Uncivil Seasons (32 page)

I took the plastic stick with its fox on top out of my glass and sipped at the Bloody Mary. “You understand,” I told him, “Monday, Rowell will be charged with her murder.”

“Why don’t we wait ’til Monday to see what happens on Monday, how’s that?” Sucking in a piece of ice, he bared his teeth and crunched it in two. “Tell you what I know today. Know Rowell’s in a hospital bed, and it’s a goddamn shame. Shame about his health, and his primary, and shame about the shit that geese are going to gabble.”

“Yes,” I nodded, “I expect whatever happens Monday, you’ll have to fund another friend to run in your primary this spring, Mr. Cadmean.”

Swallowing the ice chips, he smiled agreeably. “Oh, well, I have lots of friends.”

“Perhaps you should have made Lawry Whetstone one of them.”

“Why’s that?” Cadmean’s lidded eyes squinted at me. “Fact is, I don’t like Lawry. I don’t believe there’s a natural fiber in him. I believe he’d as soon put his pecker in a plastic balloon as a living moaning woman, and I got no use for a man not more particular.”

I said, “I don’t like him either. But I appreciated his coming in to say Cloris told him herself—the day she died—that she’d brought you those designs of Bainton Ames’s. And that you had confiscated them from her. It made me wonder why you bothered lying to me about that.” He watched me sip at my drink. I went on, “It made me wonder so much, I started wondering if maybe you decided you better get hold of copies she told you she’d made on those papers. Copies she probably kept in her safe. Maybe in her purse. Like the purse we found thrown into the grass beside her driveway.”

Turning the whiskey glass in circles on the dark table, Cadmean shook his big bald head as if I’d given the wrong answer to an easy question. “Shit, son, that’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it? You know I was watching a Shakespeare play while poor Cloris was getting robbed. A play where a fellow has himself turned into an ass, am I right?”

“Oh, I didn’t wonder if you did it personally. I don’t believe you’d personally crack open the head of even a loose woman.”

His eyebrow went up at this and stayed there, sardonic. “I appreciate your good opinion,” he said.

I took out a cigarette; I kept them now just in the pack—the case I’d put in a box with the other gifts I was returning to Susan. I said, “No, sir, I didn’t think you were over there personally rummaging around in the Dollard house. What I’ve been wondering was if maybe you arranged to have someone else do that errand for you. Or arranged to have someone else arrange it. Someone from C&W. You know, the same way C&W men come over and unfreeze your pipes when you ask them to. Maybe two somebodies. Maybe Luster Hudson and Ron Willis.”

He took a cigar out of the hunt coat, rolled it between the stiff, twisted fingers. “Luster Hudson. And Ron Willis. I don’t recall those particular names.” Now he began to lick at the cigar with a tongue pink as a cat’s.

“No? They’re C&W. I was wondering if you’d asked Ron Willis to follow me around town the last few days. Which he did.”

Cadmean looked at me, his lips puffing in and out.

I smiled back. “I know you’ve taken a real interest in my whereabouts, from your long distance calls. Problem is, Mr. Willis got a little nervous from being wanted for questioning in a murder case, and he got a little more nervous, it turns out, from being pretty full of cocaine, and the result was he took several shots at me.”

“Mighty happy to see he must have missed,” said Cadmean, pulling out a box of wood matches and waving the flame of one beneath his cigar. “Where is he now, this drug-addict fellow?”

“He’s in jail now.”

“That so? You think he killed Cloris?”

“No. He has a very good alibi for that night. Not a Shakespeare-play alibi, but just as good for his purposes. I’m interested in whether he got those papers from this friend of his, Hudson, who maybe did kill Cloris.”

“I read it was gold and jewelry that robber took, not papers. What would some old robber want with those?”

I finished my drink and patted my mouth with a paper napkin that also had the fleeing fox on it. “Mr. Cadmean,” I said, “the bad thing about using violence is, by its nature you can’t keep it on a lunge line. You can harness a waterfall to your mill, but what if there’s a flood, and the dam breaks? You can hire a thug to take some papers from a lady’s house while you and she sit watching a play, but what if the lady gets a stomachache and leaves early and catches that thug helping himself to her silverware and anything else he sees? And what if that thug got scared, or just thuggish, and killed her? You see what I mean? Once you let violence loose, it’s out of control.”

He nodded. “A lot like alcohol-drinking. Am I right? All depends on the drinker.” With a noisy gulp he finished off his whiskey. “A lot like car-driving in the snow. All depends on the car. And the driver.” The ice snapped between his teeth. “No, I don’t believe I know these two fellows of yours. ’Course, if they did kill poor Cloris, I’m going to have to let them go from C&W.” He watched his ash as he slowly rolled it loose on the edge of the ashtray. “Now, let’s go back to Rowell a minute. Huh?” His eyes seemed impervious to the smoke coiling past them as they peered at me. “What you got against your uncle, son, except he helped your mama put you in a loony bin to dry out.”

I leaned forward into the smoke behind which Cadmean’s moonwide face bobbed. “What I have against him,” I said, working to keep my voice as tranquil as his, “is I believe that he’s a murderer.”

“Who of? Joanna?”

“That’s certainly what the prosecutors think. But the person I
know
he killed is Bainton Ames. One reason I know it is that Rowell has never said to me that he didn’t.”

“No hope in hell you’ll get proof, son.”

“That may be true.”

“And why want to?”

“You say you wouldn’t want to have murderers in your factory. I don’t care to have any more of them than I can help in my state’s senate.”

“Oh shit, Justin.” With a cracking snap of his fingers he called over the bartender from the other side of the room. “You can’t clean the dung off the world. It just keeps flying. You can’t dig out the road back to Eden, don’t you know that yet? Another drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Alrighty.”

“I do know you can’t,” I said. “So let’s just say I want to find out for sure, for my own satisfaction. How’s that?”

Cadmean gave his skull another stroke. “That’s different. Check, Mr. Gilbert, if you will, sir.” He slid an ancient curved wallet from his back pocket and paid with cash. There was nothing in the wallet but a great deal of cash; credit cards were not to his taste, he said. Pawing up a handful of jelly beans from the bowl on the table, he pushed himself with a grumble out of the chair. With a snort, the old cocker spaniel shook herself instantly awake and followed her master on his progress through the room, stopping when he stopped to squeeze a shoulder, rub a head, or kiss a hand. At the door he suggested that we go for a walk.

I buttoned my coat. “Aren’t you supposed to be joining Mrs. Cadmean and Rebecca in there for lunch?”

“The girls’ll be fine. That woman’s so scared of me—now, isn’t that amazing?—she can’t even eat when I’m around. Just diddles with her fork.”

So I crossed back over the street with him, slowing my steps to his as we trudged into the snow-splotched wet field of the jumping arena bordering the stables. There we wandered about among the scattered red and white gates, and the hogback rails, and the plasterboard walls painted to look like either bricks or stone. We could hear the snow melting, and the earth sucking it in.

“Sun’s working,” Cadmean grumbled. “I told you it would. Now. Let’s play some poker.” He put his gnarled hand through my arm as we stepped around a gully of icy mud. “You see my Baby, am I right?” I nodded. “You interested in her?”

“She’s interesting, yes.”

“She’s damn pretty.”

“Indeed she is.”

“Smart.”

He bobbed his head, and then slid his hands into the deep pockets of the old hunt coat. After a few more yards, he growled, “Well, I want her to come over and see me.” I nodded again. “I want her to do something else.” He looked at me. “I want her settled down before they dig my hole. I want her with a man that can make her happy. Right sort of man.”

“What kind is that, Mr. Cadmean? Surely not the sort with a history of mental trouble. I believe I’m quoting correctly your remark to Mr. Stanhope about me.” Leaning against the fake brick wall, I thought with some pleasure about the inevitable clash between the old man and Cuddy Mangum, whose name the industrialist had doubtless never heard, unless he’d heard it from Cuddy’s father, who’d worked on the line at C&W all his adult life.

Cadmean navigated the puddles, came up to me wheezing, and stood to scrape the bottom of his old black-laced boot against the wall edge. “Oh, shit,” he grinned. “Forget what I said to Walter. I’m the one all for burying the past. You’re the gravedigger won’t let it be.” His small eyes smiled with a sleepy malevolence. “All right, son. Let me hear your answer. Can you bring my Baby over to her own home, to sit down and talk with her own daddy for one evening’s time—and doesn’t it crush your soul to hear me have to ask it? Can you bring her?” The only sign of his feelings was a rapid twitch that began at the side of his mouth.

I looked at the bearish eyes; in the sun they were yellow as sulfur. I asked, “And if I do?”

“Well, then,” he started to walk again, Duchess tilting toward his heel, dottering along beside him, as fat and old as he. “Well, then, I guess in trade I’d lend you a shovel to help close up that grave of yours. I guess I’d tell you a story. Now, understand me, this would be just a story, and it’s not one I’ll ever tell again, and it’s not one if you wanted to tell it to somebody else and give me the credit for it, I’d ever say that I’d told you. Hunh? If you were to go blabbering, I’d be obliged…” (And he grinned, his discolored teeth oddly old behind the baby-pink lips.) “…I’d certainly be obliged to tell whoever you’d talk to, that, well, you had a history of mental trouble. This here is a private story for your own satisfaction. Not for Ken Moize. I’d like your word on that.”

I looked across the road to the stubbled farm fields where a chicken hawk swooped tirelessly on the watch for a snake or a careless mouse. I said, “All right. You have my word. Tell me the story.”

He grinned. “Why don’t I tell it after you bring over my little girl?”

But I shook my head and kept walking, too quickly for him to keep up.

He called, “Hell, hold up, son.” So I waited for him to slush stiffly through the sinking snow. “Hell, I hate being old,” he was muttering. “Truly, truly hate it. But I like your gumption. You’re stubborn as me.” He took my arm again, and we ambled on around the maze of jumps. His other hand scraped its monotonous song against his cheek as he began to tell me his story: “A while back, one summer, there was this man who designed my machinery—and this is a man I treated so well, giving him so much stock, he came to hold the chits for a goddamn 10 percent of my business—this particular man decided on the sly to peddle his fanny to the highest bidder. And, same time, to peddle those designs he’d been doodling behind my back, besides.”

I interrupted, “As I understand it, Ames opposed you for trying to keep the union out of C&W.”

Cadmean stopped short. “Now, wait. Wait. Don’t ‘understand,’ just listen. This is a made-up story, wasn’t that clear? And I’m the one making it up. There’s no names to this story. Huh? You just listen, all right?”

I said all right, and he clumped forward again through the mud. “Well, now, I happen to hear that some business acquaintances who’d come up to see
me
were sneaking around on this visit and setting up a private-type meeting with this particular two-timer. I happen to hear because I make it my business to hear. Everything.” He gave me a sideways glance. “Now, pretend the place they were meeting was mighty close to where I have a summer home, and say I also keep a nice boat. Still have it. I enjoyed a spin in that boat. Pretend that night I spun it over to the marina next to Pine Hills Inn, just to keep a personal eye out, see if my sad information of this two-timing was accurate.”

I whispered, “Go on.”

He nodded, “Good story, am I right?”

At the end of the field, out of the stable trotted two young matrons, one on a gray, the other on a dun mare. They’d been in the Fox and Hound earlier, and I knew them both from those social and civic affairs that, like medieval feast days, ordered the calendar of Hillston’s inner circle. In their black and red riding outfits, the two waved merrily and Cadmean swept off his fur cap with a bow as they whisked by us. “Ah, women, lovely women!” he groaned. “I truly could have married another half a dozen if the Lord hadn’t shut off my tap.” He guffawed loudly and the women turned their heads and waved gaily again. Watching them trot away off among the trees, Cadmean squeezed my arm. “Why in hell don’t you get married? You and Baby, now. You two are certainly good looking, both of you. Good blood. Good families. I believe I could get a fine litter of grandchildren out of the two of you. ’Course, they’d be goddamn stubborn.”

I stepped away, folding my arms, but I said nothing to disabuse him of his suddenly evident plans to breed me to his daughter. Instead, I told him that yes, his story was fascinating.

“I figured you’d think so,” he chuckled. “Well, I’ll finish it. Say I took a glance into that inn window that night, and I see all my old pals are sure enough having a little gab with the two-timer. I also see, looking miserable over by himself at the bar, a certain good looking fellow, maybe about what your age is now, who I happen to know is cross-eyed in love with a foolish woman that’s already married to this betraying man I’ve been talking about. You follow me?”

I said I did, and he smiled.

“So, I go back to my boat, diddle around there—pretty damn put out and trying to ease my soul.” Cadmean stopped again and hoisted himself up on a hay bale we’d come upon; he gazed complacently around him, as if that too were a way to ease his soul. He looked on one side at the dark feathery trees fronting the blank sky, then turned around and looked across the street to where small white swamps of snow seeped into the brown and yellow grass of the meadow. The hawk still circled.