by Safran, John
Knives
Vincent skipped over the welcome mat, into the black woods, two knives in his waistband, one knife in his hand. The one in his hand, Vincent later claimed, was the knife Richard came at him with. Vincent slung it deep into the darkness as he pelted to his mum’s back door.
Vincent burst into the living room, sweating, breathing hard, holding his stomach. His stepfather, Alfred, eyed the two butcher knives. One seemed clean, at least to Alfred’s eyes, the only light in the living room a glowing TV. The other knife was smeared with blood from tip to handle.
Alfred’s black Ford pickup sped toward a town called Piney Woods. He curved into Highway 49, the road gently rising to become a bridge. Vincent rolled down the window as if about to light a cigarette. But he didn’t light a cigarette. He flung the two knives out the window. The knives nose-dived over the side of the bridge and landed in thigh-high grass lining a creek.
Wayne remembers a later interview with Vincent in the white cube on the other side of the wall.
“Vincent said, ‘Well, I’m going to change my mind here. I’m going to say I didn’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, you already confessed to it one hundred times.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but you don’t have the murder weapons.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what happened.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’ I said, ‘We don’t need the murder weapon.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you do. I watch TV. I know you need the murder weapon.’ I said, ‘All right, Vincent. I’m going to tell you the truth. We have the murder weapon.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we do.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I said, ‘We found them beside the creek.’ He said, ‘That creek just up from Florence?’ I said, ‘Yeah. That creek just up from Florence.’ He said, ‘What did it look like?’ I said, ‘Well, it looked like a knife. It got a silver blade and a black handle.’ He said, ‘Way to go, man!’”
The Oriental Girlfriend
I ask Wayne and Tim if they were familiar with Vincent before the killing. They’d never heard of him. But when the other investigator, Trip Bayles, drove into the McGee driveway, he thought, I’ve been down here before.
“Vincent had a girlfriend,” Wayne says. “An Oriental girlfriend that he had assaulted with a knife.”
Trip told them Vincent had beaten her like a dog.
“And Trip couldn’t remember her name because a couple of years had passed, but he said, ‘I do remember that he had assaulted her and tried to cut her with a knife or something, and I believe I wound up putting him in jail or something, on a misdemeanor battery charge, or something like that.’”
“Could that have been when Vincent was underage?” I ask, trying to make it sound like a throwaway question.
“He was underage,” Tim says. “He was, like, seventeen at the time or something, and he would’ve taken him to what we call a juvenile detention center.”
I shouldn’t know this. This is what the lawyer Vicky Williams had refused to tell me—the reason Vincent was in juvenile detention when he assaulted the police officers.
Having pickpocketed this secret, I quickly change the topic. I ask about race.
Race
Tim and Wayne tell me this case has nothing to do with race.
“You’ve got to realize,” Tim says of Vincent, “that this is a twenty-year-old young man who’s been in prison most of his teenage life.”
“Richard Barrett had kind of faded out of the picture over the years,” says Wayne.
“He didn’t know who Richard Barrett was,” Tim says. “And that was another thing. When we got to talking to the neighbors, all of the neighbors, the black neighbors, you know, they had heard of Richard Barrett, but they said—one man in particular told me, an older black man, a senior citizen—he said, ‘There’s no way in this world you can convince me that that man was a racist.’ He said, ‘He was the nicest man in this neighborhood.’ He said, ‘If you needed to go down to the barn for some tools,’ he said, ‘Richard Barrett was there to help. He would loan you his tools. He was there to help.’ He said, ‘He visited with people, you know, he rode a bicycle there for exercise, Richard Barrett, and he would ride his bicycle up and down the road.’ He would stop and visit everybody. Not a single neighbor in that neighborhood who was black said anything negative about him. One man pulled up—an older man, I don’t know who he was, a black man who lived in the neighborhood—and when we told him, he said, ‘Is Mr. Barrett okay?’ I said, ‘Well, no sir. He’s passed away.’ He said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘Well, right now, we’re not at liberty . . . but he passed away.’ That man started crying because he loved him.”
Tim drains the last of his water from his polystyrene cup.
The War
“I can’t explain it,” Tim says. “And then there he is, hating black people, but yet he’s wanting black men to sodomize him. Figure that—I don’t know. I have no idea. Was he . . . I mean, was there something wrong with Mr. Barrett? Was he suffering from something? I mean, was he suffering from some kind of dysfunction? I don’t know, I mean, I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
“I think he was a Vietnam veteran,” Wayne says. “And there was a lot of people who returned from Vietnam that saw battle. And I think he saw battle in Vietnam.”
“He may have,” Tim says. “Now, did he suffer from post-traumatic stress? I don’t know. I’m not saying . . . by no means are we saying that all Vietnam veterans act like this. No. By no means. But we don’t know. We can’t explain what was going on in his brain.”
“In his old newsletter,” I tell them, “he’d say Vietnam changed him because the black soldiers weren’t as efficient. And didn’t back him up as much as the white men would.”
“I don’t know what you found out,” says Tim. “And you’ve probably got a lot more to go, but you’ll probably find out that Richard Barrett was a very, obviously, mysterious person. Very mysterious.”
James Drew
I tell Wayne and Tim the Ballad of James Drew. That he was in a holding cell in Rankin County Jail six years ago, with cotton taped on his head to stop the bleeding. And he looked across the cell and there was Mr. Barrett.
That wakes up the room. Tim’s bright eyes dart to Wayne’s bright eyes.
I tell them Rankin County Justice Court has a record of James’s arrest, but not Richard’s.
“There you go,” says Tim. “But I will tell you this—and I don’t know where you need to look—I was told—and I don’t know what year this was—but somewhere in Hinds County, whether it was the City of Jackson or one of the local jurisdictions, but some man had filed an affidavit against Richard Barrett. And had him arrested for sexually assaulting him at that time.”
Is this corroboration of James’s story? James said a boy complained. In Tim’s story it’s a man. Also, James was certain he was in Rankin County, not Hinds County. Maybe it’s another sexual assault or the same one, with the details morphed through the grapevine.
I fold the news about the affidavit away for later and try a shortcut.
“If Richard was in a Rankin County holding cell and got out within hours,” I ask, “would there be records at all?”
“Let me look to see if he’s ever been here.” Tim levers himself up with his hairy hands and leaves the boardroom.
There’s a venetian blind behind Wayne not quite fully shut. I can make out smudges of the outside world, but nothing more. Now and then lollipop colors from prisoner jumpsuits roll by.
The Return of Tim Lawless
“I couldn’t find anything on Richard Barrett being in our jail,” Tim says. “If I was you, I would research Hinds County court records real well, because somebody filed an affidavit against him, somewhere.”
My two front teeth pull off my pen lid. I ask for the names of the courts in Hinds.
“Oh, gosh,” says Tim. “You’ve got the justice court, misdemeanor courts, you got the circuit court. And then you got th
e City of Jackson Court, over there with their police department. And then you got Clinton Municipal Court, the little City of Clinton. So there’s a lot of places.”
Tim twangs the other towns in Hinds: Raymond, Byram, Terry, Utica, Bolton, Edwards. They all have their own courts, too.
“I imagine once he was killed, everyone started talking,” I say. “And that’s how you found out about this affidavit in Hinds County. Do you think there are other ones?”
“That’s all I know,” says Tim. “And actually, Vincent’s attorney, Mr. Scott, he’s the one that leaked that to me about someone filing that against Mr. Barrett years ago. So he knows where it was. Now, I don’t know if he’s going to tell you. I didn’t tell you that. If you want to hit him back up for it, he’ll know.”
Tim escorts me out, through the jail. A two-minute drift through gray corridors and antiseptic smells. Dozens of young men in lollipop jumpsuits roll past me. The young black men look relaxed: Hey, this is just a part of life. The young white men look broken.
Mike Scott Squeaks
I pluck a gum ball from the gum ball machine next to the metal detector at the jail’s entrance. I call Mike Scott and tell him I’ve been told someone filed an affidavit against Richard in a Hinds County court for predatory behavior. Could he point me in the right direction?
Mike squeaks a very brief squeak, which tells me I’m onto something, because Mike isn’t a squeaker. He tries to tease out of me who told me. That might help him understand where to point me, he says. I fumble out, “Just someone.”
He tells me I might like to try the Hinds Justice Court office in Jackson. Third floor. All I’d need to give is Richard’s name.
I bolt to my car and head for Jackson. The only reason I can think of that Mike Scott would tell the police where evidence against Richard Barrett could be found, but not use it in defense of his client, is if Vincent refused to let him.
The Hinds County Justice Court Office, Third Floor
The clerk sealed behind the glass is one of the few white people here. As instructed by Mike Scott, I give her Richard Barrett’s name.
She pounds her keyboard and sucks in her face.
“Oh boy, he has a few!” she says. “Ten citations!”
I want to kiss her like you kiss the newsagent guy who sold you the winning ticket.
“Will you need them printed?” she twangs.
“Yes, please!”
To my ears, the hum of her dot matrix printer sounds sweeter than gospel music. She slides ten sheets of paper under the glass, and I dart to a chair in the nearby waiting area.
Okay, the first one is just a traffic offense: “Improper passing, August 13, 1990, $21 fine.”
Okay, the second one is also just a traffic offense: “Speeding, January 7, 1991, $200 fine.”
Okay, the third is just another traffic offense: “Speeding, January 18, 1995, $100 fine.”
My fingers whisk through the rest: three more speeding tickets, two more improper passings, one “No driver’s license (expired),” and one “Driving while license suspended.”
Where’s my goddamn unwanted sexual advance?
Amish Romance
At Walmart, I’m thumbing through Sisters of the Quilt in the Amish romance section of the Christian book department when my phone trembles on my thigh. I press the vibrating rat to my ear. It’s Mike Scott returning my call. I tell him Hinds County just coughed up Richard Barrett’s speeding tickets. He makes the sound of a man shrugging his shoulders. The McGee case may have rolled to a stop, he says, but he’s still bound by confidentiality. He says the only way he can talk is if Vincent signs a letter of consent. And I haven’t heard back from Vincent.
The Autopsy
After the investigators, the next subpoena the DA’s office had prepared for the trial that never happened was for Adele Lewis. She cut open Richard Barrett at the autopsy.
“I use a large ten-inch chef’s knife, that you would get from the kitchen store,” she tells me over the phone from Tennessee.
She flew in from Tennessee for the autopsy, because Mississippi has too many suspicious deaths and not enough forensic pathologists.
“There is a scale,” she continues, “like you see in a grocery store.”
These are the bits of Richard she weighed on that scale: heart, lungs, liver, spleen, intestines, adrenal gland, internal genitalia, and kidneys.
I think about Richard’s last will and testament. He requested no public or private viewing of his dead body or his remains. There has been no shortage of people denying him that wish in the course of their jobs. I leered over his corpse in the investigators’ boardroom.
Adele says the official cause of Richard’s death is “multiple sharp and blunt force injuries.”
“And the investigators told me there were no defensive wounds. Is that true?”
“He did have some scrapes and bruises on his left arm and on the back of his left hand that could be consistent with defense injuries.”
“Sorry to be tacky,” I say, “but there were suggestions at the start it was a sex crime, and so did you do things like any tests on whether he’d had sex, or whether there was semen on him, or anything like that?”
“No, I wasn’t made aware of that until after the autopsy had been completed and the body had been cleaned.”
She doesn’t sound happy about this.
“Do you think that was a misjudgment by them to not clue you in on that?”
“Well, let me just say, the more information that I have going into the autopsy, the better job I can do.”
Adele says had she been made aware of a sex angle she would have examined Richard with that in mind. For instance, she would have examined his anus.
Here’s a weird thing: Investigator Wayne Humphreys took me through the autopsy process. He said he was in the room when they cut open Richard. This is what Wayne told me he said to the autopsy person, presumably Adele:
“I said, ‘I’m sorry I have to get you to do this, but could you please do a visual look at his rectum to see if there’s any foreign objects?’ Then they spread him and then made an incision—with, like, hedgers you use to prune—to cut up his anus so she could really get inside. She had a look and couldn’t see anything.”
Could one of them be misremembering, or confusing Richard with another corpse? Would you be more likely to remember accurately if you were the one using the hedgers or the one watching? Which one is more likely to get carried away with the story?
I’m being punished for being here too long. The longer you stay, the more stories you get. What am I meant to do now? Burst into the sheriff’s office: Wayne, did you lie about the rectum?
The Murble
“He sucks in his top soup cooler!” cackles the black radio host, a man named Rip. “Ha-ha!”
Rip is sermonizing from the little clock radio on the bedside table in my apartment. The evening air whistles outside my window. Rip says he watched the Republican debate on television. He thinks black candidate Herman Cain intentionally sucks in his top lip to look less African American.
“Stop sucking in your soup cooler, Mr. Cain! We know you’re black!”
My phone buzzes. I pluck it from my pocket and press it to my ear.
“Hello,” I say.
“Murble aiiiiiii,” murbles The Murble.
“Hello?” I say. “Who’s this?”
“Murble ya murble yo lettar murble murble,” says The Murble.
“Murble,” he continues.
This last murble bolts into my ear, down my body, and punches my heart.
“Vincent?” I say, more a breath than a word.
“Aiiiii . . . this is Vincent.”
My eyes dart east, south, north, west. Where’s the Dictaphone? I need to tape this. I’ll need to play it back ten times to decode the murble.
“Thank you so much for ringing me,” I say.
“Aiii,” says Vincent. “Murble murble birfdate murble soshell secureety nomba.”
Social security number?
“Because. I’m. Australian . . .” I say. Enunciating. Each. Word. “I. Only. Have. A. Passport. Number.”
I skid to my suitcase like it’s home base. I make it rain with pens and shirts and socks and peel the passport from the bottom of my suitcase.
I read out my passport number.
“Ya be in penitentry?” Vincent says.
Christ! He must be filling in the visitation form.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t been in a penitentiary.”
“Murble aiiiii dat ell da infomaton a need,” he says.
“How will I know when I can visit?” I say. “Can I call you?”
“No.”
“Is this your cell phone?” I say.
“No.”
“Well, how will I know when it’ll be okay to visit?”
“Ya gave a en’vlope,” he says.
“Oh,” I say, “so you’ll send me the information in the envelope?”
“Aiiiiiiii.”
Vincent McGee hangs up.
8.
VINCENT
The Roads
I’ve been in Mississippi so long, I can feel the difference between the white roads and the black roads. I can feel the difference vibrate up my spine. The white areas are furnished with smoother roads. The black areas are pockmarked with potholes. The whole story of how the world works could be localized to these roads. Earnest would say, “See, this is how the system works. The whites sort it out so they have better roads.” Jim Giles would say, “See, this is what happens. You leave counties in the hands of black officials and they won’t take care of their roads.” I could drive Earnest and Jim around the lumpy and smooth streets of Mississippi all day and night. There they’d be, in the backseat, screaming, using exactly the same facts to explain how the world works in two opposite ways.