Authors: Michael Malone
“Okay.” Pulling down his sunglasses, he looked at me as if people were something foreign and their purposes dubious.
According to Davies, Walter Stanhope had lived alone since his wife had died; he had no other family. He was a native Banker, who actually had worked in Hillston only a decade. It was said that old Briggs Cadmean had been instrumental in maneuvering the city council into first appointing Stanhope Hillston’s police chief. What had impressed Cadmean was the man’s management of a flare of civil rights disorders in the small coastal town where he was then chief. Stanhope’s Hillston predecessor had a brutish reputation that, in Cadmean’s view, might give our city a bad name. It had been under that earlier man’s regime that Sister Resurrection’s son had been killed.
“Drive okay?” Stanhope finally asked and pushed his sun-glasses back up over his eyes.
“Fine. Catch anything?”
“Some.” In the bucket two croakers floated.
“Kind of windy out here, isn’t it?” I wiped at the tears already chapping my cheeks.
“I guess. Not so bad. Where’re you staying?”
“I don’t know yet.”
The glasses came down again. His eyes were the color of the sea, an impenetrable grayish green. “Lotta places are closed up.”
“I noticed. Looks like you lost some houses, too. I haven’t been out on the Banks in a while.”
Stanhope reeled in, unhooked some kelp from his lure, and cast. The whir of his bright brass spinning reel sent the line on and on over the ruffled waves. “Lost some in ’73. Whole place’ll be gone before long. The Army Corps of Engineers finally quit messing with those dune walls. Guess they figured they’d poured enough millions into the water. Hurricane tides sucked the groins right out.” He stopped with a brusque rasp of his throat, as if surprised to hear his voice go on so long.
I said, “Amazing the sanguinity of the human race, rebuilding on sand that already slid out from under you.”
“Amazing the stupidity.”
By now I was close to a jog trying to stamp the sting from my numb toes. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Mr. Stanhope? Maybe some lunch?”
“I’ve got coffee at home…You really come here to fish?”
“Well, sir, to tell you the truth, I hoped you wouldn’t mind if I asked you a few questions about the old days in Hillston, and maybe get some advice. Had you heard that Rowell Dollard’s wife was murdered January the ninth?”
His teeth, tannic colored, shifted back and forth on the pipe’s cracked stem. “During a robbery, I heard on the news.”
“I’m not so sure I think so.”
“I’m retired, fifteen years.” He reeled in a few turns on his line. “I don’t much like looking back. What did Hiram say to you about me?”
“He said your dismissal was totally unjustified.” It was totally untrue that Davies had said so, but nevertheless accurate. I added, “A lot of people in Hillston say you were a good chief, Mr. Stanhope. I think maybe too good.”
“I don’t much like Hillston,” he said, and added a few minutes later, “You work under Van Fulcher?”
“Out from under him, as much as I can. We’re not friendly.”
The sunglasses were pulled back down the hawked nose. “I used to work under some of your Dollard kin. We weren’t friendly.”
“Fulcher’s better at going along with them than you and I are.”
I interpreted his tug on his line as a nod. He reeled in, hooked the lure to the guide, and said, “I live over there.” Then he picked up the bucket and started toward the weedy dunes behind us, his feet sliding easily as he climbed through the soft sand. Silently we went past a collapsing plank walkway now jutting out into the air, the shore beneath it shifted away; its house’s windows were boarded, and old beer cans, left doubtless by partying trespassers, cluttered the porch. “That your car?”
I nodded. “Can I leave it there?”
“Up to you. Austin 100-4?”
“Yes, sir. Used to be a nice green.”
“Parts must cost a penny.”
“About what I earn.”
Far down the beach, scouted by furtive sandpipers, a solitary man moved with a metal detector, as though he had been condemned by Herculean gods to sweep clean the coast. “Stupid,” said Stanhope when I pointed at the treasure hunter.
I said, “Well, they used to claim Blackbeard’s gold’s still buried out here somewhere in the dunes near where he was killed.”
“There’s no gold.” It seemed to be a flat statement about life. Stanhope motioned me across the deserted highway and down a narrow cul-de-sac, dark with moss-hung oaks and yaupon.
“There might be,” I called ahead. “Things get buried.”
His head jerked back at the sea. “Lot of gold out
there
.” He said “out” as my father—a Tidewater Virginian, had—“oot.” Clearing his throat through a voice that sounded, as it had on the phone, rusty from lack of use, he added, “At Nags Head, men used to tie lanterns to their horses’ necks, drive them along the coast dunes. To trick the ships into smashing on the reefs. They’d loot the wrecks after the drowned washed off.” He stopped at the door of a tiny bleached-wood cottage and added, “I don’t much like people,” and took his tackle and bucket inside.
Like its owner, Stanhope’s living room was brown and worn and sparse: no pictures, few books. There were, however, long shelves of records, and as soon as he came in, he put on a stack of LPs. The first was string music, perhaps Mozart, very quiet. He also had an old television, with rabbit ears covered by foil, that sat beneath a cabinet neatly lined with conch shells whose shiny peach inner curls were the brightest color in the room.
He asked hoarsely, “Are you hungry?”
I admitted that I was, and at a small Formica table in the small kitchen, we ate the fish chowder he had left to warm on the stove top.
Telling Stanhope about the Cloris Dollard case was not easy, as he did not so much as nod, but I faltered on through his silence until I’d explained everything I’d come to suspect. Then we sat there without a word. Finally he said, “You want that coffee?”
“Thank you, yes. You see, if Cloris found out Rowell had killed to get her—and maybe he also had done something under the table about selling Bainton Ames’s textile shares to Whetstone, I don’t know—but if she was going to
leave
him, or
expose
him… Rowell wants to go to Washington, Mr. Stanhope. One more term in the state senate’s all, and then he wants to run for a congressional seat. If he had to choose between Cloris and his ambition…”
Stanhope combed the pipestem through thin, brown hair paler than his scalp. “Killed the woman he killed for?” he asked in the inflectionless tone his voice kept.
“Well, this is fifteen years later. Maybe they were fighting and he did it accidentally. Panicked and tried to make it look like a robbery.”
“Why’d he come home from the capital in the middle of the night to accidentally kill her?”
“Maybe she called him in Raleigh; she said she was leaving the play because of a stomachache, but maybe she was actually upset about Rowell. The last time he can confirm his where-abouts in Raleigh is 9:50. That’s plenty of time for him to drive to Hillston. We’ve got ’til midnight for time of death.”
Stanhope brushed his eyebrows. “Joanna Cadmean put this notion in your head?”
“No, not really.”
“Okay.”
“Look, you know yourself Mrs. Cadmean’s not just some kind of nut. I’ve been back to the newspaper files on her. The bodies in the basement like that! She’s listed as instrumental in the solving of at least thirty crimes.”
He poured coffee from a tin pot. “I don’t deny it,” he said. “Dollard got a lot of use out of that girl.”
“She thinks you didn’t like her.”
“Didn’t.”
“Why?”
Staring into his empty pipe bowl, he shook his head. “No reason. Superstition. Gut.”
“Did Rowell dislike her? I mean, then? He hates her now.”
Stanhope looked at me for a while. Finally, he cleared his throat with a cough. “I’ll say it this way. How that girl Joanna felt about her…what she called visions, was how she felt about Rowell Dollard. She’d do anything he’d have wanted her to.”
I stopped looking for a match and took the cigarette out of my mouth. “She was infatuated with him?” I didn’t want to believe this.
As he handed me his box of kitchen matches, Stanhope nodded. “He was taking her to bed. Not that it’s anybody’s business.”
“Are you sure? It’s hard to believe. What happened?”
“Hard to believe of him?”
“Of her. Well, she was, what, only eighteen?” I saw Mrs. Cadmean at the top of his stairs.
Hello, Rowell
. “What happened?”
“Guess it ended. Dollard got promoted, moved to Raleigh.”
“How do you know they were lovers?”
“People talk. People are sloppy. People are spiteful. And I’m a good cop. Was.” He slid his pipe along his teeth.
Leaning over toward him, I said, “Tell me. You
did
think Dollard might have killed Bainton Ames. Didn’t you?”
Instead of answering, he dumped the two fish from his pail into the sink and started scraping their scales off.
I went on. “You think what I think, don’t you? Rowell was in that boat, he pushed Ames out, and then swam to shore. He’s an impatient, violent man. He wanted Cloris, and Ames wouldn’t divorce her.”
His palm on the fish, Stanhope carefully slit open its belly. “I considered it,” he said.
“But couldn’t prove it?”
His head shook no.
“Why consider it?”
“It’s a long time ago, Mr. Savile.”
“It’s not since Cloris was murdered.”
Stanhope wrapped his fish in foil and put them in the small refrigerator before he said, “Okay. Hiram told you I thought it. I did think it. That he
might
have. That he had motive and means. That’s all. Okay, it puzzled me that Ames hadn’t been in the boat when it hit. The skull contusion,” he ran his long fingers through the back of his hair, “surprised me. Too deep and sharp to have happened in the water. Far back here on his head. He hit falling, should have hit landing on the boat floor.”
“Yes! So how’d he get over the rail?”
“Lots of ways besides Dollard’s pushing him. Accept that first off. But I knew about Dollard and Cloris Ames. And I knew Dollard was at the same restaurant as Ames the same night eating dinner.”
“He was?”
Stanhope took his pipe off the window counter and sat back down. “He left his car in the lot overnight. I asked him why. He said there was a short in the ignition. There was.”
“How’d he get home? He didn’t live anywhere near the lake.”
“I asked him. He said, a friend.”
“Who?”
“I asked him. He said it didn’t concern me.”
“You couldn’t find out?”
“I tried. But then,” he stood up and took the cups, “I lost my job.”
I lit a cigarette. “The coroner’s report said one of the textiles men Ames had been talking to, the men from Georgia, thought he saw Ames walking with somebody toward the docks; I think the somebody was Rowell. But the man said he couldn’t give any description.”
“I had a talk later on with one of those Georgia guys. Hogue? Bogue?”
“Bogue. Impressive. How can you remember that?”
His eyes crinkled the deep crow’s-feet around them. “It’s a case sticks in my mind. Bogue was, all four were, close-mouthed about whatever business had been going on at this dinner. It was around the time there was a lot of tangle with pro-union activity in some of the textile mills. I figured they might have been up to Hillston about that, planning strategy. We had our hands full for a while. Back then old Cadmean was dead set against the union. Bainton Ames was dead set for it. On principle. Don’t think he had much of a grasp of the politics one way or another. So I figured they were up talking strategy to Cadmean, and then Ames was just supposed to take them out and they’d smooth him over with a polite meal. Pine Hills Inn had rooms back then, they were staying the night.” His throat rasped into a cough, and he stopped for a few minutes to rest his voice.
“Anyhow,” he went on. “What I remember is this Bogue was itchy to know if we had some coin, some kind of rare gold piece he said Ames had brought over to the inn for him to look at. They both collected. This was a new acquisition Ames was excited about. Bogue said he’d looked at it again right before they split up outside, and Ames had put it back in a little envelope in his pants pocket. Bogue wanted to know, if we had it, could he buy it? His friend’s just dead a day now. He wants to go see the widow about a coin.”
I said, “So, you don’t much like people?”
“Not many… Now, the coin wasn’t on the body. I didn’t see how it could have fallen out, unless Bainton dropped it outside on the dock or in the boat while he was fishing for his keys, and didn’t notice. Not like him, though.”
From the back of the house the phone rang. It surprised Stanhope, and frowning, he left the kitchen. What surprised me was that he had called Bainton Ames by his first name, and I was going to ask him how well they’d known each other, when he walked back into the room, his thin mouth working hard on the gnawed pipestem. He stared at me so seriously I thought perhaps he had been given news of someone’s death. He said, “That was Mr. Briggs Cadmean on the phone. Wanting to know if you were here.”
“What?”
“I figured, some kind of family emergency, so I said yes. But that wasn’t it.”
“How the hell did he know I was here? Hiram Davies! What did he want? Is he on the phone?”
“No.” Stanhope went back into his living room and turned off his record player. I followed him. “He hung up. He wanted me to know—”
“I don’t believe this!”
“He said you were set on stirring up some nonsense from the past that had nothing to do with the investigation.”
Stanhope watched me pacing the little room.
“Said, fact that you’d come down here showed you’d gone haywire, he put it. Said he hated to say it, but you had a history of mental trouble.”
“God damn it.”
“Said I should calm you down. And just as well not mention he’d taken the trouble to call, for your family’s sake. Just concerned about you.”
We were facing each other across the kerosene heating stove that stood out from his wall. Finally I asked him, “Why’d you tell me, then? And why the hell did he think he could ask you to calm me down?”