Authors: Thomas H. Cook
He found Ben Wade much as he had left him a few days before, his large frame hunched over the latest FBI reports.
“Makes for pretty rough reading,” he said as Kinley came through the door.
Kinley nodded.
Wade laughed derisively. “Reading this stuff, you wouldn’t think a guy could make it to the grocery alive.”
Kinley smiled quietly, in no mood for levity. “It’s a little overdone,” he admitted dryly, “especially the crime clocks.”
Wade chuckled. “Every two seconds a this, every three seconds a that. Makes the human condition look pretty grim.” The laughter died away. “You work in this business
long enough, you come to think the whole world’s rotten to the core.”
Kinley walked to the chair in front of Wade’s desk and sat down. “I had a talk with Riley Hendricks,” he said evenly, almost in a tone of accusation.
“Oh yeah? Does he still like teaching school?”
“We didn’t talk much about it,” Kinley said. “We talked about the investigation of Ellie Dinker’s murder.”
Wade remained silent, his eyes peering expressionlessly into Kinley’s as if they were no more than two blue dots drawn on a white wall.
“About the well,” Kinley said, letting the word drop like a heavy weight on Wade’s battered desk.
“Yeah, that bothered him,” Wade said languidly, “the way they never looked in the well.” The hinges on his swivel chair creaked wearily as he straightened himself. “Riley kept thinking Dinker’s body must be there, but nobody ever went to look for it.” He fished a stick of gum from his shirt pocket, peeled off the wrapper and plunged it into his mouth. “We looked every damn place else, though,” he added, “all through the woods, all up and down Rocky River. We drug it from the falls where Overton said he’d dumped it to what must have been as far as ten miles downstream.” He shrugged. “We didn’t find anything. Not a trace.”
“But not the well,” Kinley said. “You never looked there.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The best I can figure, it just never entered anybody’s mind,” Wade answered. “We’d go into Sheriff Maddox’s office, and everybody would be there. I mean everybody. Me, the DA, half the Fire Department, even old Mayor Jameson a couple of times. I mean, everybody. And the Sheriff, he’d have his county map spread out across his desk, and he’d point at this place and that place, all the hell around, and he’d say, ‘Look right here,’ and put a little dot on the map, and off we’d go.” He looked at
Kinley helplessly. “But he just never put a little dot at the well in Charlie Overton’s backyard.”
“And you never mentioned it to him?”
Wade gave a low grunt. “Floyd Maddox wasn’t the sort of man that a deputy made suggestions to.” He tapped the side of his head. “We’re not dealing with the smartest guy that ever lived, you know.”
Kinley nodded. “I see.”
Wade sat back, the mouth moving in slow circles. “Turns out it didn’t matter, though,” he said.
“What didn’t matter?”
“Whether we looked in that well or not,” Wade said. “Because the girl’s body wasn’t there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Ray said so,” Wade told him.
“I thought he didn’t talk about the Dinker case.”
“He mentioned the well one time,” Wade said, “and the only other time was the day he died.”
“The day he died?”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “It was the day they found him in the canyon. He came up the stairs. He was really out of breath, and he walked over to the desk there, and he unlocked the bottom drawer. I guess it must have been the one he kept all the Overton stuff in.” He bent to the right and spit the gum into the garbage can beside his desk. “Anyway, he scooped everything out of it, scooped it all into a plain old yellow envelope. Then he looked over at me, and he said, ‘It’s just this Dinker stuff.’ Then he said he was through with it and that nobody should talk about it.”
“Nobody should talk about it?”
“Me. That I shouldn’t mention it,” Wade explained. “Like it was maybe a little embarrassing for him to have ever bothered with it in the first place.”
“And this was Sunday?”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “I wouldn’t have been here at all if I hadn’t left the keys to my tool chest in my desk.”
“Would anyone else have been in the courthouse that day?”
“On a Sunday afternoon?” Wade asked loudly. “You must be kidding.”
Kinley let his eyes shift over to the desk in a slow, thoughtful motion that Wade caught immediately.
“Something bothering you, Jack?” he asked. “It’s okay if I call you Jack, I hope?”
Kinley turned his attention back to Wade. “It’s the secrecy,” he said. “That’s what bothers me. The way Ray was keeping everything to himself.”
Wade shrugged. “If you want to look in that drawer, go ahead,” he said indifferently. “Ray wouldn’t have cared. He took the lock with him.”
Kinley took Wade up on his offer without hesitation, walked to the desk and pulled out the drawer. There was nothing inside but a green folder identical to the ones he’d found in the file cabinet in Ray’s office on Beaumont Street, but without any label of any kind.
“Too bad about Ray,” Wade said quietly. “He was a first-class investigator.”
Kinley turned toward him. “What time did you see Ray that day?”
“Around one-thirty, I guess.”
“And he was found dead two hours later?”
“That sounds about right.”
“In the canyon.”
Wade nodded. “Must have gone directly there.”
“Not quite,” Kinley said.
“What do you mean?”
“Because whatever he took out of the drawer, it wasn’t with him when he died.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Incident Reports,” Kinley told him. “They didn’t mention anything but the body.”
Wade’s face grew very solemn, but he said nothing.
Kinley let his eyes rise toward the small square window
in front of Ray’s desk. He could see the slender gray flagpole on the courthouse lawn, the long gray steps where Martha Dinker had kept her vigil, and beyond them, the green slope of the mountain which rose like a great wall to shield the canyon from his view.
He was on his way down the corridor when he saw Mrs. Hunter rise quickly from her desk and approach him.
“Well, I wasn’t sure I’d be seeing you again,” she said brightly.
Kinley nodded politely.
“I wanted to let you know that I found an answer for you,” Mrs. Hunter said.
“An answer?”
“You know, about Mrs. Dinker,” Mrs. Hunter said. “About what she’d been interested in when she came and looked over the evidence in the case.”
“Oh, yes,” Kinley said, recalling an interest that seemed purely technical to him now.
“Well, Harriet Calhoun had been away for a few days,” Mrs. Hunter went on. “But I finally got in touch with her last night, and she told me that every time Mrs. Dinker came to the office, she just wanted one thing.”
“One thing?”
“Just one particular volume of the transcript.”
“Did she remember which one?”
“Yes, she did,” Mrs. Hunter said proudly. “It was volume four.”
Kinley’s mind did its job and called the volume up. “Volume four,” he said. “That was her own testimony.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Hunter said, “but she didn’t read the whole volume, just one part of it.”
“One part?”
“Just one page, Harriet said.”
“Did she remember the page?”
A great glow of accomplishment swept over Mrs.
Hunter’s face. “Well, it turns out that Mrs. Dinker came here a lot, and she’d always get the same book, and she’d sit and read it, but she never would bring it back over to the desk. She’d just leave it open on the table.”
Kinley nodded.
“And Harriet would always put it away,” Mrs. Hunter continued. “And she said it was always open on the same page.” She allowed for a single, dramatic pause, letting the suspense build. “Four-fourteen,” she announced grandly. “Harriet remembered it very well.”
“Four-fourteen,” Kinley repeated softly.
“And I thought you might want to take a look at that page,” Mrs. Hunter said.
“Yes, I would.”
“Well, I’ve got it in my office,” Mrs. Hunter said.
Kinley followed her into the office, then waited as she pulled out a desk drawer, allowed for another dramatic pause, then placed volume four into Kinley’s waiting hands.
“I told Mr. Warfield that you were interested in this case,” Mrs. Hunter said. “And he told me that since it’s such an old case and no appeal coming, that you could just borrow the whole thing.”
Kinley hugged the transcript to his chest. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Hunter wagged her finger sternly. “But don’t forget to bring it back,” she said.
Kinley drove directly to Ray’s house, strode back into the office and opened the transcript to page four-fourteen. It was only a single page of neatly typed paper, but it had the look of an ancient text, a piece of revered parchment which had been studied again and again, the yellow stains of Mrs. Dinker’s hands running over each word as if, like a blind woman, she’d had to read it with her fingertips. In his mind, he could see her in her black dress, hunched over the little metal table beside the door of the vault,
growing older with the passing years, growing blind and deaf and mad as she read the single page over and over again, the page that Kinley now read for himself:
WARFIELD
: Did you actually see Ellie head up the mountain?
DINKER
: Yes, sir. I seen her go.
WARFIELD
: Do you remember what she was wearing?
DINKER
: A green dress and a pair of black shoes.
WARFIELD
: What was the dress made of?
DINKER
: Cotton.
WARFIELD
: Was it dark green or light green?
DINKER
: Dark green. And it had a little white lacy collar that I made for her.
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see your daughter again?
DINKER
: No, sir.
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, do you see this pair of shoes I have in my hand?
DINKER
: (whimpering) Yes, sir.
WARFIELD
: Whose shoes are these, Mrs. Dinker?
DINKER
: Those are Ellie’s shoes.
WARFIELD:
How do you know that?
DINKER
: By them shiny little buckles.
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see Ellie’s green dress again?
DINKER
: (crying) No, sir.
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, do you see this dress I’m holding up to show the jury right now?
DINKER
: (sobbing) INAUDIBLE
WARFIELD:
Mrs. Dinker, is this the dress your daughter was wearing when she headed up the mountain at twelve noon on Friday, July 2, 1954?
(THE WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND)
WARFIELD
: I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Dinker, but it’s very important. This dress you’ve been looking at, the one I’m holding in my hands. Mrs. Dinker, is
this the dress your daughter wore when she left home that Friday morning?
(WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND)
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker?
(WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND)
WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, please. I ask you, Mrs. Dinker, is this your daughter Ellie’s dress?
DINKER
: I ain’t seen it since that day.
WARFIELD:
Thank you. The witness is excused.
For a few minutes after his first reading, Kinley continued to focus his attention on the page, reading it carefully again. Then he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the scene in Judge Bryan’s courtroom as the testimony was given. He could see Mrs. Dinker at the stand, speaking firmly in that way prosecutors hoped for, the plain, unadorned language and quick responses,
yes, sir, yes, sir
, suggesting a confidence that could only be engendered in the truth.
Then suddenly her composure had collapsed, and it was easy for Kinley to visualize the exact moment in all its wrenching detail. He could see Warfield as he stepped over to the prosecutor’s table, his hands moving toward the box or bag strategically placed there for him, his words pealing over the courtroom crowd as he moved slowly toward his destination:
Did you ever see her dress again?
Then the long white fingers Kinley had seen in the newspaper photographs crawled into the nondescript container, seized something, and began to draw it out slowly, holding it gingerly by the shoulders, so that it unfolded fully as he lifted it, revealing the wide swath of blood that spread across its dark green front, the eyes of the jurors widening in horror as they gazed up at it, waiting for the District Attorney’s next question: Mrs.
Dinker, do you see this dress I’m holding up before you now?