First Lady (18 page)

She sat in the bow, resting on her arms. She'd thrown open the white shirt to feel the afternoon sun on her breasts. Like everything about her, they were beautiful. Contrary to all the reports in magazines, neither nipple was pierced. I could see the red birthmark of a star on the side of her neck, the stigmata of her destiny, the mark that hadn't been there when I'd looked at the body of Lucy Griggs.

I said, “You just stole it? Somebody else's boat?”

She turned back to me and laughed. “Well, darlin', I'm not planning to keep it forever, am I?”

It was a warning. Or should have been.

Thursday, June 21–Friday, June 29

At dawn when Mavis kissed me, the media had only just begun to hear the first whispers that she was dead. Through the morning, grief raced across the world. People cried in the streets. In our global village of strangers, our strongest feelings may be for celebrities we've never met. But by noon, the
Sun
had apologized and CNN had explained to the world that the rumors were false and that nobody had been murdered but a waitress who was nobody. And then the world that had sighed and cried and rushed to heap altars of flowers and cuddle toys at the star's death site, now sent up a cheer, reprieved by the happy news flashing on television screens across oceans. Mavis Mahar was alive. It had been thrilling that she had killed herself and it was thrilling again that she hadn't. In fact, her quick resurrection was even more satisfying. For there is one discontent in what is otherwise a thoroughly enjoyable gobble at the trough of public grief: after the shock subsides, people are forced to notice that the celebrity they are mourning really is gone. Gone for good. There will be no new footage. Never again will those particular stars do the glamorous dangerous things that made us all so fascinated with them in the first place. Never will they be messily divorced or noisily adulterous or drunkenly arrested or caught in the nude by paparazzi in their Mediterranean love nests again.

Of course, Mavis had taken a risk by being alive. Early death has its advantages for stars. It makes them endlessly young. Out of the imperishable rerun of their self-destruction comes their immortality. A Marilyn, an Elvis, a Diana—and maybe someday still, a Mavis Mahar. She was reckless enough. But for now the magic of Mavis was her escape from death. Here she was, so recently excitingly a suicide (or better yet, so gruesomely murdered), the newspapers still on the streets around the globe screaming:

MAVIS E MORTA!

SÄNGERIN MAVIS MAHAR BEENDET SICH.

LA MAVIS SE SUICIDE!

And then only hours later, here she was again
not
dead. Here she was waving at her fans live on the news, alive to sing for them and wreak havoc for them once more. Alive to make the question of who may have
tried
to kill her international news, and so a nightmare for Cuddy Mangum.

As for the young woman who actually had
been killed in Bungalow Eight at The Fifth Season Resort in a small city in the Piedmont of North Carolina, she was only an ordinary person and the world didn't care about her. Ordinary people get themselves murdered every day. Lucy Griggs' only claim on even a minute of the world's time was her bad luck that the killer had mistaken her for Mavis Mahar.

The governor's press secretary Bubba Percy was feeling, as he boasted, “pumped.” We'd just watched Mavis on television making a live statement to as many of the media as could squeeze into the ballroom of Hillston's largest downtown hotel. Quietly dressed, beautifully made-up (Dermott Quinn must have been waiting when I dropped her off at the Sheraton), the rock star was somber about the murder of Lucy Griggs, she was charming about being alive herself, she was apologetic about the missed concert at Haver Field—while leaving the effective if erroneous impression that it was the homicide itself that had somehow caused her failure to show up.

And she was irresistible in her pledge to redo the concert whenever the university would let her. She'd do two concerts and she'd sing all night! But as she spoke, the person I kept seeing wasn't this celebrity on the television screen, but the woman with whom I'd been making love only hours earlier. A troubling passionate private woman, who was now performing the part of Mavis Mahar the rock star.

Meanwhile, as far as Bubba Percy was concerned, the best thing about the singer's appearance was her complete silence on the subject of Governor Andrew Brookside. Equally miraculous to him was the fact that no one else mentioned Brookside's name in the cacophonous burst of questions shouted at Mavis as soon as she finished her statement.

“You Riverdancing bitch, I love you!' Bubba told the television set hung above the bar at the New Deal Tavern. “Home free!”

It was amazingly true. With the single exception of Shelly Bloom's
Sun
exclusive ambiguously talking about “unconfirmed rumors” linking Mavis Mahar to “a second high-ranking Southern politician” (the first presumably the ruined Tennessee Congressman), not a single leak had tied Brookside to the Irish star in any way. (At least not publicly—half the crowd here in the New Deal were trading rumors about the affair right this minute, but they were all “in the business.”) And not even this in-crowd seemed to have a clue that the governor had been in Mavis's bungalow on the actual night of the murder.

According to Bubba, it was possible that the only people who knew the truth knew that it was in their best interests to keep their mouths shut. Admittedly, this group was not small: in addition to Mavis, the governor, Bubba, Cuddy, and myself, it included at the minimum the N.C. Attorney General and Brookside's two crisp lawyers, the Haver County D.A. and the coroner, the sheriff, an SBI agent, the reporter Shelly Bloom, the hotel manager, the murderer, and (I suspected from her predawn visit to Cuddy's office) the governor's wife, Lee Haver Brookside. Of course, if someone in this group happened to
be
the murderer, that cut the number down by one.

The potential danger in this free-floating knowledge did not seem to bother the press secretary at all. He chortled, “Jesus loves me and I love Him,” still fooling with the born-again vow to which Cuddy had earlier referred. Elatedly he slapped the bar in front of him and crowed, “Come on, Justin, I'm buying,” to the astonishment of the local politicians and press corps around us, all of whom knew him to be notoriously cheap.

The state auditor hit his arm. “Bubba! And after I heard you were so tight, you shut off your mother's defibrillator to save on the electric bill.”

A columnist called to me, “Don't turn your back on him, Savile. Last time Percy bought somebody hard liquor in here, he tried to fuck her before she could drink it.”

But their ribbing rolled like water off the oil of his slick self-regard. “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” he told them cheerfully as he led me past a loud table of state legislators over to a corner booth.

The New Deal was only half-a-block from the State House, and since 1938 had been serving increasingly expensive Italian food to government officials and the reporters who got paid for talking about them. Low and wide, it had two dark noisy dining areas—the original one in which Democrats traditionally gathered and the “New Room” for Republicans (where, rumor was, prices went even higher). The walls of each were entirely filled with photographs of famous patrons shaking hands with three generations of New Deal owners. Giuseppe DiSilio with Harry Truman and a governor. Joe DiSilio Jr. with JFK and my uncle Senator Kip Dollard. Scott DiSilio with Bill Clinton and Andy Brookside. Bubba pointed at this last picture as we passed it. “Two lucky bastards,” he grinned.

I reminded him that his boss was by no means free and clear. Brookside was still a material witness in the Lucy Griggs' homicide, if not a suspect. The same, I noted, could be said for Bubba himself.

Bubba told me blandly that he'd never met or heard of Lucy Griggs and neither had the governor. If the person who'd shot her had done so thinking she was Mavis Mahar, the killer was not Andy, but one of the “Slut Queen's” ten thousand other lovers.

I stopped myself from saying, “She doesn't think much of you either,” and pointed out that even if Brookside was innocent, it was conceivable that someone had killed (or thought they'd killed) Mavis Mahar in order to implicate the governor, knowing that he'd been there on the night of the murder. The homicide still might prove to be a political vendetta against Andy Brookside in an effort to derail his reelection bid. Or it might be an act of more personal revenge. Either way would mean that the lid, which Bubba had gloated about keeping so tightly in place, was about to blow off and splatter the whitewashed walls of the Governor's Mansion.

Brookside's press secretary gave his auburn hair a quick comb. “Hey, don't even try heavying up on me, Savile. Your Cuddy-buddy Porcus Rex had me in a damn interrogation room today. Not his office, an interrogation room! Like he was trapped in some Jimmy Cagney flick and hadn't heard you can't slap the suspects around any more. You can shoot them but you can't slap them around. Does he really think we're going to roll over?” He gestured at a waitress, both his arms waving like some Balinese dancer.

I'd had one hour's sleep in the past thirty-two and the scotch was numbing me. I said I wasn't sure what he meant by “roll over.”

“That crazy arrogant bastard of yours—”

“Stop saying of mine.”

“—told me I had two weeks to resign as State House press secretary.” Bubba swung a passing waitress around by the arm to stop her and got himself rapped on the head with her pencil. “Oww! Honey pot, two more of the same.”

“You got it, Septic Tank,” the big bottle-blonde told him matter of factly and kept going.

Unfazed, Bubba went on. “Porcus was on a roll, you didn't know? Told your coroner to resign, told the sheriff and the D.A. to resign, ditto that kid SBI agent, ditto Ward Trasker.”

I was abruptly awake again. “But isn't Trasker retiring after the election anyhow?”

“According to your God Almighty Police Chief, Trasker hasn't got 'til November. He has to resign in two weeks. Now get this. Your boss gives me a letter to give Andy telling
him
to resign!”

“You're kidding.”

“No way. He wants the fucking governor to resign! And if we all don't squat over and spread 'em for ole Saint Thomas More Mangum, he's charging us with conspiracy to obstruct justice by tampering with a crime scene and destroying evidence in a felony homicide, and even hinting about the big kahuna—accessory after the fact.”

I sat back and whistled, then toasted him and sipped the last bit of my scotch. “Well, frankly, Bubba, it's all true, isn't it? I mean maybe not you yourself personally—all you did was lie, cheat, and try to steal a raincoat. Well, you ran out on a girl lying in her own blood, that from a safe distance you mistook for somebody else.”

“That girl, whoever she was, was already dead!”

I looked over at the television. Local news was now showing footage of the helicopter's aerial shot of The Fifth Season bungalow; bizarrely enough, I could see myself walking across the lawn from the terrace to the woods where Mavis was waiting. “Isn't what Cuddy says the truth?”

He spluttered at his beer foam. “Don't make me quote you Pontius Pilate on the truth, Savile.”

“I guess that's part of being born again, Bible quotes? Why shouldn't they resign?” I leaned forward to keep my voice low. In The New Deal, you always had to be careful. “Bubba, they did destroy evidence, they did obstruct justice. You know it.”

He shrugged. “So they took her out of the shower and picked up a few condom foils, so what?”

“So what? For Christ's sake, they took a .22 pistol and
shot
the poor girl between the eyes with it after she was already dead!”

He gagged on his beer. “What!”

“Man, you
are
out of the loop. They shot Lucy Griggs in the face, and left her on the floor with Andy's raincoat over her. They shot her because whoever killed her had gouged out her eyes and even our sieve-head coroner would have known that wasn't suicide. Not that you noticed, but then I guess you didn't really look all that closely.”

Bubba's eyes opened wide, then wider. His face changed color so fast that his freckles stood out like a sudden attack of measles. “Somebody cut out her eyes?”

“Right, then in comes Ward and, like the hotel manager—and like you—he mistakes the victim for Mavis. Ward either thinks Andy killed her or he thinks
any
kind of involvement in a sensational murder won't look good on Andy's résumé.”

“You think it would?” Bubba asked with a trace of his old sarcasm.

“So they wipe down the bungalow and Ward gets somebody to shoot the corpse with a gun of Mavis's that was lying on her bed. They stick the gun in her hand. Osmond Bingley is hauled in and signs the death certificate ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.' They rush her out to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home where they figure those bozos won't even notice her eyes are gone and that if you have a bullet still lodged in your brain, you don't have an exit wound through the back of your skull.”

He whispered, “Are you shitting me? Don't shit me, Justin.”

I leaned back. “I have to keep remembering you were a teen campaigner for George McGovern. I know you've been selling out ever since, Bubba, and I know you think you're complete jaded scum, but, buddy, you're seriously out of your league.”

The waitress came over with our new drinks. Bubba took the opportunity to collect himself. When he gave her a dollar tip and she sardonically asked if he wanted change, he told her to “just bank it for the next time I drop in.” His caustic eyebrow back in place, he leaned forward and told me, “Okay, so maybe I'm a little surprised they'd go that far. I saw Ward was cleaning the place up, but I figured it was cosmetic.”

“You could still call it cosmetic, I suppose.”

“I figured they threw the raincoat over her not knowing it was Andy's. That it got shoved under the bed when they bagged the body.”

I said, “Frankly, resigning may be the least of people's troubles.”

Now Bubba's smugness returned, full smirk. “You're the one out of your league. The only resignation on the table here is going to have C.R. Mangum's name written on it. These guys aren't about to mess up this reelection. I don't care if they stuck the .22 between her eyes while she was
alive
and pulled the trigger. They'll come up with a spin that'll smear your pal Mangum so bad his own mama wouldn't let him in her house.”