EIGHTEEN
Columbus is the biggest town in the southwestern part of the Georgia, which is not saying much. Southwest Georgia is five times the size of the state of Massachusetts and has a population smaller than, say, Birmingham. The only thing of note anywhere near Columbus is Fort Benning, the huge Army base.
Lt. Gooch had already set up an appointment with the detective who had worked the case. He was a white man, close to retirement, who looked like he’d spent most of his law-enforcement career eating chicken-fried steak at the café across the street from the police station. His short-sleeved mint-green polyester shirt bulged and creased as it strained to contain the rolls and ridges of fat inside it. His brown clip-on tie was held down with a tie tack shaped like one of those fish that people put on the backs of their cars to advertise what good Christians they are. The air conditioning was working overtime against the July heat, but the underarms of his shirt were dark with sweat.
“Nert Clemmiger,” he said, sticking out his hand to Lt. Gooch.
“Nert?” I said.
“Short for Albert,” he said, grinning and shaking my hand. I was tempted to ask for a more point-to-point explanation of how you got from Albert to Nert, but figured that I might save that conversational gambit for a rainy day.
Nert Clemmiger took us back to an interview room and sat us down.
“Atlanta!” he said enthusiastically. “The big city! Yessir!”
Lt. Gooch didn’t say a word in response to this, but the expression on his face didn’t seem complimentary, so I jumped in, and me and Nert had a fulsome conversation about the weather and the pros and cons of big city law-enforcement careers and the various kinds of pastries that were available within walking distance of the police station here in Columbus and what impact each pastry had had on the various diets that Nert had gone on and how each of the various diets had ultimately and miserably failed and what a fine church Nert had been affiliated with for the past twenty-one years and how there were several colored families who attended there and how just—what was it? last month? no the month before—the church had brought in a colored gentleman, a preacher from somewhere up in Tennessee, who had preached probably the most informative sermon on the subject of speaking in tongues that Nert had ever heard in his life.
By this point Lt. Gooch was looking—in his singularly expressionless way—like he was about ready to strangle Detective Nert Clemmiger.
“Lt. Gooch?” I said. “With the schedule we’re on, you maybe want to fill Detective Clemmiger in on what we’re doing here.”
“Nert! Please, call me Nert! By all means.”
“Nert.” Lt. Gooch stroked his jaw. “Delicate thing. We’re working a case up in Atlanta. Fellow by the name of Elliot Strickland.” This was the first I’d ever heard of Elliot Strickland. “We got us a, ah, I wouldn’t even call him a suspect. Potential suspect. We’re evaluating that. No criminal record. But we did learn he was a witness or possibly even a suspect in a murder case down here back in 1987. What was the name of that case, Sergeant Deakes?”
“I’ve got it right here,” I said, going along with his pretense. I flipped open my notebook. “Bokus. Gerald Bokus.”
Nert thought about it for a minute. “Aw, yeah. What a goshawful heartbreaker. Them child cases are the worst ones, don’t y’all agree?” He then proceeded to tell us in some detail about every child murder he’d ever investigated.
“Uh-huh.” Lt. Gooch finally managed to interrupt his monologue. “But here’s who we’re looking at. Fellow by the name of Doyle Ray Anderson. Says here he was employed as a painter back in 1987. Came around the place where Gerald was living.”
Nert Clemmiger frowned. “Anderson? Don’t ring a bell.”
Lt. Gooch pulled the file out of his Samsonite briefcase, opened it to the one-paragraph witness statement signed by Nert Clemmiger himself. Nert studied it for a moment. Finally he looked up. “Mind my asking how y’all got your hands on this here file?”
Lt. Gooch looked at me blankly. “The DA, wasn’t it?”
“Ah . . . yes,” I said. “I think that’s right. Fulton County DA’s office gave it to us.”
“Where’d they get it?”
Lt. Gooch shrugged vaguely. “I ast the gal over there to punch in this boy Anderson, this here’s what come up. The case, I mean. Not the file.”
“Yeah, but how’d this get in your computer? This ain’t even on our computer.”
The lieutenant and I both shrugged vaguely. “Maybe they borrowed it or something,” I said. “DA-to-DA type thing.”
“One thing I can tell you,” Lt. Gooch said. “I don’t know a goddamn thing about computers.”
Nert’s eyes narrowed, slightly disapproving now that Lt. Gooch was taking the Lord’s name in vain. But then he looked down at the file. “Tell you the truth, I don’t hardly remember this fellow.” He kept staring. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I remember. The boy’s mother said this Anderson fellow had come around, played with the boy a couple times. Something about him she didn’t like. So I talked to him.”
“But nothing came of it?”
“That woman, I don’t mean to speak ill of her. But she was a no-count type of individual. I felt pretty sure she was covering for the boyfriend. There was a history of physical abuse, whatnot. Nothing serious, but the boyfriend had been took down to the station a few times. You book him in, give him a little talking-to, then she comes and drops the charges, calls you all kind of nasty names for arresting her man. You know how that is.” He shook his head sadly. “But I never could make a case against him. Never had the evidence.”
“You say a history of abuse?” I said. “You’re not talking sexual abuse, are you?”
“Nah, nah, nothing like that. He slapped her around, is all.”
“So this guy Doyle Ray Anderson . . .” I said.
Nert glanced at the witness report again. “Looks like he had him an alibi.”
“Anything strike you about him? Anything in particular?”
“Not really. My recollection he was a friendly type fellow. Likable. Real dry wit, if you know what I mean. Liked to joke around a little.”
“You track down his employment, alibi, that type thing?” the lieutenant asked.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you.” Nert looked at the report again. “He worked for a painting contractor.”
“How did you know that?”
“Says right here: ‘Subject drove white Ford van with Allgood Painting painted on the side.’ ”
“And that was good enough for you?” the lieutenant said.
“Like I say, I got on pretty good with him. He didn’t seem . . .” Nert squinted thoughtfully. “Yeah, now I think about it, he went out of his way to help. Had some law-enforcement experience, as I recall, and so he was good with dates, times, things like that. Made it easy on you.”
“You’re saying he was a cop? Before going into house painting?”
Nert shrugged. “Something along those lines.”
“That’s kind of coming down in the world, isn’t it?” I said. “Cop to house painter?”
Nert looked at me curiously. “I don’t know how much y’all get paid up in Atlanta. I guess y’all got the union and everything. But most small-town cops—not here in Columbus maybe, but out in them tiny little burgs?—painting houses is a whale of a lot more lucrative than law-enforcement work. I got a buddy, he’s chief of police over in Rayburn, the city council wants him to hire another policeman, they give him a budget of $14,400. You believe that? Fourteen-four! This economy, you can’t hire a retard with a criminal record for fourteen-four. But that’s how it is. These dadgum politicians, boy, they want police protection, but they don’t have the stuffing to ask the voters for the funding to pay for it. Why I knew this fellow over in Alabama who—”
Lt. Gooch spoke up for the first time in several minutes, cutting off what had the makings of another fifteen-minute monologue. “So why’d you think he had been a cop, Nert? This Doyle Ray Anderson.”
“Honestly? I can’t remember. Guess he just seemed familiar with procedure, terminology. Like I say, it was just an impression.” Nert grinned. “But you run into them types from time to time, people that watch all the shows on TV. Cops, America’s Most Wanted, CSI, read all them books about crime, whatnot? It’s just a hobby. Sometimes those folks know about as much as your average street cop, procedure-wise, information-wise, whatnot. He could of been one of them.”
“You never asked, though.”
Nert apparently didn’t like the lieutenant’s tone. “Hoss, I done told you. It was twelve years ago.”
As we drove away, I said, “Who’s Elliot Strickland?”
There was a long pause. “What?”
“Elliot Strickland. You told Nert back there that we were working the Elliot Strickland case.”
“I made that up.”
“Uh-huh.” It hadn’t taken us long to get outside of Columbus and into the country. “It’s just it had the sound of a real name.”
“He’s my father-in-law.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“I’m not.”
I waited for a while in the distant hope that this cloudburst of self-revelation might rain a little more. But it didn’t.
“So,” I said finally. “There’s no Elliot Strickland case that you haven’t bothered to tell me about?”
“Nope.”
“What did we learn back there?”
“Why I left the little dipshit town I’se born in and never went back.” The tires hummed beneath us. We were driving through a long, monotonous stretch of dark pine forest unrelieved by houses or fields or much of anything. After a few miles, Lt. Gooch added. “Jesus God, I thought that fat little sumbitch’d never shut up.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to loosen him up.”
This brought no response.
“Was it okay? That I asked most of the questions? I don’t mean to be, you know, horning in on your territory or whatever. I just thought I’d developed some rappport.”
Lt. Gooch squinted at the road. “You did fine.”
“Careful now,” I said. “You’re gonna spoil me in a minute.”
Lt. Gooch rolled down the window, spit some tobacco juice into the hot wind.