Another bell went off in Sam’s old mind. His son, Bob, had brought Earl’s notebook. And some other effects. With that fool boy, Rusty, Rufus, whatever. The notebook. Whatever was in the notebook was put there without any knowledge of Reggie Gerard Fuller.
Only trouble was: where the hell was the notebook?
The old man was on a goddamn toot. Duane had never seen him like this. His gears had slipped or something. He was literally destroying his house from the inside out.
Duane had worked his way around back of the proud old dwelling on Reinie Street, which sat under a canopy of elms and maples with its stately porch like the house that Andy Hardy lived in, and peered in through the windows. Though it was not yet dark, the old man had turned on all the lights. One by one, he was emptying the insides out of every drawer, every closet, every box, every cupboard, every vase in the house. He had cracked, finally. He was in a frenzy, jabbering insanely to himself.
After doing the downstairs, he moved upstairs. Though Duane could no longer see him, he took a chance and opened the door. Inside, he could hear crashes and dumpings and things being thrown against the wall and curses.
“Goddamn sumbitch, where the goddamn hell are you?” came the screams, as from a desperate man, a man close to an attack or something.
Mr. Bama wasn’t going to have to worry about this old guy. He’d end up doing himself in before the moon rose. A vein would pop, he’d be a lump in a body bag for the Coroner’s Office.
Duane called in a report, but there was no immediate answer. Where the hell was Bama?
You old worthless goat. You dying old bastard, you brainless worthless old dog, you ain’t good for nothing. Ought to put you down. Take you out and put a bullet behind your ear. Only merciful thing.
Sam looked about him. The house was ruined, smashed, destroyed. The rooms where his children played, the room where he had loved his wife, the room where so many Thanksgiving dinners had been eaten, the room where so many Christmases had been celebrated: all gone, all lost, all ruined, all wrecked and for what, for nothing, because he couldn’t remember where he put the goddamned notebook.
Only the garage remained.
He was full of despair. How had he gotten so old and feeble, so infirm? He hated and loathed himself: he—prosecutor, man of the law, war hero, deer hunter, father, husband, lover, American: how had all that gone away and he come to this current state of nothingness? His daughter had told him it was time to move in with them or if he wanted into an apartment or even a home and his eldest boy had said no, Pop’s all right, but now he thought she was right. He could—
The office!
You old goat! You never brought it home! He remembered now—Bob had handed it to him at the office and he’d locked it in the safe.
He looked around for his coat, but the only thing he could find immediately was his wife’s pink bathrobe from years back. He threw it on and, miraculously, found his keys. He stepped into the garage, fired up the Cadillac and backed out with a shriek and a lurch, hitting something—he wasn’t sure what.
He drove and a new fear assailed him: the combination. Did he know it? Could he remember it? Or was it gone like so much of the past?
He felt a whimper, or possibly a sob, rise from his chest, and felt enfeebled by the task ahead. He lacked all confidence. He was over, finished.
But after parking and somehow getting up the steps, unlocking the office and walking through the waiting room into his lair, a mercy came from on high, and as his fingers flew to the ancient lock, he saw the numbers before him big as daylight and in a second he had the vault open and the cardboard box out.
He took the treasure to his desk, clicked on the light and stopped for just a second to fill his pipe with tobacco. Lighting it, he drew a hot burst of smoke into his mouth, felt it buzz, then expelled it, and for just a second was back in the good part of his life, in command, a man of respect and power, not a cornpone, backwoods Lear raging on the moors of Polk County.
The box held but two objects and then he remembered that Bob and Rusty-Rufus-Ralph-whatever had taken the third, a manila file with some yellowed newspaper clippings in them. No matter: what was here was what counted, not the book of old traffic and speeding citations but the notebook, Earl’s jottings from early July 23, 1955. It bore a brownish streak across the cover, like one of those flings of paint that Jackson Pollock was so famous for; and the edges of half the pages inside were brittle with the same brown substance.
Sam drew back. Earl’s blood. As he lay dying, Earl must have bled in the car on the notebook. With a shudder, he opened it.
The shock hit him first of alclass="underline" for ten years, as they’d collaborated enforcing the law, Sam had read reports that Earl filed and the man’s handwriting was as familiar as his own—then forty years of nothing. Now here it was back again, in its familiar loops and whorls, its orderliness, its occasional underlinings, its occasional misspellings. The blood, the writing: it was as if Earl himself had suddenly walked into the room, so overpowering was the sense of his presence.
Another little shudder went through Sam as he tried to enter into Earl’s mind. Earl, how did you work? What was your style? Investigators all have styles, little things that are important to them, that they recognize as they try to bring order to chaos. What was Earl’s? He tried to remember. Then he remembered Earl’s bench in his basement, with every tool in its place and a place for every tool Earl had no need for the creativity of chaos; he believed in putting things in order.
His mind would work thus: Site. Body. Evidence. Conclusions.
No, no, no, it wouldn’t. He’d make conclusions after every section. Then he’d list the conclusions at the end, adding them up. That’s how he’d do it; that’s how he always did it.
First up, a drawing of the body, in exactly the posture that Sam remembered seeing it the next day, with dotted, diagonal lines orienting it toward landmarks (“tree,” “rock”) and distance estimations. Earl had also scratched in some kind of cross-hatching behind the body and identified it as “shale wash,” adding in parenthesis “no tracks.”
Hmmmm. Sam thought about that. It was a new detail. What kind of original site investigation had been done? He tried to remember. He himself hadn’t gotten there till late the next afternoon, after all that with Earl’s death, and he’d been sleepless and irritable as well as depressed. He remembered a lone deputy telling him the state police forensics people hadn’t shown up and that lots of people from the town had come out to see the dead nigger girl. So evidently, there wasn’t much site investigation, other than Earl’s. The crime scene was hopelessly contaminated.
He turned the page, to find CONC—Earl’s comments on the site. It said only “Body moved? Dumped where no tracks could be found?”
Body moved? This was new. Body moved? Why would Reggie have—
But then he remembered: Reggie hadn’t been uncovered yet. No one would ask why Reggie would move the body, just as later investigators would not trouble to think about the body being moved, since they already had Reggie.
He turned the page: the body itself.
There were descriptions of the various violations worked on poor Shirelle, including scrapes and abrasions visible in the “private area,” as Earl had so demurely called it. He also described a “grayish cast to skin, suggesting passage of several days” and “some bloating.” He looked at the killing wound: “Looks to be a massive hematoma in the right frontal quadrant of the skull” and noted nearby “rock smeared with blood as possible murder weapon.”