'I'm not worried about him,' I said. 'I'm curious, that's all.'
'In my experience, one leads to the other,' Janice said tartly, then gave me a good, hearty kiss on the mouth. 'You look better, at least, I'll say that. For awhile there, you had me nervous. Waterworks all cured up?'
'All cured up,' I said, and off I went, singing songs like "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine" and "We're in the Money" to keep myself company.
I went to the offices of the Tefton Intelligencer first, and they told me that Burt Hammersmith, the fellow I was looking for, was most likely over at the county courthouse. At the courthouse they told me that Hammersmith had been there but had left when a burst waterpipe had closed down the main proceedings, which happened to be a rape trial (in the pages of the Intelligencer the crime would be referred to as 'assault on a woman,' which was how such things were done in the days before Ricki Lake and Carnie Wilson came on the scene). They guessed he'd probably gone on home. I got some directions out a dirt road so rutted and narrow I just about didn't dare take my Ford up it, and there I found my man. Hammersmith had written most of the stories on the Coffey trial, and it was from him I found out most of the details about the brief manhunt that had netted Coffey in the first place. The details the Intelligencer considered too gruesome to print is what I mean, of course.
Mrs. Hammersmith was a young woman with a tired, pretty face and hands red from lye soap. She didn't ask my business, just led me through a small house fragrant with the smell of baking and onto the back porch, where her husband sat with a bottle of pop in his hand and an unopened copy of Liberty magazine on his lap. There was a small, sloping backyard; at the foot of it, two little ones were squabbling and laughing over a swing. From the porch, it was impossible to tell their sexes, but I thought they were boy and girl. Maybe even twins, which cast an interesting sort of light on their father's part, peripheral as it had been, in the Coffey trial. Nearer at hand, set like an island in the middle of a turdstudded patch of bare, beatup-looking ground, was a doghouse. No sign of Fido; it was another unseasonably hot day, and I guessed he was probably inside, snoozing.
'Burt, yew-all got you a cump'ny,' Mrs. Hammersmith said.
'Allright,' he said. He glanced at me, glanced at his wife, then looked back at his kids, which was where his heart obviously lay. He was a thin man - almost painfully thin, as if he had just begun to recover from a serious illness - and his hair had started to recede. His wife touched his shoulder tentatively with one of her red, wash-swollen hands. He didn't look at it or reach up to touch it, and after a moment she took it back. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that they looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife - he'd gotten the brains, she'd gotten the looks, but neither of them had escaped some underlying resemblance, a heredity that could never be escaped. Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.
She said, 'Yew-all want a cold drink, Mr - ?'
'It's Edgecombe,' I said. 'Paul Edgecombe. And thank you. A cold drink would be wonderful, ma'am.'
She went back inside. I held out my hand to Hammersmith, who gave it a brief shake. His grip was limp and cold. He never took his eyes off the kids down at the bottom of the yard.
'Mr. Hammersmith, I'm E Block superintendent at Cold Mountain State Prison. That's - '
'I know what it is,' he said, looking at me with a little more interest. 'So - the bull-goose screw of the Green Mile is standing on my back porch, just as big as life. What brings you fifty miles to talk to the local rag's only full-time reporter?'
'John Coffey,' I said.
I think I expected some sort of strong reaction (the kids who could have been twins working at the back of my mind... and perhaps the doghouse, too; the Dettericks had had a dog), but Hammersmith only raised his eyebrows and sipped at his drink. 'Coffey's your problem now, isn't he?' Hammersmith asked.
'He's not much of a problem,' I said. 'He doesn't like the dark, and he cries a lot of the time, but neither thing makes much of a problem in our line of work. We see worse.'
'Cries a lot, does he?' Hammersmith asked. 'Well, he's got a lot to cry about, I'd say. Considering what he did. What do you want to know?'
'Anything you can tell me. I've read your newspaper stories, so I guess what I want is anything that wasn't in them.'
He gave me a sharp, dry look. 'Like how the little girls looked? Like exactly what he did to them? That the kind of stuff you're interested in, Mr. Edgecombe?'