First Lady (14 page)

“I get your point.”

At the front desk, Sergeant Brenda Moore was tiredly listening while a red-haired young man swore to Jesus that he'd thought it was his cousin Kobe's Toyota Tundra he'd hot-wired and had been selling its parts just as a joke. Cuddy walked over to him and patted his back. “Griffin, you be sure to get your eyes checked out by one of our fine prison optometrists soon as you get settled, 'cause just a few months back you were swearing to Jesus you mistook a Ford Explorer for an old Plymouth belonged to your mama's Bible club.”

The boy grinned before he could mask his pleasure at seeing Cuddy.

Cuddy grinned back. “And how is your mama?”

I recognized the sullen shifty blue of the boy's eyes. He looked like one of the Popes, a large local family who'd been marrying each other and robbing everybody else since before the Civil War. Cuddy was the only person not closely related to them who could keep their genealogy straight.

I asked, “Is this a Pope?”

“Yep.”

The boy said with stiff disdain, “Mama left Daddy.”

Cuddy patted Griffin's thin tattooed arm. “Paula'll come back by the time Graham's out on parole. Your folks'll be together again.”

“I could give a fuck,” their son boasted.

“Good god,” I said, “a new generation of Popes.”

“Always,” Cuddy nodded as Brenda handed him a stack of the pink memos. She gestured that there was someone waiting to see him, adding, “She's been here a while.”

“Who?” he asked her, his body tightening.

Brenda looked at him solemnly. “Chief, I think you want…. She said it was private.”

“I hope it's not the press already because—” But I was talking to no one because Cuddy was almost running along the corridor toward his office.

Brenda and I shrugged at each other, then I left her asking the boy for his full name. He said, “Griffin Torii Pope. Two
I
s in Torii. Just please don't phone my mama, okay? She'll fry my ass.”

“Occupation?” she asked. And he told her, “Musician,” and she wrote it down without believing it.

Out of the dark at the end of the hall, someone stepped softly toward Cuddy. A woman in a gray suit. She moved from the shadows with the stillness of a ghost. A slender woman, pale blonde hair, a cool soft voice I would have known without seeing her. As I came up behind Cuddy, she said politely, “Justin, hello.” Her suit was the color of her Mercedes outside.

“Lee, good god, what are you doing here?” I asked.

She wasn't looking at me. “Cuddy, I'm sorry to trouble you.”

He stared at her as if she'd hypnotized him as she moved closer, gestured at his office door. Then with a sudden lunge, as if compelled, he threw open his door for her. I saw Lee noticing the raincoat that Cuddy still carried. I saw her recognize it as Andy's. Then she stepped around us and walked inside the dark room.

I pulled Cuddy from the door. “This case will be under a microscope. Everybody in it. Okay? Don't do for her what you wouldn't do for anybody else. Why do you think Andy sent Bubba to you? How do you know he didn't send
her
to you?”

He shook free of my arm. “Go do your job, Justin.”

“Yeah, you too.”

The door closed in my face.

I spent the next hour at the wearisome paper trail that wanders through the databases and file cabinets of modern police departments. From the news about Mavis, the lack of sleep, the unaccustomed number of drinks, I had a horrible headache. Coffee didn't help as I wrote a long report on the crime scene at The Fifth Season. In it I put everything I'd seen going on in Bungalow Eight tonight, plus everything that Bubba had told me out by the pool. I have a very good memory if I don't wait too long. I locked the report in my desk. I didn't know what Lee was going to ask Cuddy to do for her husband, nor could I be absolutely sure what he would agree to, or not to, do. I thought I knew. I thought I could wager my life on Cuddy's integrity. But even the purest knights in Camelot were tempted by love, and the next thing they knew there was a war going on and the whole place was in flames.

Crossing the annex to the autopsy room, I heard the clatter of wheels banging through the doors into the corridor. Two bored attendants yawned as they shoved a mortuary gurney around a corner. In disposable paper scrubs, Dick Cohen stumbled sleepily along beside them.

I caught up with the macabre procession. “Is that Mavis Mahar?”

Dick nodded, tapping a clipboard lying on top of the body. “A shame, somebody like that, got it all. Great cardiovascular system, stomach, kidneys, lungs, perfect. Even her liver. Thought you said she was this big boozer.”

I tried not to look at the gurney. “She was. High alcohol content in her system, right?”

The medical examiner shrugged. “Not at all.”

“What?” Surprised, I followed them into the morgue. “Dick, she was already plastered when I saw her in the afternoon. And there were so many empties in her suite it looked like the French Quarter at Mardi Gras.”

“Well, you and I should have such a liver.” He shook his head. “We'll have a toxicology report on the chemical stuff tomorrow.”

The bored attendants chatted about whether they should give up on cable and buy satellite dishes as they lifted the gurney off its trolley, slid the body into the refrigerated compartment, and left Dick and me alone in the morgue with her. I felt grief fall on me like the heavy weight of water, stopping my breath. How could everything that Mavis Mahar had been lie so still beneath the white sheet, how could all those colors and all that song slide without a sound into so small an opening in the wall? Could it really have been only this past dawn when a beautiful stranger had dived through the mist into the lake and then burst back into the morning air, smiling at me? That moment felt as distant and alien as some lovely foreign city briefly visited and left forever behind.

Dick was talking about “livor mortis lavidity of the face and chest as well as lavidity of the back and hip.” It meant that she'd been moved—and turned from her back to her stomach—as much as four hours after her death.

“Any chance she was still alive when Bubba got there at about 10:45?”

“No way.” From rigor and body temperature, Dick put the time of death as early as nine, even eight P.M. I said it didn't seem likely that a killer would hang around 'til after Bubba left and then drag his victim into another room and flip her face down. Dick flexed his arms, his white hairy fingers laced. “You don't know what's ‘likely' with these nuts. They'll chop up their mothers and then sleep with her body parts 'til they rot. If I could take my kids and move to the moon, I'd do it.” (Dick was divorced and gloomy and often said that if he'd been his wife, he'd have left him too, for moving her down here from New York.)

Shivering, he rubbed his skinny arms. “So are we done?”

“Just a second, okay?” I reached for the stainless steel door.

He grabbed my hand. “It's not pretty.”

“I know.”

He scratched his beard. “You think you know. Her eyes are gone.”

“Gone?”

He pulled me back from the door. “Cut out, both eyeballs, neatly, with a sharp knife. The bozos at the scene didn't catch it, I guess, 'cause of all the gunk from the face wound.”

I stepped back to look at him. “Before or after she died?”

“Postmortem if that's any consolation.” He grumbled, “And I'm right as always. The .22 slug's definitely postmortem too. Muzzle was held about two inches from the nose bridge. Augie called from the lab, says there's just her prints on the grip. But some creep stuck that .22 between her eyes after she was dead and pulled the trigger.”

“So death was—”

He rubbed at his stubbled cheek. “Death was immediate from the larger caliber weapon—I don't know what, but not a .22—right under the mandible and into the cranium.”

I thought about this. “So she's in the shower. He opens the door, holds the gun under her chin, shoots her. The slug goes up through the brain and exits into the tiled wall behind her, blows out the grout and cracks the tiles.”

Dick nodded. “Then he takes out her eyeballs in the shower.”

“The eyes weren't left at the scene. At least not when we got there.”

“Maybe he ate them,” Dick shrugged. “Remember the nut in Wrightsville that ate that Marine's penis?”

“Dick, can't you ever press ‘Clear'?”

He shook his head. “They're always telling Jews, ‘Press clear.' After the pogroms, ‘Press clear.' After the Holocaust, ‘Press clear.' No, I can't. For all we know, this nut sits around that bungalow a couple of hours watching TV and nibbling on her eyeballs. Then he hauls her into the living room and sticks the .22 in her face, blows it to bits. You wanna know what? I'm sick of humans. I am. I like bonsai. I like koi. I'm okay with some of the quieter cats. But I don't like humans.”

“I don't think the same person did both shots,” I said.

His eyebrows twisted wryly. “Oh gee, now I feel a whole lot better about the species.”

“It wasn't Mavis's killer who dragged her into the living room and threw the raincoat over her and shot her postmortem to hide the eye mutilation. I think they planted the .22 in her hand so we'd go with suicide.”

He snorted at me. “They who? And how dumb can they get? We're not going to notice she was moved postmortem? We're not going to notice she was shot twice with two different guns? Who's this they?”

“
We're
going to notice. But that idiot Osmond Bingley and those coffin peddlers Pauley and Keene aren't going to notice… Dick, this is between us—”

He laughed. “Who am I gonna tell? My wife left me and my kids won't listen—”

“It was Ward Trasker using Homer Louge and his boys.”

“Sure, the A.G., right. The A.G. shot a corpse.”

“No, I'm telling you. Ward Trasker goes in that bungalow, sees Mavis Mahar is murdered and mutilated and she's got this weird hat with candles stuck on her head, and he freaks. Even if…if the governor didn't kill her himself—”

“Cheez, Justin, what the fuck are you saying?”

“Dick, he was in there. It was his raincoat on the body.”

“Holy shit.”

“Even if he's cleared, he'll be hauled in as a witness on a celebrity homicide and the press'll eat him alive. But if it's suicide, and they quick get a death certificate from a coroner like No-Brain Bingley and they quick get her to a private funeral home and buried, nobody knows what happened and maybe they can keep the governor out of it.”

Dick stared at me a long time. “I shoulda stayed in Brooklyn. They wanted to get rid of somebody, they just dumped them in a canal. Simple, tidy, professional, no problem.”

He backed away as I reached for the cloth covering the corpse. I paused and took a breath. Then I pulled the sheet away from her head. I've seen a hundred dead bodies. This was the hardest.

“Sorry.” Dick steadied me. “Warned you.”

I looked for a long time at the roughly cut and shaved skull, the blasted shattered face, the empty eye sockets. Slowly I turned her head to one side, then the other. Then my heart kicked at my chest. Quickly I examined her naked shoulder, held up each of her hands and studied them.

Dick leaned over the corpse. “What? I miss something? You gonna tell me they poisoned her too just to make sure?”

I pulled the sheet back over the young woman's body. I told the medical examiner not to leave. I was going to bring Cuddy down to the morgue in five minutes. We had a problem.

• • •

Cuddy was alone in his office, standing in the dark by the window, intently watching a jet's lights blink across the blue-black sky, as if Lee Brookside had left him and he was watching her fly off in her private plane. When I flipped on the light, he turned around startled.

“You okay, Cuddy?”

“Yeah fine.” He said nothing about his visit from Lee and neither did I. Instead, I told him I'd just gone to look at the body they'd taken from Bungalow Eight at The Fifth Season tonight. I asked him to come down to the morgue with me right now.

He interrupted me. “Look at this first.” He stepped to his desk and pointed with a pencil at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph inside a clear plastic HPD evidence bag. With the pencil's tip, Cuddy twisted the photo around so it faced me. It was a commercial shot of Mavis Mahar's face, one of the thousands that are given away in promotions and sold in concert lobbies. But on this one, the words “GUESS WHO” were scrawled across her mouth in red letters. And in the same blood-colored marker someone had completely blotted out both her eyes.

He said, “You know her eyes are gone?”

“Yes. I saw the body. That's what—”

“This was under my door,” Cuddy said, pulling the photo back.

“When you and Lee walked in here?”

“Yes. I didn't open it until after she left. No one seems to know how it got here. I haven't been in since six, so it could have been shoved under the door way before the murder. Augie checked it for prints, but it's clean.” Clean except for a tiny speck of gold glitter on the back of the print—as if it might have once been in an envelope with the kind of cardboard star that had been stuck on Cuddy's slider. “You know what you call this type photo?”

I picked it up. “It's a head shot,” I said.

“Right. A head shot. A star's head shot.” He snapped the pencil in two and threw the pieces across the room into the trash. “Cute pun, huh? Head shot, shot in the head? Keep your eye on the star, I'm going to shoot her in the head. And he did, goddamn it.” Cuddy was talking about the cardboard glitter star he had found stuck to his study slider at River Rise earlier this evening. The star that his telescope had been pointing at. The star he'd thought was only a joke of Brenda Moore's.

I leaned over to study the photograph of Mavis. The block letters spelling out GUESS WHO across her mouth looked similar to those on the label that had been hung months ago from Jane Doe's toe telling me to deliver her body to Cuddy. “Cuddy, you need to come down to the morgue.”

He slid the evidence bag into his briefcase. “I don't know about you, but to me this photo means our killer's not Brookside, it's Guess Who.”

I stood to hold open the office door for him. “The victim's not Mavis Mahar either.”

He stopped, his hand still reaching for his intercom. “What do you mean it's not Mavis Mahar?”

“That's what I came to tell you. That's not her body down in the morgue.”