Uncivil Seasons (29 page)

Back in the 1840s, John Cadmean, the first of the Hillston industrialists, had not only built on the property where the mills still stood new homes and a school and a church for his workers, but he had erected his own mansion, a huge, awkward attempt at Greek Revival, right next door to the factory. All he had to do was walk across the plank path thrown over the mud street, and there he was among his clattering looms. He wanted to be close. He did everything personally. He had even persuaded the people of Hillston to help him personally lay tracks in the middle of the night for his own railroad, tracks to run right up the street to the warehouse doors, tracks to run precisely through the right-of-way of the Virginia line that held the monopoly for freight service through the Piedmont—that Virginia monopoly being the reason why he had to start his own railroad in the middle of the night. And when the workmen from the Virginia line came in wagons and tore up a hundred feet of the illegal tracks, this first of the Cadmeans had talked a state judge of his personal acquaintance into issuing warrants for the outsiders’ arrest. The Cadmean line remained.

Hillston then was a roughshod, graceless town where rowdies, some of them named Pope, spilled out from cheap-fronted frame saloons and fought down among the lame vagrants, the whores, and the scrawny farmers crowding with mules in the dirt-swirled streets. Hillston stayed through the century’s turn as graceless as it had begun. And although by 1900 the shrewdest brigands to survive the Confederacy had bullied enough bulk of wealth to buy colleges and build conservatories and pave streets and ride upon them in open carriages with their wives, Hillston stayed still what my father, the Virginian, once said it had never stopped being: a mill town founded by a coarse breed with the trite, threadbare vision that the grabbing and holding of money was in itself a pursuit worthy of the word
civilization
; a town of a heart’s-core rapacious greed plastered over with a thin smear of bromidic morality and a vulgar aesthetic. He said this at a dinner party to which—as I recall—my mother had invited both Mr. Briggs Cadmean and Rowell Dollard, neither of whom agreed with him. It was probably the only time I saw my father anywhere near as drunk as he all too often came to see me.

Old Briggs, hidden tonight behind his iron wall, was a direct descendant of that man who had allowed no right-of-way to impede his trespass. Thinking so led me to consider another congruity unmentioned in Cuddy’s triangle of deaths: Bainton Ames and Luster Hudson and Ron Willis had all worked for Cadmean. Of course, half the people in Hillston did. Hillston was his; he had inherited it. If there were secrets about these murders the old man protected behind the iron gate, how was I to force a lock more than a roughshod century strong, even if I found the secret out?

The new C&W business offices (whose procedures, according to Lawry Whetstone, old Briggs failed to grasp) sat precisely where that first Cadmean had built his house. The new C&W gate was open, steel mesh rather than wood planks, and I drove through it to wait for Alice MacLeod to come rushing out from among the moil of bundled workers.

I’d seen her once today already. This morning, like the morning before, I had arrived early at the diner and was waiting for her with breakfast and with flowers—silk ones I’d taken out of a vase in my living room. This morning we had talked more about her and more about me; and listening and talking made me more and more want to listen and talk to Alice MacLeod. In fact, the thought—not the thought, the sensation—came, that I wanted to be near Alice MacLeod as profoundly as I had wanted, seven years ago, to be near whiskey.

“Hi,” she said under the C&W lights, and I said, “Hi,” and we stood there jostled by the ravel of men and women headed shivering toward their cars and homes.

We moved through our talk slowly in the general direction of the old Volkswagen she’d parked at the far end of the first lot. Then, over her shoulder, I saw someone I thought I knew. Edging the area of new C&W construction at the border of the lot were three work-trailers up on blocks. Behind them were rust-brown girders, the low skeleton of what, according to signs, would be eventually
C&W ELECTRONICS DIVISION
. The person I thought I saw peering out one of the trailer doors was Ron Willis, and when the moon slid over the spider tank atop the main factory, so that I could see his oddly white hair before he pulled on the orange John Deere cap, I knew that it was Willis.

“Go home, I’ll come there!” I abruptly told Alice. And I started running hard toward the trailer, cutting across aisles of moving cars. I was not close enough to catch him when Willis saw me and saw that I was coming for him. He sprinted off around the side of the trailer. I heard a car rev, and then the tan Camaro came out fast. I was right in his path. A gun came out of the driver’s window and shot wildly. Screeching, cars all around us bucked to a stop as I flung myself off the Camaro fender, got to my gun, fired, missed, and started running again back through the lot, cursing out loud because my Austin was parked all the way at the other end of the plant, and Willis, horn blaring, was in a fast weave through the astonished traffic.

Then I heard the VW’s horn, and Alice was backing at high speed toward me. I tumbled by hops into the seat beside her as she reversed gears.

“Go!” I yelled. “He’s at the gates!”

“Was that Ron Willis?”

“Yes.” I reached over her hand and jerked the wheel. “Left! Through there. Okay, just get me close enough to try to shoot out the tire! Watch out!
Jesus Christ!
”

She had sheered in a thudding tilt up on the curb and was passing around the right side of the line of cars exiting at the factory gates. I could hear the metal on my door shriek against the steel post.

“Take a right!” I leaned out the window. “See him?”

“Yes. Damn this damn car!”

By now we’d fallen half a block behind. We were going to lose him. The Camaro bounced over the top of the rise ahead on Wade Boulevard.

“
Now watch it
,” I said. “Watch the snow! You’re skidding!”

As we came over the crest of the hill, I saw that halfway down the other side, the rear of Willis’s car was starting to slip sideways. He brought it back in line, sped up, slid again, and then his brake lights came on and stayed on, and he began to pinwheel in the icy crust, spiraling down the street. A station wagon coming from the opposite direction cut away from him, went off the road, and hit a mailbox on the corner. The Camaro slid sideways up onto the sidewalk in front of us.

“God, I’m going to hit him, I can’t stop!” Alice yelled. But she did stop. With two feet to spare.

Gun in hand, shaking, I was out of the VW and at the Camaro door when Willis suddenly accelerated, blinding me with splattering slush. His car lurched forward, and jerked me loose from the door handle I’d grabbed. I fell away, rolled out into the street, fired two shots into the rear tire, and one into the back window. This time the Camaro smacked into a parked van on the other side of the street, and stopped. The woman driving the station wagon screamed. A teenage couple hopped out of the parked van. As I pulled Willis from his front seat, he kicked at me. I hit him in the stomach, and he dropped to his knees in the brown, oily snow.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he gasped, his white hair flopped over the dazed eyes.

I said, “I want to ask you a couple of questions.” I told him his rights, which he assured me he already knew. Then I cuffed his hands behind him to the streetlight.

No one was hurt. The teenagers were confusedly shaking glass slivers out of their hair. The woman in the station wagon had bitten her lip and was deeply upset because she’d only driven out to buy some coffee. She kept repeating this fact as a great injustice: “All I went out for was a can of coffee.” Beneath a scarf, her hair was in plastic rollers.

When I reached Cuddy Mangum on the phone, I told him to send along a squad car, and to radio for a wrecker.

“Justin,” he groaned. “Will you please just stay home, so I can?”

I said, “I am at home, on sick leave. This is a big collar for you, Mangum. If you want to score with V.D., better get over here quick.”

My weak leg buckled as I walked back from the Dot ’n‘ Dash to the intersection. The teenagers were staring at Ron Willis. The woman with hair rollers was staring at the gash now bent into her car’s front end. Alice MacLeod was staring at me. “Are you limping?” she asked, her hands tucked under her arms, her eyes filled with a caring so wonderful to me that smiling wasn’t enough and I laughed aloud. “I’m fine. How are
you
?”

She was laughing too. “You mentioned us going out somewhere tonight. Was this it?”

“Well, wasn’t it pretty exciting for a first date?”

She looked past me at Willis, who scowled and yanked around to turn his back on her. She said, “I was happy to help, believe me. Did he kill Mrs. Dollard?”

“I think he knows who did, if he didn’t. Good Christ, Alice MacLeod, where in the world did you learn to drive like that?”

“In the mountains. We drive like that all the time.”

“
Thunder Road
!”

“That’s right. All that bootleg whiskey weighing down the trunk keeps us from fishtailing in the snow. You ever driven in the North Carolina mountains?”

“I’ve been driven in the North Carolina mountains. I’m going to tell you all about it as soon as we get out of our clothes.” We were slopped with mud and slush from head to foot.

Far off I could hear the siren coming as she took my hand and looked at my watch. “It’s only 10:25,” she said. “Where next?”

It was nearly midnight before I opened the door to my house, stepped inside behind Alice, and saw that there was going to be a scene.

Before that, Cuddy Mangum had booked Ron Willis, a surly man in his late twenties whose demeanor vacillated between whining indignation and a drug-sustained loud bravado. Willis denied he had given a gym bag to Charlene Pope to give to Luster Hudson, claimed he had no idea where Hudson was, and snarled that he refused to say anything else. He also said did I know my girlfriend had been “a nigger’s whore?” Cuddy pulled me out of the room and locked Willis up for the night.

Down in the foyer, Cuddy told me that my tie had gone over so well with Briggs Junior, as he called her, that he would never forgive me for having telephoned his house when I did. Then he winked down at Alice, standing there with us, and said, “Governor, I’m trying to get this lady to marry me. That’s her daddy up there on the wall giving me a nasty look.” He pointed at the portrait of old Mr. Cadmean above the courtroom doors.

“Good luck,” Alice said.

I told her, “Mangum’s a little nuts on the subject of marriage.”

“Well hey, why not?” Cuddy grinned. “Now if y’all two would come get married with us, and stop this tearing around the streets shooting off guns like
The French Connection
, we could all play bridge together and then go home. Be a foursome. Y’all play bridge? I love it.”

“Good night, Cuddy,” I said.

He took Alice’s hand in his huge gloves. “Now listen, Red, I know old Sherlock here looks pretty pitiful now, but take my word for it, he used to be a pretty snappy dresser.”

I said again, “Good night, Cuddy,” and he waved his keychain of talismans at us and rubbed the rabbit’s foot lavishly against the side of his nose. Then Alice drove me back to pick up the Austin, and then she followed me home.

The scene I saw coming, I saw as soon as I realized that my furnace was clanking heat up through the radiators and that Susan’s mink coat was draped over the banister. She had never before come over to my house when Lawry was back in Hillston, so I was shocked. But then I had never before hit Lawry in the face, either.

“Well, sugar, it’s about time. Where the crap have you been?!” Susan spoke just as Alice walked through the open door into the living room, and it was too late for me to do anything but walk in after her.

Susan was draped full-length on the white canvas couch. There was a bottle of Campari on the floor beside her, and a wineglass. She was wearing black velvet slacks and a black cashmere sweater and she was reading a hardcover book she’d brought with her, entitled
Mommie Dearest
. She did not move when she saw Alice, except to toss her head so that the mane of blond hair shook.

I stepped toward her so annoyed it amazed me that she blandly smiled when I asked, “What are you doing here, Susan?” Then I turned sideways and gestured an introduction. “Alice MacLeod, this is Susan Whetstone. Mrs. Whetstone is an old friend. What did you want to see me about, Susan?” I had told her again on the phone yesterday I wanted time to think; again she hadn’t listened.

Now Susan sat up. “God, what happened to you?! Have you been rolling around in the slop out there?”

I said, “Yes.”

Susan was still ignoring Alice, who stood next to me, still buttoned up in the plaid parka, her jeans and boots as soiled and soggy as mine. I kept talking without much hope for the conversation. “Alice has just helped me capture a suspect over on Wade Boulevard.”

“What fun,” said Susan, with a grin, and now she looked at Alice as if the latter were modeling a bizarre outfit she didn’t plan to buy. She asked, “Are you a police…person too?”

“No,” Alice said, “No? Just another old friend?” And now Susan looked at me. “Or a new friend? Mighty sweet of you to play cops and robbers with Justin when it’s so cold out, and at midnight, too. I thought you’d been fired, Justin. Are you a private eye now?”

Alice said to me, “Thank you for the offer of a drink, but I think I’ll go home now.” I could feel from the heat on my ears that they had blushed as red as Alice’s hair.

“No, wait.” I caught at her arm but it tensed, and I let my hand fall away. “Let me walk you to your car,” I said.

“It’s not necessary,” Alice said.

“Oh, don’t leave on my account,” called Susan, stroking her hair up from the nape of her tan neck.

“I’m not,” Alice said.

“You just got here. And you both look like you could use a drink. Meanwhile, have we met before, Alice? Did you say her name was Alice, sugar?”