Time's Witness (55 page)

Justin grinned. “Jesus, I
hate
getting up that early in the morning.”

I turned back in the hall. “Next Christmas, you’ll be getting up that early every morning, humming lullabies with a burp rag over your silk robe. Hey, say it's a boy, you’re not going to name it J.B. Savile the
Sixth
, are you?” Justin and Alice said they planned to ask the sex of their future baby, but that she wouldn’t let him tell anybody.

“Cuddy, don’t think of trying to trick me. You’ll just have to wait and see. Now, for a girl, I always wanted Katherine. And for a boy, well, I love Andy's middle name. Theodore. Theodore Savile. You like it?”

I said I thought it was fine. I stopped myself from adding, I
thought it was particularly fine if Alice was still hoping Andy Theodore Brookside would pick her as his nominee for lieutenant governor.

As my mama often chastised me, you don’t have to say mean things, even if they’re true.

That afternoon, when I slipped into the back of Superior Court, I saw Jack Molina hunched over taking notes in the last row, and I sat down beside him. Isaac was finishing up his cross-examination of one of Mitch's witnesses from Smoke's Bar, a middle-aged black postman, who’d said that (a) George had thrown the first punch in the fight with Pym, (b) he and two other men had tried unsuccessfully to hold George down as Pym ran toward the door after the fight. On cross, Isaac led the man to explore his motive in holding George down, and got him to say it was prompted not by fear for Pym, but fear for George. “You tangle like that with white people, you gonna lose. They cops, you gonna lose bad.”

Isaac: “At the time, sir, did you know Pym was a policeman?”

“No, I thought he was a drunkard.”

Bubba Percy, up front in the press section, laughed out loud.

Isaac smiled. “Well, that wouldn’t necessarily mean he
wasn’t
a policeman. Why did you think Pym was drunk? Was he uncoordinated, weaving around, slurred speech?”

“He was in Smoke's by himself, that's mainly why.” (For some reason, this was the first thing that provoked anything resembling mirth from Judge Hilliardson—a silent snort.) “And he was talking loud, riling people, seemed like on purpose, you know, like when he started up the jukebox during the live music and all.”

Isaac asked him to think back. “Think back to the fight, now. Was Pym just standing there and George hit him?”

“No, Pym was pushing and shoving and talking ugly at him.”

“Ah.… And you’ve said that Pym pulled out his gun from under his shirt. At that point, did he speak to Hall?”

The postman looked embarrassed. “You want me to say it right out?” Isaac nodded.

“Well, when he push the gun up his nose, he yell, ‘Buddy, your fuckin’ ass is grass.’”

“And what did George say or do in response?”

“Well, just stares at him; says, ‘Try it,’…well, his word was, you
know…” The postman looked at Hilliardson, who told him to repeat exactly what he remembered hearing. Nodding, the man turned to Isaac and said, “‘Try it, you motherfucker.’”

Beside me, Jack Molina whispered, “Jesus Christ! Pym's got a loaded gun up his nose, and George says
that!
” I agreed that the Hall brothers did not scare easily.

The postman went on. “There was this crash. I believe somebody banged open the door and hit a chair, something like that. The white man wheels ’round to see, and George Hall, he knocked his arm away, then slams it down hard, three, four times, on the table, knocks the gun loose. So the white man runs off.”

On redirect, Bazemore brought the witness back to what he said were the “significant factors.” That George had initiated the fight by shoving Pym aside, yanking the jukebox cord out of the wall, and telling Pym to leave the bar. That when Pym had followed George across the room “to protest,” George had hit him with his fist. That three men had tried physically to restrain George from following Pym, and that he, the postman, had said to George, “Forget it, forget it, let it go.”

“Did Hall,” asked Mitch, thumbs jammed in his vest pockets, “appear to hear and understand your efforts to stop him from shooting Pym?”

A boom of objection from Isaac. “This witness
never said
he assumed Hall was going to shoot anybody!” Hilliardson sustained, and asked the D.A. to rephrase, which he did by changing “shooting Pym” to “pursuing Pym with a gun in his hand.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the postman. “Hall understood. He said, ‘Y’all get back. Stay back in here.’”

On recross, Isaac asked if George had used the gun as a threat to get free of his restrainers. No, he hadn’t. By “Get back, stay in here,” had the postman assumed George was threatening them?

“No, more like he didn’t want anybody hurt.”

When they finally finished, I went up front, leaned over the dividing rail, and whispered to Mitch Bazemore that I needed to talk with him as soon as court adjourned; his look suggested he hoped I was planning to offer to resign. Then I had a deputy pass a note to Isaac; in it I said that Purley had called, and was going to
surrender. Nora smiled at me when I waved, a nice change. And I would have kept on going out of the courtroom had I not heard Mitchell Bazemore call out the name of his next witness in that earnest camp-coach voice of his. “The State calls Arthur Butler.”

I imagine my face looked about the way Isaac's did, and Isaac's face rushed from shock to anger fast. All spring, he’d tried without success to have the Delaware prison release Arthur “Moonfoot” Butler to serve as a defense witness. Now here was the D.A. calling the suddenly available Mr. Butler for the prosecution. Spinning around to glower at me, Isaac saw me staring dumbfounded at Bazemore. It wasn’t so much that Mitch had
wanted
to keep his strategy secret from me that staggered me; it was that he had
succeeded.
Plus, he’d done the unexpected; his “game plan” was
obviously not at all what I’d figured, and Isaac had counted on. The
State
was going to risk opening the can of wormy cops itself, rather
than wait for the defense to do it. There was no other reason for him to put Butler on the stand. I watched these calculations take place in accelerated form in a few blinks of Isaac's eyes. Then he leaned over to George, who was looking around the room as if trying to spot Butler. George listened, frowned, nodded. Standing with a sigh, Isaac said, “Your Honor, there is no Arthur Butler on our list of the prosecution's witnesses.”

Bazemore stood across the room, pushing his knuckles into the table top. “Your Honor, this witness's appearance was only insured yesterday. He is incarcerated in Delaware; we arranged for them to make him available to us, and today was the day they chose.”

Isaac then asked to approach the bench, where the D.A. followed with the bounce of a gleeful bushwhacker. I knew Isaac was asking for a recess. I knew from Mitch's hugging himself that Judge Hilliardson was saying no.

While the deputies were escorting in Mr. Butler, Isaac whispered busily at Nora as he hurried her into her raincoat. She strode quickly by me out of the courtroom, passing Moonfoot, who walked toward the witness stand in pleated trousers. The cuffs flopped from the floaty, bent-leg walk for which he’d acquired his nickname. Arthur Butler was about George's age, but younger looking, a lighter brown, with a squashed chin not much helped by a wispy goatee, a
small head with minuscule ears above a long thin neck, sloped shoulders, and a high, narrow, tightly belted waist. His jacket looked new. He listened to the oath as if it were fascinating, then perched on the edge of the witness chair, hands on his knees. It was that pose that the
Star's
trial artist sketched; the picture appeared on the front page of the paper the next day.

After establishing Moonfoot's identity, and without going into too many details about his past, or for that matter, his present, Bazemore asked the witness to tell us in his own words how he knew George Hall.

Moonfoot nodded his long neck eagerly to show his willingness to help out. He spoke without taking his eyes from Bazemore. “I been knowing George ever since grade school. We grew up in the neighborhood, and hung out some. He come on back to Hillston after the Army, and good jobs is scarce. We both do roofing some, then he gets on at Fanshaw, truck driver—’cause he got his license. I tried for one myself but the man gave me the test…” Bazemore stopped this, and herded his witness to Fanshaw trucks. “So well, all right, I know these three men working a little business where they could use a Fanshaw driver, so, well, I put them onto George, and that's how it all got started between him and—”

Bazemore interrupted what sounded to me like the start of a long rehearsed speech: “What do you mean by a little business?”

Relaxing, Butler explained at some length that he meant these men had possession of certain goods in large quantities, including cigarettes and pornographic merchandise, which they were smuggling out of the state in Fanshaw Paper Company trucks, and then selling to prearranged buyers. The D.A. wondered if Mr. Butler could tell us how these men obtained large quantities of such goods, and Mr. Butler said he knew for a direct fact that they’d stolen some of them from the Hillston Police Impoundment Facility and confiscated some of them from “this dude and that one” (i.e., previous thieves and receivers of stolen or illicit goods).

“And who were these three men?” asked the D.A. sadly.

“Well, sir, who they were was three policemen here in Hillston. First ones I met was Newsome and Pym, then they introduce me to Russell. That was the one in charge, it looked like, and was.”

“You are referring to Hillston police officers, Purley Newsome, Winston Russell, and Robert Pym?”

“That's right. Purley Newsome, Winston—”

“And these
police officers
told you they were smuggling stolen property out of the state inside Fanshaw Paper Company trucks?” This revelation about the moral character of these policemen was, of course, news to no one who’d read a paper or watched a television in the last few months, but when Butler said, “They told me, and they
showed
me,” Mitch bowed his head mournfully, as if the knowledge of such corruption had weighed him down. “And why,” he asked when he recovered, “why should they tell and show
you
, of all people, that they were committing these crimes?”

“Why indeed?” asked Judge Shirley Hilliardson, scowling down from his high bench.

Butler coiled his neck around toward the judge. “Well, sir, supplies at the police got low and they needed a good supply-man with the right contacts, and that was me, so I’m the one they picked.” A chuckle from the jury foreman at Moonfoot's self-appraisal.

Bazemore made himself smile. “And why should you agree to be picked?” Butler allowed it might have had something to do with the circumstances under which he’d first met Officers Newsome and Pym. “Where and when
did
you meet these men?”

“Seems like it was at a warehouse loading dock at Haver Tobacco. ’Round about 3:00 A.M., on a Sunday, back about eight years. They come up on me out of the pitch-dark.”

“What were you doing there in the pitch-dark?”

“Well, I had about two hundred cartons right there on the dolly, and another three hundred in the van. I saw the two of them, I liked to had a stroke.” He grinned. The juror Mrs. Boren looked disgusted.

Bazemore, who rarely tried for humor, in the wise knowledge that he was devoid of that quality himself, now managed a bit of irony. “May we assume, Mr. Butler, that you were not at the time
employed
by Haver Tobacco Company to engage in this nocturnal
transfer of their property from the warehouse to the van?”

Most of the spectators laughed; the judge did not join them.
Moonfoot acknowledged that he had not been on the Haver payroll at that particular time. Another half hour rambled by as Bazemore led his stubbornly garrulous witness through his testimony: how the cops had impounded all the cigarettes, then coerced him under threat of a maximum sentence into supplying them with forecasts of upcoming robberies in the area, and tips on the whereabouts of illegal commodities they might also wish to impound. During a direct examination rife with conjectures, hearsay, and irrelevancies, Judge Hilliardson kept glancing at Isaac Rosethorn with expectation, then impatience, but the defense attorney made not a single objection. Instead he wrote notes to George Hall. By now it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and I suspected Isaac was hoping that Bazemore wouldn’t be able to move Moonfoot (who was in no hurry to return to Delaware) through to the end of his story before adjournment, which would give the defense all night to plan its cross-examination.

Even Mitch kept turning around as if to meet face-on inevitable objections from Rosethorn. In their absence, he tried his best to speed Butler along, flapping his arm at digressions as if they were flies. “Never mind about the adult magazines now….” “We don’t need that conversation word-for-word, Mr. Butler, just summarize for us….” Finally, he herded him back to George Hall. “So it was
then
you introduced the defendant to Robert Pym?”

“Well, sir, that's right. Pym's kinfolk, this Willie Slidell that was working in the shipping department there at Fanshaw? Well, he say how they been just taking a truck when they want one, but they gotta stop that now ’cause the man's gonna get onto them. But then the problem is, Russell didn’t trust any of the drivers Willie Slidell knew enough to cut ’em in, and I said how I could put them onto George, ’cause we go way back, and he's hurting for bread. And that's how it all got started. George was running the regular route down to Georgia, but they want him to make stops on the way where they tell him to. But Willie said to me, ‘I don’t like this whole—”

“Just a moment. To your direct knowledge, George Hall, at the instigation of Robert Pym and the others, transported stolen goods from Hillston, North Carolina, into the state of Georgia?”

Butler nodded. “Yes, sir, that's my direct knowledge of the facts. He got five hundred a trip.”

The whole room stirred like wind over wheat. This
was
news to most people at the court; it certainly appeared to be news to the judge, whose nose looked the way it might if he’d just stepped into an outhouse during an August heatwave. There was surge of motion at the press table. Bubba Percy threw aside his doodle pad and started writing as fast as he could. Back near me, Jack Molina looked stunned. So did Jordan West. Nomi Hall's head trembled, but her shoulders straightened even more stiffly against her seat. George didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on the state seal above the bench.