First Lady (10 page)

The governor's second visit this afternoon had been even briefer than his first. In fact, Bubba was willing to tell us that the governor had found Miss Mahar so “inebriated” and “on edge” that he had left The Fifth Season almost immediately and had never seen her again.

Maybe it was true that Andy had left immediately. Maybe he had finally grasped the folly of spending time alone with an alcoholic diva capable of
inviting
the tabloid paparazzi to photograph her, as she had done with the congressman on the steps of the Nashville landmark. If Andy had the slightest interest in preserving his career, not to mention his marriage and presumably his self-respect, from the same media meltdown that had vaporized this politician in Tennessee, he must have known it was time to tell Mavis Mahar good-bye and god bless.

I called over my shoulder as I raced the cruiser toward the resort. “You keep saying Andy went back over there this afternoon?”

Bubba threw out vaguely, “Yeah, three, four….”

I glanced in the rear view mirror. “Make it earlier or later, Bubba.”

“What are you talking about?” he snarled.

Cuddy also peered at me inquisitively. I checked the press secretary's face in the mirror as I said, “I'm talking about my seeing Mavis Mahar in downtown Hillston at three o'clock. In the Tucson, entertaining the kitchen staff with country songs. She was still there at quarter-to-six.”

Cuddy, who was eating some of the cheese crackers he carried in his pocket, wanted to know why I'd been hanging out in the Tucson bar from three to quarter-to-six. I said I hadn't been hanging out. Walking home for my keys, I'd seen a limousine at the bar door and had wondered what such a car was doing at a place like that. Mavis was inside. The car was still there when I drove past three hours later.

“Her limo?” he asked.

I said I didn't know whose limo it was, but the one waiting for Mavis Mahar outside the Tucson had the same license plate as the one that had delivered Governor Brookside—late—to the Governor's Gala tonight.

Bubba's throat noises grew increasingly violent; this one sounded like he was being garroted. “That's not true.”

I nodded at him in the mirror. “Yes, it is. The plate number is BAC 5768. It wasn't the official state limo, which is NC 1. It was a private car. By the way, Bubba, I've noticed your license plate too. RPP 241. Cute. Randolph Prewitt Percy. Two for one. Two what for one?”

Bubba mumbled. “Leave me alone.”

Cuddy twisted around to say to Bubba, “Start over. Try the truth.”

“I'm telling you the truth. I drove all the way over to your place to tell you the truth.”

“Bubba, you wouldn't drive to River Rise at one A.M. to tell me I'd won the Nobel Prize unless we had a deal to split the money. There's something you can't handle, which is why you need me to keep Brookside out of it. Otherwise, you'd have stepped over Mavis's body and let that maid with the Cartier watch find her in the morning.”

“I'm trying to do the right thing,” he whined.

Cuddy replied with his sardonic snort. “You don't have a clue what folks trying to do the right thing do when they walk in on a woman who's shot herself. They call 911. They hang around 'til an ambulance gets there.”

“You're police, I came to you. Can I have one of those crackers?”

Cuddy said the packet wouldn't fit through the mesh. “So what puts Brookside too close to wiggle out of? She leave a note blaming him for this?”

Bubba gagged loudly. “Oh Jesus fuck, I hope not!”

Cuddy nodded at me. “Well, I guess it's not that.”

I said, “Maybe somebody saw Andy with her there tonight.”

Cuddy watched Bubba. “Maybe that's why the maid got the watch.”

Bubba turned sullen. “I'm not answering any more hostile questions.”

At that moment, I was jackknifing into the turn for The Fifth Season Resort, whose stone gateway was so discreet that it was almost impossible to see it until it was too late. I cut the siren and slowed down enough to flash my badge out the window at the security guard. He waved us through with such a lack of surprise that Cuddy said, “Our folks already got here.”

We drove past the main house of the resort; despite the late hour, lights glowed from the windows and its large parking lot was filled with luxury cars. We could even hear a group of people laughing on the verandah. Obviously, they didn't know that one of their fellow guests had killed herself, or if they'd heard, they didn't care.

A decade ago, a hotel-resort like The Fifth Season would have been inconceivable only five miles from Hillston, North Carolina. But as soon as it opened, would-be cosmopolites, looking for the rich life in a hurry, booked every room before the Frette sheets even went on the Biedermeyer sleigh beds. Now reservations need to be made a year in advance. That's how fast new money has come to our area. In The Fifth Season, at an exorbitant fee, the middle class can live for a few luxurious days the way glamorous people presumably live (according to shelter magazines) all the time. The main house had lobbies and bars that mimicked an English country manor and offered guests an anglophilic fantasy of convivial cocktails with Lord Title and Lady Hyphen. There were dozens of deep soft plaid and striped armchairs beside dozens of glossy end tables and round tables and gaming tables, on top of which were hundreds of china pugs and porcelain grenadiers and leather hat boxes. On the green lacquered walls hung nineteenth-century oils of nobody's ancestors in particular.

Bermuda might have been a more fitting site than Pine Hills Lake for the resort's crescent beach with its imported pink sand. The huge lake had never been as exclusive as my great-grandparents would have liked, and now it was even less so: most of the big private houses on the north cove, with their gazebos and hundred-year-old trees, had to look over at the south cove's little summer rentals with their aluminum boats tied to rotted wood poles and their tether balls hung from poles on scruffy lawns. But The Fifth Season had completely blocked any view of the south cove with fast-growing evergreens. Hidden in those trees were pink plastered, tile-roofed bungalows dotted about the ten private acres—many with their own pools and hot tubs. These bungalows in the pines provided the sort of sumptuous protected privacy needed by people like Mavis Mahar.

Bubba directed us along the clandestine gravel drive to Bungalow Eight on so dark and convoluted a lane that, as I swung into the last turn, I nearly hit a black Lincoln sedan I didn't expect to see there. In fact, none of us—and that includes Bubba in the back seat muttering “What the fuck?”—expected what we ran into. As Cuddy had predicted, one of our HPD squad cars had already arrived on the scene, but it was a latecomer. Parked between it and the bungalow, five other official cars sat helter-skelter under the landscaped trees. On a terrace beside the bungalow, tall young men milled aimlessly around beneath outdoor lights. They looked as if they'd been playing basketball when somebody had suddenly run off with their ball. I recognized two deputies from the sheriff's office.

“Okay,” said Cuddy. “What's going on, Bubba?”

The press secretary banged his head on the mesh between him and the front seat. “You think
I
know? Jesus Christ, fuckin' Barbara Walters could be in there taping! Somebody called the cops. And it wasn't me.”

It wasn't the Hillston cops they'd called either. It was higher up. Yellow tape with the Haver County Coroner's seal on it crossed the front of Bungalow Eight. Under a small covered entryway, wearing the same too-tight tuxedo in which he'd been squirming earlier tonight at the Gala, stood Ward Trasker, the attorney general of the state. With him in the open door was Hillston's district attorney, the strenuously virile and fervently moralistic Mitchell Bazemore, a courtroom warrior who was always asking for the death penalty and usually getting it. Seeing Mitch there was a surprise. I'd never known him to visit a suicide scene, yet here he was at two in the morning far from home checking out Mavis Mahar's death. Clearly this was the “business” that the D.A. had already been called away on when Cuddy had spoken with his wife.

And that meant Mitch had been called away long before Bubba arrived at Cuddy's, and that meant somebody had told Mitch about Mavis Mahar long before
Bubba claimed to have been the first person to find her body, and that meant that Bubba was lying about the time he'd found it. But we already knew Bubba was lying. What we didn't know was who had called Mitch and told him to come out here. The look on Bubba's face suggested strongly that he wasn't to blame. In fact, I'd say he was more upset to see who was there than we were.

Cuddy jumped out of the patrol car and hurried toward Nancy Caleb-White as she ran from her cruiser. She was shouting, “I heard it on the dispatch so I came out. Nothing I could do, Chief—”

Cuddy asked her, “Our ID team inside? And where's Dick?” (Dick Cohen, our medical examiner.)

“They sent him back. And they sent the ambulance back. They said they already took Mavis away.” Nancy shook her head. “I swear, they'd sealed the whole place and told us to back off, how they're handling it and we're out of our jurisdiction, so when our ID guys got here, they just turned around and left, and me and Roid were waiting for you!” Nancy gets hyped when she meets resistance. “They won't let us in. Right, Roid?”

Detective Sergeant John Emory ran toward us. “Right, I tried, Chief,” he called. “But the attorney general's here!”

The word “Roid” had long ago lost its origins (it was short for Hemorrhoid as well as a play on “Emory”). Nancy had given John the nickname in his early days at HPD. She said she'd never met anyone so anal as this bookish middle-class African-American with a military school background. He and Nancy were better friends now, and both passionately loyal to Cuddy Mangum, the only police chief under whom they'd ever served. Nancy added eagerly, “But we told them you were coming, Chief, and you weren't gonna take their shit.”

“Who's them?” Cuddy asked, still moving toward the bungalow door. Bubba, by sprinting ahead, was already inside. “Who sealed off the scene? Who brought the coroner in?”

Roid, in an immaculate taupe linen suit with perfectly knotted chestnut tie, stopped himself from standing at attention as he answered. “Sheriff Louge is here. He says it's county business. D.A. Bazemore came with the coroner. I don't know why Ward Trasker's here.”

“Any press?”

“Not yet.”

I asked, “And the body's definitely gone?”

“Way before we got here.”

Cuddy patted Emory's shoulder. “Back the press off if they do show. Radio the ID guys, tell them to turn around, come back. Call Dick Cohen too. And Nance, get me a timetable, I want to know exactly who showed when.”

Fiercely improvisational, insubordinate, and slapdash, Nancy may have had trouble with hierarchy, but there was no one better one-on-one in the ranks; everybody liked her. Hurrying over to the nearest sheriff's deputy now, she threw her arm around him. “Hey Frank, how you doing, buddy?” I could hear her starting in about how she'd tried to take her niece Danielle to the Mavis Mahar concert tonight and how Danielle was in tears, and now wait'll she had to tell Danielle that Mavis was dead! So why'd they bring all these big shots over on a suicide anyhow?

Cuddy called me away, “Justin, get in there, okay?”

I ran to keep up with him.

At the bungalow door, D.A. Mitchell Bazemore was blocking our way. He showed us his biceps folded over his chest. Mitch lifted weights in his office and kept his shirtsleeves rolled high so everybody could follow the results. He and Cuddy clashed all the time. Mitch blew out the words, “Mangum, what're you doing here?” Perhaps he pumped so much iron he breathed that way without thinking. “We've got a suicide and the sheriff's handling it.”

Cuddy looked around, then mildly asked, “How's the sheriff doing that, Mitch, when he's in Haver Hospital in ICU?”

“Well obviously Homer was discharged,” Mitch addressed his remark to me as if I'd been the one who'd challenged him; he disliked me more than he did Cuddy. Once he'd oddly told me—after I'd been employed by the Hillston Police Department for twelve years—“At least Mangum works for a living.” I suppose it was an uninformed jab at my family background (he thought we were rich), and what he really meant was, “At least Mangum
has
to work for a living.” The D.A. confused class with wealth—often the case with those who lack the former.

Cuddy was peering around the bulging district attorney in order to see into the room as Mitch added in the repetitive way habitual with him, “The sheriff's department will deal with this. This is outside Hillston limits.”

“Actually, it's not.” Cuddy shook his finger in a teacherly way at the D.A.'s nose. “Actually The Fifth Season has a Hillston R3 zone and a City of Hillston registered liquor license.” (I'm always amazed that Cuddy knows these kinds of details. But, as I say, he loves the town; it's the world to him.) “So it's HPD business, I do believe. And it's a big fucking stick of dynamite that I don't think we want Homer Louge blowing up in our faces.”

Mitch puffed out annoyance. “Don't curse at me, Mangum. What's there to blow up? We've got a simple suicide.”

“You've got a crowd, Mitch, is what you've got.” In the room were two state troopers, a young field agent from the State Bureau of Investigation, whom I knew to be the county coroner's nephew, and two deputies who'd followed us inside and were huddled around Sheriff Louge. Cuddy waved at Attorney General Ward Trasker across the room, now urgently insisting on something to Bubba Percy. Bubba didn't look happy. Signaled to leave by Trasker, the state troopers stepped through the french doors to a secluded swimming pool that I could see lit up beyond the patio. Once outside, they stood gazing at the water as if they'd love to jump in it.

Cuddy started jotting the names of the people there in a little spiral notepad he always carried with him. As he did, he asked Mitch Bazemore, “So, if it's no problem and if the sheriff's handling everything, what's a Bureau agent doing here, and state troopers, not to mention the attorney general, not to mention you, Mitch? Your wife said you were out. But she didn't say you were out here in the woods, way past the midnight hour.”

I smiled at the district attorney. “Yeah, why
are
all you people here?” He couldn't control his eyes and they flicked over to Ward Trasker and back.

That chain of command was obvious. Who else but a high-ranking man like Attorney General Trasker could have brought so many different state officials to an unreported suicide in a private hotel suite in the middle of the woods after midnight? But who had sent Trasker? Not Bubba; he wasn't that good an actor. Could Andy have called the attorney general himself?

Homer Louge, in full uniform and still wearing his white plastic hospital bracelet, heard my question and ambled over. “Y'all the ones don't need to be here,” he told us, “So say good night.”

Cuddy looked around at the crowd. “Homer, sorry to hear you had a heart attack—”

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, you can't keep a good man down. Maybe I'm just a Mavis fan too, folks, came out here to join y'alls candlelight vigil over the body. Where is the body by the way?”

I pushed past Bazemore and Louge while they frenetically tried to read what Cuddy was writing. Cuddy followed me, still taking names.

Number Eight Bungalow was in Art Deco style and evoked a
Flying Down to Rio
set—white ceiling fans, tile floors, and lacquered cabinets. It had a living room large enough to do the carioca in, polished heart-of-pine floors, and the sort of curvy blonde and black deco furniture that Fred and Ginger might have tossed each other across in one of their finales. Except tonight it looked as if Fred and Ginger had used it instead to call the whole thing off. Chairs were knocked over, lamps broken, drawers askew. On the near wall there was a gigantic 1920s poster of Le Train Bleu steaming through the Riviera. Its glass was shattered. On the far wall there was a great deal of blood. It darkened both the floor and the hemp of a sisal rug. The chalk outline of a body drawn on the floor looked small and bleak. I tried hard not to see Mavis Mahar lying inside those lines.

Cuddy knelt down and touched the stains on the floorboards. I pointed his attention to a blood-smear streaked sideways across the plaster a foot above the baseboard. A trace of blood that looked scrubbed could be faintly seen on the wall that led to the bedroom. Cuddy called to the sheriff. “So where's Miss Mahar, Homer? Bubba claims there was a body in here, and it sure looks like he was right. Bubba, didn't you say you stopped by, saw Mavis Mahar dead on the floor and left her here, just a little while ago?” Cuddy pointed at the chalk outline. “Was this it? Body was right like this?”

Bubba mumbled back, “Why don't you talk to the attorney general here? He's your host, not me.”

That seemed to be the case. Attorney General Trasker stepped in front of the sheriff and D.A. both. He started off in a friendly way with a sorrowful nod. “Cuddy, this is real sad situation we've got here. She was a big star, and this is a big loss. For some unhappy reason she held a gun to her face and pulled the trigger. Terrible thing, suicide. But these rock stars, just seems to keep happening to them, doesn't it? A flash across the sky, then they're gone.” He was moving slowly through the room, picking up strewn clothes, looking behind chairs and tables. “Sheriff Louge here has things under—”

Cuddy interrupted, his arms crossed in a stubborn way I knew well. “This is a suspicious death within the Hillston city limits. Last I heard, I was chief of Hillston police.” His words fought past his clenched teeth: “I'd like to know why this room doesn't even look dusted. I'd like any video and Polaroids of the body.”

“There's no video,” Trasker looked hard at the young NCBI agent who nodded back in agreement.

“No video? Great. That's great.” Cuddy wrote in his notebook. “Who removed her body, Ward?”

Trasker nodded with mournful affability. “Well, Homer called…”

Louge said, “We had Pauley and Keene take her away.”

Cuddy's eyes turned to blue ice. “Pauley and Keene? You gave her to a private mortuary? You gave a body with a gunshot wound to the head to a private mortuary before the Hillston M.E. looked at her?!”

The A.G. turned to the D.A. Mitch tightened his grip on his biceps. “Osmond Bingley examined her and released her.”

Osmond Bingley was the Haver County Coroner. He was an old nepotism appointee with no training in forensic pathology, and he did whatever Mitchell Bazemore told him; he even went on wilderness hikes through the Pisgah National Forest every August with Mitch's Clean Teens for Christ Club, something Mitch's own children refused to do.

The two sheriff's deputies were now wandering around admiring the knickknacks. One of them stepped in a pool of blood.

Cuddy turned and yelled at him, “Back off, kid! Now!” The young deputy froze, looked down at the tiles where a red imprint of his shoes had followed him like the Invisible Man. Embarrassed, he stepped backwards.

Homer rubbed his gray flattop furiously. “Don't you order my boys around.”

“Then stop these imbecilic ox-heads,” he pointed at the sheriff's men, “from stampeding through a crime scene with no gloves on, tracking blood on the goddamn floor!” Cuddy raised his voice loud enough for the state troopers on the terrace to hear. “Ward, you want to stop looking for whatever you're looking for and tell me why you guys are even over here?” He moved closer to the A.G. “You want me to guess who sent you? Want me to guess why? Want me to start talking
real loud
about that particular individual right here and now in front of all these troopers and deputies?”

Everybody stared at him. Trasker quickly instructed the curious deputies to go join the troopers outside by the pool. Homer turned sullen when he was told to go with his men. Then the A.G. closed the french doors firmly behind them, leaving only himself, Bubba, and Mitch in the room with Cuddy and me. Trasker smiled in a queasy way. “Let's everybody calm down. I don't know why Mr. Percy here,” he glared at Bubba who had opened the minibar and was pouring the little bottles of liquor he found there into a big plastic go-cup, “thought it necessary to bother you about this, Cuddy, but this is not a Hillston police matter.”

“This is just a suicide,” Mitchell Bazemore reminded us yet again.

Cuddy turned to him. “You came an awful long way at an awful odd time for a suicide.”

Ward Trasker smiled with remarkable inappropriateness. “She was a big star. There are sensitive media issues.”

“And it's even odder all of you got here in time to do all the things you've done. Because Bubba tells me he was the first person to see Mavis Mahar lying on the floor of this room in a mess of blood and that it was half-past midnight when he left her lying here and he didn't tell anybody and he drove straight to River Rise to let me know we needed to keep Andy Brookside out of it.”

“Cuddy, for Christ sake!” Bubba sputtered.

“What's Mangum talking about?” Mitch's head snapped back and forth like flies were chasing him. “Why's the governor have to be kept out of this?”

It was clear that Bazemore had not been fully briefed. It was equally clear that Ward Trasker knew about the affair from the way he was furiously glaring at Bubba Percy while Mitch stared baffled at him.

Just then Bubba's cell phone rang loudly; he scurried with it to the end of the room, then with a flushed look gestured furiously to Ward Trasker to join him. Trasker looked at the phone as if it were a tarantula he was supposed to pick up and put to his ear.

Cuddy moved over beside the D.A. “Mitch, come on, don't be their patsy. You've got a room looks like a cyclone hit it, you've got a dead body with her brains smeared on the walls. That's a suspicious death, you treat it the way you would a homicide. The body goes to our M.E. at our morgue. It doesn't go to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home! You secure the scene, you dust, you video. Look at this! Homer's Bigfoot boys slipping and sliding in blood, just like they did at the Tyler Norris house. Is that what we want?”

Cuddy was rubbing salt in a wound. Bazemore took pride in his conviction rate, but odds were that he was going to lose the Norris case, in part because his great enemy Isaac Rosethorn had successfully—and gleefully—offered proof that the state's evidence had been contaminated by the sheriff's men who'd been first on the scene.