At dawn when Mavis kissed me, the media had only just begun to hear the first whispers that she was dead. Through the morning, grief raced across the world. People cried in the streets. In our global village of strangers, our strongest feelings may be for celebrities we’ve never met. But by noon, the Sun had apologized and CNN had explained to the world that the rumors were false and that nobody had been murdered but a waitress who was nobody. And then the world that had sighed and cried and rushed to heap altars of flowers and cuddle toys at the star’s death site, now sent up a cheer, reprieved by the happy news flashing on television screens across oceans. Mavis Mahar was alive. It had been thrilling that she had killed herself and it was thrilling again that she hadn’t. In fact, her quick resurrection was even more satisfying. For there is one discontent in what is otherwise a thoroughly enjoyable gobble at the trough of public grief: after the shock subsides, people are forced to notice that the celebrity they are mourning really is gone. Gone for good. There will be no new footage. Never again will those particular stars do the glamorous dangerous things that made us all so fascinated with them in the first place. Never will they be messily divorced or noisily adulterous or drunkenly arrested or caught in the nude by paparazzi in their Mediterranean love nests again.
Of course, Mavis had taken a risk by being alive. Early death has its advantages for stars. It makes them endlessly young. Out of the imperishable rerun of their self-destruction comes their immortality. A Marilyn, an Elvis, a Diana—and maybe someday still, a Mavis Mahar. She was reckless enough. But for now the magic of Mavis was her escape from death. Here she was, so recently excitingly a suicide (or better yet, so gruesomely murdered), the newspapers still on the streets around the globe screaming:
MAVIS E MORTA!
SÄNGERIN MAVIS MAHAR BEENDET SICH.
LA MAVIS SE SUICIDE!
And then only hours later, here she was again not dead. Here she was waving at her fans live on the news, alive to sing for them and wreak havoc for them once more. Alive to make the question of who may have tried to kill her international news, and so a nightmare for Cuddy Mangum.
As for the young woman who actually had been killed in Bungalow Eight at The Fifth Season Resort in a small city in the Piedmont of North Carolina, she was only an ordinary person and the world didn’t care about her. Ordinary people get themselves murdered every day. Lucy Griggs’ only claim on even a minute of the world’s time was her bad luck that the killer had mistaken her for Mavis Mahar.
The governor’s press secretary Bubba Percy was feeling, as he boasted, “pumped.” We’d just watched Mavis on television making a live statement to as many of the media as could squeeze into the ballroom of Hillston’s largest downtown hotel. Quietly dressed, beautifully made-up (Dermott Quinn must have been waiting when I dropped her off at the Sheraton), the rock star was somber about the murder of Lucy Griggs, she was charming about being alive herself, she was apologetic about the missed concert at Haver Field—while leaving the effective if erroneous impression that it was the homicide itself that had somehow caused her failure to show up.
And she was irresistible in her pledge to redo the concert whenever the university would let her. She’d do two concerts and she’d sing all night! But as she spoke, the person I kept seeing wasn’t this celebrity on the television screen, but the woman with whom I’d been making love only hours earlier. A troubling passionate private woman, who was now performing the part of Mavis Mahar the rock star.
Meanwhile, as far as Bubba Percy was concerned, the best thing about the singer’s appearance was her complete silence on the subject of Governor Andrew Brookside. Equally miraculous to him was the fact that no one else mentioned Brookside’s name in the cacophonous burst of questions shouted at Mavis as soon as she finished her statement.
“You Riverdancing bitch, I love you!’ Bubba told the television set hung above the bar at the New Deal Tavern. “Home free!”
It was amazingly true. With the single exception of Shelly Bloom’s Sun exclusive ambiguously talking about “unconfirmed rumors” linking Mavis Mahar to “a second high-ranking Southern politician” (the first presumably the ruined Tennessee Congressman), not a single leak had tied Brookside to the Irish star in any way. (At least not publicly—half the crowd here in the New Deal were trading rumors about the affair right this minute, but they were all “in the business.”) And not even this in-crowd seemed to have a clue that the governor had been in Mavis’s bungalow on the actual night of the murder.
According to Bubba, it was possible that the only people who knew the truth knew that it was in their best interests to keep their mouths shut. Admittedly, this group was not small: in addition to Mavis, the governor, Bubba, Cuddy, and myself, it included at the minimum the N.C. Attorney General and Brookside’s two crisp lawyers, the Haver County D.A. and the coroner, the sheriff, an SBI agent, the reporter Shelly Bloom, the hotel manager, the murderer, and (I suspected from her predawn visit to Cuddy’s office) the governor’s wife, Lee Haver Brookside. Of course, if someone in this group happened to be the murderer, that cut the number down by one.
The potential danger in this free-floating knowledge did not seem to bother the press secretary at all. He chortled, “Jesus loves me and I love Him,” still fooling with the born-again vow to which Cuddy had earlier referred. Elatedly he slapped the bar in front of him and crowed, “Come on, Justin, I’m buying,” to the astonishment of the local politicians and press corps around us, all of whom knew him to be notoriously cheap.
The state auditor hit his arm. “Bubba! And after I heard you were so tight, you shut off your mother’s defibrillator to save on the electric bill.”
A columnist called to me, “Don’t turn your back on him, Savile. Last time Percy bought somebody hard liquor in here, he tried to fuck her before she could drink it.”
But their ribbing rolled like water off the oil of his slick self-regard. “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” he told them cheerfully as he led me past a loud table of state legislators over to a corner booth.
The New Deal was only half-a-block from the State House, and since 1938 had been serving increasingly expensive Italian food to government officials and the reporters who got paid for talking about them. Low and wide, it had two dark noisy dining areas—the original one in which Democrats traditionally gathered and the “New Room” for Republicans (where, rumor was, prices went even higher). The walls of each were entirely filled with photographs of famous patrons shaking hands with three generations of New Deal owners. Giuseppe DiSilio with Harry Truman and a governor. Joe DiSilio Jr. with JFK and my uncle Senator Kip Dollard. Scott DiSilio with Bill Clinton and Andy Brookside. Bubba pointed at this last picture as we passed it. “Two lucky bastards,” he grinned.
I reminded him that his boss was by no means free and clear. Brookside was still a material witness in the Lucy Griggs’ homicide, if not a suspect. The same, I noted, could be said for Bubba himself.
Bubba told me blandly that he’d never met or heard of Lucy Griggs and neither had the governor. If the person who’d shot her had done so thinking she was Mavis Mahar, the killer was not Andy, but one of the “Slut Queen’s” ten thousand other lovers.
I stopped myself from saying, “She doesn’t think much of you either,” and pointed out that even if Brookside was innocent, it was conceivable that someone had killed (or thought they’d killed) Mavis Mahar in order to implicate the governor, knowing that he’d been there on the night of the murder. The homicide still might prove to be a political vendetta against Andy Brookside in an effort to derail his reelection bid. Or it might be an act of more personal revenge. Either way would mean that the lid, which Bubba had gloated about keeping so tightly in place, was about to blow off and splatter the whitewashed walls of the Governor’s Mansion.
Brookside’s press secretary gave his auburn hair a quick comb. “Hey, don’t even try heavying up on me, Savile. Your Cuddy-buddy Porcus Rex had me in a damn interrogation room today. Not his office, an interrogation room! Like he was trapped in some Jimmy Cagney flick and hadn’t heard you can’t slap the suspects around any more. You can shoot them but you can’t slap them around. Does he really think we’re going to roll over?” He gestured at a waitress, both his arms waving like some Balinese dancer.
I’d had one hour’s sleep in the past thirty-two and the scotch was numbing me. I said I wasn’t sure what he meant by “roll over.”
“That crazy arrogant bastard of yours—”
“Stop saying of mine.”
“—told me I had two weeks to resign as State House press secretary.” Bubba swung a passing waitress around by the arm to stop her and got himself rapped on the head with her pencil. “Oww! Honey pot, two more of the same.”
“You got it, Septic Tank,” the big bottle-blonde told him matter of factly and kept going.
Unfazed, Bubba went on. “Porcus was on a roll, you didn’t know? Told your coroner to resign, told the sheriff and the D.A. to resign, ditto that kid SBI agent, ditto Ward Trasker.”
I was abruptly awake again. “But isn’t Trasker retiring after the election anyhow?”
“According to your God Almighty Police Chief, Trasker hasn’t got ’til November. He has to resign in two weeks. Now get this. Your boss gives me a letter to give Andy telling him to resign!”
“You’re kidding.”
“No way. He wants the fucking governor to resign! And if we all don’t squat over and spread ’em for ole Saint Thomas More Mangum, he’s charging us with conspiracy to obstruct justice by tampering with a crime scene and destroying evidence in a felony homicide, and even hinting about the big kahuna—accessory after the fact.”
I sat back and whistled, then toasted him and sipped the last bit of my scotch. “Well, frankly, Bubba, it’s all true, isn’t it? I mean maybe not you yourself personally—all you did was lie, cheat, and try to steal a raincoat. Well, you ran out on a girl lying in her own blood, that from a safe distance you mistook for somebody else.”
“That girl, whoever she was, was already dead!”
I looked over at the television. Local news was now showing footage of the helicopter’s aerial shot of The Fifth Season bungalow; bizarrely enough, I could see myself walking across the lawn from the terrace to the woods where Mavis was waiting. “Isn’t what Cuddy says the truth?”
He spluttered at his beer foam. “Don’t make me quote you Pontius Pilate on the truth, Savile.”
“I guess that’s part of being born again, Bible quotes? Why shouldn’t they resign?” I leaned forward to keep my voice low. In The New Deal, you always had to be careful. “Bubba, they did destroy evidence, they did obstruct justice. You know it.”
He shrugged. “So they took her out of the shower and picked up a few condom foils, so what?”
“So what? For Christ’s sake, they took a .22 pistol and shot the poor girl between the eyes with it after she was already dead!”
He gagged on his beer. “What!”
“Man, you are out of the loop. They shot Lucy Griggs in the face, and left her on the floor with Andy’s raincoat over her. They shot her because whoever killed her had gouged out her eyes and even our sieve-head coroner would have known that wasn’t suicide. Not that you noticed, but then I guess you didn’t really look all that closely.”
Bubba’s eyes opened wide, then wider. His face changed color so fast that his freckles stood out like a sudden attack of measles. “Somebody cut out her eyes?”
“Right, then in comes Ward and, like the hotel manager—and like you—he mistakes the victim for Mavis. Ward either thinks Andy killed her or he thinks any kind of involvement in a sensational murder won’t look good on Andy’s résumé.”
“You think it would?” Bubba asked with a trace of his old sarcasm.
“So they wipe down the bungalow and Ward gets somebody to shoot the corpse with a gun of Mavis’s that was lying on her bed. They stick the gun in her hand. Osmond Bingley is hauled in and signs the death certificate ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.’ They rush her out to Pauley and Keene Funeral Home where they figure those bozos won’t even notice her eyes are gone and that if you have a bullet still lodged in your brain, you don’t have an exit wound through the back of your skull.”
He whispered, “Are you shitting me? Don’t shit me, Justin.”
I leaned back. “I have to keep remembering you were a teen campaigner for George McGovern. I know you’ve been selling out ever since, Bubba, and I know you think you’re complete jaded scum, but, buddy, you’re seriously out of your league.”
The waitress came over with our new drinks. Bubba took the opportunity to collect himself. When he gave her a dollar tip and she sardonically asked if he wanted change, he told her to “just bank it for the next time I drop in.” His caustic eyebrow back in place, he leaned forward and told me, “Okay, so maybe I’m a little surprised they’d go that far. I saw Ward was cleaning the place up, but I figured it was cosmetic.”
“You could still call it cosmetic, I suppose.”
“I figured they threw the raincoat over her not knowing it was Andy’s. That it got shoved under the bed when they bagged the body.”
I said, “Frankly, resigning may be the least of people’s troubles.”
Now Bubba’s smugness returned, full smirk. “You’re the one out of your league. The only resignation on the table here is going to have C.R. Mangum’s name written on it. These guys aren’t about to mess up this reelection. I don’t care if they stuck the .22 between her eyes while she was alive and pulled the trigger. They’ll come up with a spin that’ll smear your pal Mangum so bad his own mama wouldn’t let him in her house.”
It was certainly true that Ward Trasker was stonewalling me: his wife had said he was at his office, his office had returned none of my messages, and when I’d showed up there an hour ago had told me Ward was home with his wife. I said, “It’ll be hard for them to ignore a warrant for arrest.”
The press secretary snorted. “They’ll call Mangum’s bluff. He backs off or he’s out of there. Where’s a police chief that’s been booted going to get a warrant from? Besides, Mangum loves that job too much. He lives for that job. He’ll do what he has to to keep it.”
All of a sudden the contents of an entire pitcher of beer flew at Bubba’s face. Spluttering and flailing he leapt up, knocking his own beer into his lap. “What the fuck!”
“You shithead!” It was Shelly Bloom, the Sun reporter, in a rage so intense her whole slender body trembled, even the short black wings of her hair, as she shook the last drops of the overturned pitcher onto Bubba’s head.
There were hoots, cheers, and applause from our end of the dining room where the blond waitress shouted at her, “You go, girl!”
“Sit down, Shelly!” I stood and slid her ahead of me into my side of the booth. Bubba was frantically wiping beer out of his eyes and hair with his pink Versace shirt.
“You got me fired!” she hissed at him. “I kept Brookside’s name out of it and you still got me fired!”
“Lower your goddamn voice. Who told you that?” He grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the dispenser and wiped himself down.
She snorted. “Which? That I was fired or that you arranged it?”
“Well, both,” he said as he shook beer from his comb and used it on his hair. “Listen, Shelly, you’re sniffing the wrong luggage on the carousel here.”
“What?” She turned to me. “What kind of lame metaphor is that? Sniffing the luggage on the carousel? I can’t believe this man was ever the editor of the Hillston Star!”
“Mrs. Edwina Sunderland owned it and she was in love with him,” I threw in. “According to him.”
The waitress tossed Bubba a large towel. “Don’t bother to tip me again,” she told him. “Your dollar’s still good.”
“Thanks, honey. Listen, bring this young lady another beer. Just a glass.” Bubba patted himself down. “Listen, Shelly, I was sorry to hear you got the boot, but I figured it was because you fucked up and went front page on a bad lead.”
I had to hold her back from lunging across the booth to shake him. “You bastard, you’re the one gave me the bad lead! You told me Mavis Mahar shot herself!”
He shrugged. “You told me you’d hold the story for twenty-four hours.” They glowered at each other.
I interrupted the staring match to ask Shelly if she’d seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of Bungalow Eight last night while she was out there lurking herself. She said no, she hadn’t, and don’t bother to ask. Mangum had already had her hauled into a police cruiser this morning, dragged to HPD, and questioned for over an hour. The city would be lucky if she didn’t sue them as soon as she finished suing the governor’s staff for forcing her out of her job because she knew too much.
Bubba tried humor. “If you’re out of work, you probably shouldn’t have spent fourteen bucks on that pitcher of beer.”
“You think I’m kidding, Percy?” she seethed. “I’ll work twenty-four hours a day ’til I blow your reelection back to the Stone Age.”
He shook his head with a paternal smile. “Shelly, you’ve got the wrong idea about modern journalism. It’s not about investigation, it’s not about truth, it’s not about work. It’s about looking good when you carry the press releases of the powerful to an ignorant public with the attention span of a gnat. You’re a good-looking spin toady, sweetheart.”
“Maybe you are.”
He grinned. “Hey, thanks. You noticed.”
I stood, wiping beer from my jacket’s sleeve. “Excuse me. I have a meeting with the governor under discussion.”
Shelly laughed bitterly. “Be sure you have it before November or it’ll be with the ex-governor.”
Leaving the booth, I could hear Bubba telling Shelly that if she’d treat him to dinner at Pogo’s, he’d slip her a hot lead about the gubernatorial race that would get her her job back at the Sun for sure.
“You’re fucking amazing,” I heard her say.
“I think so,” he replied.
On my way out of the New Deal, I saw Margy Turbot, the woman Cuddy called the best-looking judge in the state, in a tête à tête with Ken Moize, the former attorney general whose decision to quit to run a human rights organization had made it possible for the assistant A.G. Ward Trasker to ascend to the post. I’d always liked Ken Moize. I couldn’t decide if he was advising Margy to run for A.G. on Brookside’s ticket or to avoid his mistake by saying no. Or maybe the two of them were just having lunch.
I approached them. “Hey, Margy. So the problem wasn’t media interference, after all? You really adjourned the Norris trial so you could come over here and drink Cosmopolitans with Ken.”
Moize, recently divorced, laughed. “I wish. All she talks about is Cuddy Mangum.”
Margy patted his arm. “What can I say, I’m a sucker for a Raleigh Medal winner.” At any rate, she cared enough about him to ask me to pass along a message. “Tell Cuddy to watch his back, okay? Ken’s hearing things.” Ken nodded at me. “And so am I.”
I asked her what things, but the judge shook her head. “Just tell him, watch his back. And after this trial, maybe we could all have dinner.”
“Sure. You figure the Norris jury’ll be out fast?”
She shrugged with non-committal discretion. “You never know with a jury. That’s why I love the system.” But we both knew it was likely that Tyler Norris and his jury both would be home tomorrow in time for dinner.
By the door, three members of the General Assembly stopped me to ask about Alice, who’d served two terms with them. I said she was still spending time with her family in the mountains. Her grandmother was getting old and…. I let the inference fade away. The young congressmen immediately began speculating that Alice might actually be up there canvassing votes, she might be thinking of switching districts, maybe even running for state senate. For politicians there are no innocent acts. I smiled secretively and let them think what they would. “You never can tell.” I didn’t know what else to say.
• • •
The scheduled interview that Cuddy had instructed me to have with Andrew Brookside had been postponed twice by the governor’s office. Now once more I waited in his anteroom until finally a polite secretary floated in and whispered to another polite secretary who then told me that someone would see me in the Havana Room. A third secretary led me through the Mansion to an attractive waiting room with a bay window where a large table was covered with magazines to read while you waited. It was called the Havana Room because another Dollard governor had brought back from the Spanish-American War the two Toledo swords and the huge Spanish map of Havana that hung on the wall across from me. I studied the map, thinking about the strangeness of its being here on a wall in North Carolina, this relic of the death of Spain’s empire in the New World, this birth of our American imperialism. The map was dated January 1898. I pointed at it and said to the young secretary, “Only a month before the Maine.”
“The main what?” she asked, and when I just shook my head, politely left me alone.
No one came for me, so I made another phone call to Ward Trasker. This time I told his secretary to say I was in the governor’s office. This time he took my call. When I told him he had conspired to obstruct justice by disguising a murder as a suicide, he accused me of having lost my mind. He denied categorically that he had wiped prints or altered a crime scene by moving the body he’d thought was Mavis Mahar’s. He denied vehemently that he had shot some poor girl in the face. He hadn’t covered up a damn thing except the corpse. It was true, he had put a coat over the corpse. It seemed the decent thing to do. If it was a crime, he’d like to know which one.
I asked, “Did you instruct anyone in the room with you to move the body or remove anything from the body? Like a hat with candles in it?”
The A.G. expressed amazement that I wasn’t in a mental institution and hung up the phone.
I looked out the large window at the Mansion grounds where old trees heavy with lank summer leaves shaded grass that no one walked on but its caretakers. Finally the two lawyers who’d seemed so brisk and crisp in Andy’s office at four in the morning suddenly appeared through a side door, now even crisper. One of them handed me three neatly typed pages. The other one said that the pages were the governor’s fully cooperative effort to assist the Hillston police in our investigation of the Lucy Griggs homicide. If I had any further questions, I should telephone their office and someone would be glad to help me. I glanced down at the typescript and read at random:
I called upon Miss Mahar to discuss the importance of her timely appearance at the second Haver Field concert. She arrived in her hotel bungalow accompanied by a young woman who somewhat resembled her. I was not introduced to nor did I speak with this person. The two women went inside the bungalow together. I remained on the terrace and don’t know what was said or done inside the suite. When I did enter the bungalow, Miss Mahar was there alone; she said the young woman had already returned to town in a taxi. I expressed concern about Miss Mahar’s inebriated condition….
The lawyers waited with affable impatience while I glanced through the rest of the document. Then I ruffled the pages at them. “A, not an interview,” I told them pleasantly. “B, not signed. Captain Mangum set up an in-person interview.” A quick flick of the eyes at each other, superior, amused, before they solemnly gazed back at me. The first lawyer said Governor Brookside sent his apologies for missing a chance to say a personal hello and sent his thanks to the Hillston police for their efforts to resolve this unfortunate matter. The second lawyer said he’d show me out.
As I was hurried along the hall, I passed an open door and, noticing Dina Yarborough, I broke away from my escort to talk to her. She was seated by herself on a silk couch whose pillows she was idly rearranging. Dina’s green eyes were always startling in her cinnamon-colored face, now the more so because she wore a suit the same green. She said, “Good lord, are you okay, Justin? You look awful.”
“Sleep will fix it,” I said. “I guess you heard we’ve got another murder. Carl must be as flipped out about it as Cuddy. And just a year ago they called us, ‘Hillston, A Bright Star in the Flag of the New South.’” I was quoting a bumper sticker. She glanced past me anxiously, then she stared silently down at her long slender feet in their beautiful shoes. I tried again. “You look elegant, Dina. First Ladies Lunch?”
“Thank you. No.”
“Something wrong?”
She appeared to make an abrupt decision; reaching up for my hand she said, “They’re going to announce in an hour so I guess it’s okay if I tell you. Carl and I just had a meeting with Andy. They’re still up there talking.”
I knew exactly what she meant and nodded. “Ahhh…”
She stood and smiled. “Carl’s on the ticket. Lieutenant Governor.”
I reached out a hand, then instead quickly embraced her. “Congratulations, Dina. Alice’ll be thrilled. Andy’s made a great call. But what’s Hillston going to do without the mayor?”
She wryly raised her exquisitely manicured hands. “If I can do without Carl, Hillston can. Cuddy saw more of him than I ever did, and I swear if I couldn’t play bridge, I’d have never seen either one of them.”
“Carl and Cuddy did great things for Hillston,” I said, noticing that the remark made her take an angry breath.
She nodded solemnly. “They certainly did. They did great things.”
“Let’s celebrate. Pick a night, we’ll go to Pogo’s. Nicer. Pine Hills Inn.”
Now she glanced evasively at the fireplace mantel. There was a plaque there saying a freed African-American named Thomas Day had designed the mantelpiece in 1832. Dina said, “Great. Let me check with Carl.”
“I don’t want you to move to Raleigh.”
“You’ll miss me.”
“I sure will. It doesn’t mean you have to quit the Hillston Players, does it?” Dina was an enthusiastic member of our amateur theatrical society. She was one of the best actresses we had and was scheduled to play the lead this fall in Measure for Measure.
She touched her pale Afro. “They better not ask me to give up the Players. My hair’s bad enough.” I asked what she meant, give up her hair. With the quiet acerbic smile that confused people, she said, “Andy thought this was a dye job and wondered why I didn’t let it go natural. When I said it was natural,” Dina laughed, “he wondered if maybe I should dye it black!”
We both knew the ancestral reason for Dina’s hair color, an ancestry that she and I shared but had never discussed and probably never would.
Her husband Carl hurried into the room to find her. Chunky, bald, pleasant-faced, the mayor was normally so effusively friendly that his aloof behavior now was startling. My presence seemed to embarrass him and he looked stiff and awkward. When Dina said she’d told me about the reelection ticket and when he thanked me for congratulating him, he didn’t once look in my eyes. Nor did he ask about the murder at The Fifth Season despite all the confusion and press coverage of the last twenty-four hours. Nor did he mention Cuddy, with whom he’d spent every day of their shared professional lives for the past eight years. Instead, reaching for Dina’s arm, he led her so quickly out of the room that she had to twist awkwardly backwards to say good-bye to me. My first thought was that Carl was just annoyed with his wife for telling me he was on the ticket before the announcement.
I had my second thought as I was walking through the large impersonal lobby of the Governor’s Mansion toward the front doors. An entourage came hurrying down the stairs from the private quarters above. Two of the house staff (both African-Americans, wearing white jackets) carried four large suitcases while two young secretarial-looking women (both white, wearing black suits) walked behind them, carrying small bags. Behind these women came Lee Haver Brookside carrying nothing but a purse. She was dressed for travel in that style of comfortable casual sophistication favored by the well-to-do. She was also wearing sunglasses, even though she wasn’t yet outside, and when she didn’t take them off as she paused to speak with me, I had the feeling she’d been crying.
“Taking a trip, Lee?”
“Hi, Justin. Yes, I’m late for the airport.” She stopped herself from sounding rushed (Lee was unfailingly gracious), and added that she was speaking at a conference on children and the arts in Washington, D.C.
I gestured at the luggage being carried outside. “Long conference?”
She told me she was leaving directly from the conference for London, a small vacation. She wished me well, moved toward the door, then, after her escorts had passed through, turned suddenly back and quickly handed me an envelope she took from her purse. There was nothing written on it. “Please give this to Cuddy,” she said hurriedly. “Tell him,” she looked at me as if the words were somewhere hidden in my eyes, “that he mustn’t hurt himself for me. Will you tell him that please, Justin? Thank you.”
Lee knew that I would do as she asked. She didn’t wait for my answer but moved ahead of me through the great doors of the Governor’s Mansion. The house belonged to the state that had made her family phenomenally wealthy and she had always felt that such gifts imposed obligations on her. She had always felt that she belonged to the state.
As the long black limousine moved smoothly away, the entourage headed back up the steps. Behind them bounced Bubba Percy returning from the New Deal Tavern, looking disturbed and puzzled. He stopped beside me and watched the car drive off. “Jesus fuck my ass!”
“Bubba, I don’t think that’s what they mean by taking Jesus as your personal savior.”
He bit frantically at his lip. “I saw her luggage. She’s not leaving him, is she? Did Lee look like she was leaving him?”
I shook my head. “She’ll be back in two weeks.”
“You wouldn’t be so sure, Savile, you heard the names her maid said she was calling Andy in their bedroom Friday night just before she didn’t show at the banquet.”
“Bubba, breathe. She won’t leave him.” I squeezed at his arm. “Now you tell me something. What are they trying to do to Cuddy in there?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Trying?” And shaking his head at my naïveté, he hurried inside.
Of course, not even the attorney general could fire Cuddy. Only the Hillston mayor and city council could do that.
And that had been my second thought about why Mayor Carl Yarborough, now Brookside’s running mate, hadn’t looked in my eyes.