The Outside Man, page 6
“The sperm test. By your theory, Jason would have had to rape his mother, then kill her. Or is it the other way around?”
Cade flushed. “I don’t find incest that amusing.”
“It’s not that credible, either, and if Rayfield thought so he wouldn’t be leaning on Henry. And that business of the telephone call makes Henry look bad.”
“I take it you’re suggesting I mishandled Rayfield.”
“All that I’m suggesting is that we make a few careful inquiries on who Lydia might have seen lately.”
“By stumbling around after the police, looking worried as hell? That’s sheer foolishness.”
“Look, when it comes to people like the Cantwells, Rayfield’s on foreign ground. We’re in better shape to ask questions and understand the answers.”
Cade shook his head. “I would have thought that anyone who’d found Lydia like that would be damned glad there are police to handle it. And your Stafford Lumber trial is set for May. You should know by now that defending a five-million-dollar job-discrimination suit is full-time work.”
“You mean especially when your client thinks that manumission was contrary to God’s law.”
“Peyton Stafford’s eccentricities are beside the point,” Cade snapped. “You’re a lawyer. Sometimes a lawyer’s job is not to feel anything.”
Cade raised his head in the prideful pose he shared with Kris Ann. Our eyes locked in a strange, distasteful intimacy, as though whatever we said didn’t really matter, that what mattered was something else we never spoke but understood in the way of two animals circling each other in darkness. “Is is possible,” I asked, “that Lydia Cantwell had a lover?”
Cade’s stare turned hard. “It would contradict any notion people had of her. What’s your basis for that?”
“The sperm. If it’s not Jason, then it’s rape or an affair, and we’d better start wondering which. And who.”
“Good God,” Cade burst out. “Try to appreciate what you’re saying. Reputation is a fragile thing, lost in strange ways, often small ones and often unfairly. There will always be people now who think Lydia’s murder reflects on Henry. You forget that this is basically a small town—society’s small here, everyone’s known, and no one ever forgets. It’s not like the North. Slander Lydia with this kind of nonsense and you’ll just add to the gossip.”
I shrugged. “I’m not so sure that the Suzy Knickerbocker school of criminal defense will work here.”
Cade eyed me carefully. Then he leaned forward, chin resting on his folded hands, as if musing. “You know, Adam, I begin to see it more clearly. A young man, a little bored with his work, perhaps disappointed with himself, and then suddenly a friend is in trouble and it’s only the young man who’s sensitive enough to understand the friend, and smart enough to save him. The police are on a witch hunt, and the friend’s lawyer is only involved out of ego—he’s an older man and the young man can see how others in their firm have indulged him until he’s become like a spoiled child, blind to his own limitations.” He paused to give me a look of infinite comprehension. “Isn’t that how it is?”
His grasp of my view of him, the disparaging inversion of my motives until they were those I saw in him, left me off balance. I took a long swallow of coffee. “That’s fascinating, Roland. Maybe you should try it out on Henry.”
Cade’s eyes flashed. His mouth opened, then closed. In a cold voice he said, “You’ll do no good with this.”
“You can’t know that.”
“It’s enough that I think it. If you want to survive in this firm you’ll do what I tell you and no more.”
“Unless Henry overrules you.”
“He’s still in shock, for God’s sake.”
“That was my point yesterday. Unlike Rayfield I’m willing to wait until Henry knows what he’s saying. We can talk to him tomorrow.”
Cade looked astonished. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you? Even with what he’s gone through.”
I sipped some coffee. “If I have to.”
Cade considered me a moment longer. Then he picked up a file with an air of infinite weariness. “Go ahead, then,” he answered, suddenly bored. “I’ve got real work to do. But it goes no further than the Parsons woman. I want an end to this before you ruin Henry.”
I stood, surprised but ready to leave. “I’ll try not to get him arrested,” I murmured, and closed the door carefully behind me.
I opened the door and got out, looking up and down the street. The ripe morning sun captured its neglect with merciless clarity. The place next to Etta’s had boards for windows and a picket fence like a row of bad teeth. But her own house was whitewashed, with red roses growing behind the neat square of lawn and honeysuckle near the porch. I went there and knocked.
The door was opened by a light-skinned black woman with processed hair and obsidian eyes which seemed centuries old. A shadow crossed her face. “You’re Mr. Shaw.”
It was less question than an affirmation of surprise: I was out of place here, had ventured where I did not belong. “May I come in?”
She backed reluctantly into a living room whose formal couch and coffee table I recognized as having once been Lydia’s. They mixed incongruously with faded brown walls and the faint smell of camphor, as if this were a halfway house between poverty and the Cantwells’. The blinds were drawn and the absence of sun lent the room the brooding sepia tinge of an old color photograph whose tints have blurred. On the coffee table was a miniature of Lydia Cantwell’s mutilated portrait.
Etta pointed me to a cane-back chair, arranging herself on the couch with ankles crossed and hands folded in her lap. “How may I help you, Mr. Shaw?”
She had almost no trace of an accent.
The chill I felt was more than roses or a picture. It was her careful movements, the air of courteous interest to match a cool, inquiring voice, even the way she tilted her head like it was something fine. It had all belonged to Lydia Cantwell.
“I’m trying to help Mr. Cantwell,” I said at last.
“Mr. Cantwell called here yesterday, crying.” Her throat tightened. “I couldn’t understand it any more than him. I’d been with her for twenty years.”
I nodded. “Perhaps if we could talk about that.”
Her look was sad yet prideful. “I don’t know what good that will do.”
“I know this is hard, Mrs. Parsons, but I’m trying to learn why anyone would kill her. You and she must have talked over the years.”
“Some.”
“About Jason?”
Her face set in the impassivity of an Aztec mask. “I heard they fought last week,” I prodded.
The small shrugging gesture she made was more a curling of shoulders. “They fought some—off and on.”
Her tone was guarded. “She’s dead now,” I began, then realized that Rayfield had used those words to me. “What I mean is that she’s got no confidences now as important as helping Mr. Cantwell.”
She watched me without answering. “Do you know what they fought about?” I tried.
Her gaze moved to Lydia’s picture. “They were in the library,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear much except that Mrs. Cantwell was upset.”
“Exactly what did you hear?”
“Something about politics.” Bitterness pulled at the corners of her mouth. “I can never make sense out of what Mr. Jason says, just a lot of craziness and screaming.”
“What did Jason have to scream about?”
“Money, what she thought or did about things—it didn’t matter between him and her. He loved her, and he hated her, too.”
There were echoes in the words. “Enough to kill her?” I asked softly.
Her veiled glance swept the room, returning to the picture. It seemed to check her anger. She folded her arms. “I don’t know.”
I tried switching subjects. “Did Mrs. Cantwell have many visitors? I mean, during the day?”
She seemed relieved. “Surely,” she nodded, “what with her committee work and things.”
I hardened my voice. “Anyone special?”
Her eyes grew large with understanding. Reflexively she said, “What do you mean?”
I hesitated, suddenly wondering whether Rayfield had been there or was coming later, and then I saw what Cade had meant: “So Mr. Shaw came to see you, Mrs. Parsons?” “Yes, sir.” “And what did he want to know?” Leaning forward, I asked, “Have the police been here?”
She stiffened. The fetor of too much bad history came to me in the darkened room: a black woman, cornered; a white man wanting answers. I pushed all that aside. “Have they?” I demanded.
She shook her head. “No.”
“They will, Mrs. Parsons, and when they do, they’ll ask the same things and you’ll tell them, because you have to. All I’m asking is that you do that much for Henry Cantwell.”
She eyed the floor in confusion. For an instant I felt close to something. But when she looked up, her head was tilted in that haunting angle of repose. “I’ll tell them she and Mr. Cantwell got on fine, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s partly what I mean.”
“Mrs. Cantwell was a good woman,” she said coldly. “It won’t help Mr. Cantwell or anyone else to try to know everything about her.”
She began smoothing her skirt.
I knew then it was useless. In her reactions—the crumbling poise retrieved by her symbiotic grasp of the dead woman’s personality—was an unsettling glimpse of her own life. Over time, she had become half of someone else, until now she protected not just Lydia Cantwell. She protected herself.
I stayed long enough to ask the gardener’s name.
EIGHT
I parked next to the L & N railroad yard and started up the street. On both sides were row shacks painted a flat green that peeled like dried bark. Except for cramped porches there was no shade and the street was pebbled with glass and gravel and lumps of tar and crowded with boys in cut-offs who pitched and batted a red rubber ball. Their parents—men in undershirts and women in cotton dresses—watched me from the porches.
On the third porch to my left a lone black man wearing Army fatigue pants hunched in a metal chair. At his feet were an old coffee can and a bottle of beer which sweated in the heat.
“I’m looking for Otis Lee,” I told him.
The man spat tobacco in the coffee can, took a long, deliberate swallow of beer, and said, “What you want?”
The preternaturally deep voice seemed to go with the rest of him. He was thick shouldered, with thick wrists and forearms and calloused hands. His face—deep black with large pores and a flat nose that looked broken—sat on a ringed, fleshy neck like some heavy object. But it was his eyes that set him apart. They were a bitter orange-yellow, the left pupil discolored by a white star. I stepped up on the porch, answering, “To talk about Lydia Cantwell.”
His stare was red rimmed and implacable. “You the police?”
“Henry Cantwell’s lawyer. I’m calling on people who knew Mrs. Cantwell.”
“I heard she was dead.” The words were devoid of feeling, as if it were a chance news item: a moon shot, the death of a stranger. “Workin’ for folks, that don’t mean you know them. I only worked there a month. Didn’t know that lady at all.”
And don’t give a damn, his expression said. “Mind if I sit, Mr. Lee?”
He looked me over with stony dispassion and then nodded perfunctorily toward the metal chair next to his. Sitting, I could see only a sliver of his house through the screen door: a worn chair, a television, bare floors, bare walls—a transient’s room. “Been in Birmingham long?” I asked.
He put down the beer and folded his hands, answering in a resentful grunt. “Maybe six weeks.”
“You from around here?”
“I’m from nowhere. Been in the Army thirty years, bein’ a drill sergeant. Just got out.”
I placed his accent then: the low, emphatic chant of a noncom after years of order giving. “How’d you happen to pick Birmingham?”
“I was born in north Alabama,” he shrugged. “Served at Fort McClellan. It’s a place I knew, so I came here.”
“How did you find the Cantwells?”
The porch was close and hot. A drop of perspiration ran down Lee’s forehead to the bridge of his nose. “How’s this gonna help you,” he finally said, “botherin’ me with these questions?”
“I don’t know yet.” I loosened my tie. “You have another beer?”
Lee’s strange eyes widened in something like astonishment. “I’m fresh out. I didn’t know you was plannin’ on resting here.”
“I thought maybe we could talk.”
“Look here,” he said impatiently. “I got out of the army with my children growed up, my wife gone off, nowhere to go, and nothin’ to do. I got some retirement and I figure this city’s as good a place as any to find work, maybe stay outdoors. So I get some temporary quarters and go around where the big houses are at to ask if they need a yardman. I figure I do that awhile, then get some nursery to hire me. I do Mrs. Cantwell’s yard a couple of days a week and one or two other folks’.” His voice turned thick and sarcastic. “Now, that satisfy you, or you figure I killed the lady?”
“That wasn’t what I was asking.”
Lee stroked his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Well, I figured you was fixin’ to ask me that. I know how much white folks always worry about black men rapin’ their women.”
“Yeah, well, I thought I’d wait awhile and just sort of spring it on you.”
He grunted, unamused, and turned toward the street. A bat thumped and a tall boy streaked after a fly ball, leaped twisting to hang in the air, and caught it. Lee watched him. “Mister,” he said slowly, “the only people I ever killed was in Korea and Vietnam—and they was yellow, not white.”
“Have any idea why someone would kill Mrs. Cantwell?”
“No way.”
“Anyone ever visit while you were there?”
He sipped his beer. “You mean men?”
“If there were any.”
“I wasn’t the doorman. Just did the yard. It’s the maid you want.”
“I’ve done that. That’s why I’m here.”
He drank more beer, too casually. I imagined his calculations: what had Etta told me, how much did I expect him to know. He finished swallowing. “Only thing I noticed was a green Cadillac parked there two, three times. Don’t know whose it was.”
“What kind?”
“New model,” he said grudgingly. “Dark green. One of the big ones.”
“Would Mrs. Parsons know whose it was?”
“Prob’ly.” It was said with contempt. “She was hangin’ ’round Mrs. Cantwell all the time.”
I leaned back. “Did Mrs. Parsons ever talk about Mrs. Cantwell’s father or the Grangeville case?”
“Didn’t talk to me about anything,” he said harshly. “What the Grangeville case?”
“An old trial. They electrocuted two black men for raping a white girl. I figured you’d heard of it.”
Lee took a contemplative sip. “How long ago that happen?”
“Forty years or so.”
“That makes me about eight years old, don’t it? I wasn’t readin’ then and killin’ black folks wasn’t news.”
There were cries from the street. The red ball bounced onto the porch, followed by a small boy with large, hungry eyes and a head too big for his body. Lee threw it back underhand and watched the boy run away to his game. Without turning, he said, “You interrupted my peace. Go back where you belong.”
I shrugged, standing. “Thanks for your time.”
He didn’t look up. “You gonna chase the cops over here?” he asked in a bored, accusing tone.
“Nope. I figure they can find you themselves.”
I started to leave. “What you say your name was?” he demanded.
I turned. “Adam Shaw.”
He plucked a wrinkled pouch of chewing tobacco from his pants pocket and stuffed some in his cheek, chewing with a grinding slowness as he looked me up and down. “Well, Mr. Shaw, you been askin’ questions like you own this place and me with it. How long you figure I’d last doin’ that at white folks’ houses?”
The hatred in his eyes was impersonal and years deep. “Not long,” I answered, and walked back to the car.
I sat there thinking as Lee watched me from the porch. Then I drove toward Henry Cantwell’s, stopping at the library for the book on Grangeville.
NINE
When I got there the Cantwell place had lost its magic. The roses looked tired and the house too large and gloomy. It was like revisiting a place you hadn’t seen in years but remembered better than it was.
The thin woman who answered had coiffed and lacquered gray-blonde hair, thick glasses, and a bony face whose tension showed in the unnatural tightness of her mouth as she spoke. She was Mr. Cantwell’s sister, she said tersely. What did I want?
“I’m Adam Shaw. Henry’s lawyer.”
Her mouth relaxed slightly, showing age lines on her upper lip. “I thought you were another reporter.” Her tone was softer. “Your Kris Ann called just a while ago. She’s been very kind—both her and Roland.”
“We’re all concerned about Henry. How is he?”
She didn’t move from the doorway. Her glasses magnified eyes that even without them would have seemed large and nervous. “He’s as you would expect.”
“I didn’t know how bad that might be. Things got rough with the police yesterday.”
Her shoulders drooped. “He just watches, and you don’t know what he’s thinking.”
I nodded. She realized that I was still on the doorstep and motioned me inside. “I’m sorry,” she said distractedly. “The last day has been very hard. I’ve been worried over Henry and afraid that whoever killed Lydia might come back. If it weren’t for Roland …” She shook her head. “Even when I was small this house frightened me and now there’s this business with the police.”
