First Lady (37 page)

Idly I read down the sheet cataloging Lucy Griggs's college courses for the four semesters she'd attended Haver:

Eng. 21a. Brownlee B-

Span. 125 Martinez A-

Then all of a sudden I saw something. I hadn't been looking for it, much less expecting it, and yet the instant my eyes fell on the name, I felt a sickening turn in my chest. In the spring term of Lucy's freshman year:

Econ. 115 Kasdan A-

Eng. 21b. de Grazia B+

Intro Wm. Studies Auerbach A-

Math. 201 Norris A

Music Hist. 350 Korshin B+

And in the fall term of Lucy's sophomore year:

Calculus 503 Norris A

And in the spring term of that year:

Algebraic Topology Norris A

“Norris.” She'd taken three courses with Tyler Norris. Professor Tyler Norris of the Haver University Mathematics Department. Tyler Norris who'd just been found not guilty of murdering his wife, who'd been set free by Judge Margy Turbot. Over two years, Lucy Griggs had repeatedly taken courses with Norris, the only courses in which she'd received straight As.

The key turned and all the doors blew open onto a vista of hell. I couldn't stop myself from seeing flashes of Norris's face. The way he'd turned and smiled so chillingly at me in the courtroom after Margy Turbot sent the jury out. The terrible rage suffusing his face as his father unctuously signed the autograph on his book of poems at Southern Depot. Last night, the way he was looking at Margy as we walked out of the Pine Hills Inn. Other images rushing back through the months since I'd arrested him. The chess pieces. Norris was a chess whiz; as a small child he could play five games simultaneously. Norris and Rosethorn outside the Tucson. Norris. Norris.

I made myself close my eyes and concentrate on deliberate deep breaths. Lucy Griggs had also taken more than one course with someone named Martinez and had done very well in them. It didn't mean she was having an affair with that teacher, it didn't mean Martinez had killed her.

The image of Tyler's smile would not go away.

I looked at the Hillston map that we'd pinned to the corkboard. Dumfries Court had sounded familiar because it was in Balmoral Heights, only three blocks from the Norris house on the Tartan Drive cul de sac. I went back to the DMV list and found three more Explorers registered in the same neighborhood. I circled the owners' names.

Nancy came quietly to the door with a bag of breakfast biscuits. I motioned her back into the hall. She said, “Are they asleep?” I nodded. “What's wrong with you, you look like total shit.”

It was true that I was unshaven, wearing last night's clothes, and probably smelling of the alcohol Mavis and I had consumed. I sidestepped the question. “Nancy, I need something fast. What kind of car does Tyler Norris drive? And I want the car color on these registrations!” I thrust the circled DMV list at her. “Don't ask. Just go!”

She stared at me, spun around, and took off. I hurried back into the room, looked up the Norris home phone number and called it. The phone seemed to ring forever, but finally he picked up and groggily said, “Hello?” It was Tyler himself, I was sure of that. I hung up the phone without speaking, went back out into the hall, and paced its length. I lit a cigarette although there were NO SMOKING signs at both ends of the hall.

Was I crazy? My brain felt tangled like a packet of firecrackers. Each “pop!” set off another. Dick Cohen had groused, “He's got a real hard-on about us, doesn't he? I mean HPD. What'd we do to him?” But if it was Norris, how easy to answer. What had we done to him? We'd charged him with murder and put him on trial for his life. We: the Hillston Police Department and the judge who'd made it almost apparent that in her heart she believed him guilty. The tag on G.I. Jane had said,

LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,

PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:

CAPTAIN C.R. MANGUM

HILLSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT

The tape in my car, the star in Cuddy's apartment, the gun returned to the display case, it was all overkill to pay us back, to prove that he was going to win. Tyler and Linsley Norris lived in Balmoral Heights. Kristin Stiller had been found near the new construction area there. What if Kristin had discovered that Tyler was Lucy's married lover and she was blackmailing him? What if Lucy had decided to force her lover's hand? According to Mavis, Lucy had bragged that the married man's life was under her control. “And he knows it too.” She must have had proof then. Letters? Photos?

Nancy came running back into the hall. “I don't believe it, Justin! You're smoking? You quit years ago.”

“What about Norris's car?”

She handed me a slip of paper. “Volvo station wagon. 1995. White. His wife had a Lexus, but he sold it after she died. Why do you want to know? Crap, I can't believe you're smoking!”

Of the four Ford Explorers in Balmoral Heights, the only one of a color that coordinated with gray carpeting belonged to Roger Ferraro on Dumfries Court. He was a professor of the history of science at Haver, with a specialty in eighteenth-century navigational instruments. According to the secretary of the department whom Nancy had called, Professor Ferraro and his family were spending the entire academic year in Greenwich, England, and had left their house in the care of neighbors. I said, “Come on, Nancy. Let's go.”

“Go where?”

“Why do you keep asking me questions?”

“Because that's what you taught me to do.”

• • •

At the door of the large gray-stained fake French chalet where so many months ago I'd watched another woman, Linsley Norris, carried out on a gurney in a plastic pouch and wheeled down a brick walk to an ambulance, Nancy and I waited for someone to answer the bell.

“This is crazy, Justin. We're gonna get our butts fried,” Nancy whispered as we heard locks click and the door open.

In black Lyrca biking pants and a Haver sweatshirt, Tyler Norris stood there with a mug of coffee. The mug demonstrated that he'd donated to public radio. I could see a razor-thin Italian twenty-speed bicycle leaned against the wall beside him. I looked down at his feet. Nike running shoes.

“What do you want?” he said coldly.

“This is Officer Caleb-White. Could we come in and talk to you, Professor Norris?”

“No, you can't. What's this about?”

I explained that we were looking for a black Ford Explorer that might have been used in the commission of a local homicide. Such a car was registered to a neighbor of his, a Dr. Roger Ferraro. Dr. Ferraro was out of the country and another neighbor had just told us that she had the impression that Professor Norris was checking on his house for him. She thought she'd seen Norris driving the Ferraro car.

Norris's flat blue eyes glanced from me to Nancy and back to me. And it was then that I saw it in his eyes. Deep down in the iris, yet unmistakable. A scared but smug evil. He'd killed them. He'd enjoyed it. I knew it.

We stared at each other, all the truth going on in our eyes. My bland question: had he driven his fellow faculty member's Ford Explorer?

“No, I haven't,” he said curtly. “Which neighbor supposedly said this?” I didn't answer him. He swung the door. “I'm calling your superiors.”

I quickly shoved my shoe in the opening. “You didn't use the Explorer last night?” He shook his head. I kept my voice low-key, nonchalant. “Where did you go last night after you and your parents left Pine Hills?”

His lips moved but nothing came out. He stretched his mouth as if his jaw hurt. “You're trespassing.” he finally said.

“Just tell me where you were last night between ten and midnight.”

“All I'll tell you is if you ever appear on my property again, I'll file a suit against this city that will bankrupt it.” The door closed. It didn't slam. He was in control. But the coffee in his mug trembled.

Five minutes later, I was shoving Nancy through a small window in the rear of the locked Ferraro garage a few blocks away but easily reachable by a wooded path from the Norris backyard. I heard her footsteps moving inside the garage, then silence, then she stepped back to the window. “Yeah. It's in there. Locked and alarmed. I can't get the carpet fiber. But it's black. Gray cloth carpet. Somebody's drove it. Still damp from last night's rain. And some wet oil on the tarmac under the engine.”

I helped pull her back through the small window. She hopped down effortlessly. “There's something stuck under the wheel frame. It's wet too.” She said it was a tiny twig of leafy boxwood. I remembered there was boxwood bordering Margy Turbot's house.

Half an hour later, two HPD officers sat in a line-repair truck in Haver Power Company outfits a block away from Tyler Norris's home. If Tyler drove out of his house, John Emory (looking like an investment banker in a BMW) would pick him up at the single gated entrance to Balmoral Heights and follow him wherever he went. Nancy headed back to Lucy Griggs's apartment to look for anything that would tie Norris personally to his dead student—best of all any letters or photos. Other detectives were talking again with Lucy's mother, friends, and classmates for clues to the relationship between the dead girl and her math professor.

On my way to the Cadmean Building, I kept reconfiguring the variables that dozens of us had already worked on hard and long. Over and over Tyler Norris made sense of them. Tyler Norris was Guess Who. He'd killed his wife Linsley Norris and gotten away with it. Now there'd been four more murders, maybe even five. Kristin Stiller. Lucy Griggs. Maria Guevarra and, I feared, her sister Lupe. Margy Turbot. Presumably he'd killed Kristin and Lucy because they'd threatened him with blackmail. Presumably he'd killed the Guevarra sisters because, after he'd used them to pass messages to us, they could identify him. And he'd killed Margy for no cause but to take revenge on her and us—because we'd sat in judgment on him and believed him guilty. I had no doubt that he'd murdered those women. I'd seen it in his eyes. But a chilling look was far from proof. Without proof, we couldn't stop him. If we didn't stop him, he would kill someone else. And how could we stop him when we'd already been warned by the mayor and the city council, by the district attorney and by the attorney general of the state, not ever to go near him again?

As I parked the old Jaguar, I saw Isaac Rosethorn in his rumpled black suit and Miss Bee Turner in her crisp bright blue suit heading together into Pogo's, a favorite restaurant of local lawyers because of its proximity to the county jail. Everyone knew that Isaac and Bee had been “dating” for a good three or four decades but that she refused to socialize with him during any trial in which she was clerk and he was defense attorney. One local lawyer quipped that he never had to wait for the news to know when the jury had given its verdict in a big case; he could tell by whether Isaac was eating lunch alone or with Miss Turner.

Following the two inside, I ordered a bloody mary at the bar. The next morning's bloody mary for the headache from the night before; the old bad habits were quickly coming back. It was just after eleven, so the place was quiet. Shortly after the courtrooms emptied at noon, it would be impossible even to reach the bar. In the long mirror, I could see Isaac gallantly holding out a chair for Miss Turner at “his” table. Drawn directly on the walls of Pogo's were cartoon drawings of Hillston's civic and legal luminaries. There was one of Cuddy. There was one of Judge Margy Turbot that already had a funeral wreath of white carnations on a stand beneath it. Isaac always sat at a table beside a large color caricature of himself wiping tears from his eyes with a huge white handkerchief as he addressed a jury. Waiting for my drink, I walked back to their table where we talked quietly for a moment about Margy's murder. They speculated about whether she would have been tempted by Cuddy's “plan” to get her nominated as state's attorney general.

Isaac didn't think so. “One of my Slim's problems has always been his abysmal inability to understand women.” This remark evoked a suppressed ironic cough from Bee Turner who'd been misunderstood by Rosethorn for forty years. “The Supreme Court,” he explained. “That was Margy's dream. The Supreme Court.” Isaac sighed. “Ah dear dear dear. She was really a very good young judge. Neither a bleeding nor a hard heart. A wise heart.”

I said, “The killer cut out her heart and left it on a kitchen scale.”

So they had heard. We sat in silence for a while.

“Judge Turbot was very knowledgeable about the law.” Miss Turner patted the blue silk peony on her lapel. “And she trusted the law.”

I looked hard at Isaac. “Maybe if she'd been a little more skeptical about trusting her last jury, she wouldn't be dead now.” The old man's head came up sharply to meet my glare and read it.

Sometime later, I watched in the mirror as Isaac said good-bye to Miss Turner, then shuffled over to the bar. Unlike most people in my life (and therefore a relief), he didn't appear to care (or notice) that I was an unshaven wreck, both smoking and drinking; in fact, he took one of my Luckies and lit it. For a while he stared at me from behind the smoke, like a woeful Saint Bernard in a snowstorm, until finally I said, “Is there something the matter?”

“You tell me, my boy.” Blue smoke swirled from the fleshy lips up into the tangled white eyebrows. “Tell me why you just suggested that you think Tyler Norris murdered Margy Turbot.”

I finished my drink, held it up for another. “I think he not only killed her—and his wife, of course—he killed his mistress Lucy Griggs and three other women. I think Tyler Norris is Guess Who.”

Isaac studied me carefully. “On what basis have you arrived at this very alarming conclusion? What evidence is there for this?”

“I'm not sure I should tell you what evidence. Look what you did with our evidence last time. It never got into the trial.”

He sighed. “I did nothing with your evidence; I did much with Homer Louge's contamination of your evidence.” Hostile stares greeted our return to the table that a quartet of waiting public defenders had been eyeing. The old attorney sat down. “Tyler's trial is over. And he can't be retried for what happened to his wife.”

“I'm talking about the five other women he killed.”

Issac's mournful eyes widened skeptically. “What five?”

“The one he was sleeping with, the one who was blackmailing him, the two who were planting false clues for him, and his judge.”

He frowned. “His mistress Lucy Griggs. Is that theory or fact?”

“She took three classes from Tyler at Haver. She got
A
s in all three.”

Isaac looked at me thoughtfully. “That makes her his student Lucy Griggs. It's theory then.”

“Her ex-boyfriend John Walker paid a woman named Kristin Stiller to find out who the man was that Lucy had left him for. Kristin found out. The man killed her. She's G.I. Jane. The man's Tyler.”

We stared at each other. Pogo's was crowded and noisy, with groups of impatient lawyers glaring at other lawyers who were lingering over their checks too long. Then, without a comment, Isaac pushed himself up from the table, leaning on his cane. “I have an appointment,” he said.

I was surprised. “You're not even going to tell me I'm crazy?”

He looked sadly at the wall where a funny caricature of Margy Turbot dressed as a little girl, playing with a doll of Justice, was half hidden by the bouquets of fresh flowers. “Tell Slim to come see his old friend. I'm always home.” He pointed at a caricature of the district attorney Mitchell Bazemore on the wall. “Mitch has a pure heart.” He shrugged. “But without understanding. Linsley's sister, Dr. Roth, for example. Mitch had her as a witness and didn't seem to know what he had there….”

I looked at him sharply. “What are you telling me?”

“I'm not telling you anything. I'm only suggesting Dr. Roth might have something to tell you.”

• • •

By the time I made it back to Cuddy's office, a furious Carl Yarborough was in there with Mitch Bazemore, yelling about HPD's renewed harassment of Tyler Norris. “For God's sakes, Cuddy,” Carl spluttered. “You knew how thin this ice was with the council. We just had this conversation! And right after it, what happens? Not only do we get a night in hell—a murdered woman in a garbage truck and a popular judge butchered in her own kitchen—because you can't catch this maniac—”

“Carl, you want to watch what you say—” Cuddy spoke quietly but dangerously.

“You got the press crawling right back up your you-know-whats, and all your people can think of to do is run over and hassle an innocent man you just got your asses reamed for dragging through a murder trial! I told you, go by the book. I told you, leave Norris alone.”

Cuddy sat behind his desk. The wooden Costa Rican chess set was back in place except for the two queens, sealed with other evidence in the property room. He quietly jumped a knight across the board. “You through?”

Mitch Bazemore, rhythmically squeezing his biceps, stood next to the mayor, nodding like a choral refrain. “You knew you had to go by the book.”

Cuddy glanced up, saw me, said, “What isn't by the book here, Mitch?”

“Listen, Mangum, Ken Moize is your buddy not mine. He's acting A.G. and he's the one just chewed my ear off that the Norris book is closed, finished, finito, over with, the end.”

“I think I get your drift.”

“Don't you get sarcastic with me.”

Cuddy motioned me over. “Justin, did you just visit Tyler Norris at his home?” I nodded yes. “Did you just accuse him—for some reason I'm not privy to—of murdering Judge Turbot?”

“No, I did not. I asked him some questions.” I explained about the DMV list directing us to the neighbor's black Ford Explorer.

Cuddy nodded toward Carl. “Well, I'm afraid the mayor here just had a phone call from Tyler Norris's lawyer—”

“You mean Isaac Rosethorn?” I asked.

“No, he doesn't mean Rosethorn. He means Amory Waller.” Carl named the most successful civil litigation lawyer in the state, the man who'd taken on tobacco companies and won. “Mr. Waller told me that the commander of the Hillston homicide division—”

“You,” explained the D.A., jabbing his forefinger at me.

“Thanks, Mitch,” I told him.

Mitch read from notes. “—Tried to force his way into Norris's private residence this morning in order to continue making the same type of libelous accusations that led to Norris's false arrest for homicide last March.”

“I asked Norris where he'd been last night between ten and midnight. That's all. I think it's interesting he interpreted it the way he did.”

Cuddy tilted his head, studied me curiously. “Why'd you go over there and ask him anything?”

I took a breath. “He killed Margy.”

“What?” In his surprise, Mitch Bazemore shouted the word.

“I think he killed Kristin Stiller too. And Lucy Griggs and both the Guevarra sisters. I think it very probable that Lupe Guevarra is dead. God knows if we'll ever find her. I think Tyler Norris is Guess Who.”

The three men stared at me. Carl took the unlit cigar out of his mouth, put it back, took it out again. Then he shook his head. “I don't know if you're crazy or drunk or both, and I realize you've been under a lot of personal stress, Justin. But that kind of wild accusation never leaves this room. I'm not having this city bankrupted by litigation from the Norris family. A jury found him innocent. Drop it. The district attorney here—”

Mitch actually stepped forward as if summoned.

“—instructs you to drop it. The acting attorney general instructs him to instruct you. Is that clear enough? Drop it.”

I said, “What if he did it?”

Carl furiously lit his cigar until smoke puffed around him like a steam engine leaving the station. “Sure, a Haver math professor ran around killing women for fun while he was in the middle of a trial for killing his wife which he didn't even do!”

Mitch forgot himself and muttered, “Well, he did do it.”

“Don't you start.” Carl pointed the cigar at him. “The jury found him not guilty. He went through a nightmare and it's over. He's innocent in the eyes of the law.” The mayor turned the cigar on Cuddy and shook it at him. “This is what comes of that bullshit of yours! All that ‘I'll resign if we haven't caught him by the Fourth of July!' Obviously your staff is determined to bring you a suspect if they have to handcuff the goddamn Pope. Jesus H. Christ!” The mayor strode heavily out of the room, slamming the door so that the circular dartboard on the back fell off. There was a campaign poster of Sheriff Homer Louge taped to the board with darts stuck all over his grinning face.

Mitch stepped over the circular board. “Mangum, I'm instructing you to put Savile here on unpaid leave as of right now, pronto, this minute.” He kicked at the black wood board with Louge's picture. “And this is puerile.”

Cuddy hung the board back on the door after Mitch left. “What did he say? Homer Louge is puerile?”

I sat down. “Yeah and then something about me and Tonto.”

His face gray with exhaustion, Cuddy went behind his desk. “No, I believe the last bit was about me tossing you out of here pronto. Got an argument why I shouldn't?” He pulled off his hushpuppy loafers, crossed his long white-socked feet on the corner of the desk, leaned back, and opened his arms. “How many days have you been drinking now?”

“I'm not drunk.”

“You're not sober. You're back to smoking. You're back to drinking. You're back to the guy I first met a long time ago and didn't much like. Fucking up and fucking off and fucking on the job. Oh, one difference. Now you're married to a very nice woman who deserves better.”

Stung, I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and waved them at him. “I least I'm just
smoking
tobacco.” I gestured across at the window where a billboard atop a huge complex of brick buildings said HAVER TOBACCO COMPANY. “So if I were you, I wouldn't be talking about—” I stopped myself.

Cuddy lowered his long bony legs from the table, leaned forward and said with a quiet deadly seriousness. “If I were you, Justin, I wouldn't compare my feelings for Lee Brookside, my long unhappy hope of marrying Lee Brookside, with your,” he came around the desk toward me, “with your diving back into the bottle so you could punish Alice by screwing a rock star you met two weeks ago.” He walked rapidly around the perimeter of his office, and out the door.