Uncivil Seasons (43 page)

The notion stopped them cold for a minute, then the bank nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about. Punishment. And I’ll tell you something else, it ought to be in public, like they used to. Put them on TV. It’s supposed to be deterrence, right? Make people watch.”

I said, “Speaking as a keeper of the peace, gentlemen, crowds make me nervous. Last time we hanged somebody in public was in the ’thirties, over in Owensboro, Kentucky. What I read is, twenty thousand folks piled in for the show, and a third of them set up refreshment stands. ‘Make them watch’ isn’t exactly the problem. It’s the fights over good seats.”

My figures led the real estate man to mention how he’d managed to buy six seats for the Super Bowl, which led to complaints about Cadmean Stadium at the university, which led to speculation about the illness of “poor old Briggs,” meaning old Briggs Cadmean (of Cadmean & Whetstone Textiles Industries), a big bald sly s.o.b. of about eighty-five, and, to hear him tell it, the private owner of Hillston. I had to walk by Cadmean’s picture on the way to my office every day; he’d paid for the municipal building and wanted everybody to know it. In this eight-foot oil painting in the lobby, he’s got the rolled-up blueprints in one hand; the other hand’s pointing down the hall towards the men’s room. Once the old bastard had claimed to my face that he was personally responsible for my promotion to chief. I was dating his youngest daughter at the time. The rest of his offspring were male, long dead, or looked it, and this girl (he’d named her Briggs after himself and called her “Baby”) was his favorite. She hated the sight of him, and turns out he thought I’d bring them together as a thank-you note for my new job. I had to disappoint him. Deep down, Briggs Junior wasn’t any fonder of me than she was of her dad, though she just about convinced me otherwise. She was an astronomy professor, and I think what she really loved the most was stars. Justin always said she was about that cold, too. Last I heard, she’d taken a position out West, where there wouldn’t be so much population between her and the sky. She sent me back my ring before I finished the Visa payments, and about a month after she left, Cadmean flagged me over to his limousine on Main Street, and accused me of reneging on a deal he’d never bothered to call to my attention. He had the morals of a grizzly bear. Justin liked him.

“Poor old Briggs,” Fanshaw was saying as he looked over at the passed-out girl on the couch who was about to deep-breathe herself out of the top of that red satin strapless. “Well, God knows, Cadmean had a good long life, and he’s dying the way he wants to.”

“How’s that?” I said. “Just temporarily?”

“See what I mean?” Pointing at me, Randolph nudged Fanshaw. Then the quartet of business leaders said they were headed to the bathroom before their wives cornered them, and did we want anything. I was the only one who appeared to find this question peculiar.

Randolph told them he’d be down later, and turned back to me. “Nahw, Dyer means Briggs won’t go to the hospital. What I heard was, he said, ‘I paid for the damn hospital, but that doesn’t oblige me to let those suckbutts get their hands on me, so I go meet my Maker with my fanny in a pan and a tube up my dick.’”

Fanshaw tightened his nostrils. I gave him a wink. “A sweet-talking man. He’s got a lot more to explain to his Maker than a bare backside.”

They both chuckled their agreement. And that’s when I saw Lee Haver Brookside. Actually it was Justin I saw first, as they swung past the crowd onto the dance floor. Justin stood out, due to being the only man at the party in white tie and tails. He was the kind who’d wear an English hunting outfit to a barbecue picnic. Now he and Mrs. Brookside were waltzing in big slow loops, so I saw her back where his hand rested just above the black folded silk, then the white of her neck and shoulders as her head turned. A diamond flared like a match in the braided coil of dark gold hair.

I said I thought I’d go get some punch. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fanshaw.”

“Same here.” He nodded at Randolph, like I’d passed a test, and told me, “Call me Dyer. The real bar’s downstairs in the men’s lounge. That punch won’t do a thing for you.”

“Mr. Fanshaw, what I paid for this outfit, I don’t want to waste it on a john. I see enough line-ups of men during the day.”

Fanshaw chuckled, and Randolph said, “Huh?,” and I gave one shoe a quick rub on the back of my trousers, put my left hand in my left pocket, and walked into the party.

For the most part, the club style seemed to be to mix the sexes for dancing, and split them up for conversation. Seated at little tables, women, their long dresses glittering, smoked themselves almost invisible while telling each other what must have been mighty funny stories. Men stood in black glossy huddles, nodding at everything everybody else said. The Reverend Thomas Campbell (an old tall Presbyterian, in a tuxedo) and Father Paul Madison (a young short Episcopalian, in a collar) had crossed the line and were chatting with our new black mayor’s wife, whose fixed smile must have been hurting her jaws.

“Chief Mangum,” called the rector, grinning dimples in his cheeks. He didn’t look any older than he had in college, and in college he’d looked about seven. “Come buy a ticket to Trinity’s Christmas lottery. And talk Mrs. Yarborough here into it too.”

“Well, Paul,” I said, squeezing in, “maybe I should remind you, soliciting in public’s against the law. Plus, our first lady’s a Baptist, right, Dina? How you doing?”

In her fifties, pleasant-looking but not pretty, Dina Yarborough was a thin light-skinned black woman with stiffly waved hair and a careful voice. “Fine, thank you. Nice to see you, Cuddy. Isn’t this a lovely party?” I’m sure she’d almost rather have gone to the dentist for a root canal, but you couldn’t tell it from her eyes.

“It’s my first time,” I said.

“Mine too,” she nodded. “It’s an annual affair?” I didn’t hear any sarcasm, so maybe she didn’t even know about those ninety-six years of hoop skirts and yellow sashes under the Stars ’n’ Bars.

Both ministers leapt in fast, Campbell by nodding in a coughing fit, and Madison by waving a thick card in my face. “Worthy cause,” he wheedled. “Add sleeping quarters to our soup kitchen.”

I said, okay, I’d take five. He said I could send a check; I said I had money in my wallet, and he said, “Five hundred dollars?”

Old Campbell (his was the richest church in town) laughed while I was gasping, “A hundred dollars each?! What are y’all raffling?!”

“A Porsche. Only two thousand tickets to be sold.” Paul Madison put his hand over his heart. “You’ve got a great chance, Cuddy.”

“You’re raffling a Porsche for a soup kitchen?”

Madison grinned like a pink conscienceless baby. “Jim Scott donated it. Here’s the thing, you raffle small-change stuff like, oh, a cord of wood, nobody wants it. A Porsche, that’s a big temptation.”

I winked at Dina Yarborough. “Paul, I thought you guys were in the business of fighting temptation.”

“Frankly,” coughed Campbell, a sad craggy man, “we at First Presbyterian have stayed away from this sort of thing.”

Madison already had his pen out and was writing my name on the damn ticket. “If Trinity had y’all’s endowment, we’d stay away from it too. How many did you say you wanted, Cuddy?” My glare hit his dimples and bounced off.

“One,” I whispered.

“One?’’

I snatched the ticket away from him. “Thank you, Father Madison. Mrs. Mayor, would you care to dance?”

“Hey, There” thumped to a close about thirty seconds after we got going, so we stood waiting while I asked her, “Where’s Carl? Off hiding one of those vile cigars of his from the public? I keep telling your husband, tobacco made Hillston. A smoking mayor’d be patriotic here.”

“Not if they’re Cuban cigars.” Her face loosened into what so suspiciously looked like wryness that I decided her question about this ball’s being an annual affair was about as innocent as the Trojan horse.

I laughed. “Lord, Dina, tell the mayor to give me a raise or I’m going to leak it to the Star how he’s trading with Fidel. Come on, let’s go get a drink.” But before we could squeeze out of the crunch of dancers, Dina’s brother, the president of Southeast Life Insurance, tapped her for the next number. Tapped me, that is; his fingers boring into my shoulder like he was looking for a major nerve to paralyze. He said, “My sister promised me this next dance,” in a tone that suggested I’d dragged her onto the floor at gunpoint. And I dropped her hand as if I’d gotten caught doing it. Lord, the South. None of us can shake off all the old sad foolishness.

On my way to the food alone, I smiled at anyone who smiled at me. Then out of nowhere, a wide elderly lady in a lacy bed jacket stopped me with two steel forefingers on my lapels, and dared me to contradict her. “You were in that magazine.
People
.”

“Excuse me?”

“I saw you. I forget what it said.”

I told her, “Ma’am, I missed that one.
Newsweek
said I was tall, gangly, innovative, and indefatigable.”

“That’s the one I saw.” She eyed me suspiciously. “What did it say your name was?”

“
Newsweek
? Seems like it said my name was Chief Mangum.”

“That’s right.” Reassured, she patted my elbow. Thousands of dollars of diamonds were slipping dangerously around on her fingers. “I’m Mrs. Marion Sunderland.”

“Not the Mrs. Marion Sunderland that owns the Hillston Star and Channel Seven? Listen, what happened to those reruns of
Ironsides
? You know where Raymond Burr’s in a wheelchair ters in their shells, and platters of tiny ham biscuits. Every four feet, a waiter stood waiting to tilt a glass ladle of champagne punch into any receptacle held up in his vicinity. (Some members had obviously lost patience with their little crystal cups, and had moved on to water glasses.) The waiters were the only black people I saw in the room, except for the mayor, the mayor’s wife, the president of Southeast Life Insurance Company, and half the band, which sat on a little dais, behind shiny red shields draped with holly garlands and labeled The Jimmy Douglas Orchestra. The band was pumping through “The Anniversary Waltz” (maybe celebrating a near-century of these affairs), but only about fifty couples were dancing (or forty-nine; I don’t know what old Judge Tiggs and his wife were doing, maybe the tango, or maybe one of them was trying to leave the floor and the other one didn’t want to). The rest of the guests looked like they were scared to lose their places in the punch line.

“You know Dyer Fanshaw?” Randolph tugged me towards the couple.

“Let me take a wild guess. Does he own Fanshaw Paper Company?”

“Chief, you kill me. Dyer, will you leave that woman alone and say hello to our chief of police? You see him in
Newsweek
last month?”

“Cuddy Mangum,” I said, just as Mrs. Fanshaw broke loose, tossed me a fast hello, and rushed into the party.

“Everything under control?” Fanshaw asked while we shook hands.

“Personally or criminally?”

“Mangum kills me,” Randolph explained. “He means the George Hall business, Chief. Don’t you, Dyer?”

Dyer did, so we talked awhile about whether the governor would stay Hall’s death sentence (they didn’t think he would), and whether there’d be a riot at Dollard Prison between the vigilants protesting execution and the enthusiasts demanding it. I explained why I had my doubts. “First of all, it’s freezing rain out there, which discourages philosophical debate, and secand has to catch the crooks secondhand? I wish you’d put those back on the air.”

Mrs. Sunderland took a beat before she surprised me. “I believe that article also described you as whimsical. They misused the word. You’re a little odd, but you don’t strike me as capricious.”

“Well, I think debonair’s really the word they were after.” I leaned over and patted her arm in return. “Mrs. Sunderland, I want you to take some professional advice. Next time you go honky-tonking, you ought to leave those rings home in a vault.”

“Mr.…Mangum, I only go out in public among friends.”

“I bet that’s what Julius Caesar said.” She surprised me again with a laugh that would have been loud on a woman twice her size. Then she invited me to “call on” her, then she introduced me to two friends hovering nearby, a fresh-scrubbed octogenarian widow of a department store, who said she couldn’t hear and just ignore her, and a Sunderland grandnephew who appeared to ski for a living. I spotted Paul Madison hunting through the dancers like Cupid through a cloud bank, so I slipped away without a word of warning to his next victims. No one else stopped me before I reached the buffet, where Judge Tiggs was trying to load his plate with deviled eggs, and his wife was trying to block his hand.

“Hey.” Somebody pulled me down by the elbow and kissed my cheek. “I’m surprised you came.” It was Alice, Justin’s wife. She’s a small beautiful copper-haired lady from the North Carolina mountains. Justin met her three years ago while we were investigating some folks that worked on her floor at Cadmean Mills, and the best move he ever made was to marry her as soon as he could talk her into it. Bluest eyes you ever saw, clean as the sky, and clear as we all used to figure truth was. Alice believes in truth, and loves politics, and claims she can keep the two in shouting distance. We argue a lot. Justin says that’s why he invites me to dinner twice a week, so he won’t have to “box around about ideas” with her himself. “Can you believe this man?” Alice would say. “Smart, educated, and he sits here and says he’s not interested in ideas, whatever that means.”

Justin would check his wine sauce. “It means, for Christ’s sake, I don’t care why Prohibition got voted in when it did. I thought we were trying to figure out if Billy Gilchrist’s too bad a drunk to be a reliable stool pigeon.” Justin would talk your head off about the people in the case at hand, but analyzing history bored him.

I put down my buffet plate and kissed Alice back. “Well, look at you.” I turned her around. “An old commie union organizer like you, used to go out to dinner in a sweatshirt with Emma Goldman on it, used to love a good brainy fight and a Hostess cupcake and don’t try to deny it ’cause I’ve seen the wrappers.” The waiter offered me a cup of punch, which was hard to drink because of the baby strawberries floating in it. “Now, Lord, Lord, Alice. Justin the Five’s got you all pregnant and dolled up in this swanky thing, looks like you borrowed it from Jackie Onassis last time y’all got together.”