Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Did they know it was me? No. They had thought they had known right after it happened, but then when pervy Peterson got nicked they weren’t so sure. I caught her dad watching my house once, just sitting in his tow truck in the street, not even looking up at the window. I called the cops on him and they made him leave, even came to check on me, apologized for the disturbance.

  I liked that.

  But when the coffin was in the hole and everyone started filing out I went back to my car, climbed in and rolled the window down before turning the engine on. As soon as I did the music came blaring out—“Watching the Detectives,” of course—and I pretended to take a second to figure out how to turn it down. Everyone stared—the parents, friends, relatives, this couple with a baby cradled in her mother’s hands who I thought might have been Michelle’s elder sister—not so much shocked as knocked back into reality, but I doubt they ever got it. I just wanted them to hear what she heard as she went out, you know? Felt fitting. Gave the whole thing a sense of closure, of ritual. I couldn’t help but laugh about it later.

  That was thirty years ago. I’ve not always been a good boy since, but I have been careful. That first time had been an impulse and it was messy. I thought a lot about the next one and made sure that the whole approach was different so that no one would ever connect the two or put me in the frame. The only thing that was the same—think of it as a kind of private joke—was the song I had playing at the end, the same lugubrious bassline, the same insinuating off-beat guitar, the same searing words about how you can’t be wounded if you’ve got no heart. Everything else was different. Maybe not so much the girls. I mean, everyone has a type, right? But the rest was unconnected. After all, I have a life, a career, not quite the way I might have once wanted things to go, but good enough that I wasn’t about to jeopardize it by getting carried away.

  Then there was Janice. And Elvis on the radio. Like I said, it’s funny how a song can take you back.

  Right back.

  Janice had only been working at Jefferson’s a week. I know because she arrived two days after the police visited me for the last time. Remember Pervy Peterson, the bloke who took the rap for Michelle? Turns out he died in prison, and in his last days he confessed to a whole bunch of things. Some of them couldn’t be proved, but other things—after he’d written out notes and maps and whatnot could—and the local bobbies were suddenly signing off on a lot of what the police shows on telly called “cold cases.” But he went to his grave, apparently, denying he had ever laid eyes on Michelle Rawlinson. So they came to me again, asking the same questions they had three decades earlier. I hadn’t expected this but, like I said, I’m careful and had never forgotten a single detail of what I had told them at the time. So I gave them all the same answers and they went away, their duty done. There was a picture in the paper, but the next day the police said the case was no longer being pursued, so that was that. The following day, Janice showed up.

  She was older than I usually liked, but not by much, and her hair was just right, and she wore this sparkly pink nail varnish that made you think things. I think I knew she would be the next one as soon as I saw her. She sort of half smiled at me and I thought, yes. There it was. Bashful and secretly wicked.

  I gave it all a lot of thought, but when the time came and I actually had her in the car, it took an unexpected turn.

  “Don’t take me straight home,” she said. “Drive me to Longridge.”

  “Longridge?” I said. “What’s in Longridge?”

  “Fields,” she said. “Trees. It’s a nice night and I want to sit where there’s a nice view.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck, to tell you the truth. A secluded spot out of her normal routine? It might be just what I needed, particularly if I could avoid the traffic cameras. On my lunch break I had already switched the license plates on my Escort, just for added safety, so even the traffic cameras might not have been too much of a risk.

  It was a nice night for the time of year, chilly, as you’d expect, and quickly getting dark, but not rainy, and I found myself warming to the idea, amused by how easy she is making it for me. Even so, I was taken aback when she pulled out a dainty little flask from her handbag and offered me a swig. I stared at her, wondering momentarily if she was not the girl I took her for.

  “I’m driving,” I said.

  “Coward,” she teased, waggling the flask in front of me. It was stainless steel but decorated with little pink cats. “Go on,” she said. “Be a man.”

  I flushed at that, and privately decided to make her pay for it later, but I took the flask from her and, just to prove the point, drained the whole thing in three long swallows. The whiskey burned my throat, but the fire was useful. Sometimes I needed a little push. It was not usually the girl who gave it to me quite so directly.

  “So where in Longridge?” I asked, already feeling the whiskey starting to work.

  “The disused reservoir on the edge of town.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment, and kept driving, mind racing. I knew the place vaguely: a Victorian stone-edged rectangle with a sloping grass verge and trees. You couldn’t see it from the road unless you were way up on the hill, and then you would be too far away to see anything, especially after dark. It might be perfect. I’d need to be careful, of course, but then I always was. I wasn’t sure what disused meant. No manned pumping station was, of course, good, but if it had been drained, then that would be no use to me. A well-weighted body could stay lost for a long time in water.

  “What do they use it for now?” I asked, trying to sound casual, eyes on the road ahead.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Fishing, I think.”

  Fishing meant water, of course, though it also meant snagged hooks on hair and clothing if you weren’t careful.

  For a moment the dotted white line on the road seemed to shift and blur and I wondered if the whiskey was a mistake, but I fought to concentrate and keep going till she told me where to turn. Even so I took the bend wider than I’d meant to and slowed down deliberately.

  Make it last, I thought. I didn’t want to rush anything, and not just because rushing makes you careless. Half the satisfaction was in the buildup. Everyone knew that.

  So I drove and she told me where to park. I didn’t like her giving orders just as I hadn’t liked her waggling the flask and saying I wasn’t a man, but I let it go for now. She’d know who is in charge soon enough.

  It was dark now, and the reservoir was glittering and black, but over on the other side I thought I saw the shape of another car. I didn’t like that, even if the people inside were probably too interested in each other to pay us any attention.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” I said, but she shook her head and took off her seatbelt as if she was getting ready for something. In front of the car the grass fell away into the water, but fifty yards or so across there was a narrow spit of land with a road to some kind of access point, and I saw the way a thick metal cable seemed to run from there into the water and over to us, ending in a big rusting hook no more than a few yards from the passenger-side wheel. I didn’t know why I notice it, and it bothered me because I realized how much my mind was wandering. I started to say something, but the words came out garbled, slurred, like I’d had a stroke.

  She opened her purse and took out a nail file, using it to trim a cuticle like it was suddenly the most important thing in the world and I felt a weird sense of strangeness, of vertigo, like the world had shifted. But then she gave me that smile of hers and in spite of everything else that felt wrong I thought yes. Now. This was when I’d do it. She was perfect. Ready. I had to hold onto the idea though, because my head was swimming and when I reached for the ancient cassette player in the dash—carefully maintained through the years—my hand was unsteady. More than that, the muscles felt loose, disconnected, so that instead of punching the button I sort of flapped at the controls but didn’t quite reach them. It was the weirdest sensation I’ve ever had. My brain was a
lert, but my hand felt like it was not in my control, like the nerves were dead, turned to rubber or a bunch of sausages stuck to my arm. I tried again, but the feeling was spreading from the wrist now, through the elbow and up, so that nothing seemed to be working properly.

  “Let me get that for you,” she said, tapping the button precisely.

  Here came the bass, the staccato rattle of the snare drum, the voice with its load of spiky, fractured words . . .

  “Oh this,” she said. “I thought it would be this.”

  I tried to look at her but my head wouldn’t turn all the way and I couldn’t stop her as she reached into the steering column and flashed the headlights twice. There was an answering flash from the car on the other side of the reservoir, and moments later it was coming toward us.

  “You know the first time I heard this?” she said, nodding at the stereo. “I don’t remember because I was very small, but it was at my aunt’s funeral. Michelle. You remember Michelle, don’t you, Barry? I was too young to understand then, but they used to talk about it, her mum and dad. The way you played a few bars when you turned your engine on at the funeral. Like it was a mistake. But they knew. They always knew. They even told the police, but no one took them seriously. Said a song on the radio wasn’t real evidence. You know what, Barry?” she said looking at me with something that was almost a smile, but cold as the girl in the song, “I think if there had been one woman on that investigation—one female police officer—they would have got you in a second. Because you’re obvious. Small and obvious.”

  I tried to turn away, but couldn’t. Something wasn’t right. And now she was listening to the song as if she’d never heard it before, nodding her head in time to the rhythm.

  “Good song,” she said. “I wondered if you would have moved on to something else. ‘Psycho Killer,’ say, or ‘Don’t Like Mondays,’ but those are a bit on the nose for someone like you, aren’t they? Too self-aware. You’re more the type who thinks ‘Every Breath You Take’ is a love song, aren’t you, Barry? I’m glad you stuck with this. You know what it’s about, right?” she said, not flirty now, not playful. “A man whose girlfriend would rather watch TV than have sex with him. I expect you know all about that, don’t you, Barry?”

  I wanted to say that she was wrong, that it was a sinister study of heartless women getting what they have coming to them, but my mouth won’t move right and now I was looking at the flask and wondering if she drank from it at all.

  “I can almost remember you at the funeral,” she said, thoughtfully. “Almost, but not quite. Michelle’s mum and dad remember though. That’s them coming now.”

  I couldn’t turn away so I could see that the car was not a car but a pick up truck with a little crane on the back.

  “‘They call it instant justice,’” she sang along with Elvis, and gave me a grin. “Well, not instant.”

  And then Janice was taking the brake off, getting out and closing the door behind her and I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn the engine back on, even as I felt her hook up the chain to the underside of the car. The pickup truck had parked on the end of that spit of land and someone out there in the dark was connecting a winch. I could feel the strain of the cable as it tightened, feel the creak of the car as it began to roll into the water, but all I could hear was “Watching the Detectives” as the car started to fill, cold and black and stifling.

  BOY WONDER

  BY JIM FUSILLI

  IT HAPPENED SO TERRIBLY QUICKLY. Bowie Thomas was spinning after midnight at a warehouse in Sault Ste. Marie; the standard DJ fare, but with a bit more bite and taste: a few EDM hits for the crowd; lots of house from Detroit, 350 miles south; some techno out of Berlin; and then he mixed in a few tunes he’d created using Reason, his Midi keyboard, his Nord synthesizer, and his family’s old upright piano, the one his father bought for Bowie’s lessons beginning at age six. A good show: tight, fluid, musical. Bowie was pleased, quietly so, as was his way.

  As he was packing up his car, bundled against the snapping winter wind, he was approached by Emily, a sophomore at his high school. Bowie tried to place her: a brother off in the Navy; their father hunted elk and whitetail deer with a bunch of steel fitters who were Packers fans; mother? Kind of a loner. “Hi,” said Bowie, blowing on a bare hand.

  Shy and awkward, Emily sputtered to tell him his set was hot. She tugged at her tuque, which bore the school colors.

  “Thank you,” said Bowie, as he put a blanket over his gear.

  She asked about the tracks she didn’t recognize.

  He replied with titles.

  “All yours?”

  “All mine,” he said. “No one else to blame.”

  “They’re great,” she said with a bright smile. “Really.”

  Music brings her out of her shell, doesn’t it? “Well, I’d better be . . .”

  “Okay. Sure, okay.” Head down, Emily trotted off toward her father and his mud-caked Grand Cherokee. Stopping suddenly, she turned and shouted: “Really hot.”

  Bowie nodded, waved.

  When he returned home, tiptoeing in 3:30 a.m., he emailed two of his tracks to her. “Don’t share, please,” he cautioned. Then he Skyped Ramaaker in Breda; Ramaaker chided him for spinning dumbed-down EDM. Bowie had a photo of Ramaaker on his workstation; Ramaaker spinning in Paris, the crowd on fire.

  On defense, Bowie told him he’d dropped in a couple of his own tunes too. “Send,” said Ramaaker. Bowie did, then climbed under an unruly mountain of comforters. Soon came an IM from the Netherlands. “Better,” Ramaaker told him. “Not ready.”

  He nodded off, purple light bouncing off a mirror ball pin-pricking his eyes.

  HIS MOTHER KNOCKED ON HIS door. Bowie fought through the fog; his throat frogged as he tried to respond. Cold morning sun pressed against the basement blinds. He draped a comforter like a cape around his shoulders as he toddled across the room, bypassing his beat-up pawnshop Fender Jazzmaster bass.

  “Bowie,” she stage-whispered. Kim Thomas aspired to fame in the nineties. A glam rock revival. She never played a gig outside of Michigan. “There’s somebody—Bowie, get out here. Hurry.”

  His clothes were in a pile on the floor. As he hobbled into his pants, he tapped his iMac’s space bar. He had 178 incoming emails.

  He walked in bare feet upstairs to the kitchen. Ionic Strength was sitting in his father’s seat, his hands wrapped around a cup of instant cocoa.

  Kim fluffed her son’s hair. “There he is,” she said. “My Bowie.”

  Ionic Strength, the producer and twice voted the world’s greatest DJ by DJ Mag back in the late nineties, stood and extended a warm hand. “What are you? Twelve?”

  In shock and still half-asleep, Bowie smiled. He had his father’s easy manner.

  “He’s seventeen,” Kim Thomas announced. The Damned T-shirt she wore was about twenty years old.

  “And a hundred pounds.”

  “Lanky,” she said, running her hands along her hips. Bowie’s father was a bear of a man, big, bearded, and flannelled. A hippie cabinetmaker.

  “Pack up,” Ionic Strength told the boy. Ion wore a silk T under a pearl-gray suit. His midnight-black hair, parted in the center, was an arc around his tanned face. A diamond ring glittered on the middle finger of his right hand. Bowie knew it was a gift from a Super Bowl champ who wanted in. Everyone knew Ion made the tracks that bore the jock’s name. As a producer, Ionic Strength was as dependable as Kraft cheese.

  “LA?” Bowie said.

  “LA,” replied Ionic Strength, who had a limo at the curb and a private jet waiting at the nearby municipal airport.

  Bowie nodded. “How did you know?”

  “They return my calls before I dial,” Ionic Strength replied, allowing his perfect teeth to shine.

  Kim shivered in delight.

  “No. Really,” Bowie said.

  Again, Ion smiled.

  Bowie retreated to his room and, as he packed his duffel, scrolled through his emails. Emily, it tur
ned out, had posted on Soundcloud the tracks he’d sent her. Of the now-189 emails, twelve were from her. She apologized with a torrent of emojis and exclamation points. “I couldn’t help myself. I got excited. They were brilliant,” she wrote. “Both tracks. Especially ‘Euphrosine.’ So hot, so chill. Forgive me. Please. Say you do. Bowie. Bowie?”

  Angry, not angry, Bowie took up his laptop and returned to the kitchen. Ionic Strength was in the limo, savoring the heat. Late January, in the UP, it was eight degrees on a sunny Saturday.

  “Bowie,” Kim said, clattering with excitement, “I should go with you.”

  With a little laugh, he replied, “I don’t think you bring your mom to these things.”

  “But what are ‘these things’? Bowie?”

  Good question, he thought. Maybe all it is a free trip to LA. “I guess I’ll find out . . .”

  “And don’t sign anything. Bowie, oh Jesus, how can you be so calm?”

  Bowie shrugged. He had long fantasized about a moment like this, though Ionic Strength would’ve been about the last producer he would’ve put in the picture.

  “Message me.” Now she was hopping in place, baggy socks sliding up, down.

  Bowie grabbed a banana. “Tell Dad.”

  Yes. But not until the plane is in the air.

  He kissed his Mom on the forehead.