Authors: Michael Malone
I told him, “I did better than read it. The Army sent me there.” I was remembering this conversation about procedural screw-ups now because I’d noticed a clipping from a recent
Hillston Star
, stapled to a folder labeled “Hall appeal” on his desk. It was a small article: a local man had won a malpractice suit against a doctor who eight years ago had performed an operation that had so permanently impaired this man's hearing that two years later he’d been fired from his job, and the following summer been struck by a motorcycle he hadn’t heard approaching. The man's name, Darwin Wheelwright, was circled with Isaac's thick black pen. It sounded vaguely familiar. But I couldn’t place it. That's one of the differences between my brain and Isaac Rosethorn's. He must have recognized it immediately. Because when I turned on some lights, after the sun gave up trying to slip through the grime on the windows, the long black-board against the far wall finally caught my eye. The “thinking board,” he called it. Ever since I’d known him, it had been covered with squiggly diagrams and cryptic outlines. Now I realized my name was scrawled in block letters in a free space near the top margin.
“CUDDY. I’ll be back. And by the way, Juror #9 at George's first trial was deaf as a post.”
On Tuesday morning, Christmas Eve, Mayor Carl Yarborough told me, “Give me a present, Cuddy. A suspect on Cooper Hall, okay?” I had to give him a bottle of Scotch instead. Our highway witnesses had proved pretty useless. One teenaged girl said “an old white car” had sped past her “real fast” seconds before she drove over the crest and saw the wreck, but she could give no other details. Nobody else had come forward with information of any sort, and the fact is, most of our cases get solved on the phone-in-tip method. Somebody squeals on X, and
then
we apply detection to figure out how X did it. I didn’t have any X yet. Justin was assuming it was Willie Slidell, especially after Bruce Parker went back out to the farm and found it shut up, with the barn emptied—no giant cylinders of Fanshaw paper, no white Ford on blocks. And no Willie Slidell, when Slidell's supervisor thought Willie was home on sick leave. Slidell's sister said that he’d driven his station wagon to Kentucky Sunday night to try to patch things up with his estranged wife. Justin had located the estranged Kentucky wife by phone; she said she had neither seen Slidell, nor expected him. Trying to patch things up with her would have been futile anyhow as she’d “been with somebody a lot better for three years,” which was when she’d lost patience with “Willie the Wimp.”
According to Willie's sister, Willie had never had a white Ford, had never had anybody staying at the farm with him, had never
stolen from his job, never attended any white-supremacy meetings, and in general never done a single thing to warrant Justin's asking her these questions. And yes, Willie’d been right there at her house Saturday from noon ’til nine, so he couldn’t have killed Cooper. Justin had a feeling she was lying.
So we had a bulletin out for Slidell. And a bulletin out for Billy Gilchrist; not just because Paul Madison was pestering me twice a day, but because I wanted to know what Billy's name was doing in Coop's address book. Meanwhile, when I cornered Otis Newsome and his brother Purley in the municipal building lobby, Otis told me he still had no idea why Coop Hall should have Clark Koontz's card with the name Newsome written on it. Purley Newsome sneered, “Me neither,” and walked off. Dead of cancer, Koontz was in no position to contradict either of them.
Otis was a short fat blond man, like the result if somebody had put his baby brother Purley in a trash compactor. His devotion to Purley was as strong (and misguided) as his opinion that I ought to be fired, Carl Yarborough (against whom he’d run for mayor) ought to be impeached, and “left-wingers” like Alice MacLeod ought to be burned. Otis was a devout Julian Lewis man and a suckbutt to the North Hillston crowd. He was in charge of the town's purchases, and the town purchased tons of paper supplies, all of them from Fanshaw Paper Company. I asked him if he knew a Fanshaw clerk named Willie Slidell. He said no, why should he?
“Who do you deal with at Fanshaw?”
He said, “I deal with Dyer Fanshaw direct.”
“You two were in college together at Haver, weren’t you?”
“So what?”
I said, “Well, Otis, I’d hate to think you weren’t taking time to entertain some competitive bids on those paper contracts.”
His fists twisted inside his Madras pants pockets like he was struggling to get them out, and couldn’t. He said, “I’m not going to waste any time talking to you, that's for sure. And I heard how you made Purley eat that ticket in front of his friends.” I said, “What friends?” but he talked right over me. “Don’t you think it's going to be forgotten. There’re a lot of us who never wanted you appointed chief.”
I said, “But not enough of you.”
Otis had dry blinky eyes, but his smile was greasy, like his hair, and he always flashed his teeth when he jabbed me with his favorite needle: “There were a
lot
of us. But you had old Cadmean behind you.”
I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but instead I smiled back. “Right. So I heard.”
“Well, you don’t have him anymore. Things are going to change in this state, soon as Lewis gets in. We’re going to get rid of your kind.”
“Meaning what, Otis? No more intelligent tall people?”
With a scowl, he trotted away across the lobby's loud marble floor.
According to the paper, there were five funerals in Hillston on Christmas Eve. I went to two of them. The first, Briggs Cadmean's at Presbyterian, drew the larger crowd. The pews were so packed, the furs so thick, the floral displays stacked so high, that by the time Mrs. Atwater Randolph warbled “Abide With Me,” the whole place, despite the frigid weather, felt like a steamy greenhouse. “Our number” from North Hillston attended en masse—as if everybody I’d seen Friday at the Club dance had changed out of their evening clothes and hurried off to church together. Sprinkled among them were distinguished out-of-towners: men whose hired drivers waited outside, stamping their feet like carriage horses; men who would fly back home to Atlanta or Richmond or Birmingham in time to sing carols with the family tonight. It crossed my mind as I studied this crowd that an anarchist could lob a single bomb through First Presbyterian's plate glass right now and take a big chunk out of the top junta of southeastern industry, politics, and social life.
Accompanied by their wives, both gubernatorial candidates— Julian Lewis on the right aisle between the governor and the Dyer Fanshaws, Andy Brookside on the left between Mayor and Mrs. Yarborough and a U.S. senator—prominently displayed bowed heads during the prayers. Lee didn’t close her eyes, but did look solemn. She wore a black wool suit with a small gray cap that had a black feather across it. At two points, Brookside leaned over to whisper something to her, and the feather brushed across his face.
At one point, Carl Yarborough whispered something to him that made him smile. Just the mayor's sitting there beside Brookside was in itself talking loud and clear to Hillston, as had a standing ovation from those black business leaders in Winston-Salem on Monday. It looked like Jack Molina's impromptu speech about Coop Hall to the TV cameras up on that porch stoop had swept his candidate right into the arms of the black vote, or maybe Brookside had finally gotten out his calculator and realized that 100 percent of 20 percent of the voters meant he only needed 31 percent of all the rest.
High above us in his white wood pulpit, Thomas Campbell swallowed his chagrin at losing old Cadmean's cavernous estate to Trinity Episcopal, and preached a sad, pious eulogy about the good servant who had made his talents multiply, grown prosperous by Divine Election, died a symbol of his nation's great blessings (blessings he had returned sevenfold to his city, state, fellow man, beloved family). And now he was welcomed to his heavenly home by the Christ Child Himself, here on the very eve of that Child's wondrous birthday. Home for Christmas, home for all eternity. Old Briggs would have guffawed through the first ten minutes and slept through the next twenty. As for his beloved family, the few ambulatory sons he had left sat with a mingle of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, in-laws, distant relatives, and a sobbing elderly woman with a black veil, who turned out to have been his fifth ex-wife (whom he’d left thirty-five years ago for Briggs Junior's mother) and who’d come all the way from Sarasota to make a play for a cut of the old man's estate. Her noisy presence and the even noisier absence of Briggs Junior (the presumed heiress) were the two human-interest highlights of the service. From the hiss of indignation I overheard on the steps (as old Cadmean's silver-handled casket was carried past the news cameras by a palsied son of his, the bank, the towel company, A.R. Randolph, Senator Kip Dollard, and Justin Savile), it was clear that Hillston was outraged by Briggs Junior's failure to attend her own father's funeral after he’d left her ten million dollars that all she had to do for was give up her career and come back home. I took considerable satisfaction in having predicted her response to Papa's codicil; as at least Alice admitted while we were waiting near the hearse for Justin to get their car.
“Okay, Cuddy, you were right.”
“My favorite words in the language, honey.” “Thank God you didn’t marry that bitch.”
I was shocked and said so. “Alice MacLeod, a feminist like your-self, and you can’t see why she was insulted by that s.o.b.'s will!”
Alice shivered as the freezing wind flattened our coats against our legs. “Of course I can see why Briggs was insulted. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have told him to fuck off. I’m saying she should have come to the bastard's funeral.” Alice turned to shake hands sweetly with Judge and Mrs. Tiggs, who were quarreling about whether it was too cold to go to the cemetery, or too rude not to. Then Justin pulled up, and as I helped Alice into the Austin, she asked, “Any word from Isaac?”
“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah for two days. Vanished. You don’t suppose that after sixty years a man would suddenly decide to take a Christmas vacation and fly off to Bermuda or Squaw Valley?”
Justin said, “He's working on the Hall case, betcha five bucks.”
“Let's hope. We could use some help. Drive careful, J.B.S., this lady's the future mother of my godchild. See y’all at the grave, which is bound to be a big one. I’m imagining something about on the scale of Rameses the Second.”
Out on the church steps, I stopped Dyer Fanshaw and asked him to tell me about his salesman Clark Koontz. “What about him? He died,” said Fanshaw, annoyed at being separated from the governor and lieutenant governor, who were getting photographed by a Raleigh reporter. “You better talk to my sales manager,” he added, admitting, “I don’t really know all that much about lower-level employees. Excuse me.”
I held him by the cuff of his herringbone tweed. “Well, Dyer, that may be a mistake. We have reason to believe that one of them—fellow named Willie Slidell—may be stealing your paper, great big old rolls full.”
Fanshaw changed colors fast, his ears turned as red as his cheeks, his lips as white as his hair. “What are you talking about?” he asked, then apparently decided he didn’t want an answer, because he pointed at the hearse, waiting behind two of my motor-cycle cops, looked at me with extreme annoyance, maybe because
discussing robberies was bad manners at a funeral, maybe because I’d made him miss his photo opportunity with the governor, and he walked away.
I noticed that Andy Brookside, bright hair ruffled in the wind, had paused at the top of the church steps, chatting with the Yarboroughs, until Governor Wollston and Lewis had reached their limousine. Then he touched Lee's arm and started down, brisk but saddened. He looked as good outdoors as he had at the Club dance. I also noticed that the reporters took more pictures of him than they had of anyone else. What struck me, seeing him, was the literalness of the metaphor “magnetic.” People lining the steps actually leaned toward him, as if pulled there.
“Hello, Cuddy, how are you?” Lee paused beside me, and already halfway past, Brookside turned back.
“Hi, Lee. Not the merriest of Christmas Eves, is it?”
She and I talked about the funeral while Brookside shook several hands thrust at him; after which he grinned at me cheerfully. “Hello again. My apologies. I hadn’t realized Friday that you and Lee were such old friends. She says you knew each other when you were kids.” He took her gloved hand in his. “That's what's so wonderful about these small Southern towns. The past keeps coming back.”
“Wonderful or horrible,” Lee said, and smiled.
“Isn’t that true in New England too?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I have no idea. Because
I
don’t keep coming back. I’m a Tarheel now, an adopted son of the South.” A gray Jaguar sedan stopped near us, and the young driver I’d seen holding Lee's fur coat outside my office scooted around to open the door for her. She nodded good-bye as she slid inside the leathery interior.
Brookside gestured at the open door. “A lift to the cemetery?”
“No thanks. My car's right up there.”
He looked at her, then me, then suddenly took me by the arm, and stepped me away from the curb. His eyes were as aquamarine as a travel poster for the Virgin Islands. “Jack Molina said you wanted to talk to me about those, what’ll we call them, anonymous threats?”
“I did. I phoned your office twice.”
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you, Captain. Things have been crazy.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “God, for
you.
The Canaan fallout from the murder! You must be half nuts.”
“Does it show?”
His smile, I admit, was a beauty. “So it seems hardly worth even—” He waved good-bye to three men that people claimed owned a county apiece in the western part of the state. “Sorry. Anyhow, cleaning out the last little bits in my Haver offices, I did find an earlier one of those ‘your-days-are-numbered’ notes. How about this, we go right past Haver on the way to North Hills Cemetery. You give me a ride. We’ll whip in and I’ll get the letter for you.”