“That’s right.”
“And, like you, I would like to put that young woman’s mind to rest,” Talbott said. “Because of that, I wouldn’t want to get into an explanation of her father’s actions.”
“Did you ever find an explanation?”
“Yes,” Talbott answered confidently. “He was deranged. Many people are.”
Kinley reached for his notebook. “In what way?”
Talbott gathered his thoughts a moment, then proceeded, his tone suddenly rather professorial. “Logic, sense, reason, these things exist only in the imagination,” he said. “That’s my conclusion on such matters.” He brushed the fronds of a fern from the side of his face. “When you look for these things in human acts, they are often not present. What you see is reflex, improvisation, a sudden impulse that sweeps over someone.” He shrugged. “There are things, Mr. Kinley, that are what I’ve learned to call ‘pure acts.’ You can’t trace any reason for them, any pattern at all. They are what they are, and when people are overwhelmed by these things, they do what they do. Like I say, ‘pure act.’”
“And you think the murder of Ellie Dinker was like that?”
Talbott nodded. “Charlie Overton was a quiet man. You’d have almost thought he was mute if you hadn’t known better.” The brown eyes narrowed. “But underneath, maybe there was a great upheaval in him. Who’s to say? Maybe for years he’d watched little girls go by and wanted to grab one, and have his way with her, and strangle her, or cut her up in little pieces. Then, all of a sudden, it rose up, you see, and he couldn’t push his hands way down in his pockets anymore, or close his eyes real tight to keep the vision out, you know? So, the door popped off the hinges.”
“And he killed her?”
Talbott’s eyes watched Kinley closely. “You have written about such people, haven’t you?”
Kinley nodded. Mildred Haskell had been forty-three before she’d murdered the first time. Willie Connors had been fifty-one. Before then, they’d been nothing but the village seamstress who had a weakness for red shoes, the high school gym teacher who lectured his students on the joys of health.
“Did you know him before the trial?” Kinley asked.
“Very slightly.”
“Then why did you defend him?” Kinley asked. “This was a pre-Gideon case. There would have been no court-appointed attorney.”
“That’s true,” Talbott said. “But my connection was not with Mr. Overton. It was with his wife, Sarah.”
“You knew his wife?”
“Very well,” Talbott said. “She worked for me. Or should I say, for my late wife.”
“In what capacity?”
“In a general capacity,” Talbott said. “Mrs. Overton came in every day to help my wife.” He glanced away for a moment, as if remembering his wife in a sudden brief glimpse, then returned his eyes to Kinley. “My wife was an invalid back then. She had polio. She became an invalid, and Mrs. Overton would come in and help out with things. She would cook and clean, and just generally do the chores. I got to know her. So, naturally, when her husband was arrested, she came to me.”
“Did you ever believe he was innocent?” Kinley asked.
Talbott shook his head. “No, I always believed that he had killed Ellie Dinker.”
“Why?”
Talbott looked at Kinley as if he were a small child defending the existence of the Tooth Fairy. “There was a great deal of evidence, Mr. Kinley.”
“But the body,” Kinley said insistently. “Why would he have hidden it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he strike you as insane?”
“No, not exactly,” Talbott said. “Tormented. He did strike me as tormented.”
“By what?”
“By poverty, Mr. Kinley,” Talbott said authoritatively. “By a life of menial jobs, by having to shift around the local rich folks, by always having to be at their beck and call.”
“So he was sullen, angry?”
“Yes,” Talbott said. “And pent-up, too. Worn out by being pent-up, with no outlet.” He thought for a moment. “Like a man who gets up on fire every morning and has to spend the rest of the day dousing himself with water, putting out the flames.”
Kinley thought about Talbott’s description for a moment. “Somehow, I don’t see Overton as being like that,” he said finally.
“Really?” Talbott asked. “And why is that? What do you know about him?”
“I just have a few impressions.”
“Gathered from what source, may I ask?”
“His daughter.”
Talbott smiled. “Dora Overton is quite an interesting woman,” he said, “and lovely, too.”
“We were talking about her father,” Kinley reminded him.
For a moment, Talbott seemed at a loss for words, as if he’d moved into a trance. “Suddenly, you follow an impulse,” he said finally. “I’m speaking of Charles Overton now. You are attracted, and you follow that attraction. All the evidence may be in the other direction, but the need, you see, is not interested in evidence or reason or logic, or any of those higher forms we make so much of. The need is only interested in itself.” He looked at Kinley. “Your current need, Mr. Kinley, is to pursue an old case.” He pulled himself softly to the left and sat erectly in his chair. “Whereas, that day on the mountain, Charles Overton pursued Ellie Dinker.” He smiled. “The only difference between Overton and you—or me, or anyone else for that matter—is that he had a very extreme need, and you, Mr. Kinley, have a safe and utterly common one.”
Kinley started to ask another question, but Talbott rose suddenly. “I’m an old man now,” he told Kinley as he walked toward the door of the room. “Everyone involved in that case is either old or dead.”
“I understand that, Mr. Talbott, however …”
Talbott opened the door. “Either old or dead or …” He stopped, his face unexpectedly mournful. “Or beyond our grasp.”
Kinley looked at him unbelievingly. “Are you kicking me out, Mr. Talbott?”
Talbott smiled, almost sweetly. “Yes, I am, Mr. Kinley,” he said, “but as you can see, I am doing it politely.”
TWELVE
“Well, you’re back,” Mrs. Hunter said as Kinley walked into her office.
“I only broke for lunch,” Kinley told her. “Is it all right if I go back into the vault now?”
“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Hunter said. “It’s all public record material, you know.”
“Thanks,” Kinley said. He turned, walked out of the office and headed back into the vault. He’d carefully returned the transcripts to their place on the shelf—a respectful practice he’d learned librarians and other bureaucrats devoutly appreciated—and now he retrieved them once again.
He’d already gone through three volumes of testimony, or, as he sometimes thought of it, two days of the trial. There were only six more volumes to go, and the very paucity of the transcript would have been enough to guess the date of the trial. Nine slender volumes could not even begin to contain a capital case transcript since the Supreme Court rulings of the sixties. Now, the voir dire testimony of prospective jurors alone required volumes of transcripts and days of courtroom time.
But the case of the People of Georgia v. Charles Herman Overton had taken only five days, a speedy trial, to say the least, but not uncommonly so for the time. It had not been an age of elaborate care for the rights of the accused, and certainly when overwhelming evidence reduced the presumption of innocence to little more than a pleasant legal concept, little time or public money had been devoted to protecting the more or less irrelevant rights of the accused.
Charles Overton had been treated as most men in his situation would have been treated in the small-town South of 1954, and nothing Kinley had read in the court record so far indicated that any but the usual standard had been applied to him. In fact, he had gotten more than most. He had been represented by counsel, a luxury few defendants would have been able to afford, and which Talbott had pr
ovided without charge because of his connection to Overton’s wife. At least, Overton had been given a fighting chance to clear himself.
But not much of one, Kinley realized as he turned to the next volume of the transcript and began reading the testimony of Luther Snow, one of Overton’s co-workers at the Thompson Construction Company. It was a hodgepodge of hearsay and conjecture to which Talbott had offered only fleeting objection, and which had done the prosecution the inestimably valuable service of establishing a motive for the murder of Ellie Dinker.
Luther Snow
WARFIELD: Do you see Charlie Overton in this courtroom today, Mr. Snow?
SNOW: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: Would you point him out, please?
SNOW: He’s the one setting right yonder beside Mr. Talbott there.
WARFIELD: Your Honor, may the record indicate that Mr. Snow has identified the defendant.
COURT: So ordered. Proceed.
WARFIELD: Now, Mr. Snow, you work with Mr. Overton down at Thompson’s, is that right?
SNOW: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: How long have you known him?
SNOW: About two years, I’d say.
For the next few pages, Snow went over the work he and Overton had done together during their time at Thompson Construction. For the last two years they’d been involved in the construction of the new courthouse, the very one in which the trial was being held, and which had only opened a few weeks before it began. Overton had worked as a general workman, doing everything from laying brick to light carpentry. Snow, on the other hand, had supervised much of the operation, from planning work schedules to handling the use of the site’s heavy equipment.
SNOW: I dug the foundation, and I poured the cement for the whole place, everything from the flagpole to the courthouse steps.
WARFIELD: And did you and Mr. Overton sometimes take lunch breaks together?
SNOW: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: And you sometimes talked to each other, isn’t that right, the way men do?
SNOW: We talked a lot.
WARFIELD: Did you get the impression that Mr. Overton liked and trusted you?
SNOW: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: And did he discuss what you might call his “private life” with you?
SNOW: Sometimes he did.
WARFIELD: In the course of those conversations, did you get an idea of his state of mind on or about July 2, 1954?
SNOW: He was upset.
WARFIELD: What about, did he tell you?
SNOW: Well, Overton was real closed up. We talked sometimes, like I said, but he was real closed off.
WARFIELD: But you did mention his mood, didn’t you, Mr. Snow?
SNOW: Yes, sir, I did. And the reason was, it was affecting his work. His mind was always wandering. He wasn’t doing his job too good.
WARFIELD: So he looked distracted?
SNOW: What was that?
WARFIELD: Worried. Preoccupied. His mind on other things.
SNOW: That’s right.
WARFIELD: And did you try to find out what the trouble was?
SNOW: Oh, yeah. I had to. Like I said, it was causing him to mess things up. His work was off. I can’t put up with that.
WARFIELD: And could you tell us the substance of that conversation?
SNOW: Well, I asked him straight out. I said, “Charlie, what’s going on? You’re off your feed. You need to keep your mind on things.”
WARFIELD: And what was Overton’s response?
SNOW: Well, there wasn’t much of a response. He just sort of looked at me. He didn’t say anything. So, I went at him again, and kept at it until he finally told me what it was that was bothering him so much.
WARFIELD: So, he finally told you what was troubling him?
SNOW: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: What was it?
SNOW: Woman trouble, that’s what he said.
WARFIELD: Woman trouble? Were those his exact words?
SNOW: Yes, sir. That’s what he said, that he was having woman trouble.
WARFIELD: And this woman trouble was the cause of his problems at work?
SNOW: That’s what he said. That woman trouble was driving him nuts.
To this testimony, Talbott offered a very effective cross-examination, one that reduced Snow’s remarks to the hazy, insubstantial mass they were.
TALBOTT: Now, Mr. Snow, you said that Mr. Overton expressed some confidences in you. I mean, talked to you about his problems?
SNOW: Woman trouble. That’s what he said.
TALBOTT: And this was causing him some alarm, is that right?
SNOW: He was pretty upset over it.
TALBOTT: Did he give you the cause of that trouble?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: Did he ever mention his wife?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: So as far as you know, Mr. Overton said only that he was having trouble with a woman.
SNOW: Well, it was a little more than that. He was real upset about it.
TALBOTT: But he never said who this woman was, did he?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: Did he ever mention Ellie Dinker?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: To your knowledge, had he ever met Ellie Dinker?
SNOW: I wouldn’t know about that.
TALBOTT: Well, you never saw them together, did you?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: So all you know, Mr. Snow, is that Charlie Overton said he was having trouble with a woman, is that right?
SNOW: That’s right.
TALBOTT: Have you ever had any trouble with a woman, Mr. Snow?
SNOW: I guess so.
TALBOTT: Did you ever kill a woman?
SNOW: No, sir.
TALBOTT: Do you know any man who’s never had any woman trouble?
SNOW: I guess not.
TALBOTT: I don’t either, Mr. Snow, not a single one. Thank you.
The prosecution had rested its case with Luther Snow’s testimony, and so after concluding his cross-examination, Talbott began the case for the defense.
His first witness was Dave Halgrave, another of Overton’s co-workers at Thompson Construction, but, unlike Luther Snow, a man who thought of Overton as a friend.
TALBOTT: How long have you known Charlie Overton?
HALGRAVE: Since we was kids, I reckon. Thirty years, something like that.
TALBOTT: And you worked together, did you not?
HALGRAVE: I been at Thompson’s for near on to twenty years now. Charlie come on about two years ago when we was hiring people to help build the courthouse.
TALBOTT: Would you say that you know Charlie Overton pretty well?
HALGRAVE: Well as anybody.
TALBOTT: Is Charlie Overton a killer, Mr. Halgrave? (WITNESS LAUGHS.)
TALBOTT: Could you answer the question? We need a response for the court reporter.
HALGRAVE: No, Charlie ain’t no killer. He ain’t mean like that.
TALBOTT: Is it within his capacity to take the life of a young girl?
HALGRAVE: NO, sir, it ain’t.
TALBOTT: Even if that young girl was pestering him, Mr. Halgrave?
HALGRAVE: She could have been setting him afire, and he wouldn’t have done her no harm. It ain’t his way of doing things.
TALBOTT: Mr. Halgrave, did you see Charlie Overton on July 2, 1954, the day of Ellie Dinker’s murder?
HALGRAVE: We was working together.
TALBOTT: In his Statement to the police, Mr. Overton said that he’d gotten sick that morning and had had to leave the courthouse construction site. To your knowledge, was Charlie Overton sick on the morning of July 2?
HALGRAVE: Yes, sir, he was.
TALBOTT: You know this for a fact?
HALGRAVE: Well, I seen him throwing up.
TALBOTT: Where was this, Mr. Halgrave?
HALGRAVE: At the courthouse. He was over by his truck, and he was all bent over, and he was, well, you know, he was heaving up.
TALBOTT: You
saw Charlie Overton vomiting beside his truck on July 2, is that your testimony?
HALGRAVE: Yes, sir.
TALBOTT: And shortly after that, he came to you and said he was sick and needed to go home, is that right?
HALGRAVE: Yes, sir.
TALBOTT: And what happened after that?
HALGRAVE: Charlie went home. He was white as a ghost.
TALBOTT: Thank you, that is all.
In his cross-examination, Warfield proved just as effective as Talbott had been, transforming words offered in defense to accusatory references.
WARFIELD: And you said you’ve known Mr. Overton almost all your life?
HALGRAVE: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: And you consider him a good friend?
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