First Lady (6 page)

He patted the Jaguar hood. “So you finally got Miss Moneypit out of the shop? How long this time, a month?”

“Thoroughbreds are more trouble, okay? Well, you are classic.”

His grin broke the spell. “Classic what?”

I don't know why I said what I did, after years of pretending not to know about Lee. “Classic, like you're getting ready to say, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why'd she have to walk into mine?'”

Cuddy looked at me with the familiar head-tilt but there was a wary curiosity in his eyes as he tried to figure if I meant by my quotation what in fact I did mean. Then he said, “Don't mix us up. You're the short romantic guy in this duo, not me. Look at your car. Old, everything's gotta be old.”

“Don't forget beautiful.”

“Looks like a car JFK put the make on movie stars in.”

I slid the sedan into gear. “You're right, you're no romantic.”

“Didn't Alice and I tell you buy U.S.A? Don't you know driving around in this old Jaguar won't bring back the splendor in the grass, boy.”

“What will then? Because it sure is gone.” I drove out of the lot. I couldn't say to him that Alice didn't tease me about anything anymore, that since Copper's death my wife and I have found ourselves standing on either side of a fissure of grief that we were so unable to bridge that she left our home and I let her go.

Alice and Cuddy are very close and I was wondering what she might have told him about our separation when he suddenly asked, “So how long is she staying in the mountains?”

“I told you I don't know.”

He surprised me by coming close again to the unspoken subject: “Alice's gone to her family for comfort. She wasn't getting it from you.” He held up his hand at me. “And I know, you weren't getting it from her either. But somebody needs to take a step here. Love's the wrong thing to waste.”

I didn't say anything as I drove toward the Raleigh bypass, and finally to fill the silence Cuddy started bragging about his new Ford. Relieved to change the subject, I pointed out my new sound system and clicked on what I expected to be the FM university jazz station. Instead, the tape deck started playing a bouncy Elvis Presley number. My fingers froze on the knob as the dead rock star sang,
“Won't you wear my ring around your neck…”

Cuddy turned the sound louder. “Now that's real friendly of you, Justin—”

I knocked his hand away. “Shut up!”

“What the hell's the matter with you?”

I swerved off the road and slammed to a stop. “I didn't put this in here! I've never owned any Elvis tapes.”

Cuddy didn't get it. “Well, don't be bad-mouthing the King.”

“
To show the world you're mine by heck…”

I shouted at him, “It's Guess Who.”

“Are you nuts?”

“The thing around G.I. Jane's neck. Won't you wear my ring around your neck? It's Guess Who. Cuddy, get out of the car!”

The skeptical, the stubbornly sanguine, the slow—all have their reasons to resist cries of alarm, but even a cynic like Cuddy won't press his luck if there's an easy alternative. He didn't believe me when I shouted that there could be a bomb in my Jaguar, but he jumped out and let me drag him across the road. We stood in our dinner jackets on the shoulder of the interstate, stared at by rubber-neckers, until the tape had ended. Although, as Cuddy gloated, there was no explosion, I insisted we call HPD to send somebody to check out my car. While we waited, Cuddy kept arguing that I was wasting his time. The old lawyer Isaac Rosethorn had once complained that if Cuddy Mangum had been Moses he'd have stood tapping his foot on top of Mount Sinai telling God to hurry up with the Ten Commandments.

It was Cuddy's idea that before Alice had left for the mountains, as a joke she'd gone over to Imports Garage and had the mechanic put in the tape cued to the song, “Won't You Wear My Ring?” But I knew that these days Alice would never go to the trouble to buy an Elvis tape in order to tease me about not liking rock'n'roll. Cuddy called the garage on his cell phone anyhow. Naturally, no one was there; they rarely were. Next he located Alice at her grandmother's family reunion in Highlands. I'd called her the day before myself, only to be told by an aunt that Alice couldn't come to the phone just then, that she'd call me back, which she hadn't done. But she did come to the phone for Cuddy and told him that she hadn't put the tape in my car and had no idea who might have done so. He told me that Alice had been on her way out the door and she sent her love. He claimed that she'd joked about hoping that he was the only Elvis fan I was driving around in my Jaguar while she was gone. It was something the old Alice might have said, and it felt like hearing a familiar voice after a long silence. Maybe she found it easier to talk to me through a translator.

After I admitted that I'd misplaced my keys earlier, Cuddy jumped on the idea that someone at HPD had taken them in order to plant the tape in my car (parked in the lot behind the Cadmean Building), someone to whom I'd talked about my “high school ring” theory on the G.I. Jane homicide. “You ever have a single solitary thought you didn't blab to anybody would listen to you?” he churlishly asked.

I was tempted to reply, “Yeah, I never told anybody I thought you were sleeping with Andy Brookside's wife.” But I didn't say it. I said, “This is Guess Who, Cuddy. I can feel it, I've been feeling something getting closer.”

He started down the highway, walked back. “Don't start that psychic googoo with me again. Don't start imagining things.”

“That's what they told Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
.”

He threw up his hands. “Life's not a movie.”

“It wants to be.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He stomped off again and started picking up trash off the shoulder of the highway. This was a man determined to clean up the world.

Old cravings suddenly rushed over me. I wanted a cigarette and a drink. I had an odd but pleasant image of myself on the dock at Pine Hills Lake with Mavis Mahar, both of us smoking, sharing a bottle of wine, watching the sun settle in the water. But I was married and I'd given up smoking long ago, and my well-documented drinking problem had been for years, by all accounts, entirely under control.

Out of the heat-fogged night came the spooky whirring bubble light of the HPD tow truck and behind it our indefatigable head of forensics, Lt. Etham Foster (an African-American still known to all long-time college basketball fans as “Doctor Dunk-It”). He unraveled from the squad car to more than six and a half feet of laconic self-possession, crossed his lean long brown arms, and frowned at us. “Got a problem?” he said.

Etham and I were friends. I think. It was hard to tell with him. In his bass monotone he rumbled at Cuddy, “Raleigh?”

Cuddy nodded. “I know, I ought to be at the capitol getting my prize. My night of nights, and Justin decides the Guess Who Killer's trying to blow up his old Jaguar with Elvis tapes.”

“Um hum.” Etham turned, ambled over to the sedan and leaned down to talk to the explosives specialist now checking under the hood with a flashlight. After a few minutes, he strolled back to us. He could cross the whole road in four steps. “No bomb,” he told us. “Tape's been wiped.”

Cuddy said, “It's just a stupid joke. Guess Who is not hanging out at the Cadmean Building looking for a chance to break into Justin's Jaguar.”

They towed my car back to the HPD garage to dust it for prints. I borrowed the black and white HPD cruiser that had brought Etham to the scene and drove a silent Cuddy to Raleigh at ninety miles an hour with the blue barlight flashing. I was thinking that the tape was a challenge, like the tag on G.I. Jane with my name on it, thinking it was a warning that another woman was going to be killed.

Cuddy was thinking about Lee Brookside. I knew him so well I suppose it didn't matter that he kept things to himself. He had bought that white dinner jacket to wear to the Gala because Lee would be there, laughed at himself for doing it, didn't want to be late, didn't want to go. As we took the downtown exit, I glanced at him grabbing one clenched hand by the wrist. The prospect of having dinner with Lee tonight was bound to break loose feelings that he'd long kept locked away. It was possible that they hadn't spoken once in private since she and Andy had moved to the governor's mansion three years ago. He stared fixedly ahead at the state capitol as we drove toward it. The gold dome shone in the moonlight like all the treasure of the New World heaped into a dowry that the richest woman in the South had given to her husband Andy, a dowry of houses, planes, cars, paintings, friends, universities, and the whole state of North Carolina.

• • •

In front of the capitol building, a parking valet, puzzled to see two guests in dinner jackets step out of a patrol car, apprehensively accepted the ignition key from me. Cuddy and I took our places at the end of a slow-moving river of guests as they streamed up the steps and through the columns of the portico and under the banner announcing the one-hundred-and-third Governor's Gala inside. Camera flashes flared at us as we climbed the marble stairs. Halfway up, Cuddy was nabbed by a mike-swinging Carol Cathy Cane, looking tonight more like a lounge hostess than a news anchor in an orange one-shouldered sheath, with a wide hairdo the same color. She cut Cuddy out of the herd like a rodeo champion. “I'm here on the Capitol steps talking to Hillston Police Chief Mangum, tonight's Raleigh Medal honoree. Captain Mangum, you must feel the irony. Here you are accepting congratulations for your low crime rate, when Guess Who's out there in the dark stalking his next victim because you can't find him even after the taxpayers almost doubled your police force.
And
your salary.”

He took the mike right out of her hand. “CeeCee darlin', you've been staying up too late at night watching slasher movies on cable all by your lonesome. You need to get out more and you'll see that nobody's stalking anybody. There's nothing for anybody in Hillston to worry about.”

She laughed skeptically. “Except a killer wandering around loose who already slit two women's throats.”

“Hillston has the lowest crime rate in the Southeast.”

“Well, maybe it used to—”

“CeeCee, have you heard these rumors about Judge Margy Turbot?”

She jumped at the bait because she couldn't bear not to prove that she knew as much as he did. “They're saying state attorney general Ward Trasker is going to retire after the election this fall to become President of the Haver Foundation. Judge Turbot's on the short list to replace him.”

Cuddy smiled as if CeeCee had just gotten a hard word right in a spelling bee. “I think she'd make a great attorney general. Judge Margaret Turbot. Always a real pleasure, CeeCee.” He kept walking.

I had moved ahead, catching up with an oddly distressed Bubba Percy (usually he was as buoyant as a rubber ball), who fell in beside me. I tapped his tuxedo jacket. “Dollyland Souvenir Shop?” My horror at Percy's taste in clothes was an old joke between us. Tonight he sported a chartreuse silk tie and a vest embroidered with gold roses. “Sonny Bono estate auction?”

He was so upset he didn't even take offense. He'd lost track of the governor and his wife. He'd assumed that our cruiser was leading in Brookside's entourage and seemed to be blaming me that it wasn't. Glancing down at the street, I shook my head. “Andy's kind of big to lose, Bubba.”

The press secretary bit at his mouth. “Andy and Lee both! They're forty-five minutes late, and the driver said they never called for the limo.”

I checked my pocket watch. It was 8:58, cocktails had started at eight, and the brief ceremony itself was scheduled for 9:15. “What do they need a limo for? Don't they live next door?”

“Jesus, Justin, the governor and the first lady don't walk anywhere. You can check into the twentieth century now that it's over.”

“Well, I'm sorry. Cuddy and I were a little late ourselves.”

“Everybody's fucking up tonight!” Bubba kept telephoning people (thick-skinned ones, I hoped) on his cellular, shouting at them, “Shit!” and clicking off.

I tried to distract him, fingering his flowered vest. “Big Boy Discounts at River Rise Mall?”

He gave the vest an angry tug. “Savile, don't start with me and the class struggle or you'll be watching your head roll down the blood-soaked streets of Paris while I sit knitting R.I.P. on your silk scarf like Madame Defarge in drag.” Proud and breathless after this retort, he stuffed the slender phone in his tuxedo pocket and calmed himself with a quick comb through auburn locks dampened by sweat in the heat.

I brushed a speck from his sleeve. “Bubba, you're always so much more literate than I remember you.”

“I said don't start. I'm going down for the third time here, I've got sharks chewing off both my legs and sea gulls crapping on my head.” According to Bubba (whose vivid personal style bore no relation to his bland press releases about the Brooksides), Andy had fucked the schedule for tonight's Governor's Gala the same way he'd fuck anything in a skirt except Rob Roy. Tonight would make the Titanic look like a great vacation plan. His TV crew was tearing around shitting their pants like dogs on a diet of Mexican beans because they were shooting the Brooksides live in ten minutes and there were no live Brooksides to shoot. His drama queen banquet coordinator was off somewhere with his face in a paper bag because guests had sneaked into the State dining room and changed the place cards at the bad tables, the press had broken into the champagne hidden under the bar, and Bubba was sorry he had ever left journalism in order to accept Brookside's invitation to “Go the Distance” as his press secretary.

Why hadn't he instead married Edwina Sunderland, the flirtatious seventy-eight-year-old who had once capriciously vaulted him over the heads of his superiors into the managing editorship of the
Hillston
Star
(which she'd owned along with Channel Seven)? “Hey, so she was pushing eighty and couldn't keep her arthritic fingers off my fanny. You know what? Muff-diving Edwina would have been a sweeter-smelling job than state politics, Jesus, and besides, she dropped dead and I'd have all her money now.”

“Bubba, your vulgarity is in a class by itself.” He probably thought that was a compliment. “And by the way,” I added, “Edwina Sunderland never would have married you, you were just a Pretty Boy Plaything to a Ruthless Dowager. The rich are very different from you.”

His cell phone rang, and he flipped me the finger as he answered it. “Yeah?… Yeah?…” And he hung up. “Okay, Andy's here. He took a different car. Jesus, I'm too good-looking for this kind of stress!” He ran back down the steps toward the approaching sound of sirens. Two police motorcycles led a long black sedan into the cul de sac. Andrew Brookside sprang from the back seat and waved to the crowd. But no Lee followed him out of the car and I noticed Bubba struggling to mask his surprise as he moved in close. Andy spoke to him hurriedly. The limousine looked familiar, but the windows were so dark-tinted I couldn't see the driver. However, as the car sped away I saw the license plate, and I'd seen it before. I'd seen the same limo outside the Tucson waiting for Mavis Mahar.

The governor moved through the swarm of eager guests like a skillful fakir dancing along a path of red hot coals. When he reached me, Brookside paused and we shook hands. He said that Lee had come down with a sudden high fever and that he'd insisted she stay home tonight. I said I was sorry to hear it. After Andy moved off with Mayor Carl Yarborough and his wife Dina, Bubba told me I was to take Lee's place at the main table. I'd be next to tonight's other medal recipient—the “Hot Hat Barbecue Widow,” who was receiving the Virginia Dare Prize for donating five million dollars to two North Carolina colleges. Bubba said she had been “close” to my late uncle, U.S. Senator Kip Dollard, a handsome, incredibly stupid old man with a beautiful voice, long lovely sentences, and absolutely nothing to say.

“Is there anybody in politics you're
not
related to?” sneered Bubba.

“You, I hope.”

Staying outside on the portico, I called Etham Foster. He had asked around at HPD. Nobody had admitted taking my car keys to rig the tape player to blast out “Won't You Wear My Ring?”

“But I wouldn't admit something that dumb either,” growled Etham. He added that Wendy Freiberg from SBI documents had called to confirm that the snake tattoos on Jane's ankles had been drawn with the same red magic marker that had written the label addressing the corpse to me. “Guess Who drew those tattoos.”

“Wonder why?”

The forensics chief said, “I do
what
. You do
why
.”