First Lady (7 page)

“I wish I was doing why faster,” I said.

The taciturn Etham surprisingly confided something: “I got a friend tight with the Mayor, says Homer Louge is spreading bad junk about Cuddy, and folks on the city council are listening. Council's had a lot of flack about y'all arresting Tyler Norris. Something needs to break on Jane soon.” In other words, should Sheriff Louge succeed in his smear campaign, I would be to blame for Cuddy's downfall.

• • •

My mother's family has held office in this state for a long time, and my wife was in the legislature for a term, so I know most of the people who show up at political receptions. It took me a while to make my way through the familiar flushed faces and recognizable high-pitched laughs in the crush of babble. In the crowd, former Raleigh Medal winners milled about wearing their medals on blue ribbons. Among them was the poet, Fulke Norris, father of the math professor on trial. Accustomed to being adored (he'd been one of the youngest and most decorated heroes in World War II), he now looked like Robert Frost and knew it and made sure everybody else did too: his carefully disheveled white hair looked exactly the same tonight as it did on the jackets of his twenty-three books of inspirational verse.

The Norrises turned ostentatiously away from me as I approached their area. Frankly, I was surprised to see them here, since the evening was to honor the chief of the police department that had arrested their son Tyler. But perhaps they felt that their absence would be construed as fear bred of guilt. Slowly I squeezed past them toward the far side of the rotunda where I saw Cuddy backed against a Corinthian column shaking hands with pudgy businessmen. Tall and lanky in his white dinner jacket, he stood under a huge painting of a few ragtag Tarheel Revolutionaries defeating the entire British army. He was smiling but looked strained. Maybe he was disappointed that Lee wasn't coming to the ceremony tonight. Or maybe her absence was a relief to him.

“I saw where the People's Poet cut you dead.” He pointed at Fulke Norris. “Your mama's got a bunch of his books right there by her hospital bed. I checked one out.
A Chorus of Comfort.
Terrible. Anybody who rhymes ‘Dalmatian' with ‘salvation' and ‘offspring' with ‘golf green,' it's no surprise his son's a killer.” Cuddy waved his jacket flaps. “This air-conditioning needs to fight harder.”

Sergeant Zeke Caleb joined us and pumped our hands, glad to find familiar faces. Six-foot-three and 220 pounds, he took shallow breaths in order not to explode out of his rented tuxedo.

Cuddy patted his ruffled shirt. “
Oh-see-yoh. Toh-hee-joo
.”

Zeke grinned at him. “
Oh-sah-dah. Nee-hee-nah
?”

Cuddy grinned back. “
Oh-sah-dah. Wah-doh.”

I asked, “What's that all about?”

“Zeke's teaching me Cherokee. You just heard everything I know. ‘Hi, how are you? Fine. How 'bout you? Fine. Thanks.'”

Zeke stopped smiling before he popped his collar button. “We got a deal. He's teaching me Spanish. I bet I get a lot more use out of mine.”

Suddenly a state militia guard marched over, saluted us, and barked, “Captain Mangum. Please follow me, sir.”

Cuddy said to me, “Good-bye, old friend. It's a far far better place I go than you have ever been. Or are likely ever to get to go.”

Zeke said, “Chief, Nancy just wants you to know she's sorry she had to blow off your big night, but she had to take her niece Danielle to the Mavis Mahar concert.”

Cuddy smiled. “I know, Zeke. I got all twenty of Nancy's messages.”

I looked at my watch. The Mavis concert must have started. I wondered what song the Irish star was singing at Haver Field right now. And how she looked. And whether she'd sobered up since she'd told me she was filled with music and wanted me to stay at the Tucson to hear her song.

Five minutes later, on the crimson dais, Cuddy bent his head so Governor Andy Brookside, whom he intensely disliked, could place around his neck the wide silk ribbon, Carolina blue, that held the gold Raleigh medallion. Andy then read out the plaque praising “Captain Cuthbert Randall Mangum, Chief of Police, Hillston, North Carolina,” for his nationally acclaimed law enforcement department, and he talked a little about all Cuddy's achievements (United States Army Purple Heart and Bronze Star, Ph.D., LL.D.), and Cuddy thanked him and everyone applauded. It was true that Cuddy had passed a miserable nineteenth birthday in a flak-dodging helicopter while Army medics pumped blood and morphine into him. It was true he had an honorary degree from his alma mater as well as a Ph.D. from Haver University that had taken him years of night classes to acquire. But it was not true that his name was “Cuthbert.” While Cuthbert is what most people assumed his name was, actually his mother, a country woman, had told the nurse in the maternity ward her baby's name was “Cudberth” and she had proudly called him Cudberth all her life.

After the brief ceremony ended, the special guests trooped into shuttle buses to be ferried half a block away to the Governor's Mansion for dinner in the State Dining Room. Among the few of us who insisted on walking, Cuddy strolled ahead with Carl Yarborough, talking of strategies to deal with Hillston's sanitation workers. I think Cuddy and the mayor cared more about the well-being of Hillston than they did about anything else in their lives, and I suspect Carl's wife Dina, following along beside them, thought so too. Thinner and much lighter than her stout husband, Dina had startling green eyes and a short Afro that was almost blonde. She and I were distantly related but had never talked about it. We were chatting about a community play we were both in when Zeke loped over and pulled me aside. Nancy had just called him from Haver Field. Mavis Mahar, scheduled to follow her warm-up act at nine o'clock, hadn't shown up. It was now 9:40 and her band The Easter Rising was still on stage without their lead singer. The band was very good, but they were not what forty-seven thousand fans had come to see. Nancy told Zeke that when she'd run into Sheriff Homer Louge and asked if he wanted reinforcements from HPD, he'd told her, “No thanks, honey,” as if she were a waitress asking about a refill. She was concerned about security at the stadium.

I agreed with Zeke that it was best not to mention the concert to Cuddy now. The university police were working with the county sheriff's people and had already told HPD they didn't need our help. “Let the Stooges handle it,” I said. (At HPD we called Sheriff Louge “Stooge,” and his deputies “the Stooges.”) Zeke was fretting. “But if this Mavis situation…. You know how the Chief likes to stay on top of everything.”

I shrugged. “She's been late before. Wasn't she late last night too?”

“I guess.” Zeke said Nancy's niece Danielle would be heartsick if she missed Mavis. “I'll tell you this, I read where Marilyn Monroe entertained the troops in Korea with a 103-degree fever. The old timers had a sense of responsibility, not like these young stars today.” (Zeke was twenty-seven.)

I said that actually Marilyn Monroe was late all the time.

“But she didn't let folks down like Mavis does. But what it is, is, I read where Mavis has got a real problem with alcohol.”

“Yeah, that's what I hear too.”

“It'll mess you up.”

“It sure will.” I thought of the winter sun tediously moving across the ceiling of my small room in a Blue Ridge Mountains sanitarium—so many years ago that I'm sure Zeke Caleb knew nothing about my own real problem with alcohol. I thought of Mavis Mahar on the Tucson stage, swaying from drink, her beautiful arm raised in the dusty afternoon bar light, reaching high for the next note with her outstretched hand, a ring on each finger…. “Reeee-lease me…and let me love again.” How long had she stayed there singing for seventeen people instead of forty-seven thousand? Where had she gone next in the black limousine? To meet Andy Brookside? Was he the man all the sad songs were for?

Zeke yanked off his clip-on black bow tie and, pulling open his stiff collar, took a long deep breath of the night air. “Well, I'm proud of the Chief and I'm out of here. This is worse than desk duty. I tell you, I'm trying for a K-9 division job. I'm waiting for my dog. She's in Holland getting trained.”

“Ah, a Dutch girl, huh?”

“Yeah, I'm going to call her Heidi.”

“Okay.” I asked him to check back with Nancy and then to page me with any news. I knew he was right: if things did go wrong at Haver Field, or anywhere else in Hillston, Cuddy would take it personally. As he left, he handed me an envelope he'd found on Cuddy's desk. “Chief Mangum, Private” was typed on the front. “Probably just congratulations,” he said.

As I moved back toward the Yarboroughs, I heard Carl oddly snap at Cuddy. “It's the last thing I need on top of this fucking garbage strike.”

Cuddy said, “I bet it's the last thing that girl he killed needed too.”

“Well, if Savile can't handle it, get some damn help.”

“I have every confidence in HPD homicide.”

Dina, embarrassed, started talking effusively about
Measure for Measure.
Then Carl abruptly excused himself from Cuddy and moved away to join a group of men smoking on the mansion steps. They included the current Attorney General Ward Trasker and the majority whip of the state senate. Cuddy was left walking alone.

I joined him and handed him the envelope from Zeke. Distracted, he opened it. There was nothing inside but the clipped editorial from the
Hillston Star
calling for his resignation. The paper's front-page banner was attached with the word “STAR” circled in red and a large red question mark beside it. He started to toss it in a nearby trashcan. I took it from him.

“Hey, Justin, a lot of people want me to resign. What are you going to do, sue them?”

I asked him where else he'd seen red magic marker used to send him a nasty message. Wasn't it on the label tied to the toe of G.I. Jane's corpse?

In the State Dining Room, everyone circled pretty tables set with gold-rimmed plates, finding their places by the numbers on replicas of the gold Raleigh Medal sticking out of garlands of tiny roses, gardenias, and miniature orchids. Because of Lee's absence, I'd been moved to Table One with Cuddy, Andy, the Yarboroughs, a college president, and today's other prizewinner, Mrs. Boodle. Fulke Norris and his wife were at Table Two with other former Raleigh Medal winners; everyone ignored the fact that the Hillston police officers who'd arrested their son were seated only five feet away.

It was an elegant meal. Despite Bubba's disparagement, the “drama queen” banquet coordinator had prepared a dinner for sixty-four that looked better organized than most military campaigns. Effortlessly, lobster bisque changed to grilled quail changed to pork medallions, champagne changed to wine to coffee, and welcoming speeches changed to raucous small talk.

Andy devoted himself mostly to Carl and Dina Yarborough. That the mayor and his wife were seated this close to the governor and that he was being this attentive suggested that Shelly Bloom of the
Sun
had heard the right rumors: Brookside was going to drop Horace DeWitt, the old party regular he'd needed in the first election, in order to offer the lieutenant governorship to Carl. (Poor DeWitt wasn't even here tonight.)

An African-American running partner would be a risky choice. But Andy loved taking chances. Some years ago, a group at the Hillston Hunt Club had founded the Carolina Polo Regulars. We had just enough players to make up a match. The first time we played, Andy got whacked in the temple with a mallet while forcing his way at a gallop between two other horses. Blood streaming down his face, he made his goal and I'd never seen him happier. Afterwards, we were in the stable grooming our horses. Mine was Manassas, the former champion that the old eccentric industrialist Briggs Cadmean had left me. Andy owned two Arabian polo ponies, bought with Lee's money. He could have bought a cavalry. Leaning into my stall, he suddenly asked, “What excites you most, Justin?”

I was brushing Manassas's black forelock past his wild watchful eye as I thought about it. “Human gifts, I guess. Talent. Beauty.” Since my answer appeared to puzzle him, I asked, “How about you?”

Andy replied immediately: “Danger excites me.” Manassas, as if he agreed, shook his head free and kicked out at his stall door with a foreleg. “I like upping the risks. I played Russian roulette once.”

“I hope once was enough.”

“Well, it takes you to a different place.”

Picking Carl as his running mate wasn't as dangerous as Russian roulette, but it was certainly going to add risk to the governor's chances of winning the election next fall. Because no matter how much Hillstonians might love their mayor, this state was still crawly with bigots who'd be muttering did we really want a Yankee and a black man running North Carolina together, and what if the Yankee dropped dead?

Andy was now raising his crystal glass. “Gentlemen, we are privileged to be at the First Ladies' table tonight. To Dina, the First Lady of Hillston.” He toasted her. Then he toasted the college president, “First Lady of Frances Bush College for Women.” Then the wealthy widow Inez Boodle, recipient of the Virginia Dare Prize, “Our First Lady of Philanthropy.” After that, Carl toasted the absent Lee, “First Lady of North Carolina.” And after that, Andy suddenly asked Cuddy if he really believed, as he had claimed to reporters this afternoon in the Cadmean Building, that there was
no
killer smart enough to get away with murder in Hillston?

Dina Yarborough said with her wry sweetness, “Do you think
you're
smart enough to murder somebody, Andy, and not get caught?”

“The Governor's
too
smart to murder somebody,” Cuddy told her. “Mostly murder's for the freaked-out and dumb as dirt. The ones that are mad at their girlfriends, mad at the convenience store clerk, so high they'll shoot their own mother for the fun of hearing the gun go off. These folks have a serious, what we call today, attention-deficit, lack of impulse control type personality.”

With his earnest look, Andy nodded. “We have to get rid of the guns.”

“I wish you would.” Cuddy smiled at him. “It won't stop people killing each other, but it sure will slow them down some.”

Shimmering tiny diamonds in his brilliant white shirt, the governor leaned to include Dina in the conversation. “Planning a murder is where the brains come in.”

“I'd certainly use mine if I knocked off Carl,” Dina smiled.

Cuddy patted her hand. “Then don't inject him with dry cleaner fluid you borrowed from your brother-in-law. That's the kind of plan I hear about.”

Dina thoughtfully sliced off a quail's wing. “But isn't the governor right? Whoever killed that girl G.I. Jane in the woods took pleasure in it. There'll always be murderous hearts out there, getting a rush from killing.”

Cuddy nodded. “Yep. A few. And I'll always catch them.”

“Ah,” Brookside grinned. “So
no one
can get away with murder?”

“Not in Hillston they can't.” Cuddy smiled back at him.

As waiters interrupted with mango sorbet, my pager beeped. It was Nancy. I stepped out into the foyer of the Governor's Mansion to return the call. A policeman (his arms crossed as if he dared anybody to challenge him) stood guarding the base of the wide cantilevered staircase that led to the private quarters above. I wondered if Lee were up there, feverish in her bed, or if Andy had lied to us about why she was skipping the banquet.

Nancy answered from her car. There'd been a riot at the Mavis Mahar concert. When the already frustrated audience was told that the star was “ill” and that her performance would have to be rescheduled, some inebriated teenagers started throwing whatever was handy down onto the field. After driving her niece home, Nancy had returned to help out the ill-equipped sheriff's deputies and university police move forty-seven thousand angry people through the exits without their killing each other.

By the time Zeke found Nancy, six people had been rushed from Haver Field to the hospital. While nobody was seriously injured, three were being held for observation. Among them was Sheriff Homer Louge himself. He'd had what might have been a mild heart attack when two teenage girls defiantly bared their breasts at him, displaying little rings in their left nipples just like, presumably, Mavis Mahar's.

“Where's Mavis?” I asked. “Is she seriously ill?”

“Don't make me laugh,” snapped Nancy. “Probably still where you saw her, in the Tucson. Or try the By-Ways Bar. Danielle was crying her eyes out!”

“Find out what happened to Mavis and call me back.”

“What do you care?” Nancy asked. It was a fair question.

“Just call me.” I hung up.

Back at the banquet, Cuddy was being chastised by Mrs. Ward Trasker, wife of the attorney general, for “peddling” Margy Turbot as the A.G.'s replacement “before poor Ward has even started thinking about leaving.”

Cuddy smiled at the small mean woman. “But SueAnne, everybody's already saying Ward's retiring after the election and you know it's gonna take him at least six months to get all that golf equipment out of his office.”

Mrs. Trasker rebuked him strenuously. “Ward has given this state the best years of his life. When he heard you telling Channel Seven how you wanted this woman judge to get his job, he couldn't believe why Channel Seven didn't ask him
who
he
wanted, isn't that right, Ward?” She turned to her husband for confirmation. “You couldn't believe it, could you, Ward?”

The stocky Trasker, purple-splotched from embarrassment or rage or both, grunted non-committally and informed her in a warning way, “Captain Mangum has every right in the world to his own opinion, now you know that, SueAnne, why don't you pass me a little more butter?”

Dina leaned between them. “I think all Cuddy was trying to do was express his admiration for Margy Turbot, and if you got to know her I bet you'd like her too.”

“Hmmph,” said Mrs. Trasker with a smile as greasy as the butter her husband was stabbing into his roll.

Seated on Cuddy's other side was the Frances Bush College president, who wore a floor-length plaid kilt, a scoop-necked sweater and a velvet jacket, as if in formal imitation of a schoolgirl's uniform. She also came to Cuddy's defense, commending him for supporting a female candidate like her close friend Judge Turbot in so traditionally male a position as State's Attorney General. He rewarded the president for her support by frequently re-filling her wineglass. Staring at it, she suddenly launched into a description of a scotch-tasting party that she'd recently attended and went on at such wistful length that he finally offered to hop out to a package store and get her a bottle. I could tell the president liked him; she was unmarried (she'd made that clear), nice looking, and she loved to laugh. But if she was making a play for the police chief tonight, she was running onto a field of romantic war that had already been won by the absent first lady. I'd seen two other women defeated by that same ghostly warrior.

On my right was Inez Boodle, recipient of the Virginia Dare Prize, widow of the Hot Hat Barbecue king, a sly loud woman in her sixties with yellow-tinged bangs and a low-cut black-beaded gown that somebody should have advised her not to wear. “I know what you're thinking,” she told me.

I said I doubted it.

“‘Why in the world would ole Inez marry a man with a ridiculous name like Boodle?'” She guffawed robustly, throwing up her arms to express bewilderment. “I have
no
idea. That man's name was the least of his problems. I'll tell you something, Justice—”

“Justin. Justin Savile.”

“Oh, right, Peggy Savile's boy. How is your poor mama?”

“Still in the hospital, but better, thank you.”

“That's good. Justin, I used to tell people, when I said I married a Boodle, I meant it! Pete was loaded! I don't mean snockered either. That man loved barbecue and barbecue loved him. Why at the Hot Hats, the damn phone number spelled out HOT PIGS. He loved to make it and eat it and sell it and he sold oodles and oodles!” Her laugh rattled her ice water and I'm surprised it didn't shatter the glass.

Mrs. Boodle had received her Prize for her philanthropic support of college education, as displayed by her five million dollar gift to Hillston's Frances Bush College for Women (her alma mater) and her five million dollar gift to King's, a small African-American college in the eastern part of the state, Carl's alma mater. She merrily told Dina that if her husband Pete hadn't already dropped dead of a massive coronary while on a tour of his Hot Hat Barbecue franchises, he would have done so instantly on hearing this news, for Pete had always believed that the rise of women and black people was the source of everything that had gone wrong in America, ever since the slave Sally Hemings had seduced Thomas Jefferson. It was hearing on CNN that Sally Hemings's descendants had tried to use their DNA to get into the Monticello Society that had shot Pete's blood-pressure through the ceiling and brought on his last and fatal heart attack. The first one he had blamed on Jane Fonda.

“Go, Jane,” Dina mumbled at me.

I flashed back to a red poinsettia pinned to my mother's mink when my parents came home from a neighbor's Christmas party and argued in the hall. My father had indignantly left the party because their host had tried to convince him that Martin Luther King worked undercover as a Communist agent for the Soviet Union. Had their host that night been Mr. Boodle?

Inez hee-hawed. That was Pete Boodle, all right! She remembered that Christmas party and how Fulke Norris—over there at Table Two right now—had tried to keep Dr. Savile from walking out in a huff. Pete had always refused to believe that Martin Luther King and the U.S.S.R. were both as dead as these pigs on our plates and not off plotting together to bring down America. Mrs. Boodle stabbed a pork medallion with her fork and shook it at Dina. “I wish I could slip past the pearly gates for long enough to let Pete Boodle know I gave half his Hot Hat millions to a women's school and the other half to a college named after Martin Luther King!”

Dina placidly laid her napkin on her plate, and asked, “Why in the world do you think your husband's gone to heaven?”

Mrs. Boodle stared at her a moment, then belly-laughed. “You are absolutely right! Thank you, Mina, for setting me straight.”

“It's Dina,” I said futilely.

Over dessert, Mrs. Boodle, who seemed to have no idea that I'd been the person to arrest Tyler Norris, told me that arresting Tyler Norris was the most “asinine, insane, and idiotic thing the Hillston police ever did.” Like most people in town (particularly the well-to-do), she was sure a burglar had “panicked and shot Tyler and Linsley both,” just the way Tyler's defense attorney had described. “What was his name? Rosenberg?”

“Isaac Rosethorn,” said Dina. “It's so hard to keep those Jewish names straight, isn't it?”

“That's right, the Rosenbergs were that poor couple Pete blamed the Cold War on. Well, I was right there at Fulke and Mary Norris's for New Year's when Fulke got the call from Tyler that a burglar was in his house and he drove over and found him lying on the floor. Well, Mary's whole life has been one long nightmare. You know she almost burned up in a house fire. Where is that idiot waiter?”

Mrs. Boodle was more disposed to believe in Isaac Rosethorn's scenario of an interrupted robbery because two years ago she and Pete had been robbed of a portable gas grill they'd kept in their garage, and if you could be robbed on Catawba Drive, Lord knows you could be robbed in Balmoral Heights. “Hillston has gone to pieces,” she announced. “Robbing and killing and cutting up strangers and chopping off their hair and their tongues.” Out of patience with the missing waiter, she lit her own cigarette with a candelabrum that almost set fire to her bangs. “Not when I was a girl. We didn't put up with that kind of violence.”