Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  “Why should they want a design at least fifteen years old?” I asked.

  “Oh, back then they couldn’t be bothered with energy efficiency, you know; they all thought Ames was some kind of half-baked, genius-type nut.” Whetstone opened his eyes wide to symbolize madness. “But now it’s the thing; everybody’s into saving power, et cetera. So, okay, Mrs. Dollard digs out these old Ames folders, but naturally she doesn’t have the foggiest what she’s looking for, so she zips over to old Cadmean here in town, and he tells her anything Bainton Ames designed belongs to him. And he grabs the papers away from her. So, that was that. Mind if I smoke? Ever try these Ultra Lights? Pretty damn good.”

  I pushed over an ashtray (one I’d made up in the mountains), and Lawry slid from his pocket a leather-and-gold cigarette case that was exactly like the one Susan had given me and I could feel now in my breast pocket being beaten on by my heart. Why had old Briggs Cadmean lied to me by saying Cloris had never brought him any designs? Why lie? I asked Lawry, “What does this have to do with her calling you?”

  “Oh, I’m C&W, too.” He gave me a collegial shrug. “She liked to ask men’s advice; you know the type. So, okay, she says she’s started getting p.o.’d at old Briggs; he’s such a senile old bullshitter, I’m not surprised. So, he tore her head off about the designs, and she’s p.o.’d, et cetera, you know: ‘Who is he to tell me?’ She’s the inventor’s widow, right? And what she wants to know is, does Cadmean really have the right to stop her from selling them?”

  “Well, she had the copies she’d made,” I said. “Did he grab the copies?”

  “Copies? Oh, I guess, well, I didn’t know about that.”

  Staring down at my note pad, I kept doodling the word Cadmean, making stairs of it. “My mother was with Cloris when she had some copies made. She mentioned it.”

  “Nice tie,” Whetstone said suddenly. I looked up and saw him studying my chest. “Dior?”

  I flipped the cloth over and read the label. “Valentino. What exactly did Cloris want your advice about?”

  “Nice tie. She wanted me to get in touch with the textiles guy who’d approached her. I said I would, and I’d call her back. Just to be a nice guy, right?”

  “Was this a Cary Bogue at Bette Gray Corporation?”

  He grinned as if I’d just told a clever joke. “How’d you know Bogue?”

  “He was with Bainton Ames the night of his death; way back. I’ve been looking back at the reports.”

  “Right.” Whetstone nodded. “I actually gave Bogue a call on this Mrs. Dollard thing, and he mentioned that drowning episode. Did you know this? Pretty interesting. Ames was so pissed then at old Briggs Cadmean, he was planning on walking out. That’s why Bogue was up there, negotiating about getting him to come down to Atlanta. Ames had come up with some new rapier-type loom, I guess.”

  I had to get out of my chair and start walking. Why hadn’t Bogue mentioned this to Stanhope at the time? Had Cadmean known Ames was leaving him? Walter Stanhope’s rasping whisper came back. If I were you, I’d be leery of the man with the strings.

  Whetstone gave me the ingratiating smile that he followed with the pause.

  “Leaving why?” I asked. “Did Cadmean know?”

  “Couldn’t say who knew. Way before my time. The story I heard was that Ames had a burr in his butt about old Briggs’s roughing up the union types that were agitating back then. Ames—now, this is all according to Bogue—Ames was trying to pressure the old man into going union by holding the designs out on him, and when Mr. C. called his bluff, Ames said he was taking his ball and was going to go play elsewhere. You know how it was in the old days. A little sandbox and everybody kicking sand. A more personal-type lifestyle, know what I mean?” Whetstone leaned smoothly forward and twisted his cigarette out half smoked. His eyes were as blue and as empty as the sky, and they were the precise color of his pocket handkerchief. I had been dreading the possibility that I would like Lawry Whetstone. But I didn’t like him.

  Now he smiled broadly, his teeth slightly bucked and intensely white in his tan face. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s all so rinky-dink. I mean, about the dumb designs. You know? Bogue told me it was no big deal; sure, he was curious to see the drawings, but what he really wanted was an intro to talk about buying some kind of coin collection. He’s a coin-type nut. But old Briggs, that’s just the sort of small beer he has a hernia over, the loom thing. How the designs belonged to him. That man is so out of it. And too full of himself to step down.”

  I sat back. “What do you mean, out of it?”

  Whetstone pulled on his nose and then glanced at his nicely buffed nails. “Ever met our Mr. Cadmean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then you know what I mean. How he loves every square inch of C&W. How FDR shook his hand for beating the ‘Krauts and Japs’ with his parachutes. Et cetera. Right? Whereas, news flash. We are Germany and Japan. Old Briggs hasn’t got even a rudimentary grasp of what’s going on at C&W these days. But you’d have to kill the old shit to get him out.”

  I leaned back on the rear legs of my chair. “That’s not what I hear from him. He says he’s down there all day every day.”

  Whetstone laughed; his tan fingers laced around one knee; on his right hand, a gold college ring. “Right! And the peacock spreads its tail on NBC every day too. But it doesn’t negotiate the deals, now does it? I like to say, ‘Corporations aren’t made out of whole cloth’: obviously, if we’d counted on the cotton mills for capital, Chink imports would have closed C&W down years ago, the way they have most of the old man’s buddies. Nobody wants to tell him, but his beloved mill is just a dinosaur we have to work around until we can cart off the bones.” His grin invited me to share in this corporate fun, but instead I tore the scribbled note off the pad, and asked him to repeat the times and contents of his calls to Cloris Dollard on the day of her death. He did so affably.

  Then he surprised me by leaning over my desk and picking up the silver letter opener Susan had given me. It was the most recent of her gifts and the one that had prompted my asking her again to stop buying me things, and her telling me again that one of the advantages of having an affair was it gave her someone else to shop for. Shopping was her occupation. Now Lawry tapped his forefinger on the silver blade’s tip. “Are you in a real hurry?” he asked. “Susan give you this?”

  I kept my eyes on his, their blue blankness impossible to interpret. “Yes,” I answered. “She did.”

  “Nice.” He placed it back at a pleasant angle to the rock crystal desk garniture. “I’ve got one too,” he added. “Listen, have you got a minute, Justin? To be honest, this Dollard thing was a kind of excuse to come in.”

  Here, then, it came. And what I couldn’t understand was why he was smiling the energetic salesman’s grin that was too kinetic to be so close to the eyes’ blue blandness.

  “Justin,” he said, and I felt his body as well as his voice hone toward me. “Justin, Susan really enjoys herself with you. She really does. The thing with you’s been a good deal for her. You and I have never laid it out, but let’s take it as programmed in—and filed. And go from there. Right?”

  My throat felt dry as sand, dry as mornings in the mountains when I would awaken to the faint jiggle of the nurse’s tray and wonder why she, a stranger, should come with such efficient comfort into my estranged delirious room. It took me a minute to wet my throat enough to reply. “I don’t know what to say, Lawry. I hadn’t realized you knew about my relationship with Susan. I can only—”

  He broke in cheerfully. “Come on! Let’s be real! This is today. You knew Susan and I have always been open about all our affairs.”

  I reached into my jacket for my cigarettes. “No, I assure you. I didn’t know you had ‘affairs.’”

  He grinned. “Well, you knew of at least one affair that one of us was having.” And he pointed at the gold-trimmed case in my hand. “Come on, Justin, everything’s fine, not to worry, okay? Long as nobody’s got
herpes.” He guffawed, then looked at me. “You know, Susan told me you weren’t going to make this too easy.”

  “Make what easy?” The sweat was starting across my upper lip, and heat pulsing into my hands. “Make what easy?”

  Looking at his coat, he said, “Well, to be honest, what would you say to the possibility of a foursome? How does that strike you?”

  “A foursome?”

  “You know.” He gave his nose a few short pulls, and turned to me and smiled.

  “No, I don’t.” But I was beginning to suspect that I did, and the skin of my scalp warmed.

  Whetstone’s voice became confidential. “Look. I’d really enjoy getting something together, and so maybe you would too. I’ve got this gal I’ve been seeing, works in Personnel. She’s pretty damn great, believe me. And we’ve tried it with another couple.” He nodded at me encouragingly, as if he were selling me insurance. “It worked out fantastically, just great. So, okay, what I’m proposing is, how about getting her together with Susan and you and me, and see what happens? Susan says fine with her—you know her, she’s adventuresome, right?—but she didn’t think you’d go for it. But me, I like to say, nothing ventured, nothing et cetera. I promise,” he laughed, “we won’t do any coke around you. She tells me you really don’t like getting into that. Okay?”

  I stood up fast. “The answer’s no.”

  Undismayed by my face, Whetstone rose from my father’s old chair and advised me, “Remember the old cliché, don’t knock it ’til. Think it over. Maybe you’ve already got somebody else you’re into things with now. I don’t know what your lifestyle is, but somebody new’d be okay with me, if it’s okay with Susan. Does she know her? I mean, no real reason it has to be this gal I was mentioning before. Slash is slash, right?”

  I hit him. I didn’t know I was hitting him, I didn’t know I’d come around the side of my desk to do it, until I was watching my fist fly into his jaw and seeing his tan complacent face shoot backward, the mouth open in suprise. His head clattered loudly down the front of my file cabinet to the floor. From down there he rubbed his blue handkerchief over his jaw and then stared at it eagerly. There was no blood. After that, he looked up at me; his unclouded eyes giving no signal at all of what he might say. Then he bounced agilely to his feet, wiggled his jaw, and said, “What’s with you? You some kind of S&M macho cop type or something? I’m beginning to wonder about Susan’s taste.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  The doorknob turned, and Cuddy Mangum’s head poked through. “Excuse me,” he drawled. “I thought I heard the sound of violence. Y’all playing squash, or what?”

  I said, “This is Mr. Whetstone. He just brought us some information.”

  “Sounds like it wasn’t very good news,” Cuddy said.

  Whetstone pulled his cashmere coat off the rack and wiggled his finger at Cuddy. “You ought to do something about this guy.” He shook the finger at me. “He’s a nut.”

  “Well, we’ll give him some more shock treatments,” Cuddy replied. “Let me walk you out, Mr. Whetstone. Our chief’s in the hall, and he’s not very stable either.” He turned to me sternly. “Savile, go to my office.”

  I said to Lawry, “If you want to continue, I’m at your service.”

  “God Almighty,” Cuddy muttered. “He wants to fight a duel.”

  Chapter 21

  Cuddy Mangum’s cubicle was stacked with crates of paperback books, for which he had the same ravenous appetite that was set loose upon the candy bars and crackers whose boxes and cellophane wrappers littered the area near the wastebasket, giving his floor the look of a movie theater after a Saturday matinee. On one of his walls was a poster of Elvis Presley, and on the other a blackboard, and on the blackboard were scribbled notations of the sort always there, for Cuddy thought aloud with chalk in what he called an academic way, although I’d often suggested that it was actually from detective films that he’d acquired his diagramming habit. This he admitted: “Well, hey, of course. How do you think the Indians learned how to sneak up on the buffaloes except from watching the dance? The whole twentieth century comes out of the movies—luvvv, everything, don’t you know that? You’re the smoking detective and I’m the chalking detective. I’ve got six channels, movies is all they show. Some of them are real old black and white ones; you’d like those.”

  Cuddy apparently had eliminated Rowell as a suspect in Cloris’s killing on principles of schematic parallel structure. Despite his continual reminders to me that it is only in books that the same character commits all the murders, he was, in his investigations, strongly drawn to any congruity in modus operandi.

  Here not only the obvious significance of Rowell's presence at the scene on the nights of both Bainton Aimes's and Joanna Cadmean's deaths, and the significance of their both falling (or getting pushed) were figured in; he also had inscribed in his geometric angles the fact that there had been discussion on both nights (Ames at the restaurant to Cary Bogue, Mrs. Cadmean to me by letter) of the 1839 Liberty quarter-eagle coin that was subsequently found in Cloris Dollard’s closet. He also seemed to think relevant the coincidence that both falls to death—separated by fifteen years—had taken place on the nineteenth of the month; the only fact in the cases that seemed to me to be just a coincidence.

  I was studying his triangle when he loped back into his office and poked me pedagogically on the collarbone. “General Lee,” he said, “you are on the hill at Gettysburg, and if you will look around you, most of the coats you see are blue.”

  I said, “Yours is gray.” He had on again his new three-piece herringbone suit.

  “You are not supposed to be here. You are particularly not supposed to be here whopping your girlfriend’s husband in the jaw, who, by the way, just probably established Mrs. Dollard’s time of death for us at about 11:07, which is the time he said her phone clicked off, and which is jest a leetle too quick for the senator to have zipped in from Raleigh to kill her. However, I must say, I didn’t like old Lawry either. He had too many teeth, and every one of them was perfect. On the other hand, why wasn’t he hitting you? You’re the adulterer. ’Course, I’m not too up on the customs of the porticos-and-polo set.”

  “Let’s drop it,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Rowell asked to see me this evening. I don’t know what for. And Ratcher Phelps wants to see me too, so I’m going there first. Want to come? I’ll explain in the car.”

  Pulling straight up on one of his many cowlicks, he looked like a lanky puppet dangling from his own hand. “Sorry,” he sighed. “I’ve got an armed robbery, and an exhibitionist. And I have just returned from another little drive that was your idea, and that may be enough for me. But I had to testify in Raleigh anyhow, so…”

  “You saw Burch Iredell? You got out to the vets’ hospital?”

  “Yep, I slid on over through the slurp and saw your old coroner for you about the Ames drowning. Hiram Davies neglected to give you an update on Mr. Iredell, because time has bullied him around in the meanwhile, bad. I asked him if he could remember back fifteen years, he said he could remember back to the Flood. I said this was more like a lake. I asked him, ‘Mr. Iredell, you have any thoughts about whether back fifteen years ago Mr. Bainton Ames (since you were coroner back then and you signed the official papers) might have been, unofficially, murdered, and if so, sir, by whom?’ Well, Mr. Iredell said he certainly did have a notion Ames was murdered. Said the man sitting across from us had done it. Said this man shot Ames with the same rifle he’d used on JFK.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Are you making this up?”

  Cuddy flopped down in his chair and threw his long legs over the edge of the metal desk. He sighed, “I wouldn’t have the heart. You eat lunch? You tore out of the house so early to eat breakfast with Alice the future governor, I bet you’re hungry. You want that extra grinder? It’s meatball. I’m losing my appetite from falling in love.”

  I ate the gooey sandwich, leaning my head over the wastebasket, while I told him why h
e’d better get back in touch with Cary Bogue. Then he told me more about his visit to the former Hillston coroner.

  “Now, where the nurse wheeled Mr. Iredell out for us to have our little talk was the so-called recreation room of this veterans’ hospital, which speaking as a vet, all I can tell you is, it’s a funny way for a country to say, ‘We appreciate it, boys,’ because this particular snotgreen-painted place was truly ugly and had gotten all tumbledown—and was el-cheapo for openers. And I sure wouldn’t want to get recreated there—the reason being almost everybody I saw was about as scrawny and lost-looking as a plucked fowl escaped from Colonel Sanders. All this recreation room had was a little old black and white TV with furry channels, and some worn-out jigsaw puzzle boxes of the Grand Canyon, and these plastic checkers that the fellow that had allegedly murdered Mr. Ames was playing a game of solitaire with. Now, this alleged murdering fellow didn’t have any legs, had his pajamas folded over with safety pins, and he looked to me more the meditating type than your Mr. Iredell seemed to think he was, what with accusing him of killing Ames, JFK, the little children in Atlanta, plus being a North Korean spy who’s been slipping into Iredell’s room every night and stealing his desserts and planting electrodes in his head. Which the latter may be true, because your Mr. Burch Iredell, by the way, had a sort of sit-down disco movement to him, including his eyeballs, that didn’t seem to wear him out at all.” Still seated, Cuddy suddenly flailed himself about in palsied gyrations, his eyes spinning like Ping-Pong balls in a bingo hopper.

  I said, “Will you quit kidding?” I had spent in the mountains many unending mornings in such a recreation room, among the checkers and the spasms, where each minute stretched like an orange pulling loose from the bough, too slowly to see it let go. I said, “Look, it’s nothing to kid about.”