First Lady (27 page)

“Ah.” She touched my face. “Tisn't much that goes by you, Detective.”

“Not much at all,” I agreed. “So long, Queen of the Night.”

She turned in the door, leaned down, and sang to me softly, “Ah, but I'm coming home to you,” the first line of the No. 1 song she'd sung to millions.

Dermott Quinn had a cigarette lighted and waiting for her. She ruffled his hair as she took it from him and then they ran together like children toward the waiting jet.

• • •

At dawn on Wednesday, Nancy Caleb-White and I sped up I-85, headed north through the last miles of undisturbed pine forests toward the interminable congested construction that stretches from the Petersburg-Richmond corridor all the way to Boston. Our destination was the Virginia Correction Center for Women. As I drove, Nancy munched on a Danish and talked about Guess Who. Finally I interrupted her. “Zeke said Dermott Quinn was trying to get in touch with you. What did he want?”

She licked sugar from her fingers. “It was so nice of him. It was about, you know, Danielle being all freaked about Mavis's concert getting cancelled. Cause I'd told Dermott about it when I was interviewing him. So he gave me these two tickets for the new concert. He said they're personally from Mavis. Can you believe it? I take back anything I ever said against her. Right on the front row too. I mean, like, two hundred dollar tickets! And Dermott gave me this card so I could bring Danielle backstage afterwards and she can get Mavis's autograph. Isn't that nice?”

I said it was very nice. “Did Dermott ask you anything about me when you were talking? I mean about me personally?”

She stared at me, stricken, with beautiful green eyes that distracted you from the old acne scars on skin that she could never get to tan. (Zeke called her “Paleface” for a joke.) “Did Dermott…tell you I did? I guess I maybe…I'm sorry, Justin. I shouldn't have said anything?”

“No, it's not a problem. I just wondered because he came by my house last night and I'm not in the phone book.”

“Oh shit, you mean like he's harassing you?” She squeezed my arm. “You think he's got a thing about you?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Yeah, I mentioned where you and Alice lived.” Her face crumpled with regret. “Maybe he asked some personal stuff, I guess, how long you'd been married and all. He acted like he liked you so much. Zeke always says why can't I keep my mouth shut. I don't mind what people know about me, but that doesn't mean I should…I'm real sorry.”

“Nancy, don't worry about it.” As Interstate 85 joined 95, I moved in among the discontented morning commuters to Richmond. “But Zeke's right.”

“I know he's right.”

“Anybody connected to a homicide? Let
them
talk. You just listen.”

Nancy nodded seriously. She wanted very much to do the right thing. “Well, Dermott talked my ear off. I'll tell you this. Mavis has a problem with drinking that's really scaring him. You know Windrush, about thirty miles south of Hillston?”

I knew it. There'd been nothing like the luxurious Windrush Clinic back when my family took me to “the mountains” and left me there locked in a room where the windows didn't open because I'd had “a problem” too.

Nancy felt down in the foot well for the tie she'd thrown there. “Well, Mavis has put herself in Windrush a couple of times. Or somebody else put her there. She was back in there just this past January but only for a week or so and nobody knew about it but Dermott. He stayed with her. I guess he's really kind of like her best friend or something.”

I glanced at her. “Mavis and Dermott were in Windrush in January?”

“Yeah?” She paused, her tie half over her head.

“So they could have been in Hillston when Kristin Stiller was killed.”

• • •

Bo, formerly Belle, Derek wasn't much interested in talking with Nancy and me, even though we'd driven all the way to Goochland, Virginia, to visit her. With a year to go on her sentence, Bo kept a busy schedule, what with two jobs—one in the copy center, one in the hair salon—plus her abuse-survivors group therapy, her AA meetings, her work-out sessions, and her auto mechanics class. She liked the classes. If she'd known more about auto mechanics back at Christmas, she might have solved the ignition troubles on that stalled Toyota before the highway patrol discovered that she'd not only stolen the car (and several other things) in Hillston, North Carolina, but that her U-Haul contained two motorcycles she'd stolen in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

To my taste, Bo was overdoing the workouts. She was big to begin with, and free weights had given her the look of an East German Olympic swimmer just when word leaked out about the steroids and everybody was in a terrible mood. Drawing comparisons between herself and Bo Derek seemed to me ill-advised, but “Belle” didn't fit her either.

She took a philosophical approach to life, perhaps under the influence of all the self-help groups she attended in prison. The photograph of Kristin Stiller produced a contemplative silence, followed by the inquiry, “What's it matter in the long run if I knew her or not?”

I suggested a shorter-term approach to life, pointing out the pleasures of spending time in this pleasant lounge, of breaking the day's routine by talking with strangers, of feeling like a helpful citizen—all these might be made to matter. Bo didn't think so. On the other hand, the prospect of my putting in a word with the parole board had enough appeal to persuade her to accept a carton of Virginia Slims from me. Smoking, she relented enough to admit that the transitory world did still call to her. “I know it's dumb, but I wish I had a frozen dac. A frozen strawberry daiquiri. God, don't I!”

I said, “Can't help you there.”

“And a long hot soak in a whirlpool. Day I get out of here, I'm headed for the Hyatt and a room with a whirlpool.” Bo walked to the window, leaned out as if right through the pines she could see the beautiful hotel room from where she stood.

I brought her a cup of coffee. “If I talk to your parole board about how you've been helping the police and the FBI solve a double homicide, maybe we can get you into that hot tub a little sooner.”

“Double homicide, what are you talking about?” Puzzlement spread slowly over her doughy big-featured face. But then she put it together. “Kristin's dead? That's why you're here?” She stood up. “Hey, wait a minute. You're not tying me to a murder.”

“Two murders. Possibly three”

She looked from me to Nancy. “No way. Somebody killed Kristin?”

Nancy asked Bo if she'd heard of the Guess Who Killer. Yes, she had. Had she heard of his victim G.I. Jane, whose throat he'd slit and whose tongue he'd cut out? G.I. Jane was her friend Kristin.

The mystery of life and the wanton randomness of fate dropped the large woman into a seat beside us. “Whoa, you just never know. That's bad, bad luck. Wrong time, wrong place and it could have been me or you. Yeah, Guess Who was on TV all the time, like about G.I. Jane and that hooker they found back in the fall. What do you mean three?”

Nancy said, “We think Guess Who also killed someone named Lucy Griggs at The Fifth Season Resort.”

“You mean the Mavis Mahar thing? How it wasn't Mavis, it was a waitress? Yeah, I saw that on the news.”

“Well, that was Lucy Griggs. You probably met her. She dated John Walker and sang in his rock band called the Mood Disorders. You know John Walker, right? You worked for his mom, Doris Nutz.”

Bo admitted that she knew John Walker through Shear Inspirations. And it was possible that she had seen Lucy in the salon before the two young people broke up. But she didn't know anything about his band. She didn't listen to rock'n'roll. She needed music that kept her serotonin flowing—new age and Mozart was all she could load on her system these days.

The news that she had personally met two of the victims of the Guess Who killer seemed to terrify Bo, as if Death was drawing too close for comfort. That she had been the last person to see Kristin Stiller alive shocked her into a willingness to cooperate; it spilled out like sticky syrup as she moved from “What's it matter anyhow?” to “Ask me anything.”

Yes, she had befriended the young Swedish woman. She'd bought Kristin a few meals (but never at the Tucson Lounge) and a few thrift store outfits (but never a Guess T-shirt, and she didn't recall ever seeing Kristin wear one). On Christmas Eve she had given her a free buzz cut at Shear Inspirations. Yes, she'd offered her a ride to Maryland for Christmas. Kristin was trying to make her migratory way north to fulfill a childhood fantasy of visiting New York City. Bo made the Swedish girl's determination to get to New York sound as valiant as the legless Porgy taking off in his goat cart.

Their plan had been to drive together on Christmas Eve to Havre de Grace, Maryland, where Bo could spend the holiday with her ex-husband, with whom she maintained a “good relationship,” and who (we subsequently learned) ran an auto paint shop where stolen cars and motorcycles were quickly given a whole new look. Riding with Bo would bring Kristin closer to her dream of seeing Manhattan. But the travel plan went awry. That same afternoon Doris Nutz, owner of Shear Inspirations, accused Bo of robbing her and fired “the best stylist who ever worked in that dump.”

“But you did rob her,” I pointed out.

“Just afterwards,” she explained indignantly.

“And the Toyota?” Nancy asked. “What'd your landlady do, evict you, so you stole her car?”

Apparently, the Toyota was a last-minute replacement for Bo's own vehicle, whose transmission had suddenly failed, forcing her into grand theft auto. “Sometimes Life shoves you into a bad corner and you can't get out unless you do things you never dreamed you'd do.”

“Tell me about it,” said Nancy. “I worked three jobs in high school, starting at five A.M. cleaning office toilets and finishing up scooping the guts out of chickens 'til eleven every night. I had three little brothers and a mama in bed with pancreatic cancer and the last thing I wanted was my stepfather getting out of the hospital where I'd put him.” Nancy had zero tolerance for criminal hard luck. “So you bailed on your friend?”

For Bo, there had clearly been some urgency to leave Hillston as soon as possible, not only because of the holiday traffic, but because she was sitting in a stolen Toyota full of stolen property. And so when Kristin, due at four, hadn't appeared by five (and with Bo's landlady, the car's owner, likely to return from the mall by six), Bo felt compelled to “cut a chogie” without her holiday guest. As to why Kristin hadn't shown up—well, would we like to hear Bo's theory? I held out my hand to stop Nancy from interrupting and said yes, we'd very much like to hear her theory.

Bo took a while calculating whether she was giving away something she ought to be charging us for. We waited. “Okay,” she finally said, “I'm not the sort to talk ill of the dead, but with Kristin there was a definite greed thing going. She'd been bragging about how she'd found out something juicy about some guy, some big shot guy with money. And what I think is, this guy was paying her to keep quiet. Because a couple of days earlier, she had this nice new leather coat on, full length, and where's she going to get the money for something like that?”

“So you think Kristin was blackmailing this man?” I asked.

Bo nodded. “While I was buzzing her hair Christmas Eve she was telling me how she was going to go see this guy later that afternoon and I said it was Christmas Eve and probably he'd be with his family. She said ha, he'd see
her
okay. I remember 'cause Kristin spoke pretty good English, but sometimes she got little things mixed up and what she said was she was going to ‘turn the nails on him.' Not the screws but the nails. Get it?”

I got it. But another hour of questioning Miss Derek produced no more information than that. Not even the image of frozen daiquiris in a Hyatt hot tub could stimulate her. She didn't know who the man was, or what Kristin had found out about him that was so valuable, or where he lived, or what he did for his money, or what he looked like, or where this last meeting with him was supposed to take place.

Nor did she know—or said she didn't—that John Walker had been paying Kristin (possibly in drugs) to spy on Lucy Griggs in order to find out who her lover was. Nor that Lucy's lover was almost certainly the man that Kristin was apparently blackmailing. All Bo knew was that Kristin had gone off to meet with someone on the afternoon of December 24 and had then failed to show up for a free ride half way to New York, city of her dreams.

“You never know,” she mused in her philosophic way. “Every fork in the road, you make your choice and whatever's behind the curtain, that's your deal with Fate. Maybe they flew off to New York together or maybe he cut her throat and dumped her in a ditch.”

“You never know,” I agreed.

Driving back down I-85 in the June heat, I told Nancy that the wealthy man Bo thought Kristin was blackmailing and the man whose “whole life” Lucy had told Mavis she held “in the palm of her hand” were likely to be the same man. We needed to find out who he was as fast as we could.

Nancy didn't see how such a man could fit the profile that Bunty and Rhonda were putting together of a serial killer. They were moving the investigation toward a psychopath, not a man trying to escape from blackmail. Given the sick things he'd done to victims, the FBI approach made more sense to her. “You know, Justin, how they say, with serial killers it's compulsions and patterns like the shaved heads and Guess shirts. And with regular killers it's like money or jealousy. I mean, if this is a guy involved with Lucy, why's he chopping everybody to pieces? It's, what's that word, redundant?”

Slowly I nodded at her. “Nancy, that's exactly right. It's redundant.”