'A what?'
'A death wish. Some men for some reason, they want to die.'
'Craziest goddamn thing I ever heard of.'
Carlo nodded. Then he said, 'But I see from them diplomas you went to Princeton University, out east. Hear that's a pretty good school. Did me some reading on what Dr. Freud said about death wishes. I'd bet you'd have run across it too, in your time educating.'
Sam Vincent stared hard at the young man.
'Say, I'll bet you think you don't miss a trick, do you?'
'Miss 'em all the time, sir. But I'd bet a dollar against a cup of coffee that someone who went to Princeton and Yale Law School and wants to be elected a prosecuting attorney himself real soon-like, I'd bet he knows more about a death wish than most.'
'Well, all right then. I have heard of such a thing. I will say Earl has a melancholy streak to him. Would that be a death wish? Don't know. I do know his daddy encouraged discipline and obedience with both his boys, and wouldn't brook no messy feelings or nothing. They were raised to do the job and see it through, and Earl certainly proved out. But they were both boys for holding things in and maybe that's what D. A. Parker sees as sadness unto death in Earl.'
'Yes sir.'
'Do you know Earl?'
'Yes sir.'
'What do you think of Earl?'
'I?I think he's the bravest man ever lived,' said Carlo. 'I seen him do some things no man should have the grit to pull.' He thought of Earl advancing through the dust with the BAR, daring the Grumleys to come out and shoot at him, letting his people get behind cover in the doorways. He thought of Earl taking that shot on a Grumley to save the Negro gal's life.
'Nobody wants nothing bad to happen to Earl,' said Sam.
'Yes sir.'
'Is that all?'
'Well. One of the things Mr. Parker wanted me to look into is this: Was Earl ever in Hot Springs? It seems he knows it damned well.'
'Never. Never, never, never. Old Baptist Charles thought Hot Springs was hell and blasphemy. He'd have beat the hide off his boy if he'd have caught him in that sewer.'
'I see.'
'Earl has a gift for terrain. All the Swaggers do. They have natural feelings for land, they're fine hunters and trackers and they have an uncommon gift for shooting. They are born men of the gun. Charles Swagger was a wonderful hunter, got a buck every damned year. Tracked the county up and down, and always came home with game. A wonderful shot. The finest natural shot I ever saw, and I've hunted with some fine shots. Don't know where it comes from, but all them boys could shoot. Earl's daddy was a hero in a war too, and he shot it out with three desperadoes in a Main Street bank in the '20s, and sent them to hell in pine boxes. So if Earl seems to know things, it's just his gift, that's all.'
'I see. Let me ask about one last thing. Earl's brother. He had a brother, named Bobby Lee. He hung himself, I believe, back in 1940. You probably hadn't gone off to fight in 1940. Maybe you were here for that.'
Sam Vincent's eyes scrunched up and even behind the glasses, Carlo could make out something there.
'What you want to dig all that up for? Poor Bobby Lee. It ain't got nothing to do with anything. That's long over and done.'
'I see.'
'Hell, Earl was somewhere in the Marines then. It don't mean much.'
'You knew Earl?'
'I knowed 'em both. Earl was two years ahead of me at high school and Bobby Lee was ten younger. I was the prosecutor that handled Bobby Lee's death. I was there when they cut him down. I wrote the report. You want to see it?'
'I suppose.'
'Betty!' Sam called.
'Her name is Ruth and you gave her the day off.'
'Goddamn her. Don't think she'll work out neither. You wait here.'
The older man left and Carl sat there, suffocating, as the fog in the air wore him down. He felt a headache beginning and he heard Sam banging drawers and cursing mightily.
Finally, Sam came back.
'There, there it is.'
He handed over the file, and Carlo read what was inside. It turned out to be straightforward enough: on October 5, 1940, the fire department was called by Mrs. Swagger and a truck got out to the place fast. The firemen found her crying in the bam at the feet of her son, who had hanged himself with a rope from a crossbeam. Sam arrived and directed that the body be taken down. The sheriff was located and he arrived from a far patrol and took over. Sam made the necessary interviews as brief as possible and supervised as the boy's body was taken to the morgue. The boy was buried without ceremony a day later and the sheriff never talked about it again. The county judge ruled death by suicide.
'No autopsy?' Carlo asked.
'What?' said Sam.
'Didn't y'all do an autopsy?'
'Son, it was open and shut.'
'Well sir, I learned my policing in Tulsa under a chief detective inspector named O'Neill and if I'd have closed on a suicide without an autopsy, he'd have?'
'Henderson, you're like all the kids today. You think every damn thing is a crime. It's my job to represent the state in these tragic instances and believe me there wasn't nothing in that circumstance worth an autopsy. I wasn't no greenhorn neither. I'd been assistant prosecuting attorney since 1935. I'd seen a lifetime's worth of squalor and misery and pain and lost life. So I made a judgment.'
'But it was irregular?'
'You are a persistent son of a bitch, ain't you?'
'I take great pride in my investigative work, sir. I believe I have a calling at it.'
'Okay. You believe in law and order?'
'Of course I do. More than anything.'
'Now you listen to me. Law and order. Law and order, you understand? That's a easy one. But let me ask you. Do you believe in law or order? That one ain't so easy.'
Carlo drew a blank. He wished he were smarter and could play ball with this sly dog.
'Seems to me they are the same,' he finally allowed.
'Maybe mostly. But maybe not. And if you've got to choose, what do you choose?'
'I don't see how there can be one 'thout the other.'
'Sometimes you got to give up on law to save order. Sometimes order is more important than law. By that I mean, sometimes you learn something that might hurt order. It might hurt the way people think on things. They have to trust the man with the badge. He's got to be a paragon, a moral certainty to them. If he has weaknesses, and those weaknesses become public knowledge, well, my God, who knows where it might lead. To doubt, then chaos, then anarchy. The edifice is only as strong as its weakest buttress. So sometimes you make a call: you don't deal with something. You let it pass, you shave a corner, you do this, you do that. Because the idea of the lawman as a man of honor and virtue and courage and decency is much more important than that lawman himself. You understand?'
Carlo did, of course. He now knew what the old bastard was getting at. He himself knew cops who were drunks or cheats or liars or cowards. But if you made a moral cause of it, and by that cause held the larger issue of the police up to ridicule, you only weakened the structure that supported the community or, even larger, the nation. So a police officer or a prosecutor had to use a certain discretion: there was a time to act, and a time to look away, and that was the heart of it.
