Alice ran back with my overcoat while I was telling Hiram, “Instruct car 32 to get on their horn: order everybody in the area inside, away from the windows. I want a square cordoned off quick, East Main along Pitt to Maplewood, nobody in but us. No press! Call Ray at the State Patrol for a couple of mounties, and get me as many more of our guys out there as fast as you can, okay? And listen to me, Hiram, make sure some of them are black. Fisher. Emory. Mike Jones. Pull in Summers.”
“Chief, you want the canine team?”
“Jesus, no. No dogs and no tear gas, you hear! That and the fuckin’ news is all the fuck we need now!”
He hung up.
As I raced out of the house, yelling back to Alice to phone Carl Yarborough, I bet myself that if Bubba Percy had his scanner on, he’d beat the Action News van out to Canaan, where I hoped they’d both run right into my roadblocks. I made some more wagers too, with my siren speeding east toward the sound of other sirens, past the old brick dilapidating sprawl of C&W Textile Mills: first off, if Governor Wollston had any feel for irony, which I doubted, he’d be struck with admiration for this latest twist of the Lord's whimsicality. Here Wollston had let his lieutenant governor, Julian Lewis, put some hometown pressure on him to postpone an execution, lest a racial disturbance mar the dignity of Briggs Cadmean's death, and here he was going to open his Sunday paper and see on page one a photo of a racial disturbance, instead of a photo of his press conference declaring a day of mourning for that great fallen captain of southern industry. Plus, George Hall was still alive; plus, his brother was now a martyr; plus, Wollston still had the decision about clemency or pardon to make, only with the stakes considerably raised, not to mention that in four weeks both State and Haver University would be back in session, and if only one out of ten students gave a damn about George Hall, that still meant forty-two hundred more possible protesters loose in the area than there would have been if he’d kept to his original execution date.
So I also bet myself that Lieutenant Governor Lewis would lose some points with his boss for ever having come up with that last-minute “stay” idea—maybe he’d even get dropped from a holiday dinner-party list. That Mitchell Bazemore, the D.A. (who, I’d heard, had had a temper tantrum about Hall's reprieve), would jump right on this mess like a whole family of acrobats on a circus spring-board. And, that off in his yellow stone chateau-style estate on Catawba Drive, A.R. Randolph was snarking at his wife that if she hadn’t changed her damn vote, the Club could have gone right ahead with the damn Confederacy Ball on the damn day and in the damn way they’d had it for the past ninety-six damn years.
The “Race Riot in Canaan,” as the Hillston Star dubbed it, was not really much of a riot, and it was all over by two A.M. Still, my cops were so terrified—with the strangeness, and flames, and smoke, and gushing fire hoses, and curses screamed out of the dark on poorly lit, rumble-strewn streets—that it was a near miracle they didn’t hurt somebody. The calmest creatures involved were the horses the three state patrolmen rode. I climbed up on a fire truck hood to see over the chaos, and used a megaphone to send two squads circling out a few blocks to flank the rioters (luckily, ganged pretty close together in the bitter cold wind). “Doesn’t look like they’ve got any serious weapons,” Sergeant Ralph Fisher shouted up at me.
I yelled against the noise, “Okay. Listen hard, everybody. We’re as good as they come. Prove it! Keep your guns holstered, keep your shields up, and don’t swing those sticks ’less you can convince me afterwards you had to!”
We did better than good; it didn’t take too long to funnel most of the rioters back toward Smoke's Bar, into a dead-end alley. Only one of what the Star called “the inflamed mob” (about two dozen black males, aged fourteen to twenty-two) sustained any injury needing treatment—a sprained ankle from a fall—and on our side, only Officer Titus Baker, who’d taken off his helmet, had to go to emergency—nine stitches over his eyebrow where he was hit by a chunk of stone hurled from the crumbling steps that were all that was left of Canaan A.M.E. Church. Oh, and a photographer pal of Bubba Percy's got knocked down by firehose spray and broke his wrist. Most of the property damage was minor—graffiti, broken car and store windows. But a new Thunderbird with Alabama plates had been rolled on its side, and wind had blown a fire in an open dumpster across into a lot selling Christmas trees, sending stacks of pines flaming up in pitch-crackling explosions. The heat scorched the near wall of the Greek grocery next door; inside, produce was smoke- and water-damaged. But the fire team had saved the store, had saved the block, and their chief and I (I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me) exchanged congratulations. The trucks were rewinding their hoses by the time Action News sneaked around my roadblocks. And by 3:00 A.M., our wagon was heading downtown with the last of the arrests.
The outbreak had started when four of the older boys, drinking at Smoke's, heard about Cooper Hall's death on the bar's television. One had flown into a rage and kicked his foot through some wood paneling. The bartender had promptly tossed them all out on the sidewalk. (He later denied he’d ever served them alcohol.) On the street, they’d run into other small groups, all of them “just hanging around,” telling each other rumors about the highway killing, and rumors that the Klan was behind it, a few sharing a bottle, a few sharing some coke, until finally somebody spiraled up enough frustration and rage to heave a stray grocery cart through the plate-glass front of ACME Loan Company (whose absentee owners, the Wister brothers, were well hated in the neighborhood—due to being a couple of shoddy white-trash gougers). Then somebody else threw a brick and somebody else smashed in the Thunderbird's windshield, and from there, the hot pleasures of destroying things took all of them off on a group high. Herd adrenaline, anger, and young testosterone pumping together—it's a hit that crack can’t touch. I saw it at work in Vietnam, doing stuff the Mother of God wouldn’t forgive.
By five in the morning the parents of most of the juveniles had come to post their bail and take them home. Hiram Davies was good with parents, consoled the distraught ones and preached forgiveness to the furious: one father was promising us that as soon as he got his son home, he’d beat him as close to death as he could manage.
The vandals we were left with in the interrogation room ranged in personality as widely as most groups do. Some were surly, some flip, one in tears, most scared. A seventeen-year-old (grabbed as he was enlarging the hole in the Thunderbird's window with a two-by-four) had a garrulous bravado way up there in Mercutio's league. Sergeant Fisher took away this boy's sunglasses and, having examined his pupils, nodded at me with a tap on his nose. “Flying high.” “No way,” announced the youngster with a solemnity that was an uncanny replica of the expression on Hiram Davies's face. “Let me tell you, okay,” he said, then bounced around the room, squeezing at the crotch of his pleated pants, while he confided in me that he was a victim of mistaken identity.
“Meaning you weren’t there?”
“Meaning I wasn’t there to be there, right? Check this out now, man, listen to what happens to me. I’m going down Maplewood, you know, doing my thing, you know. Wham, I’m in Rambo Land! I mean lumber's flying around my head, man, so listen, I’m lookin’, curious, you know what I mean, got my human curiosity same as you, all right, I’m lookin’ at the T-Bird, maybe some dude's inside, needs some help maybe, all right?” He paused, looked at Hiram Davies, who appeared skeptical, then turned his attention fully on me.
“I’m all ears,” I assured him.
“Wham, cop looks like a space monster comes arresting my ass! Listen to what he says, tells me this ain’t no way to ‘protest.’ Don’t dis me, I don’t run with these turkeys here, don’t lay that shit on me, protest is capital N-O-T my bag.”
“What's your name?”
“Walker. G.G. Walker. Check your books. You won’t see it. Go ahead.”
“Okay, G.G. Get back over there with the turkeys, my man, and check this out: misguided protest is gonna go down better with me than private enterprise,
like looting a T-Bird. Think about it.”
“See any merchandise? Hey, no way.” He opened his oversized tweed coat like a fashion model on a runway, presumably to invite us to search him for stolen property as he backed up, adding, “I’d like a receipt for those shades.”
The young man who’d originally kicked in the paneling at Smoke's Bar, slender, coal-black, with sullen handsome eyes, stared at the wall as I questioned him. His jeans were ripped down one side. Cuts on his knuckles were bleeding. “They tell me you started all this. That true?”
He shrugged, coiled at the end of the long bench, away from the others.
I nudged his foot with the toe of my shoe. “Make you feel any better? Listen, who do you think owned that car, who do you think was selling those Christmas trees? You think it was the people that shot Coop Hall? You think it was even white people?”
He shrugged.
“You punk assholes know somebody could’ve gotten killed?”
His eyes burned up at mine, then away.
“What's your name?” I pulled a chair over. “Come on, I asked you your name.”
He spat the word at the floor. “Martin.”
“Martin. Martin what?”
His eyes glared back at me, not blinking, and I was already seeing the resemblance when he snarled, “Martin Hall.”
Almost 7:00 A.M., false dawn, a hard empty blue, I’m on Cadmean Street driving home. The fact that the city didn’t burn down feels like a minor accomplishment that nobody much appreciates. In the last few hours, I’ve been accused of brutality and a bleeding heart both. Carl Yarborough has burst into my office with a suit on over his pajamas and reminded me that he's the first black mayor Hillston ever had, that he intends to keep on being mayor, and that if I intend to keep on being police chief, I’d better get on top of the Hall case fast. I find a message in my box from President Andrew Brookside's administrative assistant telling me Tuesday's the earliest her boss has a moment free to chat about threats on his life. I find a message that Mrs. Etham Foster wants to know where her husband is. The Channel 7 station manager's called me a fascist obstructing the First Amendment. Alice has phoned me because Justin hasn’t come home yet. Cooper Hall's teenaged cousin has stared at me with the dead man's eyes while I mumble platitudes like “What you did tonight's not the answer.” Stared at me, and said back, “It's a answer. Just not the one you motherfuckers wanna hear.”
I’m driving, I can’t think of anything good, except that off in a ten-by-five solitary cell in Dollard Prison, George Hall is still alive.
It's almost 7:00 A.M., my face feels like I’ve been lying in sand, my eyes feel like the sand got rubbed under their lids, a nightful of rank coffee and gooey rolls aren’t getting along in my stomach, and I’m heading home, two days before Christmas, to the longest relationship I’ve managed to hang on to for the past nine years—an old foul-tempered poodle. I reach for a tape, not looking. It's Linda Ronstadt. She's singing, “Some say the heart is just like a wheel; when you bend it, you can’t mend it.”
I tell her that's too sad a point of view.
I drive on past my turn-off, on over the Shocco Bridge, on down I-28, like I’m gonna just keep on driving west ’til the gas runs out. Then I see, sulfurous in the rising dew, the yellow flashers on the police trestles that mark where the Subaru and truck collided. They’re gone now, but near the skid marks and debris and gouged clots of red clay, there are two other cars parked on the shoulder. I know both of them. They belong to two detective lieutenants of mine. On a tarp near the rear of the station wagon lie neat rows of tools. I pump brakes, make a U-turn.
Etham Foster's shoving a flagged stick into the clay; tall, lean-fleshed, in jeans and sheepskin jacket, he looks like a black cowboy up at dawn, staking fence on the range. Thirty feet off, holding the other end of a tape measure, crouches Justin Savile in a cheap hick get-up he must have bought at a thrift store to wear bigot-slumming tonight. He waves at me like we’d run into each other at a cocktail party. As usual, Foster doesn’t bother looking up.
I pull over between them, get out, and lean on my door. “Y’all's wives are thinking of divorcing you. Me, now, I was thinking of firing your butts, but I see y’all already quit and took state jobs surveying the roads anyhow. I like your new outfit, Justin; it suits you. Dr. D., you been out here all night?”
Foster says, “Some,” then writes in his notebook, slowly sticks the pencil down its spiral loops, slowly winds the tape measure like reeling in a fish he knows is too little.
I lean one foot over the other, scratch at my chin stubble. “I thought I sent Wes Pendergraph out here to tell you to return to headquarters. Etham?”
“He told me.”
“Well, that's good.”
Foster licks his bristly mustache with the underside of his purplish lower lip, and yields enough to add, “Was out at the garage with the Subaru some.”
“Umm. I was out at a little riot in East Hillston. Even mounted patrols, Justin. I know you always wanted to be one. So, y’all didn’t happen to hear about a riot, did you? Guess not. Both been pretty busy, I guess.” I find some loose M&Ms in my pocket, and eat them. “You run into Savile here at his White Patriots’ hootenanny?” Foster doesn’t answer. I watch Justin brush clay off the knees of these orange-checkered polyester pants that are too tight. I lick my fingers with a sigh. “Lieutenants, I’m in a real bad mood. I’m in the kind of mood where I lose track of old times and camaraderie. Y’all got five minutes to tell me something good.”
Justin took longer. But it was good. This meeting he’d gone to with Preston Pope's contact wasn’t a very interesting meeting: this group called itself the “Carolina Patriots.” They’d read an article from The Fiery Cross. They’d served ribs from Hot Hat Barbecue. They’d listened to an ex–Green Beret sergeant lecture on survivalist tactics—what roots to eat, how to booby-trap your lean-to, where to cache your ammo—tactics for when white folks have to take to the woods to keep themselves pure from the tainted races. During the refreshments, Coop Hall's death had come up—they gave the news a cheer, but nobody tried to take the credit of knowing any insider gossip about who might have shot him. What had interested Justin was the fellow the rest seemed to think had the most right to an opinion: not because he said a word about it, but because he had a personal stake in anybody named Hall. Because his name was Willie Slidell, and as somebody happened to mention, his sister was the widow of Bobby Pym, and Bobby Pym was the cop George Hall had killed. So after these freedom fighters ran out of beer and adjourned, Justin decided he might as well follow Willie Slidell home instead of checking in with me, or bothering to phone Alice. And this trip was interesting, too. Turns out, Slidell's home was a farmhouse just off Exit 9 on the Interstate, and Exit 9 is less than half a mile from where we were standing right now.
So that's what Justin had to say. Etham didn’t talk. He opened the beautiful initialed briefcase I knew his wife had given him for his last birthday, because I went to the party and he showed up a half hour late. With a carefulness slow enough to make you hyper-ventilate, he took out a plastic bag. Inside it was a tiny crushed brassy cylinder, a fired bullet shell. He stretched up, tall as the sun lifting above the bare tobacco field behind him. “Thirty-eight,” he said. “Like I figured.”
chapter 7
Sunday morning I slept, drapes drawn, pillows over my head, Martha exiled. Early afternoon, I sat in a groggy stupor on the stool at my breakfast counter, staring at the smooth white lacquer surface, staring out my balcony sliders to the feathery horizon of dark winter trees behind the Shocco. Coffee eventually brought me back my brain, and with it yesterday's events. On a legal pad I drew a map of the section of I-28 along which Cooper Hall had been shot, sketched in Exit 9's turn-off, with Willie Slidell's farmhouse, and a question mark that stood for Justin's theory: since how could a car follow Coop all the way from Raleigh to Hillston without his spotting it, what if, Justin says, what if Slidell, or somebody, had waited at Exit 9 for the
Subaru to pass, pulled out then, and fired the shot? His theory didn’t answer the “how” and “why.” This somebody still needed to want Coop dead. Why? That seven years ago Coop's brother had shot Slidell's sister's husband might, I suppose, be a reason—especially if Slidell was attending white supremacy shindigs— but that didn’t answer the how. This somebody still needed to know that Coop would be coming down that highway at that time. I made phone calls to set up a serious search of Coop's apartment and the office of With Liberty and Justice on the floor below it. The person I wanted to find was the one Coop had been on his way to meet, because that's the person who had to know when and why he was driving into Hillston.
Meanwhile, the nervous green light on my answering machine kept trying to catch my eye and deliver its messages—several from newspapers, one apparently from Isaac Rosethorn. He’d started talking before the beep, but appeared to be canceling our dinner tonight at Buddha's Garden. One from Officer Nancy White, who sounded upset, two from Father Paul Madison, and three from our Haver County district attorney:
“Mangum, this is Mitchell Bazemore. Call me. It's 9:06.”
“Bazemore, Mangum. It's 10:38. I’m leaving for church. I’ll be in my office at one.”
“Mangum, call me immediately.”
“Chief? This is Zeke Caleb here. The D.A. is on my back about where you are. You coming in?”
Two other messages I didn’t expect, and not only because I wondered who’d given the callers my unlisted number:
“Mr. Mangum, my name is Edwina Sunderland, Mrs. Marion Sunderland. I had the pleasure of meeting you Friday at the Hillston Club, and I trust you’ll pardon my presuming on the briefness of our acquaintance, and the shortness of this notice, but I’d like to invite you—” Mrs. Sunderland's stately pace had made no allowances for modern impatience, and the machine cut her dead here. She didn’t appear even to realize she was speaking with a machine, for she phoned back, saying, “Mr. Mangum, I believe we were disconnected. Would you be free to accept an invitation for dinner at my home on Boxing Day? The twenty-sixth? At eight o’clock. I look forward to hearing from you, good-bye.” She ignored instructions to leave me her number.
Time's Witness Page 12