First Lady

by Michael Malone

  Cuddy swung Nancy off the ground. “Where’d you get this!”

  “Justin told me to check hair salons—”

  “It was her idea,” I said. “Nancy had the idea Jane got the buzz cut before she was killed and Guess Who just hacked at it.”

  As the picture was passed around the room, Nancy eagerly went on. “So I’ve been checking places, asking them to go back in their records—which they mostly didn’t even have, including this place called Shear Inspirations near Haver campus. But I’m there, kind of looking around and I flip through this stack of discard photos and there she is!” Her face fell. “But, Chief, they didn’t know where they got the picture from. They say they get stacks of them in the mail. And they don’t know her name.”

  I said, “I bet her name’s Christine.”

  Chapter 19

  Shear Inspirations

  In the Protestant Bible-Belt South, there’s Jesus, the Devil, and God. In that order. Very few people pray to saints, or indeed could tell you very much about saints, except that they’ve heard of St. Patrick’s Day and St. Christopher medals. The notion of virgin martyrs is more likely to evoke images of sullen celibates than of the books that I was now passing around to a skeptical homicide team in Room 105: one book was open to a Venetian engraving of St. Lucy; another to a Flemish portrait of Saint Christine of Tyre. Another to a painting of Joan of Arc at the stake, with her shaved head.

  “Bear with me,” I asked Cuddy. “Bunty said if Guess Who left anything behind, he wanted us to interpret it like a code. That’s what I’m trying to do.” I described Saint Lucy’s martyrdom (how she’d stayed a virgin in a brothel, how she’d been stabbed through the throat and had her eyes gouged out), and how on her name day still, in Sweden, the youngest daughter in the household dresses in white and wears a crown of burning candles. “We have the throat wound, the missing eyes, the halo of candles. I think he knew he was killing someone named Lucy. And now here’s why I think he knew Jane’s name was Christine.”

  I told them the myths about the possibly apocryphal Saint Christine: how the adolescent girl had renounced paganism, so incensing her father that he locked her in a tower. How she converted her twelve female guards overnight, and with them vandalized all the statues of the pagan gods they could find. How her father had her thrown into a bonfire, and when that didn’t make her give up Christianity, he tried decapitating her, only to drop dead himself. How next they tied a stone around her neck and threw her in a lake, and after she wouldn’t sink, burned her in boiling oils and sulfur.

  I noticed that (except for Nancy, thrilled just to be in a room among celebrated investigators like Rhonda and Bunty) most people at the table were trying to keep smiles off their faces by freezing them into polite disbelief, but then Bunty put down her pointer and looked at the picture of St. Christine, which showed the young woman surrounded by flames, with a millstone hanging on a chain around her neck and snakes around her ankles. A pagan soldier had just sliced off her tongue and was holding it up. Encouraged, I went on, “They tried everything they could think of—flogging, a week in a white hot oven, poisonous snakes. But the snakes just wrapped themselves around her feet. Sound familiar? Finally, the only thing they could do to stop Christine from converting everybody she met was to cut out her tongue.”

  Cuddy flicked at his captain’s hat, spun it in a circle on the table. “Paul Madison told you all this?”

  “And lent me these books.” I held them up. “Come on, folks. Just look at G.I. Jane’s body. We’ve got burns with sulfur matches. We’ve got snakes drawn on her ankles. He shaved her head and nearly decapitated her. He put a stone around her neck. And, most of all, he cut out her tongue.”

  I knew Bunty was coming with me when she said (to the window), “Don’t I remember those burnt matches looking like a halo around Jane’s head?” I nodded yes. “So maybe G.W.’s doing the same thing again when he puts the ring of candles in Lucy’s hat?”

  I nodded again. “That’s the repeat. Saints’ shaved heads and haloes.”

  Cuddy asked, “What about dates? There’re calendars of saints’ days, right? Are these homicides tied to the calendar?”

  I admitted the dates didn’t work—St. Lucy’s day was December 13, Christine’s was July 24.

  Cuddy shook his head. “And where’s the halo for Cathy Oakes?”

  I suggested that the Neville prostitute was the first crude step for Guess Who, a practice run. And for that reason he chose someone away from Hillston. The final touches came only with the second two victims. But I pointed out that flowers were often laid before images of saints (as they’d been strewn on Cathy Oakes’s torso), and that Catherine was the name of a saint, a virgin martyr. I noted that if you looked back at the medical examiner’s report on Cathy Oakes, you’d see that she had broken legs and broken ribs. In fact, the local police had speculated that her assailant had run a car over her.

  Bunty knew where I was going. She held up a painted portrait of a young medieval woman who carried a wooden wheel. “Saint Catherine. Broken on the wheel,” she said. “And her head was shaved.”

  I sat down beside Bunty. “And doesn’t it feel orderly? On Jane, three stab wounds to the throat, six burns on the torso, nine matches around the head. Three, six, nine. On Lucy—”

  “Whoa.” Rhonda stretched her arms over her head. “This is a little out there, JayJay. He put a bullet in Lucy Griggs’s throat, not a sword. And according to Dick here, it sure doesn’t look like a case of a virgin martyr. And neither was Cathy Oakes.”

  “Still,” said Wendy Freiberg looking at the pictures in a book. “A lot of coincidence here.”

  Cuddy asked us to keep in mind that any evidence could be made to fit any number of scenarios; all you need is a clever theory. The question always is, which theory actually turns out to be the truth. He walked across the room and tapped the photos of the crime scene in Bungalow Eight. “Here’s what we know without a theory: Lucy Griggs was in Mavis’s room, she was dressed like Mavis and she looked like Mavis, so much like Mavis that everybody thought she was Mavis. Somebody sent me a Hillston Star and a cardboard star and a Mavis headshot. I think the target was Mavis, candles or no candles, and I think G.W. made a mistake.”

  Augie Summer cleared his throat gruffly. He was a young, plump, sweet-natured person who’d fallen into the habit of mimicking his grouchy superior Etham Foster, but without any of Etham’s saturnine affect. (Sooner or later, everyone who worked in forensics adopted the director’s disgruntled tone, even instinctively pleasant people like Augie.) “Does anybody know how at Mavis concerts, fans hold up candles? She likes them to do it for the dead, like innocent victims killed in wars. It’s like a candlelight vigil.”

  No, nobody had mentioned that.

  “Did anybody mention,” he added, “that she had a hit song a few years back called ‘Prayers to Plastic Saints,’ and it’s all about how sick the Catholic Church is, fixating on the dismemberment of young women.”

  No, nobody had mentioned that.

  “Well, there you have it,” Lisa Grecco shrugged.

  Cuddy said right now he’d rather I go back to the hair salon Shear Inspirations and push them on the name of the girl in the G.I. Jane photograph, instead of assuming her name was Christine because of some fifth-century saint. Next thing he wanted was for Bunty and Rhonda to take a look at John Walker (Lucy’s jealous boyfriend) whom we were still holding on cocaine possession. We’d reconvene in an hour.

  With a rub of a thin finger along her narrow nose, Bunty said quietly, “Maybe we can have both.” We all looked at her. “Maybe Guess Who planned to kill Mavis, but walked in and shot the wrong person. If there’s one thing true about this man, he doesn’t like to make mistakes. More, he doesn’t want anybody to know he made a mistake. Especially not you, Cuddy.”

  Cuddy frowned. “Hey, don’t put this guy on me.”

  Bunty shook
her pointer at him. “You put this guy on you. You’re the one quoted in the papers saying nobody’s smart enough to get away with murder in Hillston. Saying how you’re going to arrest Guess Who by the Fourth of July.” She studied him bemused. “And why you let yourself get quoted saying such a thing—well, if I saw private patients, I’d say you oughta make an appointment.” (This rare bit of wryness drew scattered applause.)

  Cuddy acknowledged the applause with an ironical bow, then asked her, “So you’re saying Guess Who tries to fix it?”

  She nodded. “The clipping and the cardboard star suggest he’s planning to kill Mavis. So does the headshot. You said he could have slipped it under your office door before the murder, right? Then he sees it’s not Mavis lying there, but somebody else, some nobody like Jane. He needs to get in control. He needs it to have been his choice. That’s what I mean. So he takes the victim’s purse—that mesh carry-all thing is missing, right?”

  I said yes, it was missing. And with it a music tape that Lucy had given Mavis as well as a camera with film taken that night.

  Bunty said, “So he gets her name off her DL, credit card, whatever. It’s Lucy Griggs. Okay, if he’s into saints, he knows what to do with Lucy. No hesitation, he slices out her eyes. Maybe Lucy already had the candles for the concert in her purse. We know she had a ticket to the concert. So he puts the candles in her hat. See? If we figure out it’s Lucy, he’s ahead of us.”

  Cuddy asked her, “If he’s into virgin saints, why Mavis Mahar?”

  Bunty said, “Justin’s report says Mavis Mahar’s real name was Agnes Connolly. If she’s his intended victim, you can believe he’s done his homework and knows that. It says in here,” she held up one of Paul’s books, “Agnes was another one of those teenage virgin saints, and she was set on fire and decapitated and all that bad stuff. And before that, she was also thrown in a brothel and anybody who tried to sleep with her went blind. I mean, any which way, this nut could be into virgin martyrs.”

  Everyone thought this through until Cuddy tossed his pencil in air. “Hey, Rhonda,” he called to her. “This why your partner gets the big bucks?’

  Rhonda wound up an imaginary ball and hurled it at him. “Damn straight, Honch. But I can spend it on home improvements as fast as she can make it. I am the original Gold Medal Black and Decker dyke.”

  Dick Cohen said, “God, I wish you’d come over and do something about my air-conditioning.”

  • • •

  Cuddy had wanted me to check by Courtroom A on my way out of the Cadmean Building. I couldn’t get anywhere near the doors because a crowd was pouring through them: the summations were over. I heard that Margy Turbot had adjourned the trial until Tuesday morning when both sides would offer rebuttals and she would instruct the jury. A reporter I recognized from the Sun was complaining to Shelly Bloom, “Turbot’s dragging this out like they had her on Court TV. It’s only 3:30. Why wait ’til tomorrow? I’m losing my time-share right on the beach at Hilton Head. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and file my piece. We already know the verdict. Tyler Norris Not-Guilty, on to the next gig, right? I need a drink. Hi, Savile.” He waved good-bye.

  I cornered Shelly, looking curiously unlike herself in a soft green Talbot’s dress as if she hoped to join the Junior League. “Back at the Sun?”

  She told me, vividly, that she wouldn’t work for the Sun if they begged her, which seemed unlikely since they’d just fired her. She was writing a freelance piece on the Norris trial for the Hillston Star Sunday Magazine. Bubba Percy had helped arrange it, either out of remorse at having Shelly fired or because she’d blackmailed him into making amends.

  “So you’re friends again, you and Bubba?”

  “When were we friends?”

  I asked her how she thought Isaac Rosethorn’s summation had gone over. She predicted I wouldn’t be happy to hear. Suffice it to say that one woman on the jury had been crying and that Judge Turbot had to use her gavel to stop at least a dozen spectators from clapping. Rosethorn finished by limping to the jury box in tears and swearing he would gladly give his own weary old life, worn out in long service to Lady Justice, if he could die in the knowledge that those twelve wise and decent jurors were no more going to take away Tyler’s chance to live out his days, doing the good he’d always done—as a son, as a teacher, as a churchgoer, and as a member of this community—than they would strike dead their own living children.

  Shelly said she would vote not guilty herself if she were on the jury. She had always suspected that we’d arrested Tyler Norris mainly because we didn’t like his attitude and because we couldn’t find the intruder and it was a high-profile case we needed to close.

  “Thanks, Shelly.”

  She shrugged. “Well, I don’t like him either. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.” Her cell phone rang. “Hello?” She listened, shaking her head in disgust, then said to her caller, “Grow up. You couldn’t possibly think I’d find that proposal remotely attractive.” She hung up. “Your pal Bubba Percy,” she told me, “is a complete pervert. I won’t repeat what he just offered to give me his Porsche for doing.”

  I said, “Please don’t.”

  “Repeat it or do it?”

  “Either one. I know how much he loves that Porsche.”

  • • •

  Nancy was waiting by the HPD display case to drive me to Shear Inspirations. Near her I was surprised to see the two dark-skinned women I’d spotted so often on the street. I’d never seen them inside the Cadmean Building. They were emptying the trashcans into plastic bags. Nancy said she’d heard the city had unofficially hired some of these “migrants” because cleaning services had gone out on strike in support of the sanitation workers.

  I’d never heard of migrant workers in Hillston, North Carolina.

  “Yeah, it’s been happening. ‘Ninety-fivers,’ that’s what you hear them called, ’cause they walk Interstate 95, follow the crops, Florida to Maine. Then they turn around and head back. Like birds. Some of them don’t have nothing like a visa neither, but the chief says to the guys on patrol, leave ’em alone. Ninety-fivers.”

  In fact, the two women bent above the cans with their shiny raven-black hair and rusty black clothes, did look like birds, like two large black crows huddled over the trash, dragging it away with them.

  Shear Inspirations was a long low corridor between an Indian restaurant called Rajah and a Sam Goody music chain where Mavis Mahar CDs filled the windows under a hasty handmade banner that read, “SHE’S ALIVE!!” As a result, the hair salon smelled like curry and coriander and sounded—between the hip-hop booming through one side of the thin walls and the seventies disco thumping through the other and Frankie Lyman shaking the speakers inside—like the whole history of rock’n’roll being performed simultaneously. Most of the space in Shear Inspirations was a cluttered shrine to Marilyn Monroe—posters and photos and cutouts on the walls; statuettes, dolls, ashtrays, and clocks on the counters. In keeping with its fifties goddess, the temple was decorated with grimy flea market furnishings from the period, but the vinyl stools were too torn, the chrome tables too tarnished, the pink cone hairdryers too rusted and wobbly. On the floor, black and white linoleum looked as if it had been walked on more times than it could stand, and the female manager of the place looked as if she had too. This short overweight woman was a middle-aged baby boomer with dyed platinum Marilyn Monroe hair and light pink lipstick through which big pink gum bubbles kept popping. Forty years ago she might have looked good in her pedal pushers, tight pink horizontally striped sweater and wide stretchy belt, but at her current age and weight this outfit was the last thing she should have been wearing.

  Nancy introduced me to Mrs. Doris Nutz, who immediately snapped, “No cracks!” emphasizing her point with a loud pow of her pink gum. Mrs. Nutz also had portraits of lesser fifties celebrities on her walls (Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Sandra Dee), but it was quickly apparent
that she shared none of their energetic goodcheer. She didn’t see why the hell Nancy was bothering her again; she’d already said she didn’t know who the girl with the buzz cut was or from where the photo had originated. It was no wonder the Hillston police had such a lousy reputation when they would rather harass hard-working taxpayers than arrest the dregs of society.

  Couldn’t I see she was busy running a business? To prove her point, Mrs. Nutz held up her hands—puckered, shriveled, and white from years of immersion in various toxic liquids. I indicated with an arm wave that Shear Inspirations was currently empty except for one customer asleep with her feet in a basin of green glop. “Hell,” she sighed, “between the Koreans and the Hair Cuttery chains, I don’t know why I don’t just stick my head in an oven.”

  Finally, Mrs. Nutz begrudgingly allowed us to talk with her two haircutters (one with cornrows, one with a purple pompadour, both in bowling shirts with pleated backs), who were off in the rear of the shop eating frozen yogurt while watching All My Children. Neither of these young men recognized G.I. Jane. But then even the one with seniority had only worked there for four months.

  After a little more chitchat, Mrs. Nutz agreed to show me her old appointment book. While I looked through it, Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” fought off the BeeGees from Rajah’s and Mavis’s “Coming Home to You” from the record store. Behind me, Nancy was checking shelves stuffed with old newspapers, magazines, and promotional photos, searching for any other pictures of G.I. Jane or any other model with the same studio wallpaper visible behind her head.

  The white Shear Inspirations appointment book was inscribed “Wedding Guests.” It had not been rigorously kept, perhaps to avoid troubling the IRS with too much income to tax. For if Mrs. Nutz had had no more clients over the past six months than those she’d recorded, it was hard to imagine how she could pay her two stylists to watch soap operas. The notations I did find in her ledger were so haphazard, I worried I was wasting my time even looking. On only a few occasions were the client’s name, the haircutter’s name, the desired treatment and the price all listed. Usually there was only a terse code, like “D–4.” But I was lucky. I turned a page and saw the name “Kristin” on December 24. The word “buzz” was right beside it and after that the name “Bo.” Kristin was the same name as Christine; “buzz” was the cut I was looking for. She’d had an appointment for one P.M.