Time's Witness (33 page)

When I arrived, Nora and Isaac had already been talking through the case together for hours, and it was a little unsettling to hear her sound so familiar with names I’d been fretting over for a long time, names she’d probably never heard before tonight. But Isaac had a way of forming these strong initial impressions, and acting on them instantly. Turns out that when he’d banged on Nora Howard's door to see if she knew me (she told him she didn’t think I’d been home since Christmas morning—which was maybe a little too nosily observant of her), she’d offered to help him get into my apartment by tricking Mr. Morrison—with whom I was going to have to have a serious talk. Then she’d invited Isaac over so Billy could “sleep,” and twenty minutes later, Isaac had hired her to clerk for him on the Hall case while she was studying for the state bar exams. She’d told him she’d read some of his briefs, and that she figured that working for Isaac Rosethorn would be the best cram course for passing the bar she could take. Her admiration undoubtedly flattered any reservations out of the old egomaniac, so Nora and he were now fast pals. Maybe she was even planning to put him up in her extra bedroom (mine had no bed, just books). Her little boy and girl were off in their Christmas teepee with her brother's kids, all of them camping out on the floor of Carippini's Restaurant for the adventure of it. This family news was given me by Isaac himself, who appeared to have made himself at home with the Howards mighty quickly, what with his wandering around in his stocking feet on his first visit, and to have taken an unprecedented domestic turn—cooking those nocturnal potato skins she referred to as “ours.”

“That woman's got a very fine brain,” he told me. “Wasted,
wasted on tax law in Houston of all places.”

“Her husband worked for NASA.”

“I know, I know, poor dear, a tragedy to be widowed at her age, and with young children. But time and faith, time and faith. And extremely fortuitous that she moved to Hillston. Very good ideas. We’ve come up with
twenty-eight
points for our appeal to Judge Roscoe, only twenty-four of which I’d already thought of myself.” (He delivered this compliment with his typical complaisance.) “Let's get back over there. But first…”

But first, Isaac thought I should, as he tactfully put it, “go freshen up.” Taking me by the arm, he rubbed his wide thumb across the side of my mouth. His soulful eyebrows lifted slowly as he then examined his thumb. “Slim, you look a little…obvious.”

Off in the bathroom mirror, I saw what he meant, and why Nora Howard had been giving me such peculiar glances—though frankly she had no right to make judgments about the personal business of a complete stranger, and I was annoyed that I felt, well, embarrassed, even guilty, when I saw myself. It wasn’t just the lipstick smears; my mouth was swollen, there was a blood-bruise on my neck, a stud was missing from my ruffled shirt, and my bow tie hung loose around my neck. I looked (even to Isaac Rosethorn, who might still be a virgin, for all I know) like I’d been doing exactly what I’d been doing. I “freshened up.”

Walking across the hall to Nora's, I asked Isaac what Coop Hall thought of Andy Brookside. He said he didn’t know, that Coop and he had never discussed politics—for which Rosethorn had a Swiftian contempt—though he knew that Coop himself was interested in someday running for public office and that Jack Molina had encouraged him about it. I told him why I was asking.

In Nora's living room, over potato skins and beer, I was initially a little irritable with Isaac and his new law partner. It didn’t seem fair that after all this time when I’d led my workaholic monk's existence, that the first chance I got at the private life which everybody had pestered me to find, I should end up the object of a search party. Why couldn’t I have spent a few hours alone with a woman without half a dozen people trying to track me down? Why couldn’t I make love to a woman without, two hours later, having to listen to two
lawyers analyze the political bearing of a murder case on that woman's husband's career? Why couldn’t I have come home to dream that Lee and I were more than just one night's fulfillment of an old interrupted infatuation, without finding a wheezy wino convict hiding in my bed? Why couldn’t I say, no, I don’t want to argue evidence at three in the morning when I could be floating to sleep in a reverie about a woman whom I’d wanted half my life and who’d just told me that tonight had been the most intense sexual communion she’d ever felt.

Well, but I didn’t say, no, I’d rather sleep. So maybe that's why I don’t have much of a personal life. Because as soon as Isaac Rosethorn said that the person Billy Gilchrist was hiding from was Winston Russell, I was wide awake, and on the phone to Hiram Davies to send over copies of the files I’d already collected about the case. That's when Isaac allowed that I’d “impressed” him. That's when I told him that if he’d come to me as soon as Gilchrist had come to him, maybe we could have saved somebody's life.

I didn’t mean Cooper Hall's life. I meant Willie Slidell's. Because Billy Gilchrist hadn’t shown up at Isaac's hotel until late on the night of Coop's death—at about the time of the “Canaan Riot.” The story Billy’d told Isaac then was this; in fact, exactly this, because I woke Billy up and made him tell it again.

Gilchrist looked horrible and sounded worse; apparently he’d slipped away from Isaac a few times on their trip North and skidded into the nearest bar; apparently he hadn’t brought along a change of clothes either. Scrawny and shaking, gray faced, he sat swallowed by Nora's wing-backed chair, with an electric blanket wrapped around him, and gave me a weak hopeful smile. “Chief, this don’t come easy. It hadn’t been for Father Paul showing me the light, no way I’d be blabbing my fucking guts out to the law—excuse me, Mrs. Howard. But all those years I kept mum, well, I’m sorry for them.”

I sipped what I’ll admit was a lot better coffee than my freeze-dried. “Mum about what, Billy?”

“Lifting that cop's wallet. ’Course, I didn’t figure him for no cop at that particular time. Just some boozed-up redneck busting into Smoke's, picking on a spade happens to be sitting there with my
acquaintance, goes by the tag Moonfoot.”

I checked out my translation. “That night in Smoke's, you stole Bobby Pym's wallet while he was preoccupied with harassing George Hall?”

Gilchrist nodded.

“Deliberately and specifically George Hall?” prodded Isaac from the blue couch where he and Nora sat together, sharing notes on their legal pads.

“Huh?”

I repeated it. “Pym picked on George in particular?”

“Yeah, he went straight up his ass—I’m sorry. I mean, he was ugly to the whole joint, and feeding the jukebox while they had this spade guitar player doing his number, junk like that, but he was riding Hall the most. Yeah, deliberate.”

“You had the impression Pym
knew
Hall?”

“I didn’t have no impressions, Captain. I’m a bystander. They’re shoving each other around, and Pym takes a fall. I sort of help him up and I cop his wallet, pants pocket, you know. Then the cop leaps up—I mean, later on I hear how he's a cop—and Christ Almighty the fucker pulls a gun, sticks it up Hall's nose. Think about it, here I am with the man's wallet and he's waving a gun at the joint. So I think, ‘What's going on?’ Plus I knew Moonfoot was in the business—”

“Like breaking into cigarette warehouses and selling the merchandise out of state, that type business?”

“Yeah, well, you hear these rumors, you know.”

“And you thought maybe George and maybe Pym were in this business too? Well, Billy, I sure wish you’d done your civic duty and mentioned it back then to somebody like me.”

He snorted at the stupidity of this suggestion. “Sure, I got a dead cop's wallet, I got a record, and I’m gonna volunteer my ‘impressions.’ Sure.”

“At any point did Bobby Pym say anything to Butler?”

“Moonfoot was out of there the second that gun showed up.”

Nora asked a question now. “There was trial testimony that as Pym pushed the muzzle into George's nostril, he said, ‘Your ass is grass, buddy.’ Did you hear anything like that?”

Gilchrist whined, tugging the blanket around his skinny shoulders. “I can’t remember all these details! Rosethorn's already put me through this with a fucking lice comb. Awh, shit—excuse me—all I’m giving you's the picture, okay? Pym was in the black guy's face.”

Nora leaned forward. “But the ‘picture’ you had was that Pym was threatening George's life? That was your sense of it?”

“He wasn’t asking him to dance. Listen, y’all spring for a drink maybe? Look at my hands.” It was hard to get a clear look at them, they were shaking so much. Finally Isaac let him have a bottle of Guinness Stout, which Gilchrist said tasted like motor oil—a pickier palate than you’d expect in a wino. He drank it though. His description of the fight itself tallied pretty closely with the trial record. After the shot, Billy said he followed the crowd outside and saw Pym lying on the sidewalk. When I showed up in the patrol car, he slipped back into Smoke's and hid upstairs, where he also kindly warned the private party shooting craps to clear the cash off the floor in case the cops came up. Not that Captain Fulcher ever went to the trouble. But Billy had kept a lookout from the upstairs window. And he was still looking out after the ambulance had left, and Fulcher's team was inside the bar questioning whoever hadn’t managed to leave in time.

It was then that Billy noticed a large white man running out of the cheap hotel across the street and driving off in a Ford parked down the block; Billy noticed him because he was white, and because he had
run
to the car, and because he assumed the man had gotten into some kind of trouble with a black hooker or her boyfriend, since the “hotel,” locally known as “Clenny's Cathouse,” was 10 percent flop joint and 90 percent brothel.

Nora flipped through pages of her legal pad. Isaac leaned over, circling a note on a page. She said, “And you later decided this man was Winston Russell?”

“Yeah, like I said, I hear rumors this cop named Russell is nosing around Smoke's, putting the word out he wants to know who maybe lifted this wallet of his pal's, okay, and somebody by way of a friend points Russell out to me, okay, and it's the same redheaded guy I saw beating it out of Clenny's.”

Nora said, “You’re sure of that, Billy? When you saw him, it was
dark and he was running.”

“I saw him pretty good standing in Clenny's doorway.”

I said, “Meanwhile, you had Pym's wallet, with, I believe Isaac mentioned, eight hundred dollars in it. Which you spent.”

His rheumy eyes looked sadly at his hands. “I didn’t have no self-esteem at that particular time in my life, Captain Mangum. I was lost. I’ll tell you the truth, I hit the bottle, flew to Vegas and blew every cent. If it wasn’t for Jesus leading me to sal—”

“Um hum.” I forestalled his born-again testimony, which I (and everybody else in HPD) had already heard a number of times. “Now, you also found in Pym's wallet, according to Isaac, a public locker key. Is that right?”

“That's right. When I get back from Vegas, I scout around with this key, and finally I hit it at the bus station in Raleigh.”

“And what did you find in this locker?”

“Suitcase.”

“And in the suitcase?”

“Sixty-seven thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine dollars in cash.”

I stared at Nora and Isaac, both of whom nodded at me. I said, “That's a lot of loose cash.”

Isaac said, “When Cooper told me the rumors that Robert Pym was not the sterling police officer Mitch Bazemore had conjured so successfully for that jury, but a thief and an extortionist, my first impulse was to find a record of irregular income—had he bought his wife a new freezer, put in a pool, made odd bank deposits, that sort of thing. But we came up empty. We came up empty because the money was still in that locker.”

Billy said, “I open the suitcase, and I see sixty-seven thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine dollars.”

I asked him, “You counted it?”

“I hid it, then I counted it. I relocked the locker, and I hid the key too. I still got it. It's taped under a drawer in my bureau.”

I said no, actually, the key was at this moment in an envelope labeled “B. Gilchrist,” in the in-basket at my office. “I hope you had a warrant,” Isaac said.

“Nah, it's all right,” Billy shrugged. “Captain Mangum's done
me favors too.” The con man sank deeper into the heat of the electric blanket and sucked on his beer. “So, anyhow, I gotta figure the way Russell's been pushing for info, he's after the dead guy's wallet because of that key. Wasn’t no sentimental journey, like maybe he was gonna bronze that wallet for a souvenir of his buddy, you know? I do some asking around too. Word's out ’bout two cops doing a hustle, and I peg Pym and Russell for it. Moonfoot Butler, he fills me in, how these two put the squeeze on him after they pulled him on a B and E rap. So how he was getting merchandise for them—heavy quantity stuff now, too, cigarettes, even guns and ammo, is what he said. So I know all this cash ain’t ’cause these cops won big at bingo over at the station, you know? Then, next thing I hear, Moonfoot skips, like he dropped through a hole. Not a trace. Tell you the truth, at that particular time, I figured the cop had pumped one in him.”

I asked Isaac, “Moonfoot Butler confirms this in his deposition?” Nodding yes, Isaac pulled a folder from the pile on the floor, and shook it at me. I said, “Okay, Billy, so you find the money. Hall goes on trial for first-degree murder. Then what?”

“Well, for a while I lay off, real quiet. Then I hear on the news how Russell's got
himself
busted, A and B on some hooker, I hear, and he's pulled six to nine at Dollard. So I say to myself, ‘You’re home free, Billy,’ and that's when I start unloading the other stuff. What I did was wrong, but I know my Lord forgives me, and I want to thank God for punishing me in His fire, and then washing me in the waters of—”

“Yes, that's fine, that's good,” I said. “This is ‘other stuff’ you found in the suitcase in addition to the money?”

Gilchrist yawned. “Yeah. Plastic bags with police tags on them; mostly pot, some coke, two or three were pills.” He yawned again, his eyes flickering. “Couple of guns. I dumped the guns. I never messed with guns. That was always a strict rule with me.” His eyes closed, and his head fell to his shoulder.