Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  The dive had been instinct; the decision to tell his parents about it was courage, because as Nancy told me later, “his fuckin’ daddy whipped him good”—I suspect because the boy’d lost a B.B. gun that they’d doubtless had on lay-away since summer. But after Wally's folks had taken a look at the ruts, and weighed the pros and cons of isolationism versus citizenship, in the end they’d decided to call the police. Nancy had already talked to them, then brought Wally back with her to the scene.

  I leaned down, shook the boy's cold skinny hand. He wore a cheap digital watch that looked big as a clock on his wrist. “Thank you,” I said. “You did the right thing. I’m Cuddy Mangum. Merry Christmas.”

  He was clearly scared speechless, but he nodded up at me, then looked back at Nancy.

  She said, “Chief, I told Wally we’d get him a new rifle, okay?”

  “That seems pretty reasonable, Officer White.” (She not only didn’t have her tie on; she was wearing a bulky purple-striped turtle-neck over her khaki shirt. Looks like everybody got sweaters for Christmas.)

  I sat down on the cold grass beside them. “You lived around here long, Wally?” He nodded. “Your folks know Willie Slidell pretty well?”

  His small Adam's apple gulped. “Some. Not too good, I guess.” He looked across the clearing at the plastic mound where Justin knelt. “Is it him? Mr. Slidell?”

  “Yes.” I gave him a little while to adjust to this. “Wally? Is that Mr. Slidell's car? You recognize it when we pulled it out?”

  “No sir. He's got a tan station wagon.”

  “What about this white Ford?”

  His pale blue eyes stayed bravely on mine. “He didn’t drive it that I know of. But I think I maybe saw it once or twice.”

  “In the barn?” No answer. I took out two packages of cheese crackers, threw one of them in his lap, and opened the other one. “Wally, what grade you in, eighth?”

  “No sir, sixth.”

  “Really? You sure look older.”

  “I’m eleven and a half.” He opened the crackers carefully and slid one out.

  “The school bus take you all the way home or let you off out on the exit road?”

  “By the road.”

  “Didn’t you ever sort of check out Slidell's place when you were passing by? Look around, you know? Like lately, I’m wondering if he had somebody visiting him for a while?” Wally studied the ground and I chewed up a cracker. “You know what? My teachers used to say to me, ‘Cuddy, curiosity killed the cat.’ But those teachers were wrong as they could be.” I popped another cracker in my mouth, and finally he started to nibble on his. “Curiosity made me the youngest chief of police Hillston ever had.”

  He looked up suspiciously. Well, I did have on jeans, sneakers, and a down jacket. I said, “Nancy, you wanna tell this man I’m the chief of police.”

  Nancy vouched for me.

  Wally thought it over, finished his cracker, and slid out another. “I think he lived all by himself.”

  “Um hum. Ever get a good look in his barn?”

  “I guess I saw the Ford there.”

  “Good. See any big rolls of paper in there?”

  “It could have been paper. Tall round things in cardboard?”

  “Right. That's good. Slidell ever run you off his place? That used to happen to me a lot, I’d be snooping around.”

  Wally slowly nodded yes without looking up. “But I never took stuff, or even touched it,” he mumbled. He took his time over a few more nibbles. “I think somebody was staying there last week maybe. I think a couple of times I saw him out in the yard.”

  “You think you could describe him?”

  Wally described a large muscular man, neither young nor old, dark nor fair, “just regular.” One time Wally saw him through the window without his shirt on; he had a red scar sideways on his back. One time he watched him out in the yard firing at coffee cans with a big pistol.

  I asked him, “Good shot, this man?”

  “Yessir.” He nodded seriously.

  “Did you happen to check around for bullets? I would, if I’d been you.” Blinking slowly, he nodded again, and admitted he’d picked up some of the slugs after the man had gone back in the house. I told him Nancy was going to take him home and borrow those bullet shells; tomorrow we wanted him to come down to my office and look at some pictures with us, and then we’d give him a new B.B. gun. I threw in a promised tour of the jail, and he ate a half cracker in one gulp. “One more thing, Wally, you remember Saturday, when there was the big accident right up here on I-28. When the two men got killed?”

  He looked sorry to let me down. “I just saw it on TV.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping you maybe noticed something. Because you’re a good noticer, real good.”

  Wally was disappointed to have to say that he hadn’t been anywhere near the car crash. He’d ridden his bike five miles west, over to Lake Road Airport, the small private landing field where they gave flying lessons, plus Piper Cub rides for twenty-five dollars, which if he ever had twenty-five dollars he was going to take. “Saturdays I go to watch them sometimes. They don’t see me. I sort of hide,” he admitted, though with some trouble breathing—apparently he’d been forbidden to go to the airport, or warned off by the people who ran it. When I said he ought to be careful riding a bike along a highway, he gave me a look that was pride pure and simple. “I’m careful. I noticed something at the airport,” he added.

  “What was that, Wally?”

  “Saturday, the one you mean? That man was there riding in a plane with this other man that comes a lot.”

  “What man?” I thought he meant the man at Slidell's.

  But he didn’t. “I ’membered him when they showed his picture on the TV. That black man, that the news says they shot him.”

  “Cooper Hall?”

  “My daddy don’t believe the news though. He says y’all just want people thinking somebody shot him ’cause it's like Martin Luther King.”

  Nancy and I looked at each other. I said, “Are you sure about this, Wally? You saw Cooper Hall at the airport. Are you real sure?”

  He thought about it. “Yessir.”

  Wally didn’t know who the other man was, but thought probably somebody at Lake Road Airport could tell us his name, because he had his own plane. “They all treat him like a kind of a big shot, I guess. Just the one that got shot was black. The other one looked kind of rich.”

  He’d even noticed the time when Coop Hall and the other man had gone up for their plane ride on Saturday, and when they’d come down. While he was watching, he kept track of flights on his watch, which he told us he’d bought with his egg money and it was “a good one.” They’d stayed up an hour, and landed at “two-thirty-something.”

  “Did they leave together?”

  “No, just the black man. He drove off in his car, sort of a beat-up car.” Wally folded the plastic around the rest of his crackers, and put them in his coat pocket. He looked at us both. “Does that help?”

  I said, “Wally, that helps. That helps so much, in a couple of days, Officer White's gonna come back out here and take you up for a twenty-five-dollar plane ride. That's a Christmas present.”

  Nancy said, “Forget it. I’ve never been in a plane in my life.”

  Wally gave her a solemn stare: “Me neither. So it’ll be okay.”

  chapter 10

  Christmas night I spent downtown in my office, reading articles and reports, drawing circles around names on my blackboard; “thinking with chalk,” as the man called it who’d given me the habit, whose name, in fact, was on my board now. “Isaac” with a question mark. Where was he, and what did he know was missing from Cooper Hall's file box?

  From my window high up in the municipal building, I could see the flying Santas frozen in midair above Main Street, the choir of cutout angels lit up on the roof of the new Macy's Department Store, the sparkle on the tree atop the Hillston Star building; on almost every shop, office, and restaurant, I coul
d see some wreath or words sprayed in snow or garlanded lights, some something that people had gone to the trouble, Christmas after Christmas, to fix up in public celebration. Tonight Hillston was peaceful, quiet, and satisfied it had made that communal effort. Tonight in the dark it was looking its best. Of course, it wasn’t as long-lived, or as good-looking, as, say, just about any homely, unimportant little town you zip past on a train in Italy. It wasn’t as civilized, or as wise in the sly campaigns of the world either. Just an unimportant, decent, homely American town that had built back against entropy and chaos for 205 years.

  Still, Hillston had gotten civilized enough even now in its adolescence to have kissed good-bye those naive vows of its national youth—for example, the ones about no entangling alliances, no House of Lords. It didn’t take me much reading in Coop Hall's article on the Haver secret society with that undemocratic title, or much checking of Brookside's data on the Constitution Club, to predict that there was going to be a lot of entangling overlap in the names of the membership of both. Like peers and party leaders of all times, all places, the nobles of Hillston were thick as thieves, and always had been. And like peers and party leaders of all times, all places, they were such hogs at the board of plenty that the poor folks waiting below for the trickle-down of the lords’ crumbs stayed mighty skinny.

  But revolution's not my business. I’m not paid to stop corruption on a cultural scale. I’m paid by the system to stop the petty thieves from fouling the machinery. I work at the bottom, keeping the lower decks of the ship of state clean. It's when the nobles visit the hull to order things done that they don’t feel like doing them-selves, that's when they step into my territory, and that's when I make them my business. And that's what I spent Christmas night thinking with chalk about, writing circles of names on that blackboard.

  Finally, I must have fallen asleep on my (or rather the city's) imitation leather couch, Martha Mitchell at my feet like on a duke's tomb. I dropped off, going over—for maybe the thousandth time— the few minutes, as it turned out, crucial minutes, I’d been on the scene the night George Hall had shot Bobby Pym, sending himself to death row and his younger brother Coop into a political activism that had ended with another bullet to the head.

  In memory I think I might have heard George fire the gun, from blocks away, but I’m not sure. That hot summer Saturday night, there was a lot of loud music from open windows, and car noise and crowd noise along that section of East Main. I’d just finished my shift and was driving over to Mill Street to check on my father. (He’d lived alone since Mama's death, and he was starting to die, too, but we didn’t know it yet.) When I turned onto Pitt Street, the people bunched by the door of Smoke's Bar spotted my squad car, and most of them slipped back inside or off into the shadows. My next memory is George sitting on the sidewalk, and then another clump of people farther down the street, squatted around a twisting body that lay near the curb; I remember I noticed how the leg spasmed. And I remember being aware of all the dark, silent faces staring out from doorways, and down from windowsills. I radioed for help, but the next squad car got there so fast (three minutes, with the ambulance only a few minutes later), that I knew somebody had already phoned before I did. I found out later, in fact, that an anonymous call had come while Pym and Hall were still fighting over the gun inside the bar. As it happened, Captain Van Fulcher himself was in that squad car, along with two officers, cruising nearby on Maplewood, set to pay one of his periodic calls on the Popes (a huge extended family of fairly incompetent thieves, generations in the trade) to see what he might find on their premises while harassing them. Fulcher had a thing about arresting the Popes—they were his token whites, keeping his arrest record from charges of racism.

  George sat alone on the curb, in T-shirt and jeans; arms hanging down between his legs. Soon as I saw the pistol lying beside him on the sidewalk, I pulled my gun. That's when he raised his arms and said, “I’m not running. Just don’t shoot.” His nose was bleeding, and he kept wiping at the blood that dripped into his mustache. He asked about Pym, but didn’t say much else, just stared out at the street. He didn’t say much more at his trial, except that he’d thought Pym was running toward a blue Ford to get another gun, and so had shot in self-defense. Of course, by the trial, who knew what cars might have been parked on that dark, crowded street.

  I didn’t recognize Bobby Pym at first; he was out of uniform, and besides, his whole face was oozy with blood. A red hole gaped right through his eye, but incredibly enough he was still alive. There was a swarm of people (almost all black) hovering about, everybody pushing at each other, shouting; it was all pretty confused. I was yelling, “What happened?!” over the sound of sirens coming. But all I got was head shakes, shrugs, the mumbled, “Didn’t see it,” or, “Look like a fight,” and the blur of people's backs retreating fast into doorways. It's hard now to sort out what I saw, from what I heard at the trial, not that I even heard much of the trial; I wasn’t on record as the arresting officer. Like I said, I was only on the scene about five minutes before Captain Fulcher careened around the corner and took over. I was told to follow the ambulance to University Hospital Emergency Room. An hour later Fulcher showed up there with Bobby's wife and father, and half a dozen police officers (including, I recall, his partner Winston Russell). Word came soon after they arrived that Officer Pym had already died in the O.R. When I left, Mrs. Pym (who looked about eighteen) was hysterically insisting that Bobby's killer had robbed him first, because Bobby's wallet wasn’t in the plastic bag of personal effects the nurse gave her. No one ever found the wallet. George certainly didn’t have it.

  That was the end of my official involvement. The arresting officer of record was Van Dorn Fulcher, publicized as the captain who still works the toughest beat in town. Of course, I had no claim to the case, other than my having accidentally driven past the scene. I wasn’t even in homicide yet—not ’til I made lieutenant. And as I already had more than enough of my own cases, and my own troubles, George Hall gradually faded for me to just “the Hall case,” department gossip, maybe a little chagrin at a missed chance for “the big collar” that can speed promotion. It was only after George did the unexpected, when everybody had figured he’d go for guilty to second-degree, and pleaded innocent; and only after Mitchell Bazemore asked the jury for the death penalty, and they gave it to him, only then did my mind start going back to the image I’d first seen of George Hall, sitting slumped on the curb of that Canaan sidewalk, arms between his knees. From then on that image would push its way into my thoughts at odd times, and on bad nights George began to show up in my dreams.

  Lying on my couch now, I dreamed he was with me on a search-and-destroy near a fire base under attack in the Mekong. Pitch-black steamy night, we were huddled together in the weeds of a hollowed riverbank; incoming whistling down on us, throwing up chunks of mud, the sky bright with red and green tracers. I yelled at George, “Where's it coming from? Theirs or ours!” His mouth was next to my ear, kind of chuckling. He said, “If you knew, man, you think there’d be any difference?” Then blood suddenly spat out of his mouth, hot and sticky across my face. It woke me up, sweating.

  Later, Hiram Davies must have sneaked into my office, turned off my light, and draped my overcoat across me. At dawn the pigeons gossiping on the window ledge woke me again. I listened to Brodie Cheek selling tapes of his salvation seminars on the radio while I did a few knee bends to get the kinks out. On my desk was a neatly typed report from Hiram, who preferred the slow formality of his old Royal to the faster pace of the computer, or just telling me whatever it was he had to say.

  TO: C. R. Mangum, Capt., HPD

  FROM: Sgt. H. Davies

  RE: Suspects’ Access to HPD Impoundment Facility.

  The “Hillston Police Department Impoundment Facility” was a little concrete building next to a chain-fenced lot on the west end of town. In the lot we kept unclaimed/abandoned, and recovered/stolen cars, motorcycles, and bikes, along with broken-down police
vehicles. In the building we stored confiscated illegalities—by which I mean shelves of guns, rifles, and knives of considerable variety; shelves of pills, powders, and weeds of considerable variety; shelves of lewd and lascivious entertainments of the same considerable variety; and shelves of other people's property, even more various. The “suspects” I had in mind here were Officers Robert Earl Pym and Winston M. Russell, Jr. Their “access” to this “facility” in the period immediately preceding Pym's death had been, according to Hiram's research, “definitive and unobstructed.” In other words, flat-out easy, since (a) inventory procedures at the time had been lousy, and the records were a mess, (b) the night watchman at the time was an old retired cop on a pension who could have slept through the bombing of Dresden, and (c) Winston M. Russell, Jr. had once been assigned to duty there—long enough to get to know the place very well.

  Now as soon as Pete Zaslo at the Silver Comet had let me in on news about the bad old days before the reign of Mangum the Incorruptible, my theory was that Russell and Pym had been selling off impounded HPD goodies to customers who were in no position to argue about prices, since they were themselves violating some stuffy old statute or other—like the ones against prostitution and gambling, both of which were rumored to have flourished, for example, upstairs at Smoke's. The first call I made after the pigeons woke me up was to Justin, so he could get an early start working on my theory. He responded with a string of preppy profanities and silly demands that I tell him the time.

  I said, “It's 6:09 A.M., Lieutenant. Turn on your radio; Brodie Cheek's already on the air telling us Jesus hates abortions and Mayor Carl Yarborough condones riots. I’m already at my desk. That's how I’ve risen to the top of the heap while you wallow in the shrubs below, clipping those coupons; how I climbed the ladder of success, beating the Peter Principle, while you were lying around just beating your peter; how I maximized—”