“And you think Overton was a man like that?” Kinley asked, “that he hated women?”
“No, not all of them.”
“Just his wife, then?”
“No, he loved Sarah,” Talbott said. “That’s why he couldn’t hurt her. But Ellie Dinker? She was a stranger. He could do anything he wanted.” He plucked the Army report from the top of his desk and thrust it toward Kinley. “Which he did.”
“So she was a stand-in for Sarah Overton?” Kinley asked.
Talbott nodded. “Ellie Dinker was every bitch who’d ever betrayed Charlie Overton, every nurse who’d ever giggled outside his hospital room.”
“So you never believed that Overton and Dinker had planned to meet on the mountain that day?” Kinley asked.
“No.”
“Or had any kind of relationship before the murder?”
“Absolutely not,” Talbott said. “Charlie Overton was a withdrawn man. He went from his job to his house, and once he was in his house, he never went out again. The world scared him, and he stayed away from it as much as possible.”
“Then why did Luther Snow testify that Overton knew Ellie Dinker?” Kinley asked.
Talbott shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered about that myself, but I’ve never found an answer.” He looked at Kinley with an unexpected attitude of encouragement. “Maybe you can,” he said.
Kinley said nothing, but merely let his eyes settle on Talbott, studying his features once again, Dora in ghostly pentimento behind them.
“Are you going to tell Dora?” Talbott asked after a moment.
Kinley did not know the answer to that question, and so dodged behind a question of his own. “Should I?”
Talbott stared at him. “Ray didn’t,” he said.
Kinley leaned forward slightly. “Ray got this far? He found out this much?”
Talbott nodded slowly. “He came just like you did,” he said.
“And you told him everything you told me?”
“Everything,” Talbott said.
“When was that?”
“About six weeks before he died,” Talbott said. “He had the same information you had, but I thought he was going to do something else with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I asked him the same question, about whether he was going to tell Dora about me,” Talbott said. He smiled thinly. “And I was very encouraged by the answer.”
“What did he say?”
“He was very firm, very decisive, the way Ray always was,” Talbott said. “He looked me straight in the eye, and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ Just like that, without any hesitation. ‘Absolutely.’”
Kinley nodded silently, Ray’s face once more in the forefront of his mind, the same old Ray, with the same old answer and the same old reason: It’s always better to know, isn’t it? No matter what the cost.
“And so I expected him to do it,” Talbott added. “To tell Dora the truth, that I’m her father.” He glanced down toward his own gnarled, aging hands. “She’s my only child, you know,” he said. His eyes lifted slowly toward Kinley. “I see her almost every day. I go to that little bar she works in, and I have a glass of wine. We chat about this and that.” He let out a breath so slowly his chest seemed to empty, as if it were his last. “I thought Ray would tell her, and maybe, if he did, I’d be able to take her in my arms just once before I die.”
But Ray had never told her, and during the early, predawn hours of the following morning, as Kinley lay sleeplessly entangled in Dora’s arms, he was not at all sure that he would ever tell her, either. He was not even sure that the truth was what he’d always thought it to be, something high, exalted, worth pursuing at all costs. Perhaps it was something evil, too, just another knife that could be used to open up our veins.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
He looked up at her. “Yes.”
She let her open hand move softly down his arm “You’re sweating.”
“I sometimes do.”
“At night? In the fall? For no reason?”
He told her his first lie. “Yes.”
THIRTY
He left her a few hours later, the early morning fog still thick around him as he drove down the mountain road to Sequoyah. He did not want to return immediately to the house on Beaumont Street, to the tiny office lined with Ray’s books, to the lingering smell of the funeral flowers. He did not want to return to Ray, to what Ray had learned, or why he had learned it, or even what he had done with the information after he’d received it, all of which now burdened Kinley with unexpected and unwanted questions his other investigations had never posed. In a sense, he felt a bleak nostalgia for all his former investigations. At least they’d possessed the comfort of the impersonal, and he’d been able to conduct them in the anesthetized atmosphere which seemed extraordinarily appealing to him now. The insistent ache he felt for Ray and Dora had been absent from all his earlier inquiries, and he could sense that some unregenerate part of his character yearned for the old numbness to envelop him again, return him to the safety of purely academic cares.
The little diner on Sequoyah’s main street was the only place open, so he pulled into its small, gravelly parking lot, and went in. He sat at one of the booths at the front window, and waited, his hand grasping and releasing first the fork, then the spoon. He’d squeezed the napkin into a crumpled mass by the time the waitress appeared.
She was somewhat chubby and seemed to roll forward rather than walk, but she took his order with an unreproachable professionalism which Kinley admired. She was quick and cool and had no time for idle chatter, and he gave her his order in the same functional manner.
“Coffee. Black. No sugar,” he said.
She returned with it promptly, then vanished down the aisle.
He took a quick sip, his eyes following the still somewhat drowsy movements of the awakening town. The early birds were the same in every place he’d ever been, the deliverers of life, laden with their milk and bread. Behind them came the eager office workers, and after them, the people who worked the retail trade, filling their registers with money doled out to them from the manager’s steel safe. In a sense, he thought, it really was a kind of organism, just as Ray might have come to envision it, but one that had something brooding darkly at its core, something that he couldn’t ignore, any more than a doctor, observing an otherwise robust and healthy patient, could ignore a murmur of the heart.
It was almost eight o’clock, and Kinley was on his third cup of coffee when William Warfield came through the door, spotted him, and strode down the aisle toward him.
“Good morning,” he said as he stepped up to the booth. He glanced about the restaurant. “Looks like business isn’t too brisk this morning.”
Kinley nodded and gave him a polite smile. “No, not too busy,” he said.
Warfield nodded toward the empty seat across from Kinley. “Mind if I join you?”
“No.”
“Just my usual coffee, Dottie,” he called to the vanished waitress as he pulled himself smoothly into the booth. “How’s the book going?”
“Book?”
“On the Overton case,” Warfield said. “Aren’t you writing a book on it?”
“Just looking into a few things,” Kinley answered. “It’s not a book yet.”
“Yeah, Ben Wade said you’d talked to him,” Warfield said. “So did Ella.”
“Ella?”
“Ella Hunter, the Court Clerk,” Warfield explained. Kinley nodded. “Oh, yeah.”
“Anyway,” Warfield went on. “How’s it going? The investigation, I mean.”
“I’m running into a few roadblocks,” Kinley told him. He shrugged, unwilling to go further. “But that’s not unusual in an investigation.”
“No, I guess not,” Warfield said, then looked at him curiously. “What kind of roadblocks?”
Kinley kept the more important ones to himself, but offered Warfield the one he thought closest to th
e District Attorney’s own professional concerns.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, “some of the evidence is missing.”
“Missing?”
“Disappeared.”
Warfield looked at him worriedly. “Evidence? Missing? In the Overton case? Disappeared from where?”
“From the courthouse basement,” Kinley said. “Right out of the box it had been kept in.”
Warfield’s concern deepened instantly. “From my courthouse?” he asked incredulously, his guardianship suddenly under serious challenge.
Kinley nodded.
Warfield looked at him doubtfully. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes, I am.”
“How do you know?”
“Ben Wade told me.”
The source of the information seemed to convince Warfield. “What evidence are we talking about exactly?”
“Ellie Dinker’s dress.”
Warfield stared at him, thunderstruck. “Are you telling me that Ellie Dinker’s dress is not in the evidence box?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t see how that could be true,” Warfield said. “All that stuff is very carefully inventoried.”
Kinley said nothing.
“It’s also very carefully monitored after that,” Warfield added. “I instituted that system myself.”
“What system?”
“There’s a log,” Warfield explained. “Ella Hunter keeps it. Anybody who goes down into the basement has to sign in and out. We don’t just let people wander about, you know. We run it like the jail, everything and everybody accounted for. That’s the system I insisted upon.”
“When was that policy established?” Kinley asked.
“Ten years ago,” Warfield said. “We’d had a few things disappearing. Mostly drugs that had been confiscated and were being held for evidence. To stop that sort of thing from happening, I started this sign-in system. It’s been in place ever since.”
“How far back do you keep the logs?”
“All the way,” Warfield said without hesitation, as if pleased by such thoroughness. He gave Kinley a piercing look. “Do you know the date when the dress disappeared?”
“Within about three months, I do.”
“And when was that?”
“Between May and August of 1986.”
Warfield looked at him quizzically. “Are you sure about that?”
“Ben Wade is.”
“Well, we have a problem, then,” Warfield said, “because that was the time when the courthouse was being renovated.”
“Renovated?”
“Done over, top to bottom,” Warfield explained. “Everything bought new for the whole place. We did it floor by floor, and I remember very well that they did the basement that summer.”
“Which means what?”
“That the basement would have been closed to the public,” Warfield said. “The actual room would have been locked, because we didn’t want any of the people who work at the courthouse getting into the evidence.”
“So you locked it up?”
“Tight as a drum,” Warfield said. “Padlocked for three months.”
“And no one went in?”
“Just the people in my office and the maintenance people.”
“Would they have had to sign the log?”
Warfield shook his head. “No, they’re the only people who don’t.”
“How many people are we talking about?”
“Not many,” Warfield said. “Six or seven, something like that.”
Kinley drew his notebook from his jacket pocket. “You remember the names?”
Warfield hesitated. “Well, you have to understand something, Mr. Kinley. If something’s missing from the courthouse, it’s my job to track it down and find the people responsible. It’s not your job to do that.”
Kinley smiled quietly. “But it might be easier for me,” he said.
Warfield was not convinced. “How do you figure that?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be a threat to them,” Kinley explained. “You would.”
Warfield said nothing.
“The point is to get the dress back,” Kinley added, careful not to give Warfield the impression that he was trying to do his thinking for him. “That would put everything back in shape, wouldn’t it?”
It was an argument he’d used before, and it had never failed to be effective when dealing with a bureaucratic mind.
“That way, it would all be an internal matter,” Kinley said, putting on the finishing touch. “The way it should be, a purely private investigation.”
“You know, I think you may be right about that,” Warfield said, after considering it a moment. “If I started barrelling in, firing a lot of questions, they’d figure they were looking at a formal prosecution somewhere down the road.”
Kinley nodded. “Yes, they would.”
“Okay,” Warfield said, “but you have to let me know whatever you find out.”
“Absolutely,” Kinley assured him.
Warfield’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Well, there was myself, of course, and Ben Wade.” He stopped, as if a thought had suddenly struck him. “And there was Ray, too. He was the Sheriff then, so he had access.”
Kinley continued to write down the names.
“Chief James, of course,” Warfield went on, “but he died during that time.” He thought a moment longer. “And I guess that was about it, except for the cleaning staff.”
Kinley nodded. “And who would that be?”
“There were only two of them at the time,” Warfield said. “We’d had a labor reduction.”
“Who were they?”
“Lila Trumbull,” Warfield said. “But she mostly worked the upper floors. She moved to Atlanta in late March. That left all the cleaning to Betty Gaines.”
Kinley glanced up from the notebook. “Betty Gaines?”
Warfield nodded. “Yeah. Betty worked at the courthouse for about two years.”
“Before that, she worked for Thompson Construction, didn’t she?”
Warfield’s eyes widened. “My goodness, you are learning a lot about Sequoyah.”
“She was working for Thompson Construction when Charles Overton was working there,” Kinley added.
“She was?” Warfield asked. “I didn’t know that. Back in 1954?”
“That’s right,” Kinley told him. “Is she still around Sequoyah?”
“Yeah, she is,” Warfield said. “Betty lives over in the old factory district. You know, where the old textile mill was, over there by the railroad tracks.”
Kinley wrote it down. “I might start with her,” he said, his eyes staring at the other names on the list. “At the very least, she had a connection to the trial.” He looked back up at Warfield. “She testified for Overton,” he said. “She was one of the few witnesses who did.”
Warfield looked at Kinley with a sudden, unexpected intensity. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, there wasn’t much of a defense,” Kinley told him.
“No, there wasn’t,” he said, “but how could there have been?”
“Well, even character witnesses,” Kinley said. “There were only two of them, and one of them was his wife.”
“That’s because Overton was a loner,” Warfield said. “At least that’s the way my father described him. Very solitary. He hardly ever spoke.”
“So your father did talk about the case from time to time,” Kinley said.
“Not often,” Warfield replied, “but it was a murder case. It was the first one he’d ever had. And, in addition to that, of course, it was a capital case. A man died. Even if the man’s guilty, it’s not something you forget, putting a man in the chair.” He leaned forward. “My father certainly never forgot it.”
Kinley saw the elder Warfield in his mind, his fingers drawing the green dress from its cover. “What was he like, your father?”
“He was good,” Warfield answered. “He was kind.”
He looked at Kinley solemnly. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows about my father and that case,” he said. “After the trial, he gave some money to Mrs. Overton.”
“Money?” Kinley repeated, unbelievingly.
Warfield nodded. “To help her out,” he explained. “You know, because she’d just had a baby. Anyway, he gave her some money. He funneled it through Horace Talbott.”
“I see.”
“It’s true,” Warfield said, though Kinley did not doubt what he’d just been told. “I don’t guess Mrs. Overton ever knew where the money came from, but it came from my father.” He looked at Kinley with a knowing smile. “I guess that sort of thing doesn’t happen in New York, does it?” he asked.
Kinley shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it does.”
THIRTY-ONE
The old textile factory loomed like a great fortress over the iron rails of the tracks which separated it, along with Sequoyah’s working poor, from the other, far more prosperous part of town.
Even as a boy, Kinley had recognized the demarcation as unbridgeable and severe. The boys who drank whisky and the girls who got pregnant belonged to a dim netherworld of factory gates, shift sirens and billowing, sulfuric clouds that hung over the south side of Sequoyah like a great yellow curtain. From time to time, by some quirk of zoning which would be corrected by the following year, a teenage boy or girl from the factory district would actually wind up at Sequoyah High rather than South Side, the old Depression-era brick schoolhouse which had been set aside for their kind. Girl or boy, short or tall, they would always look the same, either thin and bony from too little food, or fat with the bloated excess of their starchy diets. Their behavior was similarly of a piece, and they would slump listlessly in a back-row seat while the teacher droned on about the Lost Cause or geometric proofs which were about as useful to them as the Rosetta stone. They were never at parties, proms or football games. They never sought elective office or campaigned for anyone who did. Their names never appeared on the rolls of the social or academic clubs, school publications. They were similarly absent from the sports rosters, and on the days designated for class photos, they did not show up to stand with their fellow students, so that, in the end, the history of Sequoyah High hardly recorded them at all.