Evidence of Blood (33 page)

“I’m working a story now,” Kinley said, “investigating it.”

The eyes squinted hard again. “Which one?”

“Ellie Dinker,” Kinley said, expecting the old man’s face to lift thoughtfully, as if trying to retrieve something only faintly impressed upon his mind.

“Oh, yes,” Townsend said softly, with the strange
sense of a prophecy fulfilled. “I knew that someday someone would.”

They sat down in a small room adorned with plants that were slowly dying of thirst.

“My wife used to water them,” Townsend said quietly, by way of explanation, “but she’s gone now.”

He did not elaborate on where his wife had gone, whether to the islands, distant relatives or the grave, but Kinley made no effort to nail it down.

“You covered the story from the beginning,” he said as he drew his notebook from his jacket pocket.

The old man nodded. “The only one who did.”

“Why was that?”

“Local thing,” Townsend explained, “nothing Atlanta or Birmingham or Chattanooga would have been interested in. Besides, it got solved too fast. There was no buildup.”

Before coming over, Kinley had done his homework thoroughly, as he always did, carefully reading the stories Ray had compiled on the case. “Were you the main reporter then?” he asked, by way of moving into a direct line of questioning.

Townsend snorted roughly. “Way back then, the Sequoyah
Standard
was nothing much but a little country printing press,” he said. “We reported when some bigwig got married, and when Miss Addie’s son came home from Vanderbilt. That was about it.”

“Until the murder.”

Townsend nodded. “Until the murder, that’s right,” he said. “Reporting that case the way we did, that’s what turned the
Standard
into a real newspaper. After that, we got an itch for stories, real stories, not just tidbits from the local social calendar.” His eyes swept over to the room’s large, dusty window. “It was strange, that case,” he said, “from beginning to end.”

It was the perfect opening, and Kinley seized it.

“That’s how
I’d
like to hear about it,” he said, “from beginning to end.”

The old man turned toward him. “It’s not a pretty story,” he said, then shrugged lightly, as if divesting himself of the one small bit of incontestable knowledge his long experience had taught him, “but then, the good ones never are.”

“When did you first hear about it?”

“Well, that was the first odd thing,” Townsend said, “because it took a long time for anybody to hear about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she’d been missing a couple days before I knew anything about it,” Townsend answered. “It wasn’t on the police blotter, you might say. The report, the one Mrs. Dinker made to the Sheriff’s Office, it wasn’t recorded anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Well, things were run sort of haphazardly in the Sheriff’s Department back then,” Townsend said, “but still, they had these little forms …”

“Incident Reports,” Kinley said.

“Yes, that kind of thing,” Townsend said, “and when Mrs. Dinker came down to tell about Ellie being missing, nobody filled out a form.”

Kinley quickly scribbled the information into his notebook. “Mrs. Dinker talked directly to Sheriff Maddox, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did.”

“And he launched an investigation.”

Townsend shook his head. “No, not really,” he said, his voice suddenly low and grave. “He later testified that he did, but I checked on his movements after Mrs. Dinker talked to him, and, really, he didn’t go looking for that little girl at all.”

“What did he do?”

“Mostly hung around the courthouse and let his deputies handle everything,” Townsend said. “Of course, he
had reason to do that. They were planning a big celebration, and there was a lot going on.”

“Wouldn’t that be enough to explain what Maddox did?” Kinley said. “Or didn’t do?”

“Maybe for the first day,” Townsend said, “but not the second. He didn’t do much of anything that day either.”

“He set up the roadblocks.”

“Only because Chief James made him,” Townsend said. “James told Maddox that if he didn’t get moving, then the City Police would take over.”

“Why did James withdraw from the case later on?” Kinley asked. “Ben Wade thinks it was just a question of jurisdiction.”

“There never was a true jurisdiction in this case,” Townsend said, “because nobody knows where the murder took place. It could have been inside the city limits, or it could have been outside.”

“So why did he bow out?”

“To let the cronies handle everything.”

“What cronies?”

Townsend ticked off the names without hesitation. “Thompson, Warfield, Maddox, Mayor Jameson, and a few others, mostly from the courthouse crowd,” he said.

“James wasn’t in that group?”

“Chief James wasn’t in any group.”

“Why was that?”

“Because he was from the south side of town,” Townsend said. “His daddy was nothing but a drunkard, and his mama worked in the cotton mills.” He smiled bitterly. “He was strictly from white trash as far as the others were concerned.”

Kinley nodded. “I see.”

Townsend shrugged. “Anyway, once Maddox started working the case, the Chief just bowed out.”

“When did Maddox start working it?”

“Not till late on the day after the girl turned up missing,” Townsend said. “Before then, he didn’t do shit.”

“July 3,” Kinley said as he wrote it in his notebook.

“That’s right,” Townsend said. “Maddox really got hopping late that day.”

“And by that afternoon?”

“It was over like that,” Townsend said, snapping his fingers softly, “like magic”

Kinley continued to read through his notes. “They did the roadblock on the afternoon of July 3,” he said, reciting its details, “found a witness who fingered Overton …” He flipped another page. “Then Wade found Ellie Dinker’s dress.”

“And twenty-four hours later Charlie Overton was in jail,” Townsend said.

Kinley looked up from the notes. “Dumb luck?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No, I don’t,” Townsend said, “but it’s not just how quickly things came together that last day, but the way the whole day broke down.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, Maddox suddenly didn’t want much to do with me,” Townsend said. “He claimed he was too busy every time I showed up at his office. He was always rushing out.” He laughed to himself. “Floyd Maddox was a big old fat boy, not too smart. He didn’t rush anywhere.”

“Unless he had something to hide?”

Townsend nodded grimly. “I was sorry when that old boy died,” he said. “You know why? Because I always figured somebody would finally come around and start looking at this case, and that if they looked deep enough, they’d get Floyd eventually, they’d nail him like he nailed Charlie Overton.”

“You don’t think Overton had anything to do with Ellie Dinker’s murder?” Kinley asked.

Townsend shook his head determinedly. “Not one thing.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Well, for one thing, Overton didn’t have a motive.”

Kinley’s mind did its trick, flashed Luther Snow’s testimony onto its black screen. “Well, at the trial …”

Townsend waved his hand dismissively. “Luther Snow,” he said disgustedly. “All that bullshit about woman trouble. That was a load of crap. If Charles Overton had woman trouble, it didn’t have anything to do with Ellie Dinker.”

“You think Snow just made it up?”

“That sorry bastard,” Townsend said harshly, the old reporter’s deathless idealism suddenly rising, as it sometimes did, to insist on the preciousness of certain vital things. “A man gets on the stand, he ought to say something that makes sense, that has some facts in it. All this woman trouble stuff, that didn’t add up to a hill of beans as far as evidence goes.”

Kinley refused to be swept away by the old man’s relentless manner. “How do you know this ‘woman trouble’ wasn’t about Dinker?”

“Well, look at what he said.”

“That Overton had talked about …”

“Implied,” Townsend said, cutting Kinley off. “Snow didn’t really
say
anything. He just implied it.”

“That’s right.”

“Woman trouble? Overton?” Townsend asked. “With Ellie Dinker, a young girl, only sixteen years old?”

Ben Wade’s equally reliable face swam into Kinley’s mind:
Ellie Dinker was a tramp
. “I’ve been told that Ellie Dinker didn’t have a spotless reputation.”

Townsend nodded. “She knew more than she should have, a girl her age,” he admitted, “and God knows that child didn’t die a virgin, but that’s just looking at it from Ellie Dinker’s side of things.”

“What does it leave out?”

“The other half.”

“Overton?”

“Overton,” Townsend said flatly.

In his mind, Kinley saw Charles Overton as Townsend’s own grainy photographs had portrayed him, poor,
broken, spiritless, a sheep walking passively into the slaughterhouse. “He didn’t seem the type who’d be having a fling with a teenage girl,” Kinley admitted.

Townsend stared at him evenly. “It wouldn’t have mattered if he was.”

Kinley felt his fingers close around the narrow shaft of the pen. “What do you mean?”

“He was a wounded man,” Townsend said softly, “in his spirit, but not only there.”

Kinley looked at him quizzically, but did not speak.

“Talbott made this speech at the end of the trial,” Townsend said. “It was about as good as Talbott could do, I guess. He was trying to save Overton’s neck, and so he brought out the fact that he’d been in the war, wounded in the war, that sort of thing.”

Kinley nodded.

“Well, after the trial, Old Man Jessup, the owner of the paper, told me to do a profile on Overton,” Townsend went on. “Just look into his life, check out a few things, so we could run a nice full story on him after the execution.”

Townsend stopped suddenly, and his face grew oddly full of wonder, as if the mystery of life did not reside in the extravagances of birth or death or the long line of accidents that stretched between them, but in the weird instances of sudden, miraculous discovery.

“Well, I was just a hireling, so I did whatever Old Man Jessup said,” Townsend continued after a moment. “I did the routine things, looked into the public record to see what he owned, what he didn’t, whether he had any kind of criminal record before the murder.” He stopped and took a deep breath, as if the very telling of his story had begun to exhaust him. “And just as a way of covering all the bases,” he continued finally, “I wrote the Army for a copy of Overton’s war record.”

Kinley could feel it coming, sense it like a primitive man might have smelled the air and sensed the approaching storm.

“Charlie Overton had been in the war, just like Talbott said,” the old man went on, “and he’d been wounded, too. It had happened right at the end of the war, in some little tussle near the Rhine. But what Talbott left out was that Overton had been wounded in the groin, the genitals, that he’d lost any capacity whatsoever to handle, or even want to handle, a sixteen-year-old girl.”

Kinley’s mind shot back to Sarah Overton, big with child in 1954, a full nine years after the war, big with a daughter she named Dora.

Townsend shook his head slowly. “What it added up to was that there was no way Overton could have had any kind of relationship with Ellie Dinker, and certainly not one like Luther Snow described, one that would get him into some kind of ‘woman trouble’ with her.”

Kinley felt his hands tighten, but retreated into his profession, focusing on the story, pushing Dora from his mind like a small girl from a speeding train.

“Did you tell Warfield this?” he asked.

Townsend nodded. “I told the person I thought would do the most with the information.”

“Horace Talbott,” Kinley said.

Townsend nodded. “And he did nothing with it,” he said grimly. “As far as I can tell, he buried it just as deep as somebody buried Ellie Dinker.”

Kinley looked at him intently. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you try to find out?”

“No,” Townsend said, as if admitting that with this failure he had reached a lost region of himself. “And, within a few weeks, Overton was dead.” He looked away for a moment, his eyes settling on the drooping petals of a dying flower before returning to Kinley. “I tried to do him one last service, though,” he said. “I kept everything I came up with on the case.” He smiled softly. “I was waiting, you see,” he added. “And I knew that you would come.”

Kinley thought of Ray, the locked drawer in his small
desk at the courthouse. “Was I the first one to come here?” he asked.

Townsend shook his head. “No,” he said. “Ray Tindall did.”

“Did you tell him everything you told me?”

“Yes.”

“And you gave him all the information you had?”

“I gave him everything,” Townsend said. He shook his head contemptuously. “But he didn’t do anything with it, either.” He glared at Kinley contemptuously. “I’d always thought better of Ray, but the way he acted, I figured he was just another one of that courthouse crowd.” He shook his head disgustedly. “At first I thought he was really trying to get to the bottom of this Overton thing, but later, I knew that was wrong.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was working for the big boys,” Townsend said authoritatively. “Whatever they did back then, Ray was trying to cover it up.”

Kinley looked at him, astonished. “How do you know that?”

“Because he brought it all back,” Townsend said, “all the papers I’d given him. All the stuff I’m giving you. He brought it all back, every single bit.”

“When did he do that?”

Townsend smiled approvingly, as if some measure of justice had been done. “The day the bastard died,” he said.