out what he'd seen of Pachoula, and he outlined the hulking intensity of the one detective and the abrupt anger of the other. The words came easily, steadily. He thought of nothing else.
It took him three days to write the first story, two days to construct the follow. He spent a day polishing, another day writing sidebars. Two days were spent going over it line by line with the city editor. Another day with lawyers, a frustrating word-by-word analysis. He hovered over the layout desk as it was budgeted for the front of the Sunday paper. The main headline was: A CASE OF QUESTIONS. He liked that. The subhead was: TWO MEN, ONE CRIME AND A MURDER THAT NO ONE CAN FORGET. He liked that as well.
He lay sleepless in bed at night, thinking: There it is. I've done it. I've really done it.
On the Saturday before the story was to run, he called Tanny Brown. The detective was home, and the homicide offices wouldn't give Co wart his unlisted telephone number. He told a secretary to have the detective call him back, which the man did an hour later.
'Cowart? Tanny Brown here. I thought we'd finished talking for now.'
'I just wanted to give you a chance to respond to what's going to be in the story.'
'Like your damn photographer gave us a chance?'
'I'm sorry about that.'
'Ambushed us.'
'Sorry.'
Brown paused. 'Well, at least tell me the picture doesn't look too damn bad. We've always got out vanity, you know.'
Cowart could not tell if the detective was joking or not.
'It's not bad,' he said. 'Like something out of Dragnet.'
'Good enough. Now, what do you want?'
'Do you want to respond to the story we're running tomorrow?'
'Tomorrow? I'll be damned. Guess I'll have to get up early and go down to the paper store. Gonna be a big deal?'
'That's right.'
'Front page, huh? Gonna make you a star, right, Cowart? Make you famous?'
'I don't know about that.'
The detective laughed mockingly. 'This is Robert Earl's big shot, right? You think it'll do the trick for him? You think you can walk him off the Row?'
'I don't know. It's a pretty interesting story.'
'I bet.'
'I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond.'
'You'll tell me what it says now?'
'Yes. That's correct. Now it's written.'
Tanny Brown's voice paused over the telephone line. 'I suppose you got all that stuff about beating him up and that crap? The bit with the gun, right?'
'It says what he contends. It also says what you said.'
'Just not quite as strong, though, huh?'
'No, they have equal weight.'
Brown laughed. 'I bet,' he said.
'So, would you like to comment directly?'
'I like that word, 'comment.' Says a bunch, doesn't it? Nice and safe. You want me to comment on what it says?' A sharp sarcasm tinged his voice.
'Right. I wanted you to have the opportunity.'
I got it. An opportunity to dig a bigger grave for myself,' the detective said. 'Get myself in more trouble than I'm already going to be in, just because I didn't bullshit you. Sure.' He took a breath and continued, almost sadly. 'I could have stonewalled the whole thing, but I didn't. Is that in your story?'
'Of course.'
Tanny Brown laughed briefly, wryly. 'You know, I know you got an idea what's gonna happen because of all this. But I'll tell you one thing. You're wrong. You're dead wrong.'
'Is that what you want to say?'
'Things never work out as smoothly or as simply as people think. There's always a mess. Always questions. Always doubts.'
'Is that what you want to say?'
'You're wrong. Just wrong.'
'Okay. If that's what you want to say.'
'No, that's what I want you to understand.'
The detective laughed abruptly. 'Still the hard case, ain't you, Cowart? You don't have to answer that. I already know the answer.' He let a beat slip by, then another.
Cowart listened to the deep, angry breathing on the line before Tanny Brown finally spoke, rumbling his words like a distant storm. 'Okay, here's a comment: Go fuck yourself.'
And then he hung up.
8. Another Letter From Death Row
He did not see or speak with Ferguson until the hearing. The same was true for the detectives, who refused to return any of his phone calls in the weeks after the stories ran. His requests for information were handled summarily by prosecutors up in Escambia County, who were scrambling for a strategy. On the other hand, Ferguson's defense attorneys were effusive, calling him almost daily to inform him of developments, filing a barrage of motions in front of the judge who'd presided over Ferguson's murder trial.
When his story had appeared, Cowart had been caught up in a natural momentum created by the allegations he'd printed, like being driven down a street by sweeping sheets of rain. The television and newspaper press inundated the case, crawling with rapacity over all the people, events, and locations that had constituted his tale, retelling it, reforming it in dozens of different yet fundamentally similar ways. To all involved, it had been a story of several fascinations: the tainted confession, the disquieted town still restless from the child's murder, the iron-hard detectives, and ultimately, the awful irony that the one killer could see the other go to the electric chair simply by keeping his mouth shut. This, of course, Blair Sullivan did, summarily refusing all interviews, refusing to speak with reporters, lawyers, police, even a crew from 60 Minutes. He made one call, to Matthew Cowart, perhaps ten days after the articles appeared.
The call was collect. Cowart was at his desk, back in the editorial department, reading the New York Times version of the story (QUESTIONS RAISED IN FLORIDA PANHANDLE MURDER CASE) when the phone rang and the clipped voice of the long-distance operator asked him if he would accept a call from a Mr. Sullivan in Starke, Florida. He was momentarily confused, then electrified. He leaned forward in his seat and heard the familiar soft twang of Sergeant Rogers at the prison.
'Cowart? You there, fella?'
'Hello, Sergeant. Yes?'
'We're bringing in Sully. He wants to talk to y'all.'
'How're things up there?'
The sergeant laughed. 'Hell, I shoulda known better than to let you in here. This place been buzzing like a damn bee's nest since your stories. All of a sudden, everybody on Death Row's calling up every damn reporter in the state, for sure. And every damn reporter is showing up here demanding interviews and tours and every damn thing.' The sergeant's laugh continued to barrel over the telephone line. 'Got this place more excited than the time both the main and the backup generators went out, and all the inmates thought it was the hand of Fate opening the doors for them.'
'I'm sorry if I caused you some trouble…'
