Time's Witness (70 page)

“Paul's okay though?”

“Yeah. Not pretty, but okay. And no concussion. He must have a hard head.”

I tried to nod. “Kept telling me to leave…like he was going to
reason
Winston out of it.”

His arms crossed over the stained jacket. “You walk in with an empty gun, right? And it saves your life. The sort of irony I know appeals to you.”

I was thinking—if I had taken the bullets from my pocket and loaded the gun, would Winston be alive now or would Paul be dead?

“Zeke's upstairs. I want to go see how he's doing, okay?” Justin started to put his hand back on my shoulder, but pulled it away. His eyes darkened to a deeper blue. “Say what you want to say, Captain.”

I squinted up at him. “You know what I want to say, Lieutenant. Russell was already down. Disarmed and down.”

“He was three feet from your back with that knife.” “Not the second shot.”

Justin looked straight at me, his eyes still, then he took a quiet breath. “The second shot was for Nancy. For her baby. He fired on a woman, a pregnant woman.”

“That's your reason.”

“I consider it a good enough one.”

“I know you do. But it isn’t a good enough reason.” “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. But as of now, you’re relieved of your duties.”

“Okay.” He touched my shoulder, then left.

Justin didn’t say a lot of things that I figured he was thinking, because I was thinking them. But I didn’t say a lot of things either. He didn’t say this was the second time he’d saved my life. He didn’t say that Winston had murdered Cooper Hall and at least three more people, including an unborn baby, and that others might still die. He didn’t say I should have
really
believed Winston was going to come after me, instead of half hoping he would try, so I could finally get him, because what I obviously couldn’t conceive was that he could get me. Not a pig like Winston.

Two young doctors came in to “do a little more sewing” on me. I let them, and went on thinking.

In a while, Wes Pendergraph brought a report from Ralph on the attack at the church. Janet Malley had a concussion from a club swung by one of the dozen thugs who’d shown up in the green van. Four of the other picketers had been badly beaten, and a bystander had a separated collarbone. The mounted patrolmen had cracked open the skull of one thug and fractured the ribs of another. Ten other people had been treated for smoke inhalation or minor injuries. Three assailants, who’d fled in the van, had suffered minor injuries when—under pursuit—they’d smashed into a median rail. All twelve of them were now in custody; all proved to have connections to the Carolina Patriots. So, Winston had either known they were planning the attack, or he’d
persuaded
them to do it as a cover. I thought the latter.

As for my own injuries—as Etham Foster grumbled when he stalked into the emergency room an hour and a half later with our medical examiner, Dick Cohen, slouching behind him—I was luckier than I deserved.

“It was distance saved you, babe, even with that vest.” Etham pressed his large thumb lightly on my breast. “Good as Winston was, he was just a little too far away. And that's the first time in your life you ever wore a vest, isn’t it? Out getting a doughnut!” He studied my arm, then my leg. “You dumb hillbilly. Man throws kerosene on you, puts cyanide in your car, smart as you are, you think you’d pay attention.”

I mumbled, “Like always, you’re right, Dr. D.”

“You look like somebody test-drove a sewing machine all over you.”

Dick Cohen gave his credentials and asked the Vietnamese doctor what the “damage was.” The worst had been blood loss from the three knife wounds; I now had seven pints donated by strangers in me. Plus I had fourteen stitches along my hairline, three under my lip, five above my eye, and thirty-some more on my forearm and thigh. Several bones were broken in my right hand. The rest was only “contusions, bruises, lacerations, some possible permanent loss of muscle tone in the left arm, and possible minor impairment of the left eardrum.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” said Etham. “He's got the weekend off anyhow.”

Cohen scratched his neck. “Bare knuckles against a psycho with a switchblade,
cheesh!
Next time, Mangum, why don’t you wait for a backup like you tell everybody else to?”

Etham's immense hand turned my head gently as he looked at the sutures. “Ralph said to tell you he feels ‘like shit’ about not checking that steeple. What I want to know is who told Russell you were going to be there. I figure he’d been waiting up on that landing two, three hours.”

Justin walked back into the room then. “Nancy's concious. But she broke up pretty badly when Zeke told her.”

Dick Cohen made a spitting noise. “Yeah, I heard the kids lost their baby. That's a tough one.”

Justin frowned. “They tried to make Zeke leave her room. They found out that was a mistake with a six-foot-seven Cherokee.”

We were quiet for a while, then Cohen asked Justin, “You hear anything about Andrew Brookside?”

“He's still in O.R., but the bullet's out. There’re over fifty reporters and television cameras out in the lobby. The mayor's out there. Jack Molina—”

I said, “Who's talking for us?”

“Nobody yet.”

I asked, “Can I get up?”

The Vietnamese doctor said, “We’re going to move you to a room in a minute. In the morning, you can get up.”

“Can I leave?”

“When you can walk, you can leave,” was his answer.

I told Etham Foster I’d like him to make a statement for HPD, to stress all the precautions we’d taken, and that all the assailants had been arrested, and—he stopped me. “I know what to say.”

Dick Cohen was rubbing his knuckles in his eyes. “You grits are too much for me. I gotta get back to Brooklyn. Buffalo Bill here riding up on his fuckin’ horse? A fuckin’ horse.”

Justin said quietly, “I knew the layout. A car couldn’t get through. It was the fastest way to get to him.”

Cohen lifted both shoulders. “Of course. What else.”

Etham glanced at Justin, then at me. “I guess we’re all lucky that Savile was as fast as he was. And as accurate. That
was
your three fifty-seven, wasn’t it, Savile, not Mangum's?” He slid a revolver from his Windbreaker pocket, racked it open. “I found this one on the floor in the church.” He spun the chamber. “This one hasn’t been fired. In fact, hasn’t been loaded. Which is careless.” Walking over to the sodden red mound of my clothes on the counter, where they’d been stacked after the nurse cut them off me, Etham picked up my shoulder holster, and slipped the revolver in it. Then he lifted the bloody vest, looked at it carefully, pinched out the crushed bullet. “Close,” he said.

Pulling out his black notebook, Cohen shook it open and flipped through the pages. “Checked the prelim autopsy on the Russell stiff. One three fifty-seven slug in the abdomen, and the
same through his jugular. But the man had been beaten to a frigging pulp. Major subdural hematoma. I’m talking critically ruptured blood vessels in his fuckin’ head. Must have been a bull
.
To come back at you with a knife, after that! Got a couple of ribs splintering his lung! Incredible. Cheesh, Mangum, what’d you do, run a semi over him?”

Etham was looking at me. “For a fellow too peaceful to carry a gun, you’re a man of pretty violent impulses. Not easy to kill a man with your bare hands. Ugly too.”

Cohen yawned. “So that's Winston Russell, huh? Sort of inhuman. A walking corpse, torn up like that, and still it takes two from a three fifty-seven to stop him. Un-fuckin’-believable.” He picked up his black bag. “So, Chief, how do we write this thing up?”

I looked away from Etham. Looked past Justin. Looked at the fluorescent circle of light above my head. Nobody said anything. Cohen cleared his throat, and waited.

I said, “Write it up that the suspect was slain while resisting arrest.”

Cohen pushed the notebook into his jacket pocket. “By the officer in pursuit?”

“Yes.”

Hair in a white tangle, Isaac Rosethorn came lumbering at a lop-sided trot around the corner of the corridor where an orderly was wheeling me to my room. Isaac's distraught eyes were fixed straight ahead as he ran right past us. When I called out to him, he spun around, and with horrible wheezing snorts leaned over my wheel-chair, tripping against it as it kept moving. His collar points poked sideways, his shirt flopped out of his wrinkled pants, his socks bunched around his ankles. “Ah, ah, ah, my dear Slim!” He glanced over me quickly, stared at my eyes, then—to the amused surprise of the young black orderly—he kissed me on the top of the head. “Look at you, look at you. I could weep.”

“
You
could weep?” I whispered. Isaac's deep sighs caromed down the long sterile hall while he patted my hair at a stumbling jog.

Talking, the old lawyer sat by the bed in the dark, talking, until I fell asleep. Alice had called him at the Piedmont, so he’d been told what had happened at Trinity. And he’d heard more details from Bubba Percy in the lobby. I wasn’t surprised that one of the first things he said after the nurse gave up trying to make him leave was that he was deeply upset to hear that Winston Russell was dead.

“You damn old man,” I muttered, groggy, “all you care about is your damn subpoenas.”

“No.” I felt the breath of his sigh pass near my hand. “No. I care because I don’t believe in killing. For any reason. And I feel sad
for…anyone who has to carry that.”

“Everybody carries something.”

He patted my leg. “Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know.…”

He sat back, waiting. After a while, I asked him how badly he’d needed whatever he could have forced out of Winston at the trial. He said, not much; that between us, he really didn’t believe he needed much of anybody but George himself.

“So why subpoena half the state?”

As in the past, he advised me to use my noggin: “I did it to scare the bejesus out of them.”

“I heard you succeeded.”

“I did.”

“Heard they dropped to a manslaughter plea.” I pulled my broken hand to a new position on my chest. “You turned them down. So why’d they let go of first degree? If they didn’t want witnesses to—”

I could hear the shuffle of his search through his pockets. “Oh, there was only one witness who ultimately mattered. That's the one I negotiated; reluctantly felt I had to negotiate, given my client's history. To get the death penalty out of the picture then and there. To take away one day of that horror from George. So a name came off the list, and I will keep that name out of the testimony.”

“Julian Lewis.”

“Exactly. A name in exchange for the threat of the gas chamber.” His chair scraped closer to me. “Ah, Cuddy. The world. ‘Those who think, laugh; those who feel, cry.’ And this old man, well, he goes back and forth.…I’m told Mr. Brookside is still critical. What a miserable thing. Such a vibrant man.…My assumption is that he was caught in the crossfire of
your
vendetta.”

“Not mine, Winston's.”

“Ummm.…But apparently, everyone else has taken the shooting for an assassination attempt on Brookside.”

“Let them.”

“Why not? More thrilling. Possibly more useful.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “How is Mrs. Brookside?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like me to find her? Tell her anything?” His hand touched mine. “Let her know you’re all right? She must be here at U.H.”

“That's okay. Alice probably told her.…But thank you.” Outside the window, a plane flashed across the sky of stars.

“I’m recalling you to the stand. Think you can make it Wednesday?”

“To ask me what?”

He chuckled. “What I ask you will matter less than what you
look
like, and why.”

“Why didn’t you take the manslaughter plea for George?”

A match flared in the dark, then my nostrils twitched at the sharp familiar smell of his cigarette. “Why should I? More to the point, why should George?”

I said because manslaughter is a much shorter sentence than second-degree murder, and if the jury should find against them, he’d be sending George back to prison for too long, and besides not even George would deny that he’d killed Pym.

By my side, the small red flame brightened, dimmed. Isaac's mellow, low-pitched voice was calm as the sky outside. “According to the law, ‘killing’ isn’t necessarily a crime, is it? Depends on the killer's state of mind, on his intent, on his alternatives. In George's case, as I will demonstrate to the jury on Monday, his intent was to save his own life.”

I was sliding off into sleep. I mumbled. “Deep down, we know George also had alternatives.”

Isaac's hand stroked against mine. “Deep down, we all have alternatives. We can’t always reach them.”

Pulling myself up, I told him that yes, after all, I did want to “talk about it,” about Russell, and I explained what had happened in the cemetery. Quietly nodding, he listened, then he said, “All right. The bureaucratic solution would be to fire Justin. The pure solution would be charge him with a crime.”

“I was out of control myself. I beat the man to death.”

“No, you didn’t. That's medical speculation.”

“I tried to.”

“Ah, intent. Didn’t Russell intend to kill you, and in that
mutual combat weren’t you trying to save your own life?”

“No, I was trying to kill him. I went crazy.”

Moonlight caught Isaac's hands as he rubbed them over his face. “Crazy.…I’m going to tell you something. When I was a youngster, Slim, a public defender, fresh out of law school, I had this case. A girl named Edith Keene. A mulatto—as they called her. She shot a white man who she said had sexually attacked her little sister. She shot him six times. She intended to kill him. I didn’t want to use an insanity plea, or plead her guilty. I was conceited, and I thought I could get her off on a smart legal loophole I’d come up with. The truth is, I didn’t give a damn about Edith Keene.

“At any rate, I lost that case, and they put Edith on death row. And if she hadn’t been before, after a few months in that place, well, everybody who saw her agreed she was insane. So, of course, that stopped the execution, and she was sent to the state asylum.… She died there. Another inmate beat her to death.