“Sam, she’s only a nigger gal.”
Sam turned away.
By the time he got back, the raiding party was already to go. Five sheriff’s deputies with shotguns and rifles and clubs, the sheriff himself already to lead the outfit in search of glory and headlines.
“No,” Sam told them. “Not yet. You boys can be cowboys later.”
But the evidence was undeniable. A quick scan of tax records in the County Clerk’s Office, happily segregated by color, had turned up but one Negro with the initials RGF. His name was Reggie Gerard Fuller, he was eighteen and the second son of Davidson Fuller, the most prosperous Negro in town and owner of Fuller’s Funeral Parlor, which buried all the Negroes. Reggie had a driver’s license on record, and access to an automobile, the hearse, or more likely one of the two smaller black Fords the parlor used to transport mourners. On top of that, Reggie was known as a sharp dresser: his shirts were monogrammed.
High school records indicated that Reggie was a studious though not overbright boy who placidly accepted that he would work for his father in some clerical capacity, lacking the grit and smarts to take over the business himself. He had no incidents on his record, but he was, after all, colored and young, and therefore by inclination more inclined toward deviant behavior. Most sensible people realized that in each Nigra there lurked the secret potential of the rapist and the killer; it had merely to be brought out by liquor or jealousy and knives would flash. The deputies even had a name for the crimes such behavior inspired: they were called “Willie-thumped-Willies” as in, “Oh, hey, I hear you caught a Willie-thumped-Willie the other night.” “Yeah, goddamned coon cut up his old lady with a whiskey bottle. Bitch died before the goddamn ambulance came. I don’t blame the ambulance. I wouldn’t go down there for nothing.” In this one Reggie thumped Shirelle.
But Sam was a stickler. After examining the evidence, he personally called Judge Harrison and personally drove the eighteen miles out to the judge’s farm to get the search warrant and the probable-cause warrant signed.
“This ain’t goddamn Mississippi,” he said. “Or goddamned Alabam. We do things by the law here.”
And he went along on the raid. He knew his presence would considerably lessen the thunder and the fury of the event; white deputies kicking down black doors in the middle of the night, no, not in his county.
So instead of kicking in doors, the deputies waited outside while Sam and the sheriff knocked on the door of the biggest, whitest house in what was called Niggertown but was actually a six-block-square neighborhood in west Blue Eye.
It was four in the morning. Groggily, Mr. Fuller opened the door with a shotgun in his hand and Sam was glad he had come along; the deputies might have opened fire.
“Mr. Fuller, I am Sam Vincent, Polk County prosecutor, and I think you recognize the sheriff.”
Automatic race fear came upon the man’s face: he saw stern whites in his doorway, and behind them, parked at the curb, four police cars, light bars flashing.
“What is this about?”
“Sir, we’ve come to question your son Reggie. And to serve papers on a search warrant. I’ve instructed the boys to be courteous and professional. But we do have an investigation to run. Could you please bring Reggie down to us? Say, the living room?”
“What is—”
“Mr. Fuller, I know you’ve heard, there was another terrible crime yesterday. One of your own kind. Now, we have an investigation to run.”
“My boy didn’t do nothing,” said Mr. Fuller.
“You know me to be a fair man, and I swear to you nothing will happen here tonight or any night except what the law decrees. That’s how I run things. But we have our duty to do. In the meantime, the deputies will search the house. I have a legal paper here which says it’s all right. The deputies won’t break anything and if they do, they’ll pay for it out of their own pockets. But we have to do what we have to do.”
Eventually, the sleepy Reggie was brought before Sam. He could have taken him to headquarters for questioning, but he elected, out of respect for Mr. Fuller’s position, to do the initial here.
“Reggie, where were you five nights ago, that is, July 19?”
“He was here,” said Mrs. Fuller.
“You let him answer, ma’am, or I will have to take him away.”
Reggie was an almost fat boy, with pale skin and an unfocused quality about him that had nothing to do with the late hour. His eyes drifted, he fidgeted. He smiled and no one returned the smile. He blinked, and seemed to forget where he was; for a while he stopped paying attention. He was wearing pajamas with butterflies on them. He betrayed more confusion than fear; nothing about him suggested aggression or tendency to violence. But Nigras were strange that way: they looked calm one second and the next they could go amok.
“Sir,” he finally said, “I don’t ‘member. Just around. Maybe in my room. I can’t say. No, I think I went for a drive in Daddy’s big old wagon.”
“The hearse?”
“Yes suh. I went for a drive, that’s all. Listen some to the radio, you know, from Memphis.”
“Anybody see you? Got people who can testify to where you were?”
“No sir.”
“Reggie, were you near the church? Did you go to the church and that meeting they had there that night?”
“No sir.”
“Reggie, you listen to me. If you were someplace you don’t want your daddy to know about, you have to be a man now and ’fess up. You were at a crib, drinking? You were gambling, you were with a woman?”
“Sir, I—”
“Mr. Sam, my boy Reggie, he’s a good boy. He’s not no genius, but he works hard and—”
“Sam.”
It was the sheriff.
“Sam, the boys found something.”
That was it, really. Sam walked into the bedroom and watched as one of the deputies pointed to a little corner of blue shirt that peeked from between the mattress and the box spring of the now stripped bed. Sam nodded, and the deputy separated the two: the corner yielded to a larger mass of material. Very carefully, with a pencil, Sam nabbed it and lifted it off the bed. It was a shirt, with the pocket missing, blue cotton. It was streaked with rust, which Sam knew to be the color of dried blood.
“Think we got us a nigger,” someone said.
“Okay,” Sam said, “mark it and bag it, very carefully. People are going to be looking at this case and we can’t afford to make a mistake.”
Then he headed back to the living room to arrest Reggie Fuller for murder.
The trial, three months later, was over in a day. The Fullers were willing to spend their life savings to hire a Little Rock lawyer, but Sam looked at the evidence and suggested that they’d do better to have Reggie plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. A Fort Smith lawyer told them the same thing: the shirt was indeed Reggie’s, as laundry markings subsequently proved and nobody ever bothered to deny. The pocket matched perfectly with the ripped seams on the chest. The blood was AB positive, as was Shirelle’s. Reggie had no meaningful alibi; he had taken the hearse that night and just “driven around.”
No bargain was ever offered, because there was no cause to. The evidence was such that a confession had no meaning. Sam made the melancholy but firm decision that Reggie, though he was young and somewhat distracted, must die. It wasn’t that Sam was a cruel man but he felt the simple rhythms of the universe had been violated and must be forcefully returned to normal. An eye for an eye: it was the best system, the only true system. He spoke for the dead, and it only worked if he spoke loudly. Besides, it was Earl’s last case: Earl would have wanted it that way too.