Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  “The House of Lords series, I guess,” she admitted begrudgingly.

  “You mean the British Parliament?”

  She looked disgusted by my lack of familiarity with their journal, and gave me a copy of the last issue. I glanced at its head-line. FROM CAMPUS TO CAPITOL: NETWORKING, SOUTHERN STYLE. PART I. By Cooper Hall. A quick skim of the lead paragraph told me that the House of Lords was a secret society founded in the 1920s for select male undergraduates at Haver University, and that membership in that club was an open sesame to any future success in state politics or industry. I had no reason to doubt it, which made my modest advancement to police chief even more astonishing, I suppose, since I’d never even heard of the House of Lords. The names listed ended in the 1940s, but later details promised in Part II. I flipped through the thin newsprint, then stuck it in my coat pocket.

  As I sat down at Coop's desk, the girl bristled. His typewriter was empty. Neat piles of paper revealed nothing startling. There were no photographs, no ashtrays, no paperweights, no knick-knacks. Just a wind-up clock that was still ticking, a calendar, a phone, and framed in plastic, another handwritten quotation.

  “If a man hasn’t discovered something he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Holding the frame, I looked over at the college vigilants. Tears started down the girl's face, and the young black man, putting his arm around her, bit his mouth to keep from crying too. Well, they’d worked so hard to stop a death—succeeded, too, for years—focused so long on ending the death penalty, it was like they’d come to believe they were ending the very notion of death. So Cooper's annihilation must have been like a trapdoor, a sideswipe, the sudden crashing of a monster through barricades built to defend against more predictable enemies.

  Foster's neck swiveled as he studied the room. “Didn’t happen ’til after 5:00 A.M., ’cause it rained ’bout an hour then, hard. No moisture under the window. Maybe tied to that blow-out in Canaan?”

  The girl slipped from under her comforter's arm. Anger swelled her face. “This is the Klan!” She pointed at the graffiti. “Who else! They,” her voice stumbled, “murdered him, and then—” The two males closed around her, drew her away. She said to the black one, “They aren’t going to do anything! Look at them!”

  Foster went on as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Happened early. Everything in here's ice cold even with the heater pumping hard.”

  Wes Pendergraph said Rosethorn wasn’t answering his phone— which didn’t mean he wasn’t there. A babysitter at the Molinas told Wes she thought Dr. Molina was in Winston-Salem, and that Mrs. Molina was “out.” In fact, Dr. Molina had just called home, thinking his wife would be there. Like the Brooksides, the Molinas didn’t appear to sit by the fire together much. It's clear my notion of marriage is way out-of-date.

  Augustine Summers, Etham's handpicked assistant, showed up with a folder Etham had called him to bring. In it were enlarged copies of the anonymous letter Lee’d given me—which I’d handed over to the lab. Together they studied the copies, then the wall. Then Summers started photographing the graffiti. “See it?” Foster said to me, holding an enlargement from the letter to Brookside (ATHIEST COON-LOVERS) against the painted word ATHEISTS on the wall. “Bars on the Ts, the H?”

  “Yeah, I see it,” I told him. “I already thought it, too. Looks like his spelling's improved, doesn’t it?”

  Wind from the open window ruffled the months on Coop Hall's desk calendar. The black student struggled with himself, I watched it in his face; then he volunteered: “I don’t think Coop came back here yesterday, before, before it happened. I got back to Hillston I guess around two, called here a couple of times, and just got the machine. The tape ran out on me the last time, so I don’t figure he’d dropped by for messages. Anyhow,” he gestured at the trashed room, “this stuff, it's nothing new. October, they threw a rock through that window there.”

  I nodded at him. “No, nothing new. ’Bout four thousand years older than you and me. But you’re still trying to stop it. So am I. You believe that?”

  The girl said, “Eric, that's bullshit.”

  I said, “Cooper Hall died yesterday. Today is Sunday. My detectives have already interrogated over thirty people with Klan connections or records of civil rights violations, including those we charged in the Trinity Church demonstration. Police officers who were up all night trying to stop a riot are out today trying to find out who killed Cooper. And that includes me. So you want to watch your mouth, young lady.” She turned her back on me.

  Eric kept staring at me. “What's going to happen to those Canaan kids you arrested last night? One of them's related to the Halls. I don’t know if you know that.”

  “I know it. He's been released on bail.”

  “Martin's never been in any kind of trouble before.”

  I nodded again. “I know that too. All I can tell you is what I want to happen. Suspended sentences and time on Canaan Street repairing the damage they did. What I don’t want is for them to do it again.”

  The white male snapped, “Sure! I bet the Klan's going to repair the damage they did here, too. What about the ‘damage’ to Coop Hall?!” He poked his upper arm at me, jabbing his finger at the black strip tied there. “What about Coop Hall?”

  I looked awhile at the anger in his reddened eyes. “Oh, I want whoever did that to go to jail a long, long time.”

  His lip curled. “One thing's for sure; he won’t get the death penalty, not if he's white! You can bet the fuck that's for sure.”

  “You’re not telling me that's what you want, are you?” I buttoned my overcoat and felt for my gloves. “The death penalty for whoever killed Coop Hall?” With my glove I tapped Foster, bent over the open windowsill with his penlight and magnifier. “Going to find Rosethorn.” The back of his head lifted an inch in acknowledgment.

  A siren shrieked, short, loud, and right beside me, scaring a bunch of us on the sidewalk into banging up against each other. In a patrol car, Officer Nancy White was trolling along Jupiter, waving her arm to catch my eye. She was alone in the front; in back behind the screen squirmed a big, unshaven, wild-eyed, ugly mental case, handcuffed to the steel mesh. Pedestrians pushed for a look as I climbed in the front. “Friend of yours back there, Nancy?” The man growled and kicked at the seat. “Drive me to the Piedmont Hotel, we’re collecting a crowd. Where's your partner DiMallo?”

  “Already took him home.” She drove with the forefinger of her left hand. “Then I see this squirrel here, listen, he's peeing in a Salvation Army Christmas pot right in front of Belk's. Folks screaming their heads off. I’m unloading him at U.H.”

  “Jesus, yes. Don’t bring him to our place!”

  I estimated the man's weight at 190. Nancy is probably 130. She's five-seven, wears her hair in a sort of floppy flattop, her skin's too pale and you can see some acne scars, but her eyes are a fine thick-lashed hazel, and she's got a great smile. Nothing scares Nancy, at least not since her stepdad died. He used to beat the shit out of her, but nobody's done it since. First week she was on the force, she broke up a fight outside the Tucson Lounge between two hicks I wouldn’t have gotten near without a sledgehammer. One of them tried to stuff her in a trash can. McInnis was with her, but he said all he did was help her pick the two guys up off the floor and put the cuffs on them. I told her then she ought to be careful who she took on because I didn’t want her hurt. She said, “Chief Mangum, if I’m messed with, if somebody gets in my face, they’re the one you better tell be careful, ’cause, listen here, no man alive's gonna shove me in no trash can.” Like I say, she’d run a girls’ gang. Natural leader. I asked her now, “You subdue this charming character on your own?” He was shaking the screen hard behind my head.

  “Couldn’t dance around.” She popped her gum. “These type squirrels, you know how they get all muscled up? They can hurt you. Had to use my stick on him.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have bothered him much.” Muttering a mantra
of, “Fucking yeah I know I know fuck yeah I know,” the man punctuated each word with kicks and rattles. “Fact, Nancy, I don’t believe you even got his attention yet.”

  She pulled up in front of the shabby genteel Piedmont Hotel, and wiggled sideways to face me. Her collar was open showing a gaudy gold heart on a gold chain—the kind of gold that's likely to go green on you. She said, “Listen here, Chief—”

  “Officer White, where's your tie?”

  “Oh, come on, I’m in the car. My shift's over. Why do I have to wear the tie in the car!”

  “’Cause you keep hopping out of the car to make the streets safe for democracy. Put the tie on.”

  She said, “Crap,” snatched the already looped tie from behind the sun visor, and pulled it over her head. Behind the screen, the “squirrel” appeared to have lulled himself into a stupor with his chant. “Chief,” she began again, talking fast. “I know you’re dealing with heavy shit now, but you said how if something bugged us, come and tell you.” Her voice sped up. “They just put me partners with that hemorrhoid Emory. I can’t hack that type detail. I mean, it's not gonna go down. That man gets his rocks off shining his badge. I’ll pull night shift, holidays, but please—”

  I picked up her hat off the floor by my feet. “Nancy, no. Nope. I already had this same talk with Emory—”

  “What’d he say!”

  “Well, he didn’t accuse you of polishing your badge. Look, we rotate so everybody gets to know everybody, gets to learn from everybody, gets to feel like a family—”

  “Crap, forget that!”

  “—After two weeks, you come and tell me five things you like about John Emory, then we’ll talk.”

  “What am I gonna like about that turkey?”

  “I don’t know. Find out. And put your hat on.” I handed it to her. “That true? You play the trombone?”

  She was still shaking her head. “Yeah, I played it in stupid high school band so I could get away from home, that's all.”

  “Well, Emory plays the piano.”

  “With his gloves on? Okay, can’t blame me for trying. Sorry I bugged you at home. I mean, bugged your machine.”

  “That's o——” I slapped my leg. “Make a U, and take me back down Crowell. Then you get this guy to U.H. Go on, go on.”

  “What's the matter?” She swung the car into its turn.

  I shook a finger at her. “I wasn’t listening. Cops shouldn’t talk, Nancy. Cops should listen.”

  Machine. The student Eric had told me he’d called the With Liberty and Justice office, but gotten “Coop's machine.” And if the tape had run out before Eric could say anything, it must be full of messages, the last ones Coop Hall had heard, or maybe had never heard. At any rate, the callers were potentially very interesting.

  Somebody else had obviously thought so too, because when I opened the top to the small machine on his desk, the cassette for incoming messages had been removed.

  I let myself into Isaac Rosethorn's smoke-rank, crammed and jumbled two-room suite on the top floor of the musty Piedmont Hotel, and found something else missing from its regular place. The little aluminum suitcase that Isaac kept under shoe boxes of bird nests on the shelf of his closet was gone. So was his electric shaver, his bathrobe, and the old photograph of Edith Keene that always sat on his bedside table. Ashtrays were stuffed with cigarette butts, Chinese food cartons on the big desk were pretty putrid, I couldn’t see the floor for the law books and newspapers on it, I couldn’t see the view for the grime on the windows, and I couldn’t see the ugly flowered bedspread for the clothes, legal pads, and record albums tossed around there. In fact, everything looked fairly normal, except that Isaac wasn’t lying on the sagging, cracked leather couch, or slumped in the swivel chair behind the eight-foot worktable, or seated on the toilet in the tiny bathroom, through whose open door he would continue to carry on conversations with me (an informal style of receiving visitors that he claimed to share with Louis XIV and L.B.J.). Isaac doesn’t like to travel—except mentally. But his home was small, he was large, and it was clear in seconds that he wasn’t anywhere around.

  I called down to the desk clerk who said he hadn’t noticed Rosethorn leave, but added he’d been “pretty busy” all afternoon— though certainly not in welcoming new guests or vacuuming the Piedmont lobby, which was consistently both filthy and deserted. I told him to go find out if Isaac's Studebaker was parked in its spot in the hotel garage behind the building. He said he was still pretty busy, I said I was the chief of police, and he said he’d be right back with the information. While waiting, I shamelessly picked the lock of the desk drawer where Isaac kept a cigar box of “emergency cash,” usually about a thousand dollars in twenties. The box was empty. Last time I’d seen him empty that box—a dozen years ago—he’d been gone for two months. He’d come back with a woman whom a client of his had been accused of murdering.

  The desk clerk must have run the whole way; he panted that the Studebaker was right there. “What did Rosethorn do? Something serious?” he asked hopefully.

  “Library fines,” I said and hung up.

  It took Brenda Moore a few hours to learn that Isaac had not taken a plane or rental car out of the area, at least not charged to his own name, nor taken a cab or bus with anyone who’d recognized his picture (and believe me, around here, his face stood out in a crowd). Before I left his room, I read through the top pile of papers on the desk. Among them was a recent State Supreme Court decision rejecting an appeal claiming disproportionate use of the death penalty against blacks. Isaac's fat inked comments on their ruling were mostly obscene. I knew he’d been hoping for (without expecting) a favorable decision on this case so he could use it for George Hall. Except that he’d always known, as he’d once said, “Listen to me, Slim, you don’t get your appeals by great legal leaps in enlightenment. You get them by little procedural screw-ups. The law's an anal-compulsive. That's its virtue and vice both. Law is like that British clerk at the labor camp in Heart of Darkness. He keeps off the jungle by wearing a pressed suit and tie. Meanwhile, his company's working poor Africans to death. You read Heart of Darkness? Extraordinary tale.”

  I told him, “I did better than read it. The Army sent me there.” I was remembering this conversation about procedural screw-ups now because I’d noticed a clipping from a recent Hillston Star, stapled to a folder labeled “Hall appeal” on his desk. It was a small article: a local man had won a malpractice suit against a doctor who eight years ago had performed an operation that had so permanently impaired this man's hearing that two years later he’d been fired from his job, and the following summer been struck by a motorcycle he hadn’t heard approaching. The man's name, Darwin Wheelwright, was circled with Isaac's thick black pen. It sounded vaguely familiar. But I couldn’t place it. That's one of the differences between my brain and Isaac Rosethorn's. He must have recognized it immediately. Because when I turned on some lights, after the sun gave up trying to slip through the grime on the windows, the long black-board against the far wall finally caught my eye. The “thinking board,” he called it. Ever since I’d known him, it had been covered with squiggly diagrams and cryptic outlines. Now I realized my name was scrawled in block letters in a free space near the top margin.

  “CUDDY. I’ll be back. And by the way, Juror #9 at George's first trial was deaf as a post.”

  chapter 8

  On Tuesday morning, Christmas Eve, Mayor Carl Yarborough told me, “Give me a present, Cuddy. A suspect on Cooper Hall, okay?” I had to give him a bottle of Scotch instead. Our highway witnesses had proved pretty useless. One teenaged girl said “an old white car” had sped past her “real fast” seconds before she drove over the crest and saw the wreck, but she could give no other details. Nobody else had come forward with information of any sort, and the fact is, most of our cases get solved on the phone-in-tip method. Somebody squeals on X, and then we apply detection to figure out how X did it. I didn’t have any X yet. Justin was assuming it was Willie Slid
ell, especially after Bruce Parker went back out to the farm and found it shut up, with the barn emptied—no giant cylinders of Fanshaw paper, no white Ford on blocks. And no Willie Slidell, when Slidell's supervisor thought Willie was home on sick leave. Slidell's sister said that he’d driven his station wagon to Kentucky Sunday night to try to patch things up with his estranged wife. Justin had located the estranged Kentucky wife by phone; she said she had neither seen Slidell, nor expected him. Trying to patch things up with her would have been futile anyhow as she’d “been with somebody a lot better for three years,” which was when she’d lost patience with “Willie the Wimp.”

  According to Willie's sister, Willie had never had a white Ford, had never had anybody staying at the farm with him, had never stolen from his job, never attended any white-supremacy meetings, and in general never done a single thing to warrant Justin's asking her these questions. And yes, Willie’d been right there at her house Saturday from noon ’til nine, so he couldn’t have killed Cooper. Justin had a feeling she was lying.

  So we had a bulletin out for Slidell. And a bulletin out for Billy Gilchrist; not just because Paul Madison was pestering me twice a day, but because I wanted to know what Billy's name was doing in Coop's address book. Meanwhile, when I cornered Otis Newsome and his brother Purley in the municipal building lobby, Otis told me he still had no idea why Coop Hall should have Clark Koontz's card with the name Newsome written on it. Purley Newsome sneered, “Me neither,” and walked off. Dead of cancer, Koontz was in no position to contradict either of them.

  Otis was a short fat blond man, like the result if somebody had put his baby brother Purley in a trash compactor. His devotion to Purley was as strong (and misguided) as his opinion that I ought to be fired, Carl Yarborough (against whom he’d run for mayor) ought to be impeached, and “left-wingers” like Alice MacLeod ought to be burned. Otis was a devout Julian Lewis man and a suckbutt to the North Hillston crowd. He was in charge of the town's purchases, and the town purchased tons of paper supplies, all of them from Fanshaw Paper Company. I asked him if he knew a Fanshaw clerk named Willie Slidell. He said no, why should he?