Time's Witness (67 page)

No comment on my producing the warrant in a lot less than the ten minutes he’d given me. Just a shove against my chair as he bull-dozed by. “You can’t prove any of that. So drop it.”

“Mitch, hold up. The same folks that were dealing with Rosethorn don’t want Mr. Fanshaw arrested for so much as tossing a candy wrapper out the car window. If you’ve still got any plans on being Lewis's new attorney general, I don’t think this is the way to do it.”

“I don’t care what you think.” He rammed his way through the doors with his briefcase.

“Right,” I said to the swinging door. “You just care about crime. Looks like that really is the truth.”

“So what's the point, Cuddy? What are we doing?” Lee's voice was resigned, angry, and hopeful all at the same time. “There’re three messages from me on your machine. You’re never home. And now you can’t come to the cabin either?”

“Lee, hey, please!…Oh, hell. Just a second.”

Zeke Caleb had opened my office door. “Captain. That priest friend of yours—Father Madison—can they have more police protection at the Trinity Church thing tonight? Says, ’cause of Andrew Brookside being there, his committee's worried about crowds. He's on line five.”

“Transfer him to Ralph Fisher. He's in charge of that. Isn’t Ralph here?”

“Yeah. But Father Madison wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, tell him I’m busy, Zeke!” I pointed at the phone receiver and waved him back out with my free hand. Martha Mitchell barked when I yelled, then trotted out after Zeke, who naturally didn’t bother to close my door. “Lee? I’m sorry. River Rise is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. But sure, I can come to the cabin if you want Officers Emory and White crowded around the fire playing pinochle with us. These kids got themselves orders straight from Carl Yarborough to sit in the bathtub with me! And for the record, you’re never home either.”

“I’m home now.…I thought we could spend the night in the
cabin. That's all. I’m disappointed.”

“Where will he be?” Both of us avoided using Brookside's name. “He's leaving straight from his Trinity speech to fly to New York.”

“I’ll be at Trinity. Why don’t you come there? We could at least refresh our memories about what we
look
like. What do you look like, Lee? What do
I
look like?”

Actually, I could see Lee clearer and realer than anything around me in my office. Right then, I saw her in the Pine Hills Lake cabin, my old blue wool shirt on over her slip, her hair white with plaster, holding my legs steady on the ladder while I patched holes in the mess we’d found after we’d pulled out the dropped ceiling. I saw her standing in the kitchen at the wobbly wood table, placing, one by one, ridiculously expensive yellow roses in a tin, blue-speckled coffeepot. “Lee? You trying to place me?”

She made a humming noise. “Let's see…are you the man with hair the color of bright-leaf tobacco, and Carolina blue eyes?”

“Sounds like an ad for Haver cigarettes. Is that why you like me? I look like the family business?…Well, damn. You’re free, and I’m under armed guards.” I spun my chair around and put my feet on the window ledge.

“Okay, not exactly free. I have the board of the North Carolina Arts Society coming for dinner. But they’ll be gone by ten. I was going to meet you at the cabin afterwards.” She laughed. “
But
, since you can’t come at
all
, I thought I’d grab the opportunity to bitch about
your
schedule for a change.”

I laughed too. “Well, no wonder it's the young who fall in love. They’re the only ones with free time.”

A knock, then Justin stuck his head inside. “Need to talk to you.”

I nodded. He sauntered through, went into my bathroom, so I said into the phone, “Listen, I better go. I’ve got Lieutenant Savile in here.”

“Well, I’d say tell him hello, but he was extremely cool at the Hunt Club this morning. I don’t suppose it matters to him that Andy does need DeWitt. Justin comes from a political family; he should understand.”

“Leave me out of this, darlin’. You two can fight it out on horse-back some morning at the Club. Slap each other around with rolled-up family trees.”

Her laugh was warm against my ear. “Oh, I love you, Cuddy.”

Justin came back in the room, wiping his hands on a paper towel. I said, “Ditto.”

Lee's voice went playfully husky. “You don’t suppose it's just sex, do you?”

“Not
just.
Well, nice talking to you, Sheriff. Keep your pants on.” She chuckled. “At least ’til I see you. If I ever do.”

“Oh, you will. It's all I think about, night and day.”

“That's not true, Captain Mangum. And I bet I wouldn’t love you if it were. Bye.”

I swung my chair back around from Elvis's smile to Justin's. He said, “What's all you ever think about, night and day?”

“Winston Russell,” I told him.

“DiMallo just called from your apartment; told Nancy he loved subbing for you; he's playing all your compact discs, turning on all your lights, drinking your beer, just having a ball. Said you lived like a king.”

“Tell Nancy to tell DiMallo to keep his hands off my stereo.”

“How come you got Nancy body-guarding? I mean, I don’t consider myself a sexist but—”

“She went over my head to the mayor. Got herself and Emory assigned to pester me to death. What’d you want to see me about? I’ve got the FBI meeting me in Mitch's office in ten minutes.”

He tossed the towel in the trash. “Boone Homicide just found the hiker's body. White male Caucasian. Shot in the back. Purley wasn’t lying.”

In addition to this ugly news about the hiker, Justin told me a Patriot had admitted under questioning that Winston took a thirty-aught-six rifle with a telescopic lens from their stock-pile yesterday. And a tip had come in: Pete Zaslo thought he’d seen a man who looked “a little” like Winston leave a phone booth outside the Silver Comet Bar. The gray T-shirt and jeans fit the description the Patriots had given us of Russell's clothes. Plus, Pete said, he was carrying a duffel bag.

Justin pulled an HPD bulletproof vest from a plastic wrapper, and threw it at me. “If you leave this building, use this.” Stepping to the door, he slapped the gun holster hanging there. “And put this on! And I don’t mean just wear it. I mean
load
it and wear it.”

I tossed the vest onto the couch. “Do we know who Winston was calling?”

“Phone company couldn’t help. Amazing anybody in the state
would
talk to him.” Justin was looking at the map of the Trinity
Church area with Ralph Fisher's surveillance positions pinpointed. “Listen, Cuddy, you really think any pals of these Patriots are going to stage a protest for them at Trinity tonight?”

I sipped at my can of Pepsi. “I don’t think they’ve got any pals. If they do, they’re gonna walk into a solid wall of cops. Ralph's got ten of ours, four of the sheriff's, and four from the state patrols, two of them mounted. I almost hope the Patriots do show up.”

He ran his finger along the map, around the side of the church to the old cemetery. “My great-great-grandfather's buried here. Eustache Dollard. You know, the governor.”

“I know his prison.”

“Oh, he wasn’t so bad.…What's your guess? Is Julian going to use that videotape against Brookside?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know that ‘Julian’ has a copy.”

His hand moved along the map, measuring distances. “How ’bout the copy
we’ve
got? Think about it. The man who commissioned the thing killed himself. The man who filmed it was murdered. The woman who was in it left the country. If you give it to Mitch—well, what's the point?”

“The point is, it's evidence in a homicide.” The meatball sub I’d ordered for dinner didn’t look very appetizing. “Besides, I thought you hated Brookside?”

Justin smiled. “Would you rather have my cousin Julian as governor of this state? Alice sure wouldn’t.” Then he tapped the map, turned, and changed the subject. “Listen, I talked to Lana Pym. She came in with a crying kid. She's scared. Demanded police protection. After a visit to Purley at the hospital, Mrs. Pym finally believes Winston killed her brother Willie.”

“Could she help us to get to Russell?”

“She doesn’t know where he is. She's in a total panic. Of course, she still denies that
Bobby
did anything wrong. She's also enraged that Isaac ‘
Rosen
thorn’ should have subpoenaed her, when he's ‘working for the nigger’ who killed her husband. She said, ‘I just don’t see how this all happened. We were just regular people. Willie wasn’t a bad man. Bobby wasn’t a bad man.’”

“Yeah. Nobody's bad.”

“So, how much does Lana Pym know about her husband and Winston's scams?”

“I don’t think all that much. Obviously, she didn’t know about the suitcase full of money or the videotape. But she admitted she’d lied to me. Brother Willie was
not
with her the afternoon of the Cooper Hall shooting. She said she’d stuck to the alibi even after we’d found Willie in the river because she’d had a call from Russell and he’d threatened her.” Justin went to the window ledge, leaned out to smoke. “She said she hoped Winston fried in hell for all eternity, and she’d be glad to pull the switch with her own hand.”

“Probably would.” I threw my meatball grinder in the waste-basket. “Probably Lana was out in that crowd at Dollard with a sign saying ‘Gas George Hall.’ Probably already made her kids their own little combat fatigues, and in ten years they’ll be marching around with martyred Papa's white-trash Patriots.”

Justin ran his thumb under the leather strap of his shoulder holster. “White trash, as my grandmother often said, is trashier than any other shade.”

“Frankly, General Lee, I’ve never seen much difference between your Confederate heroes galloping around in gray and gold, and white-trash heroes night-riding in sheets and hoods. Go put Mrs. Pym under house arrest as a material witness. And get a tap on her phone. Now!” Angry, I punched the intercom, and told Zeke to tell Mitch I’d be right down.

“Jesus, what are you so pissed at me for?” “Your ‘people’ are getting on my nerves.”

Justin grinned. “Imagine how it got on my nerves when they had me put in a loony bin?” Then, tossing his cigarette, he squinted into the sun out over the Hillston skyline. “Winston's either skulking around outside your apartment or he's on the roof of that
bank right now getting ready to take a shot through your window. He's not going to be bothering with Lana Pym. All right. I’m off. Alice said you were coming to Trinity tonight. Do me a favor. Don’t walk there.”

“I’m not.”

“Alice wrote the last paragraph of Brookside's speech. Tell her if you like it. So long.” Patting the poster of Elvis in the stomach, he left the room.

I glanced out the window. The sun, immense and fiery red, looked like it was resting a moment on the shoulders of the Haver Tobacco Company warehouses, and like the Haver buildings were strong enough to hold it up.

I rode to Trinity in the mayor's limousine, with the vest on, with the holster on, with Nancy and John in a squad car behind us, and with a motorcycle cop in front of us. We left in absolute privacy from the garage under the municipal building, which HPD now kept under constant surveillance, and as lit up as a homecoming game.

Leaning back in his seat, sunlight rich on his warm brown profile, Carl smoked peacefully at his Cuban cigar, because his car was one of the few places he felt he had left to do it in.

“How's Dina?” I asked him.

“She's fine. Speaking tonight at the Bush College graduation. Wonders when you’re going to ask her dancing again.”

“Well, tell her next time let's make it some place besides the Hillston Club's Confederacy Ball.”

He laughed, then he looked out the car window as we sped down Cadmean Street.

“Cuddy, I have a deep affection for this city. I like to look at every building in it. Despite the old problems. And the new. And maybe it's not as pretty, or artsy, or highfalutin as some Carolina towns, but it works hard. And it
tries
hard to be decent.”

I nodded. “Sometimes. Electing you mayor was one of them.”

“That's what I mean.” He rubbed at his bald head. “I’m mayor. My father loaded tobacco at Haver, and his father worked a tenant farm. And his father was the son of a slave.”

I said, “I can’t trace my folks back that far. Just through the
factory and the tenant farm.”

He smiled at me. “But you can make a pretty good guess, can’t you, that they weren’t slaves.” We stopped at an intersection in front of the Randolph Office Building, where a bustle of people, white and black, leaving work, were waiting for the light. They stared at our little caravan and Carl rolled down his tinted window to wave. “Hello there, folks. Thank God it's Friday, right? Looks like it's going to be a nice sunny weekend.”

Most of them smiled and waved and said, “Hello, Mr. Mayor.” “How’re you doing?” “Take it easy.”

As we drove on, Carl said, “That's Hillston. Those people. And I don’t want the damn media saying scum like the Carolina Patriots are what Hillston's all about. Or that all the crap in this trial is what Hillston's all about. I want everybody thrown in jail that's supposed to be there, and everybody else free to get on with things.”

I said, “We’re doing our best.…About the trial, I guess you heard—there was a lot of fancy maneuvering going on today, and going on
over
Mitch's head.”

The mayor stubbed out the cigar. “Are you surprised? Mitchell Bazemore maneuvers with the subtlety of a dinosaur. He's too self-righteous, too inflexible, and too—”

“Honest?”

“I was going to say ‘innocent’—for high office. So it's just as well. His politics are abominable anyhow. Now, Rosethorn, on the other hand”—Carl chuckled, scratching his mustache—“well, if they ever try to impeach me, get me Rosethorn.”

“I don’t know the details, just that the A.G. himself showed up to work some deal with Isaac. You hear anything?”

“I heard they wanted Rosethorn not to put on a defense, and he told them he’d do it if they’d drop
all
the charges. They went as far as voluntary manslaughter.”

“Whooee! And he turned it down?”