Sara wrote all of this down. “Thank you again, Sergeant Dillard, you’ve been a huge help.”
She had map software on her computer. Sara brought the screen up and, using her mouse, drew a distance line from Washington, D.C., to the approximate location of Fort Jackson.
“Almost four hundred miles exactly,” she said to herself. She hurried upstairs to the Court’s third-floor library and went on-line via one of the computer terminals there. None of the law clerks’ office terminals were connected to phone modems for obvious reasons of security and confidentiality. But the library terminals had on-line access. Using an Internet explorer service she typed in Rufus Harms’s name. She looked around at the hand-carved oak paneling as she waited for the computer to sprinkle its technological pixie dust.
A few minutes later she was reading all the latest news accounts on Rufus Harms, his background and that of his brother. She printed out all of these. One of the stories had a quote from the newspaper editor in Harms’s hometown. Using an Internet telephone directory, she looked up the man’s number. He still lived in the same small town near Mobile, Alabama, where both brothers had grown up.
The phone was answered after three rings. Sara introduced herself to the man, George Barker, still editor-in-chief of the local paper.
“I already talked to the papers about that,” he said flatly.
His deep southern drawl made Sara think of braying coon dogs and clear jugs of ’shine. “I’d appreciate if you could answer a few questions for me, that’s all.”
“Who are you with again?”
“An independent news service. I’m a freelancer.”
“Well, what exactly do you want to know?”
“I’ve read that Rufus Harms was convicted of killing a young girl on the military base where he was stationed.” She glanced at the news accounts she had printed out. “Fort Plessy.”
“Killed a little white girl. He’s a Negro, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Sara said curtly. “Do you know the name of the attorney who represented him at the trial?”
“Wasn’t really a trial. He did a plea arrangement. I covered the story some, because Rufus was local, sort of the reverse of the local boy makes good.”
“So you know the name of his attorney?”
“Well, I’d have to look it up. Give me your number and I can call you back.”
Evans gave him her home number. “If I’m not there, just leave it on the answering machine. What else can you tell me about Rufus and his brother?”
“Well, the most noticeable thing about Rufus was his size. He must have already been six-foot-three by the time he was fourteen. And he wasn’t skinny or lanky or anything. He already had a man’s body.”
“Good student? bad? In trouble with the police?”
“From what I recall, he wasn’t a good student. He never graduated high school, although he was real good with his hands. He worked at a little printing press with his daddy growing up. His brother did too. Why, I remember one time the press at my newspaper broke down. They sent Rufus over to fix it. He couldn’t have been much more’n sixteen. I gave him the manual for the machinery, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘Words just mess me up, Mr. Barker,’ he said, or something to that effect. He went in there and within one hour he had the whole damn thing up and running, good as new.”
“That’s pretty impressive.”
“And he was never in trouble with the police. His momma wouldn’t have let him. You got to understand, this is one small town, no more than a thousand souls have ever lived here, even fewer today. I’m pushing eighty, still run the newspaper. Nobody’s been here longer than me. Now, the Harmses lived in the colored section of town, of course, but we still knew ’em. Now, I don’t have colored folk over to my house, but they seemed like good people. She worked at the meat processing factory here just like most everybody else. Cleaning crew, not one of the good-paying jobs. But she took care of her boys.”
“What happened to their father?”
“He was a good man, not prone to drink or wild living like so many of their kind. He worked hard, too hard, because one day he just didn’t wake up. Heart attack.”