The Reckoning

by John Grisham

  When the sheriff’s car made its turn, Pete said, “There he comes.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Sheriff Gridley.”

  “What he want?”

  “He’s coming to arrest me, Nineva. For murder. I just shot and killed Dexter Bell, the Methodist preacher.”

  “Git outta here! You done what?”

  “You heard me.” He stood and walked a few steps to where she was sitting. He leaned down and pointed a finger at her face. “And you will never say a word to anyone, Nineva. You hear me?”

  Her eyes were as big as eggs and her mouth was wide open, but she could not speak. He pulled a small envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. “Get in the house now, and as soon as I leave take this to Florry.”

  He took her hand, helped her to her feet, and opened the screen door. When she was inside she let loose with a painful howl that startled him. He closed the front door and turned to watch the sheriff approach. Gridley was in no hurry. He stopped and parked by Pete’s truck, got out of his patrol car with Red and Roy for support, and walked toward the porch before stopping at the steps. He stared at Pete, who seemed unconcerned.

  “Better come with us, Pete,” Nix said.

  Pete pointed to his truck and said, “The pistol is on the front seat.”

  Nix looked at Red and said, “Get it.”

  Pete slowly stepped down and walked to the sheriff’s car. Roy opened a rear door, and as Pete was bending over he heard Nineva wail in the backyard. He looked up and saw her scampering toward the barn, holding the letter.

  “Let’s go,” Nix said as he opened his door and situated himself behind the wheel. Red sat next to him and held the gun. In the rear seat, Roy and Pete were side by side, their shoulders almost touching. No one said a word, indeed no one seemed to breathe as they left the farm and turned onto the highway. The lawmen were going through the motions with a sense of disbelief, shocked like everyone else. A popular preacher murdered in cold blood by the town’s favorite son, a legendary war hero. There had to be a damned good reason for it, and it was only a matter of time before the truth spilled out. But, at that moment, the clock had stopped and events were not real.

  Halfway to town, Nix glanced in his mirror and said, “I’m not going to ask why you did it, Pete. Just want to confirm it was you, that’s all.”

  Pete took a deep breath and looked at the cotton fields they were passing and said, “I have nothing to say.”

  * * *

  —

  The Ford County jail had been built in a prior century and was barely fit for human habitation. Originally a small warehouse, it had been converted to this and to that and finally bought by the county and divided in two by a brick wall. In the front half, six cells were configured to hold the white prisoners, and in the back eight cells were squeezed in for the blacks. The jail was rarely filled to capacity, at least up front. Attached to it was a small office wing the county had later built for the sheriff and the Clanton police department. The jail was only two blocks off the square and from its front door one could see the top of the courthouse. During criminal trials, which were rare, the accused was often walked from the jail with a deputy or two as escorts.

  A crowd had gathered in front of the jail to get a glimpse of the killer. It was still inconceivable that Pete Banning did what he did, and there was also a general disbelief that he would be thrown in jail. Surely, for someone as prominent as Mr. Banning, there would be another set of rules. However, if Nix indeed had the guts to arrest him, there were enough curious folks who wanted to see it for themselves.

  “I guess word’s out,” Nix mumbled as he turned in to the small gravel lot by the jail. “Not a word by anybody,” he instructed. The car stopped and all four doors opened. Nix grabbed Banning by the elbow and ushered him to the front door, with Red and Roy following. The crowd, gawking, was still and silent until a reporter with The Ford County Times stepped forward with a camera and snapped a photo, with a flash that startled even Pete. Just as he was entering the door, someone yelled, “You’ll die in hell, Banning!”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” someone else added.

  The suspect didn’t flinch and seemed oblivious to the crowd. Soon he was inside and out of sight.

  Waiting inside, in a cramped room where all suspects and criminals were signed in and processed, was Mr. John Wilbanks, a prominent lawyer in town and longtime friend of the Bannings.

  “And to what do we owe this pleasure?” Nix said to Mr. Wilbanks, obviously not pleased to see him.

  “Mr. Banning is my client and I’m here to represent him,” Wilbanks replied. He stepped forward and shook hands with Pete without a word.

  Nix said, “We’ll do our business first, then you can do yours.”

  Wilbanks said, “I’ve already called Judge Oswalt and we’ve discussed bail.”

  “Wonderful. When you’ve discussed it to the point of him granting bail, I’m sure he’ll give me a call. Until then, Mr. Wilbanks, this man is a suspect in a murder and I’ll deal with him accordingly. Now, would you please leave?”

  “I would like to speak with my client.”

  “He’s not going anywhere. Come back in an hour.”

  “No interrogation, you understand?”

  Banning said, “I have nothing to say.”

  * * *

  —

  Florry read the note on her front porch as Nineva and Amos watched. They were still panting from their sprint from the main house and horrified at what was happening.

  When she finished she lowered it, looked at them, and asked, “And he’s gone?”

  “The law took him, Miss Florry,” Nineva said. “He knew they were comin’ to get him.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said he done kilt the preacher,” Nineva replied, wiping her cheeks.

  The note instructed Florry to call Joel at Vanderbilt and Stella at Hollins and explain to them that their father had been arrested for the murder of the Reverend Dexter Bell. They were to speak to no one about this, especially reporters, and they were to stay away at college until further notice. He was sorry for this tragic turn of events but hopeful that one day they would understand. He asked Florry to visit him the following day at the jail to discuss matters.

  She felt faint but could show no weakness in front of the help. She folded the note, stuck it in a pocket, and dismissed them. Nineva and Amos backed away, more frightened and confused than before, and slowly walked across her front yard to the trail. She watched them until they were out of sight, then sat in a wicker rocker with one of her cats and fought her emotions.

  He had certainly seemed preoccupied at breakfast, only a few hours earlier, but then he had not been right since the war. Why hadn’t he warned her? How could he do something so unbelievably evil? What would happen to him, his children, his wife? To her, his only sibling? And the land?

  Florry was far from a devout Methodist, but she had been raised in the church and attended occasionally. She had learned to keep her distance from the ministers because they were gone by the time they’d settled in, but Bell was one of the better ones.

  She thought of his pretty wife and children, and finally broke down. Marietta eased through the screen door and stood beside her as she sobbed.

  Chapter 3

  The town descended upon the Methodist church. As the crowd grew, a deacon told Hop to unlock the sanctuary. The stricken mourners filed in and filled the pews and whispered the latest, whatever that happened to be. They prayed and wept and wiped their faces and shook their heads in disbelief. The faithful members, those who knew Dexter well and loved him dearly, clung together in small groups and moaned in their suffering. For the less committed, those who attended monthly but not weekly, the church was a magnet that drew them as close as possible to the tragedy. Even some of the trul
y backslidden arrived to share in the suffering. At that awful moment, everyone was a Methodist and welcomed in Reverend Bell’s church.

  The murder of their preacher was emotionally and physically overwhelming. The fact that he had been killed by one of their own was, initially, too astonishing to believe. Joshua Banning, Pete’s grandfather, had helped build the church. His father had been a deacon his entire adult life. Most of those present had sat in those same pews and offered countless prayers for Pete during the war. They had been devastated when the news arrived from the War Department that he was presumed dead. They had held candlelight vigils at his second coming. They had rejoiced in tears when he and Liza made their grand reentry the week after the Japanese surrendered. Every Sunday morning during the war, Reverend Bell had called out the names of soldiers from Ford County and offered a special prayer. First on his list was Pete Banning, the town’s hero and the source of immense local pride. Now the rumor that he had murdered their preacher was simply too incredible to absorb.

  But as the news sank in, the whispering intensified, in some circles anyway, and the great question of “Why?” was asked a thousand times. Only a few of the bravest dared to suggest that Pete’s wife had something to do with it.

  What the mourners really wanted was to get their hands on Jackie and the children, to touch them and have a good cry, as if that would soften their shock. But Jackie, according to the gossip, was next door in the parsonage, secluded in her bedroom with her three children, and seeing no one. The house was packed with her closest friends and the crowd spilled out onto the porches and across the front yard, where grim-faced men smoked and grumbled. When friends stepped outside for fresh air, others stepped inside to take their places. Still others moved next door to the sanctuary.

  The stricken and the curious continued to come, and the streets around the church were lined with cars and trucks. Folks drifted toward the church in small groups, moving slowly as if they weren’t sure what they would do when they got there but were needed nonetheless.

  When the pews were packed, Hop opened the door to the balcony. He hid in the shadows below the belfry and avoided everyone. Sheriff Gridley had threatened him and he was saying nothing. He did marvel, though, at the way the white folks managed to keep their composure, most of them anyway. The slaying of a popular black preacher would provoke an outpouring far more chaotic.

  A deacon suggested to Miss Emma Faye Riddle that some music might be appropriate. She had played the organ for decades, but wasn’t sure if the occasion was right. She soon agreed, though, and when she hit the first notes of “The Old Rugged Cross,” the weeping intensified.

  Outside, under the trees, a man approached a group of smokers and announced, “They got Pete Banning in jail. Got his gun too.” This was met with acceptance, commented on, then passed along until the news entered the sanctuary, where it spread from pew to pew.

  Pete Banning, arrested for the murder of their preacher.

  * * *

  —

  When it became obvious that the suspect indeed had nothing to say, Sheriff Gridley led him through a door and into a narrow hallway with little light. Iron bars lined both sides. There were three cells on the right, three on the left, each about the size of a walk-in closet. There were no windows and the jail felt like a damp, dark dungeon, a place where men were forgotten and time went unnoticed. And, evidently, a place where everyone smoked. Gridley stuck a large key into a door, pulled it open, and nodded for the suspect to step inside. A cheap cot was at the far wall, and there was nothing else in the way of furnishings.

  Gridley said, “Not much room, I’m afraid, Pete, but then it is a jail, after all.”

  Pete stepped inside, glanced around, and said, “I’ve seen worse.” He stepped to the cot and sat on it.

  “Bathroom’s down the hall,” Gridley said. “If you need to use it, just yell.”

  Pete was staring at the floor. He shrugged, said nothing. Gridley slammed the door and returned to his office. Pete stretched out and consumed the full length of his cot. He was two inches over six feet; the cot was not quite that long. The cell was musty and cold and he picked up a folded blanket, one that was practically threadbare and would be of little use at night. He didn’t care. Captivity was nothing new, and he had survived conditions that now, four years later, were still hard to imagine.

  * * *

  —

  When John Wilbanks returned less than an hour later, he and the sheriff argued briefly over where, exactly, the attorney-client conference would take place. There was no designated room for such important meetings. The lawyers usually walked into the cell block and huddled with their clients with a row of bars between them, and with every other prisoner straining to eavesdrop. Occasionally, a lawyer would catch his client outside in the rec yard and give advice through chain link. Most often, though, the lawyers did not bother to visit their clients at the jail. They waited until they were hauled into court and chatted with them there.

  But John Wilbanks considered himself to be superior to every other lawyer in Ford County, if not the entire state, and his new criminal client was certainly a cut above the rest of Gridley’s prisoners. Their status warranted a proper place to meet, and the sheriff’s office would work just fine. Gridley finally acquiesced—few people won arguments with John Wilbanks, who, by the way, had always supported the sheriff at election time—and after some mumbling and cussing and a few benign rules left to fetch Pete. He brought him in with no handcuffs and said they could chat for half an hour.

  When they were alone, Wilbanks began with “Okay, Pete, let’s talk about the crime. If you did it, tell me you did it. If you didn’t do it, then tell me who did.”

  “I have nothing to say,” Pete said and lit a cigarette.

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Interesting. Do you plan to cooperate with your defense lawyer?”

  A shrug, a puff, nothing more.

  Wilbanks offered a professional smile and said, “Okay, here’s the scenario. In a day or two they’ll take you over to the courtroom for an initial appearance before Judge Oswalt. I assume you’ll plead not guilty, then they’ll bring you back here. In a month or so, the grand jury will meet and indict you for murder, first degree. I would guess that by February or March, Oswalt will be ready for a trial, which I’m ready to handle, if that’s what you want.”

  “John, you’ve always been my lawyer.”

  “Good. Then you have to cooperate.”

  “Cooperate?”

  “Yes, Pete, cooperate. On the surface, this appears to be cold-blooded murder. Give me something to work with, Pete. Surely you had a motive.”

  “It’s between me and Dexter Bell.”

  “No, it’s now between you and the State of Mississippi, which, like all states, takes a dim view of cold-blooded murder.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “That’s not a defense, Pete.”

  “Maybe I don’t have a defense, not one that folks would understand.”

  “Well, the folks on the jury need to understand something. My first thought, indeed my only one at this moment, is a plea of insanity.”

  Pete shook his head and said, “Hell no. I’m as sane as you are.”

  “But I’m not facing the electric chair, Pete.”

  Pete blew a cloud of smoke and said, “I’m not doing that.”

  “Great, then give me a motive, a reason. Give me something, Pete.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  * * *

  —

  Joel Banning was walking down the steps outside Benson Hall when someone called his name. Another student, a freshman he knew of but had not met, handed him an envelope and said, “Dean Mulrooney needs to see you at once, in his office. It’s urgent.”

  “Thanks,” Joel s
aid, taking the envelope and watching the freshman walk away. Inside, a handwritten note on official Vanderbilt stationery instructed Joel to please come without delay to the dean’s office in Kirkland Hall, the administration building.

  Joel had a literature class in fifteen minutes and the professor frowned on absences. If he sprinted, he could run by the dean’s office, tend to whatever matter was at hand, then arrive late for class and hope the professor was in a good mood. He hustled across the quad to Kirkland Hall and bounded up the stairs to the third floor, where the dean’s secretary explained that he was to wait until precisely 11:00 a.m., when his aunt Florry would call from home. The secretary claimed to know nothing. She had spoken to Florry Banning, who was calling on her rural party line and thus without privacy. Florry planned to drive into Clanton and use the private line at a friend’s home.

  As he waited, he assumed someone had died and he could not help but think of those relatives and friends he preferred to lose before the others. The Banning family was small: just his parents, Pete and Liza, his sister, Stella, and his aunt Florry. The grandparents were dead. Florry had no children; thus, he and Stella had no first cousins on the Banning side. His mother’s people were from Memphis but had scattered after the war.

  He paced around the office, ignoring the looks from the secretary, and decided it was probably his mother. She had been sent away months earlier and the family was reeling. He and Stella had not seen her and their letters went unanswered. Their father refused to discuss his wife’s treatment, and, well, there were a lot of unknowns. Would her condition improve? Would she come home? Would the family ever be a real family again? Joel and Stella had questions, but their father preferred to talk about other matters when he chose to talk at all. Likewise, Aunt Florry was of little help.

  She called at 11:00 a.m. on the dot. The secretary handed Joel the phone and stepped around a corner, though probably within earshot, he figured. Joel said hello, then listened for what seemed an eternity. Florry began by explaining that she was in town at the home of Miss Mildred Highlander, a woman Joel had known his entire life, and she, Florry, was there because the call needed to be private and there was no privacy on their rural party line, as he well knew. And, really, nothing was private in town right now because his father had driven to the Methodist church just hours earlier and shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell, and was now in jail, and, well, as anyone could understand, the entire town was buzzing and everything had come to a complete stop. Don’t ask why and don’t say anything that might get overheard, wherever you are, Joel, but it’s just awful and God help us.