First Lady (12 page)

He said the affair between the governor and the singer was more like a three-week fling, never serious, and was over when Mega Records ran into a snag about two Mavis concerts scheduled for Haver Field here in Hillston, the last stop on her southeastern tour. The Haver University administration suddenly expressed concerns about the mayhem at earlier concerts at other colleges. They wanted to cancel. So Andy, former president of Haver, made a call to the new president, persuading him to let the star appear at Haver Field. Of course she would behave herself, the governor had apparently promised the university. In the meantime, Mavis started drinking again and if she'd ever planned to behave, she changed her mind. There was a riot in Houston, she was sued in Atlanta, she spent a night in a Nashville jail. By the time she flew into Triangle Airport three days ago, Mavis Mahar was so famous, so wild, so addicted to the spree, so dangerous, that Andrew Brookside couldn't have found anything more risky with which to play games unless he'd tried Russian roulette again, this time with bullets in five of the six chambers.

The evening before Mavis's first performance at Haver Field, the governor went to see her at the secret Fifth Season bungalow. According to Bubba, he went there to ask her to perform at a huge campaign party for his fall election. If so, he didn't deliver the news well. They had a fight—she'd been drinking heavily—and she was an hour late to her concert. Then, apparently to attempt a “nicer close” to their relationship, Brookside had gone back to see her at the bungalow again for a second time, this evening. “Don't ask me why,” Bubba shrugged.

“Because she's dangerous.”

“Try not to be epigrammatic, Savile, all right?” Bubba was licking at his long, expensive cigar. “Well, Andy says he waited here for her from six-fifteen to six-thirty. She came back so drunk she started a fight about his, get this, centrist politics—” He gestured at the wrecked room behind us. “And the kicker—she flushed his fucking car key down the toilet. Then she passed out and he left in her limo.”

I asked him what time that had been.

“Andy said he left her conked out beside the pool at seven-thirty. He had her driver rush him back to the Governor's Mansion. That's the limo you saw I guess. He was late for the Governor's Gala.”

I thought back to Andy's flurried arrival at the capitol without his wife. I asked, “So when he got to the Governor's Mansion to hop into his tux, he had a fight with Lee? That's why she refused to come to the banquet?”

Bubba shrugged. “I don't get in the bloodbath with them.”

During the banquet, Andy had asked Bubba to return to The Fifth Season to retrieve his car; he couldn't risk sending anyone else. Bubba sighed. “I was a Morehead scholar. I was a
Rhodes
scholar.” He blew cigar smoke into the air, it drifted away like all his old dreams. “Can you believe this is my job? Mop up service?”

I shrugged. “Well, you wanted to be close to power.”

“Right. But not because I was wiping their butts.”

So he'd taken a taxi and an extra key to Brookside's Mercedes and headed for The Fifth Season. It was actually only 10:43 P.M. when he'd opened the bungalow door and found Mavis dead in the bathroom. He immediately drove back to Raleigh in the Mercedes, pulled Andy out of the Gala Banquet, and told him the singer had killed herself. For forty minutes, they'd discussed their options. At one-fifteen A.M. Bubba arrived at Cuddy's place claiming he'd driven straight there after discovering the body. He and Andy had decided it would be cleaner not to have to explain the missing time.

“Oh much cleaner,” I said.

But what Bubba (and, he assumed, Andy) hadn't known was that while they were still mulling over options after the banquet, The Fifth Season manager had gotten an anonymous call, had found Mavis, and had asked Ward Trasker to help preserve the privacy of a dead star, who—he suspected—was sleeping with the governor. Ward had called for reinforcements, and by the time Bubba brought us there to look at the body, the body was gone.

I looked at the big redhead carefully. “You think Andy killed her?”

He shot upright, flicking live cigar ash on his bare stomach and hissing at the pain. “Are you fuckin' serious?”

“It didn't cross your mind when you walked in and saw her body that Andy had sent you over there to see it?”

“No way.” Bubba appeared to be genuinely shocked.

“But you've got to think it crossed Ward Trasker's mind. Why else all this rearranging?”

“Why should Andy kill her? What's she gonna do, tell on him? So what if she does?”

I gave him a skeptical look. “‘So what'? Didn't you just name your drink ‘The Lost Election'? So he loses the state and his wife leaves him. That's so what.”

“Lee hasn't left him by now, why start?” He stared morosely at his drink. “Course, it'd be just my luck if she did.”

As Bubba subsided into a self-pitying sigh, I heard a car leaving on the other side of the bungalow. When the splatter of gravel faded, I picked up a different sound: a slow crunching noise nearby in the dark behind the landscaped shrubs. It sounded like someone carefully walking on the expensive mulch that was piled high around the plants bordering the pool. The noise was steadily moving closer. I stood quietly as Bubba wiggled around in the deckchair with his hideous cocktail and his cigar, muttering, “You think there's a chance I could get my old job back at the
Star
if I gave them the Mavis Mahar suicide as my first lead? I could let it rip how she was banging the governor.”

I grabbed Bubba's tuxedo jacket from the patio floor and strolled toward the shrubbery. “Excuse me just a second—” Wheeling around, I flung the coat at a shadow hunched behind a small spiral juniper, then leapt at the shape and grabbed it. The shape screamed as I dragged it back to the pool.

When I yanked off the jacket, Shelly Bloom came out swinging. The thin pretty young reporter from the
Sun
was a whirl of terror, her short black hair an unruly tangle, her large black eyes shocked wide open. She wore black Spandex pants, a black tank top, and black Reebocks. It may have been her notion of night camouflage. She was hard to hold on to. Fighting her off, I grabbed her camera and tapped out the canister of film. “What do you think you're doing!” she wanted to know.

“Shelly, crawling around in the bushes out there, did you notice a lot of official-looking yellow tape with DO NOT CROSS on it?”

When I gave her back her camera, she hurried over to Bubba who was quickly pulling on his tuxedo pants. She told him not to get dressed on her account, and added that he wasn't as out of shape as she'd figured he'd be. He zipped up his trousers. “That it, Shelly? You drive out here to caliper the body fat on my abs?”

Shelly admitted that she'd gotten a tip from a buddy in the sheriff's office that Mavis Mahar had checked into The Fifth Season and that something big had happened to her, that she was maybe dead. So Shelly drove out here, parked on the highway, and crawled over the stone wall. Wandering around the grounds, she saw this geeky little Irish guy that she thinks worked for the rock star. He was calling “Mavis” over and over, so she figured she was in the right place. But when she tried to talk to this guy he ran off and a few seconds later she saw two hotel security guards run after and grab him. She made her way over here where she'd spotted all the barlights flashing on cars. “Is she dead?” the reporter asked eagerly.

Bubba was fishing around for his dress pumps. “Is who dead?”

“Mavis Mahar! Did she kill herself?” She said it as she might have announced that she'd just won a forty-million-dollar lottery.

“How long you been listening, Shelly?” he asked her.

“Long enough to hear you say Governor Brookside was having an affair with her.” She nodded eagerly, combing her tangled hair with her hands. “Come on, I've been good to you. Is the body still in there?”

Behind us, Cuddy suddenly stepped through the bungalow doors onto the patio. “Hey, Justin, wrap it up, okay?” He called over to the couple in the shadows. “Hi there, Shelly and Bubba. Pool party? Justin, would you please escort Shelly out of a sealed police scene? And Bubba, if you know any lawyers that haven't been disbarred, you might want to ask one along when you come to HPD tomorrow at eight A.M. Shelly, good-bye or you'll be joining Mr. Beefcake there in needing a lawyer.” He turned back inside.

I handed Bubba his shirt. “Maybe Shelly will give you a ride home.” Taking the governor's folded raincoat off the table, I waved it at him. “Maybe you could marry her if she'll find you a job on
her
paper. At least you could give her your Porsche.”

Shelly tried to see into the bungalow as she said, “No to the marriage, yes to the car. I've already had a husband, I've never had a Porsche. That's Mitch Bazemore in there. So the Chief of Police
and
the D.A. are here?”

Bubba forgot his troubles in his incredulity. “No way, Bloom. Married to who? I don't believe it.”

Shelly sniffed indignantly. “I was married three years. Who to's none of your business. Don't try to throw me off with insults.”

I left as Bubba used his syrupy Reagan voice to ask for her help in saving a career.

“Brookside's?” the reporter asked.

“No. Mine,” he said.

• • •

Inside, everybody from HPD had left but Cuddy and Nancy. Nancy had her arms around a short, skinny, overwrought young man wearing an orange and baby blue antique velour leisure suit from the 1970s. He had skin as white and dull as cheap paper, an almost shaved head, and at least eight tiny gold studs stuck through various features—ears, nose, lip, and tongue. His face was blotchy with acne scars as well as tears and he was now crying so hard he had trouble breathing. He proved to be the person Shelly had seen the security guards chase down on The Fifth Season grounds—Mavis Mahar's dresser and makeup man, Dermott Quinn. Nancy had just told him that Mavis had killed herself.

Quinn grabbed at Nancy's hands. “She'd not do a bollocks eejet thing like that. It's a fuckall lie, a lie,” he kept gasping in sobs.

Nancy hugged him tighter as his emaciated frame convulsed into spasms. “Hey, Dermott, hey, I know, I know, it's okay.”

“It's bloody shite. Kill herself? Mavis? Not Mavis.
You're liars
!”

Cuddy pulled the little Irishman away from Nancy and stood him upright. “Mr. Quinn, you need to help us here. Can you do that?” His hand tilted Dermott's chin to look up at him, until finally the dresser nodded, slowing his breathing in long shudders.

“Yes, I want to help, I do, I'm all right.”

“Okay. What made you come out here?”

Quinn told us that none of the Mavis Mahar entourage had known about this bungalow at The Fifth Season, including him, and that this was the first time Mavis hadn't shared with him the whereabouts of her secret place because they were very close good friends and she told him everything. So he'd waited for her in her dressing room at Haver Field until half-an-hour before she was scheduled to go on stage and then he'd started trying to track her down: calling the Sheraton, checking the local bars. It was not the first time Mavis had disappeared, but they'd always been able to find her before. Now they couldn't and the Mega Records reps were “going bleedin' ballistic.” Some of the band wanted to call the police, but Bernadette (her manager) didn't want any more bad publicity.

Frantic by now, Dermott had gone off on his own to look for the star. He'd come up with the idea that she might be staying somewhere under her real name, which was Agnes Connolly, although he'd never known her to do so before. (He was the only one of the group who knew her real name because they'd been friends, best of friends, since their Temple Bar days singing on the streets of Dublin, and she'd kept that name quiet.) So the dresser had slipped away from the others and phoned every hotel in the area until he'd reached The Fifth Season, where an innocent night clerk put him through after he asked for Agnes Connolly. However, to his surprise, a strange man had answered the phone in the bungalow and then hung up on him. When he'd called the desk back only a few minutes later, the same clerk had told him that there was no Agnes Connolly registered there and that he'd been mistaken before. Now alarmed, Dermott had taken a taxi from downtown Hillston out to the resort, where he had started searching the grounds for her. But hotel security had caught him and brought him here.

I asked Quinn if Mavis owned a gun. A fresh burst of tears shook him. Nancy sat him down beside her. He whispered, “I told her not to fool with that feckin' poxie gun. I hate the guns.”

I pressed him. So Mavis did own a firearm? He told us that her ex-husband, the tennis player Matteo Garcias, had once given her a pistol for a birthday present. The dresser had no idea what caliber it might have been, only that it was small and had a white handle.

Cuddy showed him the Polaroid photo of the body that he'd confiscated from the NCBI agent Ted Bingley, and Quinn gagged before finally identifying the pistol in her hand as looking like the one Mavis had owned. I asked him if she'd ever attempted or talked about killing herself.

“No. Never.” The small man refused to accept even the possibility. “She wouldn't send her soul to hell, doing away with herself so.”

“She's Catholic?” asked Cuddy. Quinn nodded.

“Practicing?” I asked the Irishman. I doubted it. Mavis Mahar was so famously angry with the Catholic Church that they'd banned her songs.

Dermott Quinn wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Tisn't much
that
matters,” he said stubbornly. “She never would.” But he admitted that Mavis might have shot herself by accident while drunk, although he thought it more likely that a sick fan had killed her. “It's terrible the tossers we have to put up with.” For example, in Amsterdam they'd found a naked man under the covers in Mavis's hotel bed, and a girl in Houston had cut out the letters of Mavis's name into her arm with a razor blade and then jumped in front of her limousine to show her the bloody tribute.