In the State Dining Room, everyone circled pretty tables set with gold-rimmed plates, finding their places by the numbers on replicas of the gold Raleigh Medal sticking out of garlands of tiny roses, gardenias, and miniature orchids. Because of Lee’s absence, I’d been moved to Table One with Cuddy, Andy, the Yarboroughs, a college president, and today’s other prizewinner, Mrs. Boodle. Fulke Norris and his wife were at Table Two with other former Raleigh Medal winners; everyone ignored the fact that the Hillston police officers who’d arrested their son were seated only five feet away.
It was an elegant meal. Despite Bubba’s disparagement, the “drama queen” banquet coordinator had prepared a dinner for sixty-four that looked better organized than most military campaigns. Effortlessly, lobster bisque changed to grilled quail changed to pork medallions, champagne changed to wine to coffee, and welcoming speeches changed to raucous small talk.
Andy devoted himself mostly to Carl and Dina Yarborough. That the mayor and his wife were seated this close to the governor and that he was being this attentive suggested that Shelly Bloom of the Sun had heard the right rumors: Brookside was going to drop Horace DeWitt, the old party regular he’d needed in the first election, in order to offer the lieutenant governorship to Carl. (Poor DeWitt wasn’t even here tonight.)
An African-American running partner would be a risky choice. But Andy loved taking chances. Some years ago, a group at the Hillston Hunt Club had founded the Carolina Polo Regulars. We had just enough players to make up a match. The first time we played, Andy got whacked in the temple with a mallet while forcing his way at a gallop between two other horses. Blood streaming down his face, he made his goal and I’d never seen him happier. Afterwards, we were in the stable grooming our horses. Mine was Manassas, the former champion that the old eccentric industrialist Briggs Cadmean had left me. Andy owned two Arabian polo ponies, bought with Lee’s money. He could have bought a cavalry. Leaning into my stall, he suddenly asked, “What excites you most, Justin?”
I was brushing Manassas’s black forelock past his wild watchful eye as I thought about it. “Human gifts, I guess. Talent. Beauty.” Since my answer appeared to puzzle him, I asked, “How about you?”
Andy replied immediately: “Danger excites me.” Manassas, as if he agreed, shook his head free and kicked out at his stall door with a foreleg. “I like upping the risks. I played Russian roulette once.”
“I hope once was enough.”
“Well, it takes you to a different place.”
Picking Carl as his running mate wasn’t as dangerous as Russian roulette, but it was certainly going to add risk to the governor’s chances of winning the election next fall. Because no matter how much Hillstonians might love their mayor, this state was still crawly with bigots who’d be muttering did we really want a Yankee and a black man running North Carolina together, and what if the Yankee dropped dead?
Andy was now raising his crystal glass. “Gentlemen, we are privileged to be at the First Ladies’ table tonight. To Dina, the First Lady of Hillston.” He toasted her. Then he toasted the college president, “First Lady of Frances Bush College for Women.” Then the wealthy widow Inez Boodle, recipient of the Virginia Dare Prize, “Our First Lady of Philanthropy.” After that, Carl toasted the absent Lee, “First Lady of North Carolina.” And after that, Andy suddenly asked Cuddy if he really believed, as he had claimed to reporters this afternoon in the Cadmean Building, that there was no killer smart enough to get away with murder in Hillston?
Dina Yarborough said with her wry sweetness, “Do you think you’re smart enough to murder somebody, Andy, and not get caught?”
“The Governor’s too smart to murder somebody,” Cuddy told her. “Mostly murder’s for the freaked-out and dumb as dirt. The ones that are mad at their girlfriends, mad at the convenience store clerk, so high they’ll shoot their own mother for the fun of hearing the gun go off. These folks have a serious, what we call today, attention-deficit, lack of impulse control type personality.”
With his earnest look, Andy nodded. “We have to get rid of the guns.”
“I wish you would.” Cuddy smiled at him. “It won’t stop people killing each other, but it sure will slow them down some.”
Shimmering tiny diamonds in his brilliant white shirt, the governor leaned to include Dina in the conversation. “Planning a murder is where the brains come in.”
“I’d certainly use mine if I knocked off Carl,” Dina smiled.
Cuddy patted her hand. “Then don’t inject him with dry cleaner fluid you borrowed from your brother-in-law. That’s the kind of plan I hear about.”
Dina thoughtfully sliced off a quail’s wing. “But isn’t the governor right? Whoever killed that girl G.I. Jane in the woods took pleasure in it. There’ll always be murderous hearts out there, getting a rush from killing.”
Cuddy nodded. “Yep. A few. And I’ll always catch them.”
“Ah,” Brookside grinned. “So no one can get away with murder?”
“Not in Hillston they can’t.” Cuddy smiled back at him.
As waiters interrupted with mango sorbet, my pager beeped. It was Nancy. I stepped out into the foyer of the Governor’s Mansion to return the call. A policeman (his arms crossed as if he dared anybody to challenge him) stood guarding the base of the wide cantilevered staircase that led to the private quarters above. I wondered if Lee were up there, feverish in her bed, or if Andy had lied to us about why she was skipping the banquet.
Nancy answered from her car. There’d been a riot at the Mavis Mahar concert. When the already frustrated audience was told that the star was “ill” and that her performance would have to be rescheduled, some inebriated teenagers started throwing whatever was handy down onto the field. After driving her niece home, Nancy had returned to help out the ill-equipped sheriff’s deputies and university police move forty-seven thousand angry people through the exits without their killing each other.
By the time Zeke found Nancy, six people had been rushed from Haver Field to the hospital. While nobody was seriously injured, three were being held for observation. Among them was Sheriff Homer Louge himself. He’d had what might have been a mild heart attack when two teenage girls defiantly bared their breasts at him, displaying little rings in their left nipples just like, presumably, Mavis Mahar’s.
“Where’s Mavis?” I asked. “Is she seriously ill?”
“Don’t make me laugh,” snapped Nancy. “Probably still where you saw her, in the Tucson. Or try the By-Ways Bar. Danielle was crying her eyes out!”
“Find out what happened to Mavis and call me back.”
“What do you care?” Nancy asked. It was a fair question.
“Just call me.” I hung up.
Back at the banquet, Cuddy was being chastised by Mrs. Ward Trasker, wife of the attorney general, for “peddling” Margy Turbot as the A.G.’s replacement “before poor Ward has even started thinking about leaving.”
Cuddy smiled at the small mean woman. “But SueAnne, everybody’s already saying Ward’s retiring after the election and you know it’s gonna take him at least six months to get all that golf equipment out of his office.”
Mrs. Trasker rebuked him strenuously. “Ward has given this state the best years of his life. When he heard you telling Channel Seven how you wanted this woman judge to get his job, he couldn’t believe why Channel Seven didn’t ask him who he wanted, isn’t that right, Ward?” She turned to her husband for confirmation. “You couldn’t believe it, could you, Ward?”
The stocky Trasker, purple-splotched from embarrassment or rage or both, grunted non-committally and informed her in a warning way, “Captain Mangum has every right in the world to his own opinion, now you know that, SueAnne, why don’t you pass me a little more butter?”
Dina leaned between them. “I think all Cuddy was trying to do was express his admiration for Margy Turbot, and if you got to know her I bet you’d like her too.”
“Hmmph,” said Mrs. Trasker with a smile as greasy as the butter her husband was stabbing into his roll.
Seated on Cuddy’s other side was the Frances Bush College president, who wore a floor-length plaid kilt, a scoop-necked sweater and a velvet jacket, as if in formal imitation of a schoolgirl’s uniform. She also came to Cuddy’s defense, commending him for supporting a female candidate like her close friend Judge Turbot in so traditionally male a position as State’s Attorney General. He rewarded the president for her support by frequently re-filling her wineglass. Staring at it, she suddenly launched into a description of a scotch-tasting party that she’d recently attended and went on at such wistful length that he finally offered to hop out to a package store and get her a bottle. I could tell the president liked him; she was unmarried (she’d made that clear), nice looking, and she loved to laugh. But if she was making a play for the police chief tonight, she was running onto a field of romantic war that had already been won by the absent first lady. I’d seen two other women defeated by that same ghostly warrior.
On my right was Inez Boodle, recipient of the Virginia Dare Prize, widow of the Hot Hat Barbecue king, a sly loud woman in her sixties with yellow-tinged bangs and a low-cut black-beaded gown that somebody should have advised her not to wear. “I know what you’re thinking,” she told me.
I said I doubted it.
“‘Why in the world would ole Inez marry a man with a ridiculous name like Boodle?’” She guffawed robustly, throwing up her arms to express bewilderment. “I have no idea. That man’s name was the least of his problems. I’ll tell you something, Justice—”
“Justin. Justin Savile.”
“Oh, right, Peggy Savile’s boy. How is your poor mama?”
“Still in the hospital, but better, thank you.”
“That’s good. Justin, I used to tell people, when I said I married a Boodle, I meant it! Pete was loaded! I don’t mean snockered either. That man loved barbecue and barbecue loved him. Why at the Hot Hats, the damn phone number spelled out HOT PIGS. He loved to make it and eat it and sell it and he sold oodles and oodles!” Her laugh rattled her ice water and I’m surprised it didn’t shatter the glass.
Mrs. Boodle had received her Prize for her philanthropic support of college education, as displayed by her five million dollar gift to Hillston’s Frances Bush College for Women (her alma mater) and her five million dollar gift to King’s, a small African-American college in the eastern part of the state, Carl’s alma mater. She merrily told Dina that if her husband Pete hadn’t already dropped dead of a massive coronary while on a tour of his Hot Hat Barbecue franchises, he would have done so instantly on hearing this news, for Pete had always believed that the rise of women and black people was the source of everything that had gone wrong in America, ever since the slave Sally Hemings had seduced Thomas Jefferson. It was hearing on CNN that Sally Hemings’s descendants had tried to use their DNA to get into the Monticello Society that had shot Pete’s blood-pressure through the ceiling and brought on his last and fatal heart attack. The first one he had blamed on Jane Fonda.
“Go, Jane,” Dina mumbled at me.
I flashed back to a red poinsettia pinned to my mother’s mink when my parents came home from a neighbor’s Christmas party and argued in the hall. My father had indignantly left the party because their host had tried to convince him that Martin Luther King worked undercover as a Communist agent for the Soviet Union. Had their host that night been Mr. Boodle?
Inez hee-hawed. That was Pete Boodle, all right! She remembered that Christmas party and how Fulke Norris—over there at Table Two right now—had tried to keep Dr. Savile from walking out in a huff. Pete had always refused to believe that Martin Luther King and the U.S.S.R. were both as dead as these pigs on our plates and not off plotting together to bring down America. Mrs. Boodle stabbed a pork medallion with her fork and shook it at Dina. “I wish I could slip past the pearly gates for long enough to let Pete Boodle know I gave half his Hot Hat millions to a women’s school and the other half to a college named after Martin Luther King!”
Dina placidly laid her napkin on her plate, and asked, “Why in the world do you think your husband’s gone to heaven?”
Mrs. Boodle stared at her a moment, then belly-laughed. “You are absolutely right! Thank you, Mina, for setting me straight.”
“It’s Dina,” I said futilely.
Over dessert, Mrs. Boodle, who seemed to have no idea that I’d been the person to arrest Tyler Norris, told me that arresting Tyler Norris was the most “asinine, insane, and idiotic thing the Hillston police ever did.” Like most people in town (particularly the well-to-do), she was sure a burglar had “panicked and shot Tyler and Linsley both,” just the way Tyler’s defense attorney had described. “What was his name? Rosenberg?”
“Isaac Rosethorn,” said Dina. “It’s so hard to keep those Jewish names straight, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, the Rosenbergs were that poor couple Pete blamed the Cold War on. Well, I was right there at Fulke and Mary Norris’s for New Year’s when Fulke got the call from Tyler that a burglar was in his house and he drove over and found him lying on the floor. Well, Mary’s whole life has been one long nightmare. You know she almost burned up in a house fire. Where is that idiot waiter?”
Mrs. Boodle was more disposed to believe in Isaac Rosethorn’s scenario of an interrupted robbery because two years ago she and Pete had been robbed of a portable gas grill they’d kept in their garage, and if you could be robbed on Catawba Drive, Lord knows you could be robbed in Balmoral Heights. “Hillston has gone to pieces,” she announced. “Robbing and killing and cutting up strangers and chopping off their hair and their tongues.” Out of patience with the missing waiter, she lit her own cigarette with a candelabrum that almost set fire to her bangs. “Not when I was a girl. We didn’t put up with that kind of violence.”
Dina said quietly, “Well, the last public lynching in Hillston was in 1932. And they sold postcards of it in Machlin’s Pharmacy.”
“Good god,” gasped the college president, overhearing. “1932?”
“Would earlier be better?” Dina asked.
Mrs. Boodle frowned disapprovingly; she obviously thought it would be politer to discuss the mutilation of G.I. Jane than to bring up Hillston’s racial problems in 1932. “Well, this Guess Who hates women,” she told us. “So did Pete Boodle. Pete was always telling me he’d like to blow my head off just to shut me up.” She suddenly squeezed my hand as if she suspected me of trying to steal her watch. “I know what you’re thinking, Jordan! You wish ole Inez would shut up and hand you that champagne bottle you keep looking at.” For the first time Mrs. Boodle had read my mind.
I was ready to go home, but at the other end of the table, Cuddy was telling the President of Frances Bush the most hilarious jokes she had ever heard. I looked at my watch (11:33) and then glanced down the long noisy row of gilt-glistening tables just as Bubba Percy walked back into the room. Something was wrong with him. He had the greenish look of a drunk back from being sick in the toilet. I watched him lean against the door wiping his hand against his usually pink sanguine face.
Then suddenly he hurried over to our table. When he squeezed past, I stood to ask him what was wrong. He ignored me, crouching behind Andy Brookside’s chair, whispering in his ear. Frowning, Andy stepped away from the table. Bubba put his hand on the governor’s forearm and said something else in a low intense voice. With a rapid intake of breath, Andy stared at him. Bubba nodded. Running his hand through his famous hair, Andy spoke urgently to Bubba who hurried off to the exit as Andy returned to our table, looking troubled. I wondered what unsettling news he might be going to tell us. I said, “Andy? Is Lee okay?”
“She’s fine,” he said distractedly. “I mean, she’s not well. The flu.” Then composing himself, he said he had an unexpected problem to deal with, thanked us for coming, wished each of us a cordial goodnight, and within thirty seconds had disappeared from the room.
“Was it something you said?” Cuddy asked the college president.
This set her off laughing and then into a coughing spasm. Mrs. Boodle rushed over to hit her vigorously on the back. Had Mrs. Boodle not recently given Frances Bush College for Women five million dollars, its president might have objected to these blows, or at least moved out of their way, but apparently she felt obliged to endure the violence in hopes of further donations. The Attorney General Ward Trasker stopped his wife from inviting her to join them for drinks at The Fifth Season, the over-priced resort in Hillston, and our table broke up.
Tired guests were being marshaled out of the State Dining Room by a phalanx of large men dressed in white jackets who looked like moonlighting highway patrol officers and probably were. Two of them were blockading the stairs. Maybe someone was worried that, left on our own, we’d scavenger through the Governor’s Mansion slipping priceless antique bijoux into our pockets. As we passed into the foyer, Cuddy stopped suddenly, turned, and stared up the curving green-carpeted staircase leading to the Brooksides’ living quarters above, as if he were dreaming of racing up the stairs like Heathcliff and carrying Lee over to look one last time out the window of her bedroom at the moors before she died of this sudden high fever.
I stopped beside him. “Cuddy?”
He didn’t answer or move as the crowd stepped irritably around us. I was about to reach for his arm when abruptly, unexpectedly, Lee herself came through a door on the second floor landing and stood looking distressed at the top of the stairs. The timing and suddenness of her appearance gave me the strange sensation that Cuddy had summoned her there, purely by the intensity, the longevity, the fidelity of his desire.
“Mrs. Brookside,” he called to her, “are you all right?”