Bob, typically, said nothing. He looked like Achilles again, and Russ thought how the severe planes of his face would fit so appropriately under the bronze of a fierce Greek helmet, scarred from much action outside the walls of Troy.
“You learned something,” Russ said again.
Bob breathed out a wisp of vapor, like liquid anger, possibly enough to allow him to live another moment or two before the demons inside chewed him to pieces. He had an ulcer of anger like a gigantic leach sucking fluid from his soul.
“I ran into a neighbor lady,” he finally said. “I couldn’t get rid of her. And then she said, ‘I wonder where that wonderful deputy is? I’m surprised he isn’t here.’ Seems our boy Duane Peck done been hanging out in Sam’s neighborhood. She saw his car parked there two, three days running and later saw Sam driving ’cross town, Duane right behind. We gonna have us a chat with Duane real soon.”
“You, ought to reconsider that,” said Russ.
“What for?” Bob demanded, flashing a Bronze Age glare at Russ.
“If you call him out and kill him, you’re a murderer. What does that prove?”
“It proves that Duane Peck is dead.”
“But it doesn’t get the man or men who killed your father, for whom we both believe Duane works. You have to wait until Duane moves against you. Then you do him and it’s righteous; nobody cares, you go home to YKN4 and Julie. Put your anger aside until it’s time.”
Bob stared out into the darkness. His eyes narrowed into something pale and bitter and Russ knew he was looking at the pure soul of a killer. It was the first time he’d ever recognized how much anger smoldered in Bob and what terrible things the man was capable of.
But Bob got himself under some kind of control.
“We’ll deal with Peck when the goddamn time comes,” he finally said.
“Good, because I have something to work on.”
“What’s that?”
Russ told him about Jed Posey’s parole.
Bob wanted to know what she’d said. Where had the information come from? Was it tainted? Was it a trap?
Well, no, it seemed to arise spontaneously. Someone in the black community had found out about it. They weren’t even talking about it to white people, but one of Jeannie’s friends, a black student at Vanderbilt, had heard about it from her mother.
“How would the blacks find out?” Bob wanted to know.
“You know, they talk among themselves. A black prison guard tells his wife that goddamned Jed Posey has been paroled; his wife tells her sister tells her friend tells her husband tells his brother; it goes like a telegram; and down here they probably hear faster than anyone. It’s how an oppressed community would survive; it would develop extremely refined communications and intelligence skills.”
“But who originally found out? That’s what I want to know. Where does it start?”
“I don’t know. It’s lost, I guess.”
“It can’t be lost,” Bob said irritably.
“Do you want to go house-to-house knocking on doors in Blue Eye?” Russ said in exasperation. “Look, it’s simple. This guy is one of two people left alive who saw your father on his last day. Maybe his testimony is important. They searched for Shirelle Parker. They were together for, near as we can figure it out, close to three hours. That’s a long time. Maybe he can remember.”
Bob just didn’t like it.
“Why now? Why release him now?”
“He’s been in prison since 1962. That’s over thirty years. It was time. Do you want to go down to Tucker tomorrow and make inquiries as to why? Do you want me to call the paper”—the paper! Russ thought. What about that job?—“and see what their cop guy says? Or do you want to check it out tomorrow, go straight to Jed and find out what he has to say?”
It was like arguing with a stubborn old man. Bob never agreed or disagreed, he simply affected a blank look that stood for a strategic retreat while he reconsidered his options. Nothing ever budged him except himself and he only believed in things he could see or touch.
“We don’t even know where he is,” he said.
“I found Connie,” said Russ. “I will find Jed.”
“Fine,” said Bob. “Get some sleep now.”
Bob himself didn’t get to sleep. Instead, he lay in the hissing light of the Coleman lantern, trying to settle down, put his furies in the far place and nail them to the floor. He was now looking through the materials that John Vincent had handed over: the old book of tickets, the blood-smeared notebook, now yellow and brittle with age, and, fresh, the yellow legal paper with Sam’s notes on it.
He looked the notes over carefully. On the first run-through, it seemed clear that Sam was reinvestigating his father’s last case. Why would that be important? Bob asked himself. What had started him? What could that have to do with anything? It puzzled him; he simply could not imagine a mechanism by which the two could be connected, since the time element was all wrong. The body of Shirelle was found on the day that Earl was murdered; there couldn’t have been time to set something up based on Earl’s discovery.
But on faith, he progressed. Sam seemed to be noting ways in which Earl’s notes diverged from the later, official version of the crime.
Sam had written: “Body moved. What significance?” Then, underneath, in bolder pen strokes, “To disaffiliate body with site of crime!!”
Bob took this in. Sure. What would the point of that be?
He read on: “Fingernaiclass="underline" red dirt under fingernail!”
Would that be Shirelle’s fingernail? And if so, what would the significance of that be?
But Sam himself had solved it. “LITTLE GEORGIA,” he’d written in all caps. Then adding: “Must be authentic murder site.”
Bob himself knew that Little Georgia was a red clay deposit a few miles west of town, a notorious place where teenagers went to neck, just over the town line and in the county. So what? He’d been there, even.
Then: “Mrs. Parker says: it would be a black boy. No black girl in 1955 would get into a car with a white boy.” Then he’d written: “Damn!”
Bob saw why. Had Shirelle gone off with a white boy, some kind of conspiracy theory might actually work, particularly (though he couldn’t imagine how yet) if it was leveraged into the plot against his father. But if she’d gone off with a black boy, nothing made any sense. For, of course, if the murder of Shirelle Parker was another elaborate conspiracy, who in the black community could possibly benefit, and who would have the resources to put together the elaborate plot by which Reggie Gerard Fuller took the fall?
That was the cruncher: Shirelle would not get in a car with a white person in 1955. Bob knew why too. Black girls wouldn’t get in cars with white boys five years later. They probably still wouldn’t because the white boy only wanted one thing.
He rolled over, still confused, and lay there trying to get to sleep.
Bob drove around the town square six times. Russ had never seen him so tense; his eyes would not stop working the landscape, the terrain, the buildings, the mirrors; his muscles were tense and his neck so stiff and rigid Russ thought he’d break it off.
“You okay?”
“Fine, goddammit,” said Bob, breathing harshly.
“There’s no one here,” said Russ. “It’s small-town America, ten in the morning.”
Bob didn’t even listen or stop working security. Finally, he said, “Okay, you git in there and do your goddamned business and git out. No fucking around, no messing with the pretty women, nothing but work. You don’t go to the bathroom, you eyeball anybody comes in. You pick an escape route.”