Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  Betty Gaines had to have been one of these, Kinley thought, as he drifted up the narrow street of cotton mill tenements which fronted the old factory on Cotton Mill Row, his eyes trained on the rusty metal mailboxes which lined the street.

  Betty Gaines’s name was painted in crude black letters on the one which stood near the middle of the block. The small wooden house which rested behind it was built on a cinder-block foundation. Its original wood façade had been covered with sheets of asphalt siding, and even from the road, it had the look of a place which had been left to its own devices. The arched tin roof slumped forward slightly, angling down toward the grassless frontyard strewn with rusting auto parts.

  An unsteady chicken wire fence lined the sidewalk, its gate held closed by a loop of clothesline. Kinley tugged the line from its mooring, then headed up the short span of wooden steps which led to the front door.

  He knocked once, waited a moment, and knocked again. He could hear a body shuffling about inside, but it took almost a minute for the door finally to swing open.

  The woman who stood behind the torn screen looked very much as Kinley would have imagined her, small and somewhat bent, her hair now gray rather than the raven black of the newspaper photographs. It was as if her youth had been squeezed from her violently, rather than having seeped away year by year at its own inevitable pace. There was something in the aridity of her face, the downward curve of her body, the rounded slump of her shoulders, that suggested heavy weights long applied, visible and invisible burdens.

  “Betty Gaines?” Kinley asked softly.

  She nodded.

  “I’m Jack Kinley. You don’t know me.”

  She stared at him through the rusty screen.

  “I’m a reporter,” Kinley added. “I’m looking into an old murder case.”

  She nodded gently, her pale lips parting somewhat, as if she’d been about to speak and had thought better of it.

  “You testified in the case,” Kinley went on. “For Charles Overton.”

  She remained silent.

  “Do you remember that?” Kinley asked.

  “I remember it,” she said. “Long time ago.”

  “1954,” Kinley reminded her.

  “I worked for Old Man Thompson then.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “So did Overton.”

  “Yes.”

  “On the courthouse,” she said, her head shifting slightly to the right, as if she were attempting to get a glimpse of its towering gray walls.

  “That’s right.”

  “Best job I ever had,” she said. “Didn’t have one that good later on.”

  Kinley felt his hand crawl toward the notebook in his pocket. “Could you spare a few minutes to talk about those days?” he asked quietly.

  For an answer, she simply opened the screen silently, and let Kinley in.

  The front room looked like a stage set for some socialist drama of the thirties, all yellow light, worn furniture and uncarpeted floors. An enormous, pre-war radio sat brown and bloated like an overweight guest in one corner. A small table rested beside it, its surface powdered with an array of sewing needles and spools of colored thread. There was a wooden rocker, a tiny, threadbare settee, and between them, another small table, this one covered with an assortment of empty plates and cups, the bleak droppings, as Kinley had noticed, of people who lived alone.

  He thought of Maria Spinola, her living room dotted with a dusty, down-at-the-heels assortment of mock French provincial flourishes, lamp shades with gilded fringes hanging limply in the smokey light. Spinola’s decor had been the New Bedford Portuguese version of the room which surrounded him now, but with the same mood of listlessness and overall abandonment.

  He turned toward Betty Gaines, shaking Maria Spinola from his mind, and asked his first question. “Had you known Charles Overton very long?”

  She leaned back slowly in the rocker, her short legs dangling over the side, her feet barely scraping against the floor. “Maybe a couple years,” she said, “ever since he started working for Thompson.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Just business.”

  “So you didn’t know him personally?”

  She shook her head. “I knew Luther, but not Charlie.”

  “Were they friends, Luther and Charlie?”

  “Not that Luther mentioned much,” she said. “They didn’t live too far from each other. Luther’s place was up on the mountain, too. He did some bootlegging way back then.” She smiled with an odd maliciousness. “They caught him for it a few times.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Sheriff.”

  “Sheriff Maddox?”

  She nodded. “He run whisky, Luther did. That’s the truth, too. You can look that up. He’s been caught a few times. He didn’t have no still, though. It was strictly bonded, what he sold.”

  “Was Overton ever involved in anything like that?” Kinley asked.

  Betty waved her hand, her face drawing together, as if in response to the absurdity of the suggestion. “Naw, he didn’t do stuff like that,” she said. “He was a family man. All he did was work and go home.”

  “How did you happen to end up testifying at Overton’s trial?” Kinley asked.

  “Well, I felt like I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “To straighten things out.”

  “What things?”

  “What Luther had said.”

  “You didn’t believe his testimony?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Betty said. “Besides, I’d seen Charlie that morning. He was working at the courthouse just like I told the jury, and he come over to me, and you could see that he was sick. He looked real bad off. He was holding to hisself.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “Like this.” She shook her head. “Sick as a dog,” she added emphatically, “in his stomach.”

  “What did he say to you exactly?” Kinley asked.

  “Stomach trouble,” Betty said flatly, “like he was going to throw up.”

  “And he asked if he could go home, is that right?”

  “He said he had to go home,” Betty told him, “that he couldn’t work no more.”

  Kinley’s mind swept back through the pages of the trial transcript, and he heard the voice of Luther Snow.

  SNOW: I dug the foundation, and I poured the cement for the whole place, everything from the flagpole to the courthouse steps. Charlie was a sort of a regular lift and haul man. He didn’t have no special trade, like a mason or a carpenter or something like that.

  “But Snow and Overton, they did work together, didn’t they?” Kinley asked.

  “At the courthouse, they did,” Betty said, “but Overton was just hired for that job. He wasn’t no regular employee at Thompson’s. He just did what Luther told him to.”

  Once again, the transcript played in Kinley’s mind.

  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.

  Kinley stared at Betty Gaines, hoping that her mind could reach back far enough to draw a subtle conclusion. “Were Overton and Luther Snow pretty close?” he asked.

  She did not answer, but the small, blue eyes seemed to cloud strangely, as if misted over by a sudden change of air.

  “Snow testified that he was a friend of Overton’s,” Kinley added, his mind now concentrating on the exact words Warfield had used to describe their relationship. “Is that true? Would Snow have known about Overton’s private life?”

  Betty remained silent, but Kinley could see the clouds lifting somewhat, as if driven upward by the warm
th of a rising wind.

  “He said they talked a lot,” Kinley went on. “He gave the impression that they were close friends.”

  Betty’s body tensed slightly as she pressed herself back against the spokes of the rocker, her small feet scraping roughly against the floor. “They were nothing to each other,” she snapped suddenly, as if a small explosion had gone off in her mind. “They just worked together, that’s all.”

  Kinley felt his fingers tighten around the upright pen. “Why would Snow have said what he did?” he asked. “Why would he have said they were friends?”

  Betty shrugged. “To please the boss.”

  “The boss?” Kinley asked. “Who’s that?”

  She looked at him, astonished by his lack of knowledge.

  “Wallace Thompson,” she answered. “You don’t know who Old Man Thompson was?”

  Kinley shook his head.

  “He owned the company,” Betty told him, “the one that was building the courthouse, Thompson Construction. He ran the whole thing. From top to bottom. He was at a site when he died, that’s how close he kept his eye on things.”

  “And he asked Luther Snow to testify against Overton?” Kinley asked, quickly jotting Thompson’s name into his notebook.

  “That’s the way I see it,” Betty said. “I know this much: I seen them two talking to each other not long before old Luther said what a great friend he was to poor old Charlie.”

  “They could have been talking about anything,” Kinley said warily. “How do you know it was about Overton?”

  “’Cause Luther wouldn’t do nothing the old man didn’t tell him to,” Betty said. “The way it was, Old Man Thompson was Luther’s protection, and Luther, being the way he was, a bootlegger and all, he needed all the protection he could get.”

  “What kind of protection?”

  “From the county cops.”

  “Maddox?”

  “Thompson kept a tight leash on Floyd Maddox,” Betty said, “and since Old Man Thompson and the rest of them liked the taste of bonded once in a while, he didn’t want Maddox closing Luther down.”

  “The rest of them?”

  “Old Man Thompson and the other bigwigs in town,” Betty explained. “Maddox and Warfield and Mayor Jameson, the whole crowd used to hang around together. They were always going out in the canyon to camp out and hunt, or whatever it is they used to do out there.” She shrugged. “It was the whole courthouse crowd. They had a little lodge or something way out somewhere, and they’d all go out there, everybody but Chief James. He wasn’t one of the group.”

  Kinley nodded. It was not the first tale of chicanery among the local elite he’d ever heard, and it still seemed to bear relatively little on the Overton case. “What would any of this have to do with Thompson asking Luther Snow to testify against Overton?” he asked.

  “’Cause it was Maddox that had arrested him,” Betty said without hesitation, “and it was Mr. Warfield that was prosecuting him.”

  “His cronies?”

  Betty nodded. “They needed a favor, I guess,” she said, “and so they come to Old Man Thompson.” She shook her head. “And he give them Luther.” She smiled cynically. “That’s the way it was with them guys.”

  Once again, Kinley’s mind retrieved a section of the trial transcript, but this time it was the testimony of Betty Gaines, the halting, unsure texture of her words.

  “Why did you testify for Overton?” he asked.

  She waved her hand, as if unwilling to discuss it.

  “You were afraid, weren’t you,” he said. “On the stand, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “When you’re a young woman, things can scare you.”

  “Things or people?”

  “Well, in this case, it was people.”

  “Thompson?”

  Betty nodded. “He had a mean streak in him,” she said. “I seen him hit his daughter once. He knocked her all the way across the room.”

  Once again, Kinley’s mind flashed back to the transcript.

  “When Snow talked about Overton having woman trouble, implying that it was with Ellie Dinker,” he asked cautiously, “could he have been talking about Wallace Thompson instead?”

  Betty nodded determinedly. “I know this much, Old Man Thompson knew Ellie Dinker,” she said. “I know he did.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cause when he found out I was going to testify for Overton, he told me to keep my mouth shut and not to go against him, because he knew what happened, and Overton was going to pay for it.”

  “Knew what happened?”

  “That Overton done it,” Betty said. “That he killed that little girl.” She rocked back in her chair, her small feet scraping against the floor. “And when he was telling me this, he said, ‘Ellie Dinker was a little whore, Betty, but it’s got to be set right.’”

  “A little whore?” Kinley repeated. “That’s what he called her?”

  “Them’s his exact words,” Betty said emphatically. “And I remembered them, too, ’cause when Old Man Thompson spoke to you, you listened.”

  “From what you knew of Charles Overton, could you have thought that Thompson might be right, that Overton had killed Ellie Dinker?”

  Betty shook her head. “Not from what I saw,” she said. “He was sort of a weak type of man, you know. Like his insides had been scooped out of him.”

  “So you never believed that Overton killed Ellie Dinker?” Kinley asked.

  “No, I never did,” Betty said. “’Course, everybody else did.”

  “Except his family,” Kinley added.

  “And Mrs. Dinker,” Betty said.

  Kinley leaned forward slightly. “Mrs. Dinker?”

  “She didn’t believe Overton done it,” Betty said. “Didn’t believe Overton had killed her little girl.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cause she come to me about it,” Betty said. She nodded toward the small space between the front door and the enormous radio. “She stood right there and told me that there was something wrong in the whole story.”

  “Why did she think that?”

  “Because of the dress,” Betty said. “She told me there was something wrong with the dress.”

  Once again, the scene replayed in Kinley’s mind, and he saw Warfield lifting the dress from the box, Mrs. Dinker staring at it, locked in that inexplicable silence which had suddenly closed around her, and from whose grip for a moment she had been unable to break: WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND.

  “The dress?” Kinley asked. “What was wrong with the dress?”

  “She wanted to see it,” Betty said. “She wanted to look at it.”

  “So she came to you?”

  “’Cause I was working at the courthouse back then,” Betty said, “and she figured I could get it.”

  Kinley’s vision climbed up the short white arms he’d only seen in his imagination before, only watched in his mind as they silently opened the box and plucked the green dress from it.

  “So you got it for her,” he whispered in a kind of awe at Betty Gaines’s passionate outlawry, her capacity to do something without regard to consequences, to respond immediately, even recklessly, to a distant plea.

  “Well, I figured it wasn’t doing no good where it was,” Betty said dully, “just going to mold down there in the basement. Besides, the way I looked at it, that dress passed on to Mrs. Dinker when the girl died.” She shrugged. “I thought it might help ease her mind, but it didn’t. Matter of fact, she sort of went nutty after that. Started poking around in people’s yards and wandering all over the place at night. Then she just started to hanging around on the courthouse steps. Not long after that, they took her away.”

  “What did she do when you gave her the dress?”

  “She just spread it out on the table right there,” Betty said, nodding toward it, “and run her fingers over the chest part. She didn’t say nothing after that. She just left it right there.”

  “Left it?
”

  “For me to take back,” Betty said. “But I never did.”

  “You still have it?”

  Betty nodded. “Folded up somewhere.”

  Kinley felt himself rise to his feet suddenly, as if pulled up by invisible hands. “Could I see it?”

  “I guess so,” Betty said as she drew herself to her feet, then disappeared into the other room.

  She returned almost immediately with a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “Here it is,” she said as she handed it to Kinley.

  He laid the bundle down very gently, reverently, as if it were Ellie Dinker’s last remains, then folded the paper back to reveal what looked like nothing more than a small green pillow. Using the same gentle motions, he spread the dress out on the table, his eyes moving silently from the hem to the shoulders like a glider passing over a flat green field.

  As he looked at it, he heard Warfield’s voice asking Mrs. Dinker to describe the dress, then her answer, that it was green and had a lacy collar that I made for her.

  At that moment, his eyes still fixed on the dress, Kinley realized precisely what Mrs. Dinker had seen as she’d stared uncomprehendingly at the dress which had hung from Thomas Warfield’s hands. He glanced up from the dress and settled his eyes on Betty Gaines’s face. “Where’s the collar?” he asked.

  She stared at him silently.

  “Mrs. Dinker said she made a collar for this dress,” Kinley added. “A white lacy collar.”

  Betty’s eyes fell toward the dress. “I can see where it was,” she said. She took a short, slightly trembling finger and ran it up a line of barely visible white stitching. “Right there’s where it was sewed on.”

  It was a seamstress’s eye, clear, sure, unfailing, and Kinley immediately saw the dress as Betty Gaines saw it, the small white threads rising like tiny, flying spirits from a broad green plain.