Time's Witness (3 page)

I decided on one hand, so that's how I walked into the Hillston Club ballroom, heading for the waltzy music and hum of voices, past a ceiling-high Christmas tree burning some more real white candles, past a blond beautiful drunk girl in a strapless red satin gown lying on a couch against the wall, her arm over her eyes, past Mr. Dyer Fanshaw trying to unhook his wife's stole from the catch on her necklace.

“Well, why, Chief Mangum, surprised to see you here.” A.R. Randolph, short, stout, shrewd, and ignorant as a hog, was shoving toward me, one hand in his back vent, tugging his pants loose from the crease of his buttocks. These folks were so used to their Rhett & Scarlett rentals, they were having trouble with their own clothes. “Dammit.” He jerked his head at the girl in red satin. “That's my damn granddaughter passed out on the damn couch and it's not even ten o’clock.”

“Looks like she might be a real pretty girl when she's feeling better.” We shook hands when he’d finished playing with his under-wear. “Surprised to see me? Why's that, Atwater?” I let Randolph's Lions Club set up their October carnival in the HPD parking lot, so I called him Atwater and joked some circles around him. He got a kick out of it. He was more than twice my age and a hundred times my income, inherited the construction company that had built Haver University and just about everything else in Hillston, including the River Rise complex and the state-funded four-lane bridge over the Shocco River that you could play a full game of softball on without worrying about interference from traffic.

He stepped closer for confidentiality. “Figured they’d need you over at the state prison. What I hear is, the Klan's going there
tonight and bust up that vigil. All those ‘Save George Hall’ nuts. That's what I hear.”

“Well, now, rumors. A rumor's kind of like the flu bug. You don’t know where it came from and you don’t want to spread it around.” I gave him my country grin. “Those Klan boys aren’t as young as they used to be. They’ll all be home watching HBO. It's too cold and messy out there for politics.”

“I heard you had a tip they were going to hassle those pro-lifers tonight.”

Luckily I was already grinning, so my laugh sounded friendly. “You got to keep up with the lingo, Atwater. Pro-lifers are the ones that are against killing fetuses, and
for
killing grown-ups. Whereas Coop Hall's group is anti-pro-capital punishment, and most of them anti-pro-lifers too. You with me?”

“Well, they’re wasting their time, whatever they call themselves.”

“Probably.”

“Cuddy, the historical fact is, mankind has a right to protect ourselves against scum. And that's always the type that gets themselves executed.”

“Um hum. Historical-wise, three popped right into my head. Socrates, Joan of Arc, and Jesus Christ. Talk about scumbags, whoowee!”

His plump face wrinkled. “Now hold up, Chief, if Christ hadn’t been killed, we’d none of us be redeemed today.”

“Well, you got me there, Atwater.”

Neither one of us was looking at the other one during this chitchat. He was watching his friend Dyer Fanshaw still trying to detach his wife from her stole while she ignored him and hugged everyone who walked close enough. I was looking over Randolph's head into the ballroom to try to spot either the man I’d told myself I was coming to see, or the lady I’d told myself I didn’t care if I saw or not. The man was Julian Lewis, once attorney general, now lieutenant governor, hoping to move up another step. The lady was Mrs. Andrew Brookside, wife of the man Lewis was running against. Except when I knew her best she wasn’t married; she was still in her teens and her name was Lee Haver.

One wall of this ballroom was glass doors; each one had its own wreath. In front of them, tables floating with white linen stretched along, crowded with crystal punch bowls, beds of oysters in their shells, and platters of tiny ham biscuits. Every four feet, a waiter stood waiting to tilt a glass ladle of champagne punch into any receptacle held up in his vicinity. (Some members had obviously lost patience with their little crystal cups and had moved on to water glasses.) The waiters were the only black people I saw in the room, except for the mayor, the mayor's wife, the president of Southeast Life Insurance Company, and half the band, which sat on a little dais behind shiny red shields draped with holly garlands and labeled The Jimmy Douglas Orchestra. The band was pumping through “The Anniversary Waltz” (maybe celebrating a near-century of these affairs), but only about fifty couples were dancing (or forty-nine; I don’t know what old Judge Tiggs and his wife were doing, maybe the tango, or maybe one of them was trying to leave the floor and the other one didn’t want to). The rest of the guests looked like they were scared to lose their places in the punch line.

“You know Dyer Fanshaw?” Randolph tugged me toward the couple.

“Let me take a wild guess. Does he own Fanshaw Paper Company?”

“Chief, you kill me. Dyer, will you leave that woman alone and say hello to our chief of police? You see him in
Newsweek
last month?”

“Cuddy Mangum,” I said, just as Mrs. Fanshaw broke loose, tossed me a fast hello, and rushed into the party.

“Everything under control?” Fanshaw asked while we shook hands.

“Personally or criminally?”

“Mangum kills me,” Randolph explained. “He means the George Hall business, Chief. Don’t you, Dyer?”

Dyer did, so we talked awhile about whether the governor would stay Hall's death sentence (they didn’t think he would), and whether there’d be a riot at Dollard Prison between the vigilants protesting execution and the enthusiasts demanding it. I explained why I had my doubts. “First of all, it's freezing rain out there, which
discourages philosophical debate, and second”—I shared a little of the inside track—“I talked to Warden Carpenter an hour ago, and the place is quiet as an opium den. I talked to the FBI, which pays about two-thirds of the dues at our local Knights of the KKK, and they don’t have a plan rattling around in their heads. And I talked to somebody working with the George Hall vigil and she says they can’t get Action News to come, which they surely could if there was a hundred-to-one shot of even a poke in the eye, much less blood in the dirt.”

My business leaders were relieved and disappointed, and tickled to be in the know. Then they talked for a while about how Governor Wollston could follow his heart since he wasn’t up for reelection, and about whether Andy Brookside had made a mistake resigning the presidency of Haver University to run on the Democratic ticket, since—even if he was a war hero married to a billionairess—having an assistant campaign manager like that Jack Molina mouthing off against capital punishment was going to kill him in the polls; not that they cared—they were Republicans and loved to see Democrats beat in their own heads with their own base-ball bats. I asked if Brookside was here tonight and they said, sure, he went every place there were more than a dozen voters penned up in a room with only one exit.

Then some more stocky financial spokes of the inner circle herded around us. A lot of this group I knew by name, but we weren’t exactly what you’d want to call golf partners. I recognized a bank, a towel company, a “Hot Hat” barbecue franchise (all the roofs had red neon pigs tipping top hats), and a lot of real estate. Most of these men looked like their bow ties were choking them. The bank (still growing the mustache he’d started for the reclassified Confederacy Ball) jumped right into the George Hall business with the interesting theory that the problem with capital punishment these days was that it wasn’t cruel enough. “Listen here, it's painless! They put you the hell to sleep, come on! In the old days, they’d flay you alive, burn you—you’d think twice.”

“Dead is dead,” said the towel company, shifting his cummer-bund to the right.

“You wouldn’t say that, Terry, if it were your feet in the fire.”

I had to agree with the bank; between gas and disembowelment, or getting stuffed with gunpowder and blown all over China, or having my head crushed by an Indian elephant, I’ll take American technology any day. I told them, “Folks don’t have any imagination anymore. You know what happened if you killed your daddy in ancient Rome? They sewed you in a cloth with a monkey, a poisonous snake, a fighting rooster, and a wild dog, and they tossed you in the Tiber.”

The notion stopped them cold for a minute, then the bank nodded. “That's what I’m talking about. Punishment. And I’ll tell you something else, it ought to be in public, like they used to. Put them on TV. It's supposed to be deterrence, right? Make people watch.”

I said, “Speaking as a keeper of the peace, gentlemen, crowds make me nervous. Last time we hanged somebody in public was in the ’thirties, over in Owensboro, Kentucky. What I read is, twenty thousand folks piled in for the show, and a third of them set up refreshment stands. ‘Make them watch’ isn’t exactly the problem. It's the fights over good seats.”

My figures led the real estate man to mention how he’d managed to buy six seats for the Super Bowl, which led to complaints about Cadmean Stadium at the university, which led to speculation about the illness of “poor old Briggs,” meaning old Briggs Cadmean (of Cadmean & Whetstone Textiles Industries), a big bald sly s.o.b. of about eighty-five, and, to hear him tell it, the private owner of Hillston. I had to walk by Cadmean's picture on the way to my office every day; he’d paid for the municipal building and wanted everybody to know it. In this eight-foot oil painting in the lobby, he's got the rolled-up blueprints in one hand; the other hand's pointing down the hall toward the men's room. Once this old bastard had claimed to my face that he was personally responsible for my promotion to chief. I was dating his daughter at the time. The rest of his offspring were male, long dead, or looked it, and this girl (he’d named her Briggs after himself and called her “Baby”) was his favorite. She hated the sight of him, and turns out he thought I’d bring them together as a thank-you note for my new job. I had to disappoint him. Deep down, Briggs Junior wasn’t any fonder of
me than she was of her dad, though she just about convinced me otherwise. She was an astronomy professor, and I think what she really loved the most was stars. Justin always said she was about that cold, too. Last I heard, she’d taken a position out West, where there wouldn’t be so much population between her and the sky. She sent me back my ring before I finished the Visa payments, and about a month after she left, Cadmean flagged me over to his limousine on Main Street and accused me of reneging on a deal he’d never bothered to call to my attention. He had the morals of a grizzly bear. Justin liked him.

“Poor old Briggs,” Fanshaw was saying as he looked over at the passed-out girl on the couch who was about to deep-breathe herself out of the top of that red satin strapless. “Well, God knows, Cadmean had a good long life, and he's dying the way he wants to.”

“How's that?” I said. “Just temporarily?”

“See what I mean?” Pointing at me, Randolph nudged Fanshaw. Then the quartet of business leaders said they were headed to the bathroom before their wives cornered them, and did we want anything. I was the only one who appeared to find this question peculiar.

Randolph told them he’d be down later, and turned back to me. “Nahw, Dyer means Briggs won’t go to the hospital. What I heard was, he said, ‘I paid for the damn hospital and it can damn well keep those suckbutts from getting their hands on me, so I won’t go meet my Maker with my fanny in a pan and a tube up my dick.’”

Offended, Fanshaw tightened his nostrils. I gave him a wink. “A sweet-talking man. Cadmean's got a lot more to explain to his Maker than a bare backside.”

They both chuckled their agreement. And that's when I saw Lee Haver Brookside. Actually it was Justin I saw first, as they swung past the crowd onto the dance floor. Justin stood out, due to being the only man at the party in white tie and tails. He was the kind who’d wear an English hunting outfit to a barbecue picnic. Now he and Mrs. Brookside were waltzing in big slow loops, so I saw her back where his hand rested just above the black folded silk, then the white of her neck and shoulders as her head turned. A diamond flared like a match in the braided coil of dark gold hair.

I said I thought I’d go get some punch. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fanshaw.”

“Same here.” He nodded at Randolph like I’d passed a test. “Call me Dyer. The real bar's downstairs in the men's lounge. That punch won’t do a thing for you.”

“Mr. Fanshaw, what I paid for this outfit, I don’t want to waste it on a john. I see enough line-ups of men during the day.”

Fanshaw chuckled, and Randolph said, “Huh?” and I gave one shoe a quick rub on the back of my trousers, put my left hand in my left pocket, and walked into the party.

For the most part, the club style seemed to be to mix the sexes for dancing, and split them up for conversation. Seated at little tables, women, their long dresses glittering, smoked themselves almost invisible while telling each other what must have been mighty funny stories. Men stood in black glossy huddles, nodding at everything everybody else said. The Reverend Thomas Campbell (an old tall Presbyterian, in a tuxedo) and Father Paul Madison (a young short Episcopalian, in a collar) had crossed the line and were chatting with our new black mayor's wife, whose fixed smile must have been hurting her jaws.

“Chief Mangum,” called the rector, grinning dimples in his cheeks. He didn’t look any older than he had in college, and in college he’d looked about seven. “Come buy a ticket to Trinity's Christmas lottery. And talk Mrs. Yarborough here into it too.”

“Well, Paul,” I said, squeezing in, “maybe I should remind you, soliciting in public's against the law. Plus, our first lady's a Baptist, right, Dina? How you doing?”

Pleasant-looking but not pretty, Dina Yarborough was a thin light-skinned black woman with stiffly waved light hair, green eyes, and a careful voice. “Fine, thank you. Nice to see you, Cuddy. Isn’t this a lovely party?” I’m sure she’d almost rather have gone to the dentist for a root canal, but you couldn’t tell it from her eyes.

“It's my first time,” I said.

“Mine too,” she nodded. “It's an annual affair?” I didn’t hear any sarcasm, but it was hard to believe she didn’t know about those ninety-six years of hoop skirts and yellow sashes under the Stars ’n’ Bars.