'He must be one of them boys working for that new young Becker feller,' said the deputy.
'I figgered he worked for Owney and Mayor O'Donovan and that Judge LeGrand and the gambling boys, like all the Grumleys these days. That ain't so?'
'I almost got my butt shot off fighting gamblers with machine guns,' said Carlo. 'Grumleys all. A Peck and a Dodge too, I believe.'
'Grumley cousins,' said L. T. 'Just as hell-black low-down mean too. Maybe meaner.'
'Damnation! Damnation in the high grass! Damnation in July! He's okay! He's goddamned okay,' said the sheriff, launching another naval shell of yellowish gunk toward the spittoon, where it banged dead bull's-eye, a rattle that reached the rafters.
'Sheriff's brother was a state liquor agent,' said L. T 'That'd be my Uncle Rollo. In '37, some ole boys set his car aflame. He was in it at the time. Burned up like a fritter that fell into the stove hole.'
'No man should die the way my brother did,' said the sheriff. 'Since then, it's been a war 'tween the Turner and the Grumley clan. Which is why ain't no Grumley in Montgomery County.'
'I think he's okay, Junior.'
'By God, I say, he is okay. He's more'n okay. He's goddamned fine, is what he be. Son, what's it you want?'
Did Carlo want recollections? The boys provided them. The files, the photos, the physical evidence. It was his for the asking. Did he want to examine the crime scene? Off they went.
In a few hours of cooperation, Carlo learned what was to be learned, which, as Junior said up front, wasn't much. In the crime scene photos, Charles Swagger lay face forward in his automobile, his head cupped against the wheel, his one arm dangling, fingers languid, pointed downward. A black puddle of blood lay on the floor of the Model T, coagulated at his feet. His old six-gun, a Colt's Army from 1904, was in the dust, one of its rounds discharged. Marks in the dust indicated no kind of scuffle. The back door to the warehouse behind Ferrell Turner's liquor store had been pried open, though nothing taken. There really wasn't much to go on, but the final conclusion reached by the Mount Ida detective, one James Fields, seemed to sum it up as well as anything.
'It appears the decedent saw or heard something as he drove through town late. He pulled around back, put his spotlight on the door, and saw some movement. He got out, drew his gun, called, then started forward. He was shot, returned fire once (probably into the air or ground, as no bullet hole was found), then returned to his car as if to drive to the hospital or a doctor's, but passed out. The recovered bullet was a.32 caliber, lodged in his heart. A manhunt and exhaustive search for clues unearthed nothing; the case remains open, though until this officer returns from wartime service it will go on the inactive list.'
It was dated January 20, 1943, the day before Jimmy Fields went off to the war he never returned from.
'Ferrell found him the next morning, early,' recalled L. T. 'Just lying there, like in the photo.'
'Nobody heard the shots?'
'No sir. But that don't mean nothing. Sound is tricky this deep in the woods. Ferrell slept about three hundred feet away in his general store but he was a drinking man. He could have slept through anything. Jimmy done a good job. He worked that case hard. If there'd a been anything to find, he'd have found it.'
They went to the crime scene, only a couple of hundred feet from the office. There, Carlo stood in the dust behind the liquor store and saw that the warehouse was really more of a shed, secured with a single padlock, which itself could easily be pried loose.
'What's he keep in there?'
'The beer, mostly. It's cool and once a day a truck delivers the ice. It's the only place 'round here that sells cold beer.'
'I suppose I could talk to Ferrell.'
'Sure, but Ferrell didn't see nothing. But I know you want to be thorough. So, yeah, let's go talk to Ferrell.'
That talk was short; Ferrell did know nothing. He'd gone out back early in the morning to open up for the ice delivery and the milk truck and been surprised to find Charles Swagger's old Ford there, old Charles Swagger dead in it. He'd heard no shots.
Carlo asked modem, scientific questions that couldn't be answered by any living man, about bloodstains and trails and fingerprints and footprints and whether there was dust of the kind that was from the ground here found on Charles's boots. Ferrell had no idee; he just called the polices and the boys all come over and Jimmy Fields done took over. The only answers to those questions died with Jimmy in the hedgerow country.
He asked as he had asked everybody: Did you all know Charles?
Charles was a great man, they said. We seen him every damn month on his way to prayer meeting at Caddo Gap.
As the afternoon wore on, poor Carlo began to see his time was wasted and whatever he learned really was of no importance in regard to his original mission, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Swagger, his angers, his violence, his fury, his death, but with Earl Swagger, his melancholy, his courage, his baffling behavior, his possible he about being in Hot Springs before. It almost made him dizzy. He felt he'd wandered into a madhouse and didn't belong, was learning things best forgotten, that meant nothing except obscure pain in years back, not worth recalling.
At nightfall, he went to say his farewells to Sheriff Junior Turner and thank him for his cooperation. After all, in the end, Junior had done all right by him, once the original misunderstanding was cleared up. But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with all the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was husded off.
And what a dinner. Whatever the Ttirners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, big and gnarly and soaked in yet a different variation on the theme of gravy, com on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody's female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, com likker and good storytelling.
It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.
The subject was set by the day's events and it turned out to be the man who was both god and devil to them, who but Charles Swagger, former sheriff of Polk County, a man who walked high and mighty and treated such as them as the scum of the earth.
'He was a proud man,' an unidentified Turner said, from the gray darkness of the porch, in a melancholy of recollection, 'that you could read on him. But you know what the Book sayeth
The dark chorus supported this point.
'Yes sir.'
'You do, you do.'
'That'd be the truth, that would.'
'That's what she says. You listen, young feller. Luke's a preacher, he know the Book.'
'The Book sayeth, pride goeth before the fall.'
'And you know what?' said Junior Turner. 'After the fall, it hangeth around too!'
Everybody laughed, including slightly overwhelmed and slightly overstuffed Carlo.
'You saw him often?' he asked, amazed that Charles was so big to them, for after all, this wasn't his county, and his office was forty miles of bad road to the west.
'Ever damn weekend in four,' said a Turner. 'He'd go on over to that Baptist prayer camp. He been a good Baptist. He been Baptist to the gills. He'd come on through in that old Model T of his, with the big star on it, and he'd stop at Ferrell's store, and have hisself a cold Coca-Cola. You'd see him watching and keeping track.'
'He was great at keeping track.'
'He stand there in that black suit and he's all glowery-like, you know. Big feller. Big hands, big face, big old
