Evidence of Blood (40 page)

He looked at the first volume without opening it, his hand peculiarly resistant, as if he were opening the dark lid of his old friend’s coffin.

As an act of discipline, he pressed his hand down on the cover, as if feeling for a pulse, his eyes drifting up to the wall behind Ray’s desk, the little note he’d hung there, a call to urge him on.

Kinley glanced back down to the transcript, opened it and read what was written on its title page:
State of Georgia v. Luther Lawrence Snow
.

The trial of Luther Snow for the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages had begun on May 3, 1946. The prosecutor was Thomas Warfield, who’d just been elected District Attorney the previous November, and as he read Warfield’s opening remarks to the jury, Kinley was surprised at how clumsy they were.

WARFIELD
: The State will prove that Mr. Snow sold liquor in this county, and he has sold it a great deal, you may be sure—and maybe he never made liquor in the county—but he’s not being tried for that. He’s being tried for illegally selling whisky in the county, and we don’t allow that here.

From this opening statement, Warfield had gone on to construct an equally inelegant case, calling witnesses in a random order which, Kinley guessed, had pretty much kept the jury off-balance for the entire trial.

First, he’d called a nineteen-year-old boy named Wendell Peeples, who’d purchased liquor from Snow. Under Warfield’s unsteady leadership, Peeples had wandered in circles through his testimony, continually backtracking, until Peeples himself had finally balked at continuing down such a winding route:

PEEPLES
: What’s that?

WARFIELD
: You know, I was asking about what time it was you left your mother’s house.

PEEPLES:
: You mean, you want me to tell that again, Mr. Warfield?

WARFIELD:
Oh, no. You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s go on to something else.

Next Warfield had called Floyd Maddox, the equally youthful and newly elected County Sheriff, and for a time, the two of them had staggered through the somewhat crude sting operation Maddox had devised against Snow.

As a scheme it had certainly skirted the edges of entrapment, a circumstance which Snow’s attorney would doubtless have noticed, except that it was 1946 and Snow had not been given an attorney to represent him in the case.

For a time, as Kinley read first one volume, then another, the atmosphere which rose from the proceedings had an almost comical effect, a bumbling Keystone Kops affair, with Warfield stumbling through his witness lineup and Maddox grandly revealing the previously secret details of a law enforcement operation that was hardly more complicated than a bait-and-switch con game.

It was not until the final volume that the mood abruptly changed.

Luther Snow took the stand in his own defense, declared that he had no questions for himself, and then, in what could only be thought of as a wild and brilliant maneuver, turned himself over to Warfield for cross-examination.
Come and get me, Warfield. I’m waiting
.

At the reading of that single grim, determined line, Kinley saw the old man before him, younger and more resourceful, but with the same small eyes, musty odor and look of malignant self-control.

SNOW
: Come and get me, Warfield. I’m waiting.

WARFIELD
: How are you, Mr. Snow?

To this question, Snow returned a steady and unflinching glare which the court reporter noted in the same succinct
phrase she’d used to describe the silence of Martha Dinker:
WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND
.

WARFIELD
: You’ve pled not guilty to this indictment, haven’t you, Mr. Snow?

SNOW:
Yeah.

WARFIELD
: Which means that you’re denying that you sold any whisky to Sheriff Maddox, isn’t that right, sir?

SNOW:
Not guilty.

WARFIELD
: So now, for the jury, and the people here …and for the record, you’re pleading not guilty, isn’t that right?

SNOW
: To the thing, I am.

WARFIELD
: Thing?

SNOW
: Whatever you called it.

WARFIELD
: You mean, the indictment?

SNOW:
Whatever’s wrote on the paper, that’s what I ain’t guilty for.

WARFIELD
: Selling whisky?

SNOW
: Ain’t nothing wrong with selling whisky.

WARFIELD
: Nothing wrong?

SNOW
: Across the state line, over there in Tennessee, they got stores on the main street that’s selling it all day long.

WARFIELD
: But we’re not talking about Chattanooga, are we?

SNOW:
No.

WARFIELD
: What are we talking about?

SNOW
: Money. How to get it.

WARFIELD
: And one way is by selling whisky?

SNOW
: Whatever way, it don’t matter to me.

WARFIELD
: So you’d do anything for money, Mr. Snow?

SNOW:
Anything.

WARFIELD
: So I could rely on that, couldn’t I?

SNOW:
Till your dying day.

It was a grim exchange, and Kinley had read a great many others like it, Mildred Haskell had talked like Snow, and Colin Bright—ghostly, disembodied voices, perfectly modulated for their refined malginancy.

WARFIELD
: Are you married, Mr. Snow?

SNOW
: Yes.

WARFIELD:
What’s your wife’s name?

SNOW
: Bertha.

WARFIELD
: Where is she right now?

SNOW
: Hospital.

WARFIELD
: How’d she get there?

SNOW
: I gave her a whipping.

WARFIELD
: You beat her up, isn’t that right?

SNOW
: I needed quiet.

WARFIELD
: And that’s the way you get it?

SNOW
: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

At that point, Snow must have said it with a sneer, or perhaps a thin, sinister grin, because the spectators had laughed so loudly that the judge had called a halt to the proceedings until order could be restored.

Then, with the laughter trailing off, the cross-examination began again.

WARFIELD
: Have you ever been in prison, Mr. Snow?

SNOW
: Yeah.

WARFIELD
: Whereabouts?

SNOW:
All over.

WARFIELD
: In Alabama, for car theft?

SNOW
: Yeah. A blue Olds, anybody would have wanted it.

WARFIELD
: In Alabama for burglary?

SNOW
: Big house. Some fat old plantation man.

WARFIELD:
Way out in Texas, for assault.

SNOW:
Yeah, and he needed stopping, too.

WARFIELD
: Nothing in Georgia.

SNOW
: I guess I’m turning soft in my old age.

Again the courtroom spectators had laughed, and again the judge had found it necessary to caution them against any further outburst.

By now Warfield was getting scared. Luther Snow was talking circles around him. In the mountain country, prosecutions for boot-legging were never easy, but Snow was turning everything against Warfield, mocking him, ridiculing him, making him look like a fool, and Warfield’s own shakiness under the assault was undermining his case almost as effectively as Snow’s determined outlawry.

As for Snow, he knew he was winning, and he went in for the kill.

SNOW:
You know what I think?

WARFIELD
: It’s not your place to …

SNOW
: I think you had a drink last night. Maybe before that, too, and, hell, I bet you up and had another one the day before that.

WARFIELD
: Mr. Snow, I’m not the one who is on …

SNOW
: And it went down warm and easy, like it does on verybody.

WARFIELD
: Mr. Snow, you cannot continue to …

SNOW
: Because everybody likes a drink when things are a little hard on them.

WARFIELD
: Mr. Snow, you …

SNOW
: And that’s what I give them.

WARFIELD
: Your Honor, I would ask that you direct the …

SNOW
: Not that rotgut they make in the hills, but bonded whisky.

WARFIELD
: …the witness to please stop …

SNOW:
Just like you got, I bet, at your little bar at home, Warfield.

WARFIELD:
…talking.

SNOW:
I’ve already stopped, Your Honor.

WARFIELD
: Well …well, I …

COURT
: Do you wish to rest your case, Mr. Warfield?

WARFIELD
: Well, I …Yes. Yes, Your Honor, I do.

If Snow had conceived of his own cross-examination as a ploy, it had worked brilliantly, Kinley realized as he turned to the last page of the transcript. For later that same afternoon, a jury of poor, hardworking country people had considered the bloated hypocrisy of Thomas Warfield, heir to all the Warfield fortune, so young his skin still held its infant sheen beneath the courtroom lights, and compared it to the snarling, belabored, but unrepentant visage of Luther Snow, and found Snow innocent of the charges which had been brought against him.

It was almost seven in the evening before Kinley completed his reading of Snow’s trial. He made himself a quick dinner before going on to the next case.

By eight he was in the back room again, his hand turning to the first page of Case Record 641739-A, the court proceeding Ray had checked out nearly two weeks following the Snow trial transcript.

It was a civil case, as Kinley already knew from the code, but the names of the plaintiff and the defendant were surprising:
County of Sequoyah v. Thompson Construction Company
.

The case had been brought to court only two years before, in the fall of 1989, and as Kinley read on through the testimony, he found it difficult to imagine why Ray had been so interested in it.