Evidence of Blood (37 page)

“And he asked Luther Snow to testify against Overton?” Kinley asked, quickly jotting Thompson’s name into his notebook.

“That’s the way I see it,” Betty said. “I know this much: I seen them two talking to each other not long before old Luther said what a great friend he was to poor old Charlie.”

“They could have been talking about anything,” Kinley said warily. “How do you know it was about Overton?”

“’Cause Luther wouldn’t do nothing the old man didn’t tell him to,” Betty said. “The way it was, Old Man Thompson was Luther’s protection, and Luther, being the way he was, a bootlegger and all, he needed all the protection he could get.”

“What kind of protection?”

“From the county cops.”

“Maddox?”

“Thompson kept a tight leash on Floyd Maddox,” Betty said, “and since Old Man Thompson and the rest of them liked the taste of bonded once in a while, he didn’t want Maddox closing Luther down.”

“The rest of them?”

“Old Man Thompson and the other bigwigs in town,” Betty explained. “Maddox and Warfield and Mayor Jameson, the whole crowd used to hang around together. They were always going out in the canyon to camp out and hunt, or whatever it is they used to do out there.” She shrugged. “It was the whole courthouse crowd. They had a little lodge or something way out somewhere, and
they’d all go out there, everybody but Chief James. He wasn’t one of the group.”

Kinley nodded. It was not the first tale of chicanery among the local elite he’d ever heard, and it still seemed to bear relatively little on the Overton case. “What would any of this have to do with Thompson asking Luther Snow to testify against Overton?” he asked.

“’Cause it was Maddox that had arrested him,” Betty said without hesitation, “and it was Mr. Warfield that was prosecuting him.”

“His cronies?”

Betty nodded. “They needed a favor, I guess,” she said, “and so they come to Old Man Thompson.” She shook her head. “And he give them Luther.” She smiled cynically. “That’s the way it was with them guys.”

Once again, Kinley’s mind retrieved a section of the trial transcript, but this time it was the testimony of Betty Gaines, the halting, unsure texture of her words.

“Why did you testify for Overton?” he asked.

She waved her hand, as if unwilling to discuss it.

“You were afraid, weren’t you,” he said. “On the stand, I mean.”

She shrugged. “When you’re a young woman, things can scare you.”

“Things or people?”

“Well, in this case, it was people.”

“Thompson?”

Betty nodded. “He had a mean streak in him,” she said. “I seen him hit his daughter once. He knocked her all the way across the room.”

Once again, Kinley’s mind flashed back to the transcript.

“When Snow talked about Overton having woman trouble, implying that it was with Ellie Dinker,” he asked cautiously, “could he have been talking about Wallace Thompson instead?”

Betty nodded determinedly. “I know this much, Old
Man Thompson knew Ellie Dinker,” she said. “I know he did.”

“How do you know that?”

“’Cause when he found out I was going to testify for Overton, he told me to keep my mouth shut and not to go against him, because he knew what happened, and Overton was going to pay for it.”

“Knew what happened?”

“That Overton done it,” Betty said. “That he killed that little girl.” She rocked back in her chair, her small feet scraping against the floor. “And when he was telling me this, he said, ‘Ellie Dinker was a little whore, Betty, but it’s got to be set right.’”

“A little whore?” Kinley repeated. “That’s what he called her?”

“Them’s his exact words,” Betty said emphatically. “And I remembered them, too, ’cause when Old Man Thompson spoke to you, you listened.”

“From what you knew of Charles Overton, could you have thought that Thompson might be right, that Overton had killed Ellie Dinker?”

Betty shook her head. “Not from what I saw,” she said. “He was sort of a weak type of man, you know. Like his insides had been scooped out of him.”

“So you never believed that Overton killed Ellie Dinker?” Kinley asked.

“No, I never did,” Betty said. “’Course, everybody else did.”

“Except his family,” Kinley added.

“And Mrs. Dinker,” Betty said.

Kinley leaned forward slightly. “Mrs. Dinker?”

“She didn’t believe Overton done it,” Betty said. “Didn’t believe Overton had killed her little girl.”

“How do you know that?”

“’Cause she come to me about it,” Betty said. She nodded toward the small space between the front door and the enormous radio. “She stood right there and told me that there was something wrong in the whole story.”

“Why did she think that?”

“Because of the dress,” Betty said. “She told me there was something wrong with the dress.”

Once again, the scene replayed in Kinley’s mind, and he saw Warfield lifting the dress from the box, Mrs. Dinker staring at it, locked in that inexplicable silence which had suddenly closed around her, and from whose grip for a moment she had been unable to break:
WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND
.

“The dress?” Kinley asked. “What was wrong with the dress?”

“She wanted to see it,” Betty said. “She wanted to look at it.”

“So she came to you?”

“’Cause I was working at the courthouse back then,” Betty said, “and she figured I could get it.”

Kinley’s vision climbed up the short white arms he’d only seen in his imagination before, only watched in his mind as they silently opened the box and plucked the green dress from it.

“So you got it for her,” he whispered in a kind of awe at Betty Gaines’s passionate outlawry, her capacity to do something without regard to consequences, to respond immediately, even recklessly, to a distant plea.

“Well, I figured it wasn’t doing no good where it was,” Betty said dully, “just going to mold down there in the basement. Besides, the way I looked at it, that dress passed on to Mrs. Dinker when the girl died.” She shrugged. “I thought it might help ease her mind, but it didn’t. Matter of fact, she sort of went nutty after that. Started poking around in people’s yards and wandering all over the place at night. Then she just started to hanging around on the courthouse steps. Not long after that, they took her away.”

“What did she do when you gave her the dress?”

“She just spread it out on the table right there,” Betty said, nodding toward it, “and run her fingers over the
chest part. She didn’t say nothing after that. She just left it right there.”

“Left it?”

“For me to take back,” Betty said. “But I never did.”

“You still have it?”

Betty nodded. “Folded up somewhere.”

Kinley felt himself rise to his feet suddenly, as if pulled up by invisible hands. “Could I see it?”

“I guess so,” Betty said as she drew herself to her feet, then disappeared into the other room.

She returned almost immediately with a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “Here it is,” she said as she handed it to Kinley.

He laid the bundle down very gently, reverently, as if it were Ellie Dinker’s last remains, then folded the paper back to reveal what looked like nothing more than a small green pillow. Using the same gentle motions, he spread the dress out on the table, his eyes moving silently from the hem to the shoulders like a glider passing over a flat green field.

As he looked at it, he heard Warfield’s voice asking Mrs. Dinker to describe the dress, then her answer, that it was green and had a lacy collar
that I made for her
.

At that moment, his eyes still fixed on the dress, Kinley realized precisely what Mrs. Dinker had seen as she’d stared uncomprehendingly at the dress which had hung from Thomas Warfield’s hands. He glanced up from the dress and settled his eyes on Betty Gaines’s face. “Where’s the collar?” he asked.

She stared at him silently.

“Mrs. Dinker said she made a collar for this dress,” Kinley added. “A white lacy collar.”

Betty’s eyes fell toward the dress. “I can see where it was,” she said. She took a short, slightly trembling finger and ran it up a line of barely visible white stitching. “Right there’s where it was sewed on.”

It was a seamstress’s eye, clear, sure, unfailing, and Kinley immediately saw the dress as Betty Gaines saw it,
the small white threads rising like tiny, flying spirits from a broad green plain.

“Somebody cut it off,” Betty said. Her finger moved from one severed thread to the next. “See,” she said, “they’ve all been snipped with scissors.”

“Snipped?” Kinley asked. “Not torn?”

“Torn?” Betty said. “You mean like somebody tearing it?”

Kinley nodded.

Betty shook her head with the certainty of a woman who had made a thousand dresses in her time, just as Martha Dinker had, and who saw just as clearly what Martha Dinker must also have seen as she’d stared at the green dress in Thomas Warfield’s hand.

“Cut,” Betty Gaines said, in a voice whose authority and expertise in such things Kinley could not doubt. “Cut clean. Cut with scissors. That’s the only way you don’t get a rip when you’re pulling something off.”

“I found it,” Kinley said as he spread the dress over Warfield’s desk.

Warfield stared at it, astonished. “Good work,” he said as he glanced back up at Kinley. “Who had it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kinley said.

Warfield looked at him grimly. “Privileged information, is that it?” he asked. “An unidentified source?”

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t our deal, as I recall,” Warfield said firmly.

Kinley dropped into a professional language he thought Warfield would understand. “There was no criminal intent.”

“But there was a criminal act,” Warfield told him, “and I believe in prosecuting people for such things.”

“We’re talking about an old person,” Kinley said.

“Mr. Kinley,” Warfield said, his voice cold and full of the law’s immovable purpose. “I would prosecute the dead if I could bring them back to life.”

“Look,” Kinley told him, now abandoning his ineffective legal jargon. “At some point, I’ll tell you. I give you my word. But for now, there’s something else I want to show you.” He pointed to the small white threads which ran in a broad crescent along the front of the dress. “There was once a collar there,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s in Mrs. Dinker’s testimony,” Kinley said. “She described it to your father.”

“And this collar, it was torn off, I guess,” Warfield said, unimpressed with the finding. “She probably fought back, and Overton ripped it off.”

“Normally, that’s what I’d think, too,” Kinley told him.

Warfield looked at him quizzically. “But in this case, you don’t?” he asked.

Kinley shook his head.

“Why not?”

Kinley let his fingers move over the line of white threads. “I had a seamstress look at it,” he said. “The collar was cut off. With scissors. It wasn’t ripped or torn.”

“As it would have been in a struggle,” Warfield added as he glanced back up at Kinley.

“Yes.”

Warfield drew his eyes down to the dress. “It gives off a feeling, doesn’t it?” he said. “Something someone died in, their clothes, or just the room, sometimes, it gives off a feeling about them.”

Kinley nodded. “Yes, it does.” He remembered all the early tools of his trade, the lengths of soiled rope, the torn skirts and bras, the lead pipe caked in blood and earth, the snub-nosed pistol on the tabletop. The locations, too, closets fitted with pulleys, beds fitted with straps, windows painted an impenetrable black, boxes with no windows in them, arrayed with leather thongs.

“I remember the first time I got that feeling,” Warfield said. “It was a pillowcase that had been used as a gag, all balled up and stained with this and that. Sheriff Maddox just sort of tossed it to me.” His eyes drifted up to Kinley. “It had been stuffed so far down this old man’s windpipe that he’d suffocated.” He took the dress and lifted it slowly, as if the ghost of Ellie Dinker were still living invisibly inside. “We’ll put it back where it belongs,” he said.

Without further word, he rose and walked out of the room, the dress still in his outstretched hands, as Kinley followed him into the elevator, then rode silently down to the basement.

“It’s my museum,” Warfield said, as he walked into the small room lined with brown boxes marked by the names of the cases whose evidence they held. He pulled out the one labeled
OVERTON
and returned the dress to its interior darkness. “I know most of them,” he said, glancing from one box to the next. “C
RAWFORD
, a drug peddler;
DICKSON
, one of his best customers; S
HEFFIELD
, a wife-beater;
CARSON
, a pedophile …”

“Overton,” Kinley said abruptly, then looked pointedly at Warfield. “I think he was innocent, Mr. Warfield.”

Warfield whirled around to face him. “Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Things I’ve found out.”

“Did Ray think he was innocent, too?”