Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  “You’ve got pizza on your sweater. Is that what you got for lunch again? Pizza, a Coke, and a Twinkie?”

  “Hey, well, I can’t afford to eat in those upper-crust tumbledown spots like where you and Lunchbreak Whetstone just got back from. Ye Olde Pine Hills Inn.”

  “I guess you want me to ask you how you knew that?”

  “Dee-tection.” He stuck his big bony hand in my jacket pocket and pulled out the Inn’s inscribed matchbook. “It’s never going to work with you and Lunchbreak, you know? What with you thinking est is Latin for is, and her thinking it’s those lessons she took where they teach you how to tell people ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ when you don’t plan to pay any attention to what they’ve said.”

  “You just don’t like Susan.”

  “Um. There’s no putting anything past you today, Mr. Esse Quam Videri.” (Once I’d made the mistake of translating for Cuddy the North Carolina state motto.)

  I said, “You know, I’m very tolerant of your hillbilly affectations. Mine are just as native as yours. My great-granddaddy studied the classics and went to law school, too.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there,” he grinned. “In fact, except that I’d have to get so pretty and preppie and go act in amateur Shakespeare theatricals, wearing jackass ears and tights, I almost wouldn’t mind being Justin the Five, so I could go out gobbling ye olde nouvelle cuisine with a blond adultress in a beat-up barn, and come staggering back to work smelling like bourbon and—”

  “Good Christ, don’t you ever shut up?”

  “Only when I….” And he began his graphic pumping again as he wandered back to erase his basketball game scores. Cuddy changed his projections continually on the basis of sudden, powerful hunches; he had never even come close to winning the pool. “Ask her if she’ll marry me,” he called over his shoulder.

  I opened my office door and realized what Cuddy had been talking about. She sat in my father’s old Yale chair staring with oddly yellow eyes at the papier-mâché ass’s head I’d stuck up on the hat rack.

  “It was part of a costume,” I said.

  “Mr. Savile? I was told you’d definitely be back by two o’clock.” She turned around the clock on my desk and pointed. It said 2:25. “My name is Briggs Cadmean.”

  I said, “Pardon me” and “I’m sorry,” and went around her to hang up my overcoat. I hit into the side of my desk and lurched against her chair. “I was detained. Briggs Cadmean?” She wore a lavender down jacket with jeans and scuffed riding boots. She had a lovely face and an annoyed look. She was clearly not the town’s oldest business magnate. I returned stiffly to my seat. “Is the C&W Briggs Cadmean your grandfather?”

  With an even more annoyed look, she stuffed the book in her lap into a new briefcase. “Father.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “Are you the youngest?”

  “Yes. Number nine. Out of wife number four. Now that you have my lineage.” She was looking me over strangely. She looked familiar to me, too, but then, Hillston’s circle was not large. I was thinking: hunt club (boots), charity tennis, political cocktails, dance. “Excuse me. Haven’t we met?”

  “Probably.” She was not terrifically forthcoming.

  “Miss?” I asked. “Mrs.? Ms.?”

  “If you prefer to be formal, how about Doctor? Or Professor?”

  “Are you an M.D.?”

  “No. I teach astronomy at the university.”

  “My dad taught surgery at the medical school here,” I said. “He didn’t think Ph.D.’s should call themselves doctors. But I will if you want me to.”

  “What you call me doesn’t matter much, since I’d like to keep this as brief as possible.”

  We were not hitting it off. In fact, she slid her chair back a significant inch away from me. “I’m here,” she said, “because my sister-in-law asked me to drop in. Joanna Cadmean. She’d like to know if you could come talk with her. About Cloris Dollard, I understand.”

  “Pardon? Joanna Cadmean?” I was looking for a cigarette; I hid them from myself.

  “She’s the widow of one of my half-brothers. And she’s staying out at my house for a few weeks. She came here from St. Simons Island for Cloris Dollard’s funeral. She’s staying because she was thrown riding; she’s on crutches now, with a bad ankle. At any rate, she’s worried about something, and she’d like to talk with you.”

  “What’s she worried about?”

  “That somebody’s trying to kill her, too.”

  I found a cigarette. “Any particular reason why she thinks so?”

  “A premonition.”

  I leaned my chair back and dismissed this Joanna Cadmean. We’d already had four other wealthy women call in, frightened that they, too, would be murdered soon, for their sterling or their diamonds or their too many years of capital and status. I said, “I’m sure it’s just that the news of Cloris Dollard’s death has upset Mrs. Cadmean.” I picked up the silver letter opener Susan had given me and balanced it on my fingers as I quoted: “‘Such tricks hath strong imagination.’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  Her response was to raise an eyebrow. “I saw your performance last week.” Obviously, not a theater enthusiast either.

  “Mrs. Cadmean,” I shrugged, “has spooked herself.”

  “Yes, she has a strong imagination. In fact, she’s a psychic.”

  “There, you see,” I said, and smiled.

  “A real psychic.”

  I smiled some more. “Visions and auras and foresee the future?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tea leaves or Ouija board?”

  The yellow eyes were flat as metal. “Please don’t be cute.”

  I let my chair come back down on all fours. My neck flushed. “I’m sorry. Exactly how do you mean, ‘a real psychic’?”

  She stood up. “If you keep records here, go look up her maiden name. Joanna Griffin. When she was in college, she got to be pretty famous for her work with your department.”

  I stood up. “That’s who your aunt was? Joanna Griffin? The Hillston psychic?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who found the two coeds’ bodies?” I looked across at Mr. Cadmean’s namesake. “Well then! Who’s going to kill her?”

  Now she looked bemused. “She didn’t say. Ask her.”

  “Why me? Why does she want to see me?”

  “I have no idea. As I understand it, she doesn’t want to talk officially to the police, and I believe she knew your mother. We’re out at Pine Hills Lake.”

  “Ah. You’re staying at your father’s summer house?”

  “The lodge belongs to me.” She walked to the door.

  “I’ll come out. Should we have dinner first?”

  She zipped up the lavender jacket. “No, thank you.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “Well, then, I’ll drive out to the lodge after I eat alone. Around eight?”

  “Fine. Joanna said to be careful about the road; she said it’s going to snow.”

  I opened the door for her. “Is that a psychic prediction?”

  Her hair shook out behind her shoulders. “No, that’s probably the weather report. Do you know where the lodge is, Mr. Savile? It’s the compound next to Lawry Whetstone’s cottage.”

  I followed her out into the hall, wondering if she and Susan could possibly be friends, and if Susan had told her about us. She so ostentatiously disliked me, I was reluctant to think it had taken only our brief conversation to make her feel that way.

  As we passed Cuddy’s office, he lunged through his open door and said to Briggs, “Ma’am, would you like to marry me?”

  She surprised me by leaning down to pet the poodle, Mrs. Mitchell, and then laughing. “I might,” she said, “but not today.”

  “Well, how about going out for a pizza and a Twinkie?”

  I was pulling on my overcoat. “Cuddy Mangum, this is Professor Briggs Cadmean. This is Detective Lieutenant Mangum, a great believer i
n marriage.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Not the Briggs Cadmean that owns Hillston! Honey, you don’t look at all like your pictures in the paper. Listen, in fact you ought to talk to them. They don’t do you justice. They make you look great big and bald and sneaky and about eighty years old!”

  Briggs’s surprising rumbling laugh suggested to me she didn’t care much for her father.

  “Excuse me, Cuddy. I’m going to walk Dr. Cadmean to her car.”

  “I don’t blame you.” He nodded toward the double doors at the end of the hall. “But what about V.D.?” He wheeled around to Briggs. “That’s just our captain’s name. Van Dorn. We call him V.D. to watch him chew up the insides of his cheeks.”

  I interrupted their laughter. “I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll mention you dropped by. Miss Cadmean, if you change your mind, I could be at the license bureau in the morning.” Cuddy ducked back into his office.

  I opened the door to what I incorrectly assumed was her father’s new Lincoln, then watched as her big black car surged into Hillston’s afternoon traffic. Something wet caught on my eyelashes. I looked up, and saw snow floating out of the dark sky.

  • • •

  “Um!” Mangum unlocked the door to the records room. “Joanna Griffin! Amazing. And asking for you like a sphinx out of a story, when the only people that call me out of the blue are trying to sell me light bulbs.”

  “Joanna Cadmean. She married a Cadmean.”

  “Isn’t there anybody in Hillston besides me that’s not part Cadmean or a damn Dollard like you?”

  “My name’s not Dollard. My name’s Savile. I’m the only Savile in Hillston. There must be two hundred Mangums.”

  “At least. And I’m hoping to add more.”

  “Even if they’re part Cadmean?”

  “Well, hey, nobody’s perfect.” Pencil tight in his teeth, Cuddy rummaged through the file cabinets. “Okay, here it is. Griffin, Joanna. Looks like a couple dozen cases here. Also looks like she was what you might want to call a volunteer worker. I don’t see where they ever paid her a damn penny.”

  “How do you charge for visions?” I took the file from him.

  “What’s her name, Jeane Dixon does all right. Course, she’s on a big scale. Like, will Elvis come back from the dead? Lord, I hope so. Well, don’t hog it. Read.”

  The file began decades ago, when one day a Hillston girl of good family had walked into the police department and shyly announced to the desk sergeant that she knew where the bodies of two missing local coeds were buried. They’d been missing for over a month. She was taken to the office of the young assistant solicitor, Rowell Dollard.

  The girl explained to him and to the incredulous police that whenever she saw photographs of the missing coeds, she saw them being forced down wood basement steps into a black space. She went on to describe, in precise detail, what turned out to be a half-burnt, long-abandoned country church thirteen miles south of Hillston. Even as the squad cars followed her lead, bouncing over the clay-clotted road into overgrown woods; no one really believed the girl. They didn’t believe her until the two corpses were dug from their shallow graves in the church basement, behind the wood steps.

  After the department agreed that she couldn’t have killed the coeds herself, after a student confessed that he had, they asked Joanna to tell them what her secret was. She said she didn’t know. Images like these had been coming into her head since she was little. Naturally, she didn’t like it. Not only was she a freak to her schoolmates, the visions themselves brought on violent headaches, and were followed by a terrible depression. She was horrified by the discovery of the bodies. So were her parents. Embarrassed, they had her put under observation at the university, where she was a freshman. There, parapsychologists asked her to look at the backs of cards and read what was on the other side. She did so. The university concluded that if there were such a phenomenon as mental telepathy (and about this they disagreed), then Joanna Griffin was telepathic.

  The Hillston police became less skeptical. When a local three-year old disappeared, his mother begged the police to call in Joanna. Joanna told them where to find the well shaft he’d fallen down, and still lay in, alive. She picked a suspected arsonist out of a lineup and recounted each moment of his crime to him so vividly that, terrified by her sorcery, he confessed both to that, and to two other unsolved arsons.

  Of course, sometimes her sibylline visions were too vague to follow, and sometimes she had nothing at all to tell the department that had sheepishly gotten into the habit of calling her in whenever they had no leads and the news was publicly wondering why. The papers called Joanna everything from a mystic to a charlatan, and one literary journalist dubbed her “the Carolina Cassandra.”

  Then suddenly, after two years, Joanna stopped working for the police and left the university for a term. When she came back to town, strangers continued to pester her with demands that she locate misplaced trinkets and wandering spouses, that she tell them where to find good jobs, that she bring back their dead. She asked them please to stop asking.

  “Can you imagine,” Cuddy said, “having no choice but to really see what’s going on in the rotten world? You know? Not being able to blink your eyes? Seeing all the old smut in the heart, and the tumor on the bone, and somebody’s future that’s never going to happen? God damn! Can you imagine being her?”

  There was a rumor that she’d attempted suicide in college, but that her family had hushed it up. Then she’d eloped with one of the Cadmean sons, and the visions, as far as anyone knew, had ended. “Marriage’ll do that,” Cuddy remarked. Perhaps after she had become a member of his family, old Briggs Cadmean forbade her to hallucinate, thinking it unseemly for a daughter-in-law of his to be even mentally trekking through creek bed and alley, feeling her way to the deserted, or raped, or stabbed. Dreaming her way to death.

  Cuddy closed the file of yellowing papers. “I thought I heard she died.”

  “Christ, I’m almost scared to go meet her.”

  “Well, if you get a chance, ask her if she can help me win the basketball pool.”

  “All right. So long, I’m going out.”

  “You just got here. Why don’t you come up to my office and do some police work, just to keep your hand in. Take your pick. Who keeps stealing Mr. Zeb Armel’s Pontiac every night and driving it ‘til the tank’s empty? And my bet’s Zeb Jr. Who is exposing his private parts to Mrs. Ernestine Staley when she walks down Smith Road to collect her mail? And, my question, why in the world did he pick her? Who held up the Dot ‘n’ Dash? And, of course, why is there blood and fingertips all over the By-Ways Massage Emporium parking lot?”

  “Sorry. I’m on special assignment. I’m going to East Hillston about the Dollard jewelry.”

  “Across the Divide? Over to where us poorfolk were herded together and told, ‘Let them eat Twinkies.’ That East Hillston?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, don’t ask any tattooed greasers to step outside, General Lee.”

  I left him at the elevator door and crossed the marble lobby back out into the snow.

  Never ask a greaser with tattoos on his knuckles to step outside, especially if he’s smiling, and combing his hair with a switchblade. Those were among the first words Cuddy Mangum ever said to me. And although we’d been born in the same year, in the same town, we were never in one another’s homes until after I joined the police department ten years later, and we met again in the hall where I’d seen him today. He’d made the remark our senior year (mine in a New England prep school, his in Hillston High). I was back home to escort a debutante to a dance, and we’d come in our formal clothes at dawn to an all-night diner. As soon as we sat down, three hoods leaned into our booth and began making vulgar cracks. I asked them to step outside. Somebody tall and thin, seated by himself at the counter, all of a sudden spun his stool around and faced them. He said, “Wally, don’t talk dirty in front of a lady. I think you left your brains out in you
r Chevy; why don’t you and your pals go look for them, how about?”

  And after a volley of muttered obscenities, Wally clanked off and his friends followed.

  It was when I came over to the counter to thank Cuddy Mangum that I got the advice never to ask tattooed greasers to step outside. He added, “They never read your rule book, General Lee.”

  “Mind if I ask—is Wally a friend of yours?”

  “He’s my cousin.” And my rescuer spun his stool back away from me and picked up his textbook and his doughnut.

  Ten years after that, when he and I were introduced by Captain Fulcher, I said, “Oh, we’ve already met.”

  Cuddy took a doughnut out of his mouth and nodded. He said, “Especially now you’re in the police business, don’t ask a tattooed greaser to step outside.”

  It was his parting shot whenever I told him I was going to East Hillston, far from Catawba Drive and my family’s circle. Cuddy leaned out into the hall while I was waiting for the elevator.

  Chapter 2

  I inched my old Austin timidly into East Hillston. I hadn’t been drinking long enough not to be still afraid of the snow. With me was a list of Cloris Dollard’s stolen property that probably wasn’t very accurate. She had been a woman of property, but not a careful or a frugal one. She’d spent her life as cheerfully as all the money she’d given to Hillston charities, and all the money she’d spent to buy the random wealthy clutter of belongings she’d given away or left behind. What had proved less fragile than their owner—and had not been stolen by her murderer—Cloris’s daughters had come from other cities and taken home with them, or stored in the basement. Rowell, who liked to keep things, would not let them touch his wife’s room.

  I had searched in the house through the clutter, looking for a clue among boxes of clothes, photographs of golf trophies, her first husband’s sheet music, and her daughters’ camp crafts; among drawers of old theater programs, packets of seeds, keys and buttons whose uses had been lost for years. I was looking through a past of good looks, marriages, travel, civic duties, through the loose ends of an easy life, for a clue to tell me that Cloris’s death had not happened, as Fulcher believed, by the unlucky accident of indiscriminate violence, but for a cause particular and personal, and so discoverable. I’d found nothing.