Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  SNOW: Whatever you called it.

  WARFIELD: You mean, the indictment?

  SNOW: Whatever’s wrote on the paper, that’s what I ain’t guilty for.

  WARFIELD: Selling whisky?

  SNOW: Ain’t nothing wrong with selling whisky.

  WARFIELD: Nothing wrong?

  SNOW: Across the state line, over there in Tennessee, they got stores on the main street that’s selling it all day long.

  WARFIELD: But we’re not talking about Chattanooga, are we?

  SNOW: No.

  WARFIELD: What are we talking about?

  SNOW: Money. How to get it.

  WARFIELD: And one way is by selling whisky?

  SNOW: Whatever way, it don’t matter to me.

  WARFIELD: So you’d do anything for money, Mr. Snow?

  SNOW: Anything.

  WARFIELD: So I could rely on that, couldn’t I?

  SNOW: Till your dying day.

  It was a grim exchange, and Kinley had read a great many others like it, Mildred Haskell had talked like Snow, and Colin Bright—ghostly, disembodied voices, perfectly modulated for their refined malginancy.

  WARFIELD: Are you married, Mr. Snow?

  SNOW: Yes.

  WARFIELD: What’s your wife’s name?

  SNOW: Bertha.

  WARFIELD: Where is she right now?

  SNOW: Hospital.

  WARFIELD: How’d she get there?

  SNOW: I gave her a whipping.

  WARFIELD: You beat her up, isn’t that right?

  SNOW: I needed quiet.

  WARFIELD: And that’s the way you get it?

  SNOW: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

  At that point, Snow must have said it with a sneer, or perhaps a thin, sinister grin, because the spectators had laughed so loudly that the judge had called a halt to the proceedings until order could be restored.

  Then, with the laughter trailing off, the cross-examination began again.

  WARFIELD: Have you ever been in prison, Mr. Snow?

  SNOW: Yeah.

  WARFIELD: Whereabouts?

  SNOW: All over.

  WARFIELD: In Alabama, for car theft?

  SNOW: Yeah. A blue Olds, anybody would have wanted it.

  WARFIELD: In Alabama for burglary?

  SNOW: Big house. Some fat old plantation man.

  WARFIELD: Way out in Texas, for assault.

  SNOW: Yeah, and he needed stopping, too.

  WARFIELD: Nothing in Georgia.

  SNOW: I guess I’m turning soft in my old age.

  Again the courtroom spectators had laughed, and again the judge had found it necessary to caution them against any further outburst.

  By now Warfield was getting scared. Luther Snow was talking circles around him. In the mountain country, prosecutions for boot-legging were never easy, but Snow was turning everything against Warfield, mocking him, ridiculing him, making him look like a fool, and Warfield’s own shakiness under the assault was undermining his case almost as effectively as Snow’s determined outlawry.

  As for Snow, he knew he was winning, and he went in for the kill.

  SNOW: You know what I think?

  WARFIELD: It’s not your place to …

  SNOW: I think you had a drink last night. Maybe before that, too, and, hell, I bet you up and had another one the day before that.

  WARFIELD: Mr. Snow, I’m not the one who is on …

  SNOW: And it went down warm and easy, like it does on verybody.

  WARFIELD: Mr. Snow, you cannot continue to …

  SNOW: Because everybody likes a drink when things are a little hard on them.

  WARFIELD: Mr. Snow, you …

  SNOW: And that’s what I give them.

  WARFIELD: Your Honor, I would ask that you direct the …

  SNOW: Not that rotgut they make in the hills, but bonded whisky.

  WARFIELD: …the witness to please stop …

  SNOW: Just like you got, I bet, at your little bar at home, Warfield.

  WARFIELD: …talking.

  SNOW: I’ve already stopped, Your Honor.

  WARFIELD: Well …well, I …

  COURT: Do you wish to rest your case, Mr. Warfield?

  WARFIELD: Well, I …Yes. Yes, Your Honor, I do.

  If Snow had conceived of his own cross-examination as a ploy, it had worked brilliantly, Kinley realized as he turned to the last page of the transcript. For later that same afternoon, a jury of poor, hardworking country people had considered the bloated hypocrisy of Thomas Warfield, heir to all the Warfield fortune, so young his skin still held its infant sheen beneath the courtroom lights, and compared it to the snarling, belabored, but unrepentant visage of Luther Snow, and found Snow innocent of the charges which had been brought against him.

  It was almost seven in the evening before Kinley completed his reading of Snow’s trial. He made himself a quick dinner before going on to the next case.

  By eight he was in the back room again, his hand turning to the first page of Case Record 641739-A, the court proceeding Ray had checked out nearly two weeks following the Snow trial transcript.

  It was a civil case, as Kinley already knew from the code, but the names of the plaintiff and the defendant were surprising: County of Sequoyah v. Thompson Construction Company.

  The case had been brought to court only two years before, in the fall of 1989, and as Kinley read on through the testimony, he found it difficult to imagine why Ray had been so interested in it.

  It was a very common legal suit for the retrieval of funds on a charge of professional negligence. According to Wallace Wainwright, the County Attorney, Thompson Construction had failed properly to reinforce certain areas on the courthouse grounds when various structures had been erected in the summer of 1954, notably one section of the cement stairs leading to the courthouse entrance and the flagpole, which rose over the front lawn. The pole had been mounted in a granite foundation that was now sinking to the left, causing it to lean northward at an angle of eighty degrees, or, as Wainwright put it colorfully in his opening statement to the judge, “enough to cause a perfectly fine set of eyes to have to look cross-eyed at our country’s flag.”

  As for the county, it asked only that the stairs be recemented, and that the flagpole, along with its original granite mount, be unearthed, its foundation reinforced, and the entire assembly returned to its original resting place.

  As for Thompson Construction, now in the hands of Leonard Thompson, the founder’s son, it remained adamantly unwilling to accept any responsibility for either the mangled steps or the sloping flagpole, as the company’s attorney, John Billings, brought out repeatedly in Leonard Thompson’s testimony:

  BILLINGS: So, as far as your own responsibility is concerned, you see none on the part of Thompson Construction, isn’t that right?

  THOMPSON: That’s correct.

  BILLINGS: Would you tell the Court why that is, Mr. Thompson?

  THOMPSON: Because my father advised against it.

  BILLINGS: And that was back in 1954?

  THOMPSON: Yes.

  BILLINGS: But county officials weren’t willing to go along with that, were they?

  THOMPSON: No. They were in a hurry to get everything finished at the courthouse. It was brand-new, and they wanted everything all fixed up for the celebration. So on the night of July 3, 1954, we sent three men down there, a foreman, a crane operator and a regular workman, and they worked pretty much all night. I’ve got the names right here. It was Lonnie Adcock and Charles Overton worked that night. Adcock worked the crane. The foreman on the job was Luther Snow.

  BILLINGS: And did they complete the flagpole that night?

  THOMPSON: They sure did. It took them all night, but they did it.

  Kinley looked up from the transcript and let his mind do its routine calculations. On July 2, even summer school had been dismissed so that students could come into Sequoyah to help spruce up the city, and to attend a small patriotic rally in front of the courthou
se that afternoon. Earlier that day, Ellie Dinker had headed up the mountain toward Helen Slater’s house. At around twelve-thirty, Charles Overton, complaining of a stomach ailment, had left the courthouse construction site and headed up that same mountain toward his home. At around twelve-forty on the mountain road at Mile Marker 27, the two of them had met, probably for the first time. Late on the afternoon of the following day, Luther Snow had telephoned Wallace Thompson and told him that the county wanted the flagpole completed by the following morning. A few hours after that, Snow, Overton and Adcock had gathered at the site and begun the long night’s work.

  Kinley let his mind wander on through the names that had so far been mentioned in the case, the inevitable toll of the years once more pressing down upon him. Wallace Thompson was dead. Overton and Dinker. Snow would not talk. Kinley’s eyes bore down upon the one remaining name: Lonnie Adcock.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Once again it was the rootedness of small-town life which had come to his rescue, the fact that people remained in place, holding down the same jobs, occupying the same living spaces, Ray’s organism endlessly reproducing itself.

  The space Lonnie Adcock occupied within Sequoyah’s scheme of things was a moderately large single-story ranch house on the north end of town. It was in the area’s only commercial housing development, and as he wound gently to the left before coming to a stop at the end of a circular cul de sac, Kinley was reminded of the identical prefabricated neighborhoods that peppered the flatlands of the North.

  Lonnie Adcock was surprisingly young, as Kinley noticed when the door opened, and to accommodate this new information, his mind envisioned a young man standing awkwardly in the thick summer darkness of July 3, 1954, his fingers playing edgily at the controls of the crane, while he waited for Luther Snow to tell him what to do.

  “I don’t mean to bother you,” Kinley said to the middle-aged man who smiled politely from his place in the open door. “My name’s Jack Kinley, and I’ve been looking into the Overton case.”

  Adcock’s face registered nothing.

  “Charles Overton,” Kinley added.

  The face brightened. “Oh, yeah, Charlie Overton,” Adcock said. “Of course, when it comes right down to it, I didn’t know him very well.”

  “I just have a few questions,” Kinley assured him.

  “Well, come on in, then,” Adcock said amiably as he opened the door more widely. “I was just sitting around anyway.”

  Kinley walked through the door and into a small, green carpeted living room which looked even smaller because of the huge rear-screen projection television that rested tike a great wooden altar at the far end.

  “My son gave it to me,” Adcock said, referring to the television, “but I don’t like it that much. Picture’s too fuzzy.”

  Kinley took a seat on the sofa while Adcock settled into a yellow Naugahyde recliner.

  “Like I told you,” Adcock repeated, “I didn’t know the man very well. We worked together some, but that’s about all.” He picked up a bowl of generic nuts and lifted it toward Kinley.

  “No, thank you.”

  Adcock popped a couple in his mouth. “I was barely twenty at that time,” he said, “and the older guys, they didn’t really pay much attention to me.”

  “The older guys?”

  “That worked at Thompson’s.”

  “You mean, Luther Snow.”

  “Snow and Peabody and Quinn,” Adcock said, ticking off the names. “And Overton, of course. He pretty much kept to himself.”

  “He and Snow weren’t friends?”

  Adcock’s lips curled downward. “Snow wasn’t nobody’s friend.”

  Kinley reached into his jacket and took out his pen and notebook. “Do you remember the night of July 3?” he asked. “That was the night you put up the flagpole.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Adcock said. “It was just the three of us that night. Me and Snow and Overton. We didn’t have no other help. The next day, I was really sort of bitching about how hard it had been.”

  “Snow just wanted you and Overton for the work that night?”

  “I guess so,” Adcock added, “but he was wrong on that, because it was a hell of a job for three men.” He shook his head, remembering it. “And besides, it was raining.”

  “Raining?”

  “That’s right,” Adcock said. “What they used to call ‘a real toad stringer.’”

  “But you put the flagpole up anyway?”

  “We sure as hell did,” Adcock said proudly.

  Kinley’s mind moved slowly through the black, rain-swept night, focusing on the long gray line of the pole, still horizontal on the courthouse grounds, its granite foundation waiting silently by the open hole.

  “It was a bitch, let me tell you,” Adcock added. Another handful of nuts disappeared into his mouth. “Worst night of work I ever had.”

  “When did you get to the courthouse?” Kinley asked.

  “Around nine,” Adcock said. “That’s when Snow told me to show up.”

  “And that would have been after dark?”

  “Damn right,” Adcock said. “It was already pitch dark when I got there, and Snow was already in the pit.”

  “Pit?”

  “The hole that had been dug for the base of the flagpole,” Adcock explained. “Snow knew the ground wasn’t ready, so he was in there trying to shore it up.” He reached for another handful of peanuts, then continued. “We kept the hole covered with a tarpaulin when we wasn’t working. That was supposed to keep it dry, and when I got there Snow was under the tarp shoring up the pit. I could hear him smacking at the ground with his shovel, like he was packing it down.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Just like a rat in a hole,” Adcock said. “He didn’t even have a flashlight down there.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He came out, and we waited for Overton to show up,” Adcock said. “He got there about ten minutes later.”

  Kinley could see the yellow lights of Overton’s battered truck as it wheeled into the courthouse parking lot, the summer downpour pelting at it mercilessly as Overton eased himself out of the cab and headed for the other men, a hunched, faceless figure, a shadow in the rain.

  “When he got there, we started to work,” Adcock said. “We worked all night, pouring cement under the tarp and smoothing everything out.”

  “Were you always together?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “But not always?”

  “Yeah, always, except for when Snow went to get us some food.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around one or two in the morning, something like that,” Adcock said. “We were all tired and needing a break, so Snow told us to sit down a spell, and he walked over and took Overton’s truck and went and got us some sandwiches and coffee.”

  “He took Overton’s truck?”

  Adcock nodded. “Yeah, he did,” he said. “I saw Charlie give him the keys, and after that Snow went up and got in and drove away.”

  “And he never left again?”

  Adcock shook his head. “No, we worked side by side until around eight the next morning. We were all dead tired by then. Especially Overton.”

  “Why Overton?”

  “Because he was sick at his stomach,” Adcock said. “He threw up a couple times that night.” He shook his head. “I felt sort of sorry for him, the way he looked. White as a sheet. He said he’d tried to get some help for it the night before, but it hadn’t done him no good.” He shook his head. “Overton really shouldn’t have been on the job that night. I don’t know why Snow wanted him there.”

  Kinley felt his pen stop on the page as the certainty dropped into place in his mind, its conclusion carved on to it as certainly as words in stone: I do.

  Back in the tiny office on Beaumont Street, Kinley glanced through the old photographs of Sequoyah that Lois had found in the file marked “S.” They’d seemed irrelevant before, nothing more than part of
Ray’s lifelong mania for gathering the facts of local history. Now they were the key to everything.

  For what he thought must be the last time, Kinley replayed the initial stages of the crime itself. He saw Overton’s truck as it drifted to a stop, then Ellie Dinker’s black shoes scrambling toward him, her green skirt slipping through the tall summer grasses, then moving away again, back up the mountain road until she passed Mile Marker 27. By then she must have been beyond Overton’s view as he lay beneath the truck, his shirt already soiled with the greasy slime and roadside dirt that Sarah Overton would later testify about at the trial.

  At some point not more than a few minutes later, Snow must have picked Ellie up. Ellie had not lived a careful life, and as Kinley thought of it, Snow was the perfect candidate for her less than discriminating eye. She’d gotten into the car with him, and disappeared up the road to some location which had never been discovered, and there, in the forest, or in some shack, or along the canyon rim, Snow had murdered her in one of the many ways Kinley had come to know, with a rope, or a stone, a pipe, a pistol or a fist.

  With Ellie dead, Snow had then turned desperately to a solution. He needed to conceal the body, and he needed someone else to pin the murder on. Overton must have emerged almost immediately as the perfect candidate. Since other people had no doubt seen Overton and Ellie together, he was the perfect fall guy, and in a single malicious instant, Snow must have realized that by framing Overton he could accomplish both ends at once. He could bury Dinker’s body beneath the courthouse flagpole, and then, while using Overton’s truck to get sandwiches, plant the bloody tire iron and Ellie Dinker’s shoes behind the seat.