First Lady

by Michael Malone

  I recognized the thick short arm, the raven black hair. Pushing forward, I leaned in next to Dick.

  “About time,” he said grumpily.

  “What happened?”

  Nancy squeezed in beside me and Chuck, who was taking photos as fast as he could. She said, “The garbage guys started at midnight loading all the stuff piled up from the strike. So this guy here—” She pointed over at a stocky African-American in his forties, wearing a Hillston Sanitation uniform, who sat anxiously on the edge of the ramp, waiting. “—Name’s Walter Webb. Walter here is tossing bags in the rear. The bottom on one of the bags rips and half of her falls out.”

  “Rats,” mumbled the medical examiner. “Rats chewed holes in the bag trying to get at her.”

  “What time?” I asked Nancy. “When Webb found her?” She said the sanitation worker had called 911 at 1:05 A.M. It was now 2:28.

  Dick gently turned the battered face toward me. “This the woman that handed Cuddy the fish in the newspaper, right?”

  I said, “No, it’s not. That was Lupe Guevarra. This woman is her sister Maria. Lupe was upset, remember, because she couldn’t find her.”

  “So here’s why,” Dick grumbled.

  I told Nancy to drive over to Trinity Church as fast as possible and see if she could find Lupe Guevarra. She was supposed to be staying in the homeless shelter there. Twenty seconds later, I heard Nancy’s siren shriek as she peeled out of the parking lot.

  Dick estimated that the Garifuna woman had been dead as long as seventy-two hours. Someone had savagely crushed in her skull with a blunt force instrument. He showed me the multiple fractures, any one of which could have killed her. I asked him, “Gun butt, car jack, crowbar?”

  He scratched at his narrow face. “Nah. Smoother. Round. Like a pipe. They’re saying she picked up some work cleaning fish at the market here. Cuddy hauled the owner in—why should he sleep when I can’t?—so you want to talk to the guy?” He jabbed a long hairy thumb at the back of the building. Then he motioned for the ambulance attendants. “Okay, Justin, we’re going to lift her out now, head back with her. You agree with Cuddy? You think this is Guess Who–related or what?”

  I said, “I think it’s Guess Who–related.”

  Dick looked at me with an odd sort of awkwardness. “I feel bad I missed that stuff on G.I. Jane, you know? I mean this psycho had practically sawed her head off, but Chang caught the asphyxiation—guy’s amazing.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dick. We all missed things. Well, if it hadn’t been for the rats, by now this bag would be compacted under tons of garbage in the town landfill. We’d have never found her.”

  “Isn’t that a problem? Doesn’t Guess Who want you to find things?”

  I said, “He’s not proud of this one. He’s just tidying up.”

  The medical examiner shrugged. “He’s got a real hard-on about us, doesn’t he? I mean HPD. What’d we do to him?” He yawned. “So why don’t you people ever find bodies at three in the afternoon? See you later.”

  “You doing the autopsy tonight?”

  “Why not? I’m up.”

  “I’ll drop in. Thanks.” I was watching Cuddy duck under the yellow tape. John Emory ran over to him with a computer printout.

  I called to Augie Summers. Guess Who would want to discard the murder weapon as quickly as possible. He wouldn’t want blood on his clothes or in his car. If he’d killed her here, he had most likely left both her body and the weapon for the garbage men to pick up. Augie and the two uniformed officers with him weren’t happy when I told them that if they weren’t able to find anything that resembled a blunt force weapon in the bag containing the body, they’d have to check all the garbage bags already loaded from this area into the truck or still piled in the passageway. I told them to look for something resembling a length of round metal pipe.

  A light chilly drizzle had started to fall. As I walked over to Cuddy I pulled on the jacket I’d tossed in the Jaguar. Without looking at each other, we talked efficiently and impersonally about the victim’s identity, the murder weapon, the likelihood that Guess Who had killed Maria Guevarra because she could identify him. The question was, could her sister Lupe identify the killer? And, if so, was there much chance that she was still alive? We did not talk about where and how he’d found me.

  John Emory had just handed Cuddy a list of all Ford Explorers registered in the county that were blue, gray, or black, 1994–1999 models (the models that would match the gray fibers we’d collected as trace evidence on Kristin Stiller and Lucy Griggs). As soon as we’d learned the make of the vehicle, we’d started checking DMV records. There’d been 893 SUVs of that description on the original list. John had narrowed it down to 264. Back at the task force room, Rhonda was checking for any owners with criminal records. I called her, told her also to check whether any of the owners lived near or worked at Southern Depot. In the morning, HPD detectives would start interviewing the staff of all the stores in Southern Depot Mall to see if anyone had noticed a Ford Explorer in the area three days ago, if anyone had noticed a man talking to Maria Guevarra, or if anyone had noticed Maria Guevarra at all.

  John Emory’s cell phone rang. It was Nancy. She asked Roid to put me on. She was with Father Paul Madison in the parish hall of Trinity Church. Lupe Guevarra wasn’t at the shelter and hadn’t been there last night either. Two days ago, Paul had found her a Spanish-speaking lawyer to help her with her papers, she’d never shown up at the lawyer’s office. Nancy was going to question other residents at the shelter. She’d get back to us. I asked Roid to call Detective Eddie Vega to see if the migrant woman had told him anything that might help. But my fear was that Lupe Guevarra was as dead as her sister, and for the same reason.

  Then Roid handed me a folded manila envelope. “I meant to get this to you earlier, Justin, and I tried calling you, but it was weird. Bubba Percy answered your phone.”

  “Yeah, sorry, he ran off with my cellular. What’s this?”

  “Haver transcript. Lucy Griggs. They finally pulled a hard copy out of her department.” He started to say something else about it, but just then a brown van with yellow stars on the doors and red lights on the roof pulled into the passageway, forcing us to jump out of its way. Sheriff Homer Louge hauled himself out of the van and pulled on his brown Stetson.

  “Hey, Mangum, looks like you need some help,” he called to Cuddy.

  We waited as the sheriff loped toward us. “Having trouble sleeping, Homer?” Cuddy smiled. “Must be that investigation the county commissioners are putting you through. Least you can take it easy now. What’d they call it—leave of absence? I heard about that.”

  “You heard about it? You fixed it.” Louge actually spit on the asphalt.

  Cuddy pointed at the spittle. “I’m going to let this go with a warning. But spitting in public’s against the law in the city of Hillston.”

  “You’re not as smart as you think you are, Mangum.” The sheriff stepped right up to Cuddy, almost chest-butting him.

  Cuddy nodded. “Probably true,” he said. Then he stepped back and walking around Louge made his way through reporters to the mall entrance.

  I followed him. “I know I’m not supposed to mention Haver Forest, but I thought the deal was, the sheriff would stay out of this case completely.”

  Cuddy pulled me aside, staring strangely at a thought he was having. “I want you to put somebody on Louge right now and keep them on him.”

  “Tail Louge? Why?” I looked behind me. The sheriff leaned against the side of the patrol van, unwrapping a piece of gum, dropping the paper to the ground, watching the body loaded into the ambulance.

  “What about him for Guess Who?” Cuddy looked at me for the first time.

  “For Guess Who?” I was taken aback.

  “Who knows more about us, who hates us more? Who’s in and out of the Cadmean Building? Who w
as messing up the evidence at The Fifth Season as fast as he could? Who had two wives divorce him and a hushed up record of domestic violence?”

  I looked around again as Louge walked over to where Augie Summers was dumping the contents of a trash bag onto a sheet of plastic. “Okay,” I said. I called over John Emory and told him to follow Sheriff Louge until further notice. Roid asked no questions.

  Like the small pretty bird of prey she resembled, Shelly abruptly darted at us again. “Come on, guys, this is a homeless woman somebody found in a garbage bag.” She tugged at Cuddy. “What’s the big deal, why’re you here?”

  Cuddy shook his head. “Dignity of human life, Shelly. Don’t they teach civics anymore?”

  He walked ahead, leaving me to handle the determined reporter. I asked her if she’d gone to press yet with the quote about breaking the Guess Who case that I’d given her earlier at Pine Hills Inn: how Guess Who had made such stupid mistakes that we were close to an arrest. If Bunty Crabtree was right, being called stupid would agitate this man so much that maybe he would make a mistake. Despite the truth of everything Cuddy had just said about Louge, he just didn’t feel like the man Bunty had described. And I trusted her description. She might have the wrong facts, but she was going to have the right personality.

  Shelly said she still had an hour to file. I told her I was about to remake her career by telling her, and only her, that Maria Guevarra was a Guess Who killing. She was already on the phone as she ran off through the rain.

  • • •

  International Fish Market, known as IFM, was a very upscale shop selling fresh seafood and exotic luxury items like Japanese sashimi, Russian caviar, and New Zealand clams. The owner was a Vietnamese man in his sixties named Harry Minh. He had nothing much to tell us about Maria Guevarra or her sister Lupe, who had worked for him briefly but whose names he had never known. After he’d caught them food-foraging in back of the store, he had hired both for a few days at the end of last week because he was shorthanded. One of his cleaners had cut his hand open with a gutting knife, and Mr. Minh had fired another one for poor work habits.

  “Too sloppy, too slow, I tell him, ‘You history, you out of here.’”

  I said, “So the Guevarra sisters were gutting fish for you?”

  Yes, and they had apparently met Minh’s high standards. “Work good, very fast.” He’d paid them a total of forty dollars (which averaged a bit more than a dollar an hour each) three days ago and had seen neither since. Had they left together? He thought so. Had they bought or had he given them a whole flounder before they left? The question puzzled him. No, but it was quite possible that they’d stolen any number of fish from IFM. His workers robbed him all the time. Could he check in his records to see if anyone had bought a flounder, specifically a flounder, the last afternoon the Guevarras had worked here? It would take too much of his time, Mr. Minh told us. Finally he agreed to go through his receipts in the morning.

  “C´am Ön anh,” Cuddy told him in what I assumed was the Vietnamese he’d learned while over in that country in his teens.

  “No problem,” Mr. Minh replied, then turned away, uninterested in a dialogue about the bad old days.

  I was looking around the store at the beautiful counters of all the varieties of fish, arranged like artworks on the ice, each species labeled by an exquisite handwritten card on a pin. My eyes moved along the rows—yellowfin tuna, halibut, coho salmon, pompano…. And then suddenly I saw a card that stopped my breath.

  “Cuddy!” My urgency brought him to the counter. “It was a flounder, right? We’re sure it was a flounder? The fish the chess piece was in?”

  He still looked angry. “Yeah, flounder, fluke, it was a flatfish.”

  “A right-eye flounder or a left-eye?”

  “Jesus, Justin, I don’t know.”

  I pointed down at the neatly layered row of wide thin gray fish with both their filmy eyes on the right side of their flattened heads. Cuddy saw the sign and knew instantly what I meant. It read, “CURL FIN TURBOT.”

  “Turbot. Goddamn it, we missed it!”

  We were both running, ignoring HPD staff shouting was there a problem? Cuddy yanked a young uniform right out of the cruiser where he sat behind the wheel eating a burrito.

  The siren howled as we shot through the mall gates and raced past downtown stoplights at eighty miles an hour.

  I asked him, “You know where Margy lives?”

  “Yes!” He was calling her phone. No one answered. He called the dispatcher. Any car in the vicinity was to go to her address. Criminal assault in progress.

  Judge Margy Turbot’s home, a white frame Italian gothic with a mansard roof, was on one of the gentrified blocks of downtown Hillston, ten blocks from my own home. We made it there in five minutes from the time we left Southern Depot. Her BMW was in the driveway, which was hidden from the house by a tall border of boxwood shrubs. No one answered the bell. Through the windows we saw that lights were on and so was the television. Together we snapped the lock on the front door.

  The large living room was wrecked, furniture knocked over, rugs awry, a phone on the floor, a broken glass. Cuddy kept calling, “Margy! Margy!” as we ran down the hall into a country kitchen. A great deal of work had gone into the renovated glass cabinets, the black granite counters and the brushed steel appliances. They were now splattered and smeared with so much blood the room looked like a butchery. “Oh Jesus God, no,” Cuddy groaned.

  In the middle of the terracotta floor was the woman who’d invested all the care and taste and cost in the room. The woman whose blood now covered the floor and cabinets. Still in the pearl gray suit she’d worn to dinner with us, Margy Turbot lay sprawled and twisted beneath a large oak cutting block. There was no question this time about how the victim had died. The bloody implements had been placed neatly back on the cutting board. She’d been struck repeatedly and savagely on the head with a large serrated wooden mallet. Her throat had been hacked open to the vertebrae with a Chinese chopping cleaver. A tin biscuit or cookie cutter had been jammed into her mouth to hold it ajar. Her chest had been hacked apart, the ribs broken back, the heart sawed out with a fillet knife.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Cuddy smashed his head so hard against the door frame that he cut open his forehead. “Stupid! How could I be so stupid?!”

  The mallet, cleaver, knife, and cutter, slick with blood, lay side by side on the oak block. Beside them was a small white scale of the sort weight watchers use to count calories. A bloody human heart lay on this scale. Next to the heart stood the other queen from Cuddy’s chess set.

  A long-haired white Persian cat was rubbing back and forth against the dead woman’s side until it saw us. It came over, rubbed against my legs and then ran away.

  Chapter 29

  Blitz

  There were three cars at the Turbot house within minutes of our arrival. One of them was Shelly Bloom’s. She’d followed Cuddy and me from Southern Depot. I’d spotted Shelly crawling around behind the high hedge of boxwood that formed a barrier between Margy’s house and her driveway. The young reporter was trying to take a photograph through the living room windows. I grabbed her and pulled her back.

  She looked torn between excitement and distress. “Come on, Justin. You told me you were this close to an arrest. How did he get her? I saw through the window. Judge Turbot was one of the best things in this good ole boy state. If you were so damn close, how did this happen?” I let go of her. I didn’t have an answer.

  I called John Emory. Where was Homer Louge? He said he had followed Homer to the ByWays Massage Parlor. The sheriff had gone into a trailer twenty-five minutes earlier and still hadn’t come out. I told him to see if he could get any alibi out of Louge for the hours—I glanced up at the clock on Margy’s kitchen wall—from ten P.M. ’til we saw him at the Southern Depot crime scene. A silence followed, then Roid said slowly, “An alibi for what
, Lieutenant?”

  “Judge Turbot’s dead. Just see what you can pull out of him without making it formal. But don’t let him get away from you.”

  An hour later, Margy Turbot, with her hands and head bagged, in a black plastic body pouch on a mortuary gurney, was wheeled from her house past a crowd of reporters and TV cameras. Carol Cathy Cane herself was there. Two bodies in one night and one of them a judge? It brought out the big guns. When Cathy (her hair and make-up perfect even at five A.M.) trotted toward us with her mike thrust out like an Olympic torch, Cuddy said in a dead voice, “Keep her away from me. I mean it.”

  I blocked the cameraman’s path while Ralph Fisher led Cuddy past the police to a patrol car and drove him away from the scene. Cathy made the best of things by asking me if I was ready to admit that we had a serial killer running amok in Hillston. Was I ready to admit Hillston was in an absolute crisis, a disaster zone, that the whole town would soon panic and riot?

  I said the town wouldn’t panic unless people like her talked it into it.

  “Three women, that’s three, have now been murdered in one week!”

  “I know that, Cathy.”

  By dawn, the bloody weapons, the chess queen, and the scale had been secured and booked into HPD property.

  By dawn, every inch of the living room, hall, and kitchen had been videoed, dusted, and vacuumed by the Identification Section detectives, and the house sealed. Margy had been transferred to a stainless steel table where her body was photographed with an MP-4 Polaroid and scanned with a laser for prints. Trace evidence was being collected in small metal evidence boxes. Serological evidence was sought. Dick Cohen’s external exam was being recorded on tape. Endocrine, urinary, hemic, biliary—the tests went on and on in the morgue while down the hall our task force supervised a county-wide dragnet for a Ford Explorer with gray carpet.

  By dawn, we’d talked to Margy’s ex-husband, a local tax lawyer, who seemed to me both very decent and very pained. He’d done what he could to help—including giving us his alibi (he’d been home with his new wife and two children all night). He’d volunteered to call Margy’s parents and they were now on their way to Hillston by plane from Florida.