Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  Still stirred up by his unprecedented challenge, Davies looped his glasses back over his long-lobed ears, and patted down the careful strands of white hair. He smoothed the piece of paper gently. “Butler.”

  “Right. Moonfoot. Long-legged guy, they called him that ’cause he had these high bouncy steps like he was walking on the moon?”

  The old Hiram was back, shoulders stiff, chin tight. “Arthur Butler. Two convictions for grand larceny, one four years ago; one, seven, maybe eight.”

  “Hiram, I love you.”

  He ignored my grin. “And something funny. What was it now?” Davies pushed slowly at the nose bar of his glasses. Finally he nodded. “Yes, Haver Tobacco Company, a warehouse robbery, that's what it was. We pulled him in on it. But they dropped the case. Officer on the scene said he’d seen a suspect run off, but couldn’t make the ID. Said it wasn’t Butler.”

  I slapped a drumroll on the desk top. “Sergeant Davies, not only would I never fire you, not only would I never allow you to retire, I’d like to kiss you under the mistletoe! And you can tell me who that officer was, I swear I’m gonna kiss you.”

  His lips pinched tight as if trying to escape the thought. “Don’t remember.”

  “You sure you’re not lying to keep me from kissing you?”

  “Captain Mangum, I have as many faults as the next man, but I’m not a liar, I never—”

  “Oh, Hiram, calm down. Go pull that Haver robbery file. I’m gonna bet you ten dollars that officer's Bobby Pym or Winston Russell. Okay, okay, you’re not a bettor either. How ’bout this? If I’m right, you’ll call Officer White ‘Nancy’ to her face. If I’m wrong, well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll go to church next Sunday. How's that? Deal?”

  It took him a while to weigh the sin of gambling against a chance to save a soul, and I was proud of him. He said okay.

  So, I guess I’m going to church next Sunday. Because the officer's name was Purley Newsome, Russell and Pym's little tagalong.

  Martha was glad to be home; I mean she's got the run of the department, and her own private suite in the back seat of the Oldsmobile, bed and all, but home's where the munchies are. Listening to a new compact disc of Vivaldi (country's not the only sound I like), I changed into jeans and the sweatshirt Justin gave me last Christmas. Here's what's printed down its front:

  Policeman, constable, peace officer,

  detective, arm of the law, inspector,

  flic, gendarme, carabiniere,

  bailiff, catchpole, beagle, beadle,

  reeve, tipstaff, bobbie,

  peeler, cop, copper, narc,

  trooper, John Law, bull, flatfoot,

  gumshoe, shamus, dick, fuzz, pig,

  the Law.

  Then Mrs. Mitchell had some fried chicken, and I nuked some frozen enchiladas, and then we lay on the carpet looking at my Christmas tree lights, and at the old crèche with its headless Joseph and its one wise man staring behind him for those two missing kings of Orient-are, like maybe they’d fallen off their camels back in some quicksand, or maybe they’d lost heart in their pal's plan to chase a star across the Sahara, and turned around.

  Now, the truth is, what I really felt like doing was reading the files Hiram Davies had found, and the folder Andy Brookside had slipped me before shutting my car door in my face. But I made myself put them down on the glass coffee table, under a lead minié ball I’d dug up at the Bentonville battlefield. What with its being Christmas Eve, and everybody accusing me of an addiction to work, I figured I’d go cold turkey—at least for the night. So I looked up “Holiday Drinks” in my bartender's guide, made myself a pitcher of eggnog, and turned on my downstairs TV, which is in a wall shelf with my CD, FM tuner, VCR, beer bottle collection dating back to college, and 2,765 alphabetized books that I counted one night when I was real depressed. I’d hate for Andy Brookside to know it, but I’ve got another TV up in my bedroom, in another wall shelf, with more books, plus my, what I call, rocks collection—these are stones, gravel, bricks, little broken bits of the past I’ve picked up loose in my travels, from rubble heaps of historical significance, like the ground around the Acropolis and Cheops's tomb.

  For an hour, I lay on my wall-to-wall by the tree and clicked at the channels with my remote control. The Pope was in St. Peter's, Billy Graham was in Berlin, and the late-night comics all had reruns. And no Chainsaw Massacres tonight. Movie stations had gone spiritual (Song of Bernadette, The Robe), or classical (How to Marry a Millionaire, The Great Caruso), or seasonal. I sipped eggnog, which I don’t much like, and flipped from old Scrooge getting terrorized by a peek at his own tombstone, to little Natalie Wood shaking down Kris Kringle for a house in the suburbs, to Gary Cooper just about jumping off the top of a building so he won’t let down the John Doe clubs who’d had faith in his suicide vow. By the time I caught up with It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart had pretty near gotten the message from his angel that—however puny, broke, and wasted he might be feeling—without him, his sweet small town would have turned into an urban combat zone. I confess it was a personal fantasy of mine that the same might be true of Hillston without me.

  Now here's something else I don’t think I ever told a soul: I’m a sucker for angel movies. Angels in the Outfield, I Married an Angel, The Bishop's Wife, Heaven Can Wait—I’ve seen them all. I love it when Claude Rains and Cary Grant and James Mason pop down from Above to fix things. I love It's a Wonderful Life. I even get the sniffles when all Jimmy Stewart's neighbors show up with cash on Christmas Eve so he won’t lose the building and loan and go to jail. So when my doorbell rang, I was blowing my nose. I clicked off the set, scuffed over in my socks, wondering who’d come calling at midnight. I admit I had a rush of hot irrational hope that Andy Brookside had disappeared in his Cessna, and Lee had driven to River Rise to tell me about it. When you watch movies, things like that seem possible.

  But life's not a movie, and it wasn’t Lee. Squinting through the chained gap, I saw a stranger—a pretty woman about my age, also in jeans and sweatshirt (except hers didn’t have thirty synonyms for “cop” on it), and also sniffling; at least, her eyelashes looked wet. She had the greenest eyes I ever saw; they sort of tipped up at the ends. And very black hair in a loose ponytail. She had a screwdriver in each hand—not the kind you drink. I said, “You want to put those away? Somebody tried to kill me with a screwdriver once.”

  “Really?” She looked at the tools, then squeezed them down in her jeans’ pocket. She glanced at my door plate. “Are you C.R. Mangum?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m Nora Howard. I’m sorry to bother you this late, but I’m next door, 2-B—”

  “TV too loud?”

  “Oh no. The thing is, I just moved in a few weeks ago, and I looked out on my patio and saw your lights were on. What I need is a smaller Phillips screwdriver. Do you happen to have one? I think I’m just going to drink down a can of Dran-o if you don’t.”

  Despite her violent turn of phrase, I decided she probably wasn’t fixing to stab me, so I flipped the chain and invited her in.

  I peered across the foyer; she’d left her door open, and a bright-colored Indian teepee looked to be taking up most of her living room. “What happened to Henry and Dennis? 2-B? The landscape architects?”

  “I’m subletting. They broke up. You didn’t know they left?”

  “I guess I’ve been pretty busy.” Well, I’d miss the smell of their nouvelle cuisine, but not their affection for obscure muscials.

  Nora Howard explained that she’d been trying to assemble her daughter's bicycle for the last three hours. “This is my first Christmas as a single Santa, and let me tell you, a sixty-eight-page instructions manual is a humbling experience.” Then she frowned at me. “Say, are you okay? I probably busted in on something. I’m really sorry.”

  “It's a Wonderful Life.” I pointed at the TV.

  “Oh.” She grinned, and gestured at her wet lashes. “Me too!” In the kitchen I found her a small Phillips screwdriver. �
�Bless you, C.R. Mangum.”

  “Most people call me Cuddy.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Not much, but it's better than Cudberth.”

  She nodded. “That's true. My family used to call me Angie; I never liked it. That was my middle name, Angela. Nora Angela Carippini.”

  “Aha. The restaurant?”

  “It's my older brother's.” Then she frowned again. “Do you all wear those shirts?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Hillston policemen? Mrs. Falliwell—3-A?—she was telling me about you. You’re the chief of police. I thought you’d be about sixty.”

  “Sometimes I think I am.”

  She laughed. “Oh boy! I know that feeling.”

  I opened my refrigerator. “Do you like eggnog?”

  She squinched up her face. “Actually, I hate it.”

  I nodded. “It's horrible, isn’t it?”

  She was looking over my shoulder into the refrigerator. “Look, I know Laura—my daughter—would say, ‘Mom, you’re embarrassing me, jeez!,’ but is that a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken in there? I’ll trade you a glass of white Chianti for a wing, and one question about ‘Figure 30-b’ in this assembly manual.” She studied my face for a moment. “You’re sorry you answered your door.”

  Well, in a way, I was. I’d been looking forward to a bath and a book. But conceit's always been my stumbling block. One look at those two hundred loose bike parts, I figured she’d be up all night, whereas I never met instructions I couldn’t translate into objects as fast as I could read, and I’m a fast reader.

  So that's how I ended up on a strange floor bolting a reflector to a pink fender when Mario Lanza sang in Christmas with “Joy to the World.” Nora's daughter Laura was ten. The teepee was for her son Brian, who was five. They were upstairs sleeping, unless they were faking it, waiting for dawn. Nora had lived with her husband, Warren, in Texas, where he’d worked for NASA. He’d died of meningitis almost a year ago. She’d come to Hillston because her brother and sister-in-law, who’d moved here a long while back to open the restaurant, thought it was a great place to raise children. And she did like Hillston. The only problem was she wasn’t licensed to practice in North Carolina.

  I said, “Practice what?”

  She said, “The Law. Just like it says on your shirt.”

  Justin and Alice always invite me for Christmas breakfast. Well, we start at breakfast, and by the time Alice finishes opening all the presents Justin's bought her, it's time for lunch. She keeps begging him not to buy her so many, and he keeps hinting that she ought to buy him more, if she's so embarrassed by us just watching her make her way around the tree where he's stacked up the boxes. Myself, I gave him a record and her a book. I’m not all that imaginative when it comes to presents. Alice gave me a sweater. Justin gave me a piece of the stone-carved pediment from the old statehouse, a pair of pink Argyle socks, a videotape of The Maltese Falcon, and an honest-to-God signed studio photograph of Patsy Cline that who knows where he got it or how much it cost.

  We were drinking our bloody marys, admiring the scotch pine (no tacky lights and tinsel, just genuine little Victorian knick-knacks scattered here and there); listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band record I’d gotten him; Alice was saying, “Oh, sweetheart, another dress!,” when we heard the beeper go off in my jacket.

  Justin said, “When constabulatory duty's to be done, to be done, / A policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one.” Alice said, “Shit.”

  Zeke Caleb said Merry Christmas, he was sorry, but call Etham Foster right away at the following number. Etham didn’t say he was sorry, he said he was at a filling station near where they were pulling a body out of the Shocco River.

  I said, “Dr. D., I hate to sound unfeeling, but I’ve seen bodies, I’ve even seen bodies pulled out of the Shocco, and so have you. And you’re supposed to be off today with your family; Ruthie's starting to hate me as it is.”

  He said, “Just come on, Cuddy. I-28, left on Exit Nine, past that farmhouse, one-point-six miles in, path to the river, you’ll see us. Body's in a car.”

  “Slidell's farmhouse?”

  “Right.”

  “Somebody drove off the bank?”

  “Didn’t. Pushed.”

  Justin said, “Okay, this makes two episodes, same place! I told you!”

  “Whatcha want, J.B.S., a raise? Looks like about double last year's salary's lying around the room here anyhow.”

  Alice walked us to the door. “Don’t mind me, boys, I’ve got at least two hours of packages left to go.”

  “Don’t open anything ’til I get back,” Justin told her; he loves to watch folks tear into presents. “Just be an hour.”

  But it was more like three before I sent Jay the Bountiful home.

  Where Cooper's Subaru and the truck had collided, the skid marks still looked fresh, the shoulder torn open. We bounced along a packed-clay road, through fields that had probably once been plowed for brightleaf tobacco, corn, and soybeans, but now were back to grass and young pines; if you don’t fight her hard, Nature's fast to reclaim her own. The tractor in the yard at Slidell's farm hadn’t been driven in years, and the rusted pickup near it didn’t even have its tires anymore. Since we were there, we stopped for a second. The doors were still locked; nobody was home. Justin showed me the barn; as Parker had reported, there were now no huge rolls of paper squeezed in with the other junk.

  “There was an old white Ford right here.” Justin pointed. “See the oil drip?”

  “Maybe Slidell drove it off for the holidays.”

  That proved not to be the case. About a mile farther in from the highway, three of our cruisers had their lights flashing. We walked the clearing toward the river; it was drivable, more or less, but not by me in my new Oldsmobile. Obviously the car in the river had made it through the dead kudzu, sumac, and maple saplings to the edge of the steep eroded bank. And obviously my men had gotten a tow truck down in there, because they’d winched the car half out of the thick brown water. It was gunked with slimy weeds and mud, but it was still unmistakably the white Ford Justin had seen in Slidell's barn. We leaned over the crumbling ledge; you could see the car's path down to the Shocco gouged in red clay and broken roots.

  “‘Sixty-eight Fairlane,” said Etham Foster, looming up behind me. Under his sheepskin, he had on a new red sweater; no doubt a Christmas present. “Been in there a few days.”

  “Merry Christmas, Dr. D. Get the body out?”

  He pointed at a plastic bag near the bank. Dick Cohen (our medical examiner, fellow about my age) sat on a stump, sadly puffing a pipe.

  Justin asked, “Etham, the car was pushed?”

  “Drove it in Low to the ledge, jumped, it went over. You’ll see,” was all we got for an answer as he headed back for the tow truck. I asked him if he’d identified the body, but he didn’t hear me. It didn’t matter, because as soon as Justin pulled the tarp down, he said, “It's Willie Slidell. I knew it.”

  I sighed. “If you were figuring to pin the Hall shooting on this guy, you need a backup plan, ’cause I don’t believe Willie here would go to the trouble to plug himself in the chest this many times before driving off a twenty-foot ledge into a river—no matter how remorseful he’d gotten to feeling.” Because we didn’t need Dr. Cohen to tell us Slidell hadn’t died from a bump on the head, or water in the lungs either.

  “Three shots, probably dead when they put him in the car,” Cohen said. “Where's my ambulance? I gotta get out of here, I’m blue.” Dick Cohen had emigrated from Brooklyn for “the weather,” and now did nothing but complain about it. Like a lot of New Yorkers, he had a shaky sense of geography beyond the Hudson, and had apparently figured the “South,” anywhere in the South, meant warm as Miami. He pulled his ski cap farther down his narrow bald head. “Cheesh, my kid wanted a car for Christmas. Oughta bring him out here, show him what can happen.”

  I said, “For Christmas? Y’all were just celebrating Hanukkah last
week.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, if my kids heard they handed out gifts on Buddha's birthday, we’d be celebrating that too.”

  Justin was going through Slidell's pockets like a derelict in an alley. I left him at it. There were about half a dozen cops on the scene now, including a diver and photographer. John Emory, soaked up to the knot of his neat tie, was shivering inside a thick blanket. He and Nancy White had taken the call and found the body—a rough way to start their partnership. I saw Nancy a few yards off, also wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a big oak. She had her arm around a skinny boy of eleven or twelve in a cheap cut-down coat, sneakers, and a just about shaved blond head (quick cure for lice, probably). Nancy was nodding as she listened to him. “Hey, Chief, c’mere,” she yelled at me. “Talk to Wally.”

  Wally lived about two miles up the road in a rental farm— modern lingo for a tenant shack with a couple of worked-out acres and a few dozen scruffy chickens. He’d found the car because he’d gotten a Daisy air rifle for Christmas. Forbidden to leave the yard with it, naturally he’d rushed off into the woods to shoot anything that happened to be there. Not much was, so he’d kept walking until he’d come upon the clearing of smashed undergrowth, which he’d followed to the ledge above the Shocco. There he’d hidden, pretending to be somebody like Rambo, firing down on “stuff” in the river. It wasn’t that he’d deduced the car from the rutted bank, or even seen the car, which had been completely submerged. He’d just leaned out too far from his ambush spot, the ledge had given way, and he’d tumbled down the bank, losing his brand-new rifle to the muddy water. So he’d dived in, coat and all. And that's when he’d bumped up against the Ford. If he’d hit it diving, it might have killed him.