First Lady

by Michael Malone

Voices rose. Cuddy’s two ostensible superiors, the Haver County district attorney and the state’s attorney general, barged back inside with him, all arguing loudly. Cuddy was shaking his cell phone at them, saying that this was a Hillston case and he was the chief of the Hillston police, and if Bazemore and Trasker didn’t back up and back off, he’d go straight to CeeCee Cane at Channel Seven. He’d apparently wormed out of the terrified NCBI agent (Ted Bingley, the coroner’s nephew) that Ted had taken Polaroids of the scene and before Trasker could stop him, the young agent had handed them over to Cuddy. Cuddy now passed them angrily to me. There were only two shots of the body, both poorly done from the same angle. Mavis had a large raincoat over her that covered her head, but her legs and arms looked bare. She lay where they’d drawn the chalk outline, on her stomach with her arm outflung. There was a small silvery gun in her right hand.

  I handed the pictures back to Cuddy. “I thought Mitch said nothing was moved from the scene besides the body.”

  Bazemore yelled at me, “Nothing’s been removed from this scene! Absolutely nothing but the corpse! What do you think, public officials are robbing a dead woman?”

  “Well, that too,” I nodded. “Because a while ago I saw Deputy Eddie Boggs walk off stuffing a gold scarf of Miss Mahar’s in his pocket. But what I more had in mind was, if Mavis Mahar shot herself, where’s the gun?”

  Chapter 9

  Dermott Quinn

  It is axiomatic that suicides do not dispose of their weapons after the fact, and certainly not after they’ve been photographed dead holding the weapons. Nevertheless, a thorough search produced no gun anywhere in Bungalow Eight. Mitch assumed it had been bagged before he arrived. Ward Trasker called in Homer Louge who said he’d seen a gun in the victim’s hand but couldn’t say where it was now. The attorney general and the district attorney accused the sheriff of allowing an underling to remove the suicide weapon from the premises; they did so with such vehemence that I was convinced neither of them did know where the gun was. After they finished blaming Homer, they called in everybody who was left—none of whom had even been inside the place until that moment—and blamed them. Then Homer, Ward, and Mitch all three turned on Bubba Percy and accused him of removing the gun for obscure reasons of his own.

  Bubba indignantly denied having taken the weapon. In fact, he now confessed that he hadn’t gotten within fifteen feet of the dead woman and wasn’t sure if he’d noticed a gun at all. I forced him to look at the Polaroids of the body and he turned green.

  Cuddy was advising Mitch to call Pauley and Keene mortuary to see if they’d taken a weapon along with them in their goddamn van. Or call the goddamn half-wit Osmond Bingley—maybe the coroner had kept the gun as a souvenir. The young NCBI agent mumbled rather wistfully that he didn’t want to hear Cuddy insulting his uncle. Cuddy told him that insulting his uncle would be a fucking impossibility.

  Mitch was rattled. “I’m sick of your cursing at us, Mangum! It’s offensive.”

  Cuddy was steaming. “Offensive? What’s offensive is the criminal activity being committed in this room by state officials! Come on in, Dick.” Cuddy pointed a disgruntled Dick Cohen at the suite’s bedroom while Ward tried to keep the HPD forensics team behind Dick from entering the premises.

  Bubba Percy hurried out the terrace doors with the governor’s raincoat in one hand and his drink from the minibar in the other. Assuming he wasn’t going anywhere far, I let him leave and followed Dick Cohen into the bathroom. The M.E. was annoyed. He’d been brought twice to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and then told there was no body out here anyhow and he needed to get the body from a funeral parlor that was only half a mile from his house! While Dick was grousing, I showed our forensics photographer Chuck Grant the thin line of dried blood on the shower drain and the shattered tiles on the back wall. I pointed out what looked like strands of short gold-brown hair. We bagged them. He took photos.

  Cuddy stuck his head in the door. “So we saying she got shot in here and was moved later?”

  I gestured toward the living room. “Yeah, I think she was moved after Bubba saw her. So if the killer moved her, he was still around when Bubba waltzed in and he’s damn lucky he’s not at Pauley and Keene’s too.”

  Cuddy pointed at the crack in the shower wall. “No slug in there?”

  I said somebody had chiseled it out of the tiles, either the killer or the crowd in the next room. “But I don’t know why they’d do it unless—”

  He nodded. “I know why they’d do it. Go see if Bubba’s too deep in this muck to haul him out.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Out on the landscaped slate terrace, the night sky was so clear I could see the full moon in the water of the swimming pool. The press secretary stood staring at it sadly. I said, “Bubba, running off with Andy’s Armani won’t solve your problem. It’s got her blood on the liner.” Startled, he dropped the coat on the glass table beside him. “And despite Ward’s best efforts, don’t you bet Andy’s prints are going to be all over this bungalow, not to mention other more personal residue of his here and there?”

  Bubba had the decency to blush—either at my sexual implication or at my catching him with Andy’s raincoat—until his whole freckled face was nearly the color of his auburn hair. “Savile,” he snarled tiredly, “why go testing for Andy’s semen? She shot herself.”

  “Not if there’s no gun.”

  “Of course there’s a fucking gun! Chuck Pauley probably slipped it into his hearse and he’s off hawking it on eBay right now, same as that deputy’s doing with her gold scarf!”

  I sat down on the blue-cushioned teak deck chair next to his. “And she didn’t shoot herself in two different rooms either. That’s just too hard to do, even for a superstar.”

  “I don’t know what you mean!”

  “Yes you do. Somebody moved her body from the shower to the living room. Before you saw her. Or after. Which?”

  Not only did Bubba look terrible (his skin clammy, his eyes webbed with blood-veins), but he was actually ripping out little curly strands of his beloved hair. “I’m fucked up here,” he finally confessed, sounding almost poignant. “All I wanted was to get a discreet official closure on her suicide without bringing in a mob of yahoos. That’s why I came to Cuddy. I wanted to keep Andy out of it and then tomorrow, you know, somebody would quietly announce she’d passed away.”

  “‘Passed away?’ Well, I suppose that’s one way to put having your face shot off. So what happened to your idea?”

  Bubba sighed. “About what would happen if you stuck dynamite up a duck’s ass. Ward says somebody anonymous, some guy, called the manager here at The Fifth Season and told him to go check out Bungalow Eight, so he goes and he sees her body.”

  “The manager goes?”

  Bubba tore off his jacket and tossed it on the patio. “Yeah, I guess somehow the manager knows Andy’s been here visiting Mavis—Christ, they probably run camcorders through the walls in these suites—and when he sees she’s dead, he flips out. He just saw Ward Trasker sitting right there in his lobby having a drink.”

  “Tonight at The Fifth Season?”

  “Ward and SueAnn came back here after the banquet instead of driving so late to Pinehurst—and you can guess who’s paying their tab, you and me, bud. So the manager runs back to the lobby, grabs Ward, and tells him there’s this problem of Mavis being dead. Bam bam bam. Stormin’ Ward takes the ball and—” Bubba shook his head in sad amazement.

  “Who tipped off the manager?”

  “No clue. Says the caller didn’t give a name, just told him he better go check out Bungalow Eight.”

  “Maybe it was Andy himself who called the manager.”

  Bubba gagged. “Why would he do that?”

  “So her body’d be found.” I took his drink from him, sipped it, and spat the contents into a bed of white peonies. “Jesus, what is
that!?”

  “It’s all she left in her minibar—rye, Drambuie, and Chianti.” He shrugged, taking back his vile concoction. “I call it The Lost Election.”

  I noticed a condom wrapper under Bubba’s deckchair and brushed it out with my foot. “Bubba, can we drop the ‘Andy was Adlai Stevenson and Mavis was Eleanor Roosevelt’ party line and admit he was sleeping with her? Can we also admit you were over here checking up on her a lot earlier than you’ve told us? If we could start there, maybe we could get some place.”

  He gave me an earnest look. “Justin, help me out. We’re in Ollie North Cover-Up Country in there.”

  “We?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m your friend!”

  “Okay, my advice is, if you can get out of the country, Bubba, do it fast.”

  He laughed sharply. “Fine. How?”

  “Step by step. Start here. At 11:30, when I saw you walk back into that banquet room, you’d already seen Mavis Mahar dead and you were telling Andy she was dead. True?”

  Bubba stared at the condom wrapper, then at me, then he took another drink. “Okay,” he said. “True. I’d already seen her, about 10:45.”

  “And then what?” I sat in a deckchair and pulled it over beside him.

  “Andy and I talked it over. My first thought was just leave it alone. Somebody’d find her sooner or later.”

  “Good god, Bubba.”

  “Right, blame me. I got you and Cuddy here, didn’t I? Who knew it’d be like the bumblefuck L.A. cops at O.J.’s house!”

  “Wouldn’t have happened if you’d called 911 in the first place.”

  “Could we do this without the moral commentary?” He slapped at the folded coat on the table as if he blamed it for his dilemma. “Then Andy remembers his fucking raincoat. By then it was too risky to go back for it. So I said I’d go ask Cuddy’s help in keeping things quiet.”

  I asked him with real curiosity, “How in hell did you think you could keep it quiet?”

  He laughed in a tragic opera way. “Well, it sure wasn’t by having Ward Trasker yell May Day to all the shits at sea. Who knew he was going to round up every moron in his Rolodex—the D.A., the sheriff, the coroner and his fucking nephew, and tell them to rush right over?”

  “Okay, Ward’s in there spring-cleaning the place without telling poor Mitch what they’re spring-cleaning for. Here’s the big question. Did you or Andy ask Ward to come over and destroy evidence of Andy’s presence?”

  “I not only didn’t ask Ward, I didn’t know he’d be here!”

  “Did Andy ask?”

  Bubba gave me a disgusted look. “Are you kidding? He was reaming Ward through the phone just a few minutes ago for ever coming in here.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t want it done, just that he wanted it done better.”

  Exasperated, apparently past bearing, Bubba twisted himself out of his chartreuse vest and ruffled shirt, and with a skipping trot peeled down to his black bikini shorts. Then he cannonballed into the pool, splashing me with a round billow of warmed water.

  I called to him as he stroked a long crawl across the black water. “Was Andy’s raincoat lying on top of Mavis when you saw her at 10:45?”

  Bubba powered back to the pool’s edge, where he stared up at me morosely. “No, she was naked. And she was propped up the way I said, not on her stomach like in the picture.”

  “And her body wasn’t where the chalk’s drawn, right? She was back in the bathroom, right? Was she in the shower?”

  Slowly he nodded. “Jesus, yes. And she’d shaved her head.”

  “She’d what?”

  “She’d shaved off her hair. I mean, I know she’d done it before, but this was a shock.”

  “So you had to walk through the living room to see her. How close did you get to her?”

  “Just to the bedroom door. I could see into the bathroom, into the shower stall. The straw hat with the candles was sort of half on her head.”

  I shook my head at him. “But you didn’t go in the bathroom? You didn’t go find out if she was dead or alive.”

  “Justin, she was dead.” He ducked under the water, came up and shook his head as if he hoped to shake out all the memories. “She was naked and that weirdo hat was kind of slipping off her head. She was facing me.”

  I walked to the pool edge. “Look at me. Was there a gun in her hand?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “I honestly don’t know.” He hoisted his body from the pool, shook himself like a big dog, and grabbed a towel lying in a chair. “Here’s the rotten break of it, it was totally in the toilet anyhow, then this crap had to happen.”

  “Does that translate that the affair between Mavis and Andy was already over?” He nodded, rubbing at his hair. I looked back at the suite where I could see Cuddy now bidding good-bye to Dick Cohen. “Yep, a rotten break, okay, especially for Mavis Mahar.”

  “Savile, don’t make me out some hard-hearted Mr. Pitiless.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of trying. But Bubba, you’re up to your furry nipples in what the Irish call shite.”

  The press secretary adjusted his black bikini briefs, found a cigar in his brocaded vest, lit it, and studied first the sky, then my face. Finally he leaned back in the deckchair.

  I sat in the one beside him. “So why did Ward’s guys move her body?”

  “The hell I know. I wish to God somebody’d cut Andy’s willie off.”

  When I asked him how Andy had ever met Mavis, Bubba did his Pagliacci laugh and thumped at his chest. “Through Randolph Stupid Percy! That’s how they met! Through me.”

  “Tell me all about it, Bubba. We’re not going anywhere.”

  • • •

  A few years ago, Bubba Percy and the Irish rock star had sat out a thunderstorm together in the VIP lounge of Triangle International Airport and had fallen into conversation. Mavis was leaving North Carolina after a stay in the new Windrush House, a very private resort clinic where clients with a drinking problem and a lot of money could get rid of both. She headed off to Sardinia to honeymoon with a Spanish tennis player whom she’d married during the bender that had sent her to the clinic. Five months later, she and the tennis star divorced as suddenly as they’d wed; he went to Wimbledon and she came back to America on a concert tour. During this tour, the singer ran into Bubba again at a fundraiser in Atlanta where she was performing for free, as she often did when charitable causes caught her eye. The press secretary introduced her to the notoriously handsome governor. Now compared to Mavis, Andy was about as left-wing as Jesse Helms. Still, he had a reputation as one of the great young hopes of Southern liberalism and that was enough to make the radical Mavis want to meet him. A little while is all the seductive Andy ever needed. “Half my job’s beating them off Randy Andy. Mick Jagger never had it so good.”

  “So an affair started around the first of the year?” I said.

  Bubba rubbed the towel over his hair. “I have no idea,” he claimed. “But I don’t think they led into it with months of stuffing envelopes for the Southern Poverty Law Center. These type people don’t have time for foreplay. All I know is, rumors started spreading like grass-fire and I had to suck a lot of dick to blow them out.”

  I said, “Do me a favor, Bubba, don’t get into your personal life.”

  “Justin, you want to hear this or not?”

  He said the affair between the governor and the singer was more like a three-week fling, never serious, and was over when Mega Records ran into a snag about two Mavis concerts scheduled for Haver Field here in Hillston, the last stop on her southeastern tour. The Haver University administration suddenly expressed concerns about the mayhem at earlier concerts at other colleges. They wanted to cancel. So Andy, former president of Haver, made a call to the new president, persuading him to let the star appear at Haver Field. Of course she would behave herself, the gov
ernor had apparently promised the university. In the meantime, Mavis started drinking again and if she’d ever planned to behave, she changed her mind. There was a riot in Houston, she was sued in Atlanta, she spent a night in a Nashville jail. By the time she flew into Triangle Airport three days ago, Mavis Mahar was so famous, so wild, so addicted to the spree, so dangerous, that Andrew Brookside couldn’t have found anything more risky with which to play games unless he’d tried Russian roulette again, this time with bullets in five of the six chambers.

  The evening before Mavis’s first performance at Haver Field, the governor went to see her at the secret Fifth Season bungalow. According to Bubba, he went there to ask her to perform at a huge campaign party for his fall election. If so, he didn’t deliver the news well. They had a fight—she’d been drinking heavily—and she was an hour late to her concert. Then, apparently to attempt a “nicer close” to their relationship, Brookside had gone back to see her at the bungalow again for a second time, this evening. “Don’t ask me why,” Bubba shrugged.

  “Because she’s dangerous.”

  “Try not to be epigrammatic, Savile, all right?” Bubba was licking at his long, expensive cigar. “Well, Andy says he waited here for her from six-fifteen to six-thirty. She came back so drunk she started a fight about his, get this, centrist politics—” He gestured at the wrecked room behind us. “And the kicker—she flushed his fucking car key down the toilet. Then she passed out and he left in her limo.”

  I asked him what time that had been.

  “Andy said he left her conked out beside the pool at seven-thirty. He had her driver rush him back to the Governor’s Mansion. That’s the limo you saw I guess. He was late for the Governor’s Gala.”

  I thought back to Andy’s flurried arrival at the capitol without his wife. I asked, “So when he got to the Governor’s Mansion to hop into his tux, he had a fight with Lee? That’s why she refused to come to the banquet?”

  Bubba shrugged. “I don’t get in the bloodbath with them.”

  During the banquet, Andy had asked Bubba to return to The Fifth Season to retrieve his car; he couldn’t risk sending anyone else. Bubba sighed. “I was a Morehead scholar. I was a Rhodes scholar.” He blew cigar smoke into the air, it drifted away like all his old dreams. “Can you believe this is my job? Mop up service?”