The next and last call was the first one I returned.
“This is Lee, Cuddy. I just heard the radio. Are you all right? When you get a chance, phone me? I’m here ’til seven.”
The maid said she’d be willing to see if Mrs. Brookside were at home. It was more than the maid had been willing to do back when Lee's mother had first forbidden me to see her daughter. Different maid, same house. “Briarhills.” Up in North Hillston near Haver University. The kind of house you give a name to. Lee's parents were dead and the Brooksides were living there now instead of on campus. Maybe the university president's house, which came with the job, hadn’t had a sky-diving landing field. The maid said Mrs. Brookside would be with me in a moment.
Lee and I talked for half an hour. I think it surprised us both. Talked about Cooper Hall and the Canaan disturbance. She didn’t know how Brookside had responded to Jack Molina's televised outburst, or even if he’d heard about it: he’d flown to Asheville yesterday and she hadn’t seen him since his return. Saturday she’d mentioned to me that she and Molina weren’t “close.” I was getting the feeling that the same might be said about her and Andy. Or maybe cozy conjugality was just another one of those rise-of-the-middle-class notions that never rose as far as the upper crust.
That was all we said about Andy. We talked about Cadmean's funeral and about Justin Savile: what did I think of his wife Alice? I said, the world. We talked about Mrs. Sunderland, since Lee was the one who’d given her my telephone number, which she’d gotten out of Sergeant Zeke Caleb.
I heard myself laughing. “So you got around Zeke. Well, that Cherokee can’t resist a woman in distress.”
“A woman in distress.” Her laugh was throatier than the young Lee's. “My God, is that what I sound like?”
“You sound—” But I stopped, scared, because I was going to say, “lonely.” And what was that supposed to mean? Instead I said, “You sound naturally a little worried, that's all.” She was quiet, so I added, “It's going to be all right. Nothing's going to happen to your husband.”
“Did Edwina invite you to dinner?” She asked as if it weren’t a peculiar change of subject.
“Pardon me?”
“She told me she wanted to ask you to her Boxing Day dinner. She said, ‘I like a man whose eyes don’t fidget. Made me laugh. Found him charming.’”
“Charming? I don’t think anybody ever called me ‘charming.’ You say she's a widow? Would it be tacky to ask her to marry me at my first Boxing Day dinner, and what is Boxing Day? Sounds too violent for a woman of her years.”
“Oh, you know, it's British. Edwina's president of the state's English Speaking Union. Besotted Anglophiles all claiming to be descended from some Plantagenet crusader or Stuart jailbird. My stepfather was in it. But then he really was the grandson of a viscount…as well as a son-of-a-bitch.”
“I’m glad you finally admit it.”
“So did you tell her yes?”
“Mrs. Sunderland? Why? You fixing to warn me she lures charming bachelors with steady eyes to these parties and drives them wild with London gin and Portsmouth oysters?”
“No,” she said, “I wanted to say I hope you’ll come. Because I am.”
I telephoned Mrs. Sunderland and told her I’d be happy to accept her invitation.
Driving downtown, I thought about, well, about whether Lee meant she was coming alone. Then I told myself to stop it. Then I thought about it some more. Then I regretted making that dumb remark about oysters. Then I thought about her laugh. Then I wondered if she’d mentioned going to Cadmean's funeral because she was maybe hoping to see me there. Skirting around the plastic Christmas tree in the municipal building's marble lobby, I felt old Briggs Monmouth C.'s bearish eyes glower down at me from his oil painting, like he wasn’t surprised to hear me planning to use his funeral to spend time with a married woman.
When I walked by Zeke Caleb at the desk, his wide red-knuckled fist waved the phone at me, as he yelled, “Chief! Father Paul Madison. Chief!”
I told him, “Sergeant, don’t bellow. I’ve got ears.”
“Well, use ’em.” Zeke's never acquired the hang of deferential subordination. It's not an Indian notion. That's why there’re a lot more family dogs in white America today than there are American Indians. “You look like shit,” he casually added, and handed me the phone.
Paul Madison was distressed about Cooper's death, distressed about the Canaan riot, wanted me to know that he was helping Elmore Greenwood, pastor of Hillston's largest black Baptist church, to raise bail money for the five young men we were still holding, and wanted to ask me if we’d arrested Billy Gilchrist again.
I said, “Again? We just released him Saturday morning. Hold on a second.” I put the receiver to my chest. “Zeke, is Gilchrist in again?” Zeke shook his head and swung back to his typewriter. “Sorry, Paul, no. What's the problem?”
“He didn’t show up last night. Wasn’t here this morning, didn’t do any of his chores, and he knew there was a processional at eleven o’clock mass. Billy never misses a processional when he can carry the St. Michael banner, never after he's just come off a binge.”
Billy Gilchrist used to be a fairly successful local con man, ’til booze ruined his coordination, his concentration, and his looks. About two years ago, a judge had sent him to an A.A. group that met at Trinity's parish house. He didn’t take to A.A., but he did take to Paul Madison, and claimed to have taken to religion as well— maybe he just admired it as a more lucrative, bigger-time con than any he’d ever pulled. At any rate, he’d convinced Paul, who gave him room and board at the soup kitchen in exchange for his doing odd jobs around the church, including setting up all the gold platters and silver chalices for mass. About once a month, he jumped off the wagon, tore up a bar or two, and stayed with us awhile for old time's sake.
Paul said, “Nobody's seen him. He's just gone. Nothing's missing from his room—”
“How ’bout the vestry? Anything missing from there? Collection plate maybe?”
“Cuddy, I’m serious! Billy hasn’t missed a procession in a year unless he was in jail. He loves to carry that banner.”
“Could be he had a crisis of faith. Okay, okay, I’ll put out a bulletin for your lost sheep. And listen, if you’re in touch with Reverend Greenwood, tell him I’d like the details on Cooper Hall's funeral as soon as possible. By the way, Coop wasn’t planning to meet you or anybody else on the Hall Committee in Hillston yesterday, was he? He had to leave Raleigh to meet somebody here, but apparently he didn’t say who.”
“Jordan and Isaac don’t know?”
“No. Why would Isaac know anyhow?”
Paul said, “Well, I know Cooper was up at Isaac's hotel almost every night last week, because Jordan kind of, you know, made a joke about never seeing him. I spoke with her this morning. She's in a very bad way. Christ help her.”
I said, “Right. Wondrous are the ways of the Lord, Father Madison. I betcha another of your damn raffle tickets that the slimeball who shot Coop calls himself a Christian.”
“You keep blaming Christ for Christianity, Cuddy. Talk to you later. Find Billy for me, will you? Bye.”
The D.A. was in my office ten minutes after I sat down. Probably kept a spy in the halls. It's no news on the upper floors of the municipal building that Mitchell Bazemore and I aren’t exactly pals. He's got a voice like a machine gun, I’m pretty quick-tongued myself, and we’ve bounced some fast exchanges off the corridor walls over the years. Our views on crime and punishment take different etymological routes: he believes in prisons, I believe in penitentiaries. What he lives for is capital crime convictions, big ones, and lots of them. Like I say, what I’m after is as much peace, with as little injustice, as this sad greedy race of creatures can be cajoled, trained, or bullied into tolerating.
Bazemore's about my age, local-bred, chisel-chinned with a dimple in the middle, like somebody stuck a pencil in it hard, which wouldn’t surprise me. His contact lenses are too green
. His hair's so black there's speculation that he dyes it, but no proof. Some women say he's handsome; he's one of those naturally skinny, Nautilus-fanatic, artificial mesomorphs whose muscles are too big for his head and hands. Like his hair, his chest looks faked. He gives off a straining-at-the-seams energy, a kind of virile moralism, like a top recruiter for a fundamentalist college with a big athletic program. “Go For It” is the printed motto cased in plastic on his desk top—as if getting folks sent to the gas chamber was the same as aiming for a gold medal in the Olympics.
“I left you half a dozen messages,” he said by way of hello.
Well, he’d only left three, but I had to let that go, because I said, “Gee, I’m sorry, Mitch, damn machine's on the blink again. What's your problem?”
“What's my problem?”
“Grab a chair.” I even picked one up for him, and shook the books off it. “No? Well, grab a door and do some chin-ups while we chat. Little on edge today, Mitch?” (That was a joke; Bazemore's so hyperkinetic, you’d figure him for a speed freak if he weren’t always campaigning for a drug-free society—he doesn’t drink or smoke either, though of course, as an elected official in North Carolina, he never makes public statements about his aversion to tobacco.)
“No, I’m not on edge. I’m just a little darn annoyed.”
“Oh? Why's that?”
“Why's that? Why am I annoyed?” Like a lot of people whose mouths run faster than their brains, he repeats things. “I leave town, I take twenty teenagers to Boone on a church retreat—”
“That does sound annoying—”
I watched him pace along my desk like it was a jury box. Mitch wears his white shirt sleeves rolled up tight around his biceps, his collar open as if his neck were too pumped full of maleness to allow him to button it, his somber trousers just a little too tight across the buttocks, and his vest straining at his chest. He wears a wedding ring and a college ring, a tiny American flag as a tiepin, a gold belt buckle with his initials on it, and tasseled wing tips he can see his face in. Marching, he flicked his Phi Beta Kappa key. “I leave, I come back, and Wollston's screwed up the George Hall execution. As a direct, I mean a direct result of which, we have a homicide. We have a homicide, and we have a race riot. A race riot!”
“As a direct result of your going on this teenage church retreat? Don’t be so hard on yourself. Cheese cracker?” I held one out as he strode past.
“I don’t snack,” he informed me.
“Ah, right. Empty mind in an empty body.”
“I don’t joke.”
“Mitch, you sell yourself short. I think you’re real funny.”
“You think I’m real funny. Well, I don’t find you at all amusing.”
What I didn’t find at all amusing was the list of indictments he was planning to ask the grand jury to bring in against the young blacks we’d arrested last night in Canaan. I tried reason: setting fires in dumpsters was illegal and dangerous (especially in windy weather around a pile of cut trees), but it wasn’t intentional arson; throwing chunks of cement randomly into a crowd was illegal and dangerous, but it wasn’t attempted murder. I tried politics: most of those involved were juveniles, and we were unlikely to get convictions on charges that stiff; all of those involved were blacks, responding to what might very well be the racist killing of a highly visible civil rights activist whose brother—
“Whose brother should have gone to the gas chamber years ago! Mangum, please. Don’t talk to me about the Hall brothers.”
I said, “I don’t have to. You can read about them in any paper you pick up. And if you go bulldozing into this Canaan thing before we make an arrest in the Coop Hall case, I’m telling you, Mitch, you’re going to read about that in the papers too. And so are the voters. Not everybody in this county's white, and not everybody who is white's a bigot. Follow me?”
He pressed his knuckles onto my desk top and twitched his biceps at me for a while. “You follow me, Mangum. You get me a suspect on this highway shooting, and you get me one quick, and I don’t care if he's white, black, purple, or green. Am I coming through?”
I said, “Like a rainbow.” I stood up to pat his shoulder; it was hot and quivery. “Mitch, you’ve just proved my point. Those civil libertarians always on your back, trying to get your convictions overturned, I tell them they got you all wrong. I tell them, color's not an issue with our D.A.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “I don’t care about color. I care about crime.”
“Right. That's what I tell ’em.”
Officer John Emory was waiting outside the door when the D.A. strode past him with what looked like a Black Power salute, but was probably just that Mitch was too hurried to unclench his fist. Emory set a huge cardboard box down on a side table, carefully lining it up with the edge. A small, well-made young black man, he had perfect posture, a pristine haircut, and his shirt and trousers were as sharply creased as if he’d just taken them from a dry cleaner's bag. John had been an army M.P., and I couldn’t get him out of the habit.
“Sir, here's the personal property from the Subaru.”
“At ease, John. Anything interesting?”
Emory didn’t like to commit himself to value judgments, so he’d brought, and itemized, the entire portable contents of Coop Hall's car, including flares, rope, manual, a gym bag with dirty shorts and towels, a baseball cap, two dozen back issues of With Liberty and Justice, one tennis shoe, a raincoat—balled up and still wet—an unpaid parking ticket, three library books on criminal law, a paper-back by Toni Morrison, and an unraveling briefcase with the handle held on by a twisted paper clip. Among the papers in the briefcase were printer's galleys; a report compiled by the NAACP Legal Fund on race and capital punishment; a copy of Isaac Rosethorn's petition to Judge Roscoe citing a dozen questionable rulings by Judge Henry Tiggs at George Hall's original trial; an old newspaper clipping from that trial with the headline COP KILLER TAKES STAND; and a scuffed bulging address book crammed with loose slips of paper. I thumbed through its pages: neat entries in ink—“Jordan” the first name under “J,” Isaac Rosethorn the last name under “R”—scribbled entries in pencil; names crossed out and dozens of numbers jotted in margins. Cooper must have used it sporadically as an appointments book as well, because on blank pages in back there were notes like “Tues, 5:30, Silver Comet” (a bar), and “Brookside, W-S, Marriott, 23rd” (the date and place of Andy Brookside's Winston-Salem speech to black business leaders). As I leafed through the thick book, I said to Emory—still in his military at-ease position, hands behind his back, “Okay, John. All these names in here? I want to know how Hall knew them, and I want to know where they were yesterday afternoon.”
He said, “Sir.”
“Hang on.” I’d already seen some names that interested me. One was “Gilchrist,” in a corner of the “G” page, with a number under it. I dialed it. After a long wait, a young girl's out-of-breath voice said, “Trinity Church soup kitchen, sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Pretty busy today? This is C.R. Mangum, chief of police. I’m looking for Billy Gilchrist.”
“Oh! Hello. Father Madison's been looking for him all day.” “He hasn’t come back then?”
“No, and he didn’t even clean out the coffee machines. But I found, can you believe this, an I.O.U. in the refrigerator for two pounds of cheese.”
“Doesn’t sound like mice, does it?”
She giggled. “Hey, did you say you were the police chief? You don’t sound like one.”
“Darlin’, it's a brave new world. Keep the faith.”
Also in Cooper's book was an old business card belonging to one “Clark Koontz, Senior Sales Representative, Fanshaw Paper Company.” It wasn’t odd that Cooper should know a paper salesman, since he edited a magazine; it was odd that on the back of the card, in faint handwriting, was written, “Newsome, Sat., 3.” This Saturday? Purley Newsome? But he couldn’t be a suspect; late Saturday afternoon, Purley was right here in the squad room swallowing the la
st bits of a speeding ticket. Purley's brother, Otis Newsome, our city comptroller?
I called Otis Newsome at home. His wife said he was over at a neighbor's watching TV. “It's a bunch of men that like to watch games together,” she explained sort of wearily.
“Lionel Tiger will tell you why,” I said.
“I don’t know him.” She sounded as if she didn’t want to either. I called the neighbor's. Otis clearly resented the interruption. Yes, he’d known Koontz, so what? He’d bought city paper supplies through him. No, he hadn’t known Cooper Hall, nor could he be bothered to try to imagine why Hall would have a card of Koontz's with “Newsome” on it. I asked how I might reach Koontz.
“You can’t,” Otis told me. “He's dead.”
I looked up after the call to find Emory still fixed in place. “Go on, John. You can take the rest of that stuff back.”
But he didn’t move. “Sir?”
“Yep?”
Staring straight over my head, Emory tucked in his chin as he spoke. “This is out of line, sir, but, but, the thing of it is, we just got our new rotation with the new partners listed.” He paused so long I lifted my eyes from the notepad I was writing on. Suddenly his face opened in shocked grief. “And I’ve been assigned to Nancy White!”
I leaned back in my swivel chair. “So?”
“I know I’m out of line,” earnestness tightened his whole body, “but well, but, but…”
“But could I switch you? Nope.” I let my chair fall forward. Now I knew why there was a message from Nancy on my machine at home. “Exactly what are your objections to Officer White? Maybe her name?”
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