Walker Burns was on his way. He knocked, opened the door part way, and stuck his head in.
“Can I borrow you for a moment, Matt?”
Bradford stood. “I’m sorry, I’ve really taken too much time.”
“Sit down,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.” I followed Walker out of the conference room.
“Are we comfy in there?” he whispered. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A donut?”
“Sorry, Walker.”
“What’s this loco want anyway?”
“I’m finding that out.”
He opened his eyes wide in mock disbelief. “You don’t know yet? In the amount of time you’ve already spent with that guy I could have written War and Peace!”
I rolled my eyes.
“Wrap it up and get your hide out here! The publisher just came by with a tip about some fatcat downtown friend of his who died. He wants an obit for tomorrow morning.”
“Why can’t Ronnie Bullock do it? He’s the obit writer.”
“If you’ve got some journalism more worthwhile to do, then you ask him to do it.” Walker headed back to the city desk.
I returned to the conference room.
“I hope I didn’t get you in trouble,” said Bradford. He started to stand again. I motioned him back down.
“I’m going to have to wrap it up,” I said. “This investigation of yours is all very interesting, but what is it that you expect us to do?”
Bradford Hall sat so far forward on the edge of his chair that he was practically kneeling. “When it comes to finding out about plants, I know where to look. There are books and periodicals and drawings and texts. When it comes to a killing, I don’t know where to start. I was hoping you or someone here could help me. You could even stay at my place. I once saw a newspaper series about unsolved crimes. Maybe the Times could look into this. Maybe somebody wrote about it at the time. Maybe somebody remembers.”
My job is night general assignment reporter. I come in late in the afternoon. By the time I arrive, the creative stories, the ones where you can really write or really investigate, have already been given to the dayside reporters the big editors favor. Those of us on the nightside get the obits, the stories from the cop shop, and night general assignment. Whatever’s left. That’s generally not going to include any time spent writing about a years-old unsolved killing on the edge of our circulation area.
But before I told Hall that, I wanted to do a little checking. I thanked him for thinking of the Charlotte Times, told him I would get back to him, and ushered him out of the newsroom.
On my way back to my cubicle, I passed Bullock. “Ronnie,” I asked, “Any way you can handle this obit for me? I’ve got to get back to the library and pull some clips on this nut case.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to have to burden the progeny of Lucas Harper with the unseemly task of writing obits.”
Bullock could be lazy, not to mention a jerk. I’ve never used being a Harper to get ahead. If I had, would I be a general assignment reporter working nights at a mid-sized daily in North Carolina? The truth of it is, in terms of journalism, neither my father nor grandfather taught me anything. Lucas Sr. was dead before I arrived and Lucas Jr. might as well have been.
“Forget it,” I told Bullock. “I’ll do it myself.”
It was the end of the shift before I could get to the newsroom library. Nancy Atkinson, the librarian, peered at me over her glasses. “Almost twenty years ago? You’re waaaay before newsroom computers, honey. In fact, you’re before microfiche. You’ll be looking for clippings.”
Assassinations, wars, scandals—Miss Nancy had catalogued it all. I couldn’t recall her ever getting excited about much of anything. But Miss Nancy actually hurried past the library’s computers and the film readers and deep into a maze of shoulder-high Army-green filing cabinets. I could sense her delight.
“It’s so nice to retrieve real stories from real newspapers,” she sighed. “Even microfiche is okay. But computers and these files make news stories seem so artificial. Anyway, there’s no proof anything was really ever printed. No proof at all.”
Miss Nancy bent down in front of one of the cabinets and pulled out a drawer, releasing the unmistakable musty smell of aging newsprint. She fingered through a row of brown envelopes and pulled one labeled Murders–South Carolina.
Inside were maybe a hundred clippings, most a paragraph or two long. They were arranged by date so it didn’t take me long to find the one I was looking for. It was yellowed but didn’t look like it had been touched since it had been put in the morgue. The four-paragraph clip had been stamped in red with the date it ran in the Times. It read in its entirety:
South Carolina Youth Shot, Dies
Hirtsboro, S.C. (AP) A 13-year-old boy was shot in the head shortly after midnight here Friday night.
Wallace Sampson was taken by Hirtsboro Ambulance to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where a spokesman said he was pronounced dead.
Police said they were investigating.
The shooting followed several nights of racial unrest.
I scanned the rest of the clips. There were plenty of other briefs on stabbings and shootings and one longer piece about a Spartanburg preacher who’d been poisoned by his wife. But there had been no follow-up stories about the Sampson incident. I made a copy of the clip and returned the file to Miss Nancy.
“Are you on to something, Matt?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. Most of these things never went anywhere.
I headed back to the newsroom deep in thought. Some of Bradford Hall’s story checked out but that didn’t mean much. I knew nothing about him beyond what he’d told me. But I liked what I saw in him—curiosity, honesty, a willingness to pursue something, even against opposition, that he could have ignored. And of all the people with grievances I’d ever met, he was one of the most unusual: a Yankee blueblood investigating an unsolved South Carolina civil rights murder of almost twenty years ago.
I slid into my cubicle and lost myself in a photograph I keep on my desk, one my father took of my late brother Luke and me in our swimming suits standing on a platform floating in the middle of a lake. We’re tanned, wet, and smiling. Luke, a head taller, has his right arm around my shoulder. Cradled in his left arm is a football, its leather soaked black from a game of catch that quickly escalated to spectacular diving grabs made while leaping into the lake from the platform.
I was still in the picture when a stack of letters, held together with rubber bands, hit my desk with a thud. The top letter was addressed to “The Racist Reporter” with the name and address of the Charlotte Times. I thumbed through the others. More of the same.
I looked up at the receptionist, who had known exactly for whom the letters were intended. “It’s such a shame, Matt. They’ve got you all wrong.”
I shrugged. “I understand where they’re coming from.”
“At least the demonstrators in front of the building are gone,” she said hopefully. “Did they ever find out where you lived?”
Walker Burns has a saying: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” This seemed like a very good weekend to spend some time checking out Hirtsboro and Bradford Hall.