“Why was that, do you suppose?” Russ asked.
“I look at the two of them, Jimmy Pye and Earl Swagger, and I see the two Americas. Earl was the old America, the America that won the war. When I say ‘the war,’ young man, of course I mean World War II.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“With young people today, you can never be sure what they know. Anyway, Earl was sturdy, patient, hardworking, stubborn, very courageous. Jimmy was the new America. He knew nothing. But he was handsome, slick, clever, cute, and evil. He only cared for himself. His theory of the world put him at the center of it, that was all. He never cared even for Edie White except to have her and say to the world, no one else can have this beautiful thing. She was a lovely, lovely girl. Earl would not allow himself to face the truth about Jimmy. That was his flaw, his hubris. That’s why it’s tragedy, not melodrama.”
“Did my father—what was he working on those last few days? Was there an investigation, a project? I have to know what he was thinking.”
“I was only with him for a half an hour that last day, maybe less. Then I left and he and Edie were alone. I never saw him again; by the time I got back, she was sleeping. But … I do remember this. He had found a body that day, earlier.”
“The young black girl,” said Russ. “Yes, we’ve heard of that.”
“Shirelle Parker, her name was. She was murdered. Your father was very troubled by the event. I could see him turning it over. I remember exactly what it was. He said he thought there were signs of ‘monkey business.’ What those were, he never elaborated.”
“But from what I understand, there was no monkey business,” Bob said. “A black youth was arrested the next day or two. Sam prosecuted. It was open-and-shut. The boy was executed two years later. That was all there was to it.”
“Yes,” said Miss Connie. “All there was to it.”
“So my father was wrong,” said Bob.
She turned and set her face outward, as if she were looking across the bay.
Then she turned back to face them.
“Your father was right. Reggie Gerard Fuller didn’t kill her. I found that out many years later.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. But I do know what happened and why it happened. The night that girl disappeared there was a meeting at the church.”
Russ remembered a note inside the notebook that Earl Swagger had left behind. “Meeting—who there?”
“In those days, the South was being prepared for the civil rights movement, which no matter what you might think, did not spring out of nowhere. For a decade, very brave young black ministers and young white volunteers traveled from church to church, where they tried to prepare the people for the dangerous work ahead. The night that Shirelle disappeared, there had been such a meeting at the church. Shirelle was at the meeting. So was Reggie. After the meeting, he drove people home in his father’s hearse, people all over Polk, Scott and Montgomery counties. That’s why he never had an alibi. He didn’t drive Shirelle home because she only lived two blocks away.”
“I don’t—”
“The white man was a Jewish radical from New York. His name was Saul Fine. I believe he was a communist. He was later killed in Mississippi. He was taken out and shot by some young white men who called him a nigger lover. That night, he gave an impassioned speech to some of the younger people that the reverend believed in. Then they went home and Saul moved on. But when Shirelle was found, and Reggie was accused, he must have decided that if he told about the meeting, there’d be consequences. It would get out that a revolution was being planned, that a communist northern agitator was down South stirring up the colored. White people would get upset, there’d be violence against the church, the whole thing would come apart. The Klan would ride again. White people were very frightened in those days, I recall.”
She looked out and took off her glasses. Her eyes were still blue though now sightless and opaque. A tear ran down them.
“Your father was a brave, brave man, Bob Lee Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor and he never spoke of it to a soul. But he wasn’t the bravest man I ever heard of. The bravest man I ever heard of was a nineteen-year-old Negro boy who sat still in the electric chair while they strapped him in, and then they killed him and he never made a peep. Because he believed in something. He didn’t get any medals or glory. He never went to meet the President. He understood there were consequences to everything, and he faced them squarely and followed them where they led him. That’s what Saul Fine had told them: People will have to die. The Struggle will cost in blood. Nobody will remember those who die. It is the simple, brutal process of progress.”
She paused. “Nobody ever knew, except the people at that meeting and they couldn’t tell. His mother didn’t know, his father didn’t know and not even many of the blacks in Blue Eye knew. Sam never knew. Sam prosecuted him and believed he was doing God’s work. I believed justice was served. When I found out—this was in 1978, when I met George Tredwell, he was the black minister who traveled with Saul Fine in those days—I almost called Sam. But then I thought: What’s the point? It would kill Sam to find out he’d made such a tragic mistake. So that was the only gift I ever gave Sam, as much as I loved him.”
“It can’t hurt him now. Sam died night before last.”
“I thought I heard death in your voice.”
“He fell down some stairs. He was eighty-six. Spry and tough.”
“He was another good man. I have missed him so over the years. Was he on a case?”
“Yes, ma’am. Never really retired.”
“Arkansas: it produced some terrible men. It produced Jimmy Pye and Boss Harry Etheridge and his idiotic son, Hollis, who wanted to be President. Holly, isn’t that what they call him? I believe it’s a mistake to give a man a girl’s name, always. He certainly paid his share of girls back too, I’m told. But Arkansas also produced Earl Swagger and Sam Vincent.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Have I helped?”
“Yes, ma’am, I think you have. We’ll be moving along now.”
“Now I have a question for you.”
“Yes, Miss Connie.”
“I’m not sure I have the courage to ask it.”
“No one ever said Miss Connie didn’t have no courage. You got us through Daddy’s funeral.”
“All right, then. The child. What became of the child?”
“I’m sorry I don’t—” started Bob.
“She means Edie’s boy. Edie and Jimmy’s son.”
“Yes. Lord, I wanted to save that child. I tried to adopt him after Edie died. Sam argued the case for me. I cared for that child for three months. He was so strong, so alert, so bright. But no court in Arkansas in the fifties would let a northern widow take over a newborn child from an Arkansas mother if there was family around. I named him Stephen, after my own son. They made me give him to Jimmy’s people. It broke my heart. I never found out what happened to him.”
Her question was met with their silence.
“Oh,” she said finally. “He did not turn out well.”
“The Pyes didn’t care about him,” said Russ, “and they beat him and the more they beat him, the worse he got. Eventually, he went into the reform school system. By age twelve he was an incorrigible. They finally sent him off to live with Jimmy’s older brother in Oklahoma. He became …”
Russ paused.
“Go ahead, young man. I’ve buried enough good men so that I can take anything by now.”
“He became a violent felon. He killed many people and traumatized many, many more. He did time in the state penitentiary, where he became even more violent. A career criminal, the worst kind of bad news. Lamar Pye, that was his name. A policeman killed him in 1994.”
“Nothing good came from that day, did it?” said Miss Connie. “I hope there’s never another like it. An evil day.”
33
The houses were all the same but Duane knew the address and he remembered what i
t looked like and didn’t have any trouble. He pulled into the driveway. The street was a dream of America, an America he’d never, ever be a part of.
Niggers.
Niggers lived here and he lived in some trailer out beyond the interstate?
But he told himself to cool off, to dial it way down. He had to be smooth. That’s what Mr. Bama had said: You got to be smooth, Peck. You’re not going in there to kick ass and show them what a stud you are. You got to crawl and snivel. He quoted somebody called Neechee: That which does not kill you makes you strong, Peck.
So he took a deep breath, climbed out of the cruiser, tucked his hair up behind his Stetson, then walked up to the house. He took some pleasure in the fact that someone was nervously watching him from a window. They still get scared when the Man comes calling.
He knocked on the door.
He waited. Seemed to be scraping and jostling inside.
Finally, the door opened and a young black woman peered out at him.
Her face was tight and she was scared.
Peck liked that a lot.
“Y-yes?” she said.
He smiled. “Ma’am?” he said as charmingly as he knew how, “ma’am, I’m Deputy Duane Peck of the County Sheriff’s Department. I’m here to talk to a Mrs. Lucille Parker.”
“That’s Mama. What is this in reference to, please?”
“Ma’am, I’m investigating the death of Sam Vincent, the former county prosecutor. He died night before last. That day, he came out here and talked to Mrs. Parker. I happened to see him out here. I’m just checking up to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. I know she’s an elderly lady, ma’am, and I don’t mean her no bother. Just got a few questions is all. Be over and out of here in a jiff.”
“Just a minute,” the woman said stonily, shutting the door.
The anger rose in Duane, like smoke. A nigger gal treating him like that! He has to stand in the hot sun! But he quelled it, telling himself to be cool, for this here goddamned thing was going to lead to a bigger job working for Mr. Bama permanent, and no one would treat him like white trash ever again. Neechee said so!
The minutes passed and eventually the door opened.
“Mama will see you. She’s upset over the death of Mr. Sam. You go easy with her, you hear? She’s eighty-two years old.”
Duane walked into the house, astonished to find it so nice and whitelike. He’d always thought these people lived like pigs in a sty.
The woman—the daughter, he knew—led him through a living room to a back porch, where the old lady sat like a queen of the village, in regal splendor and glory.
“Ma’am, I’m Deputy Peck. Hope I’m not bothering you none, but we have to make inquiries. I’ll try and be out of here fast.”
She nodded.
“Ah, you know that poor Sam Vincent fell down the stairs of his office night before last and died?”
She nodded.
“Poor Sam,” Duane said. “Anyhow it looks like a straight accidental death, but I have to ask a question or so.”
“Go ahead, Deputy.”
“Ma’am, did he seem agitated about anything? Was he in control of hisself? What was he talking about?”
“My daughter was killed in this town forty-odd years ago,” said the proud old lady. “He prosecuted the boy they said did it. I had written him a letter about the crime some years back. He came by to talk about it, that’s all.”
“I see. But he was okay? I mean, he weren’t in no state, what you might call it. So excited-like, he might fall or something. Balance problems. Did he have balance problems?”
“He was a good man. It seems like good people die around these parts and the bad ones just go on and on.”
“Yes, ma’am, it do seem that way sometime. But he was physically all right, wasn’t he? Is that what you’re telling me.”
“I don’t think Mr. Sam would fall down no stairs, no sir,” said the woman. “He was strong as a bull and very sharp and clear. I didn’t see any evidence of balance problems.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“His death is a terrible thing. He was a good man.”
“I agree, ma’am. Old Sam: he was like a daddy to me.”
“He was the only man in this state with the gumption to prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. That took courage.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Duane, trying to bite down his delight. The woman had brought him right to where he wanted to be.
“I looked it up,” he said. “Jed Posey, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Davidson Fuller, back in 1965. Beat him to death with a shovel.”
The old lady shook her head. She was tracking the tangled coils back to the murder of her daughter Shirelle. Shirelle was killed, the law said, by Reggie Fuller, who was sentenced to death. Davidson Fuller, his father, lost everything trying to free his son but was somehow made strong by the ordeal and emerged in the early sixties as the most energetic and fearless of the civil rights leaders in Arkansas. He had stopped for gas out near Nunley and a terrible white man came out of a gas station and hit him three times with a spade, just for nothing, just for being black, then went back on the porch to drink a Cherry Smash until the police arrived. Mr. Sam couldn’t get the death penalty but he got Jed Posey to spend the rest of his life in prison.
As if they both reached that destination simultaneously, their eyes met. And Duane gave her the news he’d been sent to deliver.
“D’ja hear they finally paroled that old boy Jed Posey?”
She looked at him in horror.
“Yep, he gets out today. They say he’s going back to his brother Lum’s cabin somewhere in the damn mountains. A shame a boy like that can’t die in the pen, where he belongs.”
He smiled.
“Well, thanks so much, ma’am. You cleared it all up for me.”
Jack Preece opened the gun vault and stepped inside. It was a large vault, extremely expensive, with space in it for two hundred rifles. But there were only thirty or so, all ready for shipment, various of his products destined for the world’s hot spots.
He tried to think it out.
Night shot. Infrared or passive ambient light? Range, two hundred yards or less. What to take? Match the weapon to the mission.
State-of-the-art, of course, was the Knight SR-25 with the Magnavox thermal sniperscope mounted and zeroed and a JFP suppressor, the No. 1 System. It was at this moment in time the best sniper rifle in the world. But the businessman in him looked at the one unit locked in the rack, the demonstrator. It represented an investment of about $18,000, for the rifle, the very expensive thermal scope, the suppressor and the complex array of armorer’s skills to unify all the elements into the single system. There was always the possibility of a breakage or even a battlefield loss. Could he absorb that much of a financial bite? Worse, the gun was not wiped clean; it still bore Knight’s serial numbers and the Magnavox unit bore the Magnavox numbers, both traceable to him. If by some twist of fate, he got out but the gun didn’t and it was recovered by authorities, it led them straight to him, literally in a matter of hours. Of course he had his powerful allies in the intelligence and military communities, and the helpful mantra of national security could always be invoked, but that was much less powerful nowadays. You couldn’t be sure it would work at all: newspapers had no commitment to a higher thing called national security, they hardly believed in the concept of the nation, much less security! His friends could only protect him so far; in the realpolitik of Washington, he could find himself served up fried and covered in gravy for somebody’s Pulitzer Prize. So the Stoner was out.
He looked next at the rack of lesser semiautos. These were mostly recovered M-14s or Springfield M-lAs, all in 7.62 NATO, reconfigured as the standard army M-21 sniper rifle of Vietnam, accurized and mounted with an ambient night scope, usually the AN/PVS-2 Starlight scope, and the JFP suppressor. Fine weapons, with a hundred custom tricks to make them shoot straighter and more reliably than off-th
e-rack 14s. But they had something in common with the Knight weapon: they were traceable to him, although there might be some salvation there, as the guns were older, had a much longer history and had come through many sources and via many avenues. That meant that the paper trail could be very complex, with dead ends and red herrings strewn throughout it, depending on the actual weapon. Would it be complex enough to protect him if the weapon was lost and then recovered? There was no way of knowing and he wasn’t sanguine about living the next ten years of his life waiting for some government computer to kick out the serial number connection to him. Nix to the 21s.
Next were the bolt guns. These too came from a variety of sources, many of them civilian. All were basically the same rifle, the Remington 700, though they had been worked over by secondary contractors, in some case the Remington Custom Shop, some cases Robar, or McMillan or ProFiber, or individual custom gunworks, like Tank’s Rifle Shop or D&L Firearms or Fulton Armory. Some had the night-vision device, one or two had lasers, one or two had simple Leupold police marksman scopes or Unertl 10x’s, the marine choice. Again, the possibility of tracing these guns was present, though possibly not paramount, if he consulted the records and chose carefully. But another difficulty presented itself to this system: that was tactical.
Preece knew he’d be hitting two targets, Swagger first and then that kid. The bolt gun was a highly accurate system, as Swagger himself had proven in Vietnam and hundreds of SWAT and Delta or FBI HRU engagements had since proven; it was the quintessential exemplar of the professional’s code: One Shot, One Kill. But it was not the system of choice for engaging multiple targets. There was that damned bolt throw after the shot, an inch up, three inches back, three inches forward, an inch down. Peter Paul Mauser had cooked it up back in 1892; it was a hundred years old. A good, trained rifleman could do it under a second and there was a time when Preece was as fast as anyone in the world. This was not that time. He didn’t want to be throwing a bolt then looking for target number two; the whole thing fell apart if one of the targets made it out.
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