First Lady (43 page)

The Hillston Fire Department was able to save the shell of the sixteen-room Greek Revival Norris house on Catawba Drive, but not the second-floor wing where the floor collapsed before they could free the charred body of Mary Norris. She was chained with a bike lock to a radiator in her bedroom.

The Haver University Registrar's Office was able to provide the Hillston County District Attorney's office (rather begrudgingly as it was the Fourth of July) with 272 emails from Tyler Norris to his student Lucy Griggs. The fourteen reply emails from Ms. Griggs to Professor Norris made it clear that the young woman had grown increasingly disturbed by the peculiar sexual needs of her partner, and toward the end, increasingly suspicious about what had really happened to his wife. The professor's boastful, solipsistic, unctuous, compulsive, self-serving, and self-hating “love letters” to Lucy were, as Bunty Crabtree said, “a Rosetta Stone” of research for profiling the sociopathic personality.

The capture of the Guess Who Killer—the news that he was the same brilliant math professor and local social scion who had only this week been found innocent of murdering his wife, who
had
murdered his wife, and his famous father, the people's poet, not to mention burning his mother alive, not to mention killing those other women while his own murder trial was in progress, not to mention that one of the young women had been mistaken for Mavis Mahar—was irresistible to press and public.

The fact that Norris had told the family lawyer (not that he had any family left) that he planned to act as his own attorney and to plead not guilty (which was either very foolish or, as Isaac Rosethorn said, the best case he could make for an insanity plea) made it all even more irresistible.

Even the fans who had invaded Hillston to hear Mavis Mahar sing were more interested in the capture of Guess Who than in the rock star. At the Mavis press conference that afternoon, when she distributed the first of the free tickets to her final concert, the photo opportunity was sidetracked by shouted questions about what Mavis had known about the affair between Tyler Norris and her look-alike Lucy Griggs. Mavis said with intriguing elusiveness that everything she knew she was telling to the police.

Guess Who made the news on all three networks and in fact took up much of the Fourth of July coverage on CNN, where Shelly Bloom (who'd broken the story in the
Hillston Star)
was interviewed every few hours—in between her interviews with MSNBC and Fox.

Despite the holiday, the Hillston city council invited Captain Mangum to a special breakfast meeting that was covered by CeeCee Cane live on Channel Seven. Cuddy brought me along. As he walked into the meeting, back in his jeans, his blue cotton shirt, and Tarheels tie, the whole council greeted him with a standing round of applause for his timely capture of the Guess Who Killer. Councilman Penley, who only a few nights earlier had been eating dinner with Tyler Norris at the Pine Hills Inn, praised Cuddy for taking Guess Who off the streets. Here was a madman who'd slaughtered a fine young lady judge with her whole life ahead of her, not to mention his own parents (leaders of Hillston's social elite), and also had given a fine university and a great Southern town a black eye.

Cuddy thanked Councilman Penley and noted that parenthetically Norris had butchered four other women that maybe Penley hadn't known as well. Their names were Kristin Stiller, Lucy Griggs, and Maria and Lupe Guevarra. We should remember them too. He then pulled me to my feet beside him and said that the town owed a great deal to members of the Hillston Police Department: to its medical examiner Dick Cohen, its forensics chief Etham Foster, and most of all to the homicide division and its commander Justin Savile. The council clapped for me as well. How could they not, with my bandaged arms and lacerated face? Cuddy also generously commended Mitch Bazemore and the district attorney's office, especially Lisa Grecco, as well as the Raleigh field office of the FBI—in particular agents Rhonda Weavis and Barbara Crabtree—as well as state bureau documents examiner Wendy Freiberg.

He said it all just went to show how much we needed to work together. Beside him, Sheriff Homer Louge, eating a ham biscuit, swallowed it too fast and started to choke. Cuddy nonchalantly handed him a glass of water. The mayor raised his coffee mug and toasted the Hillston Chief of Police and we all said “Hear hear!” It was terrible coffee.

Later in Cuddy's large office looking out over the town he loved, I gave him a present. It was an eighteenth-century silver Spanish chess set that my Dollard relative had liberated in 1898 from a general's home in Havana. (It was not considered theft at the time since we were taking all of Cuba too.) I gave it to Cuddy because his Costa Rican chess set had been impounded as evidence in Tyler Norris's upcoming trial and his office didn't look right without a chess game going on in it.

Cuddy said that two power brokers on the council had followed him into the men's room after the breakfast and asked him if he'd like to run for mayor. Polls suggested that the Brookside-Yarborough gubernatorial ticket was headed for a big victory in the fall and Hillston would need a new mayor. Cuddy had told the councilmen that he'd think about it.

I said, “Are you crazy?”

“As my old mentor Fatso the Bald, AKA Mr. Briggs Cadmean, always advised me, ‘Son, never say no even when you know it's no. Because
maybe
leaves open many doors to the brothel of fame and the outhouse of fortune. And son, fame and fortune are the only two places where this trashy world says a man ought to risk sticking his dick.'”

“I swear, Cuddy, I don't believe Briggs Cadmean ever said any of these things to you. I think you just make them up.”

“Verbatim, I swear,” he told me grinning.

“But tell me there is no maybe. I know you don't want to be mayor of Hillston.”

He didn't want to be Governor Brookside's Secretary of Criminal Justice and Public Safety either. And this time he said so when Carl Yarborough brought him the offer on the governor's creamy stationery. “Carl, I'm all for justice and safety and that's why I want to go on being police chief of Hillston. I don't want us to have the best crime prevention record in the Southeast. I want us to have the best crime prevention record in the whole country because I don't want there to be
any
crime in Hillston. I want everybody living in tranquillity, I want peace in the valley as the good Elvis tells us.” He pointed at the big poster of the dead star.

Carl chewed on his cigar. “Cuddy, you've got the talent and brains to move up in the world. Dina and I were having lunch a few days ago with the first lady. Know what Lee said? She said, no one ever deserved the Raleigh medal for service to this state more than you. She said you were the most decent man she'd ever known.”

“I'm glad of her good word,” he said quietly.

“You could work on that sort of crime prevention in Andy's cabinet.”

Cuddy fed the waiting pigeons far too much of his Big Whopper, then closed the window behind him. He gave a tug at his thick shock of nut-brown hair. “Carl, I'm not a cabinet type guy. I'm more a modern wall-to-wall entertainment system. Right, Justin?”

I smiled. “Right.”

After the mayor left, Cuddy balled up Brookside's invitation and banked it off Elvis's jeweled belt into the trashcan.

“That's your only good shot,” I told him. “Happy Independence Day. Well, I guess you can go on saying you're never wrong. You told them Guess Who would be in custody by the Fourth of July. And that's what I was thinking as I shimmied down that burning tree hanging onto Norris. He'll be in custody by the Fourth of July.”

He tilted his head at me. “You know what Janis says about freedom? It's just another word for nothing left to lose.” He sat back at his big desk, began setting out his new chess pieces on the silver and onyx board. “And you know what Patsy says about love?” Patsy Cline was his favorite singer, “Sweet Dreams” his favorite song. “Patsy says, ‘Why can't I forget the past and love somebody new?'”

“It's a good question, Cuddy.”

He set the silver queen down beside the silver king. “Well, Justin, some folks can't. If I were you, I'd go bring Alice home.”

• • •

I wasn't sure which was more astonishing. That in a crowd of fifty thousand people at Haver Stadium I should find myself next to Father Paul Madison or that he should be at a Mavis Mahar concert. But the small Episcopal priest told me he had bought his ticket to the original (canceled) concert six months ago. I'd had mine hand-delivered by Dermott Quinn at HPD this afternoon, where he'd come to tell me that he'd been mistaken and that the man who'd run out of Mavis's hotel suite had actually been (as Mavis thought) just a fan.

“You're lying, Dermott,” I told him. “But lying's the least of what you'd do for her, isn't it?”

The scrawny pock-faced Irishman gave me the ticket in his hand. On the back of it Mavis had sent an invitation for me to come to her dressing room after the concert. “I'd die for Mavis,” he finally said. He looked up at me with an intense solemnity. “I'm not a fool now. There're gifts worth dying for. She's one of God's great ones.”

She was certainly one of the world's great ones. While the warm-up act performed before her entrance, Paul Madison and I walked to the stadium arcade where hawkers were selling Mavis CDs, T-shirts, videos, polyester scarves, and cheap rings. With his polo shirt and docksiders and blond curls, Paul looked more like a Haver University undergraduate than the rector of Trinity Church. The vendor selling him a Guinness was quite taken aback when a young parishioner stepped into the line behind us and said to him, “Hi, Father Madison. Mavis rules, right?”

Across the arcade I saw Nancy Caleb-White buying a black satin jacket with “MAVIS” in red glitter on the back. She slipped it happily onto her smiling little niece Danielle. We said hello. Nancy asked if I'd seen the local papers. “Finally saying good stuff about us. Nice, isn't it?” she grinned.

“Very nice,” I agreed.

As Paul and I hurried back to our seats, I looked around at the crowd waiting for Mavis, and I asked him what he thought made a star. The priest thought about it a while, and then he said, “Light, I think. They draw all the light to them.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “But they throw it off too. Like real stars.” I pointed up at the shimmer in the black sky above us. “A star's light can dazzle this whole stadium full of people,” I waved my arm around the vast dark space, lit only by the flickering candles a few fans already held, “into believing, every one of them, that they are seen. Seen and loved.”

Paul sipped his Guinness. “It's different with saints. I've been thinking about the saints since you were asking me about them.”

“Thinking what?”

“What makes a saint. If stars are the light, then I'd say saints are people the light shines through.” He smiled at me. “Not just the famous saints, because the famous ones are stars too. But the everyday saints around us in the world. Light shines through them and illuminates what they see. The light just goes right through them to what they love so that we can see its beauty. They don't get in the way because they're looking too.”

When Paul said this, images of my wife Alice suddenly started to pour into me so quickly I caught my breath. I saw Alice bent over the green shoot of a narcissus, brushing off its weight of unexpected snow.

I saw Alice handing a check to the tall blushing cheaply dressed leader of the East Hillston High School Band, promising them more help from the state next year.

I saw Alice kissing our son Copper good-bye.

I saw Alice.

Because for the first time in a long time, I let myself look at her. For the first time in a long time, I let myself feel for her. And when I did, suddenly I was crying.

Paul looked over at me, then asked, “Are you all right?”

I said I was fine, but then I had to bend away from him with tears I couldn't stop. “Good Lord,” said Paul.

“I don't know,” I told him.

“Probably you do.”

“I think my heart broke.”

He patted my bandaged arm. “Don't worry about it,” the priest said. “It's a good sign. And I don't think your heart broke. I think it broke open.”

• • •

Above our heads giant spotlights shooting beams of white light through the sky crossed and recrossed faster and faster. And then together great rays of light blazed down on the stage in the middle of the huge stadium as the Easter Uprising struck the opening chords of “Coming Home to You.” The crowd roared to its feet. The music was primitive and strong and as seductive as the beautiful golden singer who now danced out into the middle of the light, into the middle of thousands of people, into the guitars and mandolins, piano, cello and bass, drums and fiddles and pipes and whistles and hurdy-gurdy, all making music together for her.

Mavis Mahar danced into the center of the light swirling on the stage. And, by her gift and her will and her arduous unseen labor, she made of us all who were a part of the night—the music, the lights, the stadium of strangers side by side—she made of us all for one instant the perfect cosmic harmony that we long for without knowing it. She gave us for a little moment that grace that the saints in heaven enjoy together without effort and forever.

• • •

“To tell God's truth, I'll miss you, Lieutenant.” In her small disorderly dressing room after the concert, Mavis poured herself a glass of Jameson's. She was exhausted, her hair and body wet with perspiration, still wearing the gold sleeveless T-shirt and the tight gold lamé trousers in which she'd ended her show—as she always did (at least in America) with an encore tribute to American rock singers that (according to magazines) personified her appeal to both males and females, at least in America.