Time's Witness by Michael Malone Page A

were some stretched out on chairs and tables) were gyrating like they’d stuck their hands into a fuse box. I gave a halfhearted look for Justin, but knew I wouldn’t find him; he's not a modernist and was probably already home one-fingering Cole Porter tunes on his upright. And I didn’t see the mayor and Mrs. Yarborough, or Paul Madison, or the Brooksides, or anybody I much knew. Maybe the older crowd had gotten word of Cadmean's death, and all gone home to mourn the passing of an era. If this group here had heard, they hadn’t let it get them down. Three very good-looking drunk girls (one, I realized, was Randolph's granddaughter) stood on the band dais, imitating the Supremes. They’d giggle when they’d turn wrong and crash into each other.
    I stood by the door in my wet raincoat a few more minutes. At a table beside me, a young freckled woman in a blue strapless evening gown sat alone, picking without much interest slivers of meat from a turkey carcass. She had a drunk tragic look to her, but it may have just been the smeared mascara. She said, “Know who you look like?”
    “Me?” I shook my head. “No. Who?”
    “You know who, he goes to the train station and it's raining and she doesn’t show up, and then she walks into his nightclub, you know the one.”
    “ Casablanca ?”
    “My mom rented the video. You look like that. I mean, your raincoat.”
    “He was much shorter.” I sat down at the table and ate some of the turkey. I said, “George Hall just got a stay of execution.”
    “Execution?”
    “George Hall. The governor granted a stay. He was going to be executed tomorrow.”
    She nodded. “Oh. The black man?”
    “Yeah.” We watched Randolph's granddaughter pretend to be Diana Ross. Then she said, “Hey, wait, I’ve seen you before. Like on TV? Were you on TV?”
    “Sometimes I’m on the news.”
    “No! It was a magazine or something.”
    I said, “Right. I’m the Hillston police chief.”
    She slapped my hand, presumably for lying. “Come on! Give me a break.”
    “Okay. I’m an investment banker. My name's Cuddy Mangum.” She nodded, but didn’t offer her own name, and as if by way of explaining her disinterest, she lifted the tablecloth so that I could see a ruddy young man sprawled in a dead drunk sleep on the floor, his head in her lap. “I don’t want to wake him up.”
    I said, “Honey, you could leave his head on that chair, drive to Charlotte, and it’d still be there when you got back.”
    She wanted to know why she should want to go to Charlotte, and I admitted I couldn’t think of a reason.
    In the lobby, the fencers’ dates were taking their pokers away from them because tempers had apparently run high; one guy had blood running from his nose into his shirt front; I now recognized him as Mrs. Sunderland's grandnephew, the professional skier. The girl who thought men were silly was crying.
     

     
    Downtown Hillston had made it through another day, and turned off its Christmas trees and its store lights and its six blocks of neon sleighs flying without any reindeer across Main Street with Santa holding tight to his toys. Somebody was still awake at the Hillston Star (probably Bubba Percy), a half-dozen lonesome peoplestill sat waiting in the coffee shop at the bus station, the Tucson Lounge was filling its dumpster with the night's rubbish, but the rest of Hillston had gone to bed when I drove up to the wide stone steps of the municipal building, flanked by two Confederate cannon that Cadmean had arranged to have hauled over from the old county courthouse. As far as I know, they’d never been fired. Sherman bypassed Hillston to the west, missing the surrender party waiting for him on the banks of the Shocco. According to a plaque, some of his stragglers did stable their horses overnight in a farmhouse near Pine Hills Lake; it's now the fanciest restaurant in town and a favorite with the inner circle.
    Above the courtroom doors in the dark marble lobby, old