The trail swung to the right, through a thick stand of pine, and as he walked, Kinley could hear the crunch of the needles beneath his feet, and he remembered how, as a boy, he’d loved to lie on the ground and cover himself in them, sleeping through the long afternoons until he’d finally open his eyes and see his grandmother looming over him, her hands stretching down and his stretching up, grasping.
He felt his hands repeat the motion and plunged them quickly into his pockets, as if to hide them from Wade’s searching eyes.
“Right there,” Wade said suddenly as he came to an abrupt halt on the trail.
Kinley stepped to his side and watched as Wade lifted his arm toward a tall tree which stood in a small clearing in the distance.
“It was hanging from right there,” Wade said quietly. “I’ll never forget it. Just hanging over a limb, like somebody had tossed it up there.”
They made their way to the clearing, and Kinley stared at the lone tree while Wade, breathless from the climb, eased himself down on a large gray stone.
“It must have been quite a sight,” Kinley said after a moment.
“Yeah, it was,” Wade told him. He shook his head, remembering it. “It was just hanging there, like I said, bent over a limb, like it was …” He stopped, and Kinley turned to look at him. His face had taken on a deep wonderment, and behind his eyes, Kinley could see a mind powerfully and passionately at work.
“Like it was what?” Kinley asked.
Wade’s eyes lifted toward him, the wonderment now turned to a dark questioning. “Like it was waiting for me,” he said.
Kinley stepped over to him. “Was it?”
Wade stood up and flung his large arm over Kinley’s shoulder. “How about a drink?” he asked. “It’s been a hard climb.”
They went to a small bar at the south end of town, the kind Kinley had come to know well in his work, remote, honky-tonk bars where people sat around nursing their grudges against whatever it was they’d come to blame for the way things had turned out.
Wade ordered, then, puffing on a cigarette, waited somewhat impatiently until the drinks arrived. “All right,” he said, when they came. “Here’s to letting it loose.”
Kinley lifted his glass, but said nothing.
“Okay, here it is,” Wade said after the first quick sip. “A few things always bothered me. Riley never knew that, and Ray didn’t either.” He sat back slightly. “But get one thing straight, as far as the Dinker girl, what I said before is the God’s truth. She was a tramp. Nobody made that up. As far as meeting Overton, that may be true, too. If he needed some, and she was able to provide it, why not? Besides, his old lady was pregnant, big as a house. Who knows, maybe he needed a little something to get him through the last few days.”
Kinley nodded. “So what bothers you?”
“The well, that always bothered me,” Wade said. “But according to Ray, that came up a crapper.”
“Yes, it did.”
Wade looked at him questioningly. “You found that out by your own self?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, you went down in the goddamn thing?”
“Yes,” Kinley said, “and there was nothing down there. I know what to look for, and it wasn’t there.”
Wade looked at him admiringly for a moment, then went on. “Okay, so one down,” he said. “The next thing was the way the investigation went. Warfield didn’t have much to say in it. Maddox took it over.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Wade gave a quick, dismissive snort. “Floyd Maddox was a fucking rube, Jack,” he said. “He was a courthouse guard dog. He didn’t know the first thing about how to handle a murder investigation.”
“Who did?”
“Warfield,” Wade said. “And Felix. Felix James, the Sequoyah Chief of Police.”
“Then why didn’t they handle it?”
“I think Warfield wanted to,” Wade said. “He kept his eye on it. Maybe for political reasons. It’s an old road. You go from District Attorney to Attorney General to Senator or Governor or whatever your dick gets hard for.”
Kinley nodded. It was a familiar path.
“So, just for the political clout, I guess Warfield wanted to keep his hand in things,” Wade went on. “Of course, he was going to get the limelight for the prosecution anyway. So, really, he didn’t have anything to worry about.”
“Unless no one was arrested,” Kinley said.
“Yeah, well, he wouldn’t have wanted that,” Wade said. “So, maybe for that reason, he hung around a lot.”
“But the Chief didn’t?”
Wade shook his head. “No, he didn’t. He just sort of bowed out of it.”
“Do you know why?”
Wade smiled. “You know, I got to hand it to Riley. He’s sort of kept at this case in a way. And, you know, about five years ago, just before Felix died, they were at a meeting somewhere, the school board or something like that, and damned if old Riley didn’t come up and ask the old Chief flat out. ‘Why didn’t you stay on top of the Dinker case?’ That’s what Riley asked him.” He laughed at the brazenness of it. “Right to his goddamn face.”
“Did he get an answer?”
“Well, the Chief was pretty well gone with cancer by then,” Wade said, “but, yeah, he had enough left of him to spit out an answer. He looked at Riley, and he said, ‘It was out of my hands, Deputy.’ Then he walked away, and that was the last time I ever saw Felix James alive.”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“I think he meant that it was a technical matter,” Wade said, “of law enforcement, I mean, a jurisdictional thing.”
“What do you mean, jurisdictional?”
“The murder was probably committed on the mountain above Mile Marker 27,” Wade explained. “Which means that it was beyond the Sequoyah city limits. That made it Sheriff Maddox’s jurisdiction.”
“I see,” Kinley said.
“So, in that case, it was the Sheriff’s business,” Wade added, “and that’s the way it went down. The Chief just went on writing speeding tickets during the whole thing.”
“So what was unusual about him bowing out?”
“Just that he didn’t usually do that sort of thing,” Wade said. “He was more like Warfield, ambitious. With a murder case, you’d have thought he’d have hung in there. But he didn’t.”
Kinley nodded quietly and took a sip of beer. He was somewhat disappointed, since nothing Wade had told him really amounted to much that could be followed up. It was speculative, subjective, the sort of testimony he’d spent hours gathering, then tossed aside like bunting gathered up after the parade had gone by.
“And one other thing,” Wade said suddenly.
Kinley lowered the glass and waited.
“The dress,” Wade told him. “It disappeared.”
Kinley felt his hand crawl up, grasp the notebook he kept nestled in his jacket pocket and draw it out. “The green dress? Ellie Dinker’s dress?”
Wade nodded. “Vanished.”
“But it was at the trial,” Kinley said, astonished. “Warfield held it up for the jury to see.”
“Oh, yeah, it was at the trial all right,” Wade said. “It didn’t disappear until after that.”
“Do you know when?”
“About five years ago,” Wade answered. “We’d always kept it in a box in the courthouse basement. All the physical evidence was kept down there—the tire iron, the dress, the shoes, everything.”
“Were the tire iron and shoes there?”
Wade nodded. “Yeah, they were still there,” he said, “but the dress was gone.” He took another sip of beer. “Anyway, I was rummaging through some stuff down there, and I came upon the box all the Dinker case stuff was kept in, and the flaps were open. I started to close them, and as I was doing that, I glanced in, and I could see that the dress was gone.”
“And that was about five years ago?” Kinley asked, as he wrote it down in his notebook.
<
br /> “Had to have been between May and August, too,” Wade said. “Because I’d been down in the basement in May, and I can tell you one thing, the flaps weren’t open on that box.”
Kinley wrote that down, too, then glanced back up at Wade. “It was during the time that Mrs. Dinker was always coming to the courthouse to read the transcript of the trial,” he said.
Wade nodded solemnly. “Yeah, I know,” he said softly. “And that’s what made me start thinking that maybe something went wrong in the case way back then.” He drained the last of the beer, then lowered the glass to the table. “One thing about that dress, it didn’t get up and walk out by itself.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
All the way back down the mountain, Kinley continued to think of the various, somewhat disconnected, things Ben Wade had told him. Most of them could be explained. It was possible, for example, that Chief James had only acted professionally in withdrawing from a case that was not in his jurisdiction. As for Sheriff Maddox, his actions could be put to nothing more sinister than the limited intelligence and organizational skill he had exhibited during his long tenure as Sheriff. Even Ray had commented upon it from time to time. “He was a bumbler, Kinley, a political hack,” he’d told him not long after Maddox had died, and just before he had decided to run for the office himself. “He just did what he was told by the local bosses.”
But neither James’s professionalism nor Maddox’s incompetence could explain the most essential of Ben Wade’s revelations, the disappearance of Ellie Dinker’s dress.
As he continued down toward the valley, driving slowly along the curving mountain road, he could see all of Sequoyah spread out before him, a narrow stretch of lights which ran for almost three miles down the slender green valley. He had spent his youth watching it from the great height of his own mountain home. It had been the “big city” then, or as much of a big city as he had yet experienced, or ever expected to experience before the Yankee researchers had discovered him, and he’d thought of it as a strange and indecipherable place, a random, haphazard collection of stores and houses, churches and factories, presided over, perhaps kept in check, by the overhanging wall of the courthouse façade.
But now, as he continued to drift down the mountainside, his foot pressed firmly on the brake, Sequoyah seemed small and vulnerable, even innocent when he thought of Boston or New York, its corruptions more or less harmless, a quick five spot from a local bootlegger, another five to fix a traffic ticket. Compared to the epic graft of Manhattan, Sequoyah’s trivial venalities seemed little more than the time-honored way of doing business, a form of friendly chicanery.
Except for Ellie Dinker’s dress.
He saw it in the fervent detail of his imagination, first as it shifted along Ellie Dinker’s thin, white legs as she made her way toward the mountain road, then as it waved in the summer breeze before Ben Wade’s astonished eyes, still later as it hung from Warfield’s determined fingers, and finally, as it was yanked from the dark box by hands Kinley could not see.
He glanced down toward the scattered lights of Sequoyah once again. Over the roofs of the shops and houses, and even higher, past the pointed spires of the Protestant churches, he could see the lights of the courthouse, some of them still burning on the top floor. One of them was in the exact place where Ray’s desk rested on the second floor. And as Kinley’s eyes focused on its tiny square of light, he could almost see Ray’s pale face pressed against the tiny window as he peered sleeplessly into the night, his ghostly eyes fixed on the mountain, a car moving down the mountain road, his old friend Kinley behind the wheel: It’s better to know, don’t you think? No matter what the cost.
He sat down at the desk and typed out the list of people who’d thus far become associated with the case, placing the names in two columns, the living and the dead.
LIVING
1)Riley Hendricks
2)Ben Wade
3)Horace Talbott
4)Dr. Stark
5)Helen Slater
6)Dora Overton
DEAD
1)Chief James
2)Sheriff Maddox
3)Thomas Warfield
4)Martha Dinker
5)Ellie Dinker
6)Charles Overton
7)Sarah Overton
8)Ray Tindall
CONDITION UNKNOWN
1)Betty Gaines
2)Luther Snow
3)David Halgrave
Once the names had been typed into the file, he returned to Martha Dinker’s testimony, and suddenly, with his knowledge of the missing dress now included in the data his mind had rearranged, Mrs. Dinker’s action on the stand became utterly clear, the halting phrases, and particularly the repeated references the court reporter had made in the record to what Kinley now saw as Mrs. Dinker’s mute alarm: WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND.
But she had responded, Kinley realized, as he looked at the single page of testimony Mrs. Dinker herself had gazed at for so long as she had sat hunched over the gray metal desk outside the evidence vault. She had powerfully responded. She had gone speechless, and as his eyes bore into the transcript for what he knew would be the final time, Kinley could visualize the whole terrible moment in his mind:
WARFIELD: Did you actually see Ellie head up the mountain?
DINKER: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: Do you remember what she was wearing?
DINKER: A pair of black shoes and a green dress.
WARFIELD: What was it made of?
DINKER: Cotton.
WARFIELD: Was it dark green or light green?
DINKER: Dark green. And it had a little white lacy collar that I made for her.
WARFIELD: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see your daughter again?
DINKER: No, sir.
At that moment, Warfield had walked to his desk and displayed the dress Ben Wade had found hanging like a headless, limbless body in the trees above the mountain road.
In response, Mrs. Dinker had stared silently at the dress for a moment, then mumbled something the court reporter had found inaudible.
But as Kinley could sense now, Martha Dinker had no longer been in the courtroom as Warfield fired his questions. Her mind had been whirling, as her eyes bore down upon the dress. And as the seconds of her unexpected silence lengthened, the court reporter had finally had no choice but to write into the bleak history of the trial that to the prosecutor’s insistent question Martha Dinker had given no answer whatsoever. Instead, she had stared mutely at the dress hanging limply from Warfield’s long white fingers, until, under the barrage of his insistent demands, she had finally responded: I ain’t seen it since that day.
Kinley held his eyes fixedly on Martha Dinker’s final, explosive response to Warfield’s question, then got up, poured himself a scotch from the bottle he’d bought the day before and walked out onto the front porch.
The feel of the wooden swing against his back was firm and reassuring, something hard and steady in a world that seemed to be dissolving, the old Sequoyah with its rooted notions of how the world should be, how people should behave within it, of where a human should stand amid the swirling chaos of the years, all that ancient, solid ground seemed to be shifting subtly beneath his feet.
He took a sip from the glass and leaned back, his mind returning to the courtroom, to Martha Dinker’s stunned silence as she’d gazed at her daughter’s dress. She had seen something which had silenced her, stopped her completely in the onward rush of her testimony, stopped her as fully and completely as if a hand had suddenly pressed itself against her mouth.
But what?
He was sure it was in the transcript somewhere, on that single page somewhere. By now he had read it a sufficient number of times for his mind fully to have recorded it, and as he sat on the dark porch he replayed it in his mind, once again moving to the abrupt halt in Mrs. Dinker’s testimony as Warfield had lifted the dress to display it before her.
What had she seen at that moment?
With the dress gone, he realized t
hat he might never know. It was one of the worst kinds of dead ends for an investigation, a solid, black wall that seemed beyond penetration. The dress was gone, and he had no way of knowing where it was, or even what it might have looked like, other than that it was dark green with a lacy collar Mrs. Dinker had made herself.
He took another sip of scotch and let his legs press back against the wooden floor, swinging himself gently in the dark air, his mind wandering amid the welter of accumulating detail, as he always allowed it to do when he confronted what appeared to be an insurmountable difficulty. At times it had been a productive maneuver, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a lost item or misspoken word flared up from the mound of ashes and sent him whirling again. At other times, however, it had come up empty, and there were moments when those failures rose to haunt and disconcert him. He had never found Billy Flynn’s little plastic ring, and for all he knew Mildred Haskell had swallowed it the day she murdered him. The strange girl in the red bell-bottoms whom Daphne Moore had seen with Willie Connors only minutes before he kidnapped her remained a black, featureless silhouette. Why Colin Bright had lied about coming north toward the Comstock farm remained a mystery, as did the reason Alley Short had called the police to report a murder she had herself committed.
He pushed back roughly, almost angrily, his feet once again flying out, sending the swing further back, so that when he swept forward again he could feel a breeze riffle through his hair. It was cooler than the air had been only seconds before, and because of that Kinley knew that a layer of high air had suddenly descended from the mountain’s heights, moving in a broad wave down its steep slopes, rustling through the leaves, branches, vines.
Evidence of Blood Page 22
