Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  The old man stared at me thoughtfully. “He knew about the smuggling, yes. He knew Pym and Russell, yes.”

  “Why didn’t he testify about it? Will you tell me?”

  “All right.” His wide spottled hand rubbed across his face. “Now I will. George kept quiet because he believed he was protecting his family. Your former colleague Winston Russell had gotten to George pretty quickly after the shooting and convinced him—I think we can imagine how convincing Mr. Russell could be—that if George let any word get out about what they’d been up to, that it’d just make things worse for him at the trial.” Isaac limped over to his window, and looked down at Hillston. “Maybe it would have. But more important—and, believe me, it was stressed again and again to George at the time of the trial, and by messages given him on death row when Russell was in Dollard—more important was, if George didn’t keep absolutely silent, Russell vowed he’d kill someone in his family. George's mother, his kid brother Cooper, his sister. That's why.”

  I stood up. “Awh, Jesus Christ. And George went along with that?!”

  Isaac's long sigh lifted his hands across the old bathrobe. “As we discovered, George was quite right to believe it wasn’t an idle threat. God help us.” He turned back to me. “The point is that he believed the threat, and he faithfully, I’d say, frankly, he nobly kept his part of the bargain. And even after Cooper involved himself actively in the case and brought me into it, George refused to talk to me, or to Cooper, about anything to do with the Pym shooting. The night before he was scheduled to die, he didn’t talk! I didn’t find this out until I got back from Delaware. George started asking to see me after Cooper was killed.”

  “You believe all this?”

  “I believe he was willing to die to protect his family. I believe he shot Pym to protect himself.” He looked at the names on the black-board. “All I need is for the jury to believe it too.”

  It was midnight before I left the Piedmont Hotel. Isaac didn’t spend the whole evening discussing the trial, just most of the evening. But he also talked about Captain John Smith's changing views on Powatan Indians, about the current situation in the Middle East, about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the life span of the male silk moth (six days, all of which time it spends looking for mates—doesn’t ever even stop to eat a single meal).

  Maybe it was the carpe diem determination of the silk moth that led him suddenly to ask, as we poked with chopsticks for the last bits of shrimp and pea pods clinging to the sides of the white cartons, if he could “ask a personal question.” I said, “Sure.”

  Leaning back in his old leather reading chair, he rubbed his paper napkin around his mouth. “When are you going to get married, Cuddy?”

  “When are you? I’ve already been married once. I’ve already tried to get married a second time; the engagement ring's still in the drawer with my socks. It's your turn.”

  “I’m in the grave to my knees, whom should I marry? But you, you’ve got the bulk of your life left, God willing. You want to spend it with an empty bed, a lonely breakfast, and a wall of books? You want to end up like me?” He waved his arms around the musty room. It was a good argument.

  I gave him a chance at the last sparerib, but he passed on it. “Whom should I marry, Isaac? There's Miss Bee, but I know for a fact she's been in love with you for forty years. Got any other candidates?”

  He brushed egg roll crumbs off his robe as he leaned over to me, his deep brown eyes warm and bright as dark candles. “Yes. I do.” “Who?”

  “Nora Howard”

  “Aww, Lord.” I stood up, broad-stepped a stack of law journals and headed for the kitchen. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

  “You had a feeling for a reason,” he shouted after me.

  “Yeah? Listen, I don’t even know Nora, and she doesn’t know me.”

  “After all these months how can you—”

  “Furthermore, she doesn’t even much like me.”

  “Not true!”

  I came back with a trash can and began dumping the food cartons in it. “Oh really? She tell you otherwise?…Listen, just because I don’t blab out my private life to you, doesn’t mean I don’t have one.”

  “Wait! Don’t throw away that egg roll.”

  “Right, let's drop it here under the chair to rot.”

  “What are you getting so angry about, Slim?…Tell me about this private life. Are you marrying somebody else?”

  “Jesus, Isaac. No, I’m not marrying ‘somebody else.’” I shoved the unused little packages of cookies and tea bags down on top of the cartons.

  “Why not?”

  I don’t know what made me blurt out the truth, but I did. “Because she's already married, okay? Okay?!”

  “Ahh.” He relit a half-smoked cigarette, and stared at me awhile. “I’m sorry.”

  “Right.” Grabbing the bottle of ale, I flung myself back in the old chair.

  Isaac shifted his glance to the window behind me. “And I imagine she feels it would not be…possible for her to leave her husband…under the circumstances.”

  I glared at him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, I’m very sorry, Slim. I wish you were happy.”

  Had he seen me with Lee? Yes, okay, a couple of times, but only at things like the reception after Coop's memorial service. Had somebody been talking about us? Maybe he knew Edwina Sunderland. Maybe Nora had seen Lee on one of the (very infrequent) occasions she’d come to my apartment. Or, maybe he hadn’t meant anything at all by “under the circumstances.” We both sat with our thoughts awhile, but he could always outlast me. Finally I said, “It's a very complicated—and delicate—situation. If someone's said something to you, I wish you’d let me know.”

  His sigh sounded like an old lion's. “I’ve known you since you were nine. It was this very room you sat in, eighteen years old, biting your mouth raw so you wouldn’t cry, the first time you let your heart get broken. Over the same damn thing.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “So don’t you ask me ‘if someone's said something to you.’ Do I need to be told who you are, after all these years? Because, God help you, you apparently have not altered one iota. She won’t leave Brookside, don’t you know that?”

  “It's none of your business!”

  “Well, well, you’re right. Ah, who knows. Certainly not an old shriveled celibate like me. So I’ll trust Juvenal: ‘Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.’ If that's how you feel, Slim, that's how you feel.” He pulled himself out of his chair, limped over, and patted me on the knee. “Now ask me a personal question. Come on.”

  I smiled up at him. “How old are you?”

  “That's it? That's not an interesting question. I’m sixty-eight, or -six, or something. That's not personal.”

  And it wasn’t the question I’d planned to ask. I was finally going to ask Isaac what had ever happened between him and Edith Keene. But I decided I didn’t have the heart to hear the answer.

  chapter 17

  On my way out of the municipal building the next afternoon, I cracked open the court doors to check on the trial. Mitchell Bazemore was sermonizing his way through his opening statement. Stroking his Phi Beta Kappa talisman, he paced the jury box like a preacher too fervent to stand still behind his pulpit. “The burden of proof is on the State, ladies and gentlemen, and in the name of our good state, I am proud to accept that burden. I honor that burden, because our Forefathers placed it upon me to protect the innocent. Unless the State establishes by an unbreakable chain of hard factual links, every charge we’ve brought against the defendant George Hall, we have not proven him guilty, and you are required to find him innocent. And that is one of the precious glories of the American system, and I cherish it as much as I’m sure you all do.

  “But if we do establish the charges beyond a reasonable doubt— and, now, that doesn’t mean beyond any doubt, or a possible doubt, but a reasonable doubt—then we have proved George Hall guilty. And t
hen your duty—your duty to the victim, to the victim's family, your duty to the great society in which we all live; your duty to the State…” (Mitch pointed at the flag and the seal now, just like he always did.) “Because, members of the jury, you are the State—your duty is to find George Hall guilty as charged of murder in the first degree.”

  He gave each row a stern gaze to be sure they’d gotten the message. “Ladies and gentlemen. The State can and will prove during the course of this trial that on the night in question, George Hall did willfully and with malice aforethought pursue Police Officer Robert Pym, Jr. with a deadly weapon—and a thirty-eight–caliber Smith and Wesson revolver is a very deadly weapon. That he did so with the deliberate intention of firing this revolver at Officer Pym. That he did in fact deliberately shoot and did in fact deliberately kill Officer Pym. That he killed him after a clear opportunity maturely and meaningfully to reflect on what he was doing. This was no accident. This was not negligence, or diminished capacity, or irresistible impulse. This was cool-headed, cold-hearted murder.”

  Bazemore turned and shook a scornful finger at Isaac Rosethorn who was making a great show of scribbling away on a pad as if he were refuting every word out of the D.A.'s mouth (he was probably writing a letter). “The defense here,” sneered Bazemore, “will try to persuade you that Officer Pym ‘provoked’ George Hall. And no doubt Mr. Rose…thorn here is also going to try to tell you that Officer Pym was no shining knight, but a corrupt man, a cruel man, even a criminal.”

  Isaac stood up, leaned to the jury, and shook his head yes in a broad pantomime of eagerness. Several of them smiled. Bazemore whipped around at the defense table, where Isaac quickly dropped his pencil and pretended to be picking it up.

  “Even so!” The D.A. did a snappy about-face, and stared down the jury. “Even so! Even if Bobby Pym was an awful man, even if he flew into a heat of passion that night and behaved in an inflammatory way toward the defendant, remember, ladies and gentlemen, Bobby Pym is not on trial here. Bobby Pym is dead. He's dead because George Hall murdered him. Because George Hall chose to follow him outside Smoke's Bar, and chose to shoot him down in cold blood. He made a choice.” Bazemore paused, contemplatively. He had the jury listening hard, and knew it. His voice hoarsened with honesty. “We all get provoked sometimes.” He looked with sorrow at the older black man on the front row of the jury. “We’ve all been treated badly, maybe been treated with the most painful unfairness, at some time or other in our lives.” Head shaking, his voice lifted. “But we don’t all turn to murder as our answer. We don’t all choose the ways of the jungle, the ways of an animal, the ways—”

  I left Mitch in full stride, walked outside, and headed down Main Street. He had another good twenty minutes to go on his murder one speech. They wouldn’t get to my testimony in the hour left before Hilliardson adjourned for the day. When the D.A. wound down, Isaac would ask to defer the defense's opening statement until after the State rested its case. He always asked to defer. Then Bazemore would begin calling his standard groundwork witnesses that always bored everybody: Coroner—yes, Pym died of a gunshot wound to the head, etc., etc.; U.H. surgeon—yes, I removed a bullet from Pym's skull etc. etc.; ballistics—yes, the bullet taken from Pym's skull was fired from the revolver registered to Pym. Is this the gun? Yes, it is. The State would like to place it in evidence as Exhibit A. And so on until the prosecution had made it inescapably clear that there was a body; the body had been shot; the body had been shot with Exhibit A. By whom, and whatever for, came later.

  Outside, it was one of those clean, breezy, blue late April days that gives spring its great reputation. The sky bright, the air sweet-smelling, the leaves a sharp new green, it was one of those days that made even Hillston look planned. Every little spot of civic earth left uncemented was wildly sending up gaudy red and orange tulips, whole pink hedges of azalea and rhododendron, buttery yellow walls of jessamine vines. I pulled off my tweed jacket, rolled up my shirt sleeves, took in a deep breath of North Carolina at its best, and started the first walk I’d taken downtown in a long time. I was back on the beat, you might say, checking out my city. It was something I’d done regularly in the first months after I’d been appointed chief of HPD, when I was restructuring the department.

  Back then, I’d been just what Newsweek reported: “Indefatigable.” I’d drive around in the middle of the night posting notices on different shop fronts and in isolated areas (“A robbery is now in progress at this store”; “A rape is now in progress in this alley”). Officers were supposed to call in to headquarters as soon as they spotted one of these simulation notices. I got complaints about “playing games,” but my game did put a stop to the old-style tour of duty favored by cops like Winston Russell; the kind where you wile away the hours snoozing in the patrol car, or strolling the safer streets, cadging free drinks, meals, and sex from civilians. I’d also drive around in the middle of the day, spot-checking whether officers were where they were supposed to be; or I’d follow radio calls to see how quickly a squad car responded, or how quickly the backup arrived if an officer asked for one, particularly a female officer, because Nancy White had consistently complained about “macho pigs” being slow to respond when she radioed for assistance. And she was right; they were stalling. I fired one of them, and scared another one (Purley Newsome) into at least a façade of fair play. Yep, I was a holy terror in those early months. A lot of people didn’t like me. A lot still don’t. But not many of those still work at HPD.

  On my walk, I saw Officer Brenda Moore at an intersection, kindly giving directions to a driver with Arizona plates. I saw Officer Titus Baker checking the lock on a ladies’ dress shop that was closed for renovations while being transformed into “Banana Republic, Arriving Here Soon.” Everybody on the streets today looked cheerful, friendly, and law-abiding, like they were extras in the opening scene of some 1950s movie, just before the innocent people of Happytown, U.S.A., look up and see monster-sized cockroaches from outer space crawling over the tops of their nicest buildings.

  At the corner of Main and Cadmean streets, next to an elegant wine store, Hillstonians sat on green slatted chairs under sidewalk umbrellas, enjoying capucchinos and Italian ice creams. The new green-and-white awning said GIORGIO’S. Three years ago, there’d been metal stools crammed along a plastic lunch counter, and outside a plywood sign saying GEORGIE’S PIZZA. Upscale everywhere—the Song of the New South.

  Somebody called to me as I walked past.

  It was Father Paul Madison, who wore his black collar, seated next to Lee Haver Brookside, who wore a light rose silk dress with a loose dark rose jacket. Seeing her when I was expecting to was jolt enough on the heart and knees; coming across her like this, before I could get my system prepared, was more like having a live power line drop out of the blue and land on your neck. Like old Patsy Cline said, “You walk by, and I fall to pieces.” Of course, it didn’t show; that's the amazing thing about the heart—it can carry on like a maniac, while the rest of you is politely shaking hands.

  Lee's purse and shoes went with the rose jacket, and I’m sure none of them had been bought anywhere near Hillston, even at its boutique best. It wasn’t that she looked like she didn’t belong in Hillston, because she always looked like she belonged wherever she was. But she could have just as easily been sitting in a café in Milan, or Paris, or one of the other places where I’d imagined running into her in the past, when I’d walked by handsome restaurants, hearing foreign laughter inside.

  “Hello there,” she said now, and let go of my hand.

  I hadn’t seen Lee for the past two weeks. For one of them, she’d gone to visit her stepsister in Palm Beach. Then four days ago, she hadn’t shown up for what was supposed to have been our first night in “our own place.” In March I’d read an ad in the paper for a “waterfront retreat, a steal at $79,900. Privacy, and a great view.” It turned out to be on the unfashionable tip of Pine Hills Lake, where nobody much went, and where it wasn’t easy to go, since t
he access road looked like no one had touched it since the Shocco Indians left town. The house was an old, brown-shingled three-room cabin with a boarded-up stone fireplace, an ugly dropped ceiling, tacky pineboard walls, and a rickety open porch built out over the water's edge. No insulation, no electricity, no phone. I loved it. I bought it—for $71,500—some C.D.s down, and the rest on that thirty-year easy monthly payment plan. Lee loved the house too, and whenever we’d take a drive now, we’d bring it a present. Some Sundays I went there alone and worked on ripping out the fake ceiling and paneling. But then the first time we’d arranged to stay the whole night there together, she hadn’t come. There’d been a message on my machine back at River Rise when I gave up at five A.M. and drove home. “Cuddy, I’m sorry. Andy didn’t leave! He's downstairs. They canceled all flights to New York. A blizzard. I’m sorry. I love you. Bye. Dammit!”

  “Join us, Cuddy,” said Paul Madison in high spirits. God knows what charitable scheme he’d been hitting Lee up for now. Equipment for the daycare center? New cutlery for the soup kitchen? Maybe a dozen doctors for his Cadmean Convalescent Home? “No, no, come on. Sit down. How are you? Have some coffee.” The two of them had sipped their way through their minuscule espressos, and were waiting for refills. I said I was in a rush. Lee smiled at me, and I sat down.

  Giorgio's young waiter passed by looking like the Philip Morris bellhop. I told him, “Scusi. Vorrei una tazza grande di caffè americano, prego.” Scowling, he looked to the priest for help.

  Paul said, “The Rio Grande belongs to Americans?”

  Lee smiled at me.

  I said, “Y’all carry American coffee in great big cups, then bring me one.” He slouched off. “How have you been, Lee, nice to see you again. Looks like spring is definitely claiming the territory.”

  She said, “Nice to see you, Cuddy. It's been a while. Have you seen Edwina Sunderland lately? I’ve been so busy with the campaign and…”