The miracle of modern forensic science is not only its accurate and thorough technology, but also its speed. By the next morning, Etham Foster’s team had matched the 1947 Bernardelli PA pistol to the spent .32 slug that Guess Who had mailed to Cuddy in the same box with Lucy Griggs’s eyes. It was the murder weapon.
At some point during the past weeks, the killer had managed to pick the lock and steal the 1947 gun from the exhibit in the lobby display case. Having used it to shoot Lucy, he’d returned it to the case with a tag describing what he’d done. He’d even put a new lock on the case, a cheap, ordinary, and untraceable lock. The insolence of the joke was as embarrassing to HPD as Guess Who had meant it to be, and as public. Among the crowd who’d first spotted the tag on the weapon was a television reporter. There was no way to keep off the six o’clock news the irresistible local lead that a serial killer had borrowed his latest murder weapon from the Hillston Police Department.
Forensics collected the fingerprints of 62 individuals from the surface of the oak case and fed them into the FBI’s national computer base. Only four prints produced records: mine and Nancy’s from our HPD personnel files, a retired high school principal who’d been arrested at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, and a man who’d been found guilty three weeks ago of assault and who had been in jail ever since. On the gun there were no prints at all.
It was June 28 and there were American flags up and down Main Street to celebrate the Fourth of July. At noon, the Norris jury was still out. The task force was taking a break. I walked to Southern Depot, to the atrium where I’d sat with Isaac Rosethorn and listened to his advice to look for the pattern to find the pattern-maker. I had a bloody mary and decided one wasn’t enough. Then I decided that what the drinks needed was a cigarette. Among the upscale boutiques across from me was a “Tobacconist” shop with mahogany humidors and silver cigar cutters on display in a Dickensian setting by Ralph Lauren. I told myself if I bought cigarettes I didn’t like, I wouldn’t enjoy smoking them and would quit after one. I bought Lucky Strikes, Mavis’s brand. Just as she’d predicted, reawakening one bad habit had stirred others into life. The first breath of nicotine raced through me like ice water and, dizzy, I had to sit down. It had been a long time since I’d smoked. But by the second cigarette, tobacco and I were growing all too comfortable again.
Meanwhile, an idea about patterns was working its way along my jangled nerves. Wasn’t Nancy right that all the martyred saints regalia was redundant? If Guess Who had murdered Kristin Stiller and Lucy Griggs because he knew them, hated and feared them—because they were blackmailing him, for example—then why bother to stage their deaths so elaborately, then why all the “playful” messages to Cuddy and me? And how did Cathy Oakes (the first corpse wearing the Guess T-shirt) fit in?
On the other hand, if Guess Who was murdering out of a sociopathic disorder that had nothing to do with these women individually, then wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that two victims (Lucy and Kristin) were so connected? What if the murders were purposeful and personal but all the games and symbols were arbitrary, expressions of the delight he took in taunting the Hillston police with our inability to catch him?
By his messages, Guess Who was boasting that he was smart enough to get away with murder—as if he’d taken Cuddy’s vaunt in the newspapers (“There are no unsolved homicides in Hillston”) as a personal challenge. The Elvis tape, the cardboard star, the Mavis headshot, the gruesome detached eyes, the Bernardelli pistol returned to the display case—all of them mocked the Hillston Police Department.
The idea, tingling with nicotine, grew: if the elaborate staging of the corpses (the shaved heads and dismemberment and candles and matches) had been done for our benefit, maybe Guess Who was motivated less by psychosis about Catholic martyrs and more by competitiveness with us. He wanted us to know that he not only felt free to stroll about the Cadmean Building, despite the fact that it was the headquarters of the Hillston police, he also felt free to go on murdering women until—unless—we caught him. In general, serial killers play an end game. Like gamblers, they keep compulsively going until stopped. Some keep going in order to be stopped. So far, Guess Who did not give the impression that he was one of them.
I threw the pack of Luckies in a trash bin, then took it out again and slipped it in my pocket. Across the atrium I noticed one of the two small dark foreign women in black whom I’d seen around the Cadmean Building over the last few weeks. She was foraging through another trashcan in front of a gourmet grocer’s called Carpe Diem. It was odd to see the woman alone without her street-corner companion. It looked to me as if she were searching in the bin for discarded bits of food. As she rummaged, some garbage fell onto the cobblestone terrace that fronted the store. A man in an apron charged angrily out of the grocery and yelled at the woman to get away from his trash. He stood behind her and, despite his closeness, she didn’t seem to hear him. He shook her by the arm. Dropping the parcels she’d collected, she ran with an odd flatfooted swiftness through the mall and disappeared. After cleaning up the spilled debris, the man looked over, saw me, and shook his head as if we shared an understanding that the world had gone off its axis and chaos had come.
On my way out of Southern Depot, I passed by the shop Gifts and Goodies, whose window was filled with copies of Fulke Norris’s pretty little books of poetry with titles like Sermons in Running Brooks, Fields of Heroes, Spring Songs. I went inside and bought the newest one to take to my mother in the hospital. I noticed that the volume God’s Beauty was dedicated to Tyler’s murdered wife:
In memory of my beloved daughter-in-law
Linsley Nowell Norris
I wondered if Isaac Rosethorn had made sure the jury saw it too.
• • •
When the Task Force reconvened in Room 105, we decided to split our focus. On the chance that the killer was one of us (a city official, a police officer, someone in the prosecutor’s office, someone with some legitimate reason to be in this building), the D.A.’s deputy counsel Lisa Grecco would pull personnel files on all Cadmean Building employees to look for any history of mental disturbance, particularly acts of violence against women. FBI forensic psychiatrist Bunty Crabtree would continue to work up a profile based on the three crime scenes and would develop the implications of the virgin martyrs theory. FBI criminologist Rhonda Weavis would go with Dick Cohen and Dr. Samuel Chang to Neville, N.C., the town fifty miles away where the prostitute Cathy Oakes had been found murdered, and where we’d made arrangements to have her body exhumed today. State Bureau documents analyst Wendy Freiberg would continue comparison of Guess Who’s handwriting with that of John Everett Walker as well as letters from fans of Mavis Mahar’s that we’d obtained through her manager, as well as with all correspondence found among the belongings of Lucy Griggs.
And Cuddy and I would focus HPD’s own efforts on a search for one specific person: the married man whom Lucy had presumably been dating and whom Kristin Stiller had possibly been blackmailing. We grouped available HPD officers and gave them assignments: one pair would focus on Lucy Griggs at work, one on her music connections, one on her college days, one on her family. We wanted the name of any man other than John Walker that anyone had ever seen her with. Margy Turbot had just signed the warrants.
“We’re going to get him.” In his office with me, Cuddy emphasized his vow with a rap of his fist against his Elvis poster. “Not the Sheriff. Not the SBI or the FBI or the U.S. Marshals. We are.”
He was still wearing a short-sleeved summer uniform. I think he’d slept in this one, here in his office, if he’d slept at all. The large office looked a mess—fast food containers on his desk, file folders and books in half-filled boxes on the floor. There were only a few pieces left on his chessboard; the rest of the Costa Rican painted woodcarvings were scattered on the coffee table in a clutter of cracker wraps and pizza crusts. I pointed around the room. “What’s going on?”
“Endgame study,” he said. “One of Genrikh Kasparyan’s.”
“I don’t mean chess. Is there something I don’t know? Like you’re fired? You packing up, moving out?” In a large box on his desk was a jumble of all the medals he’d been awarded by HPD and by the city of Hillston over the years for a variety of heroic reasons that he normally would joke about. “You turning those back in?” I asked him.
“Hell no. Cleopatra wants them. Her husband died yesterday. He’s been in the hospital for ages. It’s a blessing really. She wants to bury him with some ‘honors’, so I’m giving her these. It’s a competition thing. Nonie Upshaw’s husband got buried wearing all his church attendance medals and a bunch of Shriners’ pins that Cleopatra thinks Nonie got at the thrift store.”
Cuddy’s cleaning lady had talked so long about her husband’s “sugar” (diabetes had kept him in a wheelchair for years), that it had seemed a permanent condition not susceptible to deterioration. I’d heard her just as often (as she sat on the couch with Martha Mitchell watching the shopping channel) railing against her great rival Nonie Upshaw and the woman’s lifelong husband-stealing chicanery and deceit. I said, “I didn’t know Cleopatra’s husband was a Hillston cop.”
Cuddy smiled. “He wasn’t. He was a gentleman of complete leisure.”
I picked up a handful of medals and let them fall into the box. “Well, if he’s wearing all these, he’ll look like General Patton.”
Cuddy smiled. “I think Cleopatra would like that, especially when Nonie catches a look as she leans over his coffin to say good-bye.”
The phone rang. “Hey, Carl, yeah, I’m right here.” Cuddy frowned as he listened. While I waited, I studied the endgame laid out on his chess set. Something looked odd and it didn’t take me long to see that neither of the queens was on the board, nor had they been put aside as “taken.” I checked for them under the table and in the sofa seats. When Cuddy finished his call, I told him he was missing both the white and black queens from his chess set. Distracted, he said several offices in the Cadmean Building were missing small items, that since the custodial service had gone out on strike with the sanitation workers, there’d been so many different temporary cleaning women in and out of HPD it was a testament to their honesty that the whole place hadn’t been stripped down to the sheet rock.
There was a knock at the door; it opened and Mayor Carl Yarborough stepped inside. Smart, easy-going, and so deeply appealing that everybody in Hillston, even Republicans, called him “Carl” and found themselves smiling when he went by, his personality was his best political asset. He was by instinct warm and friendly, a reconciler and conciliator, comfortable with the give-and-take that settled on middle ground. But Carl was now in the third week of a citywide garbage strike. Negotiations were at a standstill and a problem that he had assumed he could easily smooth over was spreading to other city agencies. The usual good cheer that animated his dark face had been replaced by a gray weariness. Still, the ever-present unlit cigar bounced between his broad square teeth as he managed a grin for me. “How you doing, Justin?”
“Doing okay, Carl. How about you?”
He rubbed at the bald top of his head. “Lousy. I want to settle this strike. I just don’t have the money. I want to settle these homicides. You just don’t have the killer.”
I nodded. “I heard you wanted to be lieutenant governor.”
He smiled back at me. “I do. I want us all to get what we want.”
A pigeon tapped at Cuddy’s window. He opened it and passed the bird part of a cheese cracker. Amazed, Carl asked if the pigeons were trained. Cuddy closed the window, leaned on it, and crossed his arms. “We have a relationship that they know they can count on.”
Carl took out the cigar, pointed it at Cuddy, then put it back. Then he said, “Justin, can you excuse us for a minute?”
It was more than a minute. It was more than an hour. I strolled down the hall to make espresso in the machine I kept in the cheerful lounge that few of us used as much as Cuddy had always hoped. Off the lounge there was a small chapel, almost closet-sized, one of three “Places of Private Worship and Meditation” insisted upon by the old industrialist Briggs Cadmean when he’d donated the funds for the Cadmean Building. An atheist if not a devil worshipper himself, Cadmean had always insisted on public piety from everyone else. I don’t think I’d ever seen a soul in this chapel, but as I waited for my espresso to brew, I heard someone inside the room. The door was cracked open, and by stepping aside, I could see into the shadowy interior. It was Mitch Bazemore in there, on his knees, with his thick neck bent to the rail of a plain wooden chair. I could see his muscular hands twisting together and hear the urgent torturous singsong of his prayer:
When I call, answer me, O God of justice.
From anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!
I backed quickly away, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy. He looked to be in pain. I didn’t know if he was praying not to lose the Tyler Norris case or praying for forgiveness for keeping quiet as his boss the Attorney General Ward Trasker ran roughshod over the Law in whose Letter Mitch so righteously believed. The muttered prayer went on.
I was leaving the lounge when Carl Yarborough almost bumped into me. “You seen Mitch?”
I answered loudly in order to give Bazemore time to collect himself. “Nope, haven’t seen him. Cuddy still in his office?”
“He’s making some phone calls.”
At that point, his eyes bleary, Mitch marched out of the chapel with his usual bluster. He nodded at Carl and ignored me.
In the homicide squad room I had a call from Officer John Emory at the Registrar’s Office of Haver University. Roid was having trouble obtaining Lucy Griggs’s transcripts. Not only because of the staff’s resistance (he needed a court order and a letter from a dean), but because even if he’d had those documents, their entire computer system (in which all academic records were now kept) was “down.” I asked him, “What’s wrong with paper?”
“Trees,” he replied.
As I hung up, Cuddy stuck his head inside my glass cubicle and said, “Sorry it took so long.” He checked his watch. “I need you to take me someplace and I need to go now.”
“Sure. You don’t want to drive yourself?”
He said, “I want you to wear a wire.”
• • •
We didn’t talk much as I drove him to Haver Forest, a beautiful two-hundred-acre preserve adjoining the university and bequeathed to it by the Haver family with the provision that it never be built on. Later trustees had cleverly sidestepped the intent of the will by using one edge of the land as a world-class golf course that abutted a luxury hotel owned by the university. Cuddy told me to park in the hotel lot. All he would say as we walked along a “nature path” to a secluded clearing near the perfect grass of the ninth hole was, “Thanks for this, Justin.”
“Thanks for what? I have no idea what I’m doing.”
He rubbed at his stubble of beard, looking in his slept-in uniform like a battle-fatigued soldier. “I know. That’s why I’m so grateful.”
Century-old walnut, sycamore, and oak trees reached high above us, dappling light on the forest floor. In that light stood Andy Brookside waiting. His white shirtsleeves and golden tie flashed in the sun as he waved us over. As we reached him, out of the shadowy trees stepped Carl Yarborough.
I stopped and pointed at them. “Is this some kind of a duel?”
“Sort of,” Cuddy replied and tucked in the back of his rumpled police shirt. We kept walking until we were face to face with the governor and his new running mate.
Brookside wasn’t pleased to see me there but, in his efficient way, wasted no time on the matter. “Unexpected pleasure, Justin,” is all he said to me the whole time we stood under those trees. To Cuddy he said, “I’m glad Carl could arrange this.”
Carl Yarborough was there to broker a deal between two men who didn’t like each other for fundamental reasons. By that I don’t mean only because of their relationship to Lee, although that was certainly a part of it. She was fundamental to both men. To Cuddy who had always loved her and who would go on loving her until he died, even with no hope of a life with her. And to Andy who risked his marriage to her time after time, for easy dangerous pleasures that meant nothing lasting, and yet who admired and valued her and knew he could not succeed without her.
When I say that Carl Yarborough brokered the deal, I suspect that the real broker wasn’t even here in this clearing, at least not in the flesh. The real broker was Lee Haver Brookside and she had flown off to London so that she would be out of the way when the man who had always loved her did what she had come to his office in the middle of the night to ask him to do: help her save an election for the husband she would never leave.
Carl began by suggesting that everybody had now had a chance to cool down and think about what was best for North Carolina. Cuddy interrupted. “How about what’s best for those old tattered banners, Truth and Justice?”
Brookside smiled with his radiant easy equanimity. “Surely, Captain, the two aren’t incompatible.”
Cuddy shrugged. “Well, I guess that’s what we’re here to find out.”
Carl offered us all cigars out of an impulse similar I suppose to passing the peace pipe, but no one accepted, though it did make me want to take the Luckies out of my pocket and I would have if Cuddy hadn’t been there. The mayor advised us to relax, predicting that if we did, we’d see that we were all on the same side. I say “we,” but actually Carl was talking only to Cuddy and the governor. I was there in the way that soldiers, bodyguards, butlers, and drivers are there but not there. It was a curious sensation and it made me realize that no one had done a thorough interview of the driver of the limousine who’d brought Lucy Griggs and Mavis to The Fifth Season. Was there more that he had heard on that drive, seen near the bungalow before he’d left to rush Andy to the Governor’s Gala?
Through the circling shade trees, shafts of sunlight criss-crossed into the clearing. Carl gestured around him. “We don’t have to worry. There’re no lawyers here, no media, no political opponents, just us.”
Everyone was quiet a moment as if to make sure we couldn’t hear a guerrilla band of lawyers and reporters creeping up on us through the forest. Then Andy motioned to Cuddy. “Go ahead.”
Cuddy nodded. “Okay. First of all, I will not resign. If I am fired or the homicide commander here is fired,” he pointed over at me and it was the first I’d known that the city council had planned to boot me along with him, “my last act as Hillston’s police chief will be to issue arrests for the six individuals on the list I’ve given Carl.”
Brookside said that he’d seen the list. He ran tanned fingers through his famous hair. “All right, let’s start with your list since I’m on it. I’ll quote you. First of all, I will not resign either. And it’s pretty ludicrous even to suggest that I should.”
The more easily the governor smiled—it wasn’t a snide or sardonic or insincere smile, just a pleasant one—the more tightly Cuddy squeezed his folded arms to his chest, until the sinews on his bare forearms were rigid. He tapped the insignia on his shirt. “I’ve taken an oath to stop people from committing crimes and arrest them if they do. No matter who they are.”
“We’ve all taken oaths,” Carl mildly interjected.
“Well hey,” Cuddy threw out his arms. “Then I don’t know how some of you sleep.”
“Hold on—”
Cuddy interrupted Carl. “A young woman was murdered. Under the stupid assumption that she was Mavis Mahar, people who should know better altered a crime scene. They did it,” he pointed at Brookside, “to conceal your presence in her hotel room the night of her death. Her body was moved and she was shot in the face postmortem by or at the behest of the attorney general of this state in an effort to convince a moron of a coroner that her death was a suicide.”
Andy opened his hands as if to demonstrate he was hiding nothing. “Ward tells me that either Bubba was just mistaken about where and how he’d seen the woman’s body earlier—he was certainly mistaken about whose body it was—or it was the murderer himself who moved the corpse and fired the second shot at her face.”
Cuddy snorted. “Four hours after the first shot?”
Andy shrugged. “People do strange things.”
“They sure do. Ward Trasker organized and carried out a conspiracy to obstruct justice, aided by Sheriff Homer Louge and others.”
Andy shrugged again. “Ward denies that he did any such thing. Or that anyone with him did any such thing.”
“It’s not true and you know it. A young woman’s dead, goddamn it.”
Carl gently interjected. “Cuddy, we know that.”
“Somebody killed her. What people did to protect this man,” he pointed again at Andy, “has messed up that crime scene so much it’s going to be harder to find out who killed her and a hell of a lot harder to convict him even if we do.”
The governor turned to his running mate. “I think we need to—”
Cuddy exploded. “And you just don’t care, do you, you son of a bitch!”
Andy’s face flushed. He held up his hand to stop the mayor and moved himself directly in front of Cuddy. “I’ve told you I haven’t committed a crime and I won’t tolerate the continued implication that I’m lying about it. I did not participate in a cover up of anything criminal at The Fifth Season. I did not ask anyone to cover up anything criminal for me. Yes, I asked Percy to bring me my car and my raincoat. It was an awkward situation. I wanted to minimize the awkwardness. Why not? I had no idea that the raincoat had been used to cover her body and was therefore evidence.”
Cuddy was fighting hard to keep his voice quiet. “You didn’t know what Ward Trasker was doing in that bungalow? Bubba didn’t call and tell you? Ward didn’t tell you?”
“The first person who told me a cover-up took place in that bungalow was you.”
So angry he was trembling, Cuddy snarled, “Bullshit! Ward fucking believed you’d killed Mavis Mahar yourself to shut her up and save your so-called marriage and your election!”
Livid, Brookside jabbed Cuddy in the breastbone with his stiffened fingers. “You talk to me about my marriage, you sanctimonious bastard?”
Cuddy lunged at him. I jumped between them and pushed them both backwards. “Okay, both of you step back here. Step back right now.” I pushed them again.
Carl looked first confused, as if he wasn’t sure what was going on, and then he focused his look elsewhere, as if he’d quickly made the decision that he didn’t care to know what was going on. Then he stepped into the space I’d cleared between the opponents and urged Cuddy to face him. “Can we talk about ways to work this out, Cuddy? You’re in the middle of an investigation that we’ve got to close fast, the press is all over us. You say you think this man’s already killed maybe three women. That’s what matters.”
He turned to the governor. “Andy, only a few days ago you gave Captain Mangum the highest honor for service to the state it’s in your power to give. How’s it going to look for you, for him, for Hillston, for North Carolina, if one week after you hand him the Raleigh Medal, all this blows up in our faces?” He moved back to Cuddy. “Andy has an election to deal with. Can we agree we need to move on now or nobody wins? Can we agree the best thing for this state is for you to catch this madman and for Andy to get back to the business of governing?”
Cuddy turned and walked away, his back to us. He stared a long silent while out at Haver Forest. The trees, the land, the university all gifts from the family of the woman he loved. Gifts to the state she wanted her husband to serve. I know that’s what Cuddy was thinking because when he turned around to look at us he nodded slowly. Carl then looked questioningly at Andy, who nodded too. Carl solemnly pulled the wrapper off a long cigar. “Good. So now let’s take it point by point, all right, gentleman?”
Thirty minutes later they had a deal. And I had the deal-making on tape, although the governor and the mayor didn’t know it. Or who knows? Maybe they had tapes of their own.
—Ward Trasker would resign as State’s Attorney General tomorrow and would plead nolo contendere to a single charge of obstruction of justice. The hearing and the verdict would be sealed.
—The former A.G. Ken Moize would be asked to step in as Acting A.G.
—Acting A.G. Ken Moize would instruct D.A. Mitchell Bazemore to remove the Haver County sheriff’s department from any involvement whatsoever in the Guess Who homicide investigation.
—Mayor Yarborough would instruct the Hillston city council to inform Police Chief C.R. Mangum that he enjoyed their full and enthusiastic support.
—Police Chief C.R. Mangum would be in sole charge of the Guess Who homicide investigation.
—If on July 4 the mayor and council of Hillston were not satisfied with the progress Captain Mangum had made on the investigation, he would voluntarily resign his office. If they were satisfied, his contract would be renewed (six months early) for a period of four years.
—Osmond Bingley would retire at the end of next month as Haver County coroner.
—N.C. Bureau of Investigation agent Ted Bingley, Osmond’s nephew, would be reassigned to a field office in the western part of the state.
—The governor would immediately ask the Haver County Commissioners to appoint an external review to investigate the competence and the character of Sheriff Homer Louge. Until its findings were concluded, Sheriff Louge would take an involuntary leave of absence.
—Other than the misdemeanor to which Ward Trasker would plead nolo contendere, the Hillston police would file no charges against anyone for what happened at The Fifth Season on June 25 in connection with the murder of Lucy Griggs. Any HPD files containing evidence of possible illegal acts committed at that time (such as evidence tampering, felonious assault on the victim’s body, and so forth) would be closed and sealed.
—All parties to this agreement today pledged themselves never to discuss its terms with anyone, nor ever to make public any of the events surrounding the alleged “cover up” at The Fifth Season, nor to comment on any alleged relationship between the governor and Mavis Mahar.
—Oh, and discretionary funds in the state budget would be transferred Monday into an undisclosed supplement to the Hillston town budget. These funds would enable the city council to agree to the pay raise that the striking sanitation workers demanded, and frankly, admitted the mayor, had long deserved.
Although Carl cheerfully suggested at the end of the bargaining that we all stroll back together to the hotel bar for a friendly cocktail, I was the only one interested. Andy and Cuddy shook hands as we stood there in that clearing, but it was chillingly clear that they would be just as glad if they never laid eyes on each other again.
Andy then shook hands affably with me. “Good to see you, Justin.”
“You too, Andy.”
“Tell Alice to come see me. I’d love to get her back in the campaign. She still in the mountains?”
“Still in the mountains.”
He was good at that personal touch. Then with a last smile he turned and briskly strode through the crossed shafts of sunlight toward the shadowed forest where I supposed there was a limousine waiting. Like always, the light shimmered around him until he took on a glow—like one of the old pagan gods come down to earth to find a mortal girl and convince her that one moment of love with a swan or a bull or a shower of gold was worth a lifetime of regret.
After the governor left, Carl gave Cuddy a quick hard but heartfelt hug. “Thank the Lord,” he said.
Cuddy tilted his head in that bluejay wink. “Well, I think it’s Dina we probably need to thank. She always was the best thing that ever happened to you, Carl.”
Carl smiled at us as he held a match to the long cigar. “That is for damn sure, my friend.”
Cuddy waved away the smoke. “So you ever going to tell me how close you came to trading me in before she stopped you?”
Carl shook his head affectionately. “Cuddy, you’re one of the smartest men I know, you’re a great administrator, you’re a great cop, you may even be a great man, but you’re a lousy politician. You don’t ask questions like that.”
I said, “That’s a lesson you better teach Dina then.”
“Don’t I know it,” smiled the mayor. “She’s worse than Cuddy.” He puffed away on the cigar, sending blue swirls of smoke into the slanted light. “Now let’s get clear. You got your investigation back and you got Homer and Mitch off your back. Listen to me, everything stays as squeaky clean as my daddy’s Cadillac on a Saturday night. Cuddy, you go by the book like it was the Holy Bible. I spent a lot of capital holding this thing together. I got three guys on that council bent out of shape over the Tyler Norris arrest because they are pals of his daddy. This Guess Who mess has got Homer bending their ear and them bending my ear how you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. They are drooling to chew your ass. And you know who they are.”
Cuddy nodded yes. “I know who they are.”
“Well, don’t pull your pants down and stick your fanny in their teeth. I’ll see you back downtown. Take it easy, Justin.” Then Carl followed the path Brookside had taken into the forest.
Cuddy stood staring after him until finally I said, “Like a beer?”
“No.” He started back across the golf course toward the hotel parking lot, his long legs stretching in fast strides over the grass. “I’d like Guess Who locked up before he kills somebody else.”
I caught up with him. “By July 4. That’s six days.” For it had been Cuddy who’d volunteered to resign if he hadn’t arrested Guess Who by the Fourth. “What is it with you?”
He turned toward me, his bony face earnest, his thick nut-brown hair twisted oddly by the afternoon breeze. “I don’t think people ought to get away with doing wrong. That’s all.” We walked out of the beautiful pines of Haver Forest.
• • •
As I was driving him back to the Cadmean Building, Cuddy handed me the little spiral notepad he’d carried when we’d walked in on Ward Trasker and friends at The Fifth Season. “Take this, take the tape you’re wearing, take any notes you have on the bungalow scene. Lock them up and leave them alone. And, Justin, you don’t talk about this to anybody. Not anybody.”
“Except Alice. I tell her everything.”
He swiveled toward me on the car seat. “Oh really?”
I looked over at him and felt such a flush of heat move up my neck that I quickly turned away.
“I’m real glad to hear it,” he said.
• • •
Waiting at my door was a Federal Express deliveryman with large boxes sent from a gourmet store in Manhattan. Inside one box was a case of Dom Perignon champagne. Inside the other, packed in ice, was a fourteen-ounce tin of Beluga caviar. The note said, “Champagne and caviar. Sorry it’s not apples and whiskey.” It was signed “The Queen of the Night.” A quick calculation suggested that Dermott Quinn or Bernadette Davey or whoever had been sent to buy my presents had paid around three thousand dollars for them. But then, as Mavis had said, she had much more money than time. When I turned on my television, ironically enough there she was on the screen, singing joyfully about imported ale that she’d no doubt been paid millions to kiss the can of.
I put the case down beside the untouched pile of mostly junk mail lying on the hall floor and noticed a postcard of scarlet rhododendrons blazing over a slope of Carolina mountains. The card said, “Please remember my plants. I love you always, Alice.”
I put one bottle of the champagne in the freezer. It was cold when I finished watering all the palms and ferns and fig trees and jasmine and azaleas that Alice had kept alive year after year. Their pots were dry, the leaves wilting. I was just in time.