Simon Said

by Sarah Shaber

  "What?" "Not you. My granbaby. I'm keeping her for a while. Hold on.... Doris!" he shouted distantly. "I said Park Road, not Park Drive. You need to listen to me, girl. Sorry," Joe said to Simon.

  Simon was thoroughly confused, so he started over.

  "How did you find her?"

  "It wasn't hard," Joe said. "I recollected that Bessie's second husband, the one named Cofield, was in the Fidelity Lodge with a cousin of mine. It was easy after that. She lives with the granddaughter I told you about, the doctor who reads X rays. In my day, you just had to go to one doctor to get patched up. Now you need one to see for this and one to see for that. No wonder everybody's got to have Blue Cross. Hey, Leroy," he yelled, "if you got that fare to the VA, go on out to Jimmy's Market and pick up Mrs. Wilson. She should be done with her shopping. If you keep her waiting, I'll hear about it at church."

  Simon thanked Joe, then hung up and called the radiology department of the county medical center, where he was told that Dr. Cofield had her lunch break at one o'clock and he could meet her in her office.

  THE BLUE-HAIRED volunteer at the information desk in the medical center directed him down two halls and two flights of stairs to a dingy basement corridor. The fluorescent lighting overhead buzzed and popped as he walked down the hall, looking at room numbers. When he finally found the office to which he had been directed, it was empty. It was clearly not Dr. Cofield's personal office, but a room where anyone on duty could come and write up notes or have a cup of coffee if they had the time. One desk sat askew in the middle of the room, surrounded by four plastic stackable chairs. It was covered with empty, stained Styrofoam cups and wadded-up balls of paper. The coffeepot sat in the corner, surrounded by spilled sugar, a creamer, and stained plastic spoons. The coffee smelled as if it had been made three days ago. The pot probably hadn't been cleaned in years. Simon sat on the one upholstered piece of furniture in the place—an orange vinyl sofa with rips in it. Dirty stuffing was coming out of it.

  Dr. Elizabeth Cofield opened the door and walked in. She was the same woman Simon had seen at the cemetery with the elderly black woman he had hoped was Bessie. He had been right.

  "Dr. Shaw," she said, extending her hand to him. "I understand that you want to talk to my grandmother." "Yes," Simon began, shaking her hand. Her handshake was just barely civil. She withdrew her hand quickly and crossed her arms. She was a tall, good-looking woman, about forty, Simon guessed. Dressed in green scrubs, she had the omnipresent stethoscope around her neck and a radiation badge pinned to her pocket. She was all business, except for her long bright red fingernails and ruby earrings that hinted at the fashionable woman Simon had seen at the cemetery.

  “I’m—“ "I know who you are," she said. "I saw your ad in the newspaper. Let me say right off that I understand you are a reputable historian with an interest in an historical incident that my grandmother was involved in, but I simply cannot allow you to interview her. She is quite elderly, and the stress could be dangerous."

  "So I understand," Simon said. "Believe me when I say that I don't want to put your grandmother's health in any jeopardy." "Granma cried her eyes out when she read that article in the newspaper—or rather, when the sitter read it to her. She was very close to the deceased at the time of her disappearance, and she had convinced herself that the young woman was alive and well somewhere in Europe, even when she didn't hear from her for years. She insisted on going to the cemetery when the body was buried, and she talked to herself and cried for two days afterward. I was very worried about her."

  Simon didn't know how to deal with this. He certainly didn't want to cause any anguish, but he desperately wanted to talk to Bessie Cofield. "All I can say," Simon said, spreading his hands open in front of him, "is that I need to talk to your grandmother to get any handle at all on who might have killed Anne Bloodworth. I'm not the only person interested," he continued. "The police are involved, too. This is a homicide. But I'd be deceiving you if I said that the police are investigating it actively. They don't think it can be solved. And I don't have any authority to question anybody myself. I'm just interested. The more people I talk to, the more interested I get."

  Dr. Cofield had been expecting someone more difficult. She relaxed her arms a little and cocked her head to one side slightly, thinking.

  "Let's sit down," she said. The two of them sat. "You know how these old black people are," she said. "They're just as attached to the white families they served as they are to their own. My grandmother isn't any different. Anne's mother died when the girl was young, and my great-grandmother raised Anne and my grandmother together in that house. Granma loved Anne like a sister. She must have realized the woman was dead when she never heard from her again, but apparently she concocted an elaborate fantasy that protected her from facing that—all about how Anne probably went to Europe with her mysterious lover, got married, and lived happily ever after. It was such a shock to her to find out she'd been murdered. The sitter called me and I had to leave work and go home to her. She was still screaming and wailing when I got there. The sitter had read her the story in the paper—of course she had no idea of the relationship. I had to give Granma a sedative and put her to bed. She didn't get out of it until I told her about the funeral. Then she had to get up, get dressed in her best church clothes, and go out to the cemetery. I went with her, as you know. She is just beginning to recover. I don't want her to be upset again."

  "You're the doctor," Simon said. "Whatever you say goes. I'm disappointed, but I certainly don't want to injure Mrs. Cofield."

  Simon's conciliatory manner pleased Dr. Cofield. She studied him for a few seconds. "Let's compromise," she said. "Would you object to me being present when you talk to my grandmother?" "Absolutely not," Simon said. "I'd rather you were there, under the circumstances." "All right," she said. "This is what we'll do. Are you free tonight? Around eight?" "Certainly."

  "Then plan to come. I get home around six. I'll bring it up to her.

  If I have any second thoughts at all after I've spent a couple of hours with her, I'll call you to cancel the interview. Okay?"

  "Okay," Simon said. "I'll be at home." He gave her his home number, and she drew him a map to her house on a notepad with the name of a drug company on it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  SIMON WAS INTENSELY RELIEVED TO GET BACK TO HIS OWN office at the history department. His father's old desk and wooden file cabinets, the pictures on the walls, his mother's Oriental on the floor, and natural light flooding through the huge windows comforted him and welcomed him back to his own world. But Simon was not himself. He was obsessed with the upcoming interview with Bessie White Cofield. His students' faces, which he always memorized at the start of a semester, were blurry, and he resented their questions, which forced him to abandon his preoccupation with the Bloodworth murder to focus on them. After class, he left immediately instead of talking to his students. "Sorry," he said to one startled student as he fled down the back stairs, "I've got an appointment."

  Simon's appointment was with his nerves. When he got home, he couldn't eat. He drank two Cokes and paced the floor while waiting for Dr. Cofield's call. It didn't come. He left his house promptly at twenty minutes to eight and navigated with one hand clutching Dr. Cofield's map and the steering wheel of Marcus's Mustang and the other trying to knot a knit tie, a task made impossible by the wind blowing. He gave up and flung the tie in the backseat.

  Dusk was just beginning to fall when he pulled up in front of the big house in the upper-class black part of town. As a southerner committed to integration, it saddened Simon that life in his hometown was still segregated. He had no idea why blacks and whites lived separately. He suspected that the black middle class couldn't explain why either. But in towns and cities across the South, busing to achieve school integration had become a way of life instead of a temporary measure. The black community, instead of integrating existing neighborhoods, had built their own.

  Dr. Cofield's house was a brick col
onial on a quiet shady street. Her yard was perfectly landscaped. A black BMW sedan sat in the driveway. The porch light was on, and interior light gleamed through the screened-in front door.

  When Dr. Cofield came to the door, she looked friendlier than she had at the hospital. She was dressed in African-style pants and tunic and wore hoop earrings. Her hair, which had been covered by a hat at the funeral and by a surgical cap at the hospital, was cut in a short Afro. She welcomed Simon warmly and offered him a glass of wine, which he declined.

  "This time of night, Granma and I always have a snifter of something," she said, smiling, "for medicinal purposes only." She led Simon through the very modern living room and well-appointed kitchen. The whole house was done in white and neutral colors — white rugs, wheat furniture, white walls, and black accents. Maybelline would make short work of this place, he thought. The kitchen looked good enough to be featured in a magazine, but Simon doubted anyone really cooked there much. It was too clean. There was no spaghetti sauce on the ceiling.

  Dr. Cofield stood with Simon for a few seconds in front of a door that seemed to lead to the garage. "Granma seems okay," she said. "She's very calm about talking to you and pleased that she might be able to help. But please try not to agitate her."

  Simon promised to be considerate, and Dr. Cofield opened the door. The garage had been converted to a room for the old woman. Bessie White Cofield was sitting in an ancient recliner in the middle of the room, drinking clear liquid out of a jelly glass. She was a very elderly person and had faded mocha skin. Her white hair was pulled back in a bun.

  "Good evening, Dr. Shaw," she said. She raised her glass toward her granddaughter. "Did you offer him some, Lizzie?" "I offered him wine, Granma. Not that stuff you drink. Granma drinks white lightnin'," she said to Simon. "Not much, but regularly. I don't know who her supplier is. He comes when I'm at work. It would probably blind you or me, but she seems to be immune to it."

  "I can hear you, Lizzie, you know."

  "I know that, Granma. I'm not trying to keep you from listening."

  Mrs. Cofield drained her glass and lit what looked like a hand-rolled cigarette. The smell of unprocessed, unfiltered, un-mentholated tobacco filled the air. It reminded Simon of the smell of the country store in Boone where he and his parents used to go to buy apples and cider when he was a boy.

  Mrs. Cofield's domain couldn't have been less like the main house. In addition to the recliner, there was an old rocking chair, an iron bedstead mounded with quilts and down pillows, several hand-hooked rugs, and dozens of old family pictures crammed onto every available wall space and on every surface. A picture of a black Jesus with very blue eyes looking skyward hung over the bed. A new TV sat on a big pine dresser; its remote was taped to the arm of the recliner with duct tape.

  Mrs. Cofield noticed him taking in the room. "I live here with Elizabeth because she let me keep my own things," she said. "All the others wanted to give my stuff to Goodwill and buy me a new bedroom suite at Rhodes Furniture. What a waste of good money that would be. I probably won't live another six months."

  "Nuts," her granddaughter said. "You'll make a hundred easy."

  "She also lets me smoke and drink," Mrs. Cofield said. "My other granbabies wanted me to give it up. One of them even said I shouldn't eat fried chicken no more. Lizzie lets me eat anything I want."

  "When I'm her age, I plan to smoke, drink, and eat fried chicken, too," Dr. Cofield said. "What worse could happen to me than already has?" Mrs. Cofield asked. "I buried two husbands and two children. I'm going to join them, this year or next year—what difference does it make? Except," she said, "I never thought I'd hear that Anne died." Her eyes filled with tears. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief.

  Simon saw an expression of disgust cross Dr. Cofield's face. Her grandmother saw it, too. "Don't you roll your eyes at me, missy! You don't know what it was like. My granddaughter, and most of the rest of her generation," the old woman said to Simon, "they think we old darkies are much too attached to our massas."

  "I'm sorry, Granma," Dr. Cofield said. "It's hard for me to swallow all this affection for a family who paid you and your mother five dollars a week to run the house and raise a child but who made you use the toilet in the basement."

  "And who paid my fees at the colored school and the doctor when we were sick and Mr. Charles left us five thousand dollars in his will so we could open a restaurant after he was gone," Mrs. Cofield said. "It was that restaurant that started this family on the path that took you to medical school."

  "This is an old argument, Granma, and neither one of us is ever going to change our opinion, so let's just let Dr. Shaw ask his questions."

  "It's all right with me," the old woman said. "You started it." She turned to Simon. "What do you want to know?"

  "Tell me about that night," Simon said. "The night Anne disappeared." "I remember it as if it were yesterday," she said. "It was a Friday night. Mama and I were pining to see Ben Hur, so Anne gave us the night off and the money to go. It was wonderful. Afterward we went on down to the City Market to hear Old Man Moe Watson and his string band play. Well, when we got home, the house was quiet. Mr. Bloodworth and Anne were in bed, we assumed. Next morning, Anne didn't come downstairs at eight, like she usually did. She didn't come down and she didn't come down. So at ten, I went up to her room with a cup of tea. It was empty, and her bed hadn't been slept in. At first, I was terrified, but then I realized what had happened. She had sent us away so that she could sneak out of the house and run off with her beau."

  "Mr. X," Simon said. "What did you do?"

  "Well, I didn't know what to do. In the end, I just went down to Mr. Bloodworth's study and told him Anne hadn't spent the night in the house. Then I asked if mavbe she'd gone to a friend's and forgotten to tell me and Mama? Well, he went crazy, just crazy. He said he had kissed her good night at ten o'clock and that she had been in her nightdress— which I wasn't sure I believed."

  "Why not?" "Before going to bed, Mr. Bloodworth was in the habit of drinking a lot of whiskey in his study. I would take the decanter in to him at nine o'clock and just leave it. On Friday and Saturday nights, when he didn't have to go to work the next day, he would drink a lot more. Sometimes he would fall asleep in his chair and Anne and I would have a dickens of a time getting him up to his room. Sometimes we just left him there. He was usually out like a light before the rest of us went to bed. I figured he said that about saying good night to her so he wouldn't have to admit he was dead drunk when she disappeared."

  "So Anne knew that on that Friday night her father would be indisposed and that you and your mother would be at the movies, so she could leave the house and meet Mr. X without anybody realizing it."

  "When I look back on it, I see it so clear," Mrs. Cofield said. "Two days before that, Anne said she wanted to get out her summer clothes. So we did that and aired them and everything. She had them all laid out on her bed. And she cleaned out her dresser and desk drawers. Said she was spring cleaning. She was fixing to take off."

  "Did you tell the police that?" "No. I didn't tell the police nothing. I wanted to help her." Tears started to drip down her face. "I should have told them," she said. "I didn't know she'd been murdered." She wept quietly for a few minutes.

  "Granma," her granddaughter said. "Maybe Dr. Shaw should go now." "No," she answered. "I want to answer all his questions—every one, tonight. I'm all right." She wiped her eyes again. "There," she said, tucking the handkerchief into her sleeve. "Fire away," she said to Simon.

  "I'm interested in Adam Bloodworth," Simon said. "It seems to me he had the best motive to do away with Anne. If she didn't marry him, he would lose the business, wouldn't he? But according to the police report, he was out of the house—fishing. Do you know if there was any proof of that? Was anybody with him?"

  Mrs. Cofield chortled. She raised her handkerchief to her face, but her eyes smiled behind it. "That's right, honey, fishing. And I reckon some of the best people in town
was with him." She laughed out loud.

  "I don't understand." She looked at him intently, then looked at her granddaughter, then back at Simon. "Oh Lord!" she said. "Thank you for letting me see this day!" She broke out into peals of laughter, rocking back and forth in her chair, until she began to cough, and her granddaughter had to slap her on her back.

  "I don't understand this, either," Dr. Cofield said to Simon.

  Mrs. Cofield took a long swig of her drink and gasped. "Oh Lord," she said again. "What is it, Granma?" Dr. Cofield said.

  "Gone fishing! Oh Lord, save me! I guess you children wouldn't know, life has changed so much! Fishing, was... well, what do you call a word that you use when you really mean something else?"

  "A euphemism?" Simon asked.

  "Then," Mrs. Cofield said, "gone fishing was a euphemism."

  "For what?" Simon asked desperately.

  "Adam Bloodworth spent every Friday night at Ruby Hart's bawdy house. It was down on Hillsborough Street, in the bottom, between State College and Meredith College. He would drink smooth liquor, play poker, and stay the whole night. This was when sex wasn't free and Prohibition was on."

  Simon was stunned. "You're sure about this?" "Yessir. One of my cousins was Miss Ruby's houseman. He was the one who routed out Mr. Adam, and the police chief, when the patrolman came to tell them about Anne's disappearance. He was there all night, him and a lot of other leading citizens."

  Simon's carefully constructed but largely hypothetical case against Adam Bloodworth collapsed all around him. "Well," he said. "I guess that eliminates Adam Bloodworth."

  "It wasn't him. He drove her away, but he didn't kill her."

  Simon was so taken aback that he couldn't think. He had hoped that Mrs. Cofield would help him poke holes in Bloodworth's weak alibi, not substantiate a better one. "I confess I don't know where to go from here," Simon said.

  "How about Mr. X?" Dr. Cofield said.