Uncivil Seasons (13 page)

“That’s good. You get your rest,” Cuddy said. “Poor Lieutenant Savile here’s an insomniac, and my upstairs neighbors are too much in love. Now about these emerald earbobs I was mentioning.”

“It is dispiriting and grievous to me,” Phelps said, rolling his tongue around the words as if he were readying his lips to play what he had to say on one of his saxophones, “the same old way when white people rob and steal what belongs to some more white people, the first thing to transpire is the black people get paid the call by you people.”

“That about takes care of all the people,” said Cuddy. “Let’s drop all of them for now except the ones called Pope, and talk about a diamond and sapphire bracelet.”

“If you young men want a clarinet, a harmonica, if you are inclined to a piano in your home, we can talk ’til you buy or I close. But, gentlemen, I don’t sell jewelry.”

I said, “Do you buy it?” and he showed me his cuff links and smiled his sad, insincere smile. I tried again. “Do you buy rare American coins, and might you be interested in a reciprocal exchange? For instance, an upcoming appearance of your nephew William Phelps currently involving petty larceny, but susceptible to abatement.”

His lips repeated
reciprocal
, either because he liked the idea or liked the word and intended to add it to his already palaverous style.

I said it again for him: “Reciprocal.” My lips were a little numb after three drinks, and I thought maybe I’d mispronounced it.

His morose filmy eye lamented the Fall awhile before he said, “Such as, to what?”

“Shoplifting,” I said.

“And suspended,” Cuddy added.

“I know a Mister Dickey Pope,” he said. “Who used to buy strings and picks from me for his guitar. But I haven’t seen him since summertime. Maybe he gave up on his playing.” Phelps’s gloom suggested this would have been a wise decision. “No, not since summertime.”

I said, “Anybody besides Popes come to mind?”

“No, sir, they don’t. What would these jewels and these American coins happen to look like if I was to happen to glance down at one on the sidewalk in the midst of my constitutional?”

I described them. Only the rarest of Bainton Ames’s coins had been kept in the bedroom safe and only they had been stolen; the rest, the less valuable type sets still sat in their small vinyl boxes in the Dollard study. Among the missing, according to the detailed records Ames had kept in his neat, spidery hand, were a 1907 Saint-Gaudens double eagle, an 1841 “Little Princess,” a Bechtler’s five-dollar gold piece, and an 1880 Stella Liberty head with coiled hair; the last alone was worth at least sixty-five thousand dollars.

Phelps shook his head sorrowfully. “Isn’t that something? A couple of old dirty coins are worth more than all my horns put together.”

Cuddy said, “I know what you mean,” and rapped a beat on a snare drum so wretched-sounding that Phelps’s eyes moistened even more. I bought a collection of simplified Gershwin songs, and he came close to selling me a new piano.

“Nice to meet you,” I told him.

He moistened his lip. “The feeling is reciprocal.”

•   •   •

In his office now, V.D. Fulcher was turning the plastic cube that contained photos of his offspring from child to child. Cuddy and I were listening to him ask us again, “Who is this unidentified black source you say doesn’t know anything? There’s getting to be too many nigrahs in this case.”

I said, “You mean like the head of forensics?”

He bounded across to the file cabinet and jerked open the drawer, flashing the plastic digital watch he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist.

“I mean,” he gloated, “I have one of Mrs. Dollard’s earrings.” There was an unavoidable twitch of surprise from us both that Fulcher must have treasured. “You know who had them? Reverend Hayward.”

Cuddy said, “I didn’t realize Reverend Hayward was a nigrah! My, my, he looks as white as you do.”

Fulcher said, “You’re treading, Mangum. That crazy old colored woman Hayward takes care of came into the vestry today and dropped this in the collection plate by his elbow.” He unclenched his fist, and green flashed out. “He couldn’t get her to tell him where she got it. You know who I mean. The Bible nut. Sister What’s-Her-Face. She had a pretty expensive umbrella, too. Might be connected.”

“It’s Senator Dollard’s,” I said.

Cuddy said, “Damn, you
are
psychic.”

In the interrogation room, Sister Resurrection, indifferent to a destiny less than universal, paced out a square along the walls, so that Fulcher and I had to keep rotating on our chairs to see her. Harriet Dale, the only woman on the force with whom Fulcher felt comfortable, stood by, boxy and tight-curled. Cuddy had gone back in disgust to the lab.

“We ought to have her sedated,” Fulcher said, exasperated.

“Good Christ,” I told him. “We ought to let her go home. What the hell good is holding her supposed to do?”

“What’s with you, Savile? Ogilvey’ll be down in a second. Then we’ll make some progress.” Ogilvey was our consulting psychiatrist.

“I doubt it.”

In the gray cotton dress that Harriet Dale had somehow gotten on her, Sister Resurrection looked a third her usual size, but her sermon was the same, and in no evident way had she responded to Fulcher’s demands that she tell him where she’d found or stolen Mrs. Dollard’s earring. By the time Dr. Ogilvey arrived, she was in stride with the measure of the room she walked: “God is sick and tired of all this trash! The day coming He got to lay down His head. God fixing to move the mountains, pull over the sky, and lay down His weary head. No more shall He walk in the garden in the morning. No more shall He fret on the sinner’s hard heart. Matthew and Mark can’t hold Him back, amen. Mary weeping can’t hold Him back, Amen. His little baby Jesus can’t hold Him back. Hear the voice, hallelujah, say yes. God fixing to loose the Devil’s chains.”

“This woman is schizophrenic” was Dr. Ogilvey’s prompt diagnosis. He threw in “hebephrenic” and “a hundred percent delusional system,” and advised us our duty was to take her to the state institution. As for extracting from her the original whereabouts of the jewelry, his offhand estimate was that it would take him five years of daily work to bring her to acknowledge her own name, and in fact he doubted he’d ever succeed. Some years back I’d been forced to talk to several psychiatrists; this was the first time I’d believed one.

“What about if we sedate her?” pleaded Fulcher, but Ogilvey just pulled back on his car coat and left. The captain followed the doctor out, arguing the point. “I’m going home,” V.D. let me know over his shoulder. “We’re having company, and I’m already late.”

“Well, Sister,” I said. “Would you like a cigarette? No? Mind if I smoke?” Mrs. Dale began giving me a worried look. “Sister, you know that silver-haired man who knocked you down last night? That earring belonged to his wife. My mother was a friend of hers. And now somebody’s killed her. What’s your opinion, ma’am?” Mrs. Dale’s head jerked up; she thought I was talking to her. “Share your thoughts. You think that silver-haired man might have killed his own wife? Did that earring fall out of his car?”

Sister Resurrection was edging along the wall and shaking her head. She began again. “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego they were walking in the middle of the fire. But the flame of the fiery furnace never teched a hair of their head. The dragon he spits up fire in the night. High up. Down it rain.”

“Umbrella won’t help?”

She shook her head, back and forth. “Down it rain.”

I stood up, and scared Mrs. Dale. Clearly she was torn between her assumption that I had interrogation techniques beyond her training, and her instinctive feeling that I was deranged. I said, “I’m going to call Reverend Hayward now, and he’ll come to take you on home.”

This alarmed Mrs. Dale enough to make her step forward. “She hasn’t been released, Lieutenant Savile.”

“Has she been charged?”

“No, sir. But I don’t have the authority…”

“I have the authority.”

With relief, she gave up her struggle. “Yes, sir.” Such is the comfort of rank.

•   •   •

Back upstairs, where I hadn’t been all day, Officer Hiram Davies peered at me over his bifocals with eyes earnestly innocent at sixty-four. Behind the front desk he still sat at attention in the uncomfortable wood chair where he sat all day, fearful of sloth and forced retirement.

“Here,” he called. He handed me a neat stack of his memo sheets and added a reproach. “I hope I got them all right.”

“Hiram, let me ask you a favor? Don’t mention my having called you about where Walter Stanhope lived.”

“How come? Is something wrong?”

“No, but…”

“Nobody told me he wanted his whereabouts kept secret. Lots of people know he moved to Cape Hatteras.”

“I know, that’s not—never mind, just please don’t volunteer the information that I was asking.”

His nostrils pinched tight. “Are you saying I’m some kind of blabbermouth, because—”

One of his lines rang, and he transferred a call downstairs with elaborate precision.

I said, “One more thing, and I’ll stop pestering you.”

“You’re not pestering me.”

“Burch Iredell, that guy that was coroner here back ten, fifteen years ago?”

Davies pushed in on his bifocals as if that would help him see what I wanted.

“Is he still alive?”

“What do you want to know about all these old people for?”

“Maybe I’m planning a reunion.”

“That’s not true. Is it?”

I apologized. “It’s just a joke. Is Iredell dead?”

“He’s in the V.A. hospital over in Raleigh.” Davies sat up straighter, his shirt stiff with starch to hold off the future. “But his wife’s passed away. She attended my church for many years.”

“Hiram, tell me, do you remember when Mrs. Dollard’s first husband died? Bainton Ames?”

“Well, yes. Bainton Ames. He drowned.”

“Back then, do you remember, did anybody ever suggest he might have been murdered?”

He pushed on his glasses some more, uncertain whether I was checking to see if his memory was failing, or actually coming to him for help. “They thought he’d been blown up with the boat, then along comes his body miles away. Then they thought he’d fallen out.”

“That’s right. You have a good memory. Anybody think he’d been pushed out?”

Davies’s eyes went away to the past and came back puzzled.

He said, “Now, isn’t that funny, because Captain Stanhope did ask that same question, now I think back. Is that why you want to see him? There wasn’t anything to it. He was fired, you know.” He said this as if getting fired were a profound moral failure. Then with careful fairness he added, “He got another job, some kind of security work. But he was pretty bitter. Then I heard he just retired. I heard all he does now is fish off in the middle of nowhere.”

“That sounds pretty good to me, Hiram.”

Davies shook his head in a nervous tic, scraping his collar on his thin neck. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s not.”

Alone in my office I felt myself dropping back into the weighted depression that had always tugged me down when I didn’t keep drinking once I had started. The rush of impulse just to walk out and find a bar scared me. Instead, I started smoking. The memos in Davies’s small, precise hand all looked accusatory. One said, “Call Candace,” which was Susan Whetstone’s code name, and the name she wished she’d been given at birth. Another said, “Call Mr. Briggs Cadmean.” He was doubtless returning the call I’d made earlier about the papers my mother had said Cloris Dollard was planning to show him. The man who answered the Cadmean phone now didn’t say whether he was a secretary or a butler or a son, but he came back on the line finally and told me Mr. Cadmean would be happy to see me; right away would be fine.

Then I called Susan, though I felt guilty phoning her home, and she told me she was coming over to my place tonight after going to a bridal shower because we couldn’t meet tomorrow. Tomorrow, two days early, Lawry was coming home. I said again I really thought she and I should take some time to think things over, and she said she was coming anyhow. I said I was tired, and she said, “Good. You can be passive,” and laughed.

I tried the former police captain, Walter Stanhope, long distance again. I’d been trying during the day first to find out his phone number on Ocracoke Island, then to reach him. This time, just as I was hanging up, he answered. He answered like a man who didn’t expect to get phone calls unless somebody had died. His voice had an unused, rusted sound, and he said very little except to repeat an inflectionless, indifferent “okay.” On the spur of the moment, I decided not to explain until we met why I wanted to talk to him. Instead, I said I was coming out to the Outer Banks to fish and just wanted to pass along Hiram Davies’s regards, and maybe pick up some tips about what fish were running.

Stanhope said, “It’s January.”

“I like surf casting in winter. Truth is, I’m trying to get away from things in Hillston.”

“Okay. Up to you.”

I told him I’d call tomorrow after the ferry ride.

“Up to you,” he said again, and hung up.

My stomach had knotted and was rumbling from hunger. I ate three Tums tablets and tried to call Susan back to say I had to leave town, but now no one answered. I picked up the silver letter opener she’d given me and absentmindedly pricked blood from the palm of my hand.

Across the room, the insignia on the back of my father’s old chair said
LUX ET VERITAS
. He had believed in both. Cuddy Mangum believed in luck. Sister Resurrection and Joanna Cadmean believed in voices. Perhaps because for a short time I’d heard voices, too, they made as much sense to me as truth, light, and luck: I had an impulse to call Joanna Cadmean.

Professor Briggs Cadmean answered the phone at the lake house.

“How’s Mrs. Cadmean feeling?”

“Fine. She’s up here with me now; would you like to talk with her?”

“In that tower? How’d she get up there?”

“I helped her. She thought it’d be interesting to look through the telescope.”

“I have to go out of town tomorrow,” I explained. “If anybody asks to see her that you don’t know, or even if you do know them, stick around, all right? And would you let me know who it was?”