“No,” I whispered foolishly, still not believing it.
“You think you know Erica so well,” said Jill. “You got it into your head that you’re her confidante, part of her family, the person who should be the real love of her life. You feel so strongly you assume it’s as simple for other people—love them or hate them, enemy or friend. But people aren’t as evil as you think they are, Michelle. And they’re not as pure. Erica went to Morgan as a teacher—yes, with her Dad’s blessing—but she also went to get his work back. Mr. Jones couldn’t be bothered to fight his old buddy over his tunes. Sure, he grumbled over who wrote what to his daughter, but all the fight had gone out of him. Erica knew what diamonds her old man had created. She polished them up, gave them new arrangements and hot producers, and there you are. Top ten hits. But Morgan had the only copies of sheet music for about half of what he and Duane Jones wrote for their band.”
I couldn’t accept it. Stupefied, refusing to accept it.
“Morgan did arrangements for the Drum album, didn’t he?”
“Y—yes.”
“Three tunes on the album had bits of melody originally composed by Mr. Jones. He wrote the bridge for the title track five years before Erica was born! I’ve seen the chart, one of the few scraps the man has kept. It was his.”
Blood was throbbing in my temples. What she was saying…it wasn’t possible.
“Erica never talked about it with you because she did have feelings for Morgan. And she was embarrassed by what she did to him. That’s right—Erica actually embarrassed. Screwing the guy and then smuggling the music back! She’s not ashamed of casual sex, but she was ashamed of fucking him for an agenda. She cared about Morgan. He was a good teacher for her, and he did have talent in his own right. He was only a villain for you, Michelle. He was never a threat to her.”
“You don’t know that. He told me he had charts, he had demos—”
“Didn’t matter one bit,” replied Jill. “Don’t worry, we’ll come to that.”
It couldn’t all be for nothing. I was still denying it to myself as she hammered home the facts.
“Let me tell you what you did,” said Jill. “After you killed Morgan, you searched his place for anything that might pose a threat to Erica. You murdered him, thinking you were protecting her, and now you needed to cover up for her—or so you thought. In his file cabinet or his desk or his bedroom closet—somewhere, doesn’t matter where—was a whole bunch of sealed envelopes he mailed to himself, never opened. You had to know what was in them. You had to. You tried to stay careful, and you had your gloves on, so you opened them up. That’s what sank you. That’s what made me sure it was you.”
I didn’t say anything. One word, and I would incriminate myself. Yes, I had torn them open, not knowing what they were. All those song charts and the cassette tapes. How could she know? How could she even know they existed? I had been so careful. I had been so very careful.
“You were very stupid, Mish,” Jill went on. “You thought at first you should burn any record of the compositions. Fresh ashes under the elements on his stove, paper ashes found by the police forensics. You yanked out the little cassette tapes from their spools. Why take them with you? You ripped them up and tossed them in the fireplace, then set them alight. They proved nothing in themselves, but you were scared. You wanted to be thorough. You know what? You left just enough to confirm my suspicion.”
She pulled something out of her pocket. It was an old-fashioned reel for cassette tape, and she gave it a sharp rattle for emphasis. With two delicate fingers, she held the beginning of the tape and pulled out a couple of inches of it.
“See the splice?” she asked. “I did it with razor blades and this brand of tiny seal tape that’s like a Band-Aid. You can still get all this in the production equipment shops. Here, have a listen—we burned it to a CD to make things easier.”
A young white man I had noticed hanging back in the group pressed a button on the stereo. He had said nothing all this time, his hands clasped in front of him, his posture perfect. Cop. He was waiting for Jill to finish before he put handcuffs on me. From the wings, I heard fresh footsteps, and then Holland the detective, ginger hair, same bad suit, walked in. He looked to Jill.
“I’m almost finished,” she said.
There was nowhere to run as I heard Mr. Jones’s voice, a higher timbre from years ago, softly singing. My God. Duane Jones singing “Late Night Promises.”
“You never bothered to listen to the cassettes, did you?” Jill asked me.
I heard the fragment of a verse. It had different lines written for it, but the chorus was the same: Don’t whisper to me any more in darkness, don’t tell me you’ll change in warm sunlight…
I tried in vain to still bluff my way out. “Still proves nothing.”
“Oh, I know,” said Jill. “I’m just taking you through how I figured it out. Call it a dry run for when I’m a witness in court. You see I heard that voice on the tape, and I wondered why the killer would give a damn about destroying that stuff. It got me thinking. And it led me to the proof.”
“What proof?”
“You didn’t think about what all those envelopes meant, Michelle. You took everything that had any relevance to Erica’s music.”
Yes, I had. I had scooped up charts and tapes for Drum and the hits on the second album, focussing all my self-righteous energy on disposing of these damning goods.
“And you failed to pay attention to everything Morgan came up with himself.”
Mistake. A fatal mistake.
“Morgan penned himself a little ditty only a month ago,” Jill was telling me now. “A jazz thing he wrote for a cop show, but the job fell through. Easy Death in Queens. And he did his usual ritual. He made a demo tape—this one, he did on the ADAT that Erica gave him as a present. He burned it to a CD and slipped the disc and the chart into an envelope he addressed to himself. It arrived two weeks before you murdered him, and he had a printout clipped to the envelope with the details. You saw the page with the title of the show, and you knew this couldn’t be something Erica was working on, so you ignored it.”
“How can you know?” I whispered in disbelief. “How could you possibly…?”
I wanted to finish the sentence, to demand how she could possibly know what I did and why—why should the envelopes and not the music be so goddamn important anyway? Why should they mean I had killed him for nothing? I still couldn’t fathom it.
Furrowing her lovely brow, she looked at me in quiet amazement at how I could be such a fool.
“Didn’t you ask yourself at all why he mailed the songs back to his house? You didn’t, did you? You only saw the song titles and the opening chords, and it was Erica, Erica, Erica. Protect your great love. No common sense penetrating that obsession of yours. That envelope bothered me the very first time I got a look at the crime scene. Why did he go to the trouble of doing that?”
“You’re so fucking clever, you explain it to me, Jill.”
“Well, it’s simple really,” she said. “Songwriters used to mail their compositions to themselves all the time. They wouldn’t open the packages as a way of proving what they’d done by the postal mark. But the US Copyright Office no longer recognises this method. It hasn’t for a while, Mish.”
I felt a trapdoor in my stomach give way.
“Morgan was scraping by with his jazz gigs and his occasional arrangement work,” said Jill. “Anything he wrote for TV was bought outright, flat fee with no residuals, so he had no reason to claim the copyrights. He couldn’t get a label to take him seriously anymore, and he had given up trying. Here was this jazz artist who hit his peak in the Seventies, stuck in his ways. What was the point in publishing his songs if he couldn’t get them heard? He never bothered to keep up with changes in the legal or the business side. But Erica did. A beautiful, fresh young thing like her just starting out in the biz? She would learn all she could. And in all her time with that slimeball Easy Carson, you never thought she
’d learn contracts and ownership? Or that she’d come to New York knowing a few things? That she would make sure to cover her ass?”
Oh, Jesus, I thought. She was right. All those times I had taken care of crisis management, negotiated with troublemakers or swept people out of her way, I had got it into my head that I was thinking for Erica. But Erica was always sharp. She could solve problems herself but had merely delegated the small ones to me. And Morgan…?
“Morgan didn’t have a legal leg to stand on,” said Jill. “Erica filed her copyright forms for ‘Late Night Promises’ and ‘Pariah’ her third week in Manhattan! He could never touch them, and he wasn’t foolish enough to try. Oh, he was arrogant in the beginning. He played her Dad’s old tunes right in front of Mr. Jones’s little girl on his piano, claiming he wrote them. And if his old partner hadn’t challenged him in thirty years over these songs, Morgan didn’t figure he’d start now. He counted on Erica not having a clue. But she had done her homework. She checked everything under Morgan’s name through the government’s website. And she simply waited until she got her hands on the sheet music, then rewrote what she liked and sent it in under her own name. When the second album went big, all he could do was grumble. And try to con you, Michelle, because you were in the dark.”
Nothing. I had killed him for nothing.
Jill was watching me as the blow struck. She wasn’t finished. She hadn’t told me yet how she’d sussed it all out.
“The police didn’t connect the dots between the tiny shreds of cassette tape and the paper ashes because they weren’t looking at music as a motive,” she explained. “When I heard that splice of Mr. Jones’s voice, the pieces fell together. Because it occurred to me that if Morgan sent one envelope to himself then he had probably sent others in the past—only they were stolen by his killer. And it had to be you.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Morgan’s threats were empty and Erica knew it, so she had no motive. But not you, her great protector! And you’ll prove it for me.”
“Like hell!” I said.
“Yes, you will, Mish. When I figured out there were more envelopes, I had a guess that you would do something really stupid.”
She dug into her pocket again and held up the pink FedEx receipt I’d pushed to the back of my desk drawer.
“You have no right to—”
“You dispatched the Federal Express package on company time from the office at Brown Skin Beats,” she cut through me. “You technically work for them, not Erica, remember? That means you have no right to privacy when you’re using company funds in your work space. And I know what you’re thinking: one phone call, and Karen Ogis will make that package disappear. Uh-uh. The New York police contacted the RCMP. Being Canadian, you know how their cops’ search and seizure privileges and their warrants are a lot more flexible than ours. It’s done already. The Mounties came to Karen’s door, and she gave it up without a fight.”
Karen.
“You sent that package off, thinking just like Morgan,” said Jill. “You thought it was your insurance. If Erica ever turned away from you, you’d use it as blackmail to ruin her career.”
“I love Erica!” I yelled.
“If your love was so selfless, you would have destroyed all those pages,” she countered. “I’m willing to bet you even stuffed them into the envelope using gloves. Problem is, how is your defence attorney going to explain to the court Morgan’s papers with Morgan’s fingerprints taken from Morgan’s house and mailed by you?”
She gave the receipt to Detective Holland. “You have to sign when you send FedEx. You might as well have autographed a confession.”
“I…”
I had nothing, that’s what I had. No comeback, no excuse or explanation I could summon on the spot. Everything was slipping away from me, and I moved a step or two closer to Jill so that only she could hear my whisper.
“Jill, please. Why are you doing this? I thought we could have something. I thought you and I…”
She clucked her tongue as if I had some kind of nerve. Whispering back, she said, “Michelle. You see what you want to see. I’ve been with girls before. I’m bisexual.”
“All that talk about first times…?”
“Was just talk,” whispered Jill.
“What did you do?” I said in a small voice like a hurt little girl. “Fuck Luther and poke around his life to check him out, and then you come to me?”
“I fucked Luther to get to you, honey.”
Bitch.
“I did tell you the truth,” she said. “I just didn’t give you all our pillow talk. He was still hung up on Erica. We were having a fling, and I told him about me liking girls, too. Nothing gets a guy so hot as that idea, so when he broke it off with me, I suggested he tell you about us, every little intimate detail. He got a kick out of it, helping me with my seduction, thinking he was playing match-maker…”
Bitch.
“I knew I’d have you,” she said. “And I knew you’d want me if I made myself interesting enough. I learned about you long before you thought you had me pegged. That little story about the frolics out in Santa Fe, you guys with those electric eggs—whoa! You do such a good job of keeping a lid on Erica’s private life, you forgot about Erica, Mish. Get enough Tequila shots in her, and once you’re in the club, she’ll be candid with you. About everyone. She’ll tell every tall tale. You did turn me on, Mish. But you also made yourself top of my suspect list.”
Then she gave me a look of genuine pity. I couldn’t stand it, but I stood there and listened.
“Okay, full disclosure? Luther’s a catch, and Erica’s goddamn lucky to have him. I’d take him in a heartbeat if I didn’t love my work more. They belong together, and I always knew I couldn’t hold on to him. And you? You really got me wet, Michelle. You really had me going. I dropped my guard for a minute, and like a fool, I thought you might be interested in me.”
“I was,” I said meekly. “I am…” As if it could still make a difference.
She shook her head. “Oh, no. Not me. The way you look at her…It’s obsession. Karen knew, didn’t she? It’s why she’s never come back to New York and why you’re not invited back to her house anymore, isn’t it? I had next to nothing on you over Steven Swann. You did as good a snow job on me as you did the cops. But then you went and killed Morgan. And then you tried to finger Luther.”
“If you and I had got together,” I started.
“If, if, if,” whispered Jill. “You’ve lived your whole life on if, haven’t you? If Erica will finally see how you feel. If you can just get her past this hurdle, she’ll love you back. If you can get all the men out of the way. Here’s one for you: if there’s a God, they won’t execute you. They’ll only give you life without parole.”
As Holland stepped forward to put the cuffs on me, I lost all composure and began screaming at her, “You bitch! You fucking emotional vampire!”
The detective tugged me back by the arm.
There was flint in her eyes as she took a step closer to me and said defiantly, “I’m a vampire? You killed Steven and Morgan. You killed two men, Michelle. You sucked the lives out of them. You preyed on your friends, and you call it love. You took me to bed just to distract me, and you nearly did it. You’re a predator. You need a cage.”
“Goddamn you, Jill! You fucking manipulative—”
“Goodbye, Michelle. I probably won’t see you again until the trial.”
There’s music in here where they’ve put me. I don’t know if I think of it as a blessing or a mocking reminder, but it’s somehow fitting that music still reaches me here. The pop tunes blare through the fuzzy PA system and float down the hallways, past the doors with locks that buzz when they click shut like the crush of steel on a bank vault. You hear an insipid Christina Aguilera tune, then maybe P. Diddy and every so often Erica Jones sings out and mixes with the squeak of the mop slapping and washing the tiles.
In the beginning, her songs would come on and a coupl
e of the women would shout things like “Hey, Brown, it’s your girlfriend.” The joke got tired soon. Somebody figured out for the rest of them that as young and reticent as I was, if I could beat one man to death and shoot another, it was probably not a good idea to piss me off. Even in the violent ward, most of the women here are up for assault. Few murderers in here, and most of those killed their husbands because they got sick of getting slapped and punched around. They’re not women who hunted. They’re not obsessive. I am left alone.
I wrote to Karen. My letters returned unopened. She changed her phone number, too. In the weeks before my trial, I know the New York District Attorney’s Office sent a rude, imperious letter in which their request for her to come down and testify amounted to a demand. I know this because The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail were all over a story involving a Canadian pop star with a Canadian personal assistant charged with murder. A columnist for one of the dailies wrote:
Once again, American law enforcement thinks it can stomp its big foot across our border. Miss Ogis’s relationship with the accused was apparently done and dusted by the time of the events in question, and her involvement in the whole affair minimal. I asked her lawyer, Mr. Ram, what she told the assistant district attorney when he phoned and claimed she “must” come.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Ram. “She told the guy to go f—himself.”
That didn’t mean Karen would forgive me.
The trial…Well, everyone knows the outcome of the trial. I’m here, aren’t I? There was brief talk after six months about my being extradited to a penitentiary in Halifax, since Canada doesn’t have the death penalty, but nothing happened. I kept to myself, and they gave me a job in the prison library. The days are relatively peaceful, except that you are a child again, with someone telling you when to sleep, when to exercise, when you’ll shower, when you will eat. You go potty in front of others, your toilet visible through the bars. I miss single servings of food on my own plate. Everything here comes out of enormous pots and cafeteria trays. You have to struggle to keep your appetite after seeing mountains of yellow scrambled egg, troughs of gravy or goop that’s supposed to be vegetables.
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