Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  Now Ham Walker and I had met a number of times in connection with his work. Ham's predecessor, the late Woodrow Clenny, had called himself, with perfect justice, Hillston's “El Primo Pimp.” Ham, however, preferred the term “executive manager of a hostess service.” I was idly wondering how many of the men in this lobby had had occasion to meet if not Mr. Walker in person, then one of his hostesses. I was imagining him strolling about, shaking hands with his clients, making remarks like, “How's it going, John? The girls in Canaan say hello.” But of course he didn’t do it; his interests were, as he often told me, “strictly business,” and publicly discomforting hypocrites was never good for business. I was also wondering what he made of his nephew's abandoning that very American interest in business in order to join picket lines and amateur theatrical companies.

  At this point, G.G. himself, in tights and yellow ribbons, bounded into the lobby. The cast did not usually join its audience until after the play was over, and this additional break in tradition caused a ripple of whispers that followed behind the Players’ first black member like the trail of a loud taffeta cloak.

  “Hey hey, the man's fan club!” G.G. pushed himself into the middle of his family group, slapping hands, hugging shoulders, kissing faces. They all offered as many congratulations as they could shout into his whirl of talk and embraces. “Don’t be shy, y’all. Listen, be more than happy to give you my autograph. Step up, watch it now. Don’t y’all crowd the star. Y’all like it? Listen, this is some weird show, I mean can you believe it? Awh, come on, Daddy, loosen up. Think Sidney Poitier, man. Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. Those dudes are actors. Rich actors. Y’all hear me okay? Great. That's ’cause I’m projecting. Y’all got good seats? They said they were gonna give me some prime seats. Mama, these are my pants. Right! That was the style. What's happening, Uncle Ham? Lookin’ good. Okay, I gotta split. I don’t do much in the last act. Watch for me. Martin, my man! Hang in there. Can’t every night be Tina Turner.”

  He spun away through a crowd parting like the Red Sea in a silent movie. Alice came up behind me and pointed after him. “The Hillston Players,” she said with a grin, “will never be the same.” Then she pinched me hard on the shoulder. “And that, Mr. Mangum, is one reason why I love Justin Savile.”

  “Who's arguing?”

  “Oh, come on.” She patted her stomach through the blue silk dress. “Won’t be long—I hope—before I’m an old pregnant lady. Let me go on believing you’re secretly pining away for me, scheming how to send my handsome lieutenant out to be slaughtered in battle, like King David sent…who did he send? I want to say Uriah, but that's Heep, isn’t it?”

  (Were these adulterous references really about Lee, who had just joined the Yarboroughs at the far end of the lobby?) I said, “Well, there's Uriah Heep, and Uriah, Bathsheba's husband.”

  She gave me a stare. “For such a nonbeliever, you certainly know your Bible.”

  I gave her a fatherly pat. “I know my Das Kapital too, honey, but that don’t make me no commie pinko like you used to be before you bought into the capitalist system.”

  I got another hard pinch on the arm, as she said, “Honey, you’re the right arm of the capitalist system.”

  “You know”—I rubbed where she’d pinched me—“maybe you’re already pregnant and it's turning you violent, Alice.”

  “No alcohol, no coffee, no Cokes, and a terminal case of gas, that's what’ll be turning me violent. See you.” She went off, smiling, to hustle up some votes in the crowd.

  I was watching her some, and watching Lee some, when I heard a polite cough beside me. It was John Emory. He restrained himself from saluting when I turned, but I did see his hand spasm at his wrist. “Sir, I have something for you.”

  I said, “If it's hard liquor, opium, or filthy pictures, let's step outside.”

  He realized he was supposed to laugh, and made a dutiful but unconvincing effort. “No, sir, it's concerning Cooper Hall.”

  “Ah, John, I thought you were just here enjoying the show.” His handsome jaw twitched. “Oh. I guess I don’t like his comedies as much as, well, Hamlet and Lear and the others.”

  “I don’t think the Hillston Players can risk doing the tragedies.”

  Now he did smile, and became so interested in what he might have been saving up to say to Jordan West (I’d seen him lean toward her, then step back a half-dozen times), that his entire stance, gestures, even his vocal tone changed. “You know, if it was me, well, I’d do Merchant of Venice, or maybe Measure for Measure, you know, where you’ve got the comic relief, but there's a, there's a theme, something with meat to it, anti-Semitism, sexual repression, that the modern audience can relate to. You know, more than all those cuckold puns, and this cross-dressed stuff.”

  “Good Lord, John! You’re over my head, man. Why don’t you talk to Savile about joining up?”

  He backed off, embarrassed. “No. Well, I just…” And he stiffened into Officer Emory again. Turns out, he’d recently taken a “Classics of the Theater” extension course at Haver, and had “brushed up” on Twelfth Night prior to attending this performance. Before John Emory would change a light bulb, he would read everything the Hillston Library had on the history of electricity. He could pass the sergeant's exam hung-over in his sleep, but all I ever get from him is, “I don’t feel totally prepared yet.”

  From across the room, Lee smiled straight at me a long, long second, then turned back to her conversation with Dina Yarborough. My pulse raced. She was better at this sort of thing than I was.

  “Concerning Cooper Hall, sir,” said Officer Emory, “I’ve had a couple more talks with Martin Hall, and he put me onto G.G. Walker. Well, yesterday, G.G. introduces me to his uncle, Hamilton Walker—that I talked to about Cooper Hall's address book? He's here to—”

  “I know Ham Walker.” I glanced over at that gentleman, six feet of sinewy self-assurance, who despite his graying sideburns was one of the best-looking men in the lobby. A Junior League type behind the subscription drive table fought unsuccessfully to stop staring at him, which he was perfectly aware of, and appeared to find mildly amusing.

  “Yes, sir. What I found out was: when Cooper Hall was asking around about that night Hall shot Pym at Smoke's, somebody put him in touch with Walker. And Walker did some checking.” John looked behind him, as if to be sure his source hadn’t disappeared. “Walker can place Winston Russell in the vicinity for us at the time of the Pym shooting.”

  Now I looked to be sure Mr. Walker didn’t go anywhere. I noticed he had his eye on me, too; just a glance now and then while he was talking to G.G.'s parents: an interested, sardonic glance. I said, “Where in the vicinity?”

  As Isaac was going to be happy to hear, Walker's information confirmed the story Billy Gilchrist had told. John said, “That night, Russell took a girl upstairs in the Montgomery Hotel.” (The Montgomery or “Clenny's Cathouse”—across the street from Smoke's—was where Billy had seen Russell lurking in the lobby.)

  “Did they drive there together?”

  “No. Apparently, he saw her outside on the street, and allegedly—”

  “Prostitute?”

  “Yes, sir. And allegedly threatened her with arrest if she refused to perform oral sex—”

  “Without charge, I bet.”

  “The girl said he was only up there fifteen minutes at the most.”

  “Um hum.”

  “She told Walker they both heard the gunshot. That Russell looked out the window, and then he, well, dressed himself, and ran out of the room.”

  And then Russell ran right into the sight of me jumping out of my squad car, at which point he obviously decided his buddy Pym was beyond help, and that discretion, as the Bard would say, was a hell of a lot safer for a fellow's police pension than valor would be. So he hid in the Montgomery Hotel doorway until his fellow cops had left, and, standing there, was spotted by Billy Gilchrist. I said, “The girl worked for Walker?”

  “I assumed that.”


  “Black or white?”

  “Black.”

  “You got her name from Walker?”

  “He wouldn’t give it to me. He said the girl no longer lives in Hillston.”

  “I don’t care if she lives in Kathmandu. I want a statement from her.” The warning lights for the last act were already blinking as I started toward Hamilton Walker, but John caught me by the sleeve.

  He shook his head. “Captain. No. He doesn’t want you talking to him in public.”

  “Oh, really?” I looked across at Walker, and saw him look back at me over the heads of his cluster of relatives, one corner of his mouth slightly smiling. I turned away and saw Lee Haver Brookside accept a kiss from an elderly couple. She was someone else I couldn’t talk to in public.

  John said, “Yes, sir. He wanted you to know that what I just told you was a ‘present.’ That he has some ‘other information’ he may be willing to give us. But this time it won’t be ‘free.’ And he’ll only give it to you directly. I’m to tell you, he's inviting you for a drink after the show tonight.”

  “Well, that's sweet. I thought he didn’t want to be seen with me.” Walker and I were still watching each other across the lobby. “Is this more information about Winston Russell?”

  John frowned. “All he said to me was that it involved Cooper Hall, and, I’m quoting him, ‘heavy honkie shit’ about the governor's race.”

  I said, “Okay, where? He inviting me to his home?”

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said John was trying not to smile when he said, “Smoke's Bar.”

  The crowd was hurrying back to their seats, Lee nodding patiently at the department store widow's chittering monologue. I caught Walker's eye and raised my hand as if I were toasting him. He nodded, then leisurely strolled into the theater to watch his nephew tell all the happy Illyrian wedding folk that he didn’t want to accept their easy apology, didn’t want to come to their party, and hoped in fact to get revenge on the whole careless pack of them. I knew how he felt, which I suppose was why Justin had offered me the part. After G.G. stomped off, the clown ended the show by singing, “The rain it raineth every day,” which went over well, because it was pouring outside, and you could hear the storm showering down on the theater roof like it did have plans to keep at it every day from now on.

  Like the Players and the Confederacy Ball, Smoke's was a Hillston tradition. While it didn’t have a plaque announcing its date of the sort bolted on the side of the Pine Hills Inn, Smoke's was, in fact, the oldest continuously operating bar in town, apparently opening its doors in 1927 and never closing them since, unless forewarned of an approaching raid. It had been a beer bar during the brown-bagging forties and fifties, when the Pine Hills Inn was still an abandoned livery stable. While calling itself “Smoke's Colored Restaurant,” it had even been a bar during Prohibition, thanks to a mutual arrangement with the then chief of police, John Wesley Doad, “Pork Doad,” to his friends. For a long time, Smoke's had been the only bar for blacks in Hillston, as the Montgomery had been their only hotel.

  Legend was, Smoke, a mysteriously wealthy black man from Chicago, had come South on the lam from the mob, built the place, and given it the name bestowed on him either because of his complexion or his prowess with a gun. Two Haver graduate students researching the town's history repeated this legend in the monograph they wrote for the Bicentennial; excerpted from there, it now appeared in the Historical Society's “Official Guide to Old Hillston,” and there was even a movement afoot in the Society to have Smoke's listed with the National Historical Preservation Trust, so that its owners would be prohibited from renovating it. In fact, no one really knew whether the original “Smoke” was a person, or a style of cooking, or an acknowledgment that the whole town smelled like tobacco because of the Haver factories. Still, in the tradition of Caesarian emperors, successive owners of the bar adopted its presumed founder's name, and many were known to their customers simply as “Smoke.”

  The Society had little to fear in the way of modernization. Like the Hillston Players and the Confederacy Ball, Smoke's kept a pit-bull hold on its traditions, kept its legends of the past alive with faded memorabilia on the walls. Most proudly, Smoke's had a signed photograph of Bessie Smith, who (again according to legend) had driven through town one night, stopped in, drunk down an eight-ounce glass of gin without batting an eye, and then—accompanied by a local youngster who happened to have his guitar with him— had sung blues until word got out and the place got jammed with so many people, a man took her away out the back door, and they drove off together in a dusty car. On a shelf above Smoke's nickel-plated cash register was the glass out of which Bessie Smith was said to have drunk. It looked original. The walls, too, looked original, and maybe the paint; certainly no one had altered the little round iron tables, the curved wood booths, the black ceiling fans, the cloudy paneled mirrors, the wrought-iron bar rail like an old Singer sewing machine pedal, twenty feet long. Smoke's had gone, indifferently or obliviously, in and out of fashion, as fashions came and went, dozens of times over the decades. The saying around Canaan was, you could grow old and die in Smoke's and your bones fall in a pile on the floor, and nobody’d move them ’til Judgment Day. According to legend, a few people had died in Smoke's, some of them not all that old, and most of them not expecting to. I was there tonight because someone had died like that, though Pym had actually made it as far as the sidewalk outside.

  The only thing that had changed at Smoke's since 1927 was the customers. And only their faces changed, not their color. Maybe it was the New South, and maybe Carl Yarborough was mayor of Hillston, but there sure weren’t many white people living in Canaan, and none of them were drinking at Smoke's. The Historical Society might be trying to preserve the building, but it didn’t appear to be because they liked to visit it. As I walked the long length of that room, which had sounded mighty noisy when I shook out my umbrella and opened the doors, and sounded considerably quieter by the time I made it to a back booth, it occurred to me again that there was no way that Bobby Pym had gone entirely unnoticed in Smoke's before he called attention to himself by waving a gun at George Hall.

  Another thing crossed my mind, as backs turned on me when I passed by: Justin may have had some chutzpah to add G.G. Walker to the roster of the Hillston Players, but the worst that was going to happen to Justin was that people in his set would whisper that he’d always been a little peculiar for a Dollard. On the other hand, to bound onto that stage, to bounce into that lobby, G.G. Walker himself, at the age of only seventeen, had to be in possession of a pair of balls that if Ernest Hemingway had had them, he’d be alive today. Hell, I had the Law to keep me company, and I felt lonesome as General Custer on the few occasions I’d come into Smoke's.

  G.G.'s Uncle Hamilton was in a booth watching me approach while he twirled a swizzle stick around his long fingers like a tiny baton. At some (at least to me) invisible signal, the woman seated beside him scooted off the bench and left. She had both a very short skirt and very long legs, and shoes with such high stiletto heels that I’d hate to think she had to walk in them in this cold rain any farther than across the street to the Montgomery Hotel (where it was pretty safe odds to bet she was headed).

  Before I reached Walker, the owner—or current “Smoke,” also known for evident reasons as “Fattie”—squeezed his way through the tables toward me with the speed of a matre d’ at a nice restaurant trying to stop a drunk from tossing his dishes in the air. He even held up both round hands as if to catch the falling plates as he said, “Good evening?”

  I said, “Good evening, Fattie.”

  “Raining hard?”

  “Letting up.”

  “Some problem?”

  “No problem.”

  A bubbly sigh of relief was replaced by a blank smile, behind which he kept asking questions with his round close-set eyes, placed like buttons side by side over his nose. If there was no problem, no serious problem, what was the police chief doing here
at midnight on a rainy Saturday? Fattie and I had met personally only a couple of times over the past three years for talks about little irregularities of his, like serving to minors and running a numbers game for his customers. It was enough times for him not to like me much. He said, “Something particular?”

  I said, “Um hum. A Budweiser.”

  He checked my eyes for the trick. “A Budweiser?”

  “Um hum. Or, Miller’d be okay.”

  He stopped a cocktail waitress, maybe hired for her corpulent resemblance to her employer, and told her to bring me the beer. Then, as if he’d forgotten having just asked, he said, “Look, I got a problem?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Do you?”

  His eyes were vanishing. “You tell me, okay.”

  I nodded. “Well, I guess I’d say you look like you might be carrying a little extra weight for good health. That might be a problem.”

  He decided not to play anymore, just wait until I hit him with whatever the charge was going to be. The waitress was back so fast with a bottle of Bud on a tray, you might have thought I’d called ahead. I stepped around Fattie and sat down across from Ham Walker, who’d watched this exchange with his ironic half-smile as he stroked the fold in the crown of his hat. Maybe he had hats to match all his jackets—I don’t think I’d ever seen him without one—or maybe he kept them on because he was losing his hair.

  When I slid into the booth, Fattie's whole body, of which there was an unbridled glut, relaxed with a shiver: the world made sense, there was a serious problem, but it wasn’t his, it was Ham Walker's. Happy, he set the beer and glass in front of me, said, “Budweiser,” and disappeared.

  Walker spun the swizzle stick off his fingers, raised his high-ball glass, and gave me a nod. “À votre santé,” is what he said.

  I poured some beer, and lifted it. “Salud. Sorry to keep you waiting. I had to drive somebody's mother home.”