Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  Squeezing the rail of the witness stand, Mitch made a valiant effort to control his voice as he said, “But before this altercation began, when George Hall saw Robert Pym enter Smoke's Bar, did Hall make any comment to you about Pym?”

  Isaac objected here, again on the grounds of leading the witness. Hilliardson overruled him on the grounds that direct remarks made by the defendant at this juncture might well have a vital bearing on our understanding of the subsequent events.

  “A comment?” Moonfoot tugged at his little goatee, looked at the ceiling, then twisted sideways in the chair and lowered his head. “Well, yes, he made a comment about him, yes, sir. Pym went over by the jukebox, and folks were arguing with him ’cause he’d punched some tunes, and there was a live entertainment going on, and so George said to me…” Moonfoot looked up at Bazemore and swallowed carefully.

  Mitch nodded. “He said to you?”

  “Said, ‘If he mess with me, if he say one fuckin’ word to me…I’m gonna kill that motherfucker dead. I don’t get him now, then I get him later, but I get him.’”

  Hilliardson spoke into the thick silence that now filled the courtroom. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear your last sentence. Could you repeat it, and if possible speak more loudly?”

  Moonfoot kept his eyes on the D.A. “George said, ‘If I don’t get him now, then I get him later, but I get him.’”

  “Those were George Hall's exact words, at least fifteen minutes before his shooting Pym?”

  “Those were his words.”

  “And this was prior to the start of any fight between them? Before it started.”

  “Prior to it, that's right.”

  “At the time he said this, was Pym's gun in evidence? Was it visible to you?”

  “No, it wasn’t visible ‘til they got to shoving each other when Pym goes for it. Then it was visible.”

  “When George said, ‘Sooner or later I’m going to shoot Pym,’ did—”

  Isaac slapped the table. “Objection.”

  Hilliardson sustained it, adding, “There has been no testimony that the defendant spoke the words you just used, Mr. Bazemore.”

  Apologizing, Mitch rephrased the question, through tightly locked lips: “When George told you, ‘If he say one fuckin’ word to me…I’m gonna kill that motherfucker dead,’ what was his tone of voice?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  The judge said, “His tone of voice. Was he laughing, shouting in anger, et cetera?”

  Moonfoot squeezed his eyes shut as if to recall. “Well…serious. Quiet. Kind of scary, I guess.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I don’t recall my exact words, but something about it didn’t sound like a good idea.”

  “What didn’t?”

  “Shooting Bobby Pym.”

  Mitch walked to the jury box, then faced Isaac Rosethorn. “Mr. Butler, when did you learn that Bobby Pym had been shot to death and that George Hall had been charged with the crime?”

  “Early morning, I heard it on the radio.”

  “And were you, to borrow a word from the defense counsel, surprised to hear that George Hall had killed Robert Pym?”

  Butler wiped his hand all the way down the front of his face. “Well, no, I wasn’t surprised.”

  The D.A. looked at the clock, said, “Thank you,” and sat down.

  The judge looked at the clock, at Mitch, at Isaac, and at Moonfoot Butler. Then he said, “It is nearly four. We could continue. But rather than begin cross-examination at this late hour, I am going to adjourn court until tomorrow at ten.”

  Miss Bee Turner hopped up. Behind her, Mitch waved his arm like a first-grader desperate for permission to go to the bathroom. “Your Honor, Your Honor! Delaware police expect to return Mr. Butler to their jurisdiction tonight!”

  “Well,” said Hilliardson, as he stood like a tall black heron on a high riverbank. “Then I suggest, Counsel, that you offer them and their prisoner the hospitality for which the state of North Carolina is so justly renowned.”

  chapter 20

  After court adjourned, I walked over to ask Isaac and Nora what they were going to do about Moonfoot Butler's testimony, and they said they were going to Pogo's, the closest bar. There they were going to study the deposition Moonfoot had given Isaac back in December when he and Billy Gilchrist had driven to Delaware (and which Nora had rushed out of the courtroom today to bring back). They planned to check it for discrepancies with the pretrial statement Mitch had tossed on their table as he finished his examination. But Isaac didn’t want to talk about Butler now; he wanted instead to hear all about Purley Newsome, and told me he’d like a chance to interview Purley as soon as we had him in custody. I said, “You’ll have to wait in a long line.”

  After Pogo's, Isaac and Nora were going to dinner at Carippini's; they asked me to drop in there if I was free. I said I had a hundred things to do. Nora said, “Who doesn’t?” Isaac yanked me aside, whispered that it was a surprise party for Nora, and he wanted me to show up—even though I hadn’t been invited—because Nora didn’t actively dislike me as much as it seemed.

  I said, “On those grounds, I could drop in for supper parties at half the homes in Hillston: I wasn’t invited, and the guest of honor doesn’t actively dislike me. Good Lord, Isaac.”

  “No no, I meant everybody's just been asking everybody and I was going to ask you, but it slipped my mind. So do your hundred things and come on over.”

  One of the things I did was see Moonfoot Butler safely escorted to our holding cell at HPD, where he should have felt quite at home, after thirty-four previous visits over a score of years. Whether Moonfoot's memories of HPD were fond or not, he’d begged his Delaware escorts to let him stay with us for the night, rather than send him across the street to the county jail. Mitch showed up while I was in there and told Butler he’d done very well, adding that tomorrow he should “stick to his story” and not allow Rosethorn to “bamboozle him,” and that, until tomorrow, he should “keep his mouth shut” if anyone came to see him.

  Moonfoot yanked on the bars as if to make sure the cell were locked. “I don’t wanna see anybody. Don’t let anybody back here.”

  “Frankly, I think Butler's afraid of Hall, that's my theory,” Mitch said as he jog-walked back to his office from the holding cell.

  Furious, I walked even faster than he did. “Frankly, Mitch, I think you’ve had a major insight here. Now, I also have a theory; it's about why Butler's afraid of Hall. If I’d just committed perjury in a capital case, I too would be afraid to be locked up in the same cell with the man I’d committed it against.”

  His neck one scarlet bulge, he swung around on me fast, and started jabbing his forefinger into my sternum. “Are you implying that I suborned a witness? Is that what you’re implying, Mangum? Are you making that accusation?”

  I slapped his hand away hard. “Don’t do that, okay? You touch me again, and I’m gonna hurt you, Mitch. I said, in my opinion, Butler committed perjury. I didn’t say you told him to, or even that you believe he did it.”

  Folding his arms tightly over his chest, Mitch stepped back and locked eyes with me. “Butler is telling the truth. He isn’t lying. He told the court exactly what he told this office when he was subpoenaed. The truth. Is that clear? No one bribed him and no one intimidated him. The truth is, George Hall planned to kill a man, planned to, and did it. He's a violent disruptive factor in our society, and these trials and everything surrounding these trials has been a violent disruptive factor in our society. Hall should have been executed years ago. And Isaac Rosethorn's deigning to waltz in now and set up his fancy magic show for the jury can’t make the truth vanish. Hall took a life, and he owes a life. End of discussion, Mangum.”

  We were outside his office now, but I straight-armed my hand against the door to stop him from opening it. “I know you believe that. But the real truth is—you want the real truth?—Hall and his brother and their supporters are a big ugly thorn in your side, and y
ou’re mad. You’re mad, and you’re scared of Rosethorn because he already beat you on three other cases.”

  “Just hold it right—”

  “The real truth is, you’ve gotten your name in the papers for winning those big forty-four “Go for It” death penalty convictions of yours, and you can’t stand it that you’ve only managed to get nine of those forty-four people actually gassed. And you’ve gone on record that you’re going to make Hall number ten, and you want Hall.”

  “The state of North Carolina wants Hall!”

  “The state of North Carolina should want justice, not a victory! If you wanted the whole truth, you’d listen. I’ve tried to tell you that George Hall was repeatedly threatened by Russell, that if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, his family would be hurt. He does keep his mouth shut. And Russell still shoots his brother. And we still don’t know why.”

  Mitch shook his head fast. “I don’t believe a word of George Hall's story. It's just something he came up with after the fact. Trying to make himself look heroic. Nobody goes to the gas chamber if he thinks he can get out of it, not just because of some vague threat against his brother. George Hall knew he couldn’t get out of it. And he's not going to get out of it either. I’m going to nail him in this stupid retrial. You can tell your friend Rosethorn that Hall's going right back to death row where he belongs. That's something Rosethorn can set his clock by!” It was interesting that Bazemore accepted the idea that a man like Otis Newsome could get so upset by a brother's “shame” that he’d kill himself, but wouldn’t accept the idea that a man like George Hall could let himself be killed in order to save a brother's life.

  He flung open the glass door with DISTRICT ATTORNEY, HAVER COUNTY painted across it. Caught reading a soap opera magazine, his secretary leapt to her feet, then snatched up a stack of message slips, which she offered him as a quick distraction. He didn’t, however, even see her, much less her offering, but marched around her desk and slammed the door to his inner office. Immediately it was yanked back open and out came Bazemore's nasal command that I phone him tonight “re what to have Savile say to Newsome in the A.M.,” adding that he had to discuss things with the A.G. first. I suggested that if Purley was dumb enough to believe in deals made with murder suspects by lieutenants over the telephone, we should go ahead and promise him whatever it took to get him into custody.

  “I don’t make promises I don’t intend to keep,” snapped Mitch, with his pious prosecutor expression.

  “So, what’d you promise Moonfoot Butler that you intend to give him?” I snapped back. The D.A. said what he’d give me was five seconds to get out of his office.

  I made it easy and drove to Carippini's Restaurant.

  That night Nora Howard's brother had closed Carippini's to the public. Gold and silver balloons bounced against the ceiling, twisted mylar streamers shimmered around the columns and swagged from the archways. Across the windows, above the bar, and along the back wall stretched some long multicolored strings of big letters. They spelled out CONGRATULATIONS, NORA. A huge white pastry concoction in the shape of a Greek temple (it turned out to be the Supreme Court Building) also said CONGRATULATIONS, NORA. Tables had been pushed together into two long Ls, and at them sat twenty noisy, cheerful people drinking wine and eating a meal cooked by Nora's brother, veal marsala with risotto and Roman artichokes. Her brother had invited everyone to his restaurant to celebrate the fact that on Friday, Nora Angelica Carippini Howard had learned that she’d passed the North Carolina law bar exams.

  It was a good dinner party, with lots of songs and lots of wine, lots of children, and “Golden Oldies” dancing; there were zippy accordion tunes by (I think) Nora's aunt's second husband, and tributes to the guest of honor: the presentation of a new briefcase by her kids, Laura and Brian, a comic skit by three friends from the Law Library, the recitation by Isaac Rosethorn in Italian of Dante's meeting Beatrice in the Divine Comedy (in honor, he said, of his meeting “the more beautiful half of Rosethorn and Howard”). Later, there was a prize of little champagne bottles won by Nora and, in fact, me, for our energetic jitterbug to Jerry Lee Lewis's “Breathless”—which was exactly how three minutes of that youthful pastime left me.

  Among the people at the party was Jordan West, who sat with the young black psychiatrist from the Department of Human Services. He couldn’t take his eyes off her; a feeling most people had about Jordan to some degree or other. Watching them together, a comment of Jack Molina's popped in my head, about how if I didn’t believe him when he said Cooper had no interest in “the personal,” I should just ask Jordan West. Well, this new man looked as interested in the personal as it was possible to be; every time she spoke to him it was like she’d tapped a tuning fork. They danced a slow dance in a way that made me think John Emory might as well quit struggling to overcome his shyness in order to ask her out. I sat with them awhile and we talked about the trial, about Moonfoot Butler's testimony (she assumed it was all a fabrication—including George's involvement in the smuggling), about Nomi Hall's faith that Isaac would win an acquittal for her son.

  I said, “I hope so too.”

  Jordan looked at me. “Nomi doesn’t hope so; she believes so. To her, Cooper died for George. Saving George helps to redeem his death. Me, I don’t think Coop…” Her voice faltered, and the young doctor put his hand quietly over hers. “I don’t think of it that way. Cooper lived for George and all the others, people he never saw. But he died for no reason, just…hate.” None of us spoke for a while. Finally, she slid her hand out from under her escort's. She stood up, which I took to be a signal for me to leave, so I stood up too, and she shook my hand quickly, then said, “I hadn’t known until your testimony that you had written to the parole board for George. Isaac always told Coop that he was wrong about you. And I think if Coop had heard your testimony today, he would have decided that Isaac was right.”

  “Well, Coop wasn’t wrong about some things. I wasn’t good enough or fast enough to protect him.”

  She didn’t argue with me. I shook Dr. Arnold's hand too. He turned back toward her and I left them alone.

  Three more dances with Nora and I pleaded exhaustion. While I sat off at a far corner table recovering, replaced as her partner by (I think) her brother's wife's cousin, Isaac pulled up a chair beside me. “So, Slim,” he said, licking white icing from his fingers. “Nice people.” I agreed. We watched the party awhile, then he gave me one of his tragic looks. “Cuddy, tell me, do you think Billy's dead? Now we know how close Purley Newsome was to home, and maybe Russell, too, I’m sick with the thought that they grabbed Billy.”

  I said I hoped not, but it was possible. “’Course, Paul Madison's convinced that Gilchrist held out more than he said on those contributions to the collection plate we heard so much about, and that he's off on another toot to Vegas or Miami.”

  “Well, Paul's a man of faith. He's naturally optimistic.” Isaac's rounded shoulders shrugged up around his neck. “Me, I imagine chain saws and pools of blood.”

  “How badly do you need Gilchrist's testimony?”

  Isaac's eyes turned even more mournful. “Ah, Slim, Slim, are you really so pragmatic as that? I liked Billy.” We were both quiet awhile, then he said, “I’ve got the girl who was up in the Montgomery Hotel room with Russell.” Another silence. Then, “You want to know the word you used on the stand that hurt most? ‘Pursued.’ ‘George got hold of the gun and pursued Pym.’”

  “‘Pursued’ was the truth.”

  “‘Pursued’ was hearsay. You weren’t there, and I doubt whichever patron of Smoke's described the scene to you said, ‘And then he pursued him out the door.’ Interesting, how Judge Hilliardson will allow a bit of hearsay, a bit of conclusion. He gave us quite a speech in chambers before we opened. You know how he bites off his words like little pieces of rock candy?” Rosethorn was an excellent mimic (most good trial lawyers are good actors), and it was remarkable how he transformed his large bulk, Semitic features, and rolling baritone into
the clipped nasal tenor, and the thin Wasp semblance of Shirley Hilliardson, as he gulped down a sip of watery whiskey and said, “‘Gentlemen, in my courtroom, the game of law must and will be subordinated to the quest for truth. In that—and I am unabashed in calling it, holy—quest, jurisprudence is the servant of justice, never the master. We are all three here to seek truth. Not a conviction, not an acquittal, but truth. Counselors, are we in accord?’ Well, naturally Bazemore and I bobbed our heads like fuzzy dogs on a dashboard, then ran out into the court shooting, dodging, blocking, and behaving like any sane lawyer would. Still, it was a lovely speech.”

  I said, “I’m with Hilliardson.”

  “I’m with George Hall.” He smiled. “But in general, your testimony was helpful.” A pat on the knee. “The jury seemed to find you morally appealing.”

  I wiped my forehead and neck with my handkerchief. “Maybe because they figured I was telling the truth. Which I suspect is more than we can say for Moonfoot Butler.”

  Isaac went on an unsuccessful pocket search for his cigarettes. “Ah, Mr. Moonfoot. What he said isn’t as interesting as why he said anything at all. And even that's not nearly as interesting really, as I’m going to make it sound tomorrow morning. Poor Moonfoot Butler. It's never safe to sell your soul. The buyers can rarely be trusted to pay off. So, Bazemore scared you on redirect, didn’t he?”

  “You noticed? Thanks for shutting him up before that catechism on the death penalty got going. I would have had to answer—”

  “Why?” He had taken off his jacket, and unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, which flapped loose around his wide stubby hands as he nibbled at pieces of Nora's cake. “Your beliefs aren’t on trial; George Hall's actions are on trial. And I’d advise if you’re ever in similar circumstances—deprive yourself of the self-satisfying pleasure of beating the breast of truth, or baring your social philosophy.” His finger ticked back and forth near my nose.

  “I think Mitch Bazemore and the A.G. and the commissioner already have a pretty good idea of my social philosophy.”