“And half-killed himself doing it, too,” Brutal said.
“More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn’t be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton -that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he’d rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean
when he came in. That got me thinking about – ”
“The dog,” Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it. “How the dog’s neck was broken.”
“Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton’s court records – all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.”
“Lot of trouble?” Brutal asked.
“Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive – he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn’t there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton’s mattress – little girls with no clothes on. I said I’d wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I’d heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don’t think they crossed his mind, either.”
“Course not”, Harry said. “Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.”
“I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton’s back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff – Catlett, his name is – laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn’t he?
“I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn’t rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as ‘not much more’n stinkfinger., Sorry, honey.”
“That’s all right”, Janice said. She looked pale, though.
“How old was the girl?” Brutal asked.
“Nine”, I said.
He winced.
“The man might’ve taken off after Wharton himself, if he’d had him some big old brothers or cousins to give him a help, but he didn’t. So he went to Catlett, but made it clear he only wanted Wharton warned.
No one wants a nasty thing like that right out in public, if it can be helped. Anyway, Sheriff C. had been dealing with Wharton’s antics for quite some time – had him in the reform school up that way for eight months or so when Wharton was fifteen – and he decided enough was enough. He got three deputies, they went out to the Wharton place, set Missus Wharton aside when she started to weep and wail, and then they warned Mr. William ‘Billy the Kid, Wharton what happens to big pimple-faced galoots who go up in the hayloft with girls not even old enough to have heard about their monthly courses, let alone started them. ‘We warned that little punk good” Catlett told me. ‘Warned him until his head was bleedin, his shoulder was dislocated, and his ass was damn near broke.”