Time's Witness (38 page)

With me, Martha took the injured icy tone of a neglected wife.
And she was right that I didn’t pay much attention to her these days. Paul Madison was right that I never laughed much these days. Lee was right that I was losing weight. Justin was right that I was “obsessed” with the Hall case; out of guilt over Cooper's murder, he said. I don’t know if he was right about that or not. I do know that the only time I could stop thinking about the Hall brothers was when Lee Brookside was in my arms. And the only way I could stop thinking about what I was going to do about my feelings for Lee was to work on the Hall case.

Not that Lee was in my arms that often, or even that she would have been there if I’d had all that world enough and time to give her. I was available but preoccupied, trying to keep a hundred thousand people from robbing, raping, beating, and generally bothering each other, or at least trying to remove from circulation the ones who went ahead and did such things. Lee was
un
available, and preoccupied, trying to get her husband elected governor, or at least win over to his side as many as she could of the Inner Circle, at whose hub she sat in a series of gowns, supporting the arts, dispensing charity, and oiling the social axle with endless luncheons, dinners, dances, parties, hunts, receptions, and other such fund-raisers. Between us, we didn’t have time for an affair.

We also didn’t want to think that's what we were doing, having an affair. But we didn’t want to think about the two alternatives either; at least we didn’t want to talk about them. The first alternative was for her to leave her husband, either in the middle of a political campaign, or after he won it, or after he lost it. The other alternative was for us to stop falling in love again. We tried the second plan a few times, but then she’d telephone me late at night or we’d brush against each other in the crush of a cocktail party, and that would be the end of our ending it. We never discussed the first alternative. So months went by, with us meeting at my apartment at very rare intervals; I didn’t feel real easy about it, not with the zoo across the hall, not with Laura and Brian likely to bang on my door to watch my cable channels while enjoying some microwave popcorn, not with Isaac likely to want to borrow a book at 1:00 A.M., not with Nora giving me looks that irrationally made me feel even more guilty than I already did.

Often Lee and I would go driving somewhere we hoped was out of the way; we’d take walks or sit in the car. It was cold weather for love. Sometimes, not often, we’d meet out of town. Once we spent a weekend in a hotel in Bermuda, when Brookside had gone to Boston; we flew there on separate planes, because I figured it would be just my luck to have Carol Cathy Cane lunge out at us with her Action News cameraman at the airport, or for Mrs. Marion Sunderland to show up across the aisle or a Democratic party official, or any of a thousand other possibilities. And in fact, that particular night while I was waiting for my flight to board, I was greeted within half an hour by a police chief from a coastal town, by Mrs. Atwater Randolph (on her way to Colorado to annul her granddaughter's marriage), and by two strangers who said they’d seen me on the news. The fact was, too many people in the Piedmont knew not only Lee Haver Brookside, but me. Adultery made me aware for the first time that I was, well, I guess you’d say, a public figure; I’d never thought of myself in that way before, nor as a “public servant” as Justin was wont to define his job, nor as a “public official,” though that came a little closer. If I had to describe my position, I suppose I thought of myself as the executive head of a law enforcement bureau. But of course, it was a public bureau, dealing with the lust, greed, and violence that draws media the way carrion lures hyenas, so I was in, and on, the local news pretty regularly, and that makes you locally pretty public. As it turned out, Lee was worrying that
I’d
be recognized, while I was worrying that the regional paparazzi would pop out of a closet to snap a shot of
her.
The result was, between our lack of privacy and our lack of time (throwing aside, now, morals and reputation), our affair mostly took place by telephone (which ironically was exactly how it had been when we were in high school; I hadn’t been welcome at Briarhills then, I wasn’t welcome at Briarhills now).

I did go to her house twice, once alone, once to a campaign fund-raiser; it was a mistake, and both times I left early. Lee's life was rigorously social. Brookside had turned over his university duties to his successor, and was now deep into the gubernatorial campaign, so public events were really the only way for us to see each other anywhere near as often as we wanted to. It wasn’t the
way
I wanted
to see her, but desire takes what it can get. She arranged for me to be invited to the most populous of these winter galas (the Haver Foundation Valentine's Ball, the Children's Museum benefit, the buffet for the Cancer Society, the string quartet for the Historic Hillston Restoration Drive), and I went every time I was invited, and I usually ended up feeling miserable. It wasn’t as easy as meeting her in the old days at somebody's rec-room sock hop, and those days had been hard enough. Now Lee was on a public stage, co-starring with Brookside in a show that had already been written, and in which it was hard to find a part for myself other than faithful old Dobbin who hangs around in the wings to remind the woman he loves that she's lovable, even if her husband appears to have forgotten it. I didn’t like the role.

On the other hand, I couldn’t really imagine myself swinging down from a chandelier, grabbing Lee out of a reception line, waving a carving knife at the crowd, shouting “Back off, she's mine!” and leaping out a window with her into a future of—what? Somehow, I couldn’t see her in jeans, nuking frozen enchiladas and watching
Coal Miner's Daughter
on video out in River Rise. Somehow, I couldn’t see me in a tuxedo for the rest of my life, wine-glass in hand, turning slowly from left to right in that endless circle of smiling small talk. But we didn’t talk about the future on the phone, which was the only time we talked. If we were alone together, we made love. If we were in public, we looked at each other. We wouldn’t even have needed to speak the same language. And sometimes I wondered if in fact we did.

I told no one about Lee, and was careful (after Edwina Sunderland's innuendos) to make certain nobody was ever in a position even to speculate about us. It therefore worried me that Justin and Alice attended every one of the Brookside galas. But neither ever said a word to me, and as I’d never known Alice to hold back if something worried her (and I knew she loved me enough for this to worry her), finally I decided I was too discreet for them, or they were too absorbed in their own lives to notice. Justin was working as hard as I was on the Hall case; Alice was taking a very active role in the legislative session, giving a lot of speeches here and there, and people were talking about her. There were, for example, rumors
that Brookside was thinking of Alice as his nominee for lieutenant governor; she did nothing to discourage these rumors, and neither did Brookside. I’d given up hoping she was faking her friendliness to Brookside to further her own career; she really thought he was the most exciting possibility to hit North Carolina since the Wright brothers blew in from Ohio and put a flying machine in the air for twelve seconds before it crashed into a sand dune.

Justin too was a fervent Andrew Brookside supporter by now, mostly because of Alice, but also because Brookside and he had struck up an acquaintanceship, about which I had to hear more than I wanted to. Justin felt he and “Andy” had a great deal in common; I assume he meant their preppy pasts because their personalities certainly weren’t similar. Brookside didn’t have the innocent kindheartedness that drew folks to Justin. And Justin was no visionary for a better tomorrow. Nor was he a war hero, having been locked up in an alcoholics’ sanatorium after college. His missing that macho rite of passage may have had something to do with their new friendship, because “Andy” was teaching Justin how to fly his Cessna. Now, I’d long suspected that Justin Bartholomew Savile V had considerably more money—what he called “old money”—than he ever let on when he pestered me for raises, but he didn’t have the kind of money it takes to buy your own airplane. So I admit it was probably nice to have a friend who did happen to have one, if you were after what Justin called, in his Byronic way, “Experiences.” (An instance of Justin's innocence is that when I called him Byronic to his face, he assumed I meant it as a compliment.)

Meanwhile, Andy Brookside (Boston bred) was learning how to ride from Justin (treasurer of the Hillston Hunt Club). And Justin did own his own horse now: Manassas, the black stallion old Cadmean had left him. The fact that Justin could generally stay semivertical on top of that vicious brute is, I suppose, a testament to his prowess, or at least his passion for the sport. He even belonged to a polo club, though they could rarely get up enough players for a game. I’d never envied him his equestrian skills until I found out Lee loved to ride, which may have been why Brookside wanted to pick up some tips from Justin, who, by Lee's report, had “the best seat in Hillston.” Not that there were many in town vying for that
distinction. I heard that Justin rode Manassas at the Briarhills Hunt, where he won himself a foxtail by outriding everybody who’d had more brains than to take a shortcut by jumping a five-foot brick fence. It was the same approach to life that had led his ancestor, old Eustache Dollard's papa, into the wilderness a little too far ahead of his troops, so that the Yankees sensibly seized the opportunity to blow his head off. All Justin did was break his arm. I wasn’t too sympathetic, for more reasons than he knew, which maybe wasn’t fair.

The same sense of my own unfairness had kept me, so far, from mentioning to the D.A., or to Isaac, that Andy Brookside had spent the last hour of Cooper's life with him flying around in a plane discussing politics—assuming that's what they were doing up in the clouds that Saturday. Bazemore, a fervid Julian Lewis man if for no other reason than a shot at the attorney generalship, would have liked nothing better than to haul Lewis's opponent into court on a charge of withholding evidence in a felony. Isaac would have liked nothing better than to haul a celebrity like Brookside onto the witness stand, if only for the dramatic effect. But I’d had two hard talks with Brookside about that Saturday ride, and although I wasn’t satisfied that he was telling me the whole truth (I didn’t believe Cooper would care much for a
theoretical
conversation about the future of the state), I was satisfied that Brookside knew nothing about what had happened to Cooper twenty minutes after they parted. I don’t know, maybe the honest truth is, if the man
hadn’t
been Lee's husband, I would have been even harder on him. He was, in a way, sheltered under my guilt.

Guilt (which may have had at its roots some rotten wishful thinking) kept me very anxious, as the campaign developed, about those threats on Brookside's life. My worst nightmare was that somebody would kill him
in Hillston
, and it would be my fault. He’d received two more anonymous letters. The handwriting was bothering Etham Foster, who’d taken the material to an SBI calligraphy expert in Raleigh. This woman made two “qualified” observations: she didn’t think the earlier letters Lee and Brookside had given me were in the same handwriting as the subsequent letters and the photostats of the
With Liberty and Justice
graffiti. The similarities
were close, but “possibly” not identical. Second, there was some “suggestion” of a “tentativeness” about the latter, as if they were imitations. This worried Etham. Myself, I was more worried that whoever had written any or all of those notes was planning to take a potshot at Brookside's bright shining head one of these days, and that I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. I couldn’t force him to agree to police protection, but I did insist that HPD be kept informed in advance of his schedule. This, of course, felt pretty morally awkward for me, and I dealt with it by a private vow not to take advantage of my knowledge of his whereabouts, unless Lee told me independently that he would be away. I admit it's a Jesuitical distinction. I also admit I broke it twice, when I couldn’t stop myself from phoning her.

I would have preferred it if Brookside knew about Lee and me. I wanted her to leave him and marry me. But she said he didn’t know, hadn’t asked, and (this to me was the saddest part) “possibly wouldn’t care. Oh Cuddy, I mean, of course, Andy would
care
, he would care terribly, but his reasons would be…not completely personal. That doesn’t mean the reasons wouldn’t be…valid. Valid to us both. Do you see?”

“Yes.” That was as close as we’d come to discussing the political nature of their union. Once I asked, “Will you tell him?”

She said, “Don’t ask me to. Not now.”

Whether Lee was aware of the rumors about her husband's extramarital activities, I never knew for certain. It seemed wrong that I should point the rumors out, and I never did. But I think she suspected his promiscuity, and that the way she imagined Brookside would feel about us was a description of how she felt about him. She would care, but the reasons for her concern would be “not completely personal.” If in the beginning they had been in love, if they’d ever cared enough for real jealousy, ten years of public life had worn away all the sharp edges from their private feelings. Lee talked about her pain at not being able to have a child; she didn’t talk about how her husband's affairs might have hurt her. In the beginning, one night at my paranoid worst, I’d wondered if she was sleeping with me to get even with him. But that was never true. She talked about him with admiration, but
impersonally, as if they were not so much a marriage of convenience as an alliance of state. It didn’t make me any less jealous, or guilty, or sad. Maybe because Mr. and Mrs. Brookside looked like such a successful alliance, such a permanent one.

It ought to be no surprise that I avoided Andy Brookside as much as I could. So it wasn’t easy when finally it seemed necessary for me to call him at his campaign headquarters to insist that he stop Jack Molina from broadcasting the news about these threatening letters whenever he had the opportunity.