Time's Witness (21 page)

“Well, actually I’ve got my dog in my—”

“Just a second. Let me tell Lee.”

He was so quick, I’d been so unprepared for his suggestion, I hadn’t realized fast enough how little I wanted to have him in my car. Plus, I hated to think why. Hated to think I was embarrassed by an Oldsmobile that my daddy would have sold his soul for. Hated to think that I couldn’t stand to be around Andy Brookside because I was jealous of him.

I didn’t hear what he was saying to Lee, but she nodded and looked at me gratefully. Well, after all, I
had
promised to help.

Like everybody else in his life, Martha Mitchell fell for Brookside as soon as she laid eyes on him. She squirmed right into his lap and he patted her as he admitted he’d thrown two or three earlier anonymous letters away, “Afraid I just balled them up and tossed them like the rest of the garbage. You can’t fret over flak. You have to gun the throttle and fly through it.”

“I can’t afford to dismiss anonymous threats on your life, Mr. Brookside. Guns are cheap, and brains are rare.” In my rearview mirror I watched the funeral cortege pull out behind the motorcycle escort, then I cut off down a side street. “And by the by, you keep on letting your speechwriter accuse Reverend Brodie Cheek of being in the Klan, if not in on a murder, you’re gonna piss off a lot more anonymous people than the one already writing to you.
There’re two hundred fifty thousand right-wing born-againers on Cheek's mailing list. Lot of votes.”

He cocked his head at me. “Yeah, I heard Jack's rhetoric got a little fervent at the Hall house.” It didn’t seem to bother him. Apparently, he saw Jack Molina as a stalking horse to herd in any stray believers still waiting around left field for the old dream to show up. He said, “It's all true, though.”

“Well, it's true Brodie Cheek's a foaming reactionary. But I’m not sure he's in kahoots with the Klan, much less the Constitution Club, and I
am
sure the members of that club, including Senator Kip Dollard and Julian Lewis and probably a fifth of the guests at that funeral we just left, aren’t going to appreciate hearing Molina lump them in with the lumpen. Not to mention hearing on TV how Cooper Hall's a ‘martyr to their racist fear and hate.’”

Brookside glanced out the window at two young women at the stoplight who laughed as a gust of wind lifted their shopping bags almost sideways. “Jack had that S.D.S. gleam in his eye, huh? That's a beautiful girl there, the one in the blue coat.” He rubbed at his neck where a thin scar ran from his hairline down into his collar. “Well, he keeps a small altar fire burning to the flame of the sixties.”

I nodded. “I heard Molina at a few rallies back when he was in college. He was wild in those days. Campus cops bashed him on the head once; he soaked his shirt in the gash, climbed up on the shoulders of the Charles R. Haver statue, started waving that bloody shirt and yelling, ‘Not my country, right or wrong! My country,
right
the wrong!’”

Brookside's laugh was affectionate. “Sounds like him.” One of the women's scarf blew off and they chased it down the sidewalk. “Jack thought very highly of Cooper Hall.”

“And you? Ever meet Coop?”

He reached down to straighten a black silk sock. “His loss strikes me as a far greater waste than his brother George Hall's would have been. From what I’ve heard, at least. Not that I don’t commend the efforts to stop the brother's execution. But I haven’t shared Jack's passion about it.”

A considerable understatement. His tolerant tone provoked me into saying, “From what I hear, Molina's trying to haul you off the
fence on the capital punishment issue, but you got both legs locked tight around the rail.”

He looked bemused. “Who told you that—Alice? You’re friendly with her, right?”

“Right.” His dropping in Alice's name so casually set my teeth on edge. Or maybe I was just mad at Martha Mitchell for her down-right sickening eagerness to get her head under Brookside's hand. I said, “No, it was Lee who told me.”

The bemused look stretched into surprise. “Lee? Really? That's interesting.” Then the pleasant smile returned. He crossed his long, elegant legs and gave one a pat. “Yes, you could put it that way, I suppose.” The smile was replaced by earnestness. “But I do agree, in principle, that the death penalty's barbaric.” He ticked off points on his fingers. “It's also discriminatory, it's not a deterrent, and I’m sure innocent people do get executed, et cetera, et cetera.” He let the other hand stand in for the rest of the arguments. “But frankly where do we set our priorities? How many convicts are even on death row in this country now?”

“About nineteen hundred.”

He held out a palm in a “Okay, case proved?” gesture. “In the general scheme of things, we’re talking
very
small numbers, and let's admit it, most of them
are
criminals of one sort or another.”

I was in more of a position to admit it than he was, and did so. “Yep, most of the folks we kill have killed somebody, or at least been in the vicinity emptying a cash register while a friend killed somebody.”

He hadn’t quite decided about my tone yet, but it only showed in a slight squeezing of his eyebrows. “Most murders occur during robberies?”

“No, most murders occur during jealous fits or marital spats. A passion crime, and a one-per-customer crime. But the state picks and chooses the little percent it's going to
execute
for murder, and the state's partial to robbery murder, because the state's partial to protecting property—especially white property.” I mentioned that nothing made our D.A., Mitchell Bazemore, happier than a felony homicide; he’d get himself as many white males as he could, wave the capitalist flag in their noses, and turn them into a hanging jury
faster than you could say Dirty Harry. Brookside was with me now; his eyebrows had relaxed. He had a fine listening style, so intense I could feel it without looking at him. I said, “So folks get the notion that the death penalty's going to hold down stickups and muggings. It won’t.”

“You don’t like Mitchell Bazemore.”

“No.”

“He has an impressive record of convictions as prosecutor.”

“So did the Inquisition.” It occurred to me that I was maybe talking to the next governor, a guy who’d have jobs and judgeships jingling in his pockets like loose change. Could be he was interviewing
me
right now; he was for sure checking out Bazemore, whose possible rising future I did my best to sink fast, when Brookside asked me to “describe the man.” I told him, “Mitch is honest, dedicated, hardworking, meanspirited, small-minded, moralistic, bigoted, and rigid as Rasputin.”

He smiled. “His reputation—”

“His reputation is for capital convictions—what he calls his ‘winning streak’—and the more he's got, the more he gets. Juries are just as much suckers for reputation as the rest of us. He's sent nine men to death row from Haver County since I’ve been chief.”

“And one's George Hall.”

“No, Hall's been there a lot longer than that. I watched one of those men get executed myself, which believe me, judges and juries should be obliged to do.” (His neck stiffened on that bit of info.) “Three got out on appeals. And of the five that are still waiting, four are black, none had private lawyers, or educations, or money, or connections—or any of the goodies that if you do have them, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, you don’t end up on death row.”

Brookside nodded carefully. “I grant everything that implies. It still seems to me there’re more productive battlefields to fight on than capital punishment. Welfare's a racist tool too, and a far more pervasive one. Poverty itself—” He stopped himself and rumpled his hair. “But, well, Jack doesn’t agree, of course.”

That was so transparent, it made you wonder why in the world he’d ever wanted Molina to help with his campaign.

He appeared to be fine at reading faces as well as listening, because he said, “Why did I hire Jack? Because he's a very, very good speechwriter. The real question is, why’d he take the job?” Martha had flopped right over on her back, and he was rubbing her stomach as he smiled at me. “Jack finds me hopelessly pragmatic, a cool impurist of the most unpalatable sort. In fact, he doesn’t really even like me. But he's killing himself to get me elected because he’d rather have Impure Brookside than the alternative, which is just more of the same dumb smug thieves.”

I turned off Main Street under the canopy of flying Santas, and passed the post office where the flag was still lowered for Cadmean. I said, with a grin, “And are you?”

He grinned back. “A dumb smug thief? No.” “How ’bout a cool impurist?”

I watched from the corner of my eye as he folded his arms on his overcoat and appeared to give the question some thought; he had a way of making everything he said (for all I knew, stock phrases from standard speeches) sound spontaneous. “Purity in politics fails. So it's useless. So, yes, I have no use for it. Too many things need to be done to waste time failing.”

Stopping for the light, I turned to him. “Well, there's pure, and then there's Pure. I don’t like the one kind much myself.”

“Which is?”

“The kind that leads to the stake. Usually the type Purist who ends up in the fire himself has felt just fine about sending other guys there ahead of him. Savanarola. Thomas More. That type Purist. But then, you’re not that type, are you?”

Brookside swiveled around, throwing his arm along the seat back, giving me a slow look, as if he’d decided I was a lot more interesting than he’d thought. I’ve gotten that look from other folks of his background over the years. He asked, “So, why’d you join the police? Aren’t they our Inquisitors?”

“Because chaos always made me nervous. After the Army, it made me
real
nervous. So I build my little roads of law and order, and folks can walk around then, and don’t have to worry much about getting their feet blown off every time they take a step.”

From the way he nodded, I figured he’d followed me back to the
jungles, where guys like me—sweat-slick, bug-stung, and scared shitless to move on or stay where we were—would look up when we heard those bright cool planes diving into clouds miles above us.

The light changed, and we were both quiet for a couple of blocks. Then he picked up the two political biographies lying on my seat (just purchased—in fact, just published), and asked if I didn’t think one was “excellent” and the other a “disappointment” after a previous work by the same author. I mentioned his own book (a war journal), and he brushed it aside (“It's okay, but I’ve read better”), dismissing his national prize as “a fluke,” just the result of all the press hoopla he’d gotten for “this and that” (the Medal of Honor? the White House job?). Then he solicited my views on the state's law enforcement and prison systems; he asked good questions and listened to the answers.

All right. As Alice had said, he was bright, knowledgeable, charming, interested, and interesting. I was ready to vote for him myself by the time we’d passed through the gates of the high stone wall that protects Haver University from Hillston. And I didn’t even like him.

Inside the walls, perfectly placed trees lined perfectly paved drives through acres of Gothic architecture perfectly replicated in Appalachian stone. Even in winter the grass inside the walls seemed richer than the grass outside. Brookside pointed out various new dormitories he’d had built and the sites for additions to come, including the future Cadmean Textiles Laboratory. Without any students on campus, the place looked strangely private; without all the cars, it looked timeless. It was as if some affable medieval lord were taking me on a solitary tour of his ancestral duchy.

I asked him if he were going to miss being president of Haver.

He looked out over the cloistered buildings. “Not really. I got some cobwebs cleared out and blew away some dust, but academia, well, you know what it's like. It's, oh, the sonorous drone of long-winded big frogs croaking at each other across a little pond. It's cream soup with dowagers who may leave you Eliot's money if they don’t leave it to Vassar instead.” He stretched, as if three years in the Groves had cramped all his muscles. “Nope, I find it just a little slow.” He gave a bored glance at the Eustache Dollard Memorial
Library, where I’d sat up a lot of nights reading history to pass my orals.

I said, “Even with ten thousand twenty-year-olds running around loose? My. What do you think you’d find fast enough?”

He smiled. It was hard to believe he hadn’t paid a fortune for those teeth. “Captain—I’m sorry, that's your rank, isn’t it, as chief, Captain?”

I shrugged with a nod. “Captain's as high as it goes downtown, Major.”

It wasn’t that he was missing my irony; it appeared to appeal to him. I didn’t much like the idea of his liking me, but he gave me the feeling he did. ’Course, that's his profession, giving folks that feeling. He said, “What's fast enough? Well, your job. When you’re really
there, in
it, that's what I mean by fast enough.” He swiveled around on the seat again; his face had the star glow to it. “Imagine what we could do if we used
everything
in ourselves? All of it, full out! But whoever does? That's what I want. To
move
with everything in me. Like the first hundred days of Roosevelt's presidency. Bonaparte's consulship—”

“Hitler's blitzkrieg?”

He looked at me, more disappointed than annoyed. “No. Mozart. Keats's odes. Einstein.”

“Well, now, I believe Einstein lived on a college campus, didn’t he?”

Brookside tapped his head hard. “He lived
in here.
He used what he had. We should all do that. People are sloths.”

I said, “Yeah, thank God. We all ain’t got that much up here.” I tapped my own head, “I’ve met a lot of folks in my line of work, I don’t
want
to see them using every messy thing they got mucking around in their noggins. Trust me, let ’em stay slothful.”

He shook back a lock of hair impatiently. “Come on, I’m not talking about ordinary people. I’m talking about people like
us.
”

“Oh.” I cracked open a window; the V.I.P. view of life always made me feel stuffy fast. I asked, “What kind is that?”