Black Light

25

Sam woke in a fog after a dreamless but restless night. He had the nagging feeling that something important was scheduled for today. Was he due in court? Did he have to file a motion? Was some defense lawyer deposing him for an appeal? But nothing snapped into clarity and the goddamned maid had forgotten both the coffee and to pick up. That woman was getting sloppier and sloppier. He had half a mind to fire her, but he couldn’t remember her name. Then he remembered that he did fire her—twelve years ago. Then he remembered Mrs. Parker.

That was the woman he should have fired. When did the colored get so uppity? They had no respect anymore. It was a case of the rules simply eroding away until nothing was left but chaos and anarchy. Then he remembered little Shirelle.

He got up, straggled through a shower and got dressed, remembering his undershirt, forgetting his underpants. It went on like that for several hours: he felt a deep and mournful pain that he was not all there, he knew he was not all there, but somehow he could not get out of the track, which was a kind of infantile literal-mindedness, an unwilled concentration on petty things. He wanted to cry: Where did my mind go? Who took my mind?

Finally, a squall of clarity blew in by midafternoon, and everything popped briefly into place. He felt sane, cool, smart again. Taking advantage, he quickly went to his basement and remembered that he had originally committed to discovering his brief to the Coroner’s Office on the Earl Swagger shooting for Bob Lee Swagger. But that would have to wait. This was so much more interesting. He seized the file that he’d looked at the day before and this time he really bore down, sliding through the documents with a professional’s easy authority, examining the case against Reggie Gerard Fuller.

It held together. It might not hold together today, when the evidentiary rules were much tighter and the fact that Reggie’s initials were RGF and that those initials were found on the pocket crumpled in Shirelle’s hand might not constitute probable cause for a search warrant. But it sure as hell did then, as even Judge Harrison confirmed. Sam had a moment of pleasure: I did it by the book, by God. I don’t have to look back and be ashamed that somewhere I took a shortcut, I cut a corner, I faked this or that or lied about the other: no sir. The law was the law. The law was always right.

And the law looked at the shirt and the blood and Reggie’s absence of an alibi and said: Reggie Gerard Fuller did it.

He was satisfied. What else could he do? He had no other files. The actual evidence was burned in that damn 1994 fire. Nothing else could be learned.

But then … oh, little niggle of doubt. Little qualm, little tremor, little twitch.

He thought back on that night and his actions. What cast the longest shadow over the case was the RGF initials. Once they’d identified RGF—done, really, before he’d put his full concentration on the matter—the case developed a peculiar momentum that could not be stopped. It was such a fat, huge piece of evidence, like a proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla, that it sat anyplace it wanted to. It shaped all thought, all interpretation, all investigation; it became the central organizing principle of the case, a perceptual reality that could not be avoided.

In fact, Sam had even played that one out straight. He’d spent one whole day with Betty Hill, the town’s switchboard operator, going through the phone listings to ascertain if just possibly there wasn’t another RGF, of any color or sex. There wasn’t. He’d gone to the town registry looking for other RGFs who might not be on the phone list. He’d gone to every motel in a hundred square miles looking for another RGF in the area. No such thing.

That RGF: that was the monster.

It occurred to Sam: Suppose there was no RGF? Suppose we never found that RGF? Would we have ever tied the killing to Reggie? No, he thought not. If it weren’t for the dying girl’s spasm and the angry boy’s fury, the case might never have been solved.

But then he thought: Imagine an investigation without the weight of that discovery, that wasn’t misshapen or guided by it, that progressed quite naturally and led where it led, if anywhere. Of course he couldn’t imagine such a thing: RGF made that impossible.

Little tingle, little tremor, little buzz. Where did it come from?

What was he feeling?

He couldn’t pin it down: nothing. Forget it.

Then he had it.

Earl.

Earl Swagger had discovered the body. Earl had investigated the crime scene. Earl took notes. Earl made observations and suggestions. All of it untainted, or untouched, or unseduced by the mighty power of the RGF initials pointing the finger right straight into the heart of Reggie Gerard Fuller. Earl was dead before they ever linked anything to Reggie Gerard Fuller.

Too bad Earl hadn’t lived long enough to …

Another bell went off in Sam’s old mind. His son, Bob, had brought Earl’s notebook. And some other effects. With that fool boy, Rusty, Rufus, whatever. The notebook. Whatever was in the notebook was put there without any knowledge of Reggie Gerard Fuller.

Only trouble was: where the hell was the notebook?

The old man was on a goddamn toot. Duane had never seen him like this. His gears had slipped or something. He was literally destroying his house from the inside out.

Duane had worked his way around back of the proud old dwelling on Reinie Street, which sat under a canopy of elms and maples with its stately porch like the house that Andy Hardy lived in, and peered in through the windows. Though it was not yet dark, the old man had turned on all the lights. One by one, he was emptying the insides out of every drawer, every closet, every box, every cupboard, every vase in the house. He had cracked, finally. He was in a frenzy, jabbering insanely to himself.

After doing the downstairs, he moved upstairs. Though Duane could no longer see him, he took a chance and opened the door. Inside, he could hear crashes and dumpings and things being thrown against the wall and curses.

“Goddamn sumbitch, where the goddamn hell are you?” came the screams, as from a desperate man, a man close to an attack or something.

Mr. Bama wasn’t going to have to worry about this old guy. He’d end up doing himself in before the moon rose. A vein would pop, he’d be a lump in a body bag for the Coroner’s Office.

Duane called in a report, but there was no immediate answer. Where the hell was Bama?

You old worthless goat. You dying old bastard, you brainless worthless old dog, you ain’t good for nothing. Ought to put you down. Take you out and put a bullet behind your ear. Only merciful thing.

Sam looked about him. The house was ruined, smashed, destroyed. The rooms where his children played, the room where he had loved his wife, the room where so many Thanksgiving dinners had been eaten, the room where so many Christmases had been celebrated: all gone, all lost, all ruined, all wrecked and for what, for nothing, because he couldn’t remember where he put the goddamned notebook.

Only the garage remained.

He was full of despair. How had he gotten so old and feeble, so infirm? He hated and loathed himself: he—prosecutor, man of the law, war hero, deer hunter, father, husband, lover, American: how had all that gone away and he come to this current state of nothingness? His daughter had told him it was time to move in with them or if he wanted into an apartment or even a home and his eldest boy had said no, Pop’s all right, but now he thought she was right. He could—

The office!

You old goat! You never brought it home! He remembered now—Bob had handed it to him at the office and he’d locked it in the safe.

He looked around for his coat, but the only thing he could find immediately was his wife’s pink bathrobe from years back. He threw it on and, miraculously, found his keys. He stepped into the garage, fired up the Cadillac and backed out with a shriek and a lurch, hitting something—he wasn’t sure what.

He drove and a new fear assailed him: the combination. Did he know it? Could he remember it? Or was it gone like so much of the past?

He felt a whimper, or possibly a sob, rise from his chest, and felt enfeebled by the task ahead. He lacked all confidence. He was over, finished.

But after parking and somehow getting up the steps, unlocking the office and walking through the waiting room into his lair, a mercy came from on high, and as his fingers flew to the ancient lock, he saw the numbers before him big as daylight and in a second he had the vault open and the cardboard box out.

He took the treasure to his desk, clicked on the light and stopped for just a second to fill his pipe with tobacco. Lighting it, he drew a hot burst of smoke into his mouth, felt it buzz, then expelled it, and for just a second was back in the good part of his life, in command, a man of respect and power, not a cornpone, backwoods Lear raging on the moors of Polk County.

The box held but two objects and then he remembered that Bob and Rusty-Rufus-Ralph-whatever had taken the third, a manila file with some yellowed newspaper clippings in them. No matter: what was here was what counted, not the book of old traffic and speeding citations but the notebook, Earl’s jottings from early July 23, 1955. It bore a brownish streak across the cover, like one of those flings of paint that Jackson Pollock was so famous for; and the edges of half the pages inside were brittle with the same brown substance.

Sam drew back. Earl’s blood. As he lay dying, Earl must have bled in the car on the notebook. With a shudder, he opened it.

The shock hit him first of all: for ten years, as they’d collaborated enforcing the law, Sam had read reports that Earl filed and the man’s handwriting was as familiar as his own—then forty years of nothing. Now here it was back again, in its familiar loops and whorls, its orderliness, its occasional underlinings, its occasional misspellings. The blood, the writing: it was as if Earl himself had suddenly walked into the room, so overpowering was the sense of his presence.

Another little shudder went through Sam as he tried to enter into Earl’s mind. Earl, how did you work? What was your style? Investigators all have styles, little things that are important to them, that they recognize as they try to bring order to chaos. What was Earl’s? He tried to remember. Then he remembered Earl’s bench in his basement, with every tool in its place and a place for every tool Earl had no need for the creativity of chaos; he believed in putting things in order.

His mind would work thus: Site. Body. Evidence. Conclusions.

No, no, no, it wouldn’t. He’d make conclusions after every section. Then he’d list the conclusions at the end, adding them up. That’s how he’d do it; that’s how he always did it.

First up, a drawing of the body, in exactly the posture that Sam remembered seeing it the next day, with dotted, diagonal lines orienting it toward landmarks (“tree,” “rock”) and distance estimations. Earl had also scratched in some kind of cross-hatching behind the body and identified it as “shale wash,” adding in parenthesis “no tracks.”

Hmmmm. Sam thought about that. It was a new detail. What kind of original site investigation had been done? He tried to remember. He himself hadn’t gotten there till late the next afternoon, after all that with Earl’s death, and he’d been sleepless and irritable as well as depressed. He remembered a lone deputy telling him the state police forensics people hadn’t shown up and that lots of people from the town had come out to see the dead nigger girl. So evidently, there wasn’t much site investigation, other than Earl’s. The crime scene was hopelessly contaminated.

He turned the page, to find CONC—Earl’s comments on the site. It said only “Body moved? Dumped where no tracks could be found?”

Body moved? This was new. Body moved? Why would Reggie have—

But then he remembered: Reggie hadn’t been uncovered yet. No one would ask why Reggie would move the body, just as later investigators would not trouble to think about the body being moved, since they already had Reggie.

He turned the page: the body itself.

There were descriptions of the various violations worked on poor Shirelle, including scrapes and abrasions visible in the “private area,” as Earl had so demurely called it. He also described a “grayish cast to skin, suggesting passage of several days” and “some bloating.” He looked at the killing wound: “Looks to be a massive hematoma in the right frontal quadrant of the skull” and noted nearby “rock smeared with blood as possible murder weapon.”

But then something strange: “Cause of death? Maybe not blow; swelling and bruising around throat area suggests strangulation?”

Sam sat back. Also new to him: strangulation.

Where was this coming from?

Maybe Earl was mistaken. On the other hand, when the coroner looked at Shirelle, another two days had passed: possibly she’d swollen more and the swelling and bruising on her throat weren’t as visible. Or possibly, because Reggie was already in custody and there was a good deal of blood already in evidence, nobody looked that carefully at the body.

What was the significance of the strangulation?

Sam sawed away on this one and then had it. If he strangled her, there wouldn’t be no blood. Or not much. Yet Reggie’s shirt was stained fairly extensively with Shirelle’s blood.

Sam didn’t like this one damned bit. Then he thought: Reggie strangles her. He’s not sure if she’s dead. He smashes her with the rock.

Yes, that would explain it.

But it was a raggedness, an awkwardness, an uncertainty, where before there had only been absolute confidence.

His pipe was empty. He scraped the cake out with his keys, then refilled it, lit and sucked. It gurgled, burning too hot, wet and harsh, a sure sign he was agitated and somewhat diluting the great tobacco rush. He looked about. It was dark now, quite still. He got up, went to the window and looked out upon a small town at night, lit here and there by a window radiating heat and light, but generally still. The only thing he could see was a sheriff’s car parked down the street. Was it that goddamned Duane Peck? What the hell could he want? Was Sam now so feeble he needed full-time supervision?

He went back to his desk.

Wasn’t this a goddamned fine kettle of fish? How long was this going to last? The old goat was completely wacky. Now he was at his office. Duane looked at his watch. It was nearly nine. He’d been on the go since seven that morning, this on three hours’ sleep off of yesterday’s roaming.

Only one thing to break the monotony; middle of the afternoon there had been some kind of dustup on the radio, some kind of big gunfight over on the Taliblue Trail in Oklahoma, about forty miles away. He couldn’t make any sense of it, Oklahoma Highway Patrol shit, and calls for originally ambulances and fire trucks but then coroners but it was none of his business.

Now he was just waiting. From where he was, he couldn’t see much—just the light beaming out of the old man’s office from the window. The old man had come to it a few seconds ago, sucking on his pipe, and stared for a bit. Then he’d gone back.

Duane wasn’t quite able to see the old man, which had him worried. He was parked parallel to the curb, across the street and down a bit. So he got out of his car and walked into the square, passed the statue of General George F. James, the Iron General of Vicksburg, who’d actually been born in Polk County, though he died in a brothel in Savannah, Georgia, at the age of eighty-one surrounded by painted harlots, and went and stood on a bench at the far side. Standing so, with his binoculars, he could see the top of Sam’s body as the old man bent over whatever he was examining. He was working away steadily, and he looked to all the world like Perry Mason except, of course, for the pink bathrobe.

Sam looked at the drawing. It appeared to be a window on a one-story, rounded building with a single line drawn from the top edge of the window to an inscription, and here his penetrations into the mysteries of Earl’s handwriting ceased. “Reed dept.,” it seemed to say. Now, what the hell could that mean?

He looked at it: a mystery. What was the building, what was the department of reeds? He searched his memory for a forty-year-old hint, but couldn’t come up with a damned thing. He looked again at the drawing. Maybe it wasn’t a building, maybe it was a television set. But in 1955, there weren’t but ten televisions in all of Polk County. Maybe it was a drive-in movie screen, but the nearest drive-in movie screen was and always had been the Sky-Vue in Fort Smith, where Sam sometimes took his children.

His pipe puffed dry. He turned it upside down and smacked it into the ashtray, dumping the shards of ash. He looked around for his pouch, working slowly, enjoying the ritual and the cleansing effect it had on his mind. He was going to pack the ’baccy into the bowl when he remembered to clean the cake, but he couldn’t lay a hand on his keys they were across the room, he remembered—and so with his thick, horny thumbnail he scraped gunk off the bowl and wiped it on his pants. There, that cleared the bowl. He scrunched a wad of tobacco into the pipe, clenched it between his old teeth, lit a match and drew it to the bowl. He sucked in and watched the suction take the flame, draw it into the pipe and, ah—blast of smoke scented with the forest. Such a—

His fingernail!

His fingernail wore a crescent of ash deposit under its edge.

He looked again at the drawing: it was the girl’s fingertip, her nail. The line ran from the rim of the nail to the inscription, which he now realized said “Red dirt,” not “Reed dept.,” for the period after dirt was a minor imperfection of the paper, not from Earl’s pen.

Red dirt under her nails.

But there was no red dirt at that point off U.S. 71. Wasn’t now, wasn’t then.

Red dirt means she was killed somewhere else, yes, and brought here.

Red dirt means—Little Georgia.

He turned the page; at the top, under conclusions, Earl had written “Little Georgia?”

Little Georgia was a patch of red clay deposit not off Route 71 north of town but off 88, northeast of town, just before Ink.

If Shirelle had red dirt under her nails, it could mean that’s where she was killed. But so what? Who would move her twelve, fifteen miles? What would be the point?

Still, Sam could see how unimportant the red dirt under the nails would have been to a coroner who already knew that Reggie Gerard Fuller had been arrested and charged with the murder. Or maybe it wasn’t red dirt. Maybe it was blood, from Reggie. But there had been no forensic material of that nature entered.

Sam cursed himself. Maybe he hadn’t pushed hard enough. Maybe he should have forced the coroner to do a bang-up job and not miss a trick. Why had he been so sure it was Reggie?

Well, because of the pocket, the blood match, the—

But more, because of a limit to the imagination. It was, after all, 1955. The world was a straightforward place, with a straight-shooting President, a known Red enemy with the hydrogen bomb, and white people and colored separate and apart. Nothing was mixed up; everybody knew where they stood. Things were what they seemed.

Now all this that was going on with Reggie and Shirelle? Nobody could really have imagined it. There wasn’t room in the American mind in those days for such imaginings. They came later, after the murder of JFK, after Vietnam and Watergate; that’s when people began to see conspiracies every damned place.

Because once you admitted the idea of conspiracy, the world changed. Paranoia ruled; there were no limits. There was no certitude. That is what he hated so much about the modern world he had helped create: it beheld no certitude.

For if there was a conspiracy involving the death of Shirelle Parker, a poor Negro child in the West Arkansas of 1955, who knew where else it went and what else it contained? And for the first time, Sam began to see that it might also, though he couldn’t understand how or why, involve the strange behavior of Jimmy Pye and the death of Earl Swagger. And if, furthermore, it involved a black man, on the basis of the fact that no colored girl would have gotten into a car with a white man, then things had gotten dense and complicated to no end. It was like some terrible modern novel, of the sort that Sam couldn’t read: twisted, crazy, paranoid, ugly, cruel.

He knew he was onto something; it scared him, it exhilarated him, it made him angry, it made him sad. Quickly, he jotted some notes on a big yellow legal pad, so he wouldn’t forget, but he knew he wouldn’t forget. He felt dynamic, forceful, brilliant.

By God, he thought, I will get to the bottom of this and Earl’s son and that damned boy Rusty will help me.

Duane Peck called in and made his report.

“Sir, I don’t know, but this old guy’s onto something. He’s all excited, I can tell. He discovered something and I don’t know what. He’s been looking for something for three days, and by God, now he’s found it. What should I do?”

The call came almost immediately. Bama sounded downcast, depressed, angered; a bad day at the office?

He made Peck go through it again, very slowly, he considered and then he told him what to do.