“Well, watch out for the spikes in his golf shoes.”
I don’t think I’d ever heard Brookside in such a festive mood before. He was ebullient as he chatted on. “Wouldn’t that be something? Get the rednecks to help vote out the old Magnolias and Money Club that's been siccing them, poor dumb sons-of-bitches, on the blacks instead of on the rich for centuries. Now, that’d be a rainbow coalition! Blacks, white yuppies, rednecks, and women of all colors. I tell you, Captain, I’m beginning to make Julian Lewis's masters extremely nervous. And that's great!”
I actually smiled. “I’m glad things are going well.” And, hell, the truth was—Alice was right: he would be a better governor than Julian Lewis. I admit it.
“Just tell your friend Isaac Rosethorn not to lose Hall's retrial. Let's get that capital-punishment mine field safely behind us.”
Us? Apparently nothing could persuade the man that I wasn’t a member of his team. Of course, I suppose on the birds-of-a-feather principle, he had every right to his assumption. I’m talking about his knowing he had my closest friends, Justin and Alice, already waving from his parade float. I’m not talking about his knowing about my closeness to his wife. I said, “Isaac will do his best for Hall, and it doesn’t come any better than his best. But that's not going to solve the death-penalty issue for you. Lewis will make his strong capital punishment stand a big part of the campaign. He's going to tackle you directly.”
“If you’ll pardon my immodesty, Cuddy, I scored fourteen touch-downs for Harvard my senior year. At the time quite a few men were making a concerted effort to tackle me directly.” The way he said it, it didn’t even sound like boasting.
“Let me ask you something. If you get to be governor, are you going to use executive clemency across the board to suspend executions? Alice MacLeod assumes you are.”
“After I get into office, I’ll answer that. Let me ask you something. When you joined the police, the death penalty was unconstitutional, right? What if it hadn’t been?”
I said, “Tell you what, if you win, I’ll give you an answer, after I find out what your answer to my question is.”
Laughter came as easily to him as everything else. “Fair enough. Now. You know Ken Moize, fairly young man, used to be your county solicitor? The guy Bazemore defeated.”
“I know Ken. I was real sorry to lose him. He's good.”
“What do you think? Attorney general material?”
“Sure. Ken’d be my choice.”
Jesus, he hadn’t even won the primary, and he was picking out his cabinet. Well, later I found out he’d just gotten the results of a poll on upcoming primaries. He was the featured “Spotlight” in a Time article, which not only projected that he’d wipe up the floor with his Democratic opponent, Harold DeWitt (an old party machine fart from the western end of the state), the Time poll showed that he was pulling votes from independents and even some Republicans. A covey of national journalists had joined the noisy flock of staff already flying by his coattails as he zipped around the state, dropping in on factories, schools, churches, and shopping malls. I told him now that I was planning to put an unmarked squad car escort in his caravan when he was in the Hillston area. And that's when one of those small unexpected puzzle pieces fell into my hand.
He laughed. “What do you mean, planning to? You’ve had somebody following me since November. I admit it took me until I saw them trolling behind me in a patrol car, to figure it out. I was going to tell you to back off, but after Christmas I lost track of them, and decided you’d either quit, or gotten better.…Mangum? Mangum? You there?”
I said, “I never had anybody following you.”
“Come on! You fed me a line about some kid noticing Hall and me at the airport. You had me tailed there, didn’t you? It was a late model Pontiac or small Buick, that time. Red. I thought I shook him.”
I repeated it. “I haven’t had anybody following you.”
“I’m telling you, there were two or three different cars—one a tan station wagon, one a patrol car. I got a glimpse of the driver, in uniform. Big guy wearing sunglasses. In December!”
I looked at the photo of Purley on my bulletin board. “Right. His name's Purley Newsome.”
Now Brookside's end of the line went quiet.
I said, “Don’t you watch the news?”
“Newsome and Russell? Right, Winston Russell. Police all over the South are looking for them.”
“All over the country. Right.”
“He's related to the city comptroller, guy who hanged himself.”
“Right. I’m sending a detective over right now. I want every detail you can give him.”
“I can’t give you much more than I just have.” He took a breath. “What the fuck's going on? Why should they be following me?”
I said, “My guess is, like you pointed out, you were making some people ‘extremely nervous.’”
Nobody could have persuaded me that I could be any more desperate to find Winston Russell and Purley Newsome than I already was. But now I was a lot more desperate. Because now I wanted them not just for what they’d done, but for what I was scared they were going to try to do. If I let something happen to Andrew Brookside, when I was in love with his wife, well…if I didn’t know how she would feel about me, I did know, real well, how I’d feel about me. And I didn’t ever want to have to feel that way.
chapter 14
Justin wasn’t about to let a broken arm interfere with his heading the homicide investigation; he kept busy at “the Patriots angle,” or at least he told me that's what he was doing. I never saw him anywhere around the department, but then he’d always described himself as a “field man,” not a “desk man.” Reports from the field weren’t frequent, but again, Justin wasn’t an “organization man,” preferring to surprise you by showing up with the solutions to cases you’d almost forgotten about. Not that there was any chance I was going to forget this case. Through the winter, Justin was working closely with Dave Schulmann, because the FBI had more extensive intelligence on Klan activities than we did; he was also in touch with Klanwatch at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had even better intelligence. (They needed it the most, too, since the Klan had already firebombed their headquarters and tried to assassinate their chief trial counsel.) In Klanwatch's photo files, Justin found a fuzzy shot of fifteen men on the steps of a cabin somewhere in the deep woods of north Haver County. You might have thought they were buddies posing for a memento of a weekend hunting trip, except that they wore combat fatigues, and instead of showing off pheasants, they proudly held out automatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The photo was dated eight years ago, and more recently labeled FUTURE CAROLINA PATRIOTS? The Carolina Patriots called themselves that because, as one member had told Justin when (thanks to Preston Pope's cousin) he’d gotten himself invited to that December meeting, “It's what every last one of us is, a patriot for the free white Christian state of North Carolina.”
Justin brought me to the lab to study the huge blow-up of their photograph; he had a magnifying glass ready, and six faces circled in red, with numbers above them. “Recognize anybody?” I studied the blurred images.
He couldn’t wait. “Numbers two and seven, I saw that night at the Patriot's slide show. Seven is Willie Slidell; number two is U.S. Army Sergeant Charlie Mennehy, who was giving the lecture on survival tactics in the wilderness—Dave Schulmann's had his eye on him for, get this, supplying the Klan with explosives stolen from a U.S. Army arsenal. When this picture was taken, Mennehy was still active-duty, drawing taxpayers’ dollars. Tsk tsk tsk.” Justin pinned up on the board enlargements of two of the other faces. “Now, look. Number eight, number nine.” While I was examining them, he pulled out two studio photographs, placing them beside the enlargements. Both were Hillston Police Department photo IDs—one of Officer Robert Pym, one of Officer Winston Russell, Jr. They were the same faces as in the cabin photo.
Justin said, “Okay? Now! The man in the doorway. Number six. Nu
mber six happens to be Clark Koontz, late, of the Fanshaw Paper Company, and—” He clipped two more blow-ups to the board. The first, taken at night, showed a huddle of men talking beside a car in a crowded parking lot. Justin pointed at a thin, stooped fellow. “Here's our Mr. Koontz, again. This was taken four years ago. State fairgrounds in Raleigh, October fourteenth. You know these other gentlemen. There's number two, Sergeant Charlie Mennehy again. There's poor Willie the Wimp Slidell. And there's Winston Russell—in between prison terms.”
Justin tapped a second blow-up, cropped from the same scene, that focused on the car around which the men stood. I held the magnifying glass to a blurred figure in the driver's seat. I said, “It looks a little like Otis Newsome to me.”
“Doesn’t it though? October fourteenth. Now, maybe you remember what happened two days later, on October sixteenth, in the Williamsville auditorium?”
I remembered very vividly. At a concert rally for the benefit of the man running against Governor Wollston, then up for reelection, a huge amount of tear gas had been suddenly shot off throughout the hall. In the pandemonium, a lot of people got hurt and one person was trampled to death. He happened to be a black judge, among the few in the state, and a judge with a very liberal record, who was a powerful supporter of Wollston's opponent. Those responsible for the tear gas had never been identified; some blacks accused the Williamsville police of doing it themselves. There was a violent protest on the campus of a local black college. Governor Wollston sent in the state troops. The press commended his action. Three weeks later, Governor Wollston was reelected.
Justin now projected a slide onto the lab's wall: an enlargement of a single frame from a videotape taken at that concert, a quick pan shot of the audience. “There's the black judge who got killed. Now look at the guy, one row back, over to the left. Winston Russell. And I don’t think the tear gas was the main event. I think the judge was the main event.”
It was hard to be certain with that smudged image. It was also possible that Russell was a big fan of the folk singer performing that night, and it was possible that the group gathered around the car at the fairgrounds were discussing a blue-ribbon zucchini they’d just seen, and it was possible that it wasn’t Otis Newsome in the car anyhow. But I bet it was.
Justin said, “I want to go back to another Carolina Patriots get-together with a wire on. I want Preston to tell his cousin that good ole Jefferson Roy Calhoun is really gung ho to join the battle for white survival, really serious.”
“You didn’t tell those assholes your name was Jefferson Roy Calhoun? Jesus, don’t you think that was a little much?”
“Nothing's too much. I told them I was from Charleston, and how a black mugger had stabbed my younger brother to death, and how the courts had let him off. They ate it up.”
I said, “Forget it. There’re too many ways your cover could have gotten blown.”
“You saw what I looked like. Even if anybody had been there that knew me, they wouldn’t have recognized me. How do you think I got to be president of the Hillston Players? Talent, that's how! I imitated you doing your hillbilly number.”
I shook my head. “Wait’ll your arm heals.”
“I was going to tell them a homosexual hippie broke it.”
“Hippies are a thing of the past, Justin.”
“That's what you used to say about the Klan.”
Justin's love of acting was also too exuberant for him to let his injury deter him from performing at the Hillston Playhouse in Twelfth Night. As the character he played, Sir Toby Belch, was a lewd, belligerent drunk, Justin thought it quite likely that somebody would have broken the man's arm in a brawl, and so with his modern plaster cast hidden by a doublet, he made much of his red silk sling on stage.
It was at the final intermission of this Twelfth Night performance that I was given, from an unsuspected source, another piece of my puzzle, one I hadn’t been looking for. G.G. Walker's uncle, Hamilton, was the source. The information had to do with Andy Brookside and Cooper Hall and what they might have talked about in that private plane.
Alice had cajoled me into escorting Justin's mother and her to the play's opening night, which due to “casting problems” did not take place until late February, considerably after its original date on the twelfth day of Christmas. So on a rainy Saturday I sat through three hours and twenty-two minutes of revels by amateur thespians who loved Shakespeare not wisely but too well. They hadn’t cut a word of his play, thereby blithely mystifying their audience with long swatches of totally incomprehensible Elizabethan jokes. Despite their slavish integrity, the Hillston Players always sold out the house. In the first place, there were so many of them, their families alone filled half the seats. In the second place, they were one of the town's Grand Old Traditions (Justin was a fourth-generation member), and so the Players were an annual event in the social calendar of Hillston. The Mayor and Mrs. Yarborough came. Lee was there, with a party that included Edwina Sunderland, as well as the department store widow, who clapped at odd moments.
The Twelfth Night cast was not, as Eddie Sunderland put it, uniformly gifted. Blue Randolph (forcibly retrieved from her combination elopement and ski trip, and to judge by her sullen expression still angry about it) looked a lot like Cheryl Tiegs and sounded a lot like Shirley Temple, neither of which struck me as exactly what the Bard had had in mind for the Countess Olivia. On the other hand, I was perfectly convinced that this particular Olivia was too dumb to tell the difference between Viola and Sebastian, the twins that she’d fallen in love with, even though there was about a foot's difference in their heights, thirty pounds in their weights, a couple of octaves in their voices, and profound anatomical discrepancies in their physiques. Playing the Duke, Father Paul Madison kept forgetting to come on stage when called for, so that the others had to mill around throwing out lame improvisations like, “Methinks the Duke is somewhat TARDY!” This added considerably to the length of a show that didn’t need any help.
Some people said Justin's cavortings stole the evening. But the actor who interested me the most, and unsettled the audience the most, was young Mr. G.G. Walker, who played the part I’d turned down—Malvolio, the puritanical steward tricked by Justin's bunch of cronies into believing the Countess wants to marry him. This in-crowd doesn’t like Malvolio much because he objects to their boozing themselves blotto and bellowing dirty songs all night. But it's when he gets uppity that they really turn on him. That a house servant can so forget his place as to imagine Olivia loves him just drives them wild. And he's easy prey to their practical hi-jinks—like shutting him up in a dark cage and pretending they think he's gone crazy. Malvolio's jolly superiors find this all hilarious. Usually so does the audience.
Well now, when my man, the young high-stepping G.G. Walker, came on stage for the first time in his life, all in black, and I mean all in black, he took that audience by surprise. Then he took them with him places they weren’t sure they wanted to go. G.G. got them to laugh, and he got them to stop laughing. He may have blown a few lines and put his own inimitable twist on a few of the others (Instead of “Go hang yourselves all! You are idle shallow things. I am not of your element,” we got, “Y’all can go hang yourselves! Bunch of idle shallow things. Hey, I’m not in your element.”), but he was so real on that stage that he threw the whole comedy out of kilter. When Malvolio crouched in the dark cage, while the clown kept claiming the place was all sunshine and light, I could hear the giggles die out, and the seats start to creak from the squirms in that Hillston audience. Then, when the clown told him, “Madman, thou errest. I say, there is no darkness but ignorance,” G.G. stood up, shook the bars of that cage, and he didn’t just shout, he wailed. “I say, this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance was as dark as Hell. And I say there wasn’t ever any man abused like me. I am no more mad than you are.”
Nobody laughed.
Peggy Savile, Justin's mother, leaned over to me and whispered, “This isn’t funny at all. Are we supposed
to think it's comic that they’re treating him like this?”
I whispered back, “Peggy, I’ll say this for your boy Justin. As a casting director, he's got a lot of guts.”
Some members of the audience were offended by what they not so obliquely called “a break in traditions.” Judge Tiggs was over-heard (by Alice) to ask his wife, “What's a nigrah doing in this stupid play?” But most people were too polite to notice anything different, though at intermission quite a number made a special point of rushing over to Carl and Dina Yarborough in the lobby and telling them they thought the whole show was just simply wonderful, as if the mayor and his wife were somehow responsible for it.
Nobody (including the Yarboroughs) ran over to say anything to the only other blacks in the lobby. There were a dozen of them, standing for protection in a huddle by a watercooler a few feet from where I was waiting for Alice and Peggy Savile to come back from the ladies’ room. The middle-aged couple with three teenaged daughters, I assumed to be G.G.'s parents and sisters. The rest of the group I already knew. Officer John Emory was there; I’d never seen him before when he wasn’t in uniform, and I was surprised that he was such a stylish dresser, in a modern-looking baggy suit with pleated trousers, and a dark checkered shirt. He held back shyly from the others; I assumed he hadn’t come in their party, but on his own. And he kept trying to look at Jordan West without her noticing, which wasn’t all that hard since she was deep in conversation with a young psychiatrist—I recognized him because he did some pro bono work at human services, downstairs from me in the municipal building. Beside them, Martin Hall and Eric from the vigil group were talking to the oldest of the teenaged girls, while her sisters nudged her in the ribs and giggled. And bringing over two handfuls of little plastic glasses of wine was G.G.'s uncle, Hamilton Walker, resplendent in a soft brown leather jacket with boots and hat to match.
Time's Witness Page 31
