Evidence of Blood (20 page)

Look at the mountain, Kinley. It’s like cannon smoke
.

What is?

The way the clouds come down
.

Yes
.

Clouds like that hung over the Wilderness Campaign
.

That was a terrible battle
.

Hung for days and days, part smoke, part water. “And the bullets fell like rain.” That’s what one of the old soldiers wrote
.

Hard to imagine it
.

It was then, at that precise moment, Kinley remembered now, that a strange restlessness had suddenly appeared on Ray’s face, dark and lingering, like the clouds that were approaching from afar. “Hard to imagine, yes,” Ray had said. “Like so many things.”
Like so many things
.

It was a short, cryptic remark, and Ray had added nothing to it. It had been uttered to the air, it seemed to Kinley as he recalled its precise tone, as if Ray were alone in the swing, as if he were talking only to his soul. At the time, Kinley had thought nothing of it, but now he wondered if it had come from some other part of his life, particularly the part that had to do with Dora Overton and her father.

He took a long sip of the scotch, placed the glass on the wooden floor beneath the swing, and drew out the confession Wade had taken from Ray’s desk.

The brevity of it still amazed him. Now confessions went on for page after page, the police careful to record every imaginable detail to ensure that it was complete. In 1954, the police had moved through the world’s pervasive lawlessness with far more confidence that what they said would be believed, or at least remain unquestioned. As a result, the confessions of their prisoners had possessed a frightening succinctness. He remembered Colin Bright’s initial statement, one which he never amplified during his later trial, and whose more frightful details he had finally
told Kinley himself for no other reason, as Bright himself had said, but that
it’s you that’s here
.

Although not as brief as Bright’s statement, Charles Overton’s was only slightly more detailed, and as he read it, Kinley tried to imagine the man himself, the long, dreary face he’d seen in the newspaper photographs, his posture, whether sitting or standing, always deeply slumped so that a sense of brokenness seemed to pervade every aspect of his character.

It was a sense that equally pervaded the written statement, despite the fact that it was not a verbatim rendering, but Wade’s own summation of what Overton had told him. And yet, the same weariness and fatality rose from the account, a tone and style Kinley had seen before, most recently in Maria Spinola, the low groan of the perfect victim.

Written on plain, legal-sized yellow paper, it began with a brief commentary on Overton’s background which consisted of information which Wade had gathered before extracting the confession.

Kinley folded the statement, laid it down on the swing and headed back into the kitchen. He drained the last of the scotch into his glass, then returned to the front porch and sipped it quietly while the first evening shadows gathered around him.

For a moment, he tried to draw on his own long experience with criminal violence, asking the questions that experience had offered him as a way of testing the veracity of any particular rendering of a crime. Usually in such cases, contradictions piled on contradictions, guns exchanged hands, people shifted from one room to another, dialogue blew in the wind, randomly lighting on first one mouth then another. Consistency was the great goal of every investigator, but it was a harsh mistress, elusive, demanding, at times utterly unreachable. Inconsistencies, either of character or circumstance, dogged the trail of any investigator with the strength of character necessary to look closely at a case. As he took the last drink from his glass, he remembered Detective Ronald Casey, the man who’d finally captured Colin Bright. He had been Kinley’s best official source, but even in a case in which Bright’s guilt had been incontestable, the inconsistencies remained, and on their last meeting, with the book nearly finished, Casey had finally voiced the one that throughout the case had bothered him the most:

Why did Colin say he’d come up from Florida, Jack? I mean, before he killed the Comstocks? Did he ever tell you why he spun that particular yarn?

No. He always said he came up from Florida. He never changed that
.

No way, Jack. No way. That boy never saw a beach or a palm tree in his whole shitty little life
.

So the Florida story was a lie?

From top to bottom. He dropped a trail of bad checks all over the South, but none of them were from Florida
.

Why would he say Florida, then? What difference would that make?

To this question, Casey, ancient in his gray hair, withered skin and infinitely battered life, had given the only reply his experience suggested to him.
It’s like they say in the catechism about the Trinity, Jack
, he said with a wry, but oddly tormented smile.
It’s a mystery
.

Kinley wondered if there were a few mysteries in Charles Overton’s statement, too. If there weren’t any, then why had Ray, as Wade had described it, “pored over” the statement so many times. What had he been looking for? Or had he sensed, as Kinley often did when confronted with such documents, that something was wrong, something missing or too often and pointedly present, something indefinable at first glance, but which might later rise suddenly like a red stain on the paper?

He unfolded Overton’s confession and read it again, this time with his notebook open, too, jotting notes for any later discussion that might go on in his head.

In the first paragraph, he noted the scanty information Overton had provided about his past. Was the war wound a play for sympathy, or just a matter of information? Was the comment about working on the courthouse a feeble swipe at community involvement and social responsibility, the sort of self-serving detail Overton might have used to gain Wade’s sympathy?

In the second paragraph, Overton had continued his tale of being sick at the courthouse construction site, of having headed home, of having broken down on the way. If this part of his story was true, Kinley reasoned, then it was a confluence of small, insignificant accidents of health and mechanics that had finally served to generate a single, cataclysmic accident, the purely fortuitous meeting of Overton and Dinker on the mountain road. Such a meeting would have been likely only if Overton and Dinker had known each other and if Overton had had an illicit
relationship with Dinker, why had he been unwilling to admit it in his confession?

The third and fourth paragraphs detailed the murder, the disposal of the body and Overton’s movements after that, and the information was so spare of detail that Kinley circled it and made the notation
more here
, to indicate that he would need to speak with Wade again for additional questions.

The fifth paragraph had obviously been the result of Wade’s questioning Overton at the time of his arrest. Kinley had seen enough of such statements to know where the investigator had pressed for more details. Although no tape had been made of the interrogation, Kinley could hear the dialogue in his mind, and for a moment he listened to it carefully, imagining its progress one question at a time. If Wade had extracted the details of the confession by leading Overton through the crime, in the way police officers had often done before the rules of evidence had changed, then Overton, as Dora had described him, would have fallen for it easily, the perfect victim, chewing obediently at the hook Wade cast toward him time and time again.

WADE
: Now, Charlie, you’ve admitted killing Ellie Dinker, but let me ask you this. How did you do it?

OVERTON
: How?

WADE
: Yeah, I mean, what did you use?

OVERTON
: Well, I …

WADE
: I mean you did use something, right? I mean, there was so much blood on the dress. Did you hit her with something? Did you have something in your truck?

OVERTON
: I had a tire iron.

WADE
: Did she struggle? I mean, she must have struggled, right?

OVERTON
: Yes.

WADE
: How did you stop her from struggling? Did you hit her?

OVERTON
: Yes.

WADE
: Did you do anything else to her?

OVERTON
: You mean like …

WADE
: I mean, before or after she was dead, you know?

OVERTON
: No. No, I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.

WADE
: All right, what did you do with the body? Did you bury it or throw it in the river or something like that?

OVERTON
: I threw it in the river.

WADE
: Then what?

OVERTON
: Then I went home.

WADE
: But what about the dress, the one we found hanging in the trees?

OVERTON
: I just put it there. I don’t know why.

WADE
: Okay, Charlie, let me ask you this. Why did you kill Ellie Dinker?

OVERTON
: I don’t know.

As Kinley imagined it, the questioning of Charles Overton took on aspects of other cases he’d read or written about. In the co-ed murders in New York City, a defendant had drawn a crude floor plan of an apartment he’d never entered, described the color of the curtains in a room he’d never seen. If that kind of insistently leading police interrogation was possible in New York in 1968, he could not doubt that even greater abuses might have been carried out in the small-town South of 1954.

But that was in his mind, Kinley admitted immediately. There was no written record of the questioning, but only Wade’s brief, matter-of-fact and decidedly sketchy rendering of the results of the interrogation.

He glanced down at his notebook and quickly wrote out a command for himself:
Find out more about the interrogation. Press hard on this
.

He looked up again, the night now very deep around him. He could feel the first slight chill of autumn in the dark air, and he suddenly thought of Ray’s body in the ground, colder than the earth, colder than the air, more
distant from him now than the most distant star. He felt an urge to reach out to him across the great abyss, and even felt his hands twitch suddenly in their futile effort to drag him back from death, the fingers spreading, gripping, clutching in that motion Serena had noticed days before, as if reaching desperately for something whose departure all the hope and force of love could not delay.