Evidence of Blood (36 page)

“She was?” Warfield asked. “I didn’t know that. Back in 1954?”

“That’s right,” Kinley told him. “Is she still around Sequoyah?”

“Yeah, she is,” Warfield said. “Betty lives over in the old factory district. You know, where the old textile mill was, over there by the railroad tracks.”

Kinley wrote it down. “I might start with her,” he said, his eyes staring at the other names on the list. “At the very least, she had a connection to the trial.” He looked back up at Warfield. “She testified for Overton,” he said. “She was one of the few witnesses who did.”

Warfield looked at Kinley with a sudden, unexpected intensity. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, there wasn’t much of a defense,” Kinley told him.

“No, there wasn’t,” he said, “but how could there have been?”

“Well, even character witnesses,” Kinley said. “There were only two of them, and one of them was his wife.”

“That’s because Overton was a loner,” Warfield said. “At least that’s the way my father described him. Very solitary. He hardly ever spoke.”

“So your father did talk about the case from time to time,” Kinley said.

“Not often,” Warfield replied, “but it was a murder case. It was the first one he’d ever had. And, in addition to that, of course, it was a capital case. A man died. Even if the man’s guilty, it’s not something you forget, putting a man in the chair.” He leaned forward. “My father certainly never forgot it.”

Kinley saw the elder Warfield in his mind, his fingers drawing the green dress from its cover. “What was he like, your father?”

“He was good,” Warfield answered. “He was kind.” He looked at Kinley solemnly. “I’ll tell you something no
one else knows about my father and that case,” he said. “After the trial, he gave some money to Mrs. Overton.”

“Money?” Kinley repeated, unbelievingly.

Warfield nodded. “To help her out,” he explained. “You know, because she’d just had a baby. Anyway, he gave her some money. He funneled it through Horace Talbott.”

“I see.”

“It’s true,” Warfield said, though Kinley did not doubt what he’d just been told. “I don’t guess Mrs. Overton ever knew where the money came from, but it came from my father.” He looked at Kinley with a knowing smile. “I guess that sort of thing doesn’t happen in New York, does it?” he asked.

Kinley shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it does.”

The old textile factory loomed like a great fortress over the iron rails of the tracks which separated it, along with Sequoyah’s working poor, from the other, far more prosperous part of town.

Even as a boy, Kinley had recognized the demarcation as unbridgeable and severe. The boys who drank whisky and the girls who got pregnant belonged to a dim netherworld of factory gates, shift sirens and billowing, sulfuric clouds that hung over the south side of Sequoyah like a great yellow curtain. From time to time, by some quirk of zoning which would be corrected by the following year, a teenage boy or girl from the factory district would actually wind up at Sequoyah High rather than South Side, the old Depression-era brick schoolhouse which had been set aside for their kind. Girl or boy, short or tall, they would always look the same, either thin and bony from too little food, or fat with the bloated excess of their starchy diets. Their behavior was similarly of a piece, and they would slump listlessly in a back-row seat while the teacher droned on about the Lost Cause or geometric proofs which were about as useful to them as the Rosetta stone. They were never at parties, proms or football games. They never sought elective office or campaigned for anyone who did. Their names never appeared on the rolls of the social or academic clubs, school publications. They were similarly absent from the sports rosters, and on the days designated for class photos, they did not show up to
stand with their fellow students, so that, in the end, the history of Sequoyah High hardly recorded them at all.

Betty Gaines had to have been one of these, Kinley thought, as he drifted up the narrow street of cotton mill tenements which fronted the old factory on Cotton Mill Row, his eyes trained on the rusty metal mailboxes which lined the street.

Betty Gaines’s name was painted in crude black letters on the one which stood near the middle of the block. The small wooden house which rested behind it was built on a cinder-block foundation. Its original wood façade had been covered with sheets of asphalt siding, and even from the road, it had the look of a place which had been left to its own devices. The arched tin roof slumped forward slightly, angling down toward the grassless frontyard strewn with rusting auto parts.

An unsteady chicken wire fence lined the sidewalk, its gate held closed by a loop of clothesline. Kinley tugged the line from its mooring, then headed up the short span of wooden steps which led to the front door.

He knocked once, waited a moment, and knocked again. He could hear a body shuffling about inside, but it took almost a minute for the door finally to swing open.

The woman who stood behind the torn screen looked very much as Kinley would have imagined her, small and somewhat bent, her hair now gray rather than the raven black of the newspaper photographs. It was as if her youth had been squeezed from her violently, rather than having seeped away year by year at its own inevitable pace. There was something in the aridity of her face, the downward curve of her body, the rounded slump of her shoulders, that suggested heavy weights long applied, visible and invisible burdens.

“Betty Gaines?” Kinley asked softly.

She nodded.

“I’m Jack Kinley. You don’t know me.”

She stared at him through the rusty screen.

“I’m a reporter,” Kinley added. “I’m looking into an old murder case.”

She nodded gently, her pale lips parting somewhat, as if she’d been about to speak and had thought better of it.

“You testified in the case,” Kinley went on. “For Charles Overton.”

She remained silent.

“Do you remember that?” Kinley asked.

“I remember it,” she said. “Long time ago.”

“1954,” Kinley reminded her.

“I worked for Old Man Thompson then.”

“Yes, you did.”

“So did Overton.”

“Yes.”

“On the courthouse,” she said, her head shifting slightly to the right, as if she were attempting to get a glimpse of its towering gray walls.

“That’s right.”

“Best job I ever had,” she said. “Didn’t have one that good later on.”

Kinley felt his hand crawl toward the notebook in his pocket. “Could you spare a few minutes to talk about those days?” he asked quietly.

For an answer, she simply opened the screen silently, and let Kinley in.

The front room looked like a stage set for some socialist drama of the thirties, all yellow light, worn furniture and uncarpeted floors. An enormous, pre-war radio sat brown and bloated like an overweight guest in one corner. A small table rested beside it, its surface powdered with an array of sewing needles and spools of colored thread. There was a wooden rocker, a tiny, threadbare settee, and between them, another small table, this one covered with an assortment of empty plates and cups, the bleak droppings, as Kinley had noticed, of people who lived alone.

He thought of Maria Spinola, her living room dotted with a dusty, down-at-the-heels assortment of mock
French provincial flourishes, lamp shades with gilded fringes hanging limply in the smokey light. Spinola’s decor had been the New Bedford Portuguese version of the room which surrounded him now, but with the same mood of listlessness and overall abandonment.

He turned toward Betty Gaines, shaking Maria Spinola from his mind, and asked his first question. “Had you known Charles Overton very long?”

She leaned back slowly in the rocker, her short legs dangling over the side, her feet barely scraping against the floor. “Maybe a couple years,” she said, “ever since he started working for Thompson.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“Just business.”

“So you didn’t know him personally?”

She shook her head. “I knew Luther, but not Charlie.”

“Were they friends, Luther and Charlie?”

“Not that Luther mentioned much,” she said. “They didn’t live too far from each other. Luther’s place was up on the mountain, too. He did some bootlegging way back then.” She smiled with an odd maliciousness. “They caught him for it a few times.”

“Who did?”

“The Sheriff.”

“Sheriff Maddox?”

She nodded. “He run whisky, Luther did. That’s the truth, too. You can look that up. He’s been caught a few times. He didn’t have no still, though. It was strictly bonded, what he sold.”

“Was Overton ever involved in anything like that?” Kinley asked.

Betty waved her hand, her face drawing together, as if in response to the absurdity of the suggestion. “Naw, he didn’t do stuff like that,” she said. “He was a family man. All he did was work and go home.”

“How did you happen to end up testifying at Overton’s trial?” Kinley asked.

“Well, I felt like I had to.”

“Why?”

“To straighten things out.”

“What things?”

“What Luther had said.”

“You didn’t believe his testimony?”

“No, I didn’t,” Betty said. “Besides, I’d seen Charlie that morning. He was working at the courthouse just like I told the jury, and he come over to me, and you could see that he was sick. He looked real bad off. He was holding to hisself.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “Like this.” She shook her head. “Sick as a dog,” she added emphatically, “in his stomach.”

“What did he say to you exactly?” Kinley asked.

“Stomach trouble,” Betty said flatly, “like he was going to throw up.”

“And he asked if he could go home, is that right?”

“He said he had to go home,” Betty told him, “that he couldn’t work no more.”

Kinley’s mind swept back through the pages of the trial transcript, and he heard the voice of Luther Snow.

SNOW
: I dug the foundation, and I poured the cement for the whole place, everything from the flagpole to the courthouse steps. Charlie was a sort of a regular lift and haul man. He didn’t have no special trade, like a mason or a carpenter or something like that.

“But Snow and Overton, they did work together, didn’t they?” Kinley asked.

“At the courthouse, they did,” Betty said, “but Overton was just hired for that job. He wasn’t no regular employee at Thompson’s. He just did what Luther told him to.”

Once again, the transcript played in Kinley’s mind.

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.

Kinley stared at Betty Gaines, hoping that her mind could reach back far enough to draw a subtle conclusion. “Were Overton and Luther Snow pretty close?” he asked.

She did not answer, but the small, blue eyes seemed to cloud strangely, as if misted over by a sudden change of air.

“Snow testified that he was a friend of Overton’s,” Kinley added, his mind now concentrating on the exact words Warfield had used to describe their relationship. “Is that true? Would Snow have known about Overton’s private life?”

Betty remained silent, but Kinley could see the clouds lifting somewhat, as if driven upward by the warmth of a rising wind.

“He said they talked a lot,” Kinley went on. “He gave the impression that they were close friends.”

Betty’s body tensed slightly as she pressed herself back against the spokes of the rocker, her small feet scraping roughly against the floor. “They were nothing to each other,” she snapped suddenly, as if a small explosion had gone off in her mind. “They just worked together, that’s all.”

Kinley felt his fingers tighten around the upright pen. “Why would Snow have said what he did?” he asked. “Why would he have said they were friends?”

Betty shrugged. “To please the boss.”

“The boss?” Kinley asked. “Who’s that?”

She looked at him, astonished by his lack of knowledge.

“Wallace Thompson,” she answered. “You don’t know who Old Man Thompson was?”

Kinley shook his head.

“He owned the company,” Betty told him, “the one that was building the courthouse, Thompson Construction. He ran the whole thing. From top to bottom. He was at a site when he died, that’s how close he kept his eye on things.”