There was such a long pause, I wondered if he had put down the phone, but then he said, “Okay. I’ll try to be around.”
I didn’t ask him what he meant, because I knew. And I stood still by the phone, with the sense that I was suddenly pinioned by this unspoken sentence of death, as if my happiness with Alice were some great bird shut into a cage so small that its wings crushed, bent against the bars. But soon enough I would forget to think there was a cage; everyone does, even the dying.
I hadn’t moved when the phone rang again, scaring me. This time it was Briggs Junior, who told me that her father could be found for the next hour at the Hillston Hunt Club, and could be found later this afternoon at Joanna Cadmean’s cremation, which she herself did not plan to attend. “Such rites seem beside the point,” she explained.
I asked her to have Cuddy meet me at my house at five, and added, “Let me just say, Briggs, I think Cuddy Mangum is one of the finest men I ever knew.”
“Are you saying that because you don’t expect me to realize it?”
“No, not at all.” Somehow, whenever she and I spoke, we were quick to assume the other’s hostility. I mentioned this observation to her now, and said, “You know, you and I so instantly got off on the wrong foot, I thought we were destined to end up in love.”
She said, “That’s only true in books.”
“I thought most of the true things were in books. I just wanted to say I shared your view of Cuddy, that’s all.” She didn’t answer, and I went on, “Sorry, I’ll keep quiet. But if we’re going to play bridge together for the rest of our lives, we’re going to have to learn how to talk to each other.”
“Bridge? I don’t play bridge.”
Poor Cuddy’s suburban dream of a table for four. Alice had told me she didn’t play any games at all. And I had already played too many hands in a pacified recreation room, feeling beneath my fingertips the ruffled corners of the worn cards; looking out at winter mountains leaf into spring, swell into thick summer, then fall. Cuddy believed if he waited until he could get everything ready at once, make all arrangements, forget no detail, then life would begin for him like a birthday party at last, and keep on noisy and warm always. But in Briggs’s voice I kept hearing a disengagement cool as her stars, and it worried me for him.
• • •
At the Hillston Hunt Club I found old Mr. Cadmean. In a mammoth, black hunt coat and a fur cap, he stood smoking his cigar in the middle of the club’s indoor riding ring. At his feet in the loose sawdust earth lay a fat, elderly cocker spaniel. Cadmean held in his arthritic hand a lunge line; at the other end, on an enormous black horse, trotted his little granddaughter Rebecca Kay, plump and glossy as an apple in her red snowsuit. She was so tiny, the stirrup leathers had been tightened right up into the saddle skirts, but she was posting with a determined scowl and in good rhythm and thudding with her boots on the huge horse’s withers whenever he forgot her slight weight was up there and slowed to a walk around the circle Cadmean was turning. A woman stood by, watching, her teeth tight on her lower lip; I assumed she was the child’s mother.
“One two! One two! One two!” called Cadmean from the hub of the moving wheel. “Manassas, move your fanny! Kick him, honey! Good girl!” It surprised me to hear that this dutifully trotting horse was Manassas, the stallion who had thrown Joanna Cadmean weeks back.
“Can I jump, Grandpa?” yelled Rebecca, pointing at a low set of crossed bars behind Cadmean. She raised herself up and forward into a half seat.
“No!” cried the mother, and Cadmean growled, “No, ma’am,” at the same time.
The little girl said, “I’m not a baby; I’m almost six!”
“Manassas is a baby,” Cadmean was saying as he turned and saw me walking toward him, my shoes digging deep into the soft dirt.
“Hello, Mr. Cadmean.” I stood outside the circumference of the stallion’s trot and watched his white eye roll at me each time he snorted past. In a few minutes I said, “I’ve been trying to reach you for days, Mr. Cadmean.”
“Have you?” He didn’t look at me. “Well, looks like you found me, too. I thought I heard you were excused from work due to illness. Might be dangerous traipsing around sick like this.” He switched hands on the line, and his bent fingers came up to shift the cigar along his small, fleshy lips.
“No, sir. That’s not why I was suspended. It was for tracking dirt onto the parlor rug.”
The lidded yellow eyes stayed with the horse and rider. “I believe I warned you about that very thing,” he said.
“You did.”
“That’s right. I thought I did.”
“Let me offer my condolences about Joanna.” My offer was met with a nod. I added, “I’d like to attend the services this afternoon, if you have no objection.”
“She put down she didn’t want services, but I’m certainly not going to let her go without Reverend Campbell saying a few words over her. She was a Cadmean by name, and no nuttier than some of the others, God knows.” Then abruptly he flung out his arm and introduced me to Rebecca’s mother, wife of another of his sons, a gentle-faced, timorous woman whom he obviously terrified. As we exchanged hellos, the old man pulled in on the lunge line, halted Manassas, took Rebecca off over her protests, hugged her over her protests, handed her to her mother, and told them to go across the street to the Fox and Hound Restaurant and order their lunch. Rebecca parted unhappily while issuing her own command. “You better come soon, Grandpa.”
“Isn’t she something?” he beamed as they left the ring. “Reminds me of Baby. Did you come here to ride, Justin?”
I stroked Manassas down the white blaze of his head, while his mouth nibbled wetly at my hand. “No, I came here to see you,” I said. “But I used to ride.”
“I know you did. Now, who told you where I was?”
I smiled. “Why did you refuse to talk to me?”
“Where’s my daughter?” He moved his cigar over to the other side of his mouth.
“Why did you call Walter Stanhope and tell him I was crazy?”
Cadmean laughed out loud. “Well, son, we got the kitty full. Somebody’s got to call.”
“Go ahead.”
He laughed again, and we stood there until Manassas shook himself and backed away tugging at the lunge line.
Cadmean handed me the line. “Here. Ride him.”
“No, thanks.”
“Oh, come on, let him get the kinks out. I’ll tell you this. I wish I could still get up on an animal that pretty without every joint and bone in my body screaming its goddamn head off. These are the good times, son. Don’t throw them away saying, ‘No, thanks.’ Things just get worse and worse. They truly do. You’ll wake up one morning, and it’ll hurt just to move. Go on. I’ve got to go take a leak. I just took one, half an hour ago. That all goes to hell too. Come on, Duchess.”
His old cocker spaniel lurched to her feet and paddled after him as he left me standing there with the horse and walked with his stiff carefulness to the stable office door.
I thought about it, and finally unhooked the lunge line, climbed up, and rode Manassas. At first I was tense enough to let the horse fight me with a skittish backward dance; I was nervous that I would not be able to stop thinking about Joanna Cadmean and that Manassas would feel this and would try to throw me as he had her. But finally his rhythm took me over, and I met him there and we had worked up to a canter when Mr. Cadmean came back, scraping his fingers up against the shave of his fat cheek as he watched us. When a young boy in chaps entered the ring, Cadmean called me over. The boy took Manassas to walk him, and Cadmean, the spaniel, and I went outside and crossed the snow-curbed street. I said, “Maybe Hillston ought to invest in snowplows.”
“Look over your head.” Cadmean pointed at the glassy sun in a cloudless sky. “Let God plow. He’s the only one doesn’t come begging me for donations to buy His equipment.” He paused. “I take it back. Every time I turn around, His preachers are sliding their buttered hands in my pocket
s.”
We entered the paneled bar of the Fox and Hound Restaurant. It was busy with boasting businessmen and Hillston women rich enough to ride. Between us we knew most of them. The bar was ostentatiously sporting: hunting horns, crops, ribbons, and etchings of red-coated riders hung on all available wall space. The bar had been modeled on the proprietor’s notion of a British country pub; all the wood was varnished almost black and gouged with scratches, all the fabric was faded cabbage roses, and even the Cokes were served in pewter tankards. Above the rows of liquor was a stuffed fox who appeared to be running fast without caring where he was going, for one of his eyes glanced at the mirror behind him and the other one stared out at us. In the middle of the floor was a large Franklin stove; beneath it, Cadmean’s spaniel, which he’d brought right inside with him, flopped over exhausted from her walk across the street. Cadmean took us to a far corner away from everyone else. He sat down in a chintz armchair under an engraving of two fox hunters taking a fence while a third fell from his horse on the way.
Sitting down across from the old man, I said, “All right. I rode your horse. Now, will you answer my questions?”
“Good horse. Am I right?”
“Very.”
“Fine, fine horse, Mr. Manassas. Whiskey?” The bartender had come over with a deferential stoop.
I said, “Bloody Mary, very weak.”
“No whiskey?” asked Cadmean. “Well, I’ll have my whiskey, Mr. Gilbert. A double, how about?” Then he settled into the upholstered chair and gave one long slow stroke to his bald scalp. He said, “I called home. It was Baby found out for you where I was. Selma was glad to hear her voice after all this while.”
I said, “You don’t waste much time.”
He nodded. “I don’t have much time to waste. Where is she? She hasn’t been at the lodge since the accident. Is she coming to the services today?”
“No, she said she was not.”
His mouth twitched. “I don’t understand her, I just don’t. Where is she?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s for me to say. If Briggs wanted you to know, she’d tell you.”
“Justin, you just told me you’re not going to play the only card you’ve got in your hand.” His puffy lips pushed in and out like those of an old sea bass. “That sort of stymies our game, doesn’t it, hunh?”
“Maybe it’s not the only card I have,” I said. “But before I turn over any others, I’d like to know why you called Walter Stanhope.” We sat waiting while the bartender placed down our drinks tentatively, readjusted them, lifted them, rubbed his cloth over the wood beneath, put them back, and finally left.
Cadmean said, “I told Stanhope—good man, Walter—the same thing I told you: no sense in muddying old stagnant water, making a mess.” As if in demonstration, he swirled his drink until the amber liquid slopped over the sides.
I said, “That water was already stirred, Mr. Cadmean. And now, not only are Bainton Ames and Cloris dead, so is your daughter-in-law.”
His big head swayed sadly. “I know. I know. It’s just pitiful. I couldn’t even believe it at first. But I told you,” he sighed, “Joanna was a crazy woman. She’s proved me right. I certainly hate to think of something that bad having happened out at my lodge. I built it, and I had some happy times in it.”
I took the plastic stick with its fox on top out of my glass and sipped at the Bloody Mary. “You understand,” I told him, “Monday, Rowell will be charged with her murder.”
“Why don’t we wait ’til Monday to see what happens on Monday, how’s that?” Sucking in a piece of ice, he bared his teeth and crunched it in two. “Tell you what I know today. Know Rowell’s in a hospital bed, and it’s a goddamn shame. Shame about his health, and his primary, and shame about the shit that geese are going to gabble.”
“Yes,” I nodded, “I expect whatever happens Monday, you’ll have to fund another friend to run in your primary this spring, Mr. Cadmean.”
Swallowing the ice chips, he smiled agreeably. “Oh, well, I have lots of friends.”
“Perhaps you should have made Lawry Whetstone one of them.”
“Why’s that?” Cadmean’s lidded eyes squinted at me. “Fact is, I don’t like Lawry. I don’t believe there’s a natural fiber in him. I believe he’d as soon put his pecker in a plastic balloon as a living moaning woman, and I got no use for a man not more particular.”
I said, “I don’t like him either. But I appreciated his coming in to say Cloris told him herself—the day she died—that she’d brought you those designs of Bainton Ames’s. And that you had confiscated them from her. It made me wonder why you bothered lying to me about that.” He watched me sip at my drink. I went on, “It made me wonder so much, I started wondering if maybe you decided you better get hold of copies she told you she’d made on those papers. Copies she probably kept in her safe. Maybe in her purse. Like the purse we found thrown into the grass beside her driveway.”
Turning the whiskey glass in circles on the dark table, Cadmean shook his big bald head as if I’d given the wrong answer to an easy question. “Shit, son, that’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it? You know I was watching a Shakespeare play while poor Cloris was getting robbed. A play where a fellow has himself turned into an ass, am I right?”
“Oh, I didn’t wonder if you did it personally. I don’t believe you’d personally crack open the head of even a loose woman.”
His eyebrow went up at this and stayed there, sardonic. “I appreciate your good opinion,” he said.
I took out a cigarette; I kept them now just in the pack—the case I’d put in a box with the other gifts I was returning to Susan. I said, “No, sir, I didn’t think you were over there personally rummaging around in the Dollard house. What I’ve been wondering was if maybe you arranged to have someone else do that errand for you. Or arranged to have someone else arrange it. Someone from C&W. You know, the same way C&W men come over and unfreeze your pipes when you ask them to. Maybe two somebodies. Maybe Luster Hudson and Ron Willis.”
He took a cigar out of the hunt coat, rolled it between the stiff, twisted fingers. “Luster Hudson. And Ron Willis. I don’t recall those particular names.” Now he began to lick at the cigar with a tongue pink as a cat’s.
“No? They’re C&W. I was wondering if you’d asked Ron Willis to follow me around town the last few days. Which he did.”
Cadmean looked at me, his lips puffing in and out.
I smiled back. “I know you’ve taken a real interest in my whereabouts, from your long distance calls. Problem is, Mr. Willis got a little nervous from being wanted for questioning in a murder case, and he got a little more nervous, it turns out, from being pretty full of cocaine, and the result was he took several shots at me.”
“Mighty happy to see he must have missed,” said Cadmean, pulling out a box of wood matches and waving the flame of one beneath his cigar. “Where is he now, this drug-addict fellow?”
“He’s in jail now.”
“That so? You think he killed Cloris?”
“No. He has a very good alibi for that night. Not a Shakespeare-play alibi, but just as good for his purposes. I’m interested in whether he got those papers from this friend of his, Hudson, who maybe did kill Cloris.”
“I read it was gold and jewelry that robber took, not papers. What would some old robber want with those?”
I finished my drink and patted my mouth with a paper napkin that also had the fleeing fox on it. “Mr. Cadmean,” I said, “the bad thing about using violence is, by its nature you can’t keep it on a lunge line. You can harness a waterfall to your mill, but what if there’s a flood, and the dam breaks? You can hire a thug to take some papers from a lady’s house while you and she sit watching a play, but what if the lady gets a stomachache and leaves early and catches that thug helping himself to her silverware and anything else he sees? And what if that thug got scared, or just thuggish, and killed her? You see what I mean? Once you let violence loose, it’s out
of control.”
He nodded. “A lot like alcohol-drinking. Am I right? All depends on the drinker.” With a noisy gulp he finished off his whiskey. “A lot like car-driving in the snow. All depends on the car. And the driver.” The ice snapped between his teeth. “No, I don’t believe I know these two fellows of yours. ’Course, if they did kill poor Cloris, I’m going to have to let them go from C&W.” He watched his ash as he slowly rolled it loose on the edge of the ashtray. “Now, let’s go back to Rowell a minute. Huh?” His eyes seemed impervious to the smoke coiling past them as they peered at me. “What you got against your uncle, son, except he helped your mama put you in a loony bin to dry out.”
I leaned forward into the smoke behind which Cadmean’s moonwide face bobbed. “What I have against him,” I said, working to keep my voice as tranquil as his, “is I believe that he’s a murderer.”
“Who of? Joanna?”
“That’s certainly what the prosecutors think. But the person I know he killed is Bainton Ames. One reason I know it is that Rowell has never said to me that he didn’t.”
“No hope in hell you’ll get proof, son.”
“That may be true.”
“And why want to?”
“You say you wouldn’t want to have murderers in your factory. I don’t care to have any more of them than I can help in my state’s senate.”
“Oh shit, Justin.” With a cracking snap of his fingers he called over the bartender from the other side of the room. “You can’t clean the dung off the world. It just keeps flying. You can’t dig out the road back to Eden, don’t you know that yet? Another drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Alrighty.”
“I do know you can’t,” I said. “So let’s just say I want to find out for sure, for my own satisfaction. How’s that?”
Cadmean gave his skull another stroke. “That’s different. Check, Mr. Gilbert, if you will, sir.” He slid an ancient curved wallet from his back pocket and paid with cash. There was nothing in the wallet but a great deal of cash; credit cards were not to his taste, he said. Pawing up a handful of jelly beans from the bowl on the table, he pushed himself with a grumble out of the chair. With a snort, the old cocker spaniel shook herself instantly awake and followed her master on his progress through the room, stopping when he stopped to squeeze a shoulder, rub a head, or kiss a hand. At the door he suggested that we go for a walk.
Uncivil Seasons Page 25
