Time's Witness (39 page)

By now Molina had resigned from the communications departament at Haver and was working full-time on the Brookside campaign. He was more at the center of things than the official campaign manager, a moderate and very influential businessman from the eastern part of the state, with three decades of party contacts behind him. Jack was the unofficial coordinator of the left branch, the black branch, the female branch, and the college branch of Brookside's supporters. Together, they made up a sizable chunk of the voting tree, and it was beginning to look as if they were solid as oak for Molina's man. Obviously he thought he could help keep them that way by telling them how much their enemies were Andy's enemies too: he’d even given a copy of one of the threatening letters to the
Hillston Star
to print.

I’d talked to Molina about his inflammatory tactics but had gotten nowhere. Just as I’d gotten nowhere asking him again about what papers might have been in Cooper's file box when it was stolen, or whether Cooper had done any further research beyond his first short article on the Haver House of Lords. Molina appeared to hold me if not responsible for Cooper's death, then probably part of a cover-up. At any rate, his black blazing eyes did not look on me with any kindly flame the day I had him brought to my office, and asked him if we couldn’t cooperate.

“I can think of no case,” he told me, glaring at the shoulder holster that hung from the back of my door, “where the revolution and the police stood on the same side of the barricades.”

“Well, how about the
Industrial
Revolution?”

He didn’t think this was funny. “Yes, that proves my point.”

I said, “I don’t believe I ever heard Andy Brookside describe
himself as a ‘revolutionary.’”

Molina's short hair and tidy suit hadn’t affected his rhetoric from the old denim days. I got a pretty high-flown answer about practical instruments of the Cause, and reinterpretations of dialectical imperatives. I said, “I’m also not so sure Mr. Brookside would care to hear himself described as an instrument of the underclass, Hegelian or not. He seems to have a sort of Take Charge, Hands On, notion of history.”

Molina turned back from an examination of my bookshelf. “Yes. If Andy Brookside didn’t believe he was a hero, he wouldn’t be such an effective instrument, now would he?” There's a chance the man smiled here. I’m not sure. Leaning against the wall of books, he told me, “The march of history is not brought about, or even led, by heroic drum majors wearing plumes. But they
think
it is, and that can often be very useful.”

I said, “Well, y’all are welcome to overthrow the government at the
polls
as much as you like. But you wanna march, you need a permit. And you keep on sending out open invites to the lunatic fringe by yelling about assassinations, you could lose your drum major before you get much use out of that plume. It doesn’t help to polarize and agitate nuts like the Klan.”

“The Klan is actively trying to stop Andy. That isn’t something I’ve made up.”

“We’re keeping a close watch on the Klan. So is the FBI. Why don’t you leave that to us?”

He couldn’t stand his tie another second and jerked it loose. “A few years ago, Mr. Mangum, the Greensboro police said they were keeping a close watch on the Klan. They stood there and closely watched the Klan shoot and kill half a dozen people. People who
had
gone to the police for a permit to march. That was their
mistake. Cooper Hall is dead. George Hall is behind bars on death row. And you’re behind this big desk, stamping pieces of paper to keep everything legal. The world is polarized. Half the people on death row in this country are in six Southern states; more than half of them are black; and the blacks are the ones you people are going to kill. Look at the records. From 1930 to 1962, Mississippi had 151 executions, 122 of them were of blacks. Georgia had—”

“I’m not arguing with your statistics, or your interpretation. It's simplistic of you to assume I would.”

“It's you who sends them to death row. It
is
that simple.”

“I don’t send anyone to death row.” I said, “Professor Molina”— which he winced at—“I use what I’ve got to work with. You use what you’ve got to work with. You’ve got Andy Brookside. I’ve got this notion called ‘law.’ Maybe neither's exactly perfect, but like you say, an instrument of a cause.”

He walked to the door, setting the holster to swinging as he flung it open. “I doubt our causes have much in common.”

“Oh, I bet they do. Ask around, you’ll find out I’m one of those old of-all-the-people, by-all-the-people, for-all-the-people type guys.”

“If that were true, you’d resign. Your laws were written by a few of the people,
for
a few of the people.”

“Why should I resign? I don’t see you trying to run Hillston's local socialist comrade Janet Malley for governor, I don’t see you polishing
her
unpopular baton for the big parade.”

He started to say something, changed his mind, gave me a mock salute, and set the holstered gun swinging when he shut the door. A week later, I heard him on public radio, reading one of the threatening letters to a fascinated talk-show hostess. So I went over his head and called his boss.

I told Brookside that there might be some trigger-happy imbeciles out there who hadn’t even thought of assassinating him until they heard on the news what a popular notion it was getting to be.

Brookside didn’t seem to think this was likely, adding, “Jack just wants people to know what we’re fighting against. But I’ll talk to him, tell him to ease up.” He laughed happily. “Hell, I don’t want to alienate the right-wing trigger-happy bigot vote if I can possibly swing it my way.”

“I’m not sure swings come that big.”

“Well, why not? After Bobby was shot”—I assumed this meant Robert Kennedy—“a chunk of his supporters threw their votes to George Wallace. People vote for the
man.
The far right's still looking for John Wayne. Well?” His words sparkled with humor. “Here I am. Escape from a P.O.W. camp, heroic trek through the
jungle, barefoot, bamboo spear, eating wild dogs, hand-to-hand combat, Medal of Honor, all that good stuff. Pretty damn macho, right? What do you think? Can I turn the Brodie Cheek? Pull the far right out from under Lewis?”

“Well, watch out for the spikes in his golf shoes.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard Brookside in such a festive mood before. He was ebullient as he chatted on. “Wouldn’t that be something? Get the rednecks to help vote out the old Magnolias and Money Club that's been siccing them, poor dumb sons-of-bitches, on the blacks instead of on the rich for centuries. Now,
that’d
be a rainbow coalition! Blacks, white yuppies, rednecks, and women of all colors. I tell you, Captain, I’m beginning to make Julian Lewis's masters
extremely
nervous. And that's
great!
”

I actually smiled. “I’m glad things are going well.” And, hell, the truth was—Alice was right: he would be a better governor than Julian Lewis. I admit it.

“Just tell your friend Isaac Rosethorn not to lose Hall's retrial. Let's get that capital-punishment mine field safely behind us.”

Us? Apparently nothing could persuade the man that I wasn’t a member of his team. Of course, I suppose on the birds-of-a-feather principle, he had every right to his assumption. I’m talking about his knowing he had my closest friends, Justin and Alice, already waving from his parade float. I’m not talking about his knowing about my closeness to his wife. I said, “Isaac will do his best for Hall, and it doesn’t come any better than his best. But that's not going to solve the death-penalty issue for you. Lewis will make his strong capital punishment stand a big part of the campaign. He's going to tackle you directly.”

“If you’ll pardon my immodesty, Cuddy, I scored fourteen touch-downs for Harvard my senior year. At the time quite a few men were making a concerted effort to tackle me directly.” The way he said it, it didn’t even sound like boasting.

“Let me ask you something. If you get to be governor,
are
you going to use executive clemency across the board to suspend executions? Alice MacLeod assumes you are.”

“After I get into office, I’ll answer that. Let me ask you something. When you joined the police, the death penalty was
unconstitutional, right? What if it hadn’t been?”

I said, “Tell you what, if you win, I’ll give you an answer, after I find out what your answer to my question is.”

Laughter came as easily to him as everything else. “Fair enough. Now. You know Ken Moize, fairly young man, used to be your county solicitor? The guy Bazemore defeated.”

“I know Ken. I was real sorry to lose him. He's good.”

“What do you think? Attorney general material?”

“Sure. Ken’d be my choice.”

Jesus, he hadn’t even won the primary, and he was picking out his cabinet. Well, later I found out he’d just gotten the results of a poll on upcoming primaries. He was the featured “Spotlight” in a
Time
article, which not only projected that he’d wipe up the floor
with his Democratic opponent, Harold DeWitt (an old party machine fart from the western end of the state), the
Time
poll showed that he was pulling votes from independents and even some Republicans. A covey of national journalists had joined the noisy flock of staff already flying by his coattails as he zipped around the state, dropping in on factories, schools, churches, and shopping malls. I told him now that I was planning to put an unmarked squad car escort in his caravan when he was in the Hillston area. And that's when one of those small unexpected puzzle pieces fell into my hand.

He laughed. “What do you mean,
planning
to? You’ve had somebody following me since November. I admit it took me until I saw them trolling behind me in a
patrol
car, to figure it out. I was going to tell you to back off, but after Christmas I lost track of them, and decided you’d either quit, or gotten better.…Mangum? Mangum? You there?”

I said, “I never had anybody following you.”

“Come on! You fed me a line about some kid noticing Hall and me at the airport. You had me tailed there, didn’t you? It was a late model Pontiac or small Buick, that time. Red. I thought I shook him.”

I repeated it. “I haven’t had anybody following you.”

“I’m telling you, there were two or three different cars—one a tan station wagon, one a
patrol
car. I got a glimpse of the driver, in
uniform.
Big guy wearing sunglasses. In December!”

I looked at the photo of Purley on my bulletin board. “Right. His name's Purley Newsome.”

Now Brookside's end of the line went quiet.

I said, “Don’t you watch the news?”

“Newsome and Russell? Right, Winston Russell. Police all over the South are looking for them.”

“All over the country. Right.”

“He's related to the city comptroller, guy who hanged himself.”

“Right. I’m sending a detective over right now. I want every detail you can give him.”

“I can’t give you much more than I just have.” He took a breath. “What the fuck's going on? Why should they be following me?”

I said, “My guess is, like you pointed out, you were making some people ‘extremely nervous.’”

Nobody could have persuaded me that I could be any more desperate to find Winston Russell and Purley Newsome than I already was. But now I was a lot more desperate. Because now I wanted them not just for what they’d done, but for what I was scared they were going to try to do. If I let something happen to Andrew Brookside, when I was in love with his wife, well…if I didn’t know how she would feel about me, I did know, real well, how I’d feel about me. And I didn’t ever want to have to feel that way.

Justin wasn’t about to let a broken arm interfere with his heading the homicide investigation; he kept busy at “the Patriots angle,” or at least he told me that's what he was doing. I never saw him anywhere around the department, but then he’d always described himself as a “field man,” not a “desk man.” Reports from the field weren’t frequent, but again, Justin wasn’t an “organization man,” preferring to surprise you by showing up with the solutions to cases you’d almost forgotten about. Not that there was any chance I was going to forget this case. Through the winter, Justin was working closely with Dave Schulmann, because the FBI had more extensive intelligence on Klan activities than we did; he was also in touch with Klanwatch at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had even better intelligence. (They needed it the most, too, since the Klan had already firebombed their headquarters and tried to assassinate their chief trial counsel.) In Klanwatch's photo files, Justin found a fuzzy shot of fifteen men on the steps of a cabin somewhere in the deep woods of north Haver County. You might have thought they were buddies posing for a memento of a weekend hunting trip, except that they wore combat fatigues, and instead of showing off pheasants, they proudly held out automatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The photo was dated eight years ago, and more recently labeled FUTURE CAROLINA PATRIOTS? The Carolina Patriots called themselves that because, as one member had told Justin when (thanks to
Preston Pope's cousin) he’d gotten himself invited to that December meeting, “It's what every last one of us is, a patriot for the free white Christian state of North Carolina.”

Justin brought me to the lab to study the huge blow-up of their photograph; he had a magnifying glass ready, and six faces circled in red, with numbers above them. “Recognize anybody?” I studied the blurred images.

He couldn’t wait. “Numbers two and seven, I saw that night at the Patriot's slide show. Seven is Willie Slidell; number two is U.S. Army Sergeant Charlie Mennehy, who was giving the lecture on survival tactics in the wilderness—Dave Schulmann's had his eye on him for, get this, supplying the Klan with explosives stolen from a U.S. Army arsenal. When this picture was taken, Mennehy was still active-duty, drawing taxpayers’ dollars. Tsk tsk tsk.” Justin pinned up on the board enlargements of two of the other faces. “Now, look. Number eight, number nine.” While I was examining them, he pulled out two studio photographs, placing them beside the enlargements. Both were Hillston Police Department photo IDs—one of Officer Robert Pym, one of Officer Winston Russell, Jr. They were the same faces as in the cabin photo.