Uncivil Seasons (12 page)

Paula was mixing two more fishbowls of icy pink foam. “You wouldn’t get her to believe it in a million years, but Charlene’s acting real dumb.” She added, “That don’t mean, compared to Preston, Charlene oughtn’t to be teaching over at the university.” She giggled like a child. “Charlene says there’s this brainy girl at C&W that’s big in the union that told her she was naturally smart and oughta do something with herself.”

Cuddy said, “I’ll have to go along with that. Preston, now, is slow, no getting around it. So what makes Charlene so unnaturally dumb these days, and can I have two bags of those beer nuts over there? And bring Justin something to eat too.”

“I’m not hungry,” I told her. “I’d like another whiskey. Weak.”

“Because she’s young, is all,” Paula said. “Everybody young’s dumb. Weren’t y’all dumb? One weak Jack Daniel’s.” She had a pretty hand, set apart from the creamy arm by a crowded charm bracelet. Her arm looked as if its skin were so tight it would pop if something pricked it.

“Oh, lord,” Cuddy said with a sigh. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for a chance to get young. I was always old, working to get myself to where I could have a ball being young, and now Paula, you come telling me, ‘Remember when.’ I’m so sad, I got to have a pizza, can I order a pizza here at the bar? Justin, I want you to try some of this pizza.”

Promptly at 5:30 a rail-thin black man complaining about the cold weather came to replace Paula at the bar, and the three of us found a little cable-spool table free in a corner, and I bought her a strawberry daiquiri and had a third drink, and Cuddy ate an entire pizza the menu named “The Kitchen Sink.”

Paula said, “Charlene traded a moron for a goon, is all.”

“I bet you mean Luster Hudson,” Cuddy mumbled, cheese stuck to his fingers.

“Thinking there’s men like Luster makes me worry I gave up on Graham.” Her high, small voice struggled against the dinner clatter around us. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, last night Charlene asked me over there for supper, where she’s moved out with Luster, called me up and said we had a lot in common now, and invited me.”

“Ex-Popes Club, huh?” said Cuddy. “Y’all could get a lodge and play bingo.”

“That’d be funny if it wasn’t sad. So, anyhow, I went, and you know what that man is doing with a bunch of dogs?”

“Not feeding them,” Cuddy said. “And speaking of Luster’s dogs, business must be better’n it looked, for him to quit C&W, did you have that feeling? Didn’t he make pretty good money on the forklift at C&W? He say anything about that?”

“He didn’t say anything about anything. So, do you want to know what he does with those dogs? Well, I happened to go to the bathroom, and I heard this little kitten crying its eyes out in a box with holes punched in it, so I brought it out, and I said to him—Charlene was outside getting the bottle of wine she’d stuck in the snow to cool off.” Paula paused to offer me nachos and eat half a dozen herself. “I said, ‘Whose cute little kitten is this?’ Just trying to be polite, even though I don’t much like Luster and vice versa in a big way—you could tell he was mad at her for even inviting me over, and he was about as nice as a snake. You know what he told me? Says, ‘I get them from ads. I use them to hunt my dogs with, if it’s any of your business.’ He sat right there with the TV on, and told me that, like he thought I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice!’ He was obtaining those kittens under false pretenses and then siccing his dogs on them, I couldn’t even believe it! Then he says, ‘Put that damn cat back where you got it,’ but I set it down on the floor, and it ran right over and climbed up the leg of Luster’s jeans, like I’d told it to go scratch out his eyes. And so he yanked it off and threw it against the wall, hard. And so Charlene opened the door, and the kitten tears out and runs up a tree and can’t get down. So you know what he did?”

“Shot it,” I said.

Cuddy said, “I see you’re getting a feel for Luster’s personality. I had to bring Luster in one time, me and five guys that used to play pro football, and we ran the patrol car back and forth on top of him for a while so we could get in close enough to put the cuffs on.”

Paula sucked away half her daiquiri through a straw. “He wouldn’t even let me use his ladder to get that kitten. And he wouldn’t let Charlene do it either. And so he says, ‘I don’t have to put up with somebody coming in my house and telling me what to do.’”

I said I could imagine Charlene’s response to that.

“She didn’t say a word. And you want to know something else, Charlene’s scared of Luster. I really think that’s why she wanted me to come over, so she wouldn’t have to be by herself with him. She was glad he was going off to the mountains. She thinks she’s all excited about Luster, but what she is, is scared, if you know what I mean.”

I said, “I think that’s an interesting observation,” and she smiled with a shy hesitation that was taking a while to decide she’d been complimented.

Cuddy licked his fingers. “She told me she had a
real
man now.”

“That’s right,’ that’s what she thinks she thinks.” In one long sip, Paula finished whatever liquid there was in her drink. “I don’t know any real men.”

“Well, hey, what about us?” said Cuddy.

She looked at me, her spoon poised to scoop up the pink slush. She said, “What about you?”

I said, “I wish I could, ma’am,” which she knew wasn’t really true, but a way of saying I liked her, and she gave me a nod and closed her mouth over the Snow White pretty teeth and scooped up more daiquiri. I asked her what had happened to the kitten.

“Luster said he didn’t want me in his house, is what he said, and I said, ‘Thanks for supper, Charlene,’ and went and got my car and parked it under the tree and climbed up on the car top and just about killed myself and got the dumb kitten.” She held out her right hand so we could see the red scratch streaks. “It’s at home. You two want a kitten? I don’t even like cats all that much. You think your little dog would like a kitten, Cuddy?”

I said, “If you ask me, you sound like a real woman.”

She dropped the spoon in the empty glass. “Too much of one.” She giggled, then sighed. “Well, how bad trouble’s Graham in? Did he steal that new Mustang of his?”

“Not that anybody’s mentioned,” Cuddy said.

I asked her, “Have you ever seen him or his brothers in the company of Senator Rowell Dollard, the man whose wife’s been killed?”

She laughed. “I doubt it.”

“Ever heard them talk about him?”

“They didn’t talk much politics—except ‘Shoot them all.’”

Cuddy said, “How about, hear them talk about some old coins, jewelry, a sapphire and diamond bracelet?” Paula turned the charms on her own bracelet; she shook her head. Cuddy went on, “I got two notions. One is, Preston stole that stuff from whoever stole it. The other one is, Preston never saw so much silverware in his life ’til Mr. Savile here showed it to him. And number two means Graham and/or Dickey dropped those little bags off at the house on their way to Greensboro.
Or
, number three, old Albert Einstein Charlene needs a real lawyer a lot more’n a real man.” Cuddy wrapped his pizza crusts in a napkin to take out to Mrs. Mitchell.

Paula said, “Well, if Charlene put that stuff there, and I’m not saying she did because I never knew her to steal a thing, she sure didn’t know it belonged to that dead lady, because Luster was watching about the investigation on the news and told Charlene to shut up so he could hear because she wasn’t listening. And I tell you the truth, Cuddy, I wouldn’t put a lot past my in-laws, but they’re not killers. Graham tore in here this morning and said you folks had planted that silverware on Preston because y’all had to get somebody fast, this lady being a Hillston big shot and all. How can you eat all that pizza and stay so skinny? If I
look
at a pizza, all my buttons pop off.”

Cuddy held the last cheesy triangle about an inch from her nose. “Honey, don’t blink,” he said.

She giggled again. “Well, this was real nice, but I’ve got to go feed two kids and a cat. I shouldn’t even say this, and this is all I’m going to say, but if I was the two of you, I’d talk to a man called Ratcher Phelps, you know him? He’s the one Graham and Dickey would go to if they had something special.”

“Who?” asked Cuddy. “I never heard of him.”

“Oh, he’s tight. Old guy. Only reason I know is I’ve heard Graham on the phone telling people if they used Ratcher Phelps they had to be careful, because Phelps wouldn’t put up with sloppiness.” Paula then explained that the only way to open negotiations with this Mr. Phelps was by asking at his East Hillston business, the Melody Store, if he had banjo sheet music for “Moonlight Bay.” “You have to say it was your mother’s favorite, and you want to play it for her birthday.”

I said, “Mr. Phelps is a sentimental receiver of stolen goods, I take it?”

“Don’t Savile here talk old-fashioned?” Cuddy asked Paula. “He likes everything old. He even rides around on horses, pretending to be a Confederate general.”

“He’s talking about a pageant at the Hunt Club, that’s all, Paula. I like your bracelet,” I said. “Could I ask you where you got that particular charm there, do you mind?”

She raised her dimpled wrist. “This one? Oh, it’s some kind of an old stone bead I dug up myself in the backyard when I was little. I think it belonged to an Indian.” The charms jingled as she shook her hand. “This is my whole life, right here.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, like here’s a Bible-camp medal, third prize for backstroke, if you can believe water could ever hold me up once upon a time, and this is for high school choir.”

Her voice came out in slight pushes of air, as if it were trying to escape the weight of her body, as if it were something delicate caught inside, still singing, like the cat in
Peter and the Wolf
. She said, “And this one is one of those Purple Hearts, have you seen one? It was my first boyfriend’s that he got in vietnam. I was real young. We were going to get married but it didn’t work out that way. And here’s my wedding ring.” She spun it on its chain. “Do you know what I found out? Graham stole it out of a jewelry store in High Point, if you can believe that.”

“It has the sad smack of truth,” Cuddy said.

“And this little pin here, my mama got this for twenty-five years’ service on the loom at C&W. Mr. Cadmean presented it to her himself. They had a whole ceremony. Now they just lay people off and don’t even wave good-bye to them. Here’s my boy Giffins first tooth. And well, so on and so on. My whole life, right here on my arm.” She let it fall onto the table.

Cuddy sighed. “Paula, I sure wish you’d stop talking like the end is near.”

A curl shiny as a blackbird spilled over onto her forehead; pushing it back, she touched her broad face, puzzled, as if she’d never felt the flesh before. She said, “Oh, I don’t mean my life’s over. I just mean I can see what it is now. It’ll just be that some more.” Her giggle was like a small bell, unreverberant; swallowed by the racket of food. “I mean, I used to wonder, is all, and now I know.”

“The Popes are out,” I said an hour later, flipping my cigarette into one of the big cuspidor ashtrays sitting under Mr. Cadmean’s portrait in the municipal building’s lobby. “From the way Paula talked, I’d say Graham really thinks we’re trying to frame his baby brother. You don’t suppose V.D. could have actually dumped that silverware in their bathtub, do you? He’d do anything for Rowell.”

The instant the elevator door opened on the fifth floor, Captain V.D. Fulcher was standing there. He yapped at Cuddy. “Where have you been? Is that that dog?!” Mrs. Mitchell jumped behind me, and I hid her in my coat.

“Going up, sir,” Cuddy said, and pushed the button, but Fulcher shoved his fake-madras shoulder against the door.

I asked, “You been waiting in the hall for us long, Captain?”

Fulcher had his mouth click going at a quick tempo. “Do you two ever bother listening to the radio dispatch in your car?”

Cuddy said, “I like Loretta Lynn better. He likes Mama Rainey.”

“Ma,” I said.

“Where’ve you been all day?” Fulcher wasn’t spluttering; that meant Rowell hadn’t called him, which surprised me. I said, “We got a lead a couple of hours ago about a possible fence for the jewelry and coins, and we followed it up.”

“I don’t suppose you found out much of anything?” Fulcher’s face was so smug, I started to wonder if, despite our advice, Preston had decided to confess. “Come to my office.” Our leader marched ahead.

•   •   •

In fact, we hadn’t found out much of anything from our lead at the Melody Store. Ratcher Phelps’s response to my wanting to play “Moonlight Bay” on the banjo for my mother was to regret that he was unable to help me, especially considering that he was always happy to assist the police.

“It must have been your overcoat, Savile,” Cuddy said. “I should have asked. You just don’t look like a banjo player.”

Ratcher Phelps smiled. He was a small black man of sixty-some, wearing a black pinstripe suit with an American-flag tiepin and square, yellow-topaz cuff links. He had the rhetorical lugubrious look of a well-to-do funeral director, and smiled with aggrieved disappointment at our suspicions that he might be trafficking with petty thieves. On the way from the Rib House to East Hillston, we’d called in a check on him, and the last charge against Phelps was twenty-five years old, when someone who hadn’t liked him much had phoned the station to say there were four-dozen Lady Bulova watches in his car trunk. Since then, not so much as a parking ticket had brought him to the department’s attention, although he had a nephew either less virtuous or less careful.

Mr. Phelps’s ostensible business was musical instruments. It was in his Melody Store, while mentally adding up the spinets and electric organs all around him, that he told us sadly it was always the same old story. “And the years don’t change it, and the government won’t change it, and nothing I see’s going to turn it around, and, gentlemen, I guess that if I let it bother my tranquillity of mind, I doubt I’d sleep peaceful, which I do.” He counted the burnished trombones and glossy clarinets that hung glittering out of reach on the walls and were purchased through high-interest installment payments by the parents of East Hillston’s state-famous high school band.