The other day they hid his pipe. His pipe, his meerschaum, picked up in Germany after the war, he’d smoked it every night for close to fifty years and it was gone. It had vanished. They changed the names of his grandchildren on him and they even mixed up two of his surviving daughters.
They moved his car when he drove to the store. They changed the stoplight on him as he accelerated through an intersection and then they honked or yelled rudely to him. Sometimes they confused him as to what side of the road he was supposed to drive on.
It was enough to make a man seriously angry, but this one, their last prank, was the worst.
For so long he had been such a methodical man. He was the kind of American who believed not in law and order but that order was law. Thus he carefully cataloged or recorded his materials, he took infinitely detailed notes, he went over testimony forward and backwards, he mastered evidence forward and backwards and he never, ever asked a question twice or to which he did not know the answer.
He had outargued them all, until these new invisible devils had come gunning for him.
But he wouldn’t let them win, or if, by chance, they won, if someone finally beat him, by God they’d know they’d been in a fight.
He looked around the carnage of his basement. Someone had literally dumped his files out of their cardboard boxes onto the floor in a frenzy. Who would do such a thing? Then he remembered: he had done such a thing. Just a few minutes ago.
What was I looking for?
Yes: a copy of the report to the coroner he had put together in 1955 on a wrongful death hearing in the case of Earl Swagger. He knew he had it. He had to have it. It was in here somewhere. But where?
The box marked 1955 was empty and he’d emptied 1953 to 1957 as well, in the thought that maybe sometime when he left office and was transferring these boxes to his home, he or one of his secretaries—he’d buried more secretaries than he could even remember—had misfiled it.
Or maybe he didn’t even have a copy. It was a report on an investigation, but it didn’t lead to a prosecution or a decision not to prosecute, but only to a dead end in the Coroner’s Office, so possibly even back then he didn’t file it with his regular case files but in some other file, some annex or something.
It wasn’t like he couldn’t remember now. It wasn’t his memory that was going. No sir, not him. It was instead a sense of fog drifting through his mind. The memory was still there. It was a vision problem: he still had all his books organized just so in the library of his mind, but for some reason he had trouble reading the names on the spines and he couldn’t get them out without groping. It made him furious!
He hated the idea of going to that smug kid Rusty or whatever his goddamned name was and saying, “You know, I can’t find that document. I told you I could, but I can’t. I must have misremembered.”
Rusty would look at him as a few of his grandchildren did: their eyes would behold a relic, a living fossil, something that belonged behind glass in a museum.
Well, goddamn him anyway! Sam felt an eruption of anger so intense it was physical; his knotty old hand formed into a fist and he imagined smashing Rusty or whatever his name was in the mouth. That would satisfy him so.
He bent, but discovered his back too stiff to allow him to stay in such a position. So he knelt, and began to scrape the files up, to try and get them into some semblance of order.
A name leaped out at him.
It was like a musical tone or something, soft and vague but oddly familiar. What was it? What did it connect with? What could it mean?
Nothing. He had it, it tantalized him, then it was gone.
Goddamn them, they were doing it to him again!
He got the files together and saw from the dates they were all 1955s, and so again he slipped through them one more time and by God no, no Earl Swagger anywhere. Where did it go? Where had it—
Parker!
He held the Shirelle Parker file in his hand. It was quite thin, not much to show for such a horrible crime, though it had been an open-and-shut case.
Why was this important?
Yes, Earl’s last case. That day: July 23, 1955.
He opened the file and a picture greeted him: Shirelle at her eighth-grade graduation. He remembered some policeman had given it to him before the trial. He looked at it now and saw such a pretty girl, her eyes so lit up and full of hope. She was a colored child in the Arkansas of the fifties and she was full of hope! Now, wasn’t that something! She must have been a wonderful child, but he realized he had no evidence about her. He knew nothing about her, except the facts of the death, which are all that matter to a prosecutor. It doesn’t matter if they’re good, bad, wonderful or eviclass="underline" if they’ve been killed you try and put the killers in the chair or at least in the house.
The next picture was more familiar. It was marked POLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT PROPERTY, JULY 24, 1955—EVIDENCE. The crime scene. Shirelle, on her back on the hard shale wash of the hillside, her dress up, her privates violated, her face still and swollen, her eyes wide.
He put the photo down. He could not look at it.
I got him for you, Shirelle, he thought. Yes, I did. I got him for you and Earl. That was my job.
He remembered. It was so easy.
He’d gotten to the scene late the day after, having been devoured by the terrible mess of Earl Swagger’s death in the cornfield, by the grief and the rage and all the long and terrible ceremonies to go through.
Now, finally, at 4:00 . on the twenty-fourth he arrived at Shirelle’s site. He could see in an instant that it had been hopelessly contaminated. Footprints scalloped the ground around her, the litter of candy bar wrappers and pop bottles lay everywhere, one lazy Polk County sheriff’s deputy lounged under a tree, smoking a cigarette.
“Has the state police forensics team been here?” Sam demanded.
“No sir. They ain’t a-coming, I hear. Too busy with Mr. Earl.”
Sam shook his head, but realized it didn’t really matter. There was no evidence left to be gotten here.
“It looks like the goddamned army’s been here.”
“Well, folks heard about the dead nigger gal. They come to look. I tried to keep ’em away but you know how word git around.”
This enraged Sam but he saw the pointlessness of exploding at this dim fool. Instead, seething, he walked to the body. By now Shirelle was gray in color, almost dusty. Her negritude had all but vanished. She was simply a dead child, puffed up with gas that almost took her humanity away.
“You heard about the pocket?” the deputy asked.
Sam hadn’t.
“Earl done found it yesterday, put it in an envelope for Lem to give the state police boys, but when they done never showed, he gave it to the Sheriff’s Office.”
“Pocket?”
“I hear. Ripped from a shirt. Monogrammed. Said RGF on it, pretty as you please.”
Amazing, thought Sam. He’d been investigating and prosecuting murder for thirty years, with five years off for the war, and he’d never come across anything so lucky. But murder was like that: it defied rational explanation and was full of crazy things, coincidences, freaks of happening, the sheer play of the irrational in the universe. A Baptist, he hated murder because it always made him doubt God’s wisdom and even, if he pressed too hard, God’s existence, though he would never utter such heresy.
“I’m going to call the coroner,” he told the deputy. “It’s time to git this poor little girl out of here. Now, you listen to me, you see anybody else pulling up for a free look at the show, you chase ’em goddamn away, you understand? I don’t want to hear about people coming up here no more. It ain’t right.”