Time's Witness (63 page)

Bubba, combing his sideburns and his eyebrows, wondered why the Lewis people should give “a flying fuck” about Hall. I told him, “Because if you don’t keep shit covered up, it can get loose and hit the cooling system.”

“Don’t get poetic on me. You’re just a cop. Cover up what?”

I pulled out the piece of paper Zack Carpenter had given me. “Bubba, what do you want out of life?”

He gave a good pantomime of serious thought. “A bigger dick. A Porsche and a Pulitzer. A rich smart woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe, thinks like Dr. Ruth, and cooks like my mother.”

I laughed. “Except for the looks and the cooking, Edwina's got it all.…What about
impact
? How’d you like to play a role in the future of your state? Topple a junta?”

“Can I still have the car and the woman?”

“Look at Woodward and Bernstein. They made a mint.” I told him to go ask Julian Lewis if the reason why’d he’d so strenuously opposed the Hall stay of execution had anything to do with two close friends of his, Otis Newsome and Dyer Fanshaw. I told him to go ask Dyer Fanshaw why his friend Otis had bothered to visit Winston Russell in Dollard Prison, and ask Fanshaw why he’d let his trucks be used to smuggle guns to the Carolina Patriots; and while he was at it, ask Fanshaw if he’d destroyed a suicide note when he’d been the first person to find Otis Newsome hanging from a ceiling pipe in his office.

Bubba's nostrils opened—an intense display of journalistic curiosity from him. Then he swung his long legs off the couch and stood up, adjusting his crotch. “I owe you. But you and me both, Captain Pig, we could get our butts burned if Brookside blows this election. And the rumor is, the Lewis boys have got hold of something they’re planning to drop on him eleventh-hour that's gonna
take him out good and fast. ’Course, nobody knows what it is, and it could be total bullshit. I’ve heard every rumor about Randy Andy in the book: he was never a P.O.W., he was never at Harvard. He's boffed half the female students at Haver. He took kickbacks from all the Haver contractors. I’ve heard everything from his sister's gay, to his wife's a pillpopper. Now I don’t care if it's
all
true, still, better him that that—”

I stood up. “If
any
of it were true, it would have been leaked by now. Just like Bunny Randolph leaked that House of Lords Club membership list to you.” Opening my door, I motioned him out of my office. “By the way, that club ever do anything anyhow, besides draw up constitutions saying they didn’t want blacks at Haver University, and snubbing them when they did get in?”

Bubba took the hint, and stepped into the hall. “Yeah, that club did a lot. They helped each other buy the state of North Carolina.”

“That's not a crime, Bubba. That's the way of the world.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Mangum, don’t try to outcynic a pro. You’ll lose. Listen to you. You still think if you dig down deep enough in the shit, you’re gonna find the meaning of life. But you uncover one shitty junta, there's another one under it waiting their chance. Me, I’m just interested in shit's infinite variety. You believe in
organized
evil, man. That takes a lot of faith. Call me, you want to shoot some baskets Saturday. Catch you later.”

It's a new world. That's one thought I had when I passed through the lounge where half my off-duty patrolmen were bouncing around in Nikes and pastel wrist weights, panting to keep up with Jane Fonda's grapevine steps and sunshine arms. The other thought I had watching them exercise was one that sent me hurrying downstairs to Etham Foster's lab. He was where he usually was; his long bony back hunched over his microscope.

“Dr. D.? A question: You remember that suitcase we pulled out of Willie Slidell's station wagon? Had the presents for his ex in it, one of them was a Jane Fonda aerobics video? Did you ever actually open that tape and play it?”

He swiveled around, frowning. “Told Summers to. Why?”

“Find out if he did, okay? Call me at home.”

When Foster phoned me an hour later, he was as close as he comes to apologizing. Yes, Augustine Summers had opened the tape, and had played it. But not all of it; after a spot check of the opening of the exercises, he’d put the thing back in its box, and it had been returned, with the other property found in the station wagon, to Slidell's sister, Lana Pym. I told Foster to have someone get a warrant, go to her house, and pick up the tape, if she still had it. I told him to tell Mrs. Pym, too, that Purley Newsome was in University Hospital, and might appreciate a visit.

It was 9:30 when Etham himself showed up in River Rise with the videotape. Lana Pym had never taken it out of the suitcase, much less played it, or mailed it to Willie's ex in Kentucky. Not that she hadn’t violently objected to having it impounded by the police. Etham arrived in shorts and a HPD T-shirt, and said he’d jogged over. (He lived three miles away, but I suppose when you’ve been a star athlete, it's hard to break the habit of a healthy body.) When he got there, Justin was in my kitchen cleaning up the cooking utensils he’d brought over to make our Cajun dinner with; he treated his equipment like surgical instruments, and no doubt they’d cost as much. He and Alice had just shown me a few too many baby clothes they’d bought that afternoon, and a minute before Etham rang the bell, she’d gone across the hall to talk with Nora and Nora's more-or-less permanent room-mate, Isaac Rosethorn. As it turned out, I was glad Alice was gone, because I wouldn’t have wanted her to see the sight that popped onto my TV screen after I’d fast-forwarded what had looked, not from just its box and its label but from its first half hour too, like any other one of the millions of Miss Fonda's healthy workout packages. Then all of a sudden, Jane was no longer demonstrating an arm-pumping cha-cha. Instead, two good-looking people, white male, black female, both naked except he wore a gold Rolex watch, and she wore what looked like an emerald ring, were doing a different kind of dance on a big pile of expensive pillows. Hamilton Walker had certainly been right about Jamaica Touraine; she was not only amazingly good-looking; she was amazingly a lot of things—things that appeared to be quite lucrative, judging from the furniture in her apartment.

“Jesus Christ!” said Justin. Then he said, “Jesus Christ, it's Brookside, okay.” Then he said, “Jesus Christ!” again. I turned down the sound; it had been about what you’d expect. A few minutes later Jane Fonda was back, saying to keep breathing during the monkey pliés. Then Brookside and Touraine returned to the screen; then we were back at the workout, and so on, back and forth, as far as I fast-forwarded. Shutting off my VCR, I locked the tape in my desk drawer. “Well,” I sighed, “what do you think?”

Etham Foster scowled. “I think my wife's been campaigning for a rich white asshole. Who made this tape?”

Justin said, “The rich white assholes that this asshole's running against.”

I went to the refrigerator. “Yep, the two-party white-asshole system we call American democracy. Ain’t it grand? I’m going to fix myself a bourbon. Dr. D., you want one?”

“Bourbon?” Justin asked. Like all reformed alcoholics, he was fascinated by other people's drinking. “You don’t drink bourbon, Cuddy. I never knew you to drink anything but beer.”

I finally found the old bottle somebody’d given me for Christmas. “There's a lot of things you don’t know about me, Savile.”

After we briefed Etham on the background to the video, he stretched his bare dark arms along the back of my denim couch— they reached from end to end—and stared at the ceiling. He said, “Okay. Cooper Hall got the Touraine woman's copy of the tape and goes to Brookside and Otis both. Brookside offers to deal with him. But Otis Newsome doesn’t want to deal. Instead, Otis quick calls his brother's buddy, Winston, and tells him to go kill Cooper Hall.”

Justin said, “Well, if you put it that way, your wife ought to keep on campaigning for Brookside. Comparatively speaking.”

“Probably.” Politics didn’t interest Foster much. “Okay, if you’re right, this guy Jack Molina has now got ahold of Hall's copy. Purley told you Slidell hid the original. He duped it onto this Fonda tape. Now did he also make a dupe for Otis Newsome? Did he make a dupe for
Julian Lewis
? Did he make a
hundred
dupes—”

I toed off my shoes and rubbed my feet against each other. “Julian Lewis has got to be real sorry he let his pal Otis get 100
percent behind his campaign. Because now he's tied to the whole thing. And conceivably accessory-after-the-fact on the Hall death. However, I bet Lewis dumped our city comptroller like a lice-riddled leper with festering boils. Even if they’d told Otis to use his own initiative, I’m sure they had something a little more subtle in mind than racketeering, porno films, and murder. Even Nixon's plumbers didn’t go around shooting the opposition.”

“Far as we know,” mumbled Foster.

Justin came back in from the open balcony, where I made him stand to smoke. He said, “So Lewis's bunch turned on Otis and he hanged himself. It's like the knights that killed Beckett for Henry the Second, and then instead of getting thanked, they’re called murderers.”

“You feeling sorry for Otis Newsome? Beckett was murdered, wasn’t he? Cooper is
dead
, isn’t he?!”

My phone rang. I thought it was going to be Lee, and I was panicking about how was I going to talk to her with Justin and Etham in the room, or excuse myself and take the phone upstairs without them wondering why. But it wasn’t Lee. And it wasn’t a long conversation. It was a male voice, a low rumbling twang. It said, “That you, Mangum?”

“Yep, who's this?”

“You’re dead, you fuck. I’m gonna take you out. I want you to sweat it, ’cause it's coming. You got that?”

I said, “I got it, Winston.” But by then I was talking to a dial tone.

We had to go on the assumption that Winston Russell was in Hillston and that he meant what he said. It enraged me (and that word's mild) to have to go on this assumption, particularly after Justin and Etham pressured me into moving right then and there into my office, where I’d be surrounded, of course, by police protection. “Just ’til we find him,” Justin pointed out in a misguided attempt to calm me down. At the moment, what I wanted was to run to my car, tear off looking for that sick s.o.b., and keep looking ’til I found him and beat him to death. Instead, I went to my office. I had Purley Newsome moved into a secure private room at U.H. with two guards. I persuaded Nora to take her children to her brother's on the chance that Winston knew by now that she was George Hall's co-counsel and lived across the hall from me.

Isaac, on the other hand, wouldn’t budge from the Piedmont, remarking blandly, “He's expressed no interest in killing
me.
Let me know when you catch him. I want him subpoenaed.” Isaac's disinterest in the fact that Winston was trying to kill me made me a little snappish when he showed up at the department at midnight with a bucket of spareribs and a barrage of questions about Dyer Fanshaw and what I’d heard at Dollard prison from Zachery Carpenter. Listening, he helped himself to my beer and my blackboard— erasing my work like a teacher impatient with a slow learner. I threw him out at two A.M. and, annoyed, went to sleep on the couch
with Martha, who was equally peevish and squirming for room at my feet.

Meanwhile, Justin had roused his favorite informant Preston Pope out of bed and kept him as well as a dozen policemen out all night looking for Russell. They didn’t find him. But at four in the morning, they raided a tacky stucco duplex in West Hillston and caught fifteen Carolina Patriots playing with guns and wearing combat fatigues around the kitchen table in the middle of what was obviously not a social meeting. Among the group was the man Justin had heard lecture months ago at that survivalist talk, ex-Sergeant Charlie Mennehy (currently out on bail on federal charges). The duplex belonged to his little brother. Also there was the brother's good friend, Willis Tate, the young hood who’d harassed the vigilants at Dollard Prison the night of George Hall's reprieve.

When Justin surprised these boys, they were clearly laying plans to attack the anti-Klan conference scheduled at Trinity Church this coming evening—posters for which were lying around the house, along with a few axe handles, 9mm handguns, and homemade kerosene bombs. Lying around as well was a considerable pile of marijuana. Justin arrested them for illegal possession of narcotics and weapons, then called in the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who tore the place apart. The booty included recruitment literature from the White Aryan Resistance and the Southern White Knights, a brochure urging teenagers to “Get on the Klan Van,” a tactics manual on how to pollute water supplies, a newsletter from a Great Titan of the Invisible Empire offering honor points to any holy hero who’d assassinate the Antichrist Jesse Jackson, a MAC-10 machine gun, two sawed-off shotguns, and four U.S. Army-issue grenades.

After two hours of me personally tearing the Carolina Patriots apart (verbally speaking), Willis Tate broke down and admitted not only that the Patriots had planned to “drive by” the Trinity Church gathering, but that Winston Russell was “one of them,” and that Russell had actually shown up at the duplex earlier that day. Under the circumstances (every cop in the state was looking for him), they’d told him he couldn’t stay; so much for esprit de corps. Tate
had no idea where Russell was now, and neither did his fellow Patriots. Believe me, they would have told me if they’d known. I made very vivid that the alternative was a conviction for conspiracy to commit the first-degree murders of—among others—Cooper Hall and William Slidell. Despite their vows to die stoically for the Cause, the only member of this sorry crew of scum who wasn’t by then in a panic of blubbering evasions and self-justification was ex-Sergeant Mennehy, a big, lank, stringy man with a gray crew-cut and a leathery face. And he was so violently disgusted by his troops, whom he called “fuckin’ pussies,” that he spat at one, knocked one out cold, and broke the nose of another before we pulled him from the holding cell at seven A.M. and sent him across the street to the county jail. As it happened, Isaac Rosethorn was already at the jail in early conference with George about the day's legal strategy. The decision to move Mennehy over there was to prove, Isaac later said, “the fluke of fate even I could not have anticipated, and which I am therefore willing to ascribe—theoretically—to Call-it-what-you-will, and why not God?” Naturally, the old lawyer did not fill me in at the time on the particulars of the “fluke”; he simply had Charlie Mennehy added to the list of witnesses he wanted subpoenaed.