Uncivil Seasons (10 page)

“What’d she say?”

“I only knew one lady with a messier mouth, and she had three or four big scars down her face and rolled drunks in Saigon.”

“Charlene wasn’t sympathetic.”

“That about says it all. She told me she had a real man now, a big man she could lean on instead of carry, and she went on with that awhile like a Loretta Lynn song. So the idea is baby peckerhead can insert his privates up his own privy for all she cares. I said, ‘Where is Prince Luster so bright and early in the morning when he works the night shift?’ She said he quit C&W and was on to a better life in the dog market. I said, ‘Well, even if it does seem the thrill is gone between you and peckerhead Preston, seems like a good proletariat union volunteer like yourself wouldn’t want to see a working man railroaded by police and capitalists.’ She said Preston’d never worked a day in his life. She had me there. Her new love’s off somewhere unknown in the Great Smokies with his dawgs.”

“Did she know those silver sacks were in there?”

“I asked her that very thing. Says I, ‘Charlene, sweetheart, one more question, and I’ll let you go on back and feed those dogs before they eat each other and put Luster out of his new business. When you were taking that bath yesterday, did you notice anything in the tub besides yourself—clanky stuff belonging to a rich murdered lady?’ That’s when the doorknob slammed into my dick and I lost interest.”

“Why didn’t you bring her in? Christ!”

“Let’s hold off a little bit, see what Graham can find out. What’s that scratchy singing?”

“It’s Ma Rainey.”

“Come again?”

“An old blues singer. One of my blues records.”

“Where do you get all these folks from?”

“I bet Willie Nelson likes her.”

“Sounds like she’s singing up from the bottom of the reservoir through a tin can.”

“It’s a very old recording.”

“Hey, well, I
knew
that. You wouldn’t have it unlest it was old.” His jay eyes peered ostentatiously around my bedroom. “It’s all old. My mama had a chest in her kitchen looked like that one.” He meant the pine hutch with a white metal countertop where I kept my sweaters and shoes: “Yessir, she was ashamed to death of it, it was so country. I’d been wondering where it got to. All right, let me just lie here and take a nap while you plow through your wardrobe awhile looking for something to put on. Will this old thing hold me?”

On our way out, Cuddy snooped into my front room and took the cloth off an oil painting. I’d started a self-portrait. In the family attic I’d found the easel that had belonged to my father, who did landscape watercolors and who had, to his deep pleasure, a picture—a clump of spruces at the golf course—hanging in the university museum.

Cuddy said, “The bow tie’s good. You got the polka dots just right”

“You don’t think it looks like me.”

“Looks like a cross between Bobby Kennedy and Susan Whetstone.”

“Maybe that’s what I look like.”

“Well, that’s true. But you mostly look like Senator Rowell Dollard. Sorry. You think maybe I look a little like Jimmy Carter before he wore out. When he was leaning back in the porch rocker with his fluffy hair. What was the name of that old girlfriend of yours, the one that was so crazy about Jimmy Carter? Why can’t I come across somebody like her?”

“Well, you keep telling me you’re too ugly.”

“I know I’m ugly, but it’s the kind of ugly that’s getting real popular.”

He was still talking when we walked outside to the patrol car. “Savile, the thing you need to do, you want to be a detective like in your books, you got to do more than mope and fuck and puff your lungs to soot.
Dentists
can oil paint. You want a hobby more on the lines of bloating up big and fat and raising orchids. You want to take up something even kinkier than Shakespeare playacting.”

“Well, I play the piano in the middle of the night. Not too different from playing the violin on cocaine.”

“Shit, you can’t count that. All you know how to play is ‘Malaguefnia’ and ‘The Sting.’”

“That’s not true, and I don’t think any of your hobbies—like your wall display of a bunch of different kinds of beer cans—puts you up there with Hercule Poirot, frankly.”

“Who?”

“Christ, open the door to the car! It’s freezing out here!”

“I don’t know how you could tell. Hop in the backseat, Martha.”

The frizzy little dog scrambled over the headrest. Cuddy, driving with a doughnut clamped in his teeth, now informed me, “Here’s the truth. Your trouble is, you’re too domestic. You got too many towels. Sideboards. Relatives. You ever hear of Philip Marlowe’s mother coming to visit him at the office? Listen, the thing you have to do is to get out in the rain and let your trench coat get all soggy. You got to get lonesome, Lieutenant Savile. You’re not lonesome enough, that’s your real trouble. That and a nutty imagination. And don’t remind me how you solved who poisoned Mrs. Ormond last year, ’cause that was pure
luck
. Doughnut?”

“No. How can I get lonesome with everybody traipsing in on me all the time?” I shook four vitamin C capsules from the bottle I kept in my briefcase. “I didn’t get any sleep, and I don’t want to get run down—and don’t say a word.” I also had a hangover I didn’t mention.

Cuddy pawed through the bag and found the doughnut he was looking for, a vile jelly one. He said, “Anybody else ever tell you you were a hypochondriac?”

“Yeah. She’s probably a judge in Atlanta by now.”

“Where to, General Lee?”

“Pine Hills Lake. I want you to meet your mystic. Then I’m going to Cape Hatteras, you know, like on your wall.”

“Kind of cold for the beach, and I don’t know if V.D.’s gonna love your taking another vacation so soon after the last one, when you and Susan Whetstone slipped off to—”

“I’m going to see Walter Stanhope, you know who he is? Well, he used to have V.D.’s job, fifteen years back, before Rowell had him fired, and I found out on the phone this morning from Hiram Davies that Stanhope retired to Cape Hatteras. So I want to ask him something. You want to come? It’s four hours.”

“No, thanks, I’ll just look at my wall. But you got to listen to me, Stanhope’s not how to find out who killed Mrs. Dollard.”

“Trust me.”

“That’s what my ex-wife said.”

Cloris Dollard kept the past, whether she’d kept a diary or not. She didn’t sort it, or label it, and from all reports of her habitual sanguinity, she didn’t dwell on it. She just kept it in cardboard boxes. Tossed into a fur company’s box were hundreds of photographs—her unedited biography from scalloped black and white rectangles of herself as a habitually sanguine child, to color Polaroids of her and Rowell posing last summer at 10 Downing Street in London. Over the past week I had studied these pictures. I felt close to this big, tan, blond woman with the loud, warm voice I could remember yelling at me, “Pull that canoe on in, hey you, Jay Savile! Get your body over here and eat some lunch with my girls!”

To Captain Fulcher, the fact that the Senator’s wife had been murdered was the tragic but ancillary aftermath of the fact that she had been robbed. I didn’t believe that anymore. I believed she had been robbed because she’d been murdered. I believed she was dead because Bainton Ames was dead. I believed Joanna Cadmean. And I wanted to hear more of her dream.

At the Cadmean lake house, young professorial Briggs came down from her tower with a green ribbon through her hair, like a vine in strawberries, and engaged in a quick spate of stichomythic wisecracking with Cuddy Mangum about professional women and the merit of the solar system. All she said to me was, “Is Mr. Mangum always so…”

“Juvenile?”

“Jocular.”

I said, “He doesn’t know what jocular means,” and Cuddy said, “I do too: well-endowed,” and she excused herself to go find her sister-in-law.

Cuddy sighed. “I believe I drove her off with my lewdness. And just when she was about getting ready to want to marry me.”

“You’ve already been married. Why do you want to do it again?”

“Improve,” he said. “Besides, Briggs was married before too. Married a hippie when she was a child. It didn’t last long. He turned capitalist on her after all he’d said. She woke up one morning and he’d shaved off his beard. Imagine! After that, it all went in a downward spiral.”

Another surprise. “Are you making this up, Cuddy?”

“Nope. She told me on the phone last night.”

“Why’d you call her up?”

“My my, don’t be tetchy. You can’t keep ’em
all
on the bench.”

Joanna Cadmean came in and sat down on the couch where she’d sat before, the same pillow cushioning her foot on the coffee table. In winter light, the great vaulted space of the lodge living room was sharp, even harder than it had felt last night shadowed by snow. She wore the same skirt and the same long-sleeved sweater. On the floor beside her was the morning paper open to Bubba Percy’s article on her. Her sketchbook lay next to her on the couch; she picked it up and began to draw in that odd, unlooking, resolute way, while Cuddy and she talked about her past work with the police. Drawing, she sat in the bright, cold light and told of old nightmare visions, of seeing the lost she’d been asked to find, already dead in secret graves, hair growing wild.

I asked her, “Did you ever, do you mind if I say this? Did you ever think you were crazy?”

Mrs. Cadmean smiled at me. “Oh, I expect I
am
crazy.”

“I mean, well, did you ever want to get away from being you? Want to change? Did you suffer from what people said about you?”

With quick sideways strokes, she crossed out the face she was sketching and turned the page. “When there was that external evidence, Justin, to prove me right, people said I had a great gift. When there wasn’t, they said I was a charlatan or a lunatic. Neither the praise nor the censure of other people came to mean much to me.”

Cuddy said, “I don’t expect there’s anybody who doubts you’ve got an amazing gift.” I could tell he was as impressed with her as I had been—with her beauty and her strange incandescent self-possession.

The calm gray eyes turned to Cuddy, crooked toward her in the bent-willow chair. She said, “The trouble with the kind of gifts the gods give, Mr. Mangum, is they cannot be declined, or exchanged, or even,” she looked down at her drawing, “set aside for a while. You cannot say ‘No, thank you’ to the gods.” One hand closed over the wrist of the other, covering what I felt must be scars. Then she looked up at me. “Now, Justin, you wanted me to look at some photographs of some men? Men who may be connected to Cloris’s death? Are they in that folder? Mr. Mangum, we seem to have made a convert of your friend overnight.”

Cuddy said, “Hey, he’s got ESP! I mean, not like you, but he’s always saying things that you’re thinking, or singing songs that are in your head, you know. One night, a couple of years ago, he called me up and said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I had in fact just had the puerile notion of sticking a dirty revolver in my mouth—tasted terrible—over some real sad news about my ex-wife getting married that morning. If I’d had ESP, I wouldn’t have ever introduced her to her new love, much less hauled that same man across a rice paddy on my back.”

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes went black in the sudden way I’d noticed before, a bruised look coming into them and then vanishing.

In the manila folder were blowups of a dozen random mugshots I’d asked Cuddy to bring me—mixed among them pictures of the three Pope brothers. One by one as I handed them to her, she touched her hand over the surface, shook her head and placed them facedown beside her on the couch. She paused no more over Preston Pope’s face than any other, although when she came to Graham Pope’s, she did go back and hold the two pictures up and comment on the resemblance. The only time she even hesitated was at a photo of a bull-necked, blond ex-Marine with dulled eyes and a long arrest record, a local hood, Cuddy said, who had died ten years ago in a car crash.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Nothing. Of course, that means nothing too, you understand.”

Then I gave her the photograph I had brought in my briefcase. She dropped it, and as I leaned down to pick it up, I noticed the long fingers of her oddly translucent hand trembling in the folds of her skirt. “Why are you showing me this?” she whispered. Cuddy twisted over to see the picture I’d taken from among the jumbled stack in Cloris Dollard’s cardboard box. On the back, in her broad script, was scribbled
Pine Hills Lake house,
and on the front Bainton Ames sat slumped in a beach chair, papers on his lap; near him his step-daughter lay on a towel, my mother in her bathing suit stood in the sand, holding a cigarette, and in the shallow water, Cloris Ames and Rowell Dollard—both tan and well muscled—stood laughing together, their handsome faces close enough to touch.

I said, “They look like lovers, don’t they?”

Mrs. Cadmean turned her eyes to the huge window, where light sparked like static over the pine tops and down across the flat gray lake. I spoke quietly. “Is there anyone in
this
picture you associate with Bainton Ames’s death?”

Her response was to struggle up awkwardly onto her crutches and limp across the long room to the window. Cuddy had to jerk in his legs as she went past.

“Did the two of them arrange Bainton’s accident?” I asked her.

Her back was to me, her hands tight on the crutches. She shook her head no.

“Did the same person kill Bainton who killed Cloris? Mrs. Cadmean? You said, she died
because
of Bainton. Did the same…”

“I know no
fact
to suggest so.” Her voice was soft but distinct in the hard angles of the room. “Do you?”

“Not yet. Do you
believe
so?”

She kept staring out to the empty lake as if she were waiting for someone.

Cuddy looked up, his face uncharacteristically hushed, as I walked around him to go stand beside her. It was then that I realized that from the Cadmean window you could see across the northern tip of Pine Hills Lake to the dock and the small half-moon beach of Cloris Dollard’s summer cottage, now boarded up; with some effort I could distinguish part of the back deck, where whoever had taken my old photograph might have stood to snap it—perhaps the other daughter, not seeing what the camera saw. From the tower with the telescope, Briggs could probably see right into the house itself.