First Lady (2 page)

Cuddy called out after him. “Old blood's always blue, Sergeant, don't you know that? New blood's nothing but fast food, fast cars, and rock'n'roll.”

Throwing my sushi box in his trashcan, I stood up to leave too. “I'm not talking against progress, Cuddy.”

“No, you're talking against fried chicken.”

“I'm talking about how everybody's been swept into one big flood of momentary homogeneity.”

“You don't say?” He quickly scanned today's editorial in the
Hillston Star
. “Well, hey, does momentary homogeneity have anything to do with this?” He read out, “‘Chief Mangum to Murder Victim: Who Cares?'” and handed the paper back to me. As I read the editorial aloud, Cuddy opened his window to sprinkle fat crumbs from his KFC biscuit to the dingy pigeons waiting on his window ledge. When he finished, he grabbed the newspaper from me, balled it up, and lobbed it off his poster of Elvis Presley into the trash—his one trick shot. The police chief didn't like the
Star
's asking why Hillston should have doubled the size of its police department and yet still be unable even to identify the bodies of homicide victims. He didn't like being asked why in a national survey the Hillston Police Department should be ranked No. 1 in small cities in the Southeast when, instead of catching maniacs who sawed open young women's throats, it spent its time arresting innocent leading citizens of the community for murder—a reference to the Norris trial now going on downstairs in Superior Court where a Haver University professor had been charged with killing his wife. And most of all, Cuddy didn't like the paper's calling for his resignation.

He slammed the window shut against the heat that raced into the room, scaring the pigeons into jumping half-an-inch. “Instead of blaming your troubles on how something fundamental's broken down since your great granddaddy's day, Justin—”

“It has broken down,” I interrupted.

The police chief held his drug-store watch to my face and tapped it. “What's broken down is you finding out who killed Jane. Time, my friend, time is doing a fast dance all over your handsome head. I figured while Alice was gone, you'd be on this case twenty-four—”

“I am—”

“Really? Looks like you're up alone nights writing the sequel to
The Mind of the South
and brooding over the collapse of civilization.”

I looked at Cuddy's wall hung with civic plaques and framed tributes. “A year ago, you said I had the ‘best instincts for homicide investigation of any detective you'd ever met.'”

He said, “That was a year ago. Besides, you're not supposed to see those evaluation reports.”

“All the more reason to assume you meant what you said.” I picked up a painted wooden queen on the folk art chess set from his Peace Corps days in Costa Rica. The board was laid out for one of the classic games he was always playing by himself. I moved the queen.

He shook his head. “Do that and you're checkmated in eight moves. If it can happen to Boris Spassky, it can happen to you.”

I put down the queen and started feeling in my pockets for my car keys. “Cuddy, why do you like to play games you already know the outcome of?”

He tossed me my hat. “To know how the outcome came about.”

“That's all I'm saying. There's no more history in America. We used to have fifteen minutes of fame. Now we've got fifteen minutes of memory.”

I walked Cuddy downstairs to his meeting with his friend Mayor Carl Yarborough. They were dealing with a sanitation workers' strike that was filling the streets of Hillston with levees of black garbage bags, as if we expected an imminent flood. But the Mayor's secretary told Cuddy that they would have to postpone. Sheriff Homer Louge was in there with Yarborough on an emergency matter and they couldn't be disturbed. Sheriff Louge despised Cuddy and the feeling was reciprocated. They'd had a blowout over how the sheriff's deputies had contaminated the Norris homicide scene—as a result of which, the defendant's attorney had already managed to have most of the state's evidence disallowed during the ongoing trial.

Back in the corridor, Cuddy gestured at the closed door. “See? Sheriff Stooge is in there trashing me to Carl again. Homer's wet dream is me packing up my office bijoux in an old cardboard box, sayonara and hari kari.” (Unlike the sheriff, who was elected, the police chief in Hillston was appointed by the Mayor and the City Council and he could be fired by them. Nothing would have pleased Sheriff Louge more.)

I shrugged. “Carl's not going to listen to Homer Louge.”

“Carl's going to listen to the people, which these days means the polls, which these days means the press. Close this G.I. Jane thing, Justin.”

“Close it or solve it?”

“Solve it and close it. That horse I'm sitting on with a noose around my neck? That horse is dancing.”

• • •

It was odd that my car keys weren't in my jacket pocket, and odder that when I went back to look for them in my office, its door was locked. The desk sergeant who let me in with the master key agreed sympathetically that I was not usually so absent-minded. But for the past months I had been dealing with personal problems and so everyone was treating me tenderly, as if—as Cuddy had just said—I wasn't myself. After a frustrating search I decided to walk home for the extra set of keys I kept in a silver bowl on a George IV gaming table in my front hall. I collect what Cuddy refers to as “old stuff” and I live in an “old house” not far from the Cadmean Building.

A decade ago everyone thought I was a lunatic to buy a large 1887 Queen Anne house in downtown Hillston and convert it from the dilapidated dormitory for Frances Bush College for Women it had been since 1936. But today, when Hillston's abandoned tobacco warehouses are sleek apartments and our derelict textiles mills are boutique malls, my folly looks like such foresight that to my wife Alice's amusement, the
Hillston Star
called us
“visionary pioneers of urban revitalization.” The wedding-band quilt made by Alice's Appalachian grandmother was featured in their photo spread and Alice was shown cheerfully pruning her blue-ribbon antique roses in our garden. Now there are dozens of Range Rovers in our neighborhood, but I'm still one of the few people who actually walks the gentrified streets of urban Hillston; everybody drives if they can, and those who can't take the bus.

My walk home takes me along Jupiter Street toward the crumbling bowed-out facade of the Piedmont Hotel where they recently added a bright yellow awning over the grimy doors, like a cheap blonde wig on an old wino. Because of the strike, the hotel looked even worse, with garbage bags piled beside an overflowing dumpster in its causeway. Flies and bees swarmed at rotted food. In the heat, the stench made a strong argument for settling with the local sanitation workers as soon as possible. I noticed the two small dark foreign women in black whom I'd seen earlier at the street corner looking through the garbage. They ran away when they saw me.

I found myself stopping in front of a scruffy bar called the Tucson that had opened back in the
Urban Cowboy
eighties as a western lounge, sporting a mural of longhorn cattle stampeding through Texas. A decade later, the rawhide fringe on the cowgirl vests worn by the waitresses had frayed to greasy nubs, the garage bands who sped through Garth Brooks tunes on Saturday night didn't know a two-step from a tarantella, and the red neon in the cactus had mostly spluttered out. Still, with its gargantuan pitchers of beer and its free spicy buffalo wings and its Reba McIntire look-a-like contests, the Tucson had kept its dance floor floating in sawdust for a decade after fashion had passed it by, so we were all surprised when two years ago the owner had finally given up on the Wild West and turned the lounge into something he called The Tin-Whistle Pub.

Cheapness however took him only part way down the trendy road to the Old Country; the “pub” sported Guinness on tap, a Riverdance poster on the wall, U2 hits on the jukebox, a dartboard, and a snooker table, but it still looked like the old Tucson, and the Tucson is what everyone still called it. It had its broken mechanical bull in the corner, and its neon sign over the bar still spelled out “TUCSON” above a spluttering red cactus. Drawn not by ambiance but large cheap drinks, the regular customers may never have noticed any change at all.

Those customers were not the sort to leave a long black limousine parked outside with its driver patiently leaning against the hood reading a magazine while they took advantage of the two-for-one Happy Hour at the bar, so when I saw such a car waiting there, I stopped to look at it. Then I went to the bar door. Standing in the doorway, even before my eyes had time to adjust to the shadowy light, I recognized the woman. It wasn't just the sound of her voice, although it was a memorable voice, singing
a cappella
the old country-western ballad “I Can't Stop Loving You” in a strong, clean soprano that came soaring out from the little black-carpeted band platform across the empty tables toward me. It was the shock of her beauty.

There were only a few other patrons in the place (the Tucson catered largely to a late-night just-lost-my-job and looking-for-love crowd), and they stood off to the side with the waitresses and the kitchen staff, all of them bunched together like a chorus listening to the woman as intently as if they waited on their cue to join in.

There was no mistaking the slender singer with the tangled mass of lion-colored hair. She was the woman I'd seen from a distance this morning standing on the dock at Pine Hills Lake. She was the woman who'd suddenly thrown off her red silk robe and dived, a shimmer of perfect flesh, into the misty lake water. And Cuddy's magazine covers had looked familiar because, as I now realized, the woman I'd seen at the lake, her hair now a tawny swirl of color much longer than the buzz cut she'd worn in those photographs, was the Irish rock star Mavis Mahar.

Watching the singer as she stood alone on the black platform in a tight black top and black jeans, a bottle of Guinness in one hand, half a dozen blood-red tulips in the other, I thought again that she was the loveliest woman I'd ever seen. Photographs just flattened and dulled her. She was resplendent.

She was drunk too, and the famous Celtic lilt was slurred when she called over to me, “Hey you, boyo there in the door! Hello again. Is your big black horse tied up outside?”

I raised a hand, saluted her, shook my head.

She gestured me to her with the beer bottle. “Come in now, won't you, and have a pint with Mavis and her mates? I'm here at the pub having a bit of the past back. I'm rem…in…is…ci….” She had trouble with the word, gave it up, and turned to her small knot of awestruck fans with her arms outstretched. “Isn't it a sad thing?” she asked them, and they all nodded that it was. “I was a wild gaarl, a gaarl from the west country, singing out my heart every blessed night in Dublin pubs the sorry like of this pub here, and I met a man, you know, a man that had that sort of a look to him—” She pointed the Guinness bottle at me accusatively and the crowd turned with a hostile glare in my direction. “That man kept sad Mavis locked away like a song bird in a cage of gold….” And without a pause her voice lifted into the opening line of “Pleeease release me/ Let me go….”

I'd read in the effusive magazine I'd taken from Cuddy's office that Mavis Mahar had close to a four-octave range and that the musical world considered her “one of the phenomenal talents of her time.” Her time was undoubtedly now, for according to this article she had “broad crossover appeal, drawing fans from teens, Gen-Xers, boomers, and even Ike-ers” (that ancient crew who'd reached their adolescence in the Eisenhower fifties). The article said she could play three or four instruments and that she loved singing all types of songs—rock, blues, pop, and folk. Listening to her version of this old country tune now, I heard what the critics were talking about. Finishing the song to the fervid applause of her small audience, Mavis accepted another Guinness someone offered her. As she reached out for the bottle with her slim lean-muscled bare white arm, I noticed that she had a tiny dark red birthmark with points like a star just where her neck joined her shoulders—as if, pleased with His Creation, God had stamped her with the star as a sign of her destiny and then sent her out into the world to claim it. On both her hands she wore silver and gold rings (sometimes two or three) on all her fingers, including her thumbs. The fingers were strong and restless. The nails short, purple as hyacinths.

A very pretty waitress had pulled away from the young man next to her and pressed to the front of the crowd where she listened in an ecstasy of infatuation. The waitress obviously believed imitation was at least the most manifest form of flattery for she had the exact same hair cut, hair color, nail color, multitude of rings and black wedge open-heeled sandals as Mavis Mahar. All she didn't have was the talent and that inimitable luminous glow. Holding up a throwaway camera, she was breathlessly asking if Mavis would mind if someone took their picture together. Mavis didn't mind at all, and asked the girl her name.

“Lucy,” the waitress said as she jumped effortlessly up on the platform and impulsively hugged the singer. When she did, I noticed the young man move sullenly back to the shadows, staring angrily at the waitress. Handsome, with sideburns and a pouty mouth, in a black leather jacket and tight black jeans, he looked as if he'd styled himself on motorcycle movies made before he was born. I recognized him as someone I'd seen being booked at HPD, although I couldn't remember for what.

The flash of the camera flared as the two young women smiled, looking almost like twins in a play. “We're exactly the same size!” Lucy shouted at her coworkers, thrilled. Then she asked the star if she'd sing “Coming Home to You,” and Mavis looked at her with an extraordinarily seductive sigh of a smile. “Ah, daarlin', can't we feckin' forget that feckin' bloody song!?” But with a shrug she handed the red tulips to the ardent girl, walked to the piano, and played the opening chords, known to much of the world, of her No. 1 hit.

The shabby drunks, worn-out barmaids, and skinny dishwashers cheered and stomped their tired feet on the sawdust floor. They knew—even before what was to happen later that night—that they were in the midst of a memory they would keep until they were old. They knew they were standing close to magic that was no part of their own lives and never would be, so close to the light of fame that it made them radiant too.

“Are you leaving again then, beautiful boyo?” Mavis called over to me as I walked to the door. “Is there no song would make you stay this time?”

I turned in the doorway. Everyone was watching her look at me.

She ran both hands from her throat down to her stomach. “I'm all filled up with music.”

“I know,” I said. “You have rings on your fingers. Do you have bells on your toes?”

She smiled. “Stay and find out.”

But I waved and left the bar because I knew I'd order a drink if I stayed. Outside it was raining again; the black limousine sat patiently by the curb, wipers slowly moving over the windows. I assumed the driver was waiting behind the wheel, but with the dark tinted glass, I couldn't tell for sure.

• • •

I spent the rest of the afternoon at the construction site near where we'd found G.I. Jane. When I returned to the Cadmean Building at dusk, the two small dark women were back on the street corner side by side in the same motionless positions, with the same shopping bags beside them. Nearby Sergeant Brenda Moore and our forensics photographer Chuck Grant headed for a squad car at the curb. They were an odd pair—she, short, plump, African-American; he, tall, gaunt, self-described redneck.

“Know what those two ladies are doing over there?” I called to them.

Chuck stared, shrugged sardonically. “Hookers?”

Brenda nonchalantly raised her hand at him, then lowered each long, multicolored nail until only the middle finger was extended. She glanced at the women. “They're looking for work.”

I was puzzled. “Work? Work from whom?”

Brenda opened the driver's side of the black and white cruiser. “Whomever, Justin, just about whomever.” As she started her engine, she said, “Big Hair's after your ass again.” She drew an imaginary box around her head with her hands and grinned with parodic sincerity.

I knew who she meant. And sure enough, Carol Cathy Cane from the Channel Seven “Action News” came hurrying with her bearded cameraman down the broad stone steps where a small line of picketing sanitation workers was parading back and forth. The TV diva wasn't much interested in the strike. It was me she was after.

CeeCee, as Ms. Cane was known to Hillston, had a personal stake in Cathy Oakes' and G.I. Jane's killer. Back in March she'd named him. What if—CeeCee had suggested with zest—what if the killer had put the label around G.I. Jane's toe “mailing” her to Cuddy and me because he was daring us to solve the puzzle before he murdered again? What if he had put Guess T-shirts on his naked victims to
taunt
the police with his crime: Guess who I am? What did I think of that idea? Without waiting to find out, CeeCee had christened him “The Guess Who Killer” on the spot—she was adroit at the sound bite—and by the following evening all the Piedmont news shows were calling our unknown murderer the Guess Who Killer, and by the weekend, all the television anchors were advising women not to go out jogging alone until the police caught Guess Who.

I tried to slip past her cameraman now by dodging behind a Civil War cannon near the steps, but CeeCee ran over and blocked my path.

“Lieutenant, Lieutenant!”

“Oh, CeeCee, I'm sorry, I didn't see you.”

Carol Cathy Cane had big hair, long legs, and a breathless enthusiasm for the ephemeral that had finally freed her from the late-night wrap-up, where she feared the networks would never notice her, and promoted her to the coveted evening news spot at Channel Seven. She and I knew each other well, but in our interviews she always pretended she'd never seen me before and had never asked me the same questions a dozen previous times. Now she spun her finger at her cameraman and opened our exchange, as she always did, by warning her viewers with solemn glee that a homicidal maniac was still stalking the Piedmont and when was I going to apprehend him?

I smiled just as solemnly. “As soon as I find him.”

I heard an ugly laugh. Sheriff Homer Louge, who appeared to spend very little time at the County Sheriff's Office across town, stopped beside us on the steps and stood there listening with crossed arms and a smug grin. He was tall and thick with a face that looked as if a truck tire had rolled over it.

CeeCee was asking why a homicidal maniac had singled me out as G.I. Jane's “friend.” Was it because I was Justin Savile the Fifth? (The “V” had been emphatically added to my name on the label attached to the corpse's toe.) “Your family has always been very prominent in North Carolina. Could this be a class-hatred thing with Guess Who?”

Sheriff Louge gave another barking laugh and ambled up the steps past us, melodramatically shaking his head as I told CeeCee I had no reason to assume the killer had ever heard of my family or had any personal feelings about me or Chief Mangum either, one way or the other. “The label was addressed to me because I'm the head of homicide here.”

Bored with that possibility, CeeCee said that we were all aware, from sources like
Silence of the Lambs,
of VICAP's criminal profilers at the FBI and she wondered why we didn't ask them to help us since we obviously needed help. Maybe they had other Guess T-shirt cases in their files. I told her we had worked closely with two FBI consultants in Raleigh who said our evidence fit the pattern of no known killer. CeeCee turned grim and dramatically hushed. “You mean serial killer, don't you, Lieutenant?”

“No, I don't,” I insisted.

She wasn't listening. “He's killed twice. He'll kill again, won't he?”

I assured her that if so, the best way to stop him was to find out who G.I. Jane was, and once more I urged anyone with information to come forward. CeeCee wondered, since HPD had mishandled both the Professor Norris murder case and the G.I. Jane case, if maybe the
Hillston Star
was right today and it was time for Police Chief Cuddy Mangum to step down, even if he was winning the state's Raleigh Medal tonight?

“CeeCee, I don't think we've mishandled anything but the media.” And I gave her my friendly nod, dodged through the hot, tired, listless picketers, and hurried up the steps.

• • •

Cuddy was leaving his office, reading through his endless pink phone messages. He punched at the elevator button, gave it five seconds to open (which it never did), then started at a trot down the marble stairs.

I caught him. “A construction crew dug up a running shoe near the murder site but no help with our shoelace. It was a Nike. Man's size nine—”

He bounced a message off the wall like a tiny basketball into a wastebasket. “So you just back here to defend the Old South from momentary homogeneity?”

“All I said was that's why we don't know Jane's name—”

“Lots of women got murdered back in your great-great granddaddy's day, and nobody even
tried
to find out their names.” He balled up another message. “But these women were mostly of a non-Caucasian persuasion.”

“Don't start in again about all my genocidal landgrabbing ancestors.”

“Justin, I don't believe I called all your relatives genocidal.” Reaching out a lanky arm, he gave my bow tie a pat. “Just Governor Eustache P. Dollard.” We trotted downstairs, past the floors of town and county offices, down toward the courtrooms off the lobby.

I said, “The governor was not personally responsible for the deaths of those Cherokee Indians.”

“Well, now, personal responsibility.” Cuddy bounded along, slapping various city officials and police officers on the back as we passed them on the stairs. “When Eustache Dollard and Andy Jackson told a tribe of—and we don't call them Indians anymore, you got to catch up—told a tribe of Native Americans to take a fast hike across the Appalachians to Oklahoma, you think they figured they'd all make it there, no problem? Old folks, women and children, just jogging to Oklahoma, 'stead of freezing to death on—”

“I get it.” I nodded. “It's this Raleigh prize they're giving you tonight. You're down on governors.”

“Oh am I?” We stepped into the lobby of the Cadmean Building, a handsome domed octagonal space with a floor of black and white marble, just as the big double doors to Superior Court banged open and the crowd scurried out of the afternoon session of the Tyler Norris murder trial.

For months the
Star
had been sniping at Cuddy not only about the G.I. Jane killing, but also about this Professor Norris. A young star of the mathematics faculty of Haver University, a recipient of a Haver Foundation genius grant, Norris was the only son of one of the most eminent families in the area. We had arrested him for shooting his pregnant wife in the face with a shotgun last New Year's Eve. He said a burglar had shot her, and most people believed him. I'd been the arresting officer. Back in February I had walked into Norris's parents' sixteen-room Greek Revival estate on Catawba Drive and taken him out of it in handcuffs. His father, whom I'd known all my life, had followed us to the squad car and asked me, “Justin, how could you?” The editor of the
Star
seemed to feel the same way. For the first time in years, the town of Hillston was not happy with its police department and the newspapers and television channels were losing no opportunity to say so.