“Roll in the hay?” Lois interrupted sharply.
“That’s right.”
“And you know something, Jack, that makes it worse, not better,” Lois told him. “It makes it a lot harder to take.” She shook her head wearily. “You always think that love cancels out betrayal. All men think that. But it’s bullshit.”
Kinley shrugged. “People change, that’s all I know. It happens all the time.”
“Yes, it does,” Lois blurted, “and more’s the pity.” Her eyes fled to the window and settled on the graying late-afternoon air beyond it. “Is that why you never married?” she asked after a moment. “Because people change?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes shot over to him. “Ray always denied it, but I never believed him. He said Dora was …” She smiled grimly. “Just a friend.”
“He talked about her?” Kinley asked. “To you?”
She nodded. “Yes, he did. But not the real stuff. He said he was working on something for her, an old case. He made it sound like a job.”
“He was working on something.”
“What?”
“An old murder case.”
She looked at Kinley questioningly. “Is that why he was down in the canyon?”
In his mind, Kinley saw Ellie Dinker’s body rolling in the green waters of Rocky River, then sinking down, dissolving into an indistinguishable mass as the years passed, a condition Ray would no doubt have understood and thus found no reason whatsoever to search for her along the pebbly banks of the river.
“I don’t think he would have expected to find anything about the Overton case in the canyon,” Kinley said. “So far, I haven’t found much of anything that would have led him down there.”
“Found?” Lois asked. “You’re working on it, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it was his last case,” Kinley said. “That’s the only reason I can think of.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“I don’t know very much,” Kinley said. “So far I’ve just read the transcript of the trial. As far as I can tell, the case against Overton is pretty strong.”
“Overton?”
“Yes, Charles Overton, Dora’s father.”
Lois sat back slightly. “He was a murderer?”
Kinley found himself giving in to the weight of evidence. “He might have been,” he said.
“Who did he kill?”
“A young girl,” Kinley said. “It was back in 1954.”
“And they convicted him?”
Kinley nodded. “They executed him.”
“Executed, yes,” Lois said thoughtfully. “There was an article about that.”
“Where?”
“In with all those clippings I found in one of Ray’s files.”
“Was there anything else in the file about the case?”
“Just what was in the O file,” Lois said. “And to tell you the truth, Kinley, I was a little relieved. I didn’t want to find love letters from Dora Overton. I mean, divorce or no divorce, you always feel a certain way.”
“Yeah,” Kinley said.
“Anyway, it’s all in the envelope,” Lois added, dismissing any further discussion of the case, her mind shifting back to Dora. “What’s she like?” she asked. “What did Ray see in her?”
“I don’t know her very well.”
“But you’re going to,” Lois said. “I can see that in your face.” She smiled. “I must say, I’m a little surprised in you, Jack.”
“How?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have expected you to come home and take up where Ray left off quite so …literally.”
Kinley stared at her silently, and after a moment, she stood up and walked back out onto the porch. Kinley followed along behind her, the screen door closing softly behind him.
At the front steps, Lois paused and turned back toward him. “So, you’re going to see Dora again?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell her I despise her,” Lois said.
Kinley said nothing.
Lois glared up toward the mountain. “She knew him better, didn’t she? Better than I did?”
“I don’t know.”
“He talked to her.”
“Yes, I think he did.”
Her face took on a strange resignation, as her eyes returned to Kinley. “The lover always gets the best of someone,” she said quietly. “The dregs come home and go to sleep.”
Kinley ate a quick dinner made up of what had been left behind in Ray’s kitchen, a can of pork and beans and a few Vienna sausages, all of which he washed down with one of the three beers he found in the refrigerator.
While he ate, he watched the small black-and-white television which Ray had balanced precariously on one of the kitchen counters. It was tuned to Channel 3, a local access station which carried the latest news from Sequoyah and its surrounding communities. At the moment, a man dressed in green fatigues was tromping through a wooded area, glancing back toward the camera from time to time, as he commented on the local landscape.
As it turned out, Kinley finished his meal at the same moment the man on television brought his program to a close with a broad smile and a parting bit of homestyle instruction: “So, friends, this is Bob Burbank saying, “Hey, look around you.’”
Kinley snapped the television off, washed the dishes, then walked down the short corridor to Ray’s office, where he’d deposited the envelope Lois had given him an hour or so before.
The three files were arranged alphabetically, one on top of the other, a tribute to Lois’s orderliness, and he opened D first, found it empty, just as she had said it was, then moved on to O.
It was a thick file, though not bloated, and Ray had arranged the papers inside it chronologically, beginning with various newspaper accounts of Overton’s arrest on July 4, and ending with his execution at the state prison six months later, an event which was sufficiently newsworthy, Kinley noted, for the Sequoyah Standard to send one of its own reporters to cover it.
His name was Harry Townsend, and he’d covered the whole case, his byline under every story published by the Standard, from Dinker’s disappearance to Overton’s execution several months later. And in Kinley’s estimation, he’d done a good job, not only in his individual pieces, but in the accompanying pictures he’d also taken while covering the case.
Ray had assembled the pictures in a kind of “order of appearance” format, beginning with Ellie Dinker and ending with a final photograph of Charles Overton as he was led away from the courthouse after he’d received his death sentence. All the incidental characters were present in the collection. Maddox and Wade posed in their recently pressed uniforms, Warfield and Talbott in dark, conservative suits beside the flagpole. Mrs. Overton, her head bound in a dark scarf, dodging Townsend’s camera as she darted down the courthouse steps. Unlike Mrs. Overton, Dr. Stark and Mr. Coggins seemed grateful for the attention. As for Luther Snow and Betty Gaines, they appeared as direct human opposites: Gaines shy, looking away; Snow staring straight into the lens, as if daring it to expose him.
At the end, almost as a coda, Ray had clipped the last report on the case, Townsend’s description of Overton’s execution. To Kinley’s surprise, as he read it, Townsend was no country hack. He’d read enough back-country journalism by then to know that “reporters” for such papers were often little more than town gossips with a literary itch. Townsend, however, was nothing like that, and his account of the execution of Charles Overton was fittingly solemn, with just enough graphic detail to evoke the scene without allowing it to cross the line into morbid titillation:
Charles Herman Overton, though only thirty-five years old on the cold, rainy day of his execution, looked much older than his years as he trudged slowly toward the unadorned metal chair where he was to die exactly four minutes and seventeen seconds later.
Overton appeared slightly disoriented as he glanced about, his eyes settling briefly on th
e group of witnesses that had gathered at the far side of the small concrete room before continuing their nervous, darting motion. He did not speak to anyone as he shuffled across the room, nor did he seem aware of the magnitude of the moment, and as the efficient prison staff went through the grim routine of straps and electrodes which must inevitably precede the act of execution, he seemed to shrink away, as if the air were being squeezed from his body. He stared straight ahead, made no further eye contact with either witnesses or prison staff, as the preparations continued, the guards moving through their assigned tasks with great speed and in complete silence.
Once harnessed to the machine, Overton remained upright and very erect as the metal skull cap was lowered over the shaved pate of his head. He blinked rapidly for a moment, then closed his eyes in a tight squint, as if in anticipation of the shock which was to come, or perhaps, to prevent himself the indignity of a scream.
His eyes did not open again in this world.
Not bad, Kinley thought, as his mind shifted suddenly to his own description of the death of Colin Bright. It had been very academic, it struck him now, a writing style that had been meant to please the English professors who would never read it, and which had adroitly stressed clever ideas over the terrible feeling of a carefully orchestrated and predetermined death, its grim mechanics of seared nerves. Harry Townsend, whoever he was, had done better than that, particularly in the lovely understatement of his last line.
His eyes did not open again in this world.
As he allowed himself to read the line again, Kinley had the sense that something was being loosened up in him, as if, against his will, he were being made to feel Overton’s death as he thought Dora must feel it, and perhaps as Ray had come to feel it too, dark and tragic and unjust.
He stopped himself instantly, drew the cord tight again, shoring himself up. Dark and tragic, that much still remained true of Overton, as it was probably true, it seemed to Kinley, of every human fate. But that left the final adjective intact. And so, Kinley wondered, as he closed the O file and turned to the S, flipping quickly through the irrelevant assortment of old town photographs Ray had assembled there, could it also be said that the death of Charles Herman Overton had been entirely unjust?
When he could answer that question yes or no, he thought as he turned off the desk light and headed for his bed, his work in Sequoyah would be done, and he could return to New York, to the small apartment which overlooked the upper reaches of Broadway, to the gentle rapture of untroubled sleep.
FIFTEEN
If the arguments for and against the death of Charles Overton had ever existed in a concentrated form, Kinley knew he was about to confront them as he drew the transcripts down from the vault shelf the next morning. Early in his work, he’d discovered the high drama which inevitably accompanied even the most mediocre of the closing arguments in capital cases. With so much at stake, the arena of the courtroom became a place of mythic struggle. The petty disputes which rang through the court day after day suddenly gave way to a form of solemn combat a Roman Emperor would have admired—fierce, dedicated, and at times, as Kinley had noted more often than he would have expected, strikingly poetic, as if ordinary voices had suddenly been made glorious and eloquent by the grave issue upon which they spoke: whether or not a human being should be put to death.
Kinley had learned enough about Thomas Warfield’s courtroom style by the time he opened the trial transcript to his closing argument to expect a fine performance. He was not disappointed.
For many pages, Warfield did what nearly all prosecutors found it necessary to do before making their final plunge into the lofty moral rhetoric with which their closing arguments would truly close. He had outlined his case again, massing one detail upon another, until the evidence stood before the jury like a great concrete finger pointing directly toward the defendant. Then, and only then, had he taken flight.
What is the evidence in this case? It is what it should be in a trial for murder. It is flesh and blood. It is in Ellie Dinker’s blood on her dress. It is in the bits of flesh which clung to that tire iron Deputy Wade found in Charles Overton’s truck.
The defense will tell you that we do not have a body. Mr. Talbott will tell you that we cannot even prove a murder has been committed.
Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at that dress as we show it to you now, draped across the chair before you. Look at the blood which stains it. Ellie Dinker was sixteen years old. Ellie Dinker was five feet tall. Ellie Dinker weighed ninety-three pounds when Dr. Stark weighed her only a month before her death. Look at the amount of blood on that dress, and tell me in your hearts if a body that small could sustain an injury so profound as to stain a dress the way this one is stained, and still live.
No, ladies and gentlemen, you know that Ellie Louise Dinker is dead. And the fact that Charles Overton to this day will not tell us where her body lies, that is a cruelty which he has inflicted upon Ellie Dinker’s mother that is almost as evil as the murder itself. He could tell us where she is. He could let Elite’s mother give her only daughter a decent, Christian funeral. He could tell us. But he won’t. He wants to save his life, and this is the only way he can save it. He can hope that you believe that because Ellie Dinker’s body has never been found, that she is alive, living somewhere, probably in one of the world’s great resorts.
Do you believe that?
Is Ellie Dinker in Paris? Is she in Rome? Is she having a wonderful time bouncing in the sea, climbing mountains?
No.
Ellie Dinker will never see Rome or Paris. She will never see the ocean or the mountains. She will never marry or have children of her own. All the opportunities of life, all its beauty and sweetness are lost to her. They were snatched from her by Charles Overton, and they can never be returned.
And you know why they can’t be returned. In your hearts you know why.
Because Ellie Dinker is dead.
She is—to use the terms of the law in this case—she is unjustly dead.
You know what that means?
Unjustly dead.
It means she did not die by disease or accident.
Unjustly dead.
It means that she did not die by negligence.
Unjustly dead.
It means that she did not die in the service of her country.
Unjustly dead means that Ellie Louise Dinker was murdered.
And we may not have her body, ladies and gentlemen, but by the grace and intervention of a just and wrathful God, we do have her killer in this room with us today.
He is there. He is there.
I raise my hand and point him out to you.
He is there.
And ladies and gentlemen, I don’t ask that you do to him what he did to Ellie Dinker. He put her to death—remember the words of the law—he put her to death unjustly.
I will not ask you to do that.
I will ask you to do justice.
I will ask you to put to death Charles Herman Overton, not unjustly, the way he put Elite Dinker to death, but justly, as you have a right, and an obligation, to do.
I do not ask for vengeance.
I ask for justice.
I believe that you will render it.
Thank you.
It was good, Kinley thought as he turned the page, it was very good. It had everything a rural Southern courtroom would have needed in the winter of 1954. It had the high rhetoric and righteous fire that gave the whole argument a fierce Biblical grandeur. And, as Kinley realized, it must have swept over the jury like a mighty stream. In his mind, he could see the jurors nodding sagely as Warfield made his long stride back to the prosecution table, their eyes following him in awe and wonder before they finally slid distractedly over to where Horace Talbott now rose to address them.
Warfield had fully anticipated defense’s argument in the case, but that anticipation had not served to warn Talbott against making it. And in his closing remarks, Talbott addressed the issue as relentl
essly as if he’d never heard Warfield raise it.
You have a problem in this case. You don’t know where Ellie Dinker is. That’s not a problem for me, because I’m not being asked to put a man to death. But you are being asked to do that. Mr. Warfield is asking you to do that. He is asking you to forget about the fact that you don’t know where Ellie Dinker is.
Is she in Paris? I don’t know.
Is she in Rome? I don’t know.
And you don’t know either, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
And that is a very serious problem. Because you do not know for an absolute certainty that Elite Dinker is dead. You can look at that dress until you turn blue, and you can look at the stains and think about how big or little Ellie Dinker was, what she weighed and her blood type and all of that, but it will not tell you for an absolute certainty that she is dead.
Is she running around in the ocean? I don’t know.
Is she out mountain climbing? I don’t know.
I don’t have to know.
But you do have to know, ladies and gentlemen, because a man’s life is dependent upon your knowing where Ellie Dinker is at this moment. Not tomorrow, and not yesterday, but where she is at this instant.
But since you do not know where Ellie Dinker is, I ask that you not send a man to death for killing her.
Thank you.
It had been short and sweet, Kinley thought after reading Talbott’s closing remarks, but he had done all that was left for him to do by that point in the trial. Before that point, however, one considerably more important was so obvious that Kinley felt no need to jot it down: Why had Charles Overton not testified?
He remembered the passivity with which Overton had faced his arrest, and he wondered if such passivity might have been the result of a shock he was never able to overcome, a state he’d entered as the handcuffs were snapped in place, and which he’d lingered in from then until the moment he’d shuffled across the floor of the execution, still moving, it seemed to Kinley, like a sacrificial lamb. He’d seen that happen before, a strange, eerie calm after the wave of annihilating violence had passed. He thought of Bundy still filing his meticulous briefs during the final, dwindling hours of his life; of the Birdman of Alcatraz poring over volumes of ornithology; of Mildred Haskell’s psychosexual texts, and last of Colin Bright, so peaceful in his captivity, monkish and serene, his soft blue eyes entirely motionless as he’d offered Kinley his bit of worldly wisdom: Be careful. You don’t always know who you are.