Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  “Just a second,” I said to him. “Couple of questions, Professor.” His pale long face twitched impatiently as he listened. “First off, did you know who it was Coop Hall planned to meet this afternoon in Hillston?”

  “No idea. Ask Jordan.”

  I said she’d told us she didn’t know, and he said if Jordan didn’t know, then nobody knew. He kept trying to move into the house. He was so keyed up, I felt like I was speaking across static wires. I asked if he had any knowledge of any written threats against Coop Hall.

  He said no. “But I’ve got plenty of firsthand knowledge of, okay, mud clumps and bottles, okay, thrown in our faces, and fires set in our office, and hecklers at our vigils, okay?! Curses, taunts, spit—do they count? I’ve got a lot of knowledge of threats! Shit, man, Cooper's been threatened on the lousy radio!”

  I leaned against the front door, which he was trying to open. “But not written threats? I’m asking because, see, I understand you do have some knowledge of written threats against Andy Brookside, and so I’m wondering if there's a connection.”

  My question surprised him; his eyes widened as he ran his fingers over the stems of his round, wired glasses, pressing the loops behind his ears. “Andy told you that?”

  I said, “No. He should have. You should have too. His wife told me. Have you seen any of these letters? Do you or Brookside have any of them?”

  “Yeah, Andy showed me a few. I don’t know if he kept them or not”

  “Death threats?”

  “Yeah. Typical redneck ravings.”

  I tilted my head to look at him. “Well now, how ’bout clarifying that a little bit? I’m a redneck myself.”

  Molina balled his fists under his arms. “Lay off me, all right? I’m talking about run-of-the-mill Klan-type garbage. Rabid right-wing racist stuff. Look, politicians attract psychos. You can’t freak every time you get a poison-pen letter. Anyhow, Andy's got good security.”

  “Right. Cooper Hall was just killed driving down an interstate highway at four in the afternoon. Nobody's got good security. I want to see you and Mr. Brookside about this. Try to find some of those letters. I’ll be in touch.” I stepped away from the door. “One last question. Do you know of anyone with any personal reason to want to kill Coop Hall—grudge, rivalry, anything like that? Somebody that hated him, that he hated?”

  “You mean, besides you?” Molina's thin lips spread open over his long narrow teeth. It may have been a smile.

  “I said, a personal reason.” I kept my eyes looking at his, and he didn’t blink either, so finally we called it a draw. “I have to discount a personal motive—jealousy, love affair. Most people do hate each other for personal reasons, you know.”

  “Coop wasn’t most people. He ‘hated’ the system. He was fighting a system, fighting two hundred years of history. He didn’t give a rat's ass about ‘personal.’” Molina pushed past me, opening the door without knocking, then looked back over his shoulder at me. “Just ask Jordan West.”

  chapter 6

  Justin Savile had loved old styles and stuffy traditions long before they got to be the fashion with yuppies who’d had flower children for parents and seen a better lifestyle by watching Edwardian miniseries on Masterpiece Theater. But Justin’d been wearing a pocket watch, bow ties, and braces, trotting around on horses and slapping Stilton on water crackers since he was a toddler. When he’d first bought his brick Victorian—excuse me, Queen Anne—row house south of Main Street, across from Frances Bush College for Women, all the society folk had long ago moved off to the woods and meadows of North Hillston, abandoning the town like gold rushers who’d run out of ore. Soon as they left, country people and blacks who’d been stuck out in the woods and meadows, crowded into the old neighborhoods until inside the city limits got to be beyond the pale. Justin's relatives thought his buying a tacky shell of abandoned “old Hillston” was another instance of his “problem”—by which bland term they always referred to his past drinking and/or nervous break-down. ’Course now that some of the old tobacco warehouses are shopping boutiques, and the old mills are apartment complexes, and a couple from Massachusetts tried to buy his house for twenty times what he paid for it, and the state folk art museum offered him five thousand dollars for a pine cupboard he kept his shoes in, everybody congratulates him for being a pioneer of gentrification and a shrewd investor in tradition. Fact is, Justin never cared a damn for real estate, and couldn’t use gentrifying—he was gentry by nature.

  Me, I like modern. I like wall-to-wall, I like trash compactors, swiveling recliners, compact discs, automatic redial, frozen gourmet I can nuke in sixty seconds. I’ve got a gadget that will start my coffee before it wakes me up, I’ve got a car that will talk to me about changing the oil. Modern's pretty damn nice. I bet Tom Jefferson would have just loved to get his hands on my computer software. Listen, I grew up with a tin kitchen sink, pull-chain toilet, rag rugs, scratchy records, and laundry on the line. Believe me, my Hoover Deluxe's got a lot more going for it than a broom. I like progress, and I like heat, only two reasons why, as far as I’m concerned, Alice MacLeod was the best thing that ever happened to Justin Bartholomew Savile. When she moved into that drafty gargoyle of his, she stuck her color TV in his sideboard, her popcorn popper on his hutch, her Jesse Jackson campaign poster on the wall, and she turned up the thermostat high enough to wear a T-shirt in January.

  But now—five hours after I’d left the Halls—Alice came to the door with a quilt wrapped around a bulky sweater. It wasn’t from cold but for comfort. There was no need to ask if she’d heard about Coop Hall. When I stepped inside, she walked into my arms without speaking. I pressed my hand against the bright copper curls and we stood there in the quiet hallway until with a long breath she pulled away.

  “Oh, Cuddy. Dammit, dammit. Not again.”

  I said, “How’d you hear?”

  “Justin called me.”

  “Red, you told me on your wedding day you were gonna get to be governor of this state and straighten all the bad old shit out. You better make your move. I can’t take much more.”

  “I was supposed to ride back with Coop, Cuddy. Leave Jordan my car. Then I said no, I wanted to drop by the library, catch up on some things over the recess. I keep thinking, if I’d only just gone on with Coop, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Aw, shit. Thank God. Those motherfuckers could have killed you too.” My hand on her shoulder, I walked behind her along the high narrow hall into the front parlor, where Justin had his piano and where Alice kept a loom she’d carted down with her from the mountains, but never much used anymore.

  She wiped her eyes. “You want a beer?”

  While she was gone, I stretched out on a puffy couch with wood paws, with my feet hung over. Channel 7's “Action News” was on TV without the sound, showing Manhattanites fighting to Christmas shop in a blizzard. Alice shuffled back in the quilt from the kitchen with a six-pack and a bag of Nacho chips. I said, “Where is Justin? I’ve been up at headquarters for the last four hours, and over in the mayor's office trying to keep Carl Yarborough from telling me, ‘Do something,’ long enough to do something. Your spouse didn’t bother to call in. Etham Foster's disappeared from his lab. I’ve got about five hundred suspects, I’ve got no witnesses, I’ve got nothing for ballistics, I’ve—”

  “Here, drink this. Justin said if you got in touch, he's with Preston Pope and Preston's in-law or some such who's something like a local ‘commando captain’ in the something like ‘White Southern Patriot Party.’ Move over.” She popped open her beer can. “He called from the Tucson Lounge ’bout an hour ago.”

  “Hillbilly music and piss in a pitcher.” I raised my can to her. “Poor ole General Lee, you know how he hates that Tucson Lounge.”

  You can tease about J.B.S. the Five only so far with Alice, then she jumps on you, even knowing nothing's talking but love. “Well, you’ll recall Justin did almost get killed right outside that dive. For you.”

  “Darlin
’,” I quoted at her, “I never denied it.”

  From her next news, I realized she’d reacted to what she figured was going to bother me, because it was already bothering her. “Well, he says he's got about four of these Patriots in a booth, they’re all getting ready to go to a meeting tonight, and he's going too, to keep fishing for any word out on,” she rolled the beer can slowly against her forehead, “who shot Coop.”

  “How many times do I have to tell that man not to set up these capers without checking with me? What's he supposed to be, Imperial Wizard from some preppy Klavern club? I swear I’m gonna fire him. Meeting where? Right, he didn’t say.” I went over to what was probably one of the last black rotary dial phones in Hillston, and finally got through to Dave Schulmann in Raleigh, a regional FBI agent with Klan contacts, whom I’d already talked to once tonight about Cooper Hall's death. He’d said then he’d heard nothing about plans to stir up things in response to George's stay of execution, much less any talk about shooting George's brother. He said now that the local White Patriot Party was pretty moribund, but he’d heard rumors about a splinter group with paramilitary fantasies that had broken off from them and the Klan. He said he was already checking into it. When I hung up, Alice tore nervously with her teeth to open the bag of chips.

  I said, “Look, don’t worry. If these yahoos are letting a total stranger tag along, this ain’t, in the parlance, no heavy-duty meeting they’re going to. Probably just sitting around somebody's tacky living room, smoking pot, watching videos of Deep Throat and Birth of a Nation.” She laughed. “Right,” I grinned. “Justin's gonna delight in telling us every tasteless detail.”

  All of a sudden, I saw myself on the TV screen, speaking to the crowd at the Hall house. I felt around fast for the remote control, but naturally they didn’t have one. By the time I got the sound up, the camera was on Jack Molina. Carol Cathy Cane, in voice-over, was saying, “While police so far deny any connection between the savage gunning down of Cooper Hall, and the governor's last-minute stay of his brother George Hall's execution on Friday night, others, including gubernatorial candidate Andrew Brookside, feel strongly that today's shooting was racially motivated. Speaking for Brookside—his campaign manager, Dr. Jack Molina.”

  The lens zoomed onto Molina's thin passionate face. “Cooper Hall was killed today because he stood up against prejudice and against injustice, because he fought…” As he went on, with the off-camera crowd sounding much louder and larger than they’d actually been, Alice leapt up to stand inches from the screen, her mouth open at Molina's speech. “…Coop Hall is dead because he was black!…I’m saying racist fear and hate don’t want Andy Brookside to be governor! I’m saying racist fear and hate killed Coop Hall!”

  Alice wheeled toward me. “Andy let him do that?!”

  “Got me. But I betcha—if ‘Andy's’ watching, you could pitch a horseshoe in his mouth without touching the sides.”

  “God, I heard I was outspoken!”

  I said, “Least ole Cee Cee Cane left out the part where Molina claimed Brodie Cheek was running the Constitution Club, and the United Klan made it a threesome. Oh, fuck it!”

  Cane was now back in the Action Newsroom, where she only got to be anchorwoman on weekends, and had to make the best of her chances. With her were three guests, all black. One was Mayor Carl Yarborough, one was Dr. Judy Templeton, a psychologist, and one was Franklin Smith of the “Afro Revolutionists,” who’d once told Officer John Emory that if he—Emory—had any balls, he’d be busy stockpiling guns out of our weapons room, preparatory to exterminating honkies, instead of fucking with a brother like him— Smith—just for threatening to blow the head off a gas man who came to read his meter. “Why's she giving that lunatic a public forum? Jesus! Poor Carl, getting this sprung on him. He hates Franklin Smith.”

  Mayor Yarborough didn’t look pleased. He said Hall's death was a shocking loss, that it was painful to think it might have been racially motivated, when Hillston (though still with a long way to go) had grown in recent years into such a heartening symbol throughout the state of reform and progress. That it was premature for him, or anybody else, to speculate on what we could be sure would be a swift and thorough investigation by Chief Mangum of our nationally praised police department.

  I raised my beer to him. “Thank you, Carl. You’re the best mayor this town ever had, and when I say that, hey, I’m not just whistling ‘Dixie.’”

  Dr. Judy Templeton talked briefly (since Cane cut her off) about the psychological factors underlying bigotry, and the current socio-economic conditions that might explain a resurgence of Klan violence.

  Cane cut off fast-talking Franklin Smith even sooner, but not before—having dismissed Carl and Dr. Templeton to their startled icy faces as “honkie stooges,” “establishment dupes,” and “Oreo cookies”—he called on blacks everywhere to embrace the fire of revolution, to burn white America to the ground and sweep its beepbeepbeep ashes into the sea. A commercial whipped on quickly; by freak mischance (or tasteless program director), it was for an insurance company and showed your typical middle-class white family standing in their yard in bathrobes watching their house go up in flames. When Action News finally returned, six commercials later, Carol Cathy Cane and her guests had been replaced by a string of basketball scores. Fifteen minutes later the program ended with an old clip of Cooper Hall at the Trinity Church demonstration, followed by a shot of his body, not even fully covered by the bloodstained blanket, being carried up from the highway gully into the ambulance.

  “Oh Lord,” I groaned, and punched off the television.

  Alice said, “Freedom of the press.”

  “Right. And to think I used to be a great believer in it. Why’d they have to show that last shot?”

  “I just hope nobody that cared saw it.”

  “This is making me real nervous. Do me a favor? Call up, see if you can find out if Isaac talked Mrs. Hall and Jordan into leaving.” Alice went upstairs to phone; she was gone a long time. When she came down, she said she’d talked to a friend in the vigil group who told her Jordan West was in Richmond with her parents.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “And Sandy said somebody drove Mrs. Hall and her sister out to their brother's house in the country.”

  “Good.”

  “Sandy said Coop's funeral's Tuesday.”

  We sat there awhile, not talking. Then I lay down on a thin little oriental rug next to the couch. “Why don’t y’all get some decent carpeting?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The porcelain clock on the mantel ticked like a faucet leaking. Finally I said, “That's Christmas Eve. On Tuesday. Coop's funeral. It's the twenty-fourth. I heard they’re burying Cadmean on the twenty-fourth, too.” The clock kept on. “Alice?”

  “Want another beer?”

  “Nope. Tell me about Andy Brookside. You like him?”

  “Yes, I do. It's kind of hard not to like him. He's bright, good politics, interesting, incredibly good-looking, sexy, he listens, amazing energy—”

  “Okay, okay. You plugging for a spot on his ticket or what?” I pulled a pillow off the couch and bunched it under my head.

  She pointed a finger at me. “I’ve been wondering how long it was going to take you to admit you don’t like him. The first time I mentioned the campaign to you, you started talking about the goddamn weather. Okay, tell me why. You think he's too slick? Fake liberal? Shallow?”

  I rolled my head to look over at her. “Your words, honey. I didn’t put them in your mouth.”

  “I’ve heard other people say them.” She shook the finger again. “I’ve also heard all the womanizing rumors, so don’t bother filling me in, because, frankly, you could say the same about F.D.R. and J.F.K., and I’d still rather have them than Nixon and Reagan any day.”

  “Hey, slow down, Red. I didn’t say a thing. This is the first I heard of ‘womanizing rumors.’ But I’m not gonna say I’m surprised.”

  Alice threw off her qu
ilt and stood up in a flush. “People’ll say anything! Christ, a guy in the legislature told me just last fall—and I never even mentioned it to you—told me he’d heard that the Hillston police chief—that's you, buddy—was taking kickbacks from a ring of suburban prostitutes in Catawba Hills, and that you were sleeping with the woman who’d organized it.” “Is that true?!”

  “Yes! He said he knew it for a fact.”

  I started laughing. “Lord God Almighty. And I thought all those ladies and I had been so discreet.” My laughter wouldn’t stop, until finally Alice got the giggles with me. “He said, suburban prostitutes in Catawba Hills?”

  “Yes! Can you believe that?! Like maybe Mrs. Marion Sunderland! Mrs. Dyer Fanshaw!” Laughing, she flopped back down on the couch, beer splashing over her wrist. “His face was so solemn when he told me. Ed Blackman from Sanderton.”

  I wiped my eyes. “Well, hell, maybe I ought to investigate.”

  “God, Cuddy, how can we be laughing now?”

  “I guess it's a different way of crying.” I reached over and gave her foot a tug. “Tension. Hysterics. Life force.”

  “Oh shut up.” She wiped her eyes. “’Course, Ed was right. It would be the one who’d organized the ring that you’d sleep with. That much was right on the button.”

  I propped up on an elbow. “How do you know who I’d sleep with?”

  “I don’t.” She stood and started out the room. “But I do have my theories. Want some more nacho chips?”

  I stood up too. “You got anything real to eat? When I’m tense, I need to eat.”

  “You eat all the time.”

  “I’ve got to. What theories?”

  “Come on in the kitchen. God, what's your secret, why don’t you gain weight?”

  I followed her back through high-ceilinged rooms. “I think it's sorrow over the fall of man.”

  Alice and I were cooking a pan of fried potatoes and onions when my beeper went off at midnight. At the desk, Sergeant Hiram Davies had just gotten a call from squad car 32, which was patrolling the Canaan section of East Hillston. The two officers in it were screaming for backups, fast, and for fire trucks, fast. There were twenty to thirty young blacks rioting in the streets. Some of them were throwing bricks at store windows, upending automobiles, starting fires in trash dumpsters. Some of them were chanting, “Coop Hall! Coop Hall!”