Uncivil Seasons (16 page)

And Rowell stood with me. Even when I struck him for whispering there by the grave what I knew was true. Even when I insisted on living in Hillston as something no Dollard had ever been. For they had been college men and lawyers, and even some of them drinkers, and some more or less mad, and most had held public office. But none had ever been public officers, in so individual a sense.

Like my psychiatrists, my people had among themselves their theories about why I wanted to spend my time with criminals. My mother’s cousin the attorney general wondered if alcohol had given me a taste for gaudy violence. My mother’s older brother U.S. Senator Kip thought I’d read too many books. Her younger brother State Senator Rowell said I needed time ’til ambition took root.

But no one said anything to Hillston. People not in the circle had no idea I’d had a “really serious problem,” much less that all my pastimes—playing the piano, painting pictures, refinishing furniture, putting on plays—were hobbies I’d developed in a sanitorium, were habits to replace habits.

Because I said nothing either, not even to Cuddy Mangum, who probably thought my mother’s people had pulled the requisite strings to keep me from going off to jail or war, whereas I’d simply on my own gone off a different deep end. Which is what I meant when I told Cuddy there in the parking lot that I knew the way back.

To Mangum, in the beginning, my joining the police was only another of my social pastimes. My arrival at my first homicide in white tie and tails (I’d come to the victim’s house directly from the town’s Charity Ball) led him to conclude I’d cast myself as the inspector in a drawing room romance, a mystery novel.

But I had chosen detection carefully. In college I had studied classics, electing to learn about the distant past because I had known so long so much of a closer past, had been told since childhood so much of what my future would be: it would be the family business, public office. When Rowell decided his ambitions for me would have to be postponed (“After the mountains, you’re too vulnerable for courtroom law, and you can forget running for office anytime soon. We’re going to have to wait a good ten years to fade this mess.”), when Rowell decided to wait, he told me that in the interim I had two choices—I could go into business law, or I could accept a position on his staff.

But I chose public office. I chose the police.

Ironically, it was a remark of Rowell’s at my father’s grave that confirmed my desire. He said, “What you’ve done grieves me, but I can’t say it surprises me. I was a solicitor too long for anything to surprise me. In that building, there’re no mysteries in the end.”

After my training, I was rushed through promotions because that’s what Captain Fulcher thought the Dollards wanted him to do. And I knew they wouldn’t tell Fulcher anything different. They had to hold me up out of the mud, because I was wrapped in the flag of their name.

I had never wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t want to prosecute crime, or to defend it. I simply wanted to solve the mystery. I wanted to pull down my visor and on a common field ride to where mystery contracted to an instant, like the
crack
! of splintering wood, where no one knows from what castles the jousters have come, and justice is a blind queen on a dais who cannot see the coats of arms on their shields.

Detection was to me a knight, whereas law was only a squire to my people. A loyal, discreet British butler. And I had read enough mysteries to know how often the butler turns out in the end to be the villain.

What Mr. Briggs Cadmean meant me to remember was that I was indebted to that butler’s discretion, nevertheless. I had been sheltered by his family service. When Cadmean reached over my chair and held up before my face my empty whiskey glass and didn’t say a thing, he meant that when I had come home from what my family referred to only as “the mountains,” the circle had stood by me, in a ring. And they expected that courtesy returned.

Rowell liked to make speeches to me. “You have a duty to this family. You have inherited a sacred trust, and that is the honor of serving your state. Don’t you feel that, Jay?”

Well, now I did.

“Listen here, Lieutenant. Whatever your name is, y’all got no right to come in here and harass me! They could fire my ass, called off the line by the police like that in front of everybody and his goddamn brother. Y’all think just because I’m nobody and a woman, it’s open season on Charlene Pope. First Mangum, now you. And you really want to do something for me, you get that baby Preston’s big brothers off my back. I don’t belong to the goddamn Popes!”

“Savile.”

“What?”

“My name is Lieutenant Savile.”

“Listen, right this minute, far as I care your name’s Lieutenant Shithead, and I don’t care if you think I think so either.”

Charlene and I were having our talk inside a Plexiglas cubicle from which her elderly shift manager observed the floor; he’d politely offered to go away to buy himself a Coca-Cola.

It was almost ten o’clock at night by the time I’d left my empty glass beside Mr. Cadmean’s models and driven across Hillston to stand here looking at the originals. Beyond the window the great hall of machines kept whirring and clattering, even at this hour, blending, carding, combing. Fed by their workers, the huge looms tirelessly kept weaving Cadmean’s cloth.

Charlene (her bleached white-yellow hair pulled back in a ponytail, and wearing a smock over jeans and an orange mohair sweater) was in the same mood I’d seen her in on Maple Street. Now she also had purplish pouches under her eyes and a large scab in the corner of her lip.

Suggesting she sit down, which she wouldn’t, and offering her a cigarette, I said, “I’m not trying to harass you.”

“Sure, what do you call this? I smoke my own.” She proved it by pulling a pack of Marlboros from her pocket and flicking her plastic lighter on in front of the match I was holding out.

“I’m trying to find out why you’d called us yesterday and said your husband was responsible for the fight at By-Ways Massage.”

“You tell me,” she mumbled.

“Does that mean you wish you hadn’t?”

She shot a fast stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth; she was watching the men and women moving about in the plant beyond the glass, as if she thought one of them might suddenly turn on us with a machine gun.

I said, “One thing I can assume is, you wanted us to come over there and see that silverware. There’re easier ways to leave your husband, aren’t there, than getting him arrested for murder?”

“Don’t you start saying I did things when I didn’t do them.”

“What things didn’t you do?” I noticed a man with prematurely white hair and a black moustache staring in at us as he went by. Turning her back, Charlene hurried to stand on the other side of a tall file cabinet where she wouldn’t be as easily seen.

I said, “Well, we don’t much think Preston committed the Dollard murder.”

“Fine.” She was smoking faster than anyone I’d ever seen, holding in her other hand the little tin ashtray she’d snatched off the desk quick as a shoplifter. “I could care less, but fine.”

“Or the robbery. We don’t think his big brothers did it either.”

“How come? Don’t put it past them, mister. I could tell you stuff about the Pope boys.” She went back to her cigarette.

“No doubt. Incidentally, what was it you took out of your husband’s bureau drawer when you left on the spur of the moment in the van yesterday?”

Veins bulged in her neck “Did that prick tell you I stole that money?! Goddamn him! That was $675
I won
in Atlantic City on our vacation, and we were saving to go to the beach this summer and it belonged to me and I took it. And just let me see Preston tell me to my face I stole that money!”

“Preston didn’t say you stole it.”

Confused, she stopped her cigarette midway to her mouth, and I pointed at it. “Did you know, somebody who didn’t live at the Dollards’ left a Marlboro butt in their driveway the night of the murder?”

She blustered, “So?”

“Mrs. Pope, was that silverware there in the bathroom when you got to the house, or did you put it there? And, if you put it there—for whatever marital cause—where did you find it?”

She stabbed out her cigarette hard enough to shred it. “I’m not talking to you. I never killed a fucking fly. Y’all are off the wall.”

Outside, the throbbing noise was endlessly the same. I came around to lean on the metal desk across from her. “Nobody said you killed anyone. Your, I guess, former sister-in-law Paula told us—”

“Paula!” With a jerk she knocked two cigarettes out of her pack; they fell to the floor and I picked them up.

“Paula told us she doesn’t think you knew that silver belonged to the victim.”

Charlene let me light her cigarette this time; her eyes, black as pea coal, had gotten glittery with fear.

I said, “I wonder if you came across the silver and figured it was stolen and thought you’d get back at Preston for causes I can certainly imagine. If you don’t want to come talk to him, all right. All I want from you, Charlene, is where you got the sacks.”

She was whispering now. “I never saw it.”

“That’s not true, is it? I should and will pull you in, Charlene, but I don’t want to have to.”

“Please. Listen to me, Mr. Savile. Y’all got to leave me alone! Please! I never saw it.”

“Do you remember where you were the night Mrs. Dollard was killed? A week ago Sunday?”

Her teeth scraping across her lower lip pulled the scab off so a line of blood the color of her lipstick started down her chin. “I was with a guy called Luster Hudson the whole night, out at his place. Preston and I are separated. Luster can tell you I was there. He’s in the mountains now, delivering some dogs.”

“You remember that far back? I don’t think I would.”

“Listen, you sure would if the fucking cops—” She stopped and wiped at the blood with her fingers. I handed her the handkerchief in my jacket pocket; she just stared at it. I said, “Here,” and took it and pressed it against her mouth.

Behind us the door swung open, and a small young woman with short red curls and hostile blue eyes charged in yelling, “What’s going on here?” Above her jeans she wore a too-large sweatshirt with a badge identifying her as a union representative named Alice “Red” MacLeod. She couldn’t have been more than five one or two in her work boots, but she seemed to be under the impression that she was a great deal larger as she elbowed me away from Charlene and repeated, “Okay, what are you doing to her?”

I said, “Pardon me, I’m Detective Lieutenant Savile. I’m speaking here with Mrs. Pope.”

“What about?” In her huge sweatshirt she looked like a high school student on a stage crew, but there was none of that swollen adolescent blankness in her attractive face.

“It doesn’t concern,” I looked down at her badge, “the union.”

She spun around. “What happened to your mouth, Charlene?”

Dabbing with the handkerchief, Charlene shook her head, her eyes miserable. “Nothing. I bit my lip. He’s just asking me about Preston, the guy I’m married to, but, like I told you, I moved out. It’s nothing, honest. Okay?” She looked at me. “Can I go now? Give me a break, how ’bout. Okay?”

Alice MacLeod said, “You don’t have to talk to him, do you understand?” Then she wheeled on me, leading with her tilted chin. “What do you want with her?”

“I don’t see how it’s your business, Miss…MacLeod.”

“Anything on my floor on my shift is my business.” Her voice was North Carolina, but farther west, mountain sharp.

I said, “Mrs. Pope, the best thing you can do for yourself, listen to me, is cooperate with us voluntarily.”

Miss MacLeod pulled Charlene away by the arm. “Do you want a lawyer?” Charlene shook her head no.

Going to the door, I told Charlene, “We’re finished for now. If you don’t think I’m trying to help, wait ’til you meet my chief.”

She nodded, without meaning it, and I left.

I’d gotten all the way outside and was tugging the collar of my overcoat up over my ears to start the walk past all the railcars and trucks bringing Cadmean raw fibers to weave and taking what he wove away to sell, and past all the hundreds of cars his workers had bought with the money he paid them for making him so much more; I was still standing there staring up at the disinterested stars his daughter studied when I was jabbed in the back by the fingers of Alice “Red” MacLeod, who still wanted to know what was going on.

Her breath clouded around her face, one of those British schoolchild faces, freckled milk, one of those faces brought over from Scotland’s Highlands by vanquished followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a stubborn fighter’s face. “Is Charlene in trouble?”

“She has information involving a murder.”

“What murder?”

“Mrs. Rowell Dollard’s.”

She sucked in the cold air.

“Yes. The best advice you can give her is to tell us what she knows.”

“She’s scared out of her wits.”

“Of what?”

“What do you think?! Of you. What’s your name again?” It was not a friendly question.

“Savile. Justin Savile.” I took off my glove, found my wallet, and showed her my identification, which she examined studiously. I said, “You’re going to freeze out here. Would you like to step back inside and I’ll explain, if you’re really interested in helping Mrs. Pope.”

“Tell me here.”

I told her that Preston was being held for possession of stolen property thought to be connected with the homicide. She listened, frowning up at me, her fists balled under her crossed arms. “Okay,” she nodded when I finished, “I’m going to talk to her.” She spun away, then back around. “Sorry I jumped down your throat. I don’t like cops.”

“Why not? We’re workers too.”

“Depends on what you’re working for.”

“Mind if I ask, is Red a political nickname, or does it refer to your hair?”

She studied my face.

I smiled. “Or your temper?”

A puff of air blew from her mouth. “All three,” she said. “Bye.” And was gone.

Behind me the lights of C&W spread across the night like a small town. Old buildings, saw-toothed at their roofs with skylights, hooked on to the new, flat buildings Cadmean didn’t like. Other buildings were under construction, their scaffolding bare. Huge spider-tanks were painted pretty colors and inscribed with their owners’ initials. High smokestacks spit out the waste of power.