First Lady
Page 38
But by mid-January their deal had fallen apart. To remove the threat, Tyler murdered her by choking her to death. And then, remembering a homicide that had taken place in Neville a few months earlier—a prostitute with her throat cut, wearing only a Guess T-shirt—he cleverly disguised Kristin to look like the second victim of a publicity-hungry serial killer. “Addressing” Kristin’s body to the head of homicide and the chief of police was something such a killer might do. Tyler was even luckier than he’d hoped. Carol Cathy Cane announced that a Guess Who Killer was loose in the Piedmont. The press not only bought the double murders, they promoted them. They started screaming that a serial killer was on the loose.
Tyler’s scene-setting also was a way of taunting the police who had forced him to stand trial for his life. But he couldn’t resist all those extra touches, what Nancy had called the redundancies, touches created out of his own particular sick and sickening psyche. The idea of virgin martyrs meant something specific to him. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that his mother and his wife were both Catholic. At any rate, when he’d read about the murder of Cathy Oakes, how all her bones were broken, he must have thought of the Catholic St. Catherine broken on the wheel. He knew his own victim’s name was Kristin, Christine. So he cut out her tongue and decapitated her. He added the halo of matches, the stone around her neck with the ring of the bride of Christ, and he covered her with leaves, on the edge of the subdivision where he lived, Balmoral Heights. If she wasn’t found, fine. If she was found, everything was in place to mislead us.
As it happened, not only did months go by before Kristin’s body was found, but we couldn’t identify her when we did find it. Cuddy was probably right: the bridge where the Shocco River fed into Pine Hills Lake was little more than a mile from the Balmoral Heights subdivision. By now the young Swedish woman’s duffel bag (with all the belongings she’d planned to take on her car trip to Maryland with Bo Derek) probably lay rotted in the deep weedy mud of the lake bottom. They’d probably been joined last night by the bloody clothes Tyler had worn out of Margy Turbot’s house.
In March, we had arrested Norris for the murder of his wife. In June, the state put him on trial. He was actually shocked that we’d had the guts to do it. The press was behind him, public opinion was behind him, the university and powerful family and friends were behind him, and only Lucy Griggs threatened him, a last loose end to tie up. And yet he had to stand trial for his life. It enraged him. The Hillston police, Cuddy and I in particular, must have come to represent to Tyler the one enemy between him and freedom. His hatred and contempt (and fear) grew as he faced first an indictment, then a judge who suspected his guilt.
At some point Tyler decided he would take his revenge by making fools of all of us while, at the same time, solving the growing problem of Lucy Griggs by murdering her. Perhaps Lucy had discovered (or deduced) that he’d killed Kristin Stiller and/or his wife. Perhaps she had threatened to reveal their affair midway through his murder trial. (Hadn’t she told Mavis, “I hold his life in the palm of my hand”?) Maybe she had wanted him to marry her or maybe all she wanted was help with her musical career. Whatever she wanted, it was more than he was willing to give.
What a coup—to commit a third murder while on trial for a first! And then to pass the Lucy Griggs homicide off as another Guess Who killing. More delicious still, to pass it off as the intended murder of Mavis Mahar.
And again, it all worked beautifully. Tyler was free to carry out the murder of Lucy because Judge Turbot had granted him a million-dollar bail (paid for by his father whom he apparently hated). Having spotted Lucy at the Tucson Lounge, he was free to follow her and Mavis Mahar to The Fifth Season. He shot her there while she indulged in the trespass of showering in her idol’s suite after Mavis wandered off drunk and passed out.
Bunty and Rhonda looked at me, at each other, back at me. Rhonda asked me how did the Guevarras fit in.
I told them Tyler had hired the migrant workers to take things and leave things in the Cadmean Building as he bid them. Migrant workers were scabbing during the strike for most of the city government offices there. No one ever pays much attention to cleaning ladies. Among his six languages, Tyler spoke fluent Spanish. He had cajoled or threatened and paid the Guevarra sisters to slip the envelope with the Mavis head shot under Cuddy’s door, to slip the package with Lucy’s eyes and the .38 shell into the HPD mail pouch. Maybe he had used them to steal and then to replace the Italian pistol in the lobby display. Tyler himself would evoke no surprise if seen in the Cadmean Building. He was, after all, there every day for his trial.
Rhonda and Bunty heard me out. Afterwards they looked at each other some more as if they could talk without speaking. I had no idea what they were saying. Finally Bunty said to leave her alone to think. That was fine with me. I had to go to Haver Hospital. I said I’d be back in an hour or so. Meanwhile, Isaac Rosethorn wanted to see Cuddy as soon as possible.
“You told him this theory of yours about Tyler Norris?” Cuddy asked. I nodded. “And he said he wants to see me?” I nodded.
“Old windbag,” snorted Rhonda. “He defend anybody wasn’t guilty?”
“He defended me all my life,” Cuddy told her.
Rhonda patted me on the arm. “Well, if JayJay here hasn’t gone psycho on us, maybe your friend Isaac shouldn’t have done such a good job defending Tyler Norris. Maybe if he hadn’t, your friend Margy Turbot’s life wouldn’t have been so short.”
Bunty was studying the huge folders of notes I’d brought her—all the records I’d kept on the Linsley Norris homicide, including all interviews, depositions, and a transcript of the trial. She looked up. “Are you saying Tyler was having this affair at the same time he got his wife pregnant?”
“It can happen.”
“Let’s find out if it did,” she said and started to read.
Rhonda stretched her strong wide hand over the map of Hillston to touch both Tartan Drive and the wooded area where Kristin Stiller’s body had been found. Then she pulled herself up onto the table. “Bunty, psychology’s not going to do it for us, baby, no time. We gotta get a direct physical connection between him and a victim fast. What about the pubic hair on Kristin? Don’t we have blood of his booked on the Linsley Norris homicide?”
I said, “Yeah, but no DNA breakdown. His blood was all over because of his own injury, so there was no argument. We can send it off, but that kind of lab work takes weeks and Chang wasn’t sure about the integrity anyhow.”
Rhonda looked at me. “You know what we need?”
I nodded. “What we need’s that Ford Explorer of his neighbor’s with Margy’s boxwood under its wheel hood.”
“JayJay, you’re reading my mind.”
Cuddy said, “I’ve got direct orders for HPD not to go near that car.”
I had an idea. I said, “You won’t have to.”
On my way out, I stopped at the desk where Sergeant Brenda Moore was re-glueing a long pink nail to her baby finger. She said, “I hear you’re smoking again, Justin. Bad bad bad.”
“Yeah, well, I hear you were parked in front of Dairy Queen again last night.” Brenda was overweight and blamed it on the seductions of Dairy Queen banana splits.
She came around the booking desk, her hands comically posed on her wide hips, and leaning over did a short shimmy, shaking her large-breasted figure. “I guess you rather hear a skinny little white girl singing the blues, is that it? I saw you at Smoke’s last night falling all over Mavis Mahar. Here, take these.” She handed me an opened pack of cigarettes. “Ralph asked me to hide them from him. ‘Least he’s trying to quit. Oh and, listen, that big redhead works for the governor—”
“Bubba Percy?”
“He left this for Cuddy.” It was a postcard with a huge hog that read, “Greetings Pig King. Only two more shopping days ’til the Fourth of July!”
“Don’t give that to Cuddy.”
“Why?”
She rolled her eyes. “Man, I don’t know. I don’t why he felt like he could ask me if I’d had silicone implants either.”
I said, “You look like a natural woman to me.”
She laughed. “Take it on faith, baby.”
I asked Brenda what had happened to the young Pope she’d booked a few nights ago for joyriding. “I think he’s Graham Pope’s son. He plays with a group called the Mood Disorders.”
She rolled her eyes. “Griffin Torii with two Is?” I nodded. “You call what he was doing joyriding? Joyriding is when me and my man shoot down to Charlotte for the NASCAR races in our own Buick LeSabre that we’re making our own payments on. You call what Griffin does ‘stealin.’” She went back to her desk where she checked a sheaf of papers. “We already booked his ass again. Failure to appear on grand theft auto.”
“He’s in the holding cell now?”
“Honey, that cell is Griffin Pope’s pied a terre. He picks up cars like some folks pick up loose grapes at the Food Lion. You could put your car in a vault in the basement of Fort Knox and he’d steal it. He’d steal the Pope-mobile with the Pope still waving from the back seat and say because of the name he thought it belonged to his family. Now I got to call his poor Mama to come back down here and bail him out again.”
I told her I would call Paula Pope about her son’s bail. I wanted to talk with the young man anyhow.
Brenda applied glue to another long square nail tip and stuck it to her finger. “Well I hope you take that harmonica away from him. You white people should stick to the accordion.”
I slid the cigarettes into my pocket. “Brenda, is it fair not to let us white people play music just because we don’t happen to be as good at it as you are?”
She cheerfully gave me the finger with a freshly applied nail. “Well, sweetheart, no fairer than how y’all wouldn’t let us read, vote, marry, move, or fart just because we happened to be slaves.”
• • •
Since I’d seen him last, Griffin Pope had dyed his red hair a greenish-yellow that cast an unfortunate jaundiced hue on his pimpled face. His harmonica playing was as misguided as Brenda had claimed; it might even be called tragic—evoking as it did both pity and fear. Griffin was glad to see me, particularly when I told him I’d arranged for his release until his next court date. As for the small favor I needed him to do for me as soon as he left here, “No problem.” His mother and father had always both spoken well to him of Captain Mangum and myself. He added with contempt, “And that’s about all my Conehead parents got in common, except I’m shit-for-brains. Now they’re mad ’cause I didn’t ask them to my wedding at the beach. My dad tells Brittany she’s dumber than road kill. Then he’s mad ’cause she don’t want them there on the happiest day of her life.”
Apparently this marriage ceremony, in the surf at Wrightsville Beach (he carried a photograph from it in his wallet—the groom shirtless in white baggy shorts, the bride in a white halter and a wrap-around skirt, both carrying big sunflowers, the minister straddling a surf board), was the reason he had failed to attend his recent hearing on a charge of auto theft. “Give me a break,” he said indignantly. “How many times does a man get married?”
“Well, Griffin, I hope not as often as he steals a car.”
“Hey, exactly.” He nodded eagerly, vindicated. “So what’s this favor?”
I asked him if he knew where Balmoral Heights was. He told me he did indeed. Sometimes he and Brittany drove around in the new subdivision looking at the houses. They wanted to move there. “We’ve had it with East Hillston, it’s nothing but trailer trash.”
A half-hour later the young Pope pointed out to me his favorite Dutch Colonial with its two-car garage option as I drove him twice past the empty Ferraro house on Dumfries Court. Since standard model houses on sixty-foot lots began at three-hundred forty-nine thousand dollars in Balmoral Heights, I suggested to Griffin that he needed to think about a different career path. Music and larceny weren’t going to do it for him. He admitted that Brittany couldn’t agree with me more. Far from the bimbo his meathead dad thought her, Brittany was in accounting at The Fifth Season and had already talked to the manager about maybe Griffin’s starting a limo service there to take guests to the airport and golf courses and such. I said I thought that was an excellent idea, particularly since Griffin was so obviously fond of driving.
When Griffin hopped out of my car at the corner of Dumfries Court, I wished him luck. He said, “I don’t need luck, I got talent. Brittany thinks I got talent. And I do.” Another Pope male had found the right woman. He headed blithely to the Ferraro house to steal their car.
Chapter 31
Sacrifice
Despite Cuddy’s lectures to me about not visiting my mother, I actually dropped in to see her in Haver Hospital every day. Usually, as now, I came around five in the evening, the moment she had once called “sherry time”—when she’d sat with us at home hearing about our school days as she sipped a tiny amount of that amber liquid from a tiny crystal glass engraved with her family D for Dollard. Mother was in the hospital with pneumonia. She’d contracted it while recovering from a broken hip. But there was a problem from which it seemed unlikely she would ever recover. My mother, who once in her life could play by heart the Goldberg Variations, the Chopin Etudes, the Beethoven piano sonatas, now at times could not remember her address or her phone number or the names of her sons.
When my father resigned as Dean of Haver Medical School, he was supposed to retire, as he’d promised my mother he would. Instead, he took on the directorship of Haver Hospital in order to oversee the construction of a new wing that had been donated by old Briggs Cadmean. After the wing was finished, there was another reason why he couldn’t leave. And then another. He died in Haver Hospital while still its director. Mother so disliked the place that it was some comfort to think that although she’d been here for over a month, she often had no idea where she was.
The present was receding from her, pulling her down the rabbit hole back to childhood where the red queen in Alice in Wonderland was right: you do have to move twice as fast to stay in the same place, and when you’re old, you’re too slow to do it and so you lose ground. The future vanishes. You can’t remember what you should do tomorrow and then you can’t remember what you did today. And in the end all you have is long ago.
But Mother hadn’t yet left for good. There were days when she was so much like her old vivacious, talkative self that I grew hopeful that she might return completely, might even be able to go back home to Catawba Drive and call her friends to come over for bridge. But those hopes inevitably crashed into senseless confusions that broke my heart.
I fed her another spoonful of the lemon sorbet she loved for me to bring her. “Mom, I want to ask you something.”
“You go right ahead, honey, ask away.” She smiled, an imitation of her old bright smile. The pneumonia had so weakened her that for weeks she could barely keep her head from the white pillows fluffed behind her, although she very much disliked how the pillows flattened her hair. My mother, Peggy Dollard Savile, had been blonde, petite, and pretty when it was the fashion to be so. As a result, she had never doubted her attractiveness and felt a responsibility to maintain it for the enjoyment of others. Today she wore a pink lace bed jacket and had a thin pink band in her hair. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was having what she called one of her “Hello, Earth, I’m back” days and that this would be a good time to ask her something.
I had brought one of her gold-leaf bowls and a Georgian silver spoon to serve her the sorbet in. I think she liked the memory of elegance even on “bad days.” Then I asked, “Do you reme
mber Fulke and Mary Norris?”
“Of course I do. They only lived two blocks down from us.” And she pointed shakily at her bedside table where there was a small stack of poetry books by Fulke Norris.
“You remember what happened to their daughter-in-law Linsley?”
“Oh that was so tragic. Linsley finally pregnant after trying so long and then gone in a second. She was the sweetest thing, and Fulke and Mary both loved her like an angel on earth. I remember Inez told me—”
“Inez Boodle?”
“You remember, she had that dreadful husband Pete that you just couldn’t tolerate. Or wouldn’t, even though I said, ‘These are our neighbors and you can’t say if he comes in the front door I go out the back—’”
She’d confused me with my father, as she often did. “I think you mean Dad didn’t like Pete Boodle.”
“He hated him!”
I fed her more sorbet. “Inez said something about…?”
Mother had once loved to gossip, spending hours on the white and gold phone in her “sitting room” off their bedroom, swapping scandals with her friends, often while I pleaded with her to hang up and drive me somewhere. She said, “Inez told me in the beginning of their marriage Tyler and Linsley were having troubles and Fulke had to step in. He told Tyler if he didn’t keep his marriage together he’d be cut right out of the family. I don’t think that’s right. Family’s family, that’s what I was taught and that’s what I tried to teach my sons. Is Vaughn home yet? Was I supposed to go get him today?” Agitated, she pulled herself up into the pillows.
“No, Vaughn and Jennifer live in Richmond. Vaughn’s a doctor like Dad. He’ll be here soon…. Tell me what Tyler Norris was like as a child.”
She was happy to be able to help. “Oh, very, very smart. He was so smart they never knew what to do with him. I mean it wasn’t even funny sometimes, like Fulke had this big aquarium with some rare fish in it and Tyler wasn’t much more than four or five and he let out all the water to see what would happen. Well, of course those fish just died. They called it ‘scientific curiosity,’ but I could tell Fulke was mad as a hornet. Well, I said to Mary, I have two boys myself and why the Lord didn’t give me a girl…with all the Dollard china and silver. Of course, Jay, you do have an appreciation—”