Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  “Burch Iredell, that guy that was coroner here back ten, fifteen years ago?”

  Davies pushed in on his bifocals as if that would help him see what I wanted.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “What do you want to know about all these old people for?”

  “Maybe I’m planning a reunion.”

  “That’s not true. Is it?”

  I apologized. “It’s just a joke. Is Iredell dead?”

  “He’s in the V.A. hospital over in Raleigh.” Davies sat up straighter, his shirt stiff with starch to hold off the future. “But his wife’s passed away. She attended my church for many years.”

  “Hiram, tell me, do you remember when Mrs. Dollard’s first husband died? Bainton Ames?”

  “Well, yes. Bainton Ames. He drowned.”

  “Back then, do you remember, did anybody ever suggest he might have been murdered?”

  He pushed on his glasses some more, uncertain whether I was checking to see if his memory was failing, or actually coming to him for help. “They thought he’d been blown up with the boat, then along comes his body miles away. Then they thought he’d fallen out.”

  “That’s right. You have a good memory. Anybody think he’d been pushed out?”

  Davies’s eyes went away to the past and came back puzzled.

  He said, “Now, isn’t that funny, because Captain Stanhope did ask that same question, now I think back. Is that why you want to see him? There wasn’t anything to it. He was fired, you know.” He said this as if getting fired were a profound moral failure. Then with careful fairness he added, “He got another job, some kind of security work. But he was pretty bitter. Then I heard he just retired. I heard all he does now is fish off in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That sounds pretty good to me, Hiram.”

  Davies shook his head in a nervous tic, scraping his collar on his thin neck. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s not.”

  Alone in my office I felt myself dropping back into the weighted depression that had always tugged me down when I didn’t keep drinking once I had started. The rush of impulse just to walk out and find a bar scared me. Instead, I started smoking. The memos in Davies’s small, precise hand all looked accusatory. One said, “Call Candace,” which was Susan Whetstone’s code name, and the name she wished she’d been given at birth. Another said, “Call Mr. Briggs Cadmean.” He was doubtless returning the call I’d made earlier about the papers my mother had said Cloris Dollard was planning to show him. The man who answered the Cadmean phone now didn’t say whether he was a secretary or a butler or a son, but he came back on the line finally and told me Mr. Cadmean would be happy to see me; right away would be fine.

  Then I called Susan, though I felt guilty phoning her home, and she told me she was coming over to my place tonight after going to a bridal shower because we couldn’t meet tomorrow. Tomorrow, two days early, Lawry was coming home. I said again I really thought she and I should take some time to think things over, and she said she was coming anyhow. I said I was tired, and she said, “Good. You can be passive,” and laughed.

  I tried the former police captain, Walter Stanhope, long distance again. I’d been trying during the day first to find out his phone number on Ocracoke Island, then to reach him. This time, just as I was hanging up, he answered. He answered like a man who didn’t expect to get phone calls unless somebody had died. His voice had an unused, rusted sound, and he said very little except to repeat an inflectionless, indifferent “okay.” On the spur of the moment, I decided not to explain until we met why I wanted to talk to him. Instead, I said I was coming out to the Outer Banks to fish and just wanted to pass along Hiram Davies’s regards, and maybe pick up some tips about what fish were running.

  Stanhope said, “It’s January.”

  “I like surf casting in winter. Truth is, I’m trying to get away from things in Hillston.”

  “Okay. Up to you.”

  I told him I’d call tomorrow after the ferry ride.

  “Up to you,” he said again, and hung up.

  My stomach had knotted and was rumbling from hunger. I ate three Tums tablets and tried to call Susan back to say I had to leave town, but now no one answered. I picked up the silver letter opener she’d given me and absentmindedly pricked blood from the palm of my hand.

  Across the room, the insignia on the back of my father’s old chair said LUX ET VERITAS. He had believed in both. Cuddy Mangum believed in luck. Sister Resurrection and Joanna Cadmean believed in voices. Perhaps because for a short time I’d heard voices, too, they made as much sense to me as truth, light, and luck: I had an impulse to call Joanna Cadmean.

  Professor Briggs Cadmean answered the phone at the lake house.

  “How’s Mrs. Cadmean feeling?”

  “Fine. She’s up here with me now; would you like to talk with her?”

  “In that tower? How’d she get up there?”

  “I helped her. She thought it’d be interesting to look through the telescope.”

  “I have to go out of town tomorrow,” I explained. “If anybody asks to see her that you don’t know, or even if you do know them, stick around, all right? And would you let me know who it was?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Probably not. If Senator Dollard gets in touch with her—”

  “He called this evening.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know. He talked to Joanna.”

  “Put her on.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Probably nothing. I’m sorry. Let me speak to your aunt, please.”

  “Joanna isn’t my aunt. You forget my father’s patriarchal persistence. She’s my sister-in-law. I have brothers in their fifties.”

  Joanna Cadmean came on the phone, her voice as peaceful as a hypnotist’s. Rowell Dollard, she said, had called and spoken to her abusively, had charged her with insanity (“Not the first time I’ve heard that, of course.”), and had told her never to come to me again with her delusions.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “He said, ‘I won’t let you do this to me.’ Is that what you mean?”

  When she again refused to move into town, I suggested she invite some friend over during the hours Briggs had to be away, and she promised she would. For one thing, two strangers, who’d read Bubba Percy’s newspaper article, had already come out to the lodge to ask her to tell them where their runaway teenage son was living and why he had left them. “I’m going out to Hatteras to see Walter Stanhope, Mrs. Cadmean. About Bainton Ames. Do you remember him?”

  There was a long pause.

  Finally she said, “I don’t think that will serve much purpose, do you? After all these years, surely there’s not going to be anything he can tell you.”

  “Well, the old story is that Dollard pushed Stanhope into resigning over a series of bungled investigations. I’m wondering if it was really because he had gotten onto something about Ames’s death. Obviously he’s got no stake in protecting the senator.”

  Another pause, then she spoke slowly. “Perhaps. But digging up the past? I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought that’s what we were trying to do.”

  “I confess, I used to be rather frightened of Captain Stanhope when I was young. I don’t think he liked having me around much. Even then he seemed to me a very dissatisfied man.”

  I said, “So am I.” I meant about the case, but she said, “Yes, I think so. You have your mother’s eyes, but in yours there’s a dark rim around the iris.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Midnight blue. Very dark. May I say something, Justin? Let go. You aren’t to blame.”

  “Pardon? Blame for what? What did my mother say to you?”

  “She didn’t say anything.” There was a mild small laugh. “Don’t forget, I’m the crazy psychic. I always say weird things. Thank you for worrying about me.” She said good-bye.

  • • •
>
  Down in the garage, Lieutenant Etham Foster was stooped over unlocking his car parked in the space next to mine. I said, “It’s only 8:30. What’s your family going to say seeing you so early?” Then I realized I didn’t know whether Etham had a family or not. He had never spoken of anything but the problem under the lens.

  His sheepskin coat hung on his nearly seven-foot frame, like beach moss on a tall winter tree. He said, “What they always tell me, ‘It’s in the oven, heat it up.’”

  This was more of a response than I’d expected, and it led me to say, “Give me a second, Etham. Let me ask you something. Wouldn’t you figure if you got hit on the head in a powerboat with side rails, you’d fall down in the boat, not over the side?”

  “No idea. Never been in a powerboat.”

  I pulled myself up on the hood of my Austin so I wouldn’t break my neck trying to talk to him. “So, what’s your guess, did a robber kill Mrs. Rowell Dollard?”

  “Not paid to guess, that’s your department.”

  “He knows he can’t hock those coins. They’re too rare.”

  “Like you said before, he could already have the buyer set. Could be something else he wanted; something you don’t even know about. Nobody knew she had it but her.”

  I tossed up my car keys and caught them. “That’s good. Nobody but her, and him. Like a diary.”

  “She jots the killer’s name down?”

  “Maybe it was already in there.”

  This time when I tossed the keys, his big hand flicked out, and they disappeared inside it. He said, “Your mind’s racing,” and threw them back. Bending himself into his car seat, he added, “I heard you just sprang Jessie Webster on your own hook. You got something on Captain Fulcher you can lean against when he finds out?”

  “Yeah. A big family. Is that Sister Resurrection’s name, Jessie Webster?”

  “Oh, yeah, most of us have real names too. Did you think it was my momma named me Doctor Dunk-it?”

  “She might have. My momma named me Justin Bartholomew Savile the Fifth and called me Little Jay until my father died.”

  “You’re still pretty short,” he said, and I’m fairly certain he came close to almost smiling.

  While I was watching Foster drive off, Cuddy came out carrying Martha Mitchell and digging in the pockets of his bright blue parka for the keys to the new white Oldsmobile he kept parked as far from everybody else’s cars as he could manage. He told me that Davies had found out for us that of the four textiles executives who’d eaten dinner with Bainton Ames the night he died, two were themselves now dead, one was on vacation, and the last (a Mr. Bogue, now president of the synthetics division of Bette Gray Corporation in Atlanta), could be reached at his office tomorrow.

  “I need my own theory,” Cuddy said. “You got yours, and now it looks like V.D.’s getting the idea you and Sister Resurrection pulled the murder off together.”

  Finally he tugged out of his jeans the big key chain that had long been a department joke, for on it were a rabbit’s foot, a miniature horseshoe, and a Saint Christopher’s medal. (“Don’t laugh. Chairman Ho had nothing to match it,” he’d say.) The dirty snow of the rabbit fur had a Junior Mint stuck to it. “Well, time for Cudberth R. Mangum, M.A.—as my momma once had my name listed in the Hillston phone book—to go slosh around on that water bed you think’s so trashy, and flip on the tube. Martha and I got twenty-two channels of big tits and loud guns waiting. I just love it.” He cocked his head at me. “You ought to get home too. You don’t look so good. You’re starting to look like that painting of yours.”

  “I didn’t get any sleep. Or food.”

  “You coulda had a pizza instead of those whiskeys. Go set a couple of your sideboards on fire, warm up your house, and crawl in bed. Go home, hear me?”

  “I’m going to see Briggs Cadmean.”

  “Which?”

  “The fat, bald one.”

  “Good.”

  “Then I’m going to Hatteras.”

  “You’re going off the deep end is where you’re going.”

  I opened my car door. “That’s all right, I know the way back.”

  Cuddy shook his head as he walked away.

  Chapter 10

  I couldn’t see the Cadmean mansion until I was waiting, freezing, at its door, and what I saw then was about a block’s worth of bricks the color of old blood. Between the house and the street spread a high fence of iron spears; the long front lawn was an arboretum crowded with immense trees, each labeled with a metal plate and all indigenous to North Carolina—balsam fir, longleaf pine, palmetto, spruce; the largest were two magnolias and a red maple with the frayed ropes of an old swing hanging from it. The side of the house was sheltered by a tall latticework walkway, twisted with thick, leafless grapevines. It made sense that a little girl growing up here would have started looking out at the stars; she certainly couldn’t have seen much sun down below. The big rooms inside were as crowded and dark with wood as the yard. Wood inlaid floors and wood paneling were crammed with wood chests, paintings, Spanish chairs, and marquetry tables. Clearly the strangely empty spaces of the lake lodge had been the girl Briggs’s reaction to this press of pudding-thick furniture.

  To come upon old Mr. Cadmean’s own beaming manner in the midst of this gloom was disconcerting. The elderly black housekeeper who’d finally come to the door led me up a dark, boxed stairway into a pink children’s room wallpapered with Victorian Mother Goose characters. There, like a mammoth stuffed walrus in a toy shop, Cadmean lay on the floor in a disheveled gray suit, his huge arthritic hand working delicately to place a mirror into the bedroom of an extravagant dollhouse. Crouched beside him, a beautifully dressed little girl, five or six years old, watched with her lips pursed critically.

  “There!” he rumbled. “Now Miss Mandy can look and see how pretty she is.” He stood a miniature doll in front of the little mirror.

  “Grandpa. I told you already. Her name’s Two Eight.”

  “Honey, Two Eight’s no kind of name for a sweet pretty lady. Let’s call her Mandy, isn’t that a nice name?”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “Now put this rug down right by the bed.” With a peremptory point, the child handed him a doily.

  “Mr. Cadmean. Sorry to intrude.”

  His enormous head swung around as he lumbered up onto all fours. “Oh, Justin, there you are. Good. Come on in here and meet one of my grandchildren. This is Rebecca Kay Cadmean. Isn’t she just as pretty as a little doll?” He beamed.

  “Grandpa. Be quiet.” The child smacked her palm over his mouth.

  I’d seen Cadmean rarely since going away to school, but as a boy, I’d sat in the pew behind him in church and watched the back of his big, already bald head bounce in time to the hymns, his big hand swipe at a fly or float an envelope into the collection plate. Now, at eighty, he looked almost exactly the same—the fat still solid, the shrewd yellow eyes lidded as a bear’s, the small lips curling (like his daughter Briggs’s, like the granddaughter’s, too), the same habit of patting his stiff bent fingers up against the shave of his cheek, making a rhythmic sound of the scrape.

  Rebecca was there for a visit; her mother, who’d brought her, was off somewhere tonight, probably at the same bridal shower as Susan Whetstone. The inner circle wasn’t large. We left Rebecca rearranging the doll’s furniture as the old housekeeper complained querulously that she couldn’t get the child to mind her.

  Rebecca agreed. “I’m not going to bed, no way, Jo´se.”

  “Regina Tyrannosaura,” Cadmean chuckled at me, and brought me back down the stairs, one hand clenched on the rail, one arm tucked through mine, like a barge hooking itself to a tugboat. “Let’s us go down to the office. Can you believe this weather! Had to get two fellows from C&W to come over to unfreeze my kitchen pipes. In Hillston!”

  A fire blazed under a walnut-paneled mantel, gleamed on brown leather armchairs and on a spaniel sleeping by the hearth. The office, as he called it, looked more l
ike a small museum honoring the history of C&W Textile Industries. On its walls were engravings of the earlier factories, framed citations and advertisements for hosiery, underwear, and work clothes (“The Men Who Built America Were Wearing Cadmean Jeans”), and photographs, and maps of Hillston. On tables sat scale models of textile machines.

  Mr. Cadmean banged at the fire with another log from his woodstack, then opened a liquor cabinet in the wall next to the mantel. Over the mantel was an oil painting of an unhappily beautiful woman in a formal summer gown with a little copper-haired girl leaning against her side, their hands clasped on the woman’s billowing lap.

  “You don’t drink, do you, son?” he asked, holding up a bottle.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll have a whiskey, if you don’t mind.”

  His mouth, fleshy and pretty as Henry the Eighth’s, made a kissing noise. “Allrighty. I had the notion I heard you weren’t a drinker.”

  “I don’t drink as much.”

  His laugh rumbled. “I don’t do anything as much.” The glass he handed me was cut with a Gothic C. “And I hate it.” He clicked his glass to mine. “I certainly do hate it. You know who that is?” I was looking up at the portrait.

  “Your daughter, Briggs, isn’t it?”

  His breath rumbled slowly through his huge body. “That’s right. Her and her mother. A sweet, sweet lady.” He shuffled closer to the painting, the fire reddening his scalp. “Just that pretty, too. She was my favorite of all I married. Last and favorite. I hated like hell to lose that woman. I’ll tell you this, I just about killed your daddy when he told me she was dead. Yep.” He shook his ice hard. “I took him by the coat, I didn’t even know I was doing it, and just about killed him.”

  “He was her surgeon?”

  “That’s right. Brain tumor.” Cadmean squatted, his stiff joints popping like the fire, and dropped in another log. “Well, hell, poor fellow, his eyes got big as milk saucers. I apologized later on. But I couldn’t believe she’d left me, like that.” He snapped his fingers one sharp crack, then turned around and chuckled. “Your poor old daddy said, ‘I’m having you thrown right out of this hospital!’ Said, ‘You can’t hold on to her by shouting at her all night long!’ I said, ‘Try it, Savile, go ahead. I paid for this goddamn hospital!’ Yep, I was in a state. Have a seat, son.”