Deadly Kiss Page 12

  “Good point,” Molly murmured.

  We sat quietly, thinking about it.

  “I have a suggestion, if you like,” the lawyer finally said carefully. “I employ an investigator from time to time. A young woman. She’s awfully smart about things like this. A little bit...unorthodox, perhaps, but very, very good at what she does.”

  “An investigator?” I asked. “Like a private eye?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Although these days, more of it’s done on computers than standing in shadowy doorways. Employing her to see what became of--well, pretty much everything your father owned--may perhaps set you at ease, and it might preserve your father’s memory.”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “Unless things change dramatically, the estate won’t bear the expense. She’ll bill you directly, and that can add up significantly if it takes very long. I don’t know if perhaps you want to approach your ex-wife about sharing the cost. It’s her inheritance money that’s missing, too.”

  “No, do it. Get her started. I’m not worried about the cost. I just need to know what happened. I kind of made a promise to my dad. I’ll take whatever help she can give me. What’s her name?”

  This time he didn’t have to consult any notes. “Cotton. Her name is Sydney Cotton.”

  “Tell her she can start by looking into the death of a boy named Elijah Tull. Eli. I think it happened in the summer of 1946. Everything that’s going on is tied into it.”

  “Tull.” He wrote it down. “Elijah Tull. 1946.”

  The lawyer stood up. He shook our hands again when we left.

  CHAPTER 17

  Nathan Latta,

  Cobb County, Georgia, Friday, October 1, 1948:

  Water moved, muddy and slow, beneath the bridge. A man got out of a maroon 1937 Ford coupe, walked to the edge, and dangled a pistol over the rail.

  He wore business clothes and might have been taken for a police detective, but there was a furtiveness to him that belied that first impression. He was there to get rid of the gun. He stood, bouncing its weight gently in his palm, as if undecided if he should release it into the current below him or not. The pistol felt poisonous, and he wondered if it carried a memory with it, a cold inanimate realization of what it had done.

  The man sold ball bearings, or at least he had. Bearings were his bread and butter, although his company carried other things, too. His territory extended south of Atlanta, as far away as Macon and Augusta. The war had to be fed, and it ate all of the new machinery that North America could produce. But the continent still had to struggle on with its daily economies, making do with what could be patched and repaired. The bearing business was good, and Nathan Latta had done reasonably well for himself.

  His prosperity pained him, though. He had been old enough at the outbreak of the first war to understand the concept of honor, of duty, and of personal sacrifice and heroism. He watched the young men leave, dressed in olive, and waited anxiously for his turn. He was still too young to go. His oldest brother, ten years his senior, left and did not return, choked by gas and lost in the blackened mud in France. His mother did not recover from the loss of her first child, and Nathan imagined in some vague and childish way that he would put his family and his childhood right when he was called to wear a uniform of his own.

  That call never happened. Hitler came too late for Nathan Latta. He applied at recruiting stations throughout Georgia, but he was too old. The nation threw an entire generation of young men at the monster overseas, but it didn’t need him. He wore a tin helmet and carried a flashlight as a blackout warden. It was all the duty he could do, and it embarrassed him, for he didn’t know the nature of duty, which required the least as much as it did the most.

  When the war ended, it removed the acuity of his guilt but underlined that there would be no wars, no more chances for him.

  The end of the war also put a dent in his income. America rushed to stores and showrooms to buy the first brand-new cars and electric iceboxes and radios it had seen in years. The country seemed to roll in post-war wealth. Stalin was fumbling the gate latch to let his dogs out, but he was not yet news, and from New York to Oregon it seemed that the horizon showed nothing but the promise of a new age. The war-tired nation had no more appetite for making do, for waste not, want not, and the bearing business suffered, as failed machines were scrapped rather than fixed.

  Nathan, who felt like a failure for prospering during the war years, began to actually fail as the rest of the country was getting rich. By the time that Ben Early had pulled into the drive in his radio car, bringing Sam home, the sense of failure had begun to override almost everything else.

  Nathan looked back at his car, parked at the other side of the bridge. He had brought it home when Sam was a toddler and had waxed it with his son’s outgrown diapers, laundered to rags, every weekend. Now the car sagged on its springs and needed another valve job. He hoped that it would get him where he was going. He had a sense that he would be walking long before he decided that he had gone far enough.

  He left no note for his wife and son. It was better if they didn’t know exactly what had happened to him and, anyway, he had nothing to say. They were broke. His wife’s sister would take her and the boy in.

  His son had withdrawn. The woman had retreated into her bottle, though she brightly denied it when he brought up the matter of her drinking.

  He had taken a mistress in the last two months, a plain young woman who worked in the dispatch pool for his company. She thought that they might marry. He didn’t love her, and his coupling with her was so far outside of his notion of himself as a man that it had somehow freed him to do this unthinkable thing.

  He was also leaving her behind without word or explanation.

  At last he willed his fingers to open. The gun left him and dropped twenty feet to the brown water. The splash was tiny, and it was gone. Nathan shook his head once, walked back to his car, and got in. He sat still for a full minute before the door clunked closed and the engine ground to life. He drove away west.

  ***

  Present Day:

  Back at the house, Molly held a framed picture of my mother in her lap. Head bent, she studied it. The photo had been taken on a set of steps, and, in it, my mother leaned over me, holding both my hands. I remember being told that it was taken on an Easter Sunday. I appeared to be about a year old.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  “She’s beautiful. I couldn’t really see her face under the veil.”

  “It’s called a mantilla,” I said.

  “What’s a mantilla? Where do you get them?”

  “It’s a lacy drape that you wear like a shawl and can pull up over your head, too. Mexican women use them to cover their heads in church.”

  “Well, I want one. It’s the sexiest look I’ve seen in a while. Like a nun--chaste, but chic, too, you know? It’s going to be my resolution to start wearing hats. I like them and I only have baseball hats. A mantilla or two would be a good starting point.”

  “I like hats, too,” I said. “On you, not on me.”

  “I saw her eyes. She looked over at me. Flat, no shine. Definitely a ghost. Startled the hell out of me. I don’t think I’ve ever had one sit right in front of me and I’ve had no inkling, no premonition. She felt natural. She was younger than this picture, though. Younger than me. It would be nice to pick your age and stay that way.” She passed the photograph over to me. “How old was she when she died?”

  “She had just turned forty.”

  “I would have said she looked closer to thirty when I saw her. So now,” she said, “you have to figure out what she’s doing here.”

  “She probably came back to pay her respects to my father.”

  “That’s silly,” she said. “Why would a dead person go to a funeral? Presumably she can see your dad on the other side. She didn’t come here to view his body. She sat right in front of us. She must have something to tell you.”

  “Maybe goodbye
,” I said.

  “She already said her goodbyes,” Molly said simply. “Think like a woman. Mothers take care of their children, always and forever. You’re still her child. She came for a reason, probably to make sure you knew you hadn’t been abandoned.”

  “Or maybe to warn me about something.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. “If you think she’s here to warn you, then you’d better start listening to her, Michael.”

  ***

  I got a call from Sydney Cotton, the private investigator. Her voice on the telephone sounded very young.

  “First of all, I’d like to get into the house,” she said, without much preamble.

  “No problem. We’re staying here.”

  “I want to turn the place upside down, go through every scrap of your father’s things.”

  “I don’t have any problem with that. Crider’s the executor; he should have given you the go-ahead without waiting for my permission.”

  “He did, Mr. Latta,” she said quietly. “I’m trying to be decent about it. Mr. Latta was your father, not his, and I don’t want to hunt through his drawers without it being okay with you.”

  “Call me Mike, please. I’m not saying that to be friendly. There are too many ‘Mr. Lattas’ in this conversation.”

  She had a nice laugh. “You got it. Mike. Sydney. Let me tell you what I have so far. You said I should look at Elijah Tull, and I did. It’s quite a story. On the surface of it, you might think it would have been a legend, a civil rights rallying point. When you hear the whole thing, though, it doesn’t serve anyone. It’s a tragedy that ends up not really having a point. There’s no real moral to the story. Just better forgotten. I grew up here and I don’t remember it ever being mentioned.”

  “I grew up here too, and it’s all news to me. I don’t remember hearing a thing about it.”

  I could hear her shuffling paper.

  “There are multiple sources on this. We have records and transcripts of a grand jury prelim trial, and a separate capital murder trial. All of this is on paper; I’m pulling out one file after another, which leads to more. I should tell you most of this all took place in Milton County, which didn’t officially exist after 1931. In practical reality, it was still a functioning county government in the ’40s. I mention this because I seem to be running back and forth between Cobb and Fulton county courthouses to get records. None of this is on computer. It’s time and miles. I’m running into a lot of time on this. Time is money for you.”

  “I don’t care about that,” I said. “I’ll get you paid to date and keep it current.”

  “I wasn’t implying that I was worried about it, just keeping you informed. Instead of giving you chapter and verse, I’ve made up a timeline of whatever events seem to be related. I’ll just tell you like a story, okay?”

  “Shoot. I’m all ears.”

  “All right. July 2, 1946, a Tuesday, this came up in the grand jury trial--okay, I’m not going to do this, I said I wouldn’t--”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Cite sources, say what I found where. I’ll just tell it. There was a general store on Barne’s Ferry Road, semi-rural, outside of Marietta. There was an incident behind the store. There’s an allegation that an eleven year-old girl, Wanda Sutton, had indecent congress with a boy the same age, Elijah Tull. The girl’s father, Floyd Sutton, owner of the store, came upon the scene and the boy fled. Sutton was able to run down the boy’s identity pretty quickly by questioning the store’s Negro customers.”

  I rummaged in a drawer and found a pen and some old bills to write on. She went on.

  “The next day, July third, late at night, the father and his wife’s brother, a man named Will Davis, went to the Tull house and removed the boy from his home, in front of his family.”

  “Did you get a sense of exactly what the indecency was?” I asked. “Indecent congress?”

  “Yes, he kissed her on the mouth.”

  “All of this over a kiss,” I said.

  “Mr. Latta, you’re from the South. Things might be different now, but you must have enough tribal memory to understand how serious it was. If this had gotten out, the Sutton family was ruined. The daughter was sullied, dirty. The family was shamed. And if you think this was just a white thing, think again. There’s an element of the local black community that would have been gleeful over it and their gossip potentially far more vicious. The whites would have whispered, the blacks would have been openly contemptuous. The Suttons were facing disgrace.”

  “I’m ashamed to say that I agree,” I said. “They could never have lived it down.”

  “Important,” she said, “because monstrous as what those two men did to an eleven year-old boy was, they may not have been monsters. The pressure of the situation was intolerable.”

  “Awful,” I said.

  “Yes. On July tenth a boy’s body was found in a field. It had been badly flooded the previous month and the crop ruined. It was still a muddy swamp. The body was covered in mud. He was identified by his clothing, and by his father’s watch. The boy was allowed to wear it from time to time, and he had it on when he was taken. His face was too mutilated to be recognizable. He had been beaten badly and shot in the head.”

  “Severe head injuries?” I asked.

  “I saw the coroner’s pictures, thankfully in black and white. I’m worried they’ll give me nightmares for years. The cranial pressure from the head shot, the beating and a week of decay--oh my God. His head was like a big gray basketball. It looked like a screaming basketball, because his mouth was stretched open sideways, his jaw was broken so badly. Gray skin in tatters, and no eyes, just holes in the mess.”

  “Jesus,” I said and meant it as a prayer.

  “The Tull family, father, mother and a older brother were all present when the boy was taken. They knew the storekeeper well and identified him to police. The men claimed they took the kid for a drive and talked to him about proper respect for a white girl. They admitted to slapping him, but said they dropped him on the road to his house, basically unharmed, an hour or so later. It was a lie. He was never seen alive again.”

  “They were arrested?”

  “Sutton and Davis were picked up and charged, yes. Testimony and deliberation was all over in one day, July twenty-second. The grand jury passed over charges and freed the two.”

  “How the hell does that happen?” I asked.

  “Simple. The boy’s body could never be positively identified. You can’t bring a murder charge without conclusive evidence that there was a victim. This body was an unknown male child killed by persons unknown. For the purpose of a murder charge, there was no reliable ID of the victim. Remember, no DNA, no dental records, no fingerprints. Were patched overalls and a cheap wristwatch good enough ID?”

  “It was enough for his family to claim him and bury him.”

  “For his mother, yes. For the jury, no. Couldn’t prove it was Eli Tull, couldn’t prove that Eli had been murdered. The defense lawyer suggested he was off picking crops in Mississippi, hiding out. Davis and Sutton walked.”

  As the story came clear, I was thinking about the boy that was my father, somehow caught up in the middle of this horror. It was breaking my heart.

  “It gets worse. A reporter for Look Magazine interviewed the two men. The magazine was national. They paid six thousand dollars for the true story. It was a fortune, and the men were assured of immunity under double jeopardy. They agreed to tell the truth for the story.”

  “Disgusting,” I said.

  “For the record, I agree, Mike. I think you have to realize that the grand jury was reluctant to indict white men in the murder of a Negro--sets a bad precedent, even if it wasn’t strictly unheard of. The whites in Milton County would have been mostly horrified by what had happened to a young child, even if they were quiet about it, but civil order had to be maintained. Still, the Sutton family was absolutely ruined. Few whites would speak to them on the street, let alone patronize their store. The
y were going to lose everything, and six thousand dollars was a real fortune, the only means they had to save themselves.”

  Molly came in with a cup of coffee and set it within my reach. I nodded my thanks.

  “The article was published almost a year later. It was very subdued, for such an explosive subject. I’ve read it, and it’s so vague and confusing. You can infer the truth, though. The two men took Eli to an unused tanning shed. They hung him by his wrists and beat him. They wanted him to admit his guilt and swear to keep quiet. Apparently, he was defiant, and the beating turned into murder.

  “The boy insisted for the hundredth time that he hadn’t been anywhere near the store that day. Sutton finally lost it. When he stopped, it was too late. They realized that the boy could never recover from his injuries, so Davis shot him in the head to ‘end his misery.’”

  Her voice shook. This young woman was crying for a boy who had been dead for over sixty years. I liked her for it.

  “Eli’s father got wind of some of this, although the article was months from publication. I guess the men must’ve talked. He finally snapped. On a Sunday morning, August fourth, a little over a month after the whole thing started, Jacob Tull took a gun to the general store. It was closed, but Sutton and Davis were inside. He shot Davis in the head, and gut-shot Sutton. The little girl found them. Her father was still alive, but he didn’t tell her who did it. It was obvious though.”

  “Was it?” I murmured.

  “Elijah’s father, Jacob Tull, was found guilty in record time. He was hanged for the murders on a Saturday, October fifth, only a couple of months after he was arrested. The execution date was moved forward, because there were fears that prison security was being threatened by mob violence, and a petition to move him to a different prison was denied, deemed too dangerous. I can’t find anything that supports that. What I do find shows the white community was quite sympathetic to him. Black or white, he was a father who lost a child in a horrible way.”