Time's Witness (6 page)

George's refusal to plea-bargain annoyed the Court; his taciturnity on the witness stand annoyed the jury. All he would say was that after his interference with Pym's arresting the burglary suspect, Pym had harassed him; and that, in fact, he assumed that Pym might even have come to Smoke's that night in order to harass him further. (The D.A. objected to these conclusions and conjectures, and was sustained.) Two, George claimed he was convinced by Pym's assaulting him with the gun that his life was in danger. (The D.A. demonstrated that even if Pym had responded to Hall's obscenities by “provoking” him—which of course the D.A. didn’t believe—such provocation was certainly resistible by “any reasonable man similarly provoked.”) Three—while admitting he had chased Pym outside in the heat of passion—George claimed that he’d seen the cop run to a blue Ford down the street, reach inside it, then turn back toward him; that he’d believed Pym had taken a second gun from the car, and so had fired in self-defense. Well, the D.A. was very sure the jury wasn’t going to fall for a story that didn’t even make sense. Heat of passion! There was “appreciable time” between the moment George wrenched the .38 out of Pym's hand and the moment he shot him on the sidewalk—time for cooling reflection, or for premeditated, intentional malice aforethought, and which did George choose? And as for his thinking Officer Pym had gone for a second gun! There wasn’t even a blue Ford around, much less a gun in it! Pym drove a Dodge, and it was parked
across
the street from Smoke's, not down the street. Pym was not running for a gun, he was running for his life! The D.A. knew the jury would agree.

And so they did. They found George guilty of first-degree murder. Told to go back and determine whether he deserved the death penalty, they returned to say, yes, they thought he did. Judge Tiggs thanked them for doing their duty and sent them home.

The assistant public defender had taken exception to at least a
few of Judge Tiggs's over rulings of his objections, and on that basis he filed an appeal for George; it was denied, and the defender, having discharged his obligations, quit after telling George not to worry, because while lots of people got the death penalty, nobody had actually been executed in the state for ages. George filed his own appeal, claiming an incompetent defense; it was denied. More petitions were written, filed, and denied. Years passed. Despite the defender's sanguinity, three men and one woman were executed at Dollard Prison. George's mother hired another lawyer. George's younger brother organized the Save George Hall Committee, using contributions to buy public attention about the case. On death row, George did three hundred push-ups a day and grew African violets from seedlings in paper cartons. Years passed, almost seven since the bullet had entered Bobby Pym's skull. From that moment, most people in Hillston had been sure that George Hall was going to the gas chamber. And a lot of them were angry that it was taking the state so long to get him there.

Unless you found yourself behind a farmer too bitter to let you pass his tractor, or a teenager itchy to ram you into a tree, Old Airport Road was the shortest route from Hillston to Dollard Prison, twenty minutes away, just beyond the city limits of the state capital, and in my county. This late on Friday night, I had nothing to dodge but ice. Needles of sleet were crackling on my windshield hard enough for me to hear them, and the wipers made weak swipes that just smeared the slush around. I listened to a tape with Loretta Lynn on one side and Patsy Cline on the other. That's a lot of love gone wrong.

Out in front of the Hillston Club, I’d used my car radio to call downtown. The night desk sergeant, Hiram Davies, is a Baptist deacon starched clean as his undershirts who almost never goes home because he's past retirement age and he's scared we won’t let him back in if he leaves. After he’d stopped apologizing, he’d given me a message. It was from a man I’ve known for a lot of years, and it upset me enough to make me risk my Oldsmobile to Airport Road in a sleet storm. “Maybe I should have just sent a car, Chief, and I hate to disturb you during your social occasion—”

“Dance, Hiram. I got to this place, and I want you to know
these folks are dancing! Drinking, probably even cussing and card-playing in the back rooms. It makes a man want to fall to his knees and pray.”

“I hope so, Chief.” (Jokes slide off Davies like chestnuts off a steep tin roof.) “But since Mr. Rosethorn did say to tell you personally, that's why I decided—”

“Tell me what?”

I could hear Hiram shuffling his notes. “A pickup truck, license AX four one five seven nine, passed Dollard Prison gate twice, slowing near the vigil group; male Caucasians, obscenities and verbal threats shouted.”

“Who told Isaac Rosethorn this? Who and when?”

“He's over there at the prison.”

“Isaac?”

“Isn’t he, he's Hall's lawyer now, isn’t he? At least that's—”

“Jesus Christ, what's a man his age doing marching around with a sign in the middle of the night in this weather?!”

Davies pinched off his words, one at a time. “I couldn’t say, sir. That truck is registered to a Willis Tate, Jr., lives in Raleigh, one previous arrest, vandalism.”

I started my motor. “You’re a hot dog, Hiram, no getting around it. Call Raleigh, ask them to go after that yahoo. I’m heading out there.”

He said he’d send a car for me, and I said never mind it, and he said it wasn’t his place to argue, which had never stopped him before and didn’t this time. Finally he got around to sharing a second part to the message from Isaac. “He said to tell you Lieutenant Governor Lewis had just driven up with another man in a limousine, and gone inside the prison. He said you would want—”

“I’ll be goddamned!” I slapped my hand on my thigh so hard I hurt both of them. “Fuck the ducks, they stopped it.”

“I couldn’t say, sir.” There was a faint snort at my profanity. “And Chief Mangum, what would you like me to do? The holding cell's full and I’ve got a drunk-and-disorderly keeping everybody awake. Four joy riders, two breaking-and-entering. And Norm Brown on wife assault again.” Davies loved a full report, though he usually phrased it in terms of questions he didn’t need the answer to,
so I listened while I drove. “Attempted burglary, Maplewood Pawnshop, apprehended on the scene. Three purses snatched in River Rise Mall. Purley Newsome caught one of them.”

“He didn’t kill him, did he?” (Officer Purley Newsome was a leftover from the old regime, with a brother on the city council.)

“—And considerable shoplifting. It's busy tonight.”

“Well, it's only four more shopping days to Christmas. Folks get tense.” I turned the heater higher and turned onto Airport Road.

“—And we had a jumper on the roof at Showtime Cinema; Officer White talked him down, and then Officer White had him admitted to U.H. for observation.” (Davies’ refusal to acknowledge, by name or pronoun, that we had women—like Nancy White—on the force, drove him into a lot of syntactical byroads. He was like an old monk, stunned to find nuns sleeping in his monastery.) “Officer reports his condition satisfactory.”

“Tell Nancy she's a good lady. Aww, humankind, Hiram. Makes you wonder where God went and forgot to turn on His answering machine. Who's the loud drunk?”

Davies squeezed his voice so tight it turned falsetto. “The Lord answers all who call on Him. The drunk's Billy Gilchrist.”

“Lock him in the interrogation room, he can sleep on the table.”

“I already did.”

Sergeant Davies signed off in a huff. I put on Patsy Cline. I still hate to think of that woman's plane crashing. “Why can’t I forget the past, and love somebody new…” Her voice was so sweet with sadness, I slid down into a memory of Lee Haver as if other heart-breaks—as if my wife, as if Briggs—hadn’t worn the first loss away years and years ago.

Twenty minutes later, the black brick turrets of the old penitentiary rose up at me, caught by big searchlights. The place sat there in miles of flat meadow and rows of broken tobacco stalks, like a backwater castle built by some paranoid, third-rate baron that the king never came to visit. In summer, you could watch convicts slouch through the yellow grass swinging their thick wooden scythes. Families picnicking in the public park across the highway would point at them, maybe hoping they’d be lucky enough to see
one of the blue-shirted reapers slice a guard in half, then race off without much hope toward wherever he figured freedom was. Or maybe the picnickers pointed to show their children what could happen to them if they didn’t stop talking back. In summer, the convicts played baseball in the meadow and grew tomatoes against the fence. In winter, unless herded off to fill some highway potholes, they stayed indoors like everybody else in the South. The sixty-three men on death row never went outside at all.

Now the prison looked wide-awake, so many lights on, you could tell that the coils of barbed wire on top of the turrets were shiny with ice. Out front, I saw some huddled cars and a dozen or so figures, most in plastic ponchos, crowded together under the house ledge. Inside his steamy cubicle a guard was eating doughnuts and reading a magazine. Four more people hunched beneath umbrellas around a forty-gallon drum where burning sticks hissed at the sleet. Nothing was going on and nobody looked injured, just miserable. Obviously the pickup truck hadn’t come back. There was a stretch limo, a black Lincoln, parked near the gate.

As I slowed, a Mustang behind me passed in a hurry, then cut left into the prison drive, skidding sideways next to the high iron gates. I pulled in fast, and jumped out the same time the driver did. We had both run, spraying slush, halfway across the wide lot toward the vigil group before I recognized Bubba Percy, reporter for the
Hillston Star
—star reporter according to him—a handsome good-ole-boy gone to pudge in his thirties, with a nose for news like a jackal's after maggoty meat. Clamping me on the shoulder, he yelled, “Mangum! That pickup come back? I miss anything?”

I snapped open the umbrella I keep in my raincoat pocket. “I bet you heard that on the scanner, didn’t you, Bubba? Breaks my heart you got nothing else to do on Friday nights. And lashes pretty as a girl's, except if this ice hardens on them, it's gonna freeze your weasel eyes shut.” I kept walking toward the foursome at the fire watching us.

“Oh shut up, Mangum.” He ran, zigzagging puddles. “You know a few years back, there was a W.Y. Tate arrested in Raleigh for tossing a stink bomb in that synagogue window on Yancy Street? You know that? Do you?” His hair snagged on one of my umbrella
spokes, and I hauled him under it with me.

“Bubba, you just hang on, one of these days
The New York Times
is bound to call.”

I didn’t recognize anybody in the crowd scrunched under the gate ledge—most were black, some were female, all were bedraggled as cats. Slush had blanked out half the letters on the big signs propped up beside them: FREE GEORGE HALL. STOP THE KILLING. JUSTICE FOR
ALL.
I did know the four people under umbrellas around the fire drum. The tallest, slender and long-muscled, wearing an old army jacket that had probably belonged to George, was Cooper Hall, the condemned man's younger brother who’d just started college when George went to prison and now worked for a civil rights organization that ran a legal-aid society, engineered legislative lobbies, and published a journal called
With Liberty and
Justice
which Coop pretty much ran. He was better-looking than
George, with a fine-boned arrogant face.

The woman in a yellow slicker beside him was his fiancée, Jordan West, a caseworker at the Department of Human Services; time to time I’d see her in the municipal building when she’d come to testify about a welfare violation or child custody trouble. In her early twenties, she had the kind of remarkable good looks that will turn your head on the sidewalk, women and children's too. Bubba Percy put it differently, stopping to whisper, “Shit, now that's fucking brown sugar! That's the best excuse for miscegenation I
ever
saw. Hey! Cut it out!” I gave his wrist another sharp twist before I dropped it. “That was a
compliment
, Mangum!”

“Yeah. Here's another one. Your mama must be the first woman in history to give birth after getting fucked up the ass by a hyena.”

He was unfazed by the vilest insult I could come up with.

“Something bugging you? Something happen out here tonight?

Come on, what's the story!” “Jesus!” I kept walking.

The thin white man by the fire was Brookside's assistant campaign manager, Jack Molina, a communications professor at Haver University and a founding editor of
With Liberty and Justice.
The considerably older and broader white man next to him, smoking in the rain, his nubbly Russian hat on sideways, his dirty
camel-hair overcoat gaping at the buttons, was the one who had sent me the message: Isaac Rosethorn—for just a month now, George Hall's lawyer; for a whole lot of years, a friend of mine. He was maybe Hillston's only native-born Jew, probably its only native-born legal genius, and undoubtedly one of its most perverse citizens. He said, “Thirty-five minutes?”

I said, “Road's icy. Hi, Isaac. Evening, folks, how y’all doing? Coop, Dr. Molina. Jordan, nice to see you.” Jordan made a place for me.

Rosethorn gave up on his wet cigarette and asked, “Could you trace that truck? There was a second one. Both pickups, big Confederate flags flapping out the windows. We only got the plates on the last one.”

I said, “Raleigh's already traced it. A Willis Tate.” “Ahhh? Tate? The synagogue?”

Bubba Percy grabbed me. “Didn’t I tell you!”

“Bubba, damnit, will you stop stomping on my toes? Y’all know Bubba Percy of the
Star
, clubfooted hound of the free press?” While I talked, Coop Hall and I kept our eyes on each other; if looks could freeze, you could have snapped my arms off like icicles on a drain sprout. Behind us, the dozen young vigilants pressed nervously in a semicircle near him. I nodded at them. “Any word from Warden Carpenter?”

A few of them shook their heads and a young man said, “No. Nothing.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”