First Lady (13 page)

Quinn also had suspicions of Mavis's ex-husband, Garcias, who was a “fuckall mental” and who had shot at her with a crossbow once. Everybody knew the Spaniard was a jealous maniac. He had broken Quinn's nose with his tennis racket when the dresser was just lying on the couch in Mavis's arms and anybody with a brain could see that they were only good friends.

Cuddy shook his head at me. “It's not Garcias. He was live on ESPN in a tennis match televised from Barcelona tonight.”

Quinn started picking up and straightening Mavis's clothes strewn on the floor. I told him to put them back, that he mustn't touch things. Pointing out the straw hat with the candles in its brim, I asked him if the star wore it on stage. He looked it over curiously, then said that unless Mavis had acquired it since he'd left her this afternoon, the hat didn't belong to her. He'd never seen it before and he knew all of her clothes by heart. The small man suddenly spun around and clung tightly to Nancy. “Where did you take her? Oh, let me go to her. She needs me. Oh, what'm I to do to do to do?” Nancy walked him away from us, stroking his back.

Cuddy walked me toward the terrace. “You break Bubba's story out there?” I nodded. “It took you long enough.”

“He likes to talk. He admits he lied. He was here at 10:45, told Brookside at 11:30. When Bubba saw the body she was propped up in the shower, naked with that straw hat on. He doesn't know who moved her body or why.” Cuddy gave me a quizzical look. “No, I think Bubba really is clueless on what Trasker was up to. The coat over her in the photo is this one.” I held up the Italian raincoat, showed Cuddy its front and back. “It belongs to….” I left the sentence unfinished.

Cuddy nodded. “Yeah, I know who it belongs to. Call him.”

I moved him further away from the others. “He's the governor. He's got more lawyers than the tobacco industry. He's got the
same
lawyers. And they're not going to let me talk to him in the middle of the night. I'd have to tell them the alternative was a subpoena.”

“Then tell them. And tell Mr. Brookside that his raincoat's got his girlfriend's blood on it.”

We let Nancy take Dermott Quinn back to his hotel as soon as a new HPD team arrived to safeguard the bungalow. Then Cuddy and I walked over to the lobby to see the manager. Barricaded in his office in pajamas and robe, the petulantly defensive Mr. Rochet said he had nothing to add to what he'd already told the attorney general: at eleven P.M., he'd happened to be at the front desk and had answered the phone to hear an anonymous caller say only a few words to him: “You've got a real problem with Mavis in Bungalow Eight. Look into it before somebody else does.” Then the caller had hung up.

No, there were no tapes kept of phone calls. No, Mr. Rochet doubted he could identify the voice again. It was an ordinary male voice, nothing unusual about it: neither elderly nor juvenile, unaccented. The manager had hurried immediately to the bungalow. When he saw the dead star's body, he hurried back to turn matters over to Attorney General Ward Trasker, who happened to be a guest.

He was happy to take us into the lobby to show us the front desk and the phone. But when asked to describe the body he'd seen and exactly where he'd seen it, the manager tightened his lips as if we were trying to force vinegar down his throat and told us he had nothing to add to what he'd already said to the attorney general. Cuddy asked him, “You didn't call the police?”

Mr. Rochet said that the attorney general was after all the highest law enforcement officer in North Carolina, wasn't he? Wasn't that even better than the police? His fervent hope was that in this tragedy we could all work together to preserve the privacy of Miss Mahar.

“She's dead,” said Cuddy.

“I would hope here at The Fifth Season we could protect a guest's privacy even after her death, Captain Mangum.”

Cuddy leaned across the man's french provincial desk. “I would hope you wouldn't break the law to do it. I would hope you understand it's against the law to withhold evidence in a homicide investigation. Let me start again. Did you know Andrew Brookside was here in Bungalow Eight this evening visiting Miss Mahar?”

The manager shuddered as if he'd swallowed the vinegar. “I'm sorry. Unless you have some legal order that obliges me to talk to you, I have nothing to say.” He hurried off, pausing to straighten a bowl of marble eggs beside an antique leather letterbox.

• • •

It was past three A.M. when Cuddy and I took the Raleigh exit to the Governor's Mansion. To my surprise, Andy Brookside had agreed to see us. Led into his immense office, we discovered him seated in a Sulka bathrobe behind a desk weighty with state affairs, as if it were his regular habit to catch up on paper work in the small hours of the morning. From silver frames on his desk, both his wife and the president smiled across at him, reassuring him that all would be well.

Andy introduced us to two lawyers (one from the state justice department, i.e., Trasker's office, and one who was Brookside's personal attorney as well as a legal counselor of Haver Tobacco Company). They leaned against a wall that glowed with warm cherrywood paneling. Despite the hour, they were both crisply dressed in their summer suits. They stood there casually but as poised to leap forward as two hunting dogs waiting for the signal to run. An elderly African-American in a white jacket entered, pushing a cart gleaming with a silver coffee service. No one wanted any and he took it away.

One of the lawyers told us that the governor would not be answering questions but that he would be giving us all the information we might need to understand his part in tonight's events.

“Good,” said Cuddy. “His part in tonight's events is what I'm here for.”

The other lawyer told us that Governor Brookside was making this extraordinary gesture because of his respect for the deceased artist Mavis Mahar and because of his personal regard for the two of us. Then he placed a tape recorder on the desk, turned it on, and nodded at the governor.

Andy looked only at me as he spoke. Cuddy looked only at him. The governor spoke with a quiet sorrow that would have been completely convincing except there was something in his eyes energized and excited and not terribly sad. I recalled his telling me that what he loved most was the thrill of risk. I recalled his telling Cuddy that a smart man could get away with murder and might enjoy doing so, just for the rush of winning.

Rubbing at the bright hair that was the icon of his fame, Andy began, “First of all, this is a heartbreaking waste. Mavis Mahar was a gifted young woman whose music was important to millions of people. Let's not have the aftermath cause even more damage.”

One of the lawyers interrupted. “Has this been leaked to the press?”

“Not by us,” Cuddy said, adding that we didn't know whether anyone else had leaked it or not.

The other lawyer nodded at the governor. Andy said, “I knew Mavis. I liked her. We shared in a political agenda. I visited her this evening at The Fifth Season Resort because I was concerned about her tardy appearance the night before at Haver Field, for which I bore some responsibility. I arrived at the bungalow at 6:15. She turned up fifteen or twenty minutes later, intoxicated and,” he paused, whether really searching for words or not, I don't know, “violently emotional. She asked me to leave and I did so at 7:30. I have not returned to The Fifth Season Resort since then, nor did I see her again, alive or dead. When I was told that she had failed to show up at her concert, I asked my press secretary, Randolph Percy, to go to her bungalow to check on her. He returned and told me that she appeared to have committed suicide. We agreed that he would communicate this news directly to Captain Mangum here. We had every faith,” said the governor, “that in dealing with this suicide, Captain Mangum would do what was right and best…for everyone involved.” Brookside looked at Cuddy for the first time. They stared very carefully at each other. Then he turned his eyes back to me. “I am now told that Attorney General Ward Trasker was notified by the hotel management that Miss Mahar was dead and took independent steps to deal with the matter.”

Cuddy interrupted. “Who told you this?”

“Randolph Percy telephoned me from the bungalow. Mr. Trasker had apparently felt he should take immediate action to handle the tragedy. Naturally, everyone wished to control the kind of media feeding frenzy that Miss Mahar's suicide would inevitably cause. Mr. Trasker did not inform me that he planned to involve himself. Nor do I know what he might have done. That's all I can tell you. I admired her talent and her political passion. I'm very sorry she made this tragic choice.”

“The problem is, I'm not sure the choice was hers.” Cuddy spoke quietly. “When you saw her, had she shaved her head?”

Brookside looked startled. “Shaved her head? Good god, no.”

Cuddy unfolded the blood-stained Italian raincoat that he'd brought with him. “Is this your raincoat?” Andy looked at it, saw the blood stain. One of the lawyers told him not to answer any questions.

Brookside said, “Yes, it's my raincoat. I must have left it there.”

Cuddy put the coat back in the bag in which he'd brought it. “Did you ask Bubba Percy to remove this coat from Miss Mahar's suite?”

“We said no questions,” answered one of the lawyers.

Cuddy ignored him. “Mr. Brookside, not only was Miss Mahar's body moved after her death, there is also the strong possibility that the gunshot was not self-inflicted. Did you kill Mavis Mahar?”

“How dare you!” snapped the Haver Tobacco Company man.

“That's it! This meeting is over,” snarled the justice department man.

“No, I did not.” Andy Brookside stood and faced Cuddy. “And I'm offended that you should ask me.”

Both lawyers now moved quickly to open the large paneled door. Brookside walked briskly through it without looking at us again. Five minutes later we were escorted out of the mansion by polite state troopers on duty in the foyer. As we left, Cuddy turned to stare up the wide carpeted stairs into the darkness above, where guarded halls led to the private quarters of the first lady.

• • •

“Without sounding unduly cynical,” I remarked as I sped us along the highway, back to the Cadmean Building in downtown Hillston, “You really think a popular governor running for re-election and married to one of the richest women in the country is going to shoot a rock star one-night-stand in the face and leave his raincoat tossed over her dead body?”

“What would
duly
cynical sound like?” Cuddy wanted to know. “Really thinking that the state's attorney general would destroy evidence at a possible crime scene, move a dead body, and hide the governor's raincoat?”

I said we might as well agree that it was more than a “possible” crime scene. “She didn't kill herself. Dermott Quinn's right. She wouldn't kill herself. Not Mavis Mahar.”

“How the hell do you know?” He was on the radio, trying to reach Dick Cohen, our medical examiner.

How did I know? I thought about it then told him, “Because I saw her, you just had to see her once.”

“Oh for Christ's sake.”

But it was true. Maybe it wasn't a husband or a fan who had murdered her as Quinn thought, maybe it wasn't Brookside either, but it wasn't suicide. Cuddy shrugged. “Maybe it was Dermott Quinn. Who knows how long he was wandering around those grounds.”

I shook my head no. “It'd be like killing himself.”

“Justin, I hope you're not taking night courses in abnormal psychology and charging them to the department.” He shook the car radio mike. “Come in, damn it!”

Cuddy's threat earlier to go to the television news had bullied Mitch Bazemore into having the coroner transfer Mavis's body to the city morgue. Dick Cohen had grouchily driven over to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home himself to make sure it happened. When the HPD dispatcher was finally able to put Cuddy through to Dick, he had already started to work on the body in the autopsy room.

Dick growled through the crackly speaker: “Good news, we got a gun. Turns out Pauley did waltz off with it. Swore it was ‘pure accident.' Says it must've got itself wrapped up in the bag with the body. Hell, maybe he's even telling the truth. Down here, anything's possible except a decent meal. I'm in a diner, I ask for lox, woman tells me, ‘Go to a hardware store.'”

I said, “Dick, that happened to you two years ago.”

“I can't forget it.”

Cuddy interrupted us. “And what's the bad news?”

“This gun's a .22.”

“Does it have a white bone grip? Mavis Mahar owned one like that.”

“Sure does. It's been fired too. And there's a twenty-two slug in her cerebellum. Medial medullar lamina. Right between her eyes. Slug's soft, messed up, but Etham thinks they can match it to the gun.”

Cuddy rubbed at his hair. “That's the bad news?”

“No, the bad news is, it's not suicide.”

I muttered, “Told you so. Suicides do it here or here.” I pointed my finger first at my temple and then inside my mouth. “Not in the face, and they couldn't do that kind of damage with a .22 anyhow.”

Cuddy told me to keep quiet. “Dick, you don't buy suicide?”

Dick yawned into the speaker. “Not unless she shot herself through the brain with one gun, dug the slug out of the shower tiles and swallowed it, threw the gun out the window, and after she died, shaved her head, then went in the living room and shot herself in the face with another gun, and then crawled under a raincoat just to be modest.”

“Dick, I know you don't stay up late enough to try out as a late night comedian, so how about just do it straight?”

His voice crackled at us. “Two different entry wounds, two different bullets. The .22 between the eyes. But post mortem. Probably a .38, .32 killed her. Entry wound up through the lower jaw. Exit wound high on the back of the skull. So I don't buy suicide unless she killed herself because she was pissed off about some s.o.b. murdering her.”

Cuddy looked at me as he tapped the mike against his cheek. “Well hey, Dick, something like that is enough to put you in a real bad mood.”

• • •

I parked in front of the Cadmean Building behind a gray Mercedes that someone had left in the No Parking zone. In the eerie hollow echo of the marble lobby, Cuddy and I walked past the empty courtroom where tomorrow Tyler Norris would probably go free. While we waited for the elevator, we watched a
Hillston Star
delivery truck slow down outside and a bound stack of newspapers come flying from its rear doors. He yawned. “So what's
this
morning's headline? ‘POLICE CHIEF TO CITY: DROP DEAD EVERYBODY'?”

“Well, if Shelly Bloom has her way, the
Sun
won't be talking about you at all. It'll be ‘MAVIS DEAD IN GOV'S LOVE NEST.'”

He picked up cigarette cellophane off the marble floor and tossed it in the trash. “This homicide's got to get closed, Justin. We're entering O.J. land. The press was already killing us over G.I. Jane and Linsley Norris and neither one of them was a rock star on the cover of
Time.
The
world
press will rampage through this town like it was Pompeii and the streets were full of lava.”

“I guess by the end of the day you want me to bring in somebody yelling, ‘I did it, I did it!' Well, you already accused the governor.”

A cleaning woman came out of the courtroom carrying brooms and mops. Cuddy waved hello to her and then smacked the elevator button again. “Just find out fast if he did or he didn't.”

I held the door for him. “
Can
we pull Andy in? Maybe he'd have to be impeached first?” Cuddy didn't answer me. Silently we rode up to the offices of the Hillston Police Department. A few minutes later he came out of the men's room looking scrubbed and awake and ready for the day. He'd always had the ability to recharge himself. He said, “All I'm telling you is, we are—how can I put this?— shooting down the rapids blowing air into the flat rubber raft that we are sitting in.”