Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  “From everything I hear, Pym was a fucking criminal.”

  “Right. But as the D.A. just told the jury, Pym's not on trial.”

  “He will be. I’ve seen Rosethorn work.”

  Up in my office, Molina slammed his back against the wall, and wasted no time returning to the main point. “First, Coop did not give Andy a tape. But Coop did tell Andy, when they met that Saturday at the airport, that he had such a tape.”

  I settled into my chair, balled up my lunch trash, and tossed it in the wastebasket. “What you mean is, that's why Brookside agreed to meet him. Or let's put it this way: your candidate had every reason to believe it was possible there might exist such a tape.”

  “Yes.” He sucked at his bleeding knuckles. “Apparently so.” “So, Jack, how do you come into this…imprudence? You set up the meeting?”

  He nodded. “Coop called me after I got home from the prison that night, the night of the reprieve, really late, and he says he has to see Andy. I’d already arranged one meeting between them a few days earlier, about George. That's when Andy agreed to call Wollston with the request for clemency. So now Coop says he wants to warn Andy about something the Lewis campaign is up to.”

  Swiveling my chair to the file cabinet, I took out a blank manila envelope and placed it on my desk. “When Coop called, did he mention the videotape to you?”

  “No. Just that they—”

  “Who's they?”

  “He never mentioned names, not to me, or to Andy. Just that people working for Lewis were up to something slimy that could do us some heavy damage. I said I’d have Andy call him Saturday morning. I didn’t find out they’d actually met that same day until, well, later. But Coop told Andy then that he’d gotten hold of this videotape. He described enough to convince Andy the thing existed.”

  “Did he say where this tape was?” “In a safe place.”

  “You knew Cooper pretty well. You worked with him. Where would he put something to keep it safe?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at the knuckles; they’d stopped bleeding. “Listen, don’t get the idea Andy sent me to talk to you. I’m on my own.”

  “I figured as much. Excuse me a second.” I buzzed Zeke at the desk and told him to ask Etham Foster to come up if convenient. Then I leaned back and said, “So, Cooper just wanted to ‘warn’ the good guys that the bad guys were playing dirty?”

  Molina tightened his arms across his thin chest. “He also wanted some guarantees from Andy—human services appointments, civil rights steps, that type thing. They talked about the upcoming Winston-Salem speech. I mean, it wasn’t like Coop was blackmailing Andy. Andy was very impressed by him. I suspect he would have…”

  “Put him on the team, as they say?”

  “Yes. I just don’t want you to get any stupid ideas about Coop, or any ideas that Andy had anything to do with his death.”

  “You don’t want me to get a lot of ideas I hadn’t planned on acquiring.” I looked at the photos of Winston Russell and Purley Newsome on my corkboard. “Brookside couldn’t have killed Cooper. He has a very good alibi. But the people who probably did kill him knew where he was because they had followed Brookside to the airport. And possibly one of the reasons they killed Cooper was that he had been talking with Brookside.”

  “Those cops you’re looking for? Pym's cronies? Were they the people who made the videotape?”

  “Possibly.”

  His eyes flamed. “So they were working for Julian Lewis?”

  “For him, I don’t know. Maybe on his behalf.”

  “What's the difference!”

  “There's a considerable difference.” I found a black Magic Marker in my drawer. “All right, just after they meet, Coop is killed, and Brookside never gets to see the tape?”

  “No.”

  I looked up at him. “How ’bout you, Jack? You see it?”

  “Me?” With his back, Molina pushed off from the door, and headed around my desk toward the window. The skin had blanched around his mouth. Swiveling in my chair, I kept my eyes on him. He asked quietly, “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, one reason is, you knew the woman was black.”

  He thought about this as he stared out over Hillston, where the late sun was turning the air to gold haze. He said, “Andy admitted that he had…spent a few evenings with this Touraine woman. Look, will you tell me how you know about this tape?”

  “Sure. The man who gave it to Cooper Hall told me he’d done so. He only gave it to him late that Friday night. Obviously just before Cooper called you.”

  “Where did this man get it?”

  “Miss Touraine made this gentleman a present of it before she left the country, apparently for an indefinite stay.”

  I watched the movement of Molina's eyes as he sat down across from my desk. Then his long thin face so visibly relaxed that I was pretty sure of what I’d been suspecting. He relaxed because he thought I was telling him there was only one tape, and that it had never gotten to the “Lewis men.” It had gone from Touraine to Coop. He relaxed because he already knew where Coop's tape was. Because he had it. I said, “Your commitment to Andrew Brookside is very impressive.”

  He took off his glasses, rubbing his nose; unfiltered by glass, the large dark eyes were even more piercing. “I have no commitment to Andrew Brookside. I have an absolute commitment to social justice in this country.”

  “It's Mr. Brookside's ass you appear to be trying to extricate from the wringer.”

  “Well, I believe you’re the one who said, ‘We use what we have.’” He fitted his glasses back on. “Look, Mangum. It took me a long time to accept, but…there's not going to be a revolution in America. The thirties proved that. The sixties proved it again. A country where laid-off factory workers are opposed to inheritance taxes, where bankrupt farmers vote for Reagan, isn’t headed for a proletariat uprising. The great scam of capitalist democracy has been to trick the poor into believing they could be rich. So…” He shrugged.

  I shrugged too. “So, if they don’t see the chains, they won’t shake them off.”

  “Yeah.” He looked sadly out my window. “Well…our side did register a lot of people to vote. Our side did stop a war.”

  “Not in time. You know, Andy Brookside said to me once that you didn’t like him, Jack, just thought he was better than ‘more of the same dumb smug thieves.’”

  “He's right.” His long pale fingers spread out over the chair's arm. He wore a wedding ring. Leaning forward, he shook off whatever he was thinking. “It's crucial to find these leaks and try to contain them. Will you tell me the name of the man who gave Coop the tape?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I will tell you he's not going to tell anybody about it. But that's not going to help you, Jack. That was a copy Coop got. There's an original somewhere.”

  His body twitched in the chair. “How do you know?”

  “I think Miss Touraine gave the original to a man named Willie Slidell, who’d set up the video camera in her apartment. Willie Slidell was murdered. We don’t know if his killers have the original, or couldn’t find it. We don’t know if there's only the one copy now, or a dozen.” I opened a packet of cheese crackers. “I mean, in addition to the copy you took out of Cooper's file box at With Liberty and Justice.”

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  After I ate a cracker I added, “The copy you took when you trashed that office. When you also took the incoming tape out of the answering machine, because you realized Coop had recorded Brookside's Saturday morning call on it, when they talked about that video.”

  His hand shook but he pressed it under his arm. “This is pretty far-out shit, Mangum.”

  I cleared papers from the desk edge, and put the manila envelope and black marker in front of him. Just write ‘Mangum. Hillston Police Department.’” I handed him the marker. “Oh, and how about adding the word atheist down at the bottom.”

  Molina and I looked at each other for a solid minute. Then he sa
id softly, “Why should I do that?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  He frowned, uncapped the marker, then slowly recapped it. “Okay.”

  I said, “The thing is, Jack, I’m close to sure Bobby Pym's wallet had been kept in Coop's file box, along with the video. And somehow I figure if an ordinary thief had stolen it, or one of ‘Pym's cronies,’ or a goon from the Klan, I just don’t think they would have felt so ‘absolutely committed to social justice’ that they would have finally felt compelled to forward that wallet to a police chief who was a good friend of George Hall's lawyer.”

  We sat awhile in the quiet.

  Etham Foster knocked on my door as he was opening it. He had to stoop to walk under the sill. He said, “Yeah?” His typical greeting. I reached behind me into the jacket I’d hung over my chair-back, and pulled out the big envelope I’d taken from the Brookside volunteer, the one on which Molina had scrawled the Methodist Church address. “Etham, do me a favor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get this handwriting checked against the address on the package that Pym's wallet came in, okay? Also try it against the photos of the graffiti on the walls at With Liberty and Justice?” I tossed him the envelope, which he slapped down out of the air between his long black thumb and forefinger. “There's a TH and an IST. Even a K. That enough?”

  He said, “Maybe.” And left. He never appeared to have looked at Jack Molina, but a week from now he could have described him well enough for a police artist to draw his portrait.

  I said, “So, Professor, did you write all those letters threatening Brookside, or just the last few? Just to keep the interest up?”

  Molina had an odd grin on his face. “You arresting me right now?”

  I said, “Nope. I’m scaring you right now.”

  “You pigs never change.” He stood up. “Listen, Captain, I was in Greensboro in seventy-nine. Unless you grab that gun on your door hook and start firing, you got a long way to go before you scare me.” Fact is, I kind of admired old Jack. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe I ought to mention that I still pay the rent on the With Liberty and Justice office out of my own salary. That file box was Coop's property; so at this point, it's Nomi's property. She's a ‘close friend’ of mine. And, in fact, it was my answering machine. So what's it going to be?”

  I smiled. “Oh, we could start with those vague fascist catch-alls. Obstructing justice. Withholding evidence. That time-consuming type of stuff. Or,” I ate another cracker, “you could cooperate with the pigs.”

  The side of his mouth twitched. “How could I do that?”

  “One, a signed statement telling me the whole story. Even the slimier details. Two, get Mr. Brookside to do the same. I won’t make them public unless I have to. Three, and I’ll stop here for now, help me trap some ex-pigs by leaking a little fiction to the press.”

  Molina stuffed his hands in his chinos, and thought it over. “Trapping ex-pigs has a certain appeal.”

  I wiped the cracker crumbs off my desk top. “I had a feeling it might.”

  chapter 18

  An hour later, Jack Molina and I spoke with Justin, who called in the Star and planted the story. Bubba ran it the next day, and the wire picked it up for Sunday papers around the South. The gist was that HPD named Purley Newsome as the prime suspect in the murders of Cooper Hall and William Slidell. That we’d done so after one Dr. J.T. Molina told us that he and Cooper Hall had been repeatedly threatened by a policeman, now identified as Purley, to stop their protests against the George Hall execution:

  …According to Lt. Justin Savile, head of the Hillston Homicide Division, Dr. Molina also claims that only three days before Hall's murder, the suspect, Newsome, forced their car off the road, pointed a gun at Hall through the window, and made verbal threats on their lives.…

  We said we could now place Newsome's car in the vicinity at the time and place Cooper Hall was killed. We said we now also had evidence pointing to Newsome as the actual trigger-man in the shooting-death of William Slidell, whose body was discovered in the Shocco River last Christmas.

  In other words, we said we were firmly convinced that Police Officer Purley C. Newsome had masterminded both murders, personally carried out both murders, and had organized the smuggling ring that the murders were supposed to cover up. In his statement, Justin theorized that by now Newsome had probably killed his underling Winston Russell too. The Star went on to remind readers that the prime suspect's brother, Otis Newsome, former city comptroller, had hanged himself on December 27. It added that Mrs. Claude Newsome, Purley's mother, was devastated by these homicide charges against her only surviving son.

  I called Bubba Sunday morning to say thanks. He said, “I notice you don’t ask me to believe that turkey-turd, just run it. What are you up to, Mangum? Purley Newsome couldn’t mastermind a game of Slapjack. And it just slipped Molina's mind ’til now that a gun-waving cop had yelled ‘You’re a dead nigger’ at Hall a few days before he gets shot?! Come on, hey. What's the deal?”

  “Ask Molina. He told you the same thing he told us. Why should he lie?”

  “Okay, stonewall me. Listen, pal, you could use a friend in the press, but have it your way. You owe me a big one.”

  I said, “I already introduced you to Edwina Sunderland's money. That's a big one. And I’ll put in a good word if you ask her to marry you.”

  He said, “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” I told him I was sure it had, and hung up.

  It rained all day Sunday. I spent the morning out at my Pine Hills cabin, positioning pans under the larger holes in the roof. I spent the afternoon at my River Rise kitchen counter, reading reports and watching the Shocco River rise closer to Atwater Randolph's untraveled bridge. Martha moped around, turning slow circles on her cushion. The phone kept ringing. Alice called to say Justin had flown to Kentucky to talk to Willie Slidell's wife. Two times, somebody hung up when I answered. Three times, Lee called. She said, “When all of a sudden you walked by Friday, I felt like my heart had stopped. I couldn’t breathe.” I said, “When I got halfway across that street and saw you sitting there with Paul, my legs buckled. I couldn’t walk.” We said, in other words, the same ridiculous, true, tin-pan-alley things lovers have always said.

  Later, there was a surprise call from another woman: Professor Briggs Mary Cadmean, whom I had once briefly entertained the notion of marrying. Now I felt like I was talking to a casual acquaintance. Maybe it had always been that way for her. When she said she felt awkward about phoning me, I took some satisfaction in telling her there was absolutely no reason to.

  She had called to ask about Cooper Hall. And her purpose for doing so finally answered the question of how old Cadmean's home number had gotten into Cooper Hall's address book. It turned out that, upon Briggs Junior's acceptance of old Cadmean's chauvinist codicil to his will (which we didn’t discuss), and her coming home to the inheritance (which we didn’t discuss), the lawyers had given her a long letter of instructions dictated days before his death by her papa (who clearly intended to go on bossing her around from the grave). Along with, I bet, advice on how to live every minute of the rest of her life, these instructions told Briggs Junior what she ought to do with the Cadmean money. There was a list of proposed contributions that the industrialist hadn’t put directly into his will.

  She read me the proposal suggesting a bequest to Cooper David Hall of $25,000 “to continue his researching of racial harassment by a secret club at Haver University called the House of Lords.” In his written instructions, Cadmean took his time expounding on (which in no way ever meant defending) his rationale: “I never went to college, but I hold a man's education in high respect. And for young college men of privilege to betray the honor of their native state by acting like a pack of goddamn Gestapo goons, sneaking around to scare decent Negroes and smear their names, is a disgrace to the American way of life I love. Cooper Hall's father, Tim, worked for me at C&W, and he was a good man at his job ’til his death. I don’t s
ay I agree with most of Cooper's ideas, but I believe in a fair chance, and I have given him my help about this research of his, and a few donations to his magazine, because he looks to be a smart industrious boy, loyal to his family, and by his own lights trying to do what's best for the great state of North Carolina. $25,000.”

  I said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It sure sounds like your daddy at the top of his form. Calling a twenty-eight-year-old man ‘a smart boy,’ and then leaving him a pile of money to fight racism.”

  Briggs Junior said she was equally struck by the fact that her father's respect for the college-educated seemed to be confined entirely to males. Sounded to me like the two of them planned to keep on bickering across the Great Divide. She read a note old Cadmean had scribbled to her in the margin: “Baby, this one will appeal to a goddamn left-winger like you.”

  He’d also added a handwritten P.S. “If this secret club horseshit about Julian Lewis turns out to be true, take an ad and revoke my endorsement of the moron. Also cancel my contribution (on p. 18, ¶ 2). Give the money to the man he's running against. Unless it's that two-bit Kennedy flyboy Brookside. I don’t like him.”

  Now, as Cooper Hall was deceased, Briggs Junior's question was, did I know anyone who was carrying on his work? From the series of House of Lords pieces in the Star, it appeared to her that one Randolph Percy was fighting the good fight, and she’d also read several articles of his on Cooper Hall himself, which led her to think they had been friends. Was this true? On the other hand, she felt reluctant to turn over the bequest to a professional journalist, if in fact there was someone closer to Cooper. She wanted to ask me whom she could talk to so she could discover what Cooper would have wanted done with the money.

  Despite owing Bubba one, I said, “Cooper wouldn’t want you to give it to Randolph Percy.” I told her to get in touch with Jordan West at Human Services, and Eric Solomon at With Liberty and Justice, and with Cooper's mother, Nomi Hall. She said she would and thanked me. Before hanging up, I said I was surprised to hear she’d left her job out West. She said Arizona wasn’t the only place that had a sky with stars in it. I agreed she had a point. We both said we’d probably run into each other around Hillston one of these days; neither one of us suggested we pick a time to make it happen.