“Wanda said you was back.”
“Who’s Wanda?”
“The girl that waited on you.”
“I wanted to talk with you a little more about Wallace.” I traced my finger through a set of initials carved deeply into the picnic table.
She looked down and kicked a stone with her sneaker. “I done told you what I know.” She looked up and exchanged glances with the knot of workers. Her brown eyes looked enormous through the lenses of her over-sized glasses.
“Not here. Somewhere else. You pick when and where.”
“Why you were with the po-lice?”
“What?”
“The man you were with at breakfast. The one that ate all the pork.”
“Ronnie? He’s my partner. A reporter just like I am. He just dresses like the police.”
Vanessa Brown shrugged.
“There are some questions I didn’t ask. Please,” I pleaded.
“Mac-Donald’s,” she mumbled, swallowing the last part of the word.
“Huh?”
“How about at Mac-Donalds? Mickey D’s. By the interstate.”
She glanced at the workers, who were starting to snuff out their cigarettes in preparation for their return to work. “I’ll have to get someone to carry me out there,” she said and after some discussion we agreed to meet at 8:00 p.m. that night. “Just you,” she said.
Bullock was understanding when I got back to the Dodge and told him about the conditions of the meeting. He agreed there was no reason to introduce a fresh face into the equation, someone new Vanessa Brown would have to learn to trust. He did not agree with my initial assessment that the timing of the meeting meant that he would have to handle both of our obit assignments that day.
That afternoon, I took the path of least resistance when the day’s obituary listings from the funeral homes arrived by fax. I selected a former Charlotte City Council member who died at eighty-five. He was long-retired and nearly forgotten but I guessed the clips would be full of background. They were. The reporting went easily and I wrote quickly that afternoon, despite being distracted at one point by Lindsay, who strolled into the kitchen, her hair wet after showering, apparently dressed only in an oversized men’s shirt.
“Panties?” Bullock questioned when she had retreated to her bedroom. He answered his own question. “It’ll be easier to work if I think yes.”
By 7:00 p.m., my obit was done. An almost-full moon rose over the Georgia hills in the distance and pockets of fog filled in low spots in the barren fields as the Dodge crunched down the sand and gravel road of Window and out to the highway. I wasn’t sure why Vanessa Brown had agreed to see me. I reminded myself that almost one hundred years after the Civil War, black people in Hirtsboro still weren’t all that accustomed to saying “no” to a white man.
I could see her as I drove up to the McDonald’s, alone in a booth, framed by a section of the plate glass window that wasn’t covered by a poster touting a value meal, and dressed as she had been that morning. I was starving but I just ordered a soft drink. You can’t eat and ask questions at the same time. I slid into the seat across from her just as a table of white teenagers in backwards hats and cutoff shirtsleeves pushed out of their booth and swaggered out. I looked around the restaurant. Except for the boy behind the counter and a cook in back, Vanessa Brown and I were alone.
She pulled a small gun out of her purse and set it on the table between us. I took a sip of my drink and tried to pretend that placing a pistol next to the fries was normal behavior.
“Thanks for meeting me. I know you told me once but tell me again about what happened the night Wallace got shot. Take me through the whole evening, everything that happened.”
She picked up a straw, removed the wrapper and began tying the straw into knots. “Like what?”
“Well, what time did he come over that night?”
“Maybe around nine o’clock.”
“What did ya’all do?”
“Sat on the porch swing. Talked. Held hands.”
“That all?”
“Kissed.” She giggled, as if she were still a schoolgirl and tied another knot.
“You told me your mom made him leave at around midnight that night. You told me that you walked him part of the way home. Take me on that walk.”
She dropped her straw and tucked her legs underneath her on the booth’s bench so she could sit up taller. “Wallace,” she called to the boy behind the counter, “bring me another suicide.” The boy put a cup under the nozzle that dispensed soft drinks and pressed all the buttons. He brought the mixture to the table and I made a connection.
“Vanessa, are you married?”
“No.”
“Kids?”
She smiled. “Two.”
“How old?”
“Latetia is twelve.” She nodded at the counter. “Wallace is sixteen.”
“Named after Wallace Sampson?”
She shrugged. “It’s a beautiful name so I gave it to him.”
“What do you remember most about Wallace Sampson?”
“How smart he was. He was the smartest boy in the class. Too smart to stay in Hirtsboro.”
“What’d you see in him?”
“He loved me. That’s the thing. He loved me.”
“You still miss him.”
I expected tears and I got them, tears that splashed on the Formica counter and soaked the wrapper of the straw that Vanessa Brown had tied into knots. But I also got anger. “Why do you care so much about Wallace? No one cared when it happened.”
I don’t know what led me. I’d never made the connection before. But I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I took a picture from it that I have kept with me every day of my life since the day it happened—a school picture of Luke. I put it on the table.
“He was my brother. He died at thirteen from a bullet in the head. No one still knows what happened.”
Vanessa Brown took the pistol from the table and returned it to her purse. She pulled out a photo—the class photo of Wallace Sampson, a wallet version of the one on Mrs. Sampson’s wall, and placed it on the table right next to Luke’s. She took my hands in hers and then she began to pray, “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .”
She kept hold of my hands after we had finished. She looked into my eyes. “I walked down our street, out to the corner by the church. He kissed me good-night. He told me he loved me. I stood there in the street and watched him walk toward home. He got to the front of De Sto. The lights were on so I could still see him. He turned back to look where I was standing and then he waved.”
She took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “And then I heard a shot. And then I saw him fall. And then . . . and then I saw Billy Bascom running away from where it happened.”
It took a moment for the words from the killing’s only known eyewitness to sink in.
“You saw someone running away? Who is this Billy Bascom?”
“An old redneck. Hasn’t been in Hirtsboro in years. Worked on cars back then.”
“When you saw him that night, was he carrying a gun?”
“No.”
“And no gun was ever found. Do you think he’s the one who shot Wallace?”
“Don’t know. Like I say, he wasn’t carrying a gun.”
“Vanessa, why didn’t you tell anybody about this before?”
“Scared, I guess. Plus, nobody ever asked.”
Over the next hour, as patrons came and went, I asked her every question I could think of. I was determined to leave no stone unturned. I got a few more details but the guts of the interview came down to the Billy Bascom revelation.
“Thank you,” I told Vanessa Brown when I got up to leave.
“We’ve shared the same pain,” she said and hugged me.
I told Wallace Bro
wn behind the counter to take care of his mother and ordered six cheeseburgers and three orders of fries to go.
The sodium lights had come on in the parking lot and as I walked back to the car I thought what I was seeing was just an odd reflection. But as I got closer, and then when I rubbed the paint, I realized the truth: Someone had scratched “Nigger Lover” onto the hood of the Dodge.
Back at Windrow, the takeout food and the Billy Bascom revelation almost soothed Bullock’s anger—that, and the news unearthed by Brad’s continued digging at Town Hall: J. Rutledge Buchan, the Hirtsboro magistrate who’d presided over our speeding case, was the current owner of the building that housed De Sto.
Chapter Fifteen
We embarked on a frenzy of reporting—the stories of the recently dead by night, the story of a long-dead thirteen-year-old by day.
Bullock suggested sending Bradford Hall to search for any official records that might help us find Billy Bascom, the man Vanessa Brown had spotted running away from the scene. “Ol’ Brad’s two for two,” he pointed out. “He found the police report about the firebomb and he found out that Buchan owns the building that housed De Sto.”
“And that housed de hookers,” I agreed.
“And de hookers. I say we stick with him while he’s hot.”
“I do rather like it,” Brad confessed.
“Property tax records might be able to tell you where he lived,” Bullock said. “We can see if anyone remembers him there. And see if Miss Patty will let you check the death certificates, too. No point in looking for the guy if he’s croaked.”
Bullock and I decided to scour Hirtsboro—door to door, if that’s what it took. “Hell, the whole town ain’t that large,” he said. “We could gather ’em all right there on Jefferson Davis Avenue and ask ’em all at once.”
“That, or on Sunday, we could go church-to-church.”
Our efforts were a study in contrasts. The obituaries were a snap, the facts easy to come by, the whereabouts of the subjects well known. We were getting good at them. And fast.
“I’m gonna do two tonight,” Bullock announced one evening and he did. Of course, I had no choice but to follow suit. For days, we kept that killer pace.
The object of our dayside investigations was more difficult to pin down.
Each day, we’d park the Dodge at the railroad tracks and go about our rounds: the Farmers & Mechanics Insurance Agency, Classen’s Clothes, and the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance Store where I figured we had one of our best shots. If Bascom had worked on cars for a living, I reasoned, maybe he had come in for parts. But to the people at each of those places and others, Billy Bascom was a stranger.
At The Hirtsboro Reporter, editor Glenn Hudson said he had never heard of Bascom and reminded us that the Sampson killing had happened well before his time. When I asked if we could look through The Reporter’s clip files, he laughed.
“There’s your library and photo morgue all rolled into one,” he said, pointing to shelves of oversized volumes holding actual copies of past editions classified by year. “You’re welcome to it.”
I gave silent thanks for electronics and for librarian Nancy Atkinson. Even the old system of clips in envelopes was light years ahead of this. Reading each story in each copy of The Hirtsboro Reporter for the last twenty years in hopes that we might run across a reference to Billy Bascom was simply out of the question.
At Town Hall, Brad found an old property tax listing from a William J. Bascom at a rural route address. The address turned out to be an empty slash pine red clay country lot, its broken concrete trailer pad overgrown with weeds.
“No neighbors,” Bullock observed as we drove away in the Dodge.
By the end of the week, I was getting frustrated. Our big new lead was leading nowhere. We had traces, but no hard truth. More than anything else, I wished we could consult with Walker.
“Maybe I should call him,” I suggested during our dinner break as I stirred a bowl of noodles into a sizzling wok. Brad had joined Lindsay for a few days in New York and with both gone, the cooking had fallen to me. “What harm can one phone call do?”
“It’d cost him his damn job, that’s what it’d do,” Bullock said, plucking a chunk of chopped chestnut from a bowl and popping it into his mouth. “Direct violation of a superior’s order.” He swallowed. “It’s just the opportunity the publisher would be looking for. We’ve got to keep him clean.”
“Well, if we did call him, what do you think he’d say?”
“He’d say, ‘When you guys finish this story, would you mind sending a copy to the old folks home because that’s where I’ll be living by then.’”
We laughed but it got me thinking about something I’d heard Walker tell the projects staff: every day you have to make two lists—what you want to know and who you need to talk to. Every day you work both lists until one of them has nothing left on it. When either of the lists ends, that’s when you know you’re done. You have the story or you don’t.
The list of what we wanted to know was plenty long—starting with who shot Wallace Sampson and why. The list of who we needed to talk to was getting shorter. We needed to take another run at Olen Pennegar but, given our prior experience, that task seemed best left for last. We needed to find Billy Bascom, for sure. But, at least for now, that effort had run into a dead end. And there was one new name on the list—Magistrate J. Rutledge Buchan.
“Ronnie, what do we know about the magistrate?” I asked.
“Brad says he’s a decent guy. Shoots birds with his old man. Been here forever. Appointed to his job by the governor. His daddy was the magistrate before him.”
I lifted the cover of the wok, releasing a steamy billow of soy and ginger. “What about him being the owner of the building?”
“We don’t know if he owned it back then. Plus, if his family goes way back, he probably owns a good bit of property around town.” He dipped a fork into the wok and extracted some noodles.
“I thought you didn’t like this stuff.”
“It’s not bad as long as I get a big ol’ burger for lunch every day at the Hungry Tummy. Anyway, Buchan is worth interviewing if only because he was the magistrate.”
I removed the wok from the stove and dished out dinner.
Sometimes, two people is one too many to take on an interview, an unnecessary show of force. But neither Bullock nor I were willing to stay at Windrow where there was nothing but obits to work on and nothing but work to do. So the next day we piled into the Dodge and headed in search of Judge Buchan.
Patty Paysinger told us when we checked in at Town Hall, “He hasn’t been here today and I don’t expect to see him. You might try up at the house.” And then, “Where you been, Ronnie? I told you not to be a stranger.”
“I think she’s got her eye on you, Ronnie,” I said as we walked the few blocks toward the magistrate’s two-story brick Victorian home.
He ignored me.
No one answered the door at Buchan’s.
“Who knows where he is or when he’ll be back. Let’s just leave a note,” Bullock suggested. “He knows what we’re doing. It won’t exactly catch him by surprise.”
I took my notebook and scribbled a note for Judge Buchan to call us in connection with the Wallace Sampson killing.
“It dodges the point about whether he owned the building back then,” Bullock observed. “Good.”
We both signed it and I added Brad’s name, hoping the association with the Hall family might help. Then I slipped the note into the magistrate’s mail slot.
When we hadn’t heard from him by the next morning, we drove in a pouring rain back into town and left a duplicate note with Patty Paysinger. “I’ll tell him you’ve been looking for him.” She smiled at Bullock. “Thanks for coming by again.”
“Thanks for coming by again,” I sing-songed when we got outside.
“Screw you,” Bullock said, hunching down into his trench coat.
For good measure, we dropped another copy of the note in the U.S. Mail.
The rain slacked by dusk. By the time Bullock and I had finished our first obits of the evening and had eaten another veggie dinner, the sky had cleared. Bullock stepped out on the deck overlooking the swamp and lit a cigarette. I went out with him.
The night had turned crisp. Moisture rose from the land and the swamp, forming a low fog that hovered just above the fields, trapping the smell of cold, rich earth. Light lingered in the Georgia hills on the western horizon where a quarter moon was rising bright and clear.
Bullock extracted his miniature expandable telescope from his shirt pocket and squinted into it, scanning the sky. “Jesus, look at Venus.” He handed the telescope to me just as the phone in the kitchen alcove rang. Bullock went in to answer it and returned a minute later, shaking his head,
“I’ll be goddammed. That was the metro desk. The latest edition of Saints & Sinners is just out and guess what? Because of our extraordinary work on obituaries, we’ve been named Saints & Sinners’ Co-Employees of the Week!” We exploded into laughter.
“What in hell do you imagine crazy Carmela was thinking?”
Bullock sniffed. “Probably just sucking up to the publisher. S&S said it was the kind of stories local should be doing more of. Sounds just like something Reich would say.”
“I’ve never been Employee of the Week. Do we get some kind of prize?”
“In the great Charlotte Times tradition, we get the satisfaction of a job well done.”
“Well, at the very least, this deserves a toast.” I went inside and returned with the bourbon and tumblers that had become a fixture of what he called our B&B (bourbon and bullshit) sessions on the deck.
“To Ronnie and Matt,” I said lifting my glass. “Never were they more valuable to the newspaper than when they were away.”
We laughed. Bullock draped a white napkin over his left forearm and, doing his best imitation of a steward, poured us another stiff round. I looked at my watch. It was after 8:00 p.m. “What about the rest of the obits?”
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