First Lady

by Michael Malone

  Cuddy stood up, pounded on an invisible piano and started singing:

  So I’m givin’ you your sorrow

  Hug it home without delay.

  While I’m livin’ for tomorrow,

  Stay the king of yesterday.

  Then he rolled the newspaper and tapped me with it on each shoulder. “That’s you, Justin, the king of yesterday, the Gallant Last of the Moronic Byronics. No wonder your wife headed for the mountains. Years of listening to you yapping on about how the world’s turned to trash finally drove her off. Alice has been gone a damn month. When’s she coming back?”

  I told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

  He tilted his head, looked at me until I turned away. “Go bring that sweet lady home.”

  “I’m not sure Alice wants to come home.” I picked up two old magazines from his coffee table, pretended to flip through them.

  He shook his head. “Why don’t you ask her?” I ignored him. There was a long silence then he said, “Justin, I know you’ve been in a bad way. Do you want me to turn G.I. Jane over to—”

  “No. No, I don’t.” I changed the subject. “So, you going to check out this Mavis concert?” There’d been a near riot last night before the rock star had finally made her appearance at her first concert and Cuddy had already predicted security problems tonight as well.

  He gave up and walked back to his desk. “The university asked the sheriff and the sheriff doesn’t want my help. You going?”

  “I don’t like rock’n’roll.”

  He shook his head. “Just ’cause Mavis isn’t one of those old dead jazz singers of yours doesn’t mean she’s no good. Ever listen to her?”

  “It’s hard to avoid it.” I showed him that both magazines on his coffee table had Mavis Mahar with a buzz cut on their covers. As I glanced at them, there was an odd familiarity to her smile. But I suppose that’s what stardom means. Everybody thinks they know you. “Look at this. Same cover, same star, same scandal…” I pointed at Cuddy’s greasy bucket of chicken. “KFC in Hong Kong tastes no different from KFC in Hillston. That’s my point. Same Mexican burritos, same Greek gyros sold in the same plastic wrap coast to coast.”

  He nodded cheerfully. “You think they were selling sushi in Hillston back in your glorious good old days? Hey, Thai take-out is a nice change from growing up on canned sausages and black-eyed peas. I don’t like the way the past treated me.” He stroked his air conditioner. “Now I can freeze in June. I’m not squeezed up naked in a tin wash tub in a red-dirt yard, trying to cool off in six inches of water you could boil eggs in. I like tomorrow. And I like Mavis Mahar.”

  I shrugged. “You and everybody else.”

  All over town there were Mavis posters in store windows and Mavis CDs by checkout counters, there were bins of her music videos and cases of her trademark bottled stout in stores near the Haver University campus. Even here in Hillston, everyone called her Mavis as if they were her friends, and, after all, they probably knew more about her than they did about their neighbors. Her latest stunt had been so repeatedly covered by CNN that even I knew she had seduced a right-wing politician into meeting her at five A.M. on the steps of Nashville’s replica of the Parthenon. Handcuffing herself to this intoxicated national figure (who’d clearly thought he’d been invited to a romantic tryst), she’d sung him a song about hypocrisy while paparazzi (whom she’d previously called) snapped photos that they then sold for vast sums to the tabloids. After the politician resigned, the new Mavis Mahar album went triple-platinum, her new single “Coming Home to You” (the theme song of a popular new movie) sold even more records than “Livin’ for Tomorrow.” By the time of her arrival in Hillston, millions of teenage girls could sing “Coming Home to You”—a pulsing ballad full of defiant sorrow and mournful Celtic moans—and thousands of them had apparently pierced their left nipples just as their idol had apparently done.

  Cuddy went on singing “Livin’ for Tomorrow” until Detective Sergeant John Emory poked his shaved coal-black head in the door and handed him an opened newspaper. “Too cold in here,” he said, leaving. “Justin’s blue.”

  Cuddy called out after him. “Old blood’s always blue, Sergeant, don’t you know that? New blood’s nothing but fast food, fast cars, and rock’n’roll.”

  Throwing my sushi box in his trashcan, I stood up to leave too. “I’m not talking against progress, Cuddy.”

  “No, you’re talking against fried chicken.”

  “I’m talking about how everybody’s been swept into one big flood of momentary homogeneity.”

  “You don’t say?” He quickly scanned today’s editorial in the Hillston Star. “Well, hey, does momentary homogeneity have anything to do with this?” He read out, “‘Chief Mangum to Murder Victim: Who Cares?’” and handed the paper back to me. As I read the editorial aloud, Cuddy opened his window to sprinkle fat crumbs from his KFC biscuit to the dingy pigeons waiting on his window ledge. When he finished, he grabbed the newspaper from me, balled it up, and lobbed it off his poster of Elvis Presley into the trash—his one trick shot. The police chief didn’t like the Star’s asking why Hillston should have doubled the size of its police department and yet still be unable even to identify the bodies of homicide victims. He didn’t like being asked why in a national survey the Hillston Police Department should be ranked No. 1 in small cities in the Southeast when, instead of catching maniacs who sawed open young women’s throats, it spent its time arresting innocent leading citizens of the community for murder—a reference to the Norris trial now going on downstairs in Superior Court where a Haver University professor had been charged with killing his wife. And most of all, Cuddy didn’t like the paper’s calling for his resignation.

  He slammed the window shut against the heat that raced into the room, scaring the pigeons into jumping half-an-inch. “Instead of blaming your troubles on how something fundamental’s broken down since your great granddaddy’s day, Justin—”

  “It has broken down,” I interrupted.

  The police chief held his drug-store watch to my face and tapped it. “What’s broken down is you finding out who killed Jane. Time, my friend, time is doing a fast dance all over your handsome head. I figured while Alice was gone, you’d be on this case twenty-four—”

  “I am—”

  “Really? Looks like you’re up alone nights writing the sequel to The Mind of the South and brooding over the collapse of civilization.”

  I looked at Cuddy’s wall hung with civic plaques and framed tributes. “A year ago, you said I had the ‘best instincts for homicide investigation of any detective you’d ever met.’”

  He said, “That was a year ago. Besides, you’re not supposed to see those evaluation reports.”

  “All the more reason to assume you meant what you said.” I picked up a painted wooden queen on the folk art chess set from his Peace Corps days in Costa Rica. The board was laid out for one of the classic games he was always playing by himself. I moved the queen.

  He shook his head. “Do that and you’re checkmated in eight moves. If it can happen to Boris Spassky, it can happen to you.”

  I put down the queen and started feeling in my pockets for my car keys. “Cuddy, why do you like to play games you already know the outcome of?”

  He tossed me my hat. “To know how the outcome came about.”

  “That’s all I’m saying. There’s no more history in America. We used to have fifteen minutes of fame. Now we’ve got fifteen minutes of memory.”

  I walked Cuddy downstairs to his meeting with his friend Mayor Carl Yarborough. They were dealing with a sanitation workers’ strike that was filling the streets of Hillston with levees of black garbage bags, as if we expected an imminent flood. But the Mayor’s secretary told Cuddy that they would have to postpone. Sheriff Homer Louge was in there with Yarborough on an emergency matter and they couldn’t be disturbed. Sheri
ff Louge despised Cuddy and the feeling was reciprocated. They’d had a blowout over how the sheriff’s deputies had contaminated the Norris homicide scene—as a result of which, the defendant’s attorney had already managed to have most of the state’s evidence disallowed during the ongoing trial.

  Back in the corridor, Cuddy gestured at the closed door. “See? Sheriff Stooge is in there trashing me to Carl again. Homer’s wet dream is me packing up my office bijoux in an old cardboard box, sayonara and hari kari.” (Unlike the sheriff, who was elected, the police chief in Hillston was appointed by the Mayor and the City Council and he could be fired by them. Nothing would have pleased Sheriff Louge more.)

  I shrugged. “Carl’s not going to listen to Homer Louge.”

  “Carl’s going to listen to the people, which these days means the polls, which these days means the press. Close this G.I. Jane thing, Justin.”

  “Close it or solve it?”

  “Solve it and close it. That horse I’m sitting on with a noose around my neck? That horse is dancing.”

  • • •

  It was odd that my car keys weren’t in my jacket pocket, and odder that when I went back to look for them in my office, its door was locked. The desk sergeant who let me in with the master key agreed sympathetically that I was not usually so absent-minded. But for the past months I had been dealing with personal problems and so everyone was treating me tenderly, as if—as Cuddy had just said—I wasn’t myself. After a frustrating search I decided to walk home for the extra set of keys I kept in a silver bowl on a George IV gaming table in my front hall. I collect what Cuddy refers to as “old stuff” and I live in an “old house” not far from the Cadmean Building.

  A decade ago everyone thought I was a lunatic to buy a large 1887 Queen Anne house in downtown Hillston and convert it from the dilapidated dormitory for Frances Bush College for Women it had been since 1936. But today, when Hillston’s abandoned tobacco warehouses are sleek apartments and our derelict textiles mills are boutique malls, my folly looks like such foresight that to my wife Alice’s amusement, the Hillston Star called us “visionary pioneers of urban revitalization.” The wedding-band quilt made by Alice’s Appalachian grandmother was featured in their photo spread and Alice was shown cheerfully pruning her blue-ribbon antique roses in our garden. Now there are dozens of Range Rovers in our neighborhood, but I’m still one of the few people who actually walks the gentrified streets of urban Hillston; everybody drives if they can, and those who can’t take the bus.

  My walk home takes me along Jupiter Street toward the crumbling bowed-out facade of the Piedmont Hotel where they recently added a bright yellow awning over the grimy doors, like a cheap blonde wig on an old wino. Because of the strike, the hotel looked even worse, with garbage bags piled beside an overflowing dumpster in its causeway. Flies and bees swarmed at rotted food. In the heat, the stench made a strong argument for settling with the local sanitation workers as soon as possible. I noticed the two small dark foreign women in black whom I’d seen earlier at the street corner looking through the garbage. They ran away when they saw me.

  I found myself stopping in front of a scruffy bar called the Tucson that had opened back in the Urban Cowboy eighties as a western lounge, sporting a mural of longhorn cattle stampeding through Texas. A decade later, the rawhide fringe on the cowgirl vests worn by the waitresses had frayed to greasy nubs, the garage bands who sped through Garth Brooks tunes on Saturday night didn’t know a two-step from a tarantella, and the red neon in the cactus had mostly spluttered out. Still, with its gargantuan pitchers of beer and its free spicy buffalo wings and its Reba McIntire look-a-like contests, the Tucson had kept its dance floor floating in sawdust for a decade after fashion had passed it by, so we were all surprised when two years ago the owner had finally given up on the Wild West and turned the lounge into something he called The Tin-Whistle Pub.

  Cheapness however took him only part way down the trendy road to the Old Country; the “pub” sported Guinness on tap, a Riverdance poster on the wall, U2 hits on the jukebox, a dartboard, and a snooker table, but it still looked like the old Tucson, and the Tucson is what everyone still called it. It had its broken mechanical bull in the corner, and its neon sign over the bar still spelled out “TUCSON” above a spluttering red cactus. Drawn not by ambiance but large cheap drinks, the regular customers may never have noticed any change at all.

  Those customers were not the sort to leave a long black limousine parked outside with its driver patiently leaning against the hood reading a magazine while they took advantage of the two-for-one Happy Hour at the bar, so when I saw such a car waiting there, I stopped to look at it. Then I went to the bar door. Standing in the doorway, even before my eyes had time to adjust to the shadowy light, I recognized the woman. It wasn’t just the sound of her voice, although it was a memorable voice, singing a cappella the old country-western ballad “I Can’t Stop Loving You” in a strong, clean soprano that came soaring out from the little black-carpeted band platform across the empty tables toward me. It was the shock of her beauty.

  There were only a few other patrons in the place (the Tucson catered largely to a late-night just-lost-my-job and looking-for-love crowd), and they stood off to the side with the waitresses and the kitchen staff, all of them bunched together like a chorus listening to the woman as intently as if they waited on their cue to join in.

  There was no mistaking the slender singer with the tangled mass of lion-colored hair. She was the woman I’d seen from a distance this morning standing on the dock at Pine Hills Lake. She was the woman who’d suddenly thrown off her red silk robe and dived, a shimmer of perfect flesh, into the misty lake water. And Cuddy’s magazine covers had looked familiar because, as I now realized, the woman I’d seen at the lake, her hair now a tawny swirl of color much longer than the buzz cut she’d worn in those photographs, was the Irish rock star Mavis Mahar.

  Chapter 2

  Mavis

  Watching the singer as she stood alone on the black platform in a tight black top and black jeans, a bottle of Guinness in one hand, half a dozen blood-red tulips in the other, I thought again that she was the loveliest woman I’d ever seen. Photographs just flattened and dulled her. She was resplendent.

  She was drunk too, and the famous Celtic lilt was slurred when she called over to me, “Hey you, boyo there in the door! Hello again. Is your big black horse tied up outside?”

  I raised a hand, saluted her, shook my head.

  She gestured me to her with the beer bottle. “Come in now, won’t you, and have a pint with Mavis and her mates? I’m here at the pub having a bit of the past back. I’m rem…in…is…ci….” She had trouble with the word, gave it up, and turned to her small knot of awestruck fans with her arms outstretched. “Isn’t it a sad thing?” she asked them, and they all nodded that it was. “I was a wild gaarl, a gaarl from the west country, singing out my heart every blessed night in Dublin pubs the sorry like of this pub here, and I met a man, you know, a man that had that sort of a look to him—” She pointed the Guinness bottle at me accusatively and the crowd turned with a hostile glare in my direction. “That man kept sad Mavis locked away like a song bird in a cage of gold….” And without a pause her voice lifted into the opening line of “Pleeease release me/ Let me go….”

  I’d read in the effusive magazine I’d taken from Cuddy’s office that Mavis Mahar had close to a four-octave range and that the musical world considered her “one of the phenomenal talents of her time.” Her time was undoubtedly now, for according to this article she had “broad crossover appeal, drawing fans from teens, Gen-Xers, boomers, and even Ike-ers” (that ancient crew who’d reached their adolescence in the Eisenhower fifties). The article said she could play three or four instruments and that she loved singing all types of songs—rock, blues, pop, and folk. Listening to her version of this old country tune now, I heard what the critics were talking about. Finishing the song to the
fervid applause of her small audience, Mavis accepted another Guinness someone offered her. As she reached out for the bottle with her slim lean-muscled bare white arm, I noticed that she had a tiny dark red birthmark with points like a star just where her neck joined her shoulders—as if, pleased with His Creation, God had stamped her with the star as a sign of her destiny and then sent her out into the world to claim it. On both her hands she wore silver and gold rings (sometimes two or three) on all her fingers, including her thumbs. The fingers were strong and restless. The nails short, purple as hyacinths.

  A very pretty waitress had pulled away from the young man next to her and pressed to the front of the crowd where she listened in an ecstasy of infatuation. The waitress obviously believed imitation was at least the most manifest form of flattery for she had the exact same hair cut, hair color, nail color, multitude of rings and black wedge open-heeled sandals as Mavis Mahar. All she didn’t have was the talent and that inimitable luminous glow. Holding up a throwaway camera, she was breathlessly asking if Mavis would mind if someone took their picture together. Mavis didn’t mind at all, and asked the girl her name.

  “Lucy,” the waitress said as she jumped effortlessly up on the platform and impulsively hugged the singer. When she did, I noticed the young man move sullenly back to the shadows, staring angrily at the waitress. Handsome, with sideburns and a pouty mouth, in a black leather jacket and tight black jeans, he looked as if he’d styled himself on motorcycle movies made before he was born. I recognized him as someone I’d seen being booked at HPD, although I couldn’t remember for what.

  The flash of the camera flared as the two young women smiled, looking almost like twins in a play. “We’re exactly the same size!” Lucy shouted at her coworkers, thrilled. Then she asked the star if she’d sing “Coming Home to You,” and Mavis looked at her with an extraordinarily seductive sigh of a smile. “Ah, daarlin’, can’t we feckin’ forget that feckin’ bloody song!?” But with a shrug she handed the red tulips to the ardent girl, walked to the piano, and played the opening chords, known to much of the world, of her No. 1 hit.