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.
Tear-stained, pocked, and dirty, Dermott Quinn looked even more ravaged than he had the night before. My sudden shake of his shoulder scared him into a little shriek. As I shouted in his ear over the helicopter’s noise, my news so shocked him that his legs buckled and he fell against me. He searched frantically in my eyes. “She’s not dead? Not dead!?” I grabbed a bottle of Jameson’s whiskey from a bureau top, handed it to him, turned him toward the path on the other side of the pool and pointed. When he saw her, he shot out the french doors, tripping over his blue platform shoes. The sheriff’s deputies whispered to each other and laughed. Through the pines I could just make out Dermott’s clumsy leap as he flung his thin legs around Mavis, knocking them both over.
Malik Xavier, still in his first year with HPD, was worried about the whiskey bottle leaving the scene, but I pointed out that every single object in the suite had now been dusted at least twice and that most of the prints we’d found had belonged to the sheriff’s department anyhow. The HPD officers laughed and the sheriff’s deputies glowered at me. Malik whispered that these sheriff’s men had already been told to leave by Chief Mangum but that they had refused to go, although all they did here was try to get their faces in front of the TV cameras or use the hotel phones to call their families.
I arranged with the hotel to forward inquiries to a police hotline where callers would be told that Mavis Mahar was in fact alive and that anyone who had seen or heard anything suspicious last night at The Fifth Season should telephone HPD, but should not come to the hotel. They came anyhow.
I had Malik’s partner check the crime scene inventory for a large loose-weave yellow bag that the victim had allegedly had with her last night, and that contained a camera and an audio tape. We couldn’t find anything that resembled it. Nor had anyone been able to find the slug that had shattered the shower tiles.
According to The Fifth Season desk, the attorney general Ward Trasker and his wife had checked out earlier in the morning and were presumably driving home to Pinehurst. I left messages at the A.G.’s home and at his Raleigh office. Then I called Cuddy Mangum.
He was in his car on his way back from Raleigh. The Cadmean Building, he said, had been overrun by reporters—most of whom were demanding to talk to him about this latest murder. Because of the media siege, Margy Turbot, the Superior Court judge in the Tyler Norris murder trial, had adjourned proceedings until tomorrow morning. Isaac Rosethorn pitched a fit.
Cuddy said he had just hung up from talking with Bubba Percy, who had passed on to the governor the good news about Mavis Mahar’s being alive. “Bubba’s so thrilled he’s really going to take Jesus as his personal savior, right after he gets Shelly Bloom fired: he says Shelly had promised him not to leak the Mavis story. That big wuss has forgotten how the mix-up wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been too wimpy to get close enough to see if that girl in the shower was dead or alive.”
The word from Raleigh was that Wendy Freiberg was confident that the handwriting on the Mavis headshot photo matched the handwriting on the G.I. Jane tag telling me to deliver her body to Cuddy. Forensics thought the red marker used on both was a probable match with the red marker used on the editorial from the Star. It looked as if we had another Guess Who homicide. And that was the last thing we wanted the local press to find out any sooner than they had to. Cuddy asked, “So what was the deal with Ward? I assume he’s denying he had somebody shoot the corpse.”
I told Cuddy that I hadn’t spoken with Ward Trasker yet, but I’d left messages. I added that I’d found the rock star. She’d passed out by the lake all night and had no idea that anyone thought she was dead.
There was a long pause, then he said, “Can we keep in mind, somebody is dead? Lucy Griggs is dead and Nancy had to tell her mother that. All because Mavis Mahar wanted to play Lady Bountiful.”
“Well, come on, that’s a little—”
“Are you with Mavis Mahar right now?”
“Yes, we’re here at The Fifth Season and it’s crawling with press too.”
“Did you get a statement from her about last night?”
I filled him in on what Mavis had told me about her encounter with Lucy Griggs and with Brookside. I said, “She can’t stay here. I thought I’d take her somewhere—”
He interrupted me. “That woman has at least twenty people traveling with her and they’re paid nice salaries to watch out for her. Why don’t you let them do it, and you go do what I asked you to do? I don’t want messages left for Ward Trasker. I want Ward Trasker questioned. Also, I’ve set it up for you to take the governor’s statement at five this afternoon. I need the real timeline on what happened in that bungalow—from Brookside’s arrival ’til you and I got there. I want it typed up by six-thirty tonight.”
“Nancy was going to meet me—”
He interrupted bluntly, “Nancy’s going to be working with me.”
Nancy had been on my investigating team for months. I asked, “What do you mean working with you?”
“Look, Justin, I’m stepping in on this. I’m running a task force out of HPD. While I was in Raleigh, I had a talk with Rhonda and Bunty. They’re coming over.” Rhonda Weavis and Bunty Crabtree were female special agents of the FBI, working out of the Raleigh field office, regional-based and specialist-trained at VICAP in Quantico. Their specialty was serial sex-related homicide. They lived together in a big new house in a gated community. Some law people thought they were a couple and others thought they were just splitting the mortgage on five thousand square feet with two Jacuzzis and a club pool. Those of us who liked them called them “R&B.” Or “RhoBu.” I’d also heard them called “Weavis and Bunthead,” “the Bureau Bitches,” and persistently by Sheriff Homer Louge, “those two Lesbionic girls.”
Cuddy was saying, “The task force’s gonna meet in 105. They’re setting it up now. We’ll need all your files by this evening.”
It was obvious that I wasn’t in charge of the Guess Who homicides anymore. “So, am I going to be answering to R&B?”
He told me I was going to be answering to him.
I said, “You’re not a homicide cop anymore. You’re the chief of police.”
“And while I’m in my office writing pep talks for Kiwanis buffets, some psycho’s slicing out women’s tongues and eyes. And the ‘homicide cops’ can’t figure out who. Mavis Mahar, hey, no trouble finding her. But the son of a bitch that told us he killed these women, him no clue. When I was in homicide, we caught the killers, you remember that?”
His sarcasm infuriated me. “You want somebody to blame? Fine, go for it, Cuddy, be my guest. You and RhoBu go catch Guess Who.”
“Don’t you think that’d be a good thing for a change?”
“Just do it by the Fourth of July. That’s two weeks. Oh, and since you’re so focused on Lucy Griggs—now that I’ve told you who your victim is—maybe I should also tell you that Lucy was being stalked by her old boyfriend. Could be he followed her out here. Could even be he meant to kill Mavis out of jealousy. Check on a local musician named John Walker. Just a thought.” And I dropped the phone into the receiver.
• • •
Dermott Quinn slipped inside the french doors from the bungalow terrace and tugged at my sleeve. “She wants to talk to you,” he whispered so as not to be heard by the four young men—ours and the sheriff’s—still keeping an eye on each other from opposite sides of the suite.
I gave a pat to his bony chest. “You were right, Dermott. She didn’t kill herself.”
Tears wet the dresser’s straight pale eyelashes. “Aye. But I feel bad for the other one, the waitress. Just a fan and some fucker does her so.” He showed genuine sympathy but little curiosity about Lucy Griggs. All his focus was on Mavis. A second news helicopter had joined the first; they were swarming above the bungalow. Wrapping a pear and apple from a gift basket into a napkin, he gave them to me, begging me to get Mavis away and keep her safe. He’d deal with the “bleedin’ rats-ass” media. I saw there was no need to warn Dermott Quinn against them; he’d lived for years with a superstar and knew more about the press than I ever would. He explained that Mavis wanted to make a statement—but at her own time and under her own terms. He was going to call her manager who was to set up a press conference at the Sheraton in time for the evening news. The manager would also start negotiating with Haver University to reschedule the cancelled concert. Taking the fruit from him, I picked a round of cheese from the basket and asked him if he had a knife. He found a room service tray and handed me a dinner knife. I told him I’d meant a sharp knife, like a Swiss Army knife, did he own one?
“Knives or guns neither, I want nothing to do with them myself. I don’t like anything dangerous about me.”
“Except Mavis Mahar?”
He looked at me a moment then slowly nodded. “Ah, for certain. Except Mavis.”
I gestured out the doors at the police and the press. “Is this what her life’s usually like? Except for the dead body?”
Dermott Quinn gave me a smile a little condescending about my naïveté. “Dead bodies too. There was a student in Singapore hanged himself in a tree outside our hotel, last December it was.”
“Over Mavis?”
The dresser raised his scrawny shoulders. “Prove his love is what he said in his letter. She’s waiting in that boat for you. You’ll take good care?”
I told him protecting people was part of my job.
“That’s why you’re good for her. See she’s at the Sheraton at half past three.” A bee had flown in through the terrace doors; he very carefully and gently waved it back outside with a folded magazine. Moving closer, he looked seriously at my face. “You know, you look a terrible lot like Niall.”
“Who?”
“Niall Mahar. She took his name. Wild man he was. Played a beautiful guitar, but drank himself silly and went lookin’ for fellows to fight ’til they kicked in his face. He taught Mavis a bit of music and he wrote her a gorgeous song. It was the first time she went platinum. ‘Light at Midnight.’”
I said I’d heard it.
“But that song was the death of them. He wasn’t in her class and knew it and couldn’t live with it. Ah, but she loved that poxie fucker.”
I asked if Niall Mahar was the one who had killed himself by jumping off a Dublin bridge into the Liffey River.
“He did indeed, the eejit. She said you’re going for a sail.” Dermott Quinn pulled a pink rosary from his tight pants. “Give her this. It’ll do her no harm. And leastways, they say you can’t drown on St. John’s Eve.”
• • •
As I walked toward the woods, the news helicopter swooped around to see if I was worth following and decided I wasn’t. So I made my way across the beach to the dock and, casting off the O’Day, jumped aboard. Mavis was lying hidden in its hull. “May your fire never go out,” she said, raising her whiskey bottle to me.
I didn’t have time or ballast in me for this sail and I doubted she did either. But I didn’t care.
Out on the lake, I accepted her offered drink and moved away so she could take the rudder. The whiskey burned my throat and memories rushed back. It had been a long time.
“I’ll have you on the cigs again as well soon enough,” she predicted. Rightly as it turned out.
I asked her, “You want everybody to share your sins?”
“Oh, not everybody,” she smiled.
When I gave her the rosary from Quinn, she wrapped it around her wrist, making a bracelet of it. “So it’s St. John’s Eve today. Poor Dermott’s a country boy and believes all that shite…. Midsummer’s Eve you know. That’s when you go lookin’ for flowers that will tell a girl about her future fellow…. Dermott’d like to see me with a good strong safe married man.” She took my hand and tapped the gold wedding ring on my finger. “Isn’t that you, Lieutenant? A good strong married man.”
I swung the rosary in front of her. “I’d say your friend was determined to save you from hell.”
She tilted her head and spit whiskey out from her mouth in a playful spray. “And I’m determined to go there.”
“Well not today, I hope. Not with me, I hope.”
She just smiled and took a bite from her pear.