First Lady

by Michael Malone

  “Bitch,” said Bubba Percy, whom she’d completely ignored.

  “I don’t know, she seemed pretty friendly.” Cuddy glanced pointedly at me with an expression I didn’t want to interpret.

  “Bitch.” Bubba took off down the steps, pausing to comb his hair. “Oh, I hear you caught some leads on Guess Who.”

  “Well, we finally crossed you off the prime suspect list,” Cuddy said.

  Bubba was so conceited he was pleased. “I was a prime suspect?”

  Cuddy sighed. “Yeah, but Lisa Grecco told us you were more into sticking your dick in women’s faces than guns.”

  Unfazed, Bubba nodded. “Nine times out of ten.”

  “So you and Lisa, that’s a confirmation, huh?” Cuddy nodded.

  “Me and Lisa and your mama in a three-way.” And he was gone, bouncing down the wide stone steps into the night. Cuddy asked me if I was ready to leave. He gave me a suspicious look when I told him I was going to hang around awhile. “My advice is, don’t do it in the bar,” he said, then left with Carl. My focus was so centered on what Mavis might be doing inside the restaurant that I didn’t realize ’til hours later that Bubba had taken my cell phone with him. As a result, when John Emory tried to phone me to say he’d finally gotten hold of the transcript of Lucy Griggs’s Haver University record and that there was something on it I needed to see, I didn’t get the call.

  I might not have taken it anyhow. It was after midnight and I was in bed with Mavis Mahar.

  Chapter 27

  Foolsmate

  The poor part of Hillston was always East Hillston, where Cuddy Mangum grew up in a dark little duplex on Mill Street, where the workers at Cadmean Textiles kept their broken-down cars in dirt yards and kept their broken-down dreams to themselves except when they took them out on black people. The poorest part of East Hillston was always Canaan where the black people lived. It was to Canaan that I took Mavis Mahar at one in the morning to listen to the woman they called Blind Eva sing the blues in a bar called Smoke’s. I’d been sneaking into Smoke’s since my adolescence when a girl called Jenna Cobb first took me there to hear the music that played all night.

  I grew up as far from Canaan as the town could stretch, on Catawba Drive in North Hillston where everyone in our circle lived near the country club and close to each other. My home, a stone house built in the twenties, was called a Tudor manor and was designed to resemble an entire block of a village in the Cotswolds. My mother, a Dollard, had been born in this house. It was next door to the house in which her grandmother had been born.

  In the ninth grade I was sent away to a prep school in New England. I didn’t want to go because I was desperately in love with Jenna Cobb, the young woman who’d introduced me to Smoke’s. I wanted to be around her all the time and couldn’t bear to think of a life where that wouldn’t be possible. Jenna lived in East Hillston, near Cuddy Mangum. I only met her because she earned money by playing the organ in the church that my family attended. We were both thirteen.

  The first time I saw Jenna, she was perched high on the oak stool at the organ in the choir stall, surrounded by all the musical stops and pipes. I remember the moment when her foot, in its black flat with a small pink silk rose at the toe, reached out, stretching for the far pedal on the organ floor, and her leg—slender, pale, tense with the effort—appeared from beneath the black choir robe, exposed to above the knee in a startling intimacy that the girl was unaware of, so intent was she on her music.

  I had seen nothing so beautiful since the ballerina Margot Fonteyn had arrived in Hillston when I was six years old to dance Romeo and Juliet at Haver Auditorium. My mother, herself a pianist, loved to tell the story of how enraptured I’d been watching the ballet and how I’d had “a fit” when they wouldn’t take me backstage to meet Miss Fonteyn. “I could tell even way back then how Jay loved the fine arts and I had every hope he would be more serious about his piano lessons, but you know how boys are.”

  But it hadn’t been so much the dance that I was in love with, but the dancer. It was Margot Fonteyn doing the dance. It was Jenna Cobb playing the organ, raising herself on the seat to pound down on the keys, pulling out all the organ stops on the hymn’s last verse with an energetic abandon that never failed to give me an erection. It was Mavis Mahar singing in Smoke’s, where so long ago Jenna had brought me in secret (slipping me through in the back kitchen door) to hear Eva Wilcox singing my first live blues music in a place where whites were no more welcome than blacks in the Hillston Club.

  Despite the claims of the Pine Hills Inn, Smoke’s was in fact the oldest public eatery in Hillston and certainly the most authentic, for it looked very little changed from its 1927 photographs. It still had its nickel-plated cash register, its twenty-foot cast iron bar rail, its black fans and hanging globe lights in the shiny tin ceiling, its cloudy mirrors and tile floor. Built by a man from Chicago, “Smoke’s Colored Bar & Restaurant” hadn’t closed even during Prohibition except when tipped off that Police Chief Pork Doad was on his way over. According to the Historical Society’s “Official Guide to Old Hillston,” it was apocryphal that the original owner’s name was “Smoke” because he was a gangster and smoke was what was always coming out of his gun after he shot people. On the other hand, another old legend about the place was true. Bessie Smith had dropped into Smoke’s one night when driving through North Carolina. In exchange for some barbecue and a water glass full of gin, she had sung there while the crowd grew until it was spilling out of windows and doors and into the street.

  A very different crowd (a third of them white college students) was crowded tonight in Smoke’s as Mavis sat at the battered upright and played four-hand stride piano along with Blind Eva Wilcox, the woman I’d brought her to hear. They were singing “St. Louis Woman,” and a young Haver musicologist who’d followed Mavis here was filming the impromptu performance with a small camcorder that he seemed to hope no one was noticing. Eva Wilcox was in her eighties now; she lived with her grandson Fattie McCramer, the current “Smoke” (all owners of the place were renamed “Smoke,” like all heirs to the Roman Empire were called Caesar), but she preferred the company in the bar to an empty house in a nice suburb and so she spent her days and nights at Smoke’s, talking with old friends, criticizing new cooks, and playing the piano when she felt like it. She was now stooped, blind, bony, her big long crooked hands almost gray.

  After I went away to prep school, Jenna Cobb and I never saw each other again. Her family moved from Hillston and our letters couldn’t keep us together. But for that first year, we were so in love, every song we heard was about us. Afterwards, what remained was my lifelong passion for women like her, and my love of jazz and blues. By introducing me to Eva Wilcox, Jenna had changed my life.

  Mrs. Wilcox had taught me who was worth listening to and who wasn’t. She’d been there listening when Bessie Smith had sung that night in Smoke’s; she’d performed with Fats Waller and Lester Young; she’d made five recordings in the forties, toured the “Negro club circuit,” was an amazing singer and a great jazz piano player and very few people had ever heard of her outside Hillston, North Carolina. But one of those people was Mavis Mahar, and so when (sitting with the raucous young drunks at the Pine Hills Inn bar) I’d asked Mavis if she’d like to meet Blind Eva Wilcox, she’d drawn me out onto the porch and kissed me and told me that now I was the perfect man.

  Only Dermott knew where we were going, and he of course thought I was her salvation, whereas I’d quit trying even to save myself.

  Take all my money. Black out both of my eyes.

  Give it all to another woman. Come home and tell me lies.

  The two women laughed together as they played, leaning arm to arm on the rickety bench, one so young and astonishingly beautiful; the other blind, so old and bent that only undefeatable character seemed to keep tightening the muscles in her skinny arms and jumping her long flat black fingers over the k
eys. She’d put her hand down over Mavis’s, a split second ahead, leading her to the notes. “Naw, honey, naw honey, that ain’t right. Here you go. Now you cookin’ in Smoke’s!”

  He got to get it, bring it and put it right here,

  Or else he goin’ to keep it out there.

  That’s right. Or else you gonna keep it out there!

  Their hands crossed, crossed back, faster and faster, black on white, white on black, until with a run in the treble and a rumble in the bass they were done and the place shook with shouted cheers and stomping feet.

  The Haver musicologist kept taping as Mavis took Blind Eva’s hands in her own, kissed them, raised them to her face so the woman could feel who she was. “Thank you,” she said. “Bail ó Dhia is ó Mhuire duit.”

  Mrs. Wilcox said, “What the fuck kind of talk is that?”

  Mavis laughed and kissed her cheek. “It’s my language. Gaelic. I’m from Ireland. It means the blessing of God and Mary be on you.”

  “Well, you a pretty little thing,” said Mrs. Wilcox, feeling the shape of Mavis’s head with both large tensile hands. “And you a foreigner and love our blues like you do? That something. Well, honey, I wish you all kinds of luck with your music.” (She didn’t seem to know that Mavis was already one of the most famous rock stars in the world.) “But you ’member this. The friends you got befo, they gone stay yo friends. All the rest.…” She played a run and sang, “Nobody knows you when you down and out.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Mavis promised, but you could tell it wasn’t a lesson she expected to learn. No one does before they have to.

  A group of Haver students crowded around the piano thrusting out books and napkins and even their shirts for Mavis to autograph. She held them off as she said to the old woman still crooked over the piano. “Muillean muilte Dé go mall, ach muillean siad go mion. That means God’s mill grinds slowly, but it grinds fine. Now here’s what I’m telling you, people know about you, Mrs. Wilcox. People will remember you and what you taught us.”

  Blind Eva said with a kind weary tolerance, “That’s sweet, honey. I didn’t figure on living to hear that said.” She grinned widely. “Oh now, I figure it’d be said. Just I wasn’t gonna live to hear it.” She punctuated her own joke with an astonishing riff of a triple-timed “Danny Boy.”

  “So long, Irish girl,” said the old blues woman. “You damn good.”

  “Ah darlin’, you haven’t seen the last of me.” Mavis took off the beautiful Irish shawl and re-pinned it with the ancient silver circle around the old woman’s shoulders. Then she kissed her again and walked away to sign the autographs. I leaned over to say good night to Mrs. Wilcox, but she jerked me down to her with fingers whose strength always shocked me. “What you doing, Justin, you fucker?”

  I pulled away. “I brought her to hear you sing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Where yo wife?”

  I said, “In the mountains.”

  The withered blind face turned in disgust from side to side. “Well, she better get her ass home fore her man gone off with that Irish girl over the damn ocean and start talkin’ like a cat coughin’ up a fur ball.”

  As I pushed the crowd back to lead Mavis out of Smoke’s, I could hear the old woman singing from the shabby upright:

  You low down alligator, watch me sooner or later.

  Gonna catch you with your britches down.

  • • •

  In bed with Mavis in my family’s summer place on the lake, we made love listening to old records that Eva Wilcox had taught me to seek out.

  “You’re good at this,” Mavis said, lying on the woven rug by the fire.

  “Thank you.” I kissed the back of her neck. “You’re bad for me.” A cigarette in one hand, a glass of Jameson’s in the other, I looked up at the clock on the mantel, ignored what it told me.

  “Ah don’ be blamin’ me for your sins, you feckin’ tosser.” She leaned her head back against my kiss. “You’re good because you pay attention. Like thinking I’d like to meet Eva Wilcox. None of the shites I pay a bloody fortune to told me about Smoke’s.”

  “Probably didn’t know.” I turned her over, kissed the small of her back.

  “I pay them to know. Pay them to do my living. Buy me food and houses and feckin’ tampons. I don’t have to pull up my own sheets and still I’m tireder than when me and my ma had our heads down scrubbing in other people’s toilets. Now that’s what Andy understood.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How it wears you out racin’ round the fast track with the bright lights on you. He used to say, ‘Mavis, we do more in a day, we’re asked to do more, than most people in a lifetime. We’re in the diamond lane, going a thousand times faster than everybody else and they’re sprawled out on their couches in the dark yelling, “Faster!” at us. Because it’s us makes them feel alive.’”

  So what she had enjoyed about Brookside was that he was, like her, a star, and had felt, like her, “the terrible heat of all that light shining on you every blessed minute. If you’ve not felt it, you don’t know. We had that between us.” She smiled at me. “Truth to tell, he wasn’t much good at sex.”

  “Do I have to hear about this?”

  She walked across the room, unself-conscious without her clothes and poured us both more whiskey. “He likes a romp through the wild kingdom, Andy does. Now some folks really like the way fish taste and some just like to land the big ones.”

  I said again, “Do I have to hear about this?”

  She laughed. “Sure you love to hear you’re better. Andy liked the hooking the fish, but he wasn’t much for the frying them if you know what I mean. But now you don’t still think he killed that girl, what was her name?”

  “Lucy Griggs. No, we don’t think he killed her. Murder would be a serious stumbling block to getting reelected. And that’s what Andy wants.”

  She lay back down beside me. “If you’re a comet, you keep shooting through the sky. Because, isn’t it so, if you stop, you explode?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a comet.”

  She bent above me. “Ah, Mr. Savile, you are for certain.”

  • • •

  We were startled out of a dead sleep at nearly two in the morning, chilled, hung-over, by a loud sudden pounding at the door.

  Before I could pull anything over us, I heard the lock snap like a gunshot and the door bang open.

  I managed to cover Mavis with my jacket before Cuddy had made it to where we lay in front of the fire. Furious, he kicked over the whiskey bottle and then kicked once at my leg. “Get up, you stupid shit, and get over to Southern Depot. They just pulled another woman’s body out of a garbage bag.” He was gone again by the time I’d staggered to my feet.

  Mavis yawned. “Who the bloody hell was that?”

  “Cuddy Mangum. My boss. The police chief.” I reached for my pants. “I gotta go. Can you get Dermott to come get you?”

  “Sure. Didn’t I see him with you at Pine Hills tonight?” She ran her hand over whiskey pooling on the floor and put her fingers to her mouth.

  I said, “Yeah, he’s my best friend.”

  She shook her tangled hair. “Is that so now? Well, I don’t suppose he wants to be mine.”

  Chapter 28

  Blunder

  Except for the crack-up that sent me to the mountains, I’d always been able to sober myself quickly if I had to. I was sober as I passed Cuddy’s cruiser on the bypass just before the turnoff to downtown and I’m sure he recognized my Jaguar as I flew around him. The thudding in my heart came more from dread than shame: they’d found another woman’s body. Whose? If it had been the first lady’s, if it had been Lee’s, wouldn’t Cuddy have told me so?

  While driving, I tried to use my cell phone, usually in the well, realized it was missing, and remembered that Bubba had it. I’d disconnected the ph
one at Nachtmusik. Maybe Cuddy had called there, maybe he had gone by my house on Tuscadora before coming out to the lake house where he’d guessed I would be. Maybe even guessed with whom I’d be.

  From blocks away I could see the brick checkerboard cupolas of the huge Victorian train station that was now boutiques and markets and known as Southern Depot Mall. Its parking lot was cordoned off by yellow plastic tape reading “HILLSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT. DO NOT CROSS.” Four HPD patrol cars, their blue barlights whirring, nosed to the edge of the pedestrian walk, while white spinning lights atop a waiting ambulance gave the scene an eerie silent film look.

  Nancy Caleb-White stood on the hood of her cruiser, looking I think for me, because as soon as she saw me, she began wildly gesturing for me to hurry. The equipment on her uniform belt flew about as she led me in a sprint to the side of the building. There a rear passageway was sign-posted “LOADING UNLOADING ONLY.”

  “Jesus, where you been?” She yelled over her shoulder. “The chief went ballistic when he couldn’t find you!” Jerking her head around in a double take, she noticed that I had on trousers with suspenders, a sleeveless undershirt and loafers without socks. I didn’t answer. We skidded around a corner into a small group of curious late-nighters, held back by the tape from the loading ramp of the International Fish Market. High intensity portable standing lights shone down on a hill of gleaming black garbage bags and on the opened pneumatic jaws of a city garbage truck. Looking into its cavity was a cluster of HPD officers—among them Augie Summers from forensics and the crime scene photographer Chuck Grant.

  Suddenly Shelly Bloom shoved her way between two patrolmen. “Justin, hi! So what’s going on?”

  Nancy and I quickly slipped under the tape where she couldn’t follow and made our way over to where Dick Cohen, his pants on over his pajamas, leaned beside his assistant medical examiner, looking at a body that hung in the truck opening, half out of a black plastic garbage bag.