The Reservoir (16 page)

Dear Lillie,

I have not been able to find anything to send you. I will keep looking. I’m sorry I will not be able to get up that way before you leave, but I’ll write to you again soon. Willie says he can’t come either just now, but sends you his best. You take care on your trip and write me again soon. If Jane tells you I asked why you haven’t written me, it’s because I’ve been taking your letters to me out so that she doesn’t know. Please destroy this letter right away.

Love from your friend, Tommie.

She read it over twice more, then threw it away.

Four days later George drove her to the station at South Point and she boarded a train going west.

• CHAPTER FIFTEEN •

T
O GIVE THE JURY
a better feel for the scene of the crime, the prosecution proposes a visit to the reservoir. The defense reluctantly agrees. Evans tells Tommie that by the light of day the reservoir does not look at all like a gloomy, secluded place for the commission of evil deeds. “Don’t you agree?”

“I suppose so,” says Tommie. “I haven’t been there since I was in college.”

So the next day at the noon recess a carriage and two omnibuses carry Tommie and his police escort, the lawyers, the judge, the twelve gentlemen of the jury, and Willie out to the reservoir grounds. They alight in front of the Dunstan house, Tommie not saying a word to anyone. Willie talks cordially to a member of the press.

They climb the embankment steps, the sun making everyone shade their eyes. Tommie stoops to pick a buttercup which he twirls, holding his hands behind his back. He looks into the reservoir, and it
is
unfamiliar. The water has been drawn off a second time in a search for evidence, though nothing has turned up, and now the bottom is brown muck, reflecting glints of sky.

God be with you till we meet again
and the wheezing organ bellows—where was that coming from? It was snowing, the smell of coal fire from the ironworks on a frigid night, her warmth and her naked swollen belly. She made him feel the kicking. And later,
I could strike her and no one would hear, could squeeze the life out of her
, because it was as though she were screaming in his ear, go on and just
do
it, Tommie, I want you to, and he felt like screaming himself.

Then it’s daylight again and Willie is over talking quietly with some people, and Tommie has not seen this place since college. So there is that low picket fence around the water’s edge that Mr. Meade described, and the little gate on the south end near where the body was floating, and the sloping brick walls of the reservoir. And down the other side of the embankment—there’s the high board fence, and the loose board where Lillian (and her companion, if she had one) must have come through. It has been nailed back up. They go outside and around to the little smallpox cemetery, and the deadhouse where the hat was found, and the little hospital building, beyond which rises the Confederate memorial over in Hollywood Cemetery. Everything is so peaceful and green.

Tommie looks off toward the river. He could wait until the policemen seem distracted, then run for the bluffs before they have time to draw, jump down through the brambles, cross the railroad tracks, and swim the river. Hide out in farmhouses during the day and move west at night. He looks at his brother—Willie would do it, Willie would help him do it. But, no, the courtroom is more familiar, practically his home ground, and that’s where he has his best chance. Anyway, what kind of life would he have running? Where would he go? The Dakota Territory? Too many Indians and too cold. California? He has no feel for those places.

Willie interrupts his reverie. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

“The fresh air,” Tommie says. “It’s the greatest thing in the world.” He puts the buttercup under his nose. “You don’t appreciate it until you can’t have it.”

As they are leaving the grounds Tommie hears a girl’s laughter from somewhere off near the smallpox hospital. He looks over and sees a face at the window that has a strange resemblance to Lillie’s; the girl is laughing, as though in a teasing way. She waves, or appears to, and Tommie starts to wave back but stops himself—the reporters, who have been watching him the entire time, who watch his every movement except in the safety of his cell, will make something of it—but then he decides to wave anyway. And then he’s not sure if she was even waving at him at all, and as they pass he sees that it’s really an elderly woman with gray hair.

The trial continues with the testimony of conductor Benjamin Wright, a broad-chested man with a head full of curly brown hair. Yes, he spoke with a young woman wearing a dark gray dress and a red shawl. She was going to Richmond to meet a friend, but the friend wasn’t at the station, so Wright went with her on the omnibus to the American Hotel, as it was on the way to his own hotel. Yes, she seemed preoccupied on the trip.

Evans asks him to repeat what the woman said. Wright says, “She told me she wouldn’t mind if the train ran off the tracks and killed her.”

“That’s all I have for this witness,” Evans says.

Aylett stands up again. “Mr. Wright, you say she was agitated?”

“Yes, I said she was preoccupied.”

“What did you make of her saying that about the train running off?”

“At first I thought it was a joke. It was a strange thing for a young lady to say.”

“You thought it was a joke?” “At first I did.”

As the trial proceeds, the witnesses keep piling up their testimony, the sheer volume of it more than anything Tommie has ever heard of. “Beats anything I’ve seen,” Crump tells him at one of their regular morning meetings. “I hear they’re carrying reports in London and Paris. But don’t let it bother you. People are naturally curious. When the case is over, you’ll be famous.”

“For beating a murder charge.”

Crump fixes him with a hard stare, a vein in his forehead pulsing. “You’ll be free.”

Tommie nods sheepishly. “That’ll be enough for me.” He sometimes wonders what Crump really thinks of him, but the time for a confession seems long gone. He is sure from what Willie has told him that Evans believes in his innocence, and yet Willie himself seems uncertain. Willie has never asked for the truth, nor does he appear to want to.

No matter how much Wren threatens, Slim Lane cannot seem to turn up the newsboy who brought the note for the lady in Room 21. He spent three days looking, then quietly went back to his job at the hotel and nobody said a word about it. He manages to put it out of his mind until Wren turns up again asking for him. “Well?” Wren demands.

“I axed around, but nobody seen that boy.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Wren puffs. He’s standing arms akimbo, knuckles on his waist, staring down at Slim, who just happens to be outside of Room 21. “Mr. Dodson says you were out for three days hunting for that boy. I paid your wages for that time, and you mean to tell me you turned up nothing?”

Slim multiplies twenty-one times his own age, twenty-four, and gets five hundred and four. His eyes shift away from Wren’s gaze. “Five hundred and four,” he says.

“Five hundred and four? Five hundred and four what?”

Slim’s mind becomes a spinning top. What does Wren want to hear? Would it please him that Slim asked five hundred and four people about the boy? That in five hundred and four hours, exactly three weeks will have gone by, at which point he will have earned enough money to buy a book explaining that people descended from monkeys, a book his preacher said was the greatest piece of foolishness ever written? That there are five hundred and four cows in a field in his mind and he can see them all, in groups of three and four and seven? Would he like to know Psalm 50, verse 4? “He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people.”

“What?” Wren says. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” He shakes Slim by the shoulder. “Is something wrong with you?”

“No, sir.” That isn’t it, then. “They made a noration at the church. Somebody said the boy was at five-oh-four.”

“Five-oh-four?”

“Yes, sir. Five-oh-four Jackson Street.”

“Who said it?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was at the noration at Sixth Mount Zion.” There was a noration, though no one could come up with a name or location for any such newsboy. It was thought that he might have been visiting a relative and had gone back to South Hill, but Wren would not want to hear that.

“John Jasper’s church?”

“Yes, sir.” It occurs to Slim that Wren might get angry after he finds no one at that address and that he will return, wanting more. He decides to tell him something true. “That watch key,” he says.

“What about it?”

“I saw it in the lady’s room, on her dresser.”

Wren glances around, then speaks quietly, his voice tight. “What kind of key?”

“A gold key, shiny and fancy, just like they described in the newspaper.”

“Why didn’t you say anything at the police court?”

“Nobody axed.”

Wren grips Slim’s shoulder and stares him straight in the eyes. “You listen to me. You might’ve thought you saw such a thing, but I don’t think you did. She didn’t have any such key, you understand?”

Slim nods, remembering the little gold key when he went in with the message and waited for the lady to give him some change. But for some reason Wren doesn’t want him to have seen it. “Well it looked a whole lot like a key.”

“But it wasn’t,” Wren says. “Could’ve been a hinge or knob, you see. Or some coins, or a pin, or some other ladies’ thingamajig.” Slim nods. “If anybody asks you what you saw in there, what’ll you tell them?”

“I’ll say I don’t remember. Unless my hand’s on the Bible. Then I’ll say something that looked like a key, but I don’t know.”

“Something that
maybe
looked like a key, but you don’t know for a fact because you never held it in your hand. And that’s the God’s truth, isn’t it, Slim?”

“Yes sir, it is.”

“You’re damn right it is. That girl wasn’t out there alone, and it wasn’t her key.”

The prosecution brings Mr. Lucas back out. Meredith gets up and holds a small gold watch key in his palm. He shows it to Lucas and says, “Does this key look familiar?” Lucas studies it for a few seconds, then says that it does. “Tell us about this key.” Crump objects and is immediately overruled.

Lucas has already prayed to God about this. He has put his hand on the Bible and sworn to tell the truth, so he has no choice. “I found that key at the reservoir the day after we found the girl.”

“The day after, you say? And when did you report it?”

“I didn’t report it until a week after that, plus one day.”

“I see, and would you mind explaining to the jury why it took you so long?”

“Well sir, it’s hard to explain exactly. I liked the look of it, I guess. I thought it was right pretty, and I was thinking finderskeepers, not thinking about the case. Well, that’s not exactly true either. I was sort of thinking of that girl, and I didn’t reckon anybody would need it.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Lucas. Now explain why you decided to turn it in.”

“Well, Mr. Meade happened to catch sight of it around my neck and asked about it. So I told when and where I’d found it, and he said I ought to turn it in, so I did, and I hope he won’t let me go, not that he would, because he’s always good to me.”

The audience chuckles in sympathy, while the jury passes the key around. So much chatter arises from the courtroom and out in the hallway that Judge Hill has to bang his gavel and ask for order. Then Evans gets up and tries to make Lucas change his story, quizzing him about exactly where he found the key and what his state of mind was, then repeating the questions, hoping to trip him up. But Lucas is a rock. All Evans can do is conclude, “And you swear that you found it more than a week before you reported it, and you don’t know how it got there?”

“Yes, sir,” Lucas says. This time as Lucas steps down he takes a better look at the prisoner. Since his last testimony he has tried to imagine the young man striking the girl, and now he is baffled seeing him there in his nice brown suit and tie. Why, that boy could no more hurt another person than he himself could.

Then George Walker is brought out. He takes the oath, looking somber and out of place, then sits and begins fidgeting with his hat in his lap and knocking his knees together. He looks more haggard than Tommie remembers, his cheeks caved in and his beard gone gray and scraggly. Two of his teeth have been pulled, and he has not bothered plugging them.

Meredith asks him when the prisoner visited his house. George has to think about it, even though Meredith has already privately gone over the kinds of questions he would ask. “The last time was around about September, but not for the night.” And the last time he stopped for the night? “That was in July, I believe.” Crump objects, but Meredith explains that he is trying to establish that there was an opportunity for a seduction.

“You can’t prove any seduction took place,” Evans shoots out. Judge Hill eyes him sharply and asks the stenographer to strike the last sentence. Evans sits back, looking chastened, while Meredith pries out the details Walker can give. Yes, the prisoner visited at various times over the course of Lillian’s stay with them, and, yes, they were sometimes alone together. George explains how their rooms were situated, with his father downstairs and Lillian across the hall, and how his cousin sometimes got up at night and later complained of bowel trouble.

Meredith then asks if the prisoner was in the habit of wearing a watch key. George replies that he had a fancy one on a little chain. Asked to describe it, he says he can’t remember exactly. “It was gold, I believe, and had some kind of fancy top to it. He showed it to me once—he was proud of it, and I teased him about how expensive it was.” Meredith reintroduces the key he showed Lucas and asks if this is the same one. Tommie shakes his head, but George is not looking at him. “It looks like it,” George says. Tommie stares at his cousin—
look
at that key, it’s not mine.