Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  Once back on Beaumont Street, he walked to Ray’s office and took a seat in front of his computer. He called up various files, stared at the questions he’d posed, quickly rearranged them in the order his mind demanded now, and typed in the answers he’d been able to track down so far.

  QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION

  1)Why did they not search the well?

  ANSWER: Incompetence of Sheriff Maddox?

  Dinker not in well.

  2)Where is Ellie Dinker’s dress?

  ANSWER: Stolen by Betty Gaines on behalf of Mrs. Dinker, and later returned to the District Attorney’s Office.

  QUESTIONS CONCERNING ELLIE DINKER

  1)Why did Ellie Dinker want to meet at the Slater house instead of her own, which would have been much closer to their ultimate destination, the courthouse in Sequoyah?

  2)Why did Ellie Dinker leave for Helen’s five hours before she needed to?

  3)Why did Ellie Dinker move in a direction opposite to the one she should have taken if she’d been planning to go directly to the Slater house?

  4)Why did she stop on the mountain road?

  5)Why did she approach Overton after his truck broke down?

  6)Why did she ask him what was wrong with the truck and how long it would take for him to fix it?

  7)Why did she appear “nervous-like”? ANSWER to 1 through 6: Because she was planning to meet someone.

  Only a moment’s further thought unearthed the answer to Question 7, and he immediately typed it in: Because she did not want the man she’d planned to meet at Mile Marker 27 to be recognized.

  But who would have recognized him? Overton? Was it possible, Kinley wondered, that Overton would have known whoever it was that Ellie Dinker had planned to meet that day, and that because of that she was “nervous-like,” demanding immediate answers to her questions before walking as far up the road as she could without entirely leaving her point of rendezvous?

  Kinley fixed his eyes on the console, making sure there was nothing else, then typed in his last remaining questions, their letters burning like small hot coils on the monitor’s bright screen:

  8)Who was Ellie Dinker waiting for?

  9)Where is Ellie Dinker now?

  For a moment, he thought that these might be the only questions left in the case. Then, slowly, as if inching its way cautiously into his mind, yet demanding to be gathered within the circle of the others, a third and final question rose insistently: Why did Ray come to my grandmother’s house?

  He waited for Serena in front of Lois’s house, the cold fall chill of late afternoon already gathering around him by the time he saw her emerge from the building.

  “I wasn’t sure you were still in town,” she said as she approached him.

  “I’m still looking into a few things.”

  She did not seem surprised. “I’m glad,” she said and left it at that.

  “As a matter of fact,” Kinley added, “I was hoping you might help me a little.”

  Serena looked excited at the prospect, as if she’d just been asked to join a trek into other, more adventurous worlds.

  “It’s about Ray,” Kinley went on. “Just a few questions about him.”

  Serena nodded. “Sure.”

  “Good,” Kinley said. He shivered slightly. “It’s a little chilly out here,” he said. “Why don’t we find a place inside?”

  They found it on Beaumont Street, and after a few, brief pleasantries about how things were going at the high school and Serena’s plans to return to college the following week, Kinley moved directly into the matter at hand.

  “Ray was working very hard on an old murder case,” he said, “the Overton case. Have you ever heard of it?”

  Serena shook her head.

  “It happened in 1954,” Kinley told her, “and Charles Overton was sentenced to death. I think Ray had come to think that Overton was innocent.”

  Serena smiled sweetly. “That sounds like him.”

  Kinley nodded. “You mentioned to me at one point that you and Ray had grown apart not long before his death,” he said. “Do you remember exactly when that was?”

  Serena thought for a moment, then answered. “It hadn’t been very long,” she said, “only about a month before he died.”

  “Around late July or early August then?” Kinley said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Worried,” Serena answered. “Preoccupied.” She thought a moment longer, as if trying to find the most precise word to describe him. “Suspicious,” she said finally. “He’d started locking things up. His office. His desk. Those file cabinets.”

  “But they were unlocked later?” Kinley asked.

  “They were unlocked the day he died,” Serena said.

  “Not before then?”

  Serena shook her head. “No. That’s what made me think that someone had been in Daddy’s office. But it didn’t look like anybody had broken into anything. The only thing I noticed were the missing files.”

  Kinley’s mind produced the relevant letters instantly. “S, O and D.”

  “Yes,” Serena said. “Have you found them yet?”

  Kinley shook his head, unwilling to tell Serena that her mother had taken them in order to conceal Ray’s relationship with Dora Overton.

  “That’s the key,” Serena said flatly. “That’s the key to what happened to Daddy.”

  Kinley returned to his original question. “So, Ray was suspicious, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of what, did he ever give you any hint about that?”

  “No,” Serena said. “I just know that he was always locking things up and that he was spending a lot of time reading transcripts.”

  “Trial transcripts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of the Overton case?”

  “I don’t know,” Serena said. “But there were lots of transcripts in his office.”

  “Lots?”

  “Volumes and volumes.”

  Kinley’s mind immediately flashed to the short stack of transcripts which Overton’s brief trial had generated. “Volumes and volumes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long did it take him to read them?”

  “A couple of weeks, I guess,” Serena said. “He was reading during his spare time. Mostly at night. In his office.”

  “When did he stop?”

  “Around the middle of July, I think.”

  “Which is when he started locking things up,” Kinley said, as if to himself.

  Serena nodded. “Yes, at that same time.”

  “Do you know what the transcripts were about?”

  “No.”

  “Or where they came from?”

  Serena shrugged. “The courthouse, I guess.”

  “You mean here in Sequoyah?”

  “Yes,” Serena told him. “He’d load them into the back of his car and bring them home. He spent hours in his office. He was always taking notes.”

  “Notes?”

  “On legal pads,” Serena said.

  “Do you know what he did with the notes?”

  Serena’s face turned very solemn. “He burned them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him do it,” she said. “I just dropped by after school one day, and he was doing it.” Her mind seemed to drift back slowly, drawing in upon the moment. “He was standing by the fireplace. All his papers were in a big box, and he was feeding them into the fire.” Her eyes moved reflexively toward the fireplace. “He was standing there. He didn’t have a shirt on.”

  Kinley looked at her quizzically.

  “Because it was so hot,” Serena explained. “It was in the summer. As a matter of fact, I know exactly what day it was because we’d just gotten out of school for the holiday weekend.”

  “Which holiday weekend?”

  “The one for the Fourth of July,” Serena said. “It was that Wednesday.”

  “July 3,” Kinley said.


  Serena nodded.

  Kinley glanced toward the fireplace, but saw the one in his New York apartment instead. It had never worked, and so he’d put a planter in it, then watched over the next few days as the plants had wilted and died from lack of attention. He’d been trying to revive them that same afternoon when the phone had rung suddenly, marking the date forever in his mind. He’d been surprised to hear Ray’s voice at the other end: Sorry, Kinley, but if s Granny Dollar; I found her dead this afternoon.

  The courthouse was still open when Kinley arrived a few minutes later. In the large room which led to the evidence vault, Mrs. Hunter was busily straightening up the day’s disarray, neatly shelving books to make the office presentable for the following day.

  “I have a favor to ask,” Kinley said as he moved down the corridor toward her.

  Mrs. Hunter glanced at the clock. “It’s about quitting time,” she said.

  “It’s very important,” Kinley told her.

  Mrs. Hunter gave him the weary nod of the exasperated but dutiful civil servant. “Well, I’ll do what I can,” she said.

  “It’s the log,” Kinley said. “The one you use to keep track of things in the vault.”

  Mrs. Hunter nodded.

  “I’d like to look at it,” Kinley said.

  Mrs. Hunter looked relieved that so little was being asked of her. “Well, I can do that for you, I guess,” she said.

  Kinley followed her to the front counter and watched as Mrs. Hunter retrieved the same vast ledger in which he had written his own name several days before. “Here it is,” she said.

  “How far does it go back?”

  “We start it over once a year.”

  “So this goes back as far as last January?”

  Mrs. Hunter nodded. “Yes, sir. Do you need to go back further than that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kinley told her.

  “Well, go ahead and look at it then,” Mrs. Hunter said. “I’ll just finish up a few things.” She glanced at the clock. “You’ve got about fifteen minutes before the office closes.”

  Kinley quickly turned to the front of the book and began going through the ledger, searching for any entries for Ray Tindall, any notation of anything he’d taken from the vault.

  He found the first one on February 19, only six weeks after he’d met Dora. It was for the Overton trial, the same transcript Kinley had already pored over, and Ray had checked out each of its six volumes over the next three weeks.

  Ray’s next withdrawal from the vault, on March 1, was the first two volumes of Case Record 217394-C, the final code letter “C” indicating, as Kinley knew, that it was a criminal case.

  Over the next two weeks, Ray had checked out the remaining three volumes, returning all five of them on April 1.

  Kinley quickly wrote the case number and dates in his notebook, then returned to the log, leafing slowly through its wide pages, his eyes now intent on every withdrawal.

  He found the next one on April 24, Case Record 641739-A. Kinley noted immediately that the “A” was a general designation, which meant that it was a civil action, rather than a criminal case, the parties in the dispute having finally taken their irreconcilable differences before a judge.

  Again, Kinley wrote the number into his notebook, then began moving through the log again, his eyes bearing down more and more intently on the pages as spring passed into summer, each day moving steadily toward that moment when Ray had taken all his accumulated notes and fed them into a blazing fire.

  He stopped at May 15. On that day, Ray had checked out yet another transcript, this one for Case Record 217560-C, another criminal proceeding.

  Kinley scribbled the number into his notebook, then continued through the book, turning through the rest of May, then all of June, and finally the first week of July.

  Nothing.

  “Would it be possible to look at these transcripts?” Kinley asked as he handed the open notebook to Mrs. Hunter.

  She looked at the numbers unbelievingly. “All of them?”

  “I have the whole night,” Kinley explained. “And all of tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Whatever it takes.”

  She considered it for a moment. “Well, Mr. Warfield said to help you any way I could,” she said at last, “but you’ll have to carry them yourself.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Mrs. Hunter had been right. The accumulated volumes of trial transcript had been a formidable burden, and Kinley had had to make several trips back and forth from the courthouse to his car before the last of them were loaded into the backseat.

  The process had been repeated when he’d arrived at the house on Beaumont Street, and within a few minutes, the transcripts sat in a ragged pile beside Ray’s old metal filing cabinet.

  Kinley had arranged them in the same order in which Ray had checked them out, and as he plucked the first one from the stack and brought it over to Ray’s desk, he felt again the odd sensation that he was following a well-worn path, that Ray’s broad back was always in front of him, leading him on, just as it had been in front of him that first time so many years before, when they’d gone down into the canyon together to find the little shack behind its wall of vines.

  He looked at the first volume without opening it, his hand peculiarly resistant, as if he were opening the dark lid of his old friend’s coffin.

  As an act of discipline, he pressed his hand down on the cover, as if feeling for a pulse, his eyes drifting up to the wall behind Ray’s desk, the little note he’d hung there, a call to urge him on.

  In an age of mass death, the mystery remains the final redoubt of romantic individualism in its insistence that one life, unjustly taken, still matters so much within the human universe that the failure to discover how and by whom that life was taken contains all we still may know of romantic terror.

  Kinley glanced back down to the transcript, opened it and read what was written on its title page: State of Georgia v. Luther Lawrence Snow.

  The trial of Luther Snow for the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages had begun on May 3, 1946. The prosecutor was Thomas Warfield, who’d just been elected District Attorney the previous November, and as he read Warfield’s opening remarks to the jury, Kinley was surprised at how clumsy they were.

  WARFIELD: The State will prove that Mr. Snow sold liquor in this county, and he has sold it a great deal, you may be sure—and maybe he never made liquor in the county—but he’s not being tried for that. He’s being tried for illegally selling whisky in the county, and we don’t allow that here.

  From this opening statement, Warfield had gone on to construct an equally inelegant case, calling witnesses in a random order which, Kinley guessed, had pretty much kept the jury off-balance for the entire trial.

  First, he’d called a nineteen-year-old boy named Wendell Peeples, who’d purchased liquor from Snow. Under Warfield’s unsteady leadership, Peeples had wandered in circles through his testimony, continually backtracking, until Peeples himself had finally balked at continuing down such a winding route:

  PEEPLES: What’s that?

  WARFIELD: You know, I was asking about what time it was you left your mother’s house.

  PEEPLES:: You mean, you want me to tell that again, Mr. Warfield?

  WARFIELD: Oh, no. You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s go on to something else.

  Next Warfield had called Floyd Maddox, the equally youthful and newly elected County Sheriff, and for a time, the two of them had staggered through the somewhat crude sting operation Maddox had devised against Snow.

  As a scheme it had certainly skirted the edges of entrapment, a circumstance which Snow’s attorney would doubtless have noticed, except that it was 1946 and Snow had not been given an attorney to represent him in the case.

  For a time, as Kinley read first one volume, then another, the atmosphere which rose from the proceedings had an almost comical effect, a bumbling Keystone Kops affair, with Warfield stumbling through his witness lineup and Maddox grandly revealing
the previously secret details of a law enforcement operation that was hardly more complicated than a bait-and-switch con game.

  It was not until the final volume that the mood abruptly changed.

  Luther Snow took the stand in his own defense, declared that he had no questions for himself, and then, in what could only be thought of as a wild and brilliant maneuver, turned himself over to Warfield for cross-examination. Come and get me, Warfield. I’m waiting.

  At the reading of that single grim, determined line, Kinley saw the old man before him, younger and more resourceful, but with the same small eyes, musty odor and look of malignant self-control.

  SNOW: Come and get me, Warfield. I’m waiting.

  WARFIELD: How are you, Mr. Snow?

  To this question, Snow returned a steady and unflinching glare which the court reporter noted in the same succinct phrase she’d used to describe the silence of Martha Dinker: WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND.

  WARFIELD: You’ve pled not guilty to this indictment, haven’t you, Mr. Snow?

  SNOW: Yeah.

  WARFIELD: Which means that you’re denying that you sold any whisky to Sheriff Maddox, isn’t that right, sir?

  SNOW: Not guilty.

  WARFIELD: So now, for the jury, and the people here …and for the record, you’re pleading not guilty, isn’t that right?

  SNOW: To the thing, I am.

  WARFIELD: Thing?