The Green Mile(107)

Our trip to Warden Moores's house in Harry Terwilliger's truck never came out. The fact that Percy had been straitjacketed and locked in the restraint room during the time we were away never came out. The fact that William Wharton had been doped to the gills when Percy shot him never came out, either. Why would it? The authorities had no reason to suspect anything in Wharton's system but half a dozen slugs. The coroner removed those, the mortician put him in a pine box, and that was the end of the man with Billy the Kid tattooed on his left forearm. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say.

All in all, the uproar lasted about two weeks. During that time I didn't dare fart sideways, let alone so take a day off to investigate the idea I'd gotten at my kitchen table on the morning after all the upheavals. I knew for sure that the circus had left town when I got to work on a day just shy of the middle of November - the twelfth, I think, but don't hold me to that. That was the day I found the piece of paper I'd been dreading on the middle of my desk: the DOE on John Coffey. Curtis Anderson had signed it instead of Hal Moores, but of course it was just as legal either way, and of course it had needed to go through Hal in order to get to me. I could imagine Hal sitting at his desk in Administration with that piece of paper in his hand, sitting there and thinking of his wife, who had become something of a nine days, wonder to the doctors at Indianola General Hospital. She'd had her own DOE papers handed to her by those doctors, but John Coffey had tom them up. Now, however, it was Coffey's turn to walk the Green Mile, and who among us could stop it? Who among us would stop it?

The date on the death warrant was November 20th. Three days after I got it - the fifteenth, I think - I had Janice call me in sick. A cup of coffee later I was driving north in my badly sprung but otherwise reliable Ford. Janice had kissed me on my way and wished me good luck; I'd thanked her but no longer had any clear idea what good luck would be - finding what I was looking for or not finding it. All I knew for sure is that I didn't feel much like singing as I drove. Not that day.

By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he'd deny he'd ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn't conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.

The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn't want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn't want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn't. 'He's only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days,' McGee said, 'and he don't need a smartass prison guard who thinks he's a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don't want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I'm done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It'll weight you down.' I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.

When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. 'Well?' I asked.

'Come on home with me, we'll talk there,' he said. 'This place is a mite too public for my taste.'

We had our conference on Rob McGee's front porch. Both. of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs. McGee didn't allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn't in the least enjoy what he's hearing out of his own mouth.

'It proves nothing, you know that, don't you?' he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.

'I know,' I said.

'And if you're thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, se or. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we're awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.'

'I know that, too.'

'So what are you going to do?'

I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. 'That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee,' I said, 'but I don't. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake.'

'I'll tell you something, smart guy,' he said, still speaking in that tone of hollow belligerence. 'I don't think you should have opened Pandora's Box in the first place.'