Uncivil Seasons (19 page)

“I owed him favors, he put it.” Having said this in his flat tone, Stanhope returned to the bedroom. He came back clearing his throat repeatedly and carrying a scuffed black violin case. For a bizarre moment I thought he was bringing me the one that had belonged to my father, which I knew my mother still kept at home. Then he said, “You called up, I thought about it. I said, okay, come on. So. You came. I don’t much like looking back.” He set the case down on the worn-smooth corduroy covers of his couch, and snapped open the clasps. “Long time ago, some of us used to play. Not much. Just a little on weekends. Bainton Ames and me.”

I understood what he meant. “And my dad.”

“Some. It was no big thing.”

“I don’t know if you knew. My dad died, some years back.”

“Yes, I know.” He closed the lid on the bright ruddy wood of the violin.

I sat down beside his coffee table; under its glass top, shells were carefully arranged on sand. I said, “I hope you aren’t just agreeing that I’m on to something because you knew my father. And otherwise you’d think I was unbalanced too.”

“No. But I wouldn’t have let you come out. I think it’s possible you’re on to something. I don’t think Mr. Cadmean would bother making a call if you weren’t on to something. I just don’t know what the something is. When somebody tells me, they hate to mention it, but they’re disinterestedly eager to keep somebody else quiet, I wonder why. Where’s the string tied? Motiveless benevolence?” He shook his head. “But you probably notice I’m not much on the species. Forty years, arresting them for hating each other and trying to grab whatever the other one’s got—it’s enough.”

We sat listening to the kerosene bubble in the stove, and to the wind, and the tireless surf.

I said, “They can surprise you.”

“Not enough. I stick to fish now.”

I pointed at his shelf of records.

He nodded. “Yes. And to music. Music’s just itself. No motives.”

“People wrote it. People play it.”

“It doesn’t care who. Not a bit.” As he stood up, he scratched his brown long hands through his hair. “You even bother to bring along any tackle?”

“It’s out in the car.” I smiled.

“If you want to, go get it,” he said, and coughed. “There’s a cove on Silver Lake I’ll show you, down some; you might get a bass. Crankbait’ll sometimes stir one up in winter. Up to you. They call you Justin now?”

“Pardon?”

“Used to call you Jay, didn’t they? Seems like they called you Jay last time I saw you.” He held the tan thin hand out at the height of his waist. “You ought to quit smoking,” he added, and held out my coat.

Before I left, my two-pound bass wrapped in foil, Walter Stanhope let me use his telephone to make some calls, which I charged to the department. Mr. Bogue of Bette Gray Corporation in Atlanta told me busily he couldn’t possibly remember a conversation with Bainton Ames fifteen years ago, and thought it could hardly be relevant now, but he’d have his secretary send me a memorandum should anything come to mind. He said briskly that he still very much regretted the loss of Bainton Ames, and now, of Mrs. Dollard. And, yes, he had spoken to a police chief about the coin. He was sorry to hear others were missing now. If we recovered them, he would be interested in purchasing a few from the owner. The coin Ames had shown him fifteen years ago was, he recalled, an 1839 classic-head Liberty quarter eagle minted in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a poor sister of the star of the Ames collection, an 1841 quarter eagle known as the “Little Princess” among numismatists, but still quite something to possess. He added that he’d lost another chance at just such a piece only two years ago at an auction in Washington, D.C., and concluded in a hurry, “Was that all?” I took down the name of the auction gallery.

Then I called Hillston to tell Cuddy I was going to stay overnight on the Banks. He told me to come back now. He said, “You know that wall in that Shakespeare play you were just in? That wall you peeked through and the lion ate your girlfriend? That wall’s about to fall on your head, old Mister Bottom. And it is the only thing between you and V.D.’s snapping teeth. I am in reference to that wall being your fancy kin and friends. They are falling off. Old Cadmean called up here.”

“And Hiram told him where I was! God damn it.”

“I jumped on Deacon Davies, but he didn’t mean no harm. He got real peevish: yes, you told him not to mention it, but how was he to know that meant including not to
Mr. Briggs Cadmean
who had donated the very floor he was standing on! He thought maybe you meant don’t mention it to
me
.”

“God damn it.”

“You already said that. What’s with that fat old bald man? What’d you say to him last night? He must have hopped up and down on V.D. bad about your trying to string up Senator Dollard.”

“I didn’t say a word to Cadmean about Rowell.”

“Well, something rubbed him wrong. You better come home. Old V.D.’s saying you may need some quick R and R, by which I mean Restraint and Roughing Up. Says you’re bonkers and he’s gonna have Dr. Ogilvey come see you.”

“Oh, great.”

“Um hum. There’s more. Says Harriet Dale, our lady flatfoot flathead, told him she was ‘scared’ of you, the way you and Sister Resurrection were shooting the breeze on the same frequency downstairs yesterday. Listen here, General, when it gets so the only friends you got at headquarters are white trash and nigrahs, it’s time to pucker and pick up the bugle, and I don’t mean ‘Charge!’ As my daddy said after forty-two years on the line at C&W, ‘Enough’s enough.’ And the truly bad news is Preston’s told Fulcher he
did
pick up that silverware. Off the side of the road on Wade Boulevard around two in the morning the night of the murder. While out cruising for Charlene. He claims it caught his eye when he stopped for a red light and emptied out his brains into the ashtray. ‘Those sacks must have fallen out of the killer’s car,’ he tells us. I’m real disappointed in Joe Lieberman. He’s already talking plea bargaining for Preston. Fulcher’s got Ken Moize and the other justice boys hot to trot. Murder one. They’re going for it.”

“Where’s Charlene?”

“Can’t find her. We’re looking.”

“She might have gone after Hudson.”

“The Great Smokies are great big.”

“Well, who knows Hudson? Did he have any friends?”

“Let’s not take time out for humor. Speaking of which, I’m going out now to eat supper at Ye Olde Pine Hills Inn. I’m trying to go suave, see, and I said to myself now where would old suave Savile take a girl? So what’s good there? How’s their pizza? I’m taking Briggs. I wanted you to be the first to know, in case you found out.”

“Briggs?”

“Junior. The professor. I took six Valiums and called her up, and I think I heard her say yes.”

“So why are you telling me?”

“On accounta your tone right now.”

“She was supposed to stay with Joanna Cadmean.”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Cadmean. Not to worry. I’ll make her promise to lock up. Listen to this, I’m going to take over my basket-ball pool, and let her take a whing at it. She never saw a game in her life. But well, hell, why not? So get on back. Not that there’s all that much we can do anyhow. If you see some fellows in white coats with a net on the front steps here, don’t stop to chat.”

“Could you start a check on the late-night gas stations on Raleigh Road? If Rowell drove back and forth twice that Sunday, maybe he got some gas, God willing.”

“Savile, you are
stubborn
. Anybody else ever tell you that?”

“Rowell Dollard, for one. Constantly.”

“Well, I hate to spit on your birthday candle, but you got about as much chance of pinning either one of those killings on him—I don’t care if he’s Jack the Ripper—as you got of getting Lunchbreak Whetstone to cook you three squares behind a picket fence. Adiós and happy holiday.”

“What holiday?”

“Lawdy, Ashley, you don’t know it’s a state holiday? Today’s General Lee’s birthday! Yaahoooo! Shall we rise? We shall rise!”

I said, “Your jocularity is getting me down,” and hung up. I felt too tired to drive for four hours. As it turned out, it took me closer to five. And it was 8:30 when I reached Hillston and changed clothes, and headed across town to C&W Textiles.

I was stubborn.

That I was stubborn had moved into familial myth long ago when, at age six, I’d trekked one night in cold rain to the home of a fellow first grader three miles away, whom I rightly believed had stolen my harmonica. That was, as it proved, my first case of detection, and one involving the police as well, for a patrol car had found me on North Hillston’s winding roads, trudging, sodden, home to Catawba Drive with my harmonica.

That I was stubborn had kept me bloodied and facedown in mud through the autumns of junior high school, attempting to play the game of football, for which I had little talent and less bulk.

“No, you have your father’s talents, and my character,” my mother would say. “That’s a Dollard will. We’re all stubborn.”

“Everybody in the state of North Carolina is stubborn!” was always my father’s reply.

On vacations, to the beach or the mountains, the only times I remember his being so garrulous, my father would say (as furious drivers passed him on the shoulder, or waitresses refused to let him order what he wanted), “North Carolina is such an ornery state. Virginia may be stuck up. But North Carolina is stiff-necked. You won’t give in, you won’t give up, and you won’t move out. Did you know, Jay, until recently, ninety-nine and a half percent of the people living in this state were
born
here, and the precious few of us that weren’t are looked on with considerable suspicion?”

In proof, he would always point out that we claimed to be the first colony, even though we were a lost one; that our state was named after the only British monarch misguided enough to get his head chopped off (Charles I) and was half-settled by the crazed Highlanders who thought they could win that kingdom back for Charles III; that our president, Andrew Johnson, had been the only chief executive to get himself impeached; and that, in the seventeenth century, we had even been mad enough to declare war on Virginia!

My father would say, “The hornet’s nest, that’s what General Cornwallis called Carolina. Now, Virginia yields to no one in considered revolution, but, good Christ, you Tarheels rebel against polio vaccinations!”

“And proud of it,” I would call from the car’s backseat.

And Mother would add, “Our Edenton ladies had their tea party long before the bragging Bostonians, and what about our Culpepper rebels, and your great god Thomas Jefferson, sweet-heart, did nothing but plagiarize our Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence!”

And beside me Vaughan would turn the pages of his horror comic book as Carolina cars swept in a rage around us, “First In Freedom” on their plates.

And in school I was taught that we were indeed a stubborn state: the first colony to vote to leave old England, the last to ratify the new constitution. In the Civil War, first we wouldn’t secede, and then—though we lost more men than any other Southern state (and my mother, a Daughter of the Confederacy, could tell me the names of all those dead from whom I descended) and lost more men than this whole country lost in Vietnam—we wouldn’t surrender, not until seventeen days after Appomattox. And for ten years after that, while Federal troops guarded farmland matted with weeds, we rankled, stiff-necked. And now on the front-bumper plate of Preston Pope’s van rides a cartoon Johnny Reb, sword high, screaming, “Hell no! I won’t surrender!”

And when, at fourteen, I broke my heart refusing to stop trying to date Patty Raiford, who was ostentatiously in love with a senior (the first of her many husbands), Mother would say to my father, “Little Jay comes by his stubbornness honestly. Honey, he’s a Tarheel. My God, if I hadn’t been a Tarheel, I would have let you just slip away back to that awful girl from Alexandria. Remember her? She had the biggest bosom you would ever want to see. I never did believe those breasts were real, were they?”

And my father would say with his soft smile, “Good Christ, Peggy, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

And Mother would lean around from the car’s front seat and say to me, “Now, that’s a Virginia gentleman, I want you to know. That’s a Savile.”

At my father’s grave, Rowell Dollard had hugged his arm across my back. “You’re a Dollard, Justin. I won’t forget it. Don’t you.”

Under the lights, coming around the curve onto the Hillston beltway, I noticed the tan Camaro behind me, and the image stirred that when I’d driven home, a tan Camaro had been parked across the street near the entrance to Frances Bush College. The car was still behind me after I took the C&W Textiles exit, and when I pulled into the Dot ‘n’ Dash, it went by at a crawl. I waited; in a few minutes the tan nose edged, bouncing, out from the side street behind the store.

My escort kept behind me as I passed through the chain link gates that hem in the town of Cadmean’s mills. For five minutes I leisurely cruised up and down the long parking aisles, until finally the Camaro simply stopped in an open space behind me, and shut off its lights.

I reversed fast, slowed as I passed by, took down his plate numbers, and then continued on backward until I found a parking space.

Inside at the big board by the time clock, the driver of the Camaro walked by me without a look. Waiting for the elevator, he pulled off his orange John Deere cap and stuffed it in his mackintosh pocket. I remembered that combed-back white hair and the black moustache; last night out on the plant floor, he’d stared in at Charlene Pope long enough to make me remember.

The elderly division manager could tell me nothing about Charlene Pope’s present whereabouts; her future at C&W—if we were indeed thinking of arresting her—appeared to be in doubt. On the other hand, he was pleased to tell me about the floor’s instructional supervisor and elected union representative, Alice “Red” MacLeod, once I had assured him that far from being under suspicion, Miss MacLeod had proved a model citizen of cooperation with the authorities. Flat in the face of his own disapproval, the man obviously liked her, and, fears allayed that her politics had brought her to grief, that she might have incited a workers’ riot or kidnapped the governor, he let me know that “in spite of how it looks,” Red was “a crackerjack,” “a little steam-roller,” “smart as a whip,” “sound as a dollar,” and, in general, as industrious, reliable, and judicious as a socialistic union trouble-maker, only twenty-nine and female, could conceivably be.