“But couldn’t prove it?”
His head shook no.
“Why consider it?”
“It’s a long time ago, Mr. Savile.”
“It’s not since Cloris was murdered.”
Stanhope wrapped his fish in foil and put them in the small refrigerator before he said, “Okay. Hiram told you I thought it. I did think it. That he might have. That he had motive and means. That’s all. Okay, it puzzled me that Ames hadn’t been in the boat when it hit. The skull contusion,” he ran his long fingers through the back of his hair, “surprised me. Too deep and sharp to have happened in the water. Far back here on his head. He hit falling, should have hit landing on the boat floor.”
“Yes! So how’d he get over the rail?”
“Lots of ways besides Dollard’s pushing him. Accept that first off. But I knew about Dollard and Cloris Ames. And I knew Dollard was at the same restaurant as Ames the same night eating dinner.”
“He was?”
Stanhope took his pipe off the window counter and sat back down. “He left his car in the lot overnight. I asked him why. He said there was a short in the ignition. There was.”
“How’d he get home? He didn’t live anywhere near the lake.”
“I asked him. He said, a friend.”
“Who?”
“I asked him. He said it didn’t concern me.”
“You couldn’t find out?”
“I tried. But then,” he stood up and took the cups, “I lost my job.”
I lit a cigarette. “The coroner’s report said one of the textiles men Ames had been talking to, the men from Georgia, thought he saw Ames walking with somebody toward the docks; I think the somebody was Rowell. But the man said he couldn’t give any description.”
“I had a talk later on with one of those Georgia guys. Hogue? Bogue?”
“Bogue. Impressive. How can you remember that?”
His eyes crinkled the deep crow’s-feet around them. “It’s a case sticks in my mind. Bogue was, all four were, close-mouthed about whatever business had been going on at this dinner. It was around the time there was a lot of tangle with pro-union activity in some of the textile mills. I figured they might have been up to Hillston about that, planning strategy. We had our hands full for a while. Back then old Cadmean was dead set against the union. Bainton Ames was dead set for it. On principle. Don’t think he had much of a grasp of the politics one way or another. So I figured they were up talking strategy to Cadmean, and then Ames was just supposed to take them out and they’d smooth him over with a polite meal. Pine Hills Inn had rooms back then, they were staying the night.” His throat rasped into a cough, and he stopped for a few minutes to rest his voice.
“Anyhow,” he went on. “What I remember is this Bogue was itchy to know if we had some coin, some kind of rare gold piece he said Ames had brought over to the inn for him to look at. They both collected. This was a new acquisition Ames was excited about. Bogue said he’d looked at it again right before they split up outside, and Ames had put it back in a little envelope in his pants pocket. Bogue wanted to know, if we had it, could he buy it? His friend’s just dead a day now. He wants to go see the widow about a coin.”
I said, “So, you don’t much like people?”
“Not many… Now, the coin wasn’t on the body. I didn’t see how it could have fallen out, unless Bainton dropped it outside on the dock or in the boat while he was fishing for his keys, and didn’t notice. Not like him, though.”
From the back of the house the phone rang. It surprised Stanhope, and frowning, he left the kitchen. What surprised me was that he had called Bainton Ames by his first name, and I was going to ask him how well they’d known each other, when he walked back into the room, his thin mouth working hard on the gnawed pipestem. He stared at me so seriously I thought perhaps he had been given news of someone’s death. He said, “That was Mr. Briggs Cadmean on the phone. Wanting to know if you were here.”
“What?”
“I figured, some kind of family emergency, so I said yes. But that wasn’t it.”
“How the hell did he know I was here? Hiram Davies! What did he want? Is he on the phone?”
“No.” Stanhope went back into his living room and turned off his record player. I followed him. “He hung up. He wanted me to know—”
“I don’t believe this!”
“He said you were set on stirring up some nonsense from the past that had nothing to do with the investigation.”
Stanhope watched me pacing the little room.
“Said, fact that you’d come down here showed you’d gone haywire, he put it. Said he hated to say it, but you had a history of mental trouble.”
“God damn it.”
“Said I should calm you down. And just as well not mention he’d taken the trouble to call, for your family’s sake. Just concerned about you.”
We were facing each other across the kerosene heating stove that stood out from his wall. Finally I asked him, “Why’d you tell me, then? And why the hell did he think he could ask you to calm me down?”
“I owed him favors, he put it.” Having said this in his flat tone, Stanhope returned to the bedroom. He came back clearing his throat repeatedly and carrying a scuffed black violin case. For a bizarre moment I thought he was bringing me the one that had belonged to my father, which I knew my mother still kept at home. Then he said, “You called up, I thought about it. I said, okay, come on. So. You came. I don’t much like looking back.” He set the case down on the worn-smooth corduroy covers of his couch, and snapped open the clasps. “Long time ago, some of us used to play. Not much. Just a little on weekends. Bainton Ames and me.”
I understood what he meant. “And my dad.”
“Some. It was no big thing.”
“I don’t know if you knew. My dad died, some years back.”
“Yes, I know.” He closed the lid on the bright ruddy wood of the violin.
I sat down beside his coffee table; under its glass top, shells were carefully arranged on sand. I said, “I hope you aren’t just agreeing that I’m on to something because you knew my father. And otherwise you’d think I was unbalanced too.”
“No. But I wouldn’t have let you come out. I think it’s possible you’re on to something. I don’t think Mr. Cadmean would bother making a call if you weren’t on to something. I just don’t know what the something is. When somebody tells me, they hate to mention it, but they’re disinterestedly eager to keep somebody else quiet, I wonder why. Where’s the string tied? Motiveless benevolence?” He shook his head. “But you probably notice I’m not much on the species. Forty years, arresting them for hating each other and trying to grab whatever the other one’s got—it’s enough.”
We sat listening to the kerosene bubble in the stove, and to the wind, and the tireless surf.
I said, “They can surprise you.”
“Not enough. I stick to fish now.”
I pointed at his shelf of records.
He nodded. “Yes. And to music. Music’s just itself. No motives.”
“People wrote it. People play it.”
“It doesn’t care who. Not a bit.” As he stood up, he scratched his brown long hands through his hair. “You even bother to bring along any tackle?”
“It’s out in the car.” I smiled.
“If you want to, go get it,” he said, and coughed. “There’s a cove on Silver Lake I’ll show you, down some; you might get a bass. Crankbait’ll sometimes stir one up in winter. Up to you. They call you Justin now?”
“Pardon?”
“Used to call you Jay, didn’t they? Seems like they called you Jay last time I saw you.” He held the tan thin hand out at the height of his waist. “You ought to quit smoking,” he added, and held out my coat.
Chapter 15
Before I left, my two-pound bass wrapped in foil, Walter Stanhope let me use his telephone to make some calls, which I charged to the department. Mr. Bogue of Bette Gray Corporation in Atlanta tol
d me busily he couldn’t possibly remember a conversation with Bainton Ames fifteen years ago, and thought it could hardly be relevant now, but he’d have his secretary send me a memorandum should anything come to mind. He said briskly that he still very much regretted the loss of Bainton Ames, and now, of Mrs. Dollard. And, yes, he had spoken to a police chief about the coin. He was sorry to hear others were missing now. If we recovered them, he would be interested in purchasing a few from the owner. The coin Ames had shown him fifteen years ago was, he recalled, an 1839 classic-head Liberty quarter eagle minted in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a poor sister of the star of the Ames collection, an 1841 quarter eagle known as the “Little Princess” among numismatists, but still quite something to possess. He added that he’d lost another chance at just such a piece only two years ago at an auction in Washington, D.C., and concluded in a hurry, “Was that all?” I took down the name of the auction gallery.
Then I called Hillston to tell Cuddy I was going to stay overnight on the Banks. He told me to come back now. He said, “You know that wall in that Shakespeare play you were just in? That wall you peeked through and the lion ate your girlfriend? That wall’s about to fall on your head, old Mister Bottom. And it is the only thing between you and V.D.’s snapping teeth. I am in reference to that wall being your fancy kin and friends. They are falling off. Old Cadmean called up here.”
“And Hiram told him where I was! God damn it.”
“I jumped on Deacon Davies, but he didn’t mean no harm. He got real peevish: yes, you told him not to mention it, but how was he to know that meant including not to Mr. Briggs Cadmean who had donated the very floor he was standing on! He thought maybe you meant don’t mention it to me.”
“God damn it.”
“You already said that. What’s with that fat old bald man? What’d you say to him last night? He must have hopped up and down on V.D. bad about your trying to string up Senator Dollard.”
“I didn’t say a word to Cadmean about Rowell.”
“Well, something rubbed him wrong. You better come home. Old V.D.’s saying you may need some quick R and R, by which I mean Restraint and Roughing Up. Says you’re bonkers and he’s gonna have Dr. Ogilvey come see you.”
“Oh, great.”
“Um hum. There’s more. Says Harriet Dale, our lady flatfoot flathead, told him she was ‘scared’ of you, the way you and Sister Resurrection were shooting the breeze on the same frequency downstairs yesterday. Listen here, General, when it gets so the only friends you got at headquarters are white trash and nigrahs, it’s time to pucker and pick up the bugle, and I don’t mean ‘Charge!’ As my daddy said after forty-two years on the line at C&W, ‘Enough’s enough.’ And the truly bad news is Preston’s told Fulcher he did pick up that silverware. Off the side of the road on Wade Boulevard around two in the morning the night of the murder. While out cruising for Charlene. He claims it caught his eye when he stopped for a red light and emptied out his brains into the ashtray. ‘Those sacks must have fallen out of the killer’s car,’ he tells us. I’m real disappointed in Joe Lieberman. He’s already talking plea bargaining for Preston. Fulcher’s got Ken Moize and the other justice boys hot to trot. Murder one. They’re going for it.”
“Where’s Charlene?”
“Can’t find her. We’re looking.”
“She might have gone after Hudson.”
“The Great Smokies are great big.”
“Well, who knows Hudson? Did he have any friends?”
“Let’s not take time out for humor. Speaking of which, I’m going out now to eat supper at Ye Olde Pine Hills Inn. I’m trying to go suave, see, and I said to myself now where would old suave Savile take a girl? So what’s good there? How’s their pizza? I’m taking Briggs. I wanted you to be the first to know, in case you found out.”
“Briggs?”
“Junior. The professor. I took six Valiums and called her up, and I think I heard her say yes.”
“So why are you telling me?”
“On accounta your tone right now.”
“She was supposed to stay with Joanna Cadmean.”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Cadmean. Not to worry. I’ll make her promise to lock up. Listen to this, I’m going to take over my basket-ball pool, and let her take a whing at it. She never saw a game in her life. But well, hell, why not? So get on back. Not that there’s all that much we can do anyhow. If you see some fellows in white coats with a net on the front steps here, don’t stop to chat.”
“Could you start a check on the late-night gas stations on Raleigh Road? If Rowell drove back and forth twice that Sunday, maybe he got some gas, God willing.”
“Savile, you are stubborn. Anybody else ever tell you that?”
“Rowell Dollard, for one. Constantly.”
“Well, I hate to spit on your birthday candle, but you got about as much chance of pinning either one of those killings on him—I don’t care if he’s Jack the Ripper—as you got of getting Lunchbreak Whetstone to cook you three squares behind a picket fence. Adiós and happy holiday.”
“What holiday?”
“Lawdy, Ashley, you don’t know it’s a state holiday? Today’s General Lee’s birthday! Yaahoooo! Shall we rise? We shall rise!”
I said, “Your jocularity is getting me down,” and hung up. I felt too tired to drive for four hours. As it turned out, it took me closer to five. And it was 8:30 when I reached Hillston and changed clothes, and headed across town to C&W Textiles.
I was stubborn.
That I was stubborn had moved into familial myth long ago when, at age six, I’d trekked one night in cold rain to the home of a fellow first grader three miles away, whom I rightly believed had stolen my harmonica. That was, as it proved, my first case of detection, and one involving the police as well, for a patrol car had found me on North Hillston’s winding roads, trudging, sodden, home to Catawba Drive with my harmonica.
That I was stubborn had kept me bloodied and facedown in mud through the autumns of junior high school, attempting to play the game of football, for which I had little talent and less bulk.
“No, you have your father’s talents, and my character,” my mother would say. “That’s a Dollard will. We’re all stubborn.”
“Everybody in the state of North Carolina is stubborn!” was always my father’s reply.
On vacations, to the beach or the mountains, the only times I remember his being so garrulous, my father would say (as furious drivers passed him on the shoulder, or waitresses refused to let him order what he wanted), “North Carolina is such an ornery state. Virginia may be stuck up. But North Carolina is stiff-necked. You won’t give in, you won’t give up, and you won’t move out. Did you know, Jay, until recently, ninety-nine and a half percent of the people living in this state were born here, and the precious few of us that weren’t are looked on with considerable suspicion?”
In proof, he would always point out that we claimed to be the first colony, even though we were a lost one; that our state was named after the only British monarch misguided enough to get his head chopped off (Charles I) and was half-settled by the crazed Highlanders who thought they could win that kingdom back for Charles III; that our president, Andrew Johnson, had been the only chief executive to get himself impeached; and that, in the seventeenth century, we had even been mad enough to declare war on Virginia!
My father would say, “The hornet’s nest, that’s what General Cornwallis called Carolina. Now, Virginia yields to no one in considered revolution, but, good Christ, you Tarheels rebel against polio vaccinations!”
“And proud of it,” I would call from the car’s backseat.
And Mother would add, “Our Edenton ladies had their tea party long before the bragging Bostonians, and what about our Culpepper rebels, and your great god Thomas Jefferson, sweet-heart, did nothing but plagiarize our Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence!”
And beside me Vaughan would turn the pages of his horror comic book as Carolina cars swept in a rage around
us, “First In Freedom” on their plates.
And in school I was taught that we were indeed a stubborn state: the first colony to vote to leave old England, the last to ratify the new constitution. In the Civil War, first we wouldn’t secede, and then—though we lost more men than any other Southern state (and my mother, a Daughter of the Confederacy, could tell me the names of all those dead from whom I descended) and lost more men than this whole country lost in Vietnam—we wouldn’t surrender, not until seventeen days after Appomattox. And for ten years after that, while Federal troops guarded farmland matted with weeds, we rankled, stiff-necked. And now on the front-bumper plate of Preston Pope’s van rides a cartoon Johnny Reb, sword high, screaming, “Hell no! I won’t surrender!”
And when, at fourteen, I broke my heart refusing to stop trying to date Patty Raiford, who was ostentatiously in love with a senior (the first of her many husbands), Mother would say to my father, “Little Jay comes by his stubbornness honestly. Honey, he’s a Tarheel. My God, if I hadn’t been a Tarheel, I would have let you just slip away back to that awful girl from Alexandria. Remember her? She had the biggest bosom you would ever want to see. I never did believe those breasts were real, were they?”
And my father would say with his soft smile, “Good Christ, Peggy, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
And Mother would lean around from the car’s front seat and say to me, “Now, that’s a Virginia gentleman, I want you to know. That’s a Savile.”
At my father’s grave, Rowell Dollard had hugged his arm across my back. “You’re a Dollard, Justin. I won’t forget it. Don’t you.”
Chapter 16
Under the lights, coming around the curve onto the Hillston beltway, I noticed the tan Camaro behind me, and the image stirred that when I’d driven home, a tan Camaro had been parked across the street near the entrance to Frances Bush College. The car was still behind me after I took the C&W Textiles exit, and when I pulled into the Dot ‘n’ Dash, it went by at a crawl. I waited; in a few minutes the tan nose edged, bouncing, out from the side street behind the store.
Uncivil Seasons Page 15
