“Ray never struck me as the type who’d put up with that,” Kinley said.
“Me, neither,” Wade said, “until Dora.” The smile softened almost delicately, as if with a distant, wistful sympathy for Ray’s plight. “But you know how things get turned around in a situation like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know, like the song says,” Wade told him, “‘When a man loves a woman.’”
SEVENTEEN
It was late in the afternoon by the time Kinley left Wade’s office. By now he realized that his stay in Sequoyah would be longer than expected, and so he drove down to his hotel, gathered up his few remaining articles, and checked out, the old man behind the desk eyeing him curiously, already amazed that anyone had stayed more than one night in a town he didn’t live in.
Once back at Ray’s house, he hung his clothes in the bedroom closet, then poured himself a scotch from the dwindling remains of the bottle Ray had left behind. It was still unseasonably warm for early September, so he walked out onto the porch and sat down in the swing. The first shade of evening was descending over the valley, and a bluish haze could be seen drifting slowly down from the mountain. Night had always fallen like this in Sequoyah, and as he watched the vaporous mountain haze tumble slowly, like an avalanche of clouds from the heights above, Kinley thought of all the times he’d sat with Ray, the two of them watching the same ominous advance. They had done it on their last night together, and Kinley could remember the few words they’d spoken on that particular evening, the sorrow of his grandmother’s death still lingering in his mind, and Ray careful not to bring her up again, but to dwell on other, more distant observations.
Look at the mountain, Kinley. It’s like cannon smoke.
What is?
The way the clouds come down.
Yes.
Clouds like that hung over the Wilderness Campaign.
That was a terrible battle.
Hung for days and days, part smoke, part water. “And the bullets fell like rain.” That’s what one of the old soldiers wrote.
Hard to imagine it.
It was then, at that precise moment, Kinley remembered now, that a strange restlessness had suddenly appeared on Ray’s face, dark and lingering, like the clouds that were approaching from afar. “Hard to imagine, yes,” Ray had said. “Like so many things.” Like so many things.
It was a short, cryptic remark, and Ray had added nothing to it. It had been uttered to the air, it seemed to Kinley as he recalled its precise tone, as if Ray were alone in the swing, as if he were talking only to his soul. At the time, Kinley had thought nothing of it, but now he wondered if it had come from some other part of his life, particularly the part that had to do with Dora Overton and her father.
He took a long sip of the scotch, placed the glass on the wooden floor beneath the swing, and drew out the confession Wade had taken from Ray’s desk.
The brevity of it still amazed him. Now confessions went on for page after page, the police careful to record every imaginable detail to ensure that it was complete. In 1954, the police had moved through the world’s pervasive lawlessness with far more confidence that what they said would be believed, or at least remain unquestioned. As a result, the confessions of their prisoners had possessed a frightening succinctness. He remembered Colin Bright’s initial statement, one which he never amplified during his later trial, and whose more frightful details he had finally told Kinley himself for no other reason, as Bright himself had said, but that it’s you that’s here.
On the afternoon of August 7, 1954, I entered the home of William P. Comstock in Willisville, Alabama, and murdered five members of the Comstock family in this order in the ways I’m putting down. William P. Comstock—August 7—cut his throat Danny Comstock—August 8—shot three times Betty Comstock—August 8—stabbed several times, also raped
Keith Comstock—August 9—strangled
Wilma Jean Comstock—August 9—electrocution, also raped, front and back
This is what I did.
Sincerely,
Colin Bright
Although not as brief as Bright’s statement, Charles Overton’s was only slightly more detailed, and as he read it, Kinley tried to imagine the man himself, the long, dreary face he’d seen in the newspaper photographs, his posture, whether sitting or standing, always deeply slumped so that a sense of brokenness seemed to pervade every aspect of his character.
It was a sense that equally pervaded the written statement, despite the fact that it was not a verbatim rendering, but Wade’s own summation of what Overton had told him. And yet, the same weariness and fatality rose from the account, a tone and style Kinley had seen before, most recently in Maria Spinola, the low groan of the perfect victim.
Written on plain, legal-sized yellow paper, it began with a brief commentary on Overton’s background which consisted of information which Wade had gathered before extracting the confession.
Undersigned officer was told by Charles Herman Overton that he had lived in Sequoyah for the last twelve years. He had settled here after the war, and Mr. Overton stated that he was a veteran in the war and had been severely wounded in the European theater. Mr. Overton stated that he worked as a general laborer for Thompson Construction Company on Clermont Street in Sequoyah, and that he had been working on the new courthouse for the past year.
Mr. Overton said that he left work on the afternoon of July 2, 1954, because he was sick. On the way up the mountain, his truck broke down, and he was working on it when he saw a girl, later identified as Ellie Louise Dinker, come up the hill toward him. When she got to the road, Mr. Overton said that she came over to him, and that she began to talk to him, and that after a while, they went into the woods together.
Mr. Overton said that at some point while they were in the woods, he murdered Ellie Louise Dinker and threw her body in Rocky River and watched it float down the river and disappear over Spanish Falls.
After getting rid of the body, Mr. Overton said that he went home, then returned to his truck, fixed it, and went back home again, where he remained until he was arrested on July 4.
Mr. Overton said that he did not rape Ellie Louise Dinker, because he couldn’t do that, but that he did kill her by hitting her with a tire iron. He said he didn’t know why he hung the dress in the trees, or why he had killed the girl.
Mr. Overton said that this was a true account of his crime and swore to the statement.
This statement was taken by the undersigned officer on July 4, 1954, at twelve midnight in the holding cell at the Sequoyah County Sheriff’s Department in Sequoyah, Georgia.
Benjamin C. Wade
Deputy
Kinley folded the statement, laid it down on the swing and headed back into the kitchen. He drained the last of the scotch into his glass, then returned to the front porch and sipped it quietly while the first evening shadows gathered around him.
For a moment, he tried to draw on his own long experience with criminal violence, asking the questions that experience had offered him as a way of testing the veracity of any particular rendering of a crime. Usually in such cases, contradictions piled on contradictions, guns exchanged hands, people shifted from one room to another, dialogue blew in the wind, randomly lighting on first one mouth then another. Consistency was the great goal of every investigator, but it was a harsh mistress, elusive, demanding, at times utterly unreachable. Inconsistencies, either of character or circumstance, dogged the trail of any investigator with the strength of character necessary to look closely at a case. As he took the last drink from his glass, he remembered Detective Ronald Casey, the man who’d finally captured Colin Bright. He had been Kinley’s best official source, but even in a case in which Bright’s guilt had been incontestable, the inconsistencies remained, and on their last meeting, with the book nearly finished, Casey had finally voiced the one that throughout the case had bothered him the most:
Why did Colin say he’d come up from Florida, Jack? I mean, before
he killed the Comstocks? Did he ever tell you why he spun that particular yarn?
No. He always said he came up from Florida. He never changed that.
No way, Jack. No way. That boy never saw a beach or a palm tree in his whole shitty little life.
So the Florida story was a lie?
From top to bottom. He dropped a trail of bad checks all over the South, but none of them were from Florida.
Why would he say Florida, then? What difference would that make?
To this question, Casey, ancient in his gray hair, withered skin and infinitely battered life, had given the only reply his experience suggested to him. It’s like they say in the catechism about the Trinity, Jack, he said with a wry, but oddly tormented smile. It’s a mystery.
Kinley wondered if there were a few mysteries in Charles Overton’s statement, too. If there weren’t any, then why had Ray, as Wade had described it, “pored over” the statement so many times. What had he been looking for? Or had he sensed, as Kinley often did when confronted with such documents, that something was wrong, something missing or too often and pointedly present, something indefinable at first glance, but which might later rise suddenly like a red stain on the paper?
He unfolded Overton’s confession and read it again, this time with his notebook open, too, jotting notes for any later discussion that might go on in his head.
In the first paragraph, he noted the scanty information Overton had provided about his past. Was the war wound a play for sympathy, or just a matter of information? Was the comment about working on the courthouse a feeble swipe at community involvement and social responsibility, the sort of self-serving detail Overton might have used to gain Wade’s sympathy?
In the second paragraph, Overton had continued his tale of being sick at the courthouse construction site, of having headed home, of having broken down on the way. If this part of his story was true, Kinley reasoned, then it was a confluence of small, insignificant accidents of health and mechanics that had finally served to generate a single, cataclysmic accident, the purely fortuitous meeting of Overton and Dinker on the mountain road. Such a meeting would have been likely only if Overton and Dinker had known each other and if Overton had had an illicit relationship with Dinker, why had he been unwilling to admit it in his confession?
The third and fourth paragraphs detailed the murder, the disposal of the body and Overton’s movements after that, and the information was so spare of detail that Kinley circled it and made the notation more here, to indicate that he would need to speak with Wade again for additional questions.
The fifth paragraph had obviously been the result of Wade’s questioning Overton at the time of his arrest. Kinley had seen enough of such statements to know where the investigator had pressed for more details. Although no tape had been made of the interrogation, Kinley could hear the dialogue in his mind, and for a moment he listened to it carefully, imagining its progress one question at a time. If Wade had extracted the details of the confession by leading Overton through the crime, in the way police officers had often done before the rules of evidence had changed, then Overton, as Dora had described him, would have fallen for it easily, the perfect victim, chewing obediently at the hook Wade cast toward him time and time again.
WADE: Now, Charlie, you’ve admitted killing Ellie Dinker, but let me ask you this. How did you do it?
OVERTON: How?
WADE: Yeah, I mean, what did you use?
OVERTON: Well, I …
WADE: I mean you did use something, right? I mean, there was so much blood on the dress. Did you hit her with something? Did you have something in your truck?
OVERTON: I had a tire iron.
WADE: Did she struggle? I mean, she must have struggled, right?
OVERTON: Yes.
WADE: How did you stop her from struggling? Did you hit her?
OVERTON: Yes.
WADE: Did you do anything else to her?
OVERTON: You mean like …
WADE: I mean, before or after she was dead, you know?
OVERTON: No. No, I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.
WADE: All right, what did you do with the body? Did you bury it or throw it in the river or something like that?
OVERTON: I threw it in the river.
WADE: Then what?
OVERTON: Then I went home.
WADE: But what about the dress, the one we found hanging in the trees?
OVERTON: I just put it there. I don’t know why.
WADE: Okay, Charlie, let me ask you this. Why did you kill Ellie Dinker?
OVERTON: I don’t know.
As Kinley imagined it, the questioning of Charles Overton took on aspects of other cases he’d read or written about. In the co-ed murders in New York City, a defendant had drawn a crude floor plan of an apartment he’d never entered, described the color of the curtains in a room he’d never seen. If that kind of insistently leading police interrogation was possible in New York in 1968, he could not doubt that even greater abuses might have been carried out in the small-town South of 1954.
But that was in his mind, Kinley admitted immediately. There was no written record of the questioning, but only Wade’s brief, matter-of-fact and decidedly sketchy rendering of the results of the interrogation.
He glanced down at his notebook and quickly wrote out a command for himself: Find out more about the interrogation. Press hard on this.
He looked up again, the night now very deep around him. He could feel the first slight chill of autumn in the dark air, and he suddenly thought of Ray’s body in the ground, colder than the earth, colder than the air, more distant from him now than the most distant star. He felt an urge to reach out to him across the great abyss, and even felt his hands twitch suddenly in their futile effort to drag him back from death, the fingers spreading, gripping, clutching in that motion Serena had noticed days before, as if reaching desperately for something whose departure all the hope and force of love could not delay.
EIGHTEEN
Kinley was up early the next morning, the dawn light still filtering dustily into the single small window of Ray’s back-room office as he sat down at the desk and began to assemble a preliminary guide for his investigation.
From his book on Colin Bright, he had learned that a true crime writer must gather and organize materials less like a journalist than a lawyer. The arrangement was critical to the final product. It had to be logical, sensible, each small element adding incrementally to the overall design.
Most critical of all, he’d learned that random interviews were fruitless, that scores of questions would be lost if the order of the interviews was flawed. Just as a good lawyer arranged the order of witnesses, a true crime writer had to order the list of sources he intended to contact. After a reading of the transcript, establishing what Kinley had come to think of as a “witness list” was the immediate order of business.
He placed the laptop computer on Ray’s desk, opened it and turned it on. The soft blue light from the screen merged with the yellow dawn to give the room a strange greenish tint. It was a pleasant light, and for a moment Kinley felt as if he’d been swept into a forest grove, silent and primeval. As he continued to consider it, it struck him that at some point along the continuum of man’s development, the first investigator must have appeared within that ancient forest, wrapped in animal skins, his hair filled with dried leaves and sprigs of vine, but an investigator nonetheless, probing the unfamiliar depths of some fellow creature whose death he was driven inexplicably to explain.
He blinked hard and returned to his senses, dismissing his own literary and philosophical fancies. The allure of such notions still struck him as the gravest pitfall which yawned before true crime writers such as himself, and he fought willfully to regain his mental balance against the aura of mystery and occult devotion which he could sometimes feel hovering about his work.
It was the actual work of writing which saved him from falling victim to his private ravings. Whatever the nat
ure of his own fleeting exaltations, the work was not exalted, and after a single deep breath, he concentrated his attention on the notebook which lay open beside the computer, and the mythical Stone Age Sherlock Holmes vanished like the last frame of a B-movie dream.
Methodically, his mind now on a kind of professional autopilot, Kinley typed all the notes he’d taken in the courthouse vault, carefully arranging them in the same order in which the witnesses had been called and noting the date and time of the testimony.
It was nearly noon by the time he’d finished retyping the last of his transcript notes, then paused, his eyes lingering on the last entry.
It was Judge Bryan’s remarks on the morning he pronounced sentence in the case:
COURT: Mr. Overton, do you have anything to say before the court pronounces sentence upon you?
OVERTON: No, Your Honor.
COURT: All right, sir. Well, Charles Herman Overton, the jury in the above entitlement has found you guilty of first degree murder. Accordingly, it is the judgment of this court that you be transferred to the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, and that at that facility on January 4, 1955, and at an hour and in a manner prescribed by the laws of the State of Georgia, you suffer death by means of electrocution.
Then the gavel had sounded, Kinley knew, the hard knock of wood on wood echoing through the silent chamber, as the condemned man was led from the great hall, always led, the bailiff’s hand upon his elbow, in a gesture Kinley considered more of comfort than restraint.