Black Light Page 18

  “Well, folks heard about the dead nigger gal. They come to look. I tried to keep ’em away but you know how word git around.”

  This enraged Sam but he saw the pointlessness of exploding at this dim fool. Instead, seething, he walked to the body. By now Shirelle was gray in color, almost dusty. Her negritude had all but vanished. She was simply a dead child, puffed up with gas that almost took her humanity away.

  “You heard about the pocket?” the deputy asked.

  Sam hadn’t.

  “Earl done found it yesterday, put it in an envelope for Lem to give the state police boys, but when they done never showed, he gave it to the Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Pocket?”

  “I hear. Ripped from a shirt. Monogrammed. Said RGF on it, pretty as you please.”

  Amazing, thought Sam. He’d been investigating and prosecuting murder for thirty years, with five years off for the war, and he’d never come across anything so lucky. But murder was like that: it defied rational explanation and was full of crazy things, coincidences, freaks of happening, the sheer play of the irrational in the universe. A Baptist, he hated murder because it always made him doubt God’s wisdom and even, if he pressed too hard, God’s existence, though he would never utter such heresy.

  “I’m going to call the coroner,” he told the deputy. “It’s time to git this poor little girl out of here. Now, you listen to me, you see anybody else pulling up for a free look at the show, you chase ’em goddamn away, you understand? I don’t want to hear about people coming up here no more. It ain’t right.”

  “Sam, she’s only a nigger gal.”

  Sam turned away.

  By the time he got back, the raiding party was already to go. Five sheriff’s deputies with shotguns and rifles and clubs, the sheriff himself already to lead the outfit in search of glory and headlines.

  “No,” Sam told them. “Not yet. You boys can be cowboys later.”

  But the evidence was undeniable. A quick scan of tax records in the County Clerk’s Office, happily segregated by color, had turned up but one Negro with the initials RGF. His name was Reggie Gerard Fuller, he was eighteen and the second son of Davidson Fuller, the most prosperous Negro in town and owner of Fuller’s Funeral Parlor, which buried all the Negroes. Reggie had a driver’s license on record, and access to an automobile, the hearse, or more likely one of the two smaller black Fords the parlor used to transport mourners. On top of that, Reggie was known as a sharp dresser: his shirts were monogrammed.

  High school records indicated that Reggie was a studious though not overbright boy who placidly accepted that he would work for his father in some clerical capacity, lacking the grit and smarts to take over the business himself. He had no incidents on his record, but he was, after all, colored and young, and therefore by inclination more inclined toward deviant behavior. Most sensible people realized that in each Nigra there lurked the secret potential of the rapist and the killer; it had merely to be brought out by liquor or jealousy and knives would flash. The deputies even had a name for the crimes such behavior inspired: they were called “Willie-thumped-Willies” as in, “Oh, hey, I hear you caught a Willie-thumped-Willie the other night.” “Yeah, goddamned coon cut up his old lady with a whiskey bottle. Bitch died before the goddamn ambulance came. I don’t blame the ambulance. I wouldn’t go down there for nothing.” In this one Reggie thumped Shirelle.

  But Sam was a stickler. After examining the evidence, he personally called Judge Harrison and personally drove the eighteen miles out to the judge’s farm to get the search warrant and the probable-cause warrant signed.

  “This ain’t goddamn Mississippi,” he said. “Or goddamned Alabam. We do things by the law here.”

  And he went along on the raid. He knew his presence would considerably lessen the thunder and the fury of the event; white deputies kicking down black doors in the middle of the night, no, not in his county.

  So instead of kicking in doors, the deputies waited outside while Sam and the sheriff knocked on the door of the biggest, whitest house in what was called Niggertown but was actually a six-block-square neighborhood in west Blue Eye.

  It was four in the morning. Groggily, Mr. Fuller opened the door with a shotgun in his hand and Sam was glad he had come along; the deputies might have opened fire.

  “Mr. Fuller, I am Sam Vincent, Polk County prosecutor, and I think you recognize the sheriff.”

  Automatic race fear came upon the man’s face: he saw stern whites in his doorway, and behind them, parked at the curb, four police cars, light bars flashing.

  “What is this about?”

  “Sir, we’ve come to question your son Reggie. And to serve papers on a search warrant. I’ve instructed the boys to be courteous and professional. But we do have an investigation to run. Could you please bring Reggie down to us? Say, the living room?”

  “What is—”

  “Mr. Fuller, I know you’ve heard, there was another terrible crime yesterday. One of your own kind. Now, we have an investigation to run.”

  “My boy didn’t do nothing,” said Mr. Fuller.

  “You know me to be a fair man, and I swear to you nothing will happen here tonight or any night except what the law decrees. That’s how I run things. But we have our duty to do. In the meantime, the deputies will search the house. I have a legal paper here which says it’s all right. The deputies won’t break anything and if they do, they’ll pay for it out of their own pockets. But we have to do what we have to do.”

  Eventually, the sleepy Reggie was brought before Sam. He could have taken him to headquarters for questioning, but he elected, out of respect for Mr. Fuller’s position, to do the initial here.

  “Reggie, where were you five nights ago, that is, July 19?”

  “He was here,” said Mrs. Fuller.

  “You let him answer, ma’am, or I will have to take him away.”

  Reggie was an almost fat boy, with pale skin and an unfocused quality about him that had nothing to do with the late hour. His eyes drifted, he fidgeted. He smiled and no one returned the smile. He blinked, and seemed to forget where he was; for a while he stopped paying attention. He was wearing pajamas with butterflies on them. He betrayed more confusion than fear; nothing about him suggested aggression or tendency to violence. But Nigras were strange that way: they looked calm one second and the next they could go amok.

  “Sir,” he finally said, “I don’t ‘member. Just around. Maybe in my room. I can’t say. No, I think I went for a drive in Daddy’s big old wagon.”

  “The hearse?”

  “Yes suh. I went for a drive, that’s all. Listen some to the radio, you know, from Memphis.”

  “Anybody see you? Got people who can testify to where you were?”

  “No sir.”

  “Reggie, were you near the church? Did you go to the church and that meeting they had there that night?”

  “No sir.”

  “Reggie, you listen to me. If you were someplace you don’t want your daddy to know about, you have to be a man now and ’fess up. You were at a crib, drinking? You were gambling, you were with a woman?”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Mr. Sam, my boy Reggie, he’s a good boy. He’s not no genius, but he works hard and—”

  “Sam.”

  It was the sheriff.

  “Sam, the boys found something.”

  That was it, really. Sam walked into the bedroom and watched as one of the deputies pointed to a little corner of blue shirt that peeked from between the mattress and the box spring of the now stripped bed. Sam nodded, and the deputy separated the two: the corner yielded to a larger mass of material. Very carefully, with a pencil, Sam nabbed it and lifted it off the bed. It was a shirt, with the pocket missing, blue cotton. It was streaked with rust, which Sam knew to be the color of dried blood.

  “Think we got us a nigger,” someone said.

  “Okay,” Sam said, “mark it and bag it, very carefully. People are going to be looking at this case a
nd we can’t afford to make a mistake.”

  Then he headed back to the living room to arrest Reggie Fuller for murder.

  The trial, three months later, was over in a day. The Fullers were willing to spend their life savings to hire a Little Rock lawyer, but Sam looked at the evidence and suggested that they’d do better to have Reggie plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. A Fort Smith lawyer told them the same thing: the shirt was indeed Reggie’s, as laundry markings subsequently proved and nobody ever bothered to deny. The pocket matched perfectly with the ripped seams on the chest. The blood was AB positive, as was Shirelle’s. Reggie had no meaningful alibi; he had taken the hearse that night and just “driven around.”

  No bargain was ever offered, because there was no cause to. The evidence was such that a confession had no meaning. Sam made the melancholy but firm decision that Reggie, though he was young and somewhat distracted, must die. It wasn’t that Sam was a cruel man but he felt the simple rhythms of the universe had been violated and must be forcefully returned to normal. An eye for an eye: it was the best system, the only true system. He spoke for the dead, and it only worked if he spoke loudly. Besides, it was Earl’s last case: Earl would have wanted it that way too.

  The Fullers finally found a lawyer who would take the case on appeal, and though Sam warned them not to throw their money away, they did so anyway, on a desperately vain attempt to save their son. For over two years Mrs. Fuller wrote Sam a letter once a week begging for mercy as the case dragged through the courts and Reggie moldered at the Cummins Farm at Gould, where the Negroes were sent. When the Fullers ran out of money, they sold their house and moved into a smaller one; when they ran out of money again, Mr. Fuller sold his business to a white man and went to work for that same white man, who called him, behind his back, “the dumbest nigger in Arkansas for selling a business that did sixty thousand clear a year for sixty thousand!” Then Mrs. Fuller died, Jake Fuller, the older boy, went off to join the navy and the two daughters, Emily and Suzette, moved to St. Louis with their aunt. But old Davidson Fuller took up the letter duty and wrote Sam every week and tried to talk to him, to get him to look at the evidence one more time.

  “You a fair man, sir. Don’t let them do this to my boy. He didn’t do it.”

  “Davidson, even your own Nigra people say he did it. I have sources. I know what’s being said in the churches and the cribs.”

  “Don’t take my boy from me, Mr. Sam.”

  “I am not taking your boy from you. The law is following its course. This ain’t Mississippi. I gave him a fair trial, you had good lawyers, the reason he is going where he is going is because he has to pay. You had best adjust to that, sir. I know this is not easy on your family; it wasn’t easy on Shirelle’s either. The balance has to be squared off and restored, and we can go on from there.”

  “Tell them I did it, if they want a Negro to die. I’ll go. I’ll confess. Take me. Please, please, please, Mr. Sam, don’t take my poor little boy.”

  Sam just looked at him.

  “You have too much love in your heart for that boy,” he finally said. “He’s not worth it. He killed an innocent girl.”

  There was but one act to be played out and it occurred on October 6, 1957, at the Arkansas State Penitentiary at Tucker, where they’d removed Reggie from the Cummins Farm when his last appeal was finally denied. It was the day of the fourth game of the World Series, and Sam listened to the game that afternoon as he drove the hundred-odd miles to Tucker, just southeast of Little Rock. It was not his first time to make such a trip, nor would it be his last. On the other hand, he didn’t make it automatically; of the twenty-three men he sent to the electric chair, he only watched eleven die. Tonight it was Reggie’s turn.

  Simply in terms of convenience, it worked out. He was able to get a clear signal from Little Rock and listened numbly to the baseball all the way over. Warren Spahn was on the mound, mowing them down. Sam hated anything with the word “Yankee” in the title just as he hated anything with “New York” in the title, so he lost himself in the baseball, hoping the upstart, uprooted “Milwaukee” team—really, just the old, pitiful Boston Braves—would triumph. Sam stayed rooted in the drama the whole way, even as the game went into extra innings, even as the Yankees tied the game in the ninth on Ellston Howard’s three-run homer and then scored the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth (goddammit!).

  It looked over for the Braves, but somehow they clawed their way back into the game, when Logan doubled to left, scoring Mantilla to tie again, and Sam had the sense that something very special was about to happen. It did, shortly thereafter: Eddie Matthews’s two-run shot over the right-field fence, Braves win 7-5.

  Sam looked up: he was at the prison. He’d driven straight through town, forgotten to eat dinner. He doubled back, found a diner, had roast beef and mashed potatoes.

  Eleven P.M. He pulled into the parking lot of the penitentiary after a nodding acknowledgment from a guard. He was known: there was no difficulty getting in, and getting through the checkpoints, until at last, with twenty-some others, he found himself in a little viewing room that opened on the death chamber. He recognized a couple of Little Rock newspaper boys, somebody from the Governor’s Office, the assistant warden, and a few others. It was an odd group; one could listen to the determined banality of the conversation, most of it now turning on the great game that afternoon and the Braves’ chances against the pinstriped colossi of Gotham, with the mighty Mantle, Berra, Larsen, McDougald and Bauer. In the chamber, a few guards were making last-moment adjustments; the electrician was tightening circuits on the chair, a sturdy oak thing that was so well made and severe it could have fit into a Baptist church.

  “You must feel pret’ good, Sam,” said Hank Kelly, of the Arkansas Gazette.

  “Not really,” said Sam. “You just want it to be over.”

  “Well, I’ll be glad when it’s over too. I mean, he is just a nigger and he killed a girl, but now they got us believing niggers are human too. We had all that trouble with ’em this summer, the goddamned army and everything. Mark my words, it’s just the beginning.”

  Sam nodded; Hank was probably right, though old Boss Harry Etheridge was raising hell in the House, aligning himself with the Dixiecrats and swearing to gut the army appropriation in the upcoming budget to make Dwight Eisenhower pay for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and humiliating the great state of Arkansas before the nation. But everyone knew that Boss Harry would never do such a thing; it was all show for the folks who elected him with 94 percent of the vote every two years.

  None of that had anything to do with tonight’s drama, however, which was simply the squalid end of some very squalid business, which nobody could really remember except Sam, and in which nobody had much vested interest and emotion. As ceremony, it was banal and flat; the Masons understood ritual much better.

  He pulled away from the milling gents and went up to the glass window, where he got a better look at the engine of destruction: a chair, solid but upon closer inspection much worn, somehow institutional and bland for all its presumed meaning. Sam stared at it as he always did: heavy cables ran from behind a screen (where the executioner would do his business in private) to one leg, were bolted to the leg and pinned up the strut of the chair, rising to a sort of Bakelite nexus. Smaller wires extended from it, two down the front, one down each arm and one to lie across the top of the chair, which ended not in a wrist or ankle bracelet but a little cap. It looked very thirties, Sam thought, assigning to it the style of the decade that had spawned it.

  A phone buzzed, the assistant warden picked it up and listened.

  “Gentlemen, please take your seats. They’re bringing the condemned man up from death row.”

  Sam looked at his watch. They were late. It was 12:02 A.M. He found a seat as the lights dimmed; around him, as in the theater, people squirmed and made ready, then fell silent. The minutes ticked by; the assistant warden lowered the lights until they sat in d
arkness, and then he too sat.

  In the chamber, the door opened. Two guards, followed by the warden, followed by a priest, followed at last by Reggie Fuller, nineteen, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, Negro male, 230 pounds, eyes brown, hair brown, though it had all been shaved off.

  Reggie was weeping. The tears ran down his eyes and his face was puffy and moist. A little track of glistening mucus dribbled from a nostril, and Sam watched as his tongue shot out to lick at it. He was manacled, walking in little stutter steps, talking to himself in a desperate stream of chatter. His eyes were out of focus. He was still fat; prison had not slimmed him down or, apparently, toughened him up.

  They led poor Reggie to the chair and sat him down in it, though his body appeared stiff and he had trouble understanding what they were saying to him. At last he was seated; then came a horrid instant when one of the guards stepped back quickly, out of reflex: a stain of darkness blossomed at the crotch of Reggie’s prison denims.

  The priest whispered something to Reggie but it did him no good at all; his face seized up and his eyes closed; he continued to mutter madly. The guards moved in to secure the boy to the chair: one of them applied a slippery saline solution to his bare ankles, his wrists and the top of his head, where the electrodes were to be tightened—that would get all the electricity into him and prevent his skin from burning, although in Sam’s experience this didn’t always work out. Two others tightened and buckled the straps after the liquid had been sloshed on. Finally, they strapped the little leather beanie atop Reggie’s round, shaven head though they got it slightly skewed, so that it looked like a dunce cap.

  Quickly, a little man emerged from behind the screen and checked all the electrodes a last time, the sure professional, making dead certain that all would work. He pointed to one problem area, and a guard bent to make an adjustment. Then the little man stepped back and disappeared.

  Sam looked at his watch. It was 12:08 A.M., eight minutes late. The warden seemed to be choreographing things. He gave a nod, and the guards left the room, leaving him alone with Reggie. He gave another nod and apparently a microphone was switched on because he now spoke in a grave voice and his tones were amplified into the witness chamber.