The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “What did he say he’d done?”

  “Took the boy out in the woods. It’s a old plantation house, all broke down now and covered with kudzu. Had a root cellar in it. Put the boy down in the root cellar and . . . you know . . .”

  “Now, don’t you be deferring to my tender nature, Sheriff,” I said. “Say it plain out.”

  Higganbotham cleared his throat. “He raped the boy, what he done.”

  Lt. Gooch looked up from his meal. “No indication of that from the autopsy. No anal tearing, nothing like that.”

  The Sheriff cleared his throat nervously. It was obvious you didn’t talk about torn anuses around a lady in this part of the country. “I suppose,” he said gravely, “that there’s a variety of ways a sick person might put they abuse on a little boy.”

  “Oral sex,” the lieutenant said, chewing on his beans.

  Sheriff Higganbotham cleared his throat again.

  “You didn’t ask?” the Lieutenant said. “ ‘Did you penetrate him, Maurice? Did you jack off on him, Maurice? Did you make him do this or that, Maurice?’ ”

  The Sheriff’s face grew cool and distant. “I don’t know how it’s done in Atlanta, Lieutenant. But down here, if a man say he done a thing, if he take responsibility—well, sir, out of respect for the deceased, we don’t see any need of going into all kind of gruesome and terrible details which it’s only gonna give the survivors one more terrible thing to lay awake nights thinking of, sir.”

  The lieutenant grunted.

  I took out the file, turned it around, pushed it across the scarred Masonite table. “What about this?” I said. I pointed my fingernail at the lines on the autopsy report showing the brittle bones that indicated that Ronald Gillis had been starved.

  The sheriff took out a pair of gold-framed glasses, peered at the report. “I’m afraid that don’t mean much to me,” he said apologetically.

  “It indicates he was starved.”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Did this Maurice ever indicate to you that he had starved the boy?”

  The Sheriff frowned, took off his glasses, put them in the pocket of his funereal black suit. “No, ma’am. I can’t say he did. But like I say, I didn’t see the sense of getting all sunk down in the details.”

  “Fair enough,” the Lieutenant said. “But do me a favor, read me this.” He took the file folder, flipped it over until he reached the statement of Ronald Gillis’s mother, Mrs. Etta Jean Gillis, then tapped a line that had been highlighted in yellow with his fork.

  The Sheriff took out his glasses, read the line silently. “She later withdrew that statement, sir,” he said.

  “Nah, nah, I’m sure she did,” Lt. Gooch said. “But just read it out loud for me.”

  The Sheriff looked at Lt. Gooch for a long moment, his eyes betraying nothing, but still the naked truth and history of the moment running under the surface clear as day. Black men down in this neck of the woods had been putting up with this kind of crap for a long, long time. And it was still habit to keep taking it without complaining. Finally the Sheriff read the line, his voice flat and emotionless. “ ‘Mrs. Gillis indicated to this officer that her cousin Maurice Gillis had remained at her side during the entire service on the morning of Sunday, March 11, 1994.’ ”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “You didn’t have to embarrass him like that, Lieutenant,” I said, as we drove back from the miserable little hamlet that served as the Bascoe County seat.

  “‘I didn’t see no need of getting sunk down in the details, ’” Lt. Gooch quoted the sheriff scornfully.

  “The man’s not even a real cop,” I said. “He did his best. This guy Maurice Gillis confessed. You didn’t have to go and rub his nose in it.”

  “Tell that to Maurice Gillis.”

  I laughed loudly. I imagine it had a cynical sound to it. “Lieutenant, we’ve been driving all over this state, eating fried food and talking to country cops for close on to a week now. And I have to be honest with you, every conversation we have makes it look more and more and more like this whole thing’s a mirage. We got a few mysterious strangers, sure—but one time it’s a tall white guy, the next it’s a short black guy, the next it’s a guy that might be Italian. What we do have, we’ve got DNA out the ying-yang. And there’s not a single case in any of these files where the DNA they’ve found matches any of the DNA in any other case. We’ve got DNA off blood. We’ve got DNA off semen. We’ve got DNA off hair follicles and skin flakes and fingernail scrapings. And it doesn’t match. It doesn’t match, Lieutenant! I’ve checked. I’m sure you have, too.”

  “You being a DNA expert.”

  “Give me a break! Once you get acquainted with these tests, you can just look at the data and tell if you’ve got a match or not. It’s not that hard.”

  Lt. Gooch kept eating.

  “We’re wasting our time. I’d rather go back to Atlanta, start working the Jenny Dial thing.”

  “Nope.”

  “So where are we going next?” I said.

  “Reidsville.”

  The state of Georgia’s death house is located outside the town of Jackson a few hours’ drive south of Atlanta. It contains the worst people in the state, the ones waiting to go under the needle.

  Since death-row prisoners are on twenty-three-hour super-max lockdown, the only way to meet with them is to go to death row itself, meet with them in their cells. Ordinarily this takes a great deal of bureaucratic effort but apparently Lt. Gooch had some kind of powerful bureaucratic mojo working for him: twenty-five minutes after we’d checked in at the visitors’ center, we were standing on the other side of the bars from Maurice Gillis.

  Maurice lay on his bunk, a giant pile of brown fat in a white open-collared shirt and white pants, black stripes running down the outside seams. His hair was long and nappy, and he had light skin with large, dark freckles. He was asleep, mouth open, one arm hanging off the cot onto the floor.

  “Hey!” the guard yelled. “Sweets! Wakey, wakey!” He turned to me. “We call him Sweets.”

  “How come?”

  “Because he’s so sweet,” he said, with no apparent irony.

  “I bet that kid he killed didn’t think he was all that sweet.”

  The guard shrugged. “Around here, you take ’em as they come.” He rattled his night stick on the bars. “Come on, Sweets! Get up now!”

  The fat man stirred, yawned, sat up slowly with a dull, puzzled look on his face. “Huh?” he said, blinking against the light. He was younger than I’d expected, probably only in his midtwenties.

  “You didn’t do it, did you?” the lieutenant barked. I’d been getting the impression that Lt. Gooch was feeling some kind of pressure building inside him. He was not, by nature, a tactful man, but now he was getting worse. First his high-handedness with the sheriff, and then this, yelling at this stupid-looking kid. What was he expecting to accomplish?

  “Huh?” Maurice said.

  “Ronald Gillis,” Lt. Gooch said. “Who the hell you think I’m talking about?”

  Maurice looked at the Lieutenant warily. “Who you is, boss?”

  “My name is Mechelle Deakes,” I said, jumping in before Lt. Gooch could speak. “I’m an investigator from Atlanta. This is Mr. Gooch. We work together.”

  Maurice squinted at me, giving me a long up-and-down look. I suppose any female gets that treatment when they come into a prison. There was nothing predatory about the way he looked at me, though, just a sort of sweet, boyish interest. “What y’all want, ma’am?”

  “There’ve been some inconsistencies identified in your case. By the police. We’ve been sent down to discuss them with you.”

  “Huh?” Maurice may or may not have been sweet tempered, but it was clear he was no genius.

  “Right,” I said. “It’s the governor’s new task force on false imprisonment. Y’all heard about it? We’re looking into your case. See if there’s something here we can work with.”

  Maurice yawned. His gaze slid down
to my breasts and stayed there.

  The Lieutenant snapped at him again. “We’re talking about the possibility of getting you out of this shithole. Does that interest you, you moron, or are we wasting our time?”

  “Out?” Maurice’s sleepy gaze shifted to the lieutenant. “What you talking ’bout, out, boss?”

  “Out out. I’m talking out out, boy.”

  Maurice’s eyes narrowed slightly, not so much in suspicion as confusion. It was taking him a while to process the whole thing. If this kid’s IQ was more than 60, I’d have been shocked. I approached the bars and spoke to him in a low voice, “Maurice, honey, this is one of those things that only happens in the movies. You know what I’m saying? A couple of strangers walk in off the street saying that maybe—just maybe—they can save your life. But for us to help you, you got to be straight with us. You understand me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Now I want you to tell us exactly what happened that day.”

  “What day, ma’am?”

  “The day your cousin Ronald disappeared.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Maurice sat up in the cot and looked down at the floor. “Well, see, I went over to pick the boy up. In my car. I got me a job at the schoolhouse over in Greenville, you know what I’m saying? Sweeping up? So I done saved up some money, bought me a car. 1982 Oldmobile. Cutlass. SS. With the V8 engine. Smooth ride.” He smiled fondly. “Ronnie and his mommy, Etta Jean, they come with me down to the church. And so we was in the church, you know. And Ronnie, him and some other kids, they snuck out. So then after the service, we went outside. And Ronnie, he done got lost.” Maurice licked his lips. “And we be looking. Whole congregation be looking. And then the high sheriff come out. Had him some white man with dogs.”

  “But the dogs didn’t find anything.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Okay, now according to the sheriff, you confessed to abducting Ronald.”

  Maurice seemed to be thinking. “To what?” he said.

  “Abducting. That means kidnapping. You know what kidnapping is.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s when I done took Ronnie away. And did them bad things.”

  “Now, when you just explained what you did that morning, you didn’t say anything about kidnapping him. You said you were in church all morning.”

  Maurice nodded, trying to be helpful. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So which is it?”

  Maurice kept nodding. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Maurice, see, I’m asking you. What I want to know is, did you stay in the church all morning—”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Or did you abduct, kidnap, whatever you want to call it, did you take Ronald Gillis off somewhere and do the bad things to him?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This is either/or, Maurice. Either you stayed in church. Or you abducted the boy. Can’t be both.”

  This logical conundrum seemed to have stumped Maurice.

  “Maurice?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Well, I must of did bofe.”

  “You did both. You stayed inside the church. Right next to Etta Jean. Listening to the sermon, singing hymns, clapping your hands—”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And at the same you were out there doing something to Ronnie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lt. Gooch sighed loudly.

  I said, “Tell me what you did with the boy.”

  Maurice ducked his head once or twice. “It was how the high sheriff said it was. I done took the boy. I . . . it’s a word for it. The high sheriff said it. Entice. You know what I’m saying? I entice Ronnie with me. I entice him up and carried him in the car with some ice cream or something. And then it’s this old building back in the woods near the church. Old plantation house, you know what I’m saying. When I was kids, I use to play all up in there. We play cowboys and Indians and everything? And so I entice him in it. And I . . .” He shook his head, like a slow boy in school trying to remember the answer to a hard question in science class. “I forget what happened then.”

  “Why did you do it, Maurice?”

  “Do what?”

  “Take him to the old plantation house.”

  “Oh.” Maurice smiled. “It was like, you know, because I had them desires.”

  “What desires?”

  “Well, the high sheriff, he told me some people they got what they call pervert desires, see? With little boys or like that? And so I had me some of them pervert desires on Ronnie. Which it was like how come I carried him back in them woods, ma’am.”

  I stared at this poor fool for a while, trying to think how to draw out what had really happened. Finally I said, “When I first came in here, you looked at me in a certain way. You recall that?”

  Maurice smiled shyly.

  “You recall the way you looked at me. Looking me up and down?”

  “I ain’t mean nothing by it, ma’am. I couldn’t hardly help it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause you such a fine lady. We all locked up and everything, don’t get to see no ladies hardly never.”

  “You looked at me in a certain way because I’m a lady. Did you look at you cousin Ronnie like that?”

  Maurice looked at me like I’d asked an extraordinarily foolish question. “How come I would do that?”

  “I’m asking you. Would you look at Ronnie like you looked at me? Would you check him out like that?”

  He laughed. “Ma’am, now come on, it don’t make no sense to look at no little boy like that. You a fine lady, and he just a little boy.”

  Lt. Gooch sighed again. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. I looked over at him, and for the first time he looked sad. “Maurice,” he said in a soft voice. “My name’s Hank. Tell me what happened when the high sheriff talked to you about Ronnie.”

  Maurice nodded. “Yessir. Well. It was a few times.”

  “Tell me about the last time. When they carried you up and put you in the jailhouse. Tell me about that.”

  “Yessir. Well, it was him and Deputy Rose and Deputy Martin. They come in a car. And they took me in the car and they read me off a card. You know, like on TV?”

  “Your Miranda rights?” I said.

  “No. Like, you have the right to remain silent.”

  “That’s Miranda. Those are your rights.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, they read to me off the card. And then they say, don’t talk till we get back to the jailhouse. So then they carries me to the jailhouse and we gets out, and they puts me in this little-bitty old room. And I set there a while. Seem like a long time. Done fell asleep once or twice. After a while, tell you what, I’m fin to get hungry!” He smiled, thinking back. “Finally the high sheriff come in. Him and some white man from up at the state. And they fin to talk to me. Seem like they talking and talking and talking. They keep talking about blood and this and that. And, Lord, I’m getting so hungry. My goodness gracious!” He smiled again, smiling like somebody might do when they were thinking back on running a marathon or something else that was painful but worth all the effort in the end.

  “They was talking up one side, down the other. Finally I axe can I get a little bite of something.” Maurice shook his head. “They said, ‘No, son. Got to get the truth out of you, then we gone get you something to eat.’ Well, they be talking about this here blood again, talking about this here DMA, right? DMA. I know all about DMA now. It’s in your blood, what it is. They got the DMA, ’cause they done took out my blood a month ago. They got the DMA and they got the DMA off Ronnie’s shirt. See? So it was the proof.”

  “It was the proof of what?” I said.

  “How I entice him up and put him in the plantation.”

  “And how’d the DNA get on his shirt?”

  “From me cutting myself.” Maurice held up his hand, showed me one of his fingers. “It was off of this finger. Or this one. I forget.”


  “So they told you they had the proof of what happened from the DNA.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And that’s when you told them what happened.”

  “No ma’am! I held up staunch. The high sheriff done told me that later. He slap me on the shoulder, tell me I done held up staunch, done held up like a man, but the troof done finally set me free.”

  “How long did they talk to you in there?”

  Maurice looked thoughtful. “Pert good long while. Tell you what, I could of ate a whole hog, time they finally clap me up in the jailhouse. The high sheriff, he sent him a deputy cross the street got me a whole plate of barbecue, five piece of whitebread, string beans, chicken, turnip greens, co-cola, rice, gravy, bake beans, bread pudding.” Maurice smiled again. “Yes, Lord! I ate the whole thing. Then I went slap to sleeping!”

  “Let me try this again, Maurice. What time did they pick you up?”

  “It was before I was fin to go to work.”

  “So, what, like six, seven o’clock in the morning?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Be about right.”

  “And what time did you finally tell the sheriff what happened to Ronnie?”

  “Couldn’t exactly say. I know it done got dark and then it done got light again.”

  I stared at him. “You saying they had you in there for twenty-four hours? They didn’t feed you for twenty-four hours?”

  Maurice nodded proudly. “Yes ma’am. I guess that’s right. I done held up staunch.”