God'll Cut You Down (21 page)

I rattle that around my head. Did Vincent McGee just take sixty-five years rather than have it revealed in court that something gay went on between him and Richard? I’ve been focused on whether Richard might have made an advance. But not what that advance, if it happened, would have meant to Vincent.

I walk out the front of the courthouse. Looking back, I watch the door to Courtroom Two. After Vincent was sentenced, the press left the room, but no one else. Everyone in those pews was there for some other case. No one had turned up for Vincent. No one had turned up for Richard.

So much for the big set piece. I was counting on the trial to settle the questions of what Richard Barrett was thinking that night, and what Vincent was thinking.

Calm down, Safran. Earnest didn’t mope off when the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, slipped from his fingers. He ran up the staircase and got him.

So. Plan B.

The district attorney’s office has already done a lot of the work. Subpoenas had already been sent to witnesses, and if they’re not going to give their evidence in the courtroom, maybe they’ll give it to me. The subpoenas were filed at the Rankin County clerk’s office. The name
Wayne Humphreys
was on the first subpoena. He’s one of the investigators.
Adele Lewis
was on another. She did the autopsy. And I’ve got my own list of people I want to talk to. I want to know why Vincent was “in the heat of passion”? What had Richard done? Why didn’t Vincent want to go to trial?

I lick the Cheetos dust off my fingers. I flap my hands to dry them. I don’t want Cheetos dust on my keyboard.

Tonight, a white Mississippian preacher crackles from the clock radio in the room.

“The Nazis were formed in a gay bar in Munich!” he says. “This is mainstream history!”

He says Hitler’s inner circle was gay. He says his family hosted a German exchange student a few years back. The student told him, “We learn in school that the top Nazis were gay, because we want to learn from history so the Third Reich and the Holocaust never happen again!”

I’ve been in Mississippi so long, this is the second time I’m hearing him babble this story out. Although last time it was
he
who told the exchange student that the top Nazis were gay and she collapsed, crying, “Why didn’t our teachers tell us?”

My hands are now dry. I begin to type.

Vincent McGee

MDOC#: 122412

Current Housing Unit: CMCF R & C TRANSIENT

Institution: CMCF

Post Office Box 88550

3794 Hwy 468

Pearl, MS 39208

Dear Vincent,

I am an Australian writer, writing a book about your case.

Would you be able to place me on your visitors list, so I could meet you?

I’ve been told you are allowed to fill out a visitors list with ten visitors’ names. I’ve also been told you create this list at Receiving & Classifications.

Please write back to tell me if you have placed me on your visitors list. I have included an envelope, stamp, and paper.

All the best,
John
Safran

EVERYBODY TALKS

I
nod to the stone Confederate and curve down behind the courthouse to the sheriff’s office. It’s tucked in the same building as Rankin County Jail. Above me is the walkway in the sky where the prisoners clomp from jail to court.

Vincent is no longer here. After his plea, the van drove him to the enormous Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl. Not far from Vincent’s home, as it happens.

Fourteen sheriffs eyeball me from the wall of the sheriff’s office. From sepia Sheriff Harrison (1920–1924) to black-and-white Sheriff Laird (1944–1948) to today’s full-color Sheriff Pennington. The air is sticky and the day is nearly over. Everyone here is a little sloppy and giggly, like schoolkids at three o’clock before Christmas break.

Investigators Tim Lawless and Wayne Humphreys are old men with cherub cheeks. When you’re this Caucasian, there’s nowhere for the burst capillaries to hide. Tim Lawless is a third-generation Mississippi policeman. His father and his grandfather both served in Jackson. Wayne Humphreys is a detective and the local polygraph examiner.

Both were on the McGee case and subpoenaed for the trial that never happened. I don’t know why I’ve ended up with these two men and not some other combination of investigators involved. And I don’t know what I’m allowed to ask them.

We sit in the plainest of boardrooms with a polystyrene cup of water each. Tim Lawless pats a pile of folders, then points through the wall.

“That’s where we interviewed Vincent. The interview room there.”

I say
wow
even though it’s just a wall and I can’t see the room on the other side.

“Have you checked with him?” Tim chuckles to Wayne.

“Him” is Sheriff Pennington.

“No.” Wayne chuckles back.

Tim gets up and returns with the sheriff. He is in his sixties, tall, fit, broad shoulders. In Mississippi the old men have better bodies than the young men, who have succumbed to Xbox and Goldfish crackers and sandwich bread that tastes like cake.

“I’m writing a book on Richard Barrett and Vincent McGee . . .” I fumble out, like a guilty Jew.

The sheriff stares at me blankly.

With my history, with his history, it’s like a penguin meeting a giraffe.

“. . . and Rankin County and Mississippi,” I fumble further.

I tell him about
Race Relations
and Michael Guest and Australia and the book, but it all comes out like a blind man stumbling over rearranged furniture. The sheriff interrupts me.

“Well, you send us three copies,” he says, and leaves.

Excellent. I press record on the Dictaphone and point the mic at Tim and Wayne.

“So, what happened?”

When they arrived at the scene of the house fire, Tim Lawless, investigator Trip Bayles, and patrol captain Doug Holloway saw a body on the grass, flat on its back. It was basically smoking. The three men rolled the
body over and saw what appeared to be numerous stab wounds around the neck and the back area.

“So he was stabbed in the back?” I ask.

“If I remember right, it was in the back.” Tim turns to Wayne. “Wasn’t it, Wayne? In the neck?”

“It was sixteen times,” Wayne says. “Starting at the shoulder and going all the way around his head.”

“Oh, gee!” I say. “For some reason, just because I had incomplete information, I assumed it was going to be in the front.”

“And Mr. Barrett,” Tim continues, “didn’t have any clothes on.”

“Not even underwear?” I ask.

“He had his underwear. That’s all he had on. Just his underwear. It is something we call . . .” Tim stops and herds up his thoughts. “With that many stab wounds and, it appeared to us, someone had intentionally set the body on fire . . . And myself and Captain Holloway—he looked at me and I looked at him—and we basically said, at about the same time, ‘That’s what I call overkill.’ And Captain Holloway said, and I was thinking the same thing, ‘This is consistent with a homosexual murder.’”

That’s quite the quote. I double-, triple-, quadruple-check the Dictaphone is running.

“I mean, we’ve seen many murders like this before,” Tim says, squaring up the folders in front of him. “Where there’s multiple, multiple stab wounds or overkill.”

“And mutilation,” Wayne says.

“And mutilation,” Tim agrees. “And that’s consistent sometimes with homosexual murders.”

“What does that mean? ‘A homosexual murder’? Why would that be different from a non-homosexual murder?”

“I can’t explain it,” Tim says. “I don’t have an answer for that.”

“I think they get excited.” Wayne takes over. “Or maybe a rage. They get overemotional. You know, there’s been lots of times where appendages have been cut off and placed in other parts of the body. And once
the person’s killed—let’s say they shot him—then they shoot them twenty more times, or something like that.”

“Could it also be the case,” I ask, “where the killer is not the partner or is not a homosexual themselves, but they’re in a rage?”

“It could be,” says Tim. “It could be a homophobic-type thing. It doesn’t mean both parties were homosexual.”

I’m a bit confused as to why a first look at a stabbed, burned body would have all this homosexual subtext.

Tim Lawless opens a cream folder and fans out black-and-white photos of Richard’s body.

Richard is lying on a sheet outside his home in his underpants. His arms are stretched above his head. One charred arm and one charred leg. In some photos he’s on his back, with a little curve of a belly visible; in others he’s on his front. The skin on his back is hard and crispy, like roast chicken skin. Every smear of blood, every drop of water on his body twinkles. Richard is cooling down from the fire, but the sun is heating him up again. My arms and neck goosebump. I met this guy.

A cloth covers his face in some shots, but not in others. His face isn’t burned.

“His head was in good shape,” Wayne says.

“Except for the hair,” says Tim.

When Vincent lit him on fire, he was facedown.

Richard smelled of gasoline.

Wayne says there wasn’t much blood on his body. Most of the blood was inside the house, in the kitchen, in the laundry, all the way to the back door. By the time the fire department pulled him out of the house and washed him off with the fire hose, most of the blood had gone.

“How long do you reckon he was burning for?” I ask.

Wayne says no longer than twenty minutes.

“And how did you identify it was Richard?” I say. “Just by his face?”

“Well, we knew he lived there,” Tim says. “It was common knowledge that he was a resident in that area. But, you know, we’ve never really had any complaints, believe it or not, from anybody there. With him being white and living in a predominantly African American neighborhood, he got along with everybody in the neighborhood. Everybody liked him, believe it or not. He was well received there. Kind of felt he lived a double life.”

“One final question about the neck,” I say. “It’s not like his head was falling off or anything?”

“It was not,” Tim tells me. “The head was not severed.”

“I think that was his intention,” Wayne adds. “But he just wasn’t good enough to do it. He didn’t know how.”

“Also, Michael Guest talked about a belt,” I say, “around one of his hands?”

“I think he was bound or taped,” says Tim, “and had been tied up with that belt.”

“Either that,” says Wayne, “or he used it to drag him from one spot to the other in the house.”

“Why would Vincent want to drag him?” I ask. “Maybe closer to the fire?”

“Vincent moved him from the kitchen to the bedroom,” Wayne says.

“And why do you think he did that?”

“I don’t know.”

If Vincent did drag Richard to the bedroom, he must have later dragged him back to the kitchen, because that’s where everyone’s telling me—Wayne and Tim included—the body was found. Is it possible they’re confusing the bedroom and the kitchen because that might be what would happen in a homosexual murder?

A welcome mat lay at the back doorway. The welcome mat was soaked in blood.

The firemen told Tim, Wayne, and the other investigators it was safe to enter.

Inside the back door was a little laundry area containing a paint tin, a glass bottle of methylated spirits, and on the wall, a framed picture of a unicorn. The laundry floor was glazed in blood.

Blood glazed the kitchen floor, too. A patch in the floor was deeper red, where Richard Barrett had lain for at least ten hours, blood seeping out and blotting into the floorboards. Fireman shoe prints patterned the blood. Tim could make out a streak from this patch to the back door, like one giant paintbrush stroke, where the firemen had dragged Richard out.

Wayne peered down the kitchen, deeper into the home. Vincent had screwed up burning down the house. He’d left the doors and windows shut so there wasn’t enough oxygen.

“If he had done it correctly,” Wayne says, “he would have opened all the doors, opened some windows, so you’d get a cross blow of air, so it would help with the fire.”

Vincent McGee, failed head-severer. Failed evidence-destroyer.

The house was still smoldering. Gray flakes were still alive in the air, most white spaces were grayed by soot, and everywhere smelled of gasoline. Furnishings not burned were waterlogged by the firemen’s hose.

“The house was well kept,” Wayne says. “If you had walked into it not burned, you wouldn’t have known anybody like Richard Barrett, and the views he had, lived there.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You know,” Wayne says, “you would’ve expected literature and pictures of people hanging or something in there.”

“Or things against black people,” Tim says, “or Jewish people.”

The kitchen led to a small dining room. A TV tray rested on a coffee table—an unwashed dish and some crumbs of food. Two rooms ran off the dining room, dedicated to a video camera and other recording equipment.

Tim and Wayne brushed past an antique cabinet in the dining room, stocked with china and candelabras, and reached the master bedroom.

“I remember looking in,” Tim says. “We looked in the master bedroom and there was a closet. And we opened the door, and the only thing I remember in the closet, hanging on a coat hanger, was a Nazi uniform.”

I squeak.

Tim points to his arm.

“With a swastika on there.”

“Was it a brown uniform?” I ask.

“If I remember,” Tim says, “it was dark Nazi black. Like the Gestapo or the SS.”

“If you’re going to play,” says Wayne, “why not be the king, you know?”

Vincent slumped in a gray chair, on the other side of the wall, not four meters from where I sit.

To sit in that interview room was to be sealed inside a white cube. A video camera stared down at Vincent from the ceiling as he picked yellow threads from his yellow prison jumpsuit.

“We just talked to him,” Tim says. “And told him we pretty much knew what he had done. And probably just after a few minutes, we gave him something to drink. We gave him a soft drink, a soda.”

Vincent drank and began to tell his story.

Vincent was not two months out of the state penitentiary and living at his mother’s house. “He told us he knew Mr. Barrett when he got out
of prison,” Tim says. Mr. Barrett had a property, his Nationalist Movement headquarters, an hour’s drive away. He and Vincent would go over and keep the lawn cut, and Richard would pay him cash. Apparently this happened several times. On the day of the killing, Vincent had worked all day. Yet, Vincent told Tim bitterly, that day Mr. Barrett had only paid him twenty dollars.

I scribble on my notepad. There’s already something different in this version: a much more sustained relationship between Vincent and Richard.

That day, Mr. Barrett dropped off the bitter Vincent at his mother’s home.

“If you like,” Richard said as Vincent slid out of the big black pickup truck, “tonight you can come back down and get on the computer. You can get on your Facebook account.”

At around ten thirty that night, Vincent jumped his mum’s back fence and skulked through the moonlight and black woods that linked the McGees’ back door to Richard’s back door. This wasn’t faster than walking out the front door, down the road, to Richard’s front door. The woods wasn’t a shortcut. It was the secret way.

The back door creaked open. Richard’s little moonface poked out. Vincent stepped over the not-yet-blood-soaked doormat, passed the unicorn painting, and headed up into the kitchen. Pushed against the wall in the dining room, on a cane table, a computer glowed. Vincent punched into Facebook and profile-picture Vincent sneered back at real Vincent. He typed his first message, and Richard approached.

“Mr. Barrett basically made a sexual gesture toward him,” Tim says. “And Vincent said, ‘That’s when I just snapped. Here it was, he worked me all day for twenty dollars, and then he wants to turn around and have sex with me to boot.’”

Wayne says Vincent had brought knives from his mum’s. “So I guess,” Tim says, “in his mind he intended . . . he maybe was going to kill him anyway. But he said basically he went into a rage and that he murdered him.”

No one has mentioned before that Vincent was pre-armed.

Vincent darted out the back door, through the secret woods, throwing a knife to the moon on the way.

“You said Richard made a sexual gesture,” I say, trying not to sound tabloid. “What does that mean?”

“Well, I asked him about that,” Tim says. “I said, ‘Well, what do you mean, a sexual gesture?’ And he said basically, Mr. Barrett said, you know, ‘Do you want to have sex?’ So I said, ‘Were you ever engaged in any sexual conduct with Mr. Barrett previously?’ And he said he had been. He said that he and Mr. Barrett had been involved in sexual conduct. And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? What do you mean, sexual conduct?’ And Vincent went on to tell the story.

“He said that Mr. Barrett was attracted to black men. He said Mr. Barrett told him this. And he said that Mr. Barrett had had an older black man that worked for him years before, and they were working partners. And this older black man and him were intimate in a homosexual relationship. But the older man had passed away. The older black man had died. So Mr. Barrett was trying to get into an intimate homosexual relationship with Vincent. And Vincent had had actual sexual contact with Mr. Barrett a few times prior to this.