Arrests of prostitutes near the Montgomery Hotel were, on the other hand, kept to an all-time low.
Andy Brookside told me indignantly that he most certainly had not discussed with Cooper Hall, during their airplane ride together, a videotape of himself and anyone named Jamaica Touraine. That he could not have possibly done so since he had never known anyone with that name. And who in hell had told me otherwise? And why in hell was I even coming to him with such filth?
My reply would have been a little more forceful if I’d had a copy of that tape, but I didn’t. Coop had either given his copy to Brookside, or to someone else (nobody we’d talked to, unless they were lying), or it had been stolen out of the With Liberty and Justice office. It seemed likely that Otis's cameraman had been Willie Slidell, given all the video equipment and porno tapes we’d found at Slidell's farm. Slidell had either given the original to Otis Newsome (as they were both dead now, this possibility couldn’t be checked), or to someone else, or left it at the farm where it had, or had not, been found by Russell and Newsome. All I could say to Brookside was that my information had come from an unimpeachable source, and that he, Brookside, had better hope I found his X-rated romp before it showed up on the Brodie Cheek show.
Mr. Hamilton Walker, my unimpeachable source, regretted that he was unable to locate Jamaica Touraine (or maybe that wasn’t her real name) on her round-the-world cruise with the Argentine (or maybe he wasn’t Argentine) businessman. We did, however, find Ham's former employee “Denise” plying her trade in the nation's capital, and Wes Pendergraph flew up there to take a statement from her. She told him she’d be happy to come testify that Winston Russell was on the scene when Pym was shot. She said she hated Winston Russell so much, she’d be happy to testify that he had shot Pym himself if we wanted her to. Wes, who kept wondering if he was “tough enough,” came home “shocked.”
I had my own shock when Professor Briggs Mary Cadmean suddenly returned to Hillston, having resigned from her western university to collect the millions her chauvinist pig of a papa had left her on the condition that she do just that. Alice was also shocked. Justin was not. “You simply don’t renounce that kind of inheritance,” he informed us, somewhat smugly it seemed to Alice and me, as if how could we be expected to know such things, having grown up so poor and trashy. Alice and Justin had a fight about Briggs Junior's “character,” he spent the night on my couch, she came over at two in the morning, and from up in my bedroom, I had to listen to them, from 2:15 to 3:30 A.M., decide that they were (a) totally incompatible, (b) having a problem communicating, (c) madly in love.
Sergeant Zeke Caleb informed me that he and Officer Nancy White were madly in love. I wasn’t surprised. That he and Nancy White were having a baby. I was very surprised. That they were going to get married. I thought this was a good idea.
A munitions salesman tried to get me to buy a dozen electric stun guns to have on hand for any future race riots. “A weapon of compassion,” he called it, but turned me down flat when I said I’d buy as many as he’d let me use on him point-blank range, right here in my office.
Judge Dolores Roche sentenced each of the “Canaan Riot” teenagers to one hundred hours of community service. If they stuck with it, their records would be cleared. The older of the Wister brothers (whose loan shop's window had been broken) called out from the rear of the courtroom, “You mean they’re not going to jail?!” The judge replied that as a cure for social problems, jail was incredibly expensive, largely ineffective, and usually inhumane. Mr. Wister stood on his seat and cursed her, and was sentenced to either one hundred hours of community service working with the teenagers, or a fine of $500. Having to choose between losing money and having to sweep sidewalks with blacks proved too much for Mr. Wister, whose face went purple and whose open mouth appeared to be paralyzed. His brother paid the fine.
I assigned John Emory and Nancy White to supervise the teenagers as they were cleaning, repairing, and repainting the block of East Hillston where they’d “rioted.” One of them did not “stick with it.” A few weeks later while stealing a neighbor's TV set, he hit the neighbor with a lead pipe. Judge Roche sent him to the state reformatory. She sadly said to me afterwards, “One more failure, Cuddy; yours, mine, and the whole messed-up system's.”
Old Dolores had never been a happy judge, and she was getting gloomier by the year. I told her she was losing her capacity to look on the bright side; after all, the other eleven young men had stuck it out: that section of Canaan looked cleaner than it’d been for years. They’d cleared away the informal junkyard that had grown on the site of the demolished A.M.E. church, and then they had painted a big, bright mural of local black history on the church's single still-standing wall-section; you could see it for blocks away, because Canaan A.M.E. (to which the wide stone steps remained) had stood atop a small hill. In this mural, Bessie Smith was depicted singing in Smoke's; two black children were depicted being escorted by state troopers into Polk Elementary School through a gauntlet of ugly-faced white parents; five young civil rights demonstrators were depicted seated cross-legged in a row across Main Street, and the Hillston police were depicted hauling them off, while one of my predecessors as chief stood watching, left hand on a megaphone, right hand on a gun. A pro-basketball superstar who’d grown up in East Hillston was depicted in flight across the top of the mural. Coretta Scott King was depicted shaking hands with Mayor Carl Yarborough, and Cooper Hall was depicted dead-center, his head about as large as Lenin's in Red Square, his hand raised beneath the sun, as if he’d just tossed it into air. With John and Nancy's help, the teenagers also built two wood benches, laid a path with the old church bricks, chained a trash can to a post, and called the place “Cooper Hall Park.”
Justin discovered through his informant, Preston Pope, that last fall the Carolina Patriots had been expecting a shipment of arms for their much-discussed Armageddon against the Tainted Races, but that the (prepaid) guns had never shown up. The missing supplier turned out to have been the fellow (or what was left of him) we’d found dead in the abandoned Saab off in the woods last November. Turns out the dead man had done time in Dollard Prison during the same period, and in the same cell block, as Winston Russell.
Mayor Carl Yarborough appointed a black to replace Otis Newsome as city comptroller and was accused of “nepotism” by Brodie Cheek on his new cable television show, “Call to Christ.”
Andy Brookside was the main speaker at Cooper Hall's memorial service, organized by the Hall Committee. That night Haver Auditorium was so jammed with students that Nomi Hall's sister couldn’t make her way through to the family seats and had to stand in the back to listen to the eulogies. A black rock star sang a song he’d written about Cooper called “My Brother's Keeper.” Jack Molina read telegrams from national civil rights figures. Jordan West introduced Alice MacLeod, who introduced “our next governor Andrew Theodore Brookside.” (Maybe he was laying the groundwork for folks to call him A.T.B.—as in F.D.R. and J.F.K.)
In his speech, Brookside never mentioned the death penalty against which Hall had fought, but I’ll give him this: he brought that crowd to its feet with his final words: “Whenever a young man like Cooper Hall dies by violence, then a little of all that is best in this country dies with him. Whenever his voice is silenced by hate, then the voice of America is silenced too. Let us pledge tonight to join our voices to those who have had the courage to sing alone. Until together, our song is a shout of liberty and justice! Tonight is not our memorial to Cooper Hall. The future is our memorial to Cooper Hall!”
Jack Molina, who had presumably written this speech, was the first to leap cheering out of his seat.
Martin Hall was expelled from Hillston High for insubordination to a history teacher. Officer John Emory offered to talk to the school; Martin told him to “get fucked.”
G.G. Walker was admitted to Haver University for the fall term; he was also offered, and accepted, the Dollard Scholarship, a full free ride granted each year since 1
928 to six native male North Carolinians considered by the judges to be “mentally, morally, and athletically outstanding.” Justin's mother, Mrs. J.B. Savile IV (née Peggy Dollard) was one of the judges.
I found out I had aced my Ph.D. orals; I decided to put off the dissertation for a year, when presumably my “personal life” would have resolved itself one way or another.
I saw Debbie Molina (Jack's wife) outside civil court in the municipal building; she was deep in conversation with a lawyer I knew, who handled a lot of divorce work. I had an irrational spasm of hope that she was leaving Jack in order to marry Andy. The lawyer told me she was there to testify for a friend in a hospital negligence suit.
Justin had a small beach cottage on Okracoke Island in the Outer Banks, left to him by a man named Walter Stanhope, a friend of his father's and a former Hillston police chief. I asked him if I could use it to get away by myself for a weekend. Lee and I spent Valentine's Day there, walking along the gray beach huddled together under a blanket.
Bubba Percy told me he was “still working” on the Buddy Randolph–Cooper Hall connection. Maybe he was working on it when I saw him in the municipal building following Jordan West down the hall, grinning and jabbering at her. She side-stepped him into the ladies’ room, where I was amazed he wasn’t gross enough to follow her.
Mrs. Marion (“Call me Eddie”) Sunderland invited me to two dinner-and-bridge parties; she invited Lee to neither one. Bubba showed up at the second of these in a tuxedo with a bow tie the color of his auburn hair. Eddie laughed her head off at his impersonations (mostly stolen from “Saturday Night Live” reruns) of politicians like Clinton, Nixon, and Reagan. He also did Senator Kip Dollard after that gentleman left the party.
A week later I saw Bubba and Eddie both laughing their heads off over a luncheon of stuffed crab at the Pine Hills Inn, where I’d taken Alice for her birthday. It was a shame that when Bubba had finally found a rich, available woman as smart and jaded as he was, she turned out to be seventy-two years old.
A week later, Bubba ran an article implying that in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Haver students in a secret club called the House of Lords had engaged in the ‘intimidation and harassment’ of local blacks and of fellow students sympathetic to the civil rights movement. This article (which gave no credit to the previous article by Cooper Hall in the largely unread With Liberty and Justice), claimed that members of that secret club at that time included former Hillston official Otis Newsome and Lieutenant Governor Julian D. Lewis.
Julian Lewis issued a denial.
Bubba was fired by the managing editor of the Hillston Star.
The managing editor of the Hillston Star was fired by the editor- in-chief after the latter's private meeting with Mrs. Marion Sunderland.
The new managing editor was listed on the masthead as “Randolph P. Percy, Jr.,” which was the first anybody had ever heard of Bubba's real name, if in fact it was his real name and not something he’d quickly put together as soon as he’d listened to Edwina Sunderland's spiel on the Nowell-Randolphs of Palliser Farm. I told Eddie it looked like she’d thrown me over for Bubba's eyelashes after all. She told me her impression was that I was “already taken.”
I said, “Meaning what?”
She said, “Meaning, Cuthbert, I just hope you aren’t going to waste your life—as you so bluntly implied I had wasted mine.”
I said, “I just hope you aren’t ever going to bid four notrump with a singleton again.”
On his new cable television show, Reverend Brodie Cheek endorsed Julian Lewis for governor. So did everybody in the Constitution Club, which meant nearly every business leader in the state did.
Mayor Carl Yarborough endorsed Andy Brookside. So did a whole covey of national figures, both white and black, including members of Congress, sports stars, rock stars, and movie stars.
Under its new management, the Hillston Star reversed itself and endorsed Andy Brookside.
Julian Lewis won his primary with 47 percent of the votes.
Andy Brookside won his primary with 89 percent of the votes, the largest plurality on the polling records.
Fuzz Five ended our basketball season with three wins and five losses.
Isaac tried to get me to “date” Nora Howard.
An estatic Alice told me she was pretty sure she was pregnant. I kept seeing Lee.
chapter 16
Miss Bee Turner, the clerk, sang each word like a loud bell. “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, the Superior Court of Haver County in the State of North Carolina is now in session. The Honorable Shirley Hilliardson presiding. All please rise!”
The State versus George Hall, Part II (as Bubba Percy called the trial) was taking place daily. According to the Hillston Historical Society, which had avidly involved itself in the restoration, our new Superior Court (1947) was “an enhanced replica” of our old Superior Court (burnt 1912), which, parenthetically, had never been called Superior Court, but simply Court, just as the wood building that had housed it had been called simply Courthouse. A second wood courthouse had caught fire, and a third was bulldozed by Progress when the civic-spirited Mr. Briggs Cadmean built Hillston its stone municipal building, which by now had expanded to a block-long complex of annexed structures that included the police department. From the rolled-up blueprints that Cadmean shook down at folks from his lobby portrait had come the enhanced design of our new courtroom. Opening by massive double doors off our new marble rotunda, it was his philanthropic showplace, a huge handsome room with a forty-foot ceiling, tiered seats, a viewers gallery, sixteen brass chandeliers, and sixteen ten-foot-high windows. The walls, the seats, the bar, and the oak wainscoting were painted authentic Federalist colors, and the seats were comfortably cushioned; the jury box, witness stand, and judge's bench were gleaming cherrywood, handmade by Carolina craftsmen. The State and the defense both had rich leather chairs. The judge's chamber had on its wall an authentic oil painting of Robert E. Lee, said by Judge Tiggs (who hung it there) to have been drawn from life by his great-aunt, Miss Charlotte Victoria Tiggs. Above the bench, the Seal of the State of North Carolina was painted in gold leaf. The gavel had a silver handle. The big eagle-topped clock on the wall had been given personally to old Cadmean's father, Enos, by President McKinley, and had been presented to Enos right here in Hillston by Mark “Boss” Hanna himself, the man who had personally given McKinley to the country, and vice versa. The clock was still ticking.
Naturally, time had dulled the courtroom wood, tarnished the brass, and faded the paint; now the grand windows looked out at ten feet of air before running smack up against the concrete walls of later buildings; the visitors gallery (from which I had long ago listened to Isaac Rosethorn dazzle a jury) was now closed off as a safety hazard. Still, Superior Court looked, as the Historical Society's brochure told its readers, like a loving restoration of an architectural gem. The proportions were so fine, the space so rational, the props so solid in their symbolism, it was easy to sit in that room believing Justice was on her throne and blind as a bat to everything but the bright light of Truth.
Easy, but a big mistake. I’d seen enough examples in that room to know that Justice has got a real eye for color (she prefers white), and for class (she likes upper and middle); that, in fact, she always was, and still is, a bitch on the poor, and a pushover for power. If you’re connected to power, it's rare that Justice is going to tangle with you; it's rare you’re even going to show up in a superior court, and if you do, rarer still that you’re going to walk out of it into a jail; because by tradition in the game of law, the lower class gets to be the criminals, the middle class gets to be the jury, and the upper class gets to be the judge.
By tradition, crime is when you shoot up, take a knife to a spouse, write a bad check, bop someone on the head and snatch a purse, or steal $162.54 from a gas station. Crime is when you’re on the streets where we can catch you. Unorganized crime, that's what Justice is used to. She doesn’t mess as much with big-time corporate shenan
igans and government slip-ups. CRIME DOES NOT PAY claims the sign over the Oklahoma electric chair, but of course that's usually dependent on the size of the profits.
Well, of course, times have changed a little in Haver County since Judge Tiggs sentenced an East Hillston maid to ten years in women's prison for allegedly stealing a few dollars off her employer's bureau (on the grounds that if the money was missing, she must have taken it), the same month that he sentenced a North Hillston lady to a fine and five years probation for slipping her husband a sleeping pill, lugging him to the garage, and leaving him there with his Buick's motor running until he died (on the grounds that she’d succumbed to “mental anguish” after hearing his plans to divorce her in order to marry his receptionist).
But by and large, Justice remains faithful to her old favorites. As the late great Woodrow Clenny told Judge Tiggs to his face, “Money talks. And Money walks. Rich folks never do no time.”
At his first trial, George Hall wasn’t rich. This time around, he still wasn’t rich, but he knew some people who were; or rather, they knew him, or rather, they knew about him, and that's enough to make a difference. And when I say “rich,” I don’t mean ready cash; I mean what they used to call Society, Government, Church, and the Fourth Estate. I mean power. At his first trial, George was 100 percent lacking in that desirable commodity. So before that first trial began, while still unconvicted and (presumably) innocent until proven otherwise, he’d sat for fourteen months in Haver County Jail in a cell he sometimes had to share with as many as five other men. The jail, unequipped for “long-term prisoners”—fourteen months was (presumably) not in that category—had no facilities for counseling, medical treatment, or even exercise, other than the endless scrubbing of its floors and walls.
At his first trial, George never laid eyes on his lawyer, an assistant public defender, until he stepped into the courtroom. George's lawyer never saw George's file until it was handed to him that morning by another public defender, who’d interviewed George months earlier, and who’d lost patience with the defendant after he’d turned down the great deal this P.D. had worked out with Mitchell Bazemore in one of their games of flesh-peddle swap: Mitch would let Hall go for ten-to-twenty on guilty to second-degree murder, if the P.D. would give him a guilty plea on all three counts of rape by another client—a young thug I was pretty sure had committed at least two of the rapes. George's stubborn refusal to accept this deal loused up the court's busy schedule, and exasperated those who’d “only wanted to help” him. He couldn’t have annoyed them more unless he’d had the arrogance to act as his own lawyer and presume to tell them their own business in their own courtroom.
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