“Is it?” Quarles asked.
Jefferson nodded.
“You ought to say it.”
“It’s Mollie. Mollie Avery,” Jefferson muttered.
Quarles gently lowered the cloth back over the dead face. “All right. We can go.”
Jefferson waited as Quarles swung the heavy door back into place. He felt the strangest urge to chuckle, to make a joke, to say, You don’t have to lock her in. She’ll stay put. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to weep.
Quarles pushed open a green-painted door — the whole basement seemed to have been painted in that awful light green and dark green two-tone of public buildings in the county — and said, “Let’s sit here a minute and talk.”
Jefferson allowed himself to be ushered in, knowing that this was planned, that Quarles had already arranged with the hospital to have someplace like this little cubbyhole handy for them to converse in. It was a tiny office, equipped with a table and a couple of army-surplus green folding chairs. A Coke machine and a Lay’s vending machine stood shoulder to shoulder at the wall opposite the door. A break room for janitors or orderlies, Jefferson thought. He sank into one of the chairs. It made a metallic protest at his weight.
Quarles shut the door, sat across the table from him. He fished in his uniform pocket. “Smoke?” he asked, extending a pack of Old Golds.
Jefferson shook his head and took a cigarette simultaneously. He patted his pockets until, from his seat across the table, Quarles thumbed his lighter, held it out for Jefferson, and then lit his own cigarette. He snapped the top of the lighter, dropped it into his pocket, and pulled over a green plastic ashtray already crammed with ashes and butts.
“How’s the hand?” Quarles asked.
“Starting to hurt.” In fact it throbbed painfully now. The cigarette seemed to make it worse.
“Bad cut. Heard about the stitches.”
Jefferson nodded. “Did it when you called,” he said.
“What happened?”
Ballew Jefferson wanted again to laugh, to tell Quarles what a transparency he was. But he kept his voice steady: “I was shaving when you called. I use a straight razor. I don’t know, the shock — guess I grabbed the wrong end.”
“Hell of a cut,” Quarles said. “Good thing you didn’t cut any leaders.”
Jefferson, confused for a second, took a deep drag on the cigarette. Leaders? Then it came to him: that was what the country people called tendons. He crushed the cigarette out, only half smoked. “Yes. It bled a great deal, but it’s a shallow cut.” He looked at Quarles, who squinted at him through a thin line of smoke pouring upward from the tip of his own cigarette. “Sheriff, the doctor can tell you that cut was fresh. I didn’t kill Mollie.”
“Didn’t accuse you of it,” Quarles said.
“Didn’t you?”
Quarles raised his eyebrows and smoked on.
Jefferson began to fidget. “Is it permissible for me to leave now?” he asked as the sheriff finished his cigarette.
“Doc Gordon says Mollie Avery was raped,” Quarles said.
Jefferson blinked. “Was she?”
“She had male seed inside her.”
Again that wild impulse to laugh. Male seed! What a bumpkin of a man, what an Old Testament–sounding sheriff.
Quarles continued: “She was tore up bad. In the female parts. Bad.”
Jefferson said carefully, “That’s — shocking.”
“Yeah. Well, Mr. Jefferson, there ain’t nothin’ else you feel like you ought to tell me?”
“What?”
“Anything that would help me.”
Jefferson shook his head. “I told you that I let the woman out at the foot of the street.”
Quarles nodded. “Yeah, and you didn’t see anybody else, and you went straight home, yeah, I know. I mean somethin’ else.”
“Well, ask me, then,” Jefferson said.
“All right. Did you have sexual congress with Mollie Avery?”
Jefferson stood up. “I think I will go now.”
“Do you?”
The sheriff’s eyes were hard, knowing. Jefferson’s hand throbbed away, a drumbeat to the tempo of his heart. “That’s a hell of a thing to ask,” he said quietly.
“Is it?”
“I am respected in this town.”
Quarles nodded. “I know you are. But this is a little town, Mr. Jefferson, and people notice things. And they talk. And I’m trying to find the man who tore that woman in there open, and I need every damn bit of help I can find. And I know the question ain’t respectful, but, hell, I can’t afford the luxury of respect right now. Doc Gordon tells me this woman was maybe raped, and we might have a motive there. But maybe we don’t.”
The sheriff got up, stood behind the table. “Now, I know Billy Resaca didn’t sleep with her, because she never got home for him to. And for some reason I don’t think it was a rape. I don’t know why, but I don’t. Now, if you’ll tell me the truth, and I know it’s the truth, it won’t leave this room, and you’ve got my word on that. But if I ain’t satisfied, I’m gonna dig until I find the truth, and everybody in town is gonna know.”
Jefferson’s lips had compressed to a thin line. “You’re done as sheriff in this town,” he said.
“I may be, but right now I’m still sheriff. And I’m gonna ask you for a straight answer one last time. So you think about it hard, Mr. Jefferson.”
For maybe a quarter of a minute they stood opposite each other. Then it was as if a string holding Jefferson had become suddenly elastic. He melted back into the chair, and his head sank forward onto the table. In a voice quite unlike his own, he said, “I was lonely, Quarles.”
“You slept with her.”
“Yes.” He dragged the word out, ye-e-essssss, a weary sound, heavy with the weight of defeat.
“Okay,” Quarles said. “That’s what I needed to know.”
Jefferson pushed himself back upright. “I’m ashamed,” he said.
“Lots of people in town’d find it hard to forgive you. White man and nigger woman, they'd say.”
The banker shook his head. “Not of that. Not of that. Of the lie. I’m ashamed of the lie.”
In an oddly gentle tone, the sheriff said, “Mr. Jefferson, we all have to learn to live with the lies.” He sounded like a man who knew.
9
Billy Resaca proved an obstinate prisoner. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to call a lawyer. He didn’t want to be quiet. He wanted to hang in the fighting cell, an iron-barred cage in the anteroom of the jail proper, usually reserved for combative drunks, and while hanging there, he wanted to bother the white men in the building.
He yelled, mostly nonsense and obscenities, until his voice grew weak. Then he stamped around the cell, barefoot — Presley had taken his belt, shoes, and socks — climbed the bars, and hung like a monkey two feet below the ceiling, the muscles in his arms bulging under black skin gleaming with sweat. There he shouted hoarse imprecations or sang snatches of song, gospel, rhythm and blues, wordless chants of his own creation.
Gil Ort, who was manning the switchboard, complained to Harmon Presley about the noise. “Get him out of the fightin’ tank anyway,” he said. “I can’t but half hear with him makin’ all that racket.”
Presley looked at Ort with eyes gone tired and murderous. “I was supposed to be off this morning at six. I ain’t eat since yesterday evenin’, and I ain’t slept for a whole day and night. You want that buck moved, you move him.”
Ort, who had grown old and reedy serving Frye County, shook his head. “Ain’t my job, it’s yours. God sake, Harm, you don’t have to get mad at me. Soon as Quarles comes in, you tell him you want to go home.”
Presley swigged his latest cup of coffee. It went down acid and lay in his belly with the last one, burning his gut. “Gettin’ plumb dark out, and where the hell is Sam, that’s what I want to know. What this damn outfit needs is car radios. Damn cheap county. We had a car radio, you could just get him on i
t and get him to shake me loose.”
“Shit, go on home,” Ort told him. “Quarles is out runnin’ this thing down, he loses track of his men, you know that. Go on home, he won’t care a lick.”
Presley, unwrapping a stick of spearmint gum, gave him a lugubrious look of contempt. “You know better than that. Goddamn Marine sheriff we got, he’d kick me out on my ass, I bucked him on somethin’.” Back behind them, in the violent cell, Billy Resaca began yelling, a hoarse, inarticulate “WAAHH!” repeated over and over. Presley winced, thrust the gum into his mouth, turned in the swivel chair, pushed the wooden door open with his foot, and bellowed, “Shut up! I come in there and shut you up in a minute, nigger!” With vindictive movements, Presley folded the gum wrapper into a square and threw it hard into the trash can beside Ort’s desk. “Come in there and shut you up,” he muttered again, jaws working on the gum.
Ort, behind the desk at the dead switchboard, said, “I wish you would.”
Resaca had piped down for the moment. Presley let the door swing closed. “He’s crazy.”
“Playin’ crazy. Knows he’s gonna get burnt for cuttin’ up that nigger woman.”
“Probably.”
“Was a time the county wouldn’t have to go through a trial for somethin’ like that. Somebody cut up a woman like that, white or black, he’d be hangin’ from a tree next sunup.”
“Yeah.” Presley dumped the black, grainy dregs of his coffee into Ort’s trash can.
“Hey. That damn stuff eats the bottom outa my basket. Don’t pour no damn coffee in there, Harm.”
Behind them, in the other room, Resaca began to rattle the door of the cell. Without even looking, Presley could picture him, barefoot, spread-eagled, holding on to the bars with fingers and toes, humping his body back and forth to clang the iron door. “Shit,” Presley said. “Damn crazy nigger.”
“I wish you’d make him stop.”
Presley’s retort was cut off by a scream, Resaca’s scream, pitched absurdly high, painfully high, bubbling hoarsely away to the rasp of exhaled air. Both white men winced. “Get her outa here!” Resaca wailed. “Oh, Christ Jesus Lord get her outa here! Oh God, her guts, get her out, get her out!”
Presley and Ort exchanged a look. Heavily, with the weight of fatigue in his limbs, Presley pushed himself up. He fingered the butt of his revolver. “I think,” he said to Ort, “we might just have ourselves a confession.”
Six
1
Like a gently shelving beach, summer sloped imperceptibly toward autumn. August was going out in a week of warm days and cool nights, September coming on with the promise of fall in her breath.
It was a dry week, a week of clear blue mornings and afternoons partly overcast by white clouds like piles of cotton. Around three o’clock every day the mercury would hit eighty-nine or ninety, warm but not debilitating, comfortable to aching muscles and joints. And not a drop of rain fell all that week. It was the way everyone remembered summer ending, droning lazy days with the cry of July-flies audible even in the center of town, days that moved as slow, sweet, and golden as sorghum syrup.
The corps of old men who sat on the benches at the foot of Private Parks’s statue on the Square continued to meet, weathered and seamed faces red beneath beaten-up old hats, bleared eyes looking out from deep nests of wrinkles, voices slow and clotted and quarrelsome or breaking in high-pitched barks of laughter. They watched the world spin by, these old men, and all the while they seemed as much a fixture of the Square as the statue at its center, living monuments to the way it used to be, faint reproachful images of regret in their present uselessness.
They talked the murder out. It was true, as Officer Ort had observed, that once on a time some folks in Gaither would have done much more than talk. Hands that now were knobbed with arthritis and that clutched a walking stick had once been younger, stronger. Some of the old men, not very many, to be sure, but one or two of them, looking back into the past, could see dark nights and wild rides, sheets billowing, the firelight of torches gleaming red in the sweat of terrified black faces. They could recall the sudden thrumming tautening of a rope, the snap of bone at the end of a drop, the last gargled bloody breath of the swinging body. It had not happened often, but it had happened enough, and not one of the participants ever said he regretted the past, not even those in the county who still occasionally jolted from sleep believing they had heard once again that unmistakable liquid snap.
But now they were old, these men on the benches, and even the one or two who had once been riders of the night finally contented themselves with just talking it out, how it was a shame that any woman, black or white, should suffer the outrages they had heard this one had suffered. What they had heard was only gossip, but in truth, they had gleaned from the talk of the town a pretty good idea of the violence and ruin the killer had inflicted, maybe slightly exaggerated (any great exaggeration of how Mollie Avery met death was almost impossible) but still a better idea than anyone in Gaither could glean from the local paper.
The Advocate headlined the killing, as it was almost obliged to: murder was rare in Frye County, and being rare, was news. Still, the extent of the horror was masked by Editor Jenkins’s artful, bloodless prose: “discovered a body,” “multiple wounds,” “dead on arrival.” None of Tom Davies’s explicit photographs made it into the paper, of course, though someone somehow dug up a five- or six-year-old studio portrait of Mollie Avery, smiling but with eyes wide and apprehensive as they stared into the camera, and a small version of that saw print.
No gore sullied the pages of the Advocate, not in word or picture. But everyone knew what had really happened. It had really been a razor killing, and a nasty one at that. Talk was that the crazy buck the woman lived with had chopped her fine and fed her to his dogs. Maybe a few people down in Possum Town felt something for Billy, some pity, some understanding, some doubt of his guilt. None of that feeling was evident on the Square. A few of the old men on the benches grumbled about the county having to feed Billy Resaca, and old knotted hands gripped walking canes a little tighter. But the sun was warm on aged bones, and times had changed, and besides Billy was only a nigger.
And so, as the week wore on, talk drifted to other concerns. On the Monday after the murder, the Ford Motor Company unveiled its new car: the Edsel. Eddie Voit, owner of the Ford dealership in Gaither, had three on his lot, a sky-blue one and two red ones. Everyone in town, it seemed, went out to look at them, but no one cared to buy, at least not for the first week or so. The bench brigade went, looked, and agreed it was a funny-damn-lookin’ car.
From away up in Washington other news came down, putting the old men in a reflective mood. In a divided and troubled Senate, a man named William Proxmire took over the seat once held by Joe McCarthy. Joe was six months dead. A good man, some of the old men in the Square assured each other. Too bad the damn Reds in the gummint tore him down thataway. A good man, was old Joe McCarthy. They hoped this Proxmire fellow was half the man old Joe had been. You had to admire the way Joe called a spade a spade, the way he wouldn’t take nothin’ off of nobody. A right good old boy, Joe had been.
But so was a senator from a neighboring state, old Strom Thurmond. When the Republicans and the big-city boys tried to push something called the Civil Rights Bill through the Senate, old Strom rared back and told them he planned to filibuster against it. Of course, on Thursday the filibuster broke down, and the senators passed the bill by a margin of sixty to fifteen, but Strom had tried; he had held up his end of the bargain. He had stood tall for Southern ideals. The old men told each other it didn’t matter a bit anyway, things around here weren’t going to change. We know colored people in this town, we understand them. And they know their place. Nobody away up in Yankee Washington was gonna change that. Still, there was a note of uncertainty....
Sometimes, to tell the honest truth, they felt as if they sat on an unstable and threatened little island, the old men on their benches. Why, just this week the Soviet Unio
n had tested a missile that they said could hit any target in the world. Of course, out west our own government held a test of an atomic bomb, the fourteenth in the series. Have to take them Russkies down one of these days, the old men opined. Some of them, the more religiously inclined, recalled that the book of Revelation promised the world would end in fire. Those flames would be as hot as the sun, born in the heart of the atom, maybe, and they would purge the world of its wickedness, burn away its corruption and its sin.
And considering sin, there was that there new theater over just across the street from the Square, the ShadowShow. It opened that week, with maybe half a dozen young folks (and Andy McCory, strangely altered Andy) working for the never-seen Mr. Badon. Sinful, some of the old men called the theater and its dark promise of lies on celluloid, lies to be sent shining to the great white screen. Talking it over, the old men wondered one afternoon what had become of that preacher man who used to show up of an evening to stand on the corner of the Square and harangue the town. Nobody had seen him in some time, and it seemed a shame, in a way, because a man of God like that would surely have some powerful things to say about such a den of iniquity as the ShadowShow Theater.
Look at the titles on the marquee, in those squared-off letters: I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN. Ugly stories about nasty things, hairy monsters or bald-headed ones chasin’ girls around, girls with their titties almost showin’ through tight sweaters. Trash, the men on the Square pronounced it. Ungodly trash about things that never were and never would be real. And just imagine what all them younguns (the old men saw mostly young boys and girls going in the theater in the afternoons) would be up to in the dark. The heads shook, the tongues clucked.
But already, tugging at some of them, though almost unfelt, was the desire to see for themselves, to go into the dark cave of the ShadowShow, to look on the images cast on the screen. Vague stirrings of curiosity moved under some of those tattered hats, and some would, surely enough, go in. Eventually. Not just yet, not when the sun of the last week of August was warm, not while there was somebody on the bench to talk to or just sit companionably beside. They sat on their benches, the old men on the Square, and talked over the news, and waited to die.
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