've got the senior member of the House perverting the process! `Ostrich amendment'? Are you fucking kidding me? Sheesh, it doesn't even matter what you think about guns! What a cynical asshole! What a power-play!” That one, it seemed, almost hooked the black guy from public radio. He half-grinned, and said: “ `Ostrich amendment.' When you put it that way, it is pretty funny.” Then the short, heavy but not unattractive woman from the Peoria Post chimed in: “Weinberg. That preachy old prick!” Even the famously lazy guy from the Springfield newspaper, the one with the goatee who looked like he never bathed, had looked interested.

That was when Flynn committed his fatal error. He pulled out from his knapsack a copy of House Bill Forty-Seven—all one-hundred-forty-eight pages of it—and said: “This is the bill he killed. It's important. It might be most important bill that's ever come through this Capitol. And he killed it, just like that, with his damned little ostrich game!”

The black guy and the lazy goateed guy and the heavy but not unattractive woman all looked at the thick ream of House Bill Forty-Seven as if it was covered in slime. We have to wade into that?, said their expressions. Flynn found himself turning the bill so the cover page faced them, so they wouldn't see how thick it was, but it was too late. That's too much effort, to go through all that, said their expressions. The black guy said: “Wow. Big bill.” Then the lazy goateed guy changed the subject, saying something about baseball, and then the black guy said something about golf. And then the heavy woman nodded in Flynn's direction and said: “Leave it here. We'll look at it.” He did. They didn't.

Now, sitting in Room One-Twelve, Flynn glowered at the crowd surrounding him, in their shorts and gym shoes and competing Cubs and Cardinals caps, all of them watching this spectacle of democracy, a judicial impeachment hearing, as if it was a movie. Not a serious movie, either, but what Hollywood types called a “popcorn movie.” They fidgeted, whispered among themselves, snickered when the proceedings provided the slightest excuse to, ogling Chief Justice James Temple—Tupple, Tippler, whatever—like a star villain. All that was missing was the popcorn. Looking around at them, Flynn understood why the reporters were the way they were: because their readers were like this. No wonder he couldn't get any of the reporters interested in this indefensible assault on the Second Amendment. They would have to explain a complex issue to the MENSA members who made up their readership. Flynn glanced down the row to see a middle-aged, be-gutted man in a too-tight Simpsons t-shirt positioning his head next to Lincoln's head in a portrait that hung on the nearby wall, and make a facial expression exaggerating Lincoln's—one eyebrow raised, mouth tightened, somber deliberation in his eyes, though on the face of the t-shirt wearer it looked more like constipation—while his fat, fanny-pack-wearing wife snorted a giggle and snapped his picture. Flynn thought: Looky there! A couple of constitutional scholars!
Claire gathered her things from her desk—notebook, two pens, car keys, the printed directions to the prison. She glanced at the clock on the wall: too early to leave yet. She’d cleared the day to ensure she wouldn’t be late and now found herself with an overabundance of time. It was an issue she’d been mulling a lot lately: time, and the fact that, ultimately, everyone was running out of it, her included, and yet here she was with too much of it. She supposed she could stretch out dinner on the way there, though she wasn’t sure she could eat. She turned off the lights, flipped the thumb bolt and, before pulling the door closed behind her, looked around the small darkened office and thought: The next time I’m here, he’ll be dead.

She stepped into the press room lobby to find a knot of reporters standing at the front counter, peering down at a splayed gray newspaper like boy scouts trying to spark a campfire. She noted, with dawning curiosity, that the paper they were looking at was The New York Times. The conversation was muttered and dark. Worm said: “I don’t believe it. That Ivy-league cocksucker.” Colleen, acidly: “Well, why’d you dumbshits let him in?” They scanned the pages urgently as Macy turned them one by one, searching. It was Julian who finally pointed and said: “There!” They all leaned in, eagerly.

Claire, not eager but curious enough now to look, leaned in with the rest of them, and found it: A Springfield, Ill., dateline, topped with the headline: Two Branches of Illinois Government Collide Over Controversial Judge’s Fate. The byline: By Martin J. Cobble.

Macy, reading broken pieces of it aloud: “ `. . . State capitol in Springfield . . . first impeachment vote since Lincoln strolled these dusty streets . . . ’ ”

Worm, savagely: “Oh, how poetic!”

Macy: “Here it is—`Under the silver dome of the capitol these days, the politicians and reporters work amid a crush of tourists drawn by the Tipple hearings, their baseball caps firmly in place, their colorful shorts showing off white, creamy thighs.’ ”

The gathered reporters looked around at each other, their faces filled first with confusion, then with revelation.

It was Zack Carson who finally put the words to it, in a hushed tone of wonder: “He got it wrong.”

Then Worm, more loudly, grinning widely: “He got it wrooooong!”

Claire leaned in to look at the words again. She had seen Cobble at the hearings and earlier at the taking of Baby John, had marveled at his stature and wondered about his life, as had the rest of them. She said, almost to herself: “He actually got our bet into The New York Times?”

Colleen corrected her, with glee: “No, he lost our bet in The New York Times! The words are in the wrong order!”

Worm, nodding: “ `Creamy white thighs,’ not `white, creamy thighs.’ ’’

Shiny O’Shaughnessy said, hesitantly, tentatively: “Well, the words are all there, though.”

After a moment, he added: “I mean—this does seem like kind of a technicality.”

Then, in response to their glares: “I’m just saying.”

Then, just saying: “Maybe we should give it to him. But with, like, an asterisk or something.”

“What are you, the fucking baseball commissioner?” growled Colleen. “He got it wrong!”

All eyes turned to Macy, some with deep red warning in them. Macy read the passage one more time, slowly, carefully. Then he looked up at them and ruled flatly: “The bet was `creamy white thighs.’ This doesn’t say that.”

The reporters dispersed, trading laughter and high-fives all around, except from Claire, who agreed with Shiny: Cobble had gotten the words into the paper, an amazing achievement considering the paper they were talking about. Surely the gauntlet of editors that had to be navigated at The New York Times was more daunting than that of any other paper in the world. And he’d done it, possibly at risk to his epic summit of a career. And now she and her Springfield cohorts were going to yank the trophy away from him based on what was, by any sober standard, the most meaningless of technicalities. It wasn’t right. She knew that, and it galled her, in a small way, for a short time, though it turned out her outrage had little stamina to it. She couldn’t keep it going even when she heard Colleen’s victory call echoing from down the hall: “ `All the news that’s fit to print,’ my aaa-asssss!”
It was an hour later that Larry “Shiny” O'Shaughnessey stepped back into the press room lobby from his cubbyhole office, leading with his coffee cup, and saw the small wiry figure standing at the bulletin board, his back to him, studying the press releases. It took Larry a moment to recognize the tightly cropped back of that head as belonging to Tim Flynn—t-shirt-clad gun lobbyist, he of the cardboard Guns Save Lives! signs, patron saint of House Bill Forty-Seven. Flynn didn't turn to face him, even when Larry deliberately let his coffee mug click loudly against the counter. Only when Larry cleared his throat did Flynn glance over his shoulder, give a small tense nod, and turn back to the bulletin board.

Larry thought: Crazy Tim Flynn.

Flynn had always struck Larry as a little menacing and a little comical and maybe a little tragic, but now he struck him mainly as the latest indignity in a career full of them. Larry was surrounded, it seemed, by indignities in the form of condescending colleagues and dishonest sources and dehumanizing editors and a lazy uncaring readership whose attention he couldn't seem to get no matter how hard he worked for them. Not long ago he'd come into the ranks of the Fourth Estate as eager and excited as a child on Christmas morning, had come in ready to fight for the hallowed principles of the First Amendment and the storied legacy of The Press, ready to immerse himself in a career that mattered, and what he found himself immersed in instead was irrelevance. And indignity. Why not have to share his morning coffee with a crazy gun lobbyist as well? That was, in fact, the least of the current indignities. Larry had received the memo the previous day, along with the rest of dwindling, bedraggled army of U.N.I. reporters: Their pay was being cut again. Competition from the online sector, said the memo. A matter of “survival,” said the memo. That's what all it all came down to now: not principles, not legacy, but survival. It was what had driven him that very morning to reconsider Debbie’s persistent lobbying about her uncle in New York and the possible job at the public relations firm there—the kind of sellout job that Larry wouldn't have even considered mere weeks ago, but which now was looking more and more like an acceptable survival strategy.

Larry filled his cup with the good coffee, then stood looking at the back of Flynn's head, waiting. Larry knew Macy was hennish about his press room lobby, he didn't like politicians or lobbyists loitering around for no reason, but Macy wasn't here. Larry's default approach to most human interaction had always been Live and Let Live, but right now, it was more like Live and Get the Hell Out of My Space, You Lunatic. Larry cleared his throat again, and said: “Tim. Can I help you?”

Tim Flynn didn't answer. He continued looking at the bulletin board.

Larry noticed now that the portion of the bulletin board where Flynn was directing his stare had no press releases hanging from it.

Flynn was staring at cork.

A small chill danced along the nape of Larry’s neck.

Flynn spun around, a guttural shriek rising from his throat, both hands extended in front of him. Larry knew before he saw it what was in his hands. The gun was black, short, square.

Flynn screamed: “Don't move!”

Larry, arms up, screamed: “I'm not moving!” He still held his cup, but most of the coffee had rained over the paper-thin carpet, burning Larry’s arm on the way down.

Flynn stood like that, gun forward, as if unsure what to say next. Then he shouted: “You guys are gonna print the truth about House Bill Forty-Seven!”

Larry, barely noticing the wet hot pain along his forearm from the coffee, shouted back: “We will! We'll print the truth!”

Flynn, shouting: “Weinberg's amendment was out of order!”

Larry, shouting in agreement: “Totally out of order!”

Macy and Colleen appeared from the back hallway. They froze. Flynn spun to point the gun at them. He screamed: “Don't move!”

Colleen said, with a calmness that Larry found outrageous: “We're not moving, Tim.” Then: “What do you want?”

Flynn yelled: “I want House Bill Forty-Seven re-assigned to the Criminal Law Committee, Representative Homer presiding, and I mean now!”

Julian Marcus entered from the opposite hallway. Flynn spun. Julian froze.

Colleen said, calmly, as if talking to an overexcited child: “Now, Tim, you know goddamned well that it's too late in the session to re-assign a bill to a new committee.”

Larry, hands up, looked over at Colleen, wide eyed, and made a small noise of astonishment.

Flynn, screaming: “Then I want a House floor amendment restoring the original bill language! And Senate concurrence!”

Larry, desperately: “You got it!”

Flynn, breathing hard, pointed the gun at Larry, then at Macy, then at Colleen, then at Larry again.

It was then that the squawk box by Macy's desk erupted, having been cranked to top volume the night before by Colleen, planting one her infamous “ear bombs.” The squawk box boomed: “The House will now come to order—”

Flynn shrieked and spun away toward the squawk box, and fired. And fired. And fired again.

Macy and Julian and Colleen all rushed him, tackling him and piling over him as if on the goal line of a football field. Julian wrenched the gun from his hand and flung it to the far side of the room. Flynn thrashed, yelped, thrashed some more, then surrendered under their combined weight. Larry “Shiny” O'Shaughnessey stood watching from his spot by the coffee machine, looking mutely at the pile of colleagues in the middle of the room, and at the pieces of wood and metal that lay scattered around near the wall, below the former squawk box.

Colleen said, breathlessly: “A little fucking help, Shiny?”

Larry responded by calmly setting his empty coffee cup down on the counter, walking into the men's room at the end of the hall, dropping to both knees before the aging toilet bowl there, and depositing that day’s lunch of cafeteria chicken and fries into dull-white porcelain.
Next Stop

Claire approached the prison well after sunset. She could see it from miles off, swimming in its galaxy of artificial lights, a glaring white island in the dark sea of the southern Illinois prairie.

She'd assumed there would be protestors, but she hadn't expected them to be quite so few, nor quite so tepid. They were a small group of what looked like socially awkward young people and one short, feisty octogenarian, a woman, who appeared to be the unofficial leader. Their cardboard signs, brimming with exclamation points, spoke loudly—End State-Sponsored Murder NOW! and Illinois is a Serial Killer!—but the signs' owners acted sheepish and distracted, as if they perhaps were merely holding the signs until the real protestors got back from break or something. The old woman tried a few times to whip the little group into choruses of “Hell no, we won't go!,” though no one was trying to make them go. The only audience were the two-dozen or so people at the front entrance—reporters, lawyers, official witnesses—waiting to be led into the prison for the execution, and four uniformed guards who appeared to be sharing an on-going inside joke with one another.

Claire activated her hand-held tape recorder and tried to get a few quotes from the old woman, but the woman seemed more interested in talking about herself than about the execution. She announced, as if she thought it was just fascinating: “I've been protesting since the 1970s!”

Claire asked: “Protesting the death penalty?”

The woman, grinning and gesturing flamboyantly: “Oh, death penalty, wars, pollution, food additives, you name it!”

Claire and the rest of the group finally were led into the low sprawling brick prison and through a maze of modern but dingy corridors—shiny industrial-gray-painted walls, nondescript drop ceilings with fiber panels, soulless fluorescent lights—into a windowless room with nursery-blue plastic chairs along two walls. They were told to wait there. Claire didn't know either of the other two reporters in the group, nor the witnesses, nor anyone in the room except white-haired state Senator Hayne, who nodded a hello at her when she arrived and now was engrossed in whispered conversation with two middle-aged women and a man, relatives of Bard Connor's victims, Claire deduced from the snippets she heard. About twenty minutes later, the little delegation filed out of the room and down another dingy corridor and into a smaller room, again filled with rows of the plastic blue chairs. A wide interior window dominated one wall, a green curtain behind it. Claire scribbled in her notebook: puke-green curtain.

The puke-green curtain fluttered and parted, and the low murmur of conversation in the room ceased, and then there on the other side of the window lay the albino murderer Bard Connor, strapped to a gurney, white light pouring over him as if he were on stage in a particularly small drama theater. The skin on his face and neck and exposed forearms looked like the inside of an oyster shell. Claire had spent days preparing for the sight of him, researching what it was she would see, and it was exactly as she expected—the gurney, the i.v. bags, the bright overhead lights, the whole thing looking more like a hospital scene than an execution—and yet the scene dropped her stomach. This was someone who was alive—as alive as Claire herself was, at this moment—and who, in a short time, would be dead. Just Gone. Forever. On one hand, it was the universal fate, differentiated only by cause and timing from the future death of herself and the past death of her sister Anna and the past or future deaths of everyone in the world. On the other hand, it was the end of something unique, as every life was. And it was ending not in the random course of events, as most deaths come, but by the deliberate decree of the courts and the calendar and the clock. Death, on schedule.

Claire had always wondered, and wondered more frequently lately, whether Anna knew she was dying as she died. The coroner declared her death instantaneous, the moment the blunt whatever-it-was struck her temple, and there was nothing in the room to indicate otherwise as far as Claire knew, but she always wondered. She hadn’t known Anna well, the age gap was too great, but she spent her whole lifetime up to her twelfth year watching Anna walk and hearing her talk and generally witnessing her being alive, as alive as Claire and everyone else. Like everyone else, Anna presumably had a whole life inside her head, random thoughts and memories and imaginings and fantasies and hopes and desires and conversations with herself and assessments of life and reality and her own place in it. A whole world, in there.

Anna used to hum songs, more than most people do. That was one of the few specific things that Claire at twelve managed to notice about the sister who was more like a distant aunt: Even in the presence of others, she would often hum melodies as if she were alone. So Anna had music in her head, maybe a soundtrack that ran in a loop, so much so that it couldn’t be contained in her mind, so that it leaked out regularly. Can all of that just disappear instantaneously? It wasn’t a religious question to Claire—she once tried to embrace religious belief, to please her parents, and she later flirted with atheism as a late-teens way of rebelling against them, but her default position on the issue as an adult turned out to be an ambivalence so deep that she’d finally given up even pondering it. She neither assumed Anna was in heaven nor ruled out the possibility. She didn't know, and couldn’t know, and at some point she gave up thinking about it, as if reporting out a tip that had hit a dead end. No, it wasn't the ageless question of whether some version of Anna still existed somewhere that obsessed Claire now, as she pondered the pale, doomed man on the gurney; it was the simple and incomprehensible fact that Anna had been alive and humming, and then she wasn't.

A hollow thud emanated from the intercom system in the ceiling, prompting Claire and every other person in the room to look up. A male voice over the intercom said: “We’re ready to begin.” In the light-flooded room behind the glass, Bard Connor, too, looked ceiling-ward toward the voice, necessitating only a slight movement of his snowy head on the gurney. Claire thought the expression on his face was that of a passenger on a train, calmly looking up from his newspaper to listen to the conductor announce the next stop. She thought: Next stop, indeed.

The warden—a slight, balding, besuited man who looked to Claire more like an accountant than a man who oversaw the incarceration and occasional execution of society’s most violent criminals—entered the viewing room. He said to the assembled witnesses: “We’re going to start. Does anyone need to leave?” The question dropped Claire’s stomach by another league. Why would he ask a question like that? Did people sometimes melt down or faint or vomit during these things? We’re about to kill that man in the next room, the warden didn’t say, but might as well have. You’re going to see him die. If you can’t handle that, please step outside. She looked around at the faces in the room for signs of defectors but saw only glassy calm and, in a few eyes, stony determination.

Claire had covered Connor’s story on and off for two years now, but this was the first time she’d seen him in person. He was hands-down the whitest person she had ever seen. She studied his alabaster face through the glass. She knew this was the face of a murderer, and she felt she needed to confirm that in looking at him, but she found that she couldn’t. He didn’t look “normal,” exactly—it was clear that he’d never in his life looked normal—but he didn’t look as un-normal she’d expected him to look. She realized now that she’d been expecting a comic-book rendition of a murderer. What lay there instead was a skinny, pale man whose face betrayed no look at all except . . . patience. The patience of someone in a doctor’s waiting room, listening for his name to be called.

The warden stood to one side of the window and pressed a button on the wall, then looked down at a page in his hand. He read aloud: “ ‘The court having sentenced the defendant Bard Connor to death . . .’ ” Connor was again looking at the overhead speaker, again listening to the formal legal explanation for why his life was about to end as if listening to a train conductor. Next stop!

The warden said, into the intercom: “Mr. Connor, would you like to make a final statement?” Bard Connor appeared to consider the question. Then he gave one small shake of his white head. Then he lay back and closed his eyes as if to nap.

In the long silent minutes that followed, all in the room watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest, like watching the back-and-forth of a tennis volley—up, down, up, down. Claire, watching, became acutely aware of her own intake and exhale of breath. Such a little thing, that in-and-out. A little thing, and everything. She could hear her own breathing, and the breathing of those around her. It was the only sound in the room.

Lulled by the breathing, Claire’s mind pulled up an old moment and showed it to her. She’d been, what, six, maybe seven? Anna was babysitting her. She heard the TV and climbed out of bed and walked up the hallway and peeked around the corner and spied Anna sitting in the recliner, watching a show. Anna’s lips were moving, just a little, as if she were talking to someone, though no one else was there and no sound left her mouth. Was she singing? Or talking back to the show? Or engaged in some completely different conversation? What was going on in there?

Claire was brought back to the present by a hitch in the rhythmic breathing in the room, all of it seeming to pause at once. All eyes remained fixed on the man on the gurney, whose chest had ceased its up-and-down movement and now lay still. Claire herself had stopped breathing, she noticed after a moment. Bard Connor looked exactly as he had minutes earlier, when he was alive. He could have been sleeping, but for the stillness of his chest. Claire drew in a slow, deliberate breath, tasting the air, feeling it fill her lungs.

Two men in smocks stepped into the room beyond window and bent over the still white body, one holding a stethoscope to its white chest, the other prying open its eyelids and shining a small flashlight into its eyes. The man with the stethoscope nodded once through the window at the warden. Claire heard the breathing from the seats all around her resume as if on cue.