Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  WARFIELD: So, finally, you shelled out close to two hundred dollars, didn’t you, Ben?

  WADE: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: Well, after all that money, did your stomach get any better?

  The laughter which subsequently broke over the courtroom at Warfield’s facetious question had prevented the court reporter from hearing his answer: INAUDIBLE.

  The laughter stopped immediately, however, when Trappman herself took the stand, and even within the bare, black-and-white minimalism of the transcript pages, Kinley could sense the tension that had arisen as Warfield began to question her. For there was something in her voice that penetrated and electrified the otherwise unadorned lines of the transcript, an eerie, crystalline clarity which Kinley always associated with an overmastering intelligence.

  WARFIELD: For the record, would you state your name and address, please.

  TRAPPMAN: Edna Mae Trappman.

  WARFIELD: And your address?

  TRAPPMAN: I live where I am.

  WARFIELD: You have no address?

  TRAPPMAN: I don’t live any particular place.

  WARFIELD: You’re a drifter, isn’t that right, Miss Trappman, an itinerant?

  TRAPPMAN: I live in lots of places.

  WARFIELD: You live out of a car, isn’t that right?

  TRAPPMAN: Sometimes.

  WARFIELD: Mostly peanut butter from the glove compartment, is that it?

  Trappman did not respond, but Warfield chose not to pursue the point.

  WARFIELD: All right, fine, we’ll let the address go. We know where you are right now, that’s the main thing. Well, let me ask you this, Miss Trappman, do you have a job at this time?

  TRAPPMAN: No.

  WARFIELD: Well, how do you manage to keep that car moving on down the road, then?

  Rather than retreating into silence at Warfield’s question, Edna Trappman rallied suddenly and gave a remarkable answer.

  TRAPPMAN: I perform miracles.

  The courtroom spectators had reacted with uneasy laughter, but rather than waiting for the court to intervene, Trappman had followed a remarkable response with an even more remarkable action. She had quieted the court herself.

  TRAPPMAN: Silence!

  It was one of the few times Kinley had ever seen a court reporter use an exclamation point to describe the emotional pitch of a witness’s voice, and it must have been in response to the sound of that single word, or the look in her eye at the moment she’d delivered it.

  SILENCE!

  And from the transcript, Kinley could tell that the courtroom had fallen silent instantly, for without any intercession on the part of the judge, Warfield had immediately resumed his examination. But now he seemed ill at ease, perhaps shaken, as if by the same hard demeanor that had imposed silence on the court.

  WARFIELD: Well, I …I have a few …

  TRAPPMAN: Questions?

  WARFIELD: Yes, a few more for you to …

  TRAPPMAN: Ask, then.

  She was now in full command, and the force of her control seemed to rise like a lingering smoke from the pages of the transcript.

  WARFIELD: Well, about making a living …

  TRAPPMAN: It’s all in your head.

  WARFIELD: What?

  TRAPPMAN: What you see.

  WARFIELD: You mean …

  TRAPPMAN: When you look at me.

  WARFIELD: I don’t know what you …

  TRAPPMAN: Looking for a cure.

  WARFIELD: …mean when you …

  TRAPPMAN: Looking for a way out.

  WARFIELD: Are you saying that you …

  TRAPPMAN: I provide the way.

  WARFIELD: …are guilty?

  TRAPPMAN: Yes.

  And there, in that instant, the trial had ended. Warfield had immediately asked that Trappman’s spontaneous confession of guilt be accepted by the court, and the court had done exactly that. Minutes later, it found Trappman guilty on a charge of practicing medicine without a license, adjourned for two hours, then reconvened, at which time the court asked the accused if she had anything to say before it pronounced sentence.

  She did. It was plain-spoken, rather than eloquent, and it was clearly the voice of a person who’d had little formal education, but Kinley marvelled nonetheless at her intelligence and moral agility, her ability to turn everything around.

  TRAPPMAN: I will say this, and nothing else. There is no way out. All the roads are blocked. There are just voices. Everything is in your head. You can feel them sometimes, things crawling through you. Tiny feet. They aren’t real, these little animals. But we listen to them. We beg them. We pray to them. We want a way out of what is grinding us to death. It doesn’t matter what it is. A cancer. Polio. People tell their children. They say, “Don’t drink water when you are too hot. If you do,” they tell them, “you will get polio.” Is this practicing medicine? Or is it saying to a child, “Don’t be afraid. I know the way out. You don’t have to be afraid of getting polio and being crippled all your life. There is a way out, and I know what it is. Just don’t drink water when you’re hot, and then you’ll be all right. You’ll never get polio.” And children, they take this, and they go play, and get hot, but they don’t drink water, and polio, it doesn’t scare them anymore. They think they know the way out. It isn’t real. Nobody knows anything. It’s only a wish that gets you through. I don’t practice medicine. These people that come to me, they don’t want medicine. I practice magic. And sometimes, when it’s a problem in their heads, I give them magic for that, too. And when they can’t get over something, I show them how. I show them that everything’s a shadow. You see, they are all tied up in knots. They think it’s all solid. Their troubles are like stones. But even a stone can disappear. You just pick it up and throw it in the river. And, like magic, it’s gone. There’s no harm in any of this. Find what harm I’ve done, and make me pay for that. That’s all I got to say.

  A few minutes later, at a time the court reporter set at 2:37 p.m., the court did just that. It found the harm she’d done, and it made her pay.

  COURT: Edna Mae Trappman, you have been found guilty of practicing medicine without a license, an act which has offended the good order and dignity of the State of Georgia. Accordingly, it is my duty to sentence you to three months in the County Jail, sentence to begin immediately on this day of April 2, 1954.

  That was it, nothing more, and as he closed the transcript and dropped it onto the stack beside Ray’s desk, Kinley let his mind roam through the details he’d gathered from his own investigation. Through each of them, it seemed to him now, he had solved some small part of the puzzle. But the whole still eluded him. If Warfield had murdered Ellie Dinker, why had he done it? Why had the body been hidden? Why had Overton been framed?

  He could see Snow’s eyes staring motionlessly toward him: That’s the glory of it. Ain’t nobody got the whole story of what happened.

  Perhaps Snow was right, Kinley thought, now posing other questions of his own. If Warfield had felt he needed a motive in his case against Overton, Kinley now felt that he needed one in his case against Warfield. But there was no one left from that distant time. Maddox. Thompson. Warfield. Martha Dinker. Sarah Overton. Even Chief James. All of them were dead, all of them silenced. No wire still connected a single living person to the case.

  Except one, of course, and as Kinley considered his next move, it struck him that this final living witness had also entered the story an inordinate number of times. He was always there, lurking in the background, never in the forefront, always a witness, but never a participant, and yet, always somewhere near the action, as if to leave his fingerprints throughout the murder room.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was a Saturday, and so Kinley waited until the middle of the afternoon before pulling up to Dr. Stark’s large, colonial-style house. It rested on a spacious lawn, presided over by great magnolia trees and bordered by a towering wall of dark green shrubs. Stark had lived there for as long as Kinley could remember, the kind
ly village doctor who’d delivered half the seniors of his own graduating class, Ray Tindall included.

  Dr. Stark did not look surprised to see him when he opened the door. “Ah, Jack,” he said amiably. “Nice to see you again.” He stepped out of the door and motioned Kinley into a wide foyer, its high white walls hung with portraits of the ancestral dead.

  “How’s Serena?” Dr. Stark asked as he closed the door.

  “Fine, I suppose,” Kinley answered, his eyes fixed on one portrait, a man in a great red chair, his long white fingers folded over a black quill pen.

  “He was a writer, like you,” Dr. Stark said. He smiled quietly. “My great-grandfather.” He walked across the foyer and opened another door. “We can talk in here,” he said as he disappeared inside.

  Kinley followed behind him, then took a seat in one of the room’s large black leather chairs. “I’ve been doing a lot of work,” he said.

  Dr. Stark nodded as he settled into the identical chair which rested opposite Kinley. “So Billy tells me.”

  “Billy?”

  “Billy Warfield,” Stark said. “I still call him by the name he had when he was just a teenage boy.” He smiled quietly. “Anyway, he’s part of the country club grapevine, you might call it. We sometimes do a round of golf together. I’m not much competition to Bill. I think he more or less humors me. You know, an old man, a friend of his father’s.” He looked at Kinley significantly. “For Southerners, such attachments remain strong,” he said, as if pointing out that Kinley could no longer number himself among his former compatriots, that his Yankeeness had now entirely consumed him.

  “What did Mr. Warfield tell you?” Kinley asked.

  “That you were looking into the Overton case,” Dr. Stark said. “So, I knew you’d end up here at some point.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was a witness in that case,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “And because you’d already come to talk to me about Ray’s death,” he added.

  Kinley nodded.

  “And because Ray had come here, too,” he said pointedly. “Came here with the same questions.”

  “What questions?”

  “About Ellie Dinker.”

  “What about her?”

  “He’d read in the transcript about my having been her doctor,” Stark said. “He wanted to know more about that.” He smiled thinly. “For some reason he’d come to believe that Overton was an innocent man.”

  “Why did he think that?”

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

  “But he was asking about Ellie Dinker?”

  “Yes,” Stark said. “I think he wanted to establish some sort of connection between her and Overton. Either that, or with someone else.”

  Kinley reached for his notebook. “What did you tell him?”

  Stark hesitated a moment, eyeing the notebook. “Sequoyah’s an awfully small town, you know. People have to deal with each other carefully.”

  Kinley said nothing.

  “We’re talking about something that happened a long time ago,” Stark added. “Most of the participants are dead.”

  “So there’d be no reason to keep anything back, would there?” Kinley asked.

  Stark smiled. “That was Ray’s argument.”

  Kinley offered him his warmest down-home grin. “Did it work?”

  To Kinley’s surprise, Stark nodded. “Yes, it did.” He shrugged. “I liked Ray. He had a way of putting people at ease.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Everything I knew,” Stark answered bluntly, “which wasn’t much, when you came right down to it. Just that at the time of her murder, Ellie Dinker was pregnant.”

  Kinley’s pen froze in place.

  “She came to me,” Stark added. “I had always been her doctor.”

  “For prenatal care?”

  Stark laughed. “No, Jack, for an abortion,” he said. “You have to understand something. Ellie Dinker was not an average teenager. She’d been around, if you know what I mean, and she was a very, shall we say, frank girl.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That she asked me straight out,” Stark said. “She came into my office. I examined her and told her she was pregnant, and before I could get another word out, she just said, ‘Can you get rid of it?’ Just like that, without another thought.” He walked over to a small liquor cabinet and opened it. “It’s late enough in the afternoon, don’t you think?” he said. “Will you join me?”

  Kinley shook his head.

  Stark poured himself a drink, talking again as he did so. “Of course, something like that was out of the question. It was 1954, after all. Performing an abortion was illegal. If I wouldn’t do one now, I certainly wouldn’t have done one then.”

  “But you never mentioned any of this at the trial,” Kinley said.

  “No, but I mentioned it to Tom Warfield,” Stark said, “and he told me it was irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant?”

  Stark’s face darkened slightly. “I reacted the same way. I mean, it was Overton’s motive. At least that’s the way it seemed to me.”

  “But Warfield didn’t think so?”

  Stark shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said. “He never brought it up when he questioned me, and since it was a medical confidence, I didn’t tell anyone else.” He took a short sip, then returned to his seat, rubbing the glass rhythmically between his hands. “But privately, it gave me what I needed to put my own doubts at rest.”

  “What doubts?”

  “About Overton,” Stark said. “I mean, I had the whole story. Overton had gotten that girl pregnant. That was the whole story, the key to everything. She was pregnant, and it was Overton’s child, and she’d probably gotten awfully difficult about it.” He shrugged. “It was easy to see what happened after that. They got into an argument, and Overton killed her. I guess he thought it was the only way out.”

  “Because he was the father of the child?”

  “Of course.”

  “Were you Overton’s doctor?”

  “No,” Stark said. “He never came to me about anything. Even that mythical stomachache he’d gotten at work the day of the murder.”

  “So you had no medical knowledge of him?” Kinley asked.

  “None whatever.”

  “Well, I can tell you that Overton could not have been the father of Ellie Dinker’s child.”

  The glass stopped dead in Stark’s hands. “Why not?”

  “He was wounded in the war,” Kinley said. “In the groin. He couldn’t possibly have gotten Ellie Dinker pregnant.”

  Stark watched him unbelievingly. “How did you know that?”

  “From an Army medical report,” Kinley said. “Ray saw it, too.”

  Stark nodded thoughtfully. “I guess that’s why he asked those odd questions.”

  “What questions?”

  “Well, once I’d told him about Ellie Dinker being pregnant, he started asking a lot of other questions,” Stark said. “He wanted to know who else Ellie might have gone to.”

  “For an abortion?”

  “Yes,” Stark said. “And, to tell you the truth, at first I couldn’t think of anyone, but he kept at it, and finally I remembered something.”

  “Edna Trappman,” Kinley said.

  Stark looked at him, surprised. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You testified at her trial back in 1954,” Kinley added.

  “Yes, how did you know that?”

  “Because Ray read the transcript of that trial,” Kinley told him. “Just a few weeks before he died.”

  Stark looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Kinley admitted. “But what do you know about her?”

  Stark’s answer was unequivocal. “A terrible woman,” he said. “The coldest person I ever met.”

  “I didn’t know you’d ever met her,” Kinley said. “I mean, face to face.”

  “Well, it wasn�
��t exactly a meeting,” Stark said, “more an observation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I actually went to see what she looked like,” Stark said. “I don’t know why. Maybe I was just curious.” He fell silent for a moment, his eyes narrowing, as if trying to get a view of her again. “She was very tall, very thin. She didn’t look well, herself, but she looked …” He stopped, still trying to collect the varied elements of his observation. “She looked …the way she moved …it was like there was no one else in the world.”

  “No one else?”

  “That’s right,” Stark said. “She was the sort of person who only uses things, but never really connects with them.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “Well, I’d seen her in court, of course,” Stark said. “But never before the trial.”

  “But you saw her after the trial?”

  “It must have been a day or two after she was released,” Stark said. “It was only a glimpse, but it was enough.” His eyes lifted slightly, as if trying to find a picture of her in his head. “I’d seen her in court, of course, but to see her out in the open, free again, it was different. It made you feel …vulnerable, as if there were something loose out there, an animal on the prowl.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “It was in early July,” Stark answered. “She couldn’t have been out of jail for very long, and I was heading home from my office. It must have been around ten o’clock. I was going slow, because it was raining.”