First Lady (38 page)

After a while, he came back. I made myself look at him. I was surprised, not by the accusations—they were true—but by his sense of my motive. “Punish Alice?”

He'd thought about what he was going to say. “Way down deep, you've been blaming Alice for Copper's death. That's what I think. I don't mean consciously. But you shut that baby out of your life—you won't even have any pictures of him anywhere around. And you shut Alice out. And it's not her fault.”

• • •

After a time, he found me sitting on the stone steps of the Cadmean Building. City workers and policemen looked at me curiously as they sidestepped around me. I must have looked like a derelict—dirty clothes, tangled hair, unshaven, sitting on the steps, smoking. Cuddy sat down on the step below mine. He said, “I apologize. It's none of my business.”

I nodded, ground the cigarette under my shoe.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

He let the silence fade, then he said, “You think Tyler Norris is Guess Who. Convince me.”

For the next half hour I talked through my theory. When I finished, Cuddy started asking questions. For most but not all I had good answers. He listened to them. Then I said, “It's got to be your call. You've had direct orders not to investigate Norris. I've got Roid tailing him in a BMW rental.”

“What's Norris up to?”

“Just driving around town for hours. He hasn't gotten out of his car. You want me to pull Roid off him?”

He thought about it then he shook his head. “You didn't ask me that question so I didn't tell you so you left Roid on the case.”

I nodded. “I didn't hear anything you just said.”

We went back inside and walked downstairs to Room 105. Bunty Crabtree and Rhonda Weavis were the only ones there just then. Cuddy told them, “Justin's got an idea. I want to know what you two think about it.”

We sat down together. This is the theory I told them:

Tyler Norris was having an affair with Lucy Griggs, a student who'd signed up three times for courses with him at Haver University. When his wife found out about the affair, he killed her—now we had the motive—and disguised the murder as a botched burglary. Meanwhile, Kristin Stiller was tailing Lucy on John Walker's behalf. Kristin found out about Lucy's affair with Tyler (maybe even suspected the killing) and she tried to blackmail him. By that time, Cuddy and I were already investigating Norris for the murder of his wife. He couldn't afford to have his affair exposed; it would provide the prosecution with the ammunition it needed. So he met with Kristin on Christmas Eve, just before she was to leave for Maryland with Bo (Belle) Derek. At their meeting, they made some kind of arrangement—no doubt he began paying her off. She decided to stay in Hillston to collect.

But by mid-January their deal had fallen apart. To remove the threat, Tyler murdered her by choking her to death. And then, remembering a homicide that had taken place in Neville a few months earlier—a prostitute with her throat cut, wearing only a Guess T-shirt—he cleverly disguised Kristin to look like the second victim of a publicity-hungry serial killer. “Addressing” Kristin's body to the head of homicide and the chief of police was something such a killer might do. Tyler was even luckier than he'd hoped. Carol Cathy Cane announced that a Guess Who Killer was loose in the Piedmont. The press not only bought the double murders, they promoted them. They started screaming that a serial killer was on the loose.

Tyler's scene-setting also was a way of taunting the police who had forced him to stand trial for his life. But he couldn't resist all those extra touches, what Nancy had called the redundancies, touches created out of his own particular sick and sickening psyche. The idea of virgin martyrs meant something specific to him. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that his mother and his wife were both Catholic. At any rate, when he'd read about the murder of Cathy Oakes, how all her bones were broken, he must have thought of the Catholic St. Catherine broken on the wheel. He knew his own victim's name was Kristin, Christine. So he cut out her tongue and decapitated her. He added the halo of matches, the stone around her neck with the ring of the bride of Christ, and he covered her with leaves, on the edge of the subdivision where he lived, Balmoral Heights. If she wasn't found, fine. If she was found, everything was in place to mislead us.

As it happened, not only did months go by before Kristin's body was found, but we couldn't identify her when we did find it. Cuddy was probably right: the bridge where the Shocco River fed into Pine Hills Lake was little more than a mile from the Balmoral Heights subdivision. By now the young Swedish woman's duffel bag (with all the belongings she'd planned to take on her car trip to Maryland with Bo Derek) probably lay rotted in the deep weedy mud of the lake bottom. They'd probably been joined last night by the bloody clothes Tyler had worn out of Margy Turbot's house.

In March, we had arrested Norris for the murder of his wife. In June, the state put him on trial. He was actually shocked that we'd had the guts to do it. The press was behind him, public opinion was behind him, the university and powerful family and friends were behind him, and only Lucy Griggs threatened him, a last loose end to tie up. And yet he had to stand trial for his life. It enraged him. The Hillston police, Cuddy and I in particular, must have come to represent to Tyler the one enemy between him and freedom. His hatred and contempt (and fear) grew as he faced first an indictment, then a judge who suspected his guilt.

At some point Tyler decided he would take his revenge by making fools of all of us while, at the same time, solving the growing problem of Lucy Griggs by murdering her. Perhaps Lucy had discovered (or deduced) that he'd killed Kristin Stiller and/or his wife. Perhaps she had threatened to reveal their affair midway through his murder trial. (Hadn't she told Mavis, “I hold his life in the palm of my hand”?) Maybe she had wanted him to marry her or maybe all she wanted was help with her musical career. Whatever she wanted, it was more than he was willing to give.

What a coup—to commit a third murder while on trial for a first! And then to pass the Lucy Griggs homicide off as another Guess Who killing. More delicious still, to pass it off as the intended murder of Mavis Mahar.

And again, it all worked beautifully. Tyler was free to carry out the murder of Lucy because Judge Turbot had granted him a million-dollar bail (paid for by his father whom he apparently hated). Having spotted Lucy at the Tucson Lounge, he was free to follow her and Mavis Mahar to The Fifth Season. He shot her there while she indulged in the trespass of showering in her idol's suite after Mavis wandered off drunk and passed out.

Bunty and Rhonda looked at me, at each other, back at me. Rhonda asked me how did the Guevarras fit in.

I told them Tyler had hired the migrant workers to take things and leave things in the Cadmean Building as he bid them. Migrant workers were scabbing during the strike for most of the city government offices there. No one ever pays much attention to cleaning ladies. Among his six languages, Tyler spoke fluent Spanish. He had cajoled or threatened and paid the Guevarra sisters to slip the envelope with the Mavis head shot under Cuddy's door, to slip the package with Lucy's eyes and the .38 shell into the HPD mail pouch. Maybe he had used them to steal and then to replace the Italian pistol in the lobby display. Tyler himself would evoke no surprise if seen in the Cadmean Building. He was, after all, there every day for his trial.

Rhonda and Bunty heard me out. Afterwards they looked at each other some more as if they could talk without speaking. I had no idea what they were saying. Finally Bunty said to leave her alone to think. That was fine with me. I had to go to Haver Hospital. I said I'd be back in an hour or so. Meanwhile, Isaac Rosethorn wanted to see Cuddy as soon as possible.

“You told him this theory of yours about Tyler Norris?” Cuddy asked. I nodded. “And he said he wants to see me?” I nodded.

“Old windbag,” snorted Rhonda. “He defend anybody wasn't guilty?”

“He defended me all my life,” Cuddy told her.

Rhonda patted me on the arm. “Well, if JayJay here hasn't gone psycho on us, maybe your friend Isaac shouldn't have done such a good job defending Tyler Norris. Maybe if he hadn't, your friend Margy Turbot's life wouldn't have been so short.”

Bunty was studying the huge folders of notes I'd brought her—all the records I'd kept on the Linsley Norris homicide, including all interviews, depositions, and a transcript of the trial. She looked up. “Are you saying Tyler was having this affair at the same time he got his wife pregnant?”

“It can happen.”

“Let's find out if it did,” she said and started to read.

Rhonda stretched her strong wide hand over the map of Hillston to touch both Tartan Drive and the wooded area where Kristin Stiller's body had been found. Then she pulled herself up onto the table. “Bunty, psychology's not going to do it for us, baby, no time. We gotta get a direct physical connection between him and a victim fast. What about the pubic hair on Kristin? Don't we have blood of his booked on the Linsley Norris homicide?”

I said, “Yeah, but no DNA breakdown. His blood was all over because of his own injury, so there was no argument. We can send it off, but that kind of lab work takes weeks and Chang wasn't sure about the integrity anyhow.”

Rhonda looked at me. “You know what we need?”

I nodded. “What we need's that Ford Explorer of his neighbor's with Margy's boxwood under its wheel hood.”

“JayJay, you're reading my mind.”

Cuddy said, “I've got direct orders for HPD not to go near that car.”

I had an idea. I said, “You won't have to.”

On my way out, I stopped at the desk where Sergeant Brenda Moore was re-glueing a long pink nail to her baby finger. She said, “I hear you're smoking again, Justin. Bad bad bad.”

“Yeah, well, I hear you were parked in front of Dairy Queen again last night.” Brenda was overweight and blamed it on the seductions of Dairy Queen banana splits.

She came around the booking desk, her hands comically posed on her wide hips, and leaning over did a short shimmy, shaking her large-breasted figure. “I guess you rather hear a skinny little white girl singing the blues, is that it? I saw you at Smoke's last night falling all over Mavis Mahar. Here, take these.” She handed me an opened pack of cigarettes. “Ralph asked me to hide them from him. ‘Least he's
trying
to quit. Oh and, listen, that big redhead works for the governor—”

“Bubba Percy?”

“He left this for Cuddy.” It was a postcard with a huge hog that read, “Greetings Pig King. Only two more shopping days 'til the Fourth of July!”

“Don't give that to Cuddy.”

“Like I would.” She flipped it into the trash. “Plus he said give you this.” She handed me my cellular phone. “Call him at eight o'clock tonight. Tell him it's a big emergency and he's got to get somewhere right away.”

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “Man, I don't know. I don't why he felt like he could ask me if I'd had silicone implants either.”

I said, “You look like a natural woman to me.”

She laughed. “Take it on faith, baby.”

I asked Brenda what had happened to the young Pope she'd booked a few nights ago for joyriding. “I think he's Graham Pope's son. He plays with a group called the Mood Disorders.”

She rolled her eyes. “Griffin Torii with two
I
s?” I nodded. “You call what he was doing joyriding? Joyriding is when me and my man shoot down to Charlotte for the NASCAR races in our own Buick LeSabre that we're making our own payments on. You call what Griffin does ‘stealin.'” She went back to her desk where she checked a sheaf of papers. “We already booked his ass again. Failure to appear on grand theft auto.”

“He's in the holding cell now?”

“Honey, that cell is Griffin Pope's
pied a terre
. He picks up cars like some folks pick up loose grapes at the Food Lion. You could put your car in a vault in the basement of Fort Knox and he'd steal it. He'd steal the Pope-mobile with the Pope still waving from the back seat and say because of the name he thought it belonged to his family. Now I got to call his poor Mama to come back down here and bail him out again.”

I told her I would call Paula Pope about her son's bail. I wanted to talk with the young man anyhow.

Brenda applied glue to another long square nail tip and stuck it to her finger. “Well I hope you take that harmonica away from him. You white people should stick to the accordion.”

I slid the cigarettes into my pocket. “Brenda, is it fair not to let us white people play music just because we don't happen to be as good at it as you are?”

She cheerfully gave me the finger with a freshly applied nail. “Well, sweetheart, no fairer than how y'all wouldn't let us read, vote, marry, move, or fart just because we happened to be slaves.”

• • •

Since I'd seen him last, Griffin Pope had dyed his red hair a greenish-yellow that cast an unfortunate jaundiced hue on his pimpled face. His harmonica playing was as misguided as Brenda had claimed; it might even be called tragic—evoking as it did both pity and fear. Griffin was glad to see me, particularly when I told him I'd arranged for his release until his next court date. As for the small favor I needed him to do for me as soon as he left here, “No problem.” His mother and father had always both spoken well to him of Captain Mangum and myself. He added with contempt, “And that's about all my Conehead parents got in common, except I'm shit-for-brains. Now they're mad 'cause I didn't ask them to my wedding at the beach. My dad tells Brittany she's dumber than road kill. Then he's mad 'cause she don't want them there on the happiest day of her life.”