About Cloris, Dollard was right: I had interviewed many of those friends, and by their testimony, Cloris Dollard had been the most amicable woman in Hillston. The friends were all certain, like her husband, that she had suffered by hideous chance at the hands of a transient madness. Not only had they not killed her, they couldn’t think of a single soul who might have, “unless he’d gone crazy.” And none of them knew anyone who might have gone even temporarily insane.
Everyone had liked Cloris. She’d liked everyone. I’d talked to a dozen members of First Presbyterian Church who’d spoken with her after services that Sunday morning, when she’d been “maybe a little quiet, but her same sunny self underneath.” I’d talked to her daughters, whom she’d called that afternoon in Phoenix and Baltimore; they said their conversations had been largely about grandchildren, and unremarkable. I’d talked to Mr. and Mrs. Dyer Fanshaw of the Fanshaw Paper Company, on whom she’d paid an ordinary afternoon call at their estate in North Hillston, two wooded meadows away from the Dollards’ own brick colonial. I’d seen her myself in the audience at the Hillston Playhouse during the second intermission of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for she’d been chatting in the aisle with Susan Whetstone. Susan had said she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about, but it certainly wasn’t that Cloris expected to be murdered, although she had mentioned that her stomach was upset. I had in fact interviewed most of Hillston’s inner circle, and it had very politely informed me that no one in it was a burglar and a killer.
Although I hadn’t let Captain Fulcher know it, I had even checked out that Rowell Dollard had actually gone, as he’d said, to the suite he kept over in Raleigh for nights when he worked late during sessions of the state legislature. If Cloris had died no earlier than twelve, Rowell could conceivably have rushed back in the hour and a half it took to travel the unbanked, unlighted, two-lane road between Hillston and the state capital. He could have smothered Cloris, and then sped back to Raleigh.
But, so far, I could think of no motive. If Rowell Dollard secretly kept a mistress, no one had ever heard of her; if he secretly owed millions, so far I hadn’t found out to whom, and at this point he had as much money as Cloris did anyhow. Even if they’d used the estate she’d inherited from Bainton Ames to help build Rowell’s career, the perks and payoffs of that career were now worth considerably more than his wife’s private possessions. If he secretly hated her, Hillston hadn’t noticed. Rumor was, among Cloris’s many friends, that as a bachelor Dollard had “worshiped” her even when she’d been married to Bainton Ames. They told me now, “He loved her just the same ’til the day she died.” They thought it was the most tragic thing they’d ever heard, for death to part the Dollards after all Cloris had suffered, and when Rowell was destined for even greater office.
Standing there in the foyer under the donated gilt chandeliers, I noticed how Rowell’s eyes, which were somewhat protuberant—pressing forward, like his voice and his manner—tonight looked sunk back in his skull, their color dead in his florid face. I said, “Rowell, do you want to see the report on the arrest?”
He hesitated, also unlike him, then answered, “No, just tell me.” I gave a summary of Preston Pope’s statement while he stared past me down the empty corridor of closed doors and at the courtroom doors behind us, the doors—he had told me so often—to Washington.
We stood alone in the middle of the big marble floor. When I finished talking, he asked, “But you don’t share this Mangum’s opinion, do you? About Pope?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“I see. Walk me to my car, Justin, all right? By the way, your mother mentioned something odd tonight. She said you were out to see Joanna Cadmean earlier. Something about her wanting to talk to you about Cloris.” He paused for my response, but I made none, because I wasn’t certain what I wanted to say, and he added, “I can’t think why. As far as I know, Cloris and Joanna Cadmean hadn’t met in years.” He waited again. “I did notice she visited,” he stumbled, “the grave. It surprised me at the time.”
“Isn’t that why Mrs. Cadmean came to Hillston, for the services?”
“No! I’m sure she’s just here to see her in-laws. She’s staying out at the compound with the youngest Cadmean girl, isn’t she? The one that teaches at the university?” Dollard walked toward old Cadmean’s portrait, then hurried back, as if he couldn’t think standing still.
“Briggs,” I said.
“Typical of old Briggs to name a daughter after himself. I don’t think he liked any of his sons.”
“I don’t think his daughter likes him. Mother told me tonight on the phone that Briggs moved out to the lake because she couldn’t stand to live in that brick mausoleum with her father.”
We crossed to the tall, brass-trimmed front doors. Outside, rain had already started washing the slush over the steps and into the sidewalk gutters; by morning there’d be no trace of the aber rant snowstorm.
Rowell was tapping the umbrella’s silver knob against his lips. “Did Joanna Cadmean say what she wanted to know?”
“She wanted to know if Cloris kept a diary. Did she?”
“A diary?” He was surprised. “Why? No, Cloris didn’t keep a diary.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure! Cloris was a totally…open person. She always left everything out where anybody could see it. I would have known. She would have read it to me.” He kept shaking his head. “What did she mean, a diary?”
I decided to tell him. “Mrs. Cadmean says your wife told her in a dream to look at a diary.”
Thoughts were shifting through his eyes as he stared at me. The eyes looked angry; but then, they often did.
“She said she dreamt Cloris came to her and said she’d been murdered, and told her to read the diary.”
Rowell began pacing again, tapping the umbrella tip loudly on the marble.
I added, “She described details I just don’t see how she could have known.”
The ruddiness of his complexion deepened in his neck and ears, and his voice dropped. “Did she say who?”
“Who what?”
He snapped, “Who killed Cloris.”
His tone startled me. “She gave the impression that she had somebody in mind, but she won’t say who. It’s just a dream. I don’t know why she chose to tell me about it. Even odder, she talked more about Bainton Ames than anything else. Another dream she’d had years ago, at the time of his accident; she dreamt that it was no accident. That it was murder. And she really almost had me convinced.”
Rowell kept rubbing his lips back and forth over the umbrella’s silver handle. He said, “Do you know who she was?”
I nodded. “A psychic. A mystic. She worked with you back when you were a solicitor.”
“She did not ‘work’ with me. She was somebody who came to the police and volunteered certain premonitions.”
“She knew where the bodies were buried.”
The umbrella twitched in his hand, and the knob scraped against his teeth. “You understand,” he said softly, “this woman is preternatural. You have no idea.” He turned around to me. “She’s also insane, Justin.”
“Insane? She acted perfectly normal. You know, I would have thought you’d be the last person to place any credence in…”
His face flushed. “She is not normal. How can you say she’s normal?”
“I mean, coherent, pleasant; you know what I mean. Obviously she’s not normal. Listen, Rowell, if somebody tells you they’re Jesus Christ, they’re crazy. But if somebody tells you on Monday that X is going to be killed on Tuesday and X is killed on Tuesday, it doesn’t make them crazy. It makes them pretty damn clairvoyant.”
Rowell nodded. “Or a murderer.”
“Good Christ. You’re not suggesting she killed Cloris? She wasn’t even in Hillston. For what possible reason?”
“For God’s sake, of course I don’t think that! Don’t be absurd! I’m suggesting you stay away from that woman.”
; His command irritated me. “How much do you know about Mrs. Cadmean personally?”
His voice was curt. “I doubt I’ve seen her more than five times in the last fifteen years.”
“She never remarried. Was her marriage to, what’s his name, to Charles Cadmean, happy?”
“I have no idea. I assume so.”
“Is there any possibility she might have been involved with Bainton Ames? I’m sorry if this is awkward for you.”
He was glaring at me. “Why awkward?”
“I suppose because Bainton was Cloris’s first husband. And, quite honestly, people have said you were already involved with Cloris back when they were married.”
His mouth twisted to a sneer. “People?”
“They don’t say it critically.”
“They shouldn’t say it at all.” He put his hand on the door’s brass bar. “How I felt about her isn’t any of their business. And it isn’t any of yours.” His voice got loud enough to echo off the marble walls of the large empty space. “And I suggest you spend a little less time listening to Joanna Cadmean’s hocus-pocus, and a little more convicting the thug who killed Cloris!” The senator banged open the door, and his umbrella caught in it as it swung shut. When I tried to help, he jerked it free and started down the steps. At the curb, rain was streaming past the tires of the silver Mercedes he’d left parked there.
I was turning away, when, from behind the small, antique cannon fixed to the side of the stone steps, someone darted suddenly at Dollard with a long stick. I yelled “Rowell!” and sprang down after him, but I saw before I reached her that it was Sister Resurrection, even this late, haunting the streets, assaulting people with the promise of apocalypse. She was dressed as she always was. Rain beads hung from her knots of hair and ran down her shapeless sweaters, soaking into her split and laceless tennis shoes. Rain, like the world and the flesh, had meant nothing to her for many years.
She had her cross pointed at Rowell and was chanting as he shoved past her to pull his car door open, “It won’t be long! The dragon coming! I heard the voice say, ‘It won’t be long.’ That old serpent, he got the chain in his teeth, and he snap it! He snap it, and crawling out of the lake of fire and brimstone. He shall be loosed out of his prison!”
“Get back!” Rowell, his face white, was in his car now, tugging on the door. “Will you get her away!” Sister Resurrection touched her hand, shriveled as a claw, to his. She had a hissing whisper. “God getting ready. We shall arise anew! Say yes! Say yes!” He shook the skinny arm off his sleeve, slammed the door, and left her, fallen to the curb.
I tented my coat over my head and leaned down. “Sister, you all right? You shouldn’t be out in this cold rain. Come on. It’s late.” I pulled her to her feet. She was weightless and tense as wire, and the smell of her clothes in the rain was even fouler than usual. “You go on home. It’s late.” I pointed down the sidewalk toward the Methodist church two blocks east, where the minister had made her a place in the basement near the furnace. “You’ll catch cold.”
I doubt she had heard me, but, still chanting her garbled revelations, she turned, and with her quick stiff stride, hurried away, her makeshift cross in one hand, and Rowell Dollard’s black umbrella in the other, jutted out before her like a sword.
Chapter 5
The Hillston police are stationed in an annex connected through the basement to our new municipal building, although most HPD offices (like the detective division) have been moved into the main building itself. The lab people never come upstairs if they can help it, and Etham Foster, who runs the lab, would just as soon nobody ever came down to the basement, either. He’s a wary, saturnine black man of about forty, who looks like the basketball player he was; he had gotten himself through college playing that game, and said he had never picked up a basketball again after the day they handed him his diploma. When I walked into his lab, his long fingers were picking with tweezers at the bottom of Preston’s boot. And Cuddy, chewing on a glazed doughnut, was standing like a stork against the wall, watching him.
Cuddy looked up. “Look who’s here, come down to pay a call. You and the Senator wrap it all up?”
I said, “Sister Resurrection just scared him to death.”
Foster glanced at us, then went back to placing bits of fuzz in a plastic bag as if he were alone in the place.
“Good,” Cuddy said.
“She was out front under that overhang, just about frozen.”
“You know why she stays around this spot so much? She’s got a grudge against the powers that be, and this is where they be.”
Foster turned his back on us and switched on the light under his microscope. Cuddy went on. “You know Sister Resurrection used to have a kid, a long, long time ago? Yeah, ain’t that downright amazing to think of? But he went bad, raised hell, and got himself shot.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Well, this is a little bit of local East Hillston lore that wouldn’t necessarily have come to your attention over on Catawba Drive.”
“Who shot him?”
He licked glaze off his fingers. “Cop.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sure. I’m a great kidder.” He walked around to Foster. “Okay, Doctor Dunk-It, what you got?”
Foster slid in another slide without looking up. “No yellow fibers anywhere on your man’s shoes.”
“Good. And no prints of his on the silver, either.”
Foster said, “Doesn’t mean a thing.”
His drawer was filled with fragments of Cloris Dollard’s life: fuzz from her yellow carpet, gravel from her driveway, hairs from her cat, blood from the top of a trophy that said she was the best woman golfer in Hillston. Etham Foster knew Mrs. Dollard as precisely as my father had known where against the skull to place the drill. I said, “Tell me about who did it, Etham.”
“I told you. Man was careful.”
We had little more than that to go on. Since Cloris Dollard had never bothered locking her house, we didn’t even know whether her murderer had entered before or after she had come home. Her house was so sheltered by its grounds that no neighbor had seen or heard a thing, even if she’d struggled. And we’d lost nine hours before the Dollard maid’s arrival the next morning. We knew the upstairs phone had been yanked from its cord and that Cloris’s purse had been thrown in the grass by the stone gate, and we had a list of all Senator Dollard thought but wasn’t sure had been taken by whomever had pulled open all the drawers and cabinets in the handsome house and had left in its bedroom a dead woman.
I said, “Pros don’t kill people.”
Foster finished looking at a piece of glass taken out of Preston’s boot tread. “Didn’t say pro. Said careful.”
“Come on, can’t you give us something?”
“Give you a Marlboro butt off the driveway that wasn’t there more than a day, and nobody in the house smoked.”
“It’s too bad the neighbors and two ambulances and a half-dozen of V.D.’s new patrol cars drove all over the place before they called you.”
Foster said, “Right,” and would I mind not smoking in his lab, and Cuddy said, “He can’t be a detective without smoke coming out of his nose.” His eyes looked dull blue and angry. “Was Mrs. Dollard taking this guy on a guided tour or what? ‘Well, now you’ve loaded up the silver, and don’t forget that little TV, come on up in the bedroom ’cause I’ve got some jewelry and rare coins I think you’ll like, locked up in a little safe you probably wouldn’t even have noticed all on your own.’”
“Maybe she thought if she offered him things, he wouldn’t hurt her,” I said. “Maybe he only hit her because she went for the phone or maybe it started ringing and panicked him into hitting her.” I rubbed my hand against the back of my own skull. “Or, let’s try this possibility. He already knew the house, and knew her, and he meant to kill her.” But who in the world would want to kill Cloris? She had more friends…
Cuddy said, “How tall was she?”
“Preston’s too short.”
Etham Foster looked back up. “You don’t know she was standing.”
“And Preston’s not strong enough, either. To pull her up on that bed—and what the crap for?—and shove down a pillow so hard he breaks her nose? I don’t believe Preston could do it, much less, he’s just not that goddamn mean!”
I was thinking of how Rowell had flicked Sister Resurrection from his sleeve as if she were a gnat, knocking her down on the curb. I said, “Maybe anybody can be that mean.”
Cuddy slapped his hand loud on the counter. “Oh, don’t start that dorkshit ‘everybody’s rotten under the thin ice’ moralizing again! The only thin ice you ever knew anything about, somebody served you in a whiskey glass!”
Unhurriedly, Foster walked away from us to open the refrigerator and take out a tube of somebody’s blood. My blush had brought sweat out over my lip. “Get off my back, Mangum, you’ve been picking at me since I got down here. Why are you so pissy?” We stared at each other, until he reached up and pulled on both his ears with his knuckly hands. “I’m scared,” he said, “the powers that be’re gonna railroad Preston because it’s easy. Nothing personal.”
“Except you think those powers’re all my kinsfolk. You’re a snob.”
He blew out a sigh, and then he laughed. “Whooee, Doctor D, listen to the white folk spat!” Foster ignored him and smeared the blood on his slide, and Cuddy tossed my overcoat at me and said, “Okay, Preppie, let’s get out of the man’s lab. Don’t you ever go home, Foster?”
Foster didn’t look up, but said, “Your man had big hands,” and he held up his own, fingers spread the way they would have stretched over a basketball. He added, “Shut the door.”
Upstairs, while Cuddy fed Mrs. Mitchell a cold hamburger, I told him more about my visit with Joanna Cadmean.
“She couldn’t be that good looking.”
Uncivil Seasons Page 6