Time's Witness (58 page)

Nora smiled at me, but she scooped her arm through Isaac's and pulled him out of his chair. “Come on, partner.”

The man was actually embarrassed, which I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. Shaking his head, he held back. “Ah, Nora, alas, I don’t do this. I can’t dance.”

She tugged him away from the table. “Everybody can dance. Just hold on.”

Watching them from under the table, Brian's comment, spit out in a giggling fit, was apt. “Mommy looks like she's dancing with a big old white-haired bear.” Isaac, after a minute of riveting his eyes to Nora's feet, glanced up, smiled, and waved at us. I’d say he was probably the worst fox-trotter I ever saw in my life, but he was apparently enjoying himself.

Afterwards, he shambled over to say goodnight. Since he’d asked me how to get from here to the By-Ways Budget Motel, and since that's where Mitch Bazemore (ignoring Judge Hilliardson's advice to make North Carolina look good) had boarded the Delaware state patrolman who’d brought Moonfoot Butler down, I assumed that Isaac was on his way to the motel to try to pump the man for information. Then he’d probably go to the county jail to visit George Hall, then he’d probably see if he could get in to talk to Moonfoot Butler, then he’d go sit up all night with a pack of Chesterfields, a pint of bourbon, a bag of pistachios, and his yellow legal pad.

I left the party shortly after Isaac did, went home to River Rise, put on some Aretha Franklin, and listened to my messages. One was from Warden Carpenter at Dollard Prison asking me if I could spare the time to come talk with him tomorrow. He didn’t explain why. I returned the call from Mitch Bazemore that said, “Bazemore, Mangum. I said call me. Where are you?”

“I have a wife and children,” the D.A. informed me when he answered on the first ring. I told him I’d heard that rumor. “I mean, we’re in bed.”

“All of you? The six kids too? Kind of hard to picture.”

“Mangum, just stop right there. It's 10:35! Do you realize that?”

“I didn’t realize it, but I can assimilate it, Mitch.”

While I listened to him, I tricked Martha into taking her pill by shoving it into a cheese cracker. Mitch wanted me to know that the A.G. had told him to tell me to tell Savile to tell Newsome that if he surrendered by noon tomorrow, signed a full confession, and agreed to testify for the State, then the State would take all the above into account. I laughed and said Purley might find our part of the deal a little vague. “He can read between the lines,” Mitch impatiently pointed out.

“Purley can’t read
on
the lines, much less between them. Give me something concrete in big print, or he's not coming in, Mitch.”

“Savile can
imply
—imply, not state or delineate in any way that impacts on our deniability—
imply
that the indictment will exclude first degree on the Slidell murder.”

“And on Cooper Hall?”

“The A.G. is annoyed, very annoyed. The reputation of civic government, law enforcement, public trust itself is at stake. We indict Newsome and Russell. They’re the only ones involved in these murders, and their motives were greed, greed, and panic,
not
politics. The A.G. wants this whole mess settled quietly. Quietly, quickly, and simply. It's left a bad taste in people's mouths.”

“Yeah. Especially people like Willie Slidell and Cooper Hall. And Otis Newsome. They got mouths full of dirt.”

His voice tripled in volume, and I wondered if his wife resorted to ear plugs. “For the last time, Otis is left out of this! And politics is left out of this. Do you understand me?”

My voice made no effort to meet his. “Then tell me flat out, Mitch. You’re asking me to suppress evidence?”

He spluttered into the phone. “
I absolutely am not.
I’m telling you
you don’t have
any evidence.”

As patiently as I could bear to, I reminded the district attorney we had every reason to suspect that Otis Newsome, a town official, had (a) called in his chits on Dyer Fanshaw (to whom he’d handed over all the city's paper contracts at a fat profit), and (b) persuaded Fanshaw to overlook the illegal use of his trucks by Otis's little brother Purley. That (c), far from turning in Purley and his pals for smuggling, Otis had then (d) paid them to smuggle weapons to
extremists, and (e) worked with extremists to stir up trouble against the political opponents of people he wanted in office. That (f) it was likely Otis had been involved years back in the tear-gas stampede and death at Williamstown Auditorium. That (g) it was likely he’d been involved in an attempt to blackmail Andy Brookside into pulling out of the governor's race. That (h) we had every reason to suspect that if Otis hadn’t known beforehand, he’d surely covered up afterwards, the murder of Cooper Hall. That (adding a through h) it was likely that Otis Newsome would have been indictable on a string of charges as long as my arm.

Bazemore responded as if he’d been in the kitchen snacking the whole time I was talking. “You have no evidence against Otis.”

“
For Christ's sake, Mitch, why do you think the man killed himself?
A bad day at the office?” I was pacing fast around the kitchen counter, lifting the phone's spiraled cord to keep it from knocking things over.

“Mangum, no man who’d done the kinds of callous things you are alleging, no man like that
would
kill himself. A good man devastated by horrible revelations about a cherished brother whom he’d raised himself, that kind of man is the kind of man who might get overcome by despair and take his own life.”

I made myself sit calmly on a stool and keep my voice quiet. “I respect your feelings for Otis, but he's not one of the good guys. I’m
telling
you, I can produce a witness who will testify that Otis
Newsome hired her to blackmail Andrew Brookside.”

His reply was wide-awake. “Blackmail how?”

“Someone hired by Newsome to seduce Brookside and video-tape their sexual activity. Willie Slidell was hired to set up the tape.”

He asked me if I had the tape. I said I didn’t. How did I know such a tape had actually been made? I told him I hadn’t confirmed the tape's existence. He asked me if I had the
witness.
I told him she was out of the country. I’d been told about her by Hamilton Walker. Hamilton Walker? Was this witness then a black prostitute? A sigh like a death rattle. “Mangum, you make me sick. On the second-hand word of a
pimp
, you accuse a dead man, a dead man unable to defend himself, of consorting and conspiring with whores and
pornography scum to blackmail the president of Haver University, a gubernatorial candidate! You should be brought up on charges,
on
charges
, and don’t think I’m not prepared to do it! Don’t ever come
to me with that kind of sewage again!”

“And if I produce the tape?”

“Then Andrew Brookside is a man of loose morals, and I feel sorry for his wife. You aren’t going to produce a tape showing Otis hiring this whore of yours, and that's what it would take to convince me he had. Period! Subject closed.”

I looked out my sliders at the moon rippling in the Shocco. I said, “Tell me one thing. When you and Fanshaw found Otis, did you look for a note?”

Bazemore swallowed—I could hear it over the phone—and said I knew we hadn’t ever found a note.

“We didn’t, that's right. Maybe somebody beat us to it.”

He dropped the phone into the receiver from what sounded like a height of about ten feet.

When Purley called Justin at 6:43 A.M. (from a McDonald's across from the Raleigh bus station, as the trace quickly discovered), he was coughing and wheezing even harder than yesterday. Like me, Purley laughed at the A.G.'s offer. He wanted “limited immunity,” which he knew about from cable television. Justin said, “That sounds fine.” He wanted reduced charges for pleading guilty to lesser offenses,
and
a chance to prove he was innocent of all charges, by reason of “brainwashing.” Justin said he totally believed Purley suffered from a washed brain, and thought he should stress that to the D.A. Purley wanted “protective custody,” from Winston Russell, for which I certainly didn’t blame him. In fact, he wanted a new house and name and job in another state, which he’d heard the FBI gave to people who testified against the Mafia. Justin told Purley that since Winston hadn’t been in the Mafia, we’d have to get back to him on that one. He wanted Savile publicly to retract those statements to the papers about his being the trigger man and the mastermind, and to tell his mother they weren’t true. Justin said he’d be glad to. Purley wanted a private meeting with the district attorney and the attorney general. He wanted a doctor. He wanted a lawyer. Justin said he’d see to it that he got them.

“Okay,” Purley wheezed. “I’m turning myself in. I want it on the records, it's voluntary.”

“You got it,” Justin told him. “Now, where's Winston?”

“He ain’t with me. He's sick. We both got sick. I cut loose from him couple of weeks ago.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m hanging up now. You be standing at the fountain, first level, Catawba Mall, two P.M. Okay, Say-ville? Just you, and bring me a signed paper about how I’m cooperating.”

Justin looked up at what I’d just scrawled on the blackboard, which was what Brenda Moore had just told me on the intercom, after a call into a Raleigh police dispatcher. “McDonald's. Raleigh bus station. Five minutes max.” Justin held up an okay sign, then spoke as gentle as a priest at a deathbed. “Just stay right there, Purley. You sound like you feel rotten. You need medical attention. I don’t want you taking the bus all the way from Raleigh.”

“Fuck you,” grunted Purley, and was gone before two RPD squad cars screeched right up onto the curb in front of the golden arches. The girl behind the counter there said, yes, a tall blond man had run out the door just a few minutes earlier; she’d figured he was rushing to catch a bus. (It turned out he wasn’t, because the Raleigh cops stopped two buses pulling out, and checked all the passengers.) Asked to describe him, the girl said he’d looked shaky, feverish, exhausted, dirty, and ragged—“like a skinny beat-up bum that was sick as a dog,” was how she put it. The thought of Purley skinny was hard to imagine. She said he’d had to scrounge through his pockets for enough grimy change to pay for his Egg McMuffin. Back in December, Purley had withdrawn over nine thousand dollars from his bank account. Obviously, he hadn’t budgeted well during his travels with Winston Russell.

In the courtroom, with Bazemore on his feet the entire time, pouncing and snapping objections, Rosethorn kept Moonfoot Butler on the stand for three hours and forty minutes. I didn’t hear all of it, and neither did the jury, because Judge Hilliardson sent the twelve out of the room four separate times while he heard heated arguments from the D.A. or the defense counsel on whether this or that precedent from these cited cases warranted a favorable ruling,
or whether this or that comment by opposing counsel was inadmissable, inexcusable, and deserving of a horsewhip. The first time I wandered down to Superior Court, jammed with everyone who could squeeze in to watch the show, I heard Isaac lead Moonfoot backwards through a long and persistently unsuccessful career in crime. He asked him, to start with, if he hadn’t come up for parole in Delaware last year, and had been denied because he’d been caught stealing cigarettes and candy bars from the prison commissary.

On the stand in his same snappy jacket and pleated pants, Moonfoot looked hurt. “They lied on me about that. The only real worst thing I did was drop a couple of racks of dishes, which got broke by accident, and they gave me five days in the hole.”

The old lawyer kept flipping through a packet of papers thick as the Hillston phone book (maybe it was the Hillston phone book, since not even the bank robber Willie Sutton had an arrest record that long), as he asked things like, “For what offense
are
you in prison now, Mr. Butler?…Two years ago, you were arrested here in Hillston for receiving stolen goods, is that correct?…And, again the following year, were you not convicted of three more counts of breaking and entering, for which you served an additional eighteen months at Dollard?…Shall we call last year the year of the bad checks, then?…I’m looking at your juvenile arrest record here, Mr. Butler, and I must say I’m overwhelmed. I see here
before the age of
eighteen
, nine counts of petty larceny, four counts of unauthorized
use of a vehicle—in other words, stealing cars—two counts of carrying a pistol without a license, let's see, ah, purse-snatching, shoplifting, disorderly conduct, possession of narcotics. Maybe it would save us some time, sir, if you simply listed for us any crimes you
haven’t
committed. Have you for example ever before been charged with perjury?”

Bazemore naturally objected to this. In fact, he stormed right over to the defense table, and yelled, “All right, Mr. Rosethorn, just stop it right there! Your Honor, I protest counsel's outrageous attempt to embarrass and discredit this witness under the guise of questioning him!”

Isaac, flapping the arrest document in the D.A.'s face: “I don’t
need
to discredit him! His past discredits him! And there is no
immunity to embarrassment guaranteed a witness. Under the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Butler
was
protected against self-incrimination. You, Mr. Bazemore, you ignored that right by bringing this man here (and we might well ask how you persuaded him to come) to tell all these wild tales of robbing and smuggling and porno heists and warehouse—”

“Do you dare imply that—”

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” Judge Hilliardson whacked down the gavel hard enough to make Miss Bee turn around. “Address yourselves to me, and not to each other. If you wish to make proper arguments, I will dismiss the jury again, and hear them. If you wish to bicker, do so elsewhere.”

Bazemore: “Your Honor, I move that last question be taken out of the record. It was facetious and prejudicial and uncalled for.”

Hilliardson: “What
was
the last question?”

Mr. Walkington, the stenographer (who despite his advanced years could still do 195 words a minute): “‘Have you, for example, ever before been charged with perjury?’”