'What?'
'That in this town until that man pays, the murder of Joanie Shriver will never be closed.'
'That's the question, isn't it? Who pays?'
'We're all paying. All of us. All the time.' He slammed his fist down hard on the table. The sound echoed in the small room. 'You got something to say, say it!'
Matthew Cowart thought hard about what he knew and what he didn't know and finally replied, 'Blair Sullivan told me where to find that knife.'
The name had the expected impact on the policeman. He looked surprised, then shocked, like a batter expecting a fastball watching a curve dip over the corner of the plate.
'Sullivan? What has he got to do with this?'
'You ought to know. He passed by Pachoula in May 1987, busy killing all sorts of folks.'
I know that, but…'
'And he knew where the knife was.'
Brown stared at him. A few stretched seconds of silence filled the room. 'Did Sullivan say he killed Joanie Shriver?'
'No, he didn't.'
'Did he say Ferguson didn't kill that girl?'
'Not exactly, but
'Did he say anything exactly to contradict the original trial?'
'He knew about the knife.'
'He knew about a knife. We don't know it is the knife, and without any forensics, it's nothing more than a piece of rusted metal. Come on, Cowart, you know Sullivan's stone crazy. Did he give you anything that could even remotely be called evidence?'
Brown's eyes had narrowed. Cowart could see him processing information rapidly, speculating, absorbing, discarding. He thought right then: It's too hard for him. He won't want to consider any possibilities of mistake. He has his killer and he's satisfied.
'Nothing else.'
'Then that's not enough to reopen an investigation that resulted in a conviction.'
'No? Okay. Get ready to read it in the paper. Then we'll see if it's enough.'
The policeman glared at Cowart and pointed at the door. 'Leave, Mr. Cowart. Leave right now. Get in your rental car and go back to the motel. Pack your bags. Drive to the airport. Get on a plane and go back to your city. Don't come back. Understand?'
Cowart bristled. He could feel a surge of his own frustrated anger pushing through him. 'Are you threatening me?'
The detective shook his head. 'No. I'm giving advice.'
'And?'
'Take it.'
Matthew Cowart picked himself out of the chair and gave the detective a long stare. The two men's eyes locked, a visual game of arm wrestling. When the detective finally swerved away, turning his back, Cowart spun about and walked through the door, closed it sharply behind him, and paced briskly through the bright fluorescent lights of the police headquarters, as if pushing a wave in front of him, watching uniformed officers and other detectives step aside. He could sense the pressure of their eyes on his back as he stepped through the corridors, quieting a dozen conversations in his wake. He heard a few words muttered behind him, heard his name spoken several times with distaste. He didn't glance around, didn't alter his step. He rode the elevator alone and walked out through the wide glass doors onto the street. There he turned and looked back up toward the detective's office. For an instant he could see Tanny Brown standing in his window, staring out at him. Again their eyes locked. Matthew Cowart shook his head slightly, just the barest motion from side to side.
He saw the detective wheel aside, disappearing from the window.
Cowart stood rigid for an instant, letting the night envelop him. Then he strode away, walking slowly at first but rapidly gaining momentum and pace until he was marching briskly across the town, the words that would become his story beginning to gather deep within him, parading in military array across his imagination.
7. Words
Returning home, however, a spreading exhaustion forced the living to fade into his notebooks and let the dead take over his imagination.
It was late, well past midnight on a clear Miami night and the sky seemed an endless black painted with great brushstrokes into an infinity of blinking starlight.
He wanted someone to share his impending triumph but realized there was no one. All were gone, stolen by age, divorce, and too many dyings. Especially he wanted his parents, but they were long gone.
His mother had died when he was still a young man. She'd been mousy and quiet, with an athletic, bony thinness that made her embrace hard-edged and brittle, which she'd compensated for with a soft, almost lush voice used to great advantage in storytelling. A product of times that had created her as a housewife and kept her mired there, she'd raised him and his brothers and sisters in an endless cycle of diapers, formula, and teething that had given way to scraped knees and imaginary hurts, homework, basketball practices, and the occasional, inevitable heartbreaks of adolescence.
She'd died swiftly but undramatically at the beginning of her old age. Inoperable colonic cancer. Five weeks, a magical, steady progression from health to death, marked daily by the yellowing of her skin and growing weakness in her voice and walk. His father had died right along with her, which was odd. As Matthew had grown older, he had come to know of his father's boisterous infidelities. They had always been short-lived and poorly concealed. In retrospect they had seemed far less evil than the affair with the newspaper, which had robbed him of time and sapped his enthusiasm for being with his family. So, when his father had followed her funeral with six months of obsessive, endless weeks devoted to work, only to announce at the end that he was taking early retirement, it had surprised all the children.
They had had long conversations on the telephone, questioning his act, wondering what he would do, all alone in a big and now insistently empty, echoing suburban home, surrounded by young families who would find his presence unusual and probably unsettling. Matthew Cowart had been the last of a half-dozen children, grown into teachers, a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, and himself and spread across the states, none close enough to help their father, suddenly old. They had all failed to see the obvious. He'd shot himself on his wedding anniversary.
I should have known, he thought. I should have seen what was coming. His father had called him two nights earlier. They'd talked gingerly, distantly, about news stories and reporting. His father had said, 'Remember: It's not the facts that they want. It's the truth.' He had rarely said that sort of thing to his son before, and when Cowart had tried to get him to continue, he'd gruffly signed off.
The police had found him sitting at his desk, a small revolver in one hand, a bullet wound in his forehead, and her picture in his lap. Cowart had spoken with the detectives afterward, forever a reporter, forcing them to describe the scene with all the small details that, once heard, could never be forgotten, and stripped the dying of all its drama: that his father'd worn old red slippers and a blue business suit and a flowered tie that she'd purchased for him some forgettable Father's Day in the past; that a copy of that day's edition of the paper, red-penciled with notes, had been spread before him on the desk next to a diet soda and a half-eaten cheese sandwich. He'd remembered to write a check to the cleaning lady and left it taped to his antique green-shaded banker's lamp. There had been a half-dozen crumpled papers strewn about his chair, tossed haphazardly aside, all notes started and abandoned, to his children.
The stars blinked above him.
I was the youngest, he thought. The only one to try his profession. I thought it would make us closer. I thought I could do it better. I thought he would be proud. Or jealous.
Instead, he was more remote.
He thought of his mother's smile. His daughter's reminded him of her. And I let my wife take her with hardly a whimper. He felt a sudden dark emptiness at that thought, which was instantly replaced with the nightmare memory of the crime-scene photographs of little Joanie Shriver.