Authors: Michael Malone
I stayed by the door as he strode toward me. I said, “If you’d wanted us to think it was an accident, you shouldn’t have broken this chain.”
His head swiveled to the brass door chain I held up, its catch twisted where it had been snapped from the bent lock. “And you shouldn’t have wrenched her wrist,” I said, “so hard you tore off her watch.” I stepped over to the corner, bent down, and gathered the two pieces of the watch I’d seen on Joanna Cadmean’s wrist both times I’d been with her. The band of gold links was broken. Near the watch lay a brass letter opener. I pointed down to it. “Did she try to protect herself with this? Is that how her arm got broken? Did you take the phone downstairs off the hook so if Briggs called, she’d think Joanna was talking with someone? And your scarf, Rowell? Did Joanna grab at your scarf as you shoved her toward the rail? Is that why it’s down there in her hand now?”
Slowly, horror closed Dollard’s eyes: I listened to footsteps start to climb the stairs far below us. When they reached the first landing, he shook himself, then walked to the door without seeing me as he went by. I spoke to his back, to the lush gray sweater that looked no less rich and assured now than it had before. I said, “Just don’t leave the house. Thank you.”
Without turning back, he mumbled thickly, “You’re going to regret this.”
I picked up the extension phone on the desk and called the River Rise apartment and asked Cuddy how Briggs was doing.
“Cruddy. Same as me,” he said. “She’s okay, don’t worry. It’s feeling responsible, you know, that’s the worst. I mean, my sense is she and Mrs. Cadmean hadn’t met more than a couple of times before now. Listen, she wants to come over, and I’m gonna bring her. We both feel awful, tell you the damn truth. But that lady acted
fine
, Justin. She didn’t seem down, she seemed almost, hell, jolly. I swear I can’t understand it!”
“It’s not suicide, Cuddy.”
I heard his long whistle, like a wind. “Dollard?”
“I think so. It looks that way.”
“Shit a brick. Well, you were right. And I was wrong. Damn. How’d he get in there? She told me she was going to lock up. I
told
her to.”
“I don’t know yet. I guess she let him in. Okay, would you go ask Briggs if Joanna told her about any kind of letter or note or something she’d written to me and put somewhere.”
While Cuddy was gone, I listened to the ambulance doors snap open and shut, and its motor spit in the cold, and the keen of its siren leaving. Foster opened the study door. I waved him in.
Cuddy came back on and told me Briggs hadn’t been left any message about a letter for me. He said, “Be there soon as we can. Justin, I’m sorry.”
Foster and the photographer crowded me out of the study. Downstairs, I went to the door and watched Rowell, motionless in his black overcoat, standing outside by his car, boxed in by my car and Foster’s and the squad car whose noiseless light kept spinning, throwing fire over the lake.
In Joanna Cadmean’s room I began my search for the letter I felt certain she had written me, but had not yet made known to Briggs, because she hadn’t thought she needed to yet. There were very few belongings through which to search: one suitcase on the floor of the closet. One drawer indifferently arranged in the bureau. She had required little. I emptied Mother’s wicker basket, and ruffled the pages of the pile of thick romances, heroines in white by ruined towers, pierced by moonlight.
I found what I was looking for in a book under the bed; one of those small-print, yellowing collections of Shakespeare’s complete works, pages separated from the cracked spine, the kind of book that summer houses have on musty shelves. Mrs. Cadmean had written the letter on the notepaper given her by my mother. She had placed the dozen sheets, whether by design or accident, midway through the play
Hamlet
. Her handwriting was scrolled and ornate, but perfectly clear, perfectly linear on the page. At the top of each sheet the red cardinals sat on a dogwood branch, symbols of the state.
January 18
Dear Justin,
You said just now on the phone you planned to go speak with Mr. Stanhope. If you did, he may have told you something about an incident in my life, when I was a young girl, and involving Rowell Dollard. It is true. I was hurt by it. Perhaps I should have told you myself, but it has no bearing on this matter.
It is also true that when I first told Cloris of my terrible instinct that Rowell was responsible for Bainton’s drowning, she said I had fabricated the story because of my dislike of Rowell. Our friendship came to an end because she didn’t believe me.
It is not true that I fabricated the story. But I have to confess, when I said that Cloris had spoken to me in my dream about a diary, in fact, she had telephoned me, last month, in the ordinary way. Let me explain. I have had an interest, since my childhood, in old coins. I suppose I liked feeling on their faces the many hands that had touched them through so much history. Bainton had often shown me his collection. I knew it well. And so I noticed in the testimony surrounding his death the mention of a coin he’d brought to the inn to show someone the night he died. It was a coin he’d recently acquired.
Justin, I saw that coin
this summer
, back in the collection. I know I am not mistaken. I could only conclude that Rowell had taken it from Bainton that night, and all these years later put it back with the others.
This summer I visited Hillston (at my father-in-law’s request—he wants even relatives I suspect he doesn’t much like to keep in touch). And this time, I paid a call on Cloris (Rowell was, I believe she said, in Washington that weekend), and asked her if we might not reconcile after our quarrel. She agreed. We had a good talk. Afterward, I asked if I might see Bainton’s coins again. I was stunned to see the presumably missing gold piece there. But I didn’t mention it. Bainton had died so long ago, and I suppose I felt the cruelty of asking her to accept a truth about Rowell that would shadow the life they had, by all accounts, so happily lived for so many years.
But I did take the coin out of its case, and studied it, and I commented on the fact that it was the only one with no label on its paper envelope.
Shortly before her death, Cloris phoned me to thank me for making the overture to renew our friendship. And she said, laughing, that she had wanted me to have that coin of Bainton’s as a gift, since I’d taken such an interest in it, and after I’d left, she’d set it aside to mail to me, along, she said, with a pretty leather diary she was sending to her daughter. But she’d packed them up somewhere, and couldn’t put her hands on them—as she said—but they were somewhere in “this madhouse” and one of these days she’d send it along. It was very typical of her.
But I never received the coin. And then, a few weeks later, I had my dream, and the next morning I was told that she’d been murdered. Justin, I don’t
know
if Rowell killed Bainton. I, perhaps foolishly, decided only to intimate my feelings to you by talking about dreams without directly producing evidence that would involve me in testimony about the past. My encounter with Rowell at his house and his truly cruel attack on me over the phone make even clearer, if I need further proof, just how vicious I can expect him to be.
The coin is a two-and-a-half-dollar, Liberty-head gold piece, Charlotte-minted in 1839. Bainton kept very careful records. He had only one. I feel strongly that the coin is still in that house. I think Rowell could not bring himself to discard it as easily as he has discarded the living.
That was the end of her original letter. In a different pen, another sheet followed, dated tonight.
Dear Justin,
Briggs and your friend, Lt. Mangum, have just left for their restaurant, and I’m going to take my poor ankle to an early bed, with another friend of yours, Shakespeare. (I regret I missed the chance to see you in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, a favorite of mine, as you might expect.)
I have the strong feeling you’re thinking of me now. I thought of calling, but hate to intrude any more than I already have on your sympathetic ear. I will mail all this tomorrow. You can decide what’s best to do with it, if anything. I’m going home.
You have been very much in my thoughts. Upsetting thoughts, of your falling a long way. But perhaps only into something new. Everything around you is white. I can’t tell if it’s something good or bad. (Always the Sibyl’s way out, isn’t it?) But please take care. You know, I trusted your eyes from the first moment I saw them. They see the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than are ever dreamt of in all the Horatios’ philosophy. For believing so, dear Justin, I thank you. We are only mad north-by-northwest.
Joanna Cadmean
I folded the small, scented sheets back in order. This was no deathbed letter, and not even the Polonian fool Captain Fulcher would believe it was. On the table by the bed was the sketchbook, some of its drawings torn out. I turned over the pages. A gray shadow of Rowell’s enraged face looked out at me, uncannily like the look he had just now given me as he strode out of the study. Across the sheet, Joanna had drawn a series of vertical lines, like the rails of a balcony, like the bars of a cell.
I walked back out into the bitter cold night, and charged Rowell Dollard with murder.
The snow began to fall again early in the morning after Joanna Cadmean died; thick, sticky flakes this time, large as new buds of white azaleas. By dawn they covered Hillston, snowslip heavy on the trees, the downtown stores wheyfaced, staring out at one another across the white, silent roads. I walked onto the steps of the municipal building and saw the whole slumberous city, lulled and hushed by snow.
Rowell Dollard was not in custody; he was not even booked. He was in a private room at University Hospital under the care of a personal physician who said his patient was the victim of hyper-tension and acute prostration brought on by the shock of the violent deaths of his wife and Mrs. Cadmean. The pull of medical rank pleased almost everyone who had been sitting all night in Van Dorn Fulcher’s office. Dollard’s near nervous collapse was, said the state attorney general, “just the sort of holding pattern we need right now.”
The A.G.’s name was Julian D. Lewis, and the D was for Dollard. He had driven very quickly over from Raleigh for this informal hearing, which was also attended by Judge Henry Tiggs, a man I’d known since childhood. Everyone listened sleepily to Rowell Dollard record his statement for the stenographer until Rowell simply mumbled to a stop and said someone should call his doctor right away. His statement was the same one he had given me: Mrs. Cadmean had jumped for no cause she made known.
By dawn, V.D. Fulcher looked as if he were ready to check into a ward near the senator’s. The captain’s pink, whiskery jowls were twitching. His splutter had stammered into incoherence as he tortured himself with calculations: where should he truckle, and how? Word that Rowell Dollard could legitimately seek sanctuary in a hospital bed was the happiest news the captain had had since he heard the Jaycees were giving him a plaque and Mr. Briggs Cadmean was going to attend. Fulcher’s problem was not that I thought there was sufficient evidence to charge Dollard. And certainly not that Cuddy Mangum and Etham Foster agreed with me. It was not even that Fulcher himself—after clicking his mouth hard up in the tower study for fifteen minutes and twice rereading Joanna Cadmean’s long letter to me—did not believe with much comfort that she had committed suicide.
Fulcher’s problem was that Hillston’s current solicitor had said flatly that there were unignorable grounds for reasonable suspicion against Rowell Dollard, even if he was a state senator. This solicitor, Ken Moize, not only was not a Dollard, he was not a Hillstonian, not even a Carolinian, having only lived in the state since the age of fourteen. Moreover, this outlander Moize didn’t even like the A.G., Julian D. Lewis, whose job (Fulcher whispered) he probably coveted. Fulcher’s problem was that he needed to decide whether Julian D. Lewis would override Moize to protect his kinsman; or, whether Lewis would feed Moize a little tidbit of Dollard (an indictment), to avoid the public howl Solicitor Moize might let loose if he could prove Lewis party to a cover-up, oust him, and snatch up and wolf down the attorney generalship for himself.
So buzzed poor Fulcher’s mind. He couldn’t even be sure but that
Lewis
disliked his cousin Rowell Dollard, jealous of the backing the state moneymen (like Cadmean) had always shown the Senator, their man in Raleigh for many years, and one they’d expect to see go on being their man for years to come. Fulcher’s quandary was that if the ship was sinking and he ought to desert, where was the shore? And what if, as he paddled off, whiskers frantic above the waves, he should look back and see the big vessel majestically right itself and sail, with all its power churning, away from him? What then?
So, for most of the night, he sat fretful and let us fill his office with smoke—he couldn’t tap his Lucite-bar warning at me because the attorney general, copper as old money from his recent vacation at a golf resort, was pilfering my pack—and let us litter his floor with the yellow crumbs of Cuddy’s crackers and the foil of the solicitor’s gum. Until finally it was decided that nothing had been decided, except that Joanna Cadmean was a corpse now, in a waiting room at Pauley and Keene Funeral Home, dead either by her own hand or by misadventure at the hands of person or persons unknown. And both the city prosecutors and the state prosecutors would study the evidence, and one another, until they could decide, in due time, where the ship should dock.
Only one decision was made: Fulcher decided after everyone but Cuddy and I had left that I had overstepped my authority, and was therefore to take two weeks’ leave of absence. Inspired by the convenient collapse of Senator Dollard, he phrased my suspension in a medical way: the leave I was on was sick leave; my sickness was overwork. Clearly, wherever Fulcher thought the big boat of power was headed, he didn’t much believe anymore that I ranked among the officers, and although still a first-class passenger, I was now one who could, with impunity, be kept for two weeks from eating at the captain’s table.