First Lady (21 page)

“It's a possibility. Nancy and Roid went over to talk to Walker. He made it easy. Had a bag of hash and ten crack caps in a knapsack shoved under the couch in this mildewed pigsty they're all living in—the band, the so-called Mood Disorders. He's high-wired and waves a goddamn air pistol in Nancy's face when she goes for the knapsack.”

“Did he fire it?”

“Nah. She broke his arm before he could. We put a nice cast on it and we're holding him for forty-eight on the narcotics. Okay, Carl's called a meeting. It's either the garbage strike or I'm fired.”

“Good luck.” I took the bowl to the sink.

He nodded a few times. “Listen here, Justin, I don't want you off the case. All I want is you to cooperate with R&B. We had three months to solve Jane, and we didn't do it. Can we stop picking on each other?”

I heard Alice saying, “Stick with him.” I nodded. “We can do that.”

He sighed in ostentatious relief. “Good. Be in Room 105 at 11:30. Oh, and type up your best guess on what the crime scene looked like before Ward Trasker redecorated it. Something for them to read against what it looked like when we got there. Also could I get that timeline—who was there when? We need it at HPD in about an hour.”

“Jesus, is that all?”

He jiggled the doorknob. “No. This plate's loose; your handle's going to fall out. Got a screwdriver?”

I asked him if he felt like he had to fix everything in the world.

He looked at the ceiling as if considering. “Yep. I sure do.”

“Would you please go to your meeting?”

He grinned, put on his captain's hat, saluted, and left.

Returning the milk to the refrigerator, I noticed that Cuddy had moved all the jumbled magnet words into neat rows. They now said things like:

Sun on a stone wall.

Day in a dark room.

The summer road runs forever.

Love was.

I didn't know whether he hadn't had time to finish the last line or that was all he had to say on the subject.

• • •

Overnight a cold front had blown through the Piedmont and the weather now was crisp and clear, one of the rare June days that tricks you into believing that this summer will be different. I spent the morning typing the new crime scene report against the notes I'd kept locked in my desk. After I dropped it off at Cuddy's office, I started interviewing people who'd known Lucy Griggs. They all agreed on three things:

One, she had more brains than talent and should never have left college to try to make it as a singer. She'd done better at Haver University than she had on the stage at the Tucson Lounge.

Two, she'd abruptly dumped John Walker in the middle of what had looked like a “hot” relationship and he hadn't taken the rejection well. She'd complained to everyone about Walker's following her around, telephoning her at all hours, and creating such tension in the (apparently aptly named) Mood Disorders band (assaulting her in the middle of a performance at the Tucson one night) that the other musicians had agreed to throw him out of the group he'd started. He hadn't taken that well either.

Three, Lucy had hinted to several friends that the reason for her break-up with John was another man, “the love of her life,” about whom no one knew anything. She'd been deliberately mysterious. A young worn-out-looking barmaid at the Tucson told me, “Lucy worked hard at being mysterious. She'd drop these hints to try to, like, make us jealous or whatever, okay? She was always going to be a big star and, like, know big people.”

“And she never introduced you to this ‘love of her life'?”

“No way. I bet he didn't even know she worked here.” The barmaid waved an anemic arm around the cheap empty tables of the dimly lit bar. “This wasn't Lucy's real life, this was for losers like us.”

No one I talked to seemed to have much liked Lucy Griggs. The young barmaid went so far as to comment with a chilling blandness, “Well, at least getting herself killed's made Lucy famous for a couple of weeks.”

Walking back from the Tucson I saw the two short dark women standing on the street corner across from the Cadmean Building again, patiently waiting. Along the sidewalk curb, mountainous piles of black and green plastic garbage bags reached as high as their heads, making it look as if they were standing in a hilly fecund jungle. The women kept looking up and down Main Street expectantly. When I nodded at them as I walked past, they moved closer to each other, alarmed. One had a rosary in her hand, which she was ritualistically fingering. I asked them in English if I could help in any way. Either they didn't understand or were too frightened to answer me. I tried to reassure them, but they backed away. One of them tripped on the piled garbage and fell down, dropping her rosary. I picked it up and tried to give it to her but terrified, they both ran across the street.

The rosary was made of cheap plastic beads, but it also had curious tiny feathers and what looked like a dried bird claw attached to it. I let the women see that I was placing it on top of the post box at the corner. They watched but didn't acknowledge me.

The Catholic beads made me think of the rosary Dermott Quinn had wanted me to give Mavis. It seemed unlikely the rock star would be saying her prayers with it as avidly as this woman on the street corner had been doing. Suddenly I recalled Mavis's hostile outburst at the lake house about her mother: “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.” Even worse fates, it occurred to me, than what Guess Who had done to Cathy Oakes or G.I. Jane or Lucy Griggs.

• • •

I walked past the Cadmean Building down to Southern Depot, an upscale interior mall in a huge brick Victorian train station. In the midst of open rows of trendy shops—Laura Ashley linen dresses, Asian antique cabinets, highly priced cheese and wine, beautiful fish, imported wallpaper, rare books and prints—was a leafy atrium café trying with its green metal park chairs to look like the Luxembourg Gardens. At a table beneath a large potted birch tree sat the lawyer Isaac Rosethorn with the Norris family (Tyler and his parents). They had finished their lunch and the fat old lawyer was smoking vigorously.

Norris's homicide trial had resumed this morning after being postponed by Margy Turbot because of the media circus surrounding the “news” of Mavis Mahar's death. It was clearly now in recess. Fulke Norris, the philosophic poet, was lecturing Isaac with emphatic bobs of his beautifully disheveled white hair, which was even whiter and richer and more famous than Isaac's own trademark mane. Mrs. Norris wasn't involved in the conversation, nor was Tyler, although it was probably about him and today's events at his trial. Tyler and his mother never looked at each other.

With a final jabbing tattoo of his finger on the tabletop, Fulke Norris abruptly stood up, took his wife firmly in hand, and walked away, calling to Tyler to come along as if he'd been five rather than thirty-five. As they paused in front of a shop called Gifts and Goodies (where there was a window display of a dozen different volumes of the elder Norris's inspiration verse), a middle-aged woman came running out with a book in her hand for him to sign. I don't think I'd ever before seen so extreme a contrast in human facial emotions as I now saw between the courtly smile with which Fulke Norris unscrewed the cap from his enormous black fountain pen and the scowling grimace with which his son watched him do it.

The Norrises' clothes (blue blazers, tailored silk dress) hung on them so perfectly that they might have been a trio of mannequins in a Brooks Brothers window. Isaac Rosethorn, rumpled, littered with lunch crumbs and cigarette ash, was another study in contrasts.

“Hi there, Isaac.” I pulled over a chair and sat down with my take-out espresso. “The poet of the people didn't look too happy when he left you.”

Rosethorn scowled, his beautiful black cocker-spaniel eyes tearful from the smoke of the unfiltered Chesterfield hanging from his mouth. “Why should he be happy? His son's life is at stake. If Margy Turbot hadn't seen fit to adjourn my trial, I'd have finished my summation instead of having to listen to Mitchell all morning and then be postponed 'til after lunch.”

“And you hate waiting.”

“Justin, I despise waiting. But alas alas alas, you fellows had to turn the press loose on this dead Irish dancer like a herd of jackals on a rhino carcass.”

I pointed out that Mavis Mahar was neither a dancer nor dead. It was a Tucson Lounge waitress who'd been shot.

“Yes, and a shame you didn't discover the difference before the ravening barbarians of television stormed into the Cadmean Building and terrorized the pusillanimous Miss Turbot into adjourning.” He sighed.

“Well, murder is a problem, Isaac.”

“Now I'm hearing rumors you think Guess Who is back. I've never defended a serial killer.” He sighed again wistfully. “Too often their mad conceit leads them to insist on defending themselves.”

I drank my espresso. “Too often they're guilty with a cellar full of mutilated bodies.”

“Dear boy, no one is guilty until proven so. Your cellar might be full of mutilated bodies, your refrigerator might be full of human organs, your hands might be caked in human blood, and still, and
still,
you might be entirely innocent. Why, I can think of hundreds of reasons how you might find yourself, all unwittingly, in such an unhappy situation.”

Isaac, “the grand old man,” “the Beloved Cliché,” as the papers called him, lived atop the Piedmont Hotel on unfiltered Dunhill cigarettes, Wild Turkey whiskey, and High Hat barbecue take-out. He had been threatening to retire for a quarter of a century, but never did it. The “Dixie Darrow” had a magnificent reverberant baritone that he'd used for decades to persuade juries of his clients' innocence. Words rolled up from his belly like gushers of oil, and made him rich. Not that you could tell it from his shabby clothes or his grubby suite in the Piedmont. You had to look closely at the first editions on the shelves and the Attic Greek pottery in the cases and the dozen antique chess sets, one of them originally the property of Henry VII, set out on tables.

The Piedmont Hotel had led an entirely undistinguished life except for two guests. One was Isaac who had now lived there fifty years. The other guest was a beautiful African-American movie star, who had spent half a night there in 1959 before the owner tried to evict her, saying that his clerk had broken the law by allowing her to register in a Whites Only hotel. That's when a young Jewish man named Rosethorn had come down to the lobby in his bathrobe and told the filmstar that he was a lawyer and she should refuse to leave. It was his first famous case.

“So have you any suspects?” Isaac asked me.

“If a serial killer comes along, I'll give him your card.”

He ignored this. “Where's the pattern?” He was lighting another cigarette from a little box of wooden matches. “I don't see the pattern myself, not that I know more than the newspapers, but serial homicide is
about
the pattern, isn't that so? It's more than a modus operandi. These men kill precisely in order to reexperience the pattern.” He put the match down in the ashtray with half-a-dozen others. “And yet two young women had their throats cut and one was shot; one was lying in a culvert, one hidden in the woods, one left openly in a hotel suite. Until you find the pattern, how can you find your way to the pattern maker?”

“Cuddy's set up a task force, brought in the FBI.”

“So how is my Slim?” Slim had been Isaac's nickname for Cuddy since he'd first hired him decades back, when Cuddy had been a skinny brainy East Hillston ten-year-old and had run all the lazy Rosethorn's errands for him in exchange for the first real intellectual attention he'd ever gotten. Over the years he and the eccentric lawyer had adopted each other. Cuddy loved Isaac, but claimed he had no illusions about the megalomania of the gluttonous old bachelor. With Isaac, the universe was a place of personal possession. My Slim. My trial. My verdict. And usually, my victory.

I told him that his Slim was under pressure to resign for reasons I couldn't go into, but that Isaac should give him a call once the trial was over.

“Pressure from whom? That's outrageous. I'll call him tonight.”

I reminded him that the bad publicity under which the Hillston Police Department (and most acutely Cuddy himself) suffered had begun with our arrest of Isaac's own client Tyler Norris. If Norris was now found innocent—

“Not if,” he smiled sorrowfully. “If I know juries, and I do, they are eagerly, indeed impatiently, waiting to find Tyler innocent. I'm afraid the only question at this point is when.”

“Afraid?”

He shrugged. “From your perspective.” It was hard to tell with Isaac, he was such an actor and his large dark droopy eyes regularly had a tragic look, but I could have sworn I saw a genuine sadness in his face before he rubbed his large milky hands across his eyes and wiped the look away. “And your failure. You and Mitchell Bazemore offered no irrefutable evidence of guilt; in fact, thanks to Sheriff Louge's clodhoppers, offered little evidence of any sort. But most of all, Justin, you supplied no sufficient motive.” He licked a finger and ran it around the rim of his chocolate sundae. “No history of more than normal unhappiness with his wife, no fat insurance policy on her, no secret amour, no motive—”

“Well, Isaac, you supplied no burglar, no evidence of any intruder—”

He waved his cigarette back and forth at me. “I didn't have to. You know that. I don't have to prove things. All I have to do is raise reasonable doubt.” He lumbered to his feet in a shower of crumbs and ash. “And that's exactly what I've done. Tell Slim to come see me.”

I watched the grand old man shuffle over to look in the windows of the rare books and prints boutique. There was a slight drag to the weak leg that, whenever he needed a jury's sympathy, suddenly worsened until he could barely walk. Behind the glass door, the owner waited in avaricious expectation as Isaac bent down to peer at some illustrated leather folio displayed on a stand.