Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  I had to lie to him. “I’m getting stick from one of the musician unions.”

  “Morgan went to them?” Luther could scarcely believe it. He knew Morgan was never one for politics in music or for organisations.

  “It’s real complicated.”

  “Well, what does Erica think?”

  “I haven’t told her,” I said. “God, Luther, you know it would break her heart to know he complained. She’d pony up whether he has a case or not! She wants to be such a good friend to the masses over equal pay and rights, but I’m the one who does her books, man. Please. BSB’s got deep enough pockets they can afford it. And you’ll want the option of using Morgan again, won’t you? If the label brass gets wind of this, they’ll put him on a shit list and stamp him as a troublemaker. You won’t get to use him if that happens.”

  Luther pursed his lips thoughtfully and scratched his chin. “That’s not exactly true. I use who I want when I’m producing, it’s in my contract. But if we bring him in for somebody else’s album…Yeah, you’re right. Erica doesn’t need this shit right now anyway. And I don’t know what’s up with Morgan these days. Maybe he owes money or something. Maybe he’s burned out.”

  He told me how Morgan had performed his drunken jazz player routine at another one of his regular gigs in Morningside Heights. The way Luther described it, I was sure our friend had, at least for now, not spouted off about “his” songs on an Erica Jones album. Good. But self-interest aside, I was as concerned as Luther about the man’s steady decline.

  What did I say early on about Morgan? That Erica’s father had wanted him to teach his little girl how to love the craft beyond the glory. I called it a bittersweet compliment to Morgan’s talents, since that kind of lesson is best learned from the one who has failed, the one who stays behind to keep watch, to hold the sacred ground. Why now? Why come apart now? He’s tired, I thought. We’ll pay him off, and maybe he’ll get back on an even keel. We’ll be able to talk to him and come around to his place like old times.

  I was hanging around with people who booked a corporate jet on weekends and who bought themselves Bulgari watches when they had the blues. Cheques cured worlds of hurt. Morgan still lived in a dump of a loft with a freight elevator, his furniture on creaky boards and his double bed past a beaded curtain, and people thought this was cool because it reminded them of the movies. Bohemian chic. Morgan was probably sick of having lived like this for the better part of his life. Okay, I thought, we can fix that. Naïve yet tarnished as everyone else, I thought Luther’s sign-off on the additional money would solve my biggest problem. I was cynical.

  And I should have known better. Erica had told me how her father, good ol’ Duane Jones, and Morgan had a real bust-up before Mr. Jones quit their band and headed off home to Toronto. Sure, they had kind of patched things up over the years, and Erica went to Morgan with her Dad’s blessing, but she knew the stories of how Morgan could be a real spiteful son-of-a-bitch sometimes. He could really dig in his heels when he felt like it. I was about to discover what that was like.

  There was a break in the tour when we flew back to New York, and Erica worked on a couple of tracks for the latest album. In the morning, I had a window to go over regular business with her like cover art designs and shots for a new magazine spread. When Erica worked on recording she could spend hours without breaks, without meals, and on Tuesday, I begged my way out of sticking around and returned home. I had two D’Agostino bags’ worth of groceries in my arms and my key ring in my teeth as I opened the door. There was Jill, feet up on the desk in the front lounge, pensively examining various objects pulled out of the drawers.

  “Make yourself at home,” I snapped. Erica thought her bodyguard should have a key, though she told me she had strict rules on Jill’s use of it.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I thought you two were at work,” said Jill. “I didn’t think anybody would be back for hours.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. What are you doing?”

  I put the bags down and took a couple of tentative steps over to the desk. I noticed now that there was a common link between all the objects she had pulled out and was checking. They were all the gifts that Steven Swann had ever given Erica: a plush toy animal, expensive jewellery, a boxed CD set of the best of David Bowie, an Hermès scarf and so on. Erica had shoved the things away after his brutal admission that he couldn’t love her anymore.

  “A pattern,” said Jill. “I’m looking for a pattern.”

  “A pattern of what?” I asked.

  “How Steven thought. What he liked, what he was into, what turned him on.”

  “So you let yourself in to our place? Go to Barnes & Noble and get his bio if you want to learn about him! There are dozens getting released now. Or Erica can loan you a couple of his albums. You need HMV, not our desk.” I took the groceries into the kitchen and began putting them away.

  “Steven’s killer is still out there,” said Jill, raising her voice so that I could hear. “For all we know, maybe the killer wants to go after Erica, too. The best way I can think of for preventing that is to catch the person first.”

  I came out of the kitchen and gestured with a cup, offering her tea. Might as well be civil. No thanks, she muttered.

  “I’m sure the cops are still investigating his murder,” I said. “It’s not like they need you to play Nancy Drew for them.”

  She nodded, conceding the point. “Yeah, that’s true. But I have one client, one long-term contract. And so I’ve got one case. I can devote a lot more of my personal attention than they can.”

  I drifted back into the kitchen and poured tea for myself, nervously taking a sip before I gave it a decent chance to steep. What was she doing, sticking her nose into Steven’s murder? She was supposed to be a bodyguard, not a private detective. Trying to keep my voice calm, I called out to the living room, “And you think the best way you can catch the guy is understanding Steven?”

  She waited for my return before answering. “I do. I shouldn’t be alarmist about this, Michelle, but I think Erica, you, Luther, a couple of others could be in real danger. It’s so obvious that the killer was someone who knew Steven well. He must have been someone in your inner circle.”

  “You’re scaring me,” I said. I didn’t have to lie about it either.

  “See, I shouldn’t have said anything,” sighed Jill, taking her feet off the desk. “Now you are going to worry. Look, I still have friends on the force, and they’ve given me access to the file. I’m looking into it. And, yes, you’re right, the cops are still investigating.”

  “But you said yourself, they can’t devote all their attention to it,” I replied, letting my voice quaver a bit. “Shit, you mean his killer could be one of us? I just can’t believe it. Look, I’m sorry I was catty with you when I walked in. You do have to help figure it out, don’t you? The cops get murders every day, and they—”

  “Oh, they’ll find a suspect eventually,” she argued.

  “Why so certain?”

  “Because of the gun.”

  The gun?

  There was a flutter of nerves on my insides like startled pigeons being chased from a square. “What do you mean the gun? I thought they never found a gun.”

  “Oh, not the murder weapon,” said Jill quickly. “No, they didn’t find that. Swann had all kinds of guns all over his house, and they found a .45 under his pillow. The cops, they, uh…How can I put this politely? When the forensics guy put the barrel close to his nose to smell if it had been fired recently, he—uh—picked up something else.”

  Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Showing off his collection, all his BS talk about the Old West, his rifles and even a goddamn flintlock in his display case, and it never, ever occurred to me that Steven would have more than one handgun. I had thought the pistol looked different when I picked it up. I knew what she was going to tell me.

  “Swann owned a couple of .45 Colts, and from what I hear, he liked to do the whole John Woo thing sometimes out at his p
roperty in New Mexico,” explained Jill. She raised her index fingers at me. “Bang, bang, bang, bang! Boys with toys. When he was in New York, he split up the twins for home protection, and he must have been playing some kinky games in his spare time. The lab found traces of vaginal secretions on the barrel of the gun.”

  I couldn’t say anything. She took my reaction for regular shock. At last I ventured, “Where, um, where did they find it?”

  “Swann had it under his pillow.”

  Keep a poker face. Don’t react.

  “The cops are interpreting that as a fearful response,” said Jill. She didn’t sound convinced. “They think he must have been threatened either by a crazed fan, or maybe there’s a gang with hip-hop or rap ties that didn’t like him and made it clear. So he felt his life was in danger, and that’s why he kept a gun under his pillow.”

  “But…you don’t think that.” I wasn’t asking.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve thought it through,” replied Jill. “If you’re in fear for your life, yeah, sure, maybe you sleep with a gun under your pillow. But here’s a young guy making gazillions, and he doesn’t hire a bodyguard. The others have bodyguards, the Jacksons, the J-Los, the action stars. What was Erica’s response to Steven’s murder? Hire me. And Steven didn’t beef up security at the townhouse.”

  “He had a burglar alarm already, didn’t he?” I tried to sound as ignorant as possible.

  “Yep. One of the best. Which leads to the next obvious thing. If the cops are right, and he’s killed by someone threatening him, why no forced entry to the house? The cops come back to me with some half-assed reply that he must have known who was threatening him and been trying to talk his way out, let bygones be bygones. That’s a bit of a reach, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “It makes far more sense that either he invited his killer over since the door was unlocked—which is less likely, I mean, hey, we’re in New York—or the killer had her own key.”

  I shrugged. “Why? Why does that follow?”

  “Steven was in his recording studio when he was murdered. There was no sign of a struggle. Here’s a victim who supposedly doesn’t feel safe enough in his own home that he sleeps with a handgun, but he doesn’t bring it along with him when he’s in a sound-proof room. He’s working on tracks. He’s mixing. He’s playing back stuff. And what’s more, he’s playing it back for someone else.”

  I was really astonished now. And getting nervous. “How can you be so sure he was playing stuff back for someone else?”

  “This little Sony micro-cassette recorder had fallen out of his hand when he was shot.”

  I didn’t get it. “So?”

  “So no patch cord from the tape machine to the board,” said Jill, smiling in wonder that I didn’t make the jump in logic. “You’re mixing sound, putting together your song, and you whip out a little tape recorder to suddenly hear something? That presumes you need it. He didn’t scribble down any notes on paper, and he didn’t have the tape recorder hooked up or one of the micro-cassettes popped in a deck.”

  “Maybe he was about to,” I suggested.

  Jill sucked on the tip of her index finger, looking pensive again. “Maybe. I doubt it. I think he was playing something for his killer, and she shot him right afterwards.”

  “You keep saying ‘she.’ She killed him.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why can’t it be a guy?”

  “Goes back to those vaginal secretions on the gun barrel,” offered Jill. “Like I said, the boy liked his kink. That’s why he slept with that gun under his pillow, it was a little joke he was having with himself. I think perhaps he took it too far, and the girl got righteously pissed off. She came back later and showed him a new place to stick it. Vengeance for a sexual assault.”

  Oh, Jesus.

  “It’s only a matter of time before she’s found,” she went on. “Big pop star like that, of course, he’d be working his way through rows A to M at his concerts, but I’m sure they’ll find a match eventually, sooner or later.”

  She was right. I had to take a big gamble.

  “Jill. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this girl was his killer.”

  “No?”

  “No. Because…because if I gave the cops a DNA sample, they’d find out it was me.”

  “You?”

  I nodded.

  “People told me you’re…Never mind.” She let out a long sigh. “Shit, Michelle. You know I have to go back to the police with this, don’t you? And you’re going to have to talk to them, too.”

  “I know.”

  She looked at me, just looked at me. Waiting. “I visited Steven at the townhouse two days before he was killed,” I said. “We had sex. It wasn’t rape. There was always an attraction between us, and he started laying it on thick about how he knew Erica had guys on the side, but he planned to be faithful to her after the wedding. And he would expect the same of her. He figured if she could play around before the wedding, he should sow a few last oats of his own.”

  “And you decided to be one of them. Help him cheat on her.”

  “Don’t judge me, Jill,” I snapped. “You haven’t worked for Erica as long as I have. You’ll see plenty of shit. Yes, maybe you’ve worked for other celebrities, but she is insatiable. And it’s not in your job description or mine, but you will be expected to cover up for her and make excuses for her, and sometimes you’ll be in a corner and have to watch. She’s the star. It was a hell of an ego boost for me to have Steven Swann say let’s make it, honey. Yes, he was twisted. The gun was his idea. He said to me, here’s a real dildo for you. It wasn’t loaded or anything, and I let him do it to me. And the scary part is, I did get off on it.”

  Jill didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said in a small voice, “Well, that’s not a crime. Still. They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Okay. Please, please don’t tell Erica about this! She was devastated over Steven. She may have fucked around on him, but I think she genuinely loved him. I’m sure of it. No good will come out of talking about his private little quirks now.”

  “No, I suppose not,” she said, nodding slowly.

  I realised I was making a mistake and quickly added, “And you know I don’t want to lose my job.”

  Her head was still nodding, deep in thought. “Course. Of course you don’t. Let’s go talk to the cops.”

  The police questioned me for two hours down at a station house that looked like a set from NYPD Blue or something. Drab green walls, an interrogation room with busted plastic chairs and a Formica table, and posters that were woefully out of date with the temper of the times. One had a pen-and-ink drawing of a blond, blue-eyed boy in a Fifties-style shirt with tears in his eyes under a slogan that read: ARE YOU LOST? DON’T KNOW YOUR WAY BACK HOME TO MOMMY AND DADDY? In the hall, a skinhead type with multiple piercings in his face was led past me in shackles. I watched but couldn’t hear Jill talking to a plain-clothes detective. She nodded towards me, shrugging her shoulders, and then the detective was pointing.

  After a few minutes, I was led into the interrogation room and had to sit across from a ginger-haired sergeant of detectives who cracked his knuckles and frowned at me. “If you’re a lesbian, what did you sleep with the guy for?”

  Jill was in a corner of the room, watching. “Holland, don’t be an asshole,” she piped up.

  He gave her a dirty look, grimacing in a way that was supposed to tell her he was allowing her to be here. It was a courtesy that she could stay, since she wasn’t my lawyer. She was only a former cop and my current work colleague.

  “At any point, did he, uh, use any restraints on you? You know, tie you up? Or, umm…” The cop cleared his throat noisily. I figured he enjoyed the seamier aspects of this case but he was too button-down to talk about it without embarrassment. “Look, did he hit you or anything? Did you hit him?”

  “Why are you ask
ing me that?” I demanded. “What does that have to do with someone coming along later and shooting him?”

  “Goes to motive,” said the detective.

  Jill walked over to the table. “They found this contraption of his. Solid gold handcuffs on chains.” She passed me a blown-up photograph of it.

  “There’s an apparatus for, um, holding up his weight,” the detective added.

  Jill rolled her eyes. “An apparatus! Jesus, Holland, it was a fuck swing, okay?”

  “No, he didn’t use that with me,” I said. “I heard he had it, but—”

  The detective pounced on that one. “How did you hear about it?”

  Jill and I traded quick looks. She knew I was lying when I said, “Parties. People talk.”

  She didn’t contradict me.

  “And that got you interested in him?” asked Holland the Prude.

  “Is that important?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No.”

  “Sounds like you two were playing pretty rough.”

  “He didn’t hit me. But he did want me to use a scarf on him.”

  Now it was the detective’s turn to trade looks with Jill. They explained that the pathologist had discovered bruising on Steven’s neck, and, yes, the obvious conclusion was he was up to some kinky sex days before his murder.

  “So because of that, I’m a suspect,” I groaned.

  The detective leaned back in his seat, scratching his un-combed mess of red hair. “I’m inclined to rule you out. Especially since you decided to come forward.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If you had wanted to kill him, you could have done him in with the scarf, and it would probably be written off as death by misadventure. It happens. People get stupid. They play dangerous games. Now if he had wanted you in the scarf or maybe snapped you into those cuffs, well, perhaps you’d want to erase him for mistreating you. But Miss Chandler here tells me that you don’t look like you’re physically injured in any way, you don’t appear to have suffered any trauma, physical, psychological or whatever.”