First Lady (17 page)

Tear-stained, pocked, and dirty, Dermott Quinn looked even more ravaged than he had the night before. My sudden shake of his shoulder scared him into a little shriek. As I shouted in his ear over the helicopter's noise, my news so shocked him that his legs buckled and he fell against me. He searched frantically in my eyes. “She's not dead? Not dead!?” I grabbed a bottle of Jameson's whiskey from a bureau top, handed it to him, turned him toward the path on the other side of the pool and pointed. When he saw her, he shot out the french doors, tripping over his blue platform shoes. The sheriff's deputies whispered to each other and laughed. Through the pines I could just make out Dermott's clumsy leap as he flung his thin legs around Mavis, knocking them both over.

Malik Xavier, still in his first year with HPD, was worried about the whiskey bottle leaving the scene, but I pointed out that every single object in the suite had now been dusted at least twice and that most of the prints we'd found had belonged to the sheriff's department anyhow. The HPD officers laughed and the sheriff's deputies glowered at me. Malik whispered that these sheriff's men had already been told to leave by Chief Mangum but that they had refused to go, although all they did here was try to get their faces in front of the TV cameras or use the hotel phones to call their families.

I arranged with the hotel to forward inquiries to a police hotline where callers would be told that Mavis Mahar was in fact alive and that anyone who had seen or heard anything suspicious last night at The Fifth Season should telephone HPD, but should not come to the hotel. They came anyhow.

I had Malik's partner check the crime scene inventory for a large loose-weave yellow bag that the victim had allegedly had with her last night, and that contained a camera and an audio tape. We couldn't find anything that resembled it. Nor had anyone been able to find the slug that had shattered the shower tiles.

According to The Fifth Season desk, the attorney general Ward Trasker and his wife had checked out earlier in the morning and were presumably driving home to Pinehurst. I left messages at the A.G.'s home and at his Raleigh office. Then I called Cuddy Mangum.

He was in his car on his way back from Raleigh. The Cadmean Building, he said, had been overrun by reporters—most of whom were demanding to talk to him about this latest murder. Because of the media siege, Margy Turbot, the Superior Court judge in the Tyler Norris murder trial, had adjourned proceedings until tomorrow morning. Isaac Rosethorn pitched a fit.

Cuddy said he had just hung up from talking with Bubba Percy, who had passed on to the governor the good news about Mavis Mahar's being alive. “Bubba's so thrilled he's really going to take Jesus as his personal savior, right after he gets Shelly Bloom fired: he says Shelly had promised him not to leak the Mavis story. That big wuss has forgotten how the mix-up wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been too wimpy to get close enough to see if that girl in the shower was dead or alive.”

The word from Raleigh was that Wendy Freiberg was confident that the handwriting on the Mavis headshot photo matched the handwriting on the G.I. Jane tag telling me to deliver her body to Cuddy. Forensics thought the red marker used on both was a probable match with the red marker used on the editorial from the
Star.
It looked as if we had another Guess Who homicide. And that was the last thing we wanted the local press to find out any sooner than they had to. Cuddy asked, “So what was the deal with Ward? I assume he's denying he had somebody shoot the corpse.”

I told Cuddy that I hadn't spoken with Ward Trasker yet, but I'd left messages. I added that I'd found the rock star. She'd passed out by the lake all night and had no idea that anyone thought she was dead.

There was a long pause, then he said, “Can we keep in mind, somebody
is
dead? Lucy Griggs is dead and Nancy had to tell her mother that. All because Mavis Mahar wanted to play Lady Bountiful.”

“Well, come on, that's a little—”

“Are you with Mavis Mahar right now?”

“Yes, we're here at The Fifth Season and it's crawling with press too.”

“Did you get a statement from her about last night?”

I filled him in on what Mavis had told me about her encounter with Lucy Griggs and with Brookside. I said, “She can't stay here. I thought I'd take her somewhere—”

He interrupted me. “That woman has at least twenty people traveling with her and they're paid nice salaries to watch out for her. Why don't you let them do it, and you go do what I asked you to do? I don't want messages left for Ward Trasker. I want Ward Trasker questioned. Also, I've set it up for you to take the governor's statement at five this afternoon. I need the real timeline on what happened in that bungalow—from Brookside's arrival 'til you and I got there. I want it typed up by six-thirty tonight.”

“Nancy was going to meet me—”

He interrupted bluntly, “Nancy's going to be working with me.”

Nancy had been on my investigating team for months. I asked, “What do you mean working with you?”

“Look, Justin, I'm stepping in on this. I'm running a task force out of HPD. While I was in Raleigh, I had a talk with Rhonda and Bunty. They're coming over.” Rhonda Weavis and Bunty Crabtree were female special agents of the FBI, working out of the Raleigh field office, regional-based and specialist-trained at VICAP in Quantico. Their specialty was serial sex-related homicide. They lived together in a big new house in a gated community. Some law people thought they were a couple and others thought they were just splitting the mortgage on five thousand square feet with two Jacuzzis and a club pool. Those of us who liked them called them “R&B.” Or “RhoBu.” I'd also heard them called “Weavis and Bunthead,” “the Bureau Bitches,” and persistently by Sheriff Homer Louge, “those two Lesbionic girls.”

Cuddy was saying, “The task force's gonna meet in 105. They're setting it up now. We'll need all your files by this evening.”

It was obvious that I wasn't in charge of the Guess Who homicides anymore. “So, am I going to be answering to R&B?”

He told me I was going to be answering to him.

I said, “You're not a homicide cop anymore. You're the chief of police.”

“And while I'm in my office writing pep talks for Kiwanis buffets, some psycho's slicing out women's tongues and eyes. And the ‘homicide cops' can't figure out who. Mavis Mahar, hey, no trouble finding her. But the son of a bitch that
told
us he killed these women, him no clue. When I was in homicide, we c
augh
t the killers, you remember that?”

His sarcasm infuriated me. “You want somebody to blame? Fine, go for it, Cuddy, be my guest. You and RhoBu go catch Guess Who.”

“Don't you think that'd be a good thing for a change?”

“Just do it by the Fourth of July. That's two weeks. Oh, and since you're so focused on Lucy Griggs—now that I've told you who your victim is—maybe I should also tell you that Lucy was being stalked by her old boyfriend. Could be he followed her out here. Could even be he meant to kill Mavis out of jealousy. Check on a local musician named John Walker. Just a thought.” And I dropped the phone into the receiver.

• • •

Dermott Quinn slipped inside the french doors from the bungalow terrace and tugged at my sleeve. “She wants to talk to you,” he whispered so as not to be heard by the four young men—ours and the sheriff's—still keeping an eye on each other from opposite sides of the suite.

I gave a pat to his bony chest. “You were right, Dermott. She didn't kill herself.”

Tears wet the dresser's straight pale eyelashes. “Aye. But I feel bad for the other one, the waitress. Just a fan and some fucker does her so.” He showed genuine sympathy but little curiosity about Lucy Griggs. All his focus was on Mavis. A second news helicopter had joined the first; they were swarming above the bungalow. Wrapping a pear and apple from a gift basket into a napkin, he gave them to me, begging me to get Mavis away and keep her safe. He'd deal with the “bleedin' rats-ass” media. I saw there was no need to warn Dermott Quinn against them; he'd lived for years with a superstar and knew more about the press than I ever would. He explained that Mavis wanted to make a statement—but at her own time and under her own terms. He was going to call her manager who was to set up a press conference at the Sheraton in time for the evening news. The manager would also start negotiating with Haver University to reschedule the cancelled concert. Taking the fruit from him, I picked a round of cheese from the basket and asked him if he had a knife. He found a room service tray and handed me a dinner knife. I told him I'd meant a sharp knife, like a Swiss Army knife, did he own one?

“Knives or guns neither, I want nothing to do with them myself. I don't like anything dangerous about me.”

“Except Mavis Mahar?”

He looked at me a moment then slowly nodded. “Ah, for certain. Except Mavis.”

I gestured out the doors at the police and the press. “Is this what her life's usually like? Except for the dead body?”

Dermott Quinn gave me a smile a little condescending about my naïveté. “Dead bodies too. There was a student in Singapore hanged himself in a tree outside our hotel, last December it was.”

“Over Mavis?”

The dresser raised his scrawny shoulders. “Prove his love is what he said in his letter. She's waiting in that boat for you. You'll take good care?”

I told him protecting people was part of my job.

“That's why you're good for her. See she's at the Sheraton at half past three.” A bee had flown in through the terrace doors; he very carefully and gently waved it back outside with a folded magazine. Moving closer, he looked seriously at my face. “You know, you look a terrible lot like Niall.”

“Who?”

“Niall Mahar. She took his name. Wild man he was. Played a beautiful guitar, but drank himself silly and went lookin' for fellows to fight 'til they kicked in his face. He taught Mavis a bit of music and he wrote her a gorgeous song. It was the first time she went platinum. ‘Light at Midnight.'”

I said I'd heard it.

“But that song was the death of them. He wasn't in her class and knew it and couldn't live with it. Ah, but she loved that poxie fucker.”

I asked if Niall Mahar was the one who had killed himself by jumping off a Dublin bridge into the Liffey River.

“He did indeed, the eejit. She said you're going for a sail.” Dermott Quinn pulled a pink rosary from his tight pants. “Give her this. It'll do her no harm. And leastways, they say you can't drown on St. John's Eve.”

• • •

As I walked toward the woods, the news helicopter swooped around to see if I was worth following and decided I wasn't. So I made my way across the beach to the dock and, casting off the O'Day, jumped aboard. Mavis was lying hidden in its hull. “May your fire never go out,” she said, raising her whiskey bottle to me.

I didn't have time or ballast in me for this sail and I doubted she did either. But I didn't care.

Out on the lake, I accepted her offered drink and moved away so she could take the rudder. The whiskey burned my throat and memories rushed back. It had been a long time.

“I'll have you on the cigs again as well soon enough,” she predicted. Rightly as it turned out.

I asked her, “You want everybody to share your sins?”

“Oh, not everybody,” she smiled.

When I gave her the rosary from Quinn, she wrapped it around her wrist, making a bracelet of it. “So it's St. John's Eve today. Poor Dermott's a country boy and believes all that shite…. Midsummer's Eve you know. That's when you go lookin' for flowers that will tell a girl about her future fellow…. Dermott'd like to see me with a good strong safe married man.” She took my hand and tapped the gold wedding ring on my finger. “Isn't that you, Lieutenant? A good strong married man.”

I swung the rosary in front of her. “I'd say your friend was determined to save you from hell.”

She tilted her head and spit whiskey out from her mouth in a playful spray. “And I'm determined to go there.”

“Well not today, I hope. Not with me, I hope.”

She just smiled and took a bite from her pear.

The Irish whiskey was warm, the cool morning wind fresh, the sky Carolina blue and racing with white clouds. I'd sailed Pine Hills Lake since my boyhood, but Mavis had a feel for its water as sure as mine. We were good together. Heeled over, sail snapped taut, we leapt across the deep water, sheering foam. She told me she'd practically lived in a boat until she was eight, sailing daily on Bantry Bay with her older brother. His name was Willie Connolly. Nearly every day Willie had taken her out in his skiff. He'd found the wooden boat smashed up in a rocky cove, fixed it, and made a business from it. For a few pounds he took tourists out to photograph the seals sunning on the islands in the bay. She said Willie was a wonderful sailor “and the sweetest soul ever lived altogether,” but that he was big and shambly with epilepsy and a funny twist in his face that put off the tourists. So he brought along his baby sister Agnes because she was pretty and good for business, especially with the Americans. They'd give her as much as five dollars for singing “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and even more for “Danny Boy” with a tear in her voice. With Agnes drumming up trade, they'd made a success. Willie called her his lucky angel.

“Some luck, some angel,” she sighed, leaned over the gunnel and splashed water in her face and her hair. “Ah, I miss him still.”

“He's dead?'

A shake of her head and water drops in the sun flung like crystals around her. “So he is.” She told me the story as I'd read it in the magazine. “We'd dropped off the German couple and were going home and all of a sudden one of Willie's seizures came on him. He fell out of the boat and I couldn't pull him back, try though I did 'til my heart was bursting out of my chest, so big he was and myself so little, a girl of eight. He drowned then and there, my brother Willie, nineteen years old.” She pushed the rudder away from her, swung the beam about, turned the bow before the wind. “And I never loved another so.”

After a while I asked, “Your only brother?”

“Only everything. There were but two men in my life that left me—well, me shitebag da, but him I don't count—two men and both by drowning.” She sipped again from the bottle and sang softly, “‘It's been a long time comin' but a change is gonna come.'…Sam Cooke, ah, Willie loved that Sam Cooke. ‘There's no music but the American blacks,' he'd say. I took his records with me when I ran off; seven albums he had, Motown hits. But myself I like it all. Country, R&B, blues, especially early blues.”

“So I heard from Bubba Percy.”

“Ah, him.” All poor Bubba's deficits modulated through her two monosyllables.

I pointed out an inlet ahead where a large gray shallow-roofed summerhouse with wide verandahs sat above a green lawn. On the lakefront, a white gazebo was shaded by two huge willow trees. “Head her there,” I said. “It's my family's summer house.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So?”

“So I've got .78s by Sippie Wallace and Ida Cox. I've got Louise Bogan's ‘Tricks Ain't Walkin' Tonight.' I've got the 1925 original of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong doing
St. Louis Blues.'
And I've got very nice cheese for your apple.
”

Two could play at the seduction game.

• • •

Although christened “Nachtmusik” by my Mozart-loving father because of all the windchimes my mother hung in its willow trees, the lake house had belonged to my maternal family the Dollards since the 1880s. In their typically unimaginative way, they had always called it simply “Summer Place.” Since my father's death, my brother Vaughn and his wife Jennifer—who thank God live in Chevy Chase—had been trying to trick our mother into selling the house (“It's just sitting there. Just list it, just see what you could get, the market's through the roof, just call a realtor…”), but I had relied on Mother's fluttery indecisiveness to keep them at bay. Now since her stroke, she didn't even remember that she owned the lakefront property. I've kept putting money in savings so that when Vaughn and I inherit Summer Place, I can buy his share from him. As Cuddy says, I like old things.

Mavis wandered everywhere through the large rambling house, with no notion of possible trespass. For coolness, all the rooms had tall windows and large french doors and opened—Louisiana style—onto the verandah or above onto a balcony. There was less furniture than there'd been in my childhood because everyone in the family “borrowed” from Nachtmusik whenever in need of a wicker chair or a pine hutch. Actually, the more they removed, the better I liked it: the present spareness of the furnishings had a soothing effect on me. With Alice off in the mountains, I'd taken to spending some of my nights out here. One reason was that Summer Place is closer to the stables where I keep Manassas. The other reason is that my baby son Copper didn't die here.

I was eating Stilton cheese and an apple when finally Mavis skipped down the wide stairs from the bedrooms and flung herself into an ancient Morris chair. She took a slice of the green apple from me. “So what was your
winter
home, a palace maybe?”

I said my family hadn't been rich but they'd been comfortable for a long time.

She laughed. “You American sods never think you're rich. Now do you know what I'm going to tell you? My mother cleaned a hotel in Glengarriff not so big as this and too much for her bad feet it was at that.” The singer poured herself a glass full of her whiskey and took it to the small white spinet where I'd left out sheet music of the Scott Joplin that I played too slowly. The piano had been my mother's; she called it “The Summer Piano” and she and my father, an amateur violinist, played Mozart duets here in the long August evenings when he came home to us from Haver Medical School, which he ran. It was my mother who gave me piano lessons. A sudden rush of memory took me back to sitting with her on this white wooden bench, her hands patiently guiding mine to form the chords, our tanned bare legs side by side, in our summer shorts, my legs then shorter than hers that now seemed so small and frail to me.

Mavis's fingers raised nonchalantly over the keys and suddenly a strong sad rolling stride of bass melody shook the room. She sang from an old blues that I'd heard before, “When I…came in…to this ole world, I didn't come here to stay. / I didn't bring nothin' into this ole world. / And nothin' I'll carry away.” The music stopped as suddenly as it had started. She waved her whiskey glass around the room. “Darlin', you and Mavis got more than we can carry away, that's for certain. I am terrible, terrible rich.”

I said I would imagine so.

“All of a sudden I had more money than time. And that's surely a curious situation in which to find yourself at twenty years of age when you grew up with a poor mum longing day and night after a ratty plastic reclining chair collecting dust in a cheap store window.”

I expected her to tell me some tragic way in which her sainted mother had died—starved or clubbed by British soldiers or eaten by venereal disease—but instead she said that as far as she knew, her bitch of a mother still lived in County Clare; at least somebody at the rest home was cashing the checks she sent. She said frankly she had never liked her mother, who was “righteous religious.” “Always lighting the candles to these bloody martyred saints of hers that got burned up and raped and chopped to bits, their tongues pulled out and their heads whacked off.” The mother had even told her son Willie that his fits were signs of sin and his own fault.

The war with Mrs. Connolly had driven Mavis to run away when she was eleven. She stole the money to take the bus to Dublin to find an aunt of hers whose name was Mavis. Her mother asleep in the lumpy bed that morning as she robbed her purse was the last sight she'd had of her. “Always smackin' me. ‘You're the spit of Mavis and the twos of you will be burnin' in hell together for all eternity.' So I say, ‘That's fine by me, Ma, for I'd rather be damned with Aunt Mavis and the devil in hell than sittin' with you on the high cold throne of God.'”

I laughed. “That's a mouthful for an eleven-year-old.”

“Not for the Irish, me boyo. We've done bollocks all but talkin' at each other since the Middle Fuckin' Ages.”

When I asked what had been so damnable about her aunt, she said that the original Mavis was either a junkie hooker or she'd let a Protestant get her pregnant, or both. The young Agnes had never been able to locate her aunt in Dublin, but she had taken her name and made it famous all over the world. And as soon as she'd made the money to do so, she'd hired a detective to find her relative. The detective learned that her aunt had recently died of cancer. After he found the grave for her, Mavis had her aunt reburied in County Clare beside Willie under a marble tomb that cost ten thousand pounds. “My aunt used to say when we'd go by that church, ‘This cemetery's shite. I want a stone so grand and gorgeous the Mother of God will be proud to come calling, and please Jaesuz, she'll bring champagne and caviar.' That was her dream of heaven, someday sitting down to champagne and caviar.”

I helped myself to a glass of her whiskey and toasted her aunt with it. “To the two Mavises. May your fire never go out either.”

“Ah,” she grinned as she watched me sipping at the whiskey, and when I finished the glass and poured another, she said strange words in a raspy voice. “
Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile
.”

I asked her if it were Gaelic and she nodded that it was. “It's an old proverb. ‘One beetle recognizes another beetle.'”

I knew what she meant and didn't bother pretending I didn't. “Then you've never seen your mother since?”

She drank from my glass. “Never once. But I can see her still, with her brown kerchief tight knotted under her chin and her black purse in her fists and her legs locked together, waiting at the bus stop.” She looked at me and smiled. “So this is Nachtmusik. Am I the Queen of the Night then?”

“What do you think?”

She turned back to the piano and started singing in a raw throaty voice:

I don't want you to be no slave.

I don't want you to work all day.

I don't want you to be true.

I just want to make love to you.

She circled slowly around and looked at me. I asked her if she would like breakfast, although I was sorry I couldn't offer her champagne and caviar.

“I wouldn't be sorry for an egg,” she told me. “But I hate to leave just yet.” Her left hand played a slow blues beat. She looked at me again “Not when I've come to such a handsome place with such a handsome fellow.”

I moved to the fireplace, lit the newspaper I kept ready beneath the logs. “We don't have to leave. I'll cook you something. There's food here.” The month-old newspaper in the fire was the
Hillston
Star
and I noticed the small headline, “POLICE ADMIT NO PROGRESS ON G.I. JANE HOMICIDE,” before the words flamed into ashes.

Mavis smiled at me, not watching her hands as they moved slowly over the keys. “You cook then, do you, Mr. Savile? Ah, quite the catch you'd be. You sail…you ride…you send the bad fellows off to prison.…” After every phrase, she played the slow rhythmic beat. “You get the girl.” She turned again on the bench, leaned toward me. “Do you get the girl?”

The fire leapt up behind me. I said, “Yes I do.”

She stood and walked toward me. “At home on St. John's Eve in the country, the fellow and his girl they're supposed to take hands, you know, and jump over the fire, and that'll tell them if they're meant for one another or not.”

“Here's the fire,” I said and pulled her down toward me.

• • •

Afterwards we slept for an hour and it was two-thirty when I cooked the omelette while she listened to my old blues .78 recordings. She asked for pencil and paper and wrote things down as she played the Bessie Smith song again and again. In the hall, the old black dial phone suddenly rang.

No one knew that I came here to Nachtmusik but Alice and Cuddy. I didn't want to talk to either one. I let the phone ring. There was no answering machine in the house. Finally it stopped.

• • •

Back on the lake, the wind had died and I lowered the sails and used the outboard motor to speed us along. We were in a hurry now, late for our lives. Mavis was listening to voice mail on her small cell phone. I'd left my car near the bridle path and had decided we'd go straight there and avoid The Fifth Season. I'd take her back to the Sheraton where her entourage was waiting for her. For safety's sake, just in case, I asked her to promise to keep her people around her at all times.

“Ah,” she smiled ironically, “‘people around me at all times.' Wouldn't that be unusual now? Eight years ago, I woke up one noon and I was a celebrity and there were people all around me, who knows where they came from, and there've been people all around me ever since. Combing my hair and patting my face and hauling me along halls onto stages and into cars and onto planes and under lights and stand here and move there and hold it please. I can't go sit in the loo without people shoving their autograph books under the stall door at me. I haven't bought my own pair of knickers in fuckall because I can't go strolling in the shops. You know, I heard where in Memphis they'd open up stores for Elvis in the middle of the night like they do for the bleedin' Queen. Maybe Dodi's dad would do that for me at Harrod's, what do you think?”

“I think stars are famous because they want to be. They like it.”

She laughed like a song. “Of course I like it! I feckin' love it.”

We were coming close to The Fifth Season. I could see the outdoor ring of the stables where I boarded Manassas; it bordered the resort on one side. I had assumed the Daysailor belonged to the resort, but when I asked her if the resort had a boathouse so I could return the sailboat later, she said she hadn't taken the boat from the hotel. She had seen the O'Day tied to the small dock of some cottage that she'd swum past this morning. So she'd taken it for a sail. There'd been a duffel bag down in the hull with clean clothes in it—that had been where she'd gotten the white shirt and shorts. She wasn't sure which cottage it had been. Painted blue, she thought, but maybe not.