How could she say, Do you think Wynne Blodgett killed Joe Howard Wilson, because I’m starting to? Blurt it right out like that? Instead, she decided to dodge the question.
“Everybody said you’d be the best one . . . I mean, in Catfish Alley . . . You’d—”
“It’s not that everybody told you about me.” An interruption, true, but with it he threw her a lifeline. “It’s more like you got something you want me to do. I’ve been at this a long time. I recognize a do-something-for-me look when I see one. You seem like you might be willing to add on a please to it—something that doesn’t always happen—but you still want something. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”
Regina looked at the long lineup of certificates and diplomas behind him.
She said, “I haven’t even been able to see the grand jury docket.”
“That’s normal,” said Tom Raspberry. “It’s sealed. Nobody can see it. Once they finished up, foreman handed it over to Judge Timms like he’s supposed to. That’s that.”
“But,” said Regina, “Jackson Blodgett said he’d make sure I got a copy. He says he’s doing it for the good of the town.”
“Really?” said Tom. He cocked a bushy eyebrow.
“But there’s not going to be anything in that grand jury report, at least I’m not counting on it. What I need is for Bed Duval to go to Judge Timms and get him to call out another grand jury, one with some clout to it this time. I—we—have to find something that will make him do that.”
“There’s nothing gonna make either of them do that,” Tom said matter-of-factly. “Judge Timms . . . he’s the meanest man in Mississippi, which automatically means he’s racist to boot. Believe me, it runs like that. Besides, he’s up North Carolina duck hunting, and will be there until two days before the election, and that’s not ’til November. Win or lose, Judge Timms’s not going to let anything interfere with him taking out Dixie and Sugar.”
Regina shook her head, confused.
“His dogs,” Tom clarified. “Bird dogs. The best in three counties. Judge Timms . . . he’s more attached to them than he is to his wife. Besides, only reason Little Bed got him to do anything in the first place was because everybody knows Willie Willie, and Joe Howard was a war hero. And that was then, back almost a year ago. They’ve done what they could for Joe Howard. They’re not about to do anything more.”
“Even if we find other witnesses? Other people who were on that bus, saw what happened?”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“With flyers.” Regina nodded to the dummies on his wall. “You’ve got a press. If we printed up flyers, put them on all the trees in Revere, in the black parts of town, in the white ones, somebody would come up. I’m sure they would. This woman, Anna Dale Buchanan . . .”
“I know all about Mrs. Buchanan.”
“This is the thing about Mrs. Buchanan. The reason she got in touch with Miss Calhoun was because she’d read something in the Times Commercial. It was just a little something, two, three sentences at most, about the grand jury finding, but Mrs. Buchanan was able to put two and two together and come up with Joe Howard. I’m betting if more people heard about what had happened . . .”
Tom interrupted again. “You talk to Miss Mary Pickett about this?”
“Why should I do that?” snapped Regina. This time she didn’t even try to keep the irritation out of her voice. “What would she care? I mean, I imagine she’d be upset about them. She’s just a bundle of good civic pride. She’d probably think they were litter, messing up her pretty little town . . .”
“That’s true. She loves her some Revere, all right. But don’t you think you owe her that much?”
Regina blinked. “Why?” she said slowly.
“Because she brought you down. It seems to me this means she wants to see at least some little piece of justice done here.”
“That’s not what she said.”
“That might not be what she said, but it’s what she meant. She knew Joe Howard all his natural life just like Willie Willie’s known her for all hers. You don’t think she cared he got killed?”
“No, I do not.” Words out before Regina could stop them.
“And why’s that?”
Tom’s brows knitted, and he looked very much like he’d looked when he’d asked Regina about her father, like he’d asked a genuine question and was curious to hear the genuine response.
Regina said, “That’s obvious enough, isn’t it? This is Mississippi. And she’s white.”
“Oh,” said Tom, his voice noncommittal. “So you think a Negro—any Negro, you, for instance, come down days ago from New York—would want to help Willie Willie more than Miss Calhoun does?”
“Of course I do!” Regina was moving into a trap, and she knew it—but what kind of trap? And why would Tom Raspberry lay one for her, anyway? He lived here, for God’s sake. He must know how awful it was. “Don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” he echoed. “No need to take offense. I’m just asking.”
His lips canted upward toward unreadable eyes, but there was the drawl of the South lacing his voice, just like it laced, in different ways, Mary Pickett’s voice and Willie Willie’s and Forrest Duval’s and Bed’s and Jackson Blodgett’s and Wynne Blodgett’s and even that man on the bicycle, Ben T.’s—a cadence that strolled through words and that branded Regina as an outsider here.
And she knew it. Could feel it. But maybe what they needed was an outsider.
She hadn’t said this aloud, but Tom shook his head, still smiling that sort-of smile. “Missy, I have an idea you’re about to find out life around here’s a lot more complicated than you ever imagined.”
Staring over at his face—his smug-looking face—she had never in the whole of her life so clearly understood the term Uncle Tom as she did at that moment.
You’ve got yours. Everybody else can just rot in hell. That’s what she thought, but aloud she said primly, “So I presume that’s a no to the flyers. You’re not going to help.”
Tom threw back his head and laughed again, a very ripe, merry sound. “After all I said, and you’re still asking for me to do this—with my boy down right this very minute in Jackson, sitting for the state bar, and with the Duval blessing so there’s a chance he might be the first one of us to pass it. Now, why on earth would I jeopardize that?”
Regina opened her hands wide. “To find out what actually happened?”
“But you already know what actually happened.” The look Tom threw her was as shrewd as it was cool. “Somebody’s told you by now or else they’ve hinted all around it, brought you close up to the point. That’s why you come up here, the real reason. You just want me to confirm it, and I will. Wynne Vardaman Blodgett killed Joe Howard Wilson. He admitted it. Bragged about it to his friends, and from there, naturally, folks being how they are, it got all over town. Not that this made a scratch worth of difference. In Mississippi, any white man did what he did, they’d still be on the street, too. Don’t even need a rich daddy to get away with that; all you got to be is white. But Wynne, he’s white, and he’s got a rich daddy, too. And that daddy loves him. Gonna look out for him. And Miss Mary Pickett . . . well, she cares for Mr. Blodgett. This puts her right in the middle of a mess. You want me to put myself right in the middle of it, too? Think I’m a fool? Things might be changing, but they ain’t changed that much.”
Regina’s eyes narrowed. “If what you say is true, why didn’t Mr. Willie Willie tell me all this?”
Tom chuckled, a deep, rich sound, and seemed to feel that was answer enough. Regina gathered up her gloves, her brand-new briefcase, her purse.
A man admits he killed somebody and he’s still free to walk the streets, to hang out at the bus depot and the town square, to laugh with his friends, to brag about what he did, and nobody is inclined to do a thing about it. She walked straight to the d
oor.
“I’d watch out for Willie Willie,” said Tom softly from behind her. “He’s a killer, you know.”
Regina turned back. “You mean his son got killed.”
“No, I mean he did some killing. Ask him about it sometime. Ask Peach.”
10.
It was dark by the time Regina made her way again to Willie Willie’s cottage. Even so, there was enough daylight left for kittens to be still tumbling over one another on Mary Pickett’s lawn, for girls to still be playing one last game of hopscotch before dinner, for boys on bicycles, streaking like fallen stars across the streets of Revere, to call back to friends, like they had in The Secret of Magic.
“Come on, now, Booker. Catch up! Catch up!”
When she opened the door to the cottage, she smelled cigarette smoke and immediately thought, Wynne Blodgett. He was that much on her mind.
But the man in the cottage was not Wynne Blodgett.
She realized this as soon as she flicked on the overhead light. For one thing, he was too big, too fleshy. His massive body dwarfed the big magnolia-print easy chair on which it sat gingerly perched.
“Sheriff.” Regina plastered a smile on her face but stayed near the door. “Good evening.”
“Rand Connelly,” he said. “We saw each other round the corner other day. With Bed Duval.” He ducked his head slightly but didn’t take off his hat or get up.
“Regina Robichard. Nice to meet you.” She inched up her smile, laid her things on the desk by the window, looked over at him. “I guess you don’t need a key to come on in, in Mississippi.”
“No keys,” answered the sheriff, “because there’s no locks.”
She nodded, noticed a brown paper envelope. Small and flimsy, it too had been put on the desk, propped up neatly against the lace curtains at the window. It made her think of the shirt, and she had to fight back a strong urge to check on it, to make sure it was still hidden. She knew the sheriff had caught her looking at the envelope and wondered if he’d also caught her quick, questioning frown before she wiped it off her face. But the sheriff didn’t say anything about that, not yet. Instead, he asked her, “You planning a stay?” which was almost the same thing Willie Willie had said to her at the bus depot when she’d first got here.
“That depends on Miss Calhoun.”
“Miss Mary Pickett?”
“She’s the one brought me here.” Echoing Tom Raspberry almost word for word.
“But you’re the one made up your mind to stay. That’s what I’m hearing.” The sheriff grinned, but Regina couldn’t quite tell what kind of grin it was, just interested or maybe malicious.
She chanced a quick glance over to Mary Pickett’s house, to the bare light over its back screen door, to its still calm. Quick, true, but the sheriff hadn’t missed it. When Regina turned back, he was smiling at her, and she thought that he could have been a caricature, the small-town Southern lawman. Mean and menacing. Maybe a bully. But she realized this was a stereotype, and she could almost see Thurgood shaking his head at her, wagging an admonishing finger—“Don’t assume.”
At last, he nodded to the envelope on the desk. “Mr. Blodgett asked me to bring that over to you. To make sure you got it in your hands. I imagine you know what it is.”
She knew. “The grand jury findings.”
Pop! Pop!
Gunshots. Exploding out, one right on top of the other. Rand Connelly didn’t move, didn’t utter a syllable, but Regina thought for sure she saw a slow Gotcha! grin starting up on his face as he stared at her. As he waited for her, the little slicker from the city, to cry out, to jump. But she did neither.
“Night hunters.” She nodded to the window, to the darkness beyond it. “Mr. Willie Willie explained to me that the deer around here are just starting to see their way back.”
“They’ve been back some few years,” said Rand Connelly. If he was surprised by her knowledge of animal life in Mississippi, it didn’t show. “Weren’t any around here for the longest, not for sport hunting. Had to eat up everything we got. There wasn’t a buck roaming for a boy to aim at, the whole of the county was hunted clean out. Now everybody and his son and his cousin and his cousin’s cousins think they can shoot anything they want, anytime they want to do it. No respect for the law.”
He heaved himself up from a chair, started toward Regina and the door.
Pop! Pop!
Again. Closer this time. Regina said a silent, quick prayer that the deer got away.
Run, run now! Quick!
“I heard,” she said, moving just slightly enough to block the sheriff’s way out, at least for a moment, “that folks here would have starved for sure if it hadn’t been for what they hunted.”
“You got that from Willie Willie, too, I imagine, and he’s right. During the Depression, we sure would have. Everybody was poor as spent dirt back then. At least down here we all were,” said Rand Connelly.
“Oh, so you’re from here?”
The sheriff nodded. “Near enough. Out on the prairie, close by Miss Mary Pickett’s old plantation place, Magnolia Forest. My daddy sharecropped out there.”
“Not from Carroll County, then.”
“Oh, so you know about Carroll County?”
“I do now,” she said. “Moonshiners. Rowdy folks.” She and the sheriff shared a quick laugh.
But then Regina saw him look over at her, cock his head, turn wary.
He was curious about her, or so Regina thought, and she wondered what it must be like for him to be in this place, in this little cabin/cottage where colored people lived. She didn’t even know if a white sheriff in Mississippi would be called on to go into many Negro houses, to talk to people like he was talking to her. In Harlem, she couldn’t recall one white person who had ever come into the apartment that she shared with her mother.
Another spurt of gunfire. Rat-tat-tat. Nearer? Farther away? She couldn’t tell the direction. It could have come from anywhere.
At the door, the sheriff said, “Nice meeting you.” Almost tipped his hat, caught himself just in time.
As soon as she heard the last echoes of his boots on the pea gravel, Regina counted to ten—slowly—and then rushed into the kitchen, checked behind the sink for the shirt. It was still there, right where she’d left it. Still wrapped in brown paper. Still with those strange stains around the missing button on its otherwise perfect white front. Suddenly, the whole thing—the brightness of the shirt in the hanging overhead light, the dull brown of stain around the lost button—reminded Regina less of the random smudges of a child’s finger painting and more like the free form of a Rorschach test. Something that appeared simple enough on the surface but that hid a whole tangle of meanings, any one of which might call out . . .
Gotcha!
. . . if you didn’t understand things just right. And Regina, hunkered down in the bright add-on kitchen of Willie Willie’s cottage, had the sinking sensation that she was failing the test.
• • •
THE FILE JACK RAND CONNELLY left was thin and so new that the PROPERTY OF JEFFERSON-LEE COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT looked like it had been stenciled on maybe five minutes before, as an afterthought. When she touched it, ink smudged off on her fingers. The envelope wasn’t sealed, and she had the feeling that these particular records might not have been in the files at all. That they had been made up only when she’d asked for them and were pieced together out of whole cloth. Still, Regina was grateful, couldn’t help but feel relief that Jackson Blodgett had done what he said he would do and, in turn, given her something she could do. But if what Tom Raspberry said was right—that everybody knew Wynne Blodgett had been the one to kill Joe Howard Wilson—then why on earth had his father given her this?
Because there was nothing to it. She found this out soon enough. It was what her mother, Ida Jane, would call a flimflam, something composed of little more t
han smoke and mirrors. The document contained some names and not much else. The bus driver’s, Johnny Ray Dean; a woman, Mrs. Paula Peavey (widow), who lived on a rural route in Scooba with her twin boys. There was no mention of Anna Dale Buchanan—but then again, Anna Dale Buchanan, with what she had to say, had never been called. More important, there was no mention of Wynne Vardaman Blodgett here, no record of who exactly had been up for indictment at all. This information had disappeared—if, she thought, it had been put in the docket at all.
But there was a coroner’s report, signed by one Delray Barnes. He was listed as Mr., not Dr. In his sworn deposition, Mr. Barnes stated what Regina expected he would. Joe Howard’s body had lain long in muddy water. At the time of examination, it was in an advanced state of decomposition and this made it impossible to make a clear determination as to cause of death. No one pressed the point. Three sentences of testimony, and that was that.
Johnny Ray Dean was, if possible, even less forthcoming. He lived just over the state line in Ethelsville, Alabama, and he’d worked driving buses for the Bonnie Blue Line for six years. He hadn’t been away to war, hadn’t been drafted. That particular October day, so he said in his statement, he’d heard a little rattle in his engine. The Bonnie Blues were old buses. They’d been known to fall apart on you in a minute. All the drivers knew that. Mr. Dean had brought his vehicle to a stop on the side of the road, cranked open the door, got out to investigate. Joe Howard had climbed down after him. He said he wanted to smoke him a cigarette. He—Joe Howard—had met up with some friends. He’d gone off with them. And that had been that.
Bob Miller (Foreman): “What about his things?”
Mr. Dean: “Well, he knowed we’d put them down in Revere. That’s where his ticket went to. They’d be there when he turned up to get them.”
This answer seemed to satisfy Bob Miller. At least, after that, no other witnesses were called. On the page was the scrawl of what must be the foreman’s initials. He’d okayed this and the case had been dropped. But Regina wondered what had become of Mrs. Paula Peavey, the widow. Had she actually been in the courtroom? And if so, why hadn’t she been questioned?
The Secret of Magic Page 20
