First Lady

by Michael Malone

  By dawn, John Emory had called in with Sheriff Homer Louge’s alibi. It was as solid as his third wife, his grown son, and his son’s fiancée—all hefty people. With the three of them he’d been driving back from an emergency visit to his wife’s sick mother in Cummings, Georgia. They’d all been inside the Haver County Sheriff’s cruiser on I-85 from seven P.M. ’til nearly two A.M. Despite the late hour, Louge had then dropped off his family and headed out for a “massage” to relieve the stress of the trip, but had stopped along the way to check out the crime scene under the lights at Southern Depot.

  So Homer Louge wasn’t Guess Who. It was a blow to Cuddy. But at least, thank God, Roid had managed to elicit the alibi without having to confront the sheriff, who would have run straight to the city council, howling against HPD. Roid found out by calling Louge’s family and pretending to be Mayor Carl Yarborough. I was proud of him.

  As the sun came up, six of us—Bunty, Rhonda, Etham, Lisa Grecco, Cuddy, and myself—were still in Room 105 going over the scenario we’d pieced together. Lisa, for whom the young judge had been an admired role model, couldn’t stop crying. Cuddy was still so beside himself, so maddened by his failure to stop the murder of his friend, that he periodically burst out in a rage of self-hatred. Why hadn’t he taken Margy home? Why hadn’t he picked up on the flatfish/turbot connection? Why hadn’t he thought about the fact that his name was publicly linked with Margy’s because of his support for her candidacy as state’s attorney general—so that if Guess Who’s purpose had been some deadly game of wits with Cuddy, he would naturally choose a woman Cuddy was known to like?

  Privately Cuddy must have been cursing his myopic focus on Lee as the killer’s inevitable next victim, for he’d done so out of emotions that Guess Who couldn’t possibly be aware of, and the energy spent worrying about protecting Lee should have gone elsewhere. He asked himself endless questions. Why hadn’t it dawned on him that the chess queen could symbolize Judge Turbot of Superior Court, the first lady of the judicial system in our county? “The queen of her court,” a newspaper had actually called her only a month earlier. Clearly Guess Who was very aware of Margy’s high position. He had weighed her heart on the scales of justice and placed the queen he’d taken from Cuddy beside it.

  Cuddy was furious that he hadn’t paid more attention to Paul Madison’s books on early church saints. If he had, he would have noticed the book illustration that Bunty Crabtree was now showing him of St. Margaret. It hadn’t registered on him that Margy’s full name was Margaret (she never used it) and that Margaret was another of the martyrs whose head had been cut off. Bunty held up a picture of St. Margaret leading by a chain the dragon who’d swallowed her (as the chess queen had been swallowed by the fish) and then been forced to spit her out.

  It was no consolation to Cuddy that none of the rest of us had been any smarter that he. Guess Who had challenged him personally. And won. Finally Bunty offered to call him in a prescription for a tranquilizer. Offended, he refused. It was Etham Foster who ultimately calmed him down by grabbing him from behind when he started kicking a dent in the wall. We’d just heard that Guess Who might have killed Margy as early as ten P.M., so that if Cuddy had driven home with her from the Pine Hills Inn, the assault might never have happened. Or if he hadn’t told her he might drop by later, she might not have opened her door to the killer.

  Etham told his police chief flatly, “You want to blame yourself, go home and do it. You’re wasting our time.” Then he unlocked his arms—long enough to reach the full length of the table that he pressed Cuddy against—and he let him go. When he did, Cuddy took a very slow deep breath, then turned around toward the task force. Everybody in the room looked as if they were playing a game of “Freeze.”

  Then Cuddy said, “Doctor D is right. I apologize. Excuse me.” He left the room. When he returned, his hair and face were damp and he was calm.

  Soon afterwards, Nancy came back from Trinity Church. An old woman living at the homeless shelter there had told her that two nights ago she’d watched from her bed as Lupe Guevarra had gotten up at three A.M., put together a bag full of clothes and food, and sneaked off. It had been her impression that Lupe was frightened. Immediately we sent out a description of the Garifuna migrant and wired the photo we’d taken of her to precincts up and down the East Coast.

  Nancy brought us in the early edition of the July 3 Hillston Star with its “EXCLUSIVE! GUESS WHO STRIKES TWICE IN ONE NIGHT!” article by Shelly Bloom. In her scoop, she quoted the head of Hillston homicide (in other words, me) as saying, “We are extremely close to an arrest. Guess Who has made some serious and very stupid mistakes—sociopaths always do—and these errors have given us invaluable leads. I can’t say anything more specific, but we have a prime suspect and his arrest is imminent.”

  “JayJay, what the hell does that mean?” Rhonda asked.

  “It means flushing your pheasant,” Bunty said, nodding at me.

  Cuddy said, “It means the lieutenant’s got twenty-four hours to make Shelly an honest woman.”

  I understood him completely. We didn’t have a prime suspect. We needed to arrest one by July 4. It was July 3.

  Nancy also brought news from Augie Summers at Southern Depot. As I’d suspected, the killer had thrust the murder weapon deep inside another of the hundreds of large garbage bags that lay piled in the loading area. The weapon was a short steel-handled grapple hook used for slinging fish around by the gills. The grip was caked in blood. There were no prints on it.

  Nancy had already heard on the radio dispatch in her car that Judge Margy Turbot had been murdered that night. She sat down miserable. “Guess Who’s killed three women in one week.”

  We were all very much aware of that.

  An hour later, a message came from the morgue. By means of a chemical thermometer (the body loses one to two degrees of heat every hour after death), Dick Cohen now placed Margy’s murder somewhere close to eleven. Rigor had just been setting in when we’d discovered her. So the killer now had more than a six-hour lead.

  Tracing Margy’s steps wasn’t that difficult. She’d left the Pine Hills Inn at 9:30, dropped Dina Yarborough off at 9:50, declining an invitation to come in for a nightcap. There was no sign of a break-in at Margy’s house; it seemed probable that Guess Who had arrived just after she returned home. She hadn’t changed her clothes yet, but she had listened to her messages, poured herself a drink of single malt, turned on and muted a news channel, and fed her cat. Our best guess was that she’d incautiously answered her doorbell (perhaps assuming it was Cuddy).

  Guess Who must have pushed his way in and struck her immediately, knocking the glass out of her hand. It looked from the disarray of furniture and rugs as if he’d knocked her unconscious right there at the door. Neighbors had heard no scream or sounds of a struggle. There were no defensive wounds or skin and hair traces under her nails to suggest that she’d fought her assailant. But what had he hit her with? With her skull so battered and fractured by the wood mallet, would it be possible to distinguish a blow from a different blunt force instrument? It looked as if he’d then dragged her back into the kitchen (one of her shoes had caught in the phone line on the floor) and there found the means to finish the murder.

  Bleary with lack of sleep, our stomachs in cramps from too much coffee, we went over the sequence again and again. I acted it out. “He drags her down the hall, drops her in the kitchen by the cutting board, beats in her head with the mallet. Then what? He uses the tin cutter to pry open her mouth? He does his thing before he hacks open her throat?”

  Rhonda said yes. “The way her lips bled, looks like she was still alive when he jammed that cutter in her mouth. And you know why the son of a bitch did it too.”

  Cuddy called the morgue for the tenth time. Had Dick Cohen found any evidence of semen or pubic hair in the mouth cavity? No, Dick had not; he promised we’d know ASAP if he did.

  Bunty w
as looking out the window at the slow purple lightening of the sky. She said quietly. “G.W.’s lost it. Lost control. And he hates that.”

  Cuddy studied her eyes. “It looked more like Jeffrey Dahmer in that kitchen. Blood splatter everywhere. At least ten blows to her throat, another dozen to her chest.”

  Bunty nodded. “He had to use his hands to break those ribs, pull that heart out. He wouldn’t like that. Not at all. Our boy’s always been into neat and tidy. Everything under control. Matches just so, candles just so. Everything’s disintegrating on him now.”

  I pointed out, “There’s no way, with that cleaver flying around, that he didn’t get her blood all over him. I don’t understand why there’s nothing on the floor, walls, somewhere, on his exit route.”

  Rhonda studied the photos of Margy’s cloth Roman shades pulled down over the three kitchen windows. “He dragged her back here unconscious, took off his clothes, cut her up, washed off in the sink—look at the water here on the counter—put his clothes back on and walked out.”

  I said, “Doesn’t sound disintegrated. Sounds careful.”

  Lisa said, “But those clothes are blood soaked. Wherever they are.”

  “They’re someplace we aren’t going to find them, like the bottom of the Shocco River.” Cuddy looked directly at me, almost the first time since he’d found me with Mavis. “Okay, that’s it? Is Guess Who done? If he killed her just to show me he could do it, is that checkmate?”

  It was hard for me to believe that the man who’d hacked the heart out of the breast of Margy Turbot would be able to stop now, even if he wanted to.

  • • •

  At seven in the morning on July 3, Bunty and Rhonda were asleep on air mattresses they’d inflated and set up in a corner. Lisa had gone home. Etham was back in his lab. Cuddy was down the hall in the morgue with Dick Cohen looking at autopsy results on Margy. I was studying a DMV list of Ford Explorer registrations that he had left on top of his briefcase. I noticed that among the five vehicles he’d circled was a black ’97 model registered to a Dr. Roger Ferraro at 5171 Dumfries Court. Dumfries Court sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. When I reached over into my jacket for my pen and note pad, the manila envelope that Roid had given me at Southern Depot fell out of the pocket. It was the information he’d obtained finally from the Registrar’s Office at Haver University. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Idly I read down the sheet cataloging Lucy Griggs’s college courses for the four semesters she’d attended Haver:

  Eng. 21a. Brownlee B-

  Span. 125 Martinez A-

  Then all of a sudden I saw something. I hadn’t been looking for it, much less expecting it, and yet the instant my eyes fell on the name, I felt a sickening turn in my chest. In the spring term of Lucy’s freshman year:

  Econ. 115 Kasdan A-

  Eng. 21b. de Grazia B+

  Intro Wm. Studies Auerbach A-

  Math. 201 Norris A

  Music Hist. 350 Korshin B+

  And in the fall term of Lucy’s sophomore year:

  Calculus 503 Norris A

  And in the spring term of that year:

  Algebraic Topology Norris A

  “Norris.” She’d taken three courses with Tyler Norris. Professor Tyler Norris of the Haver University Mathematics Department. Tyler Norris who’d just been found not guilty of murdering his wife, who’d been set free by Judge Margy Turbot. Over two years, Lucy Griggs had repeatedly taken courses with Norris, the only courses in which she’d received straight As.

  The key turned and all the doors blew open onto a vista of hell. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing flashes of Norris’s face. The way he’d turned and smiled so chillingly at me in the courtroom after Margy Turbot sent the jury out. The terrible rage suffusing his face as his father unctuously signed the autograph on his book of poems at Southern Depot. Last night, the way he was looking at Margy as we walked out of the Pine Hills Inn. Other images rushing back through the months since I’d arrested him. The chess pieces. Norris was a chess whiz; as a small child he could play five games simultaneously. Norris and Rosethorn outside the Tucson. Norris. Norris.

  I made myself close my eyes and concentrate on deliberate deep breaths. Lucy Griggs had also taken more than one course with someone named Martinez and had done very well in them. It didn’t mean she was having an affair with that teacher, it didn’t mean Martinez had killed her.

  The image of Tyler’s smile would not go away.

  I looked at the Hillston map that we’d pinned to the corkboard. Dumfries Court had sounded familiar because it was in Balmoral Heights, only three blocks from the Norris house on the Tartan Drive cul de sac. I went back to the DMV list and found three more Explorers registered in the same neighborhood. I circled the owners’ names.

  Nancy came quietly to the door with a bag of breakfast biscuits. I motioned her back into the hall. She said, “Are they asleep?” I nodded. “What’s wrong with you, you look like total shit.”

  It was true that I was unshaven, wearing last night’s clothes, and probably smelling of the alcohol Mavis and I had consumed. I sidestepped the question. “Nancy, I need something fast. What kind of car does Tyler Norris drive? And I want the car color on these registrations!” I thrust the circled DMV list at her. “Don’t ask. Just go!”

  She stared at me, spun around, and took off. I hurried back into the room, looked up the Norris home phone number and called it. The phone seemed to ring forever, but finally he picked up and groggily said, “Hello?” It was Tyler himself, I was sure of that. I hung up the phone without speaking, went back out into the hall, and paced its length. I lit a cigarette although there were NO SMOKING signs at both ends of the hall.

  Was I crazy? My brain felt tangled like a packet of firecrackers. Each “pop!” set off another. Dick Cohen had groused, “He’s got a real hard-on about us, doesn’t he? I mean HPD. What’d we do to him?” But if it was Norris, how easy to answer. What had we done to him? We’d charged him with murder and put him on trial for his life. We: the Hillston Police Department and the judge who’d made it almost apparent that in her heart she believed him guilty. The tag on G.I. Jane had said,

  LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,

  PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:

  CAPTAIN C.R. MANGUM

  HILLSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT

  The tape in my car, the star in Cuddy’s apartment, the gun returned to the display case, it was all overkill to pay us back, to prove that he was going to win. Tyler and Linsley Norris lived in Balmoral Heights. Kristin Stiller had been found near the new construction area there. What if Kristin had discovered that Tyler was Lucy’s married lover and she was blackmailing him? What if Lucy had decided to force her lover’s hand? According to Mavis, Lucy had bragged that the married man’s life was under her control. “And he knows it too.” She must have had proof then. Letters? Photos?

  Nancy came running back into the hall. “I don’t believe it, Justin! You’re smoking? You quit years ago.”

  “What about Norris’s car?”

  She handed me a slip of paper. “Volvo station wagon. 1995. White. His wife had a Lexus, but he sold it after she died. Why do you want to know? Crap, I can’t believe you’re smoking!”

  Of the four Ford Explorers in Balmoral Heights, the only one of a color that coordinated with gray carpeting belonged to Roger Ferraro on Dumfries Court. He was a professor of the history of science at Haver, with a specialty in eighteenth-century navigational instruments. According to the secretary of the department whom Nancy had called, Professor Ferraro and his family were spending the entire academic year in Greenwich, England, and had left their house in the care of neighbors. I said, “Come on, Nancy. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Why do you keep asking me questions?”

  “Because that’s what you taught me to do.”

  �
�� • •

  At the door of the large gray-stained fake French chalet where so many months ago I’d watched another woman, Linsley Norris, carried out on a gurney in a plastic pouch and wheeled down a brick walk to an ambulance, Nancy and I waited for someone to answer the bell.

  “This is crazy, Justin. We’re gonna get our butts fried,” Nancy whispered as we heard locks click and the door open.

  In black Lyrca biking pants and a Haver sweatshirt, Tyler Norris stood there with a mug of coffee. The mug demonstrated that he’d donated to public radio. I could see a razor-thin Italian twenty-speed bicycle leaned against the wall beside him. I looked down at his feet. Nike running shoes.

  “What do you want?” he said coldly.

  “This is Officer Caleb-White. Could we come in and talk to you, Professor Norris?”

  “No, you can’t. What’s this about?”

  I explained that we were looking for a black Ford Explorer that might have been used in the commission of a local homicide. Such a car was registered to a neighbor of his, a Dr. Roger Ferraro. Dr. Ferraro was out of the country and another neighbor had just told us that she had the impression that Professor Norris was checking on his house for him. She thought she’d seen Norris driving the Ferraro car.

  Norris’s flat blue eyes glanced from me to Nancy and back to me. And it was then that I saw it in his eyes. Deep down in the iris, yet unmistakable. A scared but smug evil. He’d killed them. He’d enjoyed it. I knew it.

  We stared at each other, all the truth going on in our eyes. My bland question: had he driven his fellow faculty member’s Ford Explorer?

  “No, I haven’t,” he said curtly. “Which neighbor supposedly said this?” I didn’t answer him. He swung the door. “I’m calling your superiors.”