Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  We planted an article in the papers that a Mr. Billy Gilchrist was wanted for questioning about a suitcase said to have been stolen from a Raleigh bus station locker; then we sent Billy out on the street as bait, just in case Russell was still lurking around. Nothing happened except two former drinking buddies of Billy's tried to turn him in for a reward. I had the Georgia police doing surveillance in Russell's hometown, to the indignation of his relatives, who protested that they’d struck his name from the family Bible twenty years ago, hadn’t heard from him since, and hoped they never did hear from him. I had inquiries out along selected Fanshaw truck routes for possible buyers on the receiving end of those stolen shipments. Ten HPD officers had logged 1,205 hours of interviews with anybody they could find who’d ever met either of the suspects. We turned up nothing.

  Well, that's not true. We found out more about Winston Russell and Purley Newsome than people generally get to know about each other; enough to discourage those with any faith in human nature from ever wanting to pry into their neighbors’ secrets. We heard from people they’d bullied for sex and kickbacks, or just for the fun of it. We heard that they’d been known to socialize with members of the KKK. We learned that when Purley had closed out his bank account on the twenty-sixth, he’d had a little too much in it for a man living on a cop's salary. We learned there was riverbank mud still caught in the ridged soles of the shoes he’d washed, then tossed damp to the rear of his closet. We knew that when Winston was in Dollard Prison, he’d had fifteen visits from Purley, and that he’d bragged there that he had “a shitload of money” stashed waiting for him when he got out. (He also boasted that as soon as he was released, he was going to kill me for sending him up.) All we didn’t unearth, poking at the worms turned up under the rocks of Russell and Newsome's pasts, was their whereabouts. That, and their place in the puzzle.

  Because I didn’t think we had the puzzle in place yet. My new computer (its relational database manager is a much more patient fellow than I am) fed itself years of daily patrol logs for Russell, Pym, and Newsome, cross-referenced them with unsolved robberies, coordinated that with Fanshaw Paper Company truck shipments signed out by William Slidell, and so substantiated for me the dates, figures, and routes of their racket. Etham Foster (just as patient as my computer) matched two single strands of hair from inside Slidell's tan station wagon with hair taken out of Purley's bathroom brush. But I already knew these particular men were stealing, and they were smuggling, and that at least one of them had killed. I just wasn’t sure I knew for whom they were doing it.

  “For money. For themselves. That's why. For themselves, for money,” said Mitchell Bazemore, who by February had briskly flip-flopped under the weight of the evidence, from his first position—that Billy Gilchrist and Moonfoot Butler were lying scum; Pym and Newsome, paragons of law and order—to his present position—that Pym and Newsome (along with Russell and Slidell) had been a gang of crooks, working with Moonfoot Butler and George Hall. Together, they were responsible for every item missing from HPD, and every warehouse burglary in Hillston during the past ten years. In the D.A.'s new theory, Willie Slidell had gotten himself killed in “one of those typical falling-outs of thieves over the money.” We went around about this again and again under the fading color photo of Ronald Reagan on Bazemore's office wall.

  “What money, Mitch? Billy Gilchrist got the locker money. And now you’re saying Russell and Newsome shot Slidell because he wouldn’t tell them where he’d hidden some more money? My mama would call that cutting off your nose to spite your face. Because they sure were looking for something at Slidell's they were having trouble finding.”

  “They found the money and took it.”

  “And why’d they shoot Cooper Hall?” Much as he wanted to, Mitch couldn’t get around the fact that the same gun had killed both Cooper and Slidell.

  He twisted his knuckles into his biceps as he fought the facts. “You can have it one of two ways, Mangum. Russell was driving along, alone—”

  “I’ve told you. No. He couldn’t have fired across the width of his car and through a window, not with that kind of accuracy. I don’t care how many firing range awards the bastard won.”

  “Then he was with Purley Newsome, then. No, okay, that's out. Newsome was here at municipal at the time, correct?”

  I’d already pointed this fact out on a dozen occasions, but Bazemore's the tenacious kind of guy who won’t let go of even useless ideas until he mulches them to pulp. I just stood there, looking at Ronnie.

  Bazemore poked his thumb in his chin dimple. “Slidell has an alibi for Saturday afternoon. He was with his sister.”

  I fiddled with the fringe on the flag by the window. “Lana Pym is lying.”

  “You haven’t proved it. And you aren’t catching the point. I’m proposing that Russell drove along, saw Hall as he passed him, in other words saw a black man with all sorts of left-wing slogans stuck to his car, maybe recognized him for the radical on the media all the time. We know Russell has a violent, a very violent record. It's possible he simply impulsively shot out his window at Hall, simply out of impulse. Spur-of-the-moment type thing.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  Rubbing his Phi Beta Kappa key, Bazemore paced around his desk as if he were measuring it, taking the corners square. “Well, your only other choice is to assume there is a connection. That's your second choice. There's a connection between the Hall brothers and Russell that—”

  “If you’ll recall, I picked number two a long time ago.”

  “—a connection that goes back to the original murder of Pym. If in fact there's any truth in that bus station locker story, it may have been that Russell thought Cooper Hall had taken his money out of that locker.”

  “Then why kill him in such a way that he couldn’t check that possibility out? Sorry, Mitch, doesn’t work.”

  “Then, it may have been that Russell and Slidell were just revenging the killing of Bobby Pym. After all, Pym was their partner and relative. That may have been it. Newsome had nothing to do with it. The state fails to execute George. So in revenge Russell and Pym execute George's brother. That really may have been it.” Bazemore's pacing was stopped short by a jolt of pleasure with this notion.

  I said, “Then too bad they missed the lesson when you were teaching your teenyboppers up at Bible camp that vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. You do hit them with that lesson, don’t you, Mitch?”

  “I don’t enjoy your sarcasm.”

  “No? Well, it's an acquired taste.”

  He pointed his finger at me like an Uncle Sam poster. “Listen, I know what's behind all this. Your bleeding-heart obsession with George Hall. That's what's behind this. The man's a murderer, a convicted murderer, and nothing anyone did or didn’t do to his brother will change that fact.”

  I moved his finger away, and he jerked his arm back. “We’re discussing why something was done to his brother, Mitch, okay?”

  The D.A. then told me the State Supreme Court had been nothing but tricked by “that conceited Jew,” Isaac Rosethorn, into wasting a lot of useless time and money on a new trial for George Hall. But winning the death penalty against Hall this time was going to be even easier than it had been on the first go-round. It was going to be, Mitch announced, lacing his fingers backwards so the knuckles cracked, “not only a piece of cake, but a downright pleasure.” If the original jury had bought first-degree when they didn’t think George even knew Bobby Pym, they were going to hand it over to Mitch on a platter this time, when they heard George had been “in the racket with Pym up to his nose.” Poor Pym—mused Mitch aloud, rehearsing his opening statement no doubt—poor Bobby Pym, desperate for money for his new baby, had probably been led into crime under the influence of black low-lifes like Hall and Moonfoot Butler in the first place. Of course, the D.A. realized he couldn’t throw the jury his favorite, sure-fire pitch—that a black man who shoots a white cop is threatening the whole American way of life—since he was going to have to paint
this particular white cop pretty (morally) black himself. But on the other hand, the prosecution had a curve ball that would win the game anyhow—a black crook who turns on and shoots the white crook who hired him, and paid him, is threatening the whole American way of life.

  “Yes, yes, yes.” He did a few neck exercises, and studied the ceiling awhile. “Slidell and Russell shot Cooper Hall to avenge Pym. That's not going to hurt me in the retrial one little bit. Not one little bit.”

  I picked up a photo on his desk; in it the D.A. stood proudly between Governor Wollston and Lieutenant Governor Lewis in some overstuffed hotel banquet room. I said, “So why do Russell and Newsome turn around and kill Slidell a few days later?”

  Then we were back to the “thieves falling out over money” line. I put the banquet photo down beside the one of the D.A.'s perky wife and their six starched children, all lined up by height and all looking at the camera with the same tense smiles and tight muscles, like they were in the last round of a do-or-die spelling bee where the losers were going to be flogged.

  In all our discussions, there were two things Bazemore was sure of: first, the whole case—thefts, smuggling, murder—did not go beyond the two black men (Hall and Butler), the two missing men (Russell and Newsome), and the two dead men (Pym and Slidell). “The buck stops here,” he informed me forcefully. “Let's get that straight. Dyer Fanshaw has explained to me—voluntarily came in here and explained to me—that he was utterly and entirely ignorant of the misuse to which Fanshaw trucks were allegedly subjected.” Bazemore assumed a tragic stare, focused out the window. “And Otis Newsome has already suffered enough. I don’t want him going through anything else.” (An odd way to put it, since Otis had been dead for months.) “He loved Purley like a father. Otis did not, did not, know what his brother was up to, and when he found out, it crushed the life out of him. Crushed it out.” Bazemore acted this out by pressing his palm down hard on a stack of folders. “We are not dragging Otis Newsome's memory into the gutter where his brother may have chosen to lie down.”

  “Nice, Mitch. Save it for the trial.”

  But Mitch couldn’t stop, and used his empty sofa for a jury box. “Otis Newsome was not his brother's keeper, but we could say that he died for his brother's shame. Now, let him find what peace he can, Above.”

  Now I did believe that Mitch believed what he said. He was a bigot and a bounty hunter, but he had to justify his opinions to that Bible-camp moral thermometer he was always taking everybody's temperature with, including his own. In the years I’d known him, Mitch had never asked me, or—as far as I knew—anyone else in HPD, to plant evidence or perjure testimony or cover up problematic facts. What he did with those facts in a courtroom might be slimy as raw sewage, but he did it while thumping a pure breast. So I didn’t suspect Dyer Fanshaw had confided to Mitch that he was heavily into graft and smuggling, and then slipped him a few thousand to keep it a secret. I didn’t suspect that Otis Newsome had left him a note confessing crimes, and that he’d destroyed the piece of paper. Well, in the end, I guess both of us were going to be surprised by how much the Pure can justify to an Upright Heart.

  When Bazemore finished trying out a few more pieties on his imaginary jury, I said, “I’m telling you again, you’re wrong. We’re dealing here with more than a couple of greedy cops.”

  He flexed his pectorals, straining the buttons on his wool vest. “No, Mangum. We’re not dealing with more than that. And really! Isn’t that bad enough for you—Hillston police officers stealing and murdering?! Maybe you’re the one who's greedy.” He sat down, pompous in his chair, leaning back against the eagle embroidered on its cushion, nodding with the smug derisive smirk that drove me wild. “You’ve already bitten off more than you can chew, wouldn’t you say? You can’t find a murder weapon. Can’t find an eyewitness. You can’t even find the two suspects you’ve already got.”

  Heat was rising fast through my body. “You want to suggest some approach I’ve overlooked?”

  “Right! You’ve thrown so much personnel at this thing that our overall arrest and conviction statistics are down, way down.”

  “Wait a minute, okay, wait a minute! You’re telling me, do more, find them. And telling me, don’t do so much, don’t—”

  “I’m telling you we’re losing our standing state-wise. We’re falling behind. That makes me look bad.” He leapt up and slammed his fist on his desk. “I’m taking the flack because you’re fumbling the ball! That's what I’m telling you, and you better understand it fast!”

  I came around the desk at him, steaming. “Go fuck yourself, Mitch! I’m not working my ass off to beef up your goddamn fucking body count!”

  His head went scarlet, and his neck bulged so much his collar spread. “Get your dirty mouth out of my office before I put my fist through it!”

  We went eyeball-to-eyeball for a while, breathing hard. But he wasn’t about to hit me, and I wasn’t about to hit him, and we both knew it. We’d done this more than once over the years. The problem was to get out of it. He was never much help. This time I was too mad to think for us both, so we just stood there, counting each other's blinks, until luckily his secretary scurried in—maybe she was alarmed by our shouts, or maybe I’d underestimated Mitch and he’d called her with a foot button under his desk. At any rate, she said, “Sir, you’re due in court in five minutes.”

  I let out my breath, and said, “Well, I hate to leave, Mitch, but I guess you better get downstairs and gain some yardage alone. Least a field goal or two. Basketball's my game.” This was a deescalation move, but he was too much of a clod to take it gracefully.

  Hurriedly squeezing his shirt sleeves down over his biceps so he could get his jacket on, he muttered, “Alone is right. I’m certainly not getting much help from your end of the line. That's one thing I’m certainly sure of. And I mean what I said. I’m going to put George Hall away, and I better get your full cooperation in doing it. Follow me?”

  I didn’t bother answering, and he didn’t wait to see if I would.

  Like Rosethorn, Bazemore was war hungry. Both of them could already taste not only the dirt of the battlefield, but the wine of the victory cup. But that game, in which the field was the courtroom, the jury was the scoreboard, and I guess George Hall was the ball, that game was between Mitch and Isaac. My game was to find out where the buck really stopped. Because I didn’t believe it stopped with two dumb thugs like Russell and Newsome. Over the long winter, while George Hall waited for his trial, I waited for a break. Finally, slowly, new puzzle pieces were handed to me; they were the kind that keep people addicted to jigsaw puzzles, the linking kind that makes sudden sense of whole sections of loose fragments.

  I said I turned down invitations to eat dinner with Nora and Isaac because I was either working or waiting for Lee to call. Through those months of long winter nights, usually I was working. Half the nights I slept on my office couch, and therefore half the nights Martha Mitchell slept at the Howards’. Something about that family obviously brought out the grandparent instinct in old cranky spinsters and bachelors like Martha and Rosethorn. Neither one of them liked noise, mornings, or children, and they couldn’t stand each other, but both appeared to be irresistibly drawn to 2-B River Rise, where noisy children got up at 7:00 A.M. Martha set down some quick rules with Brian and Laura—don’t pick me up, leave the ears and tail alone, don’t chase me or expect me to chase you, avoid high-pitched squeals, and so on—but, that settled, she took a benign, even protective, attitude toward the Howards, occasionally leaving my bed to sneak out the back and whine at their patio doors. (I strongly suspected them of slipping her sweets, for which she had an unhealthy weakness that her doctor had already warned me about.)

  With me, Martha took the injured icy tone of a neglected wife. And she was right that I didn’t pay much attention to her these days. Paul Madison was right that I never laughed much these days. Lee was right that I was losing weight. Justin was right that I was “obsessed” with the Hall case; o
ut of guilt over Cooper's murder, he said. I don’t know if he was right about that or not. I do know that the only time I could stop thinking about the Hall brothers was when Lee Brookside was in my arms. And the only way I could stop thinking about what I was going to do about my feelings for Lee was to work on the Hall case.

  Not that Lee was in my arms that often, or even that she would have been there if I’d had all that world enough and time to give her. I was available but preoccupied, trying to keep a hundred thousand people from robbing, raping, beating, and generally bothering each other, or at least trying to remove from circulation the ones who went ahead and did such things. Lee was unavailable, and preoccupied, trying to get her husband elected governor, or at least win over to his side as many as she could of the Inner Circle, at whose hub she sat in a series of gowns, supporting the arts, dispensing charity, and oiling the social axle with endless luncheons, dinners, dances, parties, hunts, receptions, and other such fund-raisers. Between us, we didn’t have time for an affair.

  We also didn’t want to think that's what we were doing, having an affair. But we didn’t want to think about the two alternatives either; at least we didn’t want to talk about them. The first alternative was for her to leave her husband, either in the middle of a political campaign, or after he won it, or after he lost it. The other alternative was for us to stop falling in love again. We tried the second plan a few times, but then she’d telephone me late at night or we’d brush against each other in the crush of a cocktail party, and that would be the end of our ending it. We never discussed the first alternative. So months went by, with us meeting at my apartment at very rare intervals; I didn’t feel real easy about it, not with the zoo across the hall, not with Laura and Brian likely to bang on my door to watch my cable channels while enjoying some microwave popcorn, not with Isaac likely to want to borrow a book at 1:00 A.M., not with Nora giving me looks that irrationally made me feel even more guilty than I already did.