Time's Witness (22 page)

“You’d like to change things in this state, if you had the power? You already know what at least some of those things are? You’d like to
have
the power?” He shook one of the biographies at me.
“Exactly. So would I. Well, most people would rather have a bigger television set. They haven’t the imagination, the energy, the soul, the whatever it is to demand beyond the personal. Not on their own. Of course, they
want
to want more. That's why the single Kennedy line everybody remembers is the ‘Ask not’ line. Right? ‘…ask what
you can do
for your country.’”

“Tell you the truth, I could use a bigger TV set myself.”

“I’m quite serious,” he told me sternly.

“I know. This where I turn?”

Frowning, he pointed to an entrance. It was clear I’d let my maybe future governor down. No doubt, I could kiss state commissioner of police adios. But at least I was sure now that it wasn’t just because of Lee that I
wanted
to rub him the wrong way. “Look,” he told me. “I’m as much a little-d democrat as the next man. Absolutely—‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.’ But it's sentimental horseshit to deny
vast
differences in capacity.”

I said, “Um hum. But let me paraphrase your little-d democrat, old too-honest Abe. As I would not be a star, so I would not be a star-fucker.”

I got the eyebrow squeeze, but he rallied fast and said, “Depends on the star, doesn’t it? Aren’t some fucks more desirable than others?” He lifted Martha into the back seat, and that ended our two-man symposium.

Parking behind Rowell Hall, where the president's offices were, I saw a gray Porsche at the end of the lot, and asked if it was his. He flicked at his handsome forehead. “I forgot! Right, the driver picked me up here for the funeral.” He jumped out of my car, then leaned back in. “How’d you know it was mine?”

“Lee told me you’d found the note on the windshield. Parked here?”

“Right. Hold on, I’ll be back in a second.”

He didn’t invite me to come along, so I looked around the area near his Porsche. As Lee had said, there was a little sign on a post: RESERVED: PRESIDENT BROOKSIDE. But still, sticking a death threat under a car windshield seemed an odd choice. Why not mail it, or shove it under a door? I glanced up at the ivy-latticed gray stones of Rowell Hall. Just as I did, on the second floor, at a set of
arched windows, someone pulled back a drape and looked down. She was a young woman, slender, black-haired, and she seemed to be staring in my direction. She pressed one hand flat against the glass and held to the drape with the other. When she saw me, she stepped back from the window. I walked to my car and got in. Five minutes later, Brookside strode across the parking lot toward me. He came around to my door and handed me two manila folders.

“Here you go, Captain Mangum. You appear to have trouble seeing why Jack Molina chose to—shall we say?—hitch his wagon to my particular star. Read this.” He looked down at me, his head tilted the way he held it when he listened, or had his picture taken. “The other folder's the crank letter. If I get any more, I promise I’ll let you know. This one was under the windshield about a month ago.”

I opened the folder with the letter; it looked to be along the same general drift as the one Lee’d given me. Also the same strong upward slash on the
T
s in “QUIT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”

The larger folder held a typed report. Its first page made clear that it was the source of Jack Molina's remark about “Brodie Cheek's Constitution Club.” A neat diagram graphed lines of connection among (A) public officials belonging to that club—including Justin's uncle Senator Kip Dollard and his baby cousin, Lieutenant Governor Julian Lewis—(B) private money men belonging to that club—including Dyer Fanshaw and the now departed Briggs Cadmean—and (C) leading corporations, trusts, organizations, alliances, and/or drives around the state on which these officials and moneymen had sat as boards, trustees, consultants, and/or honorary members. Arrows pointed down to (D): smaller businesses, etc. owned by the businesses, etc. listed in (C). From (C) neat arrows shot at a list of contributors to “Christian Family, Inc.” (of which the Reverend Brodie Cheek was president). So, if you skipped from the top of this page to the bottom, it did give the impression that fancy folks (who’d sure never invite trash like Cheek to their dances) just might be contributing money to radio shows of his that told the Common Christian White People that they might be down-and-out, but in God's book they were better than blacks, homos, Jews, and Yankee Liberals like Andy Brookside. There were
no lines leading from Christian Family, Inc. down to any little box labeled “KKK,” but that was going to be a hard line to draw. If Christian Family was donating to the Klan, they probably didn’t bother filing deductions with the IRS.

I told Brookside, “Somebody's been working hard. Who dug it up for you?”

He gestured around him, as if at the university itself. “I have a very bright, and dedicated, and passionate staff.”

“Like Jack Molina?”

“Among many others.” He pointed at the folder. “Actually, there's nothing here that wasn’t available. It's just that nobody connected the dots before.”

“Nothing here necessarily illegal either…but I’ll give you interesting. And I doubt Lewis would like seeing it analyzed in public.” I put the folders down on the seat. “Okay. You ready to go?”

But he suddenly reached in his overcoat, pulling out keys. “Look, you know, since my car's already here, why don’t I just drive myself, then Lee won’t have to run me out to the airport after the burial. I take off at 2:30. Thanks a lot.” He shut my door with a brisk click, and stood there slapping his keys against his palm.

Once again, I felt a little caught short by his abrupt shifts in travel plans and by his decisiveness in altering mine. But then, I guess when you’re “moving everything in you, full out, energy and soul,” you do move fast. Fast and forgetful, if I was really supposed to believe he’d forgotten where he’d left his Porsche, or that he was supposed to catch a plane in an hour.

As I drove out of the parking lot, I looked back at Rowell Hall. The dark-haired woman still stood in the window. Even from this distance, I could tell that she was, in Brookside's phrase, “a beautiful girl.”

North Hills Cemetery looked down over Hillston, which is why, I suppose, the first Cadmeans and Havers with money had themselves buried there, so they could keep an eye through the ages on their property. Right beside ENOS CADMEAN, AVE ATQUE VALE— entombed in a small-scale replica of the Pantheon (modified by a grief-stricken lady angel flinging up both arms as if she’d just crossed the finish line after a torturous quarter-mile dash)—Old Briggs, son
of Enos, was electronically laid to rest. He descended under a huge blanket of nearly black roses that everybody was whispering had been sent by Briggs Junior. “Everybody” was only about a tenth of the capacity crowd who’d come to the church, which admittedly had been a good sixty degrees warmer and minus the wind chill factor. The tears rushing down the faces of the mourners around the grave were probably as much from cold as sorrow. In fact, Reverend Campbell was praying so fast, the ceremony was over five minutes after I arrived. Andy Brookside didn’t make it at all.

As soon as the coffin was lowered, the whole group hurried off to the warmth of their waiting cars. I told Justin and Alice I’d meet them later, then I walked over to speak with Lee, who stood saying good-bye to the Fanshaws, her dark fur pulled around her ears. On the cypress-dotted knoll behind her rose a thirty-foot marble obelisk with HAVER carved down its front in letters you could read a block away. Surrounding it were dozens of tombstones, temples, and crypts, all memorializing the deaths of Havers not buried in the mausoleum at the university. I wondered whether her parents were buried here or there: maybe her father, Gordon Haver, who’d been shot down over Korea, and her stepfather, Dr. Blount, who’d asked me on each of the three occasions that I’d eaten dinner at Briarhills if I wasn’t a caddy at the Hillston Club (I wasn’t), lying on either side of her mother, who’d apologized a number of times (with a distinctly unapologetic significance) for her inability to remember my name.

Lee didn’t seem surprised that I’d misplaced her husband during a fifteen-minute drive. I mumbled something about Brookside's bringing his own car so he could go to the airport; she mumbled something about, well, she wouldn’t wait then. Her driver stood leaning against the Jaguar, smoking a cigarette—probably one from a Haver factory. She said, “Walk me to my car?” I took her arm and we walked slowly back together over the hard earth, over the still sleeping past, the “Beloved” wives, “Blessed” infants, over generations of forgotten decent, and indecent, men.

I said, “Do you mind, just a second?” and led her carefully through a crowded plot of Randolphs, over to a bare dogwood tree beneath which sat the small stone inscribed EDITH KEENE, GONE
TO A BETTER PLACE. Over the years, I’d accompanied Isaac Rosethorn dozens of times on his Sunday visits here, though he’d never answer my questions about who Edith Keene was, or why he brought her a yellow rose every week of his life. She’d died in her twenties and I’d imagined a tale of tragic young love from which the old bachelor had never recovered. After I joined H.P.D., I’d even gone to Town Records and looked up her death certificate. I still remember how cold the room got when I read that Edith Keene, unmarried female, had died “by misadventure” while a patient in the state hospital for the insane. I never told him I’d found that out. Today, the rose in the bud vase was withered, petals already fallen onto the dry winter grass. Isaac had missed this Sunday's visit.

Lee said, “I remember your telling me about Edith Keene. That strange lawyer, Isaac, the one you were always going to see?”

“Isaac Rosethorn. He's still pretty strange.”

“It sounded so romantic, bringing roses to her grave, and, look, he must still be doing it!” She rested her hand on the curve of the stone.

I said, “After we broke up, I remember planning on doing the same for you, in case you died. I’d have these fantasies about standing there by your tombstone, an old white-haired bachelor, holding my rose, and young folks would wander by, whispering, ‘Now, that's love.’” I’d intended a joke here, but instead a hot embarrassment rushed over me. I couldn’t even make my mouth smile—not with her eyes looking straight up into mine.

Finally Lee saved us both, by laughing. “You were so angry, it was probably the idea of my being
dead
that you liked the most.” Then I could smile, and she reached for my arm again and we walked on.

At the Jaguar, the young chauffeur held open the door for her. She said, “Thank you, Arnold,” and he got back in behind the wheel. Standing by the door, Lee took my hand. “See you Thursday at Edwina's?” I nodded. She said, “Andy has to be in New York.”

“Oh. Is that where he's flying today? On Christmas Eve?”

“Today? Oh, ‘airport.’ No, he meant flying himself. He has a little Cessna. You know, at that private field on the way to Raleigh.”

“Ah. Well, I’m glad to hear it. I hated to think you were going
to be by yourself on Christmas Eve.” I was still holding her gloved hand, but made myself let go of it.

She looked up, into my eyes so long I could hear my own heart, and was worried she probably could too. I said, “Merry Christmas, Lee.”

She said, “Where are your gloves? Your hands are blue.”

I pulled my gloves out of the pocket of the new overcoat I was wearing for the first time. I said, “So are your ears.”

“Are they?” She put her hands over them. A flurry of wind swung the car door toward her, and jumping forward to catch it, I jostled against her. She reached out, holding on to my arms. I could see the flush heat her face, and a sudden sure sense of its meaning shot through me, almost buckling my knees.

Then she was in her car, and the driver had started the motor. As I was closing the door, she said, “Merry Christmas, Cuddy.” Then she was gone.

The cemetery where Cooper Hall was buried, only an hour after Briggs Monmouth Cadmean, was not on a hill, but in a stubby pine grove behind Holy Sion Baptist Church. Besides me, I saw only six people who went to both funerals: the Yarboroughs, Justin and Alice, Bubba Percy, and Father Paul Madison. And Bubba and I stood outside in the yard during the Hall service. Sion Baptist was on the outskirts of Canaan, that easternmost section of East Hillston that the rest of Hillston had finally—about a hundred and ten years after the Civil War—gotten out of the habit of calling “Darktown.”

Coop's political colleagues were planning a memorial service for early January. Today was private—for his family and the friends they wanted with them. I had five policemen near the doors of the small stucco church to keep it private. Still, a lot of people came that afternoon to sit with Nomi Hall and Jordan West. I watched them all go past me, and inside, Officer John Emory watched too, asking the deacon who stood in a back corner with him to put names to faces. It's a sad fact of nature that killers sometimes show up at funerals they’re responsible for. Sion was nearly filled when the two cars from Dollard Prison drove into the lot—two cars, four guards, and rifles to bring George Hall to his brother's burial. And days of
red tape, political favors, and political pressures to grant him the privilege.

When George stepped out of the cruiser, his eyes squeezed shut behind his glasses and he turned his head away from the hard winter light. His hair had grayed. They’d given him a tie and a blue suit to wear (too tight for his stocky, overmuscled body), but they had his hands cuffed together. He walked between his guards with an odd tentativeness, faltering as gravel changed to grass, testing his footing on the church steps, as if he’d lost in those seven closed years his sense of space and distance.

Standing by the door with Paul and Bubba (who had a wool scarf up over his nose like he was planning to rob the congregation), I nudged them both back to clear the entrance for Hall. I felt Bubba's resistance, so I squeezed my hand down on his shoulder, but he shook it off and growled at me, “Oh get fucked, Mangum, what kind of a creep do you think I am!” I didn’t bother to answer this question. Meanwhile, Paul slipped around me, grabbed the prisoner's hands, and murmured, “George, all my sympathy, Christ be with you.” One of the guards, about twice Paul's size, stepped between them with a polite mumble, “Excuse us here, sir.”