I said, “If you ask me, you sound like a real woman.”
She dropped the spoon in the empty glass. “Too much of one.” She giggled, then sighed. “Well, how bad trouble’s Graham in? Did he steal that new Mustang of his?”
“Not that anybody’s mentioned,” Cuddy said.
I asked her, “Have you ever seen him or his brothers in the company of Senator Rowell Dollard, the man whose wife’s been killed?”
She laughed. “I doubt it.”
“Ever heard them talk about him?”
“They didn’t talk much politics—except ‘Shoot them all.’”
Cuddy said, “How about, hear them talk about some old coins, jewelry, a sapphire and diamond bracelet?” Paula turned the charms on her own bracelet; she shook her head. Cuddy went on, “I got two notions. One is, Preston stole that stuff from whoever stole it. The other one is, Preston never saw so much silverware in his life ’til Mr. Savile here showed it to him. And number two means Graham and/or Dickey dropped those little bags off at the house on their way to Greensboro. Or, number three, old Albert Einstein Charlene needs a real lawyer a lot more’n a real man.” Cuddy wrapped his pizza crusts in a napkin to take out to Mrs. Mitchell.
Paula said, “Well, if Charlene put that stuff there, and I’m not saying she did because I never knew her to steal a thing, she sure didn’t know it belonged to that dead lady, because Luster was watching about the investigation on the news and told Charlene to shut up so he could hear because she wasn’t listening. And I tell you the truth, Cuddy, I wouldn’t put a lot past my in-laws, but they’re not killers. Graham tore in here this morning and said you folks had planted that silverware on Preston because y’all had to get somebody fast, this lady being a Hillston big shot and all. How can you eat all that pizza and stay so skinny? If I look at a pizza, all my buttons pop off.”
Cuddy held the last cheesy triangle about an inch from her nose. “Honey, don’t blink,” he said.
She giggled again. “Well, this was real nice, but I’ve got to go feed two kids and a cat. I shouldn’t even say this, and this is all I’m going to say, but if I was the two of you, I’d talk to a man called Ratcher Phelps, you know him? He’s the one Graham and Dickey would go to if they had something special.”
“Who?” asked Cuddy. “I never heard of him.”
“Oh, he’s tight. Old guy. Only reason I know is I’ve heard Graham on the phone telling people if they used Ratcher Phelps they had to be careful, because Phelps wouldn’t put up with sloppiness.” Paula then explained that the only way to open negotiations with this Mr. Phelps was by asking at his East Hillston business, the Melody Store, if he had banjo sheet music for “Moonlight Bay.” “You have to say it was your mother’s favorite, and you want to play it for her birthday.”
I said, “Mr. Phelps is a sentimental receiver of stolen goods, I take it?”
“Don’t Savile here talk old-fashioned?” Cuddy asked Paula. “He likes everything old. He even rides around on horses, pretending to be a Confederate general.”
“He’s talking about a pageant at the Hunt Club, that’s all, Paula. I like your bracelet,” I said. “Could I ask you where you got that particular charm there, do you mind?”
She raised her dimpled wrist. “This one? Oh, it’s some kind of an old stone bead I dug up myself in the backyard when I was little. I think it belonged to an Indian.” The charms jingled as she shook her hand. “This is my whole life, right here.”
“Pardon?”
“Well, like here’s a Bible-camp medal, third prize for backstroke, if you can believe water could ever hold me up once upon a time, and this is for high school choir.”
Her voice came out in slight pushes of air, as if it were trying to escape the weight of her body, as if it were something delicate caught inside, still singing, like the cat in Peter and the Wolf. She said, “And this one is one of those Purple Hearts, have you seen one? It was my first boyfriend’s that he got in vietnam. I was real young. We were going to get married but it didn’t work out that way. And here’s my wedding ring.” She spun it on its chain. “Do you know what I found out? Graham stole it out of a jewelry store in High Point, if you can believe that.”
“It has the sad smack of truth,” Cuddy said.
“And this little pin here, my mama got this for twenty-five years’ service on the loom at C&W. Mr. Cadmean presented it to her himself. They had a whole ceremony. Now they just lay people off and don’t even wave good-bye to them. Here’s my boy Giffins first tooth. And well, so on and so on. My whole life, right here on my arm.” She let it fall onto the table.
Cuddy sighed. “Paula, I sure wish you’d stop talking like the end is near.”
A curl shiny as a blackbird spilled over onto her forehead; pushing it back, she touched her broad face, puzzled, as if she’d never felt the flesh before. She said, “Oh, I don’t mean my life’s over. I just mean I can see what it is now. It’ll just be that some more.” Her giggle was like a small bell, unreverberant; swallowed by the racket of food. “I mean, I used to wonder, is all, and now I know.”
Chapter 9
“The Popes are out,” I said an hour later, flipping my cigarette into one of the big cuspidor ashtrays sitting under Mr. Cadmean’s portrait in the municipal building’s lobby. “From the way Paula talked, I’d say Graham really thinks we’re trying to frame his baby brother. You don’t suppose V.D. could have actually dumped that silverware in their bathtub, do you? He’d do anything for Rowell.”
The instant the elevator door opened on the fifth floor, Captain V.D. Fulcher was standing there. He yapped at Cuddy. “Where have you been? Is that that dog?!” Mrs. Mitchell jumped behind me, and I hid her in my coat.
“Going up, sir,” Cuddy said, and pushed the button, but Fulcher shoved his fake-madras shoulder against the door.
I asked, “You been waiting in the hall for us long, Captain?”
Fulcher had his mouth click going at a quick tempo. “Do you two ever bother listening to the radio dispatch in your car?”
Cuddy said, “I like Loretta Lynn better. He likes Mama Rainey.”
“Ma,” I said.
“Where’ve you been all day?” Fulcher wasn’t spluttering; that meant Rowell hadn’t called him, which surprised me. I said, “We got a lead a couple of hours ago about a possible fence for the jewelry and coins, and we followed it up.”
“I don’t suppose you found out much of anything?” Fulcher’s face was so smug, I started to wonder if, despite our advice, Preston had decided to confess. “Come to my office.” Our leader marched ahead.
• • •
In fact, we hadn’t found out much of anything from our lead at the Melody Store. Ratcher Phelps’s response to my wanting to play “Moonlight Bay” on the banjo for my mother was to regret that he was unable to help me, especially considering that he was always happy to assist the police.
“It must have been your overcoat, Savile,” Cuddy said. “I should have asked. You just don’t look like a banjo player.”
Ratcher Phelps smiled. He was a small black man of sixty-some, wearing a black pinstripe suit with an American-flag tiepin and square, yellow-topaz cuff links. He had the rhetorical lugubrious look of a well-to-do funeral director, and smiled with aggrieved disappointment at our suspicions that he might be trafficking with petty thieves. On the way from the Rib House to East Hillston, we’d called in a check on him, and the last charge against Phelps was twenty-five years old, when someone who hadn’t liked him much had phoned the station to say there were four-dozen Lady Bulova watches in his car trunk. Since then, not so much as a parking ticket had brought him to the department’s attention, although he had a nephew either less virtuous or less careful.
Mr. Phelps’s ostensible business was musical instruments. It was in his Melody Store, while mentally adding up the spinets and electric organs all around him, that he told us sadly it was always the same old story. “And the years don’t change it, and the government won’t
change it, and nothing I see’s going to turn it around, and, gentlemen, I guess that if I let it bother my tranquillity of mind, I doubt I’d sleep peaceful, which I do.” He counted the burnished trombones and glossy clarinets that hung glittering out of reach on the walls and were purchased through high-interest installment payments by the parents of East Hillston’s state-famous high school band.
“That’s good. You get your rest,” Cuddy said. “Poor Lieutenant Savile here’s an insomniac, and my upstairs neighbors are too much in love. Now about these emerald earbobs I was mentioning.”
“It is dispiriting and grievous to me,” Phelps said, rolling his tongue around the words as if he were readying his lips to play what he had to say on one of his saxophones, “the same old way when white people rob and steal what belongs to some more white people, the first thing to transpire is the black people get paid the call by you people.”
“That about takes care of all the people,” said Cuddy. “Let’s drop all of them for now except the ones called Pope, and talk about a diamond and sapphire bracelet.”
“If you young men want a clarinet, a harmonica, if you are inclined to a piano in your home, we can talk ’til you buy or I close. But, gentlemen, I don’t sell jewelry.”
I said, “Do you buy it?” and he showed me his cuff links and smiled his sad, insincere smile. I tried again. “Do you buy rare American coins, and might you be interested in a reciprocal exchange? For instance, an upcoming appearance of your nephew William Phelps currently involving petty larceny, but susceptible to abatement.”
His lips repeated reciprocal, either because he liked the idea or liked the word and intended to add it to his already palaverous style.
I said it again for him: “Reciprocal.” My lips were a little numb after three drinks, and I thought maybe I’d mispronounced it.
His morose filmy eye lamented the Fall awhile before he said, “Such as, to what?”
“Shoplifting,” I said.
“And suspended,” Cuddy added.
“I know a Mister Dickey Pope,” he said. “Who used to buy strings and picks from me for his guitar. But I haven’t seen him since summertime. Maybe he gave up on his playing.” Phelps’s gloom suggested this would have been a wise decision. “No, not since summertime.”
I said, “Anybody besides Popes come to mind?”
“No, sir, they don’t. What would these jewels and these American coins happen to look like if I was to happen to glance down at one on the sidewalk in the midst of my constitutional?”
I described them. Only the rarest of Bainton Ames’s coins had been kept in the bedroom safe and only they had been stolen; the rest, the less valuable type sets still sat in their small vinyl boxes in the Dollard study. Among the missing, according to the detailed records Ames had kept in his neat, spidery hand, were a 1907 Saint-Gaudens double eagle, an 1841 “Little Princess,” a Bechtler’s five-dollar gold piece, and an 1880 Stella Liberty head with coiled hair; the last alone was worth at least sixty-five thousand dollars.
Phelps shook his head sorrowfully. “Isn’t that something? A couple of old dirty coins are worth more than all my horns put together.”
Cuddy said, “I know what you mean,” and rapped a beat on a snare drum so wretched-sounding that Phelps’s eyes moistened even more. I bought a collection of simplified Gershwin songs, and he came close to selling me a new piano.
“Nice to meet you,” I told him.
He moistened his lip. “The feeling is reciprocal.”
• • •
In his office now, V.D. Fulcher was turning the plastic cube that contained photos of his offspring from child to child. Cuddy and I were listening to him ask us again, “Who is this unidentified black source you say doesn’t know anything? There’s getting to be too many nigrahs in this case.”
I said, “You mean like the head of forensics?”
He bounded across to the file cabinet and jerked open the drawer, flashing the plastic digital watch he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist.
“I mean,” he gloated, “I have one of Mrs. Dollard’s earrings.” There was an unavoidable twitch of surprise from us both that Fulcher must have treasured. “You know who had them? Reverend Hayward.”
Cuddy said, “I didn’t realize Reverend Hayward was a nigrah! My, my, he looks as white as you do.”
Fulcher said, “You’re treading, Mangum. That crazy old colored woman Hayward takes care of came into the vestry today and dropped this in the collection plate by his elbow.” He unclenched his fist, and green flashed out. “He couldn’t get her to tell him where she got it. You know who I mean. The Bible nut. Sister What’s-Her-Face. She had a pretty expensive umbrella, too. Might be connected.”
“It’s Senator Dollard’s,” I said.
Cuddy said, “Damn, you are psychic.”
In the interrogation room, Sister Resurrection, indifferent to a destiny less than universal, paced out a square along the walls, so that Fulcher and I had to keep rotating on our chairs to see her. Harriet Dale, the only woman on the force with whom Fulcher felt comfortable, stood by, boxy and tight-curled. Cuddy had gone back in disgust to the lab.
“We ought to have her sedated,” Fulcher said, exasperated.
“Good Christ,” I told him. “We ought to let her go home. What the hell good is holding her supposed to do?”
“What’s with you, Savile? Ogilvey’ll be down in a second. Then we’ll make some progress.” Ogilvey was our consulting psychiatrist.
“I doubt it.”
In the gray cotton dress that Harriet Dale had somehow gotten on her, Sister Resurrection looked a third her usual size, but her sermon was the same, and in no evident way had she responded to Fulcher’s demands that she tell him where she’d found or stolen Mrs. Dollard’s earring. By the time Dr. Ogilvey arrived, she was in stride with the measure of the room she walked: “God is sick and tired of all this trash! The day coming He got to lay down His head. God fixing to move the mountains, pull over the sky, and lay down His weary head. No more shall He walk in the garden in the morning. No more shall He fret on the sinner’s hard heart. Matthew and Mark can’t hold Him back, amen. Mary weeping can’t hold Him back, Amen. His little baby Jesus can’t hold Him back. Hear the voice, hallelujah, say yes. God fixing to loose the Devil’s chains.”
“This woman is schizophrenic” was Dr. Ogilvey’s prompt diagnosis. He threw in “hebephrenic” and “a hundred percent delusional system,” and advised us our duty was to take her to the state institution. As for extracting from her the original whereabouts of the jewelry, his offhand estimate was that it would take him five years of daily work to bring her to acknowledge her own name, and in fact he doubted he’d ever succeed. Some years back I’d been forced to talk to several psychiatrists; this was the first time I’d believed one.
“What about if we sedate her?” pleaded Fulcher, but Ogilvey just pulled back on his car coat and left. The captain followed the doctor out, arguing the point. “I’m going home,” V.D. let me know over his shoulder. “We’re having company, and I’m already late.”
“Well, Sister,” I said. “Would you like a cigarette? No? Mind if I smoke?” Mrs. Dale began giving me a worried look. “Sister, you know that silver-haired man who knocked you down last night? That earring belonged to his wife. My mother was a friend of hers. And now somebody’s killed her. What’s your opinion, ma’am?” Mrs. Dale’s head jerked up; she thought I was talking to her. “Share your thoughts. You think that silver-haired man might have killed his own wife? Did that earring fall out of his car?”
Sister Resurrection was edging along the wall and shaking her head. She began again. “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego they were walking in the middle of the fire. But the flame of the fiery furnace never teched a hair of their head. The dragon he spits up fire in the night. High up. Down it rain.”
“Umbrella won’t help?”
She shook her head, back and forth. “Down it rain.”
I stood up,
and scared Mrs. Dale. Clearly she was torn between her assumption that I had interrogation techniques beyond her training, and her instinctive feeling that I was deranged. I said, “I’m going to call Reverend Hayward now, and he’ll come to take you on home.”
This alarmed Mrs. Dale enough to make her step forward. “She hasn’t been released, Lieutenant Savile.”
“Has she been charged?”
“No, sir. But I don’t have the authority…”
“I have the authority.”
With relief, she gave up her struggle. “Yes, sir.” Such is the comfort of rank.
• • •
Back upstairs, where I hadn’t been all day, Officer Hiram Davies peered at me over his bifocals with eyes earnestly innocent at sixty-four. Behind the front desk he still sat at attention in the uncomfortable wood chair where he sat all day, fearful of sloth and forced retirement.
“Here,” he called. He handed me a neat stack of his memo sheets and added a reproach. “I hope I got them all right.”
“Hiram, let me ask you a favor? Don’t mention my having called you about where Walter Stanhope lived.”
“How come? Is something wrong?”
“No, but…”
“Nobody told me he wanted his whereabouts kept secret. Lots of people know he moved to Cape Hatteras.”
“I know, that’s not—never mind, just please don’t volunteer the information that I was asking.”
His nostrils pinched tight. “Are you saying I’m some kind of blabbermouth, because—”
One of his lines rang, and he transferred a call downstairs with elaborate precision.
I said, “One more thing, and I’ll stop pestering you.”
“You’re not pestering me.”
Uncivil Seasons Page 10