One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  Levine had gone over much of the same territory during the drive down from the Memphis airport, but now, standing in the quivering heat of the parched-clay floodplain, the story took on a raw sense of sadness.

  “Guess I didn’t fully appreciate how extensive the beatin’ part was. So his body’s found and identified, and then what?” Kel asked.

  Levine took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted his face and neck. Before continuing, he removed his jacket and draped it over his left forearm. “Yeah, he was identified and buried. There was a big funeral up at Arlington—seems that Leon Jackson was a Korean War vet or some such thing. All sorts of important people who probably wouldn’t have let ol’ Leon in their front door were in attendance. Meanwhile, LBJ sent some specialists down from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and of course the Bureau had everyone from Memphis and Little Rock, even some from the Jackson field office, out here mucking around, turning over rocks and dirt clods. Lot of money, lot of overtime; not a lot of results but a whole lot of visible effort.”

  “And the John Doe? When does he turn up?”

  Levine started walking up the road to his right and motioned with his head for Kel to follow. They went perhaps fifty yards farther and stopped again. Walking a step or two behind, Kel had noticed the black semiautomatic tucked into a polished leather holster at the small of Levine’s back. He hadn’t noticed it the other night at the airport and wondered where it had been stashed. Its presence partially explained Levine’s keeping his jacket on in spite of the heat that was obviously affecting him adversely. FBI tradition explained the rest.

  “No one knew about a second body. Unlike over near Philadelphia where Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were last seen together—known to be together—our buddy Leon was last seen alone, so no one was looking for any more bodies. No reason to, right?”

  Kel hunkered down in the dust, sitting on his right heel. No one stopped to talk in fields anymore. When he was younger, Kel could hunker for hours listening to his father and uncles talk; now his knees were beginning to complain after only a few minutes. He lowered his head and let a foamy ball of spit drop and ball up in the powdery dirt between his feet. He paused and then let a second ball drop. “Right,” he acknowledged.

  “By mid-September, the rain had stopped and the muck had dried up enough that the Bureau was able to start digging up the whole field looking for additional evidence. Not bodies, mind you, no reason to assume that, but evidence. Everyone figured a possible murder weapon—tire iron, baseball bat, whatever—might have been tossed away in the field or something. They even had the Arkansas National Guard out here tromping through everything. Certainly looked good for the media and the voters. But, like I said, no one was looking for another body, just for any clues relating to Jackson’s death.”

  Levine again indicated a third spot on the levee with a nod.

  Kel dropped his head and spat again and then looked up.

  There was a new wire fence around the field, its posts a bright red in the dusty field. In spots the weathered, split, gray wooden posts of an older, long-forgotten fence still stood. A curious bluejay had decided to perch atop the one closest the two men. It kept turning its head sideways in hopes of better understanding what was being said.

  “Right about there. Afternoon of September twenty-third. One of the National Guardsmen smells something rather unpleasant—unpleasant even for normal river muck. According to the report, it didn’t take much digging; the rain had already exposed most of it. Young, white, John Doe, single contact gunshot wound to head; badly decomposed, almost a skeleton by the time they got it out of the ground. There was a fragment of a man’s torn shirt wrapped around the head and neck, also a pair of pants, shoes, underwear, etc. Appeared to be bloody. No wallet or keys, but his watch and pocket money were there—no reason to think it was a robbery. Anyhow, down come all the pros from Dover, but no ID—try as they might, the remains don’t match anyone reported missing from a five-hundred-mile radius. Nobody. Kids, runaways, nobody. Of course, the Head-Busters don’t know what to think. Maybe they’ve got a whole mess of bodies out here—like one of those killing fields in Cambodia. So, the Feds bulldoze up the whole sonofabitching field looking for more skeletons; find none. Nothing. Case stalls, until…”

  “Until?”

  “Until the Bureau needs to create a gulag. Along comes Special Agent Michael Levine. I put a sharp stick up the wrong person’s ass, twist it twice, and the next thing I know, some of the current powers that be decide that I need to spend a summer regretting the content of some memos that I wrote. This case happens to fill the bill.”

  He paused as if his life was flashing across the field in front of him. Finally he said, “And so here I am.” He paused again. “And,” he turned and looked down at Kel still hunkering on the ground, “here you are, my friend.”

  Chapter 16

  Split Tree, Arkansas

  THURSDAY, AUGUST18, 2005

  Levine spent most of the short ride back into town adjusting and readjusting the air-conditioning vents and thinking about what he was going to ask the police chief when he met with him in a few hours, and what the next step on this seemingly dead-ended case could possibly be.

  Kel sat and stared out at the fields, thinking about growing up in Arkansas in the fifties and sixties. He remembered the summer his older brother had patiently explained to him how the water in the Colored Water fountains wasn’t really colored, and he remembered how unfair it had seemed to him as a child that the Negroes got to sit up in the balcony at the movie theater while he and his friends had to sit below. And he thought about 1965 and Leon Jackson and about who could possess enough hate to have beaten a man that badly.

  Something didn’t fit but he couldn’t get a handle on it. It was like the forgotten name of an old acquaintance that lingered annoyingly on the front of his brain but refused to solidify on his tongue.

  It was almost noon when they hit the town limits. They passed the sign that readWelcome to Split Tree, Home of Friendly People, its lettering starting to flake away around all the rusty shotgun-pellet holes punched through it. Levine announced he was hungry and steered a course for the Albert Pike. It was on the western edge of town, not far from the Pacific Funeral Home, and it took a few more minutes to get there. They parked and Levine again locked the car.

  “You don’t have to keep doin’ that, you know?” Kel said over the top of the car.

  “Doing what?”

  “Keep lockin’ everythin’ up. This isn’t the big city.”

  “Maybe so, but shitbirds are shitbirds everywhere,” Levine responded as he pocketed his keys and loosened his tie.

  “Not a very Christian attitude,” Kel joked.

  “No shit.” Levine stopped walking and faced Kel. He raised a finger. Suddenly serious. “Look, you ever been shot?”

  Kel shrugged. “No.”

  “No? Well, let me educate you, Doctor. In 1967, when I was nineteen years old, a little kid who couldn’t have been much over eleven, twelve, a goddamn little kid in cotton pajamas blew a hole through my shoulder with an AK-47. I didn’t know that kid, and he didn’t know me. But he shot me, and I never saw it coming.” Levine’s eyes seemed to dare Kel to respond. “Kind of changes your whole outlook on human beings.”

  Kel nodded slowly. “Fair enough, Mike. Fair enough.” He paused and they resumed walking. “So what happened to the kid?” he asked.

  “I killed his ass,” Levine responded quietly.

  They walked across the parking lot in silence and entered the diner.

  “I guess that explains a lot.” Kel broke the silence as they took a seat at the same booth they’d had earlier that morning. He began looking at one of the menus, as much to project a casual air as to avoid making unnecessary eye contact with Levine.

  “Explains what?”

  “That you don’t particularly like humans.”

  “You got that right.”

  McKelvey shrugged and looked
at his menu. “It shows is all.”

  “I’m a firm believer that the world would be a decent place if it weren’t for all the goddamn people.”

  “No argument. That why you don’t have a phone?”

  “What?” Levine tugged his lapels to adjust the fit of his jacket.

  “A cell phone. You’re an FBI agent. In this day and all, how come you don’t have a cell phone?”

  “You still thinking about calling your boss?” Levine seemed willing to play along.

  “Naw. He’d be awake by now. I’ll wait. Truth is, I hate phones. Just surprised that you don’t have one.”

  Levine thought a moment before answering. Finally he said, “No need. I have a phone on my desk and one in my apartment. You pegged me right. Don’t have many people that I need to talk to, and even fewer that I want to talk to.”

  “I hear ya,” Kel responded. “Me either, but I would have assumed the FBI would have issued you one, though. For this case, if nothin’ else. Made you bring one.”

  “Shit. Like I told you, Doc, the Bureau would like to forget I even exist. They’d make me pay for my badge if they could. In case you haven’t realized it, this case is not very high on their priority list. Neither am I, for that matter.” He paused and looked at Kel before picking up a menu. “So if you’re here to take notes and dime me out, get in line.”

  Kel smiled. “Your paranoia’s misplaced, Fed. I’m all outta dimes.”

  Levine studied his menu and Kel looked around. Jo was still working, and the same shriveled little man was still cooking. The same men, in the same hats, were sitting in the same places, conducting what sounded to be the same conversations. Only now they were eating cornmeal-fried catfish and chicken-fried steak. Jo smiled at her new customers as soon as she saw them and hurried over.

  “I figured I’d be seein’ y’all again,” she said as she took out a small pad of paper and readied her pen. Their return had proven to be the high point of her day. “Now, what can I get y’all?”

  Levine flipped the laminated sheet over and back several times before finally realizing that one side was the breakfast menu. Little things like that seemed to annoy him. He sighed loudly, and then began working the lunch side over as if it were written in hieroglyphs. “I’ll have a cheeseburger and a Pepsi,” he announced as he replaced the menu in the shiny wire holder that also corralled the salt and pepper and near-empty bottle of pepper sauce.

  “Shiloh Burger?”

  He nodded, seemingly unwilling to call a simple cheeseburger anything but that. “And a Pepsi.”

  “Coke Cola okay?”

  He sighed and nodded again.

  “And you, Sugar, what can I get y’all today?” She’d been looking at Kel most of the time.

  Kel snapped a quick glance at Levine as if to saynot a goddamn word out of you, and then looked at Joletta, smiled, and said, “Ahhh…can’t say I’m really hungry after that extra gravy this mornin’, darlin’, how about just some iced tea and a slice of Karo nut pie.”

  “Comin’ right up, Sugar. I think I got an extra-thick wedge with your name on it.” This time she actually winked.

  “Say there, Sugar,” Levine leaned back against his booth cushion and dipped his head down as if he were winding up for a fastball, “you all sure were quiet in the car. What’s you all thinking, Sugar?”

  “In the first place, it’s ‘y’all,’ not ‘you all,’ and secondly, jealousy doesn’t become a grown man like you.” Kel turned sideways in his seat and scooted toward the wall so that he could stretch his legs out on the booth cushion. “As to what I was thinkin’…” He took a deep breath, held it momentarily until the mood had sobered a little, and then slowly exhaled. “Somethin’ about the Jackson case doesn’t sit well with me, and I can’t quite figure out what it is, but that dog just ain’t pointin’ true, as I believe they say around here.”

  “You sure it’s not the extra gravy from this morning that’s not sitting well?”

  “Well, that could be. Food around here can do that sometimes.”

  “Don’t talk until you’ve eaten my mother’s cooking. Ever had rendered chicken fat on bread?”

  “I’ll take the extra gravy. But that’s not the problem. There’s somethin’ else.” He paused again. “This is probably a small thing, but how’d you know where to stop the car when we were out at the levee? There’re no landmarks out there to speak of, not that I saw anyway, and one patch of a dusty cotton field has a way of lookin’ like any other—especially to an outsider like you.”

  “Really not brain surgery, Doc. I’d already been out there the other day. It wasn’t my first visit.”

  “Even so…you had to find it the first time. How? Someone show you?”

  “I’ve got the ’65 case report, remember? It has a couple of dozen black-and-white scene photos in it—taken from all different angles.”

  “But there’s still no landmarks.”

  “Well, that’s not quite true. Remember those run-down sheds near where the John Doe was found? On past where we were standing? In the ’65 photos people are living in those things, though to be honest, they didn’t look much better then. But they’re still recognizable even today. There’s also a clump of trees off near the horizon that are visible in the photos, and you can kind of line up on those.”

  Jo returned with Levine’s Shiloh Burger—a cheeseburger covered with chili—and Kel’s slice of pecan pie, an extra-thick slice, as she’d promised.

  Levine looked at the slather of chili and started to comment. He’d wanted a simple cheeseburger. Instead, he held his tongue.

  “You know, maybe it’s those houses that are botherin’ me. Why there?” Kel retrieved their conversation once the waitress was gone.

  Levine was still glaring at the food on his plate as he answered. “Why where? Why what?”

  “Why there? You said Jackson was last seen at a church over near West Helena—that’s a three-quarter-, half-hour drive away, easy, just to the outskirts. What was he doin’ in a lonely field outside Split Tree?”

  “If I’m not mistaken, he was getting his head bashed in with a blunt object.”

  “Ahh, well now that answers all my questions, doesn’t it?…except…why was he there? You can get your head bashed in just about anywhere. Why there? One of two reasons come to mind: Either he went there for a reason and met up with someone he wished he hadn’t, or, he was taken there—dead or alive—to be disposed of. In either case, the question I’d be askin’ is ‘Why?’”

  “All right, I’ll ask. ‘Why?’” After a few tentative bites, Levine began shoveling in large forkfuls of chili and burger.

  Kel rolled his eyes and exhaled some frustration. “Don’t ask me, you’re the damn special agent, remember?” He was quiet for a moment while he ate a couple of bites of pie, shaking his head as he did. “Those houses we saw out there, near where the bodies were found, you said folks were livin’ in them at the time? How many were there—we saw a half-dozen or so, didn’t we? The people livin’ there…did any of those FBI reports you read mention who they were? They interview them?”

  “Farmers. Migrants. There are maybe eight, nine buildings. I’m guessing they went to bed early; you know…see no evil, hear no evil…speak no evil…get no involved.”

  Kel figure-skated some sticky pie crumbs around on his plate with a tine of his fork and thought. Finally he answered. “Bullshit. When’d you last see farmers livin’ in gang houses like that? Depression time, maybe, but not by 1965—not even in hardscrabble east Arkansas. I got a problem believin’ those were farmers—migrants, maybe, but even then I don’t think so.” He looked up and caught the eye of the waitress. That was all that was required.

  “What can I get y’all?” she asked as she approached their booth at a quick step.

  “I’m fine,” Levine replied, “but I think Sugar here may want something.”

  She did look like she wanted to spit on him.

  “Miss Joletta.” Kel smiled up at her. �
��D’you make that nut pie? That was some of the best I’ve had in long whiles. How about another slice?”

  “Well, bless your heart, comin’ right up, Sugar. And call me Jo.”

  Kel stalled the conversation while they waited. When Joletta returned with an even larger slice of pecan pie, Kel again smiled broadly and shifted gears. “You from around here, Miss Jo?”

  “Depends what you mean by from around here. I was born up in Marked Tree, but I’ve lived here ’most all my life.”

  Marked Tree was maybe an hour up the road on a windy day. Kel reckoned the waitress at about his age, give or take a few hard-earned years. “Most of your life? What would that be, Miss Jo—about twenty years?”

  Joletta colored slightly and smoothed her apron and hair.

  Kel continued before she had a chance to reply. “My friend and I were just wonderin’ somethin’ and we realized that someone knowledgeable about Split Tree, like yourself, might be able to help us. You know them buildin’s out south of town, right as you cross the railroad tracks and turn onto…ahhh…what is it? Route 3? Then you go about a quarter-mile, there by the stand-back levee?”

  “The Rumsey property? Ain’t no houses out that way,” Jo replied, scrunching her face into a tight little knot and trying to fix the location in her mind.