Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  But we weren’t circling. We were moving across North Hillston toward Briarhills, and in the ordinary sublunary amount of time, we reached the brick columns of the gates and turned in. The driveway was as straight and as long and as bordered by lights as an airline runway. High-branched rows of sycamore trees on either side of the drive blocked my view of the grounds, but I could remember where the wooden Japanese bridge had crossed the creek, and where the gazebo had looked through lattice over the pool, and where the greenhouse was hidden by the grove of cherry and willow trees. I could remember the house, the tall, impregnable expanse of white façade, with its sixteen shuttered windows across the front. (I’d stood on the steps and counted them one afternoon after Lee's mother had gently lied that Lee wasn’t home, and then softly closed the door on me.)

  There were lights burning in carriage lamps on either side of the wide varnished door, and lights on in most of the windows. And ground lights where the driveway ended in a paved oval with a fountain in its center. From the pool rose a statue of a young woman in a tunic with her arm around an antlered deer. The pool was circled by flower beds—except now in December, there were no flowers; I just remember them having been there, the extravagant patterns of unfamiliar colors.

  Onto the trees and brick and statuary, snow now fell, and vanished. I stopped the car, and turned to Lee. “Who's having the party? All your lights are on.”

  She looked at me, then vaguely at the house as if she didn’t recognize it. “Oh. The lights? Nobody. No one's home.”

  “Oh.” Around us, night was lightened by the falling white snow, and softened. Everything was losing its shape, the outline of the shrubbery, the sharp corners of the house.

  She said, “Well, the Reeds, but they’re probably all asleep by now.”

  “Bessie Reed still works here?”

  “Yes, and her son and his wife. You remember her?”

  “Yes.” I turned off the motor, and listened to the fullness of the silence.

  She said, “Bessie gave me a note from you once. Brought it up to my room while my mother was having a lunch party. A note that you were—”

  “That I was waiting by the little Japanese bridge.”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at my hands moving up and down on the steering wheel. Finally I asked her, “Why did you tell Brookside I’d be at this party tonight?”

  She looked at my hands as she answered, “So if anyone mentioned it to him later, he would have already heard it casually from me.”

  I thought of ten or fifteen things I could ask or say next, then felt each one get caught in my throat and slide burning back down inside me. We sat watching the silent snow curtain the car windows, enclosing us. I could see her without looking at her, the line of her cheek and mouth, the dark gold hair brushing the curve of her ear, the pale blue vein in her neck. I could hear her breath, and the slippery sound of her nylons as she crossed her legs. I could smell the cold air caught in the black fur of her coat.

  Then I looked at her. “I’m not casual.”

  She said, “I know that.”

  I kept holding to the steering wheel, hearing each small movement of the seat cover as she turned toward me and placed her hand over my hand. Her fingers laced through mine; they stroked my wrist under the cuff of my coat, and their heat ran up my arm into my chest, poured in everywhere, melting the tightness.

  I heard her breath catch before she whispered, “You have beautiful hands. Like they could build or heal or mend anything they wanted to. Like they could set everything right, make everything all right.”

  Her fingers tightened over mine, then she loosened my hand on the wheel, and with a small moan, she pulled me against her, drawing me to her side of the car. My arms closed around her, and my mouth grazed her hair, the clean cold sweet smell tingling into me. She tilted her head back, opening her neck into a white curve, her lips parting just before my mouth touched hers.

  When we pulled away, I cupped her face in my hands, and we looked at each other, long, close, deeper than in the past, looked right through those years apart as if we were living each one in an instant, living them all together in an instant, coming through them, bright and fast as lightning, to this moment. Then my hands moved down the lines of her neck, across her shoulders, gathering her to me, and we fell together, easily as the snow, down against the seat.

  I opened her coat, slid it down off her arms, and kissed the scented hollow of her breastbone, dizzy with the keen spiced fragrance of her skin, the soft swell of flesh between her breast and arm. Her hands kept stroking up my neck into my hair, clasping my back under my coat, drawing me closer. Her skin was warm as my lips, smoother than the white satin that slipped rustling under me as I pressed myself to her. I could feel her words prickling my neck, but I couldn’t tell whose breath I was hearing, mine or hers.

  Her eyes were all I could see: the full dark irises ringed by the smoky, gold-flecked gray. There were faint lines at their corners now that hadn’t been there the last time I had looked this close. Those clear, young eyes had always fluttered closed when we kissed. Now they were wide open, dark with desire, staring into my own. My voice was a strange low whisper coming from somewhere beyond her eyes. I said, “This is as far as we ever got before.”

  Her eyes smiled back into mine. “I know. Weren’t we silly?”

  Our legs coiled, squeezing together in the close space.

  She whispered, deep in her throat, “I used to wonder what it would have felt like.”

  “Like this.”

  She pulled my hand to her mouth and slowly kissed the inside of the palm. “Would you like to come in the house with me?”

  “No.”

  Our hands couldn’t stop moving. She slid hers between the studs of my laced shirt and onto my chest. I pulled the thin strap of her gown down from her shoulder and circled the curve of her breast. Her fingers were tight and quick in my hair. “Then here,” she said. “Let's just stay here. Hidden in the snow. In the back seat. Like we were young again.”

  I whispered against her breast. “We didn’t have a car then…especially not a police car.”

  She laughed out loud, and my lips felt her low, soft laughter lifting her breast.

  I said, “I don’t feel like being young again. I feel like finally being young the first time.” At least I think I said it, maybe I just thought it, because her hand moved up my thigh, like a flame racing over the black wool.

  chapter 12

  My mother's son, I never leave any lights burning in my apartment while I’m away. In my childhood, whenever we went out of our house, even for an hour, Mama would fretfully rush back from the car to check again that the lamps were turned off, and the stove, that the faucets weren’t leaking, that the iron was unplugged, that all the doors were locked. Often, to my father's patient sighs, to my sister Vivian's and my own impatient disgust, she’d be overcome a second or a third time—even after we were blocks away—by fear of profligate waste of light and water, of catastrophic loss by fire or flood, and we’d have to return home “just to be sure.”

  My mother was never sure. She was never not afraid that debts and sickness and accidents would drag us under, like sharks in the ocean, and chew us to bits. On the few vacations when we’d had money to rent a cottage at Wrightsville Beach, she would never enter the surf with us, but would stand frowning at the tide's edge, scurrying backwards if the foam rushed at her feet. Helpless, she’d watch the waves rise behind our bobbing heads, and would stretch out both arms, frantic to haul us back. “You’re out too far!” she’d scream uselessly into the vast roar. “Malcolm, don’t take them out so far! Viv! Cuddy! Come back!” Beyond her reach, we’d cling to my dad's arms, thrilled by her anxiety.

  My mother's son, I had an instinct for danger; since childhood I’d studied the waters of my life carefully; brooded on those waters, planned for emotional riptides, for sudden drop-offs into bad luck, for hidden moral shoals. Well, if ever I’d gone out too far, it was now,
with Lee Brookside. I was swimming against the tide toward open ocean. But for tonight, at least, there was no reason not to figure I could float all the way to Spain on my back, happily gazing at the sky.

  In this buoyant suspension, I parked the patrol car and ran to my building's entrance, zigzagging a design in the fresh thin coat of snow. Way past one in the morning, there were few lights on anywhere in River Rise (a less prodigal place than Briarhills), and in the dark breezeway shared by four apartments, I banged my shin on a bicycle. Outside my door, which was at the far end of the corridor (the river-view side, which I’d picked over the parking-lot-view side for an extra eight thousand dollars), I had to fumble for a while with my key. Instinct is stronger than euphoria: the instant the key turned, I knew the door had already been unlocked, and a rush of adrenaline tightened my muscles; the instant the door opened, I knew the white swag light over my dining room table, the lamp by my denim couch, and the track lighting in my kitchen were all burning, and that somebody besides me had turned them on. I still had my hand around the knob, pulling the door closed, cursing the fact that I wasn’t carrying my beeper, much less a gun, or anything heavier than a rented black patent leather shoe, when I heard someone in the hall behind me. Let me tell you, the beat of a lover's heart is nothing compared to the pounding mine now set up, trying to get out of my chest. I whirled around, dropping to a crouch, arms up, already thinking about Winston Russell's Carolina pancake, that gob of ignited lye and kerosene flying into my face again.

  “Cuddy?”

  “What!”

  “It's me.”

  It took a second before I recognized Nora Howard from the apartment across the hall, standing there in her doorway with a wineglass in one hand, a yellow legal pad in the other. She’d had her hair in a ponytail the night I’d helped her assemble the bike—probably the one I’d just tripped over—and now it was in loose black waves to her shoulders, which gave her a very different look. “Goddamn, you scared me!” This time I was whispering. “Get out of the light!” I scuttled over to her, and yanked on her jeans’ leg. Shocked into obedience, she crouched next to me. I gestured at my door, whispered again. “Somebody's in my apartment.”

  She shook her head at me, bewildered; then she said in a normal tone, “Oh, no, it's okay. It's a friend of—”

  But before she could finish, a big shadow, already talking, filled her doorway. “Nora? Cuddy back?” I knew the voice and the shadow both, but I was so surprised, I just stared at him as he said, “Why are you two squatting in the corridor, or whatever these modern condominiums like to call what looks like a hotel hall to an old man like me?” In his socks, with his frayed plaid flannel bathrobe on over his shirt and pants, Isaac Rosethorn rumbled toward us.

  Nora stood up, wiping the sloshed wine from her hand, but I couldn’t move, even with Isaac swaying over me. He clucked. “Slim, you appear to have gone on a café society binge over the holidays. At least it looks as if you’ve been sleeping in that tuxedo for a week. Where have you been? Sergeant Davies had no response from your pocket gizmo, or the car either.”

  He gazed down at me mournfully with those deep sad eyes, and I actually ran a guilty hand through my disheveled hair before the outrageousness of his remark struck me and brought me to my feet. “Where’ve I been?” Between terror and relief, I got so angry I actually grabbed his lapels and gave them a quick shake. “Where’ve you been, for a goddamn week? Don’t tell me you’ve been holed up in this lady's apartment while I’ve had half of HPD out rooting through the entire countryside for you. Jesus! Where were you!”

  “Delaware. And don’t exaggerate, Slim.” Isaac gave Nora a consoling smile, as if to comfort her for being neighbors with a lunatic. He smoothed down his robe. “Nora and I only met, oh, six hours ago. But we are already consociates of the most amiable sort, aren’t we, my dear? Amicita curiae, one might say. You weren’t home, and she was kind enough to invite me—”

  I strode back to my door, and flung it open. “You broke into my apartment?!”

  “Ah, no, I haven’t the knack. Your superintendent let me in. I told him I was your father. Nora kindly corroborated this mild prevarication. And, of course, being a man of sentiment, I always keep your photo in my wallet, and showed it to Mr. Morrison, who was quite touched by my paternal devotion.” He gave a pat to his breast, where his jacket pocket would have been, had he not for some peculiar reason been lounging around a strange woman's home in a bathrobe which was not only pocked with cigarette burns, but stained with God knows how many years of dribbled barbecue sauce.

  I said, “Delaware?”

  Isaac's hostess (also in her socks, but otherwise fully dressed in jeans and a green sweater) suddenly gasped, “Our potato skins!” and ran back into her apartment, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t stand there in the cold, Isaac. Cuddy, you’re welcome to come on over.”

  But I blocked the eager Isaac from trotting after his new buddy. Prodding him to my door, I nudged him inside. A ratty suitcase— his, no doubt; obviously, my place was just a changing room for visits across the hall—lay open in the middle of my carpet. I pointed at it. “You came over here with your bag in the middle of the night, after disappearing for a week, to tell me you went to Delaware?” He took his long-winded time explaining: he’d just driven straight back from Delaware (in “a friend's car”) to Dollard Prison, where he’d met with George Hall this afternoon (or rather yesterday afternoon, since it was now nearly 2:00 A.M.). He’d called HPD about 8:30, and talked to Hiram Davies, who’d told him about my getting sapped down in the garage. After Hiram couldn’t reach me (I’d left my beeper on my bureau and turned off the car radio), and had telephoned everybody he could reach, like Justin and Etham (though not, I fervently hoped, Mrs. Marion Sunderland), he and Isaac had convinced each other that I was in “trouble,” that whoever had rigged my car had come back to finish me off, and that I was probably lying in a puddle of blood on my wall-to-wall, or had suffered a delayed concussion and drowned while taking a bath (leaving poor Hiram stuck with Martha Mitchell for the rest of his—or her—life). “So,” said Isaac, scrounging in his robe. “I was seized by an intuition of disaster, luckily quite off the mark. But we drove over here to check things out.” He pulled out his bifocals, shook lint and nut husks off their case, and put them on. “Besides, I felt we should stay hidden, and here's as safe as a jail, which of course was another possibility.”

  “You and Hiram Davies wanted to hide here?”

  “Billy. Billy and I.” He picked up the phone by my couch, and started dialing, his nose an inch from the numbers. “Gilchrist. What's the matter with you, Cuddy?”

  As he said it, I heard a sudden wheezing snuffly sound coming from upstairs. I pointed toward the noise. “Billy Gilchrist is here, in my bedroom? Isaac, what the fuck is going on?”

  “Shhh.” The old lawyer waved a fat paw at me as he said into the phone, “Sergeant Davies?…Yes, speaking….Yes, yes, we found him….No, quite unharmed. Appears to have stayed late, at some, ah, party, and not been, ah, in a position to respond to his beeper.…Yes, you’re welcome. Good-bye then.” He turned to me, peering over his glasses. “Concerned about you. Davies.”

  “I wasn’t lost, Isaac. I didn’t need to be found!”

  “Shh shh shh! Billy's not well. He can’t sleep.”

  “Maybe not, but he can snore. You know Paul Madison's gone nuts worrying about Gilchrist?”

  “So we’ll call him. What's his number?” He picked up the phone again.

  “Jesus, it's two in the morning. Hang up. I’ll call him tomorrow.” “Well, you said he’d gone nuts. Cuddy, didn’t you get my post-card? I wrote you from Delaware; I explained where we were.” “No! I certainly didn’t get your ‘postcard.’ So I’m real curious.” “Keep your voice down. Well, I mailed it. Billy knew an individual who could give us some information, a man Billy saw with George at Smoke's the night of the shooting.”

  This stopped me on my way up the stairs to evict my uninvited
guest, or at least turn him over on his side. “Gilchrist was in Smoke's that night?”

  “Only by happenstance. This other fellow, who's now in prison in Delaware, is a friend of Billy's, so we went up and talked him into giving us a deposition.”

  Thoughts jumped like a horse locked in the starting gate. “A guy called Moonfoot Butler?”

  “Ah, you did get my postcard.”

  But no, I hadn’t gotten it (and never did; he’d probably neglected to put a stamp on the thing). Instead I had, in his phrase, “used my noggin,” and, in fact (as he nobly allowed later), he was “impressed” that I had independently begun to formulate a theory about the Pym shooting so close to the one he had worked on with Coop Hall for months. Of course, we’d each gotten a break—mine had come from the Willie Slidell connection. Isaac's had come after Coop's death, by means of Billy Gilchrist.

  When I arrived, Nora and Isaac had already been talking through the case together for hours, and it was a little unsettling to hear her sound so familiar with names I’d been fretting over for a long time, names she’d probably never heard before tonight. But Isaac had a way of forming these strong initial impressions, and acting on them instantly. Turns out that when he’d banged on Nora Howard's door to see if she knew me (she told him she didn’t think I’d been home since Christmas morning—which was maybe a little too nosily observant of her), she’d offered to help him get into my apartment by tricking Mr. Morrison—with whom I was going to have to have a serious talk. Then she’d invited Isaac over so Billy could “sleep,” and twenty minutes later, Isaac had hired her to clerk for him on the Hall case while she was studying for the state bar exams. She’d told him she’d read some of his briefs, and that she figured that working for Isaac Rosethorn would be the best cram course for passing the bar she could take. Her admiration undoubtedly flattered any reservations out of the old egomaniac, so Nora and he were now fast pals. Maybe she was even planning to put him up in her extra bedroom (mine had no bed, just books). Her little boy and girl were off in their Christmas teepee with her brother's kids, all of them camping out on the floor of Carippini's Restaurant for the adventure of it. This family news was given me by Isaac himself, who appeared to have made himself at home with the Howards mighty quickly, what with his wandering around in his stocking feet on his first visit, and to have taken an unprecedented domestic turn—cooking those nocturnal potato skins she referred to as “ours.”