First Lady (8 page)

Dina said quietly, “Well, the last public lynching in Hillston was in 1932. And they sold postcards of it in Machlin's Pharmacy.”

“Good god,” gasped the college president, overhearing. “1932?”

“Would earlier be better?” Dina asked.

Mrs. Boodle frowned disapprovingly; she obviously thought it would be politer to discuss the mutilation of G.I. Jane than to bring up Hillston's racial problems in 1932. “Well, this Guess Who hates women,” she told us. “So did Pete Boodle. Pete was always telling me he'd like to blow my head off just to shut me up.” She suddenly squeezed my hand as if she suspected me of trying to steal her watch. “I know what you're thinking, Jordan! You wish ole Inez
would
shut up and hand you that champagne bottle you keep looking at.” For the first time Mrs. Boodle had read my mind.

I was ready to go home, but at the other end of the table, Cuddy was telling the President of Frances Bush the most hilarious jokes she had ever heard. I looked at my watch (11:33) and then glanced down the long noisy row of gilt-glistening tables just as Bubba Percy walked back into the room. Something was wrong with him. He had the greenish look of a drunk back from being sick in the toilet. I watched him lean against the door wiping his hand against his usually pink sanguine face.

Then suddenly he hurried over to our table. When he squeezed past, I stood to ask him what was wrong. He ignored me, crouching behind Andy Brookside's chair, whispering in his ear. Frowning, Andy stepped away from the table. Bubba put his hand on the governor's forearm and said something else in a low intense voice. With a rapid intake of breath, Andy stared at him. Bubba nodded. Running his hand through his famous hair, Andy spoke urgently to Bubba who hurried off to the exit as Andy returned to our table, looking troubled. I wondered what unsettling news he might be going to tell us. I said, “Andy? Is Lee okay?”

“She's fine,” he said distractedly. “I mean, she's not well. The flu.” Then composing himself, he said he had an unexpected problem to deal with, thanked us for coming, wished each of us a cordial goodnight, and within thirty seconds had disappeared from the room.

“Was it something you said?” Cuddy asked the college president.

This set her off laughing and then into a coughing spasm. Mrs. Boodle rushed over to hit her vigorously on the back. Had Mrs. Boodle not recently given Frances Bush College for Women five million dollars, its president might have objected to these blows, or at least moved out of their way, but apparently she felt obliged to endure the violence in hopes of further donations. The Attorney General Ward Trasker stopped his wife from inviting her to join them for drinks at The Fifth Season, the over-priced resort in Hillston, and our table broke up.

Tired guests were being marshaled out of the State Dining Room by a phalanx of large men dressed in white jackets who looked like moonlighting highway patrol officers and probably were. Two of them were blockading the stairs. Maybe someone was worried that, left on our own, we'd scavenger through the Governor's Mansion slipping priceless antique bijoux into our pockets. As we passed into the foyer, Cuddy stopped suddenly, turned, and stared up the curving green-carpeted staircase leading to the Brooksides' living quarters above, as if he were dreaming of racing up the stairs like Heathcliff and carrying Lee over to look one last time out the window of her bedroom at the moors before she died of this sudden high fever.

I stopped beside him. “Cuddy?”

He didn't answer or move as the crowd stepped irritably around us. I was about to reach for his arm when abruptly, unexpectedly, Lee herself came through a door on the second floor landing and stood looking distressed at the top of the stairs. The timing and suddenness of her appearance gave me the strange sensation that Cuddy had summoned her there, purely by the intensity, the longevity, the fidelity of his desire.

“Mrs. Brookside,” he called to her, “are you all right?”

Lee Haver had always been an elegant, lovely woman. Even as a teenager, she had dressed in subdued colors and classic lines and worn her silver-blonde hair in a chignon, knowing even then how she would need to look as a public figure for decades to come. Nature had made her attractive and the Haver millions had done the rest. Now she wore a simple gray dress the color of her eyes that undoubtedly cost thousands of dollars. She wore a simple diamond bracelet that cost tens of thousands more.

No one else in the crowd seemed to have noticed her yet. She and Cuddy just stood there staring at each other; it was probably only a few seconds, but it felt forever to me, so heaven knows what eternities passed for each of them. I called up the stairs, “Hello, Lee. How are you feeling?”

As half a dozen other guests turned to look as well, a young woman wearing headphones by the exit rushed up to the second-floor landing where Lee was standing. Both state troopers moved to the middle of the stairs to block anyone from following her. Lee looked away from Cuddy and she smiled the way people like her are trained to smile when crowds are watching. “Justin, hello, how are you? Captain Mangum, congratulations.”

There was no smile on his face. “Are you all right?” he said again.

“Much better, thank you.” As the young staff worker reached her side and reached for her arm, Lee stepped back from her and turned silently to walk across the landing and out of view.

• • •

On our drive back to Hillston, Cuddy sat quietly, his hand touching the gold medallion that hung from the bright blue ribbon. He kept staring out at the black rush of pines on the one dark stretch of old highway between Raleigh and home, the only forest that had managed so far to hold off the waiting future of plastic-wrapped tacos and discounted sweat suits indistinguishable from all the others in all the other strips girding the nation. Cuddy was staring, I assumed, into his own irrecoverable past.

I too was thinking about Andy's wife Lee, but about why she hadn't come to Cuddy's ceremony. If Lee had a fever so high she couldn't fulfill her duties as first lady (and I suspect no one knew better than Cuddy how much she was willing to sacrifice to those duties), then why was she wandering about the Governor's Mansion dressed in a cocktail dress and diamonds? And if she weren't ill, why hadn't she come to the banquet? Why had both she and Bubba looked so distressed? I thought about Andy's arrival alone in the rock star's limousine and then his abrupt departure from our dinner. There were growing rumors about strains in the Brookside marriage that Bubba denied with such pontifical sincerity to the press that they were sure the governor and his wife would divorce tomorrow if they could.

But of course, they couldn't. There was no doubt that if Mrs. Brookside left her husband before the November election, his first term as governor would be his last. Lee Haver had been the first lady of North Carolina long before she'd married the “Yankee” Andrew Brookside; she had been born into that title and (no matter what her husband did or did not do to serve the state that had adopted him), she would die with that title inscribed in gothic letters on her tomb in the fan-vaulted crypt of the Haver Mausoleum. My family the Dollards might have run North Carolina, but the Havers had owned it for over a hundred years. Andy could not afford to lose her.

As I drove us home, I tried to talk about my sense that we were getting messages from Guess Who. I elicited not even a monosyllabic response from Cuddy. From a man who talked in paragraphs, the silence was scary. Finally I gave up and made a call from the cruiser to Etham Foster at his home. Etham said I could go pick up my Jaguar; he agreed with Cuddy—some HPD practical joker had planted the Elvis tape. And please stop calling him; he was in bed watching
The New Detectives
on Discovery Channel, and if the phone woke up his wife again she was going to make him turn off the television.

As Cuddy plainly had no interest in talking, I switched on the AM radio. The cruiser we'd borrowed was one normally assigned to a young cop on downtown surveillance and his dial was set to a rock station; I was surprised by the surge I felt when the sound came on in the middle of a long pulsing bluesy refrain sung by Mavis Mahar, whose voice I recognized instantly although I'd never heard the song before. It was the same strong melodious voice, but rawer and more sensual than when she'd been singing in the Tucson. Even before the song ended in a long low groan, it was overlapped by the startling intrusion of the D.J. “That was ‘I Want You More' by the First Lady of Rock'n'Roll, Five-Time Grammy Winner Mavis Mahar! Mavis, they sure wanted you more at Haver Field tonight! Fans in the hospital! Too bad you couldn't make it!
Mavvvvisssss
, where
arrrrrre
you?!”

Cuddy lowered the volume. “People in the hospital? Call the desk!”

I explained what I'd already learned from Nancy and Zeke about the scuffle at the stadium, including the sheriff's “heart attack.” I said that I'd decided not to bother him with it during the Raleigh Medal banquet. Cuddy exploded: “Don't you
ever
withhold HPD business from me again! Somebody sticks a mike in my face and wants to know my take on the riot at Haver Field tonight and I go, ‘Duh, I was off gettin' a medal for law enforcement so I told them to hold my calls about any riots going on in the town I'm supposed to be enforcing the law in!'”

“Man, it's like Wendy Freiberg said!” (Wendy was the documents examiner at the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation who'd done the Guess Who analysis for us.) “You get so twisted about bad news these days, it's like you've got poison ivy in your shorts.”

“Well, tell Wendy Freiberg to drag her mind off my private parts and go find me some
good
news, go find out who wrote that label tied around G.I. Jane's damn toe asking you to bring her to me!” He impatiently waited for the HPD dispatcher to call him back.

“You know what you need, Cuddy? A wife and a life.”

“Hey, worry about your own wife, not mine. I've got a job, a thankless job, a job where my division heads don't bother to tell me things. I don't have time for a life. Don't miss the turn.”

The squad car radio buzzed back with word that Sheriff Homer Louge's apoplectic reaction to the breast-baring teenage girls had caused no lasting damage. The five injured fans had been dismissed from the hospital with minor injuries and the Haver University provost was already out looking at the vandalism inflicted on the stadium. Apparently the injured fans were going to sue the university and the university was going to sue Mega Records, who had sponsored the concert, and Mega was going to sue Mavis Mahar. Cuddy sighed, “Maybe I'm going to sue God for the Fall of Man. It's caused me serious and irreparable emotional distress to have the sins of the fathers visited on me in downtown Hillston when I could be lying around Paradise munching on pomegranates and philosophizing with angels.”

At least he was talking again.

• • •

Cuddy's home, River Rise, is a post-modernist village of ninety cheerfully painted clapboard two-storied apartments strung together in tiers along a ridge above the Shocco River. Each apartment has curving concrete walks divided by busy landscaping, with patios separated by redwood fencing and with narrow cement balconies, in some of whose heavy glass sliders moisture had already condensed, blurring the view. All it had to recommend it when Cuddy moved in was that it was brand new, and now it didn't even have that. To me, the best thing about it was its huge vista of pine forest and the willow-banked river below. But as he says, “You like old.”

Until recently, whenever even good friends came to Cuddy's door, his ancient little white poodle Martha Mitchell (nearly blind) would block their path in a frenzy of barking until she recognized your scent and even then she would usually bite you. But now Martha was deaf and lame as well as blind, and tonight when Cuddy turned on the lights, she barely moved her head off the pink satin bedding near the heating vent that he called her boudoir.

“Hey Martha, look at this,” he told her, placing the gold Raleigh medallion down beside her wobbly head. “I won this for doing some good.” She lifted her dirty white frizzy head (he'd named her for her resemblance to Martha the deceased wife of Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell, and claimed that the soul of that maligned and discredited lady had transmigrated to his dog). Sniffing the Raleigh medal without interest, Martha turned away. He stroked her black nose softly. “Honey, you are so right. We got to remember that virtue is its own and its only reward.” He turned to me. “My Ph.D. didn't impress her either.”

Cuddy listened to his messages. Most were congratulations on the Raleigh Medal. Three were about the trouble at Haver Field; one from a reporter wanting a comment. Cuddy glared at me. One was from our chief county prosecutor, District Attorney Mitchell Bazemore, wanting to double-check some details about the Norris homicide case that he needed for his summation at the trial tomorrow. Cuddy reluctantly phoned him back (they hate each other), and was surprisingly told by a sleepy Mrs. Bazemore that Mitch had been called out on business, she couldn't, or wouldn't, say where.

“Our Mitch out on midnight business?” mused Cuddy as he headed upstairs. “Could Mister Bible Camp have a mistress?”

“I doubt it.” I stretched out in the living room on a ten-footlong beige leather couch. The whole first floor of Cuddy's condo was a big open space with cinnamon-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, an entertainment system that took up one side of the room, big low leather furniture, and a glass coffee table as large as a single bed with two chess sets on it—one chrome cubes and one Lucite bars. Cuddy loved it all.

While he was upstairs changing (not happy unless he's in jeans), Nancy called my cell phone. She'd checked for me; nobody appeared to know where Mavis Mahar was, or at least if they did, they weren't saying, and that included the star's staff, her band, and the management of the downtown Sheraton. If she was in the hospital, it wasn't under her own name. If she'd left town, it wasn't in the Mega Records private jet still sitting at the Triangle Airport. I told Nancy to call the hospitals back and describe Mavis; had they admitted anyone who looked like her?

“Thought you didn't like rock'n'roll.” She hung up.

Then, “Very funny,” Cuddy shouted down from upstairs. “When'd you do this?” I heard him above me in the study between the two bedrooms.

“Do what?”

Something sailed over the stair rail, spinning to the floor below. “Stick this on my study slider.”

The spiraling object landed on the glass coffee table. It was a gold glittered cardboard star about the size of a dinner plate. I picked it up; on the back was a sticker that had attached it to the glass door. “I didn't,” I called up the stairs. “I haven't been over here since you ordered those horrible take-out ribs two weeks ago.”

In jeans now, he leaned over the rail. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.” I ran up the open stairs and found him in the study where books filled wall-to-wall, ceiling-high shelves and spilled out into piles stacked against each other around the floor. He gestured at a small telescope on a tripod that stood near the balcony sliders pointing up at the sky beyond them. “Somebody moved this up here.” Grabbing the cardboard star from me, he slapped it against the glass so that it was positioned directly in the telescope's line of vision. “The star was right there. What was your point, I like gazing at my own stardom?”

“I told you, it's not me! You didn't leave your telescope out in the middle of the room like this?”

Cuddy said he hadn't used that telescope for years; he'd bought it way back when he was dating old Briggs Cadmean's daughter, an astronomy professor, and after they'd broken their engagement he had stored the telescope in the utility room off the kitchen. He hadn't touched it since.

Together we checked through the apartment. The utility room opened onto a rear patio downstairs. Its door was unlocked, but Cuddy admitted he might have left it that way himself. I used a print kit he kept at home to dust the doorknobs; they'd been wiped. So had the telescope.

Cuddy tried to convince himself that the cardboard star was like the Elvis tape rigged in my Jaguar—a joke played by some cop at HPD, who had sneaked in to tease him about the Raleigh Medal by pasting the star up and pointing the telescope sights at it. Half the Hillston police force knew that Cuddy kept an apartment key under a potted azalea on his little brick patio. He even came up with a suspect: Sergeant Brenda Moore, who was given to practical jokes like the hidden tape recorder she'd inserted to make the water cooler scream “Take your hands off me!” whenever the faucet was twisted. When I admitted that I'd seen Brenda in the HPD parking lot as I'd parked my Jaguar there this afternoon, he took it as confirmation that she was the probable culprit behind the Elvis tape and the cardboard star both.

Back downstairs, looking into his refrigerator for wine, I said, “You may be the one with 162 I.Q., as stated in
Newsweek
four years ago,” no one would let Cuddy forget this, since who but he could have given them the exact number?, “but I don't see why a jokester at HPD would bother to wipe that tape and your door knobs clean.” All I could find was some Chianti. “You got any wine that's not in a half-gallon?”

He was eating cold pizza. “You don't need any wine, you already had four glasses of champagne tonight. For somebody who quit drinking years ago, that seems a little absent-minded.”

“Champagne and wine aren't the same as hard liquor.”

“Sure. Right.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“You ought to go see your mother. Poor thing in the hospital.”

“I see her every day.” Cuddy's wine tasted the way it looked—economical. “I can't drink this.”