First Lady (3 page)

The Norris trial was almost over. Pushed forward by a confident defense (the famous Isaac Rosethorn had come out of retirement to take the case), it had moved along quickly under the brisk gavel of a young female judge. Cuddy stopped now to get the news on the day's proceedings from Miss Beatrice Turner, the court clerk, who was seventy-one, wouldn't admit it, and dared Age to imply otherwise by inflicting on her any of its typical advertisements like poor eyes or stooped posture. “Going okay in there, darlin'?” he called to her.

“Good afternoon, Chief Mangum. Justin, how's your mother doing, bless her sweet heart?”

“Still in the hospital, but much better, thank you, ma'am.”

Miss Turner was as sharp-eyed, plump-breasted, and self-possessed as a robin, and like that bird had no idea how small she was: despite the stiffness of her blue hair, she fit easily under Cuddy's arm when he hugged her as he asked, “How far'd Isaac get today?”

“He's through. They're done except for summations.”

“Darlin', talk to me. Is the good side gonna win?”

Miss Turner fluffed the old silk violets pinned to her full bosom. “Depends on which side of the church you're sitting on.”

“The bride's side, the bride that got her face shot off, I'm sitting on Linsley Norris's side, Bee.”

“Then I'd say you were destined for disappointment,” she told him matter-of-factly. “Isaac Rosethorn has got the whole state convinced that we are dealing with a burglar, and I don't know how many times I've seen him on Channel Seven going on about how they finally proved Dr. Sam Sheppard was innocent of killing his wife after all those years in prison because it turned out it
was
an intruder, and how we don't want another decent useful life ruined in another terrible miscarriage of justice.” Miss Turner did a recognizable imitation of Isaac Rosethorn, with whom reputedly she had been in love for forty years. “I bet if you polled that jury this afternoon,” she added, “they'd acquit and go home.”

Cuddy kicked something invisible. “Damn it. Now, Bee, Professor Norris killed his wife and shot himself to cover it up. I know he did.”

“Well, the State better start proving it, because the jury believes Tyler caught that North Hillston burglar robbing them and the burglar picked up the rifle he'd planned on stealing and shot Tyler in the stomach after he'd already shot Linsley in the face when she came through the door.”

“Norris shot himself!”

She shook her head firmly. “That jury doesn't think so. Isaac keeps telling them you don't have a motive, and you don't. For a man to kill his wife when she's about to have their first child, he's got to have more of a motive than they had an argument at a dinner party. Plus, your crime scene was a contaminated mess!” The implication was that the police had wasted Miss Turner's time by arresting the defendant in the first place.

“Sheriff Louge's boys trashed the place before HPD ever got there.”

“I don't care whose doing it was.”

“Well, hell.” Cuddy didn't question her assessment; in more than forty years of trials she had studied the faces of thousands of jurors.

Across the lobby, Isaac Rosethorn lumbered out of the courtroom doors with his arm around his client, the defendant Tyler Norris. Cuddy pointed at him. “That old bastard ought to be ashamed of himself. He knows Norris is guilty as sin. I know he knows it.”

Rosethorn was fat and tousled as a bear. Norris was slim and tall, his brown hair cropped, his brown loafers polished, his khaki suit pressed. He looked like thousands of other well-to-do young Southern men who'd gone from good families to good schools to good jobs. His distinguished-looking parents followed them out, arm in arm, walking through the lobby, stoic in undeserved adversity. They were followed in turn by Norris's dead wife's parents, who had been on television insisting they would never believe their son-in-law had murdered their daughter. All four parents shook hands solemnly with Rosethorn as a reporter took their picture.

Then Rosethorn shuffled away in his rumpled black suit with his snowy head buried in the loose papers he was reading, oblivious to people dodging out of his path as he made his way to the revolving doors. He stood there blocking the exit until a woman behind him impatiently pushed him through the doors ahead of her. He never noticed. Cuddy sighed. “Why doesn't he stay retired? Christ, he's older than God.”

Miss Turner puffed up. “Well, he's not too old to make a shambles of you and the D.A.'s office.”

Cuddy swooped over to pick up a candy wrapper someone had dropped and to stuff it down in an already full trash can. “The fact that Isaac is still alive is a slap in the face to the Surgeon General, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the American Heart Association all three.”

With an exasperated cluck Bee Turner turned from watching Rosethorn try to retrieve his bamboo cane from the revolving door in which he'd jammed it. Then she instructed Cuddy, “Do us all proud tonight at the governor's, you hear me?” and she patted him between his shoulder blades as if he were a baby being encouraged to burp.

“I hear you, darlin'. After I do this prize thing, you want to go shagging with me at the Lush Life Bar?”

With a sharp poke at his ribs, she turned to me in mock horror. “I don't have an idea in the world what ‘shagging' means. But I know what it sounds like it means.”

Cuddy laughed. “Does that mean you will come, or you won't?”

As she scooted around us to head up the stairs, she pinched my arm. “Justin, you found yourself such a smart pretty young woman to marry you. Why can't you locate somebody like Alice for your friend here? Bye now.”

I called after her, “I keep trying, but Cuddy's still in love with you.”

“She knows that,” he yelled up the stairs after her.

Cuddy grilled everyone else he could reach coming out of the courtroom for feedback on how the trial had gone today. It was unanimous. The defense was beating us. Our medical examiner Dick Cohen wandered out yawning—he's insisted for years that he hasn't had a good night's rest since he left Brooklyn. He mumbled, “Kiss this one off, Cuddy. They're licking the dirty sugar out of Rosethorn's fat old hands.” He added, heading for the doors, “But what's that to you? Raleigh prize tonight anyhow, right?”

“Right. Let 'em eat a whole cake full of dirty sugar, Dick, what do I care?” Cuddy waved Dick off, then used his raised hand to yank on his thick shock of nut-brown hair as if he were impatiently improving his posture. “I said this was going to be a bad year when I woke up New Year's morning in bed with a priest,” he growled. “For a heterosexual atheist like me, that gives you the unsettling feeling you're losing control.”

I laughed. “You got sick and Paul didn't know where else to put you.”

“Justin, you be sure to mention that incident if they ask for any little Chief Mangum anecdotes tonight at the banquet.”

Cuddy was the North Carolinian chosen to receive the Raleigh Medal tonight at the State capitol for “distinguished service to the state.” The medal was given at one of the social highlights of the year—the Governor's Gala—and the governor nominated the recipients. Everybody at the Hillston Police Department appeared to be happy that Captain Mangum had won this prize, except Captain Mangum. And I was probably the only person who knew why. All the reasons why.

Of course, one reason was that Cuddy felt responsible, if not for the whole world, certainly for Hillston and every human life in it. Secondly, he was very media sensitive, and embarrassed by the awkwardness of his receiving a prize for eradicating crime in Hillston when he obviously hadn't done so. In his early years as police chief he had been such a success, such a symbol (even in a national magazine like
Newsweek
) of the youthful, modernized, computerized, affluent equal-opportunity New South that he'd grown accustomed to having the media fawn all over him. He wouldn't admit it, but it mortified him that (because of the Norris trial and the unsolved G.I. Jane homicide), for the first time in his regime the press was treating the Hillston Police Department with the same irreverent derision that they'd shown his idiotic predecessor Captain Van Dorn Fulcher (V.D. for short.) The press was pointing out publicly that we weren't perfect, and maybe Cuddy had thought we were.

But there was another reason he didn't want the Raleigh Medal. He didn't like the governor who'd be handing it to him. He hadn't liked the very popular, good-looking, charismatic governor Andrew Brookside (an acquaintance of mine) even before Andy had been elected. He hadn't liked him even after Andy had stepped in front of an assassin's bullet that had been meant for Cuddy himself (although at the time, everybody thought the future governor was the target). Not liking the man, Cuddy let people go on thinking Andy had saved his life, and Andy had used the assumed assassination attempt to help win the election, and I suppose Cuddy thought that made them even. It wasn't Brookside's politics that Cuddy objected to. He hadn't liked Andy Brookside before he ever met him, for a very personal reason that he and I had never talked about.

I didn't talk about it now. I said, “You're mad because you don't want to want that medal.”

Cuddy stared at me, then looked away to watch people shivering as they moved from the muggy heat outside into the icy air conditioning of the lobby. After he rolled up his blue shirtsleeves, he turned back nodding. “Justin, when you're right, you're right.”

“I'm right?”

“Yep.”

“This is an historic moment. I'm right and you're not?”

“I want that prize and I don't want it.” Walking to the gigantic varnished portrait of the dead textiles king Briggs Cadmean that dominated the lobby, he gave the old bald millionaire a salute. “As B.M., the capitalist hog, my old personal patron up there always advised me,” he puffed out his thin cheeks and deepened his voice to a sonorous rumble, “‘Son, concede the irrefutable.' Well, what he actually said was, ‘Son, if you jump up on your high horse when they've got your pecker nailed to the floor, it's gonna hurt.' That was the kind of advice it was hard to argue with, and I never did.”

Cadmean, Hillston's dead patriarch, the man who'd left me Manassas in his will, had left Hillston the municipal building, the name of which had been changed to honor him. (He was holding up the blueprints in the painting, as if to make his generosity absolutely clear.) He'd thought that he owned everybody who worked in the building, including Cuddy, and had always boasted that he had personally made Cuddy police chief, an exaggeration Cuddy had never contradicted because it was useful; he still referred to Cadmean as his “patron” years after the old man's death.

I pursued my advantage. “You admit that's why you're badgering me.”

“Well now, no, this badgering,” he pulled the gray matted rabbit foot of his key chain out of his pants pocket, “is about you locating the Guess Who Killer ex po fasto.” He took the wad of messages from his pocket and ruffled them at me. “Because the mayor and the D.A. and Ward Trasker, our suck-ass attorney general, are leaning on Redial in a half-nelson kind of way, wanting to know who slit that woman's throat and cut out her tongue and mailed her body to you to give to me. They are not asking me for your theories about how there wouldn't even be these homicides if we all could trace our ancestors back to the alluvial mud and just revere the glorious Southern past together—”

“I've got a seven hundred and forty-page murder book. I've done a hundred-twenty-eight interviews—”

“And I can't keep telling them we don't need the FBI or the SBI or the damn sheriff because we can do it ourselves when we're
not
doing it ourselves. They want a suspect. I want a suspect. I don't even care if it's you. I want this case closed. And the
least
I want is that fiber analysis on the T-shirt from NCBI that I asked you for two weeks ago—”

I threw up my hands. “It hasn't come back yet! You know, your hostility to the past is damn perverse for a man with a Ph.D. in history—”

He gave me his ironic blue-jay wink. “This is not about perversity. This is about power, pure and simple, in which struggle, Justin B. Savile the Fifth, you are seriously outranked by Cudberth the First—”

“Cuddy, babe. Justin, hi.” Judge Margy Turbot hurried out of Superior Court and squeezed Cuddy's arm as she rushed away. “Congratulations.”

He blew her a kiss. “Thanks, Margy. Well hey, the rumor mill is grinding you to glitter. I hear you're the next attorney general.”

“Leave you and move to Raleigh? No way, you big hunk of love!” she sent a kiss back over her shoulder.

He shouted after her. “How's it going in there?” Margy was the judge on the bench in the Norris trial. Without turning back, she lifted her arm and waggled her hand ambiguously.

“Norris did it!” he called after her, then grumbled at me. “How could she let Isaac talk her into giving him bail? Even O.J. couldn't get bail.”

I shrugged. The judge's decision hadn't surprised me. “Margy knows Norris isn't blowing his daddy's million dollar bond by going anywhere.”

“He's going free, that's where he's going. We're about to lose this trial, Justin. And you better find out who did G.I. Jane before that happens. I don't wanna hear CeeCee Cane on the same Action News show telling the whole Piedmont how we pulled in the wrong guy on the Norris case, and no guy at all on G.I. Jane.” He watched Judge Turbot—trim, good legs, blond pageboy hair—laughing with a federal marshal near the doors. “There goes the best-looking judge in the district.”

“You said she was too healthy for you. You said she admitted she'd never had a Big Mac and never planned to.”

“That's true,” he nodded.