Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Somebody cut it off,” Betty said. Her finger moved from one severed thread to the next. “See,” she said, “they’ve all been snipped with scissors.”

  “Snipped?” Kinley asked. “Not torn?”

  “Torn?” Betty said. “You mean like somebody tearing it?”

  Kinley nodded.

  Betty shook her head with the certainty of a woman who had made a thousand dresses in her time, just as Martha Dinker had, and who saw just as clearly what Martha Dinker must also have seen as she’d stared at the green dress in Thomas Warfield’s hand.

  “Cut,” Betty Gaines said, in a voice whose authority and expertise in such things Kinley could not doubt. “Cut clean. Cut with scissors. That’s the only way you don’t get a rip when you’re pulling something off.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “I found it,” Kinley said as he spread the dress over Warfield’s desk.

  Warfield stared at it, astonished. “Good work,” he said as he glanced back up at Kinley. “Who had it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kinley said.

  Warfield looked at him grimly. “Privileged information, is that it?” he asked. “An unidentified source?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t our deal, as I recall,” Warfield said firmly.

  Kinley dropped into a professional language he thought Warfield would understand. “There was no criminal intent.”

  “But there was a criminal act,” Warfield told him, “and I believe in prosecuting people for such things.”

  “We’re talking about an old person,” Kinley said.

  “Mr. Kinley,” Warfield said, his voice cold and full of the law’s immovable purpose. “I would prosecute the dead if I could bring them back to life.”

  “Look,” Kinley told him, now abandoning his ineffective legal jargon. “At some point, I’ll tell you. I give you my word. But for now, there’s something else I want to show you.” He pointed to the small white threads which ran in a broad crescent along the front of the dress. “There was once a collar there,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s in Mrs. Dinker’s testimony,” Kinley said. “She described it to your father.”

  “And this collar, it was torn off, I guess,” Warfield said, unimpressed with the finding. “She probably fought back, and Overton ripped it off.”

  “Normally, that’s what I’d think, too,” Kinley told him.

  Warfield looked at him quizzically. “But in this case, you don’t?” he asked.

  Kinley shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  Kinley let his fingers move over the line of white threads. “I had a seamstress look at it,” he said. “The collar was cut off. With scissors. It wasn’t ripped or torn.”

  “As it would have been in a struggle,” Warfield added as he glanced back up at Kinley.

  “Yes.”

  Warfield drew his eyes down to the dress. “It gives off a feeling, doesn’t it?” he said. “Something someone died in, their clothes, or just the room, sometimes, it gives off a feeling about them.”

  Kinley nodded. “Yes, it does.” He remembered all the early tools of his trade, the lengths of soiled rope, the torn skirts and bras, the lead pipe caked in blood and earth, the snub-nosed pistol on the tabletop. The locations, too, closets fitted with pulleys, beds fitted with straps, windows painted an impenetrable black, boxes with no windows in them, arrayed with leather thongs.

  “I remember the first time I got that feeling,” Warfield said. “It was a pillowcase that had been used as a gag, all balled up and stained with this and that. Sheriff Maddox just sort of tossed it to me.” His eyes drifted up to Kinley. “It had been stuffed so far down this old man’s windpipe that he’d suffocated.” He took the dress and lifted it slowly, as if the ghost of Ellie Dinker were still living invisibly inside. “We’ll put it back where it belongs,” he said.

  Without further word, he rose and walked out of the room, the dress still in his outstretched hands, as Kinley followed him into the elevator, then rode silently down to the basement.

  “It’s my museum,” Warfield said, as he walked into the small room lined with brown boxes marked by the names of the cases whose evidence they held. He pulled out the one labeled OVERTON and returned the dress to its interior darkness. “I know most of them,” he said, glancing from one box to the next. “CRAWFORD, a drug peddler; DICKSON, one of his best customers; SHEFFIELD, a wife-beater; CARSON, a pedophile …”

  “Overton,” Kinley said abruptly, then looked pointedly at Warfield. “I think he was innocent, Mr. Warfield.”

  Warfield whirled around to face him. “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Things I’ve found out.”

  “Did Ray think he was innocent, too?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t he come to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or to you, Mr. Kinley,” Warfield added. “Why didn’t he come to you? You’re a writer. You could have gotten exposure for the case, couldn’t you?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell you about it?”

  Kinley shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Warfield said darkly. “There’s something wrong in the way Ray handled this.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to do it alone,” Kinley offered, still avoiding either of his other choices, misplaced loyalty or love, along with that third possibility which Kinley found he could not entirely exclude from his mind any more than he could block the memory of his ears: He was doing it for the big boys. Whatever they did back then, he was covering it up.

  Warfield looked at him doubtfully. “Why would he want to do it alone?” His face suggested that it was a question he’d already answered. “To impress Dora Overton,” he said. “The Lone Ranger rides again.”

  “I don’t think he was like that.”

  “Then why did he keep everything to himself?” Warfield demanded. “How much did he find out about this case—if anything—and why did he take it to the grave?”

  It was a question which Kinley was still asking himself later that night as he sat in the swing on Beaumont Street, the glass of scotch once again cool in his hand. He thought of Dora for a moment, suppressing the urge to bolt to his car and tear up the mountain to her house. If he did that, he knew that he would be lost for the night, that the urgency he had come to feel for his investigation would inevitably be drained away by this other, newer passion. It was part of the irreducible contradiction of life, that one force seeped life from another, that focusing on one scene required that others be covered with blinders.

  Kinley, are you …?

  Again, he saw Ray on that last afternoon, the rain falling upon him mercilessly as he trotted, already exhausted, beside the train. He could see Ray’s chest heaving as he’d labored briefly to keep up with the train, then given up suddenly, his great arms dropping helplessly to his sides like vanquished fighters sometimes let their arms collapse, as if to take the final punch and get it over with.

  Kinley, are you …?

  What?

  Kinley took a sip from the scotch, leaned back, and let Dora ease Ray from his mind, as if escorting his dead friend silently and without resistance from the room. He thought of her in her small house, or by the window, or out alone on the rim of the mountain, her eyes trained on the lights below, searching for the one on Beaumont Street.

  It’s better to know, isn’t it?

  And it was Ray again, resisting now, relentless, determined, his mouth moving in the coffin’s darkness, his hands squeezing together rhythmically as Kinley’s own hands so often did, obsessively, tirelessly, as if driven by devils of their own.

  Another sip of scotch went down slowly, warmly, soothingly as he fought to keep his mind on Ray. It was clear to him now that Ray had continued with his investigation even after he’d cau
ght up with Talbott, learned about Dora, and then chosen to keep it to himself. He had gone on with it, tracking down other leads, nosing into the brown box where Ellie Dinker’s dress should have been.

  He had gone on with it, then stopped abruptly, scooped the contents of his locked drawer into a yellow envelope and walked out of his office.

  Where had he gone?

  Kinley let his eyes move down Beaumont Street, its double rows of small, matter-of-fact houses, plain as the town itself, neat and functional. There was something homey in the tiny square lights which faced him from the house across the street. Through its single picture window, he could see the people who lived there as they passed back and forth across the living room, and for a moment, Kinley allowed himself a certain, distant envy for the life he thought they led. It was settled and routine, rooted in the firm clay of predictability, as he imagined Ray’s own life had been before Dora.

  Now she was with him again, a shadowy outline in his mind which he struggled to squeeze out. He concentrated on Ray instead, his last days alone in the house, then his last hours, also alone, but traveling somewhere with the yellow envelope tucked securely beneath his arm.

  His mind shifted again, this time to the last witness, the one his investigation had finally come down to, the last lead: Luther Snow.

  There was no listing for Luther Snow in the Sequoyah phone directory, but it had taken only a brief phone call to Ben Wade to track him down, and within a few minutes, Kinley found himself bumping down a deserted logging road which shot off to the left of the same secondary mountain road which, had he continued to follow it, would have led him to his grandmother’s house on the brow of the canyon.

  It was familiar territory, and even in the bluish moonlight, its details filled his mind with the days and nights he’d walked with her, talked with her or simply sat and listened hypnotically to her voice as she led him down the long trail of blood and mayhem the Police Gazette provided, it seemed now, for his instruction.

  Luther Snow had been forty-four years old at the time of the trial, a slender, sharp-featured man with a large, pointed nose and small round eyes. Even in the pictures Kinley had seen in the Sequoyah Standard clippings, he had given off the same sullen, criminal atmosphere that Kinley had noticed in men who’d done far more desperate things than committing perjury in a murder trial. He’d noticed it in Mildred Haskell and Fenton Norwood and Colin Bright, and as he thought of them, their faces rose like masks before him, grim, silent, as close as he would ever come to the manus maleficiens of medieval understanding, the hand that knows no good.

  The man who opened the door only seconds after Kinley rapped softly at it struck him as the object lesson in how effectively time could soften the hard angularity of an evil face. Luther Snow looked almost lovable as he stood squinting behind the screen, his slick black hair turned to a nest of silver fibers by the light from the room behind him.

  “Luther Snow?” Kinley asked.

  The old man nodded. “I don’t see too good,” he said, still squinting. “Are you the Fowler boy?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t come for nothing, then?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  Snow’s eyes tightened into narrow slits. “What you want?”

  “I’m a writer,” Kinley said. “My name’s Jackson Kinley, I’m working on a story.”

  Snow watched him uncomprehendingly, as if the word “writer” was one Kinley had suddenly snatched from a foreign language.

  “I’m working on the Overton case,” Kinley added.

  “Overton?”

  “Charles Overton,” Kinley told him. “The murder trial back in 1954.”

  The old man’s face suddenly hardened, all the youthful menace Kinley had seen in the newspaper photographs instantly and miraculously called back to life, as if evil, even in old age, still remained on call, a demonic army waiting in reserve. “I ain’t got nothing to say about that trial,” Snow said coldly. “It don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “Well, I just wanted to …”

  “I got nothing to say,” Snow repeated. “Now get on out of here.”

  Kinley could see the old man’s hand as it crawled slowly toward the small steel latch and eyebolt on the inside of the screen.

  “Get on out of here,” Snow snapped brutally, his hand still moving stealthily, a white spider crawling up the unpainted wooden jamb. “I ain’t got to talk to nobody about nothing.”

  Kinley grabbed the handle of the door and pulled it open slightly. “I think you should talk to me,” he said firmly.

  Snow’s hand descended immediately, its long, skeletal fingers now fiddling witlessly at the leg of his trousers. “I ain’t got nothing to say,” he repeated.

  Kinley took a chance. “It’s not too late, you know,” he warned, his own voice now as menacing as Snow’s.

  The old man seemed instantly to understand. “It’s years past,” he said roughly. “It ain’t nothing of interest to nobody.”

  “It is to me,” Kinley said. “And it was to Ray Tindall.”

  Snow’s eyes widened slightly. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Kinley said, “but Warfield isn’t.”

  Snow laughed. “He’s been dead for years.”

  “I mean his son, William Warfield,” Kinley said, “the District Attorney.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?” Snow demanded. “It ain’t nothing to do with him.”

  “Perjury is his business,” Kinley told him. “A man was executed. It’s not too late to look into something like that.”

  Snow’s eyes suddenly began to dart about, as if moving from one place to another on Kinley’s face. “Kinley,” he whispered. “Kinley. Ain’t you that little boy that …”

  Kinley nodded. “Yeah, I used to live around here.”

  “With the old woman.”

  “Granny Dollar.”

  Snow smiled. “Oh, yeah,” he said, almost to himself. “Yeah, I remember you.” His eyes drifted down toward Kinley’s hands. “I remember you.”

  “I used to play around here,” Kinley said, hoping to move Snow gently into conversation. “I used to roam the woods all around this part of the mountain.”

  Snow’s eyes rose slowly and settled on Kinley’s face. “You look like her.”

  “Who?”

  “You growed up to look like her.”

  “My grandmother?”

  Snow said nothing as his hand moved once again toward the latch and eyebolt.

  And as he watched the hand ascend, Kinley found that he could not stop it as it continued on, higher and higher, until it stopped suddenly, then pressed forward, closing the door, almost gently, in his unmoving face.

  Again, like always, he was moving through the woods, his small body plowing wildly through the heavy undergrowth, plunging blindly and at terrific speed into the impenetrable darkness. Someone was pulling him along, jerking his hand violently as he stumbled through the grasping brambles. He could feel the snare of the vines as they tangled around his bare legs, but the hand continued to wrench him forward mercilessly, dragging him brutally toward the dark stone cliff. He could hear his own heart pounding frantically as he neared its jagged edge, and he could feel something emptying inside, as if scooped out, and his hands thrust out to pull it back, to scoop it back into his body, as if it were the air, the very breath of life, which was rushing from him, rushing as he grasped for it with an animal urgency, his fingers snatching desperately at the invisible night.

  She opened the door briskly, as if she had not been asleep.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I know it’s late.”

  “I didn’t expect you.”

  “I had a bad dream,” he said, then laughed awkwardly. “I feel like a child.”

  She nodded slowly as she stepped back to let him come inside. “We all do sometimes,” she said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The next morning they had coffee in Dora’s small kitchen, th
e two of them together at the tiny aluminum table by the window.

  “I used to do this with my mother,” Dora said after a moment. She smiled, remembering it. “We’d sit by the window and look out over the mountain. Then one morning, she didn’t come out of her room.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Ten years.”

  Kinley nodded. “My grandmother went the same way, I guess. Very suddenly. They found her sitting in her chair on the porch, just staring out over the canyon.”

  “They?”

  “Actually, it was Ray who found her.”

  Dora looked at him quizzically. “Ray?”

  “He never told you that?”

  “No,” Dora said. “Did he visit her a lot?”

  Kinley shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why was he up there?”

  Kinley realized that he’d never asked Ray that question, that he’d simply taken the fact that he’d found his grandmother dead as a matter of course, something natural, part of the scheme of things. “I don’t know why he was up there that particular day,” he said.

  “Maybe he just went up to talk to her.”

  Kinley looked at her curiously. “About what?”

  “Whatever was on his mind, I guess,” Dora said lightly.

  Kinley’s mind shot backward, moving through Ray’s activities during the week preceding his grandmother’s death. “Your father was on his mind,” he said quietly. “He was very busy looking into the case at about that time.”

  Dora took a sip from the coffee, then let her eyes shift toward the window, the high mountain fog still thick behind the window pane. “I like it like this,” she said.

  “The fog?”

  She turned toward him. “Having coffee with someone in the morning.”

  He took in a long, slow breath, choking back what would otherwise have been his immediate and spontaneous response: Me, too.

  He left her a few minutes later, driving slowly down the mountainside, this time without glancing to the right where the town rested in its misty silence below him. He stared straight ahead instead, his eyes focused on the road while he tried to find a new foothold for his investigation, some tiny indentation in the wall that would allow him to cling to Sequoyah a little longer, to Overton and Ray, and more than anything, he realized, to Dora.