First Lady (29 page)

This comment produced a gasp from some of the old-timers in the courtroom, including Bee Turner herself, who (like Cuddy) had been running errands for Rosethorn for decades.

Isaac turned his large remorseful eyes up to the bench. “Your Honor, I stand corrected. Stooped, but corrected.” And he hobbled back to the defense table where his client sat looking patiently at his folded hands. Watching him was a handsome middle-aged woman seated in the first row on the prosecution side of the room, her arms tightly crossed, her eyes never leaving the defendant. She was Dr. Josie Roth, the older sister of the dead woman, the only member of her family not to side with Tyler. Her mother and father were in fact now seated right beside the elder Norrises, the four of them a formidable line of support behind the defense table.

Margy was beginning her instructions to the jury. She reminded them that a man's life was in their hands. “To prove the charge of first degree murder, the State must establish that the defendant had method, means, and motive, all three, and that he acted with premeditation and with malice. Whether the State, in the person of District Attorney Mitchell Bazemore, has done so in this case is for you alone to decide. Just because the grand jury found sufficient evidence to indict does not mean there was sufficient evidence to convict.”

She studied the eight women and four men carefully listening to her. “I remind you that you are not the police, ladies and gentlemen. You are not supposed to go into that jury room and start investigating the murder of Linsley Norris. That has already been done. Tyler Norris is charged with the crime. If, given the evidence you've heard, you do not believe he is guilty, it is your duty to say so and that is the full extent of your duty. It is not your responsibility to solve the crime or even to suggest another suspect.”

A female juror looked at the man beside her as if to say, “I told you so.”

“Secondly, you are not the judge. It is not your responsibility to interpret the law or evaluate it or teach each other about it. That is my job.”

Lisa Grecco, Mitch Bazemore's young deputy counsel, slipped into the back of the room and leaned against the wall beside me. “Back from Virginia?” she whispered. I nodded. Lisa admired Margy Turbot and wanted to hear what she had to say about a homicide case that had alienated the whole town from its police department. “I know you don't like Mitch,” she told me, “but he actually did a damn good job in this trial considering what was left after the sheriff fucked everything up.”

A woman on the back row turned around and hissed at Lisa to be quiet.

“So what
are
you here for?” The judge was smiling across at the jury and they were smiling back at her. It was impossible not to like Margy's frank easy openness. “Believe me, you have a big enough job. You are going into that room together, and come to a conclusion about this case, based on the facts that have been offered in evidence inside this courtroom. You are going to consider
only
those facts. Not something you heard elsewhere or read elsewhere or somebody else told you. Nor may you take into consideration any evidence that this court has excluded because of the—” Margy looked over at Sheriff Homer Louge who had just strolled in through a side door. Her face tightened angrily. “Because of the contamination of the crime scene by law enforcement officials.”

She and Louge stared at each other for a moment. On one side of the courtroom, Mitch Bazemore grasped his biceps and glared angrily at the floor. At the other table, defense counsel Isaac Rosethorn bowed his head and somehow restrained himself from gleeful grinning.

Margy opened a thick yellow legal pad. “You the jury are going to decide if the State has made its case. Remember that the burden of proof is on the State. The defense did not have to prove Tyler Norris innocent. The State had to prove his guilt. The State had to make a case that even if you twelve people viewed all the evidence that you've heard, in the light most favorable to the defendant, that evidence would instead prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond
any
doubt now, but beyond a reasonable doubt. Did the State make such a case? That is what you are going to decide.”

Margy turned to the next page on her yellow legal pad. She read it, then looked at the jury. “You have heard the Counsel for the State Mitchell Bazemore set before you one version of what happened last New Year's Eve in the Norris home.” She pointed over at a floor plan on a bulletin board in the courtroom. “Counsel for the Defense Isaac Rosethorn has offered us a very different version of those events. Only one is true.”

“The State's,” whispered Lisa to me.

“Miss! Please!” hissed the woman in front of us.

The courtroom stirred as the judge paused to take a drink from a glass of water. She held up the glass and smiled at Isaac Rosethorn. “I got this myself,” she said. Laughter relaxed the room. I saw Homer Louge lean over behind Mitch Bazemore and say something to him. Bazemore wheeled around and nodded. Margy startled the sheriff by suddenly addressing him. “Sheriff Louge, does your business concern this trial?” He looked up, his face flushing to a deep red. He started to speak, then stopped himself. She added, “If not, would you please allow us to continue?”

Furious, Louge stomped out of the courtroom. There was a pause until the door closed behind him. Turning the pages of her notes, Margy seemed to be struggling with a thought but may have been only distracted by her dislike of Sheriff Louge. Then she looked over at the defendant's table and Tyler Norris looked back at her. It was a strange moment, the way their eyes held. Finally her face cleared and she continued. “You must weigh these two versions of the truth, not in terms of how well they were told, but how well they are supported by the evidence.”

Isaac glanced up at her sharply. He was the great storyteller in this room and everyone knew it. Was she subtly suggesting that the evidence was with the State? She looked at him a moment then moved her eyes to the jurors. “You do not have to doubt the word of all the witnesses who spoke on behalf of Tyler Norris's character to disagree with their belief in his innocence. Good and bad citizens alike have been known to commit crimes. Brilliant men, well-bred men, charitable men, rich and famous men, quiet professors all have proved themselves capable of murder.”

I whispered. “She thinks he did it!”

Lisa gave a jerk downward of her bent elbow. “Yes, ma'am!”

The judge gazed along the two long rows of tall elegant windows, beautiful restorations of the nineteenth-century windows in the original courthouse. The afternoon summer's sun slanted through them, shadowing the faces in the room with a soft gold. Margy took a long breath as if her authority weighed heavily on her. “The crime of murder,” she said, “is the most harshly punished of human crimes because it most denies our shared humanity. To accuse a man of murdering his own wife, of murdering his own pregnant wife, is a dreadful charge, never to be made without just cause. Ask yourselves, did the State prove that charge beyond a reasonable doubt? If so, you must find Tyler Norris guilty of murder in the first degree. If not, then you must find him not guilty. The sovereign right and the solemn responsibility of that choice is yours.” And Judge Turbot sent the jury out.

Tyler Norris did not look at them as they left. Behind him, his father and mother sat waiting with the same chilling composure.

• • •

As Lisa and I were pushed along by the crowd hurrying out of the courtroom, I noticed a group gathered around Nancy and Zeke's display case of HPD homicide artifacts. It wasn't unusual to see a few people there looking over the old guns, bludgeons, straightback razors, and hangman's rope. But this was too large and too animated a crowd. I moved my way through them to the front of the case. The first thing I noticed was that the Italian Bernardelli PA .32 pistol was back in its place and the long-nosed Colt revolver returned to its normal position to make room for it.

Even if Zeke had taken the Bernardelli out of the case to lend it to the Hillston Historical Society (and he said he hadn't), I would have known that he hadn't put the weapon back. For the original tag had been removed from the gun—the tag that said, “Pistol with which Big Bob Futton killed a prostitute at the Piedmont Hotel, August 15, 1949.” Now there was a new tag through the trigger guard. In the familiar red marker, it said:

PISTOL WITH WHICH THE GUESS WHO KILLER SHOT

LUCY GRIGGS IN THE MAVIS MAHAR SUITE

AT THE FIFTH SEASON HOTEL ON JUNE 25.

Lisa pushed in beside me and looked. “Hey, where'd you get that gun? What did you put it in there for? Are y'all nuts? This is an ongoing investigation. That's evidence.”

I told her that HPD was not responsible for placing the pistol in the display case. The only one who could have put it there was the killer.

The miracle of modern forensic science is not only its accurate and thorough technology, but also its speed. By the next morning, Etham Foster's team had matched the 1947 Bernardelli PA pistol to the spent .32 slug that Guess Who had mailed to Cuddy in the same box with Lucy Griggs's eyes. It was the murder weapon.

At some point during the past weeks, the killer had managed to pick the lock and steal the 1947 gun from the exhibit in the lobby display case. Having used it to shoot Lucy, he'd returned it to the case with a tag describing what he'd done. He'd even put a new lock on the case, a cheap, ordinary, and untraceable lock. The insolence of the joke was as embarrassing to HPD as Guess Who had meant it to be, and as public. Among the crowd who'd first spotted the tag on the weapon was a television reporter. There was no way to keep off the six o'clock news the irresistible local lead that a serial killer had borrowed his latest murder weapon from the Hillston Police Department.

Forensics collected the fingerprints of 62 individuals from the surface of the oak case and fed them into the FBI's national computer base. Only four prints produced records: mine and Nancy's from our HPD personnel files, a retired high school principal who'd been arrested at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, and a man who'd been found guilty three weeks ago of assault and who had been in jail ever since. On the gun there were no prints at all.

It was June 28 and there were American flags up and down Main Street to celebrate the Fourth of July. At noon, the Norris jury was still out. The task force was taking a break. I walked to Southern Depot, to the atrium where I'd sat with Isaac Rosethorn and listened to his advice to look for the pattern to find the pattern-maker. I had a bloody mary and decided one wasn't enough. Then I decided that what the drinks needed was a cigarette. Among the upscale boutiques across from me was a “Tobacconist” shop with mahogany humidors and silver cigar cutters on display in a Dickensian setting by Ralph Lauren. I told myself if I bought cigarettes I didn't like, I wouldn't enjoy smoking them and would quit after one. I bought Lucky Strikes, Mavis's brand. Just as she'd predicted, reawakening one bad habit had stirred others into life. The first breath of nicotine raced through me like ice water and, dizzy, I had to sit down. It had been a long time since I'd smoked. But by the second cigarette, tobacco and I were growing all too comfortable again.

Meanwhile, an idea about patterns was working its way along my jangled nerves. Wasn't Nancy right that all the martyred saints regalia was redundant? If Guess Who had murdered Kristin Stiller and Lucy Griggs because he knew them, hated and feared them—because they were blackmailing him, for example—then why bother to stage their deaths so elaborately, then why all the “playful” messages to Cuddy and me? And how did Cathy Oakes (the first corpse wearing the Guess T-shirt) fit in?

On the other hand, if Guess Who was murdering out of a sociopathic disorder that had nothing to do with these women individually, then wasn't it too much of a coincidence that two victims (Lucy and Kristin) were so connected? What if the murders were purposeful and personal but all the games and symbols were arbitrary, expressions of the delight he took in taunting the Hillston police with our inability to catch him?

By his messages, Guess Who was boasting that he was smart enough to get away with murder—as if he'd taken Cuddy's vaunt in the newspapers (“There are no unsolved homicides in Hillston”) as a personal challenge. The Elvis tape, the cardboard star, the Mavis headshot, the gruesome detached eyes, the Bernardelli pistol returned to the display case—all of them mocked the Hillston Police Department.

The idea, tingling with nicotine, grew: if the elaborate staging of the corpses (the shaved heads and dismemberment and candles and matches) had been done for our benefit, maybe Guess Who was motivated less by psychosis about Catholic martyrs and more by competitiveness with us. He wanted us to know that he not only felt free to stroll about the Cadmean Building, despite the fact that it was the headquarters of the Hillston police, he also felt free to go on murdering women until—unless—we caught him. In general, serial killers play an end game. Like gamblers, they keep compulsively going until stopped. Some keep going in order
to
be
stopped. So far, Guess Who did not give the impression that he was one of them.

I threw the pack of Luckies in a trash bin, then took it out again and slipped it in my pocket. Across the atrium I noticed one of the two small dark foreign women in black whom I'd seen around the Cadmean Building over the last few weeks. She was foraging through another trashcan in front of a gourmet grocer's called Carpe Diem. It was odd to see the woman alone without her street-corner companion. It looked to me as if she were searching in the bin for discarded bits of food. As she rummaged, some garbage fell onto the cobblestone terrace that fronted the store. A man in an apron charged angrily out of the grocery and yelled at the woman to get away from his trash. He stood behind her and, despite his closeness, she didn't seem to hear him. He shook her by the arm. Dropping the parcels she'd collected, she ran with an odd flatfooted swiftness through the mall and disappeared. After cleaning up the spilled debris, the man looked over, saw me, and shook his head as if we shared an understanding that the world had gone off its axis and chaos had come.

On my way out of Southern Depot, I passed by the shop Gifts and Goodies, whose window was filled with copies of Fulke Norris's pretty little books of poetry with titles like
Sermons in Running Brooks
,
Fields of Heroes
,
Spring Songs
. I went inside and bought the newest one to take to my mother in the hospital. I noticed that the volume
God's Beauty
was dedicated to Tyler's murdered wife:

In memory of my beloved daughter-in-law

Linsley Nowell Norris

I wondered if Isaac Rosethorn had made sure the jury saw it too.

• • •

When the Task Force reconvened in Room 105, we decided to split our focus. On the chance that the killer was one of us (a city official, a police officer, someone in the prosecutor's office, someone with some legitimate reason to be in this building), the D.A.'s deputy counsel Lisa Grecco would pull personnel files on all Cadmean Building employees to look for any history of mental disturbance, particularly acts of violence against women. FBI forensic psychiatrist Bunty Crabtree would continue to work up a profile based on the three crime scenes and would develop the implications of the virgin martyrs theory. FBI criminologist Rhonda Weavis would go with Dick Cohen and Dr. Samuel Chang to Neville, N.C., the town fifty miles away where the prostitute Cathy Oakes had been found murdered, and where we'd made arrangements to have her body exhumed today. State Bureau documents analyst Wendy Freiberg would continue comparison of Guess Who's handwriting with that of John Everett Walker as well as letters from fans of Mavis Mahar's that we'd obtained through her manager, as well as with all correspondence found among the belongings of Lucy Griggs.

And Cuddy and I would focus HPD's own efforts on a search for one specific person: the married man whom Lucy had presumably been dating and whom Kristin Stiller had possibly been blackmailing. We grouped available HPD officers and gave them assignments: one pair would focus on Lucy Griggs at work, one on her music connections, one on her college days, one on her family. We wanted the name of any man other than John Walker that anyone had ever seen her with. Margy Turbot had just signed the warrants.

“We're going to get him.” In his office with me, Cuddy emphasized his vow with a rap of his fist against his Elvis poster. “Not the Sheriff. Not the SBI or the FBI or the U.S. Marshals. We are.”

He was still wearing a short-sleeved summer uniform. I think he'd slept in this one, here in his office, if he'd slept at all. The large office looked a mess—fast food containers on his desk, file folders and books in half-filled boxes on the floor. There were only a few pieces left on his chessboard; the rest of the Costa Rican painted woodcarvings were scattered on the coffee table in a clutter of cracker wraps and pizza crusts. I pointed around the room. “What's going on?”

“Endgame study,” he said. “One of Genrikh Kasparyan's.”

“I don't mean chess. Is there something I don't know? Like you're fired? You packing up, moving out?” In a large box on his desk was a jumble of all the medals he'd been awarded by HPD and by the city of Hillston over the years for a variety of heroic reasons that he normally would joke about. “You turning those back in?” I asked him.

“Hell no. Cleopatra wants them. Her husband died yesterday. He's been in the hospital for ages. It's a blessing really. She wants to bury him with some ‘honors', so I'm giving her these. It's a competition thing. Nonie Upshaw's husband got buried wearing all his church attendance medals and a bunch of Shriners' pins that Cleopatra thinks Nonie got at the thrift store.”

Cuddy's cleaning lady had talked so long about her husband's “sugar” (diabetes had kept him in a wheelchair for years), that it had seemed a permanent condition not susceptible to deterioration. I'd heard her just as often (as she sat on the couch with Martha Mitchell watching the shopping channel) railing against her great rival Nonie Upshaw and the woman's lifelong husband-stealing chicanery and deceit. I said, “I didn't know Cleopatra's husband was a Hillston cop.”

Cuddy smiled. “He wasn't. He was a gentleman of complete leisure.”

I picked up a handful of medals and let them fall into the box. “Well, if he's wearing all these, he'll look like General Patton.”

Cuddy smiled. “I think Cleopatra would like that, especially when Nonie catches a look as she leans over his coffin to say good-bye.”

The phone rang. “Hey, Carl, yeah, I'm right here.” Cuddy frowned as he listened. While I waited, I studied the endgame laid out on his chess set. Something looked odd and it didn't take me long to see that neither of the queens was on the board, nor had they been put aside as “taken.” I checked for them under the table and in the sofa seats. When Cuddy finished his call, I told him he was missing both the white and black queens from his chess set. Distracted, he said several offices in the Cadmean Building were missing small items, that since the custodial service had gone out on strike with the sanitation workers, there'd been so many different temporary cleaning women in and out of HPD it was a testament to their honesty that the whole place hadn't been stripped down to the sheet rock.

There was a knock at the door; it opened and Mayor Carl Yarborough stepped inside. Smart, easy-going, and so deeply appealing that everybody in Hillston, even Republicans, called him “Carl” and found themselves smiling when he went by, his personality was his best political asset. He was by instinct warm and friendly, a reconciler and conciliator, comfortable with the give-and-take that settled on middle ground. But Carl was now in the third week of a citywide garbage strike. Negotiations were at a standstill and a problem that he had assumed he could easily smooth over was spreading to other city agencies. The usual good cheer that animated his dark face had been replaced by a gray weariness. Still, the ever-present unlit cigar bounced between his broad square teeth as he managed a grin for me. “How you doing, Justin?”

“Doing okay, Carl. How about you?”

He rubbed at the bald top of his head. “Lousy. I want to settle this strike. I just don't have the money. I want to settle these homicides. You just don't have the killer.”

I nodded. “I heard you wanted to be lieutenant governor.”

He smiled back at me. “I do. I want us all to get what we want.”

A pigeon tapped at Cuddy's window. He opened it and passed the bird part of a cheese cracker. Amazed, Carl asked if the pigeons were trained. Cuddy closed the window, leaned on it, and crossed his arms. “We have a relationship that they know they can count on.”

Carl took out the cigar, pointed it at Cuddy, then put it back. Then he said, “Justin, can you excuse us for a minute?”

It was more than a minute. It was more than an hour. I strolled down the hall to make espresso in the machine I kept in the cheerful lounge that few of us used as much as Cuddy had always hoped. Off the lounge there was a small chapel, almost closet-sized, one of three “Places of Private Worship and Meditation” insisted upon by the old industrialist Briggs Cadmean when he'd donated the funds for the Cadmean Building. An atheist if not a devil worshipper himself, Cadmean had always insisted on public piety from everyone else. I don't think I'd ever seen a soul in this chapel, but as I waited for my espresso to brew, I heard someone inside the room. The door was cracked open, and by stepping aside, I could see into the shadowy interior. It was Mitch Bazemore in there, on his knees, with his thick neck bent to the rail of a plain wooden chair. I could see his muscular hands twisting together and hear the urgent torturous singsong of his prayer:

When I call, answer me, O God of justice.

From anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!

I backed quickly away, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy. He looked to be in pain. I didn't know if he was praying not to lose the Tyler Norris case or praying for forgiveness for keeping quiet as his boss the Attorney General Ward Trasker ran roughshod over the Law in whose Letter Mitch so righteously believed. The muttered prayer went on.

I was leaving the lounge when Carl Yarborough almost bumped into me. “You seen Mitch?”

I answered loudly in order to give Bazemore time to collect himself. “Nope, haven't seen him. Cuddy still in his office?”

“He's making some phone calls.”

At that point, his eyes bleary, Mitch marched out of the chapel with his usual bluster. He nodded at Carl and ignored me.