He handed her the letter.
“Yes.”
“I can’t ever remember seeing it. I think a secretary must have put it in the file.”
“Because it wasn’t important.”
“Ma’am, if I’d have seen it, I’d have probably put it in the file too. It doesn’t have any evidence in it.”
“Only one white person ever told me the truth,” said Mrs. Parker. “That was Earl Swagger. He was a fair man. The day that man got killed was a sad day for this whole county. But Mr. Earl said he’d find out what happened to my baby. And I know if he’d a lived, he would have, fair and square, no matter what or who.”
Sam tried to be gentle.
“Ma’am, we found out what happened to Shirelle. Reggie Fuller killed her. And he paid for it. It’s a closed account. Nowadays, accounts don’t get closed so fairly. But we closed that one.”
“No sir,” the old lady said. “I know that boy didn’t do it, just like I said in the letter.”
Sam looked at the letter. She was quoting herself almost verbatim all these years later: “Mr. Sam, I know that boy couldn’t have killed my Shirelle,” she had written in 1957, a week before the execution.
“Mrs. Parker, everything scientific matched. I swear to you. I may not be no civil rights Holy Roller, but neither am I the kind of man who would railroad evidence.”
“I don’t care what the evidence said. That boy Reggie was over to my house when my Shirelle disappeared. He was in the house. He talked to me about her. He looked me in the eye. God would not let him look me in the eye and say he missed Shirelle if the night before he had killed her.”
“Mrs. Parker, I have been around murderers my whole life. Black or white, they are wired different. They can look you in the eye and tell you that they love you and make you believe it, and when you turn your back, they hit you over the head with a claw hammer and take your watch and drink your blood and forget about it in the next second. They ain’t normal, like you and me. A lie don’t carry no weight with them at all.”
“That may be true, sir, but Reggie wasn’t like that. Don’t you understand?”
“Ma’am, facts is facts.”
“Mr. Sam, Mr. Earl said the detectives would come talk to us. No detectives never did. What you call it when you solve a crime? What Columbo does.”
“Columbo is a made-up man. Investigation. You call it investigation.”
“You never did no investigation. You found your shirt, you found your blood and you electrocuted your nigger boy.”
“He was guilty. Who would go to so much trouble to frame a boy like that?”
“The man what killed my baby Shirelle and has been walking around laughing about it all these years.”
“Madam: think about what you’re saying. A man would have to find Reggie, break into his house, get his shirt, take it to the site of the murder, dip it in your daughter’s blood, rip the pocket off, plant the pocket in your daughter’s dead hand, return to Reggie’s house, break in again, hide the shirt under the mattress. Now, who would do such a damned crazy thing? If he does nothing, we only find the body and there ain’t no other evidence to point to a suspect. Without that damned pocket and that bloody shirt, there ain’t no evidence, ain’t no case, ain’t no nothing. There’s only a dead girl.”
She didn’t blink or look away but faced him square.
“I knows all that. But … he did have the time. It ain’t like there’s some limit on the time he had, like a single night. He had four full days between the time he killed my girl and Mr. Earl found the body. It could have been done.”
It was the damn TV! Everybody thought they was Columbo or Matlock or some such and when people’s loved ones got killed, there always had to be some meaning in it. Sam looked into Mrs. Parker’s crazed old eyes: she’d been fulminating on this over the decades. She’d invented a goddamned conspiracy about her daughter’s death. No one wanted to face the squalid, simple, irrational truth, as here: a colored boy lost control and smashed her poor little daughter to death with a rock.
“Mrs. Parker, it don’t never happen that way. It just don’t.”
“Mr. Sam, I see in your eyes what you thinking. You thinking, crazy old colored woman, she be blaming a white person. Every last thing, it’s all the white man’s fault. It’s race, like all the colored, that’s all they think about. That’s what you thinking, right?”
She regarded him with fierce, brilliant eyes.
“Sister, I—”
“You is, isn’t you? Tell me!”
He sighed.
“I suppose I am. There are some things I cannot overcome. Some suspicions about y’all. I haven’t grown as I should have.”
“Then let me tell you something surprise you. I don’t think a white man done it. I think a colored man did.”
This threw Sam. It was the last thing he expected. The old woman had him foxed something powerful.
“What you mean, there, sister?”
“In them days, the one thing we told our girls, and I must have said it a hundred times to Shirelle: you don’t never get in no car with a white boy. White boy only wants one thing from you and you don’t want to give it to him. He may be friendly, he may be nice, he may be handsome, he may have the devil’s ways to him. But he only want one thing, girl, and if you give it to him, he hate you and all the black boys find out and they hate you, but they goin’ try and git the same off of you and really be angry if you don’t give it. So I know she don’t get in no car with no white man. Some colored man done this to her.”
Sam blinked, confounded. The old lady was smart. Not white smart, fancy sentences smart, but somehow she knew things: she had seen into the center of it. He’d known many a detective sergeant who wasn’t as sly as this.
“Mr. Sam, you the smartest man in this county. You smarter even than old Ray Bama or Harry Etheridge and his son, you smarter than Mr. Earl. You got his boy, Bob Lee, off when the whole U.S. govmint say he was a killer. You got Jed Posey to spend his black evil days in prison. Now you a old man and I a old woman. We both be gone soon. Cain’t you please just look at that case again? Just so’s when you goes you knows you done your job as hard at the end as you done it through the middle.”
“Well—”
He thought about it. His was a life of certitude. He was an absolute believer. He hated revisionism, hindsight, detached examination, the whole spirit of equivocation and ironic ambivalence which had become the American style in the nineties. He hated it. Goddamn Nigra woman wanted him to become what he hated.
But … there was time. She was right. It was not technically impossible. Why anyone would do such a thing was beyond his imagining, but it was, in the technical sense, by the laws of the physical world, possible. And the bit about the black man being the one who did it—that was so interesting.
As pure mystery, as pure problem of the intellect, it goaded him powerfully.
“My mind ain’t what it once was. It gits foggy. It clouds up with anger. I can’t find my socks. Seems like people hide things on me. But if I git another clear day like today, I will look at the case records again, or what of them remain. I will look, but don’t you expect nothing. I can’t have you expecting nothing, Mrs. Parker.”