Gene Terry watched him go, then returned to the matter at hand. “Shea was a long time ago,” he reminded Alistair. “You know we don’t get the crowds we used to.”
“Well we bloody well should,” Alistair grumbled. “And who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked, turning on me. “I told them, no damned reporters.”
“I’m not a weporter.” I winced “My name is Pepper. I was with Vinnie this morning and when I heard what happened to you…” I tasted blood on my lips and held the hankie to my mouth again. It was the first I noticed that Quinn’s initials were embroidered on it. “It seems stwange, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s awfully cuwious…Vinnie was murdered. And then this.”
Something told me this was something Alistair had yet to consider. He squinched up his eyes and stared at me hard. “What the hell is this woman jabbering about?” he asked Gene, as if I wasn’t even there. “Is she interrogating me?”
“She’s concerned.”
I tried to thank the agent for his support with a smile, but it hurt too much.
“I’m not intewwogating…” I clenched my teeth. “I just think we need to talk about it. That’s all.”
“The cops say Vinnie’s place was burglarized.” This came from Gene, and I was grateful. It was more than I knew when I left the condo.
“If it was a wobbery—”
I grimaced.
“If it was wandom—”
I counted to ten, searching for patience and words that didn’t include any Rs.
“We can’t dismiss this,” I said and congratulated myself when I managed to not sound like Elmer Fudd for a whole sentence. “What if it isn’t a coincidence?”
It was my turn to come under Terry’s ministering care. He dropped his hand from Alistair’s arm and patted mine. “You’re right,” he said. “We do need to talk. Hearing about Vinnie’s last moments will help give us all closure. But you’re jumping to conclusions as far as what happened to Alistair is concerned. It was an accident.”
“Pwobably.”
I’d been so busy concentrating on my vocabulary, I didn’t notice that Quinn had joined us. He looked over his shoulder back toward the stage and the crime scene technicians who were working there.
“The techs aren’t sure yet, but it doesn’t look as if the wires were cut. We’ll know more in a little while.”
“I don’t care what they say. This place is dangerous.” Alistair didn’t wait to hear any more. He shoved his way through the crowd, and Gene Terry followed. Even when Bernie the bodyguard appeared out of nowhere and ushered them away, I could still hear Alistair’s high-pitched bitching.
Gingerly, I touched the hankie to my lip. There was less blood than before. “Were you telling the twuth? Was it an accident?”
“You mean Alistair? And the lights?”
“And Vinnie. It’s awfully coincidental.”
Maybe, but if Quinn saw the connection, he didn’t have time to tell me about it. His cell phone rang.
He talked for a minute, and when he snapped his phone shut, I snapped myself out of my thoughts and fell into step behind him. “I have to go,” he said.
“You’re going to let me wide along, aren’t you? I mean, I can come with you, wight?”
“Not to the scene of a murder/suicide.” The crowd of uniformed cops in front of him parted and Quinn didn’t waste any time. He strode toward the revolving doors that led outside.
“But—” I scrambled to catch up. “But what about me? How am I going to get back to the cemetewy?”
He paused for a fraction of a second before he pushed through the doors. A smile crinkled one corner of his mouth. “You can always take the bus.”
I had the perfect comeback. Honest. But two things happened before I had a chance to deliver it. Number one, Quinn headed out the door and was gone. And number two…well, that might have had something to do with the voice I heard behind me. The one that stopped me cold.
“The angel of death circles overhead like a dove.”
It sounded like something Damon would say. Or at least something he might have written in a song. But this wasn’t Damon’s voice. I turned just in time to see a thin woman with long, stringy hair shuffle past. I recognized her at once. She was the one who’d been cleaning Damon’s exhibit the first time I visited the Rock Hall. And she’d been in Vinnie’s class, too. Just like she had been that night, she was wearing beat-up jeans and a shirt decorated with beads and sequins. It was all topped off with a dirty denim jacket.
Now—as then—she had a coffee cup in her hands. It had City Roast printed on the side of it. The cup was empty, and she twisted it in bony fingers, breaking off tiny bits of Styrofoam and scattering them like a trail of breadcrumbs.
Or clues.
Remembering something I’d seen in Vinnie’s apartment and, come to think of it, at Damon’s grave, too, I perked right up. City Roast wasn’t one of the big chains in the area. As a matter of fact, as far as I knew, their coffee was sold at only one place in the city, the West Side Market, an open-air extravaganza sort of shopping place not too far away.
Before she had a chance to get by me, I intercepted the woman. “Hey!” I tried for a friendly smile, but it hurt too much, so I gave her a wave before I pointed to what was left of her cup. “That’s my favorite coffee, too. Vinnie liked City Woast. I know because he had some of the cups in his apartment. Were you a fwiend of his?”
She frowned. “He forgot to stop. He promised he’d come for me and he passed right by.”
Something told me we weren’t talking about Vinnie. Or even about coffee. I didn’t have the luxury of wimping out, so I gulped down the heebie-jeebies. “You mean the angel of death? What, you guys had an appointment or something?”
“He’s coming for me.” The woman’s eyes were so pale, they were nearly colorless. “He said he would, and he’d never lie. He won’t disappoint me. Not again.”
I was getting nowhere fast. I decided on another tack. “Alistair’s glad the angel of death didn’t stop for him.”
“Alistair’s my cat. He’s a sweet little thing.” Her brows dipped low over her eyes. “He doesn’t like the dog next door. No, he doesn’t. But my Alistair doesn’t have to worry about the angel. I won’t let him go outside so the dog can’t eat him.”
“That’s weally smart.” Since I couldn’t smile, I nodded. “But I was talking about this Alistair. Alistair Cromwell. He almost got smashed by a light. And Vinnie…” Again, I pictured the coffee cups strewn around the penthouse. “When was the last time you saw Vinnie?”
“Vinnie’s aura is all wrong. He’s not a cat.”
“No, he’s not.” It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that there might be anyone who hadn’t heard what happened to Vinnie. It was obvious this woman was one bottle short of a six-pack. If I broke it to her, how would she take the news of Vinnie’s death?
Or maybe I didn’t need to tell her. If she knew Vinnie well enough to visit and leave her signature coffee cups behind, did she know him well enough to know what had happened to him?
Well enough to kill him?
I considered the possibility while I carefully formed my question. “You know Vinnie is dead, wight? He died this morning.”
“He died too young.” A single tear slid down the woman’s cheek. “He thought sandwiches were mother’s milk. And all the sunshine was killing poison. He’s circling now.” She looked up and beyond the glass walls that soared overhead. When she smiled, I saw she had a couple of missing teeth. “He’ll be back. He’s coming for me. My lover.” She was still smiling and mumbling when she shambled away.
“All wighty, then.” Watching her go, I shivered and hugged my arms around myself.
“She bothering you?” Gene Terry was back from wherever—minus Alistair and Bernie—and when he saw me watching the woman as she got on the escalator, and headed toward the downstairs exhibits, he came to stand beside me. “Belinda’s harmless.”
“You know her? I thought she was on
the staff here. You know, maintenance.”
He laughed. “Belinda’s not a cleaning woman. She’s—”
“As cwazy as a loon.”
“Yeah, she is that.” Gene shook his head. “The psychedelic movement was kinder to some than others.”
“So all that stuff about the angel of death and sandwiches…?”
From where we stood, we could still see Crazy Belinda. She got off the escalator, and I wasn’t surprised when she headed in the direction of Damon’s exhibit. Gene was watching her, too. “Believe it or not,” he said, “she was beautiful once. We were wild about her.”
“We? As in the band?”
Gene nodded. “She spent a lot of time hanging with the guys. Then she just sort of dropped out of sight. When we arrived in Cleveland for this gig, she showed up out of nowhere. Acted like nothing had changed. Like we could just pick up where we left off so many years ago.”
“And the guys in the band…” Yeah, I was being nosy. But remember, I was talking murder. Even if Gene didn’t know that’s what I was talking about. “Were they happy to see her?”
“What do you think?”
“I think she’s got some cwazy fixation with death. And with Mind at Large. It’s cweepy.” I was sounding cwazy and cweepy, too, and I vowed to choose my words more carefully.
Gene dismissed the whole thing with a wave of one hand. “Belinda, she’s just talking nonsense. Even before she destroyed her brain cells, she was a space cadet. She’s harmless.”
“And very cwee…Stwange…odd.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
I couldn’t see Belinda anymore, so I turned toward Gene and found him looking at the stage and the light that had crashed down on it so hard, it left a crater the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. His expression clouded. “I can’t believe we almost lost two of the guys today. Brings the whole thing back like it was yesterday. You know, about Damon.”
“But Damon wasn’t murdered.”
“No, no he wasn’t.” Gene shook himself. “I was just thinking, that’s all. We’ve been through so much together, me and the band, yet when the guys need me most…” He shivered. “I was in Pittsburgh the night Damon died, checking out the venue for our next concert date. I spent a lot of years in therapy coming to grips with the fact that even if I’d been with him, there probably wasn’t anything I could have done to save him. And this morning…” Gene sighed. “There I was, sitting on my duff back at my hotel, drinking espresso and eating eggs Benedict while somebody was slicing up Vinnie.”
Since there had actually been more stabbing than slicing, Gene’s comparison wasn’t exactly accurate. I didn’t bother to correct him. Mostly because I figured slicing or stabbing, it didn’t much matter. Dead was dead.
“And then this happens to Alistair.” Gene interrupted my thoughts just as they were about to latch on to the memory of Vinnie on the floor with that knife sticking out of his chest. For this, I was grateful. “It’s strange, don’t you think?”
“Exactly what I was twying to tell Quinn.” Don’t ask me why I bothered to look outside. Of course, Quinn was long gone.
“You don’t think it was a coincidence.” Gene studied me carefully. “Funny, you don’t look like a cop.”
I would have laughed if my mouth didn’t hurt. “I’m no cop.”
“But Officer Harrison said you sometimes work together.”
“Did he?” I was surprised (and strangely gratified) to hear Quinn would ever admit it. “I’m a kind of consultant.”
“You mean like a private detective.”
“Sort of. But not weally.” I felt it necessary to add this last bit, just so Gene didn’t get it into his head that he wanted something investigated. I had enough on my plate. “I weally work as a tour guide. At Garden View Cemetewy.”
Gene’s eyes lit. “Where Damon is buried. Is that how you met Belinda?”
“I met her downstairs. She was cleaning Damon’s exhibit.”
Gene chuckled. “Thank goodness the folks who run this place are tolerant! Belinda’s obsessed. Damon and the guys…well, she thought of them as family.” The gleam in his eyes diminished, and he looked at me carefully. “How did you get involved in all this?”
I was all set to give him the same story I’d concocted for Vinnie. The one about how I was a big fan. But something told me Gene wouldn’t believe it. For one thing, I was too young and obviously too with-it to be of the Mind at Large mindset. For another, I didn’t want to risk having another old guy try to seduce me because he thought I was an easy target. Been there, done that, thank you very much.
With not one original idea in my brain, I fell back on an old ploy, one that had worked well for me when I was investigating Gus Scarpetti’s murder.
“I feel silly admitting this,” I said, and I made sure I gave Gene a tiny (the only kind I could manage) smile along with the explanation. He might be old, but he was a man, and I had yet to meet one who couldn’t be schmoozed by a little feminine charm. “I got intewested in Damon Curtis because, like I said, I work at the cemetew…at Garden View. I’m hoping…” Here I looked away, then sighed. With any luck, he’d believe he was the first one who’d heard my secret. “I’d like to wite a book someday. About Damon. I’ve started my wesearch. That’s why I went to talk to Vinnie.”
Over the years, I’d bet Gene had heard this same story from a thousand people (though probably not with the preponderance of Ws). Big points for him, he didn’t tell me I was wasting my time. In fact, he looked downright interested. “What have you found out?” he asked.
“About Damon?” I wasn’t expecting this, and I scrambled. “Oh, you know, this and that. Vinnie was vewy helpful. He told me all about how Damon used to wite his songs.” Since Gene didn’t know which he my his referred to, this was technically true. I remembered the story I gave the Lakewood cops and decided a little corroboration wouldn’t hurt. “He loaned me a couple things, too. You know, CDs and such.”
“I’ll tell you what…” Gene reached into his pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me along with a pen. “You write down your name and address and I’ll see what I have around that might help with your research. You’ll hear from Zack.” He looked across the hall to where a tall, skinny kid with long hair and bad skin was talking to a TV reporter. “He’s our PR guy. Don’t expect anything too soon. Between dealing with what happened to Vinnie today and getting ready for the big concert, we’re going to be pretty busy.”
I scribbled down the information and handed the card back to Gene. “You’ll still do the concert?”
“The show must go on!” He tried for cheery, but I could tell he was hurting. “Vinnie wouldn’t want us to cancel.”
“And Belinda?”
When I saw that Gene was confused, I caught him up on my thought process. “I’m just wondering, that’s all. If there’s any weason, you know, that Belinda would think the show must go on. Or any weason she might want the concert to be canceled.”
“You don’t think—” Belinda was long gone but Gene automatically looked toward the escalator. “Nah!” He dismissed my suspicions with a snort and a shake of his head. “She’s crazy, all right, but she’s not dangerous. You don’t think she and Vinnie—”
“I know she might have been there.”
“At Vinnie’s place? Did you tell Officer Harrison?”
“I didn’t have a chance. Quinn doesn’t hear anything Quinn doesn’t want to hear.”
“Then do me a favor, okay?” Gene put a gentle hand on my arm. “Let’s keep this under our hats. There’s no use pulling a mentally ill woman into the limelight if we don’t have to. And you know…” He bent nearer. “That’s exactly what you’d be doing if word of this gets out. You think every reporter in the country isn’t just itching for a lead? They’d go chasing after Belinda in a minute if they knew she’d been over to Vinnie’s place.” He looked me in the eye. “And you, too, you know.”
I’d never b
een one to shy away from the spotlight, but I knew exactly what he was saying. The Lakewood police had already decided that I was a high-priced call girl. My poor mom, hiding out in Florida because of what happened with my dad, didn’t need another family scandal. If this made it’s way into the press, she’d never be able to show her face in town again.
I nodded, silently agreeing to Gene’s plan, but that didn’t mean I was willing to completely relinquish responsibility. “But what if she’s guilty?” I asked him.
“Belinda? Guilty?” Gene laughed, and when the PR guy waved him over, he patted my arm and took off in that direction. “Believe me when I tell you this, honey, because I know it for a fact. The only thing Belinda was ever guilty of was partying too hard.”
Tombs of Endearment Page 15
