First Lady

by Michael Malone

  Even if Zeke had taken the Bernardelli out of the case to lend it to the Hillston Historical Society (and he said he hadn’t), I would have known that he hadn’t put the weapon back. For the original tag had been removed from the gun—the tag that said, “Pistol with which Big Bob Futton killed a prostitute at the Piedmont Hotel, August 15, 1949.” Now there was a new tag through the trigger guard. In the familiar red marker, it said:

  PISTOL WITH WHICH THE GUESS WHO KILLER SHOT

  LUCY GRIGGS IN THE MAVIS MAHAR SUITE

  AT THE FIFTH SEASON HOTEL ON JUNE 25.

  Lisa pushed in beside me and looked. “Hey, where’d you get that gun? What did you put it in there for? Are y’all nuts? This is an ongoing investigation. That’s evidence.”

  I told her that HPD was not responsible for placing the pistol in the display case. The only one who could have put it there was the killer.

  Chapter 23

  A Clearing in

  Haver Forest

  The miracle of modern forensic science is not only its accurate and thorough technology, but also its speed. By the next morning, Etham Foster’s team had matched the 1947 Bernardelli PA pistol to the spent .32 slug that Guess Who had mailed to Cuddy in the same box with Lucy Griggs’s eyes. It was the murder weapon.

  At some point during the past weeks, the killer had managed to pick the lock and steal the 1947 gun from the exhibit in the lobby display case. Having used it to shoot Lucy, he’d returned it to the case with a tag describing what he’d done. He’d even put a new lock on the case, a cheap, ordinary, and untraceable lock. The insolence of the joke was as embarrassing to HPD as Guess Who had meant it to be, and as public. Among the crowd who’d first spotted the tag on the weapon was a television reporter. There was no way to keep off the six o’clock news the irresistible local lead that a serial killer had borrowed his latest murder weapon from the Hillston Police Department.

  Forensics collected the fingerprints of 62 individuals from the surface of the oak case and fed them into the FBI’s national computer base. Only four prints produced records: mine and Nancy’s from our HPD personnel files, a retired high school principal who’d been arrested at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, and a man who’d been found guilty three weeks ago of assault and who had been in jail ever since. On the gun there were no prints at all.

  It was June 28 and there were American flags up and down Main Street to celebrate the Fourth of July. At noon, the Norris jury was still out. The task force was taking a break. I walked to Southern Depot, to the atrium where I’d sat with Isaac Rosethorn and listened to his advice to look for the pattern to find the pattern-maker. I had a bloody mary and decided one wasn’t enough. Then I decided that what the drinks needed was a cigarette. Among the upscale boutiques across from me was a “Tobacconist” shop with mahogany humidors and silver cigar cutters on display in a Dickensian setting by Ralph Lauren. I told myself if I bought cigarettes I didn’t like, I wouldn’t enjoy smoking them and would quit after one. I bought Lucky Strikes, Mavis’s brand. Just as she’d predicted, reawakening one bad habit had stirred others into life. The first breath of nicotine raced through me like ice water and, dizzy, I had to sit down. It had been a long time since I’d smoked. But by the second cigarette, tobacco and I were growing all too comfortable again.

  Meanwhile, an idea about patterns was working its way along my jangled nerves. Wasn’t Nancy right that all the martyred saints regalia was redundant? If Guess Who had murdered Kristin Stiller and Lucy Griggs because he knew them, hated and feared them—because they were blackmailing him, for example—then why bother to stage their deaths so elaborately, then why all the “playful” messages to Cuddy and me? And how did Cathy Oakes (the first corpse wearing the Guess T-shirt) fit in?

  On the other hand, if Guess Who was murdering out of a sociopathic disorder that had nothing to do with these women individually, then wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that two victims (Lucy and Kristin) were so connected? What if the murders were purposeful and personal but all the games and symbols were arbitrary, expressions of the delight he took in taunting the Hillston police with our inability to catch him?

  By his messages, Guess Who was boasting that he was smart enough to get away with murder—as if he’d taken Cuddy’s vaunt in the newspapers (“There are no unsolved homicides in Hillston”) as a personal challenge. The Elvis tape, the cardboard star, the Mavis headshot, the gruesome detached eyes, the Bernardelli pistol returned to the display case—all of them mocked the Hillston Police Department.

  The idea, tingling with nicotine, grew: if the elaborate staging of the corpses (the shaved heads and dismemberment and candles and matches) had been done for our benefit, maybe Guess Who was motivated less by psychosis about Catholic martyrs and more by competitiveness with us. He wanted us to know that he not only felt free to stroll about the Cadmean Building, despite the fact that it was the headquarters of the Hillston police, he also felt free to go on murdering women until—unless—we caught him. In general, serial killers play an end game. Like gamblers, they keep compulsively going until stopped. Some keep going in order to be stopped. So far, Guess Who did not give the impression that he was one of them.

  I threw the pack of Luckies in a trash bin, then took it out again and slipped it in my pocket. Across the atrium I noticed one of the two small dark foreign women in black whom I’d seen around the Cadmean Building over the last few weeks. She was foraging through another trashcan in front of a gourmet grocer’s called Carpe Diem. It was odd to see the woman alone without her street-corner companion. It looked to me as if she were searching in the bin for discarded bits of food. As she rummaged, some garbage fell onto the cobblestone terrace that fronted the store. A man in an apron charged angrily out of the grocery and yelled at the woman to get away from his trash. He stood behind her and, despite his closeness, she didn’t seem to hear him. He shook her by the arm. Dropping the parcels she’d collected, she ran with an odd flatfooted swiftness through the mall and disappeared. After cleaning up the spilled debris, the man looked over, saw me, and shook his head as if we shared an understanding that the world had gone off its axis and chaos had come.

  On my way out of Southern Depot, I passed by the shop Gifts and Goodies, whose window was filled with copies of Fulke Norris’s pretty little books of poetry with titles like Sermons in Running Brooks, Fields of Heroes, Spring Songs. I went inside and bought the newest one to take to my mother in the hospital. I noticed that the volume God’s Beauty was dedicated to Tyler’s murdered wife:

  In memory of my beloved daughter-in-law

  Linsley Nowell Norris

  I wondered if Isaac Rosethorn had made sure the jury saw it too.

  • • •

  When the Task Force reconvened in Room 105, we decided to split our focus. On the chance that the killer was one of us (a city official, a police officer, someone in the prosecutor’s office, someone with some legitimate reason to be in this building), the D.A.’s deputy counsel Lisa Grecco would pull personnel files on all Cadmean Building employees to look for any history of mental disturbance, particularly acts of violence against women. FBI forensic psychiatrist Bunty Crabtree would continue to work up a profile based on the three crime scenes and would develop the implications of the virgin martyrs theory. FBI criminologist Rhonda Weavis would go with Dick Cohen and Dr. Samuel Chang to Neville, N.C., the town fifty miles away where the prostitute Cathy Oakes had been found murdered, and where we’d made arrangements to have her body exhumed today. State Bureau documents analyst Wendy Freiberg would continue comparison of Guess Who’s handwriting with that of John Everett Walker as well as letters from fans of Mavis Mahar’s that we’d obtained through her manager, as well as with all correspondence found among the belongings of Lucy Griggs.

  And Cuddy and I would focus HPD’s own efforts on a search for one specific person: the married man whom Lucy had presumably been dating and whom K
ristin Stiller had possibly been blackmailing. We grouped available HPD officers and gave them assignments: one pair would focus on Lucy Griggs at work, one on her music connections, one on her college days, one on her family. We wanted the name of any man other than John Walker that anyone had ever seen her with. Margy Turbot had just signed the warrants.

  “We’re going to get him.” In his office with me, Cuddy emphasized his vow with a rap of his fist against his Elvis poster. “Not the Sheriff. Not the SBI or the FBI or the U.S. Marshals. We are.”

  He was still wearing a short-sleeved summer uniform. I think he’d slept in this one, here in his office, if he’d slept at all. The large office looked a mess—fast food containers on his desk, file folders and books in half-filled boxes on the floor. There were only a few pieces left on his chessboard; the rest of the Costa Rican painted woodcarvings were scattered on the coffee table in a clutter of cracker wraps and pizza crusts. I pointed around the room. “What’s going on?”

  “Endgame study,” he said. “One of Genrikh Kasparyan’s.”

  “I don’t mean chess. Is there something I don’t know? Like you’re fired? You packing up, moving out?” In a large box on his desk was a jumble of all the medals he’d been awarded by HPD and by the city of Hillston over the years for a variety of heroic reasons that he normally would joke about. “You turning those back in?” I asked him.

  “Hell no. Cleopatra wants them. Her husband died yesterday. He’s been in the hospital for ages. It’s a blessing really. She wants to bury him with some ‘honors’, so I’m giving her these. It’s a competition thing. Nonie Upshaw’s husband got buried wearing all his church attendance medals and a bunch of Shriners’ pins that Cleopatra thinks Nonie got at the thrift store.”

  Cuddy’s cleaning lady had talked so long about her husband’s “sugar” (diabetes had kept him in a wheelchair for years), that it had seemed a permanent condition not susceptible to deterioration. I’d heard her just as often (as she sat on the couch with Martha Mitchell watching the shopping channel) railing against her great rival Nonie Upshaw and the woman’s lifelong husband-stealing chicanery and deceit. I said, “I didn’t know Cleopatra’s husband was a Hillston cop.”

  Cuddy smiled. “He wasn’t. He was a gentleman of complete leisure.”

  I picked up a handful of medals and let them fall into the box. “Well, if he’s wearing all these, he’ll look like General Patton.”

  Cuddy smiled. “I think Cleopatra would like that, especially when Nonie catches a look as she leans over his coffin to say good-bye.”

  The phone rang. “Hey, Carl, yeah, I’m right here.” Cuddy frowned as he listened. While I waited, I studied the endgame laid out on his chess set. Something looked odd and it didn’t take me long to see that neither of the queens was on the board, nor had they been put aside as “taken.” I checked for them under the table and in the sofa seats. When Cuddy finished his call, I told him he was missing both the white and black queens from his chess set. Distracted, he said several offices in the Cadmean Building were missing small items, that since the custodial service had gone out on strike with the sanitation workers, there’d been so many different temporary cleaning women in and out of HPD it was a testament to their honesty that the whole place hadn’t been stripped down to the sheet rock.

  There was a knock at the door; it opened and Mayor Carl Yarborough stepped inside. Smart, easy-going, and so deeply appealing that everybody in Hillston, even Republicans, called him “Carl” and found themselves smiling when he went by, his personality was his best political asset. He was by instinct warm and friendly, a reconciler and conciliator, comfortable with the give-and-take that settled on middle ground. But Carl was now in the third week of a citywide garbage strike. Negotiations were at a standstill and a problem that he had assumed he could easily smooth over was spreading to other city agencies. The usual good cheer that animated his dark face had been replaced by a gray weariness. Still, the ever-present unlit cigar bounced between his broad square teeth as he managed a grin for me. “How you doing, Justin?”

  “Doing okay, Carl. How about you?”

  He rubbed at the bald top of his head. “Lousy. I want to settle this strike. I just don’t have the money. I want to settle these homicides. You just don’t have the killer.”

  I nodded. “I heard you wanted to be lieutenant governor.”

  He smiled back at me. “I do. I want us all to get what we want.”

  A pigeon tapped at Cuddy’s window. He opened it and passed the bird part of a cheese cracker. Amazed, Carl asked if the pigeons were trained. Cuddy closed the window, leaned on it, and crossed his arms. “We have a relationship that they know they can count on.”

  Carl took out the cigar, pointed it at Cuddy, then put it back. Then he said, “Justin, can you excuse us for a minute?”

  It was more than a minute. It was more than an hour. I strolled down the hall to make espresso in the machine I kept in the cheerful lounge that few of us used as much as Cuddy had always hoped. Off the lounge there was a small chapel, almost closet-sized, one of three “Places of Private Worship and Meditation” insisted upon by the old industrialist Briggs Cadmean when he’d donated the funds for the Cadmean Building. An atheist if not a devil worshipper himself, Cadmean had always insisted on public piety from everyone else. I don’t think I’d ever seen a soul in this chapel, but as I waited for my espresso to brew, I heard someone inside the room. The door was cracked open, and by stepping aside, I could see into the shadowy interior. It was Mitch Bazemore in there, on his knees, with his thick neck bent to the rail of a plain wooden chair. I could see his muscular hands twisting together and hear the urgent torturous singsong of his prayer:

  When I call, answer me, O God of justice.

  From anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!

  I backed quickly away, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy. He looked to be in pain. I didn’t know if he was praying not to lose the Tyler Norris case or praying for forgiveness for keeping quiet as his boss the Attorney General Ward Trasker ran roughshod over the Law in whose Letter Mitch so righteously believed. The muttered prayer went on.

  I was leaving the lounge when Carl Yarborough almost bumped into me. “You seen Mitch?”

  I answered loudly in order to give Bazemore time to collect himself. “Nope, haven’t seen him. Cuddy still in his office?”

  “He’s making some phone calls.”

  At that point, his eyes bleary, Mitch marched out of the chapel with his usual bluster. He nodded at Carl and ignored me.

  In the homicide squad room I had a call from Officer John Emory at the Registrar’s Office of Haver University. Roid was having trouble obtaining Lucy Griggs’s transcripts. Not only because of the staff’s resistance (he needed a court order and a letter from a dean), but because even if he’d had those documents, their entire computer system (in which all academic records were now kept) was “down.” I asked him, “What’s wrong with paper?”

  “Trees,” he replied.

  As I hung up, Cuddy stuck his head inside my glass cubicle and said, “Sorry it took so long.” He checked his watch. “I need you to take me someplace and I need to go now.”

  “Sure. You don’t want to drive yourself?”

  He said, “I want you to wear a wire.”

  • • •

  We didn’t talk much as I drove him to Haver Forest, a beautiful two-hundred-acre preserve adjoining the university and bequeathed to it by the Haver family with the provision that it never be built on. Later trustees had cleverly sidestepped the intent of the will by using one edge of the land as a world-class golf course that abutted a luxury hotel owned by the university. Cuddy told me to park in the hotel lot. All he would say as we walked along a “nature path” to a secluded clearing near the perfect grass of the ninth hole was, “Thanks for this, Justin.”

  “Thanks for what? I have no idea
what I’m doing.”

  He rubbed at his stubble of beard, looking in his slept-in uniform like a battle-fatigued soldier. “I know. That’s why I’m so grateful.”

  Century-old walnut, sycamore, and oak trees reached high above us, dappling light on the forest floor. In that light stood Andy Brookside waiting. His white shirtsleeves and golden tie flashed in the sun as he waved us over. As we reached him, out of the shadowy trees stepped Carl Yarborough.

  I stopped and pointed at them. “Is this some kind of a duel?”

  “Sort of,” Cuddy replied and tucked in the back of his rumpled police shirt. We kept walking until we were face to face with the governor and his new running mate.

  Brookside wasn’t pleased to see me there but, in his efficient way, wasted no time on the matter. “Unexpected pleasure, Justin,” is all he said to me the whole time we stood under those trees. To Cuddy he said, “I’m glad Carl could arrange this.”

  Carl Yarborough was there to broker a deal between two men who didn’t like each other for fundamental reasons. By that I don’t mean only because of their relationship to Lee, although that was certainly a part of it. She was fundamental to both men. To Cuddy who had always loved her and who would go on loving her until he died, even with no hope of a life with her. And to Andy who risked his marriage to her time after time, for easy dangerous pleasures that meant nothing lasting, and yet who admired and valued her and knew he could not succeed without her.

  When I say that Carl Yarborough brokered the deal, I suspect that the real broker wasn’t even here in this clearing, at least not in the flesh. The real broker was Lee Haver Brookside and she had flown off to London so that she would be out of the way when the man who had always loved her did what she had come to his office in the middle of the night to ask him to do: help her save an election for the husband she would never leave.