First Lady

by Michael Malone

  I distracted her with the last of the frozen lemon. “Did you like Tyler?”

  She patted her lips slowly on a thin scalloped handkerchief embroidered EAD, her maiden name Elizabeth Ann Dollard, the handkerchief older than her long marriage. “Did I like who?”

  “Tyler Norris. Mary’s son.”

  She looked past me, back in time. “He could play the piano.” She frowned, listening to old music. “But he didn’t have your nice touch, Jay. I hate to say it and don’t tell Mary but, well, there wasn’t any…feeling in it. And that was funny because he was a very…intense little boy. One time I remember, oh, he was maybe six or so, he vomited right in front of everybody at a little publishing party for Fulke—because Fulke had brought him out and stood him on a table to show off how he could do any math problem in his head and Fulke would do them on a calculator and Tyler got one wrong and just vomited all over everywhere. Mary was mortified, mortified.”

  “You ever hear of his doing anything…strange when he was young?”

  “Strange? Well, it’s not fair, but I thought the way you’d turn around and he’d be smiling at you for no reason, that was strange.”

  “Creepy?”

  “Well, yes, but isn’t that terrible of me, he was just a little boy.”

  “What about any trouble in school?”

  “Oh, Tyler didn’t go to school, Jay. He was much too smart for our schools. Mary got permission to teach him at home. And she was his tutor ’til the accident, I believe, and then he went off to boarding school. I think it was someplace in Georgia.”

  “The accident?”

  “Yes, poor Mary said she fell asleep with a cigarette and just about burned herself to death because somehow her bedroom door got locked and she couldn’t get out. Little Tyler was only eight and I guess he got scared and ran off. It was just lucky the maid forgot her house keys and had to get off the bus and walk back. They couldn’t find Tyler for hours and hours and finally they found him hiding in this little tree house he had on their lake property. He’d gotten himself all the way out there on his bicycle.”

  “Where’s this lake property?”

  “Oh honey, you know. They still have it. A nice little place. Not as nice as Nachtmusik. You know Vaughn thinks we ought to sell Nachtmusik, but it’s been in the family so long….”

  “Where’s the Norris place?”

  “You know. Right next to that new resort, what’s it called? Something about Vivaldi.”

  “The Fifth Season?”

  She asked for her little satin make-up case and looked at the mirror in its lid. “Yes, Fulke and Mary sold some of their land to that new hotel. I don’t believe people ought to sell off their land to all these Yankees that honk their horns if you don’t shoot out like a wild horse when the light changes. But after the fire, you’d never see Mary at the club in a swimsuit or even a short sleeve dress. Luckily it didn’t get her face. I am so damn old.” Mother touched her own face, still the “peaches and cream” my dad had called her. “Peggy Peaches will now play for us,” he’d announce at the lake house as he pulled back the bedspread curtain, revealing my mother—tan in the beautiful starched white shorts and shirts that other women ironed for her—seated smiling at the small white spinet.

  We talked awhile about those old summer days at Nachtmusik on the lake. And then slowly she slipped away into that long past time. Finally she sank down into the pillows. “I’m feeling a little tired, honey.”

  I sat by her bed and took her hand and moved each finger to play along with the CD I’d put on her small player by the bed. Together we struck the imaginary notes of the first Bach variation she’d taught me. Back then, my hand had fit inside hers, had held onto hers to climb a stair, to cross a street. Now her hand was very small, the tan faded, the strength to make music gone. When I raised her fingers to kiss her good-bye, she tugged my hand toward her lips. Her face collapsed into a painful frown. “Oh, Jay. You’ve been drinking again.” I pulled my hand away. “I could always tell because your skin smells funny. Where’s Alice? Tell Alice I want to talk to her.”

  “I’ll tell her, Mom. You go on to sleep now.”

  “Is Vaughn home? I want you to be nice to your little brother.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “You’re the most beautiful little boy in the whole wide world. And smart and sweet and everything nice.”

  “I love you too, Mom. Go to sleep now.”

  When I left, I took with me from her bedside table one of the volumes of Fulke Norris’s inspirational verse that people were always bringing her on their visits. This one was titled “Saints” and had on its cover a portrait of St. Margaret leading a very domesticated dragon by a golden chain.

  • • •

  Dr. Josie Roth’s lab was across the handsome Haver quad from the hospital. A graduate student pointed her out working at a bank of microscopes. She was attractive, but not as pretty as her younger sister Linsley had been. Her features were stronger, slightly asymmetrical; her frame too large for her weight. She’d grown thinner since the murder of her sister. She was surprised I’d wanted to see her. We talked a while about her work in psychiatric pharmacology. When I told her I didn’t think of psychiatrists as working in labs, she said, “I’m not interested in listening to middle-aged businessmen whine about having affairs with twenty-year-olds because their wives don’t appreciate them.” She gestured around the long chrome counter of microscopes and centrifuges. “I’m interested in figuring out which chemicals can help readjust a brain that’s out of kilter.”

  I leaned against the wall. “Like your brother-in-law Tyler’s brain?”

  She finished jotting tiny meticulous numbers on a piece of graph paper. “I don’t want to talk about Tyler anymore. Linsley’s dead. He got away with it. You tried, I tried, it’s over.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not over. He killed Judge Turbot last night.”

  Stricken, she stared at me. It was a struggle to speak. “What are you talking about?”

  “He butchered her, cut out her heart.”

  She sank into one of the lab stools. Her hands were shaking. “The news thought it was this serial killer Guess Who.”

  “Tyler is Guess Who.”

  Dr. Roth burst into tears. I waited while she fought her way back to control then I said, “I’m here because I need you to help me stop him.”

  She shook her head confused.

  “Were you aware that Tyler was sleeping with a college student of his named Lucy Griggs, the young woman killed at The Fifth Season?”

  She said she’d be very surprised to hear that Tyler was sleeping with anyone. But she did recall seeing him once in the library food court having an intense conversation with a young woman who seemed to be furious about something. She had assumed that the girl was upset about a poor grade. I showed her a photograph of Lucy Griggs. Slowly she nodded. Yes, that was the girl. She’d seen them just before the fall term had ended, so in December, less than a month before Linsley died.

  Roth excused herself to repair her tear-stained face. When she finally returned from the ladies room, she asked me, “You really think Tyler is Guess Who? You think he killed the other women?”

  I said yes, I did think so, and warned her that she herself might be in danger and should take every precaution.

  “Why don’t you arrest him if that’s what you think?”

  I said I was very afraid we weren’t going to be allowed to arrest him. I explained that we’d been forbidden by the district attorney’s office to investigate Tyler Norris, who was threatening the city with a suit for harassment. “Nobody thinks he killed your sister, including his jury.”

  Pain seemed to shrink her until she looked not thin but frail. “I could testify that I saw him arguing with Lucy Griggs, but I have no proof that there was an affair. It’s the last thing Linsley thought, believe me.”
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  I used the suggestion Isaac Rosethorn had given me. “Dr. Roth, I wonder, is there something in that marriage that maybe you didn’t testify about at the trial? Maybe something about Linsley, something you didn’t want your folks to know or the world to know? Maybe you still don’t.”

  Josie Roth walked to the end of lab, watched for a moment as a white mouse scratched at the side of its cage. I followed her there and said, “The man’s a sociopath. You know it. He’s killed five, maybe six, women.” She didn’t answer me. We stood there in the silent lab for a few minutes. Then I wrote my cell phone number on her note pad and told her that if she should think of anything useful, to call me.

  I was in the parking lot opening the car door when my phone rang. Josie Roth said, “The baby my sister was carrying. It wasn’t Tyler’s.”

  • • •

  An hour later, Dr. Roth sat in Cuddy’s office repeating to him and to Bunty and Rhonda what she’d told me in the lab.

  A few months before she died, Linsley Norris had confided to her sister that while Tyler was capable of penetration, her husband had never had an orgasm in her presence during their seven-year marriage. He had refused to discuss his inability or unwillingness to ejaculate and he had refused to seek help—either physical or psychological. Linsley was a college convert to Catholicism; in fact, it was at a local Catholic church that she’d met Tyler’s mother Mary, and through her had met the son. It was Mrs. Norris who’d pushed the two together. Because of her faith, Linsley would not consider divorce, despite her unhappiness in her marriage. But her deep longing to have a child finally led her into an affair for just that purpose.

  Cuddy asked, “Did Tyler know?”

  She shook her head. “She never told me so, but I think he did. I watched the way he treated her that last month. He hated her.”

  Bunty asked softly, “Do you know who Linsley had this affair with?”

  Josie Roth didn’t answer. She was struggling against tears and finally lost the fight and began crying.

  I stepped beside her and offered her a handkerchief. I said, “Dr. Roth went with her sister when she had amniocentesis because she was worried about the baby’s status. It was at that point that she told Dr. Roth about her affair. The baby’s father was Fulke Norris.”

  Chapter 32

  Endgame

  At seven in the evening, Cuddy called the task force together. Or what was left of it. The sheriff from Neville County had gone home once the Cathy Oakes homicide case was cleared. The volunteer cops from neighboring towns had been told that the FBI had taken charge of the Guess Who investigation, and thanks anyhow. Cuddy said he wanted the rest of us to know that we could withdraw from the case right now if we wanted to, but as chief he had made a decision. We were going to focus on a prime suspect whom we could not—could not, he repeated—officially investigate. We were going after Tyler Norris. Cuddy waited until the shock in the room settled. Then he said that if he were wrong about Tyler, he would be resigning as police chief tomorrow, July 4, Independence Day, at five P.M., and the rest of us at HPD might not even have the choice of resigning, since his successor would most likely fire us all immediately. So if anybody felt like they were trapped in the Alamo and didn’t want to be there, it was time to polish up their Spanish and head for the door.

  Nobody moved.

  Cuddy advised us to warn any woman vulnerable to Norris that she should avoid being at home alone and should go nowhere unescorted.

  Nancy came by to report that a search both of Lucy Griggs’s apartment and of her old room at home had turned up nothing to tie her to Tyler. Nancy had shown his picture to John Walker and his mother Doris Nutz. John had identified Tyler only as Lucy’s “teacher.” He’d never suspected an affair between them. Doris wanted HPD to know we ought to be sued.

  Roid came by to report that Tyler Norris had continued for three hours on his strange rambling drive through town without ever leaving his vehicle, but had finally returned to his house, in front of which we had stationed another officer in another unmarked car.

  Cuddy had to go to a meeting of the city council with the mayor. Carl Yarborough and he had the task of assuring the town managers that they shouldn’t worry about the fact that Hillston had just been dubbed on Channel Seven, “the Southern Capitol of Sex, Death, and Rock’n’Roll.” They shouldn’t worry that the streets had been gridlocked all day by a hundred television news vans on the lookout for serial killers and by a thousand motor-cycles in town to hear Mavis Mahar sing. They weren’t to worry that the meadow behind Haver Stadium looked like Woodstock, a squatters’ village of tents and trailers that had christened itself “Mavistown,” where the faithful waited for a chance at the ten thousand free tickets the rock star was giving away to her upcoming concerts—the one tonight and the one tomorrow night. That they shouldn’t worry that vendors were hawking both Guess Who T-shirts and Mavis go-cups right here on the steps of the Cadmean Building.

  We made jokes that Cuddy and Carl could point out to the council that they should look on the bright side—store shelves were empty and hotels were full, the media was fighting over the few taxis, restaurants had reprinted menus to double the prices. The circus was in town, the sky was Carolina blue, and Hillston looked good on television all over the country—well, except for the fact that a serial killer was on a rampage.

  • • •

  In Room 105, Rhonda, Bunty, Lisa Grecco, and I were trying to put together what we’d learned about Tyler Norris from his sister-in-law Dr. Roth. The summer night was cool enough for Bunty to wear a faded handmade quilt wrapped around her thin shoulders. “Oh I buy it,” she said in her slow mountain twang. “From what I’ve read so far—and Justin, your book on this homicide is good, real good—” From the FBI psychiatrist, this was high praise. She shifted in her rocking chair. “—I buy it from Fulke Norris. Weak man, vain man—teenage war hero like that, goes to your head. Women all over you. Then you write greeting card poetry, read it on the radio, beautiful voice. Women all over you again.

  “But after a while, you’re getting up there in years, your son’s the smart one, you’re jealous, he’s jealous. You send him off to a damn military academy, make a man of him, but he’ll never be the man you are. Son’s pretty wife comes on to you, instant Viagra.”

  “Why would she?” asked Rhonda, disgusted.

  “Oh I buy it from Linsley too. Husband won’t sleep with her. Even discount her religion, family pressure from both sides not to divorce is heavy duty. She wants the gene pool, she cons herself how it’s all in the family. Fact is, it’s payback. It’s her lethal weapon. So maybe she does tell him about it. Maybe it’s her Christmas present. ‘Guess what, Tyler, we’re having your dad’s baby.’ Now we’ve got that big stressor that kicks it all off for our killer.”

  Rhonda’s tanned open face, so different from her friend’s pallor, shuddered. “I’ve got relatives calling me a pervert and this nice normal girl gets her father-in-law to knock her up?!”

  Bunty sipped the mug of tea Rhonda had brought her. “Faster we can pull him, the better. We’re getting way out in deep water now. Tyler’s in the equivalent of a feeding frenzy. It’s gone beyond fixing things—getting rid of a blackmailer, getting rid of a witness. He’s like a binge drinker. He’s gotten to where self-protection’s not his first impulse anymore. And when these guys get to kamikaze time, all bets are off. That’s when your death toll takes you into double-digits.”

  I agreed that there was a big difference between the fastidious, ritualized burial of Kristin Stiller and the slaughterhouse in which we’d found Margy Turbot, but I wasn’t sure what Bunty was predicting. “You mean like mass murder, like shooting up a McDonalds?”

  Bunty said, “No, no, nothing like that. We’re headed for suicide, but it could be he wants to take a few with him.”

  “Suicide’s better than losing another innocent woman,” I told her.


  “Can we avoid both please? I’d rather study him than bury him.” Bunty tapped the thick book of files.

  Rhonda moved back and forth along the large map of Hillston and the surrounding county. There were colored pushpins in the murder sites as well as in Tyler’s Balmoral Heights home and his family’s lake house. The groups made clusters. She frowned. “I want to get in that house on Tartan Drive. He’s keeping souvenirs in there. They always do.”

  “Forget it, guys,” Lisa Grecco reminded us. “We can’t touch him. We can’t go near him. You do it, and even if this weirdo’s got a whole drawer full of human eyeballs, he’ll walk. That’s the game, okay? This is all a game.” Lisa, the youngest deputy counsel in the D.A.’s office, was only two years out of law school. Like many of her generation who naïvely believed they could trust more in cynicism than sentiment, she always took a hardball approach to the law.

  Rhonda groaned sarcastically. “Well, what do you think we oughta do, Lisa, follow him around and videotape him hacking another woman’s heart out of her chest? Oh, sorry, we can’t film him without his permission!”

  I said, “If we had letters or photos, we could move on him. Lucy Griggs told Mavis Mahar in the limo. ‘I’ve got proof and he knows it too.’ Couple of hours later, she’s dead.”

  Lisa took a drink of water from her plastic bottle. “What do you people think, you’re going to come across a stack of creamy envelopes with a satin ribbon around them? I haven’t written a letter on a piece of paper since my mom used to make me send thank you notes to my aunt who was still giving me video tapes of Cinderella when I was a junior at Princeton.”