Time's Witness (16 page)

I pull over between them, get out, and lean on my door. “Y’all's wives are thinking of divorcing you. Me, now, I was thinking of firing your butts, but I see y’all already quit and took state jobs surveying the roads anyhow. I like your new outfit, Justin; it suits you. Dr. D., you been out here all night?”

Foster says, “Some,” then writes in his notebook, slowly sticks the pencil down its spiral loops, slowly winds the tape measure like reeling in a fish he knows is too little.

I lean one foot over the other, scratch at my chin stubble. “I thought I sent Wes Pendergraph out here to tell you to return to headquarters. Etham?”

“He told me.”

“Well, that's good.”

Foster licks his bristly mustache with the underside of his purplish lower lip, and yields enough to add, “Was out at the garage with the Subaru some.”

“Umm. I was out at a little riot in East Hillston. Even mounted patrols, Justin. I know you always wanted to be one. So, y’all didn’t happen to hear about a riot, did you? Guess not. Both been pretty busy, I guess.” I find some loose M&Ms in my pocket, and eat them. “You run into Savile here at his White Patriots’ hootenanny?” Foster doesn’t answer. I watch Justin brush clay off the knees of these orange-checkered polyester pants that are too tight. I lick my
fingers with a sigh. “Lieutenants, I’m in a real bad mood. I’m in the kind of mood where I lose track of old times and camaraderie. Y’all got five minutes to tell me something good.”

Justin took longer. But it was good. This meeting he’d gone to with Preston Pope's contact wasn’t a very interesting meeting: this group called itself the “Carolina Patriots.” They’d read an article from
The Fiery Cross.
They’d served ribs from Hot Hat Barbecue. They’d listened to an ex–Green Beret sergeant lecture on survivalist tactics—what roots to eat, how to booby-trap your lean-to, where to cache your ammo—tactics for when white folks have to take to the woods to keep themselves pure from the tainted races. During the refreshments, Coop Hall's death had come up—they gave the news a cheer, but nobody tried to take the credit of knowing any insider gossip about who might have shot him. What had interested Justin was the fellow the rest seemed to think had the most right to an opinion: not because he said a word about it, but because he had a personal stake in anybody named Hall. Because his name was Willie Slidell, and as somebody happened to mention, his sister was the widow of Bobby Pym, and Bobby Pym was the cop George Hall had killed. So after these freedom fighters ran out of beer and adjourned, Justin decided he might as well follow Willie Slidell home instead of checking in with me, or bothering to phone Alice. And this trip was interesting, too. Turns out, Slidell's home was a farmhouse just off Exit 9 on the Interstate, and Exit 9 is less than half a mile from where we were standing right now.

So that's what Justin had to say. Etham didn’t talk. He opened the beautiful initialed briefcase I knew his wife had given him for his last birthday, because I went to the party and he showed up a half hour late. With a carefulness slow enough to make you hyper-ventilate, he took out a plastic bag. Inside it was a tiny crushed brassy cylinder, a fired bullet shell. He stretched up, tall as the sun lifting above the bare tobacco field behind him. “Thirty-eight,” he said. “Like I figured.”

Sunday morning I slept, drapes drawn, pillows over my head, Martha exiled. Early afternoon, I sat in a groggy stupor on the stool at my breakfast counter, staring at the smooth white lacquer surface, staring out my balcony sliders to the feathery horizon of dark winter trees behind the Shocco. Coffee eventually brought me back my brain, and with it yesterday's events. On a legal pad I drew a map of the section of I-28 along which Cooper Hall had been shot, sketched in Exit 9's turn-off, with Willie Slidell's farmhouse, and a question mark that stood for Justin's theory: since how could a car follow Coop all the way from Raleigh to Hillston without his spotting it, what if, Justin says, what if Slidell, or somebody, had waited at Exit 9 for the Subaru to pass, pulled out then, and fired the shot? His theory didn’t answer the “how” and “why.” This somebody still needed to want Coop dead. Why? That seven years ago Coop's brother had shot Slidell's sister's husband might, I suppose, be a reason—especially if Slidell was attending white supremacy shindigs— but that didn’t answer the how. This somebody still needed to know that Coop would be coming down that highway at that time. I made phone calls to set up a serious search of Coop's apartment and the office of
With Liberty and Justice
on the floor below it. The person I wanted to find was the one Coop had been on his way to meet, because that's the person who
had
to know when and why he was driving into Hillston.

Meanwhile, the nervous green light on my answering machine kept trying to catch my eye and deliver its messages—several from newspapers, one apparently from Isaac Rosethorn. He’d started talking before the beep, but appeared to be canceling our dinner tonight at Buddha's Garden. One from Officer Nancy White, who sounded upset, two from Father Paul Madison, and three from our Haver County district attorney:

“Mangum, this is Mitchell Bazemore. Call me. It's 9:06.”

“Bazemore, Mangum. It's 10:38. I’m leaving for church. I’ll be in my office at one.”

“Mangum, call me immediately.”

“Chief? This is Zeke Caleb here. The D.A. is on my back about where you are. You coming in?”

Two other messages I didn’t expect, and not only because I wondered who’d given the callers my unlisted number:

“Mr. Mangum, my name is Edwina Sunderland, Mrs. Marion Sunderland. I had the pleasure of meeting you Friday at the Hillston Club, and I trust you’ll pardon my presuming on the briefness of our acquaintance, and the shortness of this notice, but I’d like to invite you—” Mrs. Sunderland's stately pace had made no allowances for modern impatience, and the machine cut her dead here. She didn’t appear even to realize she was speaking with a machine, for she phoned back, saying, “Mr. Mangum, I believe we were disconnected. Would you be free to accept an invitation for dinner at my home on Boxing Day? The twenty-sixth? At eight o’clock. I look forward to hearing from you, good-bye.” She ignored instructions to leave me her number.

The next and last call was the first one I returned.

“This is Lee, Cuddy. I just heard the radio. Are you all right? When you get a chance, phone me? I’m here ’til seven.”

The maid said she’d be willing to see if Mrs. Brookside were at home. It was more than the maid had been willing to do back when Lee's mother had first forbidden me to see her daughter. Different maid, same house. “Briarhills.” Up in North Hillston near Haver University. The kind of house you give a name to. Lee's parents were dead and the Brooksides were living there now instead of on campus. Maybe the university president's house, which came with
the job, hadn’t had a sky-diving landing field. The maid said Mrs. Brookside would be with me in a moment.

Lee and I talked for half an hour. I think it surprised us both. Talked about Cooper Hall and the Canaan disturbance. She didn’t know how Brookside had responded to Jack Molina's televised outburst, or even if he’d heard about it: he’d flown to Asheville yesterday and she hadn’t seen him since his return. Saturday she’d mentioned to me that she and Molina weren’t “close.” I was getting the feeling that the same might be said about her and Andy. Or maybe cozy conjugality was just another one of those rise-of-the-middle-class notions that never rose as far as the upper crust.

That was all we said about Andy. We talked about Cadmean's funeral and about Justin Savile: what did I think of his wife Alice? I said, the world. We talked about Mrs. Sunderland, since Lee was the one who’d given her my telephone number, which she’d gotten out of Sergeant Zeke Caleb.

I heard myself laughing. “So you got around Zeke. Well, that Cherokee can’t resist a woman in distress.”

“A woman in distress.” Her laugh was throatier than the young Lee's. “My God, is that what I sound like?”

“You sound—” But I stopped, scared, because I was going to say, “lonely.” And what was that supposed to mean? Instead I said, “You sound naturally a little worried, that's all.” She was quiet, so I added, “It's going to be all right. Nothing's going to happen to your husband.”

“Did Edwina invite you to dinner?” She asked as if it weren’t a peculiar change of subject.

“Pardon me?”

“She told me she wanted to ask you to her Boxing Day dinner. She said, ‘I like a man whose eyes don’t fidget. Made me laugh. Found him charming.’”

“Charming? I don’t think anybody ever called me ‘charming.’ You say she's a widow? Would it be tacky to ask her to marry me at my first Boxing Day dinner, and what is Boxing Day? Sounds too violent for a woman of her years.”

“Oh, you know, it's British. Edwina's president of the state's English Speaking Union. Besotted Anglophiles all claiming to be
descended from some Plantagenet crusader or Stuart jailbird. My stepfather was in it. But then he really
was
the grandson of a viscount…as well as a son-of-a-bitch.”

“I’m glad you finally admit it.”

“So did you tell her yes?”

“Mrs. Sunderland? Why? You fixing to warn me she lures charming bachelors with steady eyes to these parties and drives them wild with London gin and Portsmouth oysters?”

“No,” she said, “I wanted to say I hope you’ll come. Because I am.”

I telephoned Mrs. Sunderland and told her I’d be happy to accept her invitation.

Driving downtown, I thought about, well, about whether Lee meant she was coming alone. Then I told myself to stop it. Then I thought about it some more. Then I regretted making that dumb remark about oysters. Then I thought about her laugh. Then I wondered if she’d mentioned going to Cadmean's funeral because she was maybe hoping to see me there. Skirting around the plastic Christmas tree in the municipal building's marble lobby, I felt old Briggs Monmouth C.'s bearish eyes glower down at me from his oil painting, like he wasn’t surprised to hear me planning to use
his
funeral to spend time with a married woman.

When I walked by Zeke Caleb at the desk, his wide red-knuckled fist waved the phone at me, as he yelled, “Chief! Father Paul Madison.
Chief!
”

I told him, “Sergeant, don’t bellow. I’ve got ears.”

“Well, use ’em.” Zeke's never acquired the hang of deferential subordination. It's not an Indian notion. That's why there’re a lot more family dogs in white America today than there are American Indians. “You look like shit,” he casually added, and handed me the phone.

Paul Madison was distressed about Cooper's death, distressed about the Canaan riot, wanted me to know that he was helping Elmore Greenwood, pastor of Hillston's largest black Baptist church, to raise bail money for the five young men we were still holding, and wanted to ask me if we’d arrested Billy Gilchrist again.

I said, “Again? We just released him Saturday morning. Hold on
a second.” I put the receiver to my chest. “Zeke, is Gilchrist in again?” Zeke shook his head and swung back to his typewriter. “Sorry, Paul, no. What's the problem?”

“He didn’t show up last night. Wasn’t here this morning, didn’t do any of his chores, and he knew there was a processional at eleven o’clock mass. Billy never misses a processional when he can carry the St. Michael banner,
never
after he's just come off a binge.”

Billy Gilchrist used to be a fairly successful local con man, ’til booze ruined his coordination, his concentration, and his looks. About two years ago, a judge had sent him to an A.A. group that met at Trinity's parish house. He didn’t take to A.A., but he did take to Paul Madison, and claimed to have taken to religion as well— maybe he just admired it as a more lucrative, bigger-time con than any he’d ever pulled. At any rate, he’d convinced Paul, who gave him room and board at the soup kitchen in exchange for his doing odd jobs around the church, including setting up all the gold platters and silver chalices for mass. About once a month, he jumped off the wagon, tore up a bar or two, and stayed with us awhile for old time's sake.

Paul said, “Nobody's seen him. He's just gone. Nothing's missing from his room—”

“How ’bout the vestry? Anything missing from there? Collection plate maybe?”

“Cuddy, I’m serious! Billy hasn’t missed a procession in a year unless he was in jail. He
loves
to carry that banner.”

“Could be he had a crisis of faith. Okay, okay, I’ll put out a bulletin for your lost sheep. And listen, if you’re in touch with Reverend Greenwood, tell him I’d like the details on Cooper Hall's funeral as soon as possible. By the way, Coop wasn’t planning to meet you or anybody else on the Hall Committee in Hillston yesterday, was he? He had to leave Raleigh to meet somebody here, but apparently he didn’t say who.”

“Jordan and Isaac don’t know?”

“No. Why would Isaac know anyhow?”

Paul said, “Well, I know Cooper was up at Isaac's hotel almost every night last week, because Jordan kind of, you know, made a joke about never seeing him. I spoke with her this morning. She's in
a very bad way. Christ help her.”

I said, “Right. Wondrous are the ways of the Lord, Father Madison. I betcha another of your damn raffle tickets that the slimeball who shot Coop calls himself a Christian.”

“You keep blaming Christ for Christianity, Cuddy. Talk to you later. Find Billy for me, will you? Bye.”

The D.A. was in my office ten minutes after I sat down. Probably kept a spy in the halls. It's no news on the upper floors of the municipal building that Mitchell Bazemore and I aren’t exactly pals. He's got a voice like a machine gun, I’m pretty quick-tongued myself, and we’ve bounced some fast exchanges off the corridor walls over the years. Our views on crime and punishment take different etymological routes: he believes in prisons, I believe in penitentiaries. What he lives for is capital crime convictions, big ones, and lots of them. Like I say, what I’m after is as much peace, with as little injustice, as this sad greedy race of creatures can be cajoled, trained, or bullied into tolerating.

Bazemore's about my age, local-bred, chisel-chinned with a dimple in the middle, like somebody stuck a pencil in it hard, which wouldn’t surprise me. His contact lenses are too green. His hair's so black there's speculation that he dyes it, but no proof. Some women say he's handsome; he's one of those naturally skinny, Nautilus-fanatic, artificial mesomorphs whose muscles are too big for his head and hands. Like his hair, his chest looks faked. He gives off a straining-at-the-seams energy, a kind of virile moralism, like a top recruiter for a fundamentalist college with a big athletic program. “
Go For It
” is the printed motto cased in plastic on his desk top—as if getting folks sent to the gas chamber was the same as aiming for a gold medal in the Olympics.