First Lady

by Michael Malone

  One of the lawyers interrupted. “Has this been leaked to the press?”

  “Not by us,” Cuddy said, adding that we didn’t know whether anyone else had leaked it or not.

  The other lawyer nodded at the governor. Andy said, “I knew Mavis. I liked her. We shared in a political agenda. I visited her this evening at The Fifth Season Resort because I was concerned about her tardy appearance the night before at Haver Field, for which I bore some responsibility. I arrived at the bungalow at 6:15. She turned up fifteen or twenty minutes later, intoxicated and,” he paused, whether really searching for words or not, I don’t know, “violently emotional. She asked me to leave and I did so at 7:30. I have not returned to The Fifth Season Resort since then, nor did I see her again, alive or dead. When I was told that she had failed to show up at her concert, I asked my press secretary, Randolph Percy, to go to her bungalow to check on her. He returned and told me that she appeared to have committed suicide. We agreed that he would communicate this news directly to Captain Mangum here. We had every faith,” said the governor, “that in dealing with this suicide, Captain Mangum would do what was right and best…for everyone involved.” Brookside looked at Cuddy for the first time. They stared very carefully at each other. Then he turned his eyes back to me. “I am now told that Attorney General Ward Trasker was notified by the hotel management that Miss Mahar was dead and took independent steps to deal with the matter.”

  Cuddy interrupted. “Who told you this?”

  “Randolph Percy telephoned me from the bungalow. Mr. Trasker had apparently felt he should take immediate action to handle the tragedy. Naturally, everyone wished to control the kind of media feeding frenzy that Miss Mahar’s suicide would inevitably cause. Mr. Trasker did not inform me that he planned to involve himself. Nor do I know what he might have done. That’s all I can tell you. I admired her talent and her political passion. I’m very sorry she made this tragic choice.”

  “The problem is, I’m not sure the choice was hers.” Cuddy spoke quietly. “When you saw her, had she shaved her head?”

  Brookside looked startled. “Shaved her head? Good god, no.”

  Cuddy unfolded the blood-stained Italian raincoat that he’d brought with him. “Is this your raincoat?” Andy looked at it, saw the blood stain. One of the lawyers told him not to answer any questions.

  Brookside said, “Yes, it’s my raincoat. I must have left it there.”

  Cuddy put the coat back in the bag in which he’d brought it. “Did you ask Bubba Percy to remove this coat from Miss Mahar’s suite?”

  “We said no questions,” answered one of the lawyers.

  Cuddy ignored him. “Mr. Brookside, not only was Miss Mahar’s body moved after her death, there is also the strong possibility that the gunshot was not self-inflicted. Did you kill Mavis Mahar?”

  “How dare you!” snapped the Haver Tobacco Company man.

  “That’s it! This meeting is over,” snarled the justice department man.

  “No, I did not.” Andy Brookside stood and faced Cuddy. “And I’m offended that you should ask me.”

  Both lawyers now moved quickly to open the large paneled door. Brookside walked briskly through it without looking at us again. Five minutes later we were escorted out of the mansion by polite state troopers on duty in the foyer. As we left, Cuddy turned to stare up the wide carpeted stairs into the darkness above, where guarded halls led to the private quarters of the first lady.

  • • •

  “Without sounding unduly cynical,” I remarked as I sped us along the highway, back to the Cadmean Building in downtown Hillston, “You really think a popular governor running for re-election and married to one of the richest women in the country is going to shoot a rock star one-night-stand in the face and leave his raincoat tossed over her dead body?”

  “What would duly cynical sound like?” Cuddy wanted to know. “Really thinking that the state’s attorney general would destroy evidence at a possible crime scene, move a dead body, and hide the governor’s raincoat?”

  I said we might as well agree that it was more than a “possible” crime scene. “She didn’t kill herself. Dermott Quinn’s right. She wouldn’t kill herself. Not Mavis Mahar.”

  “How the hell do you know?” He was on the radio, trying to reach Dick Cohen, our medical examiner.

  How did I know? I thought about it then told him, “Because I saw her, you just had to see her once.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

  But it was true. Maybe it wasn’t a husband or a fan who had murdered her as Quinn thought, maybe it wasn’t Brookside either, but it wasn’t suicide. Cuddy shrugged. “Maybe it was Dermott Quinn. Who knows how long he was wandering around those grounds.”

  I shook my head no. “It’d be like killing himself.”

  “Justin, I hope you’re not taking night courses in abnormal psychology and charging them to the department.” He shook the car radio mike. “Come in, damn it!”

  Cuddy’s threat earlier to go to the television news had bullied Mitch Bazemore into having the coroner transfer Mavis’s body to the city morgue. Dick Cohen had grouchily driven over to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home himself to make sure it happened. When the HPD dispatcher was finally able to put Cuddy through to Dick, he had already started to work on the body in the autopsy room.

  Dick growled through the crackly speaker: “Good news, we got a gun. Turns out Pauley did waltz off with it. Swore it was ‘pure accident.’ Says it must’ve got itself wrapped up in the bag with the body. Hell, maybe he’s even telling the truth. Down here, anything’s possible except a decent meal. I’m in a diner, I ask for lox, woman tells me, ‘Go to a hardware store.’”

  I said, “Dick, that happened to you two years ago.”

  “I can’t forget it.”

  Cuddy interrupted us. “And what’s the bad news?”

  “This gun’s a .22.”

  “Does it have a white bone grip? Mavis Mahar owned one like that.”

  “Sure does. It’s been fired too. And there’s a twenty-two slug in her cerebellum. Medial medullar lamina. Right between her eyes. Slug’s soft, messed up, but Etham thinks they can match it to the gun.”

  Cuddy rubbed at his hair. “That’s the bad news?”

  “No, the bad news is, it’s not suicide.”

  I muttered, “Told you so. Suicides do it here or here.” I pointed my finger first at my temple and then inside my mouth. “Not in the face, and they couldn’t do that kind of damage with a .22 anyhow.”

  Cuddy told me to keep quiet. “Dick, you don’t buy suicide?”

  Dick yawned into the speaker. “Not unless she shot herself through the brain with one gun, dug the slug out of the shower tiles and swallowed it, threw the gun out the window, and after she died, shaved her head, then went in the living room and shot herself in the face with another gun, and then crawled under a raincoat just to be modest.”

  “Dick, I know you don’t stay up late enough to try out as a late night comedian, so how about just do it straight?”

  His voice crackled at us. “Two different entry wounds, two different bullets. The .22 between the eyes. But post mortem. Probably a .38, .32 killed her. Entry wound up through the lower jaw. Exit wound high on the back of the skull. So I don’t buy suicide unless she killed herself because she was pissed off about some s.o.b. murdering her.”

  Cuddy looked at me as he tapped the mike against his cheek. “Well hey, Dick, something like that is enough to put you in a real bad mood.”

  • • •

  I parked in front of the Cadmean Building behind a gray Mercedes that someone had left in the No Parking zone. In the eerie hollow echo of the marble lobby, Cuddy and I walked past the empty courtroom where tomorrow Tyler Norris would probably go free. While we waited for the elevator, we watched a Hillston Star delivery truck slow down outside and a bound stack
of newspapers come flying from its rear doors. He yawned. “So what’s this morning’s headline? ‘POLICE CHIEF TO CITY: DROP DEAD EVERYBODY’?”

  “Well, if Shelly Bloom has her way, the Sun won’t be talking about you at all. It’ll be ‘MAVIS DEAD IN GOV’S LOVE NEST.’”

  He picked up cigarette cellophane off the marble floor and tossed it in the trash. “This homicide’s got to get closed, Justin. We’re entering O.J. land. The press was already killing us over G.I. Jane and Linsley Norris and neither one of them was a rock star on the cover of Time. The world press will rampage through this town like it was Pompeii and the streets were full of lava.”

  “I guess by the end of the day you want me to bring in somebody yelling, ‘I did it, I did it!’ Well, you already accused the governor.”

  A cleaning woman came out of the courtroom carrying brooms and mops. Cuddy waved hello to her and then smacked the elevator button again. “Just find out fast if he did or he didn’t.”

  I held the door for him. “Can we pull Andy in? Maybe he’d have to be impeached first?” Cuddy didn’t answer me. Silently we rode up to the offices of the Hillston Police Department. A few minutes later he came out of the men’s room looking scrubbed and awake and ready for the day. He’d always had the ability to recharge himself. He said, “All I’m telling you is, we are—how can I put this?— shooting down the rapids blowing air into the flat rubber raft that we are sitting in.”

  “I get your point.”

  At the front desk, Sergeant Brenda Moore was tiredly listening while a red-haired young man swore to Jesus that he’d thought it was his cousin Kobe’s Toyota Tundra he’d hot-wired and had been selling its parts just as a joke. Cuddy walked over to him and patted his back. “Griffin, you be sure to get your eyes checked out by one of our fine prison optometrists soon as you get settled, ’cause just a few months back you were swearing to Jesus you mistook a Ford Explorer for an old Plymouth belonged to your mama’s Bible club.”

  The boy grinned before he could mask his pleasure at seeing Cuddy.

  Cuddy grinned back. “And how is your mama?”

  I recognized the sullen shifty blue of the boy’s eyes. He looked like one of the Popes, a large local family who’d been marrying each other and robbing everybody else since before the Civil War. Cuddy was the only person not closely related to them who could keep their genealogy straight.

  I asked, “Is this a Pope?”

  “Yep.”

  The boy said with stiff disdain, “Mama left Daddy.”

  Cuddy patted Griffin’s thin tattooed arm. “Paula’ll come back by the time Graham’s out on parole. Your folks’ll be together again.”

  “I could give a fuck,” their son boasted.

  “Good god,” I said, “a new generation of Popes.”

  “Always,” Cuddy nodded as Brenda handed him a stack of the pink memos. She gestured that there was someone waiting to see him, adding, “She’s been here a while.”

  “Who?” he asked her, his body tightening.

  Brenda looked at him solemnly. “Chief, I think you want…. She said it was private.”

  “I hope it’s not the press already because—” But I was talking to no one because Cuddy was almost running along the corridor toward his office.

  Brenda and I shrugged at each other, then I left her asking the boy for his full name. He said, “Griffin Torii Pope. Two Is in Torii. Just please don’t phone my mama, okay? She’ll fry my ass.”

  “Occupation?” she asked. And he told her, “Musician,” and she wrote it down without believing it.

  Out of the dark at the end of the hall, someone stepped softly toward Cuddy. A woman in a gray suit. She moved from the shadows with the stillness of a ghost. A slender woman, pale blonde hair, a cool soft voice I would have known without seeing her. As I came up behind Cuddy, she said politely, “Justin, hello.” Her suit was the color of her Mercedes outside.

  “Lee, good god, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  She wasn’t looking at me. “Cuddy, I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  He stared at her as if she’d hypnotized him as she moved closer, gestured at his office door. Then with a sudden lunge, as if compelled, he threw open his door for her. I saw Lee noticing the raincoat that Cuddy still carried. I saw her recognize it as Andy’s. Then she stepped around us and walked inside the dark room.

  I pulled Cuddy from the door. “This case will be under a microscope. Everybody in it. Okay? Don’t do for her what you wouldn’t do for anybody else. Why do you think Andy sent Bubba to you? How do you know he didn’t send her to you?”

  He shook free of my arm. “Go do your job, Justin.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  The door closed in my face.

  Chapter 11

  HPD Homicide,

  Female, Caucasian

  I spent the next hour at the wearisome paper trail that wanders through the databases and file cabinets of modern police departments. From the news about Mavis, the lack of sleep, the unaccustomed number of drinks, I had a horrible headache. Coffee didn’t help as I wrote a long report on the crime scene at The Fifth Season. In it I put everything I’d seen going on in Bungalow Eight tonight, plus everything that Bubba had told me out by the pool. I have a very good memory if I don’t wait too long. I locked the report in my desk. I didn’t know what Lee was going to ask Cuddy to do for her husband, nor could I be absolutely sure what he would agree to, or not to, do. I thought I knew. I thought I could wager my life on Cuddy’s integrity. But even the purest knights in Camelot were tempted by love, and the next thing they knew there was a war going on and the whole place was in flames.

  Crossing the annex to the autopsy room, I heard the clatter of wheels banging through the doors into the corridor. Two bored attendants yawned as they shoved a mortuary gurney around a corner. In disposable paper scrubs, Dick Cohen stumbled sleepily along beside them.

  I caught up with the macabre procession. “Is that Mavis Mahar?”

  Dick nodded, tapping a clipboard lying on top of the body. “A shame, somebody like that, got it all. Great cardiovascular system, stomach, kidneys, lungs, perfect. Even her liver. Thought you said she was this big boozer.”

  I tried not to look at the gurney. “She was. High alcohol content in her system, right?”

  The medical examiner shrugged. “Not at all.”

  “What?” Surprised, I followed them into the morgue. “Dick, she was already plastered when I saw her in the afternoon. And there were so many empties in her suite it looked like the French Quarter at Mardi Gras.”

  “Well, you and I should have such a liver.” He shook his head. “We’ll have a toxicology report on the chemical stuff tomorrow.”

  The bored attendants chatted about whether they should give up on cable and buy satellite dishes as they lifted the gurney off its trolley, slid the body into the refrigerated compartment, and left Dick and me alone in the morgue with her. I felt grief fall on me like the heavy weight of water, stopping my breath. How could everything that Mavis Mahar had been lie so still beneath the white sheet, how could all those colors and all that song slide without a sound into so small an opening in the wall? Could it really have been only this past dawn when a beautiful stranger had dived through the mist into the lake and then burst back into the morning air, smiling at me? That moment felt as distant and alien as some lovely foreign city briefly visited and left forever behind.

  Dick was talking about “livor mortis lavidity of the face and chest as well as lavidity of the back and hip.” It meant that she’d been moved—and turned from her back to her stomach—as much as four hours after her death.

  “Any chance she was still alive when Bubba got there at about 10:45?”

  “No way.” From rigor and body temperature, Dick put the time of death as early as nine, even eight P.M. I said it didn’t seem likely that a kill
er would hang around ’til after Bubba left and then drag his victim into another room and flip her face down. Dick flexed his arms, his white hairy fingers laced. “You don’t know what’s ‘likely’ with these nuts. They’ll chop up their mothers and then sleep with her body parts ’til they rot. If I could take my kids and move to the moon, I’d do it.” (Dick was divorced and gloomy and often said that if he’d been his wife, he’d have left him too, for moving her down here from New York.)

  Shivering, he rubbed his skinny arms. “So are we done?”

  “Just a second, okay?” I reached for the stainless steel door.

  He grabbed my hand. “It’s not pretty.”

  “I know.”

  He scratched his beard. “You think you know. Her eyes are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  He pulled me back from the door. “Cut out, both eyeballs, neatly, with a sharp knife. The bozos at the scene didn’t catch it, I guess, ’cause of all the gunk from the face wound.”

  I stepped back to look at him. “Before or after she died?”

  “Postmortem if that’s any consolation.” He grumbled, “And I’m right as always. The .22 slug’s definitely postmortem too. Muzzle was held about two inches from the nose bridge. Augie called from the lab, says there’s just her prints on the grip. But some creep stuck that .22 between her eyes after she was dead and pulled the trigger.”

  “So death was—”

  He rubbed at his stubbled cheek. “Death was immediate from the larger caliber weapon—I don’t know what, but not a .22—right under the mandible and into the cranium.”

  I thought about this. “So she’s in the shower. He opens the door, holds the gun under her chin, shoots her. The slug goes up through the brain and exits into the tiled wall behind her, blows out the grout and cracks the tiles.”

  Dick nodded. “Then he takes out her eyeballs in the shower.”