Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Oh, no. Sam hasn’t missed a day since he came back from the war in 1945. He’ll die here, happier than most.”

They parked and got out. Bob bent and reached behind the pickup’s seat and removed a cardboard box. Then he led Russ up a dark stairway between Wally’s Men’s Store and Milady’s Beauty Salon; at its top, they found an antiseptic green hallway that reminded Russ of some kind of private-eye movie from the forties; it should have been in black and white. The lettering on the opaque glass in one of the doorways read SAM VINC NT—Atto ney a L w.

Bob knocked and entered.

There was an anteroom, but no secretary. Dust lay everywhere; on a table between two shabby chairs for waiting clients lay two Time magazines from the month of June 1981. Cher was on one of the covers.

“Who the hell is that?” a voice boomed out of the murk of the inner office.

“Sam, it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”

“Who the hell are you?”

They stepped into the darkness and dank fumes and only gradually did the shape of the speaker emerge. When Russ got his eyes focused, he saw a man who looked as if he were built out of feed bags piled on a fence post. Everything about him signaled the collapse of the ancient; the lines in his baggy face ran downward, pulled inexorably by gravity, and his old gray suit had lost all shape and shine. His teeth were yellowed and his eyes lost behind Coke-bottle lenses. He was crusty and unkempt, his rancid old fingers blackened from long years of loading and unloading both pipes and guns. A yellowed deer’s head hung above him, and next to it some kind of star on a ribbon and a couple of diplomas so dusty Russ couldn’t read the school names.

He squinted narrowly.

“Who the hell are you, mister? What business you got here?”

“Sam. It’s Bob . Bob Lee Swagger. Earl’s boy.”

“Earl. No, Earl ain’t here. Been dead for forty years. Some white-trash peckerwoods killed him, worst damn day this county’s ever seen. No, Earl ain’t here.”

“Jesus,” whispered Russ, “he’s lost it.”

“Sonny,” said Sam, “I ain’t lost a thing I can’t find soon enough to whip your scrawny ass. Go on, get out of here. Get out of here! ”

Bob just looked at him.

“Sam, I—”

“Get out of here! Who the hell do you think you are, Bob Lee Swagger?”

“Sam, I am Bob Lee Swagger.”

The old man narrowed his eyes again and scrutinized Bob up and down.

“By God,” he finally said. “Bob Lee Swagger. Bob , goddamn, son, it’s great to see you.”

He came around the desk and gave Bob a mighty hug, his face lit and animated with genuine delight.

“So there you are, big as life. You on vacation, son? You bring that wife of yours? And that little baby gal?”

It was a little awkward, the sudden return to clarity of the old man. But Bob pretended he hadn’t noticed, while Russ just looked at his feet.

“She ain’t so little anymore, Sam,” Bob said. “Nicki’s big as they come. No, I left ’em home. This is sort of a business trip.”

“Who the hell is this?” demanded Sam, looking over at Russ. “You pick up a long-lost son?”

“He ain’t my son,” Bob said, “he’s someone else’s.”

“My name’s Russ Pewtie,” said Russ, putting out a hand, which the old buzzard seized like carrion and crushed. Christ, he had a grip for a geezer!

Bob said, “Here’s the business part: this young man is a journalist.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Sam. “The last time anybody wrote about you I sued ’em for you and we made thirty-five thousand.”

“He says he isn’t going to write about me.”

“If you don’t have that on paper, you better get it there fast, so that when his book is published we can take him to the woodshed.”

“It’s not about Mr. Swagger,” said Russ. “It’s about his father. It’s about July 23, 1955.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Sam. “That was the longest goddamn day I ever lived through, and I include June 6, 1944, in that reckoning.”

“It was a terrible day,” said Russ. Leaving out the personal connection, he tried to explain his book but Bob had heard it and Sam appeared not to care much.

“So anyway,” he concluded, aware he had not impressed anyone and getting a headache from the plummy odor of the tobacco, “that’s why we’re here.”

“Well, goddamn,” said Sam, exhaling a burst of smoke that billowed and furled in the room. “Probably a day doesn’t go by I don’t wonder why all that had to happen. Lots of good people all messed up. Your own mother’s decline begun that day, I believe.”

“I believe it did also,” said Bob.

“And poor Edie White. Edie White Pye . I always fergit she married that piece of trash. Her decline begun then, too. Nine months later she gives birth and in a year she is dead. Whatever happened to Jimmy Pye’s son, I wonder.”

“He continued in his father’s footsteps,” Russ said. “They were two of a kind.”

“That I don’t doubt. So what is it you want from me?”

“Well, sir,” Russ said, “I hope I can re-create what happened that day in a sort of dramatic narrative. But as you know there was a fire in 1994, when the old courthouse burned. That’s where all the records were kept.”

“I don’t have a thing, I don’t believe. Maybe a scrap or two.”

“Well, did the papers have it right?” Russ asked, fiddling with a small tape recorder. Sam eyed the little machine warily.

“Bob, this is under your say-so? You’re letting this boy ask questions because you want the answers too?”

“He says it could be an important book.”

“Well, I’ve read enough books not to give a hunk of spit and a quart of whittler’s shavings for any of ’em. But go ahead, young fellow. You ask ’em and if I don’t fall asleep, I’ll answer ’em.”

“Thank you,” Russ said. “I wanted to know, did the newspapers have it right? Their accounts?”

“Wasn’t much to get wrong,” said Sam. “In my business, you get to a lot of crime scenes. Oh, I’ve seen death in bathrooms and kitchens and basements and in swimming pools and outhouses, even, and sometimes there’s a mystery to it, but most often not. Mysteries are for books. In life, you look at the bodies and the cartridge cases and the blood trails, or you look at the knife and the spatter pattern and the fingerprints, and they won’t lie. They’ll tell you all you need to know, or at least the whodunit part. In this case it was pretty open-and-shut. Whydunit, why it happened? That no one ever can truly know.”

“Is there some account somewhere of the movements of the day? I mean, how and when Jim and Bub got down here, how Earl ran into them in that cornfield?”

“No sir. As I say, the event explained itself. No other information was really important.”

“Was there any kind of legal resolution?”

“In the case of unlawful homicides in which there are no survivors, the state of Arkansas deeds all power to the Coroner’s Office to hold an inquest. I represented the state and all agreed with the finding: the death of Earl Swagger was murder in the first degree, the deaths of Jimmy Pye and Bub Pye were justifiable homicide by a sworn law enforcement officer in the course of his legal duties. So it went into the books.”

“Is that document worth chasing down?”

“For your purposes, probably not, though I bet I have a copy of it at home. It contained a diagram of the bodies’ locations, a list of the recovered exhibits, testimony of the first officers on the scene, that’s all. But I’ll find it for you.”

“That would be very helpful. As I break this down, I’d like to try and acquire material in four other areas,” Russ said, consulting his notes and trying to sound important. “Witnesses. Maybe talk to the first people on scene. Then relatives of all concerned, that is, Jimmy and Bub. Next is secondary accounts. News media coverage, but maybe there were other accounts in true-crime magazines. Of course we ought to walk the site too, don’t you think, Mr. Swagger?”