Time's Witness (23 page)

“There's no reason in the world,” snapped Paul, “to have this man
chained.
”

They ignored this exaggeration.

George kept moistening his lips and clearing his throat while he spoke, as if he’d lost that habit too. “It's okay,” he said to Paul. “You know Isaac Rosethorn? He around?”

When Paul looked at me, I shook my head, and answered. “No. We don’t know where he's gone, but he's been gone since Saturday. Fact, I’m getting real worried.”

George pushed at his glasses with his wrist; he nodded when he recognized me. “I need to see him. You tell him that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

George turned to Paul. “Mama said you came by a lot. Thank you.”

The first guard muttered, “Okay. Excuse me,” pulled open the doors, and they led Hall past us inside. A soprano voice flew out of the church into the bright air like a sparrow. “Deep river, Lord…I
want to cross over into camp ground.”

It was not until after the service, when I saw her at the grave, singing with the others, “Precious Lord, take my hand,” that I realized the voice I’d heard was Officer Brenda Moore's.

I realized something else that surprised me. As the small crowd was assembling around the opened grave, behind Nomi Hall and her minister, I saw a couple who must have already been inside the church when I arrived, because I know I would have noticed them go in. First, because there weren’t that many whites in attendance. Second, because I could have picked out Jack Molina's Byzantine eyes on Coney Island on the Fourth of July. And third, because the person whose arm he kept linked through his was the slender black-haired woman I’d seen two hours earlier looking down with such intensity at Brookside and me from the window of Rowell Hall. I moved next to Paul and whispered, “Who's that with Molina?”

Paul twisted his neck around. “His wife. Debbie.”

“Does she work at the university too?”

He shook his head no, then he bowed it, closing his eyes.

The rich bass of Reverend Greenwood, a big round-shouldered man of seventy, lifted over the field and over the sounds of crying.

“Dear Lord, we send You a man we love. Cooper David Hall. His life was short in years, but it was long, long in the light of Your truth, in the strong armor of Your battle, in the bright hope of Your sweet promised land. Yes, he was young in years, but a leader for those without one and a warrior for those who need one. Young in years, but Cooper David Hall had put away childish things, and he spoke as a man….”

The shovel was passed from hand to hand as they covered Coop's coffin with cold red earth. When it reached Jordan West, she stepped back to where George, his face stung with tears, stood with his guards. Jordan embraced him, brought him forward to the edge of the grave, and placed his bound hands around the shovel's wood shaft. The guards kept their eyes lowered to the ground when George turned to hand the shovel to his cousin, the thin young man I’d last seen downtown in the interrogation room—Martin Hall. He wore the black armband of the vigil group, and stood with Eric, the college student who had talked to me about him after the break-in
at the
With Liberty and Justice
office. Martin jabbed the blade into the dirt hard and fast.

Reverend Greenwood said a prayer, and then he told us, “Cooper's not here, my friends. He's not cold and he's not lonesome. God Almighty's got him safe and warm in His bosom. Let's us go on home.”

Then George walked around the red upturned clay over to the row of metal folding chairs, where his mother sat, motionless, her sister's arm around her. He dropped down on his knees, opened his hands at the manacled wrists, placed them on Nomi Hall's face, and pulled her toward him. She cried out then, as he rocked her back and forth, “Oh son, son. Oh my Lord. Cooper, George, Cooper!”

Behind me I heard the click of Bubba Percy's camera. The picture later appeared in dozens of newspapers, even the New York Times.

When WNNC rang in Christmas at two A.M. with Mario Lanza shouting “Joy to the World,” I was seated on a stranger's rug surrounded by two hundred pieces of an unassembled ten-speed, pink-and-white bicycle. That hadn’t been my plan. But neither had the stops along the way. For example, Paul Madison invited me out to dinner, then took me to the Trinity soup kitchen where I ate spaghetti and sponge cake with his eighteen other guests—at least a third of whom I’d already met for a variety of reasons ranging from prostitution and panhandling to grand larceny. The young fellow handing out coffee was one of the kids from the Canaan riot. (They were all out on bail now, and a defense counsel from L.D.F. was dickering with Mitch Bazemore about reducing the charges.)

After the meal, Paul lured me into the church vestry where a dozen folks, aged six to seventy, were rummaging through cabinets to find robes they wouldn’t trip over. There he tried to bully me into carrying that damn banner in his processional at Christmas Eve mass; even claiming St. Michael was a sort of celestial police chief.

I refused: “I already turned down a lead in
Twelfth Night
, and all you’re offering me's a walk-on.” Paul threw in the chance to “read the Lesson instead then.” I said, “Rector, I don’t go to this church.”

“So? You don’t go to any church.” He pulled this bright embroidered outfit down over his Buster Brown haircut.

“Doesn’t that sort of give you a
hint
about my feelings on the
subject? What is this, a membership drive?”

“Absolutely.” He winked at the other priest in the room who was struggling to tuck up a choirboy's skirts while the boy surreptitiously picked his nose and wiped it on his snowy lace sleeve.

I said, “Well, Paul, not me. I already gave at the office.”

“Classic workaholic. You need a personal life, Cuddy.”

“Yeah, like you? You live here, work here, sleep here, and I’m sorry to say, you eat here. I’m getting tired of everybody I know telling me I need a personal life.”

“Doesn’t that sort of give you a
hint
,” he grinned at me, “of our feelings on the subject?” He handed a stout teenaged girl a cross on a silver pole that looked heavy enough to bash in your head if it fell on you; then looped a thin stole around his neck and clapped his hands to his line-up of candles, flags, smoky pots, and threadbare cassocks. “Bless this mass to the glory of God. Show time!”

So when the choir called, loud enough for me to hear them in the parish house, “O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” I was back in Billy Gilchrist's closet of a bedroom off the hall of the soup kitchen. If Father Madison had been right in telling me nothing was missing from this room, Billy was not a man of property. There were a few cheap, pretty ripe clothes in a couple of drawers of a bureau, a few more hanging on hooks behind the door; a worn-out suitcase under the bed with an unopened fifth of Canadian rye in it; a tabletop with ten packs of gum, a Bible (guidance for the new life?), an Elmore Leonard paperback about gamblers and racketeers (nostalgia for the old life?), and a half-dealt hand of solitaire. In a jacket pocket I found a matchbook from the Silver Comet, which interested me because Coop Hall had written the name of that bar in his address book. Taped to a supporting slat inside a bureau drawer I found the numbered key to a public locker, which interested me because it was the only thing Gilchrist had bothered to hide.

The Silver Comet Diner was a railroad car from the old Raleigh-to-Atlanta line, up on blocks behind the once also old train station, now the brand-new mall, Southern Depot. Formerly offering cheap eats to drifters from the Piedmont Hotel ($1.99 specials of chicken steak, mash potatoes, and collards, slapped on a
grimy counter by a fat pasty waitress named LuBett), the Comet had gotten a liquor license when the county finally broke the Baptists-and-bootleggers filibuster against going wet; service shifted, then, from watery coffee to watery booze. Its days as a dive were numbered. Upscale hadn’t quite reached the Comet yet, but it was moving in that direction. Pete Zaslo, the elderly owner—stringy and gray as a rag—told me, “Some developer's nosing around. Price's right, you can forward this old man's mail straight to Florida.
If
the price's right, now.”

It took a little imagination to see Hockney prints replacing faded photos of fried eggs, ferns hanging where the Pabst clock was, bleached oak instead of Formica—but all that would come. Meanwhile, tinsel ropes and cardboard bells drooped from the ceiling, big colored lights blinked on a baby-blue plastic tree in the corner, and Elvis sounded kind of scratchy on an old radio, doing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Well, it's hard to think of something sadder than the type folks who sit around a cheap bar on Christmas Eve, listening to songs about counting on them to get home for the holidays when it's transparent they either lost track of home a long time back, or don’t want in the worst way to go to the one they’ve got. It was this type I saw staring solitary into their filmy glasses when I walked into the Comet; they sure weren’t chumming around the bar, perking each other up with a round of “God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.” Most of them looked beyond dismay, and on the way to catatonia; dismay takes a little effort. Still, a woman on the stool next to mine—she looked like she’d lived fifty years, two or three real hard times without a break—had enough heart left to tell me, “I don’t guess I’ll ever stop missing Elvis.”

“If you can hang on, never do stop,” I told her. “I miss him too. What's your drink?” She said, Tequila Sunrise—because she liked the sound of it—so I bought her two. Sunrise. Some hearts keep on hoping.

The Comet owner said, sure, he knew who Cooper Hall was, from TV, but couldn’t say if he’d ever been in the place or not. On the other hand, Billy Gilchrist was a regular, “except when you guys nab him, or that runt buttinski priest pal of his busts his balls, gets
the poor fucker boo-hooing, and makes him swear off booze.” He glanced through the smoky dimness at his clientele. “Haven’t seen Billy for a while. But he’ll be back. They’re always back.”

“Well, it's a charming place, Pete, easy to see why.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Mangum.”

“I keep trying. Looks like you could use a laugh.…Anybody Billy hung around with special?”

Zaslo scratched his gray stubble. “Naw, not really. Liked to gab, you know, so whoever was around. While back, he used to pal up with this colored fellow, Butler…something weird Butler.”

“Moonfoot Butler?”

“Yeah. Haven’t seen him either though, long time.”

I finished my beer. “I’d say, be ’bout five more years ’fore you’re likely to. Moonfoot Butler went North. Extradited to Delaware. Little matter of loading up a truckful of videotapes that didn’t belong to him.”

“That so?…Wanna ’nother beer? On the house.”

“Pete, it's against the law for me to accept presents from taxpayers.”

I’d been joking with Peter Zaslo for years; this was the first time he’d laughed. Not just laughed, but volunteered more conversation than answers to direct questions. “Mangum, account of it's Christmas, I’m gonna pay you a compliment. How long you been chief now, three, four years? All the guys in Hillston got joints like mine, we waited and waited for the squeeze—you know, what the fuckin’ bill was gonna be, one thing or another. You know what? We’ve ’bout decided it ain’t never coming. We’ve ’bout decided there ain’t gonna be a squeeze, not even a free lousy beer, ’cause you new guys are fuckin’
clean.
So that's the compliment.” He walked to the end of the bar and eased the glass out of the hand of an old fellow who appeared to be napping, maybe soothed to sleep by Perry Como's crooning “The First Noel.”

When Pete came back, he said, “So with the lady's tequilas, that’ll be eight seventy-five.”

I gave him a ten. “Pete, I want to thank you for that compliment. Now, tell me who were the old guys that weren’t so squeaky clean as yours truly? I hate to think any of them are still on my payroll.”

“Naw, somebody killed ’em, didn’t he? Pym and Russell? Colored guy that got the chair. Yeah, what's his name—the governor just let him go.”

I skipped over Pete's shaky information about George Hall's crime, and just asked, “Are you telling me Bobby Pym and Winston Russell were extorting money from you?”

First he looked hurt, like I was teasing him. Then he laughed for the second time tonight, even louder. “Mangum, now
that's
funny. From me, and you name it. Them two fuckers extort the fillings out of their grandmama's mouth. They was like clockwork, them two.”

Now, I’d heard rumors, of course, back when Van Fulcher ran HPD, of cops cadging freebies, cops taking little bribes to look the other way, but nothing specific or systematic. And while I knew for a personal fact that Russell and Pym were a couple of legalized thugs, nobody’d ever said they were on the
take.
I lifted my elbows so Pete could give the bar a swipe with a cloth I think he’d used since he bought the place. “So, tell me. They’d just breeze in and say, ‘Hey, Pop, I’m here for my week's allowance’?”

“Oh come on, Mangum, you know. It was more like we had to buy—their price—what it was, whatever, they was pushing at the time.”

“Meaning what?”

“Whatever. Booze, tapes, mostly a shitload more cigarettes than you could move. I tell you this, I’m a white man, but me and a lot more, we raised a fuckin’ glass when that black boy shot them two cops.”

I reminded Zaslo that George had only shot one cop—Bobby Pym; that Winston Russell had gone to jail soon afterwards for assaulting a prostitute, and then gone back to jail for assaulting me. But, far as I knew, he wasn’t dead.

“Too bad.” Pete admitted his memory was doubtless clouded by wishful thinking. “Well, you know, it was always the two of them together, Pym and Russell, so they stick in my mind that way, I guess.”

When I left the Comet half an hour later with the names of a few of Pym and Russell's other former customers, Bing Crosby was waltzing out of the radio into a winter wonderland. As my Tequila
Sunrise neighbor thanked me for her drinks, she sighed, “I miss Bing too. All the great ones—they’re going fast.”

I said, “That's true. But look here. Peggy Lee, Loretta, we got a lot of great ones left.”