Just Cause (14 page)

'None that I can recall. And don't lecture me about stereotypes.' Brown eyed Cowart. Wilcox shifted about in his seat angrily.

'Statistics don't mean anything,' he added quietly.

'No?' Cowart asked. 'Okay. But he was home on vacation.'

'Right.'

'And nobody liked him much. That I've learned.'

'That's correct. He was a snide rat bastard. Looked down at folks.'

Cowart stared at the policeman. 'You know how silly that sounds? An unpopular person comes to visit his grandmother and you want to make him on rape charges. No wonder he didn't like it around here.'

Tanny Brown started to say something angry in reply, but then stopped. For a few seconds he simply watched Cowart, as if trying to burrow into him with his eyes. Finally he replied, slowly, 'Yes. I know how silly it sounds. We must be silly people.' His eyes had narrowed sharply.

Cowart leaned forward in his chair, speaking in his own, steady, unaffected voice. You've got no edge on me, he thought.

'But that's why you went to his grandmother's house first, looking for him?'

'That's right.'

Brown started to say something else, then closed his mouth abruptly. Cowart could feel the tension between the two of them and knew, in that moment, what the lieutenant had been prepared to say. So he said it for him. 'Because you had a feeling, right? That old policeman's sixth sense. A suspicion that you had to act on. That's what you were about to say, right?'

Brown glared at him.

'Right. Yes. Exactly.' He stopped and looked over at Wilcox, then back at Cowart. 'Bruce said you were slick,' he spoke quietly, 'but I guess I had to see it for myself.'

Cowart eyed the lieutenant with the same cold glance that he was receiving. 'I'm not slick. I'm just doing what you would do.'

'No, that's incorrect,' Brown said acidly. 'I wouldn't be trying to help that murdering bastard off of Death Row.'

The reporter and the policeman were both silent.

After a few moments, Brown said, 'This isn't going right.'

'That's correct, if what you want is to persuade me that Ferguson's a liar.'

Brown stood up and started pacing the floor, obviously thinking hard. He moved with a rugged intensity, like a sprinter coiled at the starting line, waiting for the starter's gun to sound, the muscles in his body shifting about easily, letting Cowart know all the time that he was not a person who enjoyed the sensation of being confined, either in the small room or by details.

'He was wrong,' the policeman said. I knew it from the first time I saw him, long before Joanie was killed. I know that's not evidence, but I knew it.'

'When was that?'

'A year before the murder. I rousted him from the front of the high school. He was just sitting in-that car, watching the kids leave.'

'What were you doing there?'

'Picking up my daughter. That's when I spotted him. Saw him a few times after that. Every time, he was doing something that made me uncomfortable. Hanging in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Or driving slowly down the street, following some young woman. I wasn't the only one that noticed it. A couple of the Pachoula patrolmen came to me saying the same. He got busted once, around midnight, right behind a small apartment building, just standing around. Tried to hide when the squad car rolled past. Charges got dropped right away. But still…'

'I still don't hear anything like evidence.'

'Goddammit!' the lieutenant's voice soared for the first time. 'Don't you hear? We didn't have any. All we had was impressions. Like the impression you get when you get to Ferguson's house and he's scrubbing out that car – and he's already deep-sixed a slice of rug. Like when the first thing out of his mouth is, "I didn't do that girl," before he's heard a question. And how he sits in an interview room, laughing because he knows you haven't got anything. But all those impressions add up to something more than instinct, because he finally talks. And, yes sir, all those impressions turn out to be absolutely right because he confesses to killing that girl.'

'So, where's the knife? Where's his clothes covered with blood and mud?'

'He wouldn't tell us.'

'Did he tell you how he staked out the school? How he got her to get into the car? What he said to her? Whether she fought? What did he tell you?'

'Here, goddammit, read for yourself!'

Lieutenant Brown seized a sheaf of papers from the file on his desk and tossed them toward Cowart. He looked down and saw that it was the transcript of the confession, taken by a court stenographer. It was short, only three pages long. The two detectives had gone through all of his rights with him, especially the right to an attorney. The rights colloquy occupied more than an entire page of the confession. They'd asked him whether he understood this and he'd replied he had. Their first question was phrased in traditional cop-ese: 'Now, on or about three P.M. on May 4, 1987, did you have occasion to be in a location at the corner of Grand and Spring streets, which is next to King Elementary School?' And Ferguson had replied monosyllabically, 'Yes.' The detectives had then asked him whether he had seen the young woman later known to him as Joanie Shriver, and again, his reply had been the single affirmative. They had then painstakingly brought him through the entire scenario, each time phrasing their narrative as a question and receiving a positive answer, but not one of them elaborated with even the meagerest detail. When they had asked him about the weapon and the other crucial aspects of the crime, he'd replied that he couldn't remember. The final question was designed to establish premeditation. It was the one that had put Ferguson on Death Row: 'Did you go to that location intending to kidnap and kill a young woman on that day?' and he'd replied again with a simple, awful 'Yes.'

Cowart shook his head. Ferguson had volunteered nothing except a single word, 'Yes,' over and over. He turned toward Brown and Wilcox. 'Not exactly a model confession, is it?'

Wilcox, who had been sitting unsteadily, shifting about with an obvious, growing frustration, finally jumped up, his face red with anger, shaking his fist at the reporter. 'What the hell do you want? Dammit, he did that little girl just as sure as I'm standing here now. You just don't want to hear the truth, damn you!'

'Truth?' Cowart shook his head and Wilcox seemed to explode. He sprang from behind the desk and grabbed hold of Cowart's jacket, pulling the reporter to his feet. 'You're gonna get me really angry, asshole! You don't want to do that!'

Tanny Brown jackknifed his bulk across the desk, seizing the detective with one hand and jerking him backward, controlling the smaller, wiry man easily. He did not say anything, especially when Wilcox turned toward his superior officer, still sputtering with barely controlled anger. The detective tried to say something to Brown, then turned toward Cowart. Finally, choking, fists clenched, he stormed from the office.

Cowart straightened his jacket and sat back down heavily. He breathed in and out, feeling the adrenaline pumping in his ears. After a few minutes of silence, he looked over at Brown.

'You're going to tell me now that he didn't hit Ferguson, right? That he never lost it during thirty-six hours of interrogation?'

The lieutenant paused for an instant, thinking, as if trying to assess the damage done by the outburst before replying. Then he shook his head.

'No, truth is, he did. Early on, once or twice, before I stopped him. Just slapped Ferguson across the face.'

'No punch to the stomach?'

'Not that I saw.'

'How about telephone books?'

'An old technique,' Brown said sadly, his voice growing quieter. 'No. Despite what Mr. Ferguson says.'

The lieutenant turned away for the first time, looking out the window. After a moment or two, he said, 'Mr. Cowart, I don't think I can make you understand. That little girl's death just got under all our skins and it's still there. And it was the worst for us. We had to make some sort of case out of that emotional mess. It bent us all. We weren't evil or bad. But we wanted that killer caught. I didn't sleep for three days. None of us did. But we had him, and there he was, smiling back at us just like nothing was wrong. I don't blame Bruce Wilcox for losing it a bit. I think we were all at the edge. And even then, with the confession – you're right, it's not a textbook confession, but it was the best we could get out of that closemouthed son of a bitch – even then it was all so fragile. This conviction is held together by the thinnest of threads. We all know that. And so, you come along, asking questions, and each one of those questions just shreds a little bit of those threads and we get a little crazy. There. That's my apology for my partner. And for sending you to the Shrivers. I don't want this conviction to shatter. More than anything else, I don't want to lose this one. I couldn't face those folks. I couldn't face my own family. I couldn't, face myself. I want that man to die for what he did.'

The lieutenant finished his confession and waited for Cowart's reply. The reporter felt a sudden rush of success and decided to press his advantage. 'What's the policy with your department on taking weapons into interrogation rooms?'

'Simple. You don't. Check them with the sergeant on duty. Every cop knows that. Why?'

'Would you mind standing up for a moment.'

Brown shrugged and stood.

'Now, let me see your ankles.'

He looked surprised and hesitated. 'I don't get it.'

Indulge me, Lieutenant.'

Brown stared angrily at him. 'Is this what you want to see?' He lifted his leg, putting his shoe up on the desk, raising his trouser leg at the same time. There was a small, brown-leather ankle holster holding a snub-nosed.38-caliber pistol strapped to his calf.

The lieutenant lowered his leg.

'Now, you didn't point that weapon at Ferguson and tell him you were going to kill him if he didn't confess, did you?'

'No, absolutely not.' Cold indignation rode the detective's voice.

'And you never pulled the trigger on an empty chamber?'

'No.'

'So, how would he know about that gun if you hadn't shown it to him?'

Brown stared across the desk at Cowart, an ice-like anger behind his eyes. 'This interview is finished,' he said. He pointed at the door.

'You're wrong' Cowart said, rising. 'It's just beginning.'

There is a zone reporters find, a space like the marksman's narrowing of vision down the barrel, past the sight and directly to the center of the target, where other considerations of life fade away, and they begin to see their story take shape within their imaginations. The gaps in the narrative, the prose holes that need information start to become obvious; like a gravedigger swinging shovels of soil on top of a coffin, the reporter fills the breaches in his story.

Matthew Cowart had reached that place.

He drummed his fingers impatiently on the linoleum-topped table, waiting for Sergeant Rogers to escort Ferguson into the interview room. His trip to Pachoula had left him energized with questions, suffused with answers. The story was half-settled in his mind, had been from the moment that Tanny Brown had angrily conceded that Ferguson had been slapped by Wilcox. That small admission had opened an entire vista of lies. Matthew Cowart did not know what precisely had happened between the detectives and their quarry, but he knew that there were enough questions to warrant his story, and probably to reopen the case. What he hungered for now was the second element. If Ferguson hadn't killed the little girl, then who had? When Ferguson appeared in the doorway, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lip, arms filled with legal folders, Cowart wanted to jump to his feet.

The two men shook hands and Cowart watched

Ferguson settle into the chair opposite him. 'I'm gonna be outside,' the sergeant said, closing the reporter and the convict in the small room. There was the audible click of a dead bolt lock. The prisoner was smiling, not with pleasure but with smugness, and for just a moment, as he measured the grin in front of him against the cold anger he had seen in Tanny Brown's eyes, Cowart felt a swaying within him. Then the feeling fled and Ferguson dropped his papers onto the tabletop, making a muffled thudding sound with their weight.

'I knew you'd be back,' Ferguson said. I knew what you'd find there.'

'And what do you think that was?'

'That I was telling the truth.'

Cowart hesitated, then sought to knock a bit of the prisoner's confidence astray. I found out you were telling some truths.'

Ferguson bristled instantly. 'What the hell do you mean? Didn't you talk to those cops? Didn't you see that cracker redneck town? Couldn't you see what sort of place it is?'

'One of those cracker cops was black. You didn't tell me that.'

'What, you think that just because he's the same color as me that automatically makes him okay? You think he's my brother? That he ain't as much a racist as that little worm partner of his? Where you been, Mr. Reporter? Tanny Brown's worse than the worst redneck sheriff you ever imagined. He makes all the Bulls and Bubbas and all those other Deep South cops look like a bunch of bleeding hearts from the ACLU. He's white right to his heart and soul and the only thing he hates worse than himself is folks his own color. You go ask around. Find out who the big head-banger in Pachoula is. People'd tell you it was that pig. I promise.'

Ferguson had snapped to his feet. He was pacing about the cell, pounding one fist into an open palm, the sharp slapping noise punctuating his words. 'Didn't you talk to that old alky lawyer who sold me out?'

'I talked to him.'

'Did you talk to my grandmother?'

'Yes.'

'Didn't you go over the case?'

'I saw they didn't have much.'

'Didn't you see why they had to have that confession?'