She said he wasn’t there. She said she thought he was at the courthouse.
So we all waited about an hour, leaning against the cars, the deputies and prosecutors and photographers and newspapermen, until we saw Arch’s familiar Pontiac drive slow, a funeral pace, down the long road to his brand-new house, and kill the engine.
He climbed out of the car with a smile on his face and removed his hat. “Madeline, you mind waiting inside for me?”
The baby had started to cry, and Madeline mounted the steps and path to the house, closing the door behind her.
“Did you hear?” Arch asked.
I waited.
“Governor Persons has just suffered a massive heart attack. They’ve rushed him to the hospital.”
I shook my head.
“This town is killing everyone,” Arch said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Now, just what is this about?” he asked.
I looked at him, giving a slight shake of my head, and told him he was under arrest for the killing of Mr. Patterson.
He nodded and asked if we had a warrant, and I slipped a piece of paper from my new gray suit jacket and handed it to him. He stood there, a bit shorter than me, and read through the simple document as if judging its legal validity, showing he was still very much a man of the court.
And then he nodded again and looked up.
Black was at my elbow, his hand on the butt of a.45, waiting for Arch to take off or explode. Quinnie waited at the black Chevy with a 12-gauge in his little arms.
“Can I talk to my wife?” he asked. “I’d like to be the one to tell her.”
I looked to Jack and then over at Quinnie. There were twenty-odd cars parked out at crazy angles, maybe forty newspapermen and photographers circling us.
“Sure thing, Arch.”
As he walked up the steps and to the front door, everyone fell silent. He met Madeline there and he leaned in to kiss her but missed her cheek, whispering something. She put her hand to her mouth and began to cry as he leaned in to kiss his newborn on the forehead. His older daughter, Anne’s friend, held back in the black void of the open door with a dull expression on her face, numb to it all.
THE NEXT DAY, JOHN PATTERSON AND I FLEW OUT OF Montgomery to Houston, where the local sheriff drove us over to Galveston and Si Garrett’s sanitarium. We were met in the lobby of this big white antebellum building by a doctor and a lawyer, one with a clipboard and one with a briefcase, fully ready to fight us. I presented the lawyer with the warrant and extradition papers while the doctor rattled on about all the delicate and frail sensibilities of a very ill man.
“Can we see him?” John asked.
The doctor looked to the lawyer. The lawyer shrugged.
They led us out the east wing of the building, following a well-worn brick walkway through colonnades and past large twisted oaks that grew only in this part of the country. The doctor used a key from his pocket to open a side door and walked ahead down a long gray linoleum hall dimly lit with artificial light. He spoke to a nurse sitting at a desk at the end of the hall, and we all followed to a small metal door, where he used another key from his other pocket.
He unlocked and opened the door, light following the sharp edge, opening like a weak dawn into a small square room where a skinny man lay huddled in the corner squinting up at us.
“Mr. Garrett?” I asked.
The room smelled of antiseptic and urine.
“I am Silas Garrett.”
“I’m Sheriff Lamar Murphy of Russell County, Alabama,” I said. “I’ve been sent to take you back to face charges of killing Albert Patterson.”
From the corner, Garrett palmed his way up on the two walls and stood. He wore a white smock. He looked much smaller than I remembered him, without the crisp white suit and big clean Stetson. His brown eyes looked confused, his hair thin, skin pale with the scruff of a black-and-gray beard that made him seem dirty.
“Are you well, sir?” I asked.
He shook his head. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at John Patterson. He began to tremble.
Patterson looked across at Garrett, the man fumbling with his hands and looking away. John’s jaw clenched. I waited to hold him back.
“I’d really like you to explain to my mother why you killed her husband over a political pissing match.”
He shook his head. He looked down. A scolded child.
He looked eighty years old.
“It doesn’t take much to keep you quiet. It took three bullets for my father.”
“As you can see-” the doctor started.
“He looks fine to me,” I said.
“Under no circumstances,” the doctor said, already walking out of the room. “Rest, Mr. Garrett. Please, just rest.”
He turned off the lights, arguing with us out in the long, endless linoleum hall. As he spoke, I watched the door close, the narrowing of artificial light, that swath cut down to just a sliver, and I saw Si Garrett fall back into that far corner, bracing his back and sliding down to his haunches. Doing nothing but staring into the dark as the door closed with a click.
IT WAS THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AND I WAS DOWN at Slocumb’s checking up on how my father-in-law was making out with his other son-in-law who’d taken my place. Anne and Thomas rode over with me and were raiding the ice-cream freezer, to the great aggravation of their grandfather, who had always been known to be stingy with the cones. I talked to my brother-in-law a little about the dozens of fugitives we were looking for, including Fannie Belle and Johnnie Benefield, and gave him a wanted poster to tack on the wall by the cigarettes.
He commented that Benefield’s picture was enough to scare off customers.
We were going to swing by and pick up Joyce and then head down to Columbus and Broadway to spend the rest of the day Christmas shopping. Thomas and I talked about maybe catching a movie after paying a visit to Santa Claus.
I excused myself, as Thomas was trying to climb into the cooler with his grandfather pulling him back by his sneakers, and walked around out back to smoke a cigarette. From around the garage, Arthur joined me and I gave him a cigarette, and we stood there looking across at the muddy creek and the path that had led to my house, now tangling up in weeds.
Arthur wore grease-stained denim overalls and a wide smile on his worn negro face.
“You miss me?” I asked.
“Not at all.”
“You ready for Christmas?”
“You know it, Sheriff.”
“You know you can just call me Lamar. I’m no different.”
“No different, except you can put my ass in jail.”
“You do have a point.”
He smoked the cigarette fast and crushed it under his work boot. He looked around, just to make sure no one was in earshot, and said, “I was listenin’ to the radio in the shop the other day. You know, like I always do. And, anyway, Mr. Patterson come on and started talking about Phenix. He was talking about the way the sheriff and the police didn’t let no one have any rights. He said livin’ in Phenix City was like livin’ over there in Russia.”
I nodded.
“He said a man’s vote didn’t mean a thing here. He said there hadn’t been an honest election in a hundred years.”
“That’s probably true,” I said. “So what’s the point?”
Arthur shook his head. “No point, just something I found mighty interesting.”
“You’re talking about the negro situation.”
He caught my eye. I smiled at him, my cigarette burning down to a nub, singeing my fingers.
“Fella came by to see you the other day. I told him to find you at the jail, but he left a number. Wanted to talk about that reward you put up.”