Time's Witness (29 page)

“I’m not sure I can go with that, Mr. Brookside. Was the talk personal or political?”

“It was not personal.”

“Then why did this meeting need to be private?”

He said I should be able to figure that out myself: many of his supporters, and even staff, strongly opposed his taking a stand on the George Hall execution; moreover, they felt that in general he should move his position further center, away from the left, and certainly away from such highly publicized representatives of the left as Cooper Hall was becoming.

I said, “Seems like you claimed it was
Coop
who wanted the meeting private.”

Now he chuckled. “I’m sure people on his side had similar feelings about his associating with a reactionary like me. Our talk was preliminary, speculative. A formal meeting would have been premature.”

“Are you saying you were discussing Coop Hall's joining your campaign?”

“It's immaterial now, isn’t it? Captain, I have fifty visitors waiting. I’ll be back in Hillston the thirtieth. Should I bring a lawyer?” He asked in the friendliest style, like we were in this together, and just had to say these formulas for the record.

I said, “That's up to you. We’d just like a formal statement.”

“Ah. Iron fist in the velvet glove. All right. Now, let me ask you something. Did you read the Constitution Club folder?”

“Yes. What was your motive in giving it to me?”

“Why, to win you over to my side.” I could hear the smile in his
voice, just as I could see him up at the phone in that New York conference suite, perfect features, perfect clothes, perfect tan; while behind a door the fan club of teachers milled about, clutching wine and crackers.

I said, “Not because your data's sort of ‘speculative,’ and it’d be ‘premature’ to go public until somebody did all the footwork to check it out for you at taxpayer's expense?”

“Of course.” Brookside's voice was warm as a soft scarf. “If I didn’t think you’d be interested in that kind of misuse of money and influence to manipulate people's worst prejudices; if I didn’t think you’d be interested in that old atrophied network's clutching power by keeping poor whites hating blacks and abortions more than they hate their own poverty—well, I wouldn’t want you on my side, Cuddy….I’ll see you then, soon as I get back. And by the way, I hear you’re going to Edwina's tonight. Tell her, will you, I’m disappointed that the
Star
's endorsed Julian Lewis. She won’t know anything about it. She owns that paper, but she never reads it. Bye.”

The moon was already hanging dully around outside my window, though the sky was still gray enough for me to see the tops of the Haver Tobacco Company buildings off to my west and the Cadmean Mills off to my east. I didn’t hear Zeke knock, or maybe he didn’t knock.

“Chief? Chief? Why don’t you turn a light on? I’m leaving now. You want that phone call typed up in the morning?”

I said no, but to save the tape.

He clicked on my desk lamp. “How come you got your black-board turned around?”

I said because I hadn’t wanted Bubba Percy to read what was on it. Zeke laughed and flipped the board back to the front. He shook his head at all the names, arrows, question marks in chalk. “Chief, looks like you’re fixing to arrest everybody in Hillston.” Moving quietly around the room, straightening things, he kept shaking his head. “Know what, I wouldn’t want your job. It's too worrisome. I bet you got this whole blackboard jammed up in your brain all the time. You spending the night here again?”

“No, I’m going out to a dinner party later on.”

“That what that tuxedo in the bag there's for? I rented myself
one of those suits too, once, back in high school. It was blue.”

“This one's black.”

“Then I chickened out, didn’t even go to that dance anyhow. I never heard how people wore ’em to eat dinner in, though. Y’all gonna dance after you eat or something?”

I said, “I’ll let you know tomorrow, Zeke.”

Zeke went to work on my desk. “Don’t leave these french fries sitting here for the ants. Shit, you got gum stuck right to the wood.” He picked up a chess piece beside the phone. “This lady part of that chess set? Where's it go?”

I said, “The queen goes next to the king.”

“Chief, sometime, you wanna teach me how to play this chess game? Sort of like checkers? It's a pretty old game, ain’t it?”

“Pretty old. It was a royal game. I think it came from India.”

He grinned. “Like me, huh? Well, is it the kind where it's hard to learn the rules, ’cause if there's too many rules, forget it, far as I go.”

I looked back out across the Hillston skyline, fading into night. “Yeah, I guess I’d say it's the kind where it's hard to learn the rules.”

Leaving work, my tuxedo on under my coat so nobody would see it, I forgot a much simpler rule—one I ought to have known by heart. Never assume that any dark empty basement parking garage—not even the police department parking garage—is safe enough to bend over and tie your shoe in, without checking around first to make sure it
is
empty. I keep my Oldsmobile on the opposite end from the elevator, back in a far corner spot, because I’m nervous about protecting its flanks. I should have felt the same about my own flanks. I didn’t hear, see, or sense a thing. It did flick through my mind that an awful lot of the lights were out, but I figured the circuit breaker was acting up again, and we were really going to have to give in and replace the whole box. Otherwise I just strolled toward my car, thinking I hoped Justin was right that a Sunderland Boxing Day dinner party was “definitely black tie.” Then I tripped on a shoelace, then I knelt down to tie it, then I felt a sort of whoosh of air, after which my head exploded like an ammo dump hit by N.V.A. rockets.

The next thing I was looking at after my shoe was Etham
Foster's face, actually two or three of his faces. There were also bright haloed lights glaring down at me. I was lying on the concrete floor on Etham's huge sheepskin jacket, and he was squatted beside me. He held my head in one hand; the other one was poking through my hair. I said—well, I think it was me, but it sounded more like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather
—I said, “Dr. D. you haven’t been dribbling around the floor with my head, have you? Maybe a few dunk shots?”

“Lie back down.” The hand he pushed on my chest was the size of a catcher's mitt. “You got sapped.”

“I had a feeling that's what happened.” I tried a grin. It was a mistake. I rubbed the back of my head. It was a worse mistake.

“Didn’t break the skin,” he said encouragingly. “How about the skull?”

“Too hard. What happened? Saw you lying here. Whoever it was, was gone. Drove out or ran out. You see who did it?”

I groaned. “Well, I doubt you did, Lieutenant, but that's about all I can tell you. This is what I get for leaving Martha with Hiram. She could have at least bitten somebody's ankle. Okay, okay, I can get up. I’m fine.” Etham didn’t bother to debate this shameless lie, but slowly pulled me to my feet. The best I can say for the experience is that I felt worse when Army medics dropped my stretcher dodging bullets on the way to the helicopter.

Wes Pendergraph and a couple of other guys were down here too now, checking out the garage. Nothing and nobody. They’d found a circuit breaker off, but maybe it had just blown. None of the cars looked vandalized or broken into, including mine. Mine had a real high-strung alarm system anyhow; it would have a fit if you leaned on it funny, much less jimmied a door lock. My wallet was still in my jacket. Had I somehow just thought I’d bent down, but instead had tripped over the shoelace, lost my footing, and knocked
myself
out?

“No way,” grunted Etham. “Got sapped.”

“Stop rubbing it in.” My head was shrinking a little, about down to the size of a medicine ball now, and my vision had cleared enough for me to see my watch. 7:22.48. I’d been out cold for fifteen minutes. “Shit, I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta be at a party.” I started
toward my Olds. “Tell Wes to follow this up, okay? Probably juve-niles. Shit, look at these pants!” I swiped dirt off my trousers (or rather Saddlefield's Formal Fashions’ trousers). “I’m okay, Dr. D. I’m okay.”

“Go get your head looked at.”

I turned back to him; his dark, long-jawed face was furrowed in a frown. All of a sudden I realized he had as much gray in his hair as black. “Etham,” I said, “we’re getting old, you and me. You realize that? Just the other day we were playing varsity—”

“I was playing varsity. You were mostly on the bench.”

“—Now we’re getting old. It's too late for me to get my head looked at. I’ve gotta go to this party.” While I babbled at him, I was feeling in my overcoat for my car keys. They weren’t in the right pocket. I mean the right-hand pocket. I also mean the correct pocket. Now, I’m a creature of strong habits—maybe bad habits, some of them (dietary), and maybe messy habits, some of them (sartorial)—but strong habits. My books are alphabetized, my bills are filed by date, my toothbrush is on the right-hand side of the sink, my shampoo on the right-hand side of the tub, my radio's on the right-hand side of the bed, and my car keys are
never
in the left-hand pocket of my coat, which is where I found them. I said, “That's funny, I put my keys in the wrong pocket.”

Etham grabbed the key chain out of my hand by its wornout rabbit's foot, just as I was about to unlock the door. “Get away from there!” he snapped. “Pendergraph! Go see if Augustine's still in the lab. Get him down here.” He had his flashlight pressed against the Olds’ window; then he crawled under the hood and flashed it around.

“Etham, come on! I don’t have time to sit around here while you get paranoid. Give me those keys.”

I heard his voice from under the Olds. “Use a squad car. This one's not leaving here. I smell something weird. It's gonna take a while.”

I nudged his tennis shoe, which looked like a size fifteen. “That smell was probably Martha. She farts a lot. Get out from under there. Hey, I’m a captain, you’re a lieutenant. Ever heard of the chain of command?” I didn’t get any answer. “You’re saying
somebody unset and reset my alarm? Knew the Olds was mine, knew it had an alarm system, knew where the fuse box was, plus wired a bomb in ten minutes?”

“Yeah. Kind of narrows it down, doesn’t it? But didn’t say bomb. Could be a bomb. Maybe not.”

I didn’t believe Etham enough to stick around, but I believed him enough to tell him I’d check back later, and to drive to North Hillston in a HPD squad car. I even almost made it on time because I used the siren. Well, there ought to be some perks to the job to make up for the long hours and the sore knob swelling out of the back of my head.

When I pulled in among the parked Mercedeses, I wondered if Mrs. Sunderland's neighbors were peeking out the windows, figuring her place had finally gotten itself raided by the police for throwing parties they weren’t asked to. Then I remembered that up here on Catawba Drive, nobody had to put up with neighbors, except the few and far between kind.

I bet my apology to my hostess, regal in a floor-length beaded number that matched her blue hair, was the first one of its kind she’d ever been handed in her double-storied, marbled-floored, holly-garlanded hallway. “Mrs. Sunderland, you’re gonna have to forgive me for being eight minutes and thirty-three seconds late. I was sapped with a blackjack in my parking lot, knocked out cold, and my lab people are defusing a bomb in my car.”

My hostess said, “You lucky man. Nothing's worse than a boring life, as I can testify from seventy-two years of nothing but, and you do not appear to be leading a boring life. Call me Edwina. The others are in the sitting room swilling cocktails. I was just on the phone to Atwater Randolph. His moron of a granddaughter, Blue, ran off to Aspen with my moron of a nephew. You remember Chip, my nephew, grandnephew? Well, Blue just called to inform Atwater that she and Chip had gotten married today.”

“Is that good or bad?” I handed my overcoat to a maid who’d popped up beside me and appeared to want it.

Mrs. Sunderland walked me down the hall at her stately pace. “I imagine they’ll find out in a few months. Maybe they’ll be perfectly happy. Ignorance is supposed to be bliss. Of course,
Atwater's gone berserk. Threatening to disinherit her. He's going to run out of heirs. He already cut Blue's daddy off.”

“You mean Bunny Randolph? Why’d he do that?”

“I could give you two dozen reasons, none or all of which might be true, so I won’t give you any. I always liked Bunny, though he had a spine like a wet mop. You know Atwater? He's an admirer of yours.”

“That's good to hear. I’m hoping he’ll leave me his bridge over the Shocco. I look out on it from my kitchen balcony, and since nobody ever uses that bridge much, I thought maybe I’d build some shops on it and lease them out. You know, like the Rialto, Ponte Vecchio.”

She gave my arm a squeeze that shot right up to the knot on my head. “Cuthbert, I’m sorry I didn’t meet you fifty years ago. No, let's say thirty. Then I’d already have poor Marion's money.” She had a carnal laugh with a growl in it. “And we could have built our own bridge.” She jabbed open some double doors into a room full of people. I was glad to see the men wearing tuxedos. I was gladder to see the woman introduced to me by Mrs. Sunderland as Lee Haver Brookside.

“Cuddy and I are old friends,” Lee said.

“Maybe so.” Edwina handed me a Scotch and water that was more like a Scotch and a few drops of dew. She grinned, her sharp old incisors cutting into her full lower lip. “Maybe so, but then you’re already married, Lee darling. And I’m available.”

I had the feeling Mrs. Marion Sunderland might be more dangerous than a clonk on the head. And not much more subtle.

“Nobody will discuss current politics this evening,” commanded Mrs. Sunderland, as we all rose after our cocktails in the “sitting room,” which could have sat a few dozen more than had gathered around the hefty marble fireplace for Boxing Day. “Nobody will discuss anything that appeared this morning in the
Hillston Star
,” she added, leading me to suspect that, despite Brookside's assumption, she was aware of that paper's contents. “The ‘news,’” she informed us with a contemptuous drag to her full and brightened lips, “the ‘
news
’ is the preoccupation only of those who have no culture. No knowledge. And no memory.” She paused to extend an arm from which round rich flesh swagged, and to drop her empty Scotch glass on a tray that a maid whisked under it. “And
that
, God love us, describes to a tee the
vast
majority in this nation of ours.” Her pouchy eyes gave us all the once-over. “No sports scores, no weather reports, and no politics.”