Time's Witness (43 page)

“Could you describe the political honkies?”

“White.”

“That's it?”

“Money.”

“I’m talking short, tall, thin, fat, hair, glasses. Would you recognize them? Say, if I showed you some photos?”

His eyes watched me thoughtfully behind their long, stiff lashes. “See, I’ve still got this problem, Mr. Mangum. Nothing worse for business regularity than have your staff keep calling up, telling you they’re unavoidably detained down at the municipal building. Imagine it.”

I gave what I was going to say a minute's thought. “Um hum. I’ve got a problem too. I want you to imagine mine.”

“Help me a little.” He smiled.

“Too many crimes with
victims.
The sad fact is, I’ve got so many crimes with victims to worry about, I’m forced to make it a strict priority not to tie up my facilities with crimes that
don’t
have any victims. You know what I mean, crimes that don’t hurt anybody but the people committing them, things like smoking pot, household sodomy, escort services, private gambling, that type thing. Every now and then I
should
remind my cops that we have to live in a world of priorities. Tell you what. I’ll do that right away.”

He made up his mind, looked at his Rolex watch, and said, “Ask questions.”

“Where's the tape?”

“I gave it to Cooper Hall. Sitting right here. Friday night, round midnight, December twenty-third.”

“Wait a minute. That was the night of the governor's stay of execution.”

“That's right. Cooper came in here, ’bout midnight, flying high ’cause he’d got word his brother had his reprieve. He said, ‘Now I got some time to
move
in.’ So I give him the tape, and he said,
‘Ham, I’m goin’ into politics tomorrow morning!’ Said, ‘I’m gonna change things around, do some good shit for our people. I’m gonna buy us some
good
shit!’”

“Because of the tape?”

A shrug. “Cooper spins that videotape like a Ferris wheel, and he takes off with it. Saturday, I turn on the tube, he's lying in his own blood. My girls went all to pieces, carrying on, said how it was like King and Malcolm X. Shit. ‘Change things around.’ Right, man.” Standing up slowly, Walker pulled the hat on, checking the angle in the cloudy mirror above the booth.

I said, “I’m not through asking questions. Did you tell Cooper that there was another tape, and who had it?”

“I told him somebody had it. At the time, I didn’t know who.”

“What do you mean, at the time? Do you know now?”

“I might do. Wouldn’t testify to it. Hard to tell from the TV. But the man Jamaica saw in the Hilton looked like the city hall man on the news.” Walker made a bizarrely vivid pantomime of a man hanging himself with a rope.

I tried to keep my voice level. “The man Jamaica pointed out as the one who’d hired her looked like the city comptroller, Otis Newsome, who committed suicide.”

Smiling, Walker shrugged. “Looked like to me.”

I caught his hand as he scooped up the soggy change Fattie had left. “Who was the man in the tape?”

“Oh, that man?” The grin pulling at his mouth's corner had that same expectant feel to it that made me tighten up inside. “I figured you weren’t asking about that man, Captain, ’cause you already knew about him. Figured y’all must…share things. The one humping Jamaica?” He shot his forefinger at the fat waitress who was cleaning dirty glasses off the table beside us. Pinned to her shiny blouse was one of the light Carolina blue buttons that I’d been seeing more and more people in Hillston wearing lately. The buttons with Andrew Brookside's picture on them.

I said to Walker, “You’re sure?”

He smiled at me. “Yeah, I’m sure. They may all look alike in the dark, but with Jamaica you don’t wanna be in the dark.”

I sat there, waiting for him to leave. Then when he kept looking
at me, I said, “Thanks for the beer.”

He tipped the hat. “My pleasure.”

Walker had gone, the blues band had begun to play, its amplifiers thumping like the heart of Leviathan must have sounded to Jonah. Nobody bothered me in my back booth at Smoke's, where I sat not even dealing yet with the significance of what I’d learned, because I was trying to decide whether or not Hamilton Walker knew about my involvement with Lee, at least suspected it. The irony in the curve of his lip when he said the word
Bermuda
kept coming back to me. His grin reminded me, though they were at least on the surface an unlikely pair, of Mrs. Marion Sunderland's nasty smirk. Their smiles had said the same thing to me: “It doesn’t much matter how I know. I just want you to realize that I know. I’m not even going to do anything with the knowledge, except share with you the fact that I find it mildly amusing.”

In the time between the
Twelfth Night
performance and George Hall's new trial, the following things happened:

Billy Gilchrist fell off the wagon again and disappeared.

I kept trying to find Russell and Newsome.

I kept seeing Lee.

I kept hard at work policing Hillston, logging arrests for arson, rape, homicide, child-molestation, larceny, manslaughter, embezzlement, robbery, fraud, indecent exposure, assault, shoplifting, kidnapping, drunk-driving, and all the other sad ways folks vent rage and satisfy cravings.

Arrests of prostitutes near the Montgomery Hotel were, on the other hand, kept to an all-time low.

Andy Brookside told me indignantly that he most certainly had not discussed with Cooper Hall, during their airplane ride together, a videotape of himself and anyone named Jamaica Touraine. That he could not have possibly done so since he had never known anyone with that name. And who in hell had told me otherwise? And why in hell was I even coming to him with such filth?

My reply would have been a little more forceful if I’d had a copy of that tape, but I didn’t. Coop had either given his copy to Brookside, or to someone else (nobody we’d talked to, unless they were lying), or it had been stolen out of the
With Liberty and Justice
office. It seemed likely that Otis's cameraman had been Willie Slidell, given all the video equipment and porno tapes we’d found
at Slidell's farm. Slidell had either given the original to Otis Newsome (as they were both dead now, this possibility couldn’t be checked), or to someone else, or left it at the farm where it had, or had not, been found by Russell and Newsome. All I could say to Brookside was that my information had come from an unimpeachable source, and that he, Brookside, had better hope
I
found his X-rated romp before it showed up on the Brodie Cheek show.

Mr. Hamilton Walker, my unimpeachable source, regretted that he was unable to locate Jamaica Touraine (or maybe that wasn’t her real name) on her round-the-world cruise with the Argentine (or maybe he wasn’t Argentine) businessman. We did, however, find Ham's former employee “Denise” plying her trade in the nation's capital, and Wes Pendergraph flew up there to take a statement from her. She told him she’d be happy to come testify that Winston Russell was on the scene when Pym was shot. She said she hated Winston Russell so much, she’d be happy to testify that he had shot Pym himself if we wanted her to. Wes, who kept wondering if he was “tough enough,” came home “shocked.”

I had my own shock when Professor Briggs Mary Cadmean suddenly returned to Hillston, having resigned from her western university to collect the millions her chauvinist pig of a papa had left her on the condition that she do just that. Alice was also shocked. Justin was not. “You simply don’t renounce that kind of inheritance,” he informed us, somewhat smugly it seemed to Alice and me, as if how could we be expected to know such things, having grown up so poor and trashy. Alice and Justin had a fight about Briggs Junior's “character,” he spent the night on my couch, she came over at two in the morning, and from up in my bedroom, I had to listen to them, from 2:15 to 3:30 A.M., decide that they were (a) totally incompatible, (b) having a problem communicating, (c) madly in love.

Sergeant Zeke Caleb informed me that he and Officer Nancy White were madly in love. I wasn’t surprised. That he and Nancy White were having a baby. I was very surprised. That they were going to get married. I thought this was a good idea.

A munitions salesman tried to get me to buy a dozen electric stun guns to have on hand for any future race riots. “A weapon of compassion,” he called it, but turned me down flat when I said I’d buy as many as he’d let me use on him point-blank range, right here in my office.

Judge Dolores Roche sentenced each of the “Canaan Riot” teenagers to one hundred hours of community service. If they stuck with it, their records would be cleared. The older of the Wister brothers (whose loan shop's window had been broken) called out from the rear of the courtroom, “You mean they’re not going to jail?!” The judge replied that as a cure for social problems, jail was incredibly expensive, largely ineffective, and usually inhumane. Mr. Wister stood on his seat and cursed her, and was sentenced to either one hundred hours of community service working with the teenagers, or a fine of $500. Having to choose between losing money and having to sweep sidewalks with blacks proved too much for Mr. Wister, whose face went purple and whose open mouth appeared to be paralyzed. His brother paid the fine.

I assigned John Emory and Nancy White to supervise the teenagers as they were cleaning, repairing, and repainting the block of East Hillston where they’d “rioted.” One of them did not “stick with it.” A few weeks later while stealing a neighbor's TV set, he hit the neighbor with a lead pipe. Judge Roche sent him to the state reformatory. She sadly said to me afterwards, “One more failure, Cuddy; yours, mine, and the whole messed-up system's.”

Old Dolores had never been a happy judge, and she was getting gloomier by the year. I told her she was losing her capacity to look on the bright side; after all, the other eleven young men
had
stuck it out: that section of Canaan looked cleaner than it’d been for years. They’d cleared away the informal junkyard that had grown on the site of the demolished A.M.E. church, and then they had painted a big, bright mural of local black history on the church's single still-standing wall-section; you could see it for blocks away, because Canaan A.M.E. (to which the wide stone steps remained) had stood atop a small hill. In this mural, Bessie Smith was depicted singing in Smoke's; two black children were depicted being escorted by state troopers into Polk Elementary School through a gauntlet of
ugly-faced white parents; five young civil rights demonstrators were depicted seated cross-legged in a row across Main Street, and the Hillston police were depicted hauling them off, while one of my predecessors as chief stood watching, left hand on a megaphone, right hand on a gun. A pro-basketball superstar who’d grown up in East Hillston was depicted in flight across the top of the mural. Coretta Scott King was depicted shaking hands with Mayor Carl Yarborough, and Cooper Hall was depicted dead-center, his head about as large as Lenin's in Red Square, his hand raised beneath the sun, as if he’d just tossed it into air. With John and Nancy's help, the teenagers also built two wood benches, laid a path with the old church bricks, chained a trash can to a post, and called the place “Cooper Hall Park.”

Justin discovered through his informant, Preston Pope, that last fall the Carolina Patriots had been expecting a shipment of arms for their much-discussed Armageddon against the Tainted Races, but that the (prepaid) guns had never shown up. The missing supplier turned out to have been the fellow (or what was left of him) we’d found dead in the abandoned Saab off in the woods last November. Turns out the dead man had done time in Dollard Prison during the same period, and in the same cell block, as Winston Russell.

Mayor Carl Yarborough appointed a black to replace Otis Newsome as city comptroller and was accused of “nepotism” by Brodie Cheek on his new cable television show, “Call to Christ.”

Andy Brookside was the main speaker at Cooper Hall's memorial service, organized by the Hall Committee. That night Haver Auditorium was so jammed with students that Nomi Hall's sister couldn’t make her way through to the family seats and had to stand in the back to listen to the eulogies. A black rock star sang a song he’d written about Cooper called “My Brother's Keeper.” Jack Molina read telegrams from national civil rights figures. Jordan West introduced Alice MacLeod, who introduced “our next governor Andrew Theodore Brookside.” (Maybe he was laying the groundwork for folks to call him A.T.B.—as in F.D.R. and J.F.K.)

In his speech, Brookside never mentioned the death penalty against which Hall had fought, but I’ll give him this: he brought that crowd to its feet with his final words: “Whenever a young man
like Cooper Hall dies by violence, then a little of all that is best in this country dies with him. Whenever his voice is silenced by hate, then the voice of America is silenced too. Let us pledge tonight to join our voices to those who have had the courage to sing alone. Until together, our song is a shout of liberty and justice! Tonight is not our memorial to Cooper Hall.
The future is our memorial to
Cooper Hall!
”