“Yeah.” His nose twitched and he rubbed at it angrily. He was lying.
“You sure you didn’t tell Andy at the banquet tonight, around 11:30? I saw you come back in, looking green in the face, and you hauled Andy out of there. You knew she was dead then, didn’t you?” I shook him.
“What’s with you, Justin?”
“You just walk over her body and drive back to the Governor’s Mansion for some pork medallions? Jesus!” I shoved him away from me.
He muttered something obscene at me.
“Don’t fuck with us, Bubba,” I yanked him around to face me. “You not only won’t get any help with your ‘problem,’ you’ll spend some unpleasant time where there won’t be any mirrors to comb your hair in.”
“Back off, Savile.” He jerked away from me again, huddling with my beer behind the Tarheels blanket. “It’s freezing in here!”
They’d transferred Cuddy. Now he was ordering a team from the ID section to hurry to the resort.
I stepped around Bubba so he’d have to look at me. “Why’d you go to The Fifth Season to see Mavis Mahar?”
“To find out why she’d missed her concert.”
“What do you care why she missed her concert? And how’d you know about this ‘retreat’ if it was so secret? You over there to check on her for Andy? Andy having an affair with her?”
He shook his head vehemently. “He knew her casually, from a few fundraisers.”
“Yeah sure, Bubba.”
I heard Cuddy on the phone now to Dick Cohen, the medical examiner, waking him up.
Bubba faced me. “I swear. I’d gotten word she’d skipped out on her concert at Haver. None of her people could locate her, so I told Andy. That’s what you saw me doing at the banquet. Then afterwards, I thought I’d go check on her.”
“I repeat, what’s her skipping a concert to you or Andy?”
“Andy facilitated Haver’s letting Mavis sing in the stadium. They were worried there’d be problems. He felt responsible.”
I said, “Bullshit.” He glared at me. “You hop in your car past midnight to check on this woman all the way out at The Fifth Season just because she’s a political acquaintance of the governor’s and he’s looking out for Haver University?” No answer. “If Mavis Mahar was already dead, how’d you get into her bungalow?’”
He grumbled into the Tarheels wrap.
“What?”
“The door was open.”
“Rock stars don’t leave their doors open.”
“Well, it was. But I was figuring she’d let me in.”
“Even though you and Andy didn’t know her very well?”
“Don’t start with me, Savile.” He stirred himself into indignation. “Look, I could have just gone home and crashed and kept my mouth shut.”
“You haven’t told anybody? You didn’t tell the governor?”
He looked away from me. “No, nobody.”
Cuddy was holding the door open, “Let’s go. “
I kicked Bubba to his feet.
We sped along the Old 28 in our borrowed cruiser, this time with siren and barlight flashers, on our way to the northern shore of Pine Hills Lake. Cuddy’s apartment was on the opposite side of town; the ID team and the M.E. would get there sooner than we would. Bubba perched forward in the back seat, fingers squeezed into the wire mesh that separated us, insisting that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that if I threatened him with jail again he’d have my badge. He represented the governor of this state for fuck’s sake. This was a suicide by Mavis Mahar, a world-famous recording artist; this wasn’t some cheesy carhop mattress-banger ODing on a big bottle of discount aspirin because some poonhound with a Kmart franchise had gone back to his wife.
Cuddy wheeled around in his seat. “Bubba, shut up. We ask you a question, you answer it, you don’t do anything else.” There was something in Cuddy’s face that scared even the impervious Percy because at least for a while he did exactly that. Not that his answers to Cuddy’s questions bore much relation to the truth. He persisted in his claim that the governor and the rock star had been no more than political acquaintances with a shared affinity for saving wildlife and housing victims of ethnic cleansing. His press secretary voice had a syrupy sincerity to it that made him sound strangely like Ronald Reagan. “Well, what Andy and Mavis shared was all the causes they were both committed to and that’s all they shared.”
Cuddy said, “Bubba, don’t practice on us. I swear I’ll book you for leaving the scene. Was Brookside alone with her in that bungalow?”
Bubba admitted that the governor had dropped by Mavis’s Fifth Season suite alone, briefly, twice. Yesterday afternoon, to say hello. Was he responsible for the star’s hour-late arrival at her first Haver concert? Absolutely not. But the governor had been concerned about her not showing up at her second concert and he’d asked Bubba to go check on her.
Cuddy asked why Miss Mahar would share with a casual acquaintance like the governor (and his press secretary), the address of her secret hideaway. Bubba shrugged; Mavis was friendly and unpredictable. She had once given a Cartier watch to the maid cleaning her hotel bathroom.
Cuddy nodded. “Mmmm, that does sound friendly. I’m sorry I didn’t meet Ms. Mahar in time to scrub out her sink. How ’bout today? When was Brookside there today?”
The governor’s second visit this afternoon had been even briefer than his first. In fact, Bubba was willing to tell us that the governor had found Miss Mahar so “inebriated” and “on edge” that he had left The Fifth Season almost immediately and had never seen her again.
Maybe it was true that Andy had left immediately. Maybe he had finally grasped the folly of spending time alone with an alcoholic diva capable of inviting the tabloid paparazzi to photograph her, as she had done with the congressman on the steps of the Nashville landmark. If Andy had the slightest interest in preserving his career, not to mention his marriage and presumably his self-respect, from the same media meltdown that had vaporized this politician in Tennessee, he must have known it was time to tell Mavis Mahar good-bye and god bless.
I called over my shoulder as I raced the cruiser toward the resort. “You keep saying Andy went back over there this afternoon?”
Bubba threw out vaguely, “Yeah, three, four….”
I glanced in the rear view mirror. “Make it earlier or later, Bubba.”
“What are you talking about?” he snarled.
Cuddy also peered at me inquisitively. I checked the press secretary’s face in the mirror as I said, “I’m talking about my seeing Mavis Mahar in downtown Hillston at three o’clock. In the Tucson, entertaining the kitchen staff with country songs. She was still there at quarter-to-six.”
Cuddy, who was eating some of the cheese crackers he carried in his pocket, wanted to know why I’d been hanging out in the Tucson bar from three to quarter-to-six. I said I hadn’t been hanging out. Walking home for my keys, I’d seen a limousine at the bar door and had wondered what such a car was doing at a place like that. Mavis was inside. The car was still there when I drove past three hours later.
“Her limo?” he asked.
I said I didn’t know whose limo it was, but the one waiting for Mavis Mahar outside the Tucson had the same license plate as the one that had delivered Governor Brookside—late—to the Governor’s Gala tonight.
Bubba’s throat noises grew increasingly violent; this one sounded like he was being garroted. “That’s not true.”
I nodded at him in the mirror. “Yes, it is. The plate number is BAC 5768. It wasn’t the official state limo, which is NC 1. It was a private car. By the way, Bubba, I’ve noticed your license plate too. RPP 241. Cute. Randolph Prewitt Percy. Two for one. Two what for one?”
Bubba mumbled. “Leave me alone.”
Cuddy twisted around to say to Bubba, “Start over. Try the truth.”
&n
bsp; “I’m telling you the truth. I drove all the way over to your place to tell you the truth.”
“Bubba, you wouldn’t drive to River Rise at one A.M. to tell me I’d won the Nobel Prize unless we had a deal to split the money. There’s something you can’t handle, which is why you need me to keep Brookside out of it. Otherwise, you’d have stepped over Mavis’s body and let that maid with the Cartier watch find her in the morning.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” he whined.
Cuddy replied with his sardonic snort. “You don’t have a clue what folks trying to do the right thing do when they walk in on a woman who’s shot herself. They call 911. They hang around ’til an ambulance gets there.”
“You’re police, I came to you. Can I have one of those crackers?”
Cuddy said the packet wouldn’t fit through the mesh. “So what puts Brookside too close to wiggle out of? She leave a note blaming him for this?”
Bubba gagged loudly. “Oh Jesus fuck, I hope not!”
Cuddy nodded at me. “Well, I guess it’s not that.”
I said, “Maybe somebody saw Andy with her there tonight.”
Cuddy watched Bubba. “Maybe that’s why the maid got the watch.”
Bubba turned sullen. “I’m not answering any more hostile questions.”
At that moment, I was jackknifing into the turn for The Fifth Season Resort, whose stone gateway was so discreet that it was almost impossible to see it until it was too late. I cut the siren and slowed down enough to flash my badge out the window at the security guard. He waved us through with such a lack of surprise that Cuddy said, “Our folks already got here.”
We drove past the main house of the resort; despite the late hour, lights glowed from the windows and its large parking lot was filled with luxury cars. We could even hear a group of people laughing on the verandah. Obviously, they didn’t know that one of their fellow guests had killed herself, or if they’d heard, they didn’t care.
A decade ago, a hotel-resort like The Fifth Season would have been inconceivable only five miles from Hillston, North Carolina. But as soon as it opened, would-be cosmopolites, looking for the rich life in a hurry, booked every room before the Frette sheets even went on the Biedermeyer sleigh beds. Now reservations need to be made a year in advance. That’s how fast new money has come to our area. In The Fifth Season, at an exorbitant fee, the middle class can live for a few luxurious days the way glamorous people presumably live (according to shelter magazines) all the time. The main house had lobbies and bars that mimicked an English country manor and offered guests an anglophilic fantasy of convivial cocktails with Lord Title and Lady Hyphen. There were dozens of deep soft plaid and striped armchairs beside dozens of glossy end tables and round tables and gaming tables, on top of which were hundreds of china pugs and porcelain grenadiers and leather hat boxes. On the green lacquered walls hung nineteenth-century oils of nobody’s ancestors in particular.
Bermuda might have been a more fitting site than Pine Hills Lake for the resort’s crescent beach with its imported pink sand. The huge lake had never been as exclusive as my great-grandparents would have liked, and now it was even less so: most of the big private houses on the north cove, with their gazebos and hundred-year-old trees, had to look over at the south cove’s little summer rentals with their aluminum boats tied to rotted wood poles and their tether balls hung from poles on scruffy lawns. But The Fifth Season had completely blocked any view of the south cove with fast-growing evergreens. Hidden in those trees were pink plastered, tile-roofed bungalows dotted about the ten private acres—many with their own pools and hot tubs. These bungalows in the pines provided the sort of sumptuous protected privacy needed by people like Mavis Mahar.
Bubba directed us along the clandestine gravel drive to Bungalow Eight on so dark and convoluted a lane that, as I swung into the last turn, I nearly hit a black Lincoln sedan I didn’t expect to see there. In fact, none of us—and that includes Bubba in the back seat muttering “What the fuck?”—expected what we ran into. As Cuddy had predicted, one of our HPD squad cars had already arrived on the scene, but it was a latecomer. Parked between it and the bungalow, five other official cars sat helter-skelter under the landscaped trees. On a terrace beside the bungalow, tall young men milled aimlessly around beneath outdoor lights. They looked as if they’d been playing basketball when somebody had suddenly run off with their ball. I recognized two deputies from the sheriff’s office.
“Okay,” said Cuddy. “What’s going on, Bubba?”
The press secretary banged his head on the mesh between him and the front seat. “You think I know? Jesus Christ, fuckin’ Barbara Walters could be in there taping! Somebody called the cops. And it wasn’t me.”
It wasn’t the Hillston cops they’d called either. It was higher up. Yellow tape with the Haver County Coroner’s seal on it crossed the front of Bungalow Eight. Under a small covered entryway, wearing the same too-tight tuxedo in which he’d been squirming earlier tonight at the Gala, stood Ward Trasker, the attorney general of the state. With him in the open door was Hillston’s district attorney, the strenuously virile and fervently moralistic Mitchell Bazemore, a courtroom warrior who was always asking for the death penalty and usually getting it. Seeing Mitch there was a surprise. I’d never known him to visit a suicide scene, yet here he was at two in the morning far from home checking out Mavis Mahar’s death. Clearly this was the “business” that the D.A. had already been called away on when Cuddy had spoken with his wife.
And that meant Mitch had been called away long before Bubba arrived at Cuddy’s, and that meant somebody had told Mitch about Mavis Mahar long before Bubba claimed to have been the first person to find her body, and that meant that Bubba was lying about the time he’d found it. But we already knew Bubba was lying. What we didn’t know was who had called Mitch and told him to come out here. The look on Bubba’s face suggested strongly that he wasn’t to blame. In fact, I’d say he was more upset to see who was there than we were.
Chapter 8
All the King’s Soldiers
Cuddy jumped out of the patrol car and hurried toward Nancy Caleb-White as she ran from her cruiser. She was shouting, “I heard it on the dispatch so I came out. Nothing I could do, Chief—”
Cuddy asked her, “Our ID team inside? And where’s Dick?” (Dick Cohen, our medical examiner.)
“They sent him back. And they sent the ambulance back. They said they already took Mavis away.” Nancy shook her head. “I swear, they’d sealed the whole place and told us to back off, how they’re handling it and we’re out of our jurisdiction, so when our ID guys got here, they just turned around and left, and me and Roid were waiting for you!” Nancy gets hyped when she meets resistance. “They won’t let us in. Right, Roid?”
Detective Sergeant John Emory ran toward us. “Right, I tried, Chief,” he called. “But the attorney general’s here!”
The word “Roid” had long ago lost its origins (it was short for Hemorrhoid as well as a play on “Emory”). Nancy had given John the nickname in his early days at HPD. She said she’d never met anyone so anal as this bookish middle-class African-American with a military school background. He and Nancy were better friends now, and both passionately loyal to Cuddy Mangum, the only police chief under whom they’d ever served. Nancy added eagerly, “But we told them you were coming, Chief, and you weren’t gonna take their shit.”
“Who’s them?” Cuddy asked, still moving toward the bungalow door. Bubba, by sprinting ahead, was already inside. “Who sealed off the scene? Who brought the coroner in?”
Roid, in an immaculate taupe linen suit with perfectly knotted chestnut tie, stopped himself from standing at attention as he answered. “Sheriff Louge is here. He says it’s county business. D.A. Bazemore came with the coroner. I don’t know why Ward Trasker’s here.”
“Any press?”
“Not yet.”
I asked, “And the body’s definitely gone?”
“Way before we got here.”
Cuddy patted Emory’s shoulder. “Back the press off if they do show. Radio the ID guys, tell them to turn around, come back. Call Dick Cohen too. And Nance, get me a timetable, I want to know exactly who showed when.”
Fiercely improvisational, insubordinate, and slapdash, Nancy may have had trouble with hierarchy, but there was no one better one-on-one in the ranks; everybody liked her. Hurrying over to the nearest sheriff’s deputy now, she threw her arm around him. “Hey Frank, how you doing, buddy?” I could hear her starting in about how she’d tried to take her niece Danielle to the Mavis Mahar concert tonight and how Danielle was in tears, and now wait’ll she had to tell Danielle that Mavis was dead! So why’d they bring all these big shots over on a suicide anyhow?
Cuddy called me away, “Justin, get in there, okay?”
I ran to keep up with him.
At the bungalow door, D.A. Mitchell Bazemore was blocking our way. He showed us his biceps folded over his chest. Mitch lifted weights in his office and kept his shirtsleeves rolled high so everybody could follow the results. He and Cuddy clashed all the time. Mitch blew out the words, “Mangum, what’re you doing here?” Perhaps he pumped so much iron he breathed that way without thinking. “We’ve got a suicide and the sheriff’s handling it.”
Cuddy looked around, then mildly asked, “How’s the sheriff doing that, Mitch, when he’s in Haver Hospital in ICU?”
“Well obviously Homer was discharged,” Mitch addressed his remark to me as if I’d been the one who’d challenged him; he disliked me more than he did Cuddy. Once he’d oddly told me—after I’d been employed by the Hillston Police Department for twelve years—“At least Mangum works for a living.” I suppose it was an uninformed jab at my family background (he thought we were rich), and what he really meant was, “At least Mangum has to work for a living.” The D.A. confused class with wealth—often the case with those who lack the former.
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