First Lady (20 page)

I had my second thought as I was walking through the large impersonal lobby of the Governor's Mansion toward the front doors. An entourage came hurrying down the stairs from the private quarters above. Two of the house staff (both African-Americans, wearing white jackets) carried four large suitcases while two young secretarial-looking women (both white, wearing black suits) walked behind them, carrying small bags. Behind these women came Lee Haver Brookside carrying nothing but a purse. She was dressed for travel in that style of comfortable casual sophistication favored by the well-to-do. She was also wearing sunglasses, even though she wasn't yet outside, and when she didn't take them off as she paused to speak with me, I had the feeling she'd been crying.

“Taking a trip, Lee?”

“Hi, Justin. Yes, I'm late for the airport.” She stopped herself from sounding rushed (Lee was unfailingly gracious), and added that she was speaking at a conference on children and the arts in Washington, D.C.

I gestured at the luggage being carried outside. “Long conference?”

She told me she was leaving directly from the conference for London, a small vacation. She wished me well, moved toward the door, then, after her escorts had passed through, turned suddenly back and quickly handed me an envelope she took from her purse. There was nothing written on it. “Please give this to Cuddy,” she said hurriedly. “Tell him,” she looked at me as if the words were somewhere hidden in my eyes, “that he mustn't hurt himself for me. Will you tell him that please, Justin? Thank you.”

Lee knew that I would do as she asked. She didn't wait for my answer but moved ahead of me through the great doors of the Governor's Mansion. The house belonged to the state that had made her family phenomenally wealthy and she had always felt that such gifts imposed obligations on her. She had always felt that she belonged to the state.

As the long black limousine moved smoothly away, the entourage headed back up the steps. Behind them bounced Bubba Percy returning from the New Deal Tavern, looking disturbed and puzzled. He stopped beside me and watched the car drive off. “Jesus fuck my ass!”

“Bubba, I don't think that's what they mean by taking Jesus as your personal savior.”

He bit frantically at his lip. “I saw her luggage. She's not leaving him, is she? Did Lee look like she was leaving him?”

I shook my head. “She'll be back in two weeks.”

“You wouldn't be so sure, Savile, you heard the names her maid said she was calling Andy in their bedroom Friday night just before she didn't show at the banquet.”

“Bubba, breathe. She won't leave him.” I squeezed at his arm. “Now you tell me something. What are they trying to do to Cuddy in there?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Trying?” And shaking his head at my naïveté, he hurried inside.

Of course, not even the attorney general could fire Cuddy. Only the Hillston mayor and city council could do that.

And that had been my second thought about why Mayor Carl Yarborough, now Brookside's running mate, hadn't looked in my eyes.

Sunday night the 24th of June, I fell asleep after a long talk with Alice in which I told her about all the betrayals except my own. I was back in our Queen Anne house on Tuscadora Street after spending the rest of the weekend hidden in my family's lake house with Mavis Mahar. I'd only been home an hour when Alice had called me. Instead of asking where I'd been, she apologized for not responding sooner to my call the week before. She said she hadn't felt she'd be able to talk. As she spoke, I looked at our wedding picture on the mantel, our laughter happy as angels, Cuddy, the best man, beside us, his arm around my smiling mother. Then Alice said she had called Nachtmusik once; she'd thought I might be out at the lake. I said no I hadn't been there at all. Ashamed, hung-over, I walked to the mantel, took down our wedding portrait, and put it in the desk drawer where after Christmas I'd hidden from view all the photographs of our baby who'd just died.

“So what have you been up to?” Alice asked.

I told her things at HPD were in chaos. We'd had another homicide since Cuddy had called her about the Elvis tape. The second case might be tied to Guess Who as well, although we didn't want the press to find that out. If our murderer was Guess Who, he apparently thought he'd killed the rock star Mavis Mahar but actually he had shot a young waitress instead. Mavis was alive and still in Hillston. I opened the bottle of Calvados I'd bought.

“Mavis?” said Alice.

“Everybody calls her Mavis,” I said.

“But that's because they've never met her.”

“Very funny.” I poured a drink, saying that Andrew Brookside had once been involved with Mavis, that people close to him, under the mistaken impression that the singer had been murdered, had tampered with evidence and that Cuddy was demanding their resignations. I said that Bubba Percy was hinting heavily that these people, who included the A.G. Ward Trasker, were going to protect their cover-up by having Carl Yarborough fire Cuddy.

Alice was a politician. She jumped immediately to a motive: “So Andy did give Carl a spot on his ticket.”

“You think Carl will sell Cuddy out to be lieutenant governor?”

“‘But for Wales, Richard?'” Alice quoted her favorite line from
A Man for
All Seasons.
Her voice was sad. “I don't know if Carl will or not. I don't know what anybody will do anymore.”

I didn't know if she meant anything personal by this remark, and I didn't want to know. I told her of Dina Yarborough's odd awkward behavior toward me and of Carl's evasions. And of Margy Turbot's wanting me to warn Cuddy to “watch his back.” She asked about Cuddy's response to these “hints.” I told her that I hadn't conveyed them. He'd replaced me as head of the homicide investigation and we hadn't spoken for awhile.

“Replaced you? Who with?”

“With himself.” I said that when I'd called his office, no one seemed to know where he'd gone, or at least if they did they weren't telling me. He hadn't returned my calls at home either. Finally I'd left a message saying that I had an urgent letter for him from his “old friend in Raleigh.” I told Alice of Lee's request that Cuddy not “hurt himself” on her behalf.

Alice said that if all this was going on, there was probably no need for me to warn Cuddy. He wasn't naïve. “The best thing you can do for him is find out who killed these women as fast as you can.”

“I just told you I'm not in charge anymore. He's doing it all himself.”

“Justin, come on, all that means is he's near panic. Stick with him. The harder he pushes you away, the closer he needs you. You know that.”

“It's tough.”

“You're a tough guy,” she said with the old sweetness. And as we were hanging up, she added cryptically, “Take Lee's advice yourself.”

“What's that?” I was falling asleep.

“Don't do anything that'll get you hurt.”

I heard myself mumbling, “Alice, why don't you come home?”

“I don't think you want me to. Good night, sweet dreams”

But my night was restless and my dreams were anything but sweet.

I was awakened by the moon. The phone rang. I thought it was Alice again, but when I answered I heard a different woman's voice, beautiful and strange, whispering, “
Codladh sámh, a chuisle mo chroí
!”

“Mavis. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Would you like to know what that means? ‘Pleasant sleep, oh pulse of my heart.'”

“I'd say more likely it means, ‘Oh pulse of Irish blarney,'” I mumbled. “What do you want?”

“You, I suppose.”

“Do you have people around you? Don't be alone.”

“Isn't that what we're all wanting? Not to be alone.”

I sat up and knocked over the bottle of Calvados. “I'm going to say good-bye and go to bed.”

“You know in the Gaelic, Lieutenant, ‘good-bye' is different if you're the one staying or the one going. If you were going and I was staying, I'd tell you ‘
Slán leat'
for good-bye. But if I was leaving you behind, it's ‘
Slán agat'
I'd say to you. So which is it you're saying to me now?”

“I have no idea,” I told her. “Let's just say good night.” I hung up.

Asleep again, I dreamed of walking beside the lake toward Mavis. She stood on the dock waiting, her warm flesh luminous as the full moon above her. But then just as I reached her, she suddenly burst apart in a flower of blood. Blood as red as the silk robe she'd dropped from her shoulders to dive into the morning mist the first time I'd seen her.

I was awakened again at dawn by nightmares of endless dives of my own, down to the oozing silt floor of Pine Hills Lake where my child Copper lay twisted in weeds, drowning before I could free him.

• • •

At eight o'clock Monday morning Cuddy Mangum was leaning on my front door bell. The ringing echoed loudly through the large high-ceilinged bare-floored rooms and worsened my headache. Cuddy looked rested but tense. To my surprise, he was dressed in his captain's summer dress uniform, so starched the creases hardly moved. “What's with you?” I grumbled, still in my underwear from the night before and still half asleep. “Is there a funeral?” Parades and funerals were the only times I ever saw him in a dress uniform.

“Some folks are planning on it,” he said tersely as he walked in. I saw him notice the empty Calvados bottle on the coffee table by the couch. He pointed at it. “Just tell me you spent the weekend at a cooking school and you were practicing Cherries Jubilee.”

“You never ate a cherry that wasn't in a Pop-Tart.” I followed him to the kitchen. “I don't guess everybody from the governor on down has turned in those resignations you've been asking them all for?”

He stared at me a moment, then nodded. “Oh, Bubba told you. No, not yet.” He held up a McDonald's bag. “Sorry, no latté and quail's eggs.”

I shook my head. “Thanks anyhow. How about
your
resignation? Carl ask for that yet?”

“Well hey, JB Five, you do have your ear to the railroad track.”

“According to Bubba, the Dixie Comet's barreling down that track and you're tied to the rails. Didn't you get my message?”

“'Bout an hour ago. Bunty and I flew to Atlanta to talk to Samuel Chang. He's a friend of Bunty's.” Dr. Chang was a nationally famous forensic pathologist. Bunty Crabtree was the FBI agent who had obviously taken over my investigation. He said, “I'm going to dig up G.I. Jane and Cathy Oakes both, have Chang examine them. Spaghetti for breakfast?”

I was warming some spaghetti carbonara I'd made myself for dinner and hadn't eaten. I was headed back to the place where I'd rather drink than eat. “It's bacon and eggs, what's the difference? Cuddy, people are dropping hints like slabs of concrete, they're saying the Brookside folks are going to bury what happened at The Fifth Season right on top of you.”

He nodded nonchalantly. “Yeah well, in the game of chicken somebody could get their jacket sleeve caught on the handle of the car door and I see myself more in the James Dean part.”

“You push them, they'll fire you.”

He unwrapped his sausage biscuit. “So I push them, they fire me. They fire me, I go to the press. We'll all be out of jobs. This morning everybody's backing down, thinking that over. Even if they decide to pull the trigger, it'll take Carl a little while to gut it up to do something he'll hate himself for. And a lot can happen in a little while. Where's Lee's letter?”

I staggered back up the steep stairs to get it.

When I came down to the kitchen showered and dressed, Cuddy was listening to someone on his cell phone as he leaned against my refrigerator. He was moving around the tiny magnet words that you arrange into poetry. The fragments hadn't been touched since Alice had put them there shortly before Copper's death and they were still crazily jumbled together in a clump.

On the bleached oak refectory table sat a cup of espresso Cuddy had made me. He pointed at it while listening to someone on the phone. “You're the prince of dark roast,” I told him.

He was saying to the person on the phone, “
Gracias. Me has ayadado muchissimo. Hablamos despues.
I love it.
Adios.”

“Good news?” I asked.

Eduardo Vega in forensics had his first findings from the vacuuming of The Fifth Season bungalow. He had definite gray car carpet fibers that looked like a match for the fiber taken from G.I. Jane's T-shirt. There'd been a few loose short hair strands on the floor as well and they proved to be a match for Lucy's hair. The killer had obviously collected most of her hair as he cut it off and had taken it away with him.

Cuddy said Bunty Crabtree and her FBI field agent partner Rhonda Weavis were putting together a profile of Guess Who, basing it on the assumption that he was responsible for the Lucy Griggs as well as the Cathy Oakes and G.I. Jane homicides, and assuming also that he'd thought Lucy was Mavis Mahar when he killed her.

Cuddy wanted me to turn over to these two agents my homicide books on both cases and all my files. I reminded him that he'd always warned me against inviting in the FBI, because once inside the fort, they had a tendency to lower your flag and raise their own.

Finishing his second biscuit, he carefully swept the crumbs into his hand. “Yeah well, if you don't mind my running off with your metaphor, this fort is under siege, plus it's on fire, plus it's surrounded by Apaches and we just ran out of ammunition, and there's no chloroform for sawing off our gangrene. So if all of a sudden I hear the cavalry riding up, I'm not about to say, ‘Thanks anyhow, don't need your help.' Because I don't want this to be remembered as Cuddy's last stand. I want Cuddy's last stand to be in about 2020 when my retirement kicks in.” He dropped the crumbs in my trash.

“Why did I worry when you were just staring out the window?”

He grinned. “Back me into a corner and I come out talking.” He looked at his watch. “And I hope we can say the same for our pal Mitch Bazemore, because he's starting his summation in an hour and if he doesn't shake up that jury, they're going to acquit Tyler Norris, and that's going to make me out a liar when I said you can't get away with murder in Hillston.”

I handed him the envelope from Lee and told him I had a verbal message from her as well. “She says, don't hurt yourself for her. I assume you know what she means.” He opened the envelope as if he didn't want to harm it. I added, “She was leaving for D.C. with plenty of luggage. Bubba's freaked she's not ever coming back. I told him she was.”

Cuddy sat down across from me, gently slid out the blue notepaper and read it. After he'd put it away in his jacket without speaking, I asked, “Just one question. Does Lee have any reason to think Andy killed the girl, either mistaking her for Mavis or not? And would you tell me if she did?”

He frowned. “She knew Brookside had been over there at the bungalow and she knew why and what it could do to the re-election. She was scared Mavis had killed herself.”

I poured a pitcher of milk. “So she wanted the same thing from you that Bubba did. Keep Andy out of it. When you saw her last night, she asked you to leave the cover-up alone.”

A long silence. But then I hadn't asked him a question. I sat with a bowl of raspberries and took my time pouring milk over them before I said, “I almost told Lee she shouldn't be leaving the state when she's a possible suspect in a homicide investigation herself.”

He looked up at me. “You know damn well she never shot anybody, whether she thought it was Mavis Mahar or not.”

“I didn't say she did. I said she was a possible suspect. Just for the record, since you've made it clear I'm no longer running the homicide division, Lee had motive. Her husband was having an affair that could ruin his political career. She had opportunity. She wasn't at that banquet and she wasn't in bed with a fever either. She had means. You can buy pretty much anything you need with a few billion dollars, including a gun or somebody to use one. Just for the record.”

I kept slowly eating as he walked to my kitchen door. In the doorway, he stopped. “Take yes for an answer. You said this was all about Guess Who. You were right. Oh, and thanks for the tip. I had Nancy pull in this punk John Walker, Lucy's ex-boyfriend. He's a mean little bastard—got bounced out of the Tucson twice for coming in there high and smacking Lucy around. We had him in for that, plus misdemeanor breaking and entering, communicating threats, second-degree trespassing.”

“I thought I'd seen him at HPD.”

“It was all about harassing Lucy. But she wouldn't press charges and that was the end of that.”

“Think he blamed Mavis for Lucy's dumping him? Followed them out there and shot her?”