Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  Kinley’s mind was now in Stark’s car, moving slowly through the darkness and the rain.

  “I saw her get out of a car,” Stark continued. “She got out and started walking up the sidewalk in the rain. She was drenched. Her hair was hanging down all over her.” His eyes shot over to Kinley. “Like Medusa. I remember thinking that.”

  Kinley could see her, a dark figure moving with a kind of slow, hypnotic motion through the rain. Her back was to him, but he could see her, as if through a screen of falling water, and in his own imagining, she floated in an unlighted and unpeopled world, a figure without a landscape, her feet rooted in nothing but the ebony air.

  “Where did she go?” he asked softly.

  Stark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “She was carrying a bundle in her arms, and she couldn’t have gone far. She never even turned off the headlights. I could see them disappearing behind me as I drove on down the street.”

  “But you never saw her again?” Kinley asked with a strange urgency. “Never at all?”

  “No,” Stark said. “That was the last glimpse I ever had of her. Just moving down the sidewalk.”

  “Toward what?”

  Stark shrugged. “Toward nothing,” he said. “All the stores were closed by then. But that wouldn’t have mattered. They were several blocks away anyway. There was nothing on that hill but the courthouse, and it wasn’t even finished yet.”

  Kinley glanced down at his notes. “Early July?” he said. “It was opened on the fourth.”

  “Then this must have been the day before,” Stark said. “Because they were still working on it. I know, because I saw old trucks in the parking lot, and the crane was moving.”

  Kinley closed his notebook, his mind now suddenly transported to the courthouse grounds, to where Overton toiled in the rain, to the granite slab which Adcock’s crane was lowering into its unready pit.

  “Did you tell Ray all this?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Stark said. “And then he just got up to leave. ‘I’ll let you know what I find out,’ those were the last words he said before he left.” Stark looked as if a second thought had struck him suddenly. “And as it turned out, they were the last words he ever said,” he added, “at least, to me.”

  Back in the office on Beaumont Street, Kinley thought of the last words Ray had spoken to him. Kinley, are you sure?

  Since he’d never heard the last word, it was a question Kinley himself had put in Ray’s mouth, but now it seemed no less real for his imagining it. He remembered how they’d faced each other that last time, Kinley on the train, Ray running breathlessly beside it. To answer the question, he’d gone to the last of the transcripts and found nothing but a vaguely interesting defendant in a less than interesting case. After that, he’d tried the last living witness and done no better. There seemed no place else to go, and he thought that perhaps he would have to live forever with a single eerie picture in his mind: Edna Trappman moving toward the courthouse with a bundle in her hand, the tire iron, perhaps, and Ellie Dinker’s shoes.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  He picked the transcript’s single volume up again, flipped to the front page, then the second, third, until he’d read it all a second time.

  Still there was nothing more than the names. He started with Trappman, looked it up in both the town and county phone directories on the off chance that she might actually have settled down after her release from jail. But there was no listing for any Trappman in either Sequoyah or its surroundings.

  Kinley leaned back in his chair, wondering if, perhaps, he had at last come to the end of the line. Within the body of the transcript itself, there seemed nowhere else to go.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  Once again, slowly and tediously, the minutes crawling into hours, Kinley concentrated his attention on the single volume of the transcript, reading it word by word until he had finished it entirely.

  He rubbed his eyes tiredly when he’d finished.

  Nothing.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  The voice was faint now, barely audible in Kinley’s mind, but it was enough to draw his attention back down to the final page of the transcript once again, his eyes Ungering on the Judge’s sentence:

  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.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  Now the voice was gaining strength, as if Ray’s lifeless body had twitched inside his tomb, his green eyes fluttering beneath the closed lids, as Kinley’s own eyes bore down upon his last hope.

  In his imagination, he saw her being led away, just as Overton had been led away, the bailiff’s hand on her elbow as he escorted her into the waiting arms of Sheriff Maddox and his jail. He saw the door close behind her, blocking her from his view, and for a fleeting instant, he felt a shudder as he whispered his two-word answer within the empty room.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  “Not yet.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The County Jail was a single-story brick building whose basement had been converted into a kind of windowless dungeon for the county’s incorrigibly disreputable, but more or less harmless, offenders. As Kinley had learned over the years, serious criminals were rarely kept in such facilities except for the relatively brief time during which they were being tried for their crimes, after which they were invariably transferred to far more secure institutions. As a rule, then, the county jails served as little more than unsightly, and usually unhygienic, holding pens for people on short time.

  From the trial transcript, Kinley knew that Edna Trappman had been sentenced to three months. He also knew that most jails kept visitors’ logs. Such logs were kept by the Jailer himself and rarely thrown away, since they were heavy and cumbersome, and most jailers, as Kinley had discovered, were immensely sedentary men, the type who found it easier to shove something into a backroom closet than take the more complicated steps necessary for the destruction of official county documents.

  The County Jailer did not fit this stereotype, and for a moment, as Kinley glimpsed the short, wiry, continuously animated old man behind the receiving desk, he was afraid that the logs had been discarded altogether, that there would be no record left of the short time Edna Trappman had spent there.

  “My name’s Jack Kinley,” he said as he stepped up to the desk.

  The old man nodded peremptorily. “We don’t allow visitors till afternoon,” he said.

  “I’m not a visitor,” Kinley explained. “I’m just trying to run a few things down.”

  The old man looked at him as if he could not exactly make out what the phrase “run a few things down” meant.

  “It’s an old case,” Kinley began slowly. “A woman was kept here back in April of 1954.”

  The old man nodded. “I was Jailer back then, too,” he said as if to impress Kinley with his longevity.

  “Her name was Edna Trappman.”

  The old man’s face stiffened. “Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “I remember her.”

  “She was sentenced to three months.”

  The old man nodded. “Something about medicine,” he said, “some little thing.”

  “Little?”

  “Compared to what she’d done.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I’ve been a jailer for fifty years, and sometimes you get somebody in here, and they’re not like the rest. They got this other feeling about them.” He shivered slightly. “Creepy.”

  “And she had that?”

  “More of it than anybody I ever had in this jail,” the old man said. “Man or woman, she had more of it.”

  “Did she have visitors?”

  “Yeah, she did,” the old man said. “A few.”

 
“Did you keep a visitors’ log in those days?”

  The old man nodded. “We’ve always kept one,” he said, then added before Kinley could ask him, “You want to see it?”

  Kinley smiled softly. “Yes, I do.”

  The old man disappeared for a moment, then returned with a large ledger. “This is ’54,” he said. “You should find every name listed.” He opened the book, then explained how it worked. “Over there, that’s the inmate’s name,” he said, his finger nearly touching the far left-hand column of the book. “And over here,” he added, the finger drifting to the right, “that’s the visitor’s name.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Kinley told him.

  “Glad to do it,” the man said but remained in place, watching as Kinley turned to April of 1954 and began moving his finger down the long line of names, his mind producing a story for each name he saw, all the drunks and small-time larcenists, hustlers and wife-batterers, the whole host of what New York cops called “grifters,” the petty, back-alley street scum who lacked the sheer animal intelligence or courage to do something either masterfully cunning or heroically evil.

  Edna Trappman.

  The name appeared for the first time on April 2. On the same night she’d been sentenced, another woman had come to see her, signing her name in a minuscule black script: Ludie Rae.

  Kinley took out his notebook, recorded the name, then turned the next page, his own finger moving as the old jailer’s had, down the list of names which formed a long column on the left-hand side of the page.

  Edna Trappman.

  It was three days later, on April 5, and the visitor was once again Ludie Rae.

  Again, Kinley recorded the name and date, then continued down the list, his finger moving in toward the page, nearly touching it, but held back, as if involuntarily, refusing to go too near.

  Edna Trappman.

  Three weeks had now passed, and Ludie Rae had come again, this time with someone else, a man who’d signed in, too: J. K. Creedmore.

  Kinley jotted the names into the notebook, the finger moving again down the gray precipice of names, turning one page after another as the weeks passed and no one came to visit the lone dark-haired woman in cell number four. For a time, as he continued through the book, Kinley saw her in his mind, sitting in the dank, concrete cell, its steel door open, the cell itself stripped and unoccupied, its wire-mesh cot now bare of the single thin mattress which normally rested upon it, the seatless, rust-stained toilet only a few feet from the bed, as if to remind the sleepless of their soiled and degraded state. Edna Trappman.

  It was the middle of June now, and at last someone had arrived. It was Ludie Rae again.

  Kinley noted the visit, then rushed on through the rest of June and into the first days of July, and finally to the afternoon of the second of July, when Trappman had been released, signing out on the prison log, her three-month sentence served.

  Kinley shook his head disappointedly. According to the prison log, Thomas Warfield had never dropped in on Edna Trappman a single time during her three months of incarceration.

  The old man seemed to grasp Kinley’s mood of weariness and frustration. “Didn’t find what you were looking for?” he asked.

  Kinley shook his head.

  “What was it you were after?”

  “A particular name,” Kinley told him as he closed the book. “Thomas Warfield.”

  The old man laughed.

  Kinley looked at him quizzically. “What is it?”

  “Well, hell, man, Tom Warfield didn’t have to sign the log,” he said, amazed by Kinley’s political naivete. “You don’t ever ask the District Attorney to do things like that. They’re above procedure. Always have been.”

  Kinley pressed his hands down on the book and leaned into them slightly. “Are you telling me that Thomas Warfield did visit Edna Trappman?”

  The old man nodded.

  “When?” Kinley asked.

  “Toward the end, as I recall,” the old man said. “The last month she was here, he came down a couple times.”

  “Do you remember the dates?”

  “Just the last one,” the old man said.

  “When was that?”

  “The day she got out,” the old man answered. “Warfield came down to get her, and they left together.”

  Kinley quickly opened the log again, racing toward the time and day of her release. He found it almost instantly: July 2, 12:31. He recorded the numbers, then turned back to the Jailer. “Do you know where they went?”

  “Just that they got in Warfield’s car,” the old man said. “Then Warfield pulled off, and they headed up the mountain.” He shook his head at the oddity of it. “That was strange, too, because there wasn’t nothing happening up on the mountain, but we were having a big celebration down here.”

  Kinley eased himself back, then let the flow of the swing sweep him forward. Despite the late fall chill, he felt warm, finished, satisfied.

  He had it now. Everything. The whole story, the one that had eluded everyone from Martha Dinker, still searching for her daughter among the wells and vacant lots of Sequoyah, to Ray, tormented by his own relentlessness, burning his notes out of what Kinley now understood as unbearable frustration.

  He was still contemplating the intricacies of the plot when Dora arrived almost an hour later. Without a word, he led her into the house, poured her a drink, then made a small fire in the hearth, before joining her on the sofa by the window.

  “I think I know it all now,” he said.

  She nodded. “Then you can go home soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said. “You must miss it.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said without apology. “I hope you’ll come up and …”

  She waved her hand sharply. “Please, don’t say it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She took a sip from the glass, straightening her shoulders somewhat, as if preparing to hold her ground. “Well, what did you find out?”

  “Ellie Dinker wasn’t murdered,” Kinley said. “At least, I don’t think she was.” He waited for Dora to ask a question, then went on when she didn’t. “She was pregnant, and Thomas Warfield was the father. He arranged for an abortionist to do the work on Ellie, and my guess is, she died during that procedure.”

  Dora said nothing. Her eyes drifted over to the fire.

  “He had a body on his hands,” Kinley went on, “and since an autopsy would have discovered both that Dinker was pregnant and that she’d died because of a botched abortion, he hired Luther Snow to get rid of the body.” He shook his head, still amazed at the audacity of it. “Ellie Dinker is buried under the flagpole on the courthouse lawn.”

  Once again, Dora said nothing, but only took another sip from the glass, her eyes still level on the fire.

  “Warfield framed your …Overton,” Kinley told her, his own odd code of truth stopping the word “father” before it could escape his mouth. “Then prosecuted him.”

  “He murdered my father,” Dora said softly.

  Kinley nodded, thought of Talbott alone in his big house, of the impossibility of telling her all he knew. “I think so,” he said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  For a moment, Kinley thought she’d asked the question in the same sense he’d been asking it of himself before she arrived, then realized that she meant something different altogether: what was he going to do with all he knew.

  “I want Overton cleared,” he answered. “And the only way I can do that is by telling William Warfield what I know.”

  Dora nodded slowly, “Did Ray know all this?”

  “I don’t know, Dora,” Kinley answered. “I don’t know how much he really found out.”

  “Because he wouldn’t tell me anything,” Dora added. “Why?”

  “Maybe he didn’t get far enough to be sure.”

  “And you have?”

  “Yes,” Kinley said, then felt his hands twitch involuntarily, as if grasping fo
r some final truth. He pressed them fiat against his legs, stopping their movement with a single brutal thrust. “Yes,” he repeated. “Absolutely.”

  “Good,” Dora said.

  Throughout the long night that followed, as he noticed in the morning, she said hardly another word, and as he rose to prepare himself for his confrontation with William Warfield, Kinley wondered if she’d been right in what she’d said days before, that to know for sure was not the highest value, and mystery not the terror Ray had surmised, but only the cagey, cunning route by which each life managed to evade for as long as possible its inevitable arrest.

  THIRTY-NINE

  William Warfield welcomed Kinley into his office early Monday morning, and for a slender instant, his openness and amiability made Kinley feel the urge to make a quick about-face and disappear down the corridor as Ray Tindall had, leaving the body dead and buried in the ground.

  It’s better to know, don’t you think?

  Once again, Kinley nodded silently to his old friend’s question, then took a seat, his eyes following Warfield’s slow descent into his own chair, noting the trouble that seemed to gather like a gray web across his face.

  “You look very solemn,” Warfield said. “I hope you haven’t found anything too distressing.”

  “Mr. Warfield,” Kinley began very softly, “there are a few things I have to tell you.”

  By late that same afternoon, the backhoe was in place, and Kinley stood with Warfield, Ben Wade and a few other casual observers as it went to work on the courthouse lawn.

  For almost an hour, Warfield remained nearly motionless in place, his body in a gray winter coat, his hands folded together, as if holding on to something small and precious. Kinley stood beside him, his eyes trained on the hoe’s heavy metal scoop as it sank deeper and deeper into the ground, slowing steadily as it neared the mark.

  Finally, it halted altogether, and two workmen climbed into the open pit to do the last of the work with hoes and shovels.