Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  Still in critical condition, Purley Newsome—told of Winston's death—had assured Justin (the one person on the force he’d talk to) that the man had Satanic powers, and might easily rise from the grave. At Purley's hospital bedside, Justin had recorded on video-tape more ugly confessions, which cast all blame for everything solely on the former idol. Parenthetically, Purley implicated a great many others—his brother Otis, his friend Pym, Fanshaw Paper Company, the Carolina Patriots, and himself. Emptied of knowledge, Purley had then thrown himself on the hard rock of Mitch Bazemore's mercy, and been charged with first-degree murder in the death of William Slidell. The next day, Purley himself died.

  According to Nora Howard, all six trial lawyers had spent hours huddled around the TV screen in Hilliardson's chambers fighting over sentences like a panel of censors from the Legion of Decency. Although Hilliardson finally ruled that the tape itself was admissible, he had sustained many specific objections by the State and insisted on deletions of his own. Whether because he found them immaterial, or simply tediously maudlin, I don’t know. What was left, Nora told me, was good enough. “If they believe Purley about Winston, then they ought to believe him about Pym. And, let's face it, after one look at you, who wouldn’t believe anything about Winston?”

  So all week, Isaac kept the name of Winston Russell linked to the name Bobby Pym on the lips of witnesses. And like an old pool sharp, Isaac moved with smooth, relentless speed around the story of what lay behind the incident at Smoke's. Some of his witnesses were on the stand very briefly, and if their purpose wasn’t clear to the jury, Isaac's purposefulness had all the clarity of an enormous crystal ball; indeed, most of the jurors kept staring at him as if he were one. In a brief appearance, Zackery Carpenter testified not only to George's quiet character while in prison, but got in as much as he could about Winston Russell's very different prison career, as well as the names of a few of Winston's visitors. But while the State literally held its breath—Neil Sadler's face looked blue—nothing at all was asked, or said, regarding the warden's conversation with Julian Lewis the night of Hall's reprieve.

  Next, an elderly V.A. optometrist was called; all he did was state the dates of the eye exams he’d given George Hall, and the prescription of George's glasses. Next, under protest, Neil Sadler, the assistant D.A., took the stand. All he did was look huffy when asked to state through whose arrangements, and how often, he’d interrogated Moonfoot Butler. He looked even huffier when Isaac asked him to take off his glasses. Picking up the .38 revolver from the exhibits table, and waving it under Sadler's nose, the old lawyer then walked across the room, turned his back, suddenly spun around, raised his arm, and yelled, “What am I holding, Mr. Sadler?”

  Sadler snapped, “A gun!”

  “Look again.” Isaac had slipped the gun inside his jacket while walking away from the witness, and had nothing at all in his hand, which he was waggling back and forth. Sadler squinched up his eyes, then shoved his glasses back on. Isaac said, “Thank you. That's all.”

  Sadler leaned half out of his chair while Isaac questioned the white-supremacy survivalist, Charles Mennehy, whose leathery tan had grayed during his stint in the county jail. The ex-sergeant admitted by monosyllable that he was now under indictment for gun-smuggling and seditious activities connected with his leader-ship in a group called the Carolina Patriots. Mennehy clearly thought of himself as the strong silent type. Asked if he’d ever unloaded a shipment of guns from a truck in a town called Cyrusville, Georgia, he said, “Nope.” Was he sure? “Yeah.” All right, had he ever been in a room with the accused, George Hall, apart from this courtroom? “Nope.”

  “Never walked in on a conversation between George Hall and his employer, Mr. Dyer Fanshaw, in the offices of Fanshaw Paper Company?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Neil Sadler popped up. “The witness has answered the question!” Isaac shrugged at the jury, and after a few more questions to which the same “nope” was the only answer, he abruptly dismissed Sergeant Mennehy. There was interestingly little cross-examination. Next, Mr. Dyer Fanshaw himself was called. Walking briskly down the aisle while stroking his tie, he looked rich and indignant. The assistant A.G. stood up, twitching his thumbs together, while Isaac stared mournfully at the witness. The old lawyer said that he had only a few questions. The first two were easy: was Mr. Fanshaw the president of Fanshaw Paper Company? Yes, he was. Two: had George Hall been in his employ as a driver? He “believed so.”

  The next question came fast: seven years ago, had George Hall come to Fanshaw's office and told him he’d seen rifles being unloaded from a damaged crate that had fallen out of the truck Hall had just driven to Cyrusville, Georgia? Waxen-faced, Fanshaw said he could not recall such a conversation. Could he recall ever having been in his office with George Hall when Charles Mennehy entered the room? Fanshaw shook his head.

  “Is your response ‘no’?”

  No reply, and Isaac turned to the bench. “I ask that the witness be required to answer the question.”

  Instead, Fanshaw stared at the assistant A.G. The assistant A.G. bounced up, demanding to approach the bench. He sprinted there, Isaac met him, and they began whispering emphatically at each other. Fanshaw—legs crossed, buffed shoe twitching— watched them with a scowl of heavy patience.

  Hilliardson told both lawyers to be quiet. He then sent out the jury, who took it ill. The judge rubbed his beak awhile, as he studied Dyer Fanshaw. He then said he would hear arguments about whether Fanshaw, now under indictment on charges related to these issues, might be put in a position of prejudicing his own upcoming trial. Twenty minutes later, the judge shook his head. “I am satisfied that to compel the witness to answer might imperil his Fifth Amendment rights. The State's objection is sustained. The defense will drop this line of questioning.”

  When the jury returned, Isaac limped sadly back to the witness stand, and mildly asked Dyer Fanshaw, “Seven years ago, were you made aware of a plan devised by the late city comptroller Otis Newsome, together with Robert Pym, Winston Russell, and Charles Mennehy, to bring about the death of George Hall?”

  “Absolutely not!” blurted Fanshaw even before the assistant A.G., a shrill little man, could shout out, “Objection! Objection! This is completely beyond the pale, Your Honor! Mr. Rosethorn has summonsed a leading citizen of this community as a witness for the defense, and here he is accusing the man of plotting to murder the defendant himself!”

  Neil Sadler bounded to his feet in support of his superior. “Your Honor! Mr. Rosethorn is doing his best to drown us all in a sea of red herrings! Who's on trial here anyhow? What in the world has this got to do with the defendant's shooting of Robert Pym?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Sadler,” snapped the judge.

  Isaac shrugged. “All Mr. Fanshaw has to do is say, ‘No.’”

  Hilliardson leaned over the bench. “The witness will not answer. The objection is sustained. Strike the question.” Staggering to the jury rail with his arms in the air, Isaac moaned. “I give up!”

  “Mr. Rosethorn!” Hilliardson shook the gavel at him.

  And so Dyer Fanshaw was excused without admitting anything, but thoroughly satisfying at least some of the jury (to judge from their expressions) that he had an awful lot to hide, which was exactly what Isaac wanted them to think.

  After dramatically brooding in his chair until Hilliardson grew testy, Isaac stood up to call to the stand one Denise Mabry, an attractive black woman very demurely dressed. She was the prostitute I’d sent Wes Pendergraph to interrogate in Washington, D.C., the one whose name Hamilton Walker had given me. She swore that on the night of the Pym shooting, Winston Russell had called her over to his parked car—a blue Ford—and forced her to take him to her room in the Montgomery Hotel, where he’d made her perform oral sex on him. That while there, they’d both heard a gun fired on the street below; that he’d rushed to the window to look, then had quickly pulled on his clothes and run out of the room.
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br />   Isaac Rosethorn: “Your windows in that hotel faced where?”

  Denise Mabry: “Down on Smoke's Bar. When I looked out myself, I saw the man lying on the sidewalk. And a cop car. And a crowd.”

  Isaac: “Did you see Winston Russell down there on the street?”

  Denise: “No. I never saw him again. Except a couple of years later, here in this court.”

  “He was here on trial for assaulting a female friend of yours, was he not?”

  Mitchell Bazemore stood up. “Objection. Irrelevant.”

  “Sustained,” agreed Hilliardson.

  Isaac: “I withdraw the question. One more thing. Did Winston Russell show you a gun when he came to your room that night?”

  “Yes.” She glared out at the court. “He told me to suck on it.”

  On cross-examination, Mitchell Bazemore lambasted “Ms. Mabry's” reputation as an “honest woman,” by asking whether we should believe anyone who at the time of what Mitch kept on calling “the murder,” had been in the employ of one Hamilton Walker, “a notorious Hillston pimp.”

  Ham Walker, seated in the courtroom in a pale green linen suit, laughed out loud when Denise replied, “I don’t call you a liar just ’cause you’re a lawyer. Don’t call me one, just ’cause I’m a hooker.”

  Mitch then accused her of making this whole story up in revenge for the injuries inflicted by Russell five years ago on her “fellow prostitute.”

  She denied it. “I’d wanted revenge on Russell, I already got that reading my newspaper on Saturday.”

  Disgusted, Mitch shouted, “Are you telling me this man, under the criminal circumstances you described, identified himself to you?”

  She looked at Mitch as if he was crawling with maggots. “I knew who Winston Russell was. We all did. We had cause to know his name. And his face. And to be some place else from wherever he was.”

  Mitch went doggedly on. “Being preoccupied at the Montgomery, you, however, were not a witness to the shooting on the street below?”

  “No.”

  “Then you really have nothing to tell us about it. No more questions.”

  A plump woman in her sixties, a former waitress at Smoke's, was called; she testified that a good hour before George Hall had come into the bar that night, Moonfoot Butler had arrived there alone, and that he had made a “bunch of” phone calls from the pay phone by the toilets. He’d borrowed the change for them from her, and had never paid her back. On cross-examination, Mitchell Bazemore wondered with some of his old sarcasm how she could possibly remember details from so long ago. On recross, Isaac demonstrated with a quiz show of random questions that the woman had a truly remarkable memory, “and certainly one manifestly superior to Mr. Butler's.”

  Isaac's next witness was hostile. So obviously hostile that Judge Hilliardson was quickly persuaded to declare her as such. But Lana Pym was ambivalently hostile. She wanted to protect Bobby and Willie; she wanted to blame Winston and George. The contradictory pull of these desires confused her; a vulnerable position in which to be around Isaac. She sat there, bitter and nervous, a small, wiry young woman wearing too much cheap makeup, with her hair dyed a brittle brass, and sheathed in a pathetic black outfit that the State had obviously told her to wear as a sign of her prolonged widowhood. Isaac kept her on the stand over an hour, and the State only came to her rescue whenever the questions appeared to be straying from a simple story of rotten cops on the take, to a tale with political leanings. Not that Lana Pym knew a thing about who might have been covering up what for whom, or why. But she did know more than she’d ever admitted to us, and by a rapidly mixed bombardment of sympathy, traps, and accusations, Isaac forced her to flee, with most of her cache of facts, out into the open.

  “I wish I didn’t have to ask you to remember, Mrs. Pym. God knows, I feel for you deeply. Your only brother brutally murdered!…Well, so was George Hall's only brother brutally murdered. And by the same man! But if Winston Russell so tragically led your brother astray, isn’t it possible he cast the same evil spell over your husband, Bobby?”

  “Now, Mrs. Pym, if you think Winston might have been storing stolen goods in your garage, are you saying that Bobby didn’t know what was in those crates? Seven years ago you told the police you’d thought your husband was out bowling that night. Now you’ve said that he was home with Winston Russell, eating dinner. That Winston made several phone calls. That he received several phone calls, and that to your knowledge one of them was from Otis Newsome. Now—subsequently, Russell and your husband, both armed, arrived in separate cars, at the same time, at the same place: Smoke's Bar in Canaan, which I assure you is not a bowling alley. Yet you’re telling me they hadn’t made any plans while at your home?!

  “All right, Mrs. Pym. Say we accept your sworn testimony that Bobby did not drink, did not go to bars, was never physically violent, had no acquaintances in Canaan, did not know Moonfoot Butler, and had no reason to be seeking out George Hall. Well then! Please come up with some explanation—other than mine—as to why Bobby was in Canaan, in a bar, acting drunk, and violently provoking a fight with George Hall!

  “Ah, my dear woman. My heart aches when I think what you’ve suffered at the hands of this brute, Russell. Who, in the very hour of your husband's death, rushed to the hospital to tell you to lie! Didn’t he tell you to lie? Didn’t he tell you to keep quiet about his being with Bobby that night? Didn’t he??”

  By the time Isaac walked from the weeping Mrs. Pym over to the prosecutor's table and told them, “You may take the witness,” they didn’t want anything to do with her. Well, Mitch Bazemore did ask her if Robert Pym had ever said he planned to kill the defendant. She said, no, he had no reason to kill him. None. All she knew was that man sitting over there (George Hall) had shot Bobby, and Bobby was dead, and that man was still alive. Mitch said all he could do was offer her his apologies for “Mr. Rosethorn's shabby, contemptible, heartless, and inhuman treatment of a widow.”

  Isaac demanded that the remark be struck from the record as “warrantless, if not indeed actionable,” and he demanded an apology from Bazemore. While the two counselors were arguing, Judge Hilliardson excused Mrs. Pym, struck the remark, and called a recess until the next morning. Nora’d said that in chambers Hilliardson had asked Isaac if he could “expedite matters,” since he very much hoped the trial would not run into next week. At which the assistant A.G. had made the mistake of assuming a companionable and jocular tone with Hilliardson, even patting the judge's shoulder, while saying, “I couldn’t be more in agreement, Shirl. I’m set to fly the wife to St. Kitts Sunday.” Nora said that Hilliardson gave the man a stare that made hawks look namby-pamby.

  Actually, I didn’t mind sitting in court. It gave me an excuse to hang around the municipal building to check on HPD. I needed an excuse because Carl Yarborough and the city council had ordered me, with a supporting letter from Dr. Thanh at U.H. Emergency, to take a sick leave. In the meanwhile, Carl had wanted my recommendation for an acting captain; I’d recommended Etham Foster, who said if he saw me near my office he’d have it padlocked. Some people wondered why I hadn’t appointed Justin acting captain; his mother even asked me why. Alice didn’t.

  I’d expected I’d be the first witness called Friday. I wasn’t. When court convened, there was a big TV monitor set up on a table, angled toward the jury box. Isaac explained that he was going to show them a deathbed statement. Bazemore put in a pro-forma objection, was overruled, and took exception; the deputies pulled down venetian blinds in the tall windows; Nora inserted a video cassette, and Purley Newsome, his gaunt face propped up on hospital pillows, sulkily identified himself. It seemed to me the jurors were more riveted to his testimony than they’d been to anybody else's—maybe because televised dramas are realer to us now than live ones, maybe because of the story the sick man was telling. This was just some of it:

  “…So Winston and Bobby leaned on George Hall pretty hard, ’cause they needed a driver who was making that North Georgia run.
Bobby’d already busted Hall a couple of times, and they told him they’d do it again, get him in worse trouble, if he didn’t agree. They got Moonfoot to work on him too.…Nah, Hall never knew Slidell and Koontz were in on it.…All Hall had to do was park the truck at the drop-off point in Cyrusville, and, you know, take a hike for a little while.…Cigarettes. They told him it was just crates of cigarettes. Anyhow, he only made a couple of runs.…What I heard was, Hall freaked and the whole mess blew up.”

  There was a blip, then off-camera, Justin said, “By ‘Otis,’ you are referring to your brother, the late Otis Newsome?”

  Purley's eyes teared up. “Yes, I am.”

  “And you were there that afternoon when your brother Otis had a discussion about George Hall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who else?”

  “Bobby. Winston. And Charlie.”

  “By ‘Charlie,’ you’re referring to Charles Mennehy?”

  Purley had a coughing spasm, then he nodded. “That's right.”

  “What was said?”

  Purley muttered, “It was Winston did the talking. Winston said George Hall could mess us up good. How he’d seen the guns when the crate fell out and busted. Then Charlie said he was sure Hall could identify him. So Winston says, let's just get rid of him right now.”

  “Who is ‘him’?”

  “Hall. George Hall. So Bobby says, well, that's no problem. So Winston says, we’ll fix up a plan, you know, so Hall gets it resisting arrest.”

  “Gets it?”

  “Get Hall into a fight, act like they were trying to arrest him. Chase him out in the open somewhere. Then they could shoot him, like they had to.” Purley coughed, squirming higher onto the hospital pillow.