First Lady

by Michael Malone

  But there was another reason he didn’t want the Raleigh Medal. He didn’t like the governor who’d be handing it to him. He hadn’t liked the very popular, good-looking, charismatic governor Andrew Brookside (an acquaintance of mine) even before Andy had been elected. He hadn’t liked him even after Andy had stepped in front of an assassin’s bullet that had been meant for Cuddy himself (although at the time, everybody thought the future governor was the target). Not liking the man, Cuddy let people go on thinking Andy had saved his life, and Andy had used the assumed assassination attempt to help win the election, and I suppose Cuddy thought that made them even. It wasn’t Brookside’s politics that Cuddy objected to. He hadn’t liked Andy Brookside before he ever met him, for a very personal reason that he and I had never talked about.

  I didn’t talk about it now. I said, “You’re mad because you don’t want to want that medal.”

  Cuddy stared at me, then looked away to watch people shivering as they moved from the muggy heat outside into the icy air conditioning of the lobby. After he rolled up his blue shirtsleeves, he turned back nodding. “Justin, when you’re right, you’re right.”

  “I’m right?”

  “Yep.”

  “This is an historic moment. I’m right and you’re not?”

  “I want that prize and I don’t want it.” Walking to the gigantic varnished portrait of the dead textiles king Briggs Cadmean that dominated the lobby, he gave the old bald millionaire a salute. “As B.M., the capitalist hog, my old personal patron up there always advised me,” he puffed out his thin cheeks and deepened his voice to a sonorous rumble, “‘Son, concede the irrefutable.’ Well, what he actually said was, ‘Son, if you jump up on your high horse when they’ve got your pecker nailed to the floor, it’s gonna hurt.’ That was the kind of advice it was hard to argue with, and I never did.”

  Cadmean, Hillston’s dead patriarch, the man who’d left me Manassas in his will, had left Hillston the municipal building, the name of which had been changed to honor him. (He was holding up the blueprints in the painting, as if to make his generosity absolutely clear.) He’d thought that he owned everybody who worked in the building, including Cuddy, and had always boasted that he had personally made Cuddy police chief, an exaggeration Cuddy had never contradicted because it was useful; he still referred to Cadmean as his “patron” years after the old man’s death.

  I pursued my advantage. “You admit that’s why you’re badgering me.”

  “Well now, no, this badgering,” he pulled the gray matted rabbit foot of his key chain out of his pants pocket, “is about you locating the Guess Who Killer ex po fasto.” He took the wad of messages from his pocket and ruffled them at me. “Because the mayor and the D.A. and Ward Trasker, our suck-ass attorney general, are leaning on Redial in a half-nelson kind of way, wanting to know who slit that woman’s throat and cut out her tongue and mailed her body to you to give to me. They are not asking me for your theories about how there wouldn’t even be these homicides if we all could trace our ancestors back to the alluvial mud and just revere the glorious Southern past together—”

  “I’ve got a seven hundred and forty-page murder book. I’ve done a hundred-twenty-eight interviews—”

  “And I can’t keep telling them we don’t need the FBI or the SBI or the damn sheriff because we can do it ourselves when we’re not doing it ourselves. They want a suspect. I want a suspect. I don’t even care if it’s you. I want this case closed. And the least I want is that fiber analysis on the T-shirt from NCBI that I asked you for two weeks ago—”

  I threw up my hands. “It hasn’t come back yet! You know, your hostility to the past is damn perverse for a man with a Ph.D. in history—”

  He gave me his ironic blue-jay wink. “This is not about perversity. This is about power, pure and simple, in which struggle, Justin B. Savile the Fifth, you are seriously outranked by Cudberth the First—”

  “Cuddy, babe. Justin, hi.” Judge Margy Turbot hurried out of Superior Court and squeezed Cuddy’s arm as she rushed away. “Congratulations.”

  He blew her a kiss. “Thanks, Margy. Well hey, the rumor mill is grinding you to glitter. I hear you’re the next attorney general.”

  “Leave you and move to Raleigh? No way, you big hunk of love!” she sent a kiss back over her shoulder.

  He shouted after her. “How’s it going in there?” Margy was the judge on the bench in the Norris trial. Without turning back, she lifted her arm and waggled her hand ambiguously.

  “Norris did it!” he called after her, then grumbled at me. “How could she let Isaac talk her into giving him bail? Even O.J. couldn’t get bail.”

  I shrugged. The judge’s decision hadn’t surprised me. “Margy knows Norris isn’t blowing his daddy’s million dollar bond by going anywhere.”

  “He’s going free, that’s where he’s going. We’re about to lose this trial, Justin. And you better find out who did G.I. Jane before that happens. I don’t wanna hear CeeCee Cane on the same Action News show telling the whole Piedmont how we pulled in the wrong guy on the Norris case, and no guy at all on G.I. Jane.” He watched Judge Turbot—trim, good legs, blond pageboy hair—laughing with a federal marshal near the doors. “There goes the best-looking judge in the district.”

  “You said she was too healthy for you. You said she admitted she’d never had a Big Mac and never planned to.”

  “That’s true,” he nodded.

  “On the other hand, I wish you’d marry her. I’ve had your wedding present ready for over ten years, just waiting for a bride.”

  “I hope it wasn’t a case of Twinkies.”

  “Why, don’t they have a shelf life of a century?”

  Cuddy grinned. “Maybe Alice’ll come home, wake up, and realize she should have married me in the first place, instead of a guy without air conditioning.” Cuddy’s grin vanished abruptly. “Well, great!”

  I saw the reason for his frown, and for the crowd, and for Carol Cathy Cane’s presence outside. She hadn’t been there for me after all. Governor Andrew Brookside had just walked into the building. His press secretary Bubba Percy was easing him past the herd of reporters as they all slipped around the striking sanitation workers and through the doors, jostling to stay close to the fast-moving, good-looking man known to everybody in the state as “Andy.” CeeCee must have already gotten whatever sound bite she wanted out on the steps because she hadn’t followed the crowd inside. She looked down on print journalists anyhow. She was a personality.

  I muttered, “Take it away, Chief,” as Cuddy tossed his jacket over his other arm, smiled, and held out his hand.

  Tall, crisp, and handsome, in his early forties, with the deep tan of the athletic rich, Governor Brookside had always had a brightness to him, as if he wore armor made of all the silver trophies and gold medals, bronze statues and brass plates he’d ever won in his lifetime. The more glory, the more Andy seemed to throw off light. Light gleamed from his polished shoes and his luminous tie and his radiant hair as he strode toward us now, his golden hand outstretched. He stopped when he reached us, and the whole circle of reporters stopped with him, leaning into his light. As he rubbed my shoulder, he shook my hand. “You and Alice coming to the banquet tonight?”

  “Alice is still up in the mountains visiting family, but I’ll be there.”

  “Good. And you tell Alice I don’t want to hear any more about her not running for re-election in November. We count on her voice in the General Assembly.” Only then did the governor turn his profile slightly as a camera flashed, and reach for Cuddy’s hand. “Captain Mangum, congratulations again, see you tonight, you’ll be at our table.”

  Cuddy said, “Looking forward to it, Governor,” and withdrew his hand from Brookside’s. We all knew that the “our” in “our table” meant Andy’s wife Lee, the first lady.

  “How is Lee?” I asked.

  “Lee is pe
rfect.” The governor smiled. “Always. She looks forward to seeing you, Cuddy, it’s been a long time.”

  The governor’s wife Lee Brookside had been born Lee Haver, as in Haver County, Haver University, billions of Haver Tobacco Company cigarettes smoked, despite the warnings, by millions of people; as in Haver keys to open Carolina doors for Andy to sprint into the presidency of Haver University and from there to vault into the governor’s mansion. No one doubted that without the first lady, Brookside would never have won that election, a close ugly race against the then current Lieutenant Governor, a cousin of mine. But nothing had ever stopped Andy Brookside from getting where he wanted to be. Maybe, like the old heroes, he had a goddess for a mother who wrapped him in magic and kept him safe.

  First Lady Lee Haver Brookside was the personal reason why Cuddy didn’t like the governor. He was in love with her. He always had been.

  Chapter 3

  Bubba

  There are two things Cuddy and I never talk about, even after all this time together. They both have to do with love.

  One is the death last Christmas of my infant son Copper and the weight of that loss on my marriage to Alice.

  The other is Cuddy’s love of Lee Haver Brookside. They fell in love when they were in their teens; her parents broke it up and I’d always suspected he’d never gotten over her, even during his short marriage to somebody else and his short engagement to Briggs Cadmean’s daughter.

  I’m certain that Lee and Cuddy started seeing each other again after he became police chief and that they were seriously involved during Andy Brookside’s first gubernatorial campaign. I suspect that Cuddy asked Lee to leave Andy and marry him. Cuddy Mangum is not a man who has affairs. I think the relationship was ended by the assassination attempt that sent both Cuddy and Andy to the hospital and almost sent Andy to the morgue. The affair was over, I mean, not the feelings. Cuddy is also not a man who stops loving someone he has loved as long as Lee. Alice and I used to speculate about what had happened. I had never asked him. But I’m a good detective and I notice things.

  “I’m here to see your mayor.” Brookside smiled in his easy confidential way.

  Cuddy nodded. “Well, Carl’s in a real bad mood about this strike. I hope you came with a box of cigars.”

  Cigar-addicted Carl Yarborough, Hillston’s first African-American mayor, was Cuddy’ partner in what Newsweek had called “the booming, bustling, fresh and flourishing New South.” It hadn’t been so fresh this morning when Carl had arrived at the Cadmean Building to find trash bags piled in front of his office by Hillston’s mostly African-American sanitation workers, who had also left a large sign accusing the mayor (unfairly) of contemptible indifference to his racial brothers in the matter of a 6 percent raise. After the protestors had returned to their picket line, I’d seen Carl in the men’s room puffing away in a blue smoky funk.

  Andy Brookside winked at the press. “With my family connections, I guess I could lay my hands on a few cheroots for Carl.” The young reporters laughed with him at the fact that he’d married into tobacco billions. Andy started for the stairs, and then he turned, dropping like a flirtatious handkerchief the possibility that he might have something interesting to say to the press tomorrow, why didn’t they swing by the Capitol to hear it? His teeth and eyes and shirtfront sparkled as he waved good-bye.

  But Shelly Bloom, a young woman at the Sun, scooted up the stairs and blocked him: Was Brookside changing lieutenant governors in his upcoming campaign for reelection? Is that why he was here to see Carl Yarborough? Because Shelly had heard rumors….

  Someone handed Andy a cell phone; he took the call and gestured to Bubba Percy to handle Shelly. Randolph Prewitt Percy—Bubba to us all—a reporter himself before he quit to become the governor’s press secretary, quickly elbowed a path through the crowd and pulled Shelly away from the governor. “Shelly,” he said, “I’ve heard rumors that you’re got Eric Clapton’s name tattooed in a heart on your fanny, and it’s Hewitt here who’s spreading those rumors.” Bubba threw his arm around a disheveled grungy old-timer from KWWB-FM, who collapsed in an embarrassed coughing fit.

  Shelly patted Hewitt’s back. “Percy, don’t you think it’s time for you to join the grown ups?”

  “Not yet,” Bubba said and made as if to kiss her. “First I want to give you a hickey.” As the press snickered, he moved among them, a smart, conceited man, large and pretty, with peachy freckled skin and just on the good side of pudge. “Hi, boys and girls. Who started this little press conference here in the lobby?” He slid next to Cuddy and slapped his back. “Captain Hog! You announcing you finally caught that Guess Who Killer? About time.” Bubba checked his wavy auburn hair in the glass display behind him. “Here you and Mayor Yarborough turn Hillston into Paradiseville, get us profiled on 20/20.” He turned to Cuddy, grinned knowingly. “And then all of a sudden Hillston’s got mad dog killers on the loose and the streets are full of garbage. Doesn’t look good. Make an arrest?”

  Cuddy glared at him. “No, we haven’t made an arrest.”

  Bubba did some loud tsk-tsking sounds. “No? Man, I bet it tears you to bits to have women scared to go out jogging, scared ole Guess Who’s gonna give them a buzz cut from the neck up.” The youngest reporters laughed.

  “Bubba, it tore me to bits for women to go out jogging when you lived in Hillston.” The reporters laughed again. Cuddy then gave Bubba a long friendly squeeze on the shoulder at the trapezius muscle, pinching a nerve until the big man’s smile broke and he jerked loose.

  Ending his call, Andy Brookside asked us if there was still a possibility that G.I. Jane was a local girl. Bubba threw his arms out with a sardonic chortle. “Well, if she was local, she didn’t have enough friends, and if she was just passing through, southern hospitality’s sure not what it used to be.”

  The press chuckled, but without much enthusiasm; most of them aren’t native, and for them, Hospitality is just the name of a fast food chain on the interstate. At this point, Bubba’s cell phone rang. Reporters tried to listen in as he briskly answered it, but he stepped away, moving the governor off to the side with a nod that must have conveyed a clue as to who was calling, for Brookside grabbed eagerly at the phone. After Bubba blocked the reporters’ path, they turned on Cuddy and me. Shelly, the Sun reporter who was always giving me a hard time, took the opportunity to do so again. With her short wings of rich black hair, her sharp nose, and huge inquisitive eyes, she swooped down on me like a small pretty falcon, wanting to know why I was busy turning the homicide division of HPD into a local joke.

  “Seems to me you’re the ones doing that,” I said.

  Shelly abandoned me and tried Cuddy. “Come on, Mangum, is murder the only crime you can get away with in Hillston? What if there’s another G.I. Jane, what if there’s another dozen, before you stumble over the guy because his taillight’s burnt out and there’s a woman’s body in his trunk?”

  Cuddy told Shelly he wasn’t sure what her question was, but that if she was implying we were dealing with a serial killer like Ted Bundy, she shouldn’t be provocative. Despite the two Guess T-shirts, it was possible the Neville and the Balmoral Heights stabbings were isolated. Out of the corner of my eye, I was watching Andy Brookside, who seemed to be passionately engaged with whoever was calling him. From all the way across the room, I could feel him pouring his (considerable) seductive power into the phone. Then he laughed happily and handed the phone back to Bubba, who continued the conversation with the caller.

  Meanwhile Shelly was rubbing Cuddy the wrong way by smiling as she asked if he’d read Fulke Norris’s full-page ad in last Sunday’s Star. In it, North Carolina’s eminent “philosopher poet” had charged the Hillston police with vindictive harassment of his brilliant math professor son, a loving heartsick husband who had emphatically not murdered his wife. The elder Norris was a “state treasure”: Emeritus at the University, he wrote pretty books of spiritua
l poetic advice illustrated with pastel drawings and printed on handsome creamy paper. They sold in the millions (my mother had a shelf full), and Norris’s plangent voice could be heard reading them on public radio from time to time. Norris’s ad (accusing Cuddy of incompetence and bias) had probably precipitated the Star editorial calling for his resignation.

  “I understand Mr. Norris’s reluctance to believe in his son’s guilt,” Cuddy said. “But I think we caught the right man.”

  Shelly couldn’t leave it alone, darting forward with her thin avidity, like a bird snatching at a string. “When are you going to admit you can’t catch Guess Who at all?”

  “I’m not. There are no unsolved homicides in Hillston,” he said flatly.

  “Sixty-five percent of homicides in America are unsolved.”

  Cuddy wheeled around on her. “I don’t know where you’re getting your statistics, Shelly, but there will be no unsolved homicides in Hillston as long as I’m head of HPD. That’s zero percent. Is that clear enough?” The hardness of his voice caught her off guard; his style with the press tended toward the casually facetious, but now he was even jabbing his finger an inch from her startled face. “And hey, about Professor Norris? Why don’t we let a jury decide on his guilt or innocence instead of you folks and his father? Isaac Rosethorn can flit around like a fat old Tinker Bell throwing fairy dust in your faces, but if Norris shot his wife, I don’t care if he invented algebra and his father is goddamn Billy Graham!”

  The huddle of reporters stared at him, even Bubba Percy and the governor looked over. Cuddy caught himself and laughed. “Please don’t tell Isaac I called him a fat old Tinker Bell.” Everyone looked relieved as he went on in his normal, wry, easy style. “I apologize, Shelly. But I don’t want to hear how you can get away with murder in Hillston. There’s nobody smart enough to do that. I will catch Guess Who. I guarantee it.”