First Lady (15 page)

The police chief and the medical examiner had never seen Mavis Mahar in person and had no reason to doubt me when I said that the woman in the morgue was somebody else. But they had invested in their preconception and so it took a while to persuade them to listen. Their preconception had been shared by a lot of people. It had started with Bubba Percy's assumption that Mavis Mahar had killed herself. Of course as Bubba had later admitted, he'd never gotten anywhere near the corpse. The next person to assume the corpse was Mavis was the hotel manager. The anonymous caller had told him that Mavis Mahar was in trouble in Bungalow Eight and so when he looked into Bungalow Eight and saw a woman's dead body in a blood-splattered shower, he understandably assumed that this was the trouble referred to.

Next, Ward Trasker, and then the other law officials who gathered at The Fifth Season, reinforced the mistake. They saw a corpse in the place where they'd been told they would find Mavis Mahar's corpse, so they assumed the corpse was hers. Why shouldn't they? The young dead woman was the same age, the same height and build, the stubble on her shaved head was the same tawny color, the nail polish and jewelry looked the same. Moreover, she was naked in the rock star's private hideaway, so who else could she be but the rock star?

But the young woman lying on the gurney in the Hillston city morgue was not Mavis Mahar. I'd known it the minute I'd looked closely at her body. Just as Dermott Quinn would have known it, or Andy Brookside, or even Bubba perhaps, if he'd bothered to examine her closely.

Patiently I showed Cuddy and Dick the unblemished spot in the crook of this corpse's neck where there ought to be a birthmark of a small dark-red pointed star and there wasn't. I showed them how this young woman wore fewer rings than Mavis had, and how these rings were cheap imitations of the gold and silver ones on Mavis's fingers. I said this corpse didn't have strong enough muscles in her arms to be a musician as Mavis was; that her fingernails were long—useless for playing the piano—whereas Mavis's nails were short and blunt. I said that you could tell from stubble left that this woman's hair was cheaply dyed, and that while Mavis might, like the corpse, have a pierced nipple, she did not have, like her, a shaved pubis.

Cuddy shook his head smiling at the medical examiner. “My my, Justin only caught a glimpse of Mavis singing in the Tucson Lounge, or just think of all the other things he could have told us. Dick, that's what I call detection.”

For some reason, I didn't want to say that while out riding Manassas at dawn, I had seen the singer standing naked on the dock at Pine Hills Lake.

Cuddy and Dick looked together at the body for a long silent minute. “You're sure about this,” Cuddy finally said.

“Very sure.”

“Good enough.” Cuddy covered the corpse and told Dick that she wasn't Mavis Mahar.

Dick Cohen scratched at his beard. “Here I was finally going to impress my daughter, telling her how I did an autopsy on Mavis Mahar. She plays those CDs of hers all the damn time. Now you're telling me the victim's not a superstar.”

I said the purity of the corpse's liver should have been a clue.

“Well what do you want from me, Justin? You think I read in magazines about the vital organs of the rich and famous? How would I know Mavis Mahar drank?”

Cuddy said, “Dick, that's like saying you didn't know Di was bulimic.”

“Di? Who's Di?”

“Diana, the Princess Diana!”

Dick nodded. “Oh, Diana, she's dead. She died in a car crash.”

“Good, Dick. You keep up.” Cuddy patted him on the back.

• • •

Back in Cuddy's office, Brenda brought the two of us doughnuts made of air and sugar. Cuddy bit into one as he said, “Justin, you better pray to God the Stand-Up Comedian that this dead girl is not another Jane Doe.”

“She's not. She's a waitress at the Tucson.”

He stared at me. “For somebody who claims he didn't even go inside that bar yesterday, you sure know a lot about it.”

I told him, “When I saw this girl yesterday she was dressed like a Xerox copy of Mavis Mahar. And her hair was mid-length, like Mavis's. I was in the doorway of the Tucson and I heard her asking Mavis if she could get their picture taken together. I can tell you her name….” I closed my eyes, saw the thrilled smiling girl as she leapt up on the band platform to hug the singer. I heard Mavis ask the girl her name. “Her name's Lucy,” I told Cuddy.

It took us only half an hour to find out that the waitress Lucy Griggs was twenty-three, single, and lived at home with her divorced mother and her younger brothers when she wasn't living in a low-rent downtown apartment with an indeterminate number of transient roommates. She had dropped out of Haver University after two years of very good grades in order to pursue a career as a singer. She might have pursued it, but she hadn't caught it. She worked as a waitress at the Tucson because the owner let her perform there on slow nights with a local band called Mood Disorders. (“Worst garbage you ever heard in your life,” groused the crabby owner, whom we'd admittedly awakened before dawn.)

Yesterday, Lucy had walked out of the Tucson at six P.M., right in the middle of her shift, despite being told that she'd be fired if she skipped out on work one more time. She'd left because Mavis Mahar had offered to take her for a ride in her limousine and Lucy would have sacrificed a far better job than waiting tables at the Tucson for a chance like that, although she (probably) wouldn't have sacrificed her life had she known what was going to happen to her if she went to The Fifth Season with the star.

Nobody had seen Lucy since she and Mavis drove off together. However, her mother, Mrs. Jackie Griggs, rarely saw her daughter from one week to the next anyhow. As she gave us the names of some of Lucy's friends, she didn't appear to be unduly alarmed by a predawn phone call from the police asking about the girl's whereabouts, but then I didn't tell her why we were calling. That sad task was being carried out now by Nancy Caleb-White.

The fact that the fingerprints of the corpse in the morgue did not match those of Mavis Mahar, obtained by fax from Nashville (where she had been booked after her arrest at the Parthenon) was a confirmation of something we had already accepted. We'd identified the wrong victim. The question was, had her killer done the same? The cardboard star, the word “Star” circled in red marker on the clipping from the newspaper, the disfigured head shot of Mavis, all delivered to Cuddy, suggested that Mavis was the intended victim.

It was almost dawn when Cuddy and I headed down in the elevator to leave the Cadmean Building. But as soon as the doors opened at the front lobby, Cuddy pulled me back inside and banged the “Close” button. The large marble space was jammed with reporters and television cameras. “Damn it, damn it!” He pushed hard at the “Up” arrow. “It's leaked!”

“No fooling.”

Cuddy returned to his office, wrote and sent down to the lobby a brief press release about the real identity of the murder victim. Then we left through the underground HPD garage and headed toward my Jaguar. He righted a trashcan as he passed it. “Okay,” he said, “Let's go on the assumption that this guy thinks he killed Mavis Mahar. Or he thought so at the time. Or maybe he still thinks it's Mavis he killed, we don't know—”

I saw that Etham Foster's lab had looped a neat forensics envelope through my car's door handle. The key was in the ignition.

A HPD cop named Fisher was walking toward us, sipping coffee, reading a newspaper. He stopped when he saw us and held up the morning edition of the
Sun.
The entire front page had only three words on it: “MAVIS IS DEAD!”

Below the headline was a picture of the Irish star performing two nights ago at Haver Field. Affable Ralph Fisher whistled. “Here we go again. See Hillston and die, right?” He offered us doughnuts from a bag he carried.

“I wouldn't be joking with the chief right now,” I advised him.

Without ceremony, Cuddy snatched the paper out of Ralph's hand. He had always been the fastest reader I'd ever seen; now it was almost comic how quickly he skimmed Shelly Bloom's “
Sun
Exclusive.” He handed the newspaper back to Ralph, telling him to go upstairs right away and make sure Brenda Moore had sent the press in the lobby his statement about the identity of the victim at The Fifth Season and make sure that she had called the rest of the local papers and television stations too. Ralph should tell Brenda to call them all again immediately and assure them that the
Sun
was absolutely, and
irresponsibly
wrong, that Mavis Mahar was not, repeat, not dead.

“She's not?” Ralph's mouth opened and didn't shut. “She's not?”

“Ralph, give me those doughnuts and go!”

Ralph Fisher took off in a sprint, spilling a trail of Starbucks coffee.

I asked Cuddy if Shelly Bloom had said anything in her “exclusive” about the governor's sexual involvement with Mavis Mahar. He shook his head. “Nada. But Shelly's out on a limb with what she did say. Especially since she's wrong and it's not Mavis.”

“Maybe she was annoyed because Bubba wouldn't give her his Porsche,” I suggested.

“Too bad. She could have used it to get out of Hillston.” He checked his watch; cheap as it was, it never seemed to give him any trouble. “Okay, I want you to go scare Ward Trasker into telling us exactly what he did in that room, or what he told somebody else to do. Right now. Most of all, I want to know who stuck a .22 in a dead girl's face and pulled the trigger. Because even I'm shocked at that, and as you oughta know by now, I already had a view of this post-lapsarian world that makes Hieronymous Bosch look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.”

I told him I needed to find Mavis Mahar first. It was conceivable that the killer had shot both women.

“Not anywhere around The Fifth Season. Homer Louge's boys would have stepped on her. Get to Ward. Maybe they did do a video of the real crime scene before they moved her, just to cover their butts. See if you can find out. How about driving me to River Rise on your way?”

“You going to bed?”

He said, “No, I'm getting my car, taking this head shot to Raleigh, see what Wendy says about the handwriting.” He picked through the doughnut bag, found a crushed-in chocolate concoction inside, and offered me half.

“No thank you,” I told him. “So it's Guess Who.”

“Yep, you were right.” Licking chocolate from his fingers, he added, “And we're gonna get him and save our jobs. I love my job. Plus, I don't have money and looks to fall back on like you do, JBS Five.”

I opened my car door. “Why does everybody think I have money?”

“Because you look like you have money and you—”

I told Cuddy not to get in my car.

His sigh was dramatically loud. “I am real tired, so please don't say Elvis is about to blow up your Jaguar again because I just want to get to Raleigh.”

“Fine. But I don't want you in my car until after you finish eating that chocolate doughnut.”

He laughed, stuffed the rest of the pastry in his mouth, and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Oh good lord. Peggy told me you were like this even when you were little. She said when you were four years old you asked for a lock on your bedroom door so your baby brother couldn't crawl in there and mess up your toys.”

I rubbed my hand on the backrest. “These seats are Cordova leather, thirty-five years old. I look like I
had
money.”

He laughed. “In the South, son, it's the same damn thing.”

• • •

When I stepped into Cuddy's apartment with him for some aspirin, his elderly cleaning lady Cleopatra Skelton, large, sooty black, with wild white hair like Don King's, was sitting on the couch with his poodle Martha Mitchell watching
Sunrise Gospel Hour
on cable
.
She had her legs up on an ottoman and a hot water bottle over them. I asked her how she was feeling.

She moaned softly. “Mr. Savile, I am feeling just like that Etta James song. ‘If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.'”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“My husband's got the sugar. They're taking his leg tomorrow.”

“I'm so sorry, Mrs. Skelton.”

“Well, I got this neighbor Nonie Upshaw, she's been trying to run off with my husband for the last ten years and him not havin' a leg gonna make it a lot harder!” She laughed, then asked me for some of the aspirin and then for a glass of water. After she took the pills, she politely inquired about Alice.

“She's still with her family in the mountains.”

She nodded. “Well, if you got family, then you always got a light in the wilderness. The police chief needs some family.”

“That's very true. Well, I'll see you then.”

She waved her hefty arm at Cuddy's collection of jars. “But you need your health too. Mine's gone and how am I suppose to git all this done?” A few years ago Cuddy had improved his interior by removing the photo mural of Cape Hatteras and the life-size cardboard cut-out of Elvis that offered guests a bowl of bite-size Snickers, and by replacing his collection of different beer cans by an almost equal number of indigenous pots from Costa Rica and Guatemala. They probably were very arduous to dust.

“You're right, it's a lot of do. You didn't happen to take Cuddy's telescope upstairs to his study, did you?”

“That old heavy thing?”

“I didn't think so. Nice to see you, Mrs. Skelton.”

As Cuddy yawned walking me to the door, I asked him, “Why don't you get some sleep, send somebody else to Raleigh.”

Buttoning his fresh shirt, he said, “I'm going to fix this mess myself before we all get fired and poor old Martha Mitchell and Cleopatra over there have to cut down on the gourmet treats.”