Often Lee and I would go driving somewhere we hoped was out of the way; we’d take walks or sit in the car. It was cold weather for love. Sometimes, not often, we’d meet out of town. Once we spent a weekend in a hotel in Bermuda, when Brookside had gone to Boston; we flew there on separate planes, because I figured it would be just my luck to have Carol Cathy Cane lunge out at us with her Action News cameraman at the airport, or for Mrs. Marion Sunderland to show up across the aisle or a Democratic party official, or any of a thousand other possibilities. And in fact, that particular night while I was waiting for my flight to board, I was greeted within half an hour by a police chief from a coastal town, by Mrs. Atwater Randolph (on her way to Colorado to annul her granddaughter's marriage), and by two strangers who said they’d seen me on the news. The fact was, too many people in the Piedmont knew not only Lee Haver Brookside, but me. Adultery made me aware for the first time that I was, well, I guess you’d say, a public figure; I’d never thought of myself in that way before, nor as a “public servant” as Justin was wont to define his job, nor as a “public official,” though that came a little closer. If I had to describe my position, I suppose I thought of myself as the executive head of a law enforcement bureau. But of course, it was a public bureau, dealing with the lust, greed, and violence that draws media the way carrion lures hyenas, so I was in, and on, the local news pretty regularly, and that makes you locally pretty public. As it turned out, Lee was worrying that I’d be recognized, while I was worrying that the regional paparazzi would pop out of a closet to snap a shot of her. The result was, between our lack of privacy and our lack of time (throwing aside, now, morals and reputation), our affair mostly took place by telephone (which ironically was exactly how it had been when we were in high school; I hadn’t been welcome at Briarhills then, I wasn’t welcome at Briarhills now).
I did go to her house twice, once alone, once to a campaign fund-raiser; it was a mistake, and both times I left early. Lee's life was rigorously social. Brookside had turned over his university duties to his successor, and was now deep into the gubernatorial campaign, so public events were really the only way for us to see each other anywhere near as often as we wanted to. It wasn’t the way I wanted to see her, but desire takes what it can get. She arranged for me to be invited to the most populous of these winter galas (the Haver Foundation Valentine's Ball, the Children's Museum benefit, the buffet for the Cancer Society, the string quartet for the Historic Hillston Restoration Drive), and I went every time I was invited, and I usually ended up feeling miserable. It wasn’t as easy as meeting her in the old days at somebody's rec-room sock hop, and those days had been hard enough. Now Lee was on a public stage, co-starring with Brookside in a show that had already been written, and in which it was hard to find a part for myself other than faithful old Dobbin who hangs around in the wings to remind the woman he loves that she's lovable, even if her husband appears to have forgotten it. I didn’t like the role.
On the other hand, I couldn’t really imagine myself swinging down from a chandelier, grabbing Lee out of a reception line, waving a carving knife at the crowd, shouting “Back off, she's mine!” and leaping out a window with her into a future of—what? Somehow, I couldn’t see her in jeans, nuking frozen enchiladas and watching Coal Miner's Daughter on video out in River Rise. Somehow, I couldn’t see me in a tuxedo for the rest of my life, wine-glass in hand, turning slowly from left to right in that endless circle of smiling small talk. But we didn’t talk about the future on the phone, which was the only time we talked. If we were alone together, we made love. If we were in public, we looked at each other. We wouldn’t even have needed to speak the same language. And sometimes I wondered if in fact we did.
I told no one about Lee, and was careful (after Edwina Sunderland's innuendos) to make certain nobody was ever in a position even to speculate about us. It therefore worried me that Justin and Alice attended every one of the Brookside galas. But neither ever said a word to me, and as I’d never known Alice to hold back if something worried her (and I knew she loved me enough for this to worry her), finally I decided I was too discreet for them, or they were too absorbed in their own lives to notice. Justin was working as hard as I was on the Hall case; Alice was taking a very active role in the legislative session, giving a lot of speeches here and there, and people were talking about her. There were, for example, rumors that Brookside was thinking of Alice as his nominee for lieutenant governor; she did nothing to discourage these rumors, and neither did Brookside. I’d given up hoping she was faking her friendliness to Brookside to further her own career; she really thought he was the most exciting possibility to hit North Carolina since the Wright brothers blew in from Ohio and put a flying machine in the air for twelve seconds before it crashed into a sand dune.
Justin too was a fervent Andrew Brookside supporter by now, mostly because of Alice, but also because Brookside and he had struck up an acquaintanceship, about which I had to hear more than I wanted to. Justin felt he and “Andy” had a great deal in common; I assume he meant their preppy pasts because their personalities certainly weren’t similar. Brookside didn’t have the innocent kindheartedness that drew folks to Justin. And Justin was no visionary for a better tomorrow. Nor was he a war hero, having been locked up in an alcoholics’ sanatorium after college. His missing that macho rite of passage may have had something to do with their new friendship, because “Andy” was teaching Justin how to fly his Cessna. Now, I’d long suspected that Justin Bartholomew Savile V had considerably more money—what he called “old money”—than he ever let on when he pestered me for raises, but he didn’t have the kind of money it takes to buy your own airplane. So I admit it was probably nice to have a friend who did happen to have one, if you were after what Justin called, in his Byronic way, “Experiences.” (An instance of Justin's innocence is that when I called him Byronic to his face, he assumed I meant it as a compliment.)
Meanwhile, Andy Brookside (Boston bred) was learning how to ride from Justin (treasurer of the Hillston Hunt Club). And Justin did own his own horse now: Manassas, the black stallion old Cadmean had left him. The fact that Justin could generally stay semivertical on top of that vicious brute is, I suppose, a testament to his prowess, or at least his passion for the sport. He even belonged to a polo club, though they could rarely get up enough players for a game. I’d never envied him his equestrian skills until I found out Lee loved to ride, which may have been why Brookside wanted to pick up some tips from Justin, who, by Lee's report, had “the best seat in Hillston.” Not that there were many in town vying for that distinction. I heard that Justin rode Manassas at the Briarhills Hunt, where he won himself a foxtail by outriding everybody who’d had more brains than to take a shortcut by jumping a five-foot brick fence. It was the same approach to life that had led his ancestor, old Eustache Dollard's papa, into the wilderness a little too far ahead of his troops, so that the Yankees sensibly seized the opportunity to blow his head off. All Justin did was break his arm. I wasn’t too sympathetic, for more reasons than he knew, which maybe wasn’t fair.
The same sense of my own unfairness had kept me, so far, from mentioning to the D.A., or to Isaac, that Andy Brookside had spent the last hour of Cooper's life with him flying around in a plane discussing politics—assuming that's what they were doing up in the clouds that Saturday. Bazemore, a fervid Julian Lewis man if for no other reason than a shot at the attorney generalship, would have liked nothing better than to haul Lewis's opponent into court on a charge of withholding evidence in a felony. Isaac would have liked nothing better than to haul a celebrity like Brookside onto the witness stand, if only for the dramatic effect. But I’d had two hard talks with Brookside about that Saturday ride, and although I wasn’t satisfied that he was telling me the whole truth (I didn’t believe Cooper would care much for a theoretical conversation about the future of the state), I was satisfied that Brookside knew nothing about what had happened to Cooper twenty minutes after they parted. I don’t know, maybe th
e honest truth is, if the man hadn’t been Lee's husband, I would have been even harder on him. He was, in a way, sheltered under my guilt.
Guilt (which may have had at its roots some rotten wishful thinking) kept me very anxious, as the campaign developed, about those threats on Brookside's life. My worst nightmare was that somebody would kill him in Hillston, and it would be my fault. He’d received two more anonymous letters. The handwriting was bothering Etham Foster, who’d taken the material to an SBI calligraphy expert in Raleigh. This woman made two “qualified” observations: she didn’t think the earlier letters Lee and Brookside had given me were in the same handwriting as the subsequent letters and the photostats of the With Liberty and Justice graffiti. The similarities were close, but “possibly” not identical. Second, there was some “suggestion” of a “tentativeness” about the latter, as if they were imitations. This worried Etham. Myself, I was more worried that whoever had written any or all of those notes was planning to take a potshot at Brookside's bright shining head one of these days, and that I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. I couldn’t force him to agree to police protection, but I did insist that HPD be kept informed in advance of his schedule. This, of course, felt pretty morally awkward for me, and I dealt with it by a private vow not to take advantage of my knowledge of his whereabouts, unless Lee told me independently that he would be away. I admit it's a Jesuitical distinction. I also admit I broke it twice, when I couldn’t stop myself from phoning her.
I would have preferred it if Brookside knew about Lee and me. I wanted her to leave him and marry me. But she said he didn’t know, hadn’t asked, and (this to me was the saddest part) “possibly wouldn’t care. Oh Cuddy, I mean, of course, Andy would care, he would care terribly, but his reasons would be…not completely personal. That doesn’t mean the reasons wouldn’t be…valid. Valid to us both. Do you see?”
“Yes.” That was as close as we’d come to discussing the political nature of their union. Once I asked, “Will you tell him?”
She said, “Don’t ask me to. Not now.”
Whether Lee was aware of the rumors about her husband's extramarital activities, I never knew for certain. It seemed wrong that I should point the rumors out, and I never did. But I think she suspected his promiscuity, and that the way she imagined Brookside would feel about us was a description of how she felt about him. She would care, but the reasons for her concern would be “not completely personal.” If in the beginning they had been in love, if they’d ever cared enough for real jealousy, ten years of public life had worn away all the sharp edges from their private feelings. Lee talked about her pain at not being able to have a child; she didn’t talk about how her husband's affairs might have hurt her. In the beginning, one night at my paranoid worst, I’d wondered if she was sleeping with me to get even with him. But that was never true. She talked about him with admiration, but impersonally, as if they were not so much a marriage of convenience as an alliance of state. It didn’t make me any less jealous, or guilty, or sad. Maybe because Mr. and Mrs. Brookside looked like such a successful alliance, such a permanent one.
It ought to be no surprise that I avoided Andy Brookside as much as I could. So it wasn’t easy when finally it seemed necessary for me to call him at his campaign headquarters to insist that he stop Jack Molina from broadcasting the news about these threatening letters whenever he had the opportunity.
By now Molina had resigned from the communications departament at Haver and was working full-time on the Brookside campaign. He was more at the center of things than the official campaign manager, a moderate and very influential businessman from the eastern part of the state, with three decades of party contacts behind him. Jack was the unofficial coordinator of the left branch, the black branch, the female branch, and the college branch of Brookside's supporters. Together, they made up a sizable chunk of the voting tree, and it was beginning to look as if they were solid as oak for Molina's man. Obviously he thought he could help keep them that way by telling them how much their enemies were Andy's enemies too: he’d even given a copy of one of the threatening letters to the Hillston Star to print.
I’d talked to Molina about his inflammatory tactics but had gotten nowhere. Just as I’d gotten nowhere asking him again about what papers might have been in Cooper's file box when it was stolen, or whether Cooper had done any further research beyond his first short article on the Haver House of Lords. Molina appeared to hold me if not responsible for Cooper's death, then probably part of a cover-up. At any rate, his black blazing eyes did not look on me with any kindly flame the day I had him brought to my office, and asked him if we couldn’t cooperate.
“I can think of no case,” he told me, glaring at the shoulder holster that hung from the back of my door, “where the revolution and the police stood on the same side of the barricades.”
“Well, how about the Industrial Revolution?”
He didn’t think this was funny. “Yes, that proves my point.”
I said, “I don’t believe I ever heard Andy Brookside describe himself as a ‘revolutionary.’”
Molina's short hair and tidy suit hadn’t affected his rhetoric from the old denim days. I got a pretty high-flown answer about practical instruments of the Cause, and reinterpretations of dialectical imperatives. I said, “I’m also not so sure Mr. Brookside would care to hear himself described as an instrument of the underclass, Hegelian or not. He seems to have a sort of Take Charge, Hands On, notion of history.”
Molina turned back from an examination of my bookshelf. “Yes. If Andy Brookside didn’t believe he was a hero, he wouldn’t be such an effective instrument, now would he?” There's a chance the man smiled here. I’m not sure. Leaning against the wall of books, he told me, “The march of history is not brought about, or even led, by heroic drum majors wearing plumes. But they think it is, and that can often be very useful.”
I said, “Well, y’all are welcome to overthrow the government at the polls as much as you like. But you wanna march, you need a permit. And you keep on sending out open invites to the lunatic fringe by yelling about assassinations, you could lose your drum major before you get much use out of that plume. It doesn’t help to polarize and agitate nuts like the Klan.”
“The Klan is actively trying to stop Andy. That isn’t something I’ve made up.”
“We’re keeping a close watch on the Klan. So is the FBI. Why don’t you leave that to us?”
He couldn’t stand his tie another second and jerked it loose. “A few years ago, Mr. Mangum, the Greensboro police said they were keeping a close watch on the Klan. They stood there and closely watched the Klan shoot and kill half a dozen people. People who had gone to the police for a permit to march. That was their mistake. Cooper Hall is dead. George Hall is behind bars on death row. And you’re behind this big desk, stamping pieces of paper to keep everything legal. The world is polarized. Half the people on death row in this country are in six Southern states; more than half of them are black; and the blacks are the ones you people are going to kill. Look at the records. From 1930 to 1962, Mississippi had 151 executions, 122 of them were of blacks. Georgia had—”
“I’m not arguing with your statistics, or your interpretation. It's simplistic of you to assume I would.”
“It's you who sends them to death row. It is that simple.”
“I don’t send anyone to death row.” I said, “Professor Molina”— which he winced at—“I use what I’ve got to work with. You use what you’ve got to work with. You’ve got Andy Brookside. I’ve got this notion called ‘law.’ Maybe neither's exactly perfect, but like you say, an instrument of a cause.”
He walked to the door, setting the holster to swinging as he flung it open. “I doubt our causes have much in common.”
“Oh, I bet they do. Ask around, you’ll find out I’m one of those old of-all-the-people, by-all-the-people, for-all-the-people type guys.”
“If that were true, you’d resign. Your laws were written by a few of the p
eople, for a few of the people.”
“Why should I resign? I don’t see you trying to run Hillston's local socialist comrade Janet Malley for governor, I don’t see you polishing her unpopular baton for the big parade.”
He started to say something, changed his mind, gave me a mock salute, and set the holstered gun swinging when he shut the door. A week later, I heard him on public radio, reading one of the threatening letters to a fascinated talk-show hostess. So I went over his head and called his boss.
I told Brookside that there might be some trigger-happy imbeciles out there who hadn’t even thought of assassinating him until they heard on the news what a popular notion it was getting to be.
Brookside didn’t seem to think this was likely, adding, “Jack just wants people to know what we’re fighting against. But I’ll talk to him, tell him to ease up.” He laughed happily. “Hell, I don’t want to alienate the right-wing trigger-happy bigot vote if I can possibly swing it my way.”
“I’m not sure swings come that big.”
“Well, why not? After Bobby was shot”—I assumed this meant Robert Kennedy—“a chunk of his supporters threw their votes to George Wallace. People vote for the man. The far right's still looking for John Wayne. Well?” His words sparkled with humor. “Here I am. Escape from a P.O.W. camp, heroic trek through the jungle, barefoot, bamboo spear, eating wild dogs, hand-to-hand combat, Medal of Honor, all that good stuff. Pretty damn macho, right? What do you think? Can I turn the Brodie Cheek? Pull the far right out from under Lewis?”
Time's Witness Page 30
