Cuddy was peering around the bulging district attorney in order to see into the room as Mitch added in the repetitive way habitual with him, “The sheriff’s department will deal with this. This is outside Hillston limits.”
“Actually, it’s not.” Cuddy shook his finger in a teacherly way at the D.A.’s nose. “Actually The Fifth Season has a Hillston R3 zone and a City of Hillston registered liquor license.” (I’m always amazed that Cuddy knows these kinds of details. But, as I say, he loves the town; it’s the world to him.) “So it’s HPD business, I do believe. And it’s a big fucking stick of dynamite that I don’t think we want Homer Louge blowing up in our faces.”
Mitch puffed out annoyance. “Don’t curse at me, Mangum. What’s there to blow up? We’ve got a simple suicide.”
“You’ve got a crowd, Mitch, is what you’ve got.” In the room were two state troopers, a young field agent from the State Bureau of Investigation, whom I knew to be the county coroner’s nephew, and two deputies who’d followed us inside and were huddled around Sheriff Louge. Cuddy waved at Attorney General Ward Trasker across the room, now urgently insisting on something to Bubba Percy. Bubba didn’t look happy. Signaled to leave by Trasker, the state troopers stepped through the french doors to a secluded swimming pool that I could see lit up beyond the patio. Once outside, they stood gazing at the water as if they’d love to jump in it.
Cuddy started jotting the names of the people there in a little spiral notepad he always carried with him. As he did, he asked Mitch Bazemore, “So, if it’s no problem and if the sheriff’s handling everything, what’s a Bureau agent doing here, and state troopers, not to mention the attorney general, not to mention you, Mitch? Your wife said you were out. But she didn’t say you were out here in the woods, way past the midnight hour.”
I smiled at the district attorney. “Yeah, why are all you people here?” He couldn’t control his eyes and they flicked over to Ward Trasker and back.
That chain of command was obvious. Who else but a high-ranking man like Attorney General Trasker could have brought so many different state officials to an unreported suicide in a private hotel suite in the middle of the woods after midnight? But who had sent Trasker? Not Bubba; he wasn’t that good an actor. Could Andy have called the attorney general himself?
Homer Louge, in full uniform and still wearing his white plastic hospital bracelet, heard my question and ambled over. “Y’all the ones don’t need to be here,” he told us, “So say good night.”
Cuddy looked around at the crowd. “Homer, sorry to hear you had a heart attack—”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, you can’t keep a good man down. Maybe I’m just a Mavis fan too, folks, came out here to join y’alls candlelight vigil over the body. Where is the body by the way?”
I pushed past Bazemore and Louge while they frenetically tried to read what Cuddy was writing. Cuddy followed me, still taking names.
Number Eight Bungalow was in Art Deco style and evoked a Flying Down to Rio set—white ceiling fans, tile floors, and lacquered cabinets. It had a living room large enough to do the carioca in, polished heart-of-pine floors, and the sort of curvy blonde and black deco furniture that Fred and Ginger might have tossed each other across in one of their finales. Except tonight it looked as if Fred and Ginger had used it instead to call the whole thing off. Chairs were knocked over, lamps broken, drawers askew. On the near wall there was a gigantic 1920s poster of Le Train Bleu steaming through the Riviera. Its glass was shattered. On the far wall there was a great deal of blood. It darkened both the floor and the hemp of a sisal rug. The chalk outline of a body drawn on the floor looked small and bleak. I tried hard not to see Mavis Mahar lying inside those lines.
Cuddy knelt down and touched the stains on the floorboards. I pointed his attention to a blood-smear streaked sideways across the plaster a foot above the baseboard. A trace of blood that looked scrubbed could be faintly seen on the wall that led to the bedroom. Cuddy called to the sheriff. “So where’s Miss Mahar, Homer? Bubba claims there was a body in here, and it sure looks like he was right. Bubba, didn’t you say you stopped by, saw Mavis Mahar dead on the floor and left her here, just a little while ago?” Cuddy pointed at the chalk outline. “Was this it? Body was right like this?”
Bubba mumbled back, “Why don’t you talk to the attorney general here? He’s your host, not me.”
That seemed to be the case. Attorney General Trasker stepped in front of the sheriff and D.A. both. He started off in a friendly way with a sorrowful nod. “Cuddy, this is real sad situation we’ve got here. She was a big star, and this is a big loss. For some unhappy reason she held a gun to her face and pulled the trigger. Terrible thing, suicide. But these rock stars, just seems to keep happening to them, doesn’t it? A flash across the sky, then they’re gone.” He was moving slowly through the room, picking up strewn clothes, looking behind chairs and tables. “Sheriff Louge here has things under—”
Cuddy interrupted, his arms crossed in a stubborn way I knew well. “This is a suspicious death within the Hillston city limits. Last I heard, I was chief of Hillston police.” His words fought past his clenched teeth: “I’d like to know why this room doesn’t even look dusted. I’d like any video and Polaroids of the body.”
“There’s no video,” Trasker looked hard at the young NCBI agent who nodded back in agreement.
“No video? Great. That’s great.” Cuddy wrote in his notebook. “Who removed her body, Ward?”
Trasker nodded with mournful affability. “Well, Homer called…”
Louge said, “We had Pauley and Keene take her away.”
Cuddy’s eyes turned to blue ice. “Pauley and Keene? You gave her to a private mortuary? You gave a body with a gunshot wound to the head to a private mortuary before the Hillston M.E. looked at her?!”
The A.G. turned to the D.A. Mitch tightened his grip on his biceps. “Osmond Bingley examined her and released her.”
Osmond Bingley was the Haver County Coroner. He was an old nepotism appointee with no training in forensic pathology, and he did whatever Mitchell Bazemore told him; he even went on wilderness hikes through the Pisgah National Forest every August with Mitch’s Clean Teens for Christ Club, something Mitch’s own children refused to do.
The two sheriff’s deputies were now wandering around admiring the knickknacks. One of them stepped in a pool of blood.
Cuddy turned and yelled at him, “Back off, kid! Now!” The young deputy froze, looked down at the tiles where a red imprint of his shoes had followed him like the Invisible Man. Embarrassed, he stepped backwards.
Homer rubbed his gray flattop furiously. “Don’t you order my boys around.”
“Then stop these imbecilic ox-heads,” he pointed at the sheriff’s men, “from stampeding through a crime scene with no gloves on, tracking blood on the goddamn floor!” Cuddy raised his voice loud enough for the state troopers on the terrace to hear. “Ward, you want to stop looking for whatever you’re looking for and tell me why you guys are even over here?” He moved closer to the A.G. “You want me to guess who sent you? Want me to guess why? Want me to start talking real loud about that particular individual right here and now in front of all these troopers and deputies?”
Everybody stared at him. Trasker quickly instructed the curious deputies to go join the troopers outside by the pool. Homer turned sullen when he was told to go with his men. Then the A.G. closed the french doors firmly behind them, leaving only himself, Bubba, and Mitch in the room with Cuddy and me. Trasker smiled in a queasy way. “Let’s everybody calm down. I don’t know why Mr. Percy here,” he glared at Bubba who had opened the minibar and was pouring the little bottles of liquor he found there into a big plastic go-cup, “thought it necessary to bother you about this, Cuddy, but this is not a Hillston police matter.”
“This is just a suicide,” Mitchell Bazemore reminded us yet again.
>
Cuddy turned to him. “You came an awful long way at an awful odd time for a suicide.”
Ward Trasker smiled with remarkable inappropriateness. “She was a big star. There are sensitive media issues.”
“And it’s even odder all of you got here in time to do all the things you’ve done. Because Bubba tells me he was the first person to see Mavis Mahar lying on the floor of this room in a mess of blood and that it was half-past midnight when he left her lying here and he didn’t tell anybody and he drove straight to River Rise to let me know we needed to keep Andy Brookside out of it.”
“Cuddy, for Christ sake!” Bubba sputtered.
“What’s Mangum talking about?” Mitch’s head snapped back and forth like flies were chasing him. “Why’s the governor have to be kept out of this?”
It was clear that Bazemore had not been fully briefed. It was equally clear that Ward Trasker knew about the affair from the way he was furiously glaring at Bubba Percy while Mitch stared baffled at him.
Just then Bubba’s cell phone rang loudly; he scurried with it to the end of the room, then with a flushed look gestured furiously to Ward Trasker to join him. Trasker looked at the phone as if it were a tarantula he was supposed to pick up and put to his ear.
Cuddy moved over beside the D.A. “Mitch, come on, don’t be their patsy. You’ve got a room looks like a cyclone hit it, you’ve got a dead body with her brains smeared on the walls. That’s a suspicious death, you treat it the way you would a homicide. The body goes to our M.E. at our morgue. It doesn’t go to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home! You secure the scene, you dust, you video. Look at this! Homer’s Bigfoot boys slipping and sliding in blood, just like they did at the Tyler Norris house. Is that what we want?”
Cuddy was rubbing salt in a wound. Bazemore took pride in his conviction rate, but odds were that he was going to lose the Norris case, in part because his great enemy Isaac Rosethorn had successfully—and gleefully—offered proof that the state’s evidence had been contaminated by the sheriff’s men who’d been first on the scene.
“Come on, Mitch, do we want another case blown from the get-go?”
“It’s a suicide.” Mitch’s body tightened defensively. “Ward and all these officers were already here and already told me it was a suicide when I drove over with Osmond—”
Cuddy nodded. “It was Ward who told you to bring Osmond?”
Mitch blinked, worried. “Ward wanted the body someplace safe and settled before the press got hold of the news. That made sense to me. You know what those vultures are like with celebrities. So he asked me to bring Osmond. I saw her lying there with a gun in her hand. There wasn’t any question in Osmond’s mind about suicide.”
Cuddy’s mouth twisted ironically. “Well, now, as I recall, there’s rarely a question or an answer either in our county coroner’s mind. Didn’t he tell us John Wintergrass had drowned himself when it turned out he’d been shot four times before somebody dumped him in the reservoir?”
Mitch’s thick line of eyebrows furrowed. “You think this wasn’t a suicide?”
“How would I know? That’s what investigations are for.” Cuddy waved his arms around. “Was everything torn up like this when you got here? Has anything been removed? Besides the goddamn body?”
Mitch shook his head on its thick corded neck. “Nothing. Nobody’s taken a single thing.”
The A.G. Ward Trasker tried to keep an eye on me but was distracted by Bubba’s handing him the cell phone. Whatever was said to him was said fast because he turned immediately purple, then handed the phone back, sat down, and put his head between his legs. While Cuddy drew Mitch into a corner and started writing down what he said, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
The red tulips Mavis had been holding at the Tucson lay in a wilted tangle on a dresser. The black top and black jeans I’d seen her wearing lay in a pile on the floor. Empty bottles—wine, whiskey, beer—cluttered a pale blue rug in a bay window, looking like messages floating on the sea. Someone had swept glass from a broken bottle into a neat pile in a corner. There were flamboyant clothes and bizarre jewelry all over the bed and the chairs; the strangest was a straw hat in the ribbon of whose brim was stuck a circle of small white candles.
Carefully I made my way through tangled sheets and stale room service meals into the master bathroom where a chaotic jumble of strewn make-up covered the counters. A trail of used towels led to a frosted glass shower door. I opened it. By lying on its tiled floor, I could see a miniscule thread of blood around the cap of the shower drain. Also interesting was a chunk of gouged-out grout and a big crack spidering through the tiles in the back wall of the stall. Luxury places like The Fifth Season don’t let their accommodations get rundown. I gave the shower walls a careful look with a flashlight.
When I finished, Bubba was off his cell phone and hissing at the A.G. “Well, he sure as fuck didn’t figure you’d invite in the National Guard! He says get all these people out of here now.”
Trasker had a green scared look. “None of those officers know anything about this except it’s a celebrity suicide.”
Bubba was skeptical. “Yeah, and I don’t know you were boffing your brother’s wife at the Charlotte Marriott either.”
Now the attorney general went dead white as Mitch and Cuddy turned to stare at him. Quickly Ward stepped out to the terrace and spoke to Louge, who started hustling troopers and deputies back through the room and sending them out to their cars with thanks for helping out, everything was under control now. Everyone but Bubba went outside to watch the exit as the puzzled lawmen drove off into the night, leaving only Nancy and Roid under the trees with the HPD forensics officers who’d just arrived. I saw our medical examiner Dick Cohen grouchily join them in his Bermuda shorts and baggy T-shirt, his long thin hairy legs as pale as they had been the day he’d first come South twenty years ago and announced that he’d never go outdoors in this heat if he could help it. Cuddy was pacing under the terrace lights, yelling at Bazemore and Trasker, while Homer Louge leaned against a pine tree and smirked. I heard Cuddy threaten Ward Trasker with a call to Channel Seven if the A.G. didn’t instruct Mitch to get on the phone to the brain-dead coroner and have Mavis Mahar’s body transferred immediately from Pauley and Keene mortuary to our city morgue.
As I came back into the suite, I caught Bubba crawling on the floor under the bed. He dragged out a balled-up man’s raincoat, stood casually, and draped it over his arm as if he’d walked in with it. I had no doubt that the once nice Italian coat belonged to Andy Brookside, but I pretended not to notice what Bubba was doing with it. When I touched his arm, he jumped. “Bubba, you need to straighten some things out for me. Do you know what this is all about?” I pointed at the straw hat with the candles.
He looked at it. “Jesus, I’ve got no idea. But Mavis was a total kookamonga. One minute she won’t even wear silk because it’s not fair to the worms. Next time you see her she’s got on a zebra belt and ostrich feathers in her hair.”
“Let’s start back at the beginning. You got here, you knocked, nobody answered, and—”
“Justin, Christ, I already told you all this!”
“Tell me again. You know what they say: we can do it here or we can do it downtown.”
As Bubba babbled out his story, I could tell he was simultaneously thinking through his very messy situation and how he best might be able to get himself out of it. “So Andy had told me she’d been wasted when he saw her and I heard she’d missed her concert, so I thought maybe she’d passed out inside. I could hear her CD going when I got here. It was old blues junk. Mavis had told Andy how Janis Joplin got ‘Ball ’n Chain’ from this old black woman so Andy had me find her the CD—that’s the kind of crap I do in my job, can you believe—so he gave it to her yesterday and that’s what was on.”
“Music was playing when you opened the door?”
“Yeah.” Bubba pointed at
a CD player on the bar. “Nobody but her would have been listening to that shit, so I went in.”
I said, “I wouldn’t call Big Mama Thornton ‘shit.’” I looked at the CD player. The volume had been turned completely down, but the machine was actually still on and still programmed to keep repeating the Thornton Vanguard Complete Recordings. I turned up the volume. Thornton was wailing “Hound Dog.”
Bubba snapped back into focus. “Well, hell, Justin, take the damn CD. Mavis won’t be needing it anymore.”
I hit “Stop.” “Bubba, I’ve got a problem. I bet you know what it is. The way you described things to Cuddy and me is not the way things looked when we got here. You agree?” He kept his eyes on his go-cup cocktail. “Now you said the lights were off when you walked in?”
He folded the raincoat over twice, but not before I saw the bloodstain on its liner. “But the bedroom light was on. That was enough to see her.”
“Propped up and facing the front door so you could see her face?”
He started for the patio again. “Stop bugging me about this.”
Grabbing his arm, I pulled him over to the chalk outline. “Bubba, come on.” I pointed down at the floor. “This isn’t even where you saw her, is it?” He just glared at me. “And where was the gun?”
“The gun?”
“If she shot herself, there was a gun, right, Bubba?”
He flushed. “Of course there was a gun. It was, yeah, I guess it was lying on the rug somewhere.”
“Not in her hand?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did it look like?”
He stared at me. “Like a gun. How should I know?”
“Big? Small? Black? Gray?”
He thought. “I don’t remember.”
“What was she wearing?”
Bubba flinched and chewed at his lip. “I’m not sure.”
“Clothes? Naked?”
“I don’t remember! Leave me alone!”
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