The skeptical, the stubbornly sanguine, the slow—all have their reasons to resist cries of alarm, but even a cynic like Cuddy won’t press his luck if there’s an easy alternative. He didn’t believe me when I shouted that there could be a bomb in my Jaguar, but he jumped out and let me drag him across the road. We stood in our dinner jackets on the shoulder of the interstate, stared at by rubber-neckers, until the tape had ended. Although, as Cuddy gloated, there was no explosion, I insisted we call HPD to send somebody to check out my car. While we waited, Cuddy kept arguing that I was wasting his time. The old lawyer Isaac Rosethorn had once complained that if Cuddy Mangum had been Moses he’d have stood tapping his foot on top of Mount Sinai telling God to hurry up with the Ten Commandments.
It was Cuddy’s idea that before Alice had left for the mountains, as a joke she’d gone over to Imports Garage and had the mechanic put in the tape cued to the song, “Won’t You Wear My Ring?” But I knew that these days Alice would never go to the trouble to buy an Elvis tape in order to tease me about not liking rock’n’roll. Cuddy called the garage on his cell phone anyhow. Naturally, no one was there; they rarely were. Next he located Alice at her grandmother’s family reunion in Highlands. I’d called her the day before myself, only to be told by an aunt that Alice couldn’t come to the phone just then, that she’d call me back, which she hadn’t done. But she did come to the phone for Cuddy and told him that she hadn’t put the tape in my car and had no idea who might have done so. He told me that Alice had been on her way out the door and she sent her love. He claimed that she’d joked about hoping that he was the only Elvis fan I was driving around in my Jaguar while she was gone. It was something the old Alice might have said, and it felt like hearing a familiar voice after a long silence. Maybe she found it easier to talk to me through a translator.
After I admitted that I’d misplaced my keys earlier, Cuddy jumped on the idea that someone at HPD had taken them in order to plant the tape in my car (parked in the lot behind the Cadmean Building), someone to whom I’d talked about my “high school ring” theory on the G.I. Jane homicide. “You ever have a single solitary thought you didn’t blab to anybody would listen to you?” he churlishly asked.
I was tempted to reply, “Yeah, I never told anybody I thought you were sleeping with Andy Brookside’s wife.” But I didn’t say it. I said, “This is Guess Who, Cuddy. I can feel it, I’ve been feeling something getting closer.”
He started down the highway, walked back. “Don’t start that psychic googoo with me again. Don’t start imagining things.”
“That’s what they told Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.”
He threw up his hands. “Life’s not a movie.”
“It wants to be.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He stomped off again and started picking up trash off the shoulder of the highway. This was a man determined to clean up the world.
Old cravings suddenly rushed over me. I wanted a cigarette and a drink. I had an odd but pleasant image of myself on the dock at Pine Hills Lake with Mavis Mahar, both of us smoking, sharing a bottle of wine, watching the sun settle in the water. But I was married and I’d given up smoking long ago, and my well-documented drinking problem had been for years, by all accounts, entirely under control.
Out of the heat-fogged night came the spooky whirring bubble light of the HPD tow truck and behind it our indefatigable head of forensics, Lt. Etham Foster (an African-American still known to all long-time college basketball fans as “Doctor Dunk-It”). He unraveled from the squad car to more than six and a half feet of laconic self-possession, crossed his lean long brown arms, and frowned at us. “Got a problem?” he said.
Etham and I were friends. I think. It was hard to tell with him. In his bass monotone he rumbled at Cuddy, “Raleigh?”
Cuddy nodded. “I know, I ought to be at the capitol getting my prize. My night of nights, and Justin decides the Guess Who Killer’s trying to blow up his old Jaguar with Elvis tapes.”
“Um hum.” Etham turned, ambled over to the sedan and leaned down to talk to the explosives specialist now checking under the hood with a flashlight. After a few minutes, he strolled back to us. He could cross the whole road in four steps. “No bomb,” he told us. “Tape’s been wiped.”
Cuddy said, “It’s just a stupid joke. Guess Who is not hanging out at the Cadmean Building looking for a chance to break into Justin’s Jaguar.”
They towed my car back to the HPD garage to dust it for prints. I borrowed the black and white HPD cruiser that had brought Etham to the scene and drove a silent Cuddy to Raleigh at ninety miles an hour with the blue barlight flashing. I was thinking that the tape was a challenge, like the tag on G.I. Jane with my name on it, thinking it was a warning that another woman was going to be killed.
Cuddy was thinking about Lee Brookside. I knew him so well I suppose it didn’t matter that he kept things to himself. He had bought that white dinner jacket to wear to the Gala because Lee would be there, laughed at himself for doing it, didn’t want to be late, didn’t want to go. As we took the downtown exit, I glanced at him grabbing one clenched hand by the wrist. The prospect of having dinner with Lee tonight was bound to break loose feelings that he’d long kept locked away. It was possible that they hadn’t spoken once in private since she and Andy had moved to the governor’s mansion three years ago. He stared fixedly ahead at the state capitol as we drove toward it. The gold dome shone in the moonlight like all the treasure of the New World heaped into a dowry that the richest woman in the South had given to her husband Andy, a dowry of houses, planes, cars, paintings, friends, universities, and the whole state of North Carolina.
• • •
In front of the capitol building, a parking valet, puzzled to see two guests in dinner jackets step out of a patrol car, apprehensively accepted the ignition key from me. Cuddy and I took our places at the end of a slow-moving river of guests as they streamed up the steps and through the columns of the portico and under the banner announcing the one-hundred-and-third Governor’s Gala inside. Camera flashes flared at us as we climbed the marble stairs. Halfway up, Cuddy was nabbed by a mike-swinging Carol Cathy Cane, looking tonight more like a lounge hostess than a news anchor in an orange one-shouldered sheath, with a wide hairdo the same color. She cut Cuddy out of the herd like a rodeo champion. “I’m here on the Capitol steps talking to Hillston Police Chief Mangum, tonight’s Raleigh Medal honoree. Captain Mangum, you must feel the irony. Here you are accepting congratulations for your low crime rate, when Guess Who’s out there in the dark stalking his next victim because you can’t find him even after the taxpayers almost doubled your police force. And your salary.”
He took the mike right out of her hand. “CeeCee darlin’, you’ve been staying up too late at night watching slasher movies on cable all by your lonesome. You need to get out more and you’ll see that nobody’s stalking anybody. There’s nothing for anybody in Hillston to worry about.”
She laughed skeptically. “Except a killer wandering around loose who already slit two women’s throats.”
“Hillston has the lowest crime rate in the Southeast.”
“Well, maybe it used to—”
“CeeCee, have you heard these rumors about Judge Margy Turbot?”
She jumped at the bait because she couldn’t bear not to prove that she knew as much as he did. “They’re saying state attorney general Ward Trasker is going to retire after the election this fall to become President of the Haver Foundation. Judge Turbot’s on the short list to replace him.”
Cuddy smiled as if CeeCee had just gotten a hard word right in a spelling bee. “I think she’d make a great attorney general. Judge Margaret Turbot. Always a real pleasure, CeeCee.” He kept walking.
I had moved ahead, catching up with an oddly distressed Bubba Percy (usually he was as buoyant as a rubber ball), who fell in beside me. I tapped his tuxedo jacket. “Dollyland Souvenir Shop?” My horror at Percy’s taste in clothes was an old joke between us. Tonight he sported a chartreuse silk tie and a vest embroidered with gold roses. “Sonny Bono estate auction?”
He was so upset he didn’t even take offense. He’d lost track of the governor and his wife. He’d assumed that our cruiser was leading in Brookside’s entourage and seemed to be blaming me that it wasn’t. Glancing down at the street, I shook my head. “Andy’s kind of big to lose, Bubba.”
The press secretary bit at his mouth. “Andy and Lee both! They’re forty-five minutes late, and the driver said they never called for the limo.”
I checked my pocket watch. It was 8:58, cocktails had started at eight, and the brief ceremony itself was scheduled for 9:15. “What do they need a limo for? Don’t they live next door?”
“Jesus, Justin, the governor and the first lady don’t walk anywhere. You can check into the twentieth century now that it’s over.”
“Well, I’m sorry. Cuddy and I were a little late ourselves.”
“Everybody’s fucking up tonight!” Bubba kept telephoning people (thick-skinned ones, I hoped) on his cellular, shouting at them, “Shit!” and clicking off.
I tried to distract him, fingering his flowered vest. “Big Boy Discounts at River Rise Mall?”
He gave the vest an angry tug. “Savile, don’t start with me and the class struggle or you’ll be watching your head roll down the blood-soaked streets of Paris while I sit knitting R.I.P. on your silk scarf like Madame Defarge in drag.” Proud and breathless after this retort, he stuffed the slender phone in his tuxedo pocket and calmed himself with a quick comb through auburn locks dampened by sweat in the heat.
I brushed a speck from his sleeve. “Bubba, you’re always so much more literate than I remember you.”
“I said don’t start. I’m going down for the third time here, I’ve got sharks chewing off both my legs and sea gulls crapping on my head.” According to Bubba (whose vivid personal style bore no relation to his bland press releases about the Brooksides), Andy had fucked the schedule for tonight’s Governor’s Gala the same way he’d fuck anything in a skirt except Rob Roy. Tonight would make the Titanic look like a great vacation plan. His TV crew was tearing around shitting their pants like dogs on a diet of Mexican beans because they were shooting the Brooksides live in ten minutes and there were no live Brooksides to shoot. His drama queen banquet coordinator was off somewhere with his face in a paper bag because guests had sneaked into the State dining room and changed the place cards at the bad tables, the press had broken into the champagne hidden under the bar, and Bubba was sorry he had ever left journalism in order to accept Brookside’s invitation to “Go the Distance” as his press secretary.
Why hadn’t he instead married Edwina Sunderland, the flirtatious seventy-eight-year-old who had once capriciously vaulted him over the heads of his superiors into the managing editorship of the Hillston Star (which she’d owned along with Channel Seven)? “Hey, so she was pushing eighty and couldn’t keep her arthritic fingers off my fanny. You know what? Muff-diving Edwina would have been a sweeter-smelling job than state politics, Jesus, and besides, she dropped dead and I’d have all her money now.”
“Bubba, your vulgarity is in a class by itself.” He probably thought that was a compliment. “And by the way,” I added, “Edwina Sunderland never would have married you, you were just a Pretty Boy Plaything to a Ruthless Dowager. The rich are very different from you.”
His cell phone rang, and he flipped me the finger as he answered it. “Yeah?… Yeah?…” And he hung up. “Okay, Andy’s here. He took a different car. Jesus, I’m too good-looking for this kind of stress!” He ran back down the steps toward the approaching sound of sirens. Two police motorcycles led a long black sedan into the cul de sac. Andrew Brookside sprang from the back seat and waved to the crowd. But no Lee followed him out of the car and I noticed Bubba struggling to mask his surprise as he moved in close. Andy spoke to him hurriedly. The limousine looked familiar, but the windows were so dark-tinted I couldn’t see the driver. However, as the car sped away I saw the license plate, and I’d seen it before. I’d seen the same limo outside the Tucson waiting for Mavis Mahar.
The governor moved through the swarm of eager guests like a skillful fakir dancing along a path of red hot coals. When he reached me, Brookside paused and we shook hands. He said that Lee had come down with a sudden high fever and that he’d insisted she stay home tonight. I said I was sorry to hear it. After Andy moved off with Mayor Carl Yarborough and his wife Dina, Bubba told me I was to take Lee’s place at the main table. I’d be next to tonight’s other medal recipient—the “Hot Hat Barbecue Widow,” who was receiving the Virginia Dare Prize for donating five million dollars to two North Carolina colleges. Bubba said she had been “close” to my late uncle, U.S. Senator Kip Dollard, a handsome, incredibly stupid old man with a beautiful voice, long lovely sentences, and absolutely nothing to say.
“Is there anybody in politics you’re not related to?” sneered Bubba.
“You, I hope.”
Staying outside on the portico, I called Etham Foster. He had asked around at HPD. Nobody had admitted taking my car keys to rig the tape player to blast out “Won’t You Wear My Ring?”
“But I wouldn’t admit something that dumb either,” growled Etham. He added that Wendy Freiberg from SBI documents had called to confirm that the snake tattoos on Jane’s ankles had been drawn with the same red magic marker that had written the label addressing the corpse to me. “Guess Who drew those tattoos.”
“Wonder why?”
The forensics chief said, “I do what. You do why.”
“I wish I was doing why faster,” I said.
The taciturn Etham surprisingly confided something: “I got a friend tight with the Mayor, says Homer Louge is spreading bad junk about Cuddy, and folks on the city council are listening. Council’s had a lot of flack about y’all arresting Tyler Norris. Something needs to break on Jane soon.” In other words, should Sheriff Louge succeed in his smear campaign, I would be to blame for Cuddy’s downfall.
• • •
My mother’s family has held office in this state for a long time, and my wife was in the legislature for a term, so I know most of the people who show up at political receptions. It took me a while to make my way through the familiar flushed faces and recognizable high-pitched laughs in the crush of babble. In the crowd, former Raleigh Medal winners milled about wearing their medals on blue ribbons. Among them was the poet, Fulke Norris, father of the math professor on trial. Accustomed to being adored (he’d been one of the youngest and most decorated heroes in World War II), he now looked like Robert Frost and knew it and made sure everybody else did too: his carefully disheveled white hair looked exactly the same tonight as it did on the jackets of his twenty-three books of inspirational verse.
The Norrises turned ostentatiously away from me as I approached their area. Frankly, I was surprised to see them here, since the evening was to honor the chief of the police department that had arrested their son Tyler. But perhaps they felt that their absence would be construed as fear bred of guilt. Slowly I squeezed past them toward the far side of the rotunda where I saw Cuddy backed against a Corinthian column shaking hands with pudgy businessmen. Tall and lanky in his white dinner jacket, he stood under a huge painting of a few ragtag Tarheel Revolutionaries defeating the entire British army. He was smiling but looked strained. Maybe he was disappointed that Lee wasn’t coming to the ceremony tonight. Or maybe her absence was a relief to him.
“I saw where the People’s Poet cut you dead.” He pointed at Fulke Norris. “Your mama’s got a bunch of his books right there by her hospital bed. I checked one out. A Chorus of Comfort. Terrible. Anybody who rhymes ‘Dalmatian’ with ‘salvation’ and ‘offspring’ with ‘golf green,’ it’s no surprise his son’s a killer.” Cuddy waved his jacket flaps. “This air-conditioning needs to fight harder.”
Sergeant Zeke Caleb joined us and pumped our hands, glad to find familiar faces. Six-foot-three and 220 pounds, he took shallow breaths in order not to explode out of his rented tuxedo.
Cuddy patted his ruffled shirt. “Oh-see-yoh. Toh-hee-joo.”
Zeke grinned at him. “Oh-sah-dah. Nee-hee-nah?”
Cuddy grinned back. “Oh-sah-dah. Wah-doh.”
I asked, “What’s that all about?”
“Zeke’s teaching me Cherokee. You just heard everything I know. ‘Hi, how are you? Fine. How ’bout you? Fine. Thanks.’”
Zeke stopped smiling before he popped his collar button. “We got a deal. He’s teaching me Spanish. I bet I get a lot more use out of mine.”
Suddenly a state militia guard marched over, saluted us, and barked, “Captain Mangum. Please follow me, sir.”
Cuddy said to me, “Good-bye, old friend. It’s a far far better place I go than you have ever been. Or are likely ever to get to go.”
Zeke said, “Chief, Nancy just wants you to know she’s sorry she had to blow off your big night, but she had to take her niece Danielle to the Mavis Mahar concert.”
Cuddy smiled. “I know, Zeke. I got all twenty of Nancy’s messages.”
I looked at my watch. The Mavis concert must have started. I wondered what song the Irish star was singing at Haver Field right now. And how she looked. And whether she’d sobered up since she’d told me she was filled with music and wanted me to stay at the Tucson to hear her song.
Five minutes later, on the crimson dais, Cuddy bent his head so Governor Andy Brookside, whom he intensely disliked, could place around his neck the wide silk ribbon, Carolina blue, that held the gold Raleigh medallion. Andy then read out the plaque praising “Captain Cuthbert Randall Mangum, Chief of Police, Hillston, North Carolina,” for his nationally acclaimed law enforcement department, and he talked a little about all Cuddy’s achievements (United States Army Purple Heart and Bronze Star, Ph.D., LL.D.), and Cuddy thanked him and everyone applauded. It was true that Cuddy had passed a miserable nineteenth birthday in a flak-dodging helicopter while Army medics pumped blood and morphine into him. It was true he had an honorary degree from his alma mater as well as a Ph.D. from Haver University that had taken him years of night classes to acquire. But it was not true that his name was “Cuthbert.” While Cuthbert is what most people assumed his name was, actually his mother, a country woman, had told the nurse in the maternity ward her baby’s name was “Cudberth” and she had proudly called him Cudberth all her life.
After the brief ceremony ended, the special guests trooped into shuttle buses to be ferried half a block away to the Governor’s Mansion for dinner in the State Dining Room. Among the few of us who insisted on walking, Cuddy strolled ahead with Carl Yarborough, talking of strategies to deal with Hillston’s sanitation workers. I think Cuddy and the mayor cared more about the well-being of Hillston than they did about anything else in their lives, and I suspect Carl’s wife Dina, following along beside them, thought so too. Thinner and much lighter than her stout husband, Dina had startling green eyes and a short Afro that was almost blonde. She and I were distantly related but had never talked about it. We were chatting about a community play we were both in when Zeke loped over and pulled me aside. Nancy had just called him from Haver Field. Mavis Mahar, scheduled to follow her warm-up act at nine o’clock, hadn’t shown up. It was now 9:40 and her band The Easter Rising was still on stage without their lead singer. The band was very good, but they were not what forty-seven thousand fans had come to see. Nancy told Zeke that when she’d run into Sheriff Homer Louge and asked if he wanted reinforcements from HPD, he’d told her, “No thanks, honey,” as if she were a waitress asking about a refill. She was concerned about security at the stadium.
I agreed with Zeke that it was best not to mention the concert to Cuddy now. The university police were working with the county sheriff’s people and had already told HPD they didn’t need our help. “Let the Stooges handle it,” I said. (At HPD we called Sheriff Louge “Stooge,” and his deputies “the Stooges.”) Zeke was fretting. “But if this Mavis situation…. You know how the Chief likes to stay on top of everything.”
I shrugged. “She’s been late before. Wasn’t she late last night too?”
“I guess.” Zeke said Nancy’s niece Danielle would be heartsick if she missed Mavis. “I’ll tell you this, I read where Marilyn Monroe entertained the troops in Korea with a 103-degree fever. The old timers had a sense of responsibility, not like these young stars today.” (Zeke was twenty-seven.)
I said that actually Marilyn Monroe was late all the time.
“But she didn’t let folks down like Mavis does. But what it is, is, I read where Mavis has got a real problem with alcohol.”
“Yeah, that’s what I hear too.”
“It’ll mess you up.”
“It sure will.” I thought of the winter sun tediously moving across the ceiling of my small room in a Blue Ridge Mountains sanitarium—so many years ago that I’m sure Zeke Caleb knew nothing about my own real problem with alcohol. I thought of Mavis Mahar on the Tucson stage, swaying from drink, her beautiful arm raised in the dusty afternoon bar light, reaching high for the next note with her outstretched hand, a ring on each finger…. “Reeee-lease me…and let me love again.” How long had she stayed there singing for seventeen people instead of forty-seven thousand? Where had she gone next in the black limousine? To meet Andy Brookside? Was he the man all the sad songs were for?
Zeke yanked off his clip-on black bow tie and, pulling open his stiff collar, took a long deep breath of the night air. “Well, I’m proud of the Chief and I’m out of here. This is worse than desk duty. I tell you, I’m trying for a K-9 division job. I’m waiting for my dog. She’s in Holland getting trained.”
“Ah, a Dutch girl, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m going to call her Heidi.”
“Okay.” I asked him to check back with Nancy and then to page me with any news. I knew he was right: if things did go wrong at Haver Field, or anywhere else in Hillston, Cuddy would take it personally. As he left, he handed me an envelope he’d found on Cuddy’s desk. “Chief Mangum, Private” was typed on the front. “Probably just congratulations,” he said.
As I moved back toward the Yarboroughs, I heard Carl oddly snap at Cuddy. “It’s the last thing I need on top of this fucking garbage strike.”
Cuddy said, “I bet it’s the last thing that girl he killed needed too.”
“Well, if Savile can’t handle it, get some damn help.”
“I have every confidence in HPD homicide.”
Dina, embarrassed, started talking effusively about Measure for Measure. Then Carl abruptly excused himself from Cuddy and moved away to join a group of men smoking on the mansion steps. They included the current Attorney General Ward Trasker and the majority whip of the state senate. Cuddy was left walking alone.
I joined him and handed him the envelope from Zeke. Distracted, he opened it. There was nothing inside but the clipped editorial from the Hillston Star calling for his resignation. The paper’s front-page banner was attached with the word “STAR” circled in red and a large red question mark beside it. He started to toss it in a nearby trashcan. I took it from him.
“Hey, Justin, a lot of people want me to resign. What are you going to do, sue them?”
I asked him where else he’d seen red magic marker used to send him a nasty message. Wasn’t it on the label tied to the toe of G.I. Jane’s corpse?