Evidence of Blood

  His eyes opened quickly as the idea struck him, the single slant of light which might still pierce the dark wall that separated him from Ellie Dinker’s dress.

  He stood up, walked back to Ray’s office, opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and drew out the file marked “O,” the one which Lois had returned to him several days before, and which had contained only a series of newspaper articles and photographs about the case.

  Meticulously he went through the contents of the file across the desk, staring at each photograph. After a moment, he leaned back again, his eyes moving randomly across the desk, the energy of their earlier mission now lost in failure. There had been no photograph of Ellie Dinker’s dress.

  But as his eyes shifted from article to article, Kinley noticed that the entire case had been covered by a single reporter, the same one who’d journeyed to the state prison and written so evocatively of Overton’s execution. The name appeared at the top of every article and at the bottom of every picture the paper had published about the case.

  Kinley glanced up at the still illuminated computer screen and wrote in the name under CONDITION UNKNOWN.

  It was number 4: Harry Townsend.

  Then he did what he’d learned to do first in trying to track someone down. It was an entirely obvious strategy, and it had always surprised him how often it paid off. He pulled the Sequoyah Telephone Directory down from its place on the shelf above the desk and looked Townsend up. He was there, complete with home address.

  Kinley wrote both into his notebook, then returned to the computer screen and made the necessary adjustment, erasing the name under Condition Unknown, and typing it out again, as if, with Godlike power, adding Townsend’s name to the Book of Life.

  The computer screen was still shedding its blue light into the room when, several hours later, he heard a soft knock at the door, rousing him from the sleep that had finally overtaken him. He pulled himself up, blinked the remaining slumber from his eyes, walked into the foyer and opened the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Dora said quietly.

  Kinley nodded.

  “May I come in?” she asked.

  He let her pass in front of him.

  In the living room, she eyed the bottle of scotch, now about a third empty. “Be careful,” she said, as her eyes drifted back to him.

  “I’ve always kept everything under control,” Kinley said, a little stiffly.

  “Are you leaving soon?”

  “No, why?”

  “I thought that because of …”

  “It’s not that simple, once you start.”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Nothing of importance.”

  “You don’t have to keep going, you know.”

  He looked at her determinedly. “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “I came to say I’m sorry,” Dora said, “and to let you know that if you wanted to drop everything, it would be …”

  “I don’t,” Kinley told her.

  She nodded curtly, then started toward the door, moving briskly past him, as if in flight.

  He wanted desperately to let her go, but he found that he could not. “There’s some scotch left,” he whispered, without turning around to see her.

  She stopped. “Yes, I know.”

  He turned toward her slowly, the sudden admission like a revelation, something known for years, but never fully revealed before. “I don’t want to be alone,” he told her.

  She did not seem convinced, but for the moment at least, she appeared willing to put aside her bitter doubts. “I guess, in the end, no one does,” she said.

  “Will you stay?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she told him. “Not in Ray’s bed. But if you want, you can come with me.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  He was up early the next morning, once again staring at the fog. Dora lay beside him, equally awake, but her eyes focused differently, as if on a separate world.

  “How did you get out?” she asked as she turned toward him, propping herself up on her elbow, her lips nearly touching his.

  “Didn’t Ray tell you?” Kinley answered with a slight smile. “The Yankees rescued me.”

  “They didn’t make you leave,” Dora said. “You did that.”

  Kinley shook his head. “I always wanted to leave.”

  “Even when you were young?”

  “For as long as I can remember.”

  “Why?” Dora asked. “Ray always said you had it pretty well.”

  “My grandmother loved me,” Kinley said. “That’s what Ray meant.”

  “But you left her, too.”

  Kinley nodded. “There was always something driving me,” he said, remembering it as a heated rod, or a whip at his back. In his youth, it had even taken the form of a harsh, determined voice: Getout!Getout!Getout!

  He sat up. “I have to leave early.”

  She made no effort to stop him but simply watched silently as he dressed himself.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” he said as he opened the bedroom door.

  She smiled at him indulgently. “For a genius, you don’t have a very good memory.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember, Kinley?” she asked. “I don’t have a phone.”

  As he glanced down at his notebook, then up again at the matching address on the old tin mailbox, Kinley hoped that he hadn’t arrived too early to expect a decent welcome. His experience had long ago taught him that dragging people from their beds was not the best way to get their cooperation. Even Colin Bright had preferred the afternoon, his eyes always faintly clouded in the morning light.

  It was a small, wooden house on a street that looked as if it had seen better days. Still, it was neat, and freshly painted, the typical retirement home, Kinley thought, of an old-age pensioner. The life inside the house was not difficult for him to imagine. There’d be empty soup cans in the kitchen waste basket, an orange hot water bottle hung over the shower stall, and in the medicine cabinets and scattered across the bed night tables, scores of pills, ointments, mentholating creams. His grandmother had been the only old person he’d ever known who’d managed to avoid such indignities.

  He returned the notebook to his pocket, got out of the car and walked toward the door.

  He knocked lightly when he reached it, heard a small groan from a distant room, then saw an old man lurch ponderously toward him, his ghostly white hair luminous in the surrounding shadows.

  “Coming,” the old man said, but without the gruffness Kinley had often encountered in old people, the pains of age working insidiously to undermine even the most determined manners.

  Within seconds, he was at the door, his white face pressing close to the screen. “Everything I need, I got,” he said, though not irritably, but merely as a point of information, as if to save the traveling salesman the energy of his pitch.

  Kinley offered a quick-smile. “I’m looking for Harry Townsend,” he said.

  The old man nodded. “That’s me.”

  “You used to work for the Sequoyah Standard, I believe,” Kinley added.

  “’Til I retired,” Townsend said. He brought his face still nearer to the rusty screen and squinted harshly. “Lost my sight just about,” he said. “No place in this world for a blind reporter.”

  He was a reporter all right, and Kinley had seen quite a few of them in his time. The old man who stood before him seemed almost made from the original mold, small and wiry, with a thin mouth and restless eyes, a young man now grown old in that way which made age seem more the product of too much experience than the listless passing of the days.

  “I’m a reporter, too,” Kinley told him, “not with a newspaper, though.”

  The old man nodded, unimpressed. “Magazine features?”

  “Books.”

  He nodded again, still unimpressed. “What you want me for?” he asked, his voice as direct as Kinley imagined it had been years before when he’d sat in Judge Bryan’s courtroom, his pen
cil scratching across his notebook as Warfield marched before him, or Overton slumped defeated in a chair six feet away.

  “I’m working a story now,” Kinley said, “investigating it.”

  The eyes squinted hard again. “Which one?”

  “Ellie Dinker,” Kinley said, expecting the old man’s face to lift thoughtfully, as if trying to retrieve something only faintly impressed upon his mind.

  “Oh, yes,” Townsend said softly, with the strange sense of a prophecy fulfilled. “I knew that someday someone would.”

  They sat down in a small room adorned with plants that were slowly dying of thirst.

  “My wife used to water them,” Townsend said quietly, by way of explanation, “but she’s gone now.”

  He did not elaborate on where his wife had gone, whether to the islands, distant relatives or the grave, but Kinley made no effort to nail it down.

  “You covered the story from the beginning,” he said as he drew his notebook from his jacket pocket.

  The old man nodded. “The only one who did.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Local thing,” Townsend explained, “nothing Atlanta or Birmingham or Chattanooga would have been interested in. Besides, it got solved too fast. There was no buildup.”

  Before coming over, Kinley had done his homework thoroughly, as he always did, carefully reading the stories Ray had compiled on the case. “Were you the main reporter then?” he asked, by way of moving into a direct line of questioning.

  Townsend snorted roughly. “Way back then, the Sequoyah Standard was nothing much but a little country printing press,” he said. “We reported when some bigwig got married, and when Miss Addie’s son came home from Vanderbilt. That was about it.”

  “Until the murder.”

  Townsend nodded. “Until the murder, that’s right,” he said. “Reporting that case the way we did, that’s what turned the Standard into a real newspaper. After that, we got an itch for stories, real stories, not just tidbits from the local social calendar.” His eyes swept over to the room’s large, dusty window. “It was strange, that case,” he said, “from beginning to end.”

  It was the perfect opening, and Kinley seized it.

  “That’s how I’d like to hear about it,” he said, “from beginning to end.”

  The old man turned toward him. “It’s not a pretty story,” he said, then shrugged lightly, as if divesting himself of the one small bit of incontestable knowledge his long experience had taught him, “but then, the good ones never are.”

  “When did you first hear about it?”

  “Well, that was the first odd thing,” Townsend said, “because it took a long time for anybody to hear about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’d been missing a couple days before I knew anything about it,” Townsend answered. “It wasn’t on the police blotter, you might say. The report, the one Mrs. Dinker made to the Sheriff’s Office, it wasn’t recorded anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, things were run sort of haphazardly in the Sheriff’s Department back then,” Townsend said, “but still, they had these little forms …”

  “Incident Reports,” Kinley said.

  “Yes, that kind of thing,” Townsend said, “and when Mrs. Dinker came down to tell about Ellie being missing, nobody filled out a form.”

  Kinley quickly scribbled the information into his notebook. “Mrs. Dinker talked directly to Sheriff Maddox, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And he launched an investigation.”

  Townsend shook his head. “No, not really,” he said, his voice suddenly low and grave. “He later testified that he did, but I checked on his movements after Mrs. Dinker talked to him, and, really, he didn’t go looking for that little girl at all.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Mostly hung around the courthouse and let his deputies handle everything,” Townsend said. “Of course, he had reason to do that. They were planning a big celebration, and there was a lot going on.”

  “Wouldn’t that be enough to explain what Maddox did?” Kinley said. “Or didn’t do?”

  “Maybe for the first day,” Townsend said, “but not the second. He didn’t do much of anything that day either.”

  “He set up the roadblocks.”

  “Only because Chief James made him,” Townsend said. “James told Maddox that if he didn’t get moving, then the City Police would take over.”

  “Why did James withdraw from the case later on?” Kinley asked. “Ben Wade thinks it was just a question of jurisdiction.”

  “There never was a true jurisdiction in this case,” Townsend said, “because nobody knows where the murder took place. It could have been inside the city limits, or it could have been outside.”

  “So why did he bow out?”

  “To let the cronies handle everything.”

  “What cronies?”

  Townsend ticked off the names without hesitation. “Thompson, Warfield, Maddox, Mayor Jameson, and a few others, mostly from the courthouse crowd,” he said.

  “James wasn’t in that group?”

  “Chief James wasn’t in any group.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because he was from the south side of town,” Townsend said. “His daddy was nothing but a drunkard, and his mama worked in the cotton mills.” He smiled bitterly. “He was strictly from white trash as far as the others were concerned.”

  Kinley nodded. “I see.”

  Townsend shrugged. “Anyway, once Maddox started working the case, the Chief just bowed out.”

  “When did Maddox start working it?”

  “Not till late on the day after the girl turned up missing,” Townsend said. “Before then, he didn’t do shit.”

  “July 3,” Kinley said as he wrote it in his notebook.

  “That’s right,” Townsend said. “Maddox really got hopping late that day.”

  “And by that afternoon?”

  “It was over like that,” Townsend said, snapping his fingers softly, “like magic”

  Kinley continued to read through his notes. “They did the roadblock on the afternoon of July 3,” he said, reciting its details, “found a witness who fingered Overton …” He flipped another page. “Then Wade found Ellie Dinker’s dress.”

  “And twenty-four hours later Charlie Overton was in jail,” Townsend said.

  Kinley looked up from the notes. “Dumb luck?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No, I don’t,” Townsend said, “but it’s not just how quickly things came together that last day, but the way the whole day broke down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for one thing, Maddox suddenly didn’t want much to do with me,” Townsend said. “He claimed he was too busy every time I showed up at his office. He was always rushing out.” He laughed to himself. “Floyd Maddox was a big old fat boy, not too smart. He didn’t rush anywhere.”

  “Unless he had something to hide?”

  Townsend nodded grimly. “I was sorry when that old boy died,” he said. “You know why? Because I always figured somebody would finally come around and start looking at this case, and that if they looked deep enough, they’d get Floyd eventually, they’d nail him like he nailed Charlie Overton.”

  “You don’t think Overton had anything to do with Ellie Dinker’s murder?” Kinley asked.

  Townsend shook his head determinedly. “Not one thing.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Well, for one thing, Overton didn’t have a motive.”

  Kinley’s mind did its trick, flashed Luther Snow’s testimony onto its black screen. “Well, at the trial …”

  Townsend waved his hand dismissively. “Luther Snow,” he said disgustedly. “All that bullshit about woman trouble. That was a load of crap. If Charles Overton had woman trouble, it didn’t have anything to do with Ellie Dinker.”

/>   “You think Snow just made it up?”

  “That sorry bastard,” Townsend said harshly, the old reporter’s deathless idealism suddenly rising, as it sometimes did, to insist on the preciousness of certain vital things. “A man gets on the stand, he ought to say something that makes sense, that has some facts in it. All this woman trouble stuff, that didn’t add up to a hill of beans as far as evidence goes.”

  Kinley refused to be swept away by the old man’s relentless manner. “How do you know this ‘woman trouble’ wasn’t about Dinker?”

  “Well, look at what he said.”

  “That Overton had talked about …”

  “Implied,” Townsend said, cutting Kinley off. “Snow didn’t really say anything. He just implied it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Woman trouble? Overton?” Townsend asked. “With Ellie Dinker, a young girl, only sixteen years old?”

  Ben Wade’s equally reliable face swam into Kinley’s mind: Ellie Dinker was a tramp. “I’ve been told that Ellie Dinker didn’t have a spotless reputation.”

  Townsend nodded. “She knew more than she should have, a girl her age,” he admitted, “and God knows that child didn’t die a virgin, but that’s just looking at it from Ellie Dinker’s side of things.”

  “What does it leave out?”

  “The other half.”

  “Overton?”

  “Overton,” Townsend said flatly.

  In his mind, Kinley saw Charles Overton as Townsend’s own grainy photographs had portrayed him, poor, broken, spiritless, a sheep walking passively into the slaughterhouse. “He didn’t seem the type who’d be having a fling with a teenage girl,” Kinley admitted.

  Townsend stared at him evenly. “It wouldn’t have mattered if he was.”

  Kinley felt his fingers close around the narrow shaft of the pen. “What do you mean?”

  “He was a wounded man,” Townsend said softly, “in his spirit, but not only there.”

  Kinley looked at him quizzically, but did not speak.