Time's Witness (51 page)

Later, there was a surprise call from another woman: Professor Briggs Mary Cadmean, whom I had once briefly entertained the notion of marrying. Now I felt like I was talking to a casual acquaintance. Maybe it had always been that way for her. When she said she felt awkward about phoning me, I took some satisfaction in
telling her there was absolutely no reason to.

She had called to ask about Cooper Hall. And her purpose for doing so finally answered the question of how old Cadmean's home number had gotten into Cooper Hall's address book. It turned out that, upon Briggs Junior's acceptance of old Cadmean's chauvinist codicil to his will (which we didn’t discuss), and her coming home to the inheritance (which we didn’t discuss), the lawyers had given her a long letter of instructions dictated days before his death by her papa (who clearly intended to go on bossing her around from the grave). Along with, I bet, advice on how to live every minute of the rest of her life, these instructions told Briggs Junior what she ought to do with the Cadmean money. There was a list of proposed contributions that the industrialist hadn’t put directly into his will.

She read me the proposal suggesting a bequest to Cooper David Hall of $25,000 “to continue his researching of racial harassment by a secret club at Haver University called the House of Lords.” In his written instructions, Cadmean took his time expounding on (which in no way ever meant defending) his rationale: “I never went to college, but I hold a man's education in high respect. And for young college men of privilege to betray the honor of their native state by acting like a pack of goddamn Gestapo goons, sneaking around to scare decent Negroes and smear their names, is a disgrace to the American way of life I love. Cooper Hall's father, Tim, worked for me at C&W, and he was a good man at his job ’til his death. I don’t say I agree with most of Cooper's ideas, but I believe in a fair chance, and I have given him my help about this research of his, and a few donations to his magazine, because he looks to be a smart industrious boy, loyal to his family, and by his own lights trying to do what's best for the great state of North Carolina. $25,000.”

I said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It sure sounds like your daddy at the top of his form. Calling a twenty-eight-year-old man ‘a smart boy,’ and then leaving him a pile of money to fight racism.”

Briggs Junior said she was equally struck by the fact that her father's respect for the college-educated seemed to be confined entirely to males. Sounded to me like the two of them planned to keep on bickering across the Great Divide. She read a note old
Cadmean had scribbled to her in the margin: “Baby, this one will appeal to a goddamn left-winger like you.”

He’d also added a handwritten P.S. “If this secret club horseshit about Julian Lewis turns out to be true, take an ad and revoke my endorsement of the moron. Also cancel my contribution (on p. 18, ¶ 2). Give the money to the man he's running against. Unless it's that two-bit Kennedy flyboy Brookside. I don’t like him.”

Now, as Cooper Hall was deceased, Briggs Junior's question was, did I know anyone who was carrying on his work? From the series of House of Lords pieces in the
Star
, it appeared to her that one Randolph Percy was fighting the good fight, and she’d also read several articles of his on Cooper Hall himself, which led her to think they had been friends. Was this true? On the other hand, she felt reluctant to turn over the bequest to a professional journalist, if in fact there was someone closer to Cooper. She wanted to ask me whom she could talk to so she could discover what Cooper would have wanted done with the money.

Despite owing Bubba one, I said, “Cooper wouldn’t want you to give it to Randolph Percy.” I told her to get in touch with Jordan West at Human Services, and Eric Solomon at
With Liberty and
Justice
, and with Cooper's mother, Nomi Hall. She said she would
and thanked me. Before hanging up, I said I was surprised to hear she’d left her job out West. She said Arizona wasn’t the only place that had a sky with stars in it. I agreed she had a point. We both said we’d probably run into each other around Hillston one of these days; neither one of us suggested we pick a time to make it happen.

The rain slapped at my sliders, hard as gravel. I thought about Cooper Hall's showing up at Cadmean's house and asking for a donation to
With Liberty and Justice.
I thought about his playing upon that old ruthless capitalist's squire-of-the-manor paternalism toward his workers and their families. “I’m Tim Hall's son. He worked for you.” (After all, because my father too had worked Cadmean's line, hadn’t Mr. C. actually come in person to my mother's funeral; a dazzling tribute, for which my father momentarily forgave him a quarter-century of low pay, long hours, and ruined lungs?) I thought of Cooper in the vaulted dark-paneled rooms of that brick mausoleum, listening to Cadmean's odes to
textiles and North Carolina, his two passions—beyond himself and his daughter. Cooper had undoubtedly gotten into a fight with him about politics, and there was nothing Cadmean liked better than an antler-butting fight. You just never knew what side the old s.o.b. was going to take, because the notion of
principle
never entered his head, unless “I take care of my own” can be called a principle. With Cadmean, it was all personal. He’d liked Alice MacLeod and he’d liked the fact that she was Justin's wife, so he’d put money into her state legislature campaign. He hadn’t liked the pastor of his own church, so he’d left his house to Trinity Episcopal. And me? He’d liked me, so he’d bullied the city council into making me chief of police because he’d wanted somebody in Hillston to marry his daughter and keep her from leaving town, and at the time I’d wanted the same thing.

Now apparently he hadn’t liked what he’d heard about the Haver House of Lords. So his death had come just in time for Haver University—because he might have revoked that new Textiles Institute. And just in time for Julian Lewis and Andy Brookside both—because he didn’t like either of them, and for half a century, it had been hard to carry the Piedmont unless Briggs Monmouth Cadmean was carrying you, and Mr. C. only carried folks he liked.

I picked up the phone to see if Isaac was across the hall at Nora Howard's, so I could tell them about Cooper's inheritance. Nobody answered. I heated a can of chili, did my laundry, tried to get Martha to eat something, did my dishes, called again. Nobody answered. I called Bubba Percy back and told him I figured that Bunny Randolph (Atwater's middle-aged son) was the source behind his pieces on the House of Lords—in addition, of course, to what he’d ripped off from Cooper. I reminded him I was the one who’d given him Bunny's name in the first place, when Bubba was supposed to find out for
me
Bunny's connection to Hall, and that he’d stalled me about it for months. I said I now figured it had been old Cadmean who’d introduced Cooper to Bunny Randolph.

“Assume you’re right,” said Bubba coyly.

And that Bunny had blabbed the old college dirt to Cooper (either because he hadn’t liked Julian Lewis when they’d been in the House of Lords at Haver together; or because he hated his
father, Atwater, a big Lewis supporter, for keeping him on the dole in Southern Pines).

Bubba said, “Assume you’re right.”

“So Bunny Randolph is feeding you information.”

Bubba said, “I don’t reveal my sources. Now stop bugging me, Mangum. I’ve got a girl here halfway to the sack.”

I said, “I’m tempted to send over a squad car to check her age. Or is it Edwina?”

“Nah, it's your mother. She's a wild woman. Catch you later, pig.” He made a rooting noise into the phone and hung up. I wondered which was more likely—that he knew my mother was long dead, or didn’t.

Under a coverlet of loose newspapers, I fell asleep on my denim couch listening to Dinah Washington, and when I woke up, the clouds were still black with rain. When I went out in the hall and knocked at Nora's door, a teenaged girl identified herself as the babysitter, to which phrase, the ten-year-old Laura strenuously objected. The sitter added that Nora was out. Laura, standing behind her, said, “Out on a date.”

“It's not a date,” insisted her little brother Brian, darting forward and menacing her with a rubber tomahawk.

“You’re a geek,” Laura informed him, and he ran away whooping down the hall, “Geek, geek, geek.” The babysitter chased after him.

I said, “Laura, tell your mom I dropped by, okay?”

“She’ll be out really, really late,” predicted Nora's daughter. “Can we go get Martha Mitchell and play with her?”

“Oh, we ought to let her sleep, how ’bout? She's not feeling too well.”

The girl looked at me with a sharp suspicion. “Is Martha Mitchell going to die?”

“Well, in time she will. It's natural. She's a pretty old dog.” Laura frowned. “My dad wasn’t old, but he died.”

“I know.…You must miss him a lot.”

“I do. But sometimes I can’t remember.”

I leaned down to hug her, and her small thin arms brushed against my neck. She squeezed them around me hard for a second, then she
quickly let go and ran to help the sitter herd her brother home.

Downtown across the street from the municipal building was the sheriff's office and the county jail. Sheriff Louge and I were not friends, but he had finally stopped reminding me that
he’d
been elected to office six times and stopped treating the city police like a bench of second-string substitutes there to back up the county team. The sheriff still thought of Hillston as a little warehouse town in the middle of his big farming county. He hadn’t figured out yet that everybody in the county had moved into the city, and so had a fast stream of white-collar Yankees. But over the years Louge and I had learned to save our guns for the big battles; day-to-day, we were superficially cordial. And so his deputy went so far as to stand up and suck in his gut when I dropped by the jail Sunday night. There was no objection to my having a talk with the prisoner George Hall at this late hour. With a protective squeeze of the heavy .357 that dragged his belt down low on his hips, the deputy even invited me to walk back with him to get Hall. I followed him through the steel door, down the dark corridor, and into the smell of urine and stale sweat. There were fourteen men in the eight cells, most of them were young and black, some of them were snoring, one had a harmonica, one sat hunched in a corner talking to himself. George Hall stood in a T-shirt and cotton pants, leaning his arms out through the bars, looking out at the window down at the end of the corridor.

The deputy shook the keys in his face and said, “George, Captain Mangum from HPD's here to see you. You wanna step away and I’ll unlock you.”

George turned his eyes to me. I’d only been this close to him twice before—once at his brother's funeral, once that night on the sidewalk outside Smoke's Bar. In fact, other than those brief minutes, and in the courtroom, I had never been around George Hall. Now I noticed little traces of Cooper in his features. I said, “You mind a few minutes’ talk, George?”

Cooper would have probably said, “About what?” or “Do I have a choice?” or “What's a few minutes to me?” All George said was, “No, I don’t mind.” And he pushed back from the cell door with arms so thickly muscled, they pressed the sides of the bars as they
slid away. He took a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, put them on, then waited quietly for the deputy to slide open the steel door.

As soon as we sat down in the cramped, dingy “conference room,” George lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette; I suppose if the government keeps telling you they’re going to gas you to death in two months, or two weeks, or two days, on this date, or that date, then the government's warnings about tobacco don’t have much effect. Nor do you lose track of time—as he smoked, he sat watching the black arrow of the minute hand click up the face of the oak regulator clock that was on the wall beside the NO SMOKING, NO BEVERAGES sign. Opening the bag I’d brought, I set out two coffees and four glazed doughnuts.

George's hair was gray. His brother had been murdered; he’d been in combat for two years, and on death row for seven; I’d say that was enough to do it. He sat there smoking while I offered my sympathy about Cooper, and asked if Louge was treating him all right. I said Isaac had told me how Russell had threatened his family's lives after the Pym shooting. He kept his eyes on mine, he replied politely and succinctly, he drank the coffee, ate a doughnut, and showed no interest in whether I spoke or not. Finally I said, “And Isaac says he's talked to you about how, thanks to all the work Cooper did, we were able to locate two witnesses who’ll testify that Russell was at the scene that night at Smoke's?”

“He told me about all that, yes.”

Another silence, then I said, “George, you’ve declined to talk to the police. I’m not saying that's not your privilege, but if you
were
making truck drops for those scum, and you told us where, it might help us track Russell to whoever's hiding him.” No answer.

“It would help us if you gave me the names of any Dollard inmates who passed on Russell's threats to you.” No answer. I shoved back my chair. “Do you believe Winston Russell killed your brother?”

Carefully stubbing out his second cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray, he said in a voice lower and softer than Cooper's, “Yes, I do. Believed it a long time before it happened.” Leaning over, he emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket.

“When Russell told you if you didn’t keep his name out of your
first trial, he’d—well, what
did
he say? Did he explicitly say he’d kill someone in your family?”

George looked past me, out the small high window. “He said I’d
wish
he’d shot them.” He was watching the rain. “Winston's a killer.
Just that way….”

“Sometimes I think Winston was
born
that way. With him at large, does it worry you for your mother? Because—”

“No. He's through with me and mine. He can’t hide nothing now but himself. You already told it all to the papers. Seems like maybe you ought to worry about you.”

“Why do you think he shot Cooper when he did?”