One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  Kel stopped by his room at the Sleep-Mor long enough to use the toilet, splash some cold water on his face, and take a wet washcloth to the grime that had accumulated on his neck. He looked closely in the mirror, noting the reddish cast to his eyes, the result of dust and sun and lack of honest sleep. He scanned the room for evidence of any disturbance. He didn’t see anything, but it was hard to tell since the maid had been in. Then he got back into his car and headed for the courthouse. What he was counting on was bureaucracy. For better or worse, he was now a bureaucrat. He spent most of his time analyzing memos and spreadsheets and trends and policy.

  Frightening.

  But he could use it now. He ran the process over and over in his head. In the United States, when someone dies, a death certificate is required for the collection of insurance, remarriage, probating the estate, sale of property, and perhaps most important, disposal of the body. The law wants some proof that a person really is dead before people get the green light to start disposing of the body. Death can be handled with three basic types of death certificates: natural deaths, which can be signed by an attending doctor, or in some cases a licensed nurse, police officer, ambulance driver, even a ship’s captain; same for stillbirths and fetal deaths; and then there are suspicious deaths—medicolegal deaths they’re called—those that have to be signed by coroners or medical examiners.

  But the bureaucratic gears aren’t finished grinding with the completion of a death certificate. Death certificates certify death, but another document—a certificate of disposition of remains—is required to physically do something with the remains. Rules are rules and even unidentified homicide victims have to follow them. Someone—in this case the Locust County coroner—would have had to certify the John Doe’s death. And that certificate would be on file somewhere, certainly at the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Little Rock, but sometimes small counties like Locust County kept copies as well. Made things easier in prefax days, when travel to and from Little Rock was more time-consuming. But more important, if the remains were buried—and Kel now was sure they had been—then there should be some sort of certificate of disposition of remains on file. A burial permit or a cremation permit. Given that this was an open homicide, it was unlikely that the coroner would have agreed to a cremation. Burials are exhumable, but cremations are like diamonds—forever. And if the remains were buried, probably by a licensed mortician, it had to have been in a state-approved cemetery. Once again, most likely somewhere in Locust County.

  The key was to find the burial permit. The original would have been forwarded to the state registrar in Little Rock. Kel could drive there on Monday, but the Locust County clerk might have indexed a copy for the county ledger. Kel was banking on the county courthouse again. Locust County was poor, and poor people have poor ways. Travel to the state capital involved an expense. Records, at least copies or voucher entries, would be retained locally, at the clerk’s office. The trick would be to get in there and out without attracting too much attention.

  Cecil Berle kept checking his watch; it was almost three o’clock on a long Friday afternoon, and he was looking toward shutting down early and going home. His boss, Emery Jane Hennig, the county clerk, had already left early, and there was very little keeping the spindle-thin fence post of a man at his desk other than the slow progress of the clock hands. Hardly anyone had been in all day. No one was likely to come in now, not late on a Friday afternoon. He wanted badly to take to the new hammock his wife had given him for their anniversary.

  He was looking out the second-floor window overlooking Tupelo and Main streets when the door to room 202 opened. The jamb was swollen from the humidity and it stuck and rattled when it was opened. He turned at the sound and saw someone he’d never seen in Split Tree before puppet his head around the door. So much for going home early.

  “Yes sir, can I hep you?” Cecil’s voice betrayed no desire to be of service. It was said in the same manner he might have said “bless you” if he’d heard someone sneeze.

  Kel walked into the office and closed the door behind him. “Well, I sure do hope so,” he said as he walked up to the counter. The room was floored with a short-napped industrial-grade carpet that was supposed to be a mottled blue-gray but looked an off-plum color in the buzzing fluorescent light. The old hardwood boards underneath could still be heard creaking under each step. “I’m looking to find some records.”

  Cecil Berle looked at him as if he was a talking goat with a necktie. “Then I reckon you’re in the right spot. This being County Records and all. It’s pretty late in the day; can I be of any hep?”

  Kel placed both palms flat on the counter as if he were about to order a drink. He looked at the man.How much honesty is called for in a situation like this? he wondered. “Hmmm, well sir, I’m doin’ a piece of research, and I was interested in some old…I guess old isn’t quite right, you might say, older, county records. I was hopin’ you could save me a trip to Little Rock.” He smiled. It wasn’t returned.

  “You be a lawyer?” Cecil squinted.

  “No sir. I may be a whole bunch of things, but a lawyer I ain’t.”

  Kel couldn’t tell if that was the right answer or not.

  “What kind of records? Exactly,” Cecil asked.

  “I’m interested in…ahh…well, I guess they’re vital statistics. Death certificates, burial permits, location of local cemeteries, that sort of thing.”

  “Next of kin, are you? You be next of kin? Of the folks’ records your aimin’ to look up, that is.”

  “Well…ahhh…naw, sir, not exactly.”

  “What part isnot? …exactly, that is.”

  “Oh,” Kel smiled again, wider this time, “the kin part. No, I’m not kin—not that I know of, that is. Just doin’ some research, mostly for an acquaintance in Memphis.”

  Kel watched as Cecil ruminated. Kel didn’t know it, but Cecil Berle was calculating the time investment on his part and how that was going to affect his getting home, rather than the propriety of the request. He sighed deeply, and his dark-blue bow tie cocked to starboard slightly as he exhaled. The lifetime civil servant won out in the end.

  “When’d these deaths occur—approximately? We store the records in different places dependin’ on when they occurred.”

  “Somewhere ’bout forty years ago—here in Locust County.”

  “Got a name?”

  He reminded Kel of a mud dobber; brown, spindly legs, belt cinched up too tight. Kel wasn’t entirely sure if he was asking whether he, Kel, had a name or if he meant the name of the dead person he was looking for. He hesitated, then gave the latter a shot. “Naw, he doesn’t have a name, least none that anybody around here knows. He died as an unknown. John Doe, would be my guess.” Kel noticed that he had involuntarily slipped deeper into his boyhood accent.Hey, when in Split Tree… he thought.

  The thin man nodded as if he understood all, or understood nothing. Then, without a word, he turned his back on Kel and slowly returned to his desk. He had a slight hitch in his step, as if he had a small rock in one shoe. Kel watched, afraid that his final answer had so driven the man over the bureaucratic frustration ledge that he was simply going to be ignored.

  Instead, Cecil Berle reached slowly under his desk and extracted a two-foot-long wooden pole with a single key attached to the end with a loop of cord. He walked back to the counter and slapped the instrument down in front of Kel.

  “Third floor, room 304, on the right. Y’all on your own, though. If I’m not here when you come back, leave the key outside the door.” He gave a nod in the general direction of the office door to indicate that he meant for Kel to leave the key by the door here and not the door on the third floor. It was clear that the little man had no intention of going upstairs unless he had a gun to his head, and even then it might be open to debate.

  Kel smiled and took the stick. It looked better suited to clubbing a washtub full of monkeys than being a key holder, but it no doubt was effective in keeping people from inad
vertently pocketing the key. “Yes sir, surely will. And I thank you. Third floor, room…” He arched his eyebrows to indicate that he needed a little refreshing with regard to the number.

  “Three-oh-four,” Cecil replied as he turned and headed once again for his desk. He wanted to clear the last few papers off it and head home, and he’d already spent too much time dealing with this stranger.

  Kel didn’t hang around. He walked into the hallway and looked in both directions, trying to remember which way the stairway was located. He turned right, found the stairs, and took them two at a time to the third floor. It was unbelievably hot. So hot that, from what he could tell, no living being had an office on the third floor. All the doors were closed and the entire floor had the feel of having been shut down for a long vacation. He quickly found room 304 and swung the key up to unlock the door, rapping his shins with the baseball bat attached to it. He cussed and decided that he was going to go ahead and steal the key if only as a public service.

  Kel only thought the third-floor hallway was hot. When the door to room 304 swung open, he understood what “understatement” meant. It was easily 120 degrees inside the room, and Kel was literally forced to stagger a step back. The air smelled old; a heady mixture of dust and cracked yellow varnish and dry rot slow-stewed in 90 percent humidity. He took a breath and stepped back into the doorway. The room was filled with lidded brown cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling. There was a narrow pathway that snaked through the approximate center. Kel though of Howard Carter cracking the seal on King Tut’s tomb. “Wonderful things,” he said to himself.

  From what he could tell, the accumulated Locust County records for the better part of the 1900s were here. They appeared to have been filed by whim and windstorm, certainly not by year or type or any other conventional element of organization. Kel was already dripping wet and was feeling lightheaded. Sweat stung his eyes and cut thick, salty rivulets down his face and into the corners of his mouth.

  Now he understood why the friendly neighborhood mud dobber downstairs hadn’t volunteered to escort him up here.

  The older boxes were easy to spot, as each had an acid-brittle, yellowed, hand-written label taped on the end; the inked letters in that flowery script that was once taught in precomputer, pretypewriter grade schools. The more recent boxes—those from about 1960 onward—had the contents labeled directly on the cardboard with what appeared to be black permanent marker. The lettering was simple and blocky and devoid of character or self-discipline. He blinked several drops of sweat from his eyes and wiped his hair away from his forehead with the crook of his left arm. His hands were already grayish black from accumulated time and insect droppings. As best he could tell, most of the records nearest the door were from the seventies and eighties. Farther back in the room, closest to the wall and the rippled-glass window, were boxes from the forties, fifties, and sixties. This semblance of organization resulted not from planning or ad hoc design but from a reluctance on anyone’s part to venture farther into the interior of the sweatbox than necessary. It was always easier to simply deposit the most recent boxes in the doorway and push—especially since there was hardly ever any call to access them later.

  It took the better part of a half-hour to find the boxes dating from the mid-1960s. Part of the delay was the result of his having to step into the relative oasis of the ninety-degree hallway every few minutes to revive. There had also been a short delay caused by the need to move many of the later boxes out of the room to clear some work space.

  There were five boxes that looked promising. Kel pulled them closer to the window for better light since the overhead bulb appeared to have long ago burned out. The window was painted shut with a hundred years’ worth of maintenance, and the dried husks of dozens of dead flies littered the windowsill where they’d battered their brains out against the glass. He sat cross-legged on a small clearing he’d made on the floor and opened the first box, removing a stack of bound ledgers. The covers were burgundy-colored fake leather and they smelled of paper mold and animal glue. Birth records. So was box two.

  Box three was what he was after. Five thin binders.

  He sorted them into order and opened the one labeledVital Statistics Jan. ’65 –Dec. 1966 County Deaths.The dry cover made quiet cracking and snapping sounds as it was opened. Inside were ledger pages listing Locust County coroner’s findings of death, now browned and brittle like ancient parchment. Each entry was spread across two pages, thin blue ink lines ruling it into ten columns. Only the first couple of dozen pages were filled in with neat script. As he turned the leaves, several edges broke free in thumb-sized crescents of the acidic paper. Unlike the boxes, the pages and entries were ordered chronologically. He leafed quickly through the pages, scanning the left margin until he found an entry dated June 4. He began scanning slower, running his finger down the red line separating the first and second columns. Levine had said that Jackson’s body was found in mid-August sometime.

  He soon found it. A faded, blue, fountain-pen ledger entry dated August 16, 1965. The handwriting was small and precise and spoke of a uniform mind.Decedent’s Name: Jackson, Leonidas S.; Address: Natchez, Miss.; Sex: M; Race: Colored; Age at Last Birthday: 52; Cause of Death: Injuries resulting from blunt force trauma; Manner of Death: Homicide; DOD: On or about August 15, 1965. Death certified by: Granville Begley, M.D., Coroner, Locust County, Arkansas.

  Thank God for bureaucrats,Kel thought.Now to find Mr. John Doe’s .

  Levine had said that the second body had been found in September. Locust County wasn’t big and there weren’t many deaths between August 1 and October 1. He found it easily. Another faded entry, this one dated September 24, 1965, but in a different hand, one more casual, loopy and less efficient. The writing was larger and extended beyond the ruled columns.Decedent’s Name: Unknown; Address: Unknown; Sex: M; Race: White; Age at Last Birthday: Unknown; Cause of Death: GSW to the head; Manner of Death: Homicide; DOD: O/A August 1965 . It, too, had been certified by Granville Begley, M.D.

  That had to be it. Gunshot wound to the head, date of death on or about August 1965, unknown identity.

  Kel stepped out into the hallway and bent over, hands on his knees, trying to shake off the heat. His head was pounding in sync with his pulse. His nose had plugged up with heat and dust, and sweat pooled at his feet. So far, so good, but also, so far, so what? An hour in the sauna and he had proven what everyone already knew to begin with: Leon Jackson and some unknown white boy were murdered in 1965. The only promising aspect was that Locust County seemed to have a hard time disposing of paper.

  The actual certificates of death were in two boxes near the floor, but they required moving a dozen others to reach them.

  As with the ledger books, the death certificate for Leon Jackson proved the easier of the two to find. Arkansas didn’t use a separate disposition form. Rather, the top section of the death certificate contained the body release information, and the certificates were filed by release date instead of the date of death. In Jackson’s case, his remains were released to a representative of the Jefferson Funeral Home in Natchez, Mississippi, a week and a half after being identified. From there they were signed over to a military escort for transfer to Arlington National Cemetery.

  The John Doe’s record, however, was not there. In fact, Kel searched through the 1965 binder twice from September on. No release of an unknown body for burial. He started on 1966. He slowly checked each page.

  He found it about the same time that he had decided to give up. The afternoon heat and lack of fresh air had sucked him dry like one of the dead flies on the hot windowsill.One more page, he’d thought,at least I’ll have given it a good shot . That’s when he found it.

  It was dated September 25, 1966—a year and a day after the death had been certified. “Of course,” Kel said out loud, “just like the old Missing Persons Act.” He read the top of the form:Death Certificate and Release of Body for Disposition Permit. Decedent’s Name: John Doe; Address: Unkn
own; Sex: M; Color: White; Age at Last Birthday: Unknown (Adult); Place of Death: Vicinity Split Tree, Locust Co., Date of Death: O/A August 1965; Means of Disposition: Burial. But it was the other name on the form that caught his attention:Released to: Mr. D. Hawk, Funeral Director’s License No. 471102, Hawk Funeral Home, 113 Price Avenue, Split Tree, Arkansas. And then,Location of Burial: Wallace Cemetery, Locust County, Arkansas.

  “I’ll be damned,” Kel said.

  Chapter 29

  Split Tree, Arkansas

  FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005

  Fitting all the boxes back into the room was like repacking a suitcase in the middle of a crowded airport—the volume of what had to go in well exceeded the space into which it had to go. It took a while. Kel muscled the last stack of boxes through the entryway with his hip and was backing out of the room, pulling the door shut, when he bumped into a mass.

  “Boo.”

  “Holy shit,” Kel exclaimed. He physically jumped.

  “Scare you?” Jimbo Bevins asked. His smile indicated real enjoyment.

  “Scared the piss out of me. Yeah. Goddamn, Sheriff.” Kel took a deep breath to steady himself. His heart thumped in his throat.

  Jimbo smiled even bigger. “Deputy. I’m not Sheriff yet. Gimme some time, though.” He winked and took a long drag on a cigarette. He blew the smoke out the side of his mouth. “You’re that McKelvey fella, right? We met yesterday over at the Albert Pike. You’re Mr. Levine’s buddy.”

  Kel nodded. “Robert McKelvey. Yeah, we met. Good to see you again, Deputy Bevins. Kinda surprised me. So quiet up here and all. Figured I was all alone.”

  “So I gathered. You jumped like a goosed cat.” Jimbo paused. He smiled again. “How’s the room at the Sleep-Mor? Sam treatin’ you okay?”

  Kel looked at Bevins. It was an odd segue. He thought about the intruder in his room.