The white haired man in the crimson golf shirt looked up at me in the hat of Tommy, and for one long moment, with ninety thousand people roaring around us in the autumn sun, nothing in his face moved. Then it changed. Not into fear, which I had half expected, but into something worse and wearier. A kind of recognition. He lowered his arms slowly. He said, in a voice that I could barely hear over the crowd, “You are his wife. He told me you would come someday.”
His name was Gordon Peele, seventy one years old, a retired banker from Northport, and he sat down in his seat as though his strings had been cut. Mr. Vines did not touch him. Mr. Vines only leaned forward, set his binoculars on the bench, and said in his dry quiet voice, “Gordon, it is over.” Two men in crimson windbreakers rose from the row behind us, and two more from the aisle. They had been sitting among the fans all season, I understood now, with a patience as long as my husband.
A man who sits two rows behind a murderer for forty one years does not do it for revenge, he does it so that the truth cannot slip out the stadium gate.
They did not arrest him then. Mr. Vines asked, very politely, if Gordon would like to stay for the end of the game. Gordon looked at the field, where the band was marching, and said yes. So for the next hour, the five of us sat in a row, three men and two old women, watching the last quarter of the season with the ordinary shouting going on all around. When the final whistle blew, Gordon stood up and put on his coat. He said, “Thank you. I have always loved this place.”
Mr. Vines told me the rest on the walk back to the church lot. In November of 1984, a teller named Rhonda Tate had been found in the Black Warrior River. Tommy had been a clerk at her bank, in the loan office, and he had seen her leave with the branch manager the last evening of her life. The manager was Gordon Peele. Tommy had told the police, and the police had found nothing. The case went cold. But Tommy never forgot, and neither did Mr. Vines, who had been the lead investigator.
The two men bought the seats in 1985 because of a simple idea. Gordon Peele, a lifelong fan, bought season tickets every year. Mr. Vines said he had expected the man to confess or to run. Instead, he cheered. He cheered for forty one years.
Meanwhile, the science had caught up. In 2022, a laboratory in Birmingham had tested a button found in the river and matched it to a coat that had been seized from Peele in 1984 and boxed in an evidence room. The result had arrived only three weeks before Tommy died.
“He knew,” said Mr. Vines, sitting on the bumper of my car. “He knew he was dying, and he kept his appointment with me anyway. He asked me to wait until the last home game. He said he wanted you to be there.” I did not understand. Mr. Vines gave me a small envelope. Inside, in the careful print of my husband, was one line. Martha Jean, go to the games. Let somebody finish what I started. And then, in smaller letters, I love you more than football.
They arrested Gordon Peele that night at his home, without a struggle, and he gave a full statement before dawn. The trial the next spring lasted three days. the sister of Rhonda Tate, a gray haired woman named Marilyn, came from Mobile, and she sat beside me in the second row. When the jury returned a verdict of guilty, she took my hand and said, “Forty one years. I thought I would die before anyone said her name.” I said that my husband had died saying it.
Jeff came to my house that evening and stood on the porch with his hat in his hands, not coming in. He said he had read the entire file. He said he had called Mr. Vines and listened for two hours. He said that he was ashamed of the dollar, of the resale sites, and of every word he had said about his father. I opened the screen door and told him to wipe his feet. We sat at the kitchen table until midnight, and I fed him pecan pie.
The following autumn, Jeff and I went to every home game together, in Row 32, with Mr. Vines on the other side of the empty seat of Tommy. Jeff learned the plays. He brought his children in their little crimson jerseys. At the first touchdown against LSU, he stood and shouted so loudly that the people in front turned around. I looked at him, and I saw my husband, hat and all, and I put my hand on the empty seat. And I yelled right along with them.