“Oh.” Then her eyes widened. “Oh! So you can get John Coffey off! Thank God! All you have to do is show Mr. Detterick a picture of William Wharton… his mug-shot should do…”
Brutal and I exchanged an uncomfortable look. Dean was looking a bit hopeful, but Harry was staring down at his hands, as if all at once fabulously interested in his fingernails.
“What’s wrong?” Janice asked. “Why are you looking at each other that way? Surely this man McGee will have to—”
“Rob McGee struck me as a good man, and I think he’s a hell of a law officer,” I said, “but he swings no weight in Trapingus County. The power there is Sheriff Cribus, and the day he reopens the Detterick case on the basis of what I was able to find out would be the day it snows in hell.”
“But… if Wharton was there… if Detterick can identify a picture of him and they know he was there…”
“Him being there in May doesn’t mean he came back and killed those girls in June,” Brutal said. He spoke in a low, gentle voice, the way you speak when you’re telling someone there’s been a death in the family. “On one hand you’ve got this fellow who helped Klaus Detterick paint a barn and then went away. Turns out he was committing crimes all over the place, but there’s nothing against him for the three days in May he was around Tefton. On the other hand, you’ve got this big Negro, this huge Negro, that you found on the riverbank, holding two little dead girls, both of them naked, in his arms.”
He shook his head.
“Paul’s right, Jan. McGee may have his doubts, but McGee doesn’t matter. Cribus is the only one who can reopen the case, and Cribus doesn’t want to mess with what he thinks of as a happy ending—‘it was a nigger,’ thinks he, ‘and not one of our’n in any case. Beautiful, I’ll go up there to Cold Mountain, have me a steak and a draft beer at Ma’s, then watch him fry, and there’s an end to it.’”
Janice listened to all this with a mounting expression of horror on her face, then turned to me. “But McGee believes it, doesn’t he, Paul? I could see it on your face. Deputy McGee knows he arrested the wrong man. Won’t he stand up to the Sheriff?”
“All he can do by standing up to him is lose his job,” I said. “Yes, I think that in his heart he knows it was Wharton. But what he says to himself is that, if he keeps his mouth shut and plays the game until Cribus either retires or eats himself to death, he gets the job. And things will be different then. That’s what he tells himself to get to sleep, I imagine. And he’s probably not so much different than Homer about one thing. He’ll tell himself, ‘After all, it’s only a Negro. It’s not like they’re going to burn a white man for it.’”
“Then you’ll have to go to them,” Janice said, and my heart turned cold at the decisive, no-doubt-about-it tone of her voice. “Go and tell them what you found out.”
“And how should we tell them we found it out, Jan?” Brutal asked her in that same low voice. “Should we tell them about how Wharton grabbed John while we were taking him out of the prison to work a miracle on the Warden’s wife?”
“No… of course not, but…” She saw how thin the ice was in that direction and skated in another one. “Lie, then,” she said. She looked defiantly at Brutal, then turned that look on me. It was hot enough to smoke a hole in newspaper, you’d have said.
“Lie,” I repeated. “Lie about what?”
“About what got you going, first up to Purdom County and then down to Trapingus. Go down there to that fat old Sheriff Cribus and say that Wharton told you he raped and murdered the Detterick girls. That he confessed.” She switched her hot gaze to Brutal for a moment. “You can back him up, Brutus. You can say you were there when he confessed, you heard it, too. Why, Percy probably heard it as well, and that was probably what set him off. He shot Wharton because he couldn’t stand thinking of what Wharton had done to those children. It snapped his mind. Just… What? What now, in the name of God?”
It wasn’t just me and Brutal; Harry and Dean were looking at her, too, with a kind of horror.
“We never reported anything like that, ma’am,” Harry said. He spoke as if talking to a child. “The first thing people’d ask is why we didn’t. We’re supposed to report anything our cell-babies say about prior crimes. Theirs or anyone else’s.”
“Not that we would’ve believed him,” Brutal put in. “A man like Wild Bill Wharton lies about anything, Jan. Crimes he’s committed, bigshots he’s known, women he’s gone to bed with, touchdowns he scored in high school, even the damn weather.”
“But… but…” Her face was agonized. I went to put my arm around her and she pushed it violently away. “But he was there! He painted their goddamned barn! HE ATE DINNER WITH THEM!”
“All the more reason why he might take credit for the crime,” Brutal said. “After all, what harm? Why not boast? You can’t fry a man twice, after all.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right. We here at this table know that not only did John Coffey not kill those girls, he was trying to save their lives. Deputy McGee doesn’t know all that, of course, but he does have a pretty good idea that the man condemned to die for the murders didn’t do them. And still… still… you can’t get him a new trial. Can’t even reopen the case.”
“Yessum,” Dean said. He was polishing his glasses furiously. “That’s about the size of it.”
She sat with her head lowered, thinking. Brutal started to say something and I raised a hand, shushing him. I didn’t believe Janice could think of a way to get John out of the killing box he was in, but I didn’t believe it was impossible, either. She was a fearsomely smart lady, my wife. Fearsomely determined, as well. That’s a combination that sometimes turns mountains into valleys.
“All right,” she said at last. “Then you’ve got to get him out on your own.”
“Ma’am?” Harry looked flabbergasted. Frightened, too.
“You can do it. You did it once, didn’t you? You can do it again. Only this time you won’t bring him back.”
“Would you want to be the one to explain to my kids why their daddy is in prison, Missus Edgecombe?” Dean asked. “Charged with helping a murderer escape jail?”
“There won’t be any of that, Dean; we’ll work out a plan. Make it look like a real escape.”
“Make sure it’s a plan that could be worked out by a fellow who can’t even remember how to tie his own shoes, then,” Harry said. “They’ll have to believe that.”
She looked at him uncertainly.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Brutal said. “Even if we could think of a way, it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?” She sounded as if she might be going to cry. “Just why the damn hell not?”
“Because he’s a six-foot-eight-inch baldheaded black man with barely enough brains to feed himself,” I said. “How long do you think it would be before he was recaptured? Two hours? Six?”
“He got along without attracting much attention before,” she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. She slapped it away with the heel of her hand.
That much was true. I had written letters to some friends and relatives of mine farther down south, asking if they’d seen anything in the papers about a man fitting John Coffey’s description. Anything at all. Janice had done the same. We had come up with just one possible sighting so far, in the town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A twister had struck a church there during choir practice—in 1929, this had been—and a large black man had hauled two fellows out of the rubble. Both had looked dead to onlookers at first, but as it turned out, neither had been even seriously hurt. It was like a miracle, one of the witnesses was quoted as saying. The black man, a drifter who had been hired by the church pastor to do a day’s worth of chores, had disappeared in the excitement.