Evidence of Blood (30 page)

It was then that she had broken, or faltered, her lips moving silently as if she were muttering something beneath
her breath, a phrase or sentence which the court reporter had not been able to hear: INAUDIBLE

But Warfield had continued to press her insistently, his questions now coming one upon the other, ringing through the courtroom while he continued to hold the dress suspended in the air.
Is this the dress your daughter was wearing when she headed up the mountain on Friday, July 2, 1954?

Again Mrs. Dinker fumbled, her eyes no doubt staring at the dress in the odd, lengthening silence which the court reporter recorded succinctly in a single, terse description:
WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND
.

But Warfield had waited no longer than an instant before going on again, this time relentlessly:
I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Dinker, but it’s very important. This dress you’ve been looking at, the one I’m holding in my hands. Mrs. Dinker, is this the dress your daughter wore when she left home that morning?

Kinley opened his eyes, glanced down at the bottom of the page and let the transcript do the rest:

(WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND)

WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker?

(WITNESS DOES NOT RESPOND)

WARFIELD:
Mrs. Dinker, please. I ask you, Mrs. Dinker, is this your daughter Ellie’s dress?

Then finally, she’d regained herself, as if suddenly brought back from a trance, her eyes still locked on the dark green dress, but seeing it again as Warfield demanded her to answer:
I ask you, Mrs. Dinker, is this your daughter Ellie’s dress?

To which Mrs. Dinker had given a response at last.

DINKER
: I ain’t seen it since that day.

Kinley looked up and closed his eyes again, as if giving them a badly needed rest, then let them drop back down
to the transcript. He looked carefully at the precise moment Mrs. Dinker’s testimony had come to an abrupt and surprising end:
Mrs. Dinker, do you see this dress I’m holding up?

That had been the instant, the moment her eyes had fallen upon her daughter’s dress.

There were many possible explanations, of course, and Kinley had had enough experience to know them all. He’d seen the reality of loss rise out of nowhere, a witness suddenly admitting for the first time that it was not a dream, that the body of the beloved had actually been blasted, carved up, drowned, that it would never rise again. Perhaps that was what had happened to Mrs. Dinker. She’d seen the dress, the blood, and the horror and reality of her daughter’s death had swept down upon her like a great black bird.

Or perhaps the dress had done just the opposite, shot Mrs. Dinker back to the past, where, for a brief, dazzling moment, she’d seen Ellie toddling toward her in a soiled diaper, or saying her first word, or blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Kinley had seen that happen too, seen the sweetness of an unviolated history emerge upon a witness’s face. Little Billy Flynn’s mother had sat for almost a full minute as she’d stared at the Cracker Jack whistle the prosecutor had held before her eyes, her lips whispering just loud enough for the court reporter to record her words,
BillyBillyBillyBillyBilly
, until the prosecutor had finally touched her shoulder to bring her back to her son’s death:
Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just that Billy blew that whistle all the time
.

But when Mrs. Dinker had finally returned her attention to the prosecutor, she’d answered differently, and as Kinley concentrated on the words, I
ain’t seen it since that day
, it struck him that Mrs. Dinker had never really answered Warfield’s question. She had never actually identified the green dress as being Ellie Dinker’s. Her answer, in the end, had been a dodge.

Kinley scrolled back up to his original heading and typed his first question under it:

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE INVESTIGATION

1)Why did they not search the well?

Then he paused a moment, and wrote a second:

2)Where is Ellie Dinker’s dress?

This time Kinley found Ben Wade in an open field, moving like a great, hulking bear through crackling rows of dry corn.

“Marijuana,” he explained as Kinley trudged up to him, “they plant it between rows of corn so nobody can find it from the air.”

“The air?”

“You know, DEA flights,” Wade said. “They’re doing them all the time, looking for the stuff.”

“It’s gotten that bad? I mean, in Sequoyah?”

“Everywhere, far as I can figure,” Wade said wearily. “People don’t have enough to keep them busy. So, they go for dope to fill the space.” He took a sharp left turn, plowing through the bleak brown field, his eyes trained on the ground. “How’d you find me way out here?”

“Warfield’s secretary.”

“Molly-By-Golly,” Wade said with a laugh. “That’s what we call her.”

“Why is that?”

Wade stopped abruptly and gave Kinley a pointed look. “Why do you think?”

Kinley nodded. “Oh.”

Wade smiled silently, then started out through the corn again, slamming through it thunderously, as if he were trying to destroy the fields.

“I came up with another angle on the Dinker case,”
Kinley began cautiously, hoping he had not begun to wear out his welcome as far as Wade was concerned.

“Well, there’s probably a million of them,” Wade said. “That’s usually the way it is in a murder case.”

“The dress,” Kinley said. “You’re the officer who found it.”

Wade nodded. “Sure did.”

“How did that happen?” Kinley asked.

“I went up in the woods and there it was,” Wade answered matter-of-factly.

“Where exactly in the woods?” Kinley asked. “There weren’t any graphics in the record.”

Wade stopped and looked at him quizzically. “Graphics?”

“Drawings,” Kinley explained, “of the murder scene and other relevant locations. You know, plotting distances and directions, that sort of thing.”

Wade shook his head exasperatedly. “Hell, man, this was way back in 1954, in some little one-horse Southern town.” He laughed. “Graphics, my ass.”

Kinley shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “I was wondering where you found the dress.”

Wade gave him a penetrating look. “Well, look, Jack, between two old crime buffs, let me tell you something that you need to know about this case.”

“What’s that?”

“The victim was not a princess, you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“All right, let me spell it out,” Wade said grimly. “We kept a lot of stuff under wraps. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because the Dinker kid was not much more than a teenage whore.”

The brutality of the words struck at Kinley like small lead pellets.

“But we didn’t want that to come out,” Wade went on. “Nobody did. She was an only child, and somebody had
killed her, and as far as we knew, her mother thought she was pure as the driven snow.” He gave Kinley an amiable, “good ole boy” smile. “Let’s just say that we acted like Southern gentlemen. We protected the ladies, both of them. The dead girl, and her mama.” He shrugged. “Besides, Warfield thought that no matter how the Dinker girl might have lived her life, that didn’t mean somebody had the right to kill her. So he laid down the law. Keep your mouth shut about her, that’s what he said. If Talbott wanted to get into Dinker’s background, let him, but as far as the DA was concerned, Ellie Dinker was the flower of Southern womanhood.”

“And Talbott never brought it up,” Kinley said.

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did he know?”

“If he did, he didn’t let on about it,” Wade said. “But as far as the Sheriff’s Department and the DA’s Office were concerned, Ellie Dinker’s life was off limits. So if there are some holes here and there, if we looked here, but didn’t look there, well, that was the reason for it. We didn’t want to dig too deep, because we already knew what we were probably going to find.”

“And that’s why the prosecution never really had a theory about why Ellie was killed?” Kinley asked.

“Yeah,” Wade said, “because we knew why she was killed.”

“Why, then?”

Wade looked at Kinley as if he were teaching a small child the tricks of the trade. “Ellie Dinker was a tramp, Jack,” he said. “She probably even took a few bucks for her services once in a while. So, the way we figured it, Overton had probably arranged to meet Ellie on the road for a quick fix of jelly-roll. And you’ve lived in the big city, Jack, you know what happens sometimes in a situation like that. Somebody makes a smart remark, maybe gets a little bitchy, or maybe it’s just a dispute over the fee. Anyway, at the end of the day, the girl is dead.”

Kinley struggled to gain a picture of the scene, Ellie
Dinker on the ground, laughing mockingly at the breathless old man on top of her. “Quick fix,” he said after a moment. “That’s what it would have to have been.”

“Out in the open like that?” Wade asked. “You bet.”

“So she would have just pulled up her dress, wouldn’t she?”

“Up with the dress, down with the panties,” Wade said, as if it were a line from a ribald poem.

“But you never found the panties,” Kinley said.

“The way we figured it,” Wade replied, “a girl like Ellie Dinker might not have been wearing any.”

“We?”

“The people who worked on the case.”

“Riley Hendricks?”

“Well, maybe not Riley.”

“How about you?”

“Yeah, I figured she’d been to a few parties in her life,” Wade said bluntly. “But I was like everybody else on the case. I didn’t think that gave Charlie Overton the right to kill her.”

“Are you still sure he did?”

“Yes,” Wade said, “and you’re not?”

“No, I’m not.”

Wade grinned knowingly. “You will be,” he said confidently. “You just need to get a little perspective, that’s all. You’re too close to it.” He hesitated before delivering the next remark. “Maybe too close to Dora.”

Kinley could still feel the force of her hand on his face. “That’s not it,” he said.

Wade stopped and looked at him closely. “What is it, Jack? What’s bothering you? It bothered Ray, too. But he never told me what it was.”

“I don’t know for sure,” Kinley admitted, “just a feeling.”

A curious sympathy came into Wade’s large, round face. His eyes narrowed, and a single light-brown eyebrow arched upward. “All right,” he said quietly, “what do you want from me?”

“Just to see what you saw,” Kinley told him.

“You mean where I found the dress?”

“Yeah.”

Wade shook his head wearily. “All right, Jack,” he said. “Damn, you Yankees sure are pushy.”

They reached the mountain road a few minutes later, Wade pulling his car over to the right shoulder, Kinley nosing in behind him.

“This is where I went into the woods,” Wade said as he strode back toward Kinley’s car. He turned and pointed to a small break in the forest. “I went right up that trail.” He glanced down at Kinley’s shoes. “You’re not exactly wearing your hiking boots, boy.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing any hiking when I came down here,” Kinley replied.

“Well, you won’t have much of it to do,” Wade said assuringly as he turned sharply and headed across the road. “I found her dress just a little ways up the trail.”

Kinley followed along behind as Wade jumped a narrow gully, crawled quickly up a short, red clay embankment and entered the mountain forest at the same break in the undergrowth he’d pointed out only seconds before.

“I was alone,” he said as he moved up the slender trail that led in a somewhat winding route through the forest depths. “Even Riley wasn’t with me.”

“Why not?” Kinley asked as he trudged behind, slapping thin, low-slung branches from his path.

“Maddox needed him for something,” Wade said. He chuckled softly. “Riley had actually been to college, and I think that bothered Sheriff Maddox a little.”

“What do you mean?”

“He liked to give Riley shitwork once in a while,” Wade said. “Maybe to make him humble, you know.” He thought about it for a moment. “But I think that college degree intimidated Maddox a little.” He shook his head lightly, then returned to the subject. “Anyway,” he said,
“Riley was busy doing something, so I came up here by myself. We didn’t exactly have a big law enforcement community at that time, so people were scattered around pretty good during the time we were looking for her.”

“So you often worked alone during the search?”

Wade shook his head. “No,” he said lightly. “Just that one time.”

The trail swung to the right, through a thick stand of pine, and as he walked, Kinley could hear the crunch of the needles beneath his feet, and he remembered how, as a boy, he’d loved to lie on the ground and cover himself in them, sleeping through the long afternoons until he’d finally open his eyes and see his grandmother looming over him, her hands stretching down and his stretching up, grasping.