Time's Witness (4 page)

Both ministers leapt in fast, Campbell by nodding in a coughing fit, and Madison by waving a thick card in my face. “Worthy cause,” he wheedled. “Add sleeping quarters to our soup kitchen.”

I said, okay, I’d take five. He said I could send a check; I said I had money in my wallet, and he said, “Five hundred dollars?”

Old Campbell (his was the richest church in town) laughed while I was gasping. “A hundred dollars each?! What are y’all raffling?!”

“A Porsche. Only two thousand tickets to be sold.” Paul Madison put his hand over his heart. “You’ve got a great chance, Cuddy.”

“You’re raffling a Porsche for a soup kitchen?”

Madison grinned like a pink conscienceless baby. “Jim Scott donated it. Here's the thing, you raffle small-change stuff like, oh, a cord of wood, nobody wants it. A Porsche, that's a big temptation.”

I winked at Dina Yarborough. “Paul, I thought you guys were in the business of fighting temptation.”

“Frankly,” coughed Campbell, a sad craggy man, “we at First Presbyterian have stayed away from this sort of thing.”

Madison already had his pen out and was writing my name on the damn ticket. “If Trinity had y’all's endowment, we’d stay away from it too. How many did you say you wanted, Cuddy?” My glare hit his dimples and bounced off.

“One,” I whispered.

“One?”

I snatched the ticket away from him. “Thank you, Father Madison. Mrs. Mayor, would you care to dance?”

“Hey, There” thumped to a close about thirty seconds after we got going, so we stood waiting while I asked her, “Where's Carl? Off hiding one of those vile cigars of his from the public? I keep telling your husband, tobacco
made
Hillston. A smoking mayor’d be patriotic here.”

“Not if they’re Cuban cigars.” Her face loosened into what so suspiciously looked like wryness that I decided her question about this ball's being an annual affair was about as innocent as the Trojan horse.

I laughed. “Lord, Dina, tell the mayor to give me a raise or I’m
going to leak it to the
Star
how he's trading with Fidel. Come on, let's go get a drink.” But before we could squeeze out of the crunch of dancers, Dina's brother, the president of Southeast Life Insurance, tapped her for the next number. Tapped me, that is; his fingers boring into my shoulder like he was looking for a major nerve to paralyze. He said, “My sister promised me this next dance,” in a tone that suggested I’d dragged her onto the floor at gunpoint. And I dropped her hand as if I’d gotten caught doing it. Lord, the South. None of us can shake off all the old sad foolishness.

On my way to the food alone, I smiled at anyone who smiled at me. Then out of nowhere, a wide elderly lady in a lacy bed jacket stopped me with two steel forefingers on my lapels, and dared me to contradict her. “You were in that magazine.
People.
”

“Excuse me?”

“I saw you. I forget what it said.”

I told her, “Ma’am, I missed that one.
Newsweek
said I was tall, gangly, innovative, and indefatigable.”

“That's the one I saw.” She eyed me suspiciously. “What did it say your name was?”

“
Newsweek
? Seems like it said my name was Chief Mangum.”

“That's right.” Reassured, she patted my elbow. Thousands of dollars of diamonds were slipping dangerously around on her fingers. “I’m Mrs. Marion Sunderland.”

“Not
the
Mrs. Marion Sunderland that owns the
Hillston Star
and Channel Seven? Listen, what happened to those reruns of
Ironsides
? You know where Raymond Burr's in a wheelchair and has
to catch the crooks secondhand? I wish you’d put those back on the air.”

Mrs. Sunderland took a beat before she surprised me. “I believe that article also described you as whimsical. They misused the word. You’re a little odd, but you don’t strike me as capricious.”

“Well, I think debonair's really the word they were after.” I leaned over and patted her arm in return. “Mrs. Sunderland, I want you to take some professional advice. Next time you go honky-tonking, you ought to leave those rings home in a vault.”

“Mr.…Mangum, I only go out in public among friends.”

“I bet that's what Julius Caesar said.” She surprised me again with a laugh that would have been loud on a woman twice her size. Then she invited me to “call on” her, then she introduced me to two friends hovering nearby, a fresh-scrubbed octogenarian widow of a department store, who said she couldn’t hear and just ignore her, and a Sunderland grandnephew who appeared to ski for a living. I spotted Paul Madison hunting through the dancers like Cupid through a cloud bank, so I slipped away without a word of warning to his next victims. No one else stopped me before I reached the buffet, where Judge Tiggs was trying to load his plate with deviled eggs, and his wife was trying to block his hand.

“Hey.” Somebody pulled me down by the elbow and kissed my cheek. “I’m surprised you came.” It was Alice, Justin's wife. She's a small beautiful copper-haired lady from the North Carolina mountains. Justin met her while we were investigating some folks that worked on her floor at Cadmean Mills, and the best move he ever made was to marry her as soon as he could talk her into it. Bluest eyes you ever saw, clean as the sky, and clear as we all used to figure truth was. Alice believes in truth, and loves politics, and claims she can keep the two in shouting distance. We argue a lot. Justin says that's why he invites me to dinner twice a week, so he won’t have to “box around” with her himself. “Can you believe this man?” Alice would say. “Smart, educated, and he sits here and says he's not interested in ideas, whatever that means.”

Justin would check his wine sauce. “It means, for Christ's sake, I don’t care why Prohibition got voted in when it did. I thought we were trying to figure out if Billy Gilchrist's too bad a drunk to be a reliable stool pigeon.” Justin would talk your head off about the people in the case at hand, but analyzing history bored him.

I put down my buffet plate and kissed Alice back. “Well, look at you.” I turned her around. “An old commie union organizer like you, used to go out to dinner in a sweatshirt with Emma Goldman on it, used to love a good brainy fight and a Hostess cupcake and don’t try to deny it ’cause I’ve seen the wrappers.” The waiter offered me a cup of punch, which was hard to drink because of the baby strawberries floating in it. “Now, Lord, Lord, Alice. Justin the Five's got you all pregnant and dolled up in this swanky thing, looks
like you borrowed it from Jackie Onassis last time y’all got together.”

“How do I look?”

“Like Christmas.” Her gown was a dark green velvet and her red curls were like ribbons. “You look like the prettiest Christmas present anybody ever got, by which I’m sorry to say I don’t mean me.” I kissed her. “Congratulations, Red. But please don’t name that child Cudberth, 'specially if it's a girl. Is that Scotch? Where’d you get it, the men's room?”

“Ladies’ lounge.” She gave me the drink. “I’m going to kill Justin.”

“You’re talking to the police chief. But I didn’t catch what you said.”

“I’m not pregnant. We’re trying to get pregnant. And I don’t know why he's telling you.”

“You know he can’t keep a secret. Good detective though, I’ll give you that. He tells folks his secrets, then folks tell him theirs, then we put the cuffs on them and haul them off.” I reached for a ham biscuit, but the waiter waved me away and tweezered one onto a plate stamped “Hillston Club.” I held up four fingers; he held up one eyebrow, then humored me and piled them on. “Alice, tell me about Mrs. Sunderland. How much say does she have at the paper?”

“Does have? Probably none. Could have? Probably lots.”

“You know her? Didn’t the
Hillston Star
endorse you?”

“She's one of Justin's godmothers.”

“Can’t hurt.”

She laughed with her chin raised. “Cuddy, I never denied it.” Alice is in the state legislature now, which she wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been for Justin's name, and for old Briggs Cadmean's tossing a big chunk of money into her little campaign—out of some peculiar impulse that had nothing to do with late-blooming feminism. Now I’d heard she was also working to get Andy Brookside into the Governor's Mansion, but I’d avoided discussing it with her.

We watched Justin waltz Mrs. Brookside in and out of duller dancers. The Jimmy Douglas string section was giving “Lara's Theme” all they had, fighting back against the buzz of talk. “Isn’t my husband beautiful?” Alice smiled, happy as a cat.

“Motherhood hormones are eating up your brain, Red.”

“Well, he is. He looks like Paul Newman used to.”

“When was that?” We watched some more—his black coattails, Lee's black gown lifting as they turned; her shoulders, his shirt front a bright white blur. “Married him for his looks, huh? I always thought it was his cooking.”

“Go break in on them, so I can dance with him. You know Andy's wife?”

“I did a long time ago.” Alice gave me too straight a look, so I turned toward the buffet to scoop up some cashews and I had a handful near my mouth when Lee saw me staring at her, and smiled. It was just a polite smile, then it went away as she recognized me; her body tightened, pulling Justin out of step for an instant.

Alice was talking. “Well, I feel like I ought to be at the vigil anyhow, but Jack Molina agreed if I could put some pressure on Andy's position, or get to Lewis tonight, that might do more than holding up another placard at the prison. And now he's not even here.”

“Who's not here? Brookside?”

Alice was either looking at me funny or I was getting too sensitive. She said, “No, Julian Lewis, Julian D.-for-Dollard Lewis, Justin's whatever he is, cousin, the lieutenant governor.”

“He's not here? Damnit.” I had promised George Hall's new lawyer, an old friend, that I’d come to this dance, corner Julian Lewis, and give him some reasons why he should persuade the governor to stay tomorrow's execution. Not that a lot of people hadn’t been giving the governor a lot of reasons for a lot of years, but last-minute reprieves appeal to some politicians. They’re catchy; the press likes them too. But as for Lewis caring what Alice thought, I didn’t see why she thought the lieutenant governor would listen to anybody who was trying to stop him from taking over his boss's office, even if Alice's mother-in-law was Lewis's aunt. Plus, Lewis wasn’t going to think a damn thing the governor didn’t tell him to think. As for her influencing Brookside—in public, he too had stayed away from the Hall case, soothing his liberal constituency by keeping Professor Jack Molina (one of the Hall Committee coordinators) on his campaign staff. I looked around the ballroom. “Where is Brookside?”

“Go ask his wife.” Alice took my plate away from me. “I don’t dance.”

“Oh bullshit, you’re a great dancer.”

“Honey, when you’re a mama, you got to watch your language.”

She mouthed something that was pretty easy to lip-read as I let her nudge me onto the floor. I eased my way through a cluster of younger dancers calling coded jokes from couple to couple while they circled. One pair just stood with their eyes closed, rocking softly back and forth.

Justin stopped the instant I touched his shoulder and smiled like I’d brought him a million dollars, his long-lost dog, and news that the lab was wrong about his having cancer. I tell him with that smile I don’t know why
he
isn’t in politics, except a year in the loony bin makes nervous voters nervous. I said, “Excuse me, may I?” And he said, “Hey, Cuddy, wonderful, you came!”

“Why is everybody so surprised?”

“Have you two met? Lee Brookside. Cuddy Mangum, my commanding officer.” Justin did a little bow—I suppose straight from childhood dance class—said, “Thank you,” to her, “Pardon me,” to us, and walked backwards smooth as a skater through the crowd. When I turned around to Lee, she had her hand up ready to rest on my shoulder. “Hi,” I said. Her hair, a smoky ash-blond, was pulled back in its loose knot, away from her face, a smoky ash-blond, and her eyes, which I’d remembered as blue, were actually gray, like an owl's feather, flecked and warm. I hadn’t looked this close in her eyes in a long, long time; the last time I’d looked, on a Saturday morning in June, we’d both been crying. It's easier to cry at eighteen. We were standing on a little wooden Japanese bridge in her backyard—except with that much land and trees and gardens, you don’t call it a yard—and she was telling me her mother wouldn’t let her see me again, not through the summer, not after she left for college in the fall, not, in fact, ever. I kept saying, “Why?” but we both knew why, and I don’t blame her now for not letting me force her to say it. After that, I’d next seen her a year or so later when she came to my house in East Hillston, called me a coward, and slapped me across the face. After that, only in passing.

I took my hand from my pocket now. “You still mad?”

She said, “My God, how long has it been?”

“Don’t start counting. How’d you like that French college?”

And she laughed years away for a minute. “Oh my, was I ever young enough to go to college?”

“Hey! I’m still going.”

“You are? You’re the police chief.”

“That's true, too.”

She still had her hand held near my shoulder, but lifted it back, so I moved forward, and circled her waist, and we started dancing. I couldn’t really remember what it had felt like all that while ago, pressed together in the gym under the sagging streamers and balloons, or in some school friend's hot dim living room, not moving when the records changed. Now she felt cool and sure, accustomed to dancing with strangers. There was something sad about her eyes, but it was hard to imagine her crying easily anymore. We danced at first without speaking, at one point passing close to Justin and Alice; Justin was humming, Alice smiled at me, and wiggled the fingers woven with his.

Finally Lee moved her head and asked me, “So you stayed in Hillston. You always wanted to travel.”

“I’ve traveled some.” I summed up two years in Southeast Asia, then six months in Europe (on the G.I. savings I’d planned to use to buy Cheryl and me a house), seventeen months teaching school in Costa Rica, a summer in New York City, when I decided I wanted to be a police detective. I said I still like traveling; I take a special package charter some place new every vacation I get. Last year it was Nova Scotia; the year before, Haiti. I said, “But mostly Hillston, since I’ve been with the police department here.”