by R. J. Jacobs
I gauge the shape of Robert’s head and wonder … could that have been him in the park? But surely Finch would have recognized him if she’d come upon him and Shelly. Would Robert have run from the party to confront them? And if so, why? Would there even have been time?
Marion calls, “Come on back inside, Robert.”
Robert looks past me but seems to estimate that I could slow him down enough that Marion would catch him easily. To Marion he says, “You’re making a mistake.”
But Marion says nothing as he puts his hand square on Robert’s back and shoves him inside. A second later, I realize he’s pulled Robert’s phone from his pocket—he cradles it, shielding it from the rain.
“Hey!” I hear Robert say from inside.
“Go back to the car, Jessie,” Marion says before disappearing inside, a screen door slamming behind him. But I didn’t come this far to wait in a car.
My cotton shirt sticks to my shoulders and chest as I climb the rest of the stairs and push my way in, where we three stand in a break-room kitchen. A coffee machine sits at the end of the dark countertop with two stacks of white paper coffee cups beside it. No one closes the outer door and the sound of the rain carries inside like very heavy white noise. Puddles spread from each of us across the floor. I start to shiver as the air-conditioning chills my rain-soaked clothes.
“Go back,” Marion says to me.
But I’m looking right at Robert. “You lied to me.”
Robert looks at me like he is trying to make sense of a dream, the full insanity of the situation washing over his face. The air smells like a mixture of his cologne, coffee, and something sweet and decaying—like a pastry left sitting out too long.
Marion reaches for a towel on the countertop and tosses it to me, but his eyes never leave Robert. He steps forward, backing him into the wall as if pushing him with an invisible force. Seeing the two side by side, I realize how much larger Robert is than Marion, but Marion takes another step forward, holding up Robert’s phone, fury in his eyes. “Who were you going to call? Not the police again, I’m sure.”
“You’re not here as a cop,” Robert says. “What the fuck are you two anyway, the dynamic duo? Do the police know you’re here?” He points at me, his expression a mixture of shock and disgust.
“No one knows we’re here, Robert.” Marion’s voice deepens, back to the way it sounded when he and Detective Williams questioned me. He takes another step closer. “No one at all. Who figured out you were stealing from the James family, Robert? Was it Shelly?”
Robert shakes his head back and forth, very slowly, as his hand shuffles searchingly along the wall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure, you do. All that memorabilia that started going missing during the last tour. Just a little at first, here and there. A favorite scarf, a handwritten set list. Shelly asked me to look into it, but I could never quite figure it out. She could be forgetful, so it took a while for her to know there was a thief on the tour.”
My insides sink. Of course, I think. I’d been so blinded by my own need at the time that I couldn’t see the items I bought for what they were: stolen property. Instantly, I want to send it all back, get rid of it. I feel like I’m getting further and further from being the person who wanted it to begin with.
Suddenly, Robert jerks himself toward the door. His shoes squeak as he scrambles, slipping forward.
When Marion pulls a pistol from the back of his jeans, he skids to a stop.
Time slows to a halt.
Robert’s eyes show panic. He breathes as if heaving himself those few yards took everything he had. “Holy fucking shit, Jason. You’re really doing this?”
“Is that why you killed her? You didn’t want to go to jail?”
“You losing your fucking mind?” Robert asks, his voice cracking.
I can’t tear my gaze away from the gun. Sweat is warm under my arms, mixing with the cool rainwater.
Robert says, “I’m not saying any more in front of her. The hell are you doing carting her around anyway? You switch teams? You’re not thinking clearly.” He taps the base of his palm against the side of his head. “You lovesick? Or just plain nuts? ’Cause I think you’ve lost your mind.”
Lovesick? I don’t have time to wonder about what he means before Marion motions toward a sunken room with a white L-shaped couch. He pulls a chair away from the wall.
“Stay here, Jessie. This isn’t going to take long.”
But I can’t wait here while they talk in the other room. I follow them, lingering in the hallway as I take in Owen and Shelly’s studio. Along the paneled wood hallways, black-framed gold albums catch the light as if glowing from inside. Behind the couch is a glass wall through which I see a dimly lit room with gray egg-carton-shaped siding. A microphone hangs above a single stool. I sway a little, suddenly dizzy. There are no words for seeing a place where a world was made. I know this is where Owen and Shelly recorded their albums. The album I had, when it was all I had.
“It all makes too much sense,” Marion says, his gun still pointed at Robert. “It wasn’t just the memorabilia you were stealing and selling, was it? You found a way to make some duplicate VIP passes, sold them yourself. No one would notice, right? But Shelly started to suspect something wasn’t right, didn’t she? Not just a scarf or a set list here and there, or even all-access passes, but maybe real money too. She told me once she didn’t understand why you were linked to their business bank account. So why was that?”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Robert interrupts, his eyes twitchy. “I’m probably the straightest manager in history. Anything I took wasn’t worth her attention. I never left their house last night. Ask anyone there. Only time I left was to get security, to handle your little friend.” Robert looks at me with hate in his eyes.
I bite my lip and look right back.
“Is that so?”
I can’t see Marion’s eyes from where I sit, but from the way his hands are moving I can tell he’s scrolling through Robert’s phone in his lap. I see the dull reflection of the overhead light on the gun in his other hand.
“The fuck are you even looking for in my phone?” Robert asks. He sounds so afraid it is making me afraid, and I realize that I don’t know what Detective Marion means to do to him.
“Just sit still,” Marion says calmly.
“I’ll sit still when you tell me where you were last night. And where she went when she left the party.” Robert points at me, his voice breaking with emotions I can’t name. Above us, another wave of rain sweeps across the roof, loud enough that it makes me look up.
“Cut the shit. She was only there because you asked her to be. You found yourself a perfect scapegoat to blow the whistle on so you could look like a hero, right?”
My eyes drop to my shoes. A dull ache begins in my stomach for having been so gullible.
“You never used to come to parties at the house, but you showed up last night, hobnobbing with Owen’s old Nashville crowd, making a show of it to seem less suspicious. You know there’s a new album coming out and they were going to go on tour to promote it. Shelly couldn’t prove you took any money but she was suspicious of you because her stuff kept disappearing on the last tour. So, you figured you could blame last year’s scapegoat one last time. Were you going to hand her something to make it look like she’d stolen it from the house? You figured out who was buying some of what you sold, so you knew that if the cops searched her place, they would find enough there to take any blame off you. Didn’t quite work out though, so maybe you asked Shelly if you could talk with her somewhere private, then led her out to the woods …”
“I watched Shelly start her career. I helped get her from Lower Broadway honky-tonks to the Ryman. I stood by her. I was her protector when she used to sing to empty rooms, or to a few drunk guys yelling for her to shimmy with the microphone stand. I was like a father to her.”
“Please. A father who probably gave her pills to keep her distracted
while he robbed her, then killed her to save his own skin.”
Robert stands and spits on the floor, his lip curled at the sight of Marion’s gun. “Now you listen. Shoot me if you have to, but know by God that I never laid a hand on Shelly James.”
“Sit down, Robert.”
Robert drops back onto the couch, his eyes red now. I can tell his world is upside down, and for a second I feel bad for him.
“And I never gave her any fucking pills,” he says. “I’m a drug dealer, too, now. Right?” He makes the blowing air noise people make when something can’t be believed. “She started with those pills to sleep. Started mixing them with alcohol. I’m sure you remember as well as anyone. Probably came from you. That’s what I always suspected, anyway.”
“Right,” Marion says.
“Or maybe you should be talking to her new boyfriend.”
Marion goes slightly limp, like he’s been punched.
“Who?” is all he asks.
“Someone. I never saw him. She hadn’t been seeing him for very long, maybe a month. She hid it, a lot better than you two ever did. I think you wanted people to find out, sometimes. You never bothered to be discreet.”
Marion makes a noise with his mouth, but I catch him glance at me quickly. My mind starts to race. Discreet?
“What? You don’t think people knew? It’s a miracle Owen didn’t, to be honest. I knew about you two from day one. Last month, I thought she was running out to meet you, but then she told me she didn’t want you at events going forward. She asked me to interview new security.”
The obviousness of Marion having had some sort of romantic relationship with Shelly hits me. I don’t know how I didn’t see it as possible, but learning now that it happened, it makes complete sense. My stomach sinks with disappointment—in him, and in her—even as my head begins fitting this fact into a picture that is becoming clearer piece by piece.
Now Marion’s voice is overly calm, like he’s trying to prove he’s unaffected by learning Shelly had started another relationship. “You think the guy she started seeing could have …?”
“I don’t know. He drove a sports car. A white one. I saw it from a distance once out this back door, heard the engine growl. I may have seen the same car last night near the house.”
“May have?” Marion asks.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, it’s not like I knew to look out for it. That’s not my business. But it sounded the same anyway. I forgot to tell the cops that.”
Marion stands up and slips the gun into the back of his jeans, then motions toward the door as he comes toward me.
“Let’s go,” he says. He tosses Robert’s phone to the other side of the room where it settles against the wood-paneled wall.
“You’ve always been a scumbag, Robert. Call whoever you want.”
Robert leans back. “I already talked to the cops. They mostly wanted to talk about you. But I still don’t know where you were last night.”
What has just happened? One second he was pumping information from Robert, now he’s ready to leave? Have I missed something else? Unable to conceal my … what? Anger? Disappointment? I squint as we walk toward the back door. We start through the kitchen, still marked with our wet footprints. The rain has stopped and, through the glass, I see hints of steam rising from car roofs in the alleyway.
Robert follows us. “Jason, go home,” he says now, almost like they’re friends. Like Marion confronting him was nothing personal.
This business is crazy, I heard him say once.
Maybe it is.
No, I know for sure it is.
I take one last look at the inside of the studio and picture Owen perched there, the shadow of his hat covering his eyes, as he recorded the verses of “American Moves”. Seeing the inside of the studio is like visiting somewhere you always dreamed of just as the world ends. In my head I hear the sound of his cufflink scratching against the wooden front of his guitar, then I open the door. A tiny patch of blue breaks through the clouds overhead, and the outside air smells cleaner than before. Detective Marion moves behind me like he means to be the last one out.
“You better watch your back riding around with your little friend,” Robert calls out.
“I’ll handle my back, Robert,” Marion says. I hear the squeak of his shoes on the floor, the screech of the screen door—then Robert’s voice again.
“We had a name for her on the tour, you know, since she came to all the shows.”
“Goodbye, Robert.”
“We called her the Irregular Regular.”
I turn when I hear that, the sudden sadness feeling like a hollowness inside me.
“Somebody made it up. We said it the whole tour. The Irregular Regular. That’s your partner now. That’s how much she freaked everyone out. She was such a psycho, she got a catering job just to get close to Owen and Shelly again. If it wasn’t so scary and sad, it’d be …”
Marion looks at me while Robert talks. “Just wait out here a second.”
The screen door screeches closed as Marion lets it go, then clicks shut. I hear a wooden chair hit the tile, then a thick-sounding thud as Detective Marion punches Robert right in the face. A second later, Marion is back outside again, shaking his right hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.
* * *
Outside, puddles shine everywhere. Through the thick air, I hear Robert moaning something behind us, his voice distorted in a way that tells me Detective Marion broke his nose. I brush my fingertips over my own nose and pinch the bones there as we walk back to the car, my head flooding with adrenaline from everything that just happened.
“Will Robert call the police?” I ask. “About you … hitting him?”
“No.” He sounds sure. “He knew he was asking for that.” I watch the muscle ripple under his shirt as he drops into the car.
His energy is completely different than it was on the way to the studio, when he meant to confront Robert. We drive in the direction of the community health center, back to my car. How much of a relationship did she and Marion have? And who else knew about it? Marion started doing personal security for the James family after he arrested me. He’d proven himself, I understood. He cut his forearm taking the knife away from me and was given seven stitches at the Vanderbilt ER. I saw a picture online showing off the wound. Owen was beside him, looking at the camera. Shelly was on the other side. In the photo, she was looking at Marion.
I wonder if his and Shelly’s relationship started the way I imagine: him taking on more and more responsibilities in his off time, meeting Finch and everyone else in their circle. I imagine him being understanding, too, about how much Owen worked. No doubt Shelly and he would be alone for hours at a time. I picture the two of them messaging and talking, more and more and more.
What if she took pictures for him like the one Andre and Malik saw her take?
Could he have fallen in love?
Of course.
“Sorry you had to hear all that,” he says. “That was a dead end. Robert may be a dirtbag, but he didn’t have anything to do with Shelly getting killed.”
“How do you know?” I ask. I’m too curious not to, but unable not to sound cold from what I’ve learned about him and Shelly.
He winces as he bends his fingers back and forth, evidently sore from punching Robert.
“His phone. I guess he’d just been on it, because it wasn’t locked. I looked through his call records. Just like he said, he called the police at seven PM, probably to report you for being at the house. He had to wait from then on for the cops to arrive. Our first call related to Shelly came in at seven twenty, which means she was killed before then, most likely. The crime scene in the park is too far from the house for Robert to have gotten there and back in time. And in any case, no one calls the cops and then commits a crime while waiting for them to show up.”
I think this over. The timing sounds about right. But it still doesn’t put me at ease.
“What is it?” he as
ks when he notices my silence.
“You … and Shelly.”
He nods once, shyly.
“I should have known,” I say quietly. “The way she looked at you and you looked at her after what happened at the concert … But she’s married.”
“Yes.” Marion sighs. “I told myself that Shelly and Owen’s marriage wasn’t real, but that was to justify what we were doing because I knew it was wrong. I couldn’t stop seeing her.”
“Who knew? Aside from Robert.”
“I thought no one did, honestly. I caught a few glances from the stage crew, but I always had a legitimate reason to be wherever I was. I thought maybe Owen suspected near the end, but she told me he didn’t. She was sure. Finch never knew; we were careful about that.
“She and I texted back and forth for more than a year, sometimes burner phones she bought and sometimes not. My number comes up on the records again and again. Metro doesn’t have the content of all of those texts yet, but they will. And with everything else … there’s good circumstantial evidence against me. If I was looking at it, I’d suspect me too. I look desperate. And maybe I was. I am. No, more than that, I’m ashamed. Did I think she was going to leave Owen? That we would be together? Maybe. Another part of me knew it was just a fantasy. Those texts read differently now, but no matter what, I would have never, ever, hurt her.”
There is a catch in Detective Marion’s voice. His jaw clamps down like he wants to bite back his feelings. “But that’s not all. There were photos of Shelly that I saved on my phone, and what she’d written across them was pretty graphic. I’m praying to God they don’t leak.”
I hear the—the word for extreme discomfort—anguish in his voice as he considers photos of Shelly being posted online for anyone to see.
He runs his hands through his hair, making it stand up wildly. The car creaks again. The gas-dust smell hasn’t gone anywhere. Maybe he knew they never could be a couple, that there was no way forward, but kept on seeing her anyway. Thinking about something so adult makes me shift in my seat. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never been touched by someone in the right way. I’ve wondered—after being in the dark, would the romantic part of my life ever be normal?
