“Go ahead about Tillinger,” Clete said.
“We played checkers on the floor, between the bars,” Travis said. “He knew he was gonna get the needle. He said the jury and the judge and cops and his lawyer were working for Satan. I told him they don’t need Satan, they’re working for themselves, that’s bad enough. Can I sit down? I feel like a fireplug that’s about to get pissed on.”
“Sure,” Clete said.
“He went on and on, like all these reborn people, you know, they cain’t shut up talking about it,” Travis said. “He told me he was a drunk, a rage-a-holic or whatever, then he got saved by the Pentecostals at a tent rival. He was a pain in the ass to listen to.”
“You’re going a little fast for me, Travis,” I said.
“I’m saying Tillinger wasn’t a criminal or the kind of guy who burns up his family. He ripped all the posters off his daughter’s walls when he was drunk, and yelled and hollered in the yard, but that was it. I believed him. So did the colored girl who showed up.”
“Which colored girl?” I asked.
“Her name was Lucinda. She started visiting him right after he got sentenced. She said the people at the Innocence Project were taking his case. She said she knew people in the movie business, maybe some of the people who got Hurricane Carter out of prison. It gave him hope. But I thought he was gonna ride the needle from the jump.”
“Why?” I said.
“The governor was running for president. Guys who want to be president don’t get elected by being kind to guys charged with murdering their family.”
“What was the black woman’s last name?” I said.
“He call
ed her Miss Lucinda. That’s all.”
“A rage-a-holic wouldn’t set fire to his house?” I said.
“Maybe a guy like me would. Tillinger didn’t belong in the system. Everybody knew it. You know what con-wise is, right?”
I didn’t reply.
“I did double nickels back to back. I did them straight up and went out max time. I burnt up my brother-in-law in his car and did a guy inside. In the chow line. For one of these teardrops on my face. I didn’t mean to kill my brother-in-law, but that’s the way it worked out. I deserved what I got. Tillinger is what we call a virgin. He never got his cherry busted. That means he was never in the life. He belongs in the PTA and shit like that.”
“We don’t need all that information,” I said.
“About the hit in the chow line?” he said. “You don’t like that? You think I give a shit if anybody knows?”
I didn’t answer.
“Look at me, man,” he said. “You got any idea of what those fucking black animals did to me? My best friends sold me for two cartons of smokes. They said, ‘Rip his feathers off.’ I got to live with what they did every night of my life. Fuck you, asshole.”
His eyes were brimming.
• • •
AFTER TRAVIS WAS gone, Clete and I walked down the street under the colonnade to Bojangles’ and had coffee and a piece of pecan pie in a back corner of the room.
“You believe him?” I said.
“He’s on the square most of the time,” Clete said. “He doesn’t want to lose the few connections he has. He knows the Aryan Brotherhood will probably get him down the road.”
“I don’t buy Tillinger’s innocence.”
“Here’s what happened,” Clete said. “Tillinger’s house was a hundred years old and dry as kindling. The flames were in the second story when he came home. The daughter and the mother were upstairs. He claimed he tried to get them out, but the heat was too great. Later, he told the fire inspector some of the wiring in the walls needed replacing, but he didn’t have the money for repairs.
“So far, so good. Then the inspector finds signs of an accelerant trailing from the gallery into the hallway, or at least that’s what he thought he saw. He said the fire started on the first floor and climbed the walls to the ceiling and up the stairwell. One of the neighbors said Tillinger never tried to go inside the house. Instead, he moved his new Ford F-150 away from the fire.
“On top of it, Tillinger had a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on both the wife and daughter. He also shot off his mouth in the Walmart and told a group of churchgoers his family had better straighten up or he would burn the house down.