Cowart pulled out his notepad and started taking notes. 'Can you trace the knife?'
'It's a cheap, typical nineteen-ninety-five, buy-it-in-any-sporting-goods-store-type knife. We'll try, but there's no identifying serial number or manufacturer's mark.' He hesitated and looked hard at Cowart. 'But what's the point?'
'What?'
'You heard me. It's time to stop playing games. Who told you about the knife? Is it the one that killed Joanie Shriver? Talk to me.'
Cowart hesitated.
'You gonna make me read all about it? Or what?' Harsh insistence crawled over the fatigue in his voice.
'I'll tell you one thing: Robert Earl Ferguson didn't tell me where to look for that knife.'
'You're telling me that someone else told you where to find the weapon that may have been used to kill
Joanie Shriver?'
'That's right.'
'You care to share this information?'
Matthew Cowart looked up from his scribblings. 'Tell me one thing first, Lieutenant. If I say who told me about that knife, are you going to reopen the murder investigation? Are you willing to go to the state attorney? To get up in front of the trial judge and say that the case needs to be reopened?'
The detective scowled. 'I can't make a promise like that before I know anything. Come on, Cowart. Tell me.'
Cowart shook his head. 'I just don't know if I can trust you, Lieutenant. It's as simple as that.'
In that moment, Tanny Brown looked like a man primed to explode. I thought you understood one thing,' the detective said, almost whispering.
'What?'
'That in this town until that man pays, the murder of Joanie Shriver will never be closed.'
'That's the question, isn't it? Who pays?'
'We're all paying. All of us. All the time.' He slammed his fist down hard on the table. The sound echoed in the small room. 'You got something to say, say it!'
Matthew Cowart thought hard about what he knew and what he didn't know and finally replied, 'Blair Sullivan told me where to find that knife.'
The name had the expected impact on the policeman. He looked surprised, then shocked, like a batter expecting a fastball watching a curve dip over the corner of the plate.
'Sullivan? What has he got to do with this?'
'You ought to know. He passed by Pachoula in May 1987, busy killing all sorts of folks.'
I know that, but…'
'And he knew where the knife was.'
Brown stared at him. A few stretched seconds of silence filled the room. 'Did Sullivan say he killed Joanie Shriver?'
'No, he didn't.'
'Did he say Ferguson didn't kill that girl?'
'Not exactly, but
'Did he say anything exactly to contradict the original trial?'
'He knew about the knife.'
'He knew about a knife. We don't know it is the knife, and without any forensics, it's nothing more than a piece of rusted metal. Come on, Cowart, you know Sullivan's stone crazy. Did he give you anything that could even remotely be called evidence?'
Brown's eyes had narrowed. Cowart could see him processing information rapidly, speculating, absorbing, discarding. He thought right then: It's too hard for him. He won't want to consider any possibilities of mistake. He has his killer and he's satisfied.
'Nothing else.'
'Then that's not enough to reopen an investigation that resulted in a conviction.'
'No? Okay. Get ready to read it in the paper. Then we'll see if it's enough.'
The policeman glared at Cowart and pointed at the door. 'Leave, Mr. Cowart. Leave right now. Get in your rental car and go back to the motel. Pack your bags. Drive to the airport. Get on a plane and go back to your city. Don't come back. Understand?'
Cowart bristled. He could feel a surge of his own frustrated anger pushing through him. 'Are you threatening me?'
The detective shook his head. 'No. I'm giving advice.'
'And?'
'Take it.'
Matthew Cowart picked himself out of the chair and gave the detective a long stare. The two men's eyes locked, a visual game of arm wrestling. When the detective finally swerved away, turning his back, Cowart spun about and walked through the door, closed it sharply behind him, and paced briskly through the bright fluorescent lights of the police headquarters, as if pushing a wave in front of him, watching uniformed officers and other detectives step aside. He could sense the pressure of their eyes on his back as he stepped through the corridors, quieting a dozen conversations in his wake. He heard a few words muttered behind him, heard his name spoken several times with distaste. He didn't glance around, didn't alter his step. He rode the elevator alone and walked out through the wide glass doors onto the street. There he turned and looked back up toward the detective's office. For an instant he could see Tanny Brown standing in his window, staring out at him. Again their eyes locked. Matthew Cowart shook his head slightly, just the barest motion from side to side.
He saw the detective wheel aside, disappearing from the window.
Cowart stood rigid for an instant, letting the night envelop him. Then he strode away, walking slowly at first but rapidly gaining momentum and pace until he was marching briskly across the town, the words that would become his story beginning to gather deep within him, parading in military array across his imagination.
7. Words
Returning home, however, a spreading exhaustion forced the living to fade into his notebooks and let the dead take over his imagination.
It was late, well past midnight on a clear Miami night and the sky seemed an endless black painted with great brushstrokes into an infinity of blinking starlight.
He wanted someone to share his impending triumph but realized there was no one. All were gone, stolen by age, divorce, and too many dyings. Especially he wanted his parents, but they were long gone.
His mother had died when he was still a young man. She'd been mousy and quiet, with an athletic, bony thinness that made her embrace hard-edged and brittle, which she'd compensated for with a soft, almost lush voice used to great advantage in storytelling. A product of times that had created her as a housewife and kept her mired there, she'd raised him and his brothers and sisters in an endless cycle of diapers, formula, and teething that had given way to scraped knees and imaginary hurts, homework, basketball practices, and the occasional, inevitable heartbreaks of adolescence.
She'd died swiftly but undramatically at the beginning of her old age. Inoperable colonic
