Evidence of Blood (13 page)

WARFIELD
: You say, they’d walked. How do you know that, Deputy Wade?

WADE
: Because Overton’s truck was in the driveway.

WARFIELD
: And did you have occasion to look in that truck, Deputy Wade?

WADE
: Yes, I did.

WARFIELD
: And did you find anything in that truck that you thought might have a bearing on the whereabouts of Ellie Dinker?

WADE
: Yes, sir. I found a tire iron wrapped up in cloth, and it looked to me like it had blood and hair on it.

WARFIELD
: Anything else, Deputy?

WADE
: A pair of black shoes.

WARFIELD
: And pursuant to your duties as a County Deputy, did you take these items?

WADE
: Yes, sir. I took them right down to the Sheriff’s Office and handed them over to Sheriff Maddox.

Predictably, Warfield called Sheriff Maddox to the stand a second time, then a series of court and law enforcement officials to establish that the chain of evidence had never been broken, that once the shoes and tire iron had been collected, none but authorized officials had gained access to them.

He then moved on to the arrest of Charlie Overton, something Maddox and two deputies, Wade and Riley Hendricks, had carried out themselves.

Sheriff Maddox

WARFIELD
: Where did you find Mr. Overton?

MADDOX
: At his house on the mountain. We was waiting for him when him and his wife come up the hill.

WARFIELD
: What happened then?

MADDOX
: Well, me and the boys sort of fanned out, you know, in case he tried to run off. They got on either side of him, and I just stood right there in front of him, and I said, “Charlie, you know a little girl name of Ellie Dinker?” And he didn’t say nothing. He just sort of went pale in his face, you know.

TALBOTT
: Objection, Your Honor.

COURT:
Sustained.

WARFIELD:
Did you then arrest Mr. Overton?

MADDOX
: They was a few more words between us, and then I arrested him. He didn’t put up no fight about it. He just come on with us. His wife, she was crying and such as that, but Overton, he didn’t offer no resistance.

Kinley stopped, noting, as he always did, those phrases which seemed to denote an emotional state that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.

No
resistance
.

He tried to arrive at an image of such passivity in his mind. He could see the men fan out around Overton, the Sheriff approach him, accuse him before his pregnant wife’s astonished face, of murdering a young girl, and in the midst of all that, to offer no resistance.

He thought of Dora, the level look of her eyes as she’d related the events surrounding her father’s trial the night before. Whatever Charles Herman Overton might have been, he was certainly a good deal different from his daughter, a man of no resistance whose daughter had not relented yet. He thought of Dr. Stark, of how he’d spoken of the wounded heart Ray had inherited from his father, and then of himself, wondering what secret defects he’d inherited as well, and which all his grandmother’s solitary nurturing could do nothing to correct, and then of Dora, once again. For a moment he wondered what Ray must have thought of her after their first hours together. Knowing him as he did, Kinley knew that he must have thought of Lois and Serena, both of them sleeping comfortably in the valley, assured of his old-fashioned faithfulness, while he could feel that same solidity slipping away as he looked at Dora, listened to her tale, slipping away like earth moving helplessly downward, gathering mass and momentum as it hurled down the mountainside.

It was nearly noon by the time Kinley finished the first few volumes of the transcript. By then he’d followed Warfield’s witnesses through the early stages of the investigation, Overton’s arrest, and the relatively small amount of forensic material which could be gathered in the absence of Ellie Dinker’s body. Here, the testimony had come from Dr. Stark, and as Kinley sat in the small restaurant a few blocks from the courthouse, he reviewed the notes he’d taken as he’d read it.

According to Dr. Stark, Ellie Dinker had been a patient of his from the time he’d delivered her in his clinic on June 24, 1938. Although the Dinkers were a poor family, Dr. Stark said, they’d paid his fees either in small payments in cash, or more often, with vegetables grown in their backyard. It was a form of remuneration which Stark said he’d accepted since the Depression, but a practice, he’d added to the jury’s amusement, that he did not wish to encourage in “these more prosperous times.”

Still, he had continued to see Ellie Dinker through the years, the last time only a month before her death, and in the process, he’d gathered a basic amount of data about her. For the purposes of the trial, the most crucial element within that data had been her blood type. It was B positive, Stark had told the jury, a relatively rare type that was shared by approximately eight percent of the general population. At that point in the testimony, Warfield had anticipated the defense cross-examination and had asked its
most important questions himself. No, Stark had admitted in response, he could not say for sure that the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress was her own. He could only surmise that it could not be that of ninety-two percent of the remaining population. The exchange had been so suggestive of courtroom tactics in the mid-1950’s that Kinley had written it down verbatim.

WARFIELD
: So, scientifically speaking, you cannot positively identify the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress as being Ellie Dinker’s blood, can you, Dr. Stark?

STARK
: No, sir, I can’t.

WARFIELD
: But if you took a hundred people out of this courtroom here and gave them a blood test, the chances are no more than eight of them would have B positive, is that right?

STARK
: Yes, that’s right.

WARFIELD
: And looking out over the courtroom, how many of these eight people are also wearing a green dress, Doctor?

STARK
: I haven’t counted the green dresses in the gallery, Mr. Warfield.

WARFIELD
: Now, I know you’re a scientist and a medical man, Dr. Stark. But would you also say that you have what we call around here regular walking-about sense?

STARK
: Yes, sir, I think so.

WARFIELD
: Well, let me ask you this, Dr. Stark. If I show you an animal that looks like a skunk and acts like a skunk and smells like a skunk, Doctor, using your regular walking-about sense, what would you say that animal is?

STARK
: I’d say it was a skunk, Mr. Warfield.

WARFIELD
: And if I show you a little girl in a green dress who had B positive blood, and later I show you that dress all ragged and bloody, and I tell you that the blood on that dress was ? positive, Doctor, whose blood would you say was on that dress?

At that point Horace Talbott, Overton’s attorney, had predictably objected, and the court had sustained the objection. By then it had hardly mattered, of course, since the jury had heard the question and guessed Stark’s answer to be what they themselves had already surmised, that the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress had come from her body.

But where was the body? That was the question that now moved restlessly about in Kinley’s mind. Why would Overton have hung the green dress in the tree for all to see, then taken elaborate pains necessary to conceal the body so effectively no one had ever been able to locate it?

As he finished his hamburger and fries, Kinley well knew that he could not have been the first person to ask such a question. The initial stage of Overton’s defense would have had to confront the missing body, not only as the incontestable physical evidence for the fact of Ellie Dinker’s murder, but also as the central illogical piece in the prosecution’s puzzle. Why would Overton have bothered to hide a body and leave a dress flapping openly, like a bloody pennant, in the trees above Sheriff Maddox’s head?

“You must have thought about it,” Kinley said urgently.

Horace Talbott nodded his great, bald head. Though over eighty years old, Kinley could tell that he was completely lucid. He sat in an enormous woven tapestry chair, surrounded by plants, in the bright light of the solarium. Over his left shoulder, a mynah bird squawked from time to time, as if complaining of the heat, but Talbott seemed never to hear it, his dark brown eyes very steady as they stared toward Kinley.

“Did it bother you?” Kinley asked.

“Things that don’t make sense always bother me, Mr. Kinley,” Talbott said. “But as you told me, when you asked to see me, you are doing this for Miss Overton.”

“That’s right.”

“And, like you, I would like to put that young woman’s mind to rest,” Talbott said. “Because of that, I wouldn’t want to get into an explanation of her father’s actions.”

“Did you ever find an explanation?”

“Yes,” Talbott answered confidently. “He was deranged. Many people are.”

Kinley reached for his notebook. “In what way?”

Talbott gathered his thoughts a moment, then proceeded, his tone suddenly rather professorial. “Logic, sense, reason, these things exist only in the imagination,” he said. “That’s my conclusion on such matters.” He brushed the fronds of a fern from the side of his face. “When you look for these things in human acts, they are often not present. What you see is reflex, improvisation, a sudden impulse that sweeps over someone.” He shrugged. “There are things, Mr. Kinley, that are what I’ve learned to call ‘pure acts.’ You can’t trace any reason for them, any pattern at all. They are what they are, and when people are overwhelmed by these things, they do what they do. Like I say, ‘pure act.’”

“And you think the murder of Ellie Dinker was like that?”

Talbott nodded. “Charlie Overton was a quiet man. You’d have almost thought he was mute if you hadn’t known better.” The brown eyes narrowed. “But underneath, maybe there was a great upheaval in him. Who’s to say? Maybe for years he’d watched little girls go by and wanted to grab one, and have his way with her, and strangle her, or cut her up in little pieces. Then, all of a sudden, it rose up, you see, and he couldn’t push his hands way down in his pockets anymore, or close his eyes real tight to keep the vision out, you know? So, the door popped off the hinges.”

“And he killed her?”

Talbott’s eyes watched Kinley closely. “You have written about such people, haven’t you?”

Kinley nodded. Mildred Haskell had been forty-three
before she’d murdered the first time. Willie Connors had been fifty-one. Before then, they’d been nothing but the village seamstress who had a weakness for red shoes, the high school gym teacher who lectured his students on the joys of health.

“Did you know him before the trial?” Kinley asked.

“Very slightly.”

“Then why did you defend him?” Kinley asked. “This was a pre-Gideon case. There would have been no court-appointed attorney.”

“That’s true,” Talbott said. “But my connection was not with Mr. Overton. It was with his wife, Sarah.”

“You knew his wife?”

“Very well,” Talbott said. “She worked for me. Or should I say, for my late wife.”

“In what capacity?”

“In a general capacity,” Talbott said. “Mrs. Overton came in every day to help my wife.” He glanced away for a moment, as if remembering his wife in a sudden brief glimpse, then returned his eyes to Kinley. “My wife was an invalid back then. She had polio. She became an invalid, and Mrs. Overton would come in and help out with things. She would cook and clean, and just generally do the chores. I got to know her. So, naturally, when her husband was arrested, she came to me.”