TWENTY-ONE
I didn't make it in to work until ten o'clock the next day. I don't know what happened. I mean, yes, I got drunk that night. Yes, I fell asleep on the couch. But back in my drinking days, I had always managed to wake up on time. Hung over or not, I was at work on time, without fail.
Lt. Gooch was at his desk, reading. He didn't look up when I came in.
“Hey, I'm sorry,” I said. “I had some car trouble, and then my cell phone battery was low andâ”
Lt. Gooch looked up at me finally. “Are you going to meetings?” he said.
“What?” I tried to look all innocent.
“You heard me.”
“What's this?” I said. “All of a sudden you're taking a personal interest in me?”
“No. I'm taking an interest in you not blowing this case just because you're feeling sorry for yourself. I'm taking an interest in you not getting drunk at night and coming in late looking like you just swallowed half the distillery. I'm taking an interest in how you spent six months in some high-dollar lady's drunk tank up in Rochester, Minnesota, where I have no doubt they told you if you planned to stay sober, you better go to meetings after you get through with the goddamn program, and now you seem to be ignoring that advice. That's what interest I'm taking.”
I stared at him. It was about the longest speech I'd heard him make the whole time I'd known him.
“For the third time, Detective. Are you or are you not going to meetings?”
“I hate those things,” I said. “Bunch of losers bitching about how crummy their lives are. It's awful.”
“I take that to mean no.”
“No! No! No, I'm not going to meetings. And, yes, I'm doing fine. I'm just a little frazzled or whatever because my car wouldn't start and my phone didn't work, and now you're giving me a bunch of bullshit about something you don't know anything about.”
“
Is
it a bunch of bullshit?”
I glared at the lieutenant. “I'm fine.”
“You weren't drinking last night? Putting something up your nose?”
“No! I already said!”
“Okay, fine. You know how to use a computer?”
“Yes.”
“How about a phone?”
I gave him my nastiest face.
“So take the file on this Ferlin Joyner characterâthe one who that moron in Walton County got a DNA match on. Get on the phone, get on the computer, and find him. Find out who his mama and daddy are, I bet he's living ten minutes from their house.”
I made a face. But I did what I was told.
And, damned if it didn't turn out he was right. I had to pull some fancy footwork on the computer, and then tell several ridiculous lies to various members of the Joyner family, a tight-knit clan up in Rabun County, in the foothills of Appalachia. But it only took me half a day to find out that Ferlin Joyner was living in a mobile home on the very same dead-end road as his father and mother, living under the name Farline Jeeter.
When I told Lt. Gooch what a miserable job of police work the Walton County detective had done, Gooch just shook his head.
The next day we got a warrant and drove up to Rabun County, where we met the local sheriff and Detective Watson, the friendly but ineffectual cop from Walton County who had blown the original case. The sheriff, who personally led his tactical unit in the bust, claimed to have solid intelligence that Ferlin Joyner was home.
But when we went in, the place was empty.
The chubby detective from Walton County stood in the middle of the living room looking around at the ancient Motley Crue posters on the wall and the Pabst Blue Ribbon cans on the floor and said, “I be durn. Ferlin's flew the coop again. That old boy's slicker than goose poop on glass.”
Lt. Gooch walked out the door, stretched, and said, “Man, this mountain air's nice, ain't it?”
“You don't seem disappointed,” I said.
Gooch shrugged. “Now that there's real police involved in this case, he'll turn up. I ain't worried.”
Â
Â
We spent the next two days on the road again, talking to small-town cops, eating chicken-fried steak in little towns all over Georgia, sometimes getting the brush-off, sometimes finding a helpful detail or twoâbut always there remained something elusive about the cases, a sense that something was hanging there, just out of reach.
At the end of the second day we got together with the sheriff of Bascoe County, a pitiful, jerkwater county in the sandhills of south Georgia, a part of the state that reminded you as much of Haiti as anything else.
The sheriff of Bascoe County was an earnest, gentlemanly sort of fellow, black as a piano key, with a missing incisor, a slight stutter, and an ingratiating manner. He was the first black sheriff since Reconstruction in a county where blacks outnumbered whites by a five-to-one margin. His name was John Higganbotham.
He took us out to the only restaurant in the county, a dark, ramshackle cinderblock building with several rooms and a steam table served by a big-breasted woman in a red head-rag. If it weren't for the fact that the sour old white lady who ran the place grudgingly allowed me to eat inside, it could almost have been 1939 in there.
We got our food from the steam tableâyams and fried chicken and bread pudding and green beans cooked nearly to death in fatbackâand then the Sheriff pulled the chair out for me to sit down.
“See, Lieutenant,” I said. “Out here in the country the gentlemen know how to treat a lady.”
As usual, the Lieutenant didn't bite. He just ate a couple forkfuls of candied yams, wiped his mouth, and said, “Sheriff, how 'bout you tell us about Ronald Gillis.”
“Yessir. Yessir,” Sheriff Higganbotham said. He frowned slightly, put his hands under his chin, palms together, as though praying. “I be the first to tell you I got no law enforcement experience. What it's always been, the high sheriff around hereabouts is a politician, pure and simple. The high sheriff runs the show here. Used to be Mr. Randy Nix. Before Mr. Randy, it was Mr. Farley Nix, his daddy. Before that, Mr. Elrod Nix. The Nixes used to own half the county. After Mr. Randy retired, he sold off all his timber land to the Georgia Pacific Company, and the kids done moved up to Atlanta. That's when the colored folks got together and elected one of our own. I was the first black man in the county to get him some college, and so it come up me to get elected. I got four deputies. Any time we get a serious crime, I just get on the phone, call up the GBI. My deputies ain't got the training, nor do I. That's a fact, mm-hm.”
The lieutenant gnawed impatiently on his chicken leg, not interested in history.
“At any rate,” the sheriff continued, “that little boy Ronald, his mama stay over on the other side of the county. Got her a nice trailer home up to Cutler Creek. She on disability due to she got sugar diabetes, high blood pressure, various other ailments and conditions. One Sunday her cousin Maurice Gillis carried her and the boy up to church, little AME church over on the other side of Childersville. During the service, some of the boysâyou know how boys is, no time for getting religionâthey slip out the back of the church, go out, play in the woods a little. Horsing around, nothing serious.
“After the service, all the boys come back. But not Ronald. Figure maybe he done fell in a hole, got lost in the woods, something. The whole congregation go beating the bushes, but the boy don't show up. I called up Mr. Jimmy Young, he got him a couple bloodhounds, used to track prisoners for the Department of Corrections? Mm-hm. He take them down to the woods, try to track the boy, and he say, nah, the boy ain't in the woods. I'm axing, what you mean, sir, he ain't in the woods? Mr. Jimmy say, naw, he must of done got in somebody car. Got in somebody car, done got took away.
“Anyway, couple months later, we finds the boy. Been strangled, it looks like. Out near the old railroad line. So I calls out the GBI, they studies the scene, takes the boy up to Atlanta for the autopsy, so on, so forth. They find some of that DNA on him. In the form of blood, I believe it was. A stain on that poor little boy's shirt. The fellow from the GBI say to me, what you need to do, you need to get all the peoples been in contact with this young man, see if they give you they blood, free and voluntary. We test it, see if anybody match. Well, everybody pretty much willing to give up they blood, see if it'll help. The GBI, they do them tests, lo and behold: that boy Maurice Gillis, the one carried the boy and his mama to the church, he end up matching the blood on that shirt.”
“And what happened to Maurice then?” I said.
Sheriff Higganbotham blinked. “He in the death house up at Jackson now, what you think?”
I glanced at Lt. Gooch. He was deep into his green beans and seemed unconcerned about this.
“Yes, ma'am, when that DNA come back from the lab, I went down to the jailhouse where we was keeping that boy, and I set down with him and I said to him, âYoung man, time come for you to lay it all down.' Well, he didn't want to admit to nothing. But me and the GBI fellows, we worked him around a little, eventually he give up to us what happened.”
“He confessed?” Lt. Gooch said sharply, looking up from his food.
“Yessir. Mm-hm. He confessed.”
“When you say you âworked him around,' ” I said. “What you mean by that, Sheriff?”
The Sheriff sat up straight, looking slightly offended. “It ain't like
that!
Nah, we talked to him. That's all. Time was, justice was whatever white folks said it was. No offense to you, Lieutenant, that's just how it was around here. Wrong or right, didn't matter. I may not be much of a sheriff, I be honest with you. I got my limitations, sure enough. But one thing I tell you, I ain't going back to what it was before. Frailing on people till they say they done something they ain't, like it was back when the Nixes run this county? No, ma'am. So all I done, I talked to that boy, prayed with him, tried to get past his natural mind, get down to his
spiritual
mind. See? And once I done that, the boy knew what he'd did was wrong and he confessed it all up. Broke down and cried, told me the whole thing. Free and voluntary.”
“What did he say he'd done?”
“Took the boy out in the woods. It's a old plantation house, all broke down now and covered with kudzu. Had a root cellar in it. Put the boy down in the root cellar and . . . you know . . .”
“Now, don't you be deferring to my tender nature, Sheriff,” I said. “Say it plain out.”
Higganbotham cleared his throat. “He raped the boy, what he done.”
Lt. Gooch looked up from his meal. “No indication of that from the autopsy. No anal tearing, nothing like that.”
The Sheriff cleared his throat nervously. It was obvious you didn't talk about torn anuses around a lady in this part of the country. “I suppose,” he said gravely, “that there's a variety of ways a sick person might put they abuse on a little boy.”
“Oral sex,” the lieutenant said, chewing on his beans.
Sheriff Higganbotham cleared his throat again.
“You didn't ask?” the Lieutenant said. “ âDid you penetrate him, Maurice? Did you jack off on him, Maurice? Did you make him do this or that, Maurice?' ”
The Sheriff's face grew cool and distant. “I don't know how it's done in Atlanta, Lieutenant. But down here, if a man say he done a thing, if he take responsibilityâwell, sir, out of respect for the deceased, we don't see any need of going into all kind of gruesome and terrible details which it's only gonna give the survivors one more terrible thing to lay awake nights thinking of, sir.”
The lieutenant grunted.
I took out the file, turned it around, pushed it across the scarred Masonite table. “What about this?” I said. I pointed my fingernail at the lines on the autopsy report showing the brittle bones that indicated that Ronald Gillis had been starved.
The sheriff took out a pair of gold-framed glasses, peered at the report. “I'm afraid that don't mean much to me,” he said apologetically.
“It indicates he was starved.”
“Mm-hm?”
“Did this Maurice ever indicate to you that he had starved the boy?”
The Sheriff frowned, took off his glasses, put them in the pocket of his funereal black suit. “No, ma'am. I can't say he did. But like I say, I didn't see the sense of getting all sunk down in the details.”
“Fair enough,” the Lieutenant said. “But do me a favor, read me this.” He took the file folder, flipped it over until he reached the statement of Ronald Gillis's mother, Mrs. Etta Jean Gillis, then tapped a line that had been highlighted in yellow with his fork.
The Sheriff took out his glasses, read the line silently. “She later withdrew that statement, sir,” he said.