Uncivil Seasons (28 page)

Rowell Dollard had once come to visit me in the mountains to tell me I was killing my father and was killing myself. Today I was coming to University Hospital to visit him, and hear him try to convince me he was not a murderer too.

Outside Rowell’s door, Officer Wes Pendergraph sat reading
Sports Illustrated
. Inside, on the angled pillows, the silver hair gleamed as if it really were indestructible metal not subject to the dissolution of color and flesh that had in two days withered my uncle’s face. The face, gazing out the flat window, did not turn until I said, “Rowell.”

“Justin. Well.” His eyes moved toward me; in them, anger too weak for his customary passion. “Your mother telephoned me from Alexandria.”

“Yes, I spoke with her too.”

“What did she say to you?” Rowell asked.

I didn’t say she’d called crying and bewildered; how could Joanna be dead, Rowell be her murderer, me be his accuser? And crying, asked, had my suspension from work been brought on by a relapse into an alcoholic craziness? I told her only that it had not, and that other than so saying, I would not discuss with her the investigation of Rowell Dollard. “He’s
family
, Jay,” Mother had kept repeating. I said to Rowell now, “She is naturally distressed. She wants to come back to Hillston, but she has to stay with the children until Vaughn and Jennifer return from Antigua. She asked me to send flowers to Joanna’s services.” Actually, by Joanna Cadmean’s will, there were to be no services, merely private cremation. Old Briggs was apparently making the arrangements.

“Will you sit down, please? I can’t see you.” Rowell’s voice, once so heartily senatorial, was now faltering.

“All right.” I pulled over the vinyl chair. “How are you feeling?”

“They’ve brought my blood pressure down. But there’s an embolism lodged in my lung.”

“Yes, I was told. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not supposed to laugh too hard and send it to my brain. That is, under the circumstances, hardly likely… You’ve been taken off the investigation.”

“Yes.”

“I would still like to talk with you about it”

“As you say, the matter is out of my hands. If your lawyers think you should talk to anyone, talk to Ken Moize.”

Dollard inched up farther on the pillows. “I said I want to talk to
you
.”

“All right.”

“I did not kill Cloris! I cannot believe that you could have thought I did.”

I looked at him a long time, then I said, “I owe you an apology for having believed otherwise.”

Dollard let his breath out abruptly, as if startled to realize his lungs were filled.

I added, “But it is Mrs. Cadmean’s murder the prosecutors are taking before the grand jury Monday.”

“I am not guilty of that, either. She died exactly as I told you.”

“Would you believe it if
you
were still solicitor! Does it look like suicide to you?”

“No.” His protuberant eyes fixed on mine. “No. It looks like murder. It
was
murder. Her own.”

“Her own?”

His head raised from the pillow, his neck veinous. “Yes! Listen to me. Joanna murdered herself…so that I would be convicted.”

“Jesus, Rowell! That’s preposterous.”

“Is it? I’ve lain here thinking about everything, and I know it’s so.” His voice quickened, and he stopped himself, then began again slowly. “She must have been planning it for years. She planned it perfectly.”

His eyes closed shut but moved restlessly beneath the lids as he went on in the strange thin voice. “You, Justin, were the perfect one to use. The perfect one to go to first.”

“What do you mean by that?”

His head lay motionless on the pillow, the eyes shut. “You are a sympathetic person. And an imaginative one. You are too young to know many of the circumstances of the past, but close enough to care. You are a relative of mine. And you don’t like me.”

Neither of us spoke. Outside, the clouds filled with a rusted rose color, and day’s light slipped lower in the room. From the hall filtered to us the rumbling screak of tray carts.

Then Dollard spoke again, his voice still as the time. “Joanna hated me. She never forgave me for breaking off with her. It was…unacceptable to her. After I ended it, while she was still at the university, she called me…continually, at all hours, pleading, threatening. She was
obsessed
. One time, she demanded I come to her dormitory room or she would cut her wrists. I refused, I didn’t believe her. I was wrong. I found out she had nearly died—
would
have died, if her roommate had not returned unexpectedly from home. She has done this before, Justin. Don’t you see?” He stopped, pacing his breaths with concentrated effort, while outside the red darkened.

I stood by the sealed window to watch night come on. I said, “You are telling me Mrs. Cadmean plotted her suicide to make it look as if you had murdered her?”

“Yes.”

“
She
took the phone from the hook, she broke the door chain in the study, she tore off her own watch?”

“Yes.”

“And your scarf, in her hand?”

“She must have picked it up in the hall. I didn’t notice. I was terribly upset, Justin! God! She led me up to the study. Do you think if she had been trying to get away from me—on crutches!—I couldn’t have caught her?”

“She could have been already upstairs. You could have forced her upstairs.”

His eyes stared at me but were seeing back to that night. “She stood there, and
smiled
. And said, ‘This time I am leaving
you
. And this time you will suffer.’ And then…she jumped.”

“Again, Rowell, we’re back to, why were you there? She did not call your house on the nineteenth. That’s a fact.”

His forefinger knuckle rubbed against his lips. “No, she didn’t. I had phoned her earlier myself; I admit that. I was furious that she had been in my home. That she’d manipulated you into bringing her there. It was then she told me if I didn’t come over that night…She threatened me.”

I looked around at him. “With what? That’s the point, isn’t it?”

He pushed the knuckle hard into his upper lip.

I said, “Rowell, you read the letter Mrs. Cadmean wrote me.”

“
Lies
! Incredible lies. That’s when I knew how long she had planned this…monstrous…” His voice faded.

“You know we have checked, and she did come to Hillston last summer, and there is a record of a call from your number to hers on St., Simons Island at the time she said Cloris called.”

“For God’s sake, can’t you understand?! I called her, to demand that she stop her vile accusations to Cloris.
She would never let me go
.” Rowell’s voice itself sounded penned by a furious frustration. “When she married Charles Cadmean, I thought that would be the end of it, but, no, the letters…
demented
letters, Justin…kept coming. Years later, after Cloris and I married, they still kept coming. This has gone on half my life! I don’t mean all the time. But she besieged us. It was maddening. We never knew when. Years even could go by. We would forget. Then late at night, the phone would ring and it would be her again. That voice! You have no idea… Upsetting Cloris dreadfully. Telling Cloris how she’d been made to suffer. Telling her I had—,” he pressed his hand against his forehead.

I said quietly, “Had killed Bainton Ames?” He said nothing. “We know you were at the inn the night Bainton died. Why did you take his coin? Good Christ, Rowell, why did you
keep
it?!”

Straining, Dollard pulled himself upright on the bed. “Justin, Joanna
put
that coin there in Cloris’s closet two days ago. She must have. That’s why she made you bring her to my house. She was upstairs alone, wasn’t she?”

I sat back down. “And where is she supposed to have gotten it?”

“It’s a duplicate.”

“No, it’s genuine.”

“For God’s sake, Bainton’s was not the only one of that series, was it?! There must be dozens of them. You have to find out where she bought it. Can’t you see how
long
this woman has been plotting to ruin me? She wants to kill me!”

I said, “She’s the one who’s dead, Rowell. That’s a rather extreme form of revenge.”

“I tell you, she was psychotic!”

I shook my head. “Everything you tell me, especially if true, especially if she did hate you this bitterly, all the more reason for you to get rid of her.”

“
She killed herself
. Justin, Justin, please. She actually believed that I would come back to her! When she spoke to me at Cloris’s grave, she actually believed that now I would come back to her. She had
waited
. I told her she was out of her mind.
She killed herself
.”

Behind us the door whooshed silently open and a young doctor, an East Indian with deep, placid eyes, entered the room. “Sir,” he said in a purr, “I must say to go. Senator Dollard must be staying undisturbed.” With long, attenuated fingers he lifted Rowell’s wrist to take his pulse. I told the doctor I was just leaving. “Good, then,” he murmured.

Passive and quiet in the hands of the hospital, Rowell looked up at me. He said, “Will you help me, Jay? She plotted against you, too.”

I said, “Do you have any of these demented letters she’s supposed to have written you?”

He shook his head angrily. “Of course not. I tore them up. Why should I keep them!” He saw that I did not believe him, and closed his eyes.

At the door, I asked, “One thing, Rowell. Excuse me, Doctor. Would you be willing to give any monetary reward for the recovery of Cloris’s jewelry, and the coin collection?”

“Do you know where they are?”

“I’m in contact with someone who thinks he can buy them.”

“Is this coming from you on your own? Or from the department?” Rowell’s voice was rising again, and the doctor held up an admonishing hand at me.

I said the department had no knowledge at this point of my informant.

“Send him here to me.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

He brushed his hand irritably at the doctor, who was trying to wrap a blood pressure band around his arm. Then he muttered, “Five thousand dollars. If he’ll bring those things directly back here to
me
. They’re mine.”

“Just one thing more. Did Cloris ever mention being approached in the last year by a man named Cary Bogue, who wanted to see some technical designs Bainton left behind?”

Rowell shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Had she kept any of Bainton’s Cadmean Textiles files?”

“There might have been some in the basement. I don’t know; what if there were? Justin, what are you talking about? For God’s sake!”

But the doctor took me firmly by the arm. “No more. Good evening.” He pushed the door shut behind me.

In the hall, Wes Pendergraph dutifully stood up and dropped his magazine on the chair seat behind him. Obviously he hadn’t been told of my suspension. “How’s it going, lieutenant?”

“Fine,” I said. “Anybody else been in there?”

“You better believe it.” He showed me his pad with the names on it. In addition to his private physician, Dollard had been visited by several lawyers, by his senatorial aide, by his secretary, by the lieutenant governor, by the A.G., by Judge Tiggs, and by Briggs Cadmean. Pendergraph shrugged. “The doctors are going nuts, but, gosh, I can’t keep men like Briggs Cadmean and them out, can I? And the news guys! This Mr. Percy from
The Star
won’t quit!”

“You’re doing fine. Take it easy, Wes.”

Down in the lobby, I telephoned Etham Foster and asked him to check the coin Cuddy had found in Mrs. Dollard’s diary again against Ames’s records: Was it the
same
coin? I telephoned Miss Briggs Cadmean at River Rise, where she was still staying, and asked her if she had heard what Joanna was saying on the phone to Rowell that time he had called when they were both up in the tower study. She said no, she had left the room so as not to overhear their conversation. I telephoned the Melody Store and said to its proprietor, “That song we’re singing without words, Mr. Phelps? I have an offer of five thousand dollars.”

Ratcher Phelps hummed. “Well, well now, indeed I believe you and I are going to get along, Mr. Savile. I appreciate this, I want you to know. I’ll be in touch.”

Hanging up, I noticed through the glass booth Paula Burgwin hurrying toward the elevators; she glided by so smoothly wearing her fake fur hooded jacket, I thought of a lady bear on skates in an ice show. Paula was carrying a vinyl flowery suitcase. In it, she told me, were clothes for Charlene Pope, who was being released from the hospital and was going to move in with her. She explained, “Cuddy Mangum’s promised us some—whatdoyoucallit?—surveillance, but I’m taking a week off from the Rib House to stay home with Charlene anyhow. I just hope they don’t fire me, you know?” Paula asked me to excuse her breathlessness. “I’ve been racing. I just got off work, and I wanted to get here quick as I could. Who wants to stay in a hospital longer’n they have to, do you know what I mean?”

“Yes. Tell Charlene to do what Mangum tells her. You’re a good friend.” I held the doors as she tugged the bag into the elevator.

“She’s family, is all,” Paula replied. “Bye bye, thank you.”

So I left the hospital, where they can’t always stop the bad things, and never the worst. I went out through those wide doors that I had watched so intently as a child from the backseat of Mother’s car. Watching for my father to appear again, absently patting the pockets of his long white coat, searching for his cigarettes. I would count every person released by those doors, saying to myself, he will come before I count twenty of them, before I count forty of them leaving. I would sit waiting, watching for him to escape again from the terrible vast building that I imagined as the lair of some invisible dragon who snatched away family, the dragon from whose imperishable thirst I had fled, on coming of age, to warm meadhalls where, of course, I found out the dragon comes too, leering jealous through the windows, watching, waiting.

The wall of iron spears around the Cadmean mansion was gated and locked across the driveway. Snow shiny in the starlight was frozen, on the turreted bays and conical roofs, and frozen on the winter vines of the latticed arbor, and frozen on the branch tips of all the high, thicketed trees through which, flickering, I could see lights, here and there, in the dark red house. It was close to ten. No one answered the buzzer I pushed at the gatepost, or even came, inquisitive, to a window at the sound of my horn. I gave up finally and drove on through Hillston to C&W Textiles Industries.