Uncivil Seasons (35 page)

“How are you, Rowell? Rowell?”

“Yes. I suppose you came for your informant’s money, Justin. It’s there by the bed.”

Rowell Dollard had made out the check to me, his signature less thick and sure than it had always been when scrawled across the bottom of the homiletic letters I used to angrily crumple in the waste can at law school.

Seated in the wheelchair beside the flat hospital window, he looked shrunken within the gray wool robe, black monogrammed with his initials but now too large for him. The unlighted room was nearly dark, and empty anyhow of belongings that he would want to see as part of his life. On a tray, food lay untouched in glutinous positions. On a table, ribbons drooped from flowers in cardboard vases.

I stood across the room from him to say that the man to whom I would be giving the check was risking his safety, if not his life, to lead us to Cloris’s killer.

Dollard might have been blind, his eyes looked with such fixed opaque blankness at the window glass. “Who killed her?” he asked quietly.

I sat down in the vinyl chair. “A man named Luster Hudson. He worked at C&W.”

“Robbery?”

“Yes. But it may be more complicated than that; he may have been working for someone.”

Nothing in his face changed. He wasn’t interested.

I said, “I have the jewelry. And the coins.”

“You didn’t bring them.”

“No.”

The perfectly combed silver hair was motionless; the outline of his head as still as a medallion, and lined by moonlight slatted through the half-raised venetian blinds. “I didn’t think you would,” he said finally.

I was watching his reflection in the dark window. “I expect you know what I found in the case,” I said. “And what finding that second coin in the case means.”

“What is that, Jay?” He asked the question politely, but as if he were not involved in the answer.

“It means that Joanna put a coin in the diary. To convict you of murder.”

I leaned sideways in my chair so that I could see his face now. “And the same coin in the case means that the night you killed Bainton Ames, you did pick up his coin from the marina walkway, and you did keep it. Odd how the same coin both absolves and convicts you.”

He didn’t speak, but his body seemed to become even slighter inside the handsome robe, as if the aging of years had been collapsed into minutes and his flesh wasted as I looked on.

I asked him, “Why did you strike Bainton Ames that night?”

Dollard’s head turned carefully toward me. His face, all ruddiness clarified, was frail now and nearly delicate, the eyes and mouth expressing nothing. “I assume you’ve talked with Briggs Cadmean. He surprises me, telling you. But he always did surprise me.”

I asked again, “Why did you knock Ames down?”

Rowell was looking past me out the window. After time went by long enough for me to hear the calm noises and the blurring, hummed voices that are the sound of hospital evenings, he answered, “Bainton said something about Cloris I couldn’t allow him to say.”

“All right, but
then
, when you came back, Rowell! And found him still lying there!”

He said nothing.

“Was it,” I asked, “because your car wouldn’t start that you came back?”

Preoccupied, he slowly nodded.

“When you saw Bainton was still unconscious.” I bent farther forward, into his line of vision, “Why in
hell
didn’t you go for help?! So you knocked him out, so what? Why come back and kill him?!”

Rowell’s eyes blinked, and he pressed his hand over them. “I thought he was already dead.”

“But he
wasn’t
, Rowell. There was water in his lungs. He drowned. If you hadn’t panicked about protecting your precious political career. If you hadn’t taken him out in that boat and thrown him over and killed him, Rowell, he wouldn’t have died.”

Earlier today, imagining confronting Rowell, I had assumed he would deny that he’d taken Ames into the boat; I thought he would claim he had picked up the coin where Bainton had dropped it and then left, and that the dazed man had eventually gotten up, motored off alone, and toppled overboard. But instead my uncle gazed at me, curiously. He asked, “Political career?”

“Come on! Christ! That’s why you covered it up. And you got your reward, too. Old Cadmean’s blackmail took the curious form of financing your ambition. Your goddamn ambition.”

He turned his head calmly away from me. “My ambition?… Considering my name, I don’t think I had much of that. Certainly not enough.” The robe slipped, and he pulled it back over his legs. “I had a little. But I had to flog it. My brother Kip had to flog it in me.” Rowell’s voice was so hushed, I kept myself perfectly still in order to hear him. “Even then,” he went on, as though in private meditation, “even then, I knew Dollards were supposed to play in a different league.”

“You’re a state senator.”

“State senate isn’t much, Jay. Not much to end with; maybe to start.” His hand, bruised bluish from the IV needle, moved gently down the gray wool over his legs, which rested on the props of the wheelchair. “I think I was a good solicitor. Probably I should have stopped there.”

“Yes!” I burst out. “My God, how could you bear being under Cadmean’s thumb all these years?! Him and Joanna Cadmean! Both! Jesus. I pity you.”

His face flinched and some of the color came back and some of the old anger deepened his voice. “Your pity is not something I want or need.” He pulled himself straighter in the wheelchair, tightening the gray robe around him.

And so we sat together in silence in the dark, impersonal room, until he asked mildly, “What have you said to Fulcher and Moize?”

“Nothing yet. Cadmean won’t say anything. Ever. Doubtless you know that.”

“Moize, I expect, will try to indict me only on Joanna, whatever you say.” His tone was bizarrely detached, as if he were discussing some court case in which his interest was merely professional. “The other…is so long ago.”

I said, “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Moving his forefinger softly along the rubber wheel of the chair, Rowell said, “Jay, this will disappoint you, no doubt. But if you’ll think back to your criminal law classes…Perhaps you never attended many…Though I had hoped when you enrolled at Virginia…Well, if you’ll think back, you’ll recall casebook examples I expect Mr. Moize also recalls.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dollard waited for the energy to speak. “If I struck a man in anger, that was assault. If I then returned and discovered that man—as I thought, dead—and I removed his body, that was disposing of evidence. Neither striking him in anger nor removing him is murder. Nor, by precedent, is the combination premeditated murder.” Rowell said all this seriously but dispassionately, as though he actually were in a law school classroom.

“There is no statute of limitations on manslaughter either, Rowell.”

“True.” His hand began to move again on the wheel, barely touching the rubber tread with his fingertips. “But I rather think…I have been through…a lot. And I have already paid this state—as the play says, doesn’t it?—some service. And I rather think a jury will be inclined to mercy.” His head kept staring straight out the window when he added, “I’m just sorry you can’t feel the same inclination.”

Upset, I stood and started walking. “Why, Rowell? Why didn’t you call an ambulance?!”

“I told you, I thought he was dead. I couldn’t hear his heart at all. And…and…” Now the voice faltered for the first time, and the silver hair began to tremble slightly. “And then, I didn’t think. You don’t know what you’ll do until you do it. Yes, I must have picked up the coin. I must have carried him into the boat.” He spoke softly, pausing often, seeing what he said. “I didn’t think until I was swimming and I heard it blow up and the light was in the water, and then I had already chosen…what I couldn’t even regret.” He fought through a slow, struggling breath. “Do you want the truth? I was too weak to bear the shame of having killed him…I was afraid it would cost me Cloris. I would lose Cloris. I…She…” Rowell’s head fell suddenly to his chest, then came quickly back up, and his throat tightened with a strange constricted noise. “Ambition?… She was my ambition. She was my ambition.” His bruised hand squeezed hard around the wheel. “And her, I won.”

High in the window, moonlight shuttered through the blinds and shadowed his face. And when the moon moved on, I saw that he was crying, tears following one another down into the tremulous mouth. He made no gesture to brush them away, and they hurried from his eyes and nose onto his neck and soaked into the collar of the gray robe. Grief shook through him, breaking up his words as he said, “She’s gone, Jay. I didn’t believe it until these last few days here. I put off believing it. I put it off and off, and it wouldn’t stop being true. I’ve lost her. She’s gone.” And he bent over in the chair as if an unbearable pain had twisted through his body.

“Rowell.” I came around the back of the wheelchair so that I stood close beside him. “Please don’t…You’re not supposed to get—”

He grabbed up at my hand and crushed it in his. “I don’t care. You see? I
have
lost her. When you’ve lost, you’re not scared you’ll lose.” Letting go, he breathed in a last long shudder until his body was still again. I waited there beside him. Finally he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He said, “I’m all right. Go sit down.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “I’m sorry for your pain. To have kept this inside, too, for so long. I can’t say I wish I had left it all alone. But I hope you will forgive me for the poor way I handled it. I…I judged you unfairly. I ask your pardon. I wanted to think you guilty. Even of killing Cloris to protect yourself.”

He twisted his head to see me. “Why? Why? Was it because I pushed at you so hard?”

My eyes closed, weighted shut. “Why flog in me an ambition it seems neither of us really had?”

“I just wanted you to be better than me.”

“It always felt like you wanted to prove me worse.”

Rowell shook his head, the silvery hair whitened by the moon. “I’m sorry. No… I loved you.”

“It didn’t feel like it,” I said.

“All I hated was your weakness.” He looked away, back to the window.

“I hate it too, but I’m forgiving myself. So should you, Rowell.” Reaching across the bed, I picked up the coat I’d left there.

His arms stretched out along the rests of the chair, his hands hanging motionless above the wheels. He said, “I think I’ll leave that to a higher judge than I’m going to get in Hillston. Are you leaving now?”

“Yes, I have to.” I buttoned my coat. “You should rest. I’ll go talk to Moize, now. I’ll come again tomorrow. I’ll do what I can.”

At the door, I looked back at him, still and gray by the black, empty window. “Good night, Rowell. I’m sorry.”

He whispered without moving, “Jay? This isn’t the life I meant to have.”

The Tucson Lounge on Saturday night was a place for Hillstonians to go in fumbling, sentimental quest of a feeling they had heard in the sound of songs and seen in the size of films, and thought would be theirs, and would be better than their insensible weeks, if only they clotted together in a place like the Tucson Lounge. This feeling was some amorphous heightening of impulses, nationally inherited and both fed and sedated by a week of television, which was too small and flat for the size of the impulses. This feeling was some mixture of anarchy and of nostalgia for undefined hurts, and of lust enhanced by the romance of love, and of xenophobia boiled over by sports and news into a fine and otherwise failed (not even attempted) sense of all-American spirits joined, and so each enlarged to the size of film and the sound of song.

And all this was made possible for these Hillstonians by the alchemic solution at the Tucson Lounge of beer and music and bodies and flaring lights. All this found expression in bloodied knuckles, in throats sweetly choked-up close to the band’s booming speakers, in couples rubbing hot-eyed against one another on the dance floor. All this found its correlative with the national heritage in the Tucson Lounge’s western decor. Outside blinked the red neon cactus. Inside over the long bar ran a mural of a cattle stampede in a dust storm: steers plunging off the wall away from the endless, open background; a train rushing westward into space; a solitary cowboy sitting on his horse in bittersweet, patriotic, lonesome sufficiency and self-regard.

Across from the painted cowboy, I leaned on the bar, gun heavy beneath my arm, and watched the hand of the big round Budweiser clock fall from the twelve. Behind me up on a rough wood platform, the Boot Hill Boys, a country-and-western group (mountain-country taught on fiddle and piano and guitars; western-dressed in fringe and boots) wailed of invisible tears and trembling lips and the solace of barroom buddies.

Cuddy Mangum and I had arranged with Ratcher Phelps that I should be the one to wait inside the bar, since, of us three, I was the only one Luster Hudson had never seen. “Not that I think even Luster’s dumb enough to show up in public,” Cuddy had said, “but if he does, you’ll spot him.”

I’d stared again at the photograph of the cropped-haired, ox-sullen head whose thickness narrowed nothing at all as the neck bulged into the shoulders. “I think so.”

“Yep, you’ll spot Prince Luster right away. He’ll be the one snapping folks’ backs in his biceps, and chomping the tops off the beer bottles and spitting the glass chunks at the band.”

An hour ago Cuddy and I had left our hurried meeting with the stunned and fretful Ken Moize, who had until Monday to decide what to tell the grand jury he wanted them to do with Rowell Dollard. I told him why Joanna should want us to think Rowell had killed her. I didn’t tell him Cadmean’s story about that summer night at the Pine Hills Inn.

As Cuddy dropped me off in front of the Tucson Lounge, he said, “The cavalry is coming. Wait for it, you hear me? If Parson Phelps chickens out on us, I’ll just take his car and stick Sister Resurrection up front wearing his fedora. The black people all look alike to Luster anyhow.”

It was now 12:30. I’d drunk one whiskey and four Coca Colas. I’d seen a Dodge mechanic bloody the nose of a collegiate fellow who kept insisting (out of a code the mechanic didn’t honor) that a tap on the shoulder gave him the inalienable right to slow dance with the mechanic’s date, who giggled each time her escort was tapped, and giggled higher when the collegian was knocked backward into the passion-glazed couple behind him. I had heard from the Boot Hill Boys a dozen variations on the sad imperfectability of human love. I had gone three times to the bathroom (posted
COWBOYS
), and the third time had sidestepped somebody’s vomit on the floor.