'So this robber... this wildman... you think he stopped for three days to help Klaus Detterick pain his barn,' my wife said. 'Ate dinner with them and said please pass the peas just like folks.'
'The scariest thing about men like him is how unpredictable they are,' Brutal said. 'He might've been planning to kill the Dettericks and rifle their house, then changed his mind because a cloud came over the sun at the wrong time, or something like. Maybe he just wanted to cool off a little. But most likely he already had his eye on those two girls and was planning to come back. Do you think, Paul?'
I nodded. Of course I thought it. 'And then there's the name he gave Detterick.'
'What name?' Jan asked.
'Will Bonney.'
'Bonney? I don't - '
'It was Billy the Kid's real name.'
'Oh.' Then her eyes widened. 'Oh! So you can get John Coffey off! Thank God! All you have to do is show Mr. Detterick a picture of William Wharton... his mug-shot should do... '
Brutal and I exchanged an uncomfortable look. Dean was looking a bit hopeful, but Harry was staring down at his hands, as if all at once fabulously interested in his fingernails.
'What's wrong?' Janice asked. 'Why are you looking at each other that way? Surely this man McGee will have to - '
'Rob McGee struck me as a good man, and I think he's a hell of a law officer,' I said, 'but he swings no weight in Trapingus County. The power there is Sheriff Cribus, and the day he reopens the Detterick case on the basis of what I was able to find out would be the day it snows in hell.'
'But... if Wharton was there... if Detterick can identify a picture of him and they know he was there... '
'Him being there in May doesn't mean he came back and killed those girls in June,' Brutal said. He spoke in a low, gentle voice, the way you speak when you're telling someone there's been a death in the family. 'On one hand you've got this fellow who helped Klaus Detterick paint a barn and then went away. Turns out he was committing crimes all over the place, but there's nothing against him for the three days in May he was around Tefton. On the other hand, you've got this big Negro, this huge Negro, that you found on the riverbank, holding two little dead girls, both of them naked, in his arms.'
He shook his head.
'Paul's right, Jan. McGee may have his doubts, but McGee doesn't matter. Cribus is the only one who can reopen the case, and Cribus doesn't want to mess with what he thinks of as a happy ending - 'it was a nigger' thinks he, 'and not one of our'n in any case. Beautiful. I'll go up there to Cold Mountain, have me a steak and a draft beer at Ma's, then watch him fry, and there's an end to it.'
Janice listened to all this with a mounting expression of horror on her face, then turned to me. 'But McGee believes it, doesn't he, Paul? I could see it on your face. Deputy McGee knows he arrested the wrong man. Won't he stand up to the Sheriff?'
'All he can do by standing up to him is lose his job,' I said. 'Yes, I think that in his heart he knows it was Wharton. But what he says to himself is that, if he keeps his mouth shut and plays the game until Cribus either retires or eats himself to death, he gets the job. And things will be different then. That's what he tells himself to get to sleep, I imagine. And he's probably not so much different than Homer about one thing. He'll tell himself, "After all, it's only a Negro. It's not like they're going to burn a white man for it." '
'Then you'll have to go to them,' Janice said, and my heart turned cold at the decisive, no-doubt-about-it tone of her voice. 'Go and tell them what you found out.'
'And how should we tell them we found it out, Jan?' Brutal asked her in that same low voice.
'Should we tell them about how Wharton grabbed John while we were taking him out of the prison to work a miracle on the Warden's wife?'
'No... of course not, but... ' She saw how thin the ice was in that direction and skated in another one. 'Lie, then,' she said. She looked defiantly at Brutal, then turned that look on me. It was hot enough to smoke a hole in newspaper, you'd have said.
'Lie,' I repeated. 'Lie about what?'
'About what got you going, first up to Purdom County and then down to Trapingus. Go down there to that fat old Sheriff Cribus and say that Wharton told you he raped and murdered the Detterick girls. That he confessed.' She switched her hot gaze to Brutal for a moment. 'You can back him up, Brutus. You can say you were there when he confessed, you heard it, too. Why, Percy probably heard it as well, and that was probably what set him off. He shot Wharton because he couldn't stand thinking of what Wharton had done to those children. It snapped his mind. Just... What? What now, in the name of God?'
It wasn't just me and Brutal; Harry and Dean were looking at her, too, with a kind of horror.