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Sheriff since the massacre in 1943, so he was pushing seventy years of age. He was tall and gaunt without the obligatory thick stomach required of most Southern sheriffs. On the surface he was a gentleman, and both times I’d met him I’d later wondered how such a nice man could be so corrupt. He emerged from a back room with a deputy, and I, practicing my assertiveness, rushed to him.
    “Sheriff, just a couple of questions,” I said sternly. There were no other reporters present. His boys—the real deputies, the part-timers, the wannabes, the jackleg constables with homemade uniforms—they all got quiet and gave me their sneers. I was still very much the brash new rich boy who’d somehow wrangled control of their newspaper. I was a foreigner, with no right to barge in at a time like this and start asking questions.
    Sheriff Coley smiled as usual, as if these encounters happened all the time around midnight. “Yes sir, Mr. Traynor.” He had a slow rich drawl that was very soothing. This man couldn’t tell a lie, could he?
    “What can you tell us about the murder?”
    With his arms folded across his chest, he gave a few of the basics in copspeak. “White female, age thirty-one, was attacked in her home on Benning Road. Raped, stabbed, murdered. Can’t give you her name until we talk to her kinfolks.”
    “And you’ve made an arrest?”
    “Yes sir, but no details now. Just give us a couple of hours. We’re investigatin’. That’s all, Mr. Traynor.”
    “Rumor has it that you have Danny Padgitt in custody.”
    “I don’t deal in rumors, Mr. Traynor. Not in my profession. Yours neither.”
    Wiley and I drove to the hospital, sniffed around for an hour, heard nothing we could print, then drove to the scene on Benning Road. The cops had cordoned off the house and a few of the neighbors were huddled quietly behind a strand of yellow police ribbon near themailbox. We eased next to them, listening intently, hearing almost nothing. They seemed too stunned to talk. After a few minutes of gawking at the house, we crept away.
    Wiley had a nephew who was a part-time deputy, and we found him guarding the Deece home where they were still inspecting the front porch and the swing where Rhoda took her last breath. We pulled him off to the side, behind a row of Mr. Deece’s crepe myrtles, and he told us everything. All off the record, of course, as if the gory details would somehow be kept quiet in Ford County.
    ______
    T here were three small cafés around the square in Clanton, two for the whites, one for the blacks. Wiley suggested we get an early table and just listen.
    I do not eat breakfast, and I’m usually not awake during the hours in which it is served. I don’t mind working until midnight, but I prefer to sleep until the sun is overhead and in full view. As I quickly realized, one of the advantages of owning a small weekly was that I could work late and sleep late. The stories could be written anytime, as long as the deadlines were met. Spot himself was known to drift in not long before noon, after, of course, dropping by the funeral home. I liked his hours.
    The second day I lived in my apartment above the Hocutt garage, Gilma banged on my door at nine-thirty in the morning. And banged and banged. I finally staggeredthrough my small kitchen in my underwear and saw her squinting through the blinds. She announced that she was just about to call the police. The other Hocutts were down below, wandering around the garage, looking at my car, certain that a crime had been committed.
    She asked what I was doing. I said that I had been sleeping until I heard somebody banging on the damned door. She asked me why I was still asleep at nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning. I rubbed my eyes and tried to think of an appropriate response. I was suddenly aware that I was almost nude and standing in the presence of a seventy-seven-year-old virgin. She kept looking at my thighs.
    They’d been up since five, she explained. Nobody