First Lady (16 page)

I pointed out that both his poodle and his cleaning lady were seriously overweight anyhow.

“Shhh,” he whispered.

• • •

My instructions were to interview Ward Trasker, but that isn't what I did. I drove to North Cove. And not to ride Manassas around the bridle path, pretending I was leaving behind the familiar things when I was moving in a circle and not getting very far. This dawn I knew exactly where the something new would be. I was there in time to see the sun swelling above the lake like gold. I was waiting there at the edge of the crescent beach in time to watch the morning sky streak across the long wooden dock. I was there because I knew sooner or later that would be where I'd see her.

The seventeen-foot O'Day sailboat came tacking beautifully nearer, its white hull and gleaming white mainsail filling with the morning air. On its next sharp tack, I saw her at the stern, her strong slim arm holding the line. She was dressed in a loose white shirt, and light sparkled on the luminous skin and on hair the color of lions.

I stepped onto the deck and waved until she saw me. She called, “Hi there, boyo!” Her voice was always like a song. Then suddenly the Daysailor caught a quickening breeze and, sailing fast before the wind, the foresail full out, she came flying at the dock like a great swan. At the last minute, she brought the boat sharply about, laughing as she ducked under the beam, and I grabbed the bow and pulled her to me.

“So where's that great black brute of a horse of yours?” she asked me. She looked shockingly rested, carefree, untroubled.

“Miss Mahar, did you know we thought you'd been murdered?” I tied the bowline to the dock post.

My question surprised her. It was obvious that she had no knowledge of the events of the past twelve hours. I held up for her the front page of the
Sun
with its banner headline, “MAVIS IS DEAD!”

Cupping her hands, she squinted into the sun to read the print, then she frowned. But only for a moment, then she laughed and jumped from the boat. I caught her in my arms. “I'm Lieutenant Justin Savile,” I told her. “I take it you haven't been back to your bungalow since last night?”

She stayed inside my arms as she said, “Am I killed then? To tell God's truth, there's been days I wouldn't be sorry either.” She pulled back from me to look at my eyes. Her own really were—as the magazines said—the color of violets. She smiled the famous smile. “Mavis dead? Now do you believe that at all, Lieutenant?” Soft and slow her hands pulled my face down to hers. “Here's life,” she whispered and she kissed me full on the mouth.

When Mavis stepped out of the sailboat and kissed me, the image I saw was my wife's face. Sharp, clean, clear as autumn air in the North Carolina mountains of her birth. I saw Alice, since our marriage the only woman I had kissed, although before Alice there had been in my prolonged bachelorhood a great many women, some wanting to marry me, some already married, some wanting only entertainment or company or a respite from whatever really mattered to them. Too many women, Cuddy Mangum was always telling me before there was Alice. Too many women and too many drinks in one vague hazy lost weekend a decade long. But when Alice moved into my life—frank and fresh as apples red as her hair—everything that was clouded fled like ghosts from an exorcism. And the ghosts stayed away from our house until the death of our baby son brought them howling back.

I knew there had been more drinks and more men in the briefer life of Mavis Mahar than she bothered to remember. I knew that my responding to her kiss would cost her nothing and might cost me a great deal. For a star like Mavis, seduction was an easy gift and an old habit. Seduction on a grand scale had become a multimillion dollar business, and sex in her private life was notoriously both as casual and as continual as her drinking. I knew all this and reminded myself that I was investigating a homicide with Mavis tangled at its core, tangled by her affair with our state's married governor—a man I saw socially and whose wife Lee I had always liked. I told myself I'd been living without Alice for weeks and without sleep for a day and a night and that in their absence I was likely to be tilted out of balance. And knowing all this, I went right on kissing Mavis Mahar until my wife's face turned from me and faded away.

The old dock moved beneath us as we stood there together embracing, the O'Day Daysailor nudging with a gentle thump into the padded post. Neither of us spoke. For my part, I was certain that if I said anything, even spoke her name, the magic in which I was telling myself I was spellbound would disappear—like the lady of the lake—beneath the mist.

But finally noise did break the spell, the very loud sudden noise of a Channel Seven News helicopter. It was circling above The Fifth Season's grounds, closing in on the bungalows beside the crescent beach. Quickly I led Mavis across the pink imported sand into the pinewoods where the cameraman leaning out of the helicopter couldn't see her. Beneath the pines, a meticulous path bordered with silvery shade plants curved upwards for a hundred yards and then opened near the pool of Bungalow Eight where she had stayed. Holding her out of view, I waited until the helicopter drifted back toward the main house, then said I had to ask her some questions.

“About a kiss? Well, it was a surprise, wasn't it?” she smiled at me.

“Somehow I don't think you were surprised at all,” I told her. “But my questions are about a homicide in your bungalow last night.”

She gestured at herself. “But do I look murdered?” She spun to show her trim healthy body in the man's shirt that she wore with only white boxer shorts beneath. “If I answer the questions, will you find this poor killed lady a drink now and a bite to eat?”

I said I would and then sat her down on a stone bench on the path. I said that first I needed to know at what time she had left her suite last night and where she had gone. And I needed to know what had happened with Andy Brookside before she left.

Only a few flicks of the famously long eyelashes suggested that she was startled that the Hillston police knew about the governor's visit to her hotel suite. Nor did she challenge why I was asking her. She began instead by laughing: “So it's about Andy. Well, let's see. Last night.” She looked out over the lake. “I was pissing drunk, and wild mad, and Andy tried quieting me down and, well, you might as well light yourself with napalm entirely, and dive into a tank of petrol—” She slid her hand up between my legs and touched me. “Don't forget that, will you, darlin'?”

I moved her hand away. “Diving into a tank of petrol isn't in my plans.”

“Isn't it now?” She smiled. “You have a different look to you. Well but right you are, it's a dangerous habit.”

I walked away from her to the edge of the path. “So you and the governor had a political argument and tore up the bungalow?”

She grinned, movie star teeth that would look perfect on screens a hundred feet wide. “You might say. Andy and I had long since come to the end anyhow. Only did a blackout instead of a fade. Got a fag?”

“I quit years ago. I quit smoking and drinking both. Quit all my dangerous habits.”

“Ah, did you for certain?” She took a crumpled pack of Lucky's from her shirt pocket, found one bent in half and tenderly straightened it. “So I chucked a whiskey bottle at Andy's gorgeous head of hair and waved this little gun at him. Just for the drama's sake, you know. I've got my reputation. Poor sod tried not to look too bloody relieved and off he goes in my limo….
Auf wiedersehen
,
a
bientôt
, bye-bye.” She kissed the air cheerfully.

“And the time when you closed your cabaret?”

She held up beautiful arms, the white shirt sleeves falling, leaving bare wrists. “Don't know. No watch. Can't bear the ticking. I could sing you a thousand songs about the time but I never know what it is.”

I asked, “And Andy drove directly off The Fifth Season's grounds?”

Her shrug had an elegant indifference. “Could be. Myself, I had a wee bit of a vomit on the beach, swam somewhere, and—so they tell me it's getting to be a habit—passed out.” Frustrated, she gave up trying to strike some damp matches to light her cigarette. I found the old Zippo I kept in my jacket pocket and lit her cigarette for her.

“Did they think Andy murdered me then?”

“It crossed our minds.”

“Just because my place was a bleedin' wreck and the gun was lying there on the bed?” She smoked deeply, enviably, shaking her head. “No. If Andy Brookside's a killer, it isn't day yet and no mistake. He's a fucker, that's what he is.” I wasn't sure whether she meant by the word a bastard or a fornicator; in either case it seemed neither insult nor compliment. “It's not much for murder to come into your heads, is it?”

“Oh somebody was definitely killed. It just wasn't you.” I explained to her how at first we'd thought she, Mavis, had shot herself in her bungalow last night, then had discovered that the corpse was in fact that of a young woman named Lucy Griggs whose body had been mistaken for the star's. Mavis blew a startled burst of smoke upwards and with it came unmistakable shock. “Girl named who?”

“Lucy Griggs. The waitress at the Tucson Bar, the place where you were singing? They told me there that you'd brought her back to The Fifth Season with you, promised her some clothes?”

Recognition flooded her face. “Jaezus mother of God,
that
girl? Last night? Here?” Mavis searched my face. “But you don't think she killed herself? Or could be she did, this girl Lucy? Could be she came to my place to do herself harm?”

I told her no, it was unmistakably murder.

She smoked a moment. “Who would kill her? Do you know then?”

I explained carefully, “No, we don't. And it's highly possible that the person thought he
was
shooting at you. If so, you may still be in danger.” As she took this in, I asked, “Any ideas about someone who might want to kill you? Jealous husband, lover, fan?”

“Expect so,” she said, preoccupied.

“Which?”

“All, I suppose.”

But of her three husbands, the third was the tennis player who'd been in Barcelona. The second was an English movie star now famously married to an American movie star with whom he had just made one of the summer's top-grossing movies; it was unlikely that he'd taken time off from publicizing it to come murder Mavis. And her first husband was still in a Belfast prison. “And don't go thinking Brad Pitt in the IRA neither. This shite so-called record-producing sod stole eight million pounds of my bloody royalties before they locked away his ass and God willing he'll rot there.”

Pressed, her only suggestion was that recently there had been “a pest of a stalker,” who had followed her from Houston to Atlanta where hotel security had threatened him with the police; I could get details about the incident from her manager, Bernadette Davey, who could also give me access to Mavis's fan mail.

“Okay, lovers then?” I asked her. “Besides Governor Brookside.”

She carelessly tossed her cigarette onto the path where I quickly ground it out before the pine needles caught fire. “Is it the whole list of my lovers you want?” The seductively murmured implication was that there wasn't world enough or time to compile such a list. Then with a wistful irony, she added, “If you go to it, Lieutenant, there wasn't a murderer in the whole sorry lot of Mavis's lovers but one, and that one it was himself he was wanting to kill and finally managed it with a leap into the Liffey.” She gestured a dive.

In fact, I'd read in Cuddy's magazine about the suicide of the young Irishman who'd written her first hit song. I said, “I'm sorry.”

With Mavis, one had the feeling that she said nothing that wasn't perfectly staged—each gesture, the delivery of every line, was under her control—yet at the same time that everything she said was perfectly and irresistibly true and—the best trick of all—shared with you alone.

Had she noticed anyone on the grounds near the bungalow? She paused, then told me no. Had the governor and Lucy seen each other when both were at the bungalow? She thought again. She wasn't sure. When she'd arrived at The Fifth Season with the waitress, she'd found Andy waiting there “shitin' thunder,” so she'd quickly gotten rid of the girl—presenting her with an outfit of stage clothes as well as money for a taxi back to town. Mavis had told Lucy to walk up to the main house and have them call the taxi for her. Apparently, the girl hadn't done so.

Her recollection of the young waitress's conversation during the limousine ride was sketchy; she'd heard too many of these gushing confessions of idolatry to be much interested in their details. But she did recall thinking that Lucy's infatuation wasn't a sexual come-on, as some approaches from women turned out to be. Instead, Lucy had a strange conviction that she and Mavis were “the same person in two identical bodies.” The waitress's passionate delusion (along with their striking physical similarity) had sufficiently intrigued the intoxicated Mavis for her to offer to take the girl back to her hotel to give her a souvenir of her clothing. In the limo, Lucy had snapped another picture of Mavis with her camera. She'd also begged Mavis to listen to a tape of her singing. Mavis wasn't sure what had happened to the camera or the tape; probably both were in Lucy's purse, which she remembered as a large loose-weave yellow bag. As for a straw hat with candles in it—Mavis had no idea what I was talking about. It wasn't hers and she hadn't seen it on Lucy either.

Slowly I pulled details from Mavis's memory. Most of the car ride had been spent with Lucy prattling on with all her proofs of their being “soul twins.” How they'd been born only a few days (and years) apart, how neither had ever known their fathers, how both had been in love with married men and both had been stalked, and how both had started their own bands and so on. No, Lucy hadn't told her anything about this married lover, just that there'd been one. She'd amused Mavis by saying that the man's name was “a deep dark secret.”

How about the “stalker”? Who was stalking Lucy Griggs?

Mavis pressed at her temples and pulled her hands hard through her hair. “The thirst is on me for certain. Darlin', you don't smoke but you've got yourself that lighter. You don't drink and I'm wondering if maybe you have a shot of whiskey in that pocket of yours as well?”

I said I knew just how she felt. A few more questions, I promised, and I'd see that she got her drink. “Did Lucy say anything specific about this stalker of hers?”

Mavis remembered that the girl and she had laughed about something. “Ah now, what was it? She threw someone over and he took it terrible hard. It was his name, he had a funny name. Scotch. Johnny Walker. That was his true name, she said. He was a stalker and his name was Walker. John Walker, like the scotch.”

As she spoke, Mavis looked toward her bungalow. Something she saw there made her suddenly leap up and run forward. I stopped her from rushing to the terrace by gesturing at the helicopter now circling back until it was directly above us. The motor's uproar awakened the small blue and orange figure she'd seen curled up sleeping on the stones of the patio just outside the suite. It was her dresser, Dermott Quinn, faithful sentinel at the tomb—or so he thought—of his dead mistress. She had spotted him there by the doors and suddenly realized he must have thought she was dead. “Let me loose! It's Dermott! He's destroyed.”

“I'll send him to you.” I pointed out to her the crowd in the parking area above the bungalow; through the landscaped shrubbery you could identify camera trucks and police cruisers, and at the edge of the gravel walk at least fifty people were milling near the yellow DO NOT CROSS tape that stretched from tree to tree. Some of them carried flowers. They still thought Mavis had killed herself and they wanted to be where it had happened
.

In the past twenty-four hours, dozens of mostly careless men—law officers, agents and deputies, coroners, government officials, hotel personnel, morticians—had wandered around Bungalow Eight since the shooting, and as a crime scene, it was completely compromised. At this point it was impossible to tell the aftermath of the fight between the Irish singer and the governor from the movements of the killer or for that matter from the pandemonium of the investigators. Trace evidence and prints had already been tampered with before our ID section team had stepped inside the room. If there was ever a suspect and ever a trial, it wouldn't take an Isaac Rosethorn to tear the prosecution apart. Furniture, clothes, even the body itself had been moved by the crew that Ward Trasker had brought in to help him protect the governor because he wanted the governor to appoint him the new head of the Haver Foundation. Now two Hillston police officers and two Haver County sheriff's deputies guarded the murder scene and each other.