Time's Witness (17 page)

“I left you half a dozen messages,” he said by way of hello.

Well, he’d only left three, but I had to let that go, because I said, “Gee, I’m sorry, Mitch, damn machine's on the blink again. What's your problem?”

“What's my problem?”

“Grab a chair.” I even picked one up for him, and shook the books off it. “No? Well, grab a door and do some chin-ups while we chat. Little on edge today, Mitch?” (That was a joke; Bazemore's so
hyperkinetic, you’d figure him for a speed freak if he weren’t always campaigning for a drug-free society—he doesn’t drink or smoke either, though of course, as an elected official in North Carolina, he never makes public statements about his aversion to tobacco.)

“No, I’m not on edge. I’m just a little darn annoyed.”

“Oh? Why's that?”

“Why's that? Why am I annoyed?” Like a lot of people whose mouths run faster than their brains, he repeats things. “I leave town, I take twenty teenagers to Boone on a church retreat—”

“That
does
sound annoying—”

I watched him pace along my desk like it was a jury box. Mitch wears his white shirt sleeves rolled up tight around his biceps, his collar open as if his neck were too pumped full of maleness to allow him to button it, his somber trousers just a little too tight across the buttocks, and his vest straining at his chest. He wears a wedding ring and a college ring, a tiny American flag as a tiepin, a gold belt buckle with his initials on it, and tasseled wing tips he can see his face in. Marching, he flicked his Phi Beta Kappa key. “I leave, I come back, and Wollston's screwed up the George Hall execution. As a direct, I mean a
direct
result of which, we have a homicide. We have a homicide, and we have a race riot. A race riot!”

“As a direct result of your going on this teenage church retreat? Don’t be so hard on yourself. Cheese cracker?” I held one out as he strode past.

“I don’t snack,” he informed me.

“Ah, right. Empty mind in an empty body.”

“I don’t joke.”

“Mitch, you sell yourself short. I think you’re real funny.”

“You think I’m real funny. Well, I don’t find you at all amusing.”

What I didn’t find at all amusing was the list of indictments he was planning to ask the grand jury to bring in against the young blacks we’d arrested last night in Canaan. I tried reason: setting fires in dumpsters was illegal and dangerous (especially in windy weather around a pile of cut trees), but it wasn’t intentional arson; throwing chunks of cement randomly into a crowd was illegal and dangerous, but it wasn’t attempted murder. I tried politics: most of those involved were juveniles, and we were unlikely to get convictions on
charges that stiff; all of those involved were blacks, responding to what might very well be the racist killing of a highly visible civil rights activist whose brother—

“Whose brother should have gone to the gas chamber years ago! Mangum, please. Don’t talk to me about the Hall brothers.”

I said, “I don’t have to. You can read about them in any paper you pick up. And if you go bulldozing into this Canaan thing before we make an arrest in the Coop Hall case, I’m telling you, Mitch, you’re going to read about that in the papers too. And so are the voters. Not everybody in this county's white, and not everybody who
is
white's a bigot. Follow me?”

He pressed his knuckles onto my desk top and twitched his biceps at me for a while. “You follow
me
, Mangum. You get me a suspect on this highway shooting, and you get me one quick, and I don’t care if he's white, black, purple, or green. Am I coming through?”

I said, “Like a rainbow.” I stood up to pat his shoulder; it was hot and quivery. “Mitch, you’ve just proved my point. Those civil libertarians always on your back, trying to get your convictions overturned, I tell them they got you all wrong. I tell them, color's not an issue with our D.A.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “I don’t care about color. I care about crime.”

“Right. That's what I tell ’em.”

Officer John Emory was waiting outside the door when the D.A. strode past him with what looked like a Black Power salute, but was probably just that Mitch was too hurried to unclench his fist. Emory set a huge cardboard box down on a side table, carefully lining it up with the edge. A small, well-made young black man, he had perfect posture, a pristine haircut, and his shirt and trousers were as sharply creased as if he’d just taken them from a dry cleaner's bag. John had been an army M.P., and I couldn’t get him out of the habit.

“Sir, here's the personal property from the Subaru.”

“At ease, John. Anything interesting?”

Emory didn’t like to commit himself to value judgments, so he’d brought, and itemized, the entire portable contents of Coop Hall's car, including flares, rope, manual, a gym bag with dirty shorts and
towels, a baseball cap, two dozen back issues of
With Liberty and
Justice
, one tennis shoe, a raincoat—balled up and still wet—an
unpaid parking ticket, three library books on criminal law, a paper-back by Toni Morrison, and an unraveling briefcase with the handle held on by a twisted paper clip. Among the papers in the briefcase were printer's galleys; a report compiled by the NAACP Legal Fund on race and capital punishment; a copy of Isaac Rosethorn's petition to Judge Roscoe citing a dozen questionable rulings by Judge Henry Tiggs at George Hall's original trial; an old newspaper clipping from that trial with the headline COP KILLER TAKES STAND; and a scuffed bulging address book crammed with loose slips of paper. I thumbed through its pages: neat entries in ink—“Jordan” the first name under “J,” Isaac Rosethorn the last name under “R”—scribbled entries in pencil; names crossed out and dozens of numbers jotted in margins. Cooper must have used it sporadically as an appointments book as well, because on blank pages in back there were notes like “Tues, 5:30, Silver Comet” (a bar), and “Brookside, W-S, Marriott, 23rd” (the date and place of Andy Brookside's Winston-Salem speech to black business leaders). As I leafed through the thick book, I said to Emory—still in his military at-ease position, hands behind his back, “Okay, John. All these names in here? I want to know how Hall knew them, and I want to know where they were yesterday afternoon.”

He said, “Sir.”

“Hang on.” I’d already seen some names that interested me. One was “Gilchrist,” in a corner of the “G” page, with a number under it. I dialed it. After a long wait, a young girl's out-of-breath voice said, “Trinity Church soup kitchen, sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Pretty busy today? This is C.R. Mangum, chief of police. I’m looking for Billy Gilchrist.”

“Oh! Hello. Father Madison's been looking for him all day.” “He hasn’t come back then?”

“No, and he didn’t even clean out the coffee machines. But I found, can you believe this, an I.O.U. in the refrigerator for two pounds of cheese.”

“Doesn’t sound like mice, does it?”

She giggled. “Hey, did you say you were the
police
chief? You don’t sound like one.”

“Darlin’, it's a brave new world. Keep the faith.”

Also in Cooper's book was an old business card belonging to one “Clark Koontz, Senior Sales Representative, Fanshaw Paper Company.” It wasn’t odd that Cooper should know a paper salesman, since he edited a magazine; it was odd that on the back of the card, in faint handwriting, was written, “Newsome, Sat., 3.” This Saturday? Purley Newsome? But he couldn’t be a suspect; late Saturday afternoon, Purley was right here in the squad room swallowing the last bits of a speeding ticket. Purley's brother, Otis Newsome, our city comptroller?

I called Otis Newsome at home. His wife said he was over at a neighbor's watching TV. “It's a bunch of men that like to watch games together,” she explained sort of wearily.

“Lionel Tiger will tell you why,” I said.

“I don’t know him.” She sounded as if she didn’t want to either. I called the neighbor's. Otis clearly resented the interruption. Yes, he’d known Koontz, so what? He’d bought city paper supplies through him. No, he hadn’t known Cooper Hall, nor could he be bothered to try to imagine why Hall would have a card of Koontz's with “Newsome” on it. I asked how I might reach Koontz.

“You can’t,” Otis told me. “He's dead.”

I looked up after the call to find Emory still fixed in place. “Go on, John. You can take the rest of that stuff back.”

But he didn’t move. “Sir?”

“Yep?”

Staring straight over my head, Emory tucked in his chin as he spoke. “This is out of line, sir, but, but, the thing of it is, we just got our new rotation with the new partners listed.” He paused so long I lifted my eyes from the notepad I was writing on. Suddenly his face opened in shocked grief. “And I’ve been assigned to Nancy White!”

I leaned back in my swivel chair. “So?”

“I know I’m out of line,” earnestness tightened his whole body, “but well, but, but…”

“But could I switch you? Nope.” I let my chair fall forward. Now I knew why there was a message from Nancy on my machine at
home. “Exactly what are your objections to Officer White? Maybe her name?”

Emory shook his head vigorously.

“Her sex?”

He shook his head again, but much more slowly, and without a lot of conviction. “I’ll tell you the truth—”

“Please do, John.”

“I don’t feel good about that.” Indeed, he looked miserable, sweat starting to bead on his handsome forehead.

“Will you sit down?” I walked around my desk and shoved him into the vinyl armchair. He froze in it like a pharaoh guarding a pyramid. “Now you listen, Nancy's a good cop. But she's a little, well, individualistic.” He nodded quickly. “You’re a good cop. But you’re a little…what’ll we say?” I tilted my head at him, grinning. “Let's say…fussy.”

His face went rigid. “Sir?”

“Gung ho. By which I mean, John, you arrest people for spitting.”

“It's against the law!”

“But you bring them downtown, and we just don’t have the space. You arrest married couples for shouting at each other on the sidewalk.”

He was out of his chair. “That was an oral altercation, Chief Mangum. It says in the manual—”

“I know, I know. The point is, I think if you and Nancy meet somewhere in the middle, you’ll make a fine team.”

“I don’t feel, sir, that—”

My phone rang. “Okay, John. We’ll discuss this after you try it, two weeks. Start on that address book.” I gave him a salute.

It was Zeke Caleb with a message from Wes Pendergraph, reporting from the
With Liberty and Justice
office. There’d been a break-in there, probably late last night. The place was trashed and a file cabinet had been stolen.

“What the hell does Wes mean, a file cabinet? The cabinet or the files?”

“Says, a file cabinet, Chief. Says, that fat old lawyer fellow came on the premises, claiming this cabinet's got taken.”

“By ‘fat old lawyer fellow’ do you mean my friend Isaac
Rosethorn?”

“Don’t ice up on me, Chief. I
like
that old lawyer. Also, Savile's down in the lab if you got a second.”

I tossed my crackers wrapper at my Hong Kong Rodin; it bounced off Balzac's head down into the trash can below.

Out in the main room, Officer Brenda Moore was twisting loops of red and green streamers around the doors and guardrail. Zeke was standing on his desk, attaching mistletoe to a ceiling wire. I said, “Cherokee, you sure about that mistletoe? You want a string of holiday drunks smacking their lips at you all day?” His sharp-winged cheeks blushed bright.

“Wasn’t any idea of mine,” he mumbled, jumping off the desk like he was figuring to fly across the room.

“Zeke, what did Purley Newsome do after the briefing broke up yesterday? When was it, quarter to three?”

“’Bout. Purley? Hung around the locker room, runs his mouth like a dirty river to any what would listen. Mostly laying shit on you.”

“’Til when?”

“Still here when I signed out at four. Playing pinochle with McInnis, seems like.”

“McInnis his new partner?”

“Yeah, and he don’t deserve it.”

I said first thing tomorrow morning I wanted to see McInnis.

“You got a meeting with the Board of Finances first thing tomorrow.”

“Right. I was gonna ask if I can get us some band uniforms in the budget, maybe a couple of majorettes. Didn’t you used to love majorettes? Whooo, I did.”

“Band uniforms? We don’t even have a band.”

“Well, hey, New York's finest's got one, why shouldn’t we?”

“A band?”

“Cherokee, when are you gonna get used to me?” I turned to Brenda Moore, a young black officer, plump and happy-tempered. “Hey, Brenda, ask me over for supper again?”

She came back quick, like always, hands on her big-hipped trousers. “Soon as you give me a raise. Last Easter you came, I had a
whole basket of painted eggs, and you ate ’em all. Ate the rabbit too.”

Zeke said, “Be kind of nice to have a band. You know, Nancy can play the trombone?”

I winked at Brenda. “I’m not real surprised.”

Actually, Justin wasn’t in the lab, but in the hall outside it, because Etham Foster doesn’t allow smoke anywhere near his equipment. Nose in a paperback Cajun cookbook, Justin stood puffing away on his Dunhill, in his Harvard sweats—with the “Veritas” shield across his chest—his fine Arrow shirt features contorted in a coughing fit. “Don’t say a word,” he told me as soon as he could manage to.

“If you won’t listen to the surgeon general, why should you listen to the chief of police? Don’t put that butt out on my floor.”

“This isn’t
your
floor, Cudberth, it belongs to the city of Hillston. ‘
Salus populi suprema lex est.
’ Or: ‘The people's good is the highest law.’ Marcus Tullius Cicero.”

I took his cigarette and crunched it in the sand bucket across the hall. “It ain’t necessarily so. George and Ira Gershwin.”

While I waited for him to finish hacking, I pulled down some out-of-date notices off the bulletin board beside him, including one in crayon from Brenda Moore. I sighed. “Brenda's married now. So she's
probably
not still looking to share an apartment with ‘one or more females.’ Doesn’t anybody ever read these boards? Alice let you back in this morning, or could I maybe replace you in her affections? Tell me, J.B.S, what have you got that I don’t have anyhow?”