“Yes,” he said. “They do. They certainly do.”
“And it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to follow his backtrail and find out. A man his size, and a Negro to boot, can’t be that hard to trace.”
“You’d think so, but you’d be wrong,” he said. “In Coffey’s case, anyhow. I know.”
“You tried?”
“I did, and came up all but empty. There were a couple of railroad fellows who thought they saw him in
the Knoxville yards two days before the Detterick girls were killed. No surprise there; he was just across the river from the Great Southern tracks when they collared him, and that’s probably how he came down here from Tennessee. I got a letter from a man who said he’d hired a big bald black man to shift crates for him in the early spring of this year – this as in Kentucky. I sent him a picture of Coffey and he said that was the man. But other than that -” Hammersmith shrugged and shook his head.
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”
“Strikes me as a lot odd, Mr. Edgecombe. It’s like he dropped out of the sky. And he’s no help; he can’t remember last week once this week comes.”
“No, he can’t,” I said. “How do you explain it?”
“We’re in a Depression,” he said, “that’s how I explain it. People all over the roads. The Okies want to pick peaches in California, the poor whites from up in the brakes want to build cars in Detroit, the black folks from Mississippi want to go up to New England and work in the shoe factories or the textile mills.
Everyone – black as well as white – thinks it’s going to be better over the next jump of land. It’s the American damn way. Even a giant like Coffey doesn’t get noticed everywhere he goes – until, that is, he decides to kill a couple of little girls. Little white girls.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
He gave me a bland look from his too-thin face. “Sometimes I do,” he said.
His wife leaned out of the kitchen window like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and called,
“Kids! Cookies are ready!” She turned to me. “Would you like an oatmeal-raisin cookie, Mr.
Edgecombe?”
“I’m sure they’re delicious, ma’am, but I’ll take a pass this time.”
“All right,” she said, and drew her head back inside.
“Have you seen the scars on him?” Hammersmith asked abruptly. He was still watching his kids, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to abandon the pleasures of the swing – not even for oatmeal-raisin cookies.
“Yes.” But I was surprised he had.
He saw my reaction and laughed. “The defense attorney’s one big victory was getting Coffey to take off his shirt and show those scars to the jury. The prosecutor, George Peterson, objected like hell, but the judge allowed it. Old George could have saved, his breath – juries around these parts don’t buy all that psychology crap about how people who’ve been mistreated just can’t help themselves. They believe people can help themselves. It’s a point of view I have a lot of sympathy for – but those scars were pretty ghastly, just the same. Notice anything about them, Edgecombe?”
I had seen the man naked in the shower, and I’d noticed, all right; I knew just what he was talking about.
“They’re all broken up. Latticed, almost.”
“You know what that means?”
“Somebody whopped the living hell out of him when he was a kid,” I said. “Before he grew.”
“But they didn’t manage to whop the devil out of him, did they, Edgecombe? Should have spared the rod and just drowned him in the river like a stray kitten, don’t you think?”
I suppose it would have been politic to simply agree and get out of there, but I couldn’t. I’d seen him. And I’d felt him, as well. Felt the touch of his hands.
“He’s … strange,” I said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any real violence in him. I know how he was found, and it’s hard to jibe that with what I see, day in and day out, on the block. I know violent men, Mr.