Time's Witness (30 page)

Arrested on our way out the double-sized doors, to cross the parqueted hall into a dining room that disdained electricity, all the guests froze in a cluster, nodding at these instructions from our hostess as solemnly as recruits getting the battle drill from General Patton. I moved over to Lee, who still stood by a grand piano covered with lace, loose sheet music, and framed photographs, including one of Mrs. Sunderland in a long-line of red-eyed people bowing and curtsying to Queen Elizabeth II.

Lee smiled at me, whispering, “The no-politics orders are for Kip Dollard. Sometimes he forgets where he is and starts filibustering the dinner table. It drives Edwina nuts. She believes in ‘conversation.’”

I whispered, “Why does she invite him?”

“Oh, I think they had an affair about a hundred years ago and she's sentimental.”

“Um hum, like the Borgia popes.”

“What happened to your head?”

“I’m okay. Somebody knocked me out.”

“Are you
serious?
”

“Sometimes I’m real serious.” I smiled at her. “Listen, tell me, why does Edwina—”

She put her finger to her lips. “Shhhhh.” Lee's neck and shoulders were bare. Her long dress was a sheath of pale glimmering fabric that rustled when she moved.

I whispered, “She keeps calling me Cuthbert. Did you tell her to?”

“No, she had a great-uncle whose name was Cuthbert, and he was called Cuddy. She thinks maybe you’re related.”

Hands clapped once. They were those of our hostess, who had caught us whispering while the other guests marched obediently to dinner. Chastened, we joined the end of the line.

Turning to me between the salmon and game hens, as I sat enthroned on her left in a high-backed stiff velvet chair with knobbed arms, Mrs. Marion Sunderland explained that her Catawba Hills house (which had always been her house, and not
Mr.
Marion Sunderland's, because it had always been a Nowell-Randolph house, and that was exactly what Edwina Sunderland had always been, even after her marriage—as was testified by the worn N-R on my thin silver napkin ring), Mrs. Sunderland's 1857 golden-brick, porticoed and columned house had always been called Palliser Farm. Though, until, as she bluntly put it, she’d “gotten her hands on Marion's money,” and fixed it up again, Palliser Farm had been a ghost house, having lost over the generations all of its live-stock and much of its furniture.

Presumably the other guests, spaced like a conference of
cardinals in their own narrow thrones, already knew the name of their hostess's home; they were at any rate not listening to Mrs. Sunderland give me her genealogy, but were all busy between courses, turning from their seating partners on the right to those on their left: Lee from Dyer Fanshaw to Judge Tiggs, Mrs. Fanshaw from me to the bank, Mrs. bank from Father Paul Madison to Senator Kip Dollard, and so on, along the dark oval expanse of a dining table the ten of us could have probably slow-danced on, if the party had gotten wild enough—which it wasn’t likely to do, despite Judge Tiggs's two-handed pumping of a crystal wine carafe whenever his wife wasn’t looking. The very old and very shrunken widow of the department store, who’d told me at the Club dance to ignore her because she was hard of hearing, must have told her dinner partners the same; at any rate she was talking quite happily to the oblivious Fanshaw while he was picking at his pearl onions as if he was afraid somebody's eyeball had gotten mixed in with them. He’d avoided me during cocktails, but then so had Kip Dollard—though maybe only because Dollard had always found his sister's son, Justin, an embarrassment, and I reminded him of Justin. Judge Tiggs, on the other hand, had been friendly all evening (apparently having never noticed in our forensic dealings—before his retirement after the George Hall trial—that I thought him a disgrace to his profession who’d filled Dollard Prison with endless victims of his bias or boredom or sore fanny).

“Why's your place called Palliser Farm?” I asked Edwina (as she’d insisted I call her). “Is it because you were a Trollope as well as a Nowell-Randolph?”

Her raucous laugh bounced the loops of garnets and yellow diamonds on her ample, wrinkled bosom, and startled Mrs. Fanshaw, beside me, into spooning too much salt on her yam. “Cuthbert, you and I shall be friends,” Edwina announced, with a squeeze of my hand that left the impression of those loose diamonds of hers dinted into a few of my fingers. “Mangum…Mangum. What was your mother's maiden name?”

“Cobb.”

“No, it's not familiar. But good English names. Well, a Hillston policeman who reads Trollope. I want you to call me Eddie.”

I gave her the country smile. “Lord, what do folks read who get to call you ‘Ed’?” This set her off again, but I snatched my hand away in time by grabbing one of my sharp-stemmed wineglasses—these with a fat “S” cut into them, so post “N-R,” maybe part of Mr. Sunderland's dowry. I said, “But I’ve got to disabuse you, Eddie, I saw my Trollope on TV, and it wasn’t even your channel. It was the good channel, you know, the intellectual one. The one you own goes more in for blood, sweat, tears, and smut. Terrible shows about tacky rich families deceiving one another, and shows with these old has-been comedians sitting up in little Tic-Tac-Toe boxes—”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know.” She picked up a tiny game hen wing with her fingers and took a sturdy bite out of it, so I dropped my useless knife and fork, and did the same. “Channel Seven is unwatchable, except by the mentally and morally retarded.”

I said, “Lucky for you, there's so many of both crowded around the Piedmont tuning in.”

“Lucky for me? Explain yourself.”

“Well, their tacky taste supports your good taste.” I gave a nod at the furnishings.

Mrs. Sunderland took a hefty sip of wine. “Cuthbert,” she swilled the wine around like a mouthwash for a minute. “Cuthbert, capitalism is not a benevolent system. It is, in fact, the pure opposite. And I have always believed it's damn silly to pretend otherwise, though I have many mealy mouthed acquaintances who do exactly that.” Paul Madison opened his mouth, but she reached across and stopped him with one of those bone-crunchers to the wrist. “Girls I went to college with. They’ll sell off their chemical stocks one year, and their South African stocks the next year, whatever horror gets to be the liberal boogyman, and then they’ll buy themselves something ‘nicer,’ that's just as profitable.”

I buttered a roll and held it up. “Have their cake and
caritas
too.”

“Yes, sir!” Another laugh that set her ear bobs swinging, though I don’t think a hurricane could have budged those laminated blue waves of hair. “Well, it's damn silly. I say, in or out. By the luck of birth, I’m in. I enjoy the fruits of other people's labor. And my charities I take off my taxes.”

Senator Kip Dollard, white haired and red nosed—sort of what a Dorian Gray portrait of Justin might have gotten to look like— heard the word taxes and launched a multi-metaphoric salvo across the candles that flickered their flames. “If handed the reins of this good state of ours, the Democrats will gallop their Taxation Chariot over the backs of business, sowing the seeds of inflation and misery like dragon's teeth—”

“Kip, confound it!” Mrs. Sunderland gave her crystal goblet such a crack with her spoon, I was surprised it didn’t shatter. The sound did, however, shatter the old senator, who sputtered out one more classical allusion to the many-headed Hydra, then continued his speech privately to Mrs. bank in a hushed murmur.

Somebody from behind my shoulder slipped my plate away while I was saying, “Oh come on, Eddie, what about good capitalists, laissez-faire philanthropy? What about everybody rising to the top by the action of the cream? Wasn’t that the American Revolution's plan?”

She said, “Horse shit.” Mrs. Fanshaw looked up, scared into trembles, and her peas slid right off her silver fork into her lap; she sneakily shook them onto the floor as her hostess boomed on. “The American Revolution was to protect middle-class capitalism from aristocratic exploitation. The Civil War was to protect Southern capitalism from Northern capitalism, and vicey versy. Slaves picked the cotton in Georgia; immigrants made the shirts in Massachusetts. And both sides paid sweet boys like Paul here to preach to them about camels and needle eyes.”

I leaned over to whisper in her powdered ear. “You know what I think you really are deep down, Eddie? A Marxist.”

She grinned, swiping her napkin across her lips and leaving it with a bloody look. “No sir, I’m a Nowell-Randolph. A Sunderland by acquisition.”

“Well, I wish your Channel Seven newshound acquisition wouldn’t root around quite so much in all the
carnage.
Stirs the viewers up; it's like flashing full moons at werewolves. Then they rampage, and I have to deal with the messy results.”

“Cuddy has a very cynical opinion of human nature, Mrs. Sunderland.” Paul Madison grinned at us from behind a fat candelabrum. “He's a Puritan at heart. Calvinist. Original sin.”

Edwina shook her leg, or rather the little hen's leg, at Paul. “Paulie, you don’t believe in sin at all, which is mighty peculiar in a man of the cloth, and probably grounds for dismissal.” They both laughed at this risqué flirtation with orthodoxy.

I said, “Yep, Paul's unfallen. That's why he looks thirty years younger than he is.”

Paul blushed in a peculiar, hurt kind of way. Then he smiled. “Maybe that's my sin.” He turned to Mrs. Tiggs, leaving me feeling like I’d said something wrong. I looked down to the other end of the table where Lee, dark gold in the candlelight, raised her wineglass to her lips as she nodded at something Judge Tiggs was saying. She turned her head toward me as if she could feel me looking at her. And she smiled. The frail judge babbled on, abruptly laughing, jerking his bald skinny head back like a chicken somebody was choking. I’d seen him laugh that way at his own witless jokes in the courtroom for years. His jokes were the laughingstock of the municipal building, but not the way he imagined. His wife made a flanking grab for the carafe, around the flower bowl; she and Tiggs did a silent little tug-of-war, which she won.

Lee put down her wineglass slowly, still looking at me. All the other guests seemed to go static and silent, like painted figures in an old mural. But they didn’t know it, and kept on chattering.

Back in the sitting room for cordials, Lee played the piano for Paul, who sang a few comic songs from
The Mikado
, dedicating “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” with a wink at me, to Judge Tiggs. The judge merrily choked out that high spastic laugh of his; it's clear there were no bad ghosts in his memory. The widow of the department store started clapping a few notes before “Tit Willow” was over. The bank had set her down like a slumped baby in a deep flowered armchair, and she finally gave up trying to pull herself out of it and get to the dish of chocolates. She cooed, “Just so pretty. I love hymns. I thought the hymns at Briggs Cadmean's funeral were as moving as they could be. Didn’t y’all? I did.”

Senator Dollard raised his snifter. “A great man, a great North Carolinean, a great—”

“Lovely, lovely hymns. And you couldn’t see the coffin for the flowers. That was so nice. Eddie, it's downright tragic your arthritis wouldn’t allow you to attend.”

Eddie brought over the silver candy dish, setting it down in her friend's lap, where it stayed until there wasn’t a Godiva left for the rest of us. She said, “Sue Ann, I despised Briggs Cadmean. And it wasn’t my arthritis that wouldn’t allow me to attend. It was my stomach. I wasn’t about to sit listening to Hillston fawn over that pile of bull manure the way it did his whole life.” No one defended the dead man.

Dyer Fanshaw, having kept carefully out of my vicinity all night, suddenly stopped poking at the fire with a brass tong, crossed the room, and led me into a corner. “Look here,” he said, then scratched at his upper lip where he’d shaved off that mustache he’d grown for the Confederacy Ball. “Sorry I cut you off back at the funeral, but you know, upsetting circumstances, so on. You said one of my shipping clerks might be stealing paper from me? I’ve looked into it. There’re no indications of any such thing. What made you say it?” He had us squeezed between a highboy and the Christmas tree, and kept nervously glancing out at the room, like he was going to whip some dirty pictures out of his dinner jacket. At the piano, Lee and Paul were taking requests now; they appeared to have the entire Gilbert and Sullivan corpus at their fingertips—maybe a prerequisite for these Anglophilic affairs.

I said, “Mr. Fanshaw—”

“Dyer, Cuddy.”

“What made me say it, Dyer? About a ton's worth of paper rolls my detective saw in Willie Slidell's barn. Or was that a holiday bonus?”

He shook his head impatiently. “Our inventory's intact. And I did check into this man. He has a good record. Why was a detective even out at his house? I was told he's on sick leave now. The flu.”

“Worse than that.” But I wasn’t going to mention how much worse just yet. Instead I told him, “This detective of mine, well, he thinks this Slidell of yours might have killed somebody. Cooper
Hall.”

Fanshaw's eyes bulged, he was staring so hard. “My God, why?” He was shocked. Maybe he was a little too shocked. “You’re arresting Slidell?”

I said, “Nope. He disappeared from his farm. Seems like working for you can be pretty high risk. Slidell gone. And here's George Hall, drove one of your trucks, didn’t he, and he's on death row.”

It took Fanshaw a while to focus; when he did, his mood had changed. “Look here, what are you getting at, Mr. Mangum?” We seemed to be back to last names fast.

As I answered, I turned to join the polite clapping for Paul and Lee, who’d finished up with a fast-talking tune from
Pinafore.
“Well, I’m still wondering about that Mr. Koontz who died. Why his card, with ‘Newsome’ written on it, showed up in Cooper Hall's address book.”

We stared at each other a little bit. Then he muttered, “I have no idea. I would assume Clark tried to sell the man some paper supplies, and gave him the card.”

“Since Hall didn’t buy paper—from you folks or anybody else— odd he would have kept the card so long.” Fanshaw shrugged. I said, “Otis claims he never met Cooper Hall. Should I believe him? Y’all pretty close?”