The shabby drunks, worn-out barmaids, and skinny dishwashers cheered and stomped their tired feet on the sawdust floor. They knew—even before what was to happen later that night—that they were in the midst of a memory they would keep until they were old. They knew they were standing close to magic that was no part of their own lives and never would be, so close to the light of fame that it made them radiant too.
“Are you leaving again then, beautiful boyo?” Mavis called over to me as I walked to the door. “Is there no song would make you stay this time?”
I turned in the doorway. Everyone was watching her look at me.
She ran both hands from her throat down to her stomach. “I’m all filled up with music.”
“I know,” I said. “You have rings on your fingers. Do you have bells on your toes?”
She smiled. “Stay and find out.”
But I waved and left the bar because I knew I’d order a drink if I stayed. Outside it was raining again; the black limousine sat patiently by the curb, wipers slowly moving over the windows. I assumed the driver was waiting behind the wheel, but with the dark tinted glass, I couldn’t tell for sure.
• • •
I spent the rest of the afternoon at the construction site near where we’d found G.I. Jane. When I returned to the Cadmean Building at dusk, the two small dark women were back on the street corner side by side in the same motionless positions, with the same shopping bags beside them. Nearby Sergeant Brenda Moore and our forensics photographer Chuck Grant headed for a squad car at the curb. They were an odd pair—she, short, plump, African-American; he, tall, gaunt, self-described redneck.
“Know what those two ladies are doing over there?” I called to them.
Chuck stared, shrugged sardonically. “Hookers?”
Brenda nonchalantly raised her hand at him, then lowered each long, multicolored nail until only the middle finger was extended. She glanced at the women. “They’re looking for work.”
I was puzzled. “Work? Work from whom?”
Brenda opened the driver’s side of the black and white cruiser. “Whomever, Justin, just about whomever.” As she started her engine, she said, “Big Hair’s after your ass again.” She drew an imaginary box around her head with her hands and grinned with parodic sincerity.
I knew who she meant. And sure enough, Carol Cathy Cane from the Channel Seven “Action News” came hurrying with her bearded cameraman down the broad stone steps where a small line of picketing sanitation workers was parading back and forth. The TV diva wasn’t much interested in the strike. It was me she was after.
CeeCee, as Ms. Cane was known to Hillston, had a personal stake in Cathy Oakes’ and G.I. Jane’s killer. Back in March she’d named him. What if—CeeCee had suggested with zest—what if the killer had put the label around G.I. Jane’s toe “mailing” her to Cuddy and me because he was daring us to solve the puzzle before he murdered again? What if he had put Guess T-shirts on his naked victims to taunt the police with his crime: Guess who I am? What did I think of that idea? Without waiting to find out, CeeCee had christened him “The Guess Who Killer” on the spot—she was adroit at the sound bite—and by the following evening all the Piedmont news shows were calling our unknown murderer the Guess Who Killer, and by the weekend, all the television anchors were advising women not to go out jogging alone until the police caught Guess Who.
I tried to slip past her cameraman now by dodging behind a Civil War cannon near the steps, but CeeCee ran over and blocked my path.
“Lieutenant, Lieutenant!”
“Oh, CeeCee, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”
Carol Cathy Cane had big hair, long legs, and a breathless enthusiasm for the ephemeral that had finally freed her from the late-night wrap-up, where she feared the networks would never notice her, and promoted her to the coveted evening news spot at Channel Seven. She and I knew each other well, but in our interviews she always pretended she’d never seen me before and had never asked me the same questions a dozen previous times. Now she spun her finger at her cameraman and opened our exchange, as she always did, by warning her viewers with solemn glee that a homicidal maniac was still stalking the Piedmont and when was I going to apprehend him?
I smiled just as solemnly. “As soon as I find him.”
I heard an ugly laugh. Sheriff Homer Louge, who appeared to spend very little time at the County Sheriff’s Office across town, stopped beside us on the steps and stood there listening with crossed arms and a smug grin. He was tall and thick with a face that looked as if a truck tire had rolled over it.
CeeCee was asking why a homicidal maniac had singled me out as G.I. Jane’s “friend.” Was it because I was Justin Savile the Fifth? (The “V” had been emphatically added to my name on the label attached to the corpse’s toe.) “Your family has always been very prominent in North Carolina. Could this be a class-hatred thing with Guess Who?”
Sheriff Louge gave another barking laugh and ambled up the steps past us, melodramatically shaking his head as I told CeeCee I had no reason to assume the killer had ever heard of my family or had any personal feelings about me or Chief Mangum either, one way or the other. “The label was addressed to me because I’m the head of homicide here.”
Bored with that possibility, CeeCee said that we were all aware, from sources like Silence of the Lambs, of VICAP’s criminal profilers at the FBI and she wondered why we didn’t ask them to help us since we obviously needed help. Maybe they had other Guess T-shirt cases in their files. I told her we had worked closely with two FBI consultants in Raleigh who said our evidence fit the pattern of no known killer. CeeCee turned grim and dramatically hushed. “You mean serial killer, don’t you, Lieutenant?”
“No, I don’t,” I insisted.
She wasn’t listening. “He’s killed twice. He’ll kill again, won’t he?”
I assured her that if so, the best way to stop him was to find out who G.I. Jane was, and once more I urged anyone with information to come forward. CeeCee wondered, since HPD had mishandled both the Professor Norris murder case and the G.I. Jane case, if maybe the Hillston Star was right today and it was time for Police Chief Cuddy Mangum to step down, even if he was winning the state’s Raleigh Medal tonight?
“CeeCee, I don’t think we’ve mishandled anything but the media.” And I gave her my friendly nod, dodged through the hot, tired, listless picketers, and hurried up the steps.
• • •
Cuddy was leaving his office, reading through his endless pink phone messages. He punched at the elevator button, gave it five seconds to open (which it never did), then started at a trot down the marble stairs.
I caught him. “A construction crew dug up a running shoe near the murder site but no help with our shoelace. It was a Nike. Man’s size nine—”
He bounced a message off the wall like a tiny basketball into a wastebasket. “So you just back here to defend the Old South from momentary homogeneity?”
“All I said was that’s why we don’t know Jane’s name—”
“Lots of women got murdered back in your great-great granddaddy’s day, and nobody even tried to find out their names.” He balled up another message. “But these women were mostly of a non-Caucasian persuasion.”
“Don’t start in again about all my genocidal landgrabbing ancestors.”
“Justin, I don’t believe I called all your relatives genocidal.” Reaching out a lanky arm, he gave my bow tie a pat. “Just Governor Eustache P. Dollard.” We trotted downstairs, past the floors of town and county offices, down toward the courtrooms off the lobby.
I said, “The governor was not personally responsible for the deaths of those Cherokee Indians.”
“Well, now, personal responsibility.” Cuddy bounded along, slapping various city officials and police officers on the back as we passed them on the stairs. “When Eustache Dollard and Andy Jackson told a tr
ibe of—and we don’t call them Indians anymore, you got to catch up—told a tribe of Native Americans to take a fast hike across the Appalachians to Oklahoma, you think they figured they’d all make it there, no problem? Old folks, women and children, just jogging to Oklahoma, ’stead of freezing to death on—”
“I get it.” I nodded. “It’s this Raleigh prize they’re giving you tonight. You’re down on governors.”
“Oh am I?” We stepped into the lobby of the Cadmean Building, a handsome domed octagonal space with a floor of black and white marble, just as the big double doors to Superior Court banged open and the crowd scurried out of the afternoon session of the Tyler Norris murder trial.
For months the Star had been sniping at Cuddy not only about the G.I. Jane killing, but also about this Professor Norris. A young star of the mathematics faculty of Haver University, a recipient of a Haver Foundation genius grant, Norris was the only son of one of the most eminent families in the area. We had arrested him for shooting his pregnant wife in the face with a shotgun last New Year’s Eve. He said a burglar had shot her, and most people believed him. I’d been the arresting officer. Back in February I had walked into Norris’s parents’ sixteen-room Greek Revival estate on Catawba Drive and taken him out of it in handcuffs. His father, whom I’d known all my life, had followed us to the squad car and asked me, “Justin, how could you?” The editor of the Star seemed to feel the same way. For the first time in years, the town of Hillston was not happy with its police department and the newspapers and television channels were losing no opportunity to say so.
The Norris trial was almost over. Pushed forward by a confident defense (the famous Isaac Rosethorn had come out of retirement to take the case), it had moved along quickly under the brisk gavel of a young female judge. Cuddy stopped now to get the news on the day’s proceedings from Miss Beatrice Turner, the court clerk, who was seventy-one, wouldn’t admit it, and dared Age to imply otherwise by inflicting on her any of its typical advertisements like poor eyes or stooped posture. “Going okay in there, darlin’?” he called to her.
“Good afternoon, Chief Mangum. Justin, how’s your mother doing, bless her sweet heart?”
“Still in the hospital, but much better, thank you, ma’am.”
Miss Turner was as sharp-eyed, plump-breasted, and self-possessed as a robin, and like that bird had no idea how small she was: despite the stiffness of her blue hair, she fit easily under Cuddy’s arm when he hugged her as he asked, “How far’d Isaac get today?”
“He’s through. They’re done except for summations.”
“Darlin’, talk to me. Is the good side gonna win?”
Miss Turner fluffed the old silk violets pinned to her full bosom. “Depends on which side of the church you’re sitting on.”
“The bride’s side, the bride that got her face shot off, I’m sitting on Linsley Norris’s side, Bee.”
“Then I’d say you were destined for disappointment,” she told him matter-of-factly. “Isaac Rosethorn has got the whole state convinced that we are dealing with a burglar, and I don’t know how many times I’ve seen him on Channel Seven going on about how they finally proved Dr. Sam Sheppard was innocent of killing his wife after all those years in prison because it turned out it was an intruder, and how we don’t want another decent useful life ruined in another terrible miscarriage of justice.” Miss Turner did a recognizable imitation of Isaac Rosethorn, with whom reputedly she had been in love for forty years. “I bet if you polled that jury this afternoon,” she added, “they’d acquit and go home.”
Cuddy kicked something invisible. “Damn it. Now, Bee, Professor Norris killed his wife and shot himself to cover it up. I know he did.”
“Well, the State better start proving it, because the jury believes Tyler caught that North Hillston burglar robbing them and the burglar picked up the rifle he’d planned on stealing and shot Tyler in the stomach after he’d already shot Linsley in the face when she came through the door.”
“Norris shot himself!”
She shook her head firmly. “That jury doesn’t think so. Isaac keeps telling them you don’t have a motive, and you don’t. For a man to kill his wife when she’s about to have their first child, he’s got to have more of a motive than they had an argument at a dinner party. Plus, your crime scene was a contaminated mess!” The implication was that the police had wasted Miss Turner’s time by arresting the defendant in the first place.
“Sheriff Louge’s boys trashed the place before HPD ever got there.”
“I don’t care whose doing it was.”
“Well, hell.” Cuddy didn’t question her assessment; in more than forty years of trials she had studied the faces of thousands of jurors.
Across the lobby, Isaac Rosethorn lumbered out of the courtroom doors with his arm around his client, the defendant Tyler Norris. Cuddy pointed at him. “That old bastard ought to be ashamed of himself. He knows Norris is guilty as sin. I know he knows it.”
Rosethorn was fat and tousled as a bear. Norris was slim and tall, his brown hair cropped, his brown loafers polished, his khaki suit pressed. He looked like thousands of other well-to-do young Southern men who’d gone from good families to good schools to good jobs. His distinguished-looking parents followed them out, arm in arm, walking through the lobby, stoic in undeserved adversity. They were followed in turn by Norris’s dead wife’s parents, who had been on television insisting they would never believe their son-in-law had murdered their daughter. All four parents shook hands solemnly with Rosethorn as a reporter took their picture.
Then Rosethorn shuffled away in his rumpled black suit with his snowy head buried in the loose papers he was reading, oblivious to people dodging out of his path as he made his way to the revolving doors. He stood there blocking the exit until a woman behind him impatiently pushed him through the doors ahead of her. He never noticed. Cuddy sighed. “Why doesn’t he stay retired? Christ, he’s older than God.”
Miss Turner puffed up. “Well, he’s not too old to make a shambles of you and the D.A.’s office.”
Cuddy swooped over to pick up a candy wrapper someone had dropped and to stuff it down in an already full trash can. “The fact that Isaac is still alive is a slap in the face to the Surgeon General, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the American Heart Association all three.”
With an exasperated cluck Bee Turner turned from watching Rosethorn try to retrieve his bamboo cane from the revolving door in which he’d jammed it. Then she instructed Cuddy, “Do us all proud tonight at the governor’s, you hear me?” and she patted him between his shoulder blades as if he were a baby being encouraged to burp.
“I hear you, darlin’. After I do this prize thing, you want to go shagging with me at the Lush Life Bar?”
With a sharp poke at his ribs, she turned to me in mock horror. “I don’t have an idea in the world what ‘shagging’ means. But I know what it sounds like it means.”
Cuddy laughed. “Does that mean you will come, or you won’t?”
As she scooted around us to head up the stairs, she pinched my arm. “Justin, you found yourself such a smart pretty young woman to marry you. Why can’t you locate somebody like Alice for your friend here? Bye now.”
I called after her, “I keep trying, but Cuddy’s still in love with you.”
“She knows that,” he yelled up the stairs after her.
Cuddy grilled everyone else he could reach coming out of the courtroom for feedback on how the trial had gone today. It was unanimous. The defense was beating us. Our medical examiner Dick Cohen wandered out yawning—he’s insisted for years that he hasn’t had a good night’s rest since he left Brooklyn. He mumbled, “Kiss this one off, Cuddy. They’re licking the dirty sugar out of Rosethorn’s fat old hands.” He added, heading for the doors, “But what’s that to you? Raleigh prize tonight anyhow, right?”
“Right. Let ’em eat a whole cake full of d
irty sugar, Dick, what do I care?” Cuddy waved Dick off, then used his raised hand to yank on his thick shock of nut-brown hair as if he were impatiently improving his posture. “I said this was going to be a bad year when I woke up New Year’s morning in bed with a priest,” he growled. “For a heterosexual atheist like me, that gives you the unsettling feeling you’re losing control.”
I laughed. “You got sick and Paul didn’t know where else to put you.”
“Justin, you be sure to mention that incident if they ask for any little Chief Mangum anecdotes tonight at the banquet.”
Cuddy was the North Carolinian chosen to receive the Raleigh Medal tonight at the State capitol for “distinguished service to the state.” The medal was given at one of the social highlights of the year—the Governor’s Gala—and the governor nominated the recipients. Everybody at the Hillston Police Department appeared to be happy that Captain Mangum had won this prize, except Captain Mangum. And I was probably the only person who knew why. All the reasons why.
Of course, one reason was that Cuddy felt responsible, if not for the whole world, certainly for Hillston and every human life in it. Secondly, he was very media sensitive, and embarrassed by the awkwardness of his receiving a prize for eradicating crime in Hillston when he obviously hadn’t done so. In his early years as police chief he had been such a success, such a symbol (even in a national magazine like Newsweek) of the youthful, modernized, computerized, affluent equal-opportunity New South that he’d grown accustomed to having the media fawn all over him. He wouldn’t admit it, but it mortified him that (because of the Norris trial and the unsolved G.I. Jane homicide), for the first time in his regime the press was treating the Hillston Police Department with the same irreverent derision that they’d shown his idiotic predecessor Captain Van Dorn Fulcher (V.D. for short.) The press was pointing out publicly that we weren’t perfect, and maybe Cuddy had thought we were.
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