Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  We were all quiet for a moment. Then I said, “I’ll take you over to the Dollards’ house.”

  Cuddy unwound himself and stood. “I suppose we could. Couldn’t hurt.”

  “Let’s go now,” I said. I wanted to go back there too.

  She excused herself to change her clothes, and I was surprised again by her attractiveness when she returned in a stylish red wool dress and wool cape. Outside, she walked awkwardly on the unfamiliar crutches, dodging the puddled ice that was alarming all Hillston, a city unaccustomed to the cold.

  • • •

  Mrs. Cadmean said nothing as we drove in past the Dollard gate and along the crackling driveway up to the imperturbable expanse of red brick and white wood. An orange Pinto was parked in front of high rhododendron bushes whose stiff brown winter leaves seemed to have given up all hope of spring. Inside, a Mrs. Teknik was vacuuming; she had replaced the former cleaning woman who’d quit. She said that this woman had refused to come back inside the unlucky house. “Colored people,” she said, “believe in ghosts.”

  I said, “So do I.”

  The house had been restored to order, Etham Foster’s men having long since abandoned the search for proof of an intruder’s identity anywhere on the premises. Upstairs, my uncle had had the bloodstained yellow carpeting torn off the bedroom floor, and the blond oak queen-size bed was stripped to its mattress. But his wife’s clothes still hung in their closets, her toiletries still lined the white wicker shelves in her bathroom. Dust lingered in the light over the vanity table where Cloris Dollard’s perfumes, combs, and jewelry boxes sat in geometric patterns utterly unlike the untroubling disarray in which we’d found them that first Monday morning we’d been summoned there. In fact, it was not that the house had been returned to order, it had been put in order: premises that had once looked like an unresolved quarrel between two incompatible decorators now had swung in favor of Rowell Dollard’s opulent fastidiousness. Downstairs the stiff, silk, pearl-hued chairs and settee made a precise square with the gray mantel, and no longer gawked askance at the painted wood secretary I’d seen so piled with magazines and gloves and so stuffed with scraps of paper, pointless pencils, and unmailed letters that it would not close. Everywhere in this house, now, the disorder of life was missing.

  By holding to the rail and to my shoulder, Mrs. Cadmean was able to climb the curved stairs to the bedroom. Her body heat against my side shocked me; her arm burned across the back of my jacket. Her other arm clutched a shoulder bag. In our slow ascent I said, “I don’t like the idea of your being out at the lake by yourself.”

  “Briggs is usually with me, and before she leaves to teach, she fixes everything so I’m quite comfortable.”

  “Still, couldn’t you go to your father-in-law’s in town?” She shook her head. “Way out there,” I said. “What do you do?”

  She smiled the strange cold smile that had scared me at the end of our first conversation. She said, “Oh, I prophesy.”

  “If you get…worried, you’ll let me know?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said. “Is that the bedroom through there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, Justin, should something…happen to me, ask Briggs for a letter. I don’t mean to be coy, I want you to understand. So, tonight, I’m going to write everything down for you.”

  “All right.” My shoulder felt abruptly cold when her hand moved away to take the crutches. I left her, as she had asked, alone in Cloris Dollard’s bedroom. The sound of the crutches moved slowly across the bare wood above me.

  Downstairs I searched through the wood secretary, the study desk, and the bookshelves for anything Cloris might have used as a diary. Then I went down to the basement, where I found no boxes of anything resembling technical papers that might have belonged to Bainton Ames.

  “Savile, you are tangling with the big boys now. Why’d you let me go on believing you were rich?” Cuddy was in the study, looking at Rowell’s framed diplomas.

  “I tried to disabuse you, but obviously the idea meant too much to you to give it up.”

  “Now I see Uncle Rowell’s place, and Cadmean’s play-house—not even his real house!—I wonder why I bothered being jealous of you all these years.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yassir, things have clearly slumped for you since all the slaves done run off your place and jest left the corn rotting in the fields, like some old, tall, dead, yellow-sashed soldiers.” He started on the other wall of bookshelves, reading the spines.

  “Christ, you love to talk,” I said.

  “I can’t rely on my features, Lieutenant.”

  From the other wing the vacuuming buzz stopped loudly. I heard Mrs. Teknik mumble, then I heard a sharp “Where are they?” As we hurried back out into the entryway, Rowell Dollard, his scarf very white between his black velvet collar and his flushed ear, was starting up the stairs.

  “Rowell,” I called. “Sorry to intrude again. I assumed you’d be in Raleigh.”

  His face was swollen with suppressed irritation. “I understood from Fulcher that you people were finished here, Justin. I don’t mean to be uncooperative, but…” Then his eyes were pulled away from us and turned up toward the landing at the top of the stairs where, soundless, Joanna Cadmean stood braced by the angle of her crutches. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse. “What are you doing here?”

  She answered mildly, “Hello, Rowell.”

  Florid, he backed down the steps toward me. “Why is she here? Why have you brought her in this house? What in hell kind of hocus-pocus are you pulling, Justin?”

  Cuddy loped up the stairs to help Mrs. Cadmean down. I said, “I’m trying to find out who killed Cloris.”

  “How so?” Dollard snapped.

  “Any way I can.”

  His black overcoat still buttoned, the senator strode across the entryway to the study door, his head quivering from the effort to control his voice. “I’m sorry, but this is not tolerable. I’ll have to ask you all to leave.” The door shut sharply behind him. I suspected he was telephoning Captain Fulcher.

  My apologies to Joanna Cadmean for having subjected her to so painful an encounter were acknowledged, if heard, by a nod from some far-distant and chilling place. In the car, Cuddy’s little dog whimpered on the floor of the backseat where Mrs. Cadmean sat silently until we were back out on the bypass. Then she asked, “Is there no phone in Cloris’s bedroom?”

  “There was,” I told her. “After the jack was torn out, I suppose they must have had it removed.”

  “Because standing in there, I kept hearing her phone ring. Very loud. There was no image really of what might have…taken place. I simply kept hearing the phone ringing over and over. Except I did see coins. Coins falling in the air. Bainton’s, I suppose. I recall from the papers back at the time, one of the men Bainton had been with that night was talking about the coins. Odd. Falling like a storm.” In the rearview mirror I watched Mrs. Cadmean’s steady, peaceful eyes gazing out as the unleafed trees went blurring past. I noticed that the eyes never blinked.

  • • •

  All the way back to town Cuddy said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s nutty.”

  I reminded him that he was the one who had first told me just how accustomed the Hillston police were to exactly Joanna Cadmean’s kind of detection.

  “That’s true, but mind if I say something personal?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Mitchell nosed herself under my elbow.

  “Hate is blind and so are the hots.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You ought to take yourself off this case and go back to your regular assignments.”

  “Sure!” I leaned over and punched in his cigarette lighter. “And leave you to run the only case the town council and the newspapers care anything about! Get your name on this one, Mangum, and maybe you can squeeze out Fulcher.”

  “Get fucked, Justin.”

  “You sound like Charlene. Okay, okay. I apologize. You’re just
trying to help. Like always. How are hate and ‘the hots,’ as you so eloquently put it, blinding me?”

  We were both angry. I was smoking; he rolled down the window and let in the freezing wind. He said, “You know what I’m talking about. You want to believe Senator Dollard killed his wife, because you hate him. You hate the way your momma thought you ought to let her little brother be your great white father. You hate the way she loves him so much and admires him so much, and, and, and. You’re jealous.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ! Now you sound like Fulcher’s psychology course. And who am I jealous for? Cloris Dollard, or my mother? Is it for them I have ‘the hots’?”

  “You said it, not me. I had in mind Joanna Cadmean.”

  “I’m not even going to respond to that, it’s so absurd.”

  “I watched you, General Lee. You gloop around her like some soulful teenager with sore nuts, mooning over the high school art teacher.” The anger loosened and left Cuddy’s face; he grinned. “In fact, now I remember, you were in love with your seventh-grade Latin teacher, weren’t you! What was her name?”

  “Mrs. Berry.”

  “That’s right. It was because of her you majored in classics. You know what’s amazing that I bet you never thought of? We’re older now than Mrs. Berry was then! What could she have been—twenty-seven at the most? Here she was, an Older Woman—up in a tower of knowledge and power there was no way you could climb—and the damn truth is, she was a baby!”

  “I’m not going to drop the Dollard case.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” he said, and rolled the window back up. “You can lead a horse to water but a jackass likes to mix his own drinks.”

  Chapter 8

  Graham Pope’s former wife, Paula, tended bar at the Rib House, out on the bypass, on the other side of Hillston from Pine Hills Lake. Almost as big as its parking lot, the Rib House stretched between a Toyota dealership and a pitch-and-putt course that was closed for the winter. Its long-tentacled machine, there to feel through the weeds for balls, had been left waiting like a giant mantis in the grass. The Rib House, in a regrettable effort to resemble a Victorian train depot, had stuffed itself with semi-antiques, beginning with a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller in a glass case by the door. In trolley cars, plywood gazebos, and papier-mâché caves, large families ate at long tables without talking—except to yell at their children to stop running back to the salad bar. Even if the parents hadn’t apparently worn out conversation years back, they couldn’t have heard each other. The Rib House was a clangorous blare of herded suburban flight from life at home together. Hand to my ear, I made phone calls while Cuddy walked Mrs. Mitchell outside.

  By half past five, on every level surface, vast dripping ribs of pig and cow were being devoured. A lengthy line of more hungry families craned out necks to meter their progress, while they stood discussing whether they should order “The Hombre” or “Big Mama” or “Little Dude,” as poster-size menus labeled these platters.

  Paula Pope was a creamy, fat woman somewhere near forty, with hair so black and skin and eyes so lovely she looked as though some cartoonist had drawn Snow White’s face inside a moon. She was working fast, puffing at a loose curl, and frowning fretfully as she plopped cherries and pineapple chunks into huge frozen pink and lime drinks that she topped with paper Confederate flags. “I’m divorced,” she said to Cuddy for openers. “We’re friendly, I guess, but we’re divorced; so don’t come asking me about Graham Pope, because I don’t know.”

  Cuddy said, “How you doing, Paula? This is Lieutenant Savile. Paula Pope.”

  “Paula Burgwin.” She wiped her small hands on a towel when I offered mine, and we shook. “I got back my own name. Do you know what it cost me? Fifty-five dollars.”

  I asked her if she’d heard about what happened to Preston and she nodded the way you nod when the highway patrol asks you if you know what the speed limit is. “What can you tell us about it, Paula?”

  “Not a thing, except it’s probably not true. You two want a drink?” Cuddy had a beer and I had a whiskey, and for a few minutes we both tried to pick up the check.

  “You keep up with Charlene, don’t you?” Cuddy asked, licking at his beer head. “Preston wants to see her, real bad. Is it all over between them? Because she gave me that feeling.”

  Paula was mixing two more fishbowls of icy pink foam. “You wouldn’t get her to believe it in a million years, but Charlene’s acting real dumb.” She added, “That don’t mean, compared to Preston, Charlene oughtn’t to be teaching over at the university.” She giggled like a child. “Charlene says there’s this brainy girl at C&W that’s big in the union that told her she was naturally smart and oughta do something with herself.”

  Cuddy said, “I’ll have to go along with that. Preston, now, is slow, no getting around it. So what makes Charlene so unnaturally dumb these days, and can I have two bags of those beer nuts over there? And bring Justin something to eat too.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I told her. “I’d like another whiskey. Weak.”

  “Because she’s young, is all,” Paula said. “Everybody young’s dumb. Weren’t y’all dumb? One weak Jack Daniel’s.” She had a pretty hand, set apart from the creamy arm by a crowded charm bracelet. Her arm looked as if its skin were so tight it would pop if something pricked it.

  “Oh, lord,” Cuddy said with a sigh. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for a chance to get young. I was always old, working to get myself to where I could have a ball being young, and now Paula, you come telling me, ‘Remember when.’ I’m so sad, I got to have a pizza, can I order a pizza here at the bar? Justin, I want you to try some of this pizza.”

  Promptly at 5:30 a rail-thin black man complaining about the cold weather came to replace Paula at the bar, and the three of us found a little cable-spool table free in a corner, and I bought her a strawberry daiquiri and had a third drink, and Cuddy ate an entire pizza the menu named “The Kitchen Sink.”

  Paula said, “Charlene traded a moron for a goon, is all.”

  “I bet you mean Luster Hudson,” Cuddy mumbled, cheese stuck to his fingers.

  “Thinking there’s men like Luster makes me worry I gave up on Graham.” Her high, small voice struggled against the dinner clatter around us. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, last night Charlene asked me over there for supper, where she’s moved out with Luster, called me up and said we had a lot in common now, and invited me.”

  “Ex-Popes Club, huh?” said Cuddy. “Y’all could get a lodge and play bingo.”

  “That’d be funny if it wasn’t sad. So, anyhow, I went, and you know what that man is doing with a bunch of dogs?”

  “Not feeding them,” Cuddy said. “And speaking of Luster’s dogs, business must be better’n it looked, for him to quit C&W, did you have that feeling? Didn’t he make pretty good money on the forklift at C&W? He say anything about that?”

  “He didn’t say anything about anything. So, do you want to know what he does with those dogs? Well, I happened to go to the bathroom, and I heard this little kitten crying its eyes out in a box with holes punched in it, so I brought it out, and I said to him—Charlene was outside getting the bottle of wine she’d stuck in the snow to cool off.” Paula paused to offer me nachos and eat half a dozen herself. “I said, ‘Whose cute little kitten is this?’ Just trying to be polite, even though I don’t much like Luster and vice versa in a big way—you could tell he was mad at her for even inviting me over, and he was about as nice as a snake. You know what he told me? Says, ‘I get them from ads. I use them to hunt my dogs with, if it’s any of your business.’ He sat right there with the TV on, and told me that, like he thought I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice!’ He was obtaining those kittens under false pretenses and then siccing his dogs on them, I couldn’t even believe it! Then he says, ‘Put that damn cat back where you got it,’ but I set it down on the floor, and it ran right over and climbed up the leg of Luster’s jeans, like I’d told it to go scratch out his eyes. And so he yan
ked it off and threw it against the wall, hard. And so Charlene opened the door, and the kitten tears out and runs up a tree and can’t get down. So you know what he did?”

  “Shot it,” I said.

  Cuddy said, “I see you’re getting a feel for Luster’s personality. I had to bring Luster in one time, me and five guys that used to play pro football, and we ran the patrol car back and forth on top of him for a while so we could get in close enough to put the cuffs on.”

  Paula sucked away half her daiquiri through a straw. “He wouldn’t even let me use his ladder to get that kitten. And he wouldn’t let Charlene do it either. And so he says, ‘I don’t have to put up with somebody coming in my house and telling me what to do.’”

  I said I could imagine Charlene’s response to that.

  “She didn’t say a word. And you want to know something else, Charlene’s scared of Luster. I really think that’s why she wanted me to come over, so she wouldn’t have to be by herself with him. She was glad he was going off to the mountains. She thinks she’s all excited about Luster, but what she is, is scared, if you know what I mean.”

  I said, “I think that’s an interesting observation,” and she smiled with a shy hesitation that was taking a while to decide she’d been complimented.

  Cuddy licked his fingers. “She told me she had a real man now.”

  “That’s right,’ that’s what she thinks she thinks.” In one long sip, Paula finished whatever liquid there was in her drink. “I don’t know any real men.”

  “Well, hey, what about us?” said Cuddy.

  She looked at me, her spoon poised to scoop up the pink slush. She said, “What about you?”

  I said, “I wish I could, ma’am,” which she knew wasn’t really true, but a way of saying I liked her, and she gave me a nod and closed her mouth over the Snow White pretty teeth and scooped up more daiquiri. I asked her what had happened to the kitten.

  “Luster said he didn’t want me in his house, is what he said, and I said, ‘Thanks for supper, Charlene,’ and went and got my car and parked it under the tree and climbed up on the car top and just about killed myself and got the dumb kitten.” She held out her right hand so we could see the red scratch streaks. “It’s at home. You two want a kitten? I don’t even like cats all that much. You think your little dog would like a kitten, Cuddy?”