“That I don’t doubt. So what is it you want from me?”
“Well, sir,” Russ said, “I hope I can re-create what happened that day in a sort of dramatic narrative. But as you know there was a fire in 1994, when the old courthouse burned. That’s where all the records were kept.”
“I don’t have a thing, I don’t believe. Maybe a scrap or two.”
“Well, did the papers have it right?” Russ asked, fiddling with a small tape recorder. Sam eyed the little machine warily.
“Bob, this is under your say-so? You’re letting this boy ask questions because you want the answers too?”
“He says it could be an important book.”
“Well, I’ve read enough books not to give a hunk of spit and a quart of whittler’s shavings for any of ’em. But go ahead, young fellow. You ask ’em and if I don’t fall asleep, I’ll answer ’em.”
“Thank you,” Russ said. “I wanted to know, did the newspapers have it right? Their accounts?”
“Wasn’t much to get wrong,” said Sam. “In my business, you get to a lot of crime scenes. Oh, I’ve seen death in bathrooms and kitchens and basements and in swimming pools and outhouses, even, and sometimes there’s a mystery to it, but most often not. Mysteries are for books. In life, you look at the bodies and the cartridge cases and the blood trails, or you look at the knife and the spatter pattern and the fingerprints, and they won’t lie. They’ll tell you all you need to know, or at least the whodunit part. In this case it was pretty open-and-shut. Whydunit, why it happened? That no one ever can truly know.”
“Is there some account somewhere of the movements of the day? I mean, how and when Jim and Bub got down here, how Earl ran into them in that cornfield?”
“No sir. As I say, the event explained itself. No other information was really important.”
“Was there any kind of legal resolution?”
“In the case of unlawful homicides in which there are no survivors, the state of Arkansas deeds all power to the Coroner’s Office to hold an inquest. I represented the state and all agreed with the finding: the death of Earl Swagger was murder in the first degree, the deaths of Jimmy Pye and Bub Pye were justifiable homicide by a sworn law enforcement officer in the course of his legal duties. So it went into the books.”
“Is that document worth chasing down?”
“For your purposes, probably not, though I bet I have a copy of it at home. It contained a diagram of the bodies’ locations, a list of the recovered exhibits, testimony of the first officers on the scene, that’s all. But I’ll find it for you.”
“That would be very helpful. As I break this down, I’d like to try and acquire material in four other areas,” Russ said, consulting his notes and trying to sound important. “Witnesses. Maybe talk to the first people on scene. Then relatives of all concerned, that is, Jimmy and Bub. Next is secondary accounts. News media coverage, but maybe there were other accounts in true-crime magazines. Of course we ought to walk the site too, don’t you think, Mr. Swagger?”
“Hah,” said Sam. “Walk the site! I believe the famous Harry Etheridge Memorial Porkway buried it under a ton or so of concrete in memory to the greatest man Polk County ever produced. Son, you’re looking for a past that ain’t hardly there no more. There’s no Pyes left in Polk County. I heard that Jimmy’s father, Lannie, had a brother in Oklahoma.”
“Anadarko,” said Russ. “He was murdered in 1970, by parties unknown.”
“Miss Connie Longacre knew Edie the best. But she left town after Edie died and the child went to some Pye kin. She tried to get that baby herself, but they said she was too old. Nineteen fifty-six, I think.”
“Was there an autopsy?” Bob asked.
“There was,” said Sam. “State law in the case of unlawful deaths. Paperwork all gone, however, in that courthouse fire.”
Bob nodded, chewing that one over.
“A long and terrible day,” said Sam. “It has always seemed to me a tragedy of the Republic that it can no longer produce men the caliber of Earl Swagger. I’ve said this to you many a time, Bob Lee. He was a quietly great man.”
“He did his duty,” said Bob, “more than some.”
“Fortunately, Polk County has never had such a day since. Four dead. It marked the community for many years that followed. In some places, the pain even yet hasn’t—”
“Excuse me,” said Russ. “You mean three dead. Or are you counting the victims in Fort Smith? Then it would be seven dead. Just a little—”
“Young man, where did you go to college?”
“Ah, Princeton, sir.”
“Did you graduate?”
“Er, no. I, uh, left after two years. But I may return.”
“Well, no matter. Anyhows, Princeton? Well; if you want to climb up and blow the dust off that picture frame”—he gestured to the wall—“you’d see old Sam Vincent, the country rube lawyer from Hicksville, Arkansas, he went to Princeton University too! And if you blow the dust off the other frame, you’d see he went to Yale Law School. And though he’s old, he’s not as dim as you seem to think, at least on good days. And if he says four, he goddamn-your-soul means four.”
Russ was stilled.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I meant no disrespect. But who was the fourth one?”
“Earl’s last case. A poor girl named Shirelle Parker. A Nigra child, fifteen years old. She was raped and beaten to death out in the Ouachitas, and it was Earl who found her that very morning and made the initial reports. I felt it was his legacy and I pursued it with a special attention to duty. Fortunately, it was open-and-shut too. In that one, there was some justice.”
“I think I remember,” said Bob. “Some Negro boy. Wasn’t he—”
“He was indeed electrocuted. I watched him die up at the state penitentiary at Tucker in 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, it was a terrible tragedy.”
“You going to put that in your book?” Bob asked.
“I don’t know … it is very strange, isn’t it?”
“Earl spent the morning out there. Possibly he was still thinking of that case when he ran into Jimmy and Bub and that’s how they got a jump on him.”
“It was open-and-shut?”
“Like a door. The poor girl had ripped his monogrammed shirt pocket as he had his evil fun with her. We checked among the colored folk for the proper initials, and when we found one that matched, we raided. I’m happy to say that even in those benighted days, I arranged for the proper warrants to be issued. Here in Polk County, we run it by the goddamned rules. We found the shirt stuffed under his bed, the pocket missing. It was smeared with her blood, by type. She was AB positive, he was A positive. The boy made a mistake, he got carried away, he couldn’t stop himself. She died, he died, both families devastated. I don’t hold with the theory Nigras can’t feel pain as white people do. The Parkers and the Fullers felt plenty of pain, as much as I’ve ever seen.”
Russ shook his head, which now profoundly ached. He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.
“Sam, we’ve tired you. I may have some things I want you to do. You’ll take my money, I suppose,” Bob was saying.
“Of course I will,” said Sam.
“Here’s a box,” he said, handing over the cardboard container. “You have an office safe, I guess?”
“I’m so old I may have forgotten the combination.”
“Well, can you keep this stuff here? It’s my father’s effects. For some reason, I thought it might come in handy. I don’t want to be carrying it about.”
Sam took the package and they all rose.
“Tomorrow,” Bob said, “I think we may go see where it happened. Sam, could you come? You were there?”
“Oh, I suppose.”
“In the meantime, you’ll look for that document and any others?”
“I will.”
“This afternoon I think we’ll go to the library, see what the old papers said.”
“Fair enough,” said Russ.
Sam shook Bob’s hand and ignored Russ, leaving the younger man to face the fact that nobody gave a damn. He thought he could live with it.
The two went out, down the dark stairs, and stepped out into bright daylight.
“He seemed a little daffy there at the beginning,” said Russ. “I hope he’s up to this thing. What did he call them? Nigras? Colored folk? God, what Klan klavern did he come from?”
“That old man is as tough as they come. Not only did he keep my bacon out of the fire a few years back, he was the first prosecutor in Arkansas to try a white man for killing a black man back in 1962, when it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. He may say ‘Nigra’ where you say ‘African American’ to show everybody how wonderful you are, but he risked his goddamned life. They shot up his house, scared his kids and voted him out of office. But he stuck to it, because he knew it was right. So don’t you go disrespecting him. He’s solid as brass.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “If you say so.”
Then they saw a big deputy sheriff looking into Bob’s cab window.
“What’s this all about?” Russ said.
“Oh, just a small-town cop who noticed an out-of-state plate.” He walked over to the cop.
“Howdy there,” he said.
The cop turned, flashing pale eyes on Bob; then those same eyes hungered over to Russ and ate him up. He was a lanky, tan man, with a thick mat of hair that was maybe a bit too fussed over, hipless and lean and long-faced, with a Glock at a sporty angle on his belt. He looked mean as a horse whip.
“This your truck, son?” asked the cop.
“It is, uh, Deputy Peck,” Bob replied, reading the name off the name tag. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“Well, sir, just checking up is all. We got a pretty nice little town here and I like to keep my eyes open.”
“I grew up in this town,” said Bob. “My daddy’s buried in this town.”
“Bob Lee Swagger,” said Peck. “Goddamn, yes.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember—”
“Yes, all that’s finished now. You want to run my tag and name you go ahead. I come up clean, you’ll see. That was all a big mistake.”
“You back on vacation, Mr. Swagger?”
“Oh, you might say. Got a young friend here with me. It’s just a sort of a sentimental trip. Looking at my old haunts and the places I went with my father.”
“Well, sir, you got any trouble or need any help, you come see me. Duane Peck’s the name.”
“I’ll remember that, Deputy Peck.”
Peck drew back, let them pass, but Russ had an odd feeling of being sized up, read up one side and down the other. He didn’t like it.
“Did that guy seem a little strange?” he asked. “I’ve been around cops all my life and that guy couldn’t keep his eyes off us.”
“You think so?” said Bob. “Seemed like a pretty nice feller to me.”
12
It was opening night. A road company Cats, fresh from Little Rock and due in Tulsa in a week, had booked three days in Fort Smith, five performances only. Good seating was available on subsequent nights, but not tonight. It was SRO and the Civic Center seethed with the town’s most raffish and self-assured men—the Rich Boys Club—and their families, the manufacturing, poultry and corn elite of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.
Red Bama sat with his slim beautiful second wife, Miss Arkansas Runner-up, 1986, his two new children and Nick, the youngest of his children from his first marriage. He waved, chatted, took homage calls and genuflections from others as the excitement built and curtain time approached. Then he saw his first wife, still beautiful but not so young and not so slim anymore, sitting with his only daughter on the other aisle.
“Honey,” he said to Beth, “there’s Susie. I’m going by to say hi.”
“Go on, baby,” said Beth, smiling, showing her perfect teeth. Before she was the Miss Arkansas Runner-up, she had been the 1985 Miss Sebastian County.
“You boys and girls, you don’t give your mama no hard time, now,” he warned in his humorous trashy tyrant-father voice.
He rose, said hello to Jerry Flood, regional vice-president of Hoffman-Prieur & Associates, passed between Nick Conway of Harris-Ray Furniture, Bill Donnelly, who ran the Shelter Insurance Companies, and finally made it over to Susie.
“Hi, doll,” he said, leaning to give her a kiss. She wore a diamond necklace that had cost him $52,000 in 1981. “Jeez, don’t let Beth see that. She’ll want the same damn thing. How are you, baby?” he added to his snooty oldest child Amy, who attended Smith and taught tennis at the club during the summer.
“Hi, babe,” Susie said. “That gal of yours just gets prettier every time I see her.”
“She is a peach, I agree, but she ain’t half so much fun in the sack as you were!”
“Daddy, don’t be so gross,” said Amy, making a face of disapproval.
“Amy, when you going to come down to the truck depot? We could get you a nice Peterbilt 16 and give you the Macon run for Tyson’s. You’d like them chickens shitting up the rig!”
“Daddy!” said Amy prissily.
“Red, you shouldn’t tease the girl.”
“I’ve spoiled her, like I’ve spoiled all my children, can’t I have some fun teasing her? Honey, why don’t you quit teaching that silly tennis and come down to the office. We’ll find something useful for you to do.”
“No thank you. You overmanage. That’s why everybody hates you.”
“They don’t hate me. They love me. They only think they hate me. And they fear me, which I like a lot.” “Red!”
He turned from provoking the young woman he loved so much and returned to Susie.
“Well, anyway, I think, no, I know we’re going to get Tyson’s new regional headquarters, plus I have it on good authority that GM is thinking about Greenwood for its new Blazer plant. We’d get that job too.”
“Honey, that’s the best news. And everything else, it’s going—”
“It’s fine, sweetie. Oh, it’s just—”
He felt something like a sting at his hip, jumped a tiny bit, then recognized it as his beeper’s vibrator. But it wasn’t the office beeper, it was the new one. It was the Blue Eye 800 number.
“Red?”
“Just got a message, no big deal,” he said, taking the little cellular out of his pocket. “I’ll call in a sec. Amy, honey, haven’t you had that Rolex three whole weeks? It’s gotten boring, hasn’t it? Why don’t you let Daddy buy you a new one?”
“Daddy, you suck.”
Red laughed. Good-naturedly tormenting his children was one of his deepest delights. Amy knitted her fierce, bright little face up into something like a fist, and if it had been possible, she would have smacked him with it. A wave of deep and uncompromising love poured over and through him. The way a man feels about his favorite daughter who goes her own way, takes nothing and makes good on everything. The watch was presented to her not by Red at all but by Maryvale Prep, for graduating with the highest accum in its history.
The lights began to dim.
“Okay, got to get back to family number two,” Red said cheerily to Susie.
“You’ll bring Nick home tonight?”
“He can stay with us if you want.”
“No, that’s fine. He’s got practice early. I know you won’t get him there.”
“We’ll take him for ice cream after, and bring him by.”
“Great, honey.”
“See you,” he said, as the overture came up, hot and pounding.
But Red didn’t return directly. He walked back to the rear of the house, paying no attention as the curtain opened to tumultuous applause, revealing what looked like a back alley populated by sleek, sinuous feline shapes that one after another began to shim
mer to life.
Red dialed his number and listened.
“It’s Duane Peck here,” the voice came, telling him what he already knew and impressing him with nothing. “Anyhows, uh, this kid is in town, and I got him nailed and I’ll stay with him. First stop, old Sam Vincent. Is that a problem? Should I take care of that? Let me know. Also, uh—”
Someone was singing.
And we all say: OH!
Well I never!
Was there ever
A Cat so clever
As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
“—ah, he ain’t alone. Tall guy, lanky, looks you up and down real fine. I thought it might be. Yeah, it was. The son. The guy in Vietnam, called him Bob the Nailer. He’s along with the kid. Don’t know why, but he’s here too. Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy.”
No emotion showed on Red’s face. He just cleared the call and, standing there in the back of the house, dialed another one.
“Billy, Red here.”
“Hey, Red, what’s on your—”
“Listen here, got me a situation. You put me together a team. Very tough guys, experienced, qualified on full automatic, professionals. I don’t want to use my boys. Got that?”
“Red, what—”
“Shut up, Billy, and listen. I want no less than ten. I want good weapons, good team discipline. I want ’em all to have felony records, preferably as drug enforcers. Get ’em from Dallas, get ’em from New Orleans, get ’em from Miami. Out-of-town boys. I want them to have records, in case we lose a few and bodies start showing up in Polk County, the newspapers will start calling it a drug war.”
“How much you want to go, Red?”
“I want the best. The best costs. You get ’em here, get ’em here fast. Good boys. Shooters. I want the best shooters. I want an A-team.”
“We’ll get working on it right now.”
“Good work, Billy,” Red said, then returned to his seat for the rest of Cats.
13
It took three hours, not at all helped by the fact that Sam’s old eyes weren’t as good as they once were and that he had to stop twice to go to the bathroom. Then he got irritable and hungry and they bought him some pancakes at the Waldron exit Denny’s. But there were no more episodes of strangeness, where Sam forgot who they were or who he was.