First Lady (11 page)

“Come on, Mitch, do we want
another
case blown from the get-go?”

“It's a suicide.” Mitch's body tightened defensively. “Ward and all these officers were already here and already told me it was a suicide when I drove over with Osmond—”

Cuddy nodded. “It was Ward who told you to bring Osmond?”

Mitch blinked, worried. “Ward wanted the body someplace safe and settled before the press got hold of the news. That made sense to me. You know what those vultures are like with celebrities. So he asked me to bring Osmond. I saw her lying there with a gun in her hand. There wasn't any question in Osmond's mind about suicide.”

Cuddy's mouth twisted ironically. “Well, now, as I recall, there's rarely a question or an answer either in our county coroner's mind. Didn't he tell us John Wintergrass had drowned himself when it turned out he'd been shot four times before somebody dumped him in the reservoir?”

Mitch's thick line of eyebrows furrowed. “You think this wasn't a suicide?”

“How would I know? That's what investigations are for.” Cuddy waved his arms around. “Was everything torn up like this when you got here? Has anything been removed? Besides the goddamn body?”

Mitch shook his head on its thick corded neck. “Nothing. Nobody's taken a single thing.”

The A.G. Ward Trasker tried to keep an eye on me but was distracted by Bubba's handing him the cell phone. Whatever was said to him was said fast because he turned immediately purple, then handed the phone back, sat down, and put his head between his legs. While Cuddy drew Mitch into a corner and started writing down what he said, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

The red tulips Mavis had been holding at the Tucson lay in a wilted tangle on a dresser. The black top and black jeans I'd seen her wearing lay in a pile on the floor. Empty bottles—wine, whiskey, beer—cluttered a pale blue rug in a bay window, looking like messages floating on the sea. Someone had swept glass from a broken bottle into a neat pile in a corner. There were flamboyant clothes and bizarre jewelry all over the bed and the chairs; the strangest was a straw hat in the ribbon of whose brim was stuck a circle of small white candles.

Carefully I made my way through tangled sheets and stale room service meals into the master bathroom where a chaotic jumble of strewn make-up covered the counters. A trail of used towels led to a frosted glass shower door. I opened it. By lying on its tiled floor, I could see a miniscule thread of blood around the cap of the shower drain. Also interesting was a chunk of gouged-out grout and a big crack spidering through the tiles in the back wall of the stall. Luxury places like The Fifth Season don't let their accommodations get rundown. I gave the shower walls a careful look with a flashlight.

When I finished, Bubba was off his cell phone and hissing at the A.G. “Well, he sure as fuck didn't figure you'd invite in the National Guard! He says get all these people out of here
now
.”

Trasker had a green scared look. “None of those officers know anything about this except it's a celebrity suicide.”

Bubba was skeptical. “Yeah, and I don't know you were boffing your brother's wife at the Charlotte Marriott either.”

Now the attorney general went dead white as Mitch and Cuddy turned to stare at him. Quickly Ward stepped out to the terrace and spoke to Louge, who started hustling troopers and deputies back through the room and sending them out to their cars with thanks for helping out, everything was under control now. Everyone but Bubba went outside to watch the exit as the puzzled lawmen drove off into the night, leaving only Nancy and Roid under the trees with the HPD forensics officers who'd just arrived. I saw our medical examiner Dick Cohen grouchily join them in his Bermuda shorts and baggy T-shirt, his long thin hairy legs as pale as they had been the day he'd first come South twenty years ago and announced that he'd never go outdoors in this heat if he could help it. Cuddy was pacing under the terrace lights, yelling at Bazemore and Trasker, while Homer Louge leaned against a pine tree and smirked. I heard Cuddy threaten Ward Trasker with a call to Channel Seven if the A.G. didn't instruct Mitch to get on the phone to the brain-dead coroner and have Mavis Mahar's body transferred immediately from Pauley and Keene mortuary to our city morgue.

As I came back into the suite, I caught Bubba crawling on the floor under the bed. He dragged out a balled-up man's raincoat, stood casually, and draped it over his arm as if he'd walked in with it. I had no doubt that the once nice Italian coat belonged to Andy Brookside, but I pretended not to notice what Bubba was doing with it. When I touched his arm, he jumped. “Bubba, you need to straighten some things out for me. Do you know what this is all about?” I pointed at the straw hat with the candles.

He looked at it. “Jesus, I've got no idea. But Mavis was a total kookamonga. One minute she won't even wear silk because it's not fair to the worms. Next time you see her she's got on a zebra belt and ostrich feathers in her hair.”

“Let's start back at the beginning. You got here, you knocked, nobody answered, and—”

“Justin, Christ, I already told you all this!”

“Tell me again. You know what they say: we can do it here or we can do it downtown.”

As Bubba babbled out his story, I could tell he was simultaneously thinking through his very messy situation and how he best might be able to get himself out of it. “So Andy had told me she'd been wasted when he saw her and I heard she'd missed her concert, so I thought maybe she'd passed out inside. I could hear her CD going when I got here. It was old blues junk. Mavis had told Andy how Janis Joplin got ‘Ball 'n Chain' from this old black woman so Andy had me find her the CD—that's the kind of crap I do in my job, can you believe—so he gave it to her yesterday and that's what was on.”

“Music was playing when you opened the door?”

“Yeah.” Bubba pointed at a CD player on the bar. “Nobody but her would have been listening to that shit, so I went in.”

I said, “I wouldn't call Big Mama Thornton ‘shit.'” I looked at the CD player. The volume had been turned completely down, but the machine was actually still on and still programmed to keep repeating the Thornton
Vanguard
Complete Recordings
. I turned up the volume. Thornton was wailing “Hound Dog.”

Bubba snapped back into focus. “Well, hell, Justin, take the damn CD. Mavis won't be needing it anymore.”

I hit “Stop.” “Bubba, I've got a problem. I bet you know what it is. The way you described things to Cuddy and me is not the way things looked when we got here. You agree?” He kept his eyes on his go-cup cocktail. “Now you said the lights were off when you walked in?”

He folded the raincoat over twice, but not before I saw the bloodstain on its liner. “But the bedroom light was on. That was enough to see her.”

“Propped up and facing the front door so you could see her face?”

He started for the patio again. “Stop bugging me about this.”

Grabbing his arm, I pulled him over to the chalk outline. “Bubba, come on.” I pointed down at the floor. “This isn't even where you saw her, is it?” He just glared at me. “And where was the gun?”

“The gun?”

“If she shot herself, there was a gun, right, Bubba?”

He flushed. “Of course there was a gun. It was, yeah, I guess it was lying on the rug somewhere.”

“Not in her hand?”

“I don't know.”

“What did it look like?”

He stared at me. “Like a gun. How should I know?”

“Big? Small? Black? Gray?”

He thought. “I don't remember.”

“What was she wearing?”

Bubba flinched and chewed at his lip. “I'm not sure.”

“Clothes? Naked?”

“I don't remember! Leave me alone!”

Voices rose. Cuddy's two ostensible superiors, the Haver County district attorney and the state's attorney general, barged back inside with him, all arguing loudly. Cuddy was shaking his cell phone at them, saying that this was a Hillston case and he was the chief of the Hillston police, and if Bazemore and Trasker didn't back up and back off, he'd go straight to CeeCee Cane at Channel Seven. He'd apparently wormed out of the terrified NCBI agent (Ted Bingley, the coroner's nephew) that Ted had taken Polaroids of the scene and before Trasker could stop him, the young agent had handed them over to Cuddy. Cuddy now passed them angrily to me. There were only two shots of the body, both poorly done from the same angle. Mavis had a large raincoat over her that covered her head, but her legs and arms looked bare. She lay where they'd drawn the chalk outline, on her stomach with her arm outflung. There was a small silvery gun in her right hand.

I handed the pictures back to Cuddy. “I thought Mitch said nothing was moved from the scene besides the body.”

Bazemore yelled at me, “Nothing's been removed from this scene! Absolutely nothing but the corpse! What do you think, public officials are robbing a dead woman?”

“Well, that too,” I nodded. “Because a while ago I saw Deputy Eddie Boggs walk off stuffing a gold scarf of Miss Mahar's in his pocket. But what I more had in mind was, if Mavis Mahar shot herself, where's the gun?”

It is axiomatic that suicides do not dispose of their weapons after the fact, and certainly not after they've been photographed dead holding the weapons. Nevertheless, a thorough search produced no gun anywhere in Bungalow Eight. Mitch assumed it had been bagged before he arrived. Ward Trasker called in Homer Louge who said he'd seen a gun in the victim's hand but couldn't say where it was now. The attorney general and the district attorney accused the sheriff of allowing an underling to remove the suicide weapon from the premises; they did so with such vehemence that I was convinced neither of them did know where the gun was. After they finished blaming Homer, they called in everybody who was left—none of whom had even been inside the place until that moment—and blamed them. Then Homer, Ward, and Mitch all three turned on Bubba Percy and accused him of removing the gun for obscure reasons of his own.

Bubba indignantly denied having taken the weapon. In fact, he now confessed that he hadn't gotten within fifteen feet of the dead woman and wasn't sure if he'd noticed a gun at all. I forced him to look at the Polaroids of the body and he turned green.

Cuddy was advising Mitch to call Pauley and Keene mortuary to see if they'd taken a weapon along with them in their goddamn van. Or call the goddamn half-wit Osmond Bingley—maybe the coroner had kept the gun as a souvenir. The young NCBI agent mumbled rather wistfully that he didn't want to hear Cuddy insulting his uncle. Cuddy told him that insulting his uncle would be a fucking impossibility.

Mitch was rattled. “I'm sick of your cursing at us, Mangum! It's offensive.”

Cuddy was steaming. “Offensive? What's
offensive
is the criminal activity being committed in this room by state officials! Come on in, Dick.” Cuddy pointed a disgruntled Dick Cohen at the suite's bedroom while Ward tried to keep the HPD forensics team behind Dick from entering the premises.

Bubba Percy hurried out the terrace doors with the governor's raincoat in one hand and his drink from the minibar in the other. Assuming he wasn't going anywhere far, I let him leave and followed Dick Cohen into the bathroom. The M.E. was annoyed. He'd been brought
twice
to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and then told there was no body out here anyhow and he needed to get the body from a funeral parlor that was only half a mile from his house! While Dick was grousing, I showed our forensics photographer Chuck Grant the thin line of dried blood on the shower drain and the shattered tiles on the back wall. I pointed out what looked like strands of short gold-brown hair. We bagged them. He took photos.

Cuddy stuck his head in the door. “So we saying she got shot in here and was moved later?”

I gestured toward the living room. “Yeah, I think she was moved
after
Bubba saw her. So if the killer moved her, he was still around when Bubba waltzed in and he's damn lucky he's not at Pauley and Keene's too.”

Cuddy pointed at the crack in the shower wall. “No slug in there?”

I said somebody had chiseled it out of the tiles, either the killer or the crowd in the next room. “But I don't know why they'd do it unless—”

He nodded. “I know why they'd do it. Go see if Bubba's too deep in this muck to haul him out.”

“My pleasure.”

Out on the landscaped slate terrace, the night sky was so clear I could see the full moon in the water of the swimming pool. The press secretary stood staring at it sadly. I said, “Bubba, running off with Andy's Armani won't solve your problem. It's got her blood on the liner.” Startled, he dropped the coat on the glass table beside him. “And despite Ward's best efforts, don't you bet Andy's prints are going to be all over this bungalow, not to mention other more personal residue of his here and there?”

Bubba had the decency to blush—either at my sexual implication or at my catching him with Andy's raincoat—until his whole freckled face was nearly the color of his auburn hair. “Savile,” he snarled tiredly, “why go testing for Andy's semen? She shot herself.”

“Not if there's no gun.”

“Of course there's a fucking gun! Chuck Pauley probably slipped it into his hearse and he's off hawking it on eBay right now, same as that deputy's doing with her gold scarf!”

I sat down on the blue-cushioned teak deck chair next to his. “And she didn't shoot herself in two different rooms either. That's just too hard to do, even for a superstar.”

“I don't know what you mean!”

“Yes you do. Somebody moved her body from the shower to the living room. Before you saw her. Or after. Which?”

Not only did Bubba look terrible (his skin clammy, his eyes webbed with blood-veins), but he was actually ripping out little curly strands of his beloved hair. “I'm fucked up here,” he finally confessed, sounding almost poignant. “All I wanted was to get a discreet official closure on her suicide without bringing in a mob of yahoos. That's why I came to Cuddy. I wanted to keep Andy out of it and then tomorrow, you know, somebody would quietly announce she'd passed away.”

“‘Passed away?' Well, I suppose that's one way to put having your face shot off. So what happened to your idea?”

Bubba sighed. “About what would happen if you stuck dynamite up a duck's ass. Ward says somebody anonymous, some guy, called the manager here at The Fifth Season and told him to go check out Bungalow Eight, so he goes and he sees her body.”

“The manager goes?”

Bubba tore off his jacket and tossed it on the patio. “Yeah, I guess somehow the manager knows Andy's been here visiting Mavis—Christ, they probably run camcorders through the walls in these suites—and when he sees she's dead, he flips out. He just saw Ward Trasker sitting right there in his lobby having a drink.”

“Tonight at The Fifth Season?”

“Ward and SueAnn came back here after the banquet instead of driving so late to Pinehurst—and you can guess who's paying their tab, you and me, bud. So the manager runs back to the lobby, grabs Ward, and tells him there's this problem of Mavis being dead. Bam bam bam. Stormin' Ward takes the ball and—” Bubba shook his head in sad amazement.

“Who tipped off the manager?”

“No clue. Says the caller didn't give a name, just told him he better go check out Bungalow Eight.”

“Maybe it was Andy himself who called the manager.”

Bubba gagged. “Why would he do that?”

“So her body'd be found.” I took his drink from him, sipped it, and spat the contents into a bed of white peonies. “Jesus, what is that!?”

“It's all she left in her minibar—rye, Drambuie, and Chianti.” He shrugged, taking back his vile concoction. “I call it The Lost Election.”

I noticed a condom wrapper under Bubba's deckchair and brushed it out with my foot. “Bubba, can we drop the ‘Andy was Adlai Stevenson and Mavis was Eleanor Roosevelt' party line and admit he was sleeping with her? Can we also admit you were over here checking up on her a lot earlier than you've told us? If we could start there, maybe we could get some place.”

He gave me an earnest look. “Justin, help me out. We're in Ollie North Cover-Up Country in there.”

“We?”

“For Christ's sake, I'm your friend!”

“Okay, my advice is, if you can get out of the country, Bubba, do it fast.”

He laughed sharply. “Fine. How?”

“Step by step. Start here. At 11:30, when I saw you walk back into that banquet room, you'd already seen Mavis Mahar dead and you were telling Andy she was dead. True?”

Bubba stared at the condom wrapper, then at me, then he took another drink. “Okay,” he said. “True. I'd already seen her, about 10:45.”

“And then what?” I sat in a deckchair and pulled it over beside him.

“Andy and I talked it over. My first thought was just leave it alone. Somebody'd find her sooner or later.”

“Good god, Bubba.”

“Right, blame me. I got you and Cuddy here, didn't I? Who knew it'd be like the bumblefuck L.A. cops at O.J.'s house!”

“Wouldn't have happened if you'd called 911 in the first place.”

“Could we do this without the moral commentary?” He slapped at the folded coat on the table as if he blamed it for his dilemma. “Then Andy remembers his fucking raincoat. By then it was too risky to go back for it. So I said I'd go ask Cuddy's help in keeping things quiet.”

I asked him with real curiosity, “How in hell did you think you could keep it quiet?”

He laughed in a tragic opera way. “Well, it sure wasn't by having Ward Trasker yell May Day to all the shits at sea. Who knew he was going to round up every moron in his Rolodex—the D.A., the sheriff, the coroner and his fucking nephew, and tell them to rush right over?”

“Okay, Ward's in there spring-cleaning the place without telling poor Mitch what they're spring-cleaning for. Here's the big question. Did you or Andy ask Ward to come over and destroy evidence of Andy's presence?”

“I not only didn't ask Ward, I didn't know he'd be here!”

“Did Andy ask?”

Bubba gave me a disgusted look. “Are you kidding? He was reaming Ward through the phone just a few minutes ago for ever coming in here.”

“Doesn't mean he didn't want it done, just that he wanted it done better.”

Exasperated, apparently past bearing, Bubba twisted himself out of his chartreuse vest and ruffled shirt, and with a skipping trot peeled down to his black bikini shorts. Then he cannonballed into the pool, splashing me with a round billow of warmed water.

I called to him as he stroked a long crawl across the black water. “Was Andy's raincoat lying on top of Mavis when you saw her at 10:45?”

Bubba powered back to the pool's edge, where he stared up at me morosely. “No, she was naked. And she was propped up the way I said, not on her stomach like in the picture.”

“And her body wasn't where the chalk's drawn, right? She was back in the bathroom, right? Was she in the shower?”

Slowly he nodded. “Jesus, yes. And she'd shaved her head.”

“She'd what?”

“She'd shaved off her hair. I mean, I know she'd done it before, but this was a shock.”

“So you had to walk through the living room to see her. How close did you get to her?”

“Just to the bedroom door. I could see into the bathroom, into the shower stall. The straw hat with the candles was sort of half on her head.”

I shook my head at him. “But you didn't go in the bathroom? You didn't go find out if she was dead or alive.”

“Justin, she was dead.” He ducked under the water, came up and shook his head as if he hoped to shake out all the memories. “She was naked and that weirdo hat was kind of slipping off her head. She was facing me.”

I walked to the pool edge. “Look at me. Was there a gun in her hand?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I honestly don't know.” He hoisted his body from the pool, shook himself like a big dog, and grabbed a towel lying in a chair. “Here's the rotten break of it, it was totally in the toilet anyhow, then this crap had to happen.”

“Does that translate that the affair between Mavis and Andy was already over?” He nodded, rubbing at his hair. I looked back at the suite where I could see Cuddy now bidding good-bye to Dick Cohen. “Yep, a rotten break, okay, especially for Mavis Mahar.”

“Savile, don't make me out some hard-hearted Mr. Pitiless.”

“I wouldn't dream of trying. But Bubba, you're up to your furry nipples in what the Irish call shite.”

The press secretary adjusted his black bikini briefs, found a cigar in his brocaded vest, lit it, and studied first the sky, then my face. Finally he leaned back in the deckchair.

I sat in the one beside him. “So why did Ward's guys move her body?”

“The hell I know. I wish to God somebody'd cut Andy's willie off.”

When I asked him how Andy had ever met Mavis, Bubba did his Pagliacci laugh and thumped at his chest. “Through Randolph Stupid Percy! That's how they met! Through me.”

“Tell me all about it, Bubba. We're not going anywhere.”

• • •

A few years ago, Bubba Percy and the Irish rock star had sat out a thunderstorm together in the VIP lounge of Triangle International Airport and had fallen into conversation. Mavis was leaving North Carolina after a stay in the new Windrush House, a very private resort clinic where clients with a drinking problem and a lot of money could get rid of both. She headed off to Sardinia to honeymoon with a Spanish tennis player whom she'd married during the bender that had sent her to the clinic. Five months later, she and the tennis star divorced as suddenly as they'd wed; he went to Wimbledon and she came back to America on a concert tour. During this tour, the singer ran into Bubba again at a fundraiser in Atlanta where she was performing for free, as she often did when charitable causes caught her eye. The press secretary introduced her to the notoriously handsome governor. Now compared to Mavis, Andy was about as left-wing as Jesse Helms. Still, he had a reputation as one of the great young hopes of Southern liberalism and that was enough to make the radical Mavis want to meet him. A little while is all the seductive Andy ever needed. “Half my job's beating them off Randy Andy. Mick Jagger never had it so good.”

“So an affair started around the first of the year?” I said.

Bubba rubbed the towel over his hair. “I have no idea,” he claimed. “But I don't think they led into it with months of stuffing envelopes for the Southern Poverty Law Center. These type people don't have time for foreplay. All I know is, rumors started spreading like grass-fire and I had to suck a lot of dick to blow them out.”

I said, “Do me a favor, Bubba, don't get into your personal life.”

“Justin, you want to hear this or not?”