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
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
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!
