Time's Witness (79 page)

Cuddy had his old suede loafers up on the cluttered desk of his corner office on the top floor of the Hillston municipal complex known now as the Cadmean Building. His was the biggest office in the place, bigger than the mayor's office downstairs, and the air conditioning was on so high that frost dripped down the two walls of windows. He was eating Kentucky Fried Chicken from a cardboard bucket when I dropped my damp hat on the coffee table. I said, “We lost the South when we lost the past, and what we got in its place was junk food.”

Hillston's youngest police chief winked a bright blue eye at me. “Justin B. Savile the Five, it's a small price to pay. Want a Pepsi?”

“I want a blanket.”

“How about some Extra-Crispy?”

I showed him my sushi take-out. “No thanks,” I grumbled. “Hail
the new millennium. The whole country can watch and eat the same trash at the same time.”

Cuddy gave me an ironic snort. “I never knew a man so incensed by junk food.” He spun his hands in a tumbling circle. “Well, I say roll out the polyester carpet for the new millennium. Let it roll, let it rock’n’roll, right on over the past. The Old South's got a lot worse to answer for than Colonel Sanders’ family-pack.”

I opened my chopsticks. “Everybody knows the same trash and that's all they know. One story at a time, one new hot story every week.”

“What story's that?” Cuddy pulled a KFC wing from the bucket. “I sure hope it's the story of how you just found out who murdered G.I. Jane and you came in here to tell me. Because I am under the tree with a noose around my neck, and the press has an electric prod aimed at my horse's behind.”

“I can’t find out who killed her ’til I find out who she is.”

“Justin, we’re talking about a human being.
Somebody
knows her.”

I shook my head. “Not in Hillston they don’t. Not anymore.”

Two teenagers had come across the slender fair-haired woman lying in a rain-flooded incline under wet dead leaves and rotted branches deep in scrub forest on the north edge of town. Her killer had cut her throat open to her spinal cord. He’d apparently used the same serrated knife to saw off her hair close to her scalp and to slice off the skin attaching a small pierced ring to her eye-brow. Then he’d roughly shaved her head. That's why we called her G.I. Jane. She was unclothed except for a new gray Guess T-shirt.

It was the hair and this Guess T-shirt that had brought the press running. For back in November in Neville, North Carolina, a town less than fifty miles from Hillston, the body of another young woman had been found with her throat cut, her head shaved and she was also naked except for a gray Guess T-shirt. There were red roses strewn on this young woman's breast. But her body, lying in a drainage culvert, had been discovered within twenty-four hours of her death. The Neville police had no
trouble identifying her as one Cathy Oakes: her fingerprints were on file because they’d arrested her often for prostitution. The fact that her head was shaved and she had worn nothing but a Guess T-shirt had been, at the time, of no particular interest. But when four months later the same kind of shirt was found on our victim in Hillston, an affluent Southern college town, the press jumped. A forensic pathologist thought it was “possible” that the same knife had cut the throats of both women. He wasn’t sure about it, but the press was. Patterns suggest a killer with a habit, a killer who likes to call attention to his habit by repeating it. A serial killer.

In the case of G.I. Jane, there was no doubt that the killer had wanted the police to take notice. He had cut off her tongue at its root. There were small burn marks on her arms and torso, inflicted after her death, and there were burnt sulfur kitchen matches arranged in a circle around her head. The small earring that had been sliced from her eyebrow, with her skin still attached, was threaded through a dirty white shoelace and tied around her neck. And just to make things clear, there was a label on a string tied around her toe, and on this label was printed in red marker:

LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,
PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:
CAPTAIN C. R. MANGUM, HILLSTON POLICE

The fact that the head of homicide was being asked to pass along a dead “friend” to the police chief gave the G.I. Jane case both urgency and (after somebody leaked to the press what was written on the tag) media pizzazz. Without asking me, the press announced that I knew the victim. I didn’t, but it would have been hard to tell if I had. Our medical examiner calculated that her corpse had lain there in the woods unnoticed for about eight weeks before we’d found her. Her blood had drained deep into the earth; her bones had settled. Finally, some animal dragged out from under the leaves enough of a human arm for the teenage
couple to see it. By then it was too late. The killer had left his signature behind but no easy way to trace him, or his victim.

Impressions of the girl's beautiful teeth matched none of the missing young women whose dental records were on file in national computer banks. Of as little help were the red painted tattoos of coiled snakes around her ankles and possibly around her wrists as well—but since her hands had been gnawed off by the wild creatures that had presumably also eaten her tongue, we could only guess. She might have been pretty.

As I kept telling Cuddy, I didn’t know who the dead girl was because nothing about her was particular enough to tell me. Today, in Hillston, a girl from anywhere could paint on snake tattoos with a Magic Marker, could wear a new Guess T-shirt, Nike shoelaces, Kenneth Cole sunglasses. A girl with expensively cared for teeth could now be murdered without being missed, even in Hillston. But the media was impatient for G.I.'s Jane's killer to do something else, like kill a third woman, or kill me or Cuddy, or kill himself, or at least get caught trying, and when he didn’t do any of these as spring turned to summer, they took it out on the Hillston police.

I finished my sushi roll. “Cuddy, these days it's not just big cities where homicides can go dead cold. Three, ten, thirty years or more. Then all of a sudden, you stumble onto a clue and kazaam, the door opens.”

He rubbed his paper napkin between his large bony hands. “Tell me that's not a prediction. I want kazaam tomorrow. I’m with Mavis Mahar. I’m living for tomorrow.”

“Oh god, even you. Nobody in town's even talking about G.I. Jane anymore. Nobody cares about the Norris murder trial right downstairs either. This week everything's all about this idiotic Mavis.” I held up the
Hillston Star
where the front page had a huge headline, “MAVIS COMES TO TOWN.” Mavis Mahar, the Irish rock star, had just arrived in Hillston for two sold-out concerts at the Haver University football stadium. “Livin’ for Tomorrow” was one of her big hits.

Cuddy stood up, pounded on an invisible piano and started
singing:

So I’m givin’ you your sorrow

Hug it home without delay.

While I’m livin’ for tomorrow,

Stay the king of yesterday.

Then he rolled the newspaper and tapped me with it on each shoulder. “That's you, Justin, the king of yesterday, the Gallant Last of the Moronic Byronics. No wonder your wife headed for the mountains. Years of listening to you yapping on about how the world's turned to trash finally drove her off. Alice has been gone a damn month. When's she coming back?”

I told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

He tilted his head, looked at me until I turned away. “Go bring that sweet lady home.”

“I’m not sure Alice wants to come home.” I picked up two old magazines from his coffee table, pretended to flip through them.

He shook his head. “Why don’t you ask her?” I ignored him. There was a long silence then he said, “Justin, I know you’ve been in a bad way. Do you want me to turn G.I. Jane over to—”

“No. No, I don’t.” I changed the subject. “So, you going to check out this Mavis concert?” There’d been a near riot last night before the rock star had finally made her appearance at her first concert and Cuddy had already predicted security problems tonight as well.

He gave up and walked back to his desk. “The university asked the sheriff and the sheriff doesn’t want my help. You going?”

“I don’t like rock’n’roll.”

He shook his head. “Just ’cause Mavis isn’t one of those old dead jazz singers of yours doesn’t mean she's no good. Ever listen to her?”

“It's hard to avoid it.” I showed him that both magazines on his coffee table had Mavis Mahar with a buzz cut on their covers. As I glanced at them, there was an odd familiarity to her smile. But I suppose that's what stardom means. Everybody
thinks they know you. “Look at this. Same cover, same star, same scandal…” I pointed at Cuddy's greasy bucket of chicken. “KFC in Hong Kong tastes no different from KFC in Hillston. That's my point. Same Mexican burritos, same Greek gyros sold in the same plastic wrap coast to coast.”

He nodded cheerfully. “You think they were selling sushi in Hillston back in your glorious good old days? Hey, Thai take-out is a nice change from growing up on canned sausages and black-eyed peas. I don’t like the way the past treated me.” He stroked his air conditioner. “Now I can freeze in June. I’m not squeezed up naked in a tin wash tub in a red-dirt yard, trying to cool off in six inches of water you could boil eggs in. I like tomorrow. And I like Mavis Mahar.”

I shrugged. “You and everybody else.”

All over town there were Mavis posters in store windows and Mavis CDs by checkout counters, there were bins of her music videos and cases of her trademark bottled stout in stores near the Haver University campus. Even here in Hillston, everyone called her Mavis as if they were her friends, and, after all, they probably knew more about her than they did about their neighbors. Her latest stunt had been so repeatedly covered by CNN that even I knew she had seduced a right-wing politician into meeting her at five A.M. on the steps of Nashville's replica of the Parthenon. Handcuffing herself to this intoxicated national figure (who’d clearly thought he’d been invited to a romantic tryst), she’d sung him a song about hypocrisy while paparazzi (whom she’d previously called) snapped photos that they then sold for vast sums to the tabloids. After the politician resigned, the new Mavis Mahar album went triple-platinum, her new single “Coming Home to You” (the theme song of a popular new movie) sold even more records than “Livin’ for Tomorrow.” By the time of her arrival in Hillston, millions of teenage girls could sing “Coming Home to You”—a pulsing ballad full of defiant sorrow and mournful Celtic moans—and thousands of them had apparently pierced their left nipples just as their idol had apparently done.

Cuddy went on singing “Livin’ for Tomorrow” until Detective Sergeant John Emory poked his shaved coal-black head in the door and handed him an opened newspaper. “Too cold in here,” he said, leaving. “Justin's blue.”

Cuddy called out after him. “Old blood's always blue, Sergeant, don’t you know that? New blood's nothing but fast food, fast cars, and rock’n’roll.”

Throwing my sushi box in his trashcan, I stood up to leave too. “I’m not talking against progress, Cuddy.”

“No, you’re talking against fried chicken.”

“I’m talking about how everybody's been swept into one big flood of momentary homogeneity.”

“You don’t say?” He quickly scanned today's editorial in the
Hillston Star
. “Well, hey, does momentary homogeneity have
anything to do with this?” He read out, “‘Chief Mangum to Murder Victim: Who Cares?’” and handed the paper back to me. As I read the editorial aloud, Cuddy opened his window to sprinkle fat crumbs from his KFC biscuit to the dingy pigeons waiting on his window ledge. When he finished, he grabbed the newspaper from me, balled it up, and lobbed it off his poster of Elvis Presley into the trash—his one trick shot. The police chief didn’t like the
Star
's asking why Hillston should have doubled the size of its police department and yet still be unable even to identify the bodies of homicide victims. He didn’t like being asked why in a national survey the Hillston Police Department should be ranked No. 1 in small cities in the Southeast when, instead of catching maniacs who sawed open young women's throats, it spent its time arresting innocent leading citizens of the community for murder—a reference to the Norris trial now going on downstairs in Superior Court where a Haver University professor had been charged with killing his wife. And most of all, Cuddy didn’t like the paper's calling for his resignation.

He slammed the window shut against the heat that raced into the room, scaring the pigeons into jumping half-an-inch. “Instead of blaming your troubles on how something fundamental's broken down since your great granddaddy's day, Justin—”

“It has broken down,” I interrupted.

The police chief held his drug-store watch to my face and tapped it. “What's broken down is you finding out who killed Jane. Time, my friend, time is doing a fast dance all over your handsome head. I figured while Alice was gone, you’d be on this case twenty-four—”

“I am—”

“Really? Looks like you’re up alone nights writing the sequel to
The Mind of the South
and brooding over the collapse of civilization.”