Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  Almost to escape his own grim meditations, Kinley returned his eyes to the photographs Ray had gathered together in the “S” file.

  In the first, the courthouse stood in all its gray magnificence, the steps in place, the motto already affixed above its great carved doors, the grounds thoroughly seeded, the rich summer green already on the lawn, everything in place, even the august crowd of county servants and politicians who posed before the building, smiling brightly at Harry Townsend’s camera. Everything was in place except for the long gray flagpole and its granite mooring. It stood several yards from the open pit which had already been dug for it, its green tarpaulin cover fluttering slightly before the beaming line of county officials. On the back, Ray had written the date in his own tiny script, “July 2, 1954.” By looking at the slender shadow cast by the courthouse as it appeared in the photograph, Ray had been able to calculate the time of day at which it had been taken, “midday to early afternoon, July 2, 1954.”

  In the second photograph, the courthouse grounds were empty, all the officials now in their offices or behind their counters, the steps vacant, the courthouse doors securely closed. Now the flagpole stood erect and unbending in the morning sun. Beneath the photograph, the newspaper had written its own stirring caption: Our flag on high. Independence Day in Sequoyah. July 4, 1954, 8:00 a.m.

  Kinley glanced up suddenly as something caught in his mind. He snapped the first picture up, turned it over and looked at the date and time again: July 2, 1954, between twelve noon and early afternoon. Within those slender bounds Ellie Dinker had already arrived at Mile Marker 27. By then Charles Overton’s truck had ground to a halt on the shoulders of the mountain road, and she had stridden down the road to flutter about Overton’s racked body, firing her questions before darting away, “walking on a little ways,” as Overton had said, before she stopped. By any possible scenario, between midday and early afternoon, Ellie Dinker had been picked up, murdered, and her body hidden for later burial.

  Quickly, Kinley turned the picture over and stared closely at the figures who had assembled on the courthouse steps to smile dutifully for Townsend’s picture. He could see Wallace Thompson standing between Sheriff Maddox and Chief James. He could see their respective deputies arrayed on either side, Ben Wade, Riley Hendricks, all of them together in one military line, and to their left, the courthouse construction crew, Adcock and two other men whom Kinley imagined to be Quinn and Peabody. Overton, of course, was missing because he’d gone home sick only minutes before. But of the five-man construction crew, Overton was the only absent one. For standing grimly on the courthouse steps, his hands folded around the handle of a clay-encrusted pick, standing there where he could not have been if all Kinley’s earlier assumptions had been right, standing there where he could not have been if Ellie Dinker were to die by his hands within the meticulous time frame Ray, himself, had established, was Luther Lawrence Snow.

  Kinley felt his lips part silently, a short breath rush in as his mind took over, concentrating its considerable attention on the line of men who stood together on the courthouse steps, searching for a shadowy afterimage, rather than a man, a face that occupied the dark reverse of Snow’s unexpected presence, missing in body, but spiritually there, as Kinley suddenly saw it, the name printed on a campaign poster as if to take up the otherwise vacant space of his catastrophic absence: Thomas Warfield for Criminal Court Judge.

  THIRTY-SIX

  It was nearly midnight by the time Kinley got there, but a small yellow light was still burning in Snow’s front room. Once on the porch, Kinley could see the old man inside. He was sitting at an angle from the door, his eyes trained on the fire that flickered softly in the small brick hearth.

  Kinley knocked lightly at the door, waited a moment, and was about to rap again, this time as loudly and insistently as he felt the need, when suddenly the door creaked open and the old man stood before him again. He looked older than the day before, though not in the least frail.

  “You back?” Snow said flatly.

  Kinley paused just an instant for dramatic effect, then cast the most clever lure he had, the one that usually initiated an immediate and spontaneous defense. “There’s no statutory limit on murder,” he said.

  Snow stared at him unflinchingly. “What murder?”

  “Ellie Dinker.”

  Snow snorted. “I didn’t kill Ellie Dinker,” he said coldly.

  “I know you know what happened to her,” Kinley told him evenly.

  Snow opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. For a moment the two of them stood in the chilly silence, the moonlight pouring softly over them. “I’m nearly eighty now. You think I give a shit what comes out on me?”

  “At first, I thought you killed her,” Kinley added. “But you didn’t, did you? You couldn’t have done that. You were at the courthouse when it was happening.”

  The old man walked to the edge of the porch and peered out at the dark landscape. Far in the distance, through a screen of trees, the diffused light of Sequoyah could be seen as it swept up from the valley below. “You best be on your way,” he said.

  Kinley did not move. “Who did kill her?” he asked as he stepped over to Snow. “And why?”

  Snow did not answer. He kept his eyes fixed on the rim of the mountain and the distant grayish light that ascended from the valley town below.

  Kinley shifted to the right and came up on Snow’s side, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It was Warfield, wasn’t it?” he asked tentatively.

  Snow remained silent. His arms crawled upward and wrapped around his chest, as if to protect it from the cold. “I hate the way the winds always whip up from the canyon.”

  Kinley turned toward him, his eyes on Snow’s immobile face. “Was it Warfield who framed Charles Overton?” he asked.

  Snow’s eyes slid over to him. “He’s dead. What difference does it make?”

  Kinley decided on a different direction. “Where did it happen?” he asked. “Where was she killed?”

  Snow snapped a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lit one and took a long, slow inhalation, as if fortifying some inner part of himself against the encircling cold. “That’s what the big cop wanted to know.”

  “Ray Tindall?”

  Snow laughed. “Chief James,” he said. “Poor old Cousin Felix.” He grinned at the irony of it. “When he didn’t have nothing, he come to me. He thought it being blood between us, I might tell him something about the goings on up here.” He shrugged, as if giving in to the randomness of life, the way it came at you suddenly from around the corner, like a man snarling in your face. “But I told him to forget it. I said, ‘Blood don’t mean nothing to me. I got a friend or two, but blood, it ain’t nothing to me.’”

  “And he left it at that?” Kinley asked.

  Snow smiled. “He didn’t have no choice. He was boxed in. It was me or nothing.” He shrugged. “So it was nothing.”

  Kinley decided to play his trump card. “You buried her,” he said bluntly. “You must know what happened.”

  Snow inhaled a long draw on the cigarette. He did not seem troubled by the accusation. “Where’d I bury her then?”

  “Under the flagpole down at the courthouse.”

  Snow took another pull on the cigarette, then released it in a sudden burst. “Well, that’s a new one on me.” His eyes returned to the dark valley and the distant cloudy light which seemed to rise from it persistently, like smoke from a still-smoldering city. “Something happened, but don’t nobody know what it was.” A slender grin crawled onto his face. “That’s the glory of it,” he said, almost wonderingly, as if in the presence of an epic criminality. “That Felix tried, and Warfield and Sheriff Tindall, he tried. But ain’t nobody got the whole story of what happened to Ellie Dinker.” He tossed the cigarette into the darkness, as a small, hard laugh broke from his lips. “Under the flagpole?” he scoffed. “You think that’s where Ellie Dinker is?” He seemed to consider it a moment. “Well, hell, why don’t you
look?” His laughter pierced the air again as his eyes shifted back to Kinley, utterly still and penetrating, but with the same disturbing sense of demonic teasing that Kinley had noticed at the end of their last meeting: You look like her.

  Kinley gave him a penetrating look. “You’re bluffing,” he said determinedly.

  Snow lit another cigarette. “If she’s under the flagpole,” he said smugly, “then why don’t you go dig her up?”

  “I intend to,” Kinley told him firmly.

  Snow pulled himself to his full height and headed back to the front door. “You don’t plan to do no such thing,” he said contemptuously as he closed it, leaving Kinley alone on the dark porch. “’Cause you’re just like all the others. You don’t want to know.”

  Once back at the house on Beaumont Street, Kinley slumped down in the front room. It was still a long time until the courthouse opened for business, but he knew he would not be able to sleep. Instead, he let his eyes wander over to the charred interior of the fireplace.

  You’re just like all the others. You don’t want to know.

  In his mind, he saw Ray burning the yellow sheets one at a time, sending up in flames all that he’d been working to assemble, the black ashes rising like tiny question marks into the blank, overhanging sky. He wondered if Snow was right about everyone, Warfield, Maddox, Ray and himself, everyone but old Chief James from the wrong side of the tracks, excluded from the inner circle, yet probing relentlessly at his dark edges, trying, against all odds, to find out what had happened to Ellie Dinker.

  He stood up, walked to the office and took his seat once again at Ray’s desk. Ray was there, too, permanently fixed in his mind, no longer the young red-headed boy in the corridor of Sequoyah High. Nor was he the young man crouched over the little marble table in Jefferson’s Drug Store, his eyes trained on the black figure of Martha Dinker. He was not the local lawman, either, strong and incorruptible, the lone pillar of righteousness upon whom depended the innocent and the just. Instead, Kinley found that he could envision him only as he’d appeared in their final dwindling seconds together, a slightly overweight middle-aged man, running breathlessly by the train, the rain pelting him fiendishly as he struggled forward, trying with all his fading strength to utter one last word: Kinley, are you …?

  Kinley felt his eyes drawn down toward the still un-opened volumes of the third transcript Ray had checked out of the courthouse vault, then heard, as if it were whispered directly into his ears, the last of Ray Tindall’s words, Kinley are you …sure?

  He opened the transcript at once and read the title page: State of Georgia v. Edna Mae Trappman. The trial had occurred in the spring of 1954, and once again, as in the case of Luther Snow, the prosecutor had been Thomas Warfield. The defendant, however, was not whom Kinley might have expected. She was young, only nineteen at the time of her arrest, and she was charged with a crime he’d never run across in any of his other cases, practicing medicine without a license, a charge brought on an accusation by none other than Dr. Joseph Stark.

  As Kinley began reading, it was clear that in 1954, Stark had come to think of himself not only as the mythical village doctor, kind, gentle and certainly all-knowing, but as the guardian of Sequoyah’s medical ethics as well. Trappman, he told the court, had broken those ethics by ministering to the ills of the gullible, the hopeless, the mindlessly in need.

  WARFIELD: Now, Dr. Stark, when did you become aware of Edna Mae Trappman?

  STARK: You mean, when did I first hear of her?

  WARFIELD: Yes, sir.

  STARK: I have my notes right here. That would have been in April of 1953.

  WARFIELD: About a year ago, then?

  STARK: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: And could you tell the Court the circumstances of that entry in your notes, Doctor?

  STARK: It was a conversation with a patient who had been suffering from an inoperable tumor.

  WARFIELD: And this person had been treated by you?

  STARK: To the extent that she could be treated, yes. But she was terminal. There was very little that could be done.

  WARFIELD: Were you her only doctor?

  STARK: I had always thought so.

  WARFIELD: Did something come up in that conversation with—let’s call her Patient X—did something come up in your conversation with Patient X to convince you otherwise?

  STARK: It most certainly did. She—Patient X—told me that she’d been seeing someone else. A woman.

  WARFIELD: And did Patient X name that person who had been treating her?

  STARK: Yes, she did. She said her name was Edna Mae Trappman.

  WARFIELD: Now, Dr. Stark, did you conduct, what we might call, a private investigation of Miss Trappman?

  STARK: Yes, I did. At least as much as I could. I asked other patients about her, and I found that a few of them had heard of her. Some had even been treated by her.

  WARFIELD: Treated. How?

  STARK: Medically. She gave them things.

  WARFIELD: Medicines?

  STARK: If you can call them that. Mostly plants from the woods up there on the mountain. One concoction was made of some wildflowers that grow down in the canyon. There were pieces of bark in it and sprigs of vine.

  WARFIELD: And to whom did she give these—well—we can’t really call them medicines, can we, Doctor?

  STARK: Certainly not. She gave them only to the dying. They were her special clientele, you might say. Desperate people. They’d buy anything.

  WARFIELD: But terminal cases, they were not her only patients, were they, Doctor?

  STARK: Well, no. She had other treatments, if you can call them that. Anyway, she claimed that she could do a great many things.

  WARFIELD: What things, Doctor?

  STARK: Well, for one, that she could get rid of a child, things like that.

  WARFIELD: Get rid of a child?

  STARK: She was an abortionist.

  WARFIELD: Did you verify any of these other things, Dr. Stark?

  STARK: Not on my own, no, sir.

  WARFIELD: You came to me instead, didn’t you, Dr. Stark?

  STARK: Yes, sir, Mr. Warfield. Since you were the District Attorney, I came to you.

  Warfield had subsequently conducted his own investigation, assigning Ben Wade to go under cover by posing as a man with a recurrent and undiagnosable “stomach growth.”

  WARFIELD: And that’s all you told her, wasn’t it, Mr. Wade, that you had stomach trouble?

  WADE: That’s right. I said I’d had it a long time, and that it was killing me. I told her I’d been everywhere trying to get help, and it wasn’t getting any better.

  WARFIELD: And as a result of these conversations, did Edna Trappman agree to treat you for this condition?

  WADE: Yes, she did.

  WARFIELD: And did that treatment, in fact, take place?

  WADE: Yes, it did.

  WARFIELD: Could you describe it for us?

  WADE: We met at this house on the mountain. When I first talked to her, she said that she was planning on leaving Sequoyah in a few days, and that if I wanted a treatment, she’d have to do it right away. I said that was fine with me, and we set up an appointment.

  WARFIELD: And pursuant to that appointment, you met with Miss Trappman, didn’t you?

  WADE: Yeah, I did. We met at this place on the mountain. She didn’t live there, but she sort of used it sometimes, I guess.

  WARFIELD: Used it?

  WADE: Like a home base or something. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It was just a shack, more or less, but done over pretty well.

  WARFIELD: When did you meet with Miss Trappman?

  WADE: The first time was on February 4. It was at night. We always met at night. I guess she liked it better. Anyway, I drove up the mountain to the place she said she’d be at.

  WARFIELD: And you found her waiting for you?

  WADE: Yes, sir. She was standing along the canyon rim, and she was wrapped up in a long shawl that went almost to the groun
d. The wind was blowing hard, and she had long black hair, and it was really whirling around her head. She looked real strange. It gave me the creeps.

  WARFIELD: But you didn’t run away, did you, Ben?

  WADE: No, sir.

  WARFIELD: What happened after you got there?

  WADE: I kept the car lights on, and they were shining right on her. She didn’t come toward me. She just stayed there on the rim of the canyon, like she was about to jump off of it or something.

  WARFIELD: All right, go ahead.

  WADE: Well, I came up to her, and I told her who I was, and she didn’t say anything. She just handed me a little bottle, and I gave her some money.

  WARFIELD: How much did you give her?

  WADE: Five dollars.

  These were not the last of the county funds turned over to Edna Trappman, however, for during the next two months, as she returned sporadically to Sequoyah, then moved on, Wade continued to request treatments, then receive and pay for them.