Time's Witness (26 page)

From my window high up in the municipal building, I could see the flying Santas frozen in midair above Main Street, the choir of cutout angels lit up on the roof of the new Macy's Department Store, the sparkle on the tree atop the Hillston Star building; on almost every shop, office, and restaurant, I could see some wreath or words sprayed in snow or garlanded lights, some
something
that people had gone to the trouble, Christmas after Christmas, to fix up in public celebration. Tonight Hillston was peaceful, quiet, and satisfied it had made that communal effort. Tonight in the dark it was looking its best. Of course, it wasn’t as long-lived, or as good-looking, as, say, just about any homely, unimportant little town you zip past on a train in Italy. It wasn’t as civilized, or as wise in the sly campaigns of the world either. Just an unimportant, decent, homely American town that had built back against entropy and chaos for 205 years.

Still, Hillston had gotten civilized enough even now in its adolescence to have kissed good-bye those naive vows of its
national youth—for example, the ones about no entangling alliances, no House of Lords. It didn’t take me much reading in Coop Hall's article on the Haver secret society with that undemocratic title, or much checking of Brookside's data on the Constitution Club, to predict that there was going to be a lot of entangling overlap in the names of the membership of both. Like peers and party leaders of all times, all places, the nobles of Hillston were thick as thieves, and always had been. And like peers and party leaders of all times, all places, they were such hogs at the board of plenty that the poor folks waiting below for the trickle-down of the lords’ crumbs stayed mighty skinny.

But revolution's not my business. I’m not paid to stop corruption on a cultural scale. I’m paid by the system to stop the petty thieves from fouling the machinery. I work at the bottom, keeping the lower decks of the ship of state clean. It's when the nobles visit the hull to order things done that they don’t feel like doing them-selves, that's when they step into my territory, and that's when I make them my business. And that's what I spent Christmas night thinking with chalk about, writing circles of names on that blackboard.

Finally, I must have fallen asleep on my (or rather the city's) imitation leather couch, Martha Mitchell at my feet like on a duke's tomb. I dropped off, going over—for maybe the thousandth time— the few minutes, as it turned out, crucial minutes, I’d been on the scene the night George Hall had shot Bobby Pym, sending himself to death row and his younger brother Coop into a political activism that had ended with another bullet to the head.

In memory I think I might have heard George fire the gun, from blocks away, but I’m not sure. That hot summer Saturday night, there was a lot of loud music from open windows, and car noise and crowd noise along that section of East Main. I’d just finished my shift and was driving over to Mill Street to check on my father. (He’d lived alone since Mama's death, and he was starting to die, too, but we didn’t know it yet.) When I turned onto Pitt Street, the people bunched by the door of Smoke's Bar spotted my squad car, and most of them slipped back inside or off into the shadows. My next memory is George sitting on the sidewalk, and then another clump of people farther down the street, squatted around a twisting
body that lay near the curb; I remember I noticed how the leg spasmed. And I remember being aware of all the dark, silent faces staring out from doorways, and down from windowsills. I radioed for help, but the next squad car got there so fast (three minutes, with the ambulance only a few minutes later), that I knew somebody had already phoned before I did. I found out later, in fact, that an anonymous call had come while Pym and Hall were still fighting over the gun inside the bar. As it happened, Captain Van Fulcher himself was in that squad car, along with two officers, cruising nearby on Maplewood, set to pay one of his periodic calls on the Popes (a huge extended family of fairly incompetent thieves, generations in the trade) to see what he might find on their premises while harassing them. Fulcher had a thing about arresting the Popes—they were his token whites, keeping his arrest record from charges of racism.

George sat alone on the curb, in T-shirt and jeans; arms hanging down between his legs. Soon as I saw the pistol lying beside him on the sidewalk, I pulled my gun. That's when he raised his arms and said, “I’m not running. Just don’t shoot.” His nose was bleeding, and he kept wiping at the blood that dripped into his mustache. He asked about Pym, but didn’t say much else, just stared out at the street. He didn’t say much more at his trial, except that he’d thought Pym was running toward a blue Ford to get another gun, and so had shot in self-defense. Of course, by the trial, who knew what cars might have been parked on that dark, crowded street.

I didn’t recognize Bobby Pym at first; he was out of uniform, and besides, his whole face was oozy with blood. A red hole gaped right through his eye, but incredibly enough he was still alive. There was a swarm of people (almost all black) hovering about, everybody pushing at each other, shouting; it was all pretty confused. I was yelling, “What happened?!” over the sound of sirens coming. But all I got was head shakes, shrugs, the mumbled, “Didn’t see it,” or, “Look like a fight,” and the blur of people's backs retreating fast into doorways. It's hard now to sort out what I
saw
, from what I heard at the trial, not that I even heard much of the trial; I wasn’t on record as the arresting officer. Like I said, I was only on the scene about five minutes before Captain Fulcher careened around the corner and took over. I was told to follow the ambulance to University Hospital
Emergency Room. An hour later Fulcher showed up there with Bobby's wife and father, and half a dozen police officers (including, I recall, his partner Winston Russell). Word came soon after they arrived that Officer Pym had already died in the O.R. When I left, Mrs. Pym (who looked about eighteen) was hysterically insisting that Bobby's killer had robbed him first, because Bobby's wallet wasn’t in the plastic bag of personal effects the nurse gave her. No one ever found the wallet. George certainly didn’t have it.

That was the end of my official involvement. The arresting officer of record was Van Dorn Fulcher, publicized as the captain who still works the toughest beat in town. Of course, I had no claim to the case, other than my having accidentally driven past the scene. I wasn’t even in homicide yet—not ’til I made lieutenant. And as I already had more than enough of my own cases, and my own troubles, George Hall gradually faded for me to just “the Hall case,” department gossip, maybe a little chagrin at a missed chance for “the big collar” that can speed promotion. It was only after George did the unexpected, when everybody had figured he’d go for guilty to second-degree, and pleaded innocent; and only after Mitchell Bazemore asked the jury for the death penalty, and they gave it to him, only then did my mind start going back to the image I’d first seen of George Hall, sitting slumped on the curb of that Canaan sidewalk, arms between his knees. From then on that image would push its way into my thoughts at odd times, and on bad nights George began to show up in my dreams.

Lying on my couch now, I dreamed he was with me on a search-and-destroy near a fire base under attack in the Mekong. Pitch-black steamy night, we were huddled together in the weeds of a hollowed riverbank; incoming whistling down on us, throwing up chunks of mud, the sky bright with red and green tracers. I yelled at George, “Where's it coming from? Theirs or ours!” His mouth was next to my ear, kind of chuckling. He said, “If you
knew
, man, you think there’d be any difference?” Then blood suddenly spat out of his mouth, hot and sticky across my face. It woke me up, sweating.

Later, Hiram Davies must have sneaked into my office, turned off my light, and draped my overcoat across me. At dawn the pigeons gossiping on the window ledge woke me again. I listened to
Brodie Cheek selling tapes of his salvation seminars on the radio while I did a few knee bends to get the kinks out. On my desk was a neatly typed report from Hiram, who preferred the slow formality of his old Royal to the faster pace of the computer, or just telling me whatever it was he had to say.

TO: C. R. Mangum, Capt., HPD

FROM: Sgt. H. Davies

RE: Suspects’ Access to HPD Impoundment Facility.

The “Hillston Police Department Impoundment Facility” was a little concrete building next to a chain-fenced lot on the west end of town. In the lot we kept unclaimed/abandoned, and recovered/stolen cars, motorcycles, and bikes, along with broken-down police vehicles. In the building we stored confiscated illegalities—by which I mean shelves of guns, rifles, and knives of considerable variety; shelves of pills, powders, and weeds of considerable variety; shelves of lewd and lascivious entertainments of the same considerable variety; and shelves of other people's property, even more various. The “suspects” I had in mind here were Officers Robert Earl Pym and Winston M. Russell, Jr. Their “access” to this “facility” in the period immediately preceding Pym's death had been, according to Hiram's research, “definitive and unobstructed.” In other words, flat-out easy, since (a) inventory procedures at the time had been lousy, and the records were a mess, (b) the night watchman at the time was an old retired cop on a pension who could have slept through the bombing of Dresden, and (c) Winston M. Russell, Jr. had once been assigned to duty there—long enough to get to know the place very well.

Now as soon as Pete Zaslo at the Silver Comet had let me in on news about the bad old days before the reign of Mangum the Incorruptible, my theory was that Russell and Pym had been selling off impounded HPD goodies to customers who were in no position to argue about prices, since they were themselves violating some stuffy old statute or other—like the ones against prostitution and gambling, both of which were rumored to have flourished, for example, upstairs at Smoke's. The first call I made after the pigeons
woke me up was to Justin, so he could get an early start working on my theory. He responded with a string of preppy profanities and silly demands that I tell him the time.

I said, “It's 6:09 A.M., Lieutenant. Turn on your radio; Brodie Cheek's already on the air telling us Jesus hates abortions and Mayor Carl Yarborough condones riots. I’m already at my desk. That's how I’ve risen to the top of the heap while you wallow in the shrubs below, clipping those coupons; how I climbed the ladder of success, beating the Peter Principle, while you were lying around just beating your peter; how I maximized—”

“Oh God, I can’t stand it,” he whined. “I’m up, I’m up, good-bye.”

The next call I made was to Warden Carpenter at Dollard Prison. He hoped I was phoning with news of Isaac Rosethorn, since George Hall continued to be overwrought in his demands to speak with Rosethorn immediately. I said there’d been no word from the old lawyer, but I’d let him know; meantime, I said, ask George if there was anyone else to whom he’d like to talk. Carpenter said George had made it clear he wanted Rosethorn, and nobody but Rosethorn.

Warden Carpenter was a big, rawboned, rural man, a former police chief himself, a vet with a burn scar down the left half of his face. He was slow spoken; I got my desk straightened up while I listened to him. “He's real different, George, these last few days. All along, and even, you know, the day before we were scheduled to carry out the sentence, well, George was…resigned, I guess. Kind of just pulled back real far inside himself, not fighting a thing, not interested, like he’d already died or something. Then the governor's stay—”

“You know I was out there the night Lewis dropped by?”

A long pause. Then, “No…well, maybe the shock of the reprieve, what happened to his brother, but George is real different now. Real agitated. Yelling at the guards, not eating, getting out of control. It's rattling the other men. Hate to think George could lose it after holding on all these years.”

I said, “Well, sir, you know if Hall does go crazy, the state can’t execute. Not ’til we cure him of the insanity enough so he can pay
attention when we kill him. Now, how's that for proof that capital punishment's there to deter killers, not for vengeance?”

Carpenter sighed into the phone. “The ones that
don’t
go crazy over here are the ones I wonder about, young fellow. We’re up to eight years wait time on death row. Kind of like getting forced to play Russian roulette eight years solid. The only ones don’t go crazy are the psychopaths, and the retards, and the suicidals begging for it. Oh, hell, I ought not to talk, you know, in general. You got to look at the individual situation. Every last one of them's a different case when you get down to it.”

Ten years ago, Warden Carpenter had walked into Dollard Prison a hidebound authoritarian, an unthinking racist, a guard of the guilty. But somehow, ten prison years had taught him the opposite of what you might predict—not more bigotry but a struggling tolerance. Now he was about as fair-minded as a warden in a crowded, antiquated, badly staffed, barbarically designed prison system could be. Fair-mindedness had given him a great reputation and bad stomach ulcers.

He said, “So what can I do for you, Cuddy? Not sending me anybody today, are you? We’re full, no vacancies.”

I said, “Just information. You remember a cop you had there, Winston Russell? Aggravated assault.”

There was another pause. Then, “Oh, yeah. Now there was a real s.o.b. I thought about arguing with the board to nix his parole, but hell, who wanted him around?”

“He's out, isn’t he?”

“Think he went down to his folks’ home in north Georgia, had a security job lined up. What's the problem?”

“This goes way back. Looks like he and Bobby Pym were in tight on an extortion scam, including maybe shakedowns at that bar in Canaan, Smoke's, where George Hall hung out, where he shot Pym. We’re just starting to dig into it—”

“What are you saying: George knew Pym and Russell were on the pad?”

“I’m not saying George knew it.”

“Well, still, I’d just leave that sucker down in Georgia. Somebody on the street’ll kill him down there sooner or later.
Somebody in here just about did already. Otherwise Winston would have been out couple of months back. We had him in the infirmary seven weeks.”