Time's Witness (15 page)

“Yes! He said he knew it for a fact.”

I started laughing. “Lord God Almighty. And I thought all those ladies and I had been so discreet.” My laughter wouldn’t stop, until finally Alice got the giggles with me. “He said, suburban prostitutes in
Catawba Hills?
”

“Yes! Can you believe that?! Like maybe Mrs. Marion Sunderland! Mrs. Dyer Fanshaw!” Laughing, she flopped back down on the couch, beer splashing over her wrist. “His face was so solemn when he told me. Ed Blackman from Sanderton.”

I wiped my eyes. “Well, hell, maybe I ought to investigate.”

“God, Cuddy, how can we be laughing now?”

“I guess it's a different way of crying.” I reached over and gave her foot a tug. “Tension. Hysterics. Life force.”

“Oh shut up.” She wiped her eyes. “’Course, Ed was right. It would be the one who’d
organized
the ring that you’d sleep with. That much was right on the button.”

I propped up on an elbow. “How do you know who I’d sleep with?”

“I don’t.” She stood and started out the room. “But I do have my theories. Want some more nacho chips?”

I stood up too. “You got anything real to eat? When I’m tense, I need to eat.”

“You eat all the time.”

“I’ve got to. What theories?”

“Come on in the kitchen. God, what's your secret, why don’t you gain weight?”

I followed her back through high-ceilinged rooms. “I think it's sorrow over the fall of man.”

Alice and I were cooking a pan of fried potatoes and onions when my beeper went off at midnight. At the desk, Sergeant Hiram Davies had just gotten a call from squad car 32, which was patrolling the Canaan section of East Hillston. The two officers in it were screaming for backups, fast, and for fire trucks, fast. There were twenty to thirty young blacks rioting in the streets. Some of them were throwing bricks at store windows, upending automobiles, starting fires in trash dumpsters. Some of them were chanting, “
Coop Hall! Coop Hall!
”

Alice ran back with my overcoat while I was telling Hiram, “Instruct car 32 to get on their horn: order everybody in the area
inside
, away from the windows. I want a square cordoned off quick,
East Main along Pitt to Maplewood,
nobody in but us.
No press! Call Ray at the State Patrol for a couple of mounties, and get me as many more of our guys out there as fast as you can, okay? And listen to me, Hiram, make sure some of them are black. Fisher. Emory. Mike Jones. Pull in Summers.”

“Chief, you want the canine team?”

“Jesus, no. No dogs and no tear gas, you hear! That and the fuckin’ news is all the fuck we need now!”

He hung up.

As I raced out of the house, yelling back to Alice to phone Carl Yarborough, I bet myself that if Bubba Percy had his scanner on, he’d beat the Action News van out to Canaan, where I hoped they’d both run right into my roadblocks. I made some more wagers too, with my siren speeding east toward the sound of other sirens, past the old brick dilapidating sprawl of C&W Textile Mills: first off, if Governor Wollston had any feel for irony, which I doubted, he’d be struck with admiration for this latest twist of the Lord's whimsicality. Here Wollston had let his lieutenant governor, Julian Lewis, put some hometown pressure on him to postpone an execution, lest a racial disturbance mar the dignity of Briggs Cadmean's death, and here he was going to open his Sunday paper and see on page one a photo of a racial disturbance, instead of a photo of his press conference declaring a day of mourning for that great fallen captain of southern industry. Plus, George Hall was still alive; plus, his brother was now a martyr; plus, Wollston still had the decision about clemency or pardon to make, only with the stakes considerably raised, not to mention that in four weeks both State and Haver University would be back in session, and if only one out of ten students gave a damn about George Hall, that still meant forty-two hundred more possible protesters loose in the area than there would have been if he’d kept to his original execution date.

So I also bet myself that Lieutenant Governor Lewis would lose some points with his boss for ever having come up with that last-minute “stay” idea—maybe he’d even get dropped from a holiday dinner-party list. That Mitchell Bazemore, the D.A. (who, I’d heard, had had a temper tantrum about Hall's reprieve), would jump right on this mess like a whole family of acrobats on a circus spring-board.
And
, that off in his yellow stone chateau-style estate on Catawba Drive, A.R. Randolph was snarking at his wife that if she hadn’t changed her damn vote, the Club could have gone right ahead with the damn Confederacy Ball on the damn day and in the damn way they’d had it for the past ninety-six damn years.

The “Race Riot in Canaan,” as the
Hillston Star
dubbed it, was not really much of a riot, and it was all over by two A.M. Still, my cops were so terrified—with the strangeness, and flames, and smoke,
and gushing fire hoses, and curses screamed out of the dark on poorly lit, rumble-strewn streets—that it was a near miracle they didn’t hurt somebody. The calmest creatures involved were the horses the three state patrolmen rode. I climbed up on a fire truck hood to see over the chaos, and used a megaphone to send two squads circling out a few blocks to flank the rioters (luckily, ganged pretty close together in the bitter cold wind). “Doesn’t look like they’ve got any serious weapons,” Sergeant Ralph Fisher shouted up at me.

I yelled against the noise, “Okay. Listen hard, everybody. We’re as good as they come. Prove it! Keep your guns holstered, keep your shields up, and don’t swing those sticks ’less you can convince me afterwards you
had to!
”

We did better than good; it didn’t take too long to funnel most of the rioters back toward Smoke's Bar, into a dead-end alley. Only one of what the
Star
called “the inflamed mob” (about two dozen black males, aged fourteen to twenty-two) sustained any injury needing treatment—a sprained ankle from a fall—and on our side, only Officer Titus Baker, who’d taken off his helmet, had to go to emergency—nine stitches over his eyebrow where he was hit by a chunk of stone hurled from the crumbling steps that were all that was left of Canaan A.M.E. Church. Oh, and a photographer pal of Bubba Percy's got knocked down by firehose spray and broke his wrist. Most of the property damage was minor—graffiti, broken car and store windows. But a new Thunderbird with Alabama plates had been rolled on its side, and wind had blown a fire in an open dumpster across into a lot selling Christmas trees, sending stacks of pines flaming up in pitch-crackling explosions. The heat scorched the near wall of the Greek grocery next door; inside, produce was smoke- and water-damaged. But the fire team had saved the store, had saved the
block
, and their chief and I (I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me) exchanged congratulations. The trucks were rewinding their hoses by the time Action News sneaked around my roadblocks. And by 3:00 A.M., our wagon was heading downtown with the last of the arrests.

The outbreak had started when four of the older boys, drinking at Smoke's, heard about Cooper Hall's death on the bar's television.
One had flown into a rage and kicked his foot through some wood paneling. The bartender had promptly tossed them all out on the sidewalk. (He later denied he’d ever served them alcohol.) On the street, they’d run into other small groups, all of them “just hanging around,” telling each other rumors about the highway killing, and rumors that the Klan was behind it, a few sharing a bottle, a few sharing some coke, until finally somebody spiraled up enough frustration and rage to heave a stray grocery cart through the plate-glass front of ACME Loan Company (whose absentee owners, the Wister brothers, were well hated in the neighborhood—due to being a couple of shoddy white-trash gougers). Then somebody else threw a brick and somebody else smashed in the Thunderbird's windshield, and from there, the hot pleasures of destroying things took all of them off on a group high. Herd adrenaline, anger, and young testosterone pumping together—it's a hit that crack can’t touch. I saw it at work in Vietnam, doing stuff the Mother of God wouldn’t forgive.

By five in the morning the parents of most of the juveniles had come to post their bail and take them home. Hiram Davies was good with parents, consoled the distraught ones and preached forgiveness to the furious: one father was promising us that as soon as he got his son home, he’d beat him as close to death as he could manage.

The vandals we were left with in the interrogation room ranged in personality as widely as most groups do. Some were surly, some flip, one in tears, most scared. A seventeen-year-old (grabbed as he was enlarging the hole in the Thunderbird's window with a two-by-four) had a garrulous bravado way up there in Mercutio's league. Sergeant Fisher took away this boy's sunglasses and, having examined his pupils, nodded at me with a tap on his nose. “Flying high.” “No way,” announced the youngster with a solemnity that was an uncanny replica of the expression on Hiram Davies's face. “Let me tell you, okay,” he said, then bounced around the room, squeezing at the crotch of his pleated pants, while he confided in me that he was a victim of mistaken identity.

“Meaning you weren’t there?”

“Meaning I wasn’t there to be there, right? Check this out now, man, listen to what happens to me. I’m going down Maplewood,
you know, doing my thing, you know.
Wham
, I’m in Rambo Land! I mean
lumber's
flying around my head, man, so listen, I’m lookin’, curious, you know what I mean, got my human curiosity same as you, all right, I’m
lookin
’ at the T-Bird, maybe some dude's inside, needs some help maybe, all right?” He paused, looked at Hiram Davies, who appeared skeptical, then turned his attention fully on me.

“I’m all ears,” I assured him.

“
Wham
, cop looks like a space monster comes arresting my ass! Listen to what he says, tells me this ain’t no way to ‘
protest.
’ Don’t dis me, I don’t run with these turkeys here, don’t lay that shit on me, protest is capital N-O-T my bag.”

“What's your name?”

“Walker. G.G. Walker. Check your books. You won’t see it. Go ahead.”

“Okay, G.G. Get back over there with the turkeys, my man, and check
this
out: misguided protest is gonna go down better with me than private enterprise, like looting a T-Bird. Think about it.”

“See any merchandise? Hey, no way.” He opened his oversized tweed coat like a fashion model on a runway, presumably to invite us to search him for stolen property as he backed up, adding, “I’d like a receipt for those shades.”

The young man who’d originally kicked in the paneling at Smoke's Bar, slender, coal-black, with sullen handsome eyes, stared at the wall as I questioned him. His jeans were ripped down one side. Cuts on his knuckles were bleeding. “They tell me you started all this. That true?”

He shrugged, coiled at the end of the long bench, away from the others.

I nudged his foot with the toe of my shoe. “Make you feel any better? Listen, who do you think owned that car, who do you think was selling those Christmas trees? You think it was the people that shot Coop Hall? You think it was even
white
people?”

He shrugged.

“You punk assholes know somebody could’ve gotten
killed?
”

His eyes burned up at mine, then away.

“What's your name?” I pulled a chair over. “Come on, I asked
you your name.”

He spat the word at the floor. “Martin.”

“Martin. Martin what?”

His eyes glared back at me, not blinking, and I was already seeing the resemblance when he snarled, “Martin Hall.”

Almost 7:00 A.M., false dawn, a hard empty blue, I’m on Cadmean Street driving home. The fact that the city didn’t burn down feels like a minor accomplishment that nobody much appreciates. In the last few hours, I’ve been accused of brutality and a bleeding heart both. Carl Yarborough has burst into my office with a suit on over his pajamas and reminded me that he's the first black mayor Hillston ever had, that he intends to keep on being mayor, and that if I intend to keep on being police chief, I’d better get on top of the Hall case fast. I find a message in my box from President Andrew Brookside's administrative assistant telling me Tuesday's the earliest her boss has a moment free to chat about threats on his life. I find a message that Mrs. Etham Foster wants to know where her husband is. The Channel 7 station manager's called me a fascist obstructing the First Amendment. Alice has phoned me because Justin hasn’t come home yet. Cooper Hall's teenaged cousin has stared at me with the dead man's eyes while I mumble platitudes like “What you did tonight's not the answer.” Stared at me, and said back, “It's
a
answer. Just not the one you motherfuckers wanna hear.”

I’m driving, I can’t think of anything good, except that off in a ten-by-five solitary cell in Dollard Prison, George Hall is still alive.

It's almost 7:00 A.M., my face feels like I’ve been lying in sand, my eyes feel like the sand got rubbed under their lids, a nightful of rank coffee and gooey rolls aren’t getting along in my stomach, and I’m heading home, two days before Christmas, to the longest relationship I’ve managed to hang on to for the past nine years—an old foul-tempered poodle. I reach for a tape, not looking. It's Linda Ronstadt. She's singing, “Some say the heart is just like a wheel; when you bend it, you can’t mend it.”

I tell her that's too sad a point of view.

I drive on past my turn-off, on over the Shocco Bridge, on down I-28, like I’m gonna just keep on driving west ’til the gas runs out.
Then I see, sulfurous in the rising dew, the yellow flashers on the police trestles that mark where the Subaru and truck collided. They’re gone now, but near the skid marks and debris and gouged clots of red clay, there are two other cars parked on the shoulder. I know both of them. They belong to two detective lieutenants of mine. On a tarp near the rear of the station wagon lie neat rows of tools. I pump brakes, make a U-turn.

Etham Foster's shoving a flagged stick into the clay; tall, lean-fleshed, in jeans and sheepskin jacket, he looks like a black cowboy up at dawn, staking fence on the range. Thirty feet off, holding the other end of a tape measure, crouches Justin Savile in a cheap hick get-up he must have bought at a thrift store to wear bigot-slumming tonight. He waves at me like we’d run into each other at a cocktail party. As usual, Foster doesn’t bother looking up.