Time's Witness (54 page)

Nancy White, at the desk by the door, two-fingering a report on her typewriter, called to Justin, “Hey, love your jacket, man.”

I said, “What's this, Savile, a bill for the gas?”

“Signed statement from the former Mrs. Willie Slidell, who said not to call her that. ‘Call me Karla,’ she said as we took a little sight-seeing flight together over bluegrass country.” He smiled, throwing off an old leather flight jacket he must have bought at Antique Apparel in the mall.

“So, what did Karla say?”

He perched on Nancy's desk. “Said yes, they were smuggling stolen goodies in Fanshaw trucks. Yes, they were running guns. But, one, Willie the Wimp was a very reluctant partner in the whole deal, preferring making dirty movies to arming for a race war. He got suckered into it by his brother-in-law Pym. Once in, he was too scared of Winston Russell to pull out. He also had an expensive coke habit to support. Two, Willie called Karla in a panic two days before he was killed, and told her that Russell had gotten him into, quote, ‘major shit,’ and that he, Willie, ‘was scared out of his mind,’ and ‘had to get away.’ He mentioned to her that he had something Russell wanted, and said holding it back was his only insurance.”

I said, “Well done, Kemo Sabe. I bet that insurance was the porno Brookside video.”

“Willie didn’t tell her what it was, and she didn’t care to ask. She told him if he ended up dead, it was his own fault, and she hung up on him. Given what happened to her ex, she now says she's ‘sorry’ she talked to him that way.”

“Okay. Go park your plane, Lindy. Where is it, on the roof?”

“No, on top of your Oldsmobile.” He lit a cigarette. “Oh, Karla says it was Winston's friend Sergeant Charlie Mennehy who talked Bobby Pym and Willie into joining the Carolina Patriots too. She described the Patriots as ‘just a bunch of jerk-off dick-heads that like to hide in the woods and diddle with guns.’”

“I like Karla,” said Nancy. “Hey, Justin, I just talked to the last one of those Patriots this morning. Same as the others. An alibi,
and don’t know nuttin’ about nobody murdering nobody. Said if Winston and Purley had been blowing people away, it sure wasn’t for the Carolina Patriots. ‘We’re against killing.’ Gave me his best bad-ass grin, said, ‘You got that, lady?’ Said he hadn’t seen Winston in years.” She scrubbed a hole in the paper with her eraser. “‘Uncooperative’ got an
a
in it?”

Justin said “Yep.” Then, pouring himself some coffee, he asked Nancy if she’d made an appointment to see Alice's obstetrician yet. She hadn’t. “Come
on
, Nancy! You need to start
planning.
The wedding, honeymoon, pregnancy leave—”

I said, “If she doesn’t get a move on, they’re all three going to happen at the same time.”

They ignored me. He said, “Are you and Zeke interested in Lamaze? There's this class starting now—”

Nancy spit the heart on her gold chain out of her mouth. “Listen, man, I’ve
delivered
eleven babies, including
twins.
I want the needle. I don’t need classes.”

I looked over the top of Karla Slidell's statement. “Nancy, what you
need
's a preacher.”

Justin said, “Why? She and Zeke have got
you
preaching at them all the time. You’re always trying to get other people married, Cuddy, but I don’t notice you in a rush yourself.”

“You don’t notice me three months pregnant either.”

Nancy laughed. “Yeah, if Zeke's Okie redskin relatives don’t show up soon, I’ll be waddling down the aisle with a papoose strapped to my back.” Standing up, she showed her unbuckled uniform trousers. “What I
need
's some bigger pants.” She laughed with her head thrown up, and I realized that while I’d seen Nancy grin a million times, I’d never heard her laugh before. A quick image flashed by of her and Zeke with two or three kids crawling all over them, and a little jab of jealousy flickered through me.

While I finished reading about Mrs. Slidell's irritation with her ex, Nancy and Justin went over their report on Winston Russell's buddies in the Carolina Patriots. Justin had requested Nancy full-time, and I’d let him have both her and John Emory, because Nancy had said she wanted to stay with “Roid,” short for “Hemorrhoid,” though I don’t think she even remembered the origin of the
nick-name she’d first given John. Nancy had also come a long way since her first comments about Justin: “Hey, Chief, what's the deal with that fag Lieutenant Supercop, got his fucking name hand-sewn into all his clothes, he on loan from Hollywood or what? All of a sudden he takes me out with a flying tackle, then he jumps out the damn window after the suspect!” No, it didn’t take Nancy and Justin long to realize how much they had in common: they both were impulsive, insubordinate, and reckless, and as each took considerable pride in these flaws, they pretty soon developed a fondness for the same traits in the other. Both of them loved being cops, too. Myself, a lot of the time I don’t even like it.

Back in Justin's office, I sat down on the press bench he keeps to exercise his right leg: a bullet hit it when he jumped between me and a murder suspect. I said, “J.B. the Five, I’ve got to make an arrest on the Hall thing. Carl Yarborough's stopped talking to me and this morning the goddamn governor called me again.”

“Well, for what it's worth, Preston Pope's got a hunch the Patriots are hiding Russell and Pym right here in the Piedmont.”

“If I could still use thumbscrews, maybe I could get them to say where. Speaking of Preston the Stooge, when are we gonna hear some
squealing
instead of hunches?”

“He thinks the Patriots don’t trust him anymore. You should have let me go to some more meetings before they got so suspicious.” “If I’d let you clog-dance back to those rednecks with a wire on, I’d have probably found you hanging charred from a tree in a cloud of soot.”

“Oh bull.”

“Yeah, oh bull.” I turned onto my stomach on the bench, hooked my ankles under the weights, and did a few lifts. “Besides, those meetings were dickshit. I don’t want any more smudgy hand-outs comparing Negro and Caucasian brain sizes. I don’t want any more reports about how this one says he hates Jews, and that one maybe made an obscene phone call. I want y’all to hand me those Carolina Patriots on a platter full of
felonies
, General Lee.”

“Barkis is willing. But Dave Schulmann thinks they’ve folded their tents—that this interrogation scared them into shutting down.” He handed me a folder labeled “Carolina Patriots.” Then he
shook his phone messages off their spike, where they looked to me like they’d been piling up for quite a while.

I let the leg weights clang, and flipped through his folder. The FBI had gotten its indictment against former Green Beret Sergeant Charles Mennehy, for robbing a federal armory, but they still couldn’t tie in our local yahoos. And Bazemore said we hadn’t given him enough to do it either. The Patriots’ lawyer claimed that the Carolina Patriots was
not
a white-supremacy, paramilitary organization at all, nor affiliated with the Klan, but was instead a “social club for modern military history buffs”: that the old group photo of them in fatigues, waving those M-16s in front of their camp cabin, commemorated a “Vietnam War reenactment retreat,” rather like— explained the lawyer—the local Colonial Club that restaged a Revolutionary War battle once a year. All those firearms in that old picture were “solely for the purposes of the reenactments.” Forced to acknowledge that they’d met Pym, Russell, and Koontz (since they were in the photo with them), Mennehy and the other Patriots denied knowing anything about any crimes any of those fellows might have committed. They denied even knowing Otis Newsome (and the photo we had of him in the state fairgrounds parking lot wasn’t good enough to prove them wrong). Justin was keeping a tail on them; they led very boring lives. I closed the folder and threw it back down on his desk. I said, “They do seem to be, like Brer Fox, just laying low.”

Tilted back in his Harvard chair with
Veritas
stamped on it, he sighed at his messages as he rolled them into pink balls. Then he said, “Preston says he's hearing rumors they’re planning something. If we get wind of a big meeting, I say let's just swoop on them. If we could nail them with something, it’d be easier to pump them about Russell.”

I climbed off the bench. “You want to do a Jeb Stuart, you get me a
date
, and a
place
, and a definite promise that I’m going to find a lot of guys doing
real
illegal things on the premises, and I don’t mean pot and porno, I mean like drills with twenty-two-caliber machine guns, okay? I mean blueprints showing where they’re planning to put the bombs.”

He laced his hands behind his head and thought a minute.
“What if we plant a rogue cop to sell them the weapons we found under the floorboards in Slidell's barn?”

“I don’t think so, General.”

“Jesus, Cuddy, you just said we’ve got to do
something.
We nail them with Slidell's guns.” He tossed this idea around until his phone rang. After listening about five secounds, he began frantically gesturing for me to run to the next phone and pick up extension 15. Adrenaline went through me like ice on a bad tooth. Justin had mouthed the words “Purley Newsome.”

The call hadn’t come through the desk. I punched Zeke's button and told him to start a tape and a trace on 15. When I switched the line on, I heard the same slow, truculent, self-pitying voice I’d had to listen to for years. “Listen, Say-ville, I know what y’all are up to. Every last word in those papers is a fuckin’ lie. I don’t know any Dr. Molina and he's a fuckin’ liar. I never pulled a gun on Cooper Hall, I never shot him, and y’all know it. And I never shot Slidell either. Y’all are trying to frame me, aren’t you?” Newsome seemed to have trouble breathing.

Justin sounded calm and friendly. “No, Purley, we’re just going on the evidence we’ve been given. If we’ve got it wrong, we’ll be glad to listen to your version. Where are you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I sure would. Is Winston with you?”

“You told the papers you bet I’d killed Winston. That was a fuckin’ lie, Say-ville.”

“It's Sah-
ville
, Purley.”

“Fuck you.”

“You still hanging out with Winston? Listen, you two have really had all of us hopping these past months. Made us look pretty bad.”

“Damn straight. Made that shit
Mangum
look bad.”

“Yeah, the governor was on the phone to Mangum this morning, saying he wanted to call out the National Guard, bring you in dead or alive. Now, Mangum personally, he’d prefer you
dead.
I’ve never seen him like this before. The D.A. either. I’m going to tell you the truth, Purley—I mean, you and I never had any axe to grind, right?—they’re going to hang murder one on you, both
counts, plus about a thousand other felonies, put you away for life plus a hundred. Except you’ll get the death penalty. Mangum says he's
living
for the day he looks through that gas chamber window and sees you strapped in there with pink foam spurting out of your mouth and ears.”

Not surprisingly, Purley had no answer to this. In the silence, I thought Justin might have blown it, and we’d lost him, but finally the sullen voice grumbled, “I wasn’t even around when either one of them got killed, and I can prove it. I can prove a lot of stuff.”

“What we hear is you planned the whole thing. The smuggling, the cover-up, and now the shootings. Russell was your accomplice, but you ran the show. You and your brother Otis.”

“Jesus shit, you’re trying to make me think you’re talking to Russell, and I know you’re not.”

“Because he's dead?”

“He's
crazy
, that's what he is. Winston's fuckin’ crazy if he told you all that!”

“Well, Purley, you may be right. I hope he's not there in the room with you calling him crazy. As I recall, he's got a very bad temper. On the other hand, if you’ve sneaked off to call me, he's too smart not to figure out what you’re up to—”

“I’m not up to anything!” A horrible coughing spasm.

“Purley, are you okay? You sound sick.”

“I’m hanging up.”

Justin turned urgent and earnest fast. “Purley, listen to me! Use your head. If Winston was the real trigger man, his best bet is to get you accidentally killed, and let us find your body. Otis is already dead. Mangum’ll unload the Hall/Slidell murders on you and your brother, and close the case. I’m being straight with you now. If you didn’t kill anybody,
your
best bet is come in. Come in and tell us your side of it. I’ll listen. I’ll keep Mangum out of it. I’ll talk to Bazemore.”

We knew this is exactly what Purley had had in mind when he made the call, or he wouldn’t have made it. But he said, “I’m not talking anymore. You think I’m a moron? I don’t know you’re trying to trace this call? Listen, Sayville—”

At that instant, Zeke Caleb ran into the room, whispering, “In
state! Pay phone, Rocky Mount!” It was all I could do to keep from shouting into my extension to Purley that if he hadn’t always been such a stupid, rotten cop, he would have known how fast computers can track down phone numbers these days. But, still, of course, by the time we got a Rocky Mount patrol car to the shopping mall he’d been calling from, Purley
was
gone. The local P.D. threw everybody they had at a manhunt for him and Russell. It didn’t much matter that they came up empty, because before he slammed down the phone, Purley told Justin he’d be calling him back tomorrow at six A.M. to find out what Bazemore had to say “regarding his cooperation, and it better be good.”

I bashed down my phone, yelled at the top of my lungs, and leapt a good two feet off the ground, scaring Zeke Caleb into slightly lifting the edge of one eyelid.

Justin ran into the hall, slammed his bad knee against the door corner, and hobbled up to slap me on the shoulder. “He's coming in! We hooked him, Cuddy! Four days. And who would have thought he could even
read
a newspaper.”

I said I hoped he and Winston had already split up, because Winston wasn’t about to let Purley waltz home and turn State's evidence. “That would mean Purley's got to be smart enough to get away, and Winston's got to be dumb enough to let him, and neither notion has the crystal ring of plausibility. Rocky Mount, shit! Okay, meet me here at 5:30.”