Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “That’s right. Nothing jumped out when we looked at it.” His eyes flashed angrily.

  “But . . .” Brown said.

  “That’s right. But,” Wilcox replied, “I can’t guarantee he didn’t have some way of getting down into the shit hole that we didn’t see. The tech went in, checked with a light, and then came out, like I told you. I stuck my head in, looked around, and that was it. I mean, one of us would’ve seen anything shoved down that hole . . .”

  “If you wanted to hide something, and you didn’t think you had much time and you wanted to be sure it’d be the last place searched in the most perfunctory fashion . . .” Brown’s voice hovered between lecture and anger.

  “Why not take it out into the woods and bury it?”

  “Can’t be certain it won’t be found, especially when we bring the damn dogs in. Can’t be certain you won’t be seen. But one thing’s for sure. Nobody’s gonna go down there into a shit hole that don’t have to.”

  Wilcox nodded. His voice curled up softly in despair. “You’re right. Dammit. D’you think . . .”

  His thought was interrupted by a sudden, shrill cry from behind them.

  “Get away from there!”

  The three men turned and saw the old woman standing on a back stoop, holding an old double-barreled shotgun at her hip.

  “I will blow you straight to hell if’n you don’t move away from there! Now!”

  Cowart froze in position, but the two detectives instantly started to move slowly apart, one right, one left, spreading the distance between the three men.

  “Mrs. Ferguson,” Brown started.

  “You shut up!” she said, swinging the gun toward him.

  “Come on, Mrs. Ferguson . . .” Wilcox pleaded quietly, lifting both his hands up in a gesture more of supplication than surrender.

  “You, too!” the old woman cried, swinging the barrels toward him. “And both you men stop moving.”

  Cowart saw a quick glance go between the partners. He didn’t know what it meant.

  The old woman turned back toward him. “I tole you to get away from there.”

  He lifted his arms but shook his head. “No.”

  “What you mean, no? Boy, don’t you see this shotgun? I’ll use it, too.”

  Cowart felt a sudden rush of blood to his head. He saw all the fury masking the fear in the old woman’s eyes and knew then she knew what she was hiding. It’s there, he thought. Whatever it is, it’s there. It was as if all the frustration and exhaustion he’d felt for the past days coalesced in that second, and outrage overcame whatever reason he had left. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said again, louder. “No, ma’am. I’m going to look in there, even if you have to kill me. I’m just too damn tired of being lied to. I’m too damn tired of being used. I’m too damn tired of feeling like some goddamn fool all the time. You got it, old woman? I’m too damn tired!”

  With each repetition of the phrase, he’d stepped toward her, covering half the distance between them.

  “You stay away!” the old woman shouted.

  “You gonna kill me?” he shouted back. “That’ll do a helluva lot of good. You just shoot me right in front of these two detectives. Go ahead. Goddammit, come on!”

  He began to stride toward her. He saw the shotgun waver in her arms.

  “I means to!” she screamed.

  “Then go ahead!” he screamed back.

  His rage was complete. It overcame the delusion he’d clung to of Ferguson’s innocence, so that it all poured out of him. “Go ahead! Go ahead! Just like your grandson killed that little girl in cold blood! Go ahead! You gonna give me the same chance he gave her? You a killer too, old woman? This where he learned how to do it? Did you teach him how to slice up a little defenseless girl?”

  “He didn’t do nothing!”

  “The hell he didn’t!”

  “Stand back!”

  “Or what? You maybe just taught him how to lie? Is that it?”

  “Stay away from me!”

  “Did you, goddammit? Did you?”

  “He didn’t do no such thing. Now get back or I’ll blow your head off!”

  “He did it. You know it, goddammit, he did it, he did it, he did it!”

  And the shotgun exploded.

  The blast shredded the air above Cowart’s head, singeing him and knocking him, stunned, to the ground. There was a rattle of bird shot against the walk of the outhouse behind him; shouts from the two detectives, who simultaneously went for their own weapons, screaming, “Freeze! Drop the gun!”

  The sky spun above him and his nose filled with the smell of cordite. He could hear a thumping sound deep beyond the ringing from the shotgun’s explosion, which confused him, until he realized it was the echo of his own heart in his ears.

  Cowart sat up and felt his head, then stared at his hand, which came away damp from sweat, not blood. He stared up at the old woman. The detectives both continued to shout commands, which seemed lost in the heat and sun.

  The old woman looked down at him. Her voice was shrill. “I told you, Mr. Reporter Man, I told you once before, I’d spit in the eye of the devil hisself if’n it’d help my grandson.”

  Cowart continued to stare at her.

  “You dead?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied quietly.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she said bitterly. “Like to blow your head clean off. Damn.”

  Her skin had turned an ashen gray. She dropped the weapon to her side.

  “Only got one shell,” she said.

  She looked over toward the two detectives, who were approaching her, weapons drawn, crouched and ready to fire. She fixed her eyes on Brown.

  “Should have saved it for you,” she said.

  “Drop the weapon.”

  “You gonna kill me now, Tanny Brown?”

  “Drop the weapon!”

  The old woman humphed at him. Slowly, she took the shotgun and carefully set it against the door behind her. Then she stood and faced him, folding her arms.

  “You gonna kill me now?” she asked again.

  Wilcox bent toward Cowart. “You okay, Cowart?”

  “I’m okay,” the reporter replied.

  He helped pull Cowart back to his feet. “Christ, Cowart, that was something. You really lost it.”

  Cowart felt suddenly elated. “No shit,” he laughed.

  Wilcox turned toward Brown. “You want me to cuff her and read her her rights?”

  The detective shook his head, reached over, and grasped the shotgun, cracking it open to check the double chambers. He pulled out the spent shell and flipped it to Cowart. “Here. A souvenir.”

  Then he turned back to Ferguson’s grandmother. “You got any other weapons lying around?”

  She shook her head at him.

  “You gonna talk to me now, old woman?”

  She shook her head again and spat on the ground, still defiant.

  “Okay then, you can watch. Bruce?”

  “Boss?”

  “Find a shovel in the storeroom.”

  The police lieutenant holstered his revolver and handed the emptied shotgun back to the old woman, who scowled at him. He walked back to the outhouse and gestured to Cowart. “Here,” he said, handing the reporter the crowbar. “Seems like you earned first swipe at this thing.”

  The old wood protested slowly at the assault first with the crowbar, then with the shovel Wilcox discovered by the side of the shack. But when it finally cracked and gave way, it tore apart rapidly, exposing a fetid hole in the earth. Quicklime had been used for sanitation. White streaks covered the gray-brown mass of waste.

  “In there somewhere,” Cowart said.

  “I hope you got all your shots,�
� Wilcox muttered. “Anybody got any open cuts or sores? Better be careful.”

  He grabbed the shovel out of Brown’s hands.

  “It was my search fucked up three years ago. Mine, now,” he whispered grimly. He took off his coat jacket and found a handkerchief in a pocket. This he tied around his face, over his nose and mouth. “Damn,” he said, his words muffled by the makeshift mask. “You know this ain’t a legal search,” he said to Brown, who nodded. “Damn,” Wilcox said again.

  Then he stepped down into the ooze and muck.

  He groaned once, muttering a series of expletives, then he set to uncovering each layer of refuse, scraping away with the shovel.

  “You keep your eyes on the shovel,” he said, breathing through his mouth, hard. “Don’t let me miss something.”

  Brown and Cowart didn’t reply. They just watched Wilcox’s progress. He kept at it steadily, carefully, slowly working his way through the pile. He slipped once, catching himself before sliding down into the hole, but coming up with waste streaking his arms and hands. Wilcox simply swore hard and continued working with the shovel.

  Five minutes passed, then ten. The detective continued to dig, pausing only to cough away some of the stench.

  Another half dozen swipes with the shovel and he muttered, “Got to be down a couple of years, now. I mean, how much shit can that old lady produce in a year?” He laughed unhappily.

  “There!” Cowart said.

  “Where?” Wilcox asked.

  “Right there,” said Tanny Brown, pointing. “What’s that?”

  The corner of some solid object had been uncovered by a swipe with the shovel.

  Wilcox grimaced and reached down gingerly, seizing the object. It came free with a sucking sound. It was a rectangular piece of thick synthetic material.

  Brown crouched down, staring, took the material by the corner and held it up.

  “You know what this is, Bruce?”

  The detective nodded. “You bet.”

  “What?” Cowart asked.

  “One slice of car carpet. You remember, in Ferguson’s car, on the passenger side, there was a big piece of carpeting cut out. There it is.”

  “You see anything else?” Brown asked.

  Wilcox turned back and poked with the shovel in the same location. “No,” he said. “Wait, unh-hunh, well, what have we here?”

  He plucked what appeared to be a solid mass of refuse from the muck, and handed it to Brown. “There it is.”

  The police lieutenant turned toward Cowart. “See,” he said.

  Cowart stared hard and finally did see.

  The lump was a pair of jeans, a shirt, and sneakers and socks all rolled tightly together, tied with a shoelace. The years of being under the refuse, covered with lime, had worn them away to tatters, but they were still unmistakable.

  “I’ll bet the farm,” Wilcox said, “that there’s blood residue on those clothes somewhere.”

  “Anything else down there?”

  The detective struggled for another moment with the shovel. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on out, then.”

  “With pleasure.” He scrambled from the pit.

  The three men wordlessly walked back into the yard. They spread the items out carefully in the sun. “Can they be processed?” Cowart asked after a moment had passed.

  Brown shrugged. “I suspect so.” He looked at the items quietly. “Don’t really need to.”

  “That’s right,” said Cowart.

  Wilcox was trying to clean himself up as best as possible. He looked up from the task of shaking the clods of waste from his clothes over toward his partner.

  “Tanny,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, buddy. I should have been more careful. I should have figured.”

  Brown shook his head. “You know more now than you did then. It’s okay. I should have double-checked the search report.” He continued to look down at the items. “Damn,” he said, finally. “Dammit to hell.” He looked up at Cowart. “But now we know, don’t we?”

  Cowart nodded.

  The three men picked up the clothing and particle of carpet gingerly and turned back toward the house. They saw the old woman standing alone, watching them from her perch on the back stoop. She stared at them helplessly. Cowart could see her hands quivering at her sides.

  “It don’t mean nothing!” she yelled, searching for defiance. One arm rose slowly from her side and she shook a fist at them. “Throw all sorts of old stuff away! It don’t mean nothing at all!”

  The two detectives and the reporter walked past her, but she continued to shout after them, the words soaring across the yard, up into the pale blue sky. “It don’t mean nothing! Can’t you hear? Damn your eyes, Tanny Brown! It don’t mean nothing at all!”

  20

  TRAPS

  Tanny Brown drove the police cruiser aimlessly down the streets of the town where he’d grown up, Cowart next to him, waiting for the detective to say something. Wilcox had been dropped at the crime lab with the items seized from the outhouse. The reporter had thought that they would return immediately to the police offices to map out their next step, but instead found himself moving slowly through the town.

  “And so?” he finally asked. “What’s next?”

  “You know,” Brown said slowly, “it’s not really much of a town. Always played second fiddle to Pensacola and Mobile. Still, it was all I knew. All I ever really wanted. Even when I went away in the service and then to Tallahassee for college, always knew I wanted to come back here. What about you, Cowart? Where’s home for you?”

  Cowart pictured the small brick house where he’d grown up. It had been set back from the street, with a large oak tree in the front yard. It had had a front porch with a creaky, swinging love seat in the corner that was never used, and had grown rusty with the passing of winters. But almost immediately the picture of the house faded and what he saw was his father’s newspaper, twenty years earlier, through a child’s eyes, before computers and electronic layout machines. It was as if his understanding of the world had been channeled through the battered, steel-gray desks and wan fluorescent lights, past the cacophony of constantly ringing telephones, the voices raised in newsroom give-and-take, the whooshing sound of the vacuum tubes that linked the newsroom with composing, the machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of fingers slamming the keys of the old manual typewriters that banged out the history of the day’s events. He’d grown up wanting nothing more than to get away, but away had always been interpreted to mean something the same, only bigger, better. Finally, Miami. One of the nation’s finest newspapers. A life defined by words.

  Maybe, he thought, a death defined by them, as well.

  “No home,” he replied. “Just a career.”

  “Aren’t they the same?”

  “I suppose. It’s hard to make distinctions.”

  The detective nodded.

  “So what are we going to do?” Cowart asked again.

  The detective had no easy response. “Well,” he said slowly, “we know who really killed Joanie Shriver.”

  Both men felt a palpable, physical depression with those words. Brown thought, I knew. All along, I knew. But he still couldn’t shake the sensation that something had changed.

  “You can’t touch him, right?”

  “Not in a court of law. Bad confession. Illegal search. We’ve been all over that.”

  “And I can’t touch him, either,” Cowart said, bitterness streaking his voice.

  “Why? What happens if you write a story?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Brown suddenly steered the car to the curb, jamming on the brakes. He slammed the car out of gear and pivoted toward the reporter in a single motion.

  “What happens?” he asked furiously. “Tell
me, dammit! What happens?”

  Cowart’s face reddened. “I’ll tell you what happens: I write the story and the whole world jumps on our backs. You think the press was tough on you before? You have no idea what they’re like when they smell blood in the water. Everyone’s going to want a piece of this mess. More microphones and notepads and camera lights than you’ve ever seen. Stupid cop and stupid reporter screw up their jobs and let a killer go free. There isn’t a front page, a prime-time news show in this country that won’t scream for that story.”

  “What happens to Ferguson?”

  Cowart scowled. “It’s easiest for him. He simply denies it. Smiles at the cameras and says, ‘No, sir. I didn’t do anything. They must have planted that evidence there.’ A setup, he’ll say, a cheap trick by a frustrated cop. He’ll say you planted the evidence there after finding it someplace else—someplace where Blair Sullivan told me to find it, just like the knife. Got me to go along, or tricked me into going along, makes no difference. l’m the conduit for covering your mistakes. And you know what? A lot of people will believe it. You beat a confession out of him once. Why not try some other scheme?”

  Brown opened his mouth, but Cowart wasn’t done. “Then, suppose he files a defamation suit? Remember Fatal Vision? He filed a crazy suit and right away everyone seemed to forget that he was convicted of slaughtering his wife and kids when they got so damned concerned over what that writer did or didn’t do. Who do you think is going to be slicker on the air? More persuasive? What are you going to do when Barbara Walters or fucking Mike Wallace leans across the table, cameras rolling, lights making you sweat, and asks you, ‘Well, now, you really did order your man to beat Mr. Ferguson, right? Even though you knew it was against the law? Even though you knew if anyone found out, he would go free?’ And what good is it going to do for you to say anything? How’re you going to answer those questions, Detective? How’re you going to make it seem like you wouldn’t go and plant evidence at Ferguson’s home? Tell me, Detective, because I’d surely like to know.”

  Brown glared at Cowart. “And what about you?”

  “Oh, they’ll be just as tough on me, Detective. America is used to killers, familiar with the species. But failures? Ahh, failures get special, unique attention. Screwups and mistakes aren’t the American way. We tolerate murder, but not defeat. I can just see it: ‘Now, Mr. Cowart, you won a Pulitzer Prize for saying this man was innocent. What do you expect to win by saying he’s not?’ And then it’ll get tougher. ‘Guilty? Innocent? What do you want, Mr. Cowart? Can’t have it both ways. Why didn’t you tell us this before? Why did you wait? What were you trying to cover up? What other mistakes have you made? Do you know the difference between the truth and a lie, Mr. Cowart?’”