Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Too many heads bursting into orange flames, I guess.”

  “Do you know,” said Davidson, “that we’re the only civilized nation in the world that still has the death penalty?”

  “Actually, you’re wrong about that.”

  “Oh?”

  “No civilized nation still has the death penalty.”

  “Now that,” said Davidson, “sounds more like the Jessica Woodruff I know and love. The fighter. Listen, don’t worry about Johannsen-”

  “Jorgensen.”

  “-Jorgensen. Let him get his rocks off, running around playing Perry Mason. He’ll get tired of it soon enough. You didn’t lose your cool with him, or anything, did you?”

  “No, no,” said Jessica. “In fact, I told him I’d put one of our investigators on it, see if he could track down the mysterious three-fingered man.”

  “Good. He’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

  But August Jorgensen was anything but fine. He’d found Jessica Woodruff rather dismissive on the phone. When he’d first gotten through to her - he’d reached her on her cell phone, while she was in the back of a cab on the Queensboro Bridge - she’d had trouble understanding the importance of his new discovery. Then, when Jorgensen had explained how finding the man could shed new light on whether Boyd Davies was able to connect his act to its consequences, she’d turned patronizing, promising to assign an investigator to check it out.

  Well, Jorgensen didn’t need some investigator to tell him how many fingers the man had; he’d counted them himself, a hundred times already. She was giving him lip service, is what she was doing.

  One of August Jorgensen’s admitted shortcomings as an appellate judge had been his inability to delegate responsibility. His budget had allowed him to maintain a staff consisting of two law clerks and a secretary, all full-time employees. A two-year clerkship for a United States Court of Appeals judge was a plum job, and each January graduating law review seniors from Harvard, Michigan, Yale, Columbia, DePaul, and the rest of the country’s top law schools had flooded him with more résumés than he could read. He’d tried his best to hire the best and the brightest, while keeping an eye out for women and minorities (a practice unheard of among his all-male, all-white colleagues). They’d turned out to be genuine scholars - almost every one of them - talented researchers and gifted writers. And yet, somehow, Jorgensen had always ended up in the stacks himself, hunting down some elusive precedent or arcane footnote, or hunched over his typewriter, putting his personal touch into a decision or a dissent (and there’d been no shortage of dissents), long after everyone else had been home in bed.

  He just hadn’t been able to help it.

  Any more than he could help it now.

  It wasn’t that Trial TV didn’t have good investigators; he was quite sure they did. They certainly had enough money to go out and hire retired FBI agents and CIA sleuths and big-city homicide detectives. The best and the brightest, just like Jorgensen’s law clerks. But as capable as they were, they lacked one thing. And that one thing was passion, fire. To everyone else, whether it came down to a matter of writing a legal opinion or picking up a trail grown cold over sixteen years, it was just a job.

  To Jorgensen, it would become a mission.

  He would go back up to Virginia. He would do it himself. With winter socked in as solid as any fog, what better did he have to do with his time but read and pass the days? He would go to the hill country, to the place where little Ilsa Meisner had had the life choked out of her one September afternoon, long ago. To the place where Wesley Boyd Davies had been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. To the place where folks tended to grow old under the same roof where they’d grown up, and would be likely to remember a law enforcement officer missing two fingers on his right hand.

  Virginia is not so much a single state as many smaller states passing themselves off as one. To the northeast, it is a network of suburbs serving Washington, D.C., going by names like Arlington, Alexandria, Annandale, Reston, and Falls Church. Due south lies Richmond, the state capital, at the hub of crisscrossing interstates. From there, one can continue south through Petersburg and Emporia all the way to the North Carolina border, or east-northeast over to Charlottesville. But a more tempting route lies to the southeast, past Tallysville and Williamsburg and on to where the land meets the ocean. Here lie cities with grander names, like Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, and Virginia Beach, guarding the gateway to Chesapeake Bay. Here billionaires do business over lunch at outdoor cafés, gazing out across an azure sea, while hired captains tend their yachts.

  And far to the west, there is another Virginia, a Virginia of aromatic spruce and cedar, and breathtaking mountain ranges that together comprise the Appalachians, but whose names invite not so much listing, but singing: Blue Ridge. Cumberland. Allegheny. Black Creek. Shenandoah.

  That leaves the south-central part of the state, an expanse that many Virginians would just as well forget about altogether. Here one discovers towns bearing names that are somewhat less pretentious, like South Boston, Red House, Horse Pasture, Motley, Mike, Henry, Mayo, Hurt, Dry Fork, Union Hall, and Pittsville. There are no fancy capitol buildings here, no azure seas, no majestic mountain ranges. Instead, there are dirt farms, trailer parks, feed stores, and filling stations, peopled with poor whites, and even poorer blacks.

  This was the part of Virginia that August Jorgensen came to, his red pickup truck bouncing along and kicking up dust behind it. He stopped at three different motels along a twenty-mile stretch of Route 29, but none of the proprietors was interested in putting him up once they heard he had a dog. Finally, just outside of a place called Gretna, he spotted a small sign in front of a blue frame house.

  CLEAN ROOMS SOME WITH BATHS

  A black woman answered the door and looked him up and down through thick glasses. “How come the white folks wouldn’t take you in?” she asked.

  “I’m not too sure,” said Jorgensen. “Maybe it’s because my dog’s black.”

  She chuckled at that, and said her name was Ruby Mason, and he knew he’d found a place to say. He paid her $60 in cash, to cover the first two nights of his stay, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that breakfast was included, “as long as you can get yerself into the kitchen by eight.” He assured her that would be no problem.

  They followed her up a well-worn staircase lined with photos of smiling children.

  “Dog don’t bite, does he?”

  “Not once in all the years I’ve had him.”

  “You don’t think maybe he’s been savin’ up, do you?”

  The room was small but, as promised, clean. And it was one of those with a bath, not too far down the hall. Right before she left them alone, Jorgensen removed a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and unfolded it. “Any chance you might recognize this fellow?” he asked her. “Picture’s close to twenty years old, but if you look closely, you can see he was missing a couple of fingers on one hand.”

  “Then he most likely still is,” said Ruby. “They don’t grow back, you know.”

  “No,” he said, “I guess they don’t.”

  She studied the drawing for a minute. “Nope,” she said. “Anyway, this here is farm country. Lotsa folks around here be missin’ fingers. Toes, too. Them machines, they eat ‘em up. Jus’ like that.”

  He spent a day and a half getting the lay of the land, driving from Gretna to places like Pittsville, Sandy Level, Dusty Hill, and Little Hollow. Everywhere he went, he brought along Boyd Davies’s drawing of the three-fingered man and showed it to anyone willing to take the time to look at it. By the afternoon of the second day, he’d grown bold enough to tell a few people that he was working on a case from sixteen years ago, in which a young girl had been murdered, her body buried in a shallow grave.

  What he found was that the older folks - the ones who’d been living there back at the time - remembered. Not Boyd Davies’s name, or Ilsa Meisner’s, ei
ther, but the case itself. And those who remembered either tried hard to be helpful, or tried hard not to be, depending pretty much on the color of their skin.

  As a result, he learned about a good half-dozen men who had lost this finger or that to a piece of farm machinery, cut a hand off with a chainsaw, or been mangled by a bumper jack. But every last one of them was a black man. It was beginning to seem to Jorgensen that the Good Lord was decidedly not an equal-opportunity amputator.

  He made the rounds of the local police departments, the county sheriff’s office, and the state police barracks. No one he spoke to remembered any law enforcement personnel with missing fingers.

  “Impossible,” said one highway patrolman. “I mean, how’s he gonna fire his weapon with nothin’ to pull the trigger with? His pecker?”

  “Good question,” agreed Jorgensen, biting his tongue to refrain from mentioning that, over the years, he’d actually encountered some officers who’d had two hands.

  He stopped in every diner, restaurant, and fast-food joint he came across, drank more cups of coffee than he’d had in a lifetime, and over-tipped every waitress who would talk to him. But he made it a point to steer clear of the food, which - as best as he could judge - ran the entire gamut from totally inedible to downright dangerous. Instead, he made a deal with Ruby Mason, promising her an extra $10 a day if she’d agree to make him dinner as well as breakfast. It turned out to be the best investment of his life: Ruby was a terrific cook and, living alone and having no other takers for clean rooms at the moment, she was more than happy to oblige. The first night of their new arrangement she served him like a maid, donning an apron and ladling pork chops, stewed tomatoes, and rice onto his plate.

  “No, no,” he explained. “My offer’s only good if you’ll sit down and eat at the table with me.”

  She pondered that for a moment, but by the second night, she’d gotten rid of the apron and set a place for herself, across from his. But not without giving him a hard time about it.

  “You are one strange old white man,” is how she put it.

  He couldn’t have felt more honored.

  On the fourth day, Jorgensen caught a break. He’d struck up a conversation with a man stacking pallets of two-by-fours at a lumberyard over in Leesville.

  “You handle that forklift pretty good,” Jorgensen said.

  “Ain’t a forklift,” said the man.

  “Oh?” It sure looked like a forklift to Jorgensen. But he was looking for information, not an argument.

  “This here’s a hi-lo,” the man explained. “See the way I can raise the platform all away up, like this?” And he demonstrated, by pushing forward a lever that proceeded to lift the two-by-fours a good ten feet off the ground, threatening to return them to the very treetops they’d come from.

  “Dang!” said Jorgensen. “I guess that shows you how much I know.”

  “Shucks,” said the man, but he was obviously pleased to show off his superior knowledge. “I prob’ly don’t know much about whatever it is you do, know what I mean?”

  “Could be,” said Jorgensen.

  “So what line a work you in, anyway?”

  “Me? I settle claims for an insurance company,” Jorgensen lied. “It’s my job to track down people who are owed money from accident settlements, but haven’t claimed it.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out Boyd Davies’s drawing, which by this time was showing signs of wear.

  “Sheeeet,” said the hi-lo operator. “I hope my name’s on that list.”

  “Ain’t a list,” said Jorgensen. “It’s an old drawing of a man I’m looking for right now.” He unfolded it and showed it to the man.

  “Nice pitcher.”

  “Know him?” Jorgensen asked. “Bear in mind, it’s been some years since this drawing was made.” He was talking to a white man, so he was purposefully vague about the length of time. “They say the guy mighta been a law enforcement officer of some sort. And if you look real close there, you can see he’s missing two fingers on his right hand.”

  “That what the accident was about?”

  Jorgensen pointed a finger at the man, a gesture meant to equate him with a rocket scientist.

  “Shucks,” the man said again.

  “Know him?”

  “‘Fraid not. There’s a lot a nigras runnin’ around shorta fingers,” he said, effectively combining negro and nigger into a single word. “But the only white man I know like that is Clement Brownlee, over in Rocky Mount.”

  “Clement Brownlee?”

  “Yeah, but don’t ask for him by that name. No one’ll know who yer talkin’ about.”

  “Okay then,” said Jorgensen. “What name should I use?”

  “His nickname.”

  “And that would be-”

  The man smiled mischievously, before delivering his carefully orchestrated punch line. “Why, Three-finger Brown, a course!”

  Jorgensen’s polite smile evidently failed to satisfy the man, who promptly launched into an elaborate explanation. “See, there was this feller, Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown. That was his true name, swear to Jesus. Lost two fingers to a thresher, he did, when he was a young’un. But a cause a that, he was able to break off a wicked curve on a baseball, right offa the stub where his fingers had used to a been. So guess what they called him?”

  Jorgensen shrugged, as though he still had no idea.

  “Three-finger Brown!”

  This time, Jorgensen laughed heartily.

  Rocky Mount turned out to be almost an hour’s drive to the west, just off State Highway 40. Three-finger Brown turned out to be something else.

  Over the years, Clement Brownlee had lost more than a couple of fingers. A diabetic who prided himself on shunning insulin (“That stuff’s for AIDS patients and faggots,” he explained to Jorgensen), he’d miraculously lived into his seventies. But along the way, he’d parted company with his eyesight, one kidney, six fingers, and all of his toes. Presently confined to a wheelchair (“I can still walk, but I fall over a lot”), he seemed happy to have someone to talk to.

  “Nope,” he told Jorgensen, “I never carried the little girl’s body. Remember the case, though. It was the talk of the county at the time. Nineteen eighty-one, wasn’t it?”

  “Right around then.” It had actually been 1985.

  “Horrible thing, horrible thing. Family never did get over it, from what I heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “Older brother got hisself kilt in a car crash, and their mama just wasted away till she died. Wouldn’t eat nuthin’ after the killin.’“

  “And the rest of the family?” Jorgensen realized he’d shown little concern for the surviving Meisners. It was an occupational hazard of working for the defense, he guessed: You had only so much sympathy to spread around.

  “Other two kids moved away, up North or out West somewhere, I dunno.” He shifted in his wheelchair, grimacing as his body settled itself into a slightly different position.

  “And the daddy?”

  “The daddy,” said Brownlee. “He took it worst of all.”

  Jorgensen tried to imagine what could be worse than killing yourself in a car accident or starving yourself to death. He expected to hear that Kurt Meisner had blown his brains out, slit his wrists, or worse. It was the worse that had him worried.

  But Brownlee surprised him. “Last I heard, he was livin’ up in Ronoke,” he said, “in some kinda rest home.”

  That surprised Jorgensen. From what he’d read in the file, he had the impression that Ilsa’s father had been around forty at the time of the tragedy. That would put him in his mid-fifties now. Then again, maybe Jorgensen’s memory was failing him. That happened more and more these days, it seemed.

  “How old is he?” he asked.

  “The daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I dunno,” said Brownlee, shifting his weight again. “Sixty?”

  “You know the name of the rest home?” Jorgensen asked. Roanoke was no more th
an twenty miles north of Rocky Mount. It might be worth the drive, to show Boyd Davies’s drawing to Kurt Meisner, see if he remembered a three-fingered lawman. Of course, there was no way Jorgensen could show him the entire drawing; doing so would force him to look at the recovered body of his daughter all over again, and likely set him back another sixteen years.

  Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

  “So far as I know,” said Clement Brownlee, “ain’t but one rest home up there. Ronoke ain’t exactly the capital of the world, you know.”

  Tim Harkin had the feeling he’d reached the very edge of the world. The first time he’d come out to the lighthouse, Ray Gilbert had done the driving, with Jessica Woodruff beside him in the passenger seat. That had left Harkin in the back seat, with his view obstructed, and he hadn’t paid much attention to what was ahead of them. Now, alone behind the wheel of his own car, he’d been forced to concentrate carefully as he crossed the rickety bridge and followed the narrow road as it snaked its way through the dunes and finally down to the ocean’s edge.

  Only to find no sign of the old man, his pickup truck or his dog.

  The lighthouse itself was unlocked, and Harkin swung the heavy door open and leaned his head inside. “Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?”

  The only answer was the echo of his own voice, bounced back to him by the hard walls of the structure. Harkin had grown up on a farm outside of Memphis, and the lighthouse reminded him of nothing more than a silo that had had the corn cleaned out of it.

  Cavernous, cylindrical, and empty.

  He sat down against the outside wall and waited for an hour, and another hour after that. He’d driven four hours to get there, and the drive home would take even longer in the dark. He needed to see Jorgensen, needed to let him know what he himself knew. If the judge still wanted in, so be it. But he had a right to know. An informed decision, wasn’t that what they called it?

  But by now the sun was casting long shadows over the dunes, and Harkin was leery of driving back to the mainland in the dark. He gave it another half an hour, then found a sheet of paper in his glove compartment and penned a note to the old man.