First Lady

by Michael Malone

  Chapter 26

  Exchange

  The Pine Hills Inn is a nineteenth-century barn on the outskirts of Hillston in the hills above the lake. It has a bronze placard boasting that when Sherman’s troops stabled their horses here, three teenaged rebels sneaked inside and shooed half the animals away. One of the teenagers was caught and shot to death, thus entering immortality as a martyr to the Cause. (A local high school is still named after him.) The invading Yankees spent the next few days catching the runaway horses while a group of elderly Confederates waited on the banks of the Shocco River to surrender to them. Finally the surrender party gave up and went home, and the Yankees left for Bentonville. The War was over anyhow; General Lee had already surrendered up in Appomattox. But the horse raid incident had turned the barn into a place of pilgrimage, preserving it until seventy years later when the Yankees came back and turned it into a French restaurant.

  It was July 2 but more like a summer night in the mountains than in the humid Piedmont—a big moon, a cool crisp sky full of stars. Everyone was out to revel in the respite from the exhausting heat. Our party—the Yarboroughs, Cuddy, Margy Turbot, and myself—might not have succeeded in getting a good table at the busy Pine Hills Inn if one of us hadn’t been the mayor, another the police chief, and a third the district’s chief judge. “I guess you and I are just along for our looks,” I told Dina as the maitre d’ fell all over Cuddy, Carl, and Margy.

  “Well, we are mighty good looking,” she agreed.

  Now the truth is, what Dina and I also had in common should have assured us of a table at the Pine Hills Inn: Dollards had had a good table saved for them there since the place opened in 1933, and Dina and I were both Dollards. She and I had the same great-great grandfather, Eustache Dollard—although (of course) Dina’s great-great grandmother didn’t call herself Mrs. Dollard and mine did. My grandmother had told me this bit of history when I was a teenager. My mother’s mother, the widow of Chief Justice BVD, was in her nineties when she confided in me. Grandmama called me into her bedroom and showed me old photos of people called Kipleys. She said the Kipleys were my “tarbaby cousins from the wrong side of the blanket.” Kipley was Dina’s maiden name, as it was my uncle Senator Kip Dollard’s first name.

  Grandmama claimed that the reason that the Kipleys owned half of Canaan, the African-American section of Hillston formerly known as Darktown, was because their Dollard relatives had lent them the money to buy it. When my mother heard Grandmama telling me these stories about “tarbaby cousins,” she hurried me away from the old woman and told me that my grandmother had lost her mind and was capable of any silly thing. She had a point. A week later, the newspaper heiress Edwina Sunderland pretended not to notice that my Grandmama Dollard was standing in the Hillston Club wearing hat, gloves, pearls, heels, and a girdle and a bra, having forgotten her slip and dress (as well as her name). Mrs. Sunderland came to get me on the tennis courts and said, “Justin honey, I believe your grandmama is feeling a little tired out and would like you to escort her home.” The South rests on a foundation of such pretences.

  After Grandmama’s mind “wandered” and took her discretion with it, she told me all sorts of wonderful scandalous secrets and mysteries about the Dollards and everyone else in Hillston that I suspect were absolutely true. I also suspect she was the genesis of my desire to be a detective.

  It may be that Dina and I were the first two people from our respective sides of the very separate and not very equal branches of our family to sit down together to dinner at the Pine Hills Inn, although lying down together in beds had apparently been going on for over a hundred years. I’d always assumed she knew she was Dollard, but it wasn’t the sort of question one traditionally asked in the South.

  Until a few years ago, the Pine Hills Inn was thought to offer the oldest and fanciest public dining in town. Now it is just the oldest. Now the place to be seen is The Fifth Season. The Hillston Club is still the “nicest” place, but it isn’t public and Carl and Dina haven’t been asked to join even though they’re the mayor and first lady. At the Hillston Club, members never see their bills until the end of the year and then they don’t care what the bill is or they pretend they don’t.

  In the same Southern way, this evening at Pine Hills, our party pretended not to notice that Dr. and Mrs. Fulke Norris were seated with their son Tyler and a member of the city council near the big yellow stone fireplace. And the Norrises pretended not to see us walk past them into the quietly bustling high vaulted room. They were presumably there to celebrate the not-guilty verdict that three days ago had set Tyler free.

  Our own group didn’t talk about this verdict, although after we were seated I did ask Margy why she’d agreed even to a million-dollar bail that allowed Tyler as much comfort and liberty during his trial as if he’d been charged with a far lesser crime. Margy said, first of all, that Tyler hadn’t been allowed to leave the Hillston city limits and he had been required to report to the sheriff’s department every eight hours. “Sure, it was a judgment call,” she told me, looking with her platinum pageboy and pearl gray linen suit more like someone in Town and Country than a judge. “But I knew he’d stay put. It wasn’t just that bail was a lot of money, and not just his strong ties to the community. Isaac Rosethorn was betting on a not-guilty verdict and any bail violation would risk that.”

  Cuddy refilled his beer glass. “Well, too bad you were right and Isaac was right. Because the sad fact is that Justin was right. Tyler killed his wife. Not that it appears to amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. See, Justin, I can quote the movies too.”

  “You can quote Casablanca, Jailhouse Rock, and Coal Miner’s Daughter. I believe that’s it.” I poured the Dom Perignon champagne I’d brought from home and had the restaurant uncork for us.

  Carl squeezed Dina’s hand in his darker pudgy one. “I don’t ever want to hear either of you mention the words Tyler Norris again. We are here to celebrate. And Justin’s helped us do it in style. I better check into your salary, Justin.” He lifted his glass of champagne. “So Happy Birthday to Margy. And may she join our ticket someday as attorney general.” We toasted her.

  She laughed. “I like being a judge.” Then she pleaded with us not to let the waiters come out singing, carrying tiramisu with a candle in it.

  I toasted Carl’s running for lieutenant governor and Dina’s letting him. Then Cuddy toasted the end of the garbage strike at midnight tonight. “To no more trash on the streets.”

  I said, “You sound like my grandmother Dollard.”

  He winked. “She was talking about my grandmother.”

  Carl laughed. “My grandmother thought everybody was trash except her, Jesus, and Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. And that includes her husband and her children both.”

  I heard a pleasant laugh I recognized. Sure enough, at a table behind us the President of Frances Bush College was saying good-bye to a well-dressed group of the elderly affluent, including the philanthropic Inez Boodle. The president stopped at our table and greeted us, wishing the Yarboroughs well in the coming campaign. There was a disappointment in her eyes as she joked with Cuddy. I suspect it came from the fact that he was sitting beside her good friend Margy Turbot. Both women were single. Cuddy was like one of the last lifeboats on the Titanic.

  Inez Boodle stopped by the table as well and said she recognized me. “Kip Dollard’s boy, right?” I told her Senator Kip Dollard was my uncle and confessed that I had been wondering how such an intelligent woman had ever been a close friend of the silver-haired senator. Close to what? She grinned, showing teeth as yellowed as her hair, and informed me that brains weren’t the only thing a man had to offer a woman.

  “Ahhhh,” I nodded. “True, Uncle Kip was a really good dancer.”

  “That too,” she cackled. On her way out, she headed over to hug Mrs. Fulke Norris, who then must have reminded her that I’d arrested her son Tyler, for Inez wheel
ed around and gave me a look of outraged indignation.

  It was one of the best evenings Cuddy and I had had together in a long time, except for the unspoken absence of Alice. I could tell from their tiptoeing around the subject that the Yarboroughs and Margy weren’t sure whether Alice had left me, I’d left her, or if she really had simply gone on a long visit to her family in the mountains. But apart from that, and Cuddy’s surveillance of my refilling my champagne glass, and my own private urge to smoke at the table (the Pine Hills Inn is one of the few places left where you can smoke), it was an easy friendly time for us. Cuddy and I could talk freely to Margy again now that the trial was over. We could talk freely with the Yarboroughs again now that the Haver Forest Accord (as I called it) had been sealed. We even joked that starting at midnight we could breathe freely again because the sanitation workers would then start removing the trash from the streets. True, we had only a few days to catch Guess Who before the Fourth of July, but the task force was moving so quickly that an arrest seemed, if not imminent, imminently possible.

  And then, when our cheerful party was leaving Pine Hills Inn, several small things happened that were to make a great difference. As Cuddy and Margy walked arm in arm past the huge stone fireplace, Fulke Norris stood up to block their path, his trademark white hair flopping perfectly over an eyebrow. He breathed like a man who thought he might be having a heart attack. “It’s not surprising to see you two together, but I wonder that even you don’t have the decency to leave us alone.”

  Cuddy said mildly, “I believe this is a public restaurant, Mr. Norris.”

  “Dr. Norris,” he announced loudly. Heads at nearby tables turned.

  His wife plucked with annoyance at his sleeve. “Fulke, sit down.”

  The poet of the people ignored her. “Your criminal collusion to destroy my family failed, didn’t it?” He pointed backwards without looking at Tyler, whose face, reddened by the flames of the fire behind him, swelled with anger he was trembling to control. Oddly enough, the emotion appeared to be directed as much against his father as the police chief and the judge who’d arrested and tried him.

  “You want to be careful about making such allegations,” Margy said.

  Cuddy added, “Dr. Norris, we weren’t trying to destroy your family. We were trying to convict a man who murdered his pregnant wife.”

  Mrs. Norris’s voice was glacial. “Fulke, please, this serves no purpose.”

  “Mary, be quiet.”

  Tyler did a mock salute. “You heard him, Mother, be quiet.”

  Margy took Cuddy’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  We kept walking.

  At the bar by the door, a crowd was distracted from their long wait for tables by drinks and a pianist at a baby grand. This slender seventy-year-old with an almost pinkish toupee had been playing from a fake book there nightly for at least thirty years. Once every few weeks he’d have a second martini and suddenly launch into a terrifying rendition of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude” but otherwise kept to quiet pleasant pop tunes. He affably described himself at least once a night as the “oldest gay man in Hillston,” which may or may not have been true. Margy now tried futilely to stop him from playing “Happy Birthday” to her as we paused at the keyboard to slip money in his little cut-glass vase.

  Dina pulled me aside and pointed at Cuddy and Margy who were close together laughing by the coatroom. “What do you think?”

  Frankly I didn’t think anything romantic would happen for Cuddy as long as Lee Brookside was alive. After his breakup with old Briggs Cadmean’s daughter, there’d been an attractive lawyer, Nora Howard, who had lived in the apartment across from his. For a year, we had hoped his camaraderie with Nora would turn to romance. When she moved out of River Rise to take a job with a firm across the state, she told me, “Cuddy wishes he could fall in love with me but he can’t. He didn’t say why.” But we both knew why. The why was Lee Haver Brookside.

  I said to Dina, “We’ll do our best.”

  My cell phone rang. It was Rhonda, still working in Room 105. She told me there was bad news. The male pubic hairs found on Kristin Stiller’s corpse and on Lucy Griggs’s underwear were not compatible with samples voluntarily given us by John Walker. “Guess Johnny Walker’s walking,” Rhonda sighed. “And he looked soooo damn good.”

  Margy was offering Cuddy a ride home when I gave him Rhonda’s news. He wasn’t surprised. He’d never thought Walker had the brains. “Bunty says we need to look for pride in intellect. And, JB Five, you’re not going to find it in John E. Walker.”

  “Pride in intellect? Bunty ever wonder if you were Guess Who?”

  Margy looked dejected when he told her he’d have to take a rain check on her ride. He was heading back to the Cadmean Building. Carl was headed there too, for a late-night meeting about the traffic problems of removing all the garbage before tomorrow’s rush hour. Dina sighed. “Oh well, I guess life can’t be all bouillabaisse and champagne for politicians.”

  “Sure it can,” I told her. “It was for Senator Kip Dollard.” And then under the influence of all the champagne I’d drunk, I decided to add something. I said, “Your relative and mine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I opened my hands. “Well, we’re Dollard cousins, aren’t we, Dina?”

  She blinked the odd emerald eyes in the coffee-colored face. She stared at me a moment. “Cousins?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” I smiled. “Isn’t that what you’ve heard?”

  Slowly she smiled back at me. “Yep, that’s what I’ve heard.” We shook hands solemnly.

  Dina took the ride with Margy that Cuddy had declined. Carl wanted to smoke a cigar before he and Cuddy left, so the three of us walked around to the long side porch. There we bumped into Bubba Percy and Shelly Bloom sitting closely together in green rockers under the big full moon. They were drinking brandy from huge snifters and looking for all the world like a couple—albeit a couple who might (in their Dolce e Gabbana blues and blacks) suit a Soho sushi bar better than a Hillston barn. Embarrassed to be found together, they instantly rushed to deny or at least camouflage any suggestion that they were together by choice.

  Unasked, Shelly explained that she was paying off a bet by taking Bubba to dinner. Checking her watch, she added that she was glad it was almost over. She rocked to her feet, set her drink on a wicker table, and briskly hurried inside. After she left, Bubba rushed to let us know that he’d felt so sorry for Shelly, and was so worried she really would bring a lawsuit against him, that he’d hoped to bribe her with a nice meal and a new job. He’d called in some chits and they’d taken her on permanently at his old paper the Star. “Praise Jesus it’s over,” he added and drank down the rest of Shelly’s brandy, which I’d been eyeing myself.

  “Bubba,” smiled Cuddy, “how long is this Billy Graham bit going on?”

  “Through all eternity, isn’t it?” grinned the big redhead as he accepted the large cigar the mayor offered him. “Carl, we’ll be puffing these babies in the White House before it’s over. You have just been signed by a World Champion Yankee. Andy’s going all the way. “

  Carl puffed peaceably. “I’ll be happy if I get to Raleigh.”

  Cuddy said, “That’s what Napoleon said about Moscow.”

  Bubba stuck the cigar in his pretty mouth, then slapped Cuddy on the arm. “So you did it, Porcus Rex. I hear Ward Trasker resigned yesterday. Go figure, huh?” He grinned around the cigar.

  “Yeah, go figure,” said Cuddy. “How was New York?” Bubba had flown up there to meet Lee and they’d come home together.

  “It’s there, Boonie Boy, it’s alive and well, which is more than we can say for hillbilly Hillston.”

  Thinking about Bunty’s “pride in intellect” phrase, I excused myself and went looking for Shelly. I found her at the bar, maybe waiting there for Bubba. “Shelly, you want an exclusive with the head
of HPD homicide?”

  The big black eyes sparked with interest that contradicted her reply. “I’ve had about all the exclusives I can take.”

  I told her we were close to an arrest on Guess Who. The killer had made too many mistakes and we’d broken the case. As I’d predicted, she couldn’t resist.

  Back on the porch, Carl, Bubba, and Cuddy were telling political jokes. I was mostly wishing they’d leave so I could take out the cigarettes in my pocket, but instead Bubba asked to borrow my cell phone because he had left his in his car. While he was using it, a long white limousine suddenly thundered onto the gravel drive. Young thin people jumped out of it, hyped and laughing, like an ad for hip casual clothing. They looked high on looks and fame and other exhilarating substances easier to buy.

  It was the Mavis Mahar entourage and her band the Easter Uprising, back from their concert in Central Park where two nights ago a hundred thousand people had sat under the stars to listen to her sing. The news had said she’d started on time and sung for three hours, she’d been “electric,” “extraordinary,” she had crowned herself “the undisputed empress of rock and roll” by giving “the best performance of her brilliant career.” I was just glad to be looking at her again as I watched her moving around the car and toward the steps. She wore black pants and T-shirt and over them a beautiful loose-weave Irish shawl, like the cloak of an ancient queen, pinned by a large silver circle with a huge stone in it that looked like a real ruby and probably was. Suddenly she saw me watching her. Her smile squeezed at my heart then released it with a sharp pain.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Boyo,” she called merrily. “Come have a drink with Mavis and her mates.” She skipped up the steps and as her musicians bunched around us, she ran the back of her hand slowly across the zipper of my pants. She got the response I’m sure she wanted. She turned her head and grinned at me as she was swept through the door. A few seconds later the pianist struck up her big hit “Comin’ Home to You,” and the restaurant burst into applause.