Time's Witness (31 page)

As he made a show of not knowing what I meant, I prodded him. “Otis Newsome? City comptroller? You know, the guy who gets you the contracts to supply Hillston with all its paper needs? Otis Newsome whose little brother Purley that works for me used to pal around with a cop named Bobby Pym, that had a brother-in-law named Willie Slidell that works for you? You follow me? That Otis Newsome. Are you and Otis close friends?”

Fanshaw went the color of his cummerbund, which was red in honor of the season. “I don’t know what you’re trying to suggest by these remarks.” As he left me standing there, and stomped over to the couch where Mrs. Fanshaw was yawning behind her hand, I guess he didn’t want to know either. He whispered something to her. She nodded pretty eagerly, leapt off the couch, sneaked around Judge Tiggs (who was telling a very long joke, the plot of which his wife kept correcting), and took Lee aside to whisper to her. Lee
looked over at me, questioning. I nodded, and Lee shook her head no at Mrs. Fanshaw.

Mrs. Sunderland told me where I could find a phone, and I excused myself to call the department. I asked Hiram to send some-body over to bring me my Olds and take back the squad car, so I wouldn’t have to drive Lee in the latter. Hiram said I couldn’t have my car. I asked if I could at least have the fingerprint report I’d asked for. “Five minutes,” he said, then connected me to the HPD garage where Etham Foster was still at work. Etham wanted me to know that he was right and I was wrong. It was something he pretty regularly wanted me to know. I said, “I didn’t think it was a bomb, and it wasn’t.”

“You’d have been just as dead if enough of that cyanide had seeped through the vents in your firewall. And probably would have, high up as you turn your heater. At the least you’d have passed out, crashed that new car, maybe killed somebody.”

“Okay, Dr. D. you were right. That old rabbit foot on my key chain has saved my butt half a dozen times, and looks like it's still got some hoodoo left. Enough to bring you on the scene. I know you don’t want me to thank you. Thank you.”

Whoever had lifted my keys had opened the hood and poured a solution of acid and cyanide under the cowl of the circulating system. With the heater fan on, the fumes would have been blown right in at me. This whoever obviously knew a lot about the parking garage, my car, and me, just not enough about me to know I was such a strong creature of habit regarding things like key chains. Etham said, “Couple of months back, didn’t somebody get blasted with some deer rut from the heater ducts in a squad car?”

“Zeke. Purley Newsome probably did it.”

“Think he did this?”

“On his own? I don’t think he's got the guts. But I’ve about decided he's not on his own.”

I had Etham connect me back with Hiram Davies at the desk, where I got the information I’d expected. Winston Russell's finger-prints were all over the Slidell farmhouse. He might have had relatives in north Georgia, but he sure hadn’t gone down there to take an honest job when he’d left Dollard Prison. “Okay, Hiram, call
Savile, tell him to get folks on this fast. That fuck Russell was right here in Hillston, but if he hasn’t gone by now he's going quick. So get it on the wire. And I want Purley Newsome picked up too. Check his brother's house. Then put out a bulletin—oh, and have the prints at Slidell's checked against Purley's file.”

“You want a bulletin out on Purley Newsome? Don’t want to wait, see if he shows up here for duty?—Due in a few hours anyhow.”

“I got a feeling Purley took early retirement this evening and didn’t bother to do it in writing. He's wherever his pal Winston is.”

“You think
they
tried to kill you? But good gravy, Chief!”

“Hiram, I want you to watch that strong language. Kiss Martha goodnight. Call you later.”

When I returned to the sitting room, the Fanshaws had left, pleading her headache (though I seriously doubt her head hurt anywhere near as much as mine did, despite all the alcohol I’d sent up to help it out). The eight of us guests remaining were then commanded by Edwina to play bridge. She picked me for her partner, and after I overrode some of her greedier swoops on the bid, we came out the winners, with $38.55. Well, I’m a good bridge player, despite a lack of practice opportunities other than the games in the newspaper. At any rate, Edwina was impressed, and between that and the Trollope and my violent job, she got carried away enough to propose that we have Judge Tiggs marry us then and there. I had to disappoint her on the claim that I was too old to keep up with her, but I grabbed the opportunity to recommend a more hedonistic bachelor—Bubba Percy. She’d never heard of Bubba Percy. I told her that despite, or because of, fatal character flaws, Bubba was the best journalist on her
Hillston Star
, much better than the man who ran that rotten rag. She said, “Send him to me.” Rather, I imagine, as old Queen Elizabeth One would have said it when she was in the mood for a set of well-shaped gartered legs with a Renaissance brain on top. I promised to send Bubba around, if she promised not to throw me over for his pompadour and curly eyelashes.

This chatty flirting wiled away the time while Lee was saying good-bye to Senator Dollard and the Tiggses. They all kissed her cheek affectionately. Well, she was one of them, even if she’d
married a Yankee-born liberal who was trying to steal the governor-ship from their native son, Julian D.-for-Dollard Lewis. In Edwina's terms—terms of pure, unadulterated capitalism—Lee was not just one of them, but
the
one. She was the international royal princess to their regional lords and ladies. And they’d have loved her no matter whom she’d married, as long as he was white and well-bred, because they’d known her not only all her life, but known her for generations before she was born, because she was born a Haver. There was
no one
that Andy Brookside could have married (including the Virgin Mary, because there’re not that many Catholic voters around here), who could have helped him more powerfully to pull that gubernatorial chair out from under the junta who’d shoved Wollston into it, the man before Wollston into it, and—if they had their way—the man after Wollston into it too.

Lee was the perfect choice for a candidate's wife. Not just because campaigns cost money, and she had money; not just because politics is photo opportunities, and she was photogenic. Not just because she had relatives and friends in the state. Lee Haver
was
the state. She summed the state up in her family's history of private success and public service, of scandals, philanthropies, and heroics—her great-great-grandfather's university, her wastrel grand-father's celebrity, her noble father's death fighting Communists. And most of all, that history of money, money, money. She summed up, in her name, the state's century-long climb out of rural poverty and illiteracy; she industrialized the state, modernized it, capitalized it; she brought the Yankees to their knees, and then moved them in and built them shopping malls. She was the dream of
winning.
Was that why Andy had married her? Why she had married him? Was his victory to be Lee Haver's service to her state?

Standing in the hallway, I watched her, wrapped in her black fur, bend to hug the little widow of the department store, whom Paul Madison was driving home. I saw Paul take Lee's hands, thanking her. Heard him say, “Your check will mean a lot to the Hall Fund; we’re just very grateful for your, your, your incredible generosity.”

She said, “I was glad to be able to help. I share Andy's deep concern about this case….And Paul, please, let me know more
about this new convalescent home you were talking about? Will you?”

“Oh absolutely!” Paul nodded, still holding her hands as if he was going to kiss them.

Yep, even if Brookside didn’t love her (and I had no reason but envy to think he didn’t), he couldn’t have made a better choice. And if he was jeopardizing it for a few more trophies on his cocks-manship, he did indeed, as Lee had said, need to take deadly risks.

Edwina had sneaked up behind me in the hall, while I was watching Lee. “Is that cracked skull bothering you, Cuthbert, or are you just sad to leave me and get back to your much more fascinating criminals?”

I sighed, turning to her. “Most of my ‘criminals’ are boring, Eddie. Dumber than they think they are, poorer than they wanna be, and resentful as shit of folks like you.” I buttoned my overcoat. “Your TV shows that keep most of the underclass comatose; well, those shows make ‘my criminals’ all mean and itchy, know what I mean?”

She flashed those long yellow incisors at me in a grin. “That's what my TV shows are there for. To keep the vast majority comatose. Lucky for you. Otherwise, the streets would be full of guns, wouldn’t they? And that's mighty bad for business.” She got in one last hand squeeze. “Now kiss me good-night.” I did so, and smelled talcum powder, sweet alcohol, and a flowery odor like old sachets in musty linen. “Look at that.” She pointed me at the window. “A nice seasonal touch for my party. I wanted it to snow. And it's snowing.” A few flakes were floating slowly down and settling on the long stone front steps. I said, “You see some causal connection between your desire and the weather, Eddie?”

Patting her yellow diamonds, she frowned at me. “No, I’ve never thought for a minute I could get snow if I wanted it, or anything else of that
nature.
I sensibly limited my desires to things I could buy. Goodnight, now, thank you for coming, and go give Lee Brookside that ride home—since that's what she informs me you’ve offered her. I suppose she dislikes imposing on her driver.”

Edwina's old pale eyes were hard as her diamonds, but I wasn’t about to let her stare me down. I said, “Thank you for having me. I
enjoyed it. You’re a brainy woman. It's a crime you were too lazy to run that newspaper yourself. Maybe you’d have gotten a real kick out of the power of the press. Since you claim the power of money's done nothing but bore the pants off you for seventy-two years.”

I suspect I’d nicked her a little, but she came right back. “Power of money
is
the power of the press—without getting your fingers inky.”

I gave her the look she was giving me. “Well, inky fingers might have been better than wasting away your whole life bullying your friends over a deck of cards.”

She backed off a step and rubbed the corners of her mouth with her two middle fingers. “Ah…I don’t think I’m going to worry anymore about your safety among our little group, Captain Mangum. Because you’ve got a nice mean streak in you. So go on now and take her home.”

Maybe Mrs. Sunderland didn’t need to worry about me, but I did. I mean, I thought I
ought
to worry, ought to worry about consequences and responsibilities—all those things I’ve got a long habit of worrying about. But I’d put off thinking until it was too late. It took only ten minutes to drive to Briarhills, which wasn’t long enough. Neither Lee nor I spoke. All I could do was feel her beside me in the enclosed still space of the dark car. I felt enveloped by intimacy, familiar, strong as a pulse. And at the same time an almost panicking sense of freedom and strangeness surged in my chest. The fact that I wore formal, uncustomary clothes, the fact that the car was an anonymous, unmarked patrol car, with its Spartan interior and all its metallic equipment, the fact that snow, unusual in Hillston, was swirling like moths into the car lights—all of it made more intense both the intimacy and the strangeness. As long as we kept in motion, neither in her world nor in mine, but just winding along the dark wooded roads, we were free. We could drift, suspended in the night, circling our lives like a sky of stars.

But we weren’t circling. We were moving across North Hillston toward Briarhills, and in the ordinary sublunary amount of time, we reached the brick columns of the gates and turned in. The driveway was as straight and as long and as bordered by lights as an airline runway. High-branched rows of sycamore trees on either side of the
drive blocked my view of the grounds, but I could remember where the wooden Japanese bridge had crossed the creek, and where the gazebo had looked through lattice over the pool, and where the greenhouse was hidden by the grove of cherry and willow trees. I could remember the house, the tall, impregnable expanse of white façade, with its sixteen shuttered windows across the front. (I’d stood on the steps and counted them one afternoon after Lee's mother had gently lied that Lee wasn’t home, and then softly closed the door on me.)

There were lights burning in carriage lamps on either side of the wide varnished door, and lights on in most of the windows. And ground lights where the driveway ended in a paved oval with a fountain in its center. From the pool rose a statue of a young woman in a tunic with her arm around an antlered deer. The pool was circled by flower beds—except now in December, there were no flowers; I just remember them having been there, the extravagant patterns of unfamiliar colors.

Onto the trees and brick and statuary, snow now fell, and vanished. I stopped the car, and turned to Lee. “Who's having the party? All your lights are on.”

She looked at me, then vaguely at the house as if she didn’t recognize it. “Oh. The lights? Nobody. No one's home.”

“Oh.” Around us, night was lightened by the falling white snow, and softened. Everything was losing its shape, the outline of the shrubbery, the sharp corners of the house.

She said, “Well, the Reeds, but they’re probably all asleep by now.”

“Bessie Reed still works here?”

“Yes, and her son and his wife. You remember her?”

“Yes.” I turned off the motor, and listened to the fullness of the silence.

She said, “Bessie gave me a note from you once. Brought it up to my room while my mother was having a lunch party. A note that you were—”

“That I was waiting by the little Japanese bridge.”

“Yes.”

I stared at my hands moving up and down on the steering
wheel. Finally I asked her, “Why did you tell Brookside I’d be at this party tonight?”

She looked at my hands as she answered, “So if anyone mentioned it to him later, he would have already heard it casually from me.”

I thought of ten or fifteen things I could ask or say next, then felt each one get caught in my throat and slide burning back down inside me. We sat watching the silent snow curtain the car windows, enclosing us. I could see her without looking at her, the line of her cheek and mouth, the dark gold hair brushing the curve of her ear, the pale blue vein in her neck. I could hear her breath, and the slippery sound of her nylons as she crossed her legs. I could smell the cold air caught in the black fur of her coat.