Time's Witness (18 page)

“Her,” he said, stuffing his book into his sweatshirt pouch. “Plus looks, savoir faire, family connections—” “I notice you don’t mention brains.”

“You and Alice would bore each other to death. You’re too much alike. Besides, you’d both be dead in a year from grease, sugar, preservatives, and salt. Y’all ruined one of my frying pans last night burning those oily potatoes. Let me show you something.” He opened the door to the lab.

“You had the frying pan analyzed?”

The lab was empty and immaculate: microscopes covered, sinks scrubbed, photo blow-ups of tire tracks and skid marks, of bullet
shells, of shattered windshields, thumbtacked neatly to a corkboard. Immaculate, except that one long counter was strewn with garbage. Real garbage—sparerib bones, coffee grinds, broken light bulbs, salad goop on crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, all kinds of disgusting stuff poured out of a smelly brown plastic trashbag. Justin leapt up, perched on the edge of the counter, and smiled. “First,” he said, “let me fill you in.”

“I hope this wasn’t your lunch.”

“Listen. I sent Parker out to talk to Willie Slidell this afternoon, you know—‘We’re investigating this shooting on the interstate. Did you happen to see anything, and by the way where were
you
yesterday from etc., etc.’ So Slidell says he was at his sister's all afternoon. So Parker asks him if anybody else lives there at the farm with him, and he says he lives alone. And he's acting hyper. Meanwhile—”

“Justin, what's this junk doing all over Etham's lab?”

“
Meanwhile
, I’m waiting down the road at this filling station.

Right after Parker leaves, Slidell leaves.” “Let me guess. You follow Slidell?”

“No, Parker tailed him. He went straight to West Hillston to see his sister, Lana. Bobby Pym's
widow
? I find that interesting.”

“Jesus, Justin, I’ve known folks to visit their sisters that weren’t murderers.” I took a pencil and poked through some greasy napkins. “
Meanwhile
, back at the farm, I hope you’re not fixing to tell me you entered Mr. Slidell's house without a warrant.”

“Who me?” He gave me his old Boy Scout pledge, three fingers and a grin. “No, I just looked in the windows. Somebody was asleep in a bedroom, but I couldn’t really see very well.”

“Male or female?”

“I don’t know. Big though. The point is, he’d said he lives alone.”

“Maybe he has a big girlfriend. This by any chance Slidell's garbage?”

He looked at it affectionately. “Yeah. I took it out of his dumpster by the side of the road on my way out. You can tell a lot about people from their garbage.”

“Um hum.” I gave my hair a tug. “You did say you were
released
from that loony bin up in Asheville, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t escape out a window maybe?”

“Very funny. That was ten years ago. And I wasn’t crazy. I was a drunk. You could hurt somebody's feelings one of these days.” But he brushed this possibility aside by jumping off the counter and slapping me on the arm. “Let me show you something you can learn from garbage.” He reached around me to pick up a small flattened paper box. It had once held, according to its cover, two dozen .38 caliber bullets.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Okay,” I nodded.

Justin was rubbing his hands together in a way I’d seen before, on homicide cases or when he was about to slap down a Scrabble word on a triple point square. “We can pull Willie Slidell anyhow. He's stealing from his job! I didn’t go in the house, but I did go in the barn. And, guess what, there's about eight giant cylinders of paper in there behind an old car.”

I startled him, snapping the pencil in two. “Slidell works at Fanshaw Paper Company.”

“Christ, how’d you know? He's a shipping clerk there. And he's stealing paper. I just can’t figure out why. I mean, it's just paper. It couldn’t be counterfeiting or something, could it? Printing?”

I gave Justin the business card from Fanshaw Paper Company, and told him to check out the dead salesman, Koontz. Also to pull the personnel file on Otis Newsome.

My mind was running all over the place, a fact nagging for me to remember it. Justin sent Parker back to Slidell's, to say we were doing a general search for hideouts the killers might have driven to after the shooting. He could insist on looking in the barn, and then question Slidell about the paper containers. I agreed to let Justin keep on undercover. “But you go talk to Dave Schulmann first; the FBI's got much better files on these Patriot yahoos than we do. And you stay away from that farmhouse unless this Willie Slidell of yours
invites
you over, understood?”

Justin solemnly promised. “I was thinking,” he added, “well, these Carolina Patriots were listening to that ex–Green Beret sergeant, you know, tell them to start stockpiling weapons and
ammo for Armageddon. So I was thinking of saying I know where we can get a bunch of guns.”

“Where? Sears and Roebuck's?”

“No. Rob the Crawford Sons warehouse over in Bennville. You know, that mail-order firearms place? Get some M-sixteens, twenty-two-caliber machine guns, stuff like that. I’ll say I’ve figured out a no-risk way to break in there.”

His eyes danced like some artist had painted the twinkles in with a tiny glitter brush. I sighed loudly. “Justin, these jerks are never gonna suspect you’re not one of them.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, despite your intentions.” He pulled on a magazine ad–looking jacket. “Now, what about Malvolio?”

“Say who?”

“
Twelfth Night.
We had to postpone. We lost Blue.”

“Y’all are getting careless. First, a male member. Now, Miss Randolph, who, as I recall, was quite a lot of flesh to mislay.”

“All of a sudden she flew to Vail with this moron Chip Sunderland.”

I said, “My my,” wondering if that's whose chair at Mrs. Marion Sunderland's table I’d been invited to fill. I started out the lab door. “Look here, Justin, I don’t have time to play. I don’t have time to
work.
”

“You need a
personal
life, Cuddy. Like Alice says, you’ve just cut yourself off like a kind of misanthrope. Hey, maybe we ought to do Molière.”

“Play-acting is not a personal life.”

“Sure it is. It's personal. It's
people.
Playing together.” He jogged backwards in my path as I headed down the hall. “You want to know my theory? Bring back all the old feast days, harvest festivals, jousts, guild pageants. Make ritual, not war. Societies that
play
together stay together.”

“That's not a theory; that's an ad campaign. And I don’t think I’d look so hot with yellow ribbons crisscrossed up my legs. Get somebody else to do this social-climbing steward of yours.”

He caught my arm. “Ah ha, you’ve read
Twelfth Night!
You read it last night!”

I removed his hand with two fingers. “I read it in high school. Last night I put a stop to a race riot. See the difference? And don’t tell me if those kids got more chances to do Shakespeare's plays, they wouldn’t have torn up Canaan.”

“Exactly right!” Well, one thing about old Justin, you can’t repress him with rationality. “
Coriolanus, Henry the Fourth
, I bet they’d be great!”

I told him there was a fast-talking young man in the holding cell right now wearing sunglasses and an overcoat down to his high-top Reeboks, a natural actor, trying to raise bail. “‘Politics is N-O-T his bag.’ Why don’t you go audition him, leave me alone.”

“What's his name?” asked Justin.

On my way out, I passed Sergeant Fisher with a chest-high stack of arrest files. “Any luck, Sergeant?”

He scratched at gray stubble on his black cheek. “Nothing but alibis tighter’n a bank on a dollar. Looks like most of these Klanners work Saturday jobs.”

“Well, just keep on rounding up the usual suspects. Like the movie says. You know, I met this girl, thought I looked like Humphrey Bogart.”

He kept going. “Can’t help you. White people all look alike to me.”

It was when I saw George Hall's picture on the poster that the fact nagging at me pushed through. All those lost jobs of George's that Bazemore had run past the jury to show how the defendant was a troublemaker—hadn’t one of them been a job driving for Fanshaw Paper Company? I didn’t know what to fit this fact
to
, but I was getting the angry feeling that maybe in all these nightly meetings Paul Madison had said Isaac and Cooper were having, they were fiddling with the same facts, and hadn’t bothered to share the news with me.

The poster that said SAVE GEORGE HALL was on the door of the
With Liberty and Justice
magazine office. This magazine was staffed by volunteers—mostly students—and financed by the civil
rights organization that paid Coop Hall's salary. Its office was squeezed between two boarded-up clothing stores on a dark side street off Jupiter, near the old train station, now a shopping gallery called Southern Depot, modeled, according to its developers, on the Bourse in Milan. But
With Liberty and Justice
hadn’t developed into anything as affluent as the Depot, and, when I’d sent Wes Pendergraph to run a search on the office this afternoon, it had still looked, apart from some computers, pretty much as it had fifteen years ago, with one room of secondhand desks, mismatched chairs and crowded metal bookshelves. Except that Wes had found a back window open, had found NIGGERS OUT and KKK dripped in black painted letters down a wall, and books and papers littered across the floor.

Three college kids I’d seen at Dollard Prison Friday night, and again at Nomi Hall's house, stood close together in a corner, watching the kneeling Etham Foster peer in disgust with a penlight at the windowsill. Wes told me that Isaac Rosethorn had come by shortly after he’d arrived; that he hadn’t explained how he’d known files were missing; that he’d left immediately. The three college vigilants told me they weren’t leaving until we did. They looked stunned and hostile. Friday, they’d gotten their stay of execution; Saturday, the world—whose amenability they were affluent enough to assume—had revealed a malevolence so indifferent, it must have felt like a betrayal.

There were little posters of quotations on the wall. Splattered black paint dots speckled them now. Someone had painted NIGGERS OUT over the one that said:

“You’re either a part of the solution or part of the problem. —Elridge Cleaver”

And ATHEISTS over this one:

“Every human being that believes in capital punishment loves killing and the only reason they believe in capital puishment is because they get a kick out of it. —Clarence Darrow”

I said, “Dr. D.?” When Foster stood up, I asked, “How about Hall's apartment upstairs?”

“Not touched since our folks were there yesterday.” He wrote in his notebook, slid it in the sheepskin pocket. “These three here say
they can’t really tell if anything but those files’re missing. Hall pretty much ran the place single-handed.” He pointed at the paint on the wall. “Could be, robbery was just a side show anyhow. Came and left by the window, paint smear on it.”

“Carrying a file cabinet?”

Wes stepped forward. “Mr. Rosethorn said a ‘cabinet,’ but it sounds like all it was, was a locked metal box Hall kept in his desk.”

“Isaac tends to exaggerate,” I said. “Wes, how ’bout giving him a call at the Piedmont. Tell him I said stay put ’til I get there. And see if you can get a phone number for a Jack or John Molina.”

The students—two male, one female, one of the males black, all wearing bulky jackets with a strip of black cloth tied around their upper arms—waited silently, their faces a battlefield of numb grief and anger. They seemed to think we didn’t believe them when they said that the last time they’d seen Coop Hall was at noon when he’d left the Governor's Mansion. They said he’d seemed happy, even exhilarated. When I asked if they were sure he’d left as early as noon, they looked at me as if I’d accused them of killing him.

Noon? You could make that drive in twenty-five minutes. Hall had been shot entering Hillston at 2:45. Where’d he gone for over two hours? I asked them if they thought he might have come back here to the office. They didn’t know. Pressed, they sullenly said they knew nothing about the contents of the file box, though the black male added that he thought Coop kept personal papers in it. The last time any of them had been in here themselves was early Saturday morning. Coop had been typing at his desk then, the girl said, and had told them he was waiting for a call, so for them to go ahead and pick up Jordan for the Raleigh trip. I said, “Typing what?” The girl said she had no idea, probably a piece for
WL&J.
He wrote a lot of the copy himself. I asked about the most recent subjects he’d been working on.

“The House of Lords series, I guess,” she admitted begrudgingly.

“You mean the British Parliament?”

She looked disgusted by my lack of familiarity with their journal, and gave me a copy of the last issue. I glanced at its head-line. FROM CAMPUS TO CAPITOL: NETWORKING, SOUTHERN STYLE. PART I. By Cooper Hall. A quick skim of the lead paragraph
told me that the House of Lords was a secret society founded in the 1920s for select male undergraduates at Haver University, and that membership in that club was an open sesame to any future success in state politics or industry. I had no reason to doubt it, which made my modest advancement to police chief even more astonishing, I suppose, since I’d never even heard of the House of Lords. The names listed ended in the 1940s, but later details promised in Part II. I flipped through the thin newsprint, then stuck it in my coat pocket.