“How come?”
“You the forensic genius, Dr. Bill. Why you think?”
“To make it look like a hate crime?”
“See, baby, you know it. It just takes you a while to know you know it. Sort of like the way you was slow to know you love Miss Jess.”
“But surely whoever killed this guy knew he was a pedophile,” I said. “So wouldn’t it still be a hate crime?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “Different kind of hate. So different kind of crime.”
Something was crystallizing in my mind. Slowly, to be sure, but definitely. “So if it’s a different kind of hate,” I said, “and a different kind of killing, that means…” Miss Georgia nodded encouragingly. “That means a different kind of killer, someone killing for a different reason.”
“Dr. Bill, you so brilliant,” she said.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “Now you’re patronizing me.” Miss Georgia’s laugh pealed throughout the deli, causing another round of head-turning. “So instead of just some redneck yahoo who’s enraged by a man in drag, we’re looking for someone who hates pedophiles. Maybe somebody he molested who wanted revenge?”
Miss Georgia looked doubtful. “You think some li’l boy done turned killer?” She shook her head. “That fella not old enough to have victims what be growed up. Besides, a boy been molested might turn molester his own self. Shit flow downstream, we say here in Chattanooga. Y’all might not say that in Knoxville, being upriver and all.”
“Well, Craig Willis sure flowed downstream,” I said. “But if it wasn’t someone he molested, then who?” Miss Georgia rolled her eyes and drummed her fingers on the table. Finally I got it. “A parent.” Then I thought of my grandsons, and how enraged I would be if someone molested them. “Or a grandparent.” And then I thought of Art, and his quiet fury at the predators he was stalking day in, day out, and of what he’d told me about the officer who caught Craig Willis in the act of molesting Joey Scott; I wondered how it might have affected that officer to see Willis set free without so much as a trial. “Or a frustrated cop.”
Miss Georgia beamed at me. “Now you usin’ that big ol’ brain of yours, Dr. Bill.” She took another sip through her straw, then frowned at the thin plastic tube. “I can’t get no satisfaction through this staw. I guess I just be out of practice suckin’ on things.” She winked at me, then put her lips into a pout and wrapped them around the straw again. “Oh, the hell with it,” she finally said in a huskier voice. She extracted the straw and dropped it on the table, then hoisted the glass and drained it in three larynx-pumping gulps. Then she set down the glass and looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her face before. She looked shy, and scared, and utterly free of the dramatics and affectations she hid behind so much of the time. “Dr. Bill, could I ax you something? Iss a highly personal matter.”
It was hard for me to imagine what could be more personal than some of the conversational ground Miss Georgia had already trampled with abandon. I nodded nervously. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve had some surgery. I got these boobs; maybe you noticed?” I nodded again. “As a first step, you know, toward seeing how I might like being a real woman.”
“And?”
“I think I want to go the rest of the way.”
“Does ‘the rest of the way’ mean what I think it means?”
“If you thinking Lorena Bobbitt, it do,” she said. Then she shook her head. “Actually, iss a lot more complicated than that. Iss called ‘sex reassignment surgery,’ and they don’t just whack everything off. They kinda split everything open, and turn it inside out, and do some serious tuckin’-in. They do empty the marble bag, and take out most of the hydraulic tubing, if you know what I mean. But they make you a vagina and even a little clitoris, with nerve endings and everything.” She got a wistful look on her face. “I’ve seen pictures; I could look like a real woman. Make love like a real woman, too. Do everything but have periods and have babies, and who wants to mess with all that?”
“The surgery sounds pretty drastic,” I said. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Pretty sure, Dr. Bill. I been trying to get out of this male body ever since I hit puberty. The fit just don’t seem right, you know?”
“Well, I don’t know, but I reckon you do,” I said. “But you wanted to ask me something?”
“They’s a plastic surgeon up in Knoxville at the UT hospital, supposed to be pretty good,” she said. “He trained over in France with the doctor pioneered this fancy operation.” She hesitated. “I got me an appointment a while back. If I come up there and have this done…” She trailed off.
“Yes?”
“Would you come visit me in the hospital, Dr. Bill?”
I laughed. “That’s it? That’s what you were worried about asking me? Good Lord, Miss Georgia. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”
As we left the deli and headed back to my boring white car, Miss Georgia took my arm. And when I got in, she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. I kissed hers, too. It felt smooth and soft-like a real woman’s-and it was the most human, compassionate, comforting moment I’d experienced in the five days since I’d found Jess’s desecrated corpse at the Body Farm.
I decided not to take the interstate back to Knoxville; instead, in hopes a different route might distract me from thoughts of Jess, I took U.S. 27, which crossed the river a half mile downstream from the glass-peaked aquarium. It had been years since I’d taken 27; the highway had been mostly four-laned since then, but the surrounding countryside remained virtually unchanged. The road roughly paralleled I-75-both of them angling northeast from Chattanooga-but while 75 ran through the broadest, flattest part of the Tennessee Valley, 27 lay about twenty miles to the west, skirting the base of Walden Ridge, the mouth of the rugged Chickamauga Gulch, and the eastern escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau.
Forty minutes north of Chattanooga, highway 27 bypassed Dayton, and on a whim, I angled left into the business district. On the north edge of the four-block downtown, I saw an elegant old courthouse on my left, three stories of brick with a bell tower rising another two stories above the main structure. It hit me with almost physical force: this was the court house where Williams Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow had tried the case of John Scopes, the high school science teacher arrested for teaching evolution in 1925. Had I subconsciously chosen this route so that I would pass this his
toric spot, site of a debate that remained as unresolved today as it was eight de cades ago? Probably, I decided.
There were plenty of parking spaces along Main Street, and-irrefutable proof that Dayton was a small town-no meters to feed. I pulled into a spot directly across from the court house and strolled across the shady lawn toward the front doors. To the left of the entrance stood a life-size bronze statue on a pedestal; the inscription identified it as William Jennings Bryan, U.S. senator and three-time presidential candidate, nicknamed “the Great Commoner” for his affinity with ordinary folk of the time. Already famous for his dire pronouncements about the nihilistic implications of evolution, Bryan was recruited as the celebrity spokesman for the prosecution. I looked around for another statue; surely there was one of the lead attorney defending Scopes, Clarence Darrow. Darrow, like Bryan, was considered a titan. To his admirers, he was “the Great Defender”; to his detractors, “Attorney for the Damned.” If there was a statue of Darrow, it was well hidden.
As I puzzled over the sculptural imbalance, an older gentleman emerged from the court house, approached me, and said hello. “Where’s Darrow?” I asked. “Seems like they ought to have both lawyers out here.”
“Anybody wants to put up the money, we’d be glad to have him,” the man said. It turned out that he was the volunteer curator of the Scopes Trial Museum, housed in the basement of the court house. The court house had just closed, but when he found out I was passing through from out of town and hoped to see the courtroom, he graciously offered to let me look around not just the courtroom but the museum as well.
Stepping into the courtroom was like stepping back in time. The room occupied the entire second floor of the building; high windows lined every wall; the stamped-tin ceiling was the perfect counterpoint to the scuffed wood floor. Even the seats-old auditorium-style wooden seats bolted to the floor-were original. I sat in one of the front-row seats, imagining Darrow and Jennings hammering away at one another, and at one another’s philosophies: Darrow’s fierce belief in human free will and self-determination, Bryan’s dogged belief in the necessity of divine salvation. They staked out their positions in their opening arguments. “Scopes isn’t on trial,” Darrow proclaimed; “civilization is on trial.” Bryan set the stakes even higher, claiming, “If evolution wins, Christianity goes.”