Death in the 12th House

by Mitchell Scott Lewis

  “Then let’s go find out.”

  “Vivian, this isn’t going to be pleasant.”

  “Do you think anything about my father’s death has been?”

  “But the truth…”

  “Whatever the truth is,” she said with determination, “I want to know it.”

  Lowell looked over at Andy, who stood leaning against the car, his arms folded across his chest. The driver shrugged when he saw the look, and then put his hand up to his face to mimic a phone call. Lowell nodded.

  “Alright, as long as you’re here you might as well come with me.”

  The front door was unlocked and they brazenly entered the building. Nobody was in the outer office, and they walked into the back. There they were, sitting around a table, the co-conspirators, all present, deep in conversation. They didn’t even notice their new arrivals.

  Lowell coughed.

  Everybody stopped what they were doing and turned.

  “Well,” said the detective, “what have we here?”

  “You have no right being here. Get out before I call the police.”

  “You do that,” said Lowell, “and tell them that you are calling from the firm of Warren, Brewster, and Springfield.”

  “He knows,” said one of them.

  “Shut up,” said the first. “He doesn’t know anything, just let me handle this. Mr. Lowell, you are trespassing and seem to be making some sort of accusation.”

  Lowell put his hands on the back of the only empty chair and looked out at his audience. “Warren, Brewster, and Springfield. Or should I say, Larry Latner, Johnny Gleason, and Richard Frey.”

  Vivian looked confused. “What’s this all about?”

  “They took the names of the towns where they grew up for the name of their financial shell company. Larry Latner was raised in Brewster, New York, James Gleason in Warren, Michigan, and Richard Frey in Springfield, Massachusetts. Unfortunately they weren’t born in those cities or I would have discovered their connection as soon as I got their birth information. My guess is they’ve been friends for years. When did you meet, in Harvard?” The guy in the crimson sweatshirt finally made sense.

  “Yeah,” said Frey, “in the seventies.”

  “I’m sure your alma mater will be very proud. I assume you anonymously bought the lion’s share of your clients’ bonds for millions of dollars and figured you’d clean up on it. Isn’t that about right?”

  The three sat quietly.

  “Then you sold off pieces to other investors through a third party, including a very angry Jimmy DeAngelo, to protect part of your investment. When the bonds were about to fail you realized that the only way to save your asses was to kill your own clients. This is a nice business you’re in.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Vivian.

  “That’s not the way it was.” Frey was practically hysterical. “Sure we bought the bonds, there’s nothing wrong with that. But Gene’s death was an accident, I swear.”

  Lowell tugged on his ponytail. “Tell me about it.”

  “We were in New York to promote a new video. The bonds were killing us. We were spending a fortune just to pay dividends to the investors and prevent a total default, or worse. Some of the people we sold shares to weren’t going to accept us defaulting. Our lives were in danger.”

  “So what happened?” asked Lowell.

  “One night I admitted to Gene that it was us who had put up the money for the three bonds and begged him to help us out by promoting the old catalogue. He became furious and called me a crook, me! The one who had stood by his side when his records failed in the nineties and stayed loyal to him when his drinking threatened his career. I wasn’t a crook.”

  “And then?” prodded Lowell.

  “We were in the hotel and he went crazy. I had never seen him that way. He said he was going to call Freddie and Wally and tell them what was happening and then call the newspapers and tell them he had fired me. He walked over to the phone and, I swear to god, tripped over the damned wire and fell out of the fifteenth story window. On my mother’s grave it was an accident.”

  That’s what threw me when I looked at the victim’s death charts, thought the astrologer. Gene’s never did match the other two for violence and vengeance. Also Frey’s composite chart with the other mangers doesn’t add up to murder. He probably was telling the truth. “So why didn’t you call the police?”

  “And tell them what? That Gene was going to fire me and accidentally fell out of the window just before he could expose me? Would you have believed me?”

  “So what did you do?” asked Lowell.

  “I called him,” he pointed to Latner.

  “Then what? Larry here must have realized the potential, and you all decided to just keep your mouths shut and see what happened? When you saw the enormous increase in air play and record sales for Gene’s old catalogue, you knew you’d hit the mother lode.” He looked at Latner. “Is that when you decided to kill the other two?”

  Frey looked at Latner. “You told me it was probably a rabid fan that killed them? What’s the truth?”

  Latner shook his head. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Frey was frantic. “I was in Boston when Wally and Freddie were killed and I can prove it.”

  Latner started to pace. “Sure, we were in financial trouble. Vivian, you’ve got to understand how it was. It was all going to shit. We put up over one hundred million dollars and they just pissed it away. And we were going to wind up holding the bag. I was ruined. I don’t own a piece of property that isn’t mortgaged because of these bonds. If we didn’t start getting a return on our investment they were going to expire and we would have to eat it all.”

  “And the only way out that you could think of was to kill my father?”

  “I told you, I didn’t kill anyone. I talked to him. I tried to reason with him, begged him to help out in some way. If he had just put out another album of greatest hits we could have made some of it back at least. I asked him to buy back a piece of the bond. He laughed in my face, said if I was stupid enough to give him all that money against old songs I got what I deserved.”

  Vivian was pale. She looked at Latner. “It was you, wasn’t it? Why don’t you just admit it? You killed my father.”

  “He can’t admit it,” said Lowell. “He’s facing twenty-five years to life.”

  Her eyes flared as she started toward Latner, her hands reaching for him. Lowell stood between them, took her gently, but firmly by the shoulders, and sat her down. She panted audibly. “How could you?”

  They were all silent for a moment.

  “Besides,” added Latner, “he would have loved this.”

  “Loved what?” asked Vivian. “Being murdered so you could make more money? Is that what he would have loved?”

  “You didn’t know your father at all. You want to know what he was most afraid of? It wasn’t illness or even death. His greatest fear was that he would outlive his fame and nobody would remember him. That his funeral would be playing to an empty house. They were all like that, all the rock stars, narcissists every one. At least he went out in his glory on the very top of the charts. Not only is his new album going to be number one with a bullet but five of his old albums are now on the charts and climbing. There’s going to be a massive resurgence of Freddie’s music and a whole new generation will know who he was and remember his songs.”

  Vivian was near tears. “My father looked up to you. He always told me that you were the only one who really cared about the band. The rest were just using them. I…I’ve known you since I was a little girl. How could you do it? You were a rich man. Why would you have risked it all?”

  “Rich? I wasn’t rich. I owned some property and had a few bucks in the bank, but I needed that money to get out, get a ranch somewhere. The record business is dying. The Internet killed the whole damn industry years ago. They pay you sixty nine cents and download your hit song, then they send it to everyone they know for free.”

  Sh
e stared at him disbelieving. “You’re sick.”

  “I’m sick? Let me tell you about your dear departed father.”

  “Latner!” admonished Lowell.

  “She wants to judge me, well let her have all the facts.” He got up from his chair and started to pace. “Your father was a pig.”

  “That’s enough,” Lowell moved a step toward him.

  Latner took out a pistol from the desk drawer and pointed it directly at Lowell. “Sit down and listen.

  “I nursed that band through drugs and alcohol, pregnant groupies and lousy records. I bailed them out of jail more than once and paid off god knows how many reporters to keep things out of the papers.” He turned to Lowell. “You brought up Marty Winebeck a few weeks ago. You want to know what that cost to cover up.”

  “And you didn’t give Marty a dime of it.”

  “It was the principle of the thing. If Freddie paid him off he left himself open to lawsuits and harassment forever.”

  Lowell shook his head. “So instead you paid off some cops and probably a judge or two and got the whole thing squashed. You could have paid Marty a tenth of what it cost and done the right thing.”

  “It wasn’t as much as you think. Buffalo’s a small town. But like I said, it was the principle of the thing.”

  “You three owned the townhouse we found Freddie in, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Frey. “We had to sell it to make good on that damned bond.” He stared at Latner. “So that’s why they found Freddie there. You said it was someone who found out about the bonds and wanted to send us a message. It was you that was sending the message, wasn’t it?”

  Latner turned back to Vivian. “I protected your father every day of his life for almost forty years. And you know how he repays me? One night I came home to my house in Mount Kisco unexpectedly and saw him through the window prancing around naked. I stayed in the shadows and watched, expecting to see my wife join him. I knew he had been screwing her for years. I didn’t mind so much. I just pretended I didn’t know. But when my seventeen-year old daughter came out of the room naked, I had had enough.”

  “So you killed him,” said Vivian.

  Latner looked at her and shook his head. “It’s a dirty world. People have polluted the planet and their souls. You can’t turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper without seeing the disgust and contamination all around us. What I saw in my lifetime hanging around these self-proclaimed gods, these abusers of the flesh, was enough to sicken Caligula. I watched little girls by the hundreds take drugs and let them do things to their bodies I wouldn’t even talk about. And they thought it was funny. Every one of those girls was somebody’s daughter.

  “There was only one thing pure and uncontaminated in my world, my little girl, Ashley. And he took that from me after all I had done for him.” He shook his head slightly and regained his composure. “I…Whoever killed him did the world a favor. Besides, you can’t prove anything.”

  Lowell tugged on his ponytail. “You must have waited until Freddie left the house and then followed him into the city, sneaked into Cantaloupe’s Bar, and put a knockout drug in his soda. And then you put him in a car and took him somewhere and killed him. And you decided to leave him in the townhouse you had to sell to help pay off the bond. You probably thought the police would be too busy to follow the threads and figure this out. And when I was called into the case you put Jimmy DeAngelo on my tail.”

  “She’s a seventeen-year-old girl, for god’s sake. He was sixty-three years old, a dirty old man, and he got what he deserved.”

  Vivian put her face in her hands and wept.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  “Now everybody just sit tight,” said Latner.

  “Where do you think we’re going to go?” asked Frey. “You don’t think he came here alone, do you?” He picked up the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling my lawyer.”

  Latner pointed the gun at Frey. “Put down that phone.”

  Frey hung up. “Are you going to kill me, too?”

  “Just sit down.”

  Lowell shook his head. “Latner, it’s over.”

  “Over?” he looked around his office at the gold and platinum records hanging on the walls. “It can’t be over.” He shook his head. “Do you know how amazing they were, how beautiful rock and roll was, how beautiful Freddie was? When he was young he would strut across the stage like Jaggar, only with a better voice. Their songs were incredible, one hit after another rising to the top ten. For decades everything was going along fine, until that damn Internet ate the fucking record industry in one gulp. And now it’s doing it to books, and movies, and all the arts.” Rage filled his eyes. “Do you want to know who killed Freddie? I’ll tell you.”

  His hands shook with anger as he aimed the gun at his computer screen. “It was the beast that killed beauty!”

  He pulled the trigger. The computer screen shattered into a million pieces, shards of glass flew everywhere. Lowell instinctively covered Vivian with his body.

  “You’ve got nothing on any of us.”

  “So if you had nothing to do with Freddie’s murder,” said Lowell, “why don’t you just come along with me and we’ll sort it all out at the police station?”

  Latner turned to him. His eyes seemed out of focus, as if looking at something far off. “You know,” he lowered the gun, “you’re right. Why don’t we just clean this whole mess up now? You’ll see that we had nothing to do with these murders. Oh sure, we took the bonds out, but there’s absolutely nothing illegal about that. Let me just get a few papers I think I’ll need to show the police.”

  “Okay,” Lowell looked at his watch, “but don’t take too long.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.” He opened the door to his inner office and turned. “Johnny,” he said to Wally’s manager, “give me a hand with these papers, will ya?”

  “Sure, Larry.” Gleason got up, followed him into the office, and closed the door.

  “I swear Gene’s death was an accident,” said Frey. “The other two I don’t know anything about.”

  “Well, it’s really not my concern. I’m just going to give you all over to the cops and you can tell them your story.” He looked at his watch. “Hey,” he shouted, “hurry up in there.”

  “What’s the rush?” asked Vivian, wiping her eyes.

  “I had Andy call Lieutenant Roland and in about two minutes the police are going to come through that door, followed closely by the press. I would just as soon not be here when the reporters arrive.” He got up, walked to the office door and knocked. Then he opened it. It was empty. “God damn it.”

  “What wrong?” asked Vivian.

  “They’re gone.”

  She looked in the office. “How, there’s no other door?”

  Lowell walked into the office followed by Vivian and began feeling along the walls. Then he went to Latner’s desk and started handling the edges.

  There was a loud pounding at the front door. “Vivian, would you?” She walked to the front door and opened it. Lieutenant Roland was the first one in.

  Vivian pointed to the inner office. “I think you’d better talk to David.”

  Roland entered followed by two uniforms. “All right, Lowell, so where are your killers?”

  “This is Richard Frey, Gene’s manager. He’ll tell you his side of things.”

  “Did he kill Freddie?”

  “No,” cried Frey, “I swear to Christ I never killed anybody. You got to believe me, Gene’s death was an accident, an accident!”

  “The other two came into this office and disappeared,” said Lowell.

  “What?” said Roland, “how?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I have a feeling…” Lowell was still fondling the desk when he heard a sharp clicking sound, and a wood panel that covered one wall of the office slid to the right revealing a passageway. “What is this? How terrific.”

  “What the hell?” asked Roland. “
Who has secret passages in New York?”

  “This is an old house,” said Vivian. “Larry was very proud of it, said it was one of the first built up here about the turn of the last century. This was all wilderness and farms until about 1900.”

  “This must have originally been a connection to another building, maybe a barn,” said Lowell.

  They went through a short passageway and came to a door that led out onto the street via a basement exit.

  “Well,” said Roland, when they were standing on the sidewalk, “they must’ve hidden here till we came in and now they’re long gone.” He turned to one of the policemen. “Put out an APB.” He turned to Lowell. “What are their names?”

  “Larry Latner and Johnny Gleason. I’ll give your men a description.”

  They went back through the tunnel and into the office.

  “I’m going to need statements from you two.”

  “Lieutenant, I think it would be prudent for me to get Ms. Younger out of here as soon as possible. The press should be along anytime. We can meet you at your office and straighten this out later.”

  “Agreed. Go.”

  Lowell took Vivian by the arm and hurried out the front door only to be confronted by a wall of reporters and photographers already interviewing the cops at the scene.

  “Vivian,” one shouted, “over here.”

  He took their picture. Then a barrage of cameras exploded in their faces. One of the reporters recognized Lowell and stuck a microphone in front of him. “Mr. Lowell, were you involved in this case?”

  “Only peripherally. It was solved by Lieutenant Roland of the NYPD. I only had a small hand in aiding the police in this matter.”

  “That’s not what my sources tell me. I have it on excellent authority that you cracked this case and led the police here to the office of Freddie Finger’s manager, Larry Latner.”

  “No comment.”

  “Vivian, what do you think about this? Was it really your father’s manager that killed him? And why?”

  Lowell put his arm around Vivian, waved the reporter away, and pushed through the crowd. Andy was waiting at the corner. They jumped into the back seat and sped away.