Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “This is a favorite of mine.”

  Cowart rose and approached the stereo system. He put the tape into the player and turned to the detective. “You don’t mind if we just listen to the end, huh?”

  He punched a button and plaintive jazz filled the room.

  Brown stared at the reporter. “Cowart, what’re you doing? I’m not here to listen to music.”

  Cowart slumped back into his seat. “Sketches of Spain. Very famous. Ask any expert and they’ll tell you it’s a seminal piece of American musicianship. It just slides its rhythms right through you, gentle and harsh all at the same time. You probably think this piece ends nice and easy-like. But you’re wrong.”

  The mingled horns paled slowly and were abruptly replaced by Blair Sullivan’s acrid voice. Brown pitched forward in his seat at the murderer’s first words. He craned his neck toward the stereo speakers, his back rigid, his attention totally on what he was hearing.

  “. . . Now I will tell you the truth about little Joanie Shriver . . . Perfect little Joanie . . .” The executed man’s voice was mocking, clear and resonant.

  “. . . Number forty,” Cowart said on the tape.

  And the dead man’s laugh pierced the air.

  The reporter and the police detective sat still, letting Sullivan’s voice envelop them. When the tape hissed to its end and clicked off, the two men sat quietly, staring at each other.

  “Damn,” said Brown. “I knew it. Son of a bitch.”

  “Right,” replied Cowart.

  Brown rose and pounded one hand into another. He felt his insides spark with energy, as if the killer’s words had electrified the air. He clenched his teeth and said, “I’ve got you, you bastard. I’ve got you.”

  Cowart remained slumped in his seat, watching the policeman. “Nobody’s got anybody,” he said quietly, sadly.

  “What do you mean?” The detective looked at the tape machine. “Who else knows about this?”

  “You and me.”

  “You didn’t tell those detectives working the Monroe murders?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You understand that you’re withholding important evidence in a murder investigation. You understand that’s a crime?”

  “What evidence? A lying, twisted killer tells me a story. Blames another man for all sorts of things. What does that amount to? Reporters hear stuff all the time. We listen, process, discard. You tell me: evidence of what?”

  “His goddamn confession. His description of the deaths of his mother and stepfather. How he worked it all out. Dying declaration, just as he said, is admissible in a court of law.”

  “He lied. He lied right, left, up, and down. I don’t think, at the end, he understood what was truth and what was fiction.”

  “Bullshit. That story sounds pretty goddamn real to me.”

  “That’s because you want it to be real. Look at it another way. Suppose I told you that in the rest of the interview, he made up things. Claimed murders he couldn’t possibly have committed. Misstated all sorts of stuff. He was grandiose, egotistical, wanted to be remembered for his achievements. Hell, he almost claimed being a part of the Kennedy assassination and to know where Hoffa’s body lies. Now, hearing all that stuff mixed together, wouldn’t that make you wonder if he was telling you the truth about this little murder or two?”

  Brown hesitated. “No.”

  Cowart stared at the detective.

  “All right. Maybe.”

  “And what about him and Bobby Earl? Just where does the betrayal start? Maybe he figured this was his way back at Bobby Earl. I mean, what meant what? And now he’s dead. Can’t ask him, unless you want to take a trip to hell.”

  “I’m willing.”

  “So am I.”

  The detective glared over at Cowart, but then his frown dissipated and he nodded his head. “I think I see now.”

  “See what?”

  “Why it’s so damn important for you to believe Bobby Earl’s still innocent. I see why you tore up your own place here. Tore up your nice little life a bit when you heard what Sullivan told you, huh?”

  Cowart gestured, as if to say the detective was stating the obvious.

  “Prize. Reputation. Future. Pretty big stakes. Maybe you’d prefer it just all go away, huh, Mr. Cowart?”

  “It won’t,” he replied softly.

  “No, it won’t, will it? Maybe you can close your eyes to a lot, but you’re still gonna see that little girl all dripping dead in the swamp, aren’t you? No matter how hard you shut your eyes.”

  “Correct.”

  “And so you’ve got a debt, too, huh, Mr. Cowart?”

  “It seems that way.”

  “Need to make things right? Put the world back in order?”

  Cowart didn’t need to answer. He smiled sadly and took another long drink. He gestured Brown back to his seat. The detective slumped down but remained on the front rim of the chair, wound tight, as if ready to jump up.

  “Okay,” said the reporter. “You’re the detective. What would you do first? Go see Bobby Earl?”

  Brown considered carefully. “Maybe. Maybe not. Fox’ll walk through the trap unless it’s set just right and proper.”

  “If there’s a trap to set. If he is a fox.”

  “Well,” Brown said slowly, “Sullivan said a few things that can be checked out up in Pachoula. Maybe another talk with that old grandmother, and a look around her place. Sullivan said we missed something. Let’s go see if he was telling the truth about that. Maybe we can start there, figure out what’s the truth and what’s not.”

  Cowart shook his head slowly. “That’s right. Except we go back there and walk through the front door and there’s eight-by-ten glossy photographs of Ferguson committing that murder sitting on the mantelpiece and it doesn’t help a damn thing. . . .” He pointed his finger at Tanny Brown. “He can’t be touched, not legally. You know that you won’t ever make a case against him. Not ever. Not with that confession and with all the other stuff that’s muddying up all this. It’ll never happen in any court of law.”

  Cowart breathed in hard. “. . . And another thing. When we show up there, that old grandmother of his will know that something’s changed. And as soon as she knows, he’ll know.”

  Brown nodded but said harshly, “I still want the answer.”

  “So do I,” Cowart said, before continuing. “But the Monroe case. Well, if he did it—and I’m only saying if—if he did it, you could make him on that.” He paused, then corrected himself. “We could make him on that. You and me.”

  “And that might put things right? Put him back on Death Row, clear the slate? That what you’re thinking?”

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  “Hope,” said the detective, “is something I have never placed much faith in. Like luck and prayer. And anyway,” he continued, shaking his head, “same problem. One lying man says a deal’s been made. But the only corroboration of that deal is dead in Monroe County. So, you think maybe we can find some weapon on Bobby Earl? Maybe he used a credit card to buy a plane ticket and rent a car, so we can place him down there on the day of the murder? You think he let someone see him? Or maybe he shot his mouth off to some other folks? You think he was so stupid that he left prints or hair or any damn bit of forensic evidence which your dear friends in the Monroe sheriff’s department will generously hand over to you with no questions asked? You don’t think he learned enough the first time around, so that he did this clean?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that he did it.”

  “If he didn’t do it, then who the hell did? You think Blair Sullivan struck some other deals in prison?”

  “I only know one thing. Making deals, running head games, manipulation, it was what he lived for.”

  “And died
for.”

  “That’s right. Maybe that was his last deal.”

  Brown relaxed in his seat. He picked up his pistol and twirled it around, stroking a finger across the blue metal. “You stick to that, Mr. Cowart. You stick to that objectivity. No matter how goddamn stupid it makes you look.”

  Cowart felt a sudden rush of anger. “Not as goddamn stupid as someone beating a confession out of a murder suspect so the man gets a free ride.”

  There was a brief quiet between the two men before the detective said, “And there’s that one other thing on the tape, right? Where Sullivan says ‘Someone just like me . . .’” He looked hard at the reporter. “Didn’t that make your skin crawl just a bit, Mr. Cowart? What do you suppose that means?” The detective spoke through tightly clenched teeth. “Don’t you think that’s a question we ought to answer?”

  “Yes,” Cowart replied, bitterness streaking the word. Silence gripped the two men again.

  “All right,” Cowart said. “You’re right. Let’s start.” He looked over at the policeman. “Do we have an agreement?”

  “What sort of agreement?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brown nodded. “In that case, then, I suspect so,” replied the policeman.

  Both men looked at each other. Neither believed the other for an instant. Both men knew they needed to find out the truth of what happened. The problem, each realized silently to himself, was that each man needed a different truth.

  “What about the Monroe detectives?” Cowart asked.

  “Let them do their job. At least for now. I need to see what happened down there for myself.”

  “They’ll be back. I think I’m the only thing they’ve got to go on.”

  “Then we’ll see. But I think they’ll head back to the prison. That’s what I’d do if I were them.” He pointed to the tape. “. . . And if I didn’t know about that.”

  The reporter nodded. “A few minutes back you were accusing me of breaking the law.”

  Brown rose and fixed the reporter with a single, fierce glance. Cowart glared back.

  “There’s likely to be a few more laws broken before we get through with all this,” the policeman said quietly.

  15

  STANDING OUT

  A burst of heat seemed to bridge the territory between the pale blues of the ocean and the sky. It wrapped them in a sticky embrace, squeezing the breath from their lungs. The two uneasy men walked slowly together, keeping their thoughts to themselves, their feet kicking up puffs of gray-white dust, crunching against the odd shells and pieces of coral that made up Tarpon Drive. Neither man thought the other an ally; only that they were both engaged in a process that required the two of them, and that it was safest together. Cowart had parked his car adjacent to the house where he’d found the bodies. Then they’d begun walking door-to-door, armed with a photograph of Ferguson appropriated from the Journal’s photo library.

  By the third house, they’d established a routine: Tanny Brown flashed his badge, Matthew Cowart identified himself. Then they’d thrust the photo toward the inhabitants, with the single question, “Have you seen this man before?”

  A young mother in a thin yellow shift, her hair drooping in blonde curls around her sweat-damp forehead, had shushed her crying child, hitched the baby over to her hip, and shaken her head. A pair of teenage boys working on a dismantled outboard engine in the front of another yard had studied the picture with a devotion unseen in any schoolroom and then been equally negative. A huge, beer-gutted man, wearing oil-streaked jeans and a denim jacket with cut-off sleeves and a Harley-Davidson Motorcycles patch above the breast, had refused to speak with them, saying, “I ain’t talking to no cops. And I ain’t talking to no reporters. And I ain’t seen nothing worth the telling.” Then he’d slammed the door in their faces, the thin aluminum of the frame rattling in the heat.

  They moved on, working the street methodically. A few folks had questions for them. “Who’s this guy?” and “Why’re you asking?”

  Cowart realized quickly that Brown was adept at turning an inquiry into a question of his own. If someone asked him, “This got something to do with those killings down the street?” he would turn it back on the questioner, “Do you know anything about what happened?”

  But this question was greeted with blank stares and shaken heads.

  Brown also made a point of asking everyone if the Monroe Sheriff’s Department had questioned them. They all replied that they had. They all remembered a young woman detective with a clipped, assured manner on the day the bodies were discovered. But no one had seen or heard anything unusual.

  “They’re all over it,” Tanny Brown mumbled.

  “Who?”

  “Your friends from Monroe. They’ve done what I would’ve done.”

  Cowart nodded. He looked down at the photograph in his hand but refused to put any words to the thoughts that seemed to lurk just beyond the glare of the day.

  Sweat darkened the collar of the detective’s shirt. “Romantic, huh?” he grunted.

  They were standing on the outside of a low, chain link fence that protected a faded aqua-colored trailer with an incongruous pink plastic flamingo attached with gray duct tape to the front door. The sun reflected harshly off the steel sides of the trailer, making the entire edifice glow. A single air-conditioning unit, hanging from a window, labored against the temperature, clanking and whirring but continuing to operate. Ten yards away, roped to a skewed pole sunk into the hard-rock ground, a mottled brown pit bull eyed the two men warily. Matthew Cowart noticed that the dog had closed its mouth tight, despite the heat which should have caused its tongue to loll out. The dog seemed alert, yet not terrifically concerned, as if it was inconceivable to the animal that anyone would question its authority over the yard or trespass within its reach.

  “What do you mean?” Cowart replied.

  “Police work.” Brown looked over at the dog and then to the door. “Ought to shoot that animal. Ever see what one of those can do to you? Or to a kid?”

  Cowart nodded. Pit bulls were a Florida mainstay. In South Florida, drug dealers used them as watchdogs. Good old boys living near Lake Okeechobee raised them in filthy, illegal farms, training them for fights. Home owners in dozens of tract developments, terrified of break-ins, got them and then acted surprised when they tore the face off some neighbor’s child. He’d written that story once, after sitting in a darkened hospital room across from a pitifully bandaged twelve-year-old whose words had been muffled by pain and the inadequate results of plastic surgery. His friend Hawkins had tried to get the dog’s owner indicted for assault with a deadly weapon, but nothing had come of it.

  Before they could move from the front, the door to the trailer opened and a middle-aged man stepped out, shading his eyes and staring at the two men. He wore a white T-shirt and khaki pants that hadn’t seen a washing machine in months. The man was balding, with unkempt strands of hair that seemed glued to his scalp, and a pinched, florid, unshaven face. He moved toward them, ignoring the dog, which shifted about, beat its tail twice against the ground, then continued to watch.

  “Y’all want somethin’?”

  Tanny Brown produced his badge. “Just a question or two.”

  “About those old folks got their throats slit?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Other police already asked questions. Didn’t know shit.”

  “I want to show you a picture of someone, see if you’ve seen him around here. Anytime in the last few weeks, or anytime at all.”

  The man nodded, staying a few feet back of the fence.

  Cowart handed him the photograph of Ferguson. The man stared at it, then shook his head.

  “Look hard. You sure?”

  The man eyed Cowart with irritation. “Sure I’m sure. He some sort of suspect?”
/>
  “Just someone we’re checking out,” Brown said. He retrieved the picture. “Not hanging around here, or maybe driving by in a rental car?”

  “No,” the man said. He smiled, displaying a mouth of brown teeth and gaps. “Ain’t seen nobody hanging around. Nobody casing the place. Nobody in no rental car. And for damn sure, you’re the only Negro I seen around here, ever.”

  The man spit, laughed sarcastically and added, “He looks like you. Negro.”

  He pronounced the word knee-grow, elongating the two syllables into a harsh singsong, imbuing the word with mockery, turning it into an epithet.

  Then the man turned, grinning, and gave a little whistle to the dog, who rose instantly, back hairs bristling, teeth bared. Cowart took a step back involuntarily, realizing that the man probably spent more time, effort, and money on maintaining the dog’s mouth than his own. The reporter retreated another step before noticing that the detective hadn’t budged. After a moment punctuated only by the deep-throated continual growling of the dog, the policeman stepped back and silently moved down the street. Cowart had to hurry to keep pace.

  Brown headed back toward the reporter’s car. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “There are a few other houses.”

  “Let’s go,” Brown repeated. He stopped and gestured broadly at the decrepit homes and trailers. “The bastard was right.”

  “What do you mean?’’

  “A black man driving down this street in the middle of the day would stand out like a goddamn Fourth of July rocket. Especially a young black man. If Ferguson had been here, he’d have had to sneak in under cover of midnight. He might have done that, maybe. But that’s a big risk, you know.”

  “Where’s the risk at night? Nobody’d see him.”

  The policeman leaned up against the side of the car. “Come on, Cowart, think about it. You’ve got an address and a job. A killing job. What you’ve got to do is come to some place you’ve never been. Find a house you’ve never seen before. Break in and kill two people you don’t know, and then get out, without leaving any evidence behind and without attracting any attention. Big risk. Take a lot of luck No, you want to do some homework first. Got to see where you’re going, what you’re up against. And how’s he gonna do that without being seen? None of these folks go anywhere. Hell, half of them are retirees sitting outside no matter how damn hot the sun gets, and the other half never held a job more’n maybe five or ten minutes. They got nothing much to do except watch.”