“Who do you deal with at Fanshaw?”
He said, “I deal with Dyer Fanshaw direct.”
“You two were in college together at Haver, weren’t you?”
“So what?”
I said, “Well, Otis, I’d hate to think you weren’t taking time to entertain some competitive bids on those paper contracts.”
His fists twisted inside his Madras pants pockets like he was struggling to get them out, and couldn’t. He said, “I’m not going to waste any time talking to you, that's for sure. And I heard how you made Purley eat that ticket in front of his friends.” I said, “What friends?” but he talked right over me. “Don’t you think it's going to be forgotten. There’re a lot of us who never wanted you appointed chief.”
I said, “But not enough of you.”
Otis had dry blinky eyes, but his smile was greasy, like his hair, and he always flashed his teeth when he jabbed me with his favorite needle: “There were a lot of us. But you had old Cadmean behind you.”
I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but instead I smiled back. “Right. So I heard.”
“Well, you don’t have him anymore. Things are going to change in this state, soon as Lewis gets in. We’re going to get rid of your kind.”
“Meaning what, Otis? No more intelligent tall people?”
With a scowl, he trotted away across the lobby's loud marble floor.
According to the paper, there were five funerals in Hillston on Christmas Eve. I went to two of them. The first, Briggs Cadmean's at Presbyterian, drew the larger crowd. The pews were so packed, the furs so thick, the floral displays stacked so high, that by the time Mrs. Atwater Randolph warbled “Abide With Me,” the whole place, despite the frigid weather, felt like a steamy greenhouse. “Our number” from North Hillston attended en masse—as if everybody I’d seen Friday at the Club dance had changed out of their evening clothes and hurried off to church together. Sprinkled among them were distinguished out-of-towners: men whose hired drivers waited outside, stamping their feet like carriage horses; men who would fly back home to Atlanta or Richmond or Birmingham in time to sing carols with the family tonight. It crossed my mind as I studied this crowd that an anarchist could lob a single bomb through First Presbyterian's plate glass right now and take a big chunk out of the top junta of southeastern industry, politics, and social life.
Accompanied by their wives, both gubernatorial candidates— Julian Lewis on the right aisle between the governor and the Dyer Fanshaws, Andy Brookside on the left between Mayor and Mrs. Yarborough and a U.S. senator—prominently displayed bowed heads during the prayers. Lee didn’t close her eyes, but did look solemn. She wore a black wool suit with a small gray cap that had a black feather across it. At two points, Brookside leaned over to whisper something to her, and the feather brushed across his face. At one point, Carl Yarborough whispered something to him that made him smile. Just the mayor's sitting there beside Brookside was in itself talking loud and clear to Hillston, as had a standing ovation from those black business leaders in Winston-Salem on Monday. It looked like Jack Molina's impromptu speech about Coop Hall to the TV cameras up on that porch stoop had swept his candidate right into the arms of the black vote, or maybe Brookside had finally gotten out his calculator and realized that 100 percent of 20 percent of the voters meant he only needed 31 percent of all the rest.
High above us in his white wood pulpit, Thomas Campbell swallowed his chagrin at losing old Cadmean's cavernous estate to Trinity Episcopal, and preached a sad, pious eulogy about the good servant who had made his talents multiply, grown prosperous by Divine Election, died a symbol of his nation's great blessings (blessings he had returned sevenfold to his city, state, fellow man, beloved family). And now he was welcomed to his heavenly home by the Christ Child Himself, here on the very eve of that Child's wondrous birthday. Home for Christmas, home for all eternity. Old Briggs would have guffawed through the first ten minutes and slept through the next twenty. As for his beloved family, the few ambulatory sons he had left sat with a mingle of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, in-laws, distant relatives, and a sobbing elderly woman with a black veil, who turned out to have been his fifth ex-wife (whom he’d left thirty-five years ago for Briggs Junior's mother) and who’d come all the way from Sarasota to make a play for a cut of the old man's estate. Her noisy presence and the even noisier absence of Briggs Junior (the presumed heiress) were the two human-interest highlights of the service. From the hiss of indignation I overheard on the steps (as old Cadmean's silver-handled casket was carried past the news cameras by a palsied son of his, the bank, the towel company, A.R. Randolph, Senator Kip Dollard, and Justin Savile), it was clear that Hillston was outraged by Briggs Junior's failure to attend her own father's funeral after he’d left her ten million dollars that all she had to do for was give up her career and come back home. I took considerable satisfaction in having predicted her response to Papa's codicil; as at least Alice admitted while we were waiting near the hearse for Justin to get their car.
“Okay, Cuddy, you were right.”
“My favorite words in the language, honey.” “Thank God you didn’t marry that bitch.”
I was shocked and said so. “Alice MacLeod, a feminist like your-self, and you can’t see why she was insulted by that s.o.b.'s will!”
Alice shivered as the freezing wind flattened our coats against our legs. “Of course I can see why Briggs was insulted. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have told him to fuck off. I’m saying she should have come to the bastard's funeral.” Alice turned to shake hands sweetly with Judge and Mrs. Tiggs, who were quarreling about whether it was too cold to go to the cemetery, or too rude not to. Then Justin pulled up, and as I helped Alice into the Austin, she asked, “Any word from Isaac?”
“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah for two days. Vanished. You don’t suppose that after sixty years a man would suddenly decide to take a Christmas vacation and fly off to Bermuda or Squaw Valley?”
Justin said, “He's working on the Hall case, betcha five bucks.”
“Let's hope. We could use some help. Drive careful, J.B.S., this lady's the future mother of my godchild. See y’all at the grave, which is bound to be a big one. I’m imagining something about on the scale of Rameses the Second.”
Out on the church steps, I stopped Dyer Fanshaw and asked him to tell me about his salesman Clark Koontz. “What about him? He died,” said Fanshaw, annoyed at being separated from the governor and lieutenant governor, who were getting photographed by a Raleigh reporter. “You better talk to my sales manager,” he added, admitting, “I don’t really know all that much about lower-level employees. Excuse me.”
I held him by the cuff of his herringbone tweed. “Well, Dyer, that may be a mistake. We have reason to believe that one of them—fellow named Willie Slidell—may be stealing your paper, great big old rolls full.”
Fanshaw changed colors fast, his ears turned as red as his cheeks, his lips as white as his hair. “What are you talking about?” he asked, then apparently decided he didn’t want an answer, because he pointed at the hearse, waiting behind two of my motor-cycle cops, looked at me with extreme annoyance, maybe because discussing robberies was bad manners at a funeral, maybe because I’d made him miss his photo opportunity with the governor, and he walked away.
I noticed that Andy Brookside, bright hair ruffled in the wind, had paused at the top of the church steps, chatting with the Yarboroughs, until Governor Wollston and Lewis had reached their limousine. Then he touched Lee's arm and started down, brisk but saddened. He looked as good outdoors as he had at the Club dance. I also noticed that the reporters took more pictures of him than they had of anyone else. What struck me, seeing him, was the literalness of the metaphor “magnetic.” People lining the steps actually leaned toward him, as if pulled there.
“Hello, Cuddy, how are you?” Lee paused beside me, and already halfway past, Brookside turned back.
“Hi, Lee. Not the merriest of Christmas Eves, is it?”
&nbs
p; She and I talked about the funeral while Brookside shook several hands thrust at him; after which he grinned at me cheerfully. “Hello again. My apologies. I hadn’t realized Friday that you and Lee were such old friends. She says you knew each other when you were kids.” He took her gloved hand in his. “That's what's so wonderful about these small Southern towns. The past keeps coming back.”
“Wonderful or horrible,” Lee said, and smiled.
“Isn’t that true in New England too?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I have no idea. Because I don’t keep coming back. I’m a Tarheel now, an adopted son of the South.” A gray Jaguar sedan stopped near us, and the young driver I’d seen holding Lee's fur coat outside my office scooted around to open the door for her. She nodded good-bye as she slid inside the leathery interior.
Brookside gestured at the open door. “A lift to the cemetery?”
“No thanks. My car's right up there.”
He looked at her, then me, then suddenly took me by the arm, and stepped me away from the curb. His eyes were as aquamarine as a travel poster for the Virgin Islands. “Jack Molina said you wanted to talk to me about those, what’ll we call them, anonymous threats?”
“I did. I phoned your office twice.”
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you, Captain. Things have been crazy.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “God, for you. The Canaan fallout from the murder! You must be half nuts.”
“Does it show?”
His smile, I admit, was a beauty. “So it seems hardly worth even—” He waved good-bye to three men that people claimed owned a county apiece in the western part of the state. “Sorry. Anyhow, cleaning out the last little bits in my Haver offices, I did find an earlier one of those ‘your-days-are-numbered’ notes. How about this, we go right past Haver on the way to North Hills Cemetery. You give me a ride. We’ll whip in and I’ll get the letter for you.”
“Well, actually I’ve got my dog in my—”
“Just a second. Let me tell Lee.”
He was so quick, I’d been so unprepared for his suggestion, I hadn’t realized fast enough how little I wanted to have him in my car. Plus, I hated to think why. Hated to think I was embarrassed by an Oldsmobile that my daddy would have sold his soul for. Hated to think that I couldn’t stand to be around Andy Brookside because I was jealous of him.
I didn’t hear what he was saying to Lee, but she nodded and looked at me gratefully. Well, after all, I had promised to help.
Like everybody else in his life, Martha Mitchell fell for Brookside as soon as she laid eyes on him. She squirmed right into his lap and he patted her as he admitted he’d thrown two or three earlier anonymous letters away, “Afraid I just balled them up and tossed them like the rest of the garbage. You can’t fret over flak. You have to gun the throttle and fly through it.”
“I can’t afford to dismiss anonymous threats on your life, Mr. Brookside. Guns are cheap, and brains are rare.” In my rearview mirror I watched the funeral cortege pull out behind the motorcycle escort, then I cut off down a side street. “And by the by, you keep on letting your speechwriter accuse Reverend Brodie Cheek of being in the Klan, if not in on a murder, you’re gonna piss off a lot more anonymous people than the one already writing to you. There’re two hundred fifty thousand right-wing born-againers on Cheek's mailing list. Lot of votes.”
He cocked his head at me. “Yeah, I heard Jack's rhetoric got a little fervent at the Hall house.” It didn’t seem to bother him. Apparently, he saw Jack Molina as a stalking horse to herd in any stray believers still waiting around left field for the old dream to show up. He said, “It's all true, though.”
“Well, it's true Brodie Cheek's a foaming reactionary. But I’m not sure he's in kahoots with the Klan, much less the Constitution Club, and I am sure the members of that club, including Senator Kip Dollard and Julian Lewis and probably a fifth of the guests at that funeral we just left, aren’t going to appreciate hearing Molina lump them in with the lumpen. Not to mention hearing on TV how Cooper Hall's a ‘martyr to their racist fear and hate.’”
Brookside glanced out the window at two young women at the stoplight who laughed as a gust of wind lifted their shopping bags almost sideways. “Jack had that S.D.S. gleam in his eye, huh? That's a beautiful girl there, the one in the blue coat.” He rubbed at his neck where a thin scar ran from his hairline down into his collar. “Well, he keeps a small altar fire burning to the flame of the sixties.”
I nodded. “I heard Molina at a few rallies back when he was in college. He was wild in those days. Campus cops bashed him on the head once; he soaked his shirt in the gash, climbed up on the shoulders of the Charles R. Haver statue, started waving that bloody shirt and yelling, ‘Not my country, right or wrong! My country, right the wrong!’”
Brookside's laugh was affectionate. “Sounds like him.” One of the women's scarf blew off and they chased it down the sidewalk. “Jack thought very highly of Cooper Hall.”
“And you? Ever meet Coop?”
He reached down to straighten a black silk sock. “His loss strikes me as a far greater waste than his brother George Hall's would have been. From what I’ve heard, at least. Not that I don’t commend the efforts to stop the brother's execution. But I haven’t shared Jack's passion about it.”
A considerable understatement. His tolerant tone provoked me into saying, “From what I hear, Molina's trying to haul you off the fence on the capital punishment issue, but you got both legs locked tight around the rail.”
He looked bemused. “Who told you that—Alice? You’re friendly with her, right?”
“Right.” His dropping in Alice's name so casually set my teeth on edge. Or maybe I was just mad at Martha Mitchell for her down-right sickening eagerness to get her head under Brookside's hand. I said, “No, it was Lee who told me.”
The bemused look stretched into surprise. “Lee? Really? That's interesting.” Then the pleasant smile returned. He crossed his long, elegant legs and gave one a pat. “Yes, you could put it that way, I suppose.” The smile was replaced by earnestness. “But I do agree, in principle, that the death penalty's barbaric.” He ticked off points on his fingers. “It's also discriminatory, it's not a deterrent, and I’m sure innocent people do get executed, et cetera, et cetera.” He let the other hand stand in for the rest of the arguments. “But frankly where do we set our priorities? How many convicts are even on death row in this country now?”
“About nineteen hundred.”
He held out a palm in a “Okay, case proved?” gesture. “In the general scheme of things, we’re talking very small numbers, and let's admit it, most of them are criminals of one sort or another.”
I was in more of a position to admit it than he was, and did so. “Yep, most of the folks we kill have killed somebody, or at least been in the vicinity emptying a cash register while a friend killed somebody.”
He hadn’t quite decided about my tone yet, but it only showed in a slight squeezing of his eyebrows. “Most murders occur during robberies?”
“No, most murders occur during jealous fits or marital spats. A passion crime, and a one-per-customer crime. But the state picks and chooses the little percent it's going to execute for murder, and the state's partial to robbery murder, because the state's partial to protecting property—especially white property.” I mentioned that nothing made our D.A., Mitchell Bazemore, happier than a felony homicide; he’d get himself as many white males as he could, wave the capitalist flag in their noses, and turn them into a hanging jury faster than you could say Dirty Harry. Brookside was with me now; his eyebrows had relaxed. He had a fine listening style, so intense I could feel it without looking at him. I said, “So folks get the notion that the death penalty's going to hold down stickups and muggings. It won’t.”
“You don’t like Mitchell Bazemore.”
“No.”
“He has an impressive record of convictions as prosecutor.”
“So did
the Inquisition.” It occurred to me that I was maybe talking to the next governor, a guy who’d have jobs and judgeships jingling in his pockets like loose change. Could be he was interviewing me right now; he was for sure checking out Bazemore, whose possible rising future I did my best to sink fast, when Brookside asked me to “describe the man.” I told him, “Mitch is honest, dedicated, hardworking, meanspirited, small-minded, moralistic, bigoted, and rigid as Rasputin.”
He smiled. “His reputation—”
“His reputation is for capital convictions—what he calls his ‘winning streak’—and the more he's got, the more he gets. Juries are just as much suckers for reputation as the rest of us. He's sent nine men to death row from Haver County since I’ve been chief.”
“And one's George Hall.”
“No, Hall's been there a lot longer than that. I watched one of those men get executed myself, which believe me, judges and juries should be obliged to do.” (His neck stiffened on that bit of info.) “Three got out on appeals. And of the five that are still waiting, four are black, none had private lawyers, or educations, or money, or connections—or any of the goodies that if you do have them, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, you don’t end up on death row.”
Brookside nodded carefully. “I grant everything that implies. It still seems to me there’re more productive battlefields to fight on than capital punishment. Welfare's a racist tool too, and a far more pervasive one. Poverty itself—” He stopped himself and rumpled his hair. “But, well, Jack doesn’t agree, of course.”
That was so transparent, it made you wonder why in the world he’d ever wanted Molina to help with his campaign.
He appeared to be fine at reading faces as well as listening, because he said, “Why did I hire Jack? Because he's a very, very good speechwriter. The real question is, why’d he take the job?” Martha had flopped right over on her back, and he was rubbing her stomach as he smiled at me. “Jack finds me hopelessly pragmatic, a cool impurist of the most unpalatable sort. In fact, he doesn’t really even like me. But he's killing himself to get me elected because he’d rather have Impure Brookside than the alternative, which is just more of the same dumb smug thieves.”
Time's Witness Page 16
