But then something strange: “Cause of death? Maybe not blow; swelling and bruising around throat area suggests strangulation?”
Sam sat back. Also new to him: strangulation.
Where was this coming from?
Maybe Earl was mistaken. On the other hand, when the coroner looked at Shirelle, another two days had passed: possibly she’d swollen more and the swelling and bruising on her throat weren’t as visible. Or possibly, because Reggie was already in custody and there was a good deal of blood already in evidence, nobody looked that carefully at the body.
What was the significance of the strangulation?
Sam sawed away on this one and then had it. If he strangled her, there wouldn’t be no blood. Or not much. Yet Reggie’s shirt was stained fairly extensively with Shirelle’s blood.
Sam didn’t like this one damned bit. Then he thought: Reggie strangles her. He’s not sure if she’s dead. He smashes her with the rock.
Yes, that would explain it.
But it was a raggedness, an awkwardness, an uncertainty, where before there had only been absolute confidence.
His pipe was empty. He scraped the cake out with his keys, then refilled it, lit and sucked. It gurgled, burning too hot, wet and harsh, a sure sign he was agitated and somewhat diluting the great tobacco rush. He looked about. It was dark now, quite still. He got up, went to the window and looked out upon a small town at night, lit here and there by a window radiating heat and light, but generally still. The only thing he could see was a sheriff’s car parked down the street. Was it that goddamned Duane Peck? What the hell could he want? Was Sam now so feeble he needed full-time supervision?
He went back to his desk.
Wasn’t this a goddamned fine kettle of fish? How long was this going to last? The old goat was completely wacky. Now he was at his office. Duane looked at his watch. It was nearly nine. He’d been on the go since seven that morning, this on three hours’ sleep off of yesterday’s roaming.
Only one thing to break the monotony; middle of the afternoon there had been some kind of dustup on the radio, some kind of big gunfight over on the Taliblue Trail in Oklahoma, about forty miles away. He couldn’t make any sense of it, Oklahoma Highway Patrol shit, and calls for originally ambulances and fire trucks but then coroners but it was none of his business.
Now he was just waiting. From where he was, he couldn’t see much—just the light beaming out of the old man’s office from the window. The old man had come to it a few seconds ago, sucking on his pipe, and stared for a bit. Then he’d gone back.
Duane wasn’t quite able to see the old man, which had him worried. He was parked parallel to the curb, across the street and down a bit. So he got out of his car and walked into the square, passed the statue of General George F. James, the Iron General of Vicksburg, who’d actually been born in Polk County, though he died in a brothel in Savannah, Georgia, at the age of eighty-one surrounded by painted harlots, and went and stood on a bench at the far side. Standing so, with his binoculars, he could see the top of Sam’s body as the old man bent over whatever he was examining. He was working away steadily, and he looked to all the world like Perry Mason except, of course, for the pink bathrobe.
Sam looked at the drawing. It appeared to be a window on a one-story, rounded building with a single line drawn from the top edge of the window to an inscription, and here his penetrations into the mysteries of Earl’s handwriting ceased. “Reed dept.,” it seemed to say. Now, what the hell could that mean?
He looked at it: a mystery. What was the building, what was the department of reeds? He searched his memory for a forty-year-old hint, but couldn’t come up with a damned thing. He looked again at the drawing. Maybe it wasn’t a building, maybe it was a television set. But in 1955, there weren’t but ten televisions in all of Polk County. Maybe it was a drive-in movie screen, but the nearest drive-in movie screen was and always had been the Sky-Vue in Fort Smith, where Sam sometimes took his children.
His pipe puffed dry. He turned it upside down and smacked it into the ashtray, dumping the shards of ash. He looked around for his pouch, working slowly, enjoying the ritual and the cleansing effect it had on his mind. He was going to pack the ’baccy into the bowl when he remembered to clean the cake, but he couldn’t lay a hand on his keys they were across the room, he remembered—and so with his thick, horny thumbnail he scraped gunk off the bowl and wiped it on his pants. There, that cleared the bowl. He scrunched a wad of tobacco into the pipe, clenched it between his old teeth, lit a match and drew it to the bowl. He sucked in and watched the suction take the flame, draw it into the pipe and, ah—blast of smoke scented with the forest. Such a—
His fingernail!
His fingernail wore a crescent of ash deposit under its edge.
He looked again at the drawing: it was the girl’s fingertip, her nail. The line ran from the rim of the nail to the inscription, which he now realized said “Red dirt,” not “Reed dept.,” for the period after dirt was a minor imperfection of the paper, not from Earl’s pen.
Red dirt under her nails.
But there was no red dirt at that point off U.S. 71. Wasn’t now, wasn’t then.
Red dirt means she was killed somewhere else, yes, and brought here.
Red dirt means—Little Georgia.
He turned the page; at the top, under conclusions, Earl had written “Little Georgia?”
Little Georgia was a patch of red clay deposit not off Route 71 north of town but off 88, northeast of town, just before Ink.
If Shirelle had red dirt under her nails, it could mean that’s where she was killed. But so what? Who would move her twelve, fifteen miles? What would be the point?
Still, Sam could see how unimportant the red dirt under the nails would have been to a coroner who already knew that Reggie Gerard Fuller had been arrested and charged with the murder. Or maybe it wasn’t red dirt. Maybe it was blood, from Reggie. But there had been no forensic material of that nature entered.
Sam cursed himself. Maybe he hadn’t pushed hard enough. Maybe he should have forced the coroner to do a bang-up job and not miss a trick. Why had he been so sure it was Reggie?
Well, because of the pocket, the blood match, the—
But more, because of a limit to the imagination. It was, after all, 1955. The world was a straightforward place, with a straight-shooting President, a known Red enemy with the hydrogen bomb, and white people and colored separate and apart. Nothing was mixed up; everybody knew where they stood. Things were what they seemed.
Now all this that was going on with Reggie and Shirelle? Nobody could really have imagined it. There wasn’t room in the American mind in those days for such imaginings. They came later, after the murder of JFK, after Vietnam and Watergate; that’s when people began to see conspiracies every damned place.
Because once you admitted the idea of conspiracy, the world changed. Paranoia ruled; there were no limits. There was no certitude. That is what he hated so much about the modern world he had helped create: it beheld no certitude.
For if there was a conspiracy involving the death of Shirelle Parker, a poor Negro child in the West Arkansas of 1955, who knew where else it went and what else it contained? And for the first time, Sam began to see that it might also, though he couldn’t understand how or why, involve the strange behavior of Jimmy Pye and the death of Earl Swagger. And if, furthermore, it involved a black man, on the basis of the fact that no colored girl would have gotten into a car with a white man, then things had gotten dense and complicated to no end. It was like some terrible modern novel, of the sort that Sam couldn’t read: twisted, crazy, paranoid, ugly, cruel.