He shook his head and gave me a sad smile. “No.”
Three days later, I changed my life irrevocably when I went back to visit Steven. I can recall actually sitting hours beforehand at a table in the Dean & Deluca café on Prince Street and fingering the spare set of keys he’d given me. A special security key plus one Yale key for the top lock. I considered changing my plan. There had to be alternatives, but I couldn’t see any, and time was an important factor. It wouldn’t take long for the media to get a whiff of blood in the air, their intuition kicking in that something had happened. If I were going to pull this off and save her, I would need to do it soon.
And so I put the keys back in my purse. I intended to use them.
When my own personal “zero hour” hit, I used one of the last semi-clean Bell payphones you can find in the Big Apple. I called Steven’s townhouse to make sure he was home—I didn’t dare use my mobile in case of any permanent trace record later. He answered frostily, and just from his tone, I knew he must be in his home studio. Steven always liked the option of re-recording his vocals in his own time in his own space, no pressure from engineers or producers or anyone else when he was at home. This would be perfect. I hung up without saying a word and looked for the nearest subway station for the journey from SoHo to the Upper East Side.
It was clear he wasn’t paying attention to his security monitors as I let myself in, and I mentally patted myself on the back again for my good luck. I wouldn’t need to chit-chat now or make up an excuse. I could cross the living room to his desk, and I won a bet I had with myself that Steven would be careless. Yes, indeed. The drawer with the gun was unlocked.
But no gun.
Shit.
Come on, I thought, my heart pounding. Where would he leave it? Knowing his huge ego and casual sense of in-vulnerability, it would probably be in plain view. From where I stood, I could see the little red bulb he’d had installed that meant he was recording, a warning for any house guests staying over. His studio had all the bells and whistles, right down to professional soundproofing, not just the layers of cork board Easy Carson had stapled up in the back room of his nightclub. Come on, I told myself, you don’t have forever.
Where the hell was it?
I looked to the designer coffee table, each of its legs a gaudy replica of a Fabergé egg, the top a sheet of thick glass with a small trick chamber for a pen—no kidding!—that had a diamond stylus. Celebrities he liked could autograph his coffee table. I looked to the bookshelves. A copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a copy of Shelby Foote’s three-volume set on the American Civil War, still in its shrink-wrap and probably a gift. Damn it. Where…? Then I spotted it resting on the stereo cabinet.
It looked different from the last time I’d seen it, but from its size and weight, it had to be the .45. You would think I’d know, having been intimate with the damn thing. As I checked the magazine and shoved it back home, there was a metallic clack that never penetrated the studio, and then I snapped a round into the chamber. I tossed the gun into my handbag and took a deep breath. Just don’t be an idiot, I warned myself. When you pull it out, make sure you release the safety. Do it quick. Do it without hesitation.
God bless America. In Canada, it’s harder than you think to get a handgun. There are rural places like out on the prairies and such where men have rifles, either for sport hunting or killing pests on their farms. But if you want a pistol, you make a written application and the Mounties, our federal police, interview you in your home. And you better have a damn good reason for wanting one. None of this “right to bear arms” shit. You must keep it under lock and key at home, you must transport it in a sealed case in the back of your car to and from the firing range. Like Britain, guns get smuggled in and sold on the black market, but the odds of getting shot in downtown Toronto are a lot less than if you were walking around Detroit or even Beverly Hills.
In a way, Luther was my unwitting accomplice for Steven Swann. He had taught me how to shoot.
He wasn’t a gun freak the way Steven was, not at all. Growing up in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, he never saw a gangbanger until he began producing. I asked him once about it, and he looked at me with this peculiar expression as if he’d just returned from Beirut.
“It’s fucking Mars, Michelle. I’m sitting in the back of a limo with Chester K and a couple of guys from Furrr, and this Audi pulls up at the stoplight next to us. All I can see is a hand in a white jacket sleeve making signs at Chester, and I can’t hear anything. Chester gets out of the car and pulls out this honking big Magnum! But the Audi rips through the stoplight and tears off before he can do anything, thank God. When he’s inside and sitting down again, I’m saying, ‘Son-of-a-bitch, man, how can you live like this?’ They’re all laughing at me, and he says, ‘Got to get the word out, dog.’ ”
Luther rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I said to him what word? And he started in on this whole thing about how this is real life, and I didn’t know it. I said, ‘No, Chester, real life is buying groceries and going to the park and making music if that happens to be your job. You think real people go around like bandits capping each other?’ He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said and told me, ‘I’m the genuine shit, Luther. I ain’t posing.’ And I told him yes, I know. I went to his label management the next day and told them I’m out. I’ll finish up Chester’s album, but don’t ever ask me to work with this guy again because I don’t want to be standing next to him when his head gets blown off.”
Still, Luther had purchased and registered a gun. A semiautomatic just like Steven had, only his was a Smith & Wesson, I think. And on a whim of modern chivalry, he’d insisted on teaching Erica and me how to use it because we were two single girls living alone in Manhattan. Granted, we were on the Upper East Side, but we were alone. Erica, he said, should buy herself a gun. “No fucking way!” she told him. But she couldn’t resist her morbid curiosity to experience what one felt like in her hand. Neither could I. So there were the two of us wearing those clear protection goggles like they have for surgeons and dentists, Luther standing behind each of us as we took a turn to heft the weight of the thing and squeeze off a few rounds. It sounded jarringly loud, even through the protective headphones.
The next time I saw a gun, it was Steven’s, and he was nudging it inside my pussy.
And now I had it smuggled in my handbag.
I took a breath to calm my nerves and walked over to the recording studio. I stared at him through the glass. The dimmers were on low in the room so that he was almost in shadow, and at last he looked up from the control panel and noticed me. I gave him a puckered half smile, my brow furrowed, as if to say: all right, I did have to come back. I don’t like you, but I enjoy fucking you. I couldn’t look too eager for him.
He smiled back at me and killed the music as I walked in. Folding his arms, he remarked, “Well, I guess it wouldn’t be very sexy of me if I played it smug.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
He paused a moment over his board, at last saying, “I knew you had fun. Let me finish up here, and then we can have a couple of drinks.”
I watched him work for a long moment.
“You expecting anyone else this evening?”
“No,” he said, his face clouding for a moment. “Why?”
“Just hoped we’d get some privacy, that’s all.”
“You have me all to yourself.”
Shoot him. Shoot him now.
I couldn’t just yet. I felt strangely detached from my intention. I didn’t feel sorry for him or have this big attack of morality that, yes, killing was wrong. I wasn’t even nervous. I was so calm that all my outrage seemed to have drained out of me. I was too collected. Ending him would be like exterminating a pest. As bizarre as it sounds, I needed my righteous indignation back. I wanted to feel something, so I kept talking to him.
“Hey, listen,” I said. “When we were doing it the other day, and you had me strangling you…�
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“Yeah?”
“Did you think about where you were? That you could die in that room?”
He shook his head, thinking I was making a joke. “No.”
“But you could have died, Steven. That would have been it. Your spot. In your home. And it would have been a hell of a way to go.”
“I trusted you, Mish. Wasn’t that a turn-on for you? You know, taking me to the edge and all that? My life in your hands?”
“Maybe it was a bigger turn-on for you than for me,” I suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said in a casual voice. “You can tell yourself that if you want to. If we got to play games, honey, okay, we’ll play games.”
He hit a button on the panel, and as I heard a flood of music, I took the second to dig into my handbag and release the safety.
“You’re gonna love this,” he told me.
I heard the distinctive bass line from “It Was a Pleasure to Burn.” He was weaving it into the mix of his own new single.
I couldn’t believe it. “You think Erica will let you keep permission to do that?”
“Does it matter these days?” he shot back. And then: “But the beauty of it is, I got it during the engagement! She waived royalties on the use. Oooh, oooh, check this out, it’s my idea—”
And before the bridge was an instrumental section with a strange sound. I couldn’t place it. I sat leaning against the dynamically futuristic desk he had in there for his mixer boards and equipment, my hand still touching the gun in my unzipped handbag, and the situation was absurd. Guess that noise, as I stood waiting for the right moment to pull out the Colt and shoot him.
“It’s this kid’s squeal in a day care run backwards,” he explained. “Sounds like a girl coming, huh? I pick up all kinds of stuff to throw in.”
He held up a palm-size Sony micro-cassette recorder, punched the play, and, yes, there was the kid in a long joyous giggle, “Eeeeee!” He had done an amazing job of sifting out the ambient background noise around it for the mix. He hit the play for the new track, and there was the bass and the keyboards again, plus his creation.
I shook my head at him. “You’re a real heartless bastard, you know that?”
He made a horse whinny of a laugh and fell back against his chair. “Fuuuuck! Gimme a break, Michelle. These rappers borrow from Sting, Phil Collins, Bruce Hornsby, who the fuck knows how many other half-buried corpses from our parents’ rock and roll, and you want to get pissy over me using a bit of Erica? Alicia Keys took classical piano, and what? You think Mozart is bitching? That’s what I’m going to do, you goofy chick! These white suburban wannabes like the brothers’ music. I like the music. I’m not going to apologise for putting my own spin on it or ‘watering it down’ or whatever you want to call it to speak to my kind. What, I’m a thief because I talk to my own target audience using their licks? Bullshit.”
I was captivated for a moment by his impromptu diatribe, maybe not so much by his argument but by the fact that for once, Steven was being sincerely passionate. He wasn’t pulling his pretty boy Zen aphorism shit, wasn’t being condescending. He actually believed.
“I love the hypocrisy, man,” he said with a wide grin. “Music is music—so goes the big politically correct chant. Except when we go to the well and want to pull up a bucket of African rhythms or Indian stuff or whatever the world music flavour is this month. Let Paul Simon and Malcolm McLaren burn in hell, huh?”
“That’s a nice speech,” I countered. “You’re always saying you don’t pretend to be what you’re not. And then you pull that engagement shit to look good—”
“Not this again—”
“Yes, that again. That’s hypocrisy.”
“No, that’s marketing,” insisted Steven. “Look, I let you in on what I only hoped folks would think. I can’t be sure. And I never came out with any statements about Erica’s politics or crusades or any shit. I never stuck my nose into it. People made their own conclusions about my credibility—”
“You said the album sales—”
“Hey, do you think that says something about me? Or about them?”
I couldn’t answer that one.
“What do you think they’d say about you if they found you naked with a scarf around your neck after sex?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re back to that,” he answered. “You’re talking in circles today.”
“Come on, really, what do you think they’d say?”
He stood up, his fingers drumming along the leather sleeve of the Sony tape recorder, and he reached out to stroke my cheek. “They’d say…That Steven Swann. The guy was coming and going! Get it?”
“You’re a riot,” I told him. “I wish you begged me for your life.”
“Why?” he laughed, backing up a step and glancing down at the mixer board. “Would that have made it more erotic?”
“No,” I said as I withdrew the gun from my handbag, “but maybe I would have felt something. Maybe I’d change my mind about this.”
He stared at me, his mouth slack and his eyes wide and completely bewildered. No cleverness in him at all as he faced the barrel. I fired.
It wasn’t like in the movies. There was a cannon roar in my ears, and the ugly muzzle of the thing spat flame and a tiny cloud. In a fleeting instant, Steven grew a bright red dot in his forehead and cried out, short, sharp, and without hope. Then he appeared to suddenly faint, falling to the side, hitting the control board and slumping to the floor. His right hand flew back and dropped the tape recorder, his other hand fanning out to complete the spread eagle. And all the while, Steven Swann’s voice sang inside the studio. The tiny green light indicators were like an ever-changing bar graph popping and falling with the vocals and the bass.
I paused a minute to make sure he was gone. I wasn’t interested in the ugly red and black hole I had made in his head, I watched for a change in his expression, a stirring of movement. But his face was frozen in its shock.
I had come prepared with a thick flannel cloth and a medium-size makeup pouch inside my handbag. I wiped my prints off the gun and slipped it into the pouch, zipped it closed, and as I slung my handbag over my shoulder, I realised I hadn’t even checked through the glass of the booth to make sure Steven was right, that we were alone. When I turned no one was there, and my body shook in spasms of jangled nerves. Now get out of here, I ordered myself. I took another flannel from my handbag and wiped the inside and outside knobs of the studio door, but I didn’t care about my prints being in the rest of the apartment. I had been a regular visitor here with Erica, no suspicion aroused by that. Best to wipe down the front door, though.
Then I was out on the street. I took a short ride on the subway, and half an hour later, I waved goodbye to the makeup pouch as it made a soft splash in the East River. No more gun. Yes, the cops would figure out that Steven’s gun was missing, and that it was probably the murder weapon, but there was no reason I should make life easier for them.
I went home, and Erica was out. I felt the need to take a shower. I liked mystery stories, and I liked cop shows, and I remembered reading that stuff from guns, powder or whatever, can contaminate the shooter. I must have stood under the hot spray for forty-five minutes, obsessively washing my arms, my hands, my face and my neck, as if I could cleanse away both Steven Swann and what I had done to him. I wondered if they’d found him by now. I wondered if it made the news yet.
I told myself I was right to do what I did. He would have ruined Erica’s career, at the very least tarnished her reputation, and he did it not even out of cruelty or revenge over her sleeping around. He targeted her like he was a goddamn plant manager needing to get rid of a few thousand workers on a factory line. She had loved him. She had opened herself so completely to him and even opened up her personal life and her feelings to the world. For him. For the likes of him.
I hated what he did to her. I hated him.
And I hated that Steven made me come.
Questions
I don’t ne
ed to go over how huge the fallout was from Steven’s death, do I? First the headlines and quotes from shocked friends and BSB management and then the lurid speculation about who might have killed him. The leading theory for fifteen minutes was that the murderer was a secret gay lover—probably pushed by that contingent of fans and press who cynically believe every celebrity’s gay and in the closet. Then there was the candlelight vigil outside the townhouse off Park Avenue, Fox News showing kids who said, “Steven’s music was about peace, man, and we can’t forget that.” As if “Skankin’ Around” had a message.
Erica hated the idea of playing the grieving fiancée. The label’s publicity department very politely and steadily kept nudging her to make a statement until I watched her explode in their offices. “I am not going to stand in front of a bunch of fucking cameras and cry my eyes out like, like—some beauty queen getting her crown! Steven’s dead! He’s dead. Do you understand that? You don’t have to patronise people by giving them a show! You think they have to guess how I feel?”
And her hands were balled in fists as streaks of tears poured down both cheeks. What they couldn’t get in front of a camera was wrenched out of her in this private confrontation. As she rushed out the door, I remember one executive appealing to me.
“Michelle, talk to her, will you?”
I turned on my heel and stared at the guy. “How old is your mother?”
“What?”
“You heard me,” I said. “How old is your mother?”
He actually had to think about it. “Seventy-three. Why?”
“When she dies, remind me to send a camera crew to your house.”
I hurried for the elevator to catch up to Erica.
I know, I know. Who was I now? I had detached myself completely. It was another Michelle who had gone over to Steven Swann’s apartment that night and exacted a revenge for Erica’s humiliation. I swear to God that when I looked at the newspapers the morning after, Newsday, The Post, The Times, I felt a ripple of genuine astonishment and grief for him. As if killing him hadn’t been real and only the papers made it so. To be completely honest, I didn’t feel a pang of guilt for Erica’s desolation over his death. It struck me as a wish for a genuine grief, no more substantial than the zircon pain over their break-up. Maybe because we both knew that, as righteous as she sounded in that BSB office, she wasn’t about to divulge the fact that, oh, yeah, by the way, he broke up with me only a couple of days before he was shot.
Soul Siren Page 19
