Eddie Sartain was at my shop door within twenty minutes, in his fishing hat and a rain jacket, carrying a thick accordion folder under his arm. He locked the door behind him and turned the sign. We sat down at the card table I keep in the back. He laid the folder on the green felt like a man setting down a dead bird. “Carl,” he said, “I want you to be sure you want to read this. I have not let myself think about this case for forty years. I still cannot tell if your brother was a hero or something else.”
I read the arrest report slowly. October 9th, 1976. The body of a nineteen year old college student named Janet Marsh found in the marsh behind a shrimp dock in Bayou La Batre. Otis Reed, a dockworker, picked up two days later. A bloody shirt found in his locker. A confession, signed. The arresting officer, Floyd Dubois. The prosecutor, Harlan Bishop. I put my finger on the name of my brother and kept it there. Thirty years I had admired him. He had taught me to ride a bicycle, to throw a left hook, to hold my head up in a bad room.
“The shirt,” Eddie said, “was found by Floyd alone. In the locker of Otis Reed, which had been searched by two other officers the day before. They found nothing. And Reed said until the hour he died that he was home with his mother. The mother swore it. Nobody listened.” Eddie rubbed his eyes. “Carl, that metal box in the attic of your brother is going to hold something. A man does not keep a thing like that for forty years unless he wants somebody to find it.”
A hero who dies with a secret leaves behind a medal, and a brother who will finally finish the mission.
We drove to the house of Floyd that same afternoon. Darla opened the door in a bathrobe with her hair in a towel, and when she saw Eddie in his rain jacket and me in my pawn shop vest, her face tightened. “Carl,” she said. “I told you I was thinking about the medal.” I said, “Darla, I have the medal. Your son sold it to me for a hundred and fifty dollars on Tuesday.” She went the color of paper. Eddie put his hand on the doorframe and said, with a gentleness that surprised me, “Mrs. Dubois, I am a retired detective. I would like to see the box in your attic before somebody does something foolish.”
She showed us. Her hands shook as she led the way up the creaking attic stairs. In a corner under a pile of old Christmas boxes sat a gray metal strongbox, the size of a toaster, with a combination lock. Darla said she had never been able to open it, only to read the papers that had been taped to the lid. Eddie crouched. He said, “Carl, what would your brother use for a combination?” I thought about it. Then I said, “The Purple Heart of Daddy. The year it was awarded.” Eddie spun the dial to 1951. The lock clicked.
Inside the box were a bloodstained shirt, sealed in a plastic bag, labeled in the square handwriting of Floyd. A second, smaller shirt, a gray flannel, in another bag. And a long confession written on yellow legal paper, dated the week Floyd retired from the force. It began: To whoever finds this. On October 11th, 1976, at the direction of Assistant District Attorney Harlan Bishop, I placed a shirt in the locker of Otis Reed. The shirt belonged to another man. I knew who. I was told to protect him. I am so sorry. I did what I was ordered, and I have not slept since.
The other man, Floyd wrote, was the son of a powerful family in Pensacola, a college boy named Roland Whitcomb who had killed Janet Marsh in a drunken rage, and whose father had paid Judge Bishop to see that a convenient suspect was found. The flannel shirt had belonged to Roland. It had Janet blood on the cuff. Floyd had kept it, out of guilt, as proof of what he had done. And at the bottom of the confession, in a shaky hand, he had added one more line: Carl, if you read this, take the medal of Daddy and make it right.
I called a lawyer in Montgomery who ran an innocence project and was not afraid of anyone. She drove down the next morning. We spent a week with the box. The flannel shirt went to a laboratory in Birmingham, and the lab found the blood of Janet Marsh and the DNA of a man who, according to the state records, was now seventy eight years old and living on a pretty street in Pensacola. His name was Roland Whitcomb. His father, the retired circuit judge, whom Jace had heard called the judge, had died at the age of ninety, two months earlier.
The governor of Alabama pardoned Otis Reed in March, thirty nine years after his execution, in a small ceremony at the capitol in Montgomery. His daughter, Loretta, now sixty three, a nurse in Mobile, stood on the steps in a gray suit with a photograph in her hands. She did not cry. She looked at the governor, and then at me, and said quietly, “I was four. I remember his hands.” Roland Whitcomb was arrested at his house in Pensacola a week later and tried for first degree murder. The jury was out for two hours.
Darla returned the Purple Heart to me in a velvet box, and Jace came with her, thin and ashamed, and stood in my doorway with his hands in his pockets. I did not scold him. I said, “Son, you sold me the medal of my own father for a hundred and fifty dollars. That is the best bargain I ever made.” He laughed in spite of himself. I offered him a job sweeping the shop floor, and he took it, and he turned out to have a gift for fixing guitars.
Every Veterans Day I take the Purple Heart of my father out of its glass frame and show it to the customers. I tell them about Heartbreak Ridge, and about Floyd, and about Otis Reed. I tell them that a medal is only a piece of metal until somebody keeps a promise on its behalf. Then I put it back in the frame, between the photograph of my father and my brother, side by side. And I lock the door of the pawn shop, and I turn the sign, and I stand in the quiet for a moment, with the sun coming through the window.