Time's Witness (5 page)

“Why the police? I mean I guess I always expected to read how you’d…I don’t know, written the history of the United States.” She was squeezed against me by a wild-spinning couple.

I back stepped us away. “Well, probably the more history I read, the more I figured, crooked as the law is, it's straighter than lynch mobs and posses on the loose, right? I’m a great believer in capital-L Law. And Hillston's home. So here I am, enforcing the law in Hillston.”

“Hillston's gotten so big.” Her hand lifted out of mine to gesture
at the room. “I used to think I’d find myself seated beside you at a dinner, but I never did.”

“I used to think that too.” I didn’t tell her that when I’d first gone to Paris, I’d get the dumb notion to rush off to a certain park or museum because I was sure that's where I was going to see her stroll by.

She’d stayed abroad after college. Her first husband's hobby was mountain climbing; I’d read in a paper that he’d died in a hotel fire, only twenty-seven years old. I remember thinking: Lee's husband makes it up Mount Everest but can’t get out of a suite on the Riviera. After his death, she’d come home and married Brookside. She had no children.

“Andy was there the same time you were,” she said, her neck arching back to look up at me. “In Vietnam. Have you two met?”

“Over there? Nope, we never did run into each other.” It was interesting—“Andy”—the matter-of-fact assumption that everyone knew who her second husband was, which of course everyone did. The “Have you met?” probably meant local politics, since I doubt she figured young Major Brookside had ever swooped down in his jet to shoot the breeze with the boys in the mangrove swamp. Well, maybe she’d lived so long in a world where everybody knew each other, that's all the world she thought there was. I mean world, too. Randolphs and Fanshaws, now, they counted in Hillston, and Cadmeans and Dollards might own the Piedmont and have a long lease on the state, but Havers had been so rich for so long, they were on the big map. When Chinese and Kenyans and Danes smoke your cigarettes, you can build universities with your loose change, and you can expect even your collateral daughters to marry heroes; you don’t need them to marry money. That message her family had sent to the little Japanese bridge—well, you could see their point. I’ve got my All-State Guard plaque and my dinky combat medals in my bureau, I’ve got my three-inch
Newsweek
clipping on the refrigerator door. Andy Brookside's got a cabinet full of football trophies, a Congressional Medal of Honor and a presidential committee appointment to study that sad war, a national prize for the book he wrote after he studied it, a
Time
magazine cover, and Lee Haver. There's no catching heroes. They’ve got the gods running interference for them, you know what I mean? The gods keep them wrapped in a glow, you can
see the shimmer when they come in a room.

I said, “Well now, this is a pretty place. Never been in here before, myself. You come to these Christmas parties with your family back then?”

She didn’t answer. A tiny blue vein in her neck tensed against the diamond necklace around it. Then, after a silence, she said, not smiling, “You know, I hated you for a long time.”

The rush of old intimacy shocked me. I tilted my head to look at her; it felt like that sudden fall that jerks you awake when you nod off in a chair.

Her eyes searched in mine until finally she said, “You remember that day I came to your house with the box of letters? Right before I left for France? You wouldn’t even talk to me. You wouldn’t
look
at me. Your mother left us standing there in your living room, and shut the door to the kitchen. I think she was crying too. She asked me if I wanted a glass of tea, and you snapped at her, ‘No, she doesn’t.’”

I said, “I remember it very well. You threw the letters at me and slapped me in the face.”

Her palm moved inside mine as she pulled her hand away. We stopped there in the middle of the dance floor.

“You’re the only man I ever hit,” she said.

She put her hand back in mine. Other couples seemed to be moving around us, but far away, small and shadowy, as if the room had suddenly doubled in size. We moved together. Then I heard, coming from a distance, the rustle of applause, and I realized the music had already stopped.

I was going to ask her if she’d like that glass of tea now, when through the knots of applauding couples I saw Andy Brookside walking toward us, tall, bright-haired, full of energy, his handsome head nodding right and left; maybe he thought folks were clapping for him instead of the band. He touched Lee's arm, and claimed her. “I’m sorry, darling, I got caught up in a conversation.” (It was the first I’d seen him all night, and I wondered if he’d been down in the men's lounge where the “real drinks” were.)

She said quietly, “There you are.”

He put his arm through hers, saying, “Shall we?” before turning to me with a friendly, expectant face; I didn’t see a twitch of phoniness
in it, and I was looking hard.

Lee stepped away from him to introduce us. “Have you met my husband, Andy? Cuddy—” And then the beeper in my breast pocket went off, which meant that Sergeant Davies at headquarters had decided I needed to make a decision, which to him could mean anything from Mrs. Thompson had called again because Clark Gable was back in her attic crawlspace, to Officer Purley Newsome had put another dead cat in Officer Nancy White's locker, to a gang of terrorists with Uzi machine guns were holding the entire down-town population of Hillston hostage.

I turned the beeper off. “Excuse me, I better go phone in.”

“You’re a doctor?” Brookside smiled, then showed me how he’d won the nomination. “No, wait…Cuddy, Cuddy…. Of course, Mangum! Our police chief. Last spring at the Jaycee's breakfast panel, ‘Improving Town and Gown Relations.’ Right?” His hand-shake was professional but not stingy. “Good to see you. Tell me, what's your sense of the George Hall situation?”

“Lousy for George Hall,” I said.

“Naturally, yes. Of course, I meant the governor. Clemency.”

I said, “I don’t think so. But then I’m not in tight with the powers that be.”

Lee had been standing there, her fingers touching a jewel on the necklace. Into our silence, she suddenly said, “Andy phoned the governor yesterday, asking him to extend mercy,” then she looked up at Brookside as if to make sure it was all right to have told me. There was something uncomfortable between them, which was odd in such a poised couple. I mean, I knew why I felt uneasy—I was half back to eighteen years old—but I certainly didn’t suppose I was what was troubling the Brooksides.

“Um hum….” I looked from her to him. “Well, there's mercy, and then there's justice.”

“True.” There was nothing in his eyes but earnestness.

“Hall's supporters wanted not just clemency, but a pardon. At this point, they’re just trying to get the stay of execution. And if you’re planning on making any statement about ‘mercy’ of a little more of a
public
nature, seems like waiting much longer might make it pretty moot.”

He gave me a stare. “I know.”

Mr. and Mrs. Dyer Fanshaw shuffled in a bored fox-trot near us. Mrs. Fanshaw smiled brilliantly at Lee, then patted the clumps of diamonds strung on her own neck. Every city employee in Hillston (including teachers, including tax clerks and garbage collectors, including me) who filled out a form or washed his hands or signed a check, did it on Fanshaw Paper. It adds up to diamonds fast. She cooed as they swerved close, “That is just a beautiful, beautiful dress, Lee.”

Lee smiled brilliantly back. “Oh thank you, Betty. Yours too. Merry Christmas.”

I excused myself again to go telephone, but Lee touched my arm. “Cuddy, before you go? Is it true there’ve been threats against the group George Hall's brother organized? Jack Molina, on Andy's staff, says so. He's been working with—is it ‘Cooper’ Hall?”

I nodded. “There’re threats against just about anybody who steps in front of the public and moves enough to catch their eye.”

She stared at her husband. “But you’re protecting them?”

“Coop Hall? I can’t. Not unless I locked him up, and maybe not then. Oh, I could catch whoever did it, but if they don’t mind going to the trouble, and they don’t care about getting caught, anybody in this country can kill anybody they want to.”

“Lee?” Brookside reached for her arm again.

I backed away. “Thanks for the dance, Mrs. Brookside.” She offered her hand again, so I took it. Her fingers were cold, colder than they’d been when I’d held them before.

Out in the lobby, I saw Father Paul Madison, small and eager, selling Mrs. Sunderland's grandnephew a chance to own a Porsche. I waved good-bye, but he held up a palm to stop me, so I waited.

“Cuddy,” he said, brushing blond hair out of his eyes, “don’t take this wrong, please, but would you know anybody I could lean on to make a contribution to the George Hall Fund? We’re seven thousand in the hole.”

“You mean, like me? And why should I take it wrong?”

He blushed. “Well, you’re the one who arrested George in the first place, but then I know you’re a friend of Isaac Rosethorn's.”

“Isaac's charging you guys seven thousand to represent Hall?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that much. It's the
paperwork
, and phone calls, and now we need to hire an investigator to go back over—”

My back was still tightened with memories of Lee. Paul stopped in midsentence, peered at my face, then he lowered his head. “You don’t think we’ll get the stay?”

I said, “No. Do you?”

“I’m praying we will.”

“You are? Looks to me like you’re selling Porsches.”

His blush spread over his ears and neck. “Cuddy, I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. When I didn’t answer, he gave my arm a rub. “You still mad about what happened at Trinity?”

I said, “Only when I think about it.” He was referring to a protest rally that the Save George Hall Committee had staged in October on the steps of his church, Trinity Episcopal, to which they’d invited a very left-wing movie star who happened to be on location in North Carolina; they’d sent a lot of news people advance word, but neglected to do the same for the police— meaning me. I also suspected they’d taunted the Klan into coming; at any rate, ten showed up in robes, with a few Aryans in combat fatigues, plus a hundred hoods with nothing else to do. I didn’t have enough men there to handle it. Mud clots got thrown; we made four arrests, and the evening news shot a lot of footage. I was so angry at Paul and Cooper Hall, I came close to arresting them too. It was right after that that Isaac Rosethorn offered to take on the Hall case. It was also right after that that
Newsweek
called me up.

Paul was saying, “And look, drop by the soup kitchen someday. We’ve got a new stove. Eight burners and a built-in grill. Mr. Carippini bought a range for his restaurant, so he gave us his old one.”

“Isn’t he Catholic?”

“Sure. Listen, this stove's been blessed by a bishop.”

“Father Madison,” I grinned back at him, “please don’t turn to crime; you’d run me ragged. About your Hall Fund, why don’t you ask Mrs. Andrew Brookside?”

“You think?”

“I think she's sympathetic. But you may have to say you won’t use her name.”

Madison looked puzzled, then nodded. “Oh, right, Andy Brookside. Politics.” He acknowledged that little world with upraised palms, then with a soft whistle blew it away.

As I waited for the cloakroom attendant—an old black man with a completely specious grin, and “Hillston Club” embroidered on his jacket—I glanced at the couch by the tree, but the girl in red satin was gone. Inside the ballroom, Justin and Alice were talking to Mayor and Mrs. Yarborough. They all turned when the Jimmy Douglas Orchestra struck up “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” while behind them brass-buttoned waiters trooped out of an open door carrying gleaming platters of shiny roasted turkeys with red ribbons on their legs and circled by white candles burning in bright little apples. Everybody clapped.

On a sticky hot summer night seven years ago, George Hall sat drinking in an East Hillston bar called Smoke's; it was a loud, rough old place in an all-black neighborhood known as Canaan because of a gigantic A.M.E. church of that name, now demolished, that had once dominated all the cheap-shod houses around it. George often spent his evenings at Smoke's; his mother didn’t allow alcohol in her home. He was a very dark, stocky young man, thick-chested with a broad flat face and a long mustache; a veteran with a small government check as payment for two lost toes on his left foot. That summer night, he was young, unmarried, unemployed. The prosecutor Mitchell Bazemore was to remind everybody at his trial that George hadn’t kept a job for as long as a year since he’d been twenty, his age when he’d come back from Army duty. He’d had a lot of chances—loader at the tobacco warehouses, roof tarrer, jack-hammer operator, driver for a doughnut supplier, driver for Fanshaw Paper Company. But as the court's psychiatrist explained to the jury, despite these opportunities, time after time George had “gotten himself fired,” or he had simply quit. He had a “problem with authority,” had lost his stripes for insubordination, and returned home to lose his jobs in Hillston from the same “antisocial disorder.” Moreover, as Captain Fulcher testified (without objection from the public defender), George had a police record—three arrests since his return home, one for a fight at the ballpark, one for
interfering with a police officer who was trying to cuff a burglary suspect, and one for running a red light. The second arrest was made by Bobby Pym, the man Hall subsequently shot outside Smoke's on that hot August Saturday.

Smoke's offered more than liquor; it had the ball games on TV, a coin-operated pool table, and, reputedly, cards in a back room, plus three girls upstairs, plus a bookie bartender who’d take your money for anything from a numbers game to a spitting contest. On weekends it had a blues band and dancing, and from time to time it had fights. Occasionally, an ambulance had to be called, which, occasionally, brought the police. So George had been in trouble before, and Smoke's had been in trouble before, and the only thing that was unusual about this trouble was what a white,
off-duty
policeman like Bobby Pym might be doing in all-black Canaan in all-black Smoke's, when he lived way across town in West Hillston, and when his wife thought he was at a bowling alley south of I-28. The question was asked but not pressed, and nobody ever knew the answer. All the customers at Smoke's that night said they’d never seen Officer Pym before, hadn’t even noticed him in there until the fight—which was pretty hard to believe, no matter how crowded the place, or how bad the light was. Captain Fulcher might have claimed that Pym was there working undercover, if he hadn’t blurted out to me, as soon as he saw the bloody body, “What the g.d. hell was Bobby doing
here!?
” That question came up again at the trial, but was overruled by Judge Henry Tiggs. According to the judge's instructions as to the law, a man had a right to go to a public bar of his choice, even if others might find his choice “peculiar and frankly unsavory”; he had a right to turn on a jukebox even if some-body else was playing a guitar and singing (this somebody was the blues performer); he had a right to carry a licensed weapon (this was in reference to the .38 pistol stuffed in Pym's belt under his bowling shirt); being told by George Hall, in abusive language, to get out of a public bar, Pym had a right to “object” (presumably the judge referred here to Pym's inserting the barrel of this gun into George's nostril). And, as Mitchell Bazemore heatedly summarized for the jury, most assuredly, a man, a
policeman
, a man with a wife and a baby, a man whose dying groans (tape-recorded in the ambulance)
the jury had heard for themselves, a policeman had the right to leave a public establishment without being chased outside and shot down in cold blood by a state-supported black troublemaker with three arrests, a bad army record, and an abandoned and malignant heart.