The date on the death warrant was November 20th. Three days after I got it – the fifteenth, I think I had Janice call me in sick. A cup of coffee later I was driving north in my badly sprung but otherwise reliable Ford. Janice had kissed me on my way and wished me good luck; I’d thanked her but no longer had any clear idea what good luck would be – finding what I was looking for or not finding it. All I knew for sure is that I didn’t feel much like singing as I drove. Not that day.
By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he’d deny he’d ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn’t conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.
The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn’t want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn’t want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn’t. “He’s only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days,” McGee said,
“and he don’t need a smartass prison guard who thinks he’s a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don’t want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I’m done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling
restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It’ll weight you down.” I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.
When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. “Well?” I asked.
“Come on home with me, we’ll talk there,” he said. “This place is a mite too public for my taste.”
We had our conference on Rob McGee’s front porch. Both. of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs.
McGee didn’t allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn’t in the least enjoy what he’s hearing out of his own mouth.
“It proves nothing, you know that, don’t you?” he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.
“I know,” I said.
“And if you’re thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, senor. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we’re awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.”
“I know that, too.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. “That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee,” I said, “but I don’t. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake.”