First Lady (25 page)

Nancy introduced me to Mrs. Doris Nutz, who immediately snapped, “No cracks!” emphasizing her point with a loud
pow
of her pink gum. Mrs. Nutz also had portraits of lesser fifties celebrities on her walls (Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Sandra Dee), but it was quickly apparent that she shared none of their energetic goodcheer. She didn't see why the hell Nancy was bothering her again; she'd already said she didn't know who the girl with the buzz cut was or from where the photo had originated. It was no wonder the Hillston police had such a lousy reputation when they would rather harass hard-working taxpayers than arrest the dregs of society.

Couldn't I see she was busy running a business? To prove her point, Mrs. Nutz held up her hands—puckered, shriveled, and white from years of immersion in various toxic liquids. I indicated with an arm wave that Shear Inspirations was currently empty except for one customer asleep with her feet in a basin of green glop. “Hell,” she sighed, “between the Koreans and the Hair Cuttery chains, I don't know why I don't just stick my head in an oven.”

Finally, Mrs. Nutz begrudgingly allowed us to talk with her two haircutters (one with cornrows, one with a purple pompadour, both in bowling shirts with pleated backs), who were off in the rear of the shop eating frozen yogurt while watching
All My Children
. Neither of these young men recognized G.I. Jane. But then even the one with seniority had only worked there for four months.

After a little more chitchat, Mrs. Nutz agreed to show me her old appointment book. While I looked through it, Debbie Reynolds' “Tammy”
fought off the BeeGees from Rajah's and Mavis's “Coming Home to You” from the record store. Behind me, Nancy was checking shelves stuffed with old newspapers, magazines, and promotional photos, searching for any other pictures of G.I. Jane or any other model with the same studio wallpaper visible behind her head.

The white Shear Inspirations appointment book was inscribed “Wedding Guests.” It had not been rigorously kept, perhaps to avoid troubling the IRS with too much income to tax. For if Mrs. Nutz had had no more clients over the past six months than those she'd recorded, it was hard to imagine how she could pay her two stylists to watch soap operas. The notations I did find in her ledger were so haphazard, I worried I was wasting my time even looking. On only a few occasions were the client's name, the haircutter's name, the desired treatment and the price all listed. Usually there was only a terse code, like “D–4.” But I was lucky. I turned a page and saw the name “Kristin” on December 24. The word “buzz” was right beside it and after that the name “Bo.” Kristin was the same name as Christine; “buzz” was the cut I was looking for. She'd had an appointment for one P.M.

Excited, I asked Mrs. Nutz to look again at the photo we'd brought back to her shop. Might this “Kristin” in her appointment book be the girl in the photograph? If she'd gotten the buzz cut here on December 24, was it possible that someone around here had taken the photograph that Nancy had found?

Mrs. Nutz didn't take time to think; she had no regulars named Kristin and couldn't be expected to remember a walk-in from six months ago. She said she'd already said that no one in her salon had ever taken any photos of haircuts. The hair product companies sent them and she didn't know where the one of G.I. Jane had come from. I asked her about the other name in the appointment book: who was Bo?

“A bitch and a thief,” was the answer, fired back again with the accompanying gum pop. Apparently, Bo Derek (self-named after Bo Derek but “who's she kidding?”) had robbed Mrs. Nutz on Christmas Eve of all the cash in the register, her Sony TV and camcorder, and a new lamb shearling jacket she'd accidentally left in the restroom. When she'd rushed over to the house on Whitcomb where this thieving employee had rented a room, she'd found Bo's landlady crying in the street because her Toyota Camry was gone. “She robbed us both on Christmas Eve. And Bo's landlady even had a little present waiting for her under the tree!”

“That's awful. I guess this Kristin would have been Bo's last customer.”

Mrs. Nutz took back her appointment book. “Well if ‘Kristin' was wearing anything that bitch wanted, Bo's probably the one that cut her throat.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “There're too many people on this planet and half of them ought to be shot into outer space.”

I pointed at Marilyn Monroe smiling down on us from the pink wall. “Doris, you think it was a kinder, gentler world back then in the fifties?”

Mrs. Nutz made a dismissive splutter through her pale pink lipstick. “No, I think it was the same pile of crap. I loved Marilyn, but I never had her innocence,” she said. “I was more like Carolyn Jones in
King Creole
,” she said. “Kind of bitter.”

As I was writing down what information she had about the larcenous Bo, Nancy, behind me on her knees in piles of mildewed junk mail suddenly shouted, “Hey!” When I walked over, she handed me a faded photo Christmas card. “Look at that.” On its glossy cover, I saw a half-dozen people standing in front of the Shear Inspirations sinks, all but one of them wearing Santa hats with pink smocks and holding up a string of tinfoil letters that spelled out “HAPPY HOLIDAYS.” I recognized Mrs. Nutz, looking in her pink smock like one of her bigger gum bubbles, but I didn't see anyone resembling G.I. Jane.

“No, not her.” Nancy pointed at the one person not wearing a Santa hat or a salon smock. It was a hostile young man, good looking, dressed in black jeans and black leather jacket, and not at all in the Christmas spirit. “That's John Walker,” she whispered. “That's the guy we're holding. The guy was stalking Lucy Griggs. Her ex-boyfriend.”

He was also the person I'd seen glowering at Lucy from the shadows of the Tucson band platform when she was getting her picture taken with her idol Mavis Mahar. I took the greeting card over to Mrs. Nutz and asked her about the young man sulking in the corner of her Christmas card. Had he worked here in Shear Inspirations? She avoided my question. Instead, she pointed out a big-boned muscular woman with a white streak in her feathered hair, who was standing with her arm around Doris just as if she wasn't planning to rob her in less than a month. The thief Bo Derek.

I said it was the young man I was interested in right now.

She told me she didn't see why I had to waste her time.

“Come on, Doris. You know who he is.”

She abruptly burst out that the young man in the photo was her son John Walker from her rotten first marriage, and no, he hadn't worked here. Honest work didn't interest her son John. He was “a quote artist unquote.” But in her opinion, what his band the Mood Disorders played wasn't music, and anybody with any talent from Percy Faith to Ray Charles would agree with her. Why were we asking her about John? Just because a kid got in trouble when he was a kid did we have to keep hounding him his whole life?

I asked if she was aware that her son was being held at this moment for questioning in the shooting death last night of Lucy Griggs. She looked at me shocked. Then she sat down in one of the pink metal chairs, carefully placed her hands on the knees of her pedal pushers, and stared at their white shriveled skin. She sat without moving for so long that finally I repeated my question, although I already knew the answer was no. She hadn't known that Lucy Griggs had been murdered. No, she hadn't known that her son was in custody. Is that what we were really here about? Was the G.I. Jane photo just a trick to get us in the door so we could try to pin something on her son?

Glancing mournfully around her shop—as if wondering why she bothered—Mrs. Nutz promised me that John had not killed Lucy. They broke up over a year ago and were out of each other's lives now. Yes, the break-up had been Lucy's doing and yes, Lucy had added insult to injury by trying to persuade her quote band unquote, whose other guitarist happened to be John's best friend since junior high, to throw John out of his own band. The other guitarist's name was Griffin Pope.

I suggested that this rejection by Lucy must have troubled her son. Not at all, claimed his mother. John could care less about Lucy; he'd had a dozen other girls since then. Mrs. Nutz—caught between protecting her child and casting as much blame as possible on the dead girl—went on proving that Lucy's mistreatment of John was monstrous and that John hadn't been in the least bothered by it, until she finally tangled herself in verbal knots and abruptly stopped, taking refuge in popping her gum at me. I borrowed the photo Christmas card and told her we'd be back. She wasn't surprised.

On the way to HPD, Nancy nodded as she drove. “You're good with women, Justin. I couldn't get old Doris to open up at all.”

“You're better with guys.”

“It's this personal thing you do. Yeah, I'm like you that way with guys. You noticed?” She glanced over and the car swerved.

I asked her, “Hasn't Cuddy talked to you about having only one finger on the steering wheel?”

“A good finger,” she said and used it to make the turn into the municipal lot. “But listen, where I'm best is young guys. You grow up in East Hillston and you got younger brothers, you better be. Let me do Mister Johnny Walker Black Leather, okay?”

“He's all yours.”

• • •

Nancy's husband Sergeant Zeke Caleb was supervising the desk. He passed release forms to a remorseful DWI before acknowledging us with a stiff hello. (He and Nancy keep a formal distance between work and love, and if you saw them on HPD property, you'd never know they'd ever met, much less been married for years.) He told Nancy, “Officer, you got a phone call from a guy called Dermott Quinn, wants you to call him back after six, okay?”

“Okay, thanks, Sergeant,” she said. “The Lieutenant and I are going to talk to this kid we're holding, John Walker. I'll take him to Three, Justin.” She waved as she walked off.

I asked Zeke if the task force had reconvened in Room 105, and he said no. Cuddy was in the district attorney's office and some of them had gone out to interview the coroner, Osmond Bingley.

“I hope they ask him why he keeps ruling suicide on victims with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.”

Zeke was too good a soldier to joke about city officials. He said only, “I hear there's a break on G.I. Jane. I hear you got a photo.”

“Thanks to your wife,” I said. He tried to stop his smile but couldn't.

• • •

We looked through the glass of Interrogation Room 3 at the pouty fidgety young suspect seated in the plastic chair with his lizard-skin boots up on the table, his arm in a cast. Nancy nodded at me. “Okay, go crazy, show me what you got.”

“Just watch me.”

It took only five minutes to scare the bravado off John Everett Walker's pretty face and replace it with a green jellyish anxiety. I knocked his legs off the table, cuffed one of them to the chair leg, and told him he was the best thing to happen to me in months because he'd solved two big problems of mine. I was under pressure to book a suspect on the Lucy Griggs murder and here he was—a prime candidate. Plus, I
really
needed to clear the Guess Who killings, and here he was again. I could tie him to G.I. Jane's homicide through his mother's hair salon.

As Walker fought to hold on to his skeptical sneer, I fell forward onto him and hit him hard with my elbow as his chair went over. “Lost my balance,” I smiled.

On his side, trapped by the leg cuff, he held his cast in air and heaved for breath, shocked and gagging, his eyes darting desperately to Nancy. “What's the matter with him? I didn't kill Lucy! What's going on? First these two FBI bitches are all over me, now this freak?”

Nancy stepped between us and helped Walker pull himself upright in the chair, patting his back kindly as she did so. “Lieutenant Savile, hey, take it easy. You okay, John?”

I snarled, “This s.o.b. murdered three women and you want me to take it easy with him?”

She stared at me dubiously. “Think we can make him for all three?”

“Three women? Jesus, what the fuck are y'all talking about?” The young man looked like someone who'd suddenly been abducted by aliens.

I stepped close to his face, squeezed his chin in my hand and stared into his eyes. Flinching, he pulled his head back as far away from me as he could. “Yeah. He killed them all,” I told Nancy. “I can see it all over him. It makes me sick, what he did to Lucy and Jane, butchering them like that, cutting out their tongues and eyes.”

Walker's own eyes swelled, pushing open his thick-lashed lids. “You're crazy! He's crazy!”

“You think so? Give me a reason not to strap you down and slide the needle in. Give me a reason!” I shoved hard at his chair with every few words until I knocked it over again against the wall.

Tilted backwards, Walker twisted himself frantically toward Nancy. “Get him away from me! I didn't kill anybody!”

Nancy pushed me across the room, pleading with me to calm down, take a break, leave her to talk to the suspect alone for a while. Finally I was persuaded to go have a cup of coffee. As I slipped out the door, she whispered, “Better. I mean, you got a ways to go, but you're getting there.”

“From you,” I told her, “high praise.”

Usually I'd be the one protecting the suspect from Nancy's outbursts. She thought her “mad dog cop” was scarier than mine, and she was right. The stepfather who'd tried to rape her when she was a teenager came out of the hospital in a wheelchair two months after he went in.

While Nancy was comforting John Walker, I checked by District Attorney Mitch Bazemore's office. There was no need to wonder if Cuddy was still in there because he exploded like a bull out of the closed door just as I walked by it. Mitch, swollen with anger, chased after him, waving a letter at his back. “You don't tell me! I tell you! There's a chain of command here and if Ward Trasker, the attorney general of this state—”

Cuddy wheeled around on Mitch. The veins in his neck were so distended I could see his pulse beating there. “Ward Trasker ought to be indicted and you know it, you goddamn coward!”

“If the attorney general tells me we're turning the Guess Who investigation over to the sheriff's department, then that's exactly what we're doing because there's a chain of command here! Turn your files over to Homer Louge.” Bazemore suddenly realized he was in a public corridor and that I was in it with him. By a huge effort of will, he deflated himself as if he'd let out compressed air. “We'll discuss this later, Mangum.”

Cuddy grabbed the sheet of paper from Bazemore and ripped it in two. “No, we won't.” He threw the paper at Bazemore's chest. “The answer's no. Homer Louge has fucked this investigation already—”

“Don't you dare use that filthy language—”

“And I'm not turning a fuckshit paper clip over to him. And you fucks fire me you'll be seeing yourselves on the news more goddamn times than Monica Lewinsky!”

I walked past them. “Hi. How you doing, Mitch? Cuddy. Nice day. Good talking to you.” I kept going.

• • •

The next morning, Tuesday the twenty-sixth, I arrived at Room 105 before Cuddy's brain trust assembled there. No one was around but Rhonda Weavis, perched on the conference table, eating some egg and cheese concoction out of a cardboard container. Oddly, she looked as if she might have been crying, which was startling in someone so habitually sanguine. As she hopped down to greet me, she forced energy into her voice. “How's it going, JayJay?”

“Fine, how about you? Where is everybody?”

“Caught in traffic probably. Bunty's lying down in Cuddy's office. She was here all night.”

“She okay?”

Years of asking people questions they don't want to answer has taught me that the ones who don't like to lie have trouble with their faces when they do it. Involuntary eyelid flickers are a typical giveaway and that's what Rhonda did now as she said, “Sure, she's fine, just tired. Works too hard.” She hurried over to some photographs on the conference table. “Good news, buddy!” Showing me a blow-up of the commercial photo of G.I. Jane that Nancy had found at Shear Inspirations, Rhonda pointed out a small insignia on the T-shirt that Jane wore, just visible at the bottom edge of the picture. Bunty had identified it as the logo of a cruise ship line. “We got her!”

“My god, Rhonda, you know who she is?”

“We sure do!”

I held out my hand. “I owe you an apology. I didn't want you two brought in. It was a slap and I resented it. But you and Bunty have gone further in four hours than we did in four months. Congratulations.”

She looked at me with a quizzical affection. “JayJay, you don't know what resentment is. Some guys we work with act like we're shoving their heads down in a toilet full of menstrual blood. Sorry, that's a little graphic.”

I smiled. “It makes your point.”

She rubbed my back. “So I like working with you. And I appreciate your getting the ego out of it. Besides, hey, you guys are the ones who found the photo. You know how it is, sometimes you catch that first break and then it's chain chain chain, chain reaction.” She opened a folder on the table and handed me a fax. “So, anyhow, can you beat it? Shipping line runs out of Nassau, but it's a Scandinavian company.” Rhonda pointed out the same logo above a famous cruise line's letterhead on the fax. “We fax their headquarters this photo and they match it to this ship of theirs that does island-hops in the west Caribbean. This wallpaper's in the beauty salon.”

“Could they ID Jane?”

Nodding, she passed me another fax. I looked down at the fuzzy paper at a copy of a young woman's identification card as an employee of the cruise liner's “Atlantis Salon.” She had worked there as a hair stylist and it was there that the photograph had been taken that Nancy had found in Shear Inspirations.

I sat down, shaken. After all these months, after all the interviews and phone calls and emails and lab tests, after all the parents who had come to us, hoping and dreading that she was their daughter, then gone away with their grief unresolved, here at last was the woman we had called G.I. Jane. She had a name and a past, she had a job and a family and friends and a life that, for reasons that might finally be traceable, had brought her to a shallow grave of leaves in a muddy ravine.

Her age was twenty-six, her hair was blonde, her eyes were blue, her nationality and passport were Swedish. Rhonda pointed a tan strong finger at the name on the faxed ID card. “But hey, congratulations to you too, buddy. Her name
is
Christine. Well, it's Kristin. Just like you called it. Looks like your saints angle gets a follow up.”

Her name was Kristin Stiller. The cruise line had provided Rhonda with the family member's phone number on file for the girl. This proved to be an only sister who lived in Stockholm. Their parents were dead. When Rhonda phoned the woman, a housewife, she said in perfect English that she and Kristin had never been close and had almost never corresponded so that not hearing from her for more than six months had been no cause for alarm. She had assumed that her younger sister was still working on the cruise ship and wouldn't return to Stockholm until late summer. But in fact the girl had left the ship last December 6 in Miami, although she'd originally planned to renew her contract through the June transatlantic crossing to Marseilles.

I looked at the young woman's small smiling face on the blurry fax. “So that's why nobody missed her. And nobody reported her. And nobody in this country had any kind of record of her, no prints, no dental files. And when we checked foreign, there was no missing persons report on her.”

Rhonda shrugged as she gathered the debris of her lunch into a paper bag. “Right. Zip. All she's got's this sister off in Sweden and this sister doesn't know and doesn't care. Who's gonna wonder why she's headed up the Southeast corridor of the USA?”

I compared the ID with the hair salon photo. Despite the differences, the girl with the buzz cut was clearly the same person as the longhaired blonde on the cruise line employee's card. Kristin had gotten her haircut at Shear Inspirations on Christmas Eve. She left the cruise ship on December 6 and was—for some reason—in Hillston, North Carolina, on the twenty-fourth. Dick Cohen estimated that she'd been murdered in late January or early February. All we had to do now was fill in the rest.

Rhonda suddenly lunged around the table to grab a fax coming off the machine. As she did so, her elbow snagged the side of Bunty's briefcase, spinning it off the table edge. We both knelt to pick up the spilt contents. Among all the loose papers and file folders, there were at least four different bottles of prescription drugs.

“I got it, I got it,” Rhonda backed me away and I moved over to the fax machine, pretending that I hadn't seen the name “Barbara Crabtree,” and the label of the chemotherapy drug, “Cytoxan” on one of bottles of pills. Bunty's weight loss, paleness, weakness, her thin hair and sudden sweats now made sense. I'd seen the worry in Rhonda's eyes as she helped her friend to sit or stand, but I wasn't sure she would want to talk about it, just as I had never wanted to talk about losing Copper, not even to Alice.

We talked about the fax instead. It was from the cruise ship's purser's office and informed us that Kristin Stiller had cashed paychecks amounting to $983 a day before leaving the ship. I said, “Think Kristin was running out of money by the time she got to Hillston? Maybe she took this photo to Shear Inspirations to apply for a job.”

While Rhonda and I were talking about John Walker, son of the evasive Mrs. Doris Nutz, the phone rang. It was Zeke at the desk, saying that Cuddy wanted me down the hall in the forensics lab. “I think maybe the chief just got another one of those sick presents from Guess Who.”

• • •

In the white organized clutter of Room 107, the forensics laboratory of the Cadmean Building, Etham Foster perched on a stool, his long legs folded under him like a crane, carefully dusting a baggie for prints. The delicate precision of his enormous hands was hypnotizing, and Cuddy, staring at his work, didn't notice my entrance. “Nope, nothing,” Etham said.

Cuddy bent over to look at the bottom of a plastic container. “How 'bout a laser wand, Etham? Could we use a wand on them?”

Our head criminalist grumbled at him, “You're driving me crazy.”