Evidence of Blood (14 page)

“Did you ever believe he was innocent?” Kinley asked.

Talbott shook his head. “No, I always believed that he had killed Ellie Dinker.”

“Why?”

Talbott looked at Kinley as if he were a small child defending the existence of the Tooth Fairy. “There was a great deal of evidence, Mr. Kinley.”

“But the body,” Kinley said insistently. “Why would he have hidden it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he strike you as insane?”

“No, not exactly,” Talbott said. “Tormented. He did strike me as tormented.”

“By what?”

“By poverty, Mr. Kinley,” Talbott said authoritatively. “By a life of menial jobs, by having to shift around the local rich folks, by always having to be at their beck and call.”

“So he was sullen, angry?”

“Yes,” Talbott said. “And pent-up, too. Worn out by being pent-up, with no outlet.” He thought for a moment. “Like a man who gets up on fire every morning and has to spend the rest of the day dousing himself with water, putting out the flames.”

Kinley thought about Talbott’s description for a moment. “Somehow, I don’t see Overton as being like that,” he said finally.

“Really?” Talbott asked. “And why is that? What do you know about him?”

“I just have a few impressions.”

“Gathered from what source, may I ask?”

“His daughter.”

Talbott smiled. “Dora Overton is quite an interesting woman,” he said, “and lovely, too.”

“We were talking about her father,” Kinley reminded him.

For a moment, Talbott seemed at a loss for words, as if he’d moved into a trance. “Suddenly, you follow an impulse,” he said finally. “I’m speaking of Charles Overton now. You are attracted, and you follow that attraction. All the evidence may be in the other direction, but the need, you see, is not interested in evidence or reason or logic, or any of those higher forms we make so much of. The need is only interested in itself.” He looked at Kinley. “Your current need, Mr. Kinley, is to pursue an old case.” He pulled himself softly to the left and sat erectly in his chair. “Whereas, that day on the mountain, Charles Overton pursued Ellie Dinker.” He smiled. “The only difference between Overton and you—or me, or anyone else for that matter—is that he had a very extreme need, and you, Mr. Kinley, have a safe and utterly common one.”

Kinley started to ask another question, but Talbott rose suddenly. “I’m an old man now,” he told Kinley as he walked toward the door of the room. “Everyone involved in that case is either old or dead.”

“I understand that, Mr. Talbott, however …”

Talbott opened the door. “Either old or dead or …” He stopped, his face unexpectedly mournful. “Or beyond our grasp.”

Kinley looked at him unbelievingly. “Are you kicking me out, Mr. Talbott?”

Talbott smiled, almost sweetly. “Yes, I am, Mr. Kinley,” he said, “but as you can see, I am doing it politely.”

“Well, you’re back,” Mrs. Hunter said as Kinley walked into her office.

“I only broke for lunch,” Kinley told her. “Is it all right if I go back into the vault now?”

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Hunter said. “It’s all public record material, you know.”

“Thanks,” Kinley said. He turned, walked out of the office and headed back into the vault. He’d carefully returned the transcripts to their place on the shelf—a respectful practice he’d learned librarians and other bureaucrats devoutly appreciated—and now he retrieved them once again.

He’d already gone through three volumes of testimony, or, as he sometimes thought of it, two days of the trial. There were only six more volumes to go, and the very paucity of the transcript would have been enough to guess the date of the trial. Nine slender volumes could not even begin to contain a capital case transcript since the Supreme Court rulings of the sixties. Now, the
voir dire
testimony of prospective jurors alone required volumes of transcripts and days of courtroom time.

But the case of the
People of Georgia v. Charles Herman Overton
had taken only five days, a speedy trial, to say the least, but not uncommonly so for the time. It had not been an age of elaborate care for the rights of the accused, and certainly when overwhelming evidence reduced the presumption of innocence to little more than a
pleasant legal concept, little time or public money had been devoted to protecting the more or less irrelevant rights of the accused.

Charles Overton had been treated as most men in his situation would have been treated in the small-town South of 1954, and nothing Kinley had read in the court record so far indicated that any but the usual standard had been applied to him. In fact, he had gotten more than most. He had been represented by counsel, a luxury few defendants would have been able to afford, and which Talbott had provided without charge because of his connection to Overton’s wife. At least, Overton had been given a fighting chance to clear himself.

But not much of one, Kinley realized as he turned to the next volume of the transcript and began reading the testimony of Luther Snow, one of Overton’s co-workers at the Thompson Construction Company. It was a hodgepodge of hearsay and conjecture to which Talbott had offered only fleeting objection, and which had done the prosecution the inestimably valuable service of establishing a motive for the murder of Ellie Dinker.

Luther Snow

WARFIELD
: Do you see Charlie Overton in this courtroom today, Mr. Snow?

SNOW:
Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: Would you point him out, please?

SNOW
: He’s the one setting right yonder beside Mr. Talbott there.

WARFIELD
: Your Honor, may the record indicate that Mr. Snow has identified the defendant.

COURT
: So ordered. Proceed.

WARFIELD:
Now, Mr. Snow, you work with Mr. Overton down at Thompson’s, is that right?

SNOW:
Yes, sir.

WARFIELD:
How long have you known him?

SNOW:
About two years, I’d say.

For the next few pages, Snow went over the work he and Overton had done together during their time at Thompson Construction. For the last two years they’d been involved in the construction of the new courthouse, the very one in which the trial was being held, and which had only opened a few weeks before it began. Overton had worked as a general workman, doing everything from laying brick to light carpentry. Snow, on the other hand, had supervised much of the operation, from planning work schedules to handling the use of the site’s heavy equipment.

SNOW
: I dug the foundation, and I poured the cement for the whole place, everything from the flagpole to the courthouse steps.

WARFIELD
: And did you and Mr. Overton sometimes take lunch breaks together?

SNOW:
Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: And you sometimes talked to each other, isn’t that right, the way men do?

SNOW
: We talked a lot.

WARFIELD
: Did you get the impression that Mr. Overton liked and trusted you?

SNOW
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: And did he discuss what you might call his “private life” with you?

SNOW
: Sometimes he did.

WARFIELD
: In the course of those conversations, did you get an idea of his state of mind on or about July 2, 1954?

SNOW
: He was upset.

WARFIELD
: What about, did he tell you?

SNOW:
Well, Overton was real closed up. We talked sometimes, like I said, but he was real closed off.

WARFIELD
: But you did mention his mood, didn’t you, Mr. Snow?

SNOW:
Yes, sir, I did. And the reason was, it was affecting his work. His mind was always wandering. He wasn’t doing his job too good.

WARFIELD:
So he looked distracted?

SNOW:
What was that?

WARFIELD:
Worried. Preoccupied. His mind on other things.

SNOW:
That’s right.

WARFIELD:
And did you try to find out what the trouble was?

SNOW:
Oh, yeah. I had to. Like I said, it was causing him to mess things up. His work was off. I can’t put up with that.

WARFIELD:
And could you tell us the substance of that conversation?

SNOW
: Well, I asked him straight out. I said, “Charlie, what’s going on? You’re off your feed. You need to keep your mind on things.”

WARFIELD
: And what was Overton’s response?

SNOW
: Well, there wasn’t much of a response. He just sort of looked at me. He didn’t say anything. So, I went at him again, and kept at it until he finally told me what it was that was bothering him so much.

WARFIELD
: So, he finally told you what was troubling him?

SNOW
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD:
What was it?

SNOW:
Woman trouble, that’s what he said.

WARFIELD:
Woman trouble? Were those his exact words?

SNOW
: Yes, sir. That’s what he said, that he was having woman trouble.

WARFIELD:
And this woman trouble was the cause of his problems at work?

SNOW
: That’s what he said. That woman trouble was driving him nuts.

To this testimony, Talbott offered a very effective cross-examination, one that reduced Snow’s remarks to the hazy, insubstantial mass they were.

TALBOTT:
Now, Mr. Snow, you said that Mr. Overton expressed some confidences in you. I mean, talked to you about his problems?

SNOW
: Woman trouble. That’s what he said.

TALBOTT:
And this was causing him some alarm, is that right?

SNOW:
He was pretty upset over it.

TALBOTT:
Did he give you the cause of that trouble?

SNOW:
No, sir.

TALBOTT:
Did he ever mention his wife?

SNOW:
No, sir.

TALBOTT:
So as far as you know, Mr. Overton said only that he was having trouble with a woman.

SNOW
: Well, it was a little more than that. He was real upset about it.

TALBOTT:
But he never said who this woman was, did he?