Time's Witness (12 page)

I was thinking about her first husband, the young French mountain climber who’d died in the hotel fire. She must have come to believe that, like Love and Glory, Death is after heroes too, tries to steal them away as young as it can. Funny, I felt a low kind of sadness about how much she must love Brookside.

I pulled out a plastic folder to slip the letter in. “You called Jack Molina? What was his attitude?”

“Like Andy's; he brushed it off. I think he was mostly angry I was going to try to use it to get Andy to pull back from some of the positions Jack wants him to take. Because I did say it made me worry more about this speech in Winston-Salem Monday. Jack and I aren’t…close.”

“Okay.” I pulled a pencil out of the Cherokee bowl I keep them in. “Give me a number where I can call your husband.” I wrote down the three different phone numbers she recited. “Lee, probably it
is
just some vile-spewer with nothing on his mind but shooting off his mouth. But anybody running for office in this country ought to recall enough history to know that sometimes nuts do exactly what they warned you they were going to do. I’ll check it out.”

“Thank you, Cuddy.” She rested her hand on mine for a second; the rush of my response scared me.

My phone buzzed; Zeke said he was sorry, but a car had swerved across the 28 divider, gotten sideswiped by a semi; there was a fatality, and Wes Pendergraph had called in to say he thought there was something I needed to look at.

Lee stood up quickly. “I’m sorry to take up your free time.”

“Don’t be stupid.” While I walked her to the door, I asked, “Is there anything on your husband's car to identify it as his?”

“Oh. You mean, the letter's being on the windshield? The parking space. There's a sign. ‘Reserved. President Brookside.’ The car's just a gray Porsche.”

I grinned at her. “He didn’t happen to win it in a church lottery, did he?”

She smiled back, puzzled. “I don’t think so.” Then she looked up at me. “But there’re a lot of things in Andy's life I don’t appear to know.” She touched my arm while she said, “Cuddy, it's good to see you again.” And her smile came back.

Outside in the corridor sat a young black man in a navy-blue suit; on the chair beside him was an immense glistening fur coat. He was on his feet, holding the coat out as soon as he saw her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brookside. They made me move the car. I brought your coat.” She smiled at him too, like he’d done her a kindness, but she didn’t introduce us.

The accident was on I-28, south of Hillston, a little west of the Shocco River. I took Cadmean Street, named for old Briggs's grand-father, who’d built it right after the Civil War to get from the river up to the railroad tracks that he’d also built so he wouldn’t have to pay a Virginia line to haul his wares. Every block or so, I’d see a lowered flag mourning the mill owner. From the sidewalks Christmas shoppers gawked, hearing my siren.

I sped the last half mile along the break-down lane; traffic on the Interstate was still backed up. When I reached the wreck, I saw “Action News” already videoing a stretcher being shoved into one of the ambulances parked on the shoulder. An attendant with “Haver University Hospital” sewn over his pocket kept his face to the camera. Under the low, gray-clouded sun, flashes of red and blue lights gave the scene that ghoulish look passing sightseers can’t resist slowing down for. Highway patrolmen near the smashed-in
truck were flagging a single line of traffic along without bothering to answer all the “What happened?” questions shouted from car windows.

Officer Wes Pendergraph leaned against the side of an over-turned, crumpled Subaru, his head in his arms. His uniform was wet with the blood and urine of the young man who’d been flung through the window down into the culvert. Wes had sat there holding him ’til he died. Wes is twenty-three. He keeps asking me if he should quit the force: “The other guys say I take things too hard.” I tell him that's why I need him to stay. Now I just looped my arm over his shoulder and walked him, not talking, beside the highway until he was ready to show me the body. At the bottom of the incline, in scrub brush and hard red clay, the driver lay still covered by a hospital blanket. Another ambulance attendant stood beside it yawning, his fingers laced over his upstretched arms.

Wes said, “I didn’t want them to move him ’til you got here. It's hard to tell, all the blood, and everything's so mangled up. But was I right, Chief? Look over here.”

The dark face was crushed in, covered with blood and clay, but I knew who it was. It took me a while to get my throat to work so I could say. “No, you’re right. It's Cooper Hall.”

But that's not what Wes meant. He’d never seen Coop Hall before, except on television news, and hadn’t recognized him. Wes knelt and turned the head to show me why he’d wanted me to come here. It was a small round cavity just under the ear. He said, “I didn’t notice it at first. But, Chief Mangum, I swear that looks a lot like a bullet hole to me.”

The factory whistles kept crying over Hillston, grieving for the old industrialist who’d built them. Decade after decade they’d summoned the town each morning to come weave for him, told it at noon to eat lunch, sent it home each evening to rest; now they wailed that Cadmean was dead, wailed loudest here in East Hillston where the factories loomed. Messengers of death, like me. From the porch of Nomi Hall's house on Mill Street, past the patrol car that would wait and watch all night, I could see lights glitter the sooty brick smokestacks, the stained pastel water towers, the lowered flags, and the rusty teeth of the skylighted roof with its neon greeting, “HAPPY HOLIDAYS!” Mrs. Hall lived a few blocks from the C&W gates; a few blocks from the stucco duplex I’d grown up in. The Hall house was a one-story box, with an asphalt walkway and an old scarred sugar maple in the dirt yard. Years ago, somebody had added a porch but hadn’t gotten around to painting it the yellow with blue trim that was fading from the rest of the wood.

I told Cooper's mother myself. Jordan West was still somewhere in Raleigh with the vigil group, and I couldn’t find Isaac. Mrs. Hall and I stood together just inside her front door, because she stepped back when I tried to lead her to the couch behind us. She was a small woman, her hair still a crisp black, her features—like her son George's—almost Asian, flattened across the dark plane of her face.
She’d come from the kitchen, flour on her hands and apron. Seeing me there meant something bad, why else would I come? And naturally she thought only of George. Living all these years under his sentence, four different specific days and times pronounced for the death of her child, how could she think it would be anything but George? Before I spoke, she said, “The governor stopped it. He stopped it at 10:30 last night. What's the matter?”

At first she couldn’t hear “highway accident” and kept asking, “Has something happened to George?” The word
Cooper
struck her like a fist, so hard her breath rushed out with the sound of wind.

She repeated the name. “Cooper?…Cooper?” “Yes, I’m sorry.”

“But he's not gone? He's alive?” Carefully, she took off her glasses, and her eyes in a strong unblinking pull drew the truth out of mine.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hall. No.”

“No?” She was staring hard in my eyes for some chance of a different meaning. Then her pupils shrank away from mine, and she cried out, “My Savior, no! Lord Jesus, no, not my boy.” I reached for her hands, but she lifted the apron to cover her face.

Finally when she took it away, wet white flour splotched her cheeks. Her head still shook that “no” while she said, “I want to see him. Where is he?”

I said, “He's at the hospital. Mrs. Hall, we’re going to have to do an autopsy. I’m afraid there's evidence that Coop went off the road because he was shot.”

She stepped back. “Shot? I can’t understand you. You said nobody was in the car with Cooper.”

“We think he was fired at from a passing car.”

She swayed suddenly forward, and I reached out for her. “Ma’am, please, come take a seat here, please.”

But her fingers rested on my arm only an instant, then she straightened, and wiped the backs of her hands across her face. “Let me be alone by myself for a few minutes now.”

“Are you—”

Her arm pointed past me. “If you would just step two doors down and get me my sister Verna.” Shoulders hunched tight, she
turned without waiting for my response. On top of the television stood framed color photographs—studio portraits of George in his army uniform, Cooper in his graduate gown, a daughter with two small girls in Easter dresses—and she paused there, then took the picture of Cooper with her toward the dark back of the house.

For the next half hour, I sat outside on their porch in an aluminum beach chair, my neck tucked down into my overcoat, while behind me the house groaned with the grief and prayers of her gathering family and neighbors and minister. They’d stop in their hurry up the walkway, nod at me nervously, then quickly step inside. I didn’t want to go back in the house, which Mrs. Hall had asked me to leave, but I couldn’t make myself walk away, sick with a feeling that something else horrible would happen if I left her there. I’d sent Wes Pendergraph to Jordan's apartment. Three of the young vigilants came back with her in his patrol car and helped her up the steps. She moved like a blind woman. Wes said she hadn’t spoken after he told her. I didn’t try to talk to her now. The other three couldn’t tell me much; they kept insisting that somebody must have followed Coop when he left Raleigh—though they’d seen nobody suspicious hanging around. All they’d done was stand on the side-walk in front of the Governor's Mansion and hand out copies of
With Liberty and Justice.
They’d waved signs at the Supreme Court
judge when his car sped through the gates. After Coop had left them, they’d driven to a restaurant, then returned to Hillston. They said Alice was probably still in Raleigh; she’d gone to the library. I didn’t try to question them further, just offered my sympathy. None of them acknowledged it.

Ten minutes later, Isaac Rosethorn's Studebaker bucked to a smoky stop across the street. He stumbled out, tugging impatiently at his bad leg. I met him at the curb, where Wes sat in his squad car waiting for further radio reports from downtown.

Isaac said, “I just heard at the courthouse. A fellow who’d been over at University Hospital when they brought Coop in.” He gave a yank to straighten his frayed black tie. “Poor woman. Poor woman.” His eyes burned in their deep shadowed sockets. “Is it definite? He was shot?”

“Yes. It's like a goddamn nightmare. You better go in and see
about getting word to George at the prison before somebody like Bubba Percy does.”

“I already called Warden Carpenter; he’ll let me spend ‘a few minutes’ with George tonight.”

“You want a ride out there?”

“No.” He yanked off his gloves, linted with loose tobacco, and pushed them at his baggy coat pockets. “Slim, what I want from you is to try not to feel responsible for this”

“I
am
responsible.” Angry, I scooped one of his gloves up from the sidewalk where it had dropped, and slapped it into his hand. “I’m the chief of police in this city, and when one of its citizens gets shot to death driving his fuckin’ car home, I am responsible.”

“Well, we’ll argue that another time.” He used the glove in a halfhearted attempt to buff the tops of his oxfords. “Nomi. Does she know how Cooper was killed?”

“I told her, yes.”

“God help us all.” The old man lifted his head to the starless early winter night. “Stupid, endless stupid evil…” He twisted to look at the house. “What are you still doing here?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe I was waiting for you.”

His arm hugged through mine. “Here I am. Now, how did it happen?”

We walked together toward the porch while I summed up what little I knew. “Looks like Coop left the demonstration in Raleigh early. Mentioned having to meet somebody in Hillston. None of these kids seem to know who. He was hit just before coming over that rise on I-28, you know, about a mile west of the Shocco Bridge. Jumped the divider and went head-on into a semi. The driver's still unconscious, and the hospital's not hopeful.”

Isaac watched the silhouettes moving slowly behind the Halls’ front windows. “Witnesses?”

I said that we had two drivers who’d stopped, plus the one who’d called in the accident on his C.B. But all any of them had seen was Coop's Subaru smashed into the oncoming truck just after it happened. This stretch of 28 was heavily wooded, uninhabited, and a search through the area hadn’t turned up a thing. According to Dick Cohen, our medical examiner, the shell was fired at too
short a range to have come from the woods, or probably even from across the median strip; his guess was that someone had fired from the passenger side of a vehicle traveling in the same direction down the Interstate. The bullet had entered under Coop's left ear, passed through his brain, and out the right temple. No slug had been found, and given the extent of the wreckage, we couldn’t even tell if the bullet was still in the Subaru.

Isaac poked at my arm. “Listen. One of those witnesses
saw
the car that fired at him. Had to. Cars can’t evaporate. Maybe didn’t see it
when
, but right before, or after, they shot him. That car had to have been following Cooper, and it had to pass Cooper. And it had to keep going.” Isaac shook his yellow-stained finger in my face. “You stay on the witnesses, Cuddy, stay on them.”

I said the possibility of some psycho firing at random from his car window couldn’t be ruled out yet.

“Oh, don’t feed me your municipal pabulum!” Isaac jerked off his fur hat in disgust. “It's because of George's reprieve. A black man named Hall was supposed to die today, and somebody felt cheated! Why, I heard ignoramuses this morning who thought George had been pardoned outright, and they were
mad
about it. It's the Klan, the Invisible Empire. Arrest the vermin!”

“We’re already going down our list, checking alibis, but, Isaac, a lot, a whole lot of people in this town, in this state, hated Cooper Hall's guts. I can’t go arrest them just for being racist.” I pulled my coat collar higher around my neck. “So you listen, I want Mrs. Hall out of here, okay? Her, and Jordan, too. I don’t have the resources to protect them.”