First Lady (31 page)

After the governor left, Carl gave Cuddy a quick hard but heartfelt hug. “Thank the Lord,” he said.

Cuddy tilted his head in that bluejay wink. “Well, I think it's Dina we probably need to thank. She always was the best thing that ever happened to you, Carl.”

Carl smiled at us as he held a match to the long cigar. “That is for damn sure, my friend.”

Cuddy waved away the smoke. “So you ever going to tell me how close you came to trading me in before she stopped you?”

Carl shook his head affectionately. “Cuddy, you're one of the smartest men I know, you're a great administrator, you're a great cop, you may even be a great man, but you're a lousy politician. You don't ask questions like that.”

I said, “That's a lesson you better teach Dina then.”

“Don't I know it,” smiled the mayor. “She's worse than Cuddy.” He puffed away on the cigar, sending blue swirls of smoke into the slanted light. “Now let's get clear. You got your investigation back and you got Homer and Mitch off your back. Listen to me,
everything
stays as squeaky clean as my daddy's Cadillac on a Saturday night. Cuddy, you go by the book like it was the Holy Bible. I spent a
lot
of capital holding this thing together. I got three guys on that council bent out of shape over the Tyler Norris arrest because they are pals of his daddy. This Guess Who mess has got Homer bending their ear and them bending my ear how you don't know what the hell you're doing. They are drooling to chew your ass. And you know who they are.”

Cuddy nodded yes. “I know who they are.”

“Well, don't pull your pants down and stick your fanny in their teeth. I'll see you back downtown. Take it easy, Justin.” Then Carl followed the path Brookside had taken into the forest.

Cuddy stood staring after him until finally I said, “Like a beer?”

“No.” He started back across the golf course toward the hotel parking lot, his long legs stretching in fast strides over the grass. “I'd like Guess Who locked up before he kills somebody else.”

I caught up with him. “By July 4. That's six days.” For it had been Cuddy who'd volunteered to resign if he hadn't arrested Guess Who by the Fourth. “What is it with you?”

He turned toward me, his bony face earnest, his thick nut-brown hair twisted oddly by the afternoon breeze. “I don't think people ought to get away with doing wrong. That's all.” We walked out of the beautiful pines of Haver Forest.

• • •

As I was driving him back to the Cadmean Building, Cuddy handed me the little spiral notepad he'd carried when we'd walked in on Ward Trasker and friends at The Fifth Season. “Take this, take the tape you're wearing, take any notes you have on the bungalow scene. Lock them up and leave them alone. And, Justin, you don't talk about this to anybody. Not anybody.”

“Except Alice. I tell her everything.”

He swiveled toward me on the car seat. “Oh really?”

I looked over at him and felt such a flush of heat move up my neck that I quickly turned away.

“I'm real glad to hear it,” he said.

• • •

Waiting at my door was a Federal Express deliveryman with large boxes sent from a gourmet store in Manhattan. Inside one box was a case of Dom Perignon champagne. Inside the other, packed in ice, was a fourteen-ounce tin of Beluga caviar. The note said, “Champagne and caviar. Sorry it's not apples and whiskey.” It was signed “The Queen of the Night.” A quick calculation suggested that Dermott Quinn or Bernadette Davey or whoever had been sent to buy my presents had paid around three thousand dollars for them. But then, as Mavis had said, she had much more money than time. When I turned on my television, ironically enough there she was on the screen, singing joyfully about imported ale that she'd no doubt been paid millions to kiss the can of.

I put the case down beside the untouched pile of mostly junk mail lying on the hall floor and noticed a postcard of scarlet rhododendrons blazing over a slope of Carolina mountains. The card said, “Please remember my plants. I love you always, Alice.”

I put one bottle of the champagne in the freezer. It was cold when I finished watering all the palms and ferns and fig trees and jasmine and azaleas that Alice had kept alive year after year. Their pots were dry, the leaves wilting. I was just in time.

The Norris jury was out all that night. Cuddy began to hope we'd get a conviction after all. Friday morning he and I met with Dr. Isabel Sonora, an assistant dean of Haver Medical School. She took us past a dissecting arena where two young men in white coats, presumably students, were cheerfully laughing about something as they fiddled with a long human leg on a table. The dean was tall and thin with a bony look to her rather like the row of skeletons hanging around the walls. A large fan blew through the room and the skeletons trembled as if they were hearing a musical cue to start a medieval dance of death.

As Dr. Sonora pushed open the door to a huge freezer room labeled Cadaver Storage, she sternly repeated the lecture she'd already given us in her office. “Next time, if you people think you're going to need your cadavers back, don't donate them. You're lucky we found as much of her as we did.”

The dean pointed at a long counter surface where neatly arranged in a row were the dismembered skeletal remains of one full human arm, one forearm, one detached hand and a footless lower leg.

“That's it?” Cuddy asked, upset. “Some arms and legs?”

Dr. Sonora opened a cadaver drawer. “I said you were lucky. This was going into a classroom next week.” The dean showed us a female torso with no arms or legs. But the flesh was still on it and the head was still attached. I knew who it was. Having been embalmed, stored in freezers, first at the city morgue, then here at Haver Medical School, Kristin Stiller had decomposed not all that much more since I'd first seen her lying in a ditch of rotted leaves and raw red earth where her murderer had left her. But eerily enough, her eyes were now missing (having been used in a class), giving her a macabre resemblance to her fellow victim Lucy Griggs.

We presented Dr. Sonora with the court order to release what was left of Kristin Stiller's body to Dr. Samuel Chang, the forensic pathologist, when he arrived here this afternoon. She accepted the legal papers rather grumpily and on the way out of the building couldn't stop herself from scolding us again not to expect to be able to show up two months after donating an anonymous cadaver and find it waiting for us. “These things are expensive. You're very lucky.”

“Luckier than Kristin Stiller,” I agreed.

She looked at me then at an oil painting on the paneled wall of the reception room. “What did you say your name was?”

“Justin Savile.”

She gestured at the oil painting. “Dr. Justin Savile was head of this medical school.” I nodded. “Your father?” I nodded again. “Good man, people around here say.” I kept nodding. “Died in a car crash?”

I said no, he'd had a heart attack in the car crash and died from it later. She said she was sorry. I didn't say that it was snowing that night on Catawba Drive, that I was driving him home, that I was drinking. I was surprised she didn't already know. Years ago it was the talk of the town.

Walking back to the car, Cuddy examined his drivers' license. “I'm donating my organs. I like the notion of my eyes seeing Hillston and my heart feeling good about a nice spring day. But don't give them the rest of me, okay? I swear I'm not sure I want med students yucking it up over my femur after I'm gone.”

Just as we reached Haver Hospital parking lot, a woman came running through a line of cars toward ours. I heard the beeping of a nearby Land Rover as she clicked her remote key. It was Dr. Josie Roth, Linsley Norris's older sister, still in a white lab coat. She didn't stop or even slow down as she raced to open her door. But she recognized and called to us, “The jury's in. Court's reconvening in fifteen minutes.” Her tires screeched as she backed out of her parking spot.

We watched her speed off. Finally Cuddy said almost wistfully, “They were out sixteen hours. But that may not be long enough.”

Headed back to town, he leaned his head out the car window as if he needed clean air. “Well, comrade, so much for my new improved justice system in the South. Looks like your old grandpa judge—what was his name? You know, the judge that averaged sentencing twenty black men a year to the electric chair and kept it up 'til they made him Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court?”

“His name was Benjamin Virgil Dollard.” I took out the old gold pocket watch my mother had given me with those initials on one side and the female figure of Justice on the other and gave it to him.

He looked at the watch, spun it on its chain. “Right, BVD. How could I forget? Well, BVD would feel right at home in Hillston today, 'cause it's looking like if you're white, rich, come from a good family, and talk nice, you can still get away with murder in the South.”

I took back my watch. “It's no different in the North.”

“You got me there.”

“Cuddy, you keep expecting America to keep its promises. Maybe that's why the Fourth of July is so damn important to you.”

“Jesus, Justin. Don't start analyzing. I don't expect anything to keep its promise…. Except me.”

“Sounds lonesome.”

“It is.” He looked out at the town he'd policed his whole adult life as we drove down a block of Main Street. The lampposts were decorated with clusters of small American flags. Wryly he saluted them as we passed.

• • •

Courtroom A was so jammed with sightseers and journalists that Judge Turbot made the bailiff move the crowd back from the side aisles and away from the jury box. Cuddy and I stood against the back wall watching as Bee Turner took the folded verdict from the foreperson of the jury—a nervous middle-aged woman whose hand shook as she passed it to her. Miss Turner stood on tiptoe in her oddly youthful bright blue high heels to hand it up to the judge on the bench. Margy read the verdict, folded it, crossed her hands over it, and asked Tyler Norris to stand.

In his blue blazer, striped tie, and gray slacks, Norris looked more as if he were waiting for a dinner table at the Hillston Club than news about whether he was going to live or die. Beside him, Isaac Rosethorn painfully pushed himself up against the defense table. Tyler watched the judge. Isaac watched the jury. Cuddy watched Isaac.

Margy asked the foreman, “On the charge of murder in the first degree, how do you find the defendant Tyler Gilbert Norris?”

“Not guilty,” whispered Cuddy to me.

“Not guilty,” said the foreman to the judge.

“The jury finds the defendant not guilty.” Margy raised her gavel, expecting the commotion that usually follows a verdict in a homicide case, shrieks of joy, shouts of anger. But Courtroom A was strangely subdued, maybe because no one was surprised. There was a short rumbled murmur from the crowd. Scattered applause. People started leaving before Margy finished her final remarks, dismissed the jury, and set Tyler Norris free.

The senior Norrises and Linsley's parents politely embraced each other and moved together to the defense table where Tyler coolly received a round of hugs. Then they shook hands with Isaac Rosethorn who messily shoved papers into his tattered, taped-up briefcase and hurried away, almost forgetting to limp. The Norris group was soon joined by a dozen other well-dressed WASPs, all shaking hands and looking like a reception line at a society wedding.

The clumped mass of the crowd pressed through the doors and clotted together in the lobby. Cuddy was trying to push aside a cluster of reporters to reach Dr. Josie Roth, the one member of Linsley's family who'd testified against Tyler. Still in the white medical coat in which she'd run through the university parking lot earlier, she stood alone against the wall, trying hard not to lose control before she could make her way through the crowd to get out of the lobby.

Suddenly one of the small dark foreign women, the one I'd seen at Southern Depot, the one I'd decided was deaf, hurried up and stepped in front of Cuddy. She shoved a long thin parcel wrapped in old newspaper into his arms and then scurried away through the crowd.

“Drop it,” I said to Cuddy as I took off after her. But when I reached the broad stone portico outside, she was already running down the sidewalk in her odd flat-footed way, beneath the rows of clustered American flags. I saw Nancy and Zeke starting up the steps and yelled at them, “Stop her! Woman in black! The Ninety-fiver!” Nancy and Zeke raced dodging back through the puzzled crowd. Zeke was remarkably fast; he swept down upon the small woman, lifting her off her feet. She began to scream.

I hurried back through the revolving door into the lobby where Cuddy had naturally not listened to me but had unwrapped the newspaper. He was staring down at a dead fish. Sticking out of the fish's mouth was the white queen from his office chess set.

Upset, he gingerly slid out the painted wood figure of the Indian queen with a Kleenex. Because the set had been given to him by children in the Costa Rica village where he'd taught as a volunteer twenty years earlier, it was one of his beloved possessions.

“You think Guess Who did this?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He wrapped the chess piece in the tissue.

“What's his point? Queen? White Queen?”

“First Lady,” said Cuddy.

Sunday, July 1–Wednesday, July 4

Unlike Odysseus, I had not chained myself to any strong mast of character or will so that I could hear the siren's song yet still sail past the fatal rock on which she sat singing me toward her. Unlike his sailors, I had not stopped my ears.

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

“Oh, not everybody,” Mavis had smiled.

I was smoking—not in the house where the smoke would linger and be detected by Alice, if she ever came home—but on my porch and on my walks to work and in a bar in East Hillston called Smoke's, where no one I knew was likely to see me drinking. I was drinking alone in my house late at night, alone in restaurants at lunch, and alone in my car. I was waiting for Mavis Mahar to return to Hillston.

Meanwhile, I was still in the early stages, early enough for drinking not to get in the way of my work on the Guess Who investigation. In fact, I was more focused than I'd been since before Copper died. Or at least I told myself so.

By now, Cuddy, once so skeptically dismissive of my intuitions about the Elvis tape and the cardboard star, had begun reading everything as a coded message from Guess Who. For example, he assumed the fish (a flounder) handed to him in the lobby was supposed to make us think of the adage, “Guests and Fish Stink in Three Days.” That meant we had only three days to locate whoever had given the wrapped newspaper to the Amerindian migrant woman and told her to take it to Cuddy.

Because of the earlier puns (like “headshot”), Cuddy took flounder to be a pun as well; an insulting one. He, Cuddy, was floundering, unable to solve the riddle of Guess Who. If another woman died, Cuddy's stupidity would be to blame.

Over the weekend, we had checked out and warned all women in the area who were named Chess or Queen or White (including Nancy) or who lived on Queen or White Street. We called in a delighted Carol Cathy Cane and had her interrupt Channel Seven broadcasts through the day with repeated warnings that
all
women in the Piedmont should be cautious, avoid strangers, never travel alone. We took every precaution we could think of. But deep down Cuddy feared that the white chess queen symbolized one woman only, Lee Haver Brookside, because she was always talked about in the press and on television as the First Lady of North Carolina.

Finally he made a phone call to a man he hated. He advised Governor Brookside to give his wife immediate twenty-four-hour protection. When Andy told him that Lee was on her way home from a trip to London, Cuddy insisted that there be state troopers waiting at the airport to escort her to the Governor's Mansion and that they should stay with her at all times.

We knew Guess Who was somewhere in the area. He had gotten close enough to replace the gun in the display and to have the wrapped fish delivered to Cuddy. The migrant woman could tell us only that a man had approached her on the steps of the building just as the trial let out. He led her into the lobby crowd, pointed at Cuddy and pushed her in his direction, gesturing that she should take him the folded newspaper.

We wouldn't have known even this much if it hadn't been for Cuddy himself, who'd come into the homicide squad room that afternoon while we were futilely attempting to question the terrified woman after Zeke and Nancy caught her. By then she'd quit fighting—she'd spit at Zeke as he carried her into the Cadmean Building—and had turned her back and was quietly whimpering to the wall, twisting her peculiar rosary of beads and feathers in her short thick hands. We told Cuddy that she wouldn't answer our questions, although she did appear to be able to hear them. We'd brought in Eddie Vega, a detective in robbery, to talk to her in Spanish, but she hadn't responded to that language either. Eddie figured she spoke some mestizo dialect, but we had no idea from where. She carried no identifying papers and might not even be legally in this country.

Cuddy asked to see what Brenda Moore had found on the woman: we showed him a tiny leather pouch with herbs and bones in it, two photographs of what looked like a family gathering in front of a tin shack in a dense tangle of green vegetation, a fast food coupon, a five dollar bill, and some odd looking coins. Cuddy looked for a while at the woman, at her broad torso and strong wide face, her braided bun of thick raven black hair. Feeling his gaze, she pressed closer to the wall. Finally he leaned down and said to her, “
Garinagu
?”

Startled, she jerked around to look at him.

He repeated, “
Garinagu
?
Garifuna
?” and then added a few sentences in a strange language.

The woman nodded at him in grateful relief; she stood, grabbed at his shirt, and started talking quickly in the unknown language. Cuddy waved his hands to show that she'd lost him. Then he began speaking with her in Spanish. After a pause, she responded in Spanish, which it was now obvious she did understand. Occasionally asking a brief question, he listened as she explained who she was. I brought him a glass of water to give her and finally she drank some. After a while, he asked Brenda Moore to take her to the lounge and find her something to eat.

While they were gone, Cuddy told us that the woman's name was Lupe Guevarra and that a “tall, fat, black-haired” man had given her the five dollars for handing Cuddy the newspaper. It seemed unlikely that this man—if someone of that description even existed—was Guess Who himself. He had doubtless been an intermediary—someone who paid Lupe to hand over the package. Still, we had to find him. The small coins she carried were quetzal, the currency of Guatemala. Lupe was an Amerindian, more specifically a Garifuna. They were, Cuddy explained, Black Caribs descended from Arawak and Kalipuna Indians (the ones who'd greeted Columbus when he “discovered” the New World). Over time, they'd mixed with Mayans and shipwrecked Nigerian slaves and their Spanish masters, and now lived mostly along the coasts of Central America. While teaching in Costa Rica, Cuddy had spent time in Garifuna villages, one of them in Guatemala, not far from this woman's home. She appeared to be migrating north from Florida along I-95, but for the past month she had been working here in Hillston (doing cleaning jobs during the strike). Homeless, she had apparently been sleeping in Haver Gardens at the university.

With great intensity, Lupe claimed to possess papers (a passport and a green card), but insisted that her sister Maria had them. Now she couldn't find this sister, who she said had not only their papers but all their money and clothes as well. Cuddy was skeptical of this “sister's” existence.

I wasn't. I said to ask Lupe if her sister was the woman I always saw her with, standing on the street corner in front of the Cadmean Building. When Cuddy did so, she eagerly told me yes, the one I'd seen her with was her sister, Maria. Holding up her rosary in her folded hands, she begged me in Spanish to tell her where her sister was. I didn't know.

The legal ramifications of holding Lupe were complicated (if we notified Immigration, they'd take her into custody and we'd lose a possible lead to Guess Who). On the other hand, she had rights and needs we had to address. Finally we sent her off with Brenda Moore and Eddie Vega to look for her sister. Afterwards they were to take her to Trinity Church where Paul Madison ran a homeless shelter. Meanwhile Eddie was to find her a Spanish-speaking pro bono lawyer to help sort out her legal status in the country.

The rest of us went back downstairs to Room 105 where the task force worked once again through the night. Those of us who cared fought against being sick at heart about the not-guilty verdict for Tyler Norris, although—as those who didn't much care pointed out—it was hard to see how we could have expected anything else. And everyone fought against the suspicion that Guess Who was going to kill another woman sooner rather than later.

Of course we tried coming up with different explanations for what looked like his warning: that the fish wrapped in newspapers hadn't even been meant for Cuddy. Or that a sanitation worker had sent it to him as a hostile jab about the stench of the strike. Or that Lupe Guevarra had found the chess queen while cleaning Cuddy's office and had stuffed it in the fish for some obscure reason of her own (odd mixtures of voodoo and Catholicism were practiced by the Garifuna). Or that a political enemy had sent it (the fish was wrapped in the old edition of the
Star
which had the editorial calling for Cuddy's dismissal).

But none of us believed any of that. We believed Guess Who had stolen the chess queen and sent it to Cuddy like the slap of a glove in his face to taunt him with a death he wouldn't be smart enough to stop.

• • •

On Sunday after the Tyler Norris verdict, Cuddy and I met in the evening with the six original members of the task force. Over the past week, our investigation team had tripled in size—with State Bureau agents, detectives from neighboring homicide divisions, and the Neville County sheriff joining us. Paper was everywhere, whirring out of fax machines and computer printers, grinding into shredders, swelling files. Even with us working around the clock, information piled up faster than we could sort it out. Room 105 was looking like a disaster shelter, crowded with tired bodies in ripe clothing. Plastic liters of soda and containers for junk food filled trash cans. People had made small areas personal by setting out a photo, an NPR mug, a pot of miniature daffodils, a tiny TV. In one corner, beside a computer bank, the forensic psychiatrist Bunty Crabtree pretty much lived in a rocking chair with a heating pad and spongy pillows propped against its back. Her partner Rhonda would quietly walk by to straighten the pillows or bring her a drink or ask her if she didn't want to go home to rest; sometimes she would bring the cancer medication I'd seen falling out of Bunty's briefcase when Rhonda and I had both pretended I hadn't noticed what it was.

When I walked in, Rhonda, Wendy Freiberg, and Lisa Grecco sat together near Bunty's rocking chair. Etham Foster stood by the fax machine sending data to Dr. Samuel Chang, the forensic pathologist who had gone to examine the exhumed body of Cathy Oakes. Dick Cohen was still with Chang in Neville County. With coffee in a Tarheels go-cup, Cuddy stepped in the front of the room. He was back to his jeans and T-shirt style—this shirt with an American flag on it. He told us, “I got y'all here early to tell you a couple of things. Last night, Ward Trasker announced he was going to step down today as A.G. The governor's appointing Ken Moize Acting A.G.” He stopped the eruption of questions with both hands. “Hang on, hang on, let me finish. Yesterday, I met with Mitch Bazemore and Homer Louge. They both have decided that since HPD has been on top of this Guess Who case, plus now we've got good federal help,” he pointed at Rhonda and Bunty, “they agree we oughta leave things the way they are. So the D.A.'s office and the sheriff's department are withdrawing from this investigation.”

Another outburst, this time punctuated first by cheers then with puzzled questions: was this fallout from the cover-up?

Cuddy sidestepped their conjectures (as he'd agreed in Haver Forest to do), and said only, “This is Mitch's decision and Homer's decision. I think it's a good one.”

“A great one,” agreed Rhonda with a skeptical stare.

“Last thing. Over breakfast, I met with the Hillston city council and they want us to know that our task force has their full support.”

Ironic applause.

Cuddy smiled. “Now, one little rub. I've told the council and the mayor that if they aren't completely satisfied with our progress on this case, then on July 4, I'll resign as police chief.”

Silence deadened the room, quickly followed by groans. “Honch,” Rhonda shook her head at him melodramatically, “doesn't your mouth ever get worn out with you sticking your big feet in it?”

Cuddy winked at her, a flash of Carolina blue. “Rho, when those boys on that council fire up the grills in their yards on Independence Day, they're going to have satisfied minds. And a killer in custody. Am I right?” He grinned. “It's simple. You guys come through. I don't have to resign.”

Wendy Freiberg threw her arms to the ceiling, jingling bracelets on both wrists. “It's July 1. We don't come through by July 4, you lose your job. That's low, Cuddy, that's really low.”

He made a kissing noise at her, then handed out what he called the “update”—every day we got a handout of all new information collected the day before. He said, passing the pages around, “Still nothing on the guy that gave Lupe Gueverra the fish. And no sign of her sister. But we've had a few slam-dunks these last couple of days. We're getting there. And Justin's got a couple of interviews to report.”

He read out the data in today's sheet:

—The gray car carpet fibers taken both from G.I. Jane's corpse and off the floor of Bungalow Eight came from the floor mats of a Ford Explorer, 1996 to 1999 model.

Etham growled, “These days even serial killers are driving SUVs.”

—The straw hat with the candles had belonged to Lucy Griggs; her mother had identified it. She'd also identified Lucy's mesh bag, which we'd found in the woods off the access road to The Fifth Season Resort, as if the killer had tossed it out the car window as he drove away. A gray carpet fiber was found on the bag.

Lucy's camera was missing from the bag, but the audio tape was still in there. Cuddy stuck the tape into a small player and we listened to it. The thoroughly untalented Lucy Griggs and the Mood Disorders singing the Mavis Mahar hit “I Want You More” produced a rare communal moment of comic relief from the task force, evoking such groans that Chuck Grant came from his dark room to ask us what was going on.

—The partial shoe print taken from the floor of the bungalow shower was a Nike running shoe, man's size nine, of a model that matched the shoe found at the construction site and the shoelaces on G.I. Jane's “necklace.” The shoe did not appear to belong to any law officials, mortuary personnel, or hotel staff who'd been in the bungalow after the shooting. It was likely that it belonged to the killer.