I shrugged. “Well, you wanted to be close to power.”
“Right. But not because I was wiping their butts.”
So he’d taken a taxi and an extra key to Brookside’s Mercedes and headed for The Fifth Season. It was actually only 10:43 P.M. when he’d opened the bungalow door and found Mavis dead in the bathroom. He immediately drove back to Raleigh in the Mercedes, pulled Andy out of the Gala Banquet, and told him the singer had killed herself. For forty minutes, they’d discussed their options. At one-fifteen A.M. Bubba arrived at Cuddy’s place claiming he’d driven straight there after discovering the body. He and Andy had decided it would be cleaner not to have to explain the missing time.
“Oh much cleaner,” I said.
But what Bubba (and, he assumed, Andy) hadn’t known was that while they were still mulling over options after the banquet, The Fifth Season manager had gotten an anonymous call, had found Mavis, and had asked Ward Trasker to help preserve the privacy of a dead star, who—he suspected—was sleeping with the governor. Ward had called for reinforcements, and by the time Bubba brought us there to look at the body, the body was gone.
I looked at the big redhead carefully. “You think Andy killed her?”
He shot upright, flicking live cigar ash on his bare stomach and hissing at the pain. “Are you fuckin’ serious?”
“It didn’t cross your mind when you walked in and saw her body that Andy had sent you over there to see it?”
“No way.” Bubba appeared to be genuinely shocked.
“But you’ve got to think it crossed Ward Trasker’s mind. Why else all this rearranging?”
“Why should Andy kill her? What’s she gonna do, tell on him? So what if she does?”
I gave him a skeptical look. “‘So what’? Didn’t you just name your drink ‘The Lost Election’? So he loses the state and his wife leaves him. That’s so what.”
“Lee hasn’t left him by now, why start?” He stared morosely at his drink. “Course, it’d be just my luck if she did.”
As Bubba subsided into a self-pitying sigh, I heard a car leaving on the other side of the bungalow. When the splatter of gravel faded, I picked up a different sound: a slow crunching noise nearby in the dark behind the landscaped shrubs. It sounded like someone carefully walking on the expensive mulch that was piled high around the plants bordering the pool. The noise was steadily moving closer. I stood quietly as Bubba wiggled around in the deckchair with his hideous cocktail and his cigar, muttering, “You think there’s a chance I could get my old job back at the Star if I gave them the Mavis Mahar suicide as my first lead? I could let it rip how she was banging the governor.”
I grabbed Bubba’s tuxedo jacket from the patio floor and strolled toward the shrubbery. “Excuse me just a second—” Wheeling around, I flung the coat at a shadow hunched behind a small spiral juniper, then leapt at the shape and grabbed it. The shape screamed as I dragged it back to the pool.
When I yanked off the jacket, Shelly Bloom came out swinging. The thin pretty young reporter from the Sun was a whirl of terror, her short black hair an unruly tangle, her large black eyes shocked wide open. She wore black Spandex pants, a black tank top, and black Reebocks. It may have been her notion of night camouflage. She was hard to hold on to. Fighting her off, I grabbed her camera and tapped out the canister of film. “What do you think you’re doing!” she wanted to know.
“Shelly, crawling around in the bushes out there, did you notice a lot of official-looking yellow tape with DO NOT CROSS on it?”
When I gave her back her camera, she hurried over to Bubba who was quickly pulling on his tuxedo pants. She told him not to get dressed on her account, and added that he wasn’t as out of shape as she’d figured he’d be. He zipped up his trousers. “That it, Shelly? You drive out here to caliper the body fat on my abs?”
Shelly admitted that she’d gotten a tip from a buddy in the sheriff’s office that Mavis Mahar had checked into The Fifth Season and that something big had happened to her, that she was maybe dead. So Shelly drove out here, parked on the highway, and crawled over the stone wall. Wandering around the grounds, she saw this geeky little Irish guy that she thinks worked for the rock star. He was calling “Mavis” over and over, so she figured she was in the right place. But when she tried to talk to this guy he ran off and a few seconds later she saw two hotel security guards run after and grab him. She made her way over here where she’d spotted all the barlights flashing on cars. “Is she dead?” the reporter asked eagerly.
Bubba was fishing around for his dress pumps. “Is who dead?”
“Mavis Mahar! Did she kill herself?” She said it as she might have announced that she’d just won a forty-million-dollar lottery.
“How long you been listening, Shelly?” he asked her.
“Long enough to hear you say Governor Brookside was having an affair with her.” She nodded eagerly, combing her tangled hair with her hands. “Come on, I’ve been good to you. Is the body still in there?”
Behind us, Cuddy suddenly stepped through the bungalow doors onto the patio. “Hey, Justin, wrap it up, okay?” He called over to the couple in the shadows. “Hi there, Shelly and Bubba. Pool party? Justin, would you please escort Shelly out of a sealed police scene? And Bubba, if you know any lawyers that haven’t been disbarred, you might want to ask one along when you come to HPD tomorrow at eight A.M. Shelly, good-bye or you’ll be joining Mr. Beefcake there in needing a lawyer.” He turned back inside.
I handed Bubba his shirt. “Maybe Shelly will give you a ride home.” Taking the governor’s folded raincoat off the table, I waved it at him. “Maybe you could marry her if she’ll find you a job on her paper. At least you could give her your Porsche.”
Shelly tried to see into the bungalow as she said, “No to the marriage, yes to the car. I’ve already had a husband, I’ve never had a Porsche. That’s Mitch Bazemore in there. So the Chief of Police and the D.A. are here?”
Bubba forgot his troubles in his incredulity. “No way, Bloom. Married to who? I don’t believe it.”
Shelly sniffed indignantly. “I was married three years. Who to’s none of your business. Don’t try to throw me off with insults.”
I left as Bubba used his syrupy Reagan voice to ask for her help in saving a career.
“Brookside’s?” the reporter asked.
“No. Mine,” he said.
• • •
Inside, everybody from HPD had left but Cuddy and Nancy. Nancy had her arms around a short, skinny, overwrought young man wearing an orange and baby blue antique velour leisure suit from the 1970s. He had skin as white and dull as cheap paper, an almost shaved head, and at least eight tiny gold studs stuck through various features—ears, nose, lip, and tongue. His face was blotchy with acne scars as well as tears and he was now crying so hard he had trouble breathing. He proved to be the person Shelly had seen the security guards chase down on The Fifth Season grounds—Mavis Mahar’s dresser and makeup man, Dermott Quinn. Nancy had just told him that Mavis had killed herself.
Quinn grabbed at Nancy’s hands. “She’d not do a bollocks eejet thing like that. It’s a fuckall lie, a lie,” he kept gasping in sobs.
Nancy hugged him tighter as his emaciated frame convulsed into spasms. “Hey, Dermott, hey, I know, I know, it’s okay.”
“It’s bloody shite. Kill herself? Mavis? Not Mavis. You’re liars!”
Cuddy pulled the little Irishman away from Nancy and stood him upright. “Mr. Quinn, you need to help us here. Can you do that?” His hand tilted Dermott’s chin to look up at him, until finally the dresser nodded, slowing his breathing in long shudders.
“Yes, I want to help, I do, I’m all right.”
“Okay. What made you come out here?”
Quinn told us that none of the Mavis Mahar entourage had known about this bungalow at The Fifth Season, including him, and that this was the
first time Mavis hadn’t shared with him the whereabouts of her secret place because they were very close good friends and she told him everything. So he’d waited for her in her dressing room at Haver Field until half-an-hour before she was scheduled to go on stage and then he’d started trying to track her down: calling the Sheraton, checking the local bars. It was not the first time Mavis had disappeared, but they’d always been able to find her before. Now they couldn’t and the Mega Records reps were “going bleedin’ ballistic.” Some of the band wanted to call the police, but Bernadette (her manager) didn’t want any more bad publicity.
Frantic by now, Dermott had gone off on his own to look for the star. He’d come up with the idea that she might be staying somewhere under her real name, which was Agnes Connolly, although he’d never known her to do so before. (He was the only one of the group who knew her real name because they’d been friends, best of friends, since their Temple Bar days singing on the streets of Dublin, and she’d kept that name quiet.) So the dresser had slipped away from the others and phoned every hotel in the area until he’d reached The Fifth Season, where an innocent night clerk put him through after he asked for Agnes Connolly. However, to his surprise, a strange man had answered the phone in the bungalow and then hung up on him. When he’d called the desk back only a few minutes later, the same clerk had told him that there was no Agnes Connolly registered there and that he’d been mistaken before. Now alarmed, Dermott had taken a taxi from downtown Hillston out to the resort, where he had started searching the grounds for her. But hotel security had caught him and brought him here.
I asked Quinn if Mavis owned a gun. A fresh burst of tears shook him. Nancy sat him down beside her. He whispered, “I told her not to fool with that feckin’ poxie gun. I hate the guns.”
I pressed him. So Mavis did own a firearm? He told us that her ex-husband, the tennis player Matteo Garcias, had once given her a pistol for a birthday present. The dresser had no idea what caliber it might have been, only that it was small and had a white handle.
Cuddy showed him the Polaroid photo of the body that he’d confiscated from the NCBI agent Ted Bingley, and Quinn gagged before finally identifying the pistol in her hand as looking like the one Mavis had owned. I asked him if she’d ever attempted or talked about killing herself.
“No. Never.” The small man refused to accept even the possibility. “She wouldn’t send her soul to hell, doing away with herself so.”
“She’s Catholic?” asked Cuddy. Quinn nodded.
“Practicing?” I asked the Irishman. I doubted it. Mavis Mahar was so famously angry with the Catholic Church that they’d banned her songs.
Dermott Quinn wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Tisn’t much that matters,” he said stubbornly. “She never would.” But he admitted that Mavis might have shot herself by accident while drunk, although he thought it more likely that a sick fan had killed her. “It’s terrible the tossers we have to put up with.” For example, in Amsterdam they’d found a naked man under the covers in Mavis’s hotel bed, and a girl in Houston had cut out the letters of Mavis’s name into her arm with a razor blade and then jumped in front of her limousine to show her the bloody tribute.
Quinn also had suspicions of Mavis’s ex-husband, Garcias, who was a “fuckall mental” and who had shot at her with a crossbow once. Everybody knew the Spaniard was a jealous maniac. He had broken Quinn’s nose with his tennis racket when the dresser was just lying on the couch in Mavis’s arms and anybody with a brain could see that they were only good friends.
Cuddy shook his head at me. “It’s not Garcias. He was live on ESPN in a tennis match televised from Barcelona tonight.”
Quinn started picking up and straightening Mavis’s clothes strewn on the floor. I told him to put them back, that he mustn’t touch things. Pointing out the straw hat with the candles in its brim, I asked him if the star wore it on stage. He looked it over curiously, then said that unless Mavis had acquired it since he’d left her this afternoon, the hat didn’t belong to her. He’d never seen it before and he knew all of her clothes by heart. The small man suddenly spun around and clung tightly to Nancy. “Where did you take her? Oh, let me go to her. She needs me. Oh, what’m I to do to do to do?” Nancy walked him away from us, stroking his back.
Cuddy walked me toward the terrace. “You break Bubba’s story out there?” I nodded. “It took you long enough.”
“He likes to talk. He admits he lied. He was here at 10:45, told Brookside at 11:30. When Bubba saw the body she was propped up in the shower, naked with that straw hat on. He doesn’t know who moved her body or why.” Cuddy gave me a quizzical look. “No, I think Bubba really is clueless on what Trasker was up to. The coat over her in the photo is this one.” I held up the Italian raincoat, showed Cuddy its front and back. “It belongs to….” I left the sentence unfinished.
Cuddy nodded. “Yeah, I know who it belongs to. Call him.”
I moved him further away from the others. “He’s the governor. He’s got more lawyers than the tobacco industry. He’s got the same lawyers. And they’re not going to let me talk to him in the middle of the night. I’d have to tell them the alternative was a subpoena.”
“Then tell them. And tell Mr. Brookside that his raincoat’s got his girlfriend’s blood on it.”
Chapter 10
Woman in Gray
We let Nancy take Dermott Quinn back to his hotel as soon as a new HPD team arrived to safeguard the bungalow. Then Cuddy and I walked over to the lobby to see the manager. Barricaded in his office in pajamas and robe, the petulantly defensive Mr. Rochet said he had nothing to add to what he’d already told the attorney general: at eleven P.M., he’d happened to be at the front desk and had answered the phone to hear an anonymous caller say only a few words to him: “You’ve got a real problem with Mavis in Bungalow Eight. Look into it before somebody else does.” Then the caller had hung up.
No, there were no tapes kept of phone calls. No, Mr. Rochet doubted he could identify the voice again. It was an ordinary male voice, nothing unusual about it: neither elderly nor juvenile, unaccented. The manager had hurried immediately to the bungalow. When he saw the dead star’s body, he hurried back to turn matters over to Attorney General Ward Trasker, who happened to be a guest.
He was happy to take us into the lobby to show us the front desk and the phone. But when asked to describe the body he’d seen and exactly where he’d seen it, the manager tightened his lips as if we were trying to force vinegar down his throat and told us he had nothing to add to what he’d already said to the attorney general. Cuddy asked him, “You didn’t call the police?”
Mr. Rochet said that the attorney general was after all the highest law enforcement officer in North Carolina, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that even better than the police? His fervent hope was that in this tragedy we could all work together to preserve the privacy of Miss Mahar.
“She’s dead,” said Cuddy.
“I would hope here at The Fifth Season we could protect a guest’s privacy even after her death, Captain Mangum.”
Cuddy leaned across the man’s french provincial desk. “I would hope you wouldn’t break the law to do it. I would hope you understand it’s against the law to withhold evidence in a homicide investigation. Let me start again. Did you know Andrew Brookside was here in Bungalow Eight this evening visiting Miss Mahar?”
The manager shuddered as if he’d swallowed the vinegar. “I’m sorry. Unless you have some legal order that obliges me to talk to you, I have nothing to say.” He hurried off, pausing to straighten a bowl of marble eggs beside an antique leather letterbox.
• • •
It was past three A.M. when Cuddy and I took the Raleigh exit to the Governor’s Mansion. To my surprise, Andy Brookside had agreed to see us. Led into his immense office, we discovered him seated in a Sulka bathrobe behind a desk weighty with state affairs, as if it were his regular habit to catch up o
n paper work in the small hours of the morning. From silver frames on his desk, both his wife and the president smiled across at him, reassuring him that all would be well.
Andy introduced us to two lawyers (one from the state justice department, i.e., Trasker’s office, and one who was Brookside’s personal attorney as well as a legal counselor of Haver Tobacco Company). They leaned against a wall that glowed with warm cherrywood paneling. Despite the hour, they were both crisply dressed in their summer suits. They stood there casually but as poised to leap forward as two hunting dogs waiting for the signal to run. An elderly African-American in a white jacket entered, pushing a cart gleaming with a silver coffee service. No one wanted any and he took it away.
One of the lawyers told us that the governor would not be answering questions but that he would be giving us all the information we might need to understand his part in tonight’s events.
“Good,” said Cuddy. “His part in tonight’s events is what I’m here for.”
The other lawyer told us that Governor Brookside was making this extraordinary gesture because of his respect for the deceased artist Mavis Mahar and because of his personal regard for the two of us. Then he placed a tape recorder on the desk, turned it on, and nodded at the governor.
Andy looked only at me as he spoke. Cuddy looked only at him. The governor spoke with a quiet sorrow that would have been completely convincing except there was something in his eyes energized and excited and not terribly sad. I recalled his telling me that what he loved most was the thrill of risk. I recalled his telling Cuddy that a smart man could get away with murder and might enjoy doing so, just for the rush of winning.
Rubbing at the bright hair that was the icon of his fame, Andy began, “First of all, this is a heartbreaking waste. Mavis Mahar was a gifted young woman whose music was important to millions of people. Let’s not have the aftermath cause even more damage.”
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