Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  “Things went wrong.”

  “Yeah, they sure did. Winston was crazy. He laughed when he told me he’d shot Willie. I said, nobody was supposed to die. And he laughed.”

  chapter 29

  While the jury, sequestered at the Holiday Inn, was not supposed to be reading or listening to anything about the case, no one (except possibly Hilliardson) really believed that all twelve of them had completely abstained for two weeks from one of the few things there was to do in their motel rooms—which was to watch television. Certainly, Isaac and Nora assumed that at least some news about the Trinity ambush had reached them. With my swollen face, my cast and bandages, I provided, as Isaac had planned, a vivid illustration of what Winston Russell was capable of. So when Nora Howard rose in a quiet flow of white cotton, and said, “The defense recalls C.R. Mangum,” and I carefully limped forward, she gave me a look some-where between horror and grief. “Captain Mangum, would you like assistance? We apologize for asking you to come here in your condition.” I eased myself into the chair, and she sighed, “The news of Winston Russell's savage attack on you—”

  “Objection!!” Mitch Bazemore had found his old voice again; the one like a German siren.

  “Sustained,” said Hilliardson. “Ask questions, Miss Howard.”

  Nora shook her head at the jury, apologized to the judge, and asked me to please tell her if at any point I was in too much pain to continue. I said I thought I could manage.

  “We’re very grateful, Captain Mangum. The Hillston police have conducted an intensive investigation into the matters volunteered by Mr. Newsome's confession. Are the facts consistent with the evidence produced by your exhaustive, six-month investigation?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Was the now deceased Winston Russell charged with the murder of William Slidell and Cooper Hall?”

  Bazemore was up again, jingling his pocketful of dimes and quarters. “Your Honor, I don’t know where Miss Howard thinks she's headed. Irrelevant and immaterial.”

  Nora asked the judge if she could approach the bench. She stayed there long enough to give the jury ample time to study my injuries, which they did with interest. When she returned, Hilliardson told Bazemore he was overruling his objection.

  I said, yes, Russell had been charged with Slidell's murder.

  “Captain Mangum,” Nora continued crisply, pausing only long enough for me to get in the word yes, at each question, “the bullet-riddled body of William Slidell was recovered from a car in the Shocco River by your homicide division, was it not? And that car was a Ford on which an attempt had been made to destroy the identification number, and hide the original color? And after research, it proved to be a blue Ford that had been stolen from the police impoundment facility seven years ago, at the time when Winston Russell had access to that facility. Is that true?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That's true.”

  “So it's possible that the blue Ford that Arthur Butler said Russell drove, and that Denise Mabry said Russell was sitting in near Smoke's Bar, was the car you dragged from the river with William Slidell's body in it?”

  “I think it highly probable.”

  “And that this is the same blue Ford that George Hall told the police he’d seen Robert Pym running toward, on the sidewalk outside Smoke's Bar?”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  She promised she wouldn’t tax my condition much longer. Walking to the poster-board map of the street outside Smoke's, she pointed at a circled spot on the drawing. “Captain Mangum. When you apprehended George Hall, seated here on the sidewalk, was he wearing his glasses?”

  I’d thought about this, trying to see George's face staring up at me from that sidewalk. I said, “To the best of my recollection, he was not.”

  She told Mitch Bazemore I was his. Mitch didn’t want me. We hadn’t spoken since he’d told me I should be fired because of the Trinity “disaster,” and had added that if Brookside died, he wouldn’t rest until I was fired. Now he didn’t bother to look in my direction as he asked perfunctorily, “Captain, you don’t remember for certain if the accused was wearing glasses or not, do you?”

  “No, not for certain.”

  Mitch's hostility got away from him, and he chased it with his usual lead-footed sarcasm. “For all you know, Captain Mangum, he might have been wearing three pairs of glasses, three pairs of glasses, and carrying binoculars! Right?”

  I gave him a serious look. “No, sir. Even with his face all covered with blood from where Pym assaulted him, I think I would have noticed three pairs of glasses.”

  Nora beamed at me as she offered me her arm to help me out of the witness chair.

  After the lunch recess, Isaac Rosethorn pushed himself to his feet carefully, and said, “We now call the defendant George Hall.”

  The tiers of spectators hushed as George took his hand from the Bible and quietly settled into the witness chair. It was a shock to people, I think, to see his hair grizzled, his eyes sunken behind the glasses—and to compare that with the hard black shine of the young man who’d sat coiled in this chair only seven years ago. The contrast said to everybody looking at him, “You don’t ever want to go to prison under sentence of death.”

  George answered every question in the same steady unhurried voice. Talking about himself didn’t seem to come easily to him, but he never fumbled for words. He just chose them slowly. He wasn’t choosing them to please, or to hide, or to justify himself, or to conform in any way to what might be expected to serve his interest. It wasn’t that he was withheld, he was self-contained. His world in those seven years had contracted inside that small barred room to a terrible solitude without privacy. Somehow within it, he’d found a center.

  Isaac stayed back by the defense table, his hands quietly pressed against its corner. He let the long silence fill the room before he spoke. “Would you state your full name and address, please?”

  “Timothy George Hall, Jr. One twenty Mill Street, in Hillston.”

  “And, Mr. Hall, when was the last time you were in your home on Mill Street?”

  George said it matter-of-factly. “Seven years, two months, and twelve days ago.”

  “And since then?”

  “Dollard Prison, except for here, and at the jail.” He gestured with his head at the window facing the county jail.

  “Why have you been in prison all that time?”

  “I was scheduled for execution on a first-degree murder charge.”

  “The murder of Robert Pym?”

  “Yes.”

  “George, do you believe you are guilty of the crime of murder?” “No, sir, I don’t.”

  Isaac looked at him for a moment, then he sighed. “George, seven years, two months, and thirteen days ago, did you go at night to a bar in Canaan called Smoke's?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you go alone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You did not go there with Arthur ‘Moonfoot’ Butler?”

  “I went by myself. Butler was already in there. He came over and talked at me awhile.”

  “Did you go into that bar planning to kill Robert Pym?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell Moonfoot Butler at any time in any words that you planned to kill Robert Pym?”

  George shook his head. “The man lied. I don’t know why he did it, but he lied. I never said what he claimed.”

  “Why did you go to Smoke's that night?”

  “To get a beer. I was troubled about something. It had happened earlier on. I couldn’t think it through. My mother didn’t allow alcohol in her house—so I walked over to Smoke's to get a beer.”

  “Would you tell us in your own words, George, what you felt so troubled about?”

  Quietly, steadily, looking only at Isaac, George told the story of how the two policemen Pym and Russell had pressured him into making special stops on his Fanshaw trucking route, and into “looking the other way.” He did not know they’d been smuggling stolen goods. He’d b
een told by Moonfoot that they were buying large quantities of cigarettes in North Carolina and selling them at a profit out of state, that other drivers were doing the drop-offs too. Yes, he knew that it was illegal, but they were white policemen, and they said they’d make things hard on him if he didn’t cooperate. He’d lost several jobs since returning to Hillston, and he feared losing another one—or even being jailed on some trumped-up charge.

  “You couldn’t afford to be out of work because you supported your mother and your younger brother?” asked Isaac.

  “We all worked,” George said. “But Cooper was in high school, and I didn’t want him to take on any more. He was the class president.” He added this suddenly, as if it were something he’d forgotten to tell Rosethorn, and thought the lawyer would want to know.

  Hall said he’d made only two runs before that summer night in Cyrusville, Georgia, when he’d returned from his “walk,” and seen at the rear of his truck, three men flinging M-16 rifles from a broken crate into a car trunk. He’d backed off, and they hadn’t noticed him. The whole way home to Hillston, he’d thought about what the guns meant. And all he could think of was the articles and reports that Cooper brought home from his political meetings. Articles about the Carolina Klan, about their paramilitary camps, about what they’d done in the Piedmont, about how policemen were known to be involved. Cooper talked about it often. Whenever George would say something positive about one of his white platoon leaders in the Army, how he’d been a decent guy, or easy on the men, Cooper would explode. He’d show George the articles on the Klan and say, “This is what white people are like! This!”

  Isaac asked, “Did you think of talking to Cooper about what you’d seen in Cyrusville?”

  Hall looked down at his hands. “The truth is, Mr. Rosethorn, I was ashamed for them to know I’d let myself get mixed up in it.” The cheap fabric of the black suit stretched under his muscles as he straightened in the chair. “But, the same time, I felt like I couldn’t just let it go. That's what I kept on thinking, when I brought the truck back into the garage, I can’t just let it go. These other drivers Moonfoot had talked about. I didn’t know which ones they were, and he wouldn’t tell me. I got him on the phone, and he just kept on yelling, ‘Don’t you say a word to anybody.’”

  “Did you think of going to the police, George?”

  His mouth twitched. “No.”

  “Why?”

  “With me accusing some of their own?”

  “So you returned the truck to the Fanshaw Company, and…?” “And I thought, well, I could talk to my dispatcher. So I looked for him, but he wasn’t around. Then I saw Mr. Fanshaw get out of his car and head for his office. He’d treated me all right, few times I’d had cause to see him. And I said, well, it's his company, and he could go to the police himself.”

  “So did you approach Mr. Fanshaw and tell him?”

  An objection from the assistant A.G. was overruled by Hilliardson, who told him that if he wished to challenge this direct testimony, he could do so in cross-examination. Isaac repeated the question, and George said that yes, he had. At first, Mr. Fanshaw had acted shocked, and said he would “look into it.” But then his face had gotten very upset when another man had walked into the office. A man George recognized as one of the men he’d seen unloading the guns in Cyrusville.

  “Is that man in the courtroom now?”

  “Yes.” And George pointed to ex-Sargent Charles Mennehy. Fanshaw had then brushed George off in a hurry, told him to forget the whole thing, that he’d take care of it. “I looked in his eyes, Mr. Fanshaw's eyes, and I felt like he was lying. It was a real strong feeling. So I just went home. Nobody was there. Later I went on over to Smoke's. And Moonfoot came, sat down, kept at me about don’t be crazy, don’t cross these white cops.”

  Their talk had ended sometime before midnight, when Robert Pym had walked into Smoke's and “begun to hassle people about the jukebox and all.”

  Isaac asked, “Were you surprised to see Pym in there?”

  “Yes, I was. But I didn’t think right off it was due to me. He was loud, acting up like he was drunk. I went over to him, said how I was shutting off the jukebox ’cause this man was trying to play his music up there. I said why didn’t Pym get out right now. He give me a shove, said, something like, ‘Nigger, you don’t ever talk to a white man like that.’” George squeezed his hand around his fist.

  Isaac nodded. “That's when the fight began? And then he pulled the gun out from his belt and rammed it into your nostril and said, ‘Buddy, your ass is grass’?”

  George shook his head. “I can’t say I remember those exact words.”

  “All right.… Now, when you managed to get the gun away from him, and Pym ran, and you followed him, did you run out onto that sidewalk intending to kill him?”

  “No. I just saw him running off, and I went after him. But then I saw him sort of scrambling around at that blue car, and I knew how Winston Russell had a blue Ford, and it hit me, just like that, maybe they were coming for me, ’cause of what I’d seen. So when Pym wheeled back, I thought he had a gun. I just fired at him. Just fired.” George stopped suddenly with an intake of breath and lowered his head.

  Now Isaac moved around the table toward George. “You said, you thought Robert Pym had a gun. You didn’t see he had a gun?”

  George pointed at his glasses, took them off. “It was pretty dark. And my glasses must have come off in the fight. I couldn’t see too good.”

  Isaac limped nearer the witness stand. “Why didn’t you pick your glasses up, put them back on, before you gave chase to Pym?”

  “I didn’t think to.”

  “Then you simply fired blind, hoping to stop him from killing you?”

  The State objected to this, as leading the witness, and was sustained. Isaac offered to rephrase. “When you fired the shot, did you think your own life was in danger?”

  George carefully replaced his glasses. “I can’t say I thought, like you said. You do it quicker than thinking. And you still maybe aren’t quick enough. In combat, I knew a lot weren’t quick enough.”

  “You knew soldiers who didn’t act quickly enough in their own defense and so lost their lives?”

  “I knew a lot of men where quickness didn’t do them any good.”

  Isaac's hand touched the arm of the chair beside the defendant's. “George, why didn’t you tell the court at your first trial the story you’ve now told us? Why did you never mention the smuggling?”

  George's face tightened. “Winston Russell came to me here at the jail that first night. He said if I let his name come up, or about the Fanshaw trucks, well, it’d just make things harder on me in the trial. He said they’d never ask for murder one, not if they figured Pym and I didn’t know each other. He said since I’d already told them about the Ford, just say I thought it was Pym's.”

  Nodding, Isaac asked, “And you agreed because you were persuaded that his approach would best serve your defense?”

  “No.” A deep rush of breath pushed through George's chest. “He said if I told any of it, he said, I’d wish my family dead and buried, compare it to what he’d do to them. He said he’d use a knife and it’d take them a long time to die.”

  “Those were his exact words?”

  He nodded. “Those words I know for sure.”

  “By your family, he meant your mother, your sister, and your younger brother?”

  “Yes.” George looked over at his mother; her hands covered her face.

  “He said their names to you?” “Yes.”

  “Did you believe he would carry out this threat to use a knife to mutilate and murder your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this threat ever repeated?”

  George said that after his death-penalty conviction, Winston visited him again at the county jail and told him that he knew where George's sister lived with her two small children in Greensboro, and that the same “promise” held for them all. Still later, when G
eorge was already on death row, he was approached by a lifer-trusty named Gary Fisk. Fisk told him he had a message for him from Winston Russell. The message was, “I keep my promises. You keep yours.”

  “And you believed this message.” Isaac was facing the jury now. “And you never told anyone?” The answer was no. “And the night before your scheduled execution, when they had shaved you, and given you the clothes you were to wear to your death, and moved you to the cell beside the gas chamber, and brought you your minister, you never told anyone?”

  George looked up quietly. “I just said, Mr. Rosethorn. I believed the man would do what he said.…And I believed if I didn’t talk…he wouldn’t…” He took off his glasses, and stared down at them in his hand. “But Cooper's dead anyhow.”

  The assistant A.G. could not badger George into changing his story; I don’t think he tried as hard or as long as Mitch would have. But they didn’t let Mitch try.

  Some people assumed George Hall would be the last witness. But Isaac Rosethorn often said that at the end of a trial, it was effective to bring in somebody nobody’d ever heard mentioned so far, and to make it clear that they’d come from a long way off, driven by an overwhelming impulse to see justice done. Friday morning, he brought in three such mysterious travelers. The first, a young red-haired woman, introduced herself as Mandy Schwerner, née Katz, of St. Louis, Missouri. She sat in a pretty pink suit, handbag on her lap, and told the jury that seven years ago she’d been employed by the city comptroller, Otis Newsome, as his secretary. She said that on the Monday after the shooting of Pym—she recalled quite clearly having the newspaper with the story about it on her desk—that Winston Russell (a frequent visitor) had stormed past her into Mr. Newsome's office while Mr. Dyer Fanshaw was in there, and that while there, the men had yelled at each other for some time. She distinctly remembered being curious about why Mr. Newsome was so angry with Mr. Russell, and why Mr. Russell kept yelling, “Hall's not going to talk!” and telling Mr. Newsome things like “calm down” and “keep your mouth shut, and your friends’ too.” Then Mr. Russell had left, slamming the door so hard a print fell off the wall and the glass smashed.