First Lady (5 page)

Cuddy called to him. “Hey, Homer, you and Carl settle the garbage strike, I hope?” Louge moved his mouth but just kept going. He walked at a tilt, possibly in admiration of John Wayne. Cuddy tried to help him out. “Oh, you could say lots of things. Like, ‘If I had ended the strike, there'd be at least one thing done right in Hillston.'”

Louge paused long enough to drop a gum wrapper on the floor.

Cuddy picked it up. “Well, I wish I could go on discussing this with you, Homer, but I gotta get dressed in a tux and head to the capitol for this Raleigh Medal prize they're giving me and not you.” Louge quickened his pace and was at the revolving door when Cuddy called, “I appreciate your good wishes.… Hold on, Homer. Door turns to the right. There you go.”

After the sheriff stomped off, I said, “I don't know why you have to rile him. He doesn't take it well. So you're really wearing a tux?'

Cuddy loosened his tie and pulled open his shirt to show me the Elvis Presley T-shirt underneath. “How about with this?”

“Sure. As long as it's with black tie too.”

“Now look at that, speaking of ties.…” He gestured and I turned to see Officer Nancy Caleb-White just coming out of the elevator; she was in uniform, but with her collar open, tieless. Shaking his head, Cuddy pointed at his own tie. “Nancy, put it on.” Then he spun backwards though the revolving door, calling to me, “Pick me up at eight and don't be late as the big-eyed girl said to the Big Bopper. Well, they're all in rock'n'roll heaven now and left this cold old world a whiter shade of pale.”

One of the few women on the force whose slender long-limbed body wasn't defeated by those hideous boxy trousers and squared-off shirts, Nancy, in her twenties, my junior partner, could never make herself wear the full uniform unless coerced. Pulling her truant tie out of a pocket, she muttered, “What's he bugging me for? I saw that Elvis thing he had on.”

“That T-shirt of Cuddy's is famous. He wore it in
Newsweek
.”

She nodded morosely. “Four years ago.”

“According to our captain, Elvis is timeless.”

“Zeke says Elvis had Indian blood.” Nancy recently married a young sergeant of ours, Zeke Caleb, a Cherokee from the North Carolina mountains, presumably descended from one of the few survivors of my great-great grandfather's governorship. For some reason, they'd added Zeke's last name in front of hers and she was now officially “Nancy Caleb-White.”

I centered the knot in her tie. “Didn't your husband also tell us Frank Sinatra hired Sirhan Sirhan to kill Bobby Kennedy to get back at him for killing Marilyn Monroe?”

Nancy laughed. “Zeke reads these magazines.” She held up a tabloid. “Listen, Justin, I got something for you on Guess Who.”

“That's good, Nancy, because the Hillston
Star
just called for Cuddy's resignation, and Bubba Percy just maneuvered him into telling a dozen reporters we'd have Guess Who locked up by the Fourth of July.”

“Sure, no problem.” Nancy aspires to the rank of a homicide detective, and she works hard, except for refusing to take her exam. It reminds her of school and scares her. Nothing physical has frightened this former East Hillston girl gang leader since she hit her stepfather over the head with a hammer when he tried to rape her. “NCBI just called,” she said. “Fiber on the Guess T-shirt? It's car carpeting, gray, but they can't make the model yet.”

“So he moved Jane?”

“I knew we were in a rut figuring Jane was out jogging when the perp grabbed her. I always thought those shoelaces were
his.
He offs her, puts the Guess shirt on her, drives the body out to Balmoral Heights after dark. Maybe he burns her, cuts out her tongue there, gives her sunglasses so it looks like a day hit. First time, with Cathy Oakes, all he did was put the T-shirt on her and add the roses. With Jane, he's getting fancier.”

“How can a girl like that die and nobody miss her?” I slapped my hand on a glass case in the lobby.

“Hey, watch it.” Nancy rubbed carefully at the glass beneath which she and her husband had arranged a display labeled, “Crime and Punishment. Hillston Police 1883–1953.” They had come across the dusty case packed with artifacts that had figured in homicide cases solved over the past half century. These murderous items had been exhibited at the old courthouse, but in one of the many moves of government offices, they'd been relegated to the basement. Zeke Caleb, a fervent historian of the state that had exiled his ancestors, put the display up in the lobby. Among the still carefully labeled weapons were old guns, a hatchet, a bludgeon, and a straight-back razor, all stained with rusty human blood. There was even the “Hangman's noose used to execute Miss Idele Straithorn on March 1, 1901, in the yard of Hillston County Courthouse for the murder of Mrs. Boone Hackney.”

When he saw it, Cuddy had disgustedly suggested that Nancy and Zeke take the restored display back to the basement. “Or hey, bring it up to date. Stick G.I. Jane's bloody T-shirt in there too.” But the case had stayed in the lobby, and every day people stopped to peer into the murderous past it contained. Old violence was almost as good as fresh carnage.

Nancy pointed now at a brown bottle labeled “POISON.” “I bet it was easier to catch them back then.”

I agreed. “In 1901, Hillston didn't have Jane Does lying around dead in the woods for months.” I looked down into the case. “That's weird. Did you rearrange these guns?” I showed her where a 1947 Italian pistol was missing and a long-nosed Colt revolver had been moved into its place.

She leaned over to look. “Well, the case is still locked. Probably Zeke lent that Bernardelli to the Historical Society.”

The Hillston Historical Society ran a little museum in a former tobacco warehouse that they shared with a Thai restaurant and a ceramics arts gallery. But their displays ran to the bourgeois and decorative—the malachite shoe buckles worn by a debutante flapper—and it didn't seem likely that they would borrow the Italian Bernardelli PA thirty-two with which Big Bob Futton had killed a prostitute at the Piedmont Hotel in 1949. Nancy said she'd check with Zeke.

She wanted to tell me an idea she'd had about Jane. Opening her tabloid, she pointed to a grainy photo of the Irish rock star Mavis Mahar being hauled into a patrol car apparently wearing nothing but a Nashville police officer's jacket. Her hair was in the buzz cut she had worn in the magazines in Cuddy's office. Nancy said, “What if Guess Who didn't saw off a lot of Jane's hair like he did Cathy Oakes? What if she already had a buzz cut and it had just grown out a little, and this guy wanted it to look like he'd shaved off a whole lot of her hair and maybe kept it, so he used the knife on what little she had? I mean, lots of models get buzz cuts. See, Mavis had one. Now she's grown it back.” Nancy pointed at the Irish singer's fuzzy skull, beautifully shaped, pressed against the policeman's jacket.

When I told Nancy that I'd spoken to Mavis Mahar this afternoon in the Tucson, she was devastated that I hadn't gotten an autograph for her niece Danielle, who was a fan. She yanked at her braided ponytail, tightening its rubber band. “But how can I blow off the Chief's big night tonight, just so Danielle can get fucking crushed by a zillion blotto rock freakheads.”

Everyone at HPD knew that Nancy was taking her niece to the Mavis Mahar concert tonight but that she hated to miss seeing the governor pin a medal on Cuddy, whom she adored. She'd been fretting for a month about her dilemma to anyone who'd listen: not attending Cuddy's ceremony would show him a lack of respect. Attending would mean giving up tickets she'd bought
last winter
. I said, “Hey, give me the tickets, I don't mind skipping Cuddy's getting one more civic prize.”

She sighed. “I figure Mavis won't even show up anyhow.”

It was true that of the forty thousand people who would be at Haver Field tonight, there was some doubt that the star would be one of them. The magazine had said that as a result of “a drinking problem” for which she'd been in and out of Windrush Clinic here in the Piedmont as often as the man delivering the mineral water, Mavis Mahar had started a riot when she'd walked off the stage in Houston, had canceled her concert in Atlanta (the promoters were suing her), and just last night in Hillston had been so late fans were close to assaulting her weary band.

“Sixty-seven-fifty each for these tickets,” brooded Nancy. “Mavis Mahar is like my niece's personal idol. Danielle was at the Sheraton downtown—that's where Mavis and the Easter Uprising are staying—at five o'clock this morning waiting to catch her coming out. My asshole brother don't—doesn't—even know it, but Danielle's seeing a lot of me, and this is important to us.” Nancy's alcoholic brother, Danielle's father, hasn't spoken to her since she married Zeke Caleb, whom he oddly called a “half-breed,” although Zeke was proudly 100 percent Cherokee.

“I've got to go talk to forensics. Nancy, take Danielle to the concert.”

“I bet the Chief wishes he could blow off this whole thing too.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Cuddy's worried the press'll get sarcastic about Norris and G.I. Jane, but he'll get his face in the TV camera and blow smoke 'til they roll the credits. How many times have we heard him on the news saying how Hillston's got the lowest per capita felony crime rate in the South? And how the hell does he even know that?”

Nancy didn't like any criticism of Cuddy. “Studies. They do studies.”

As I headed to the elevators, I added, “Well, Guess Who's cost our captain his
A+
on the test, and I can assure you that the glorious summer of his bonhomie will not be making a return appearance until we're back to ground zero in the world of unsolved homicides.”

Nancy spun her finger at the side of her head. “Justin, most of the time I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about, and neither does anybody else around here.”

“I'm saying Cuddy will boot some butts if we don't collar Guess Who before the Fourth of July.” I held the elevator door.

“He won't fire his friends.”

“Sure he will. You want me to say I saw you at the Gala?”

She shook her head, the long black braid flicking a shoulder. “No thanks. Lying just messes me up. But I gotta think this through; I hate to blow off the Chief's big night—“

I distracted her quickly. “That eyebrow earring on the shoelace, tied around the neck of the victim? Remember I thought it was like the old custom where a girl wears a boy's high school ring on a chain around her neck because they're going steady? That's young romance, like the roses on Cathy Oakes, right? I'm thinking maybe Neville PD focused too much on her johns. I want to check Cathy's high school book. Maybe this psycho went to school with her and Jane. And you ask around the local hair salons, see if anybody like Jane maybe got a buzz cut back in January.”

Her face brightened. “Yeah, let's grab this squirrel. Me and Zeke can't even get a beer at the Tucson without somebody cracking some lame joke.”

My only suggestion was to stay out of cheap bars.

• • •

The defense lawyer Isaac Rosethorn was leaving the dilapidated Piedmont Hotel, where he had lived on the top floor in unbudgeable clutter for forty years while gentrification swept around him with the stimulating hand that Cuddy and the mayor called Progress. Walking with Isaac was his current client, the accused wife-killer Professor Tyler Norris. Isaac was holding forth with energetic gestures as if arguing some point with him. I watched as they passed through a nearby pedestrian alley where years ago an undercover sting had gone awry and almost killed Cuddy and me both; on damp days my right leg still stiffened around the ingenious little pieces of steel that held it together.

I drove to the other side of the alley just as the lawyer and his client emerged and paused to talk near the door of the Tucson bar. Norris's bland clean-cut features grimaced as he swatted at the smoke from Isaac's cigarette. They made a distinctive pair: Norris with everything so tight and pressed; Isaac with his flowing white hair and white rumpled billowing shirt looking like a fat polar bear wearing trousers. Suddenly Norris spotted me in my car and, frowning, turned his back; Isaac was too busy talking to notice. I waited until they'd left before stopping at the Tucson. It was nearly six o'clock and the black limousine was still waiting outside. I noticed the driver asleep at the wheel. I thought about going inside the bar to see what Mavis Mahar was doing but it was a dangerous urge and I knew it. The two small dark women were back at the dumpster looking through the garbage bags. Sheriff Homer Louge came out of the Tucson and shooed them away.

• • •

Later that evening when I drove on the new winding streets to Cuddy's River Rise condominium complex, the white sweep of searchlights criss-crossing the sky lit up the bridge over the Shocco River. The day's second hard rain had just ended and the bridge still had a lush wet shine. The lights were coming from the Mavis Mahar concert at Haver Field. I imagined her standing in those lights, her pale arm raised, her hand filled with red tulips.

Cuddy was waiting outside his unit, leaning against an ornamental street lamp, wearing a black tie and a white dinner jacket. In all the years I'd known him, I don't think he'd ever looked better. Despite his jokes about how in high school he'd resembled Abe Lincoln with a flat top, Cuddy had never been anywhere near as homely as he boasted, but tonight there was a remote, handsome edge to his looks. The sweeping lights had an old nostalgic war look about them, and as Cuddy watched them arc across the night, with the big silver moon floating past the Shocco, he had a trace of that imperturbable forties cool that makes the disenchanted so alluring.

When he didn't seem to hear me brake, I rolled down the window of my new car (new to me, it was a thirty-year-old Jaguar sedan), and called out, “You'd think the governor would send you a limo.”