Murder in Rock & Roll Heaven

by Robin Ray

  Arriving at a bend in the block, the ex-cop read the street sign – Byrdcliff Road. According to the instructions given to him last night by Shannon Hoon, he should soon arrive at a large, white, six-bedroom colonial house with a sloping front yard and a detached garage. Ah, there it is, he thought as he came upon it seconds later. The hedges in the front, he noticed, could use a trimming and the lawn could stand a little mowing. Other than that, the estate appeared to be well kept. Some of the garbage cans on one side of the house were overflowing, though. And, although it didn’t look it from the street, the house could benefit from a touch up paint job. Replacing some of the missing beams in the wooden porch railing would also probably be in order, too. But who was Gregory to say? He was just a visitor on a mission, not the lifestyles judge from Better Homes & Gardens.

  Ringing the door bell, the PI waited for someone, anyone, to answer. The house, being up on a hill, had a spectacular view of downtown Woodstock, but would it kill them to upkeep the place? he thought. Ringing the bell once again, he peeked in the curtained windows but wasn’t able to see inside. Still receiving no answer, he knocked on the door. Maybe this is the wrong house, he thought.

  As he started walking down the steps from the porch, he heard something akin to a scratching noise, albeit faint, coming from the right side of the house. Instinctively, he started investigating, traipsing down the grass-covered driveway to the detached wooden garage in the back. Arriving at the light yellow terminus, he tugged on the heavy lock anchored through the latch that kept the shed tightly closed. Then, knocking, on the door, he listened carefully to see if he could perceive anything.

  “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”

  Just then, he heard what sounded like a phlegmy snort emitted from the back of the garage. Hurrying around the shed, his eyes fell upon a black-bearded man with curly black hair nodding off beneath an old, torn, psychedelic blanket. His pillow was a puffed out garbage bag.

  Hmm, the PI thought. A transient, probably unusual for a place like Heaven. Just then, the stranger stirred.

  “Are you okay?” Gregory asked him. “Need some help?”

  “What time is it?” the stranger asked, wiping spittle from his mouth.

  The PI checked his watch. “9:30.”

  “How come it’s so bright?” the squinting waker asked.

  Gregory shook his head. “9:30 in the morning.”

  “Oh,” Black Beard muttered, extending his right arm. “Can you give me a hand?”

  Treading towards the downed man, Gregory helped him up. The strong smell of hard liquor in the stranger’s skin caused the PI to reel backwards slightly, but not so much as to offend the recently awaked señor. He then helped the curly haired Romeo sit on the steps of the back porch. Clad in a thigh-length, black and red plaid tunic, loose-fitting, dark blue cargo pants and brown shoes, he was a dead ringer for Paul Bunyan sans Babe the Blue Ox.

  “Do you live around here?” Gregory asked him.

  Black Beard cupped his throbbing head. “Yes. Right here, as a matter of fact.”

  “What were you doing back there?” the PI asked.

  The recently roused man took a deep breath then answered, “I think I came home late and probably lost my card.”

  Gregory squinted. “Probably?”

  “Maybe I did,” Black Beard voiced weakly. “I don’t remember. Who are you anyway?”

  “Gregory Angelicus,” the D answered.

  “You live around here?”

  “Uh huh,” the PI said. “New in town.”

  The stranger offered him his hand and said, “Jim, Jim Morrison. Oh,” he groaned. “Who planted an axe in my skull?”

  “Oh, you’re Jim Morrison,” Gregory realized. “Mama Cass mentioned you earlier.”

  “I love that chick,” Jim stated plainly.

  The former policeman surveyed the area and noticed the back door of the house was ajar.

  “Let’s get you inside,” the ex-cop told him.

  Seconds later, Jim was sitting on a kitchen chair with the new arrival’s help.

  “You drink coffee?” he asked the Paul Bunyan clone.

  “Yes,” Jim answered.

  “I’ll make some,” Gregory offered, “if I can use your kitchen.”

  “Help yourself, man,” Black Beard said. “If I tried I’d probably burn this place to the ground.”

  “How do you take yours?” the PI inquired, scouring the cabinets for ground beans.

  “Black,” Jim replied. “Make it so I can stand a spoon in it.”

  “You lived here a long time?” Gregory asked as he started rinsing the glass coffee pot he’d found near the sink.

  The black haired man rubbed his stomach as if it was troubled. “Since 1971.”

  “Wow,” the PI stated. “What’s that, like, 45 years?”

  Jim shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I stopped counting in ’72.”

  “Well, you look good for a 70-year-old chap,” the detective complimented him.

  Morrison started getting up. “You don’t mind if I shower and change while you do whatever it is you do, do you?”

  “No,” Gregory assured him. “Go ahead. I’ll be right down here.”

  “Okay,” Jim said, sauntering off to the upstairs bathroom.

  About 30 minutes later, after being rejuvenated by the cold water and a thorough splashing of scented rubbing alcohol on his neck, Morrison looked and felt like he was fit enough to run a marathon. Wearing a fresh change of clothes, he almost looked like a different man with his white pyjama pants and light blue, long sleeve shirt. Plopping himself down on a couch in the wooden floored living room opposite Gregory, he helped himself to the coffee and sponge cake that was set out on the center table. The PI had turned the holographic TV above the mantle on to a game show. The soft sunlight, filtering in through the curtain-covered blinds, washing the room with its gentle presence, was hardly a visual deterrent to the virtual TV.

  “Oh, yes,” the curly haired musician smiled, rubbing his cleaned beard. “Much better.”

  “Do you do that a lot?” the ex-cop asked, “sleeping behind the garage?’

  “I have a history,” Jim answered, pouring himself some coffee in a mug.

  “Mama Cass you’re a musician?”

  “I’m a singer and poet,” Jim specified. “You ever got into poetry?”

  “Sorry,” the detective apologized. “Not my thing. I’m real busy doing other stuff.”

  “That’s okay,” the singer said. “Did you ever hear Light My Fire?”

  Gregory looked puzzled. “Light My Fire?”

  Jim lazily sang one line of the chorus, “Come on baby light my fire.”

  “Oh, yeah” Gregory smiled. “I know that one. That’s by…um…”

  “The Doors,” the 70’s icon filled him in. “The Doors of Perception.”

  “The Doors of Perception,” the PI mused then, looking around the room, asked, “So this is the famed 27 Club?”

  “27 Club, Club 27, whatever,” the singer explained. “The one and only.”

  “Where’s everybody?” the detective asked.

  “Working,” Jim answered, reaching for some crumb cake. “Who are you again?”

  “Angelicus,” the PI answered. “I’m investigating the death of Amy Winehouse.”

  “Oh,” Jim groaned. “Here we go with the 50 questions again. I’m tired of you fucking angels prodding me and prodding me about this shit. When is it gonna end?”

  “I’m not an angel,” Gregory assured him. “I do understand the importance of this situation, though. Just like you, just like everyone else, I want this whole thing to be done and over with. I know it’s hard for you to not take it personally; I know how it feels to lose the people around you.”

  “Where are you from?” the rock singer asked. “Legal Heaven?”

  Gregory shook his head. “I live here. Just arrived a few days ago.”

  “Oh, man,” Jim lamented. “I’m sorry, man. I di
dn’t know you just, you know…”

  “That’s okay,” the D assured him. “I’m getting used to the place.”

  “Yeah, you will,” Jim acknowledged. “Pretty big adjustment, huh? A lot of cats who come here go crazy within a week, especially when they realize there ain’t no drugs here. Weed, but no hard stuff. And you know, for a rock and roll crowd, that’s torture.”

  “I can believe it,” Gregory attested. “Did you get along with Amy?”

  Jim stroked the hairs on his chin. “Amy was…troublesome. I mean, she was okay when she first got here, but she changed.”

  “How so?” the detective asked.

  The rock singer shrugged. “She was really enthused about hanging out with Pearl…Janis Joplin. They did get close, too. Went around everywhere. I don’t know when shit got sour, though. You know how it is with ladies. They’re here, they’re there, they’re everywhere.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” the addled interviewer admitted, “but if you say so.”

  “Pearl’s like my sister, man.,” Black Beard insisted. “We go way back. Haight-Ashbury, Hollywood. Shoulda been with me in Paris. Oh well. Too late now. See this?” The singer bent his head forward, parted some of the hair on top and showed Gregory the old faded scar there.

  “Janis did that?” the detective asked.

  “With a bottle of Southern Comfort,” Jim lamented. “I dug her but, you know, that’s how it turns out sometimes. I kinda like to think she was jealous of Amy, but that wasn’t the case.”

  “I thought all scars healed completely up here in Heaven?” Gregory wondered.

  “I think the angels purposely didn’t make this one disappear,” Jim guessed, “to be sure I don’t forget how destructive my hedonistic, Bacchanalian ways can be. I don’t blame ‘em.”

  “You and Amy had something going?” Gregory inquired.

  “Nope,” the singer swore. “A little too out there for me, and this is Jim Morrison talking!”

  The PI smiled. “How many people live here?”

  “Just me, Janis, Jimi,” Jim answered. “We get along swimmingly – just as long as we keep our own businesses to ourselves. Better that way, you know? Our private paradises within the house of love.

  “Where was Amy’s room? Gregory asked.

  “Upstairs,” Jim answered. “Wanna have a look?”

  CHAPTER 13

  The private sanctuary/domain/fortress of solitude belonging to one Amy Jade Winehouse from London, England, looked exactly like what Gregory thought the den of a troubled person would resemble – to say her personal space was a mismatch of contrasting styles would be the understatement of the century. First, there was the floor. Relatively simple in design, it was painted as a black and white checkerboard. In the black spaces were stickers of stars, constellations and other planets. Some of the white squares had splotches of red paint which, eerily, resembled blood stains. Some of the other white squares were painted to look like mint candies; that is, 2” red stripes jutted from the peripheries of the squares towards the middle. All four walls were covered with stickers and pictures that bared little resemblance to each other. For instance, next to a blacklight picture of Bela Lugosi was a cutout of a broken mountain bike which, itself, was next to a picture of Madonna with goat’s legs embedded in a laminated pine board next to a vintage IH truck hubcap serving as the belly button for a life-sized poster of the Empress Dowager Cixi from China beneath an upside cutout of the Three Stooges, and so on. A psychological nightmare, to be sure.

  It also didn’t help that, wait, what were those? Florentine axes dangling off the ceiling? Were they real? In the sunlight they sure looked like they could decapitate an armadillo. The closet, stuffed to the hilt with vintage clothes, had some of their innards spilled out to the floor. The three or four ashtrays in the room were overfilled with butts. Beer bottles, some still unopened, were littered about the room and on the bed which, itself, looked like there might be a body beneath the sheets; if not a missing body then certainly the corks of at least 100 bottles of wine. Over on her cluttered desk sat, finally, a sign that the PI was in the room of a musician – an open notebook with lyrics to songs yet to be recorded.

  “They left everything exactly the way she left it,” Jim explained.

  “I can just imagine what’s under that bed,” Gregory mused.

  Getting on his knees, he checked beneath the bed anyway. Nothing came up but empty cans of beer, dust, a few spent lipsticks, dust, a handful of music magazines, dust, eyeliners, dust, more sheets of lyrics, dust, a rolled up poster of The Beatles’ “supposedly pornographic” Apple Corps logo from the Abbey Road album, and more dust.

  “Geez,” the PI exclaimed, getting up. “I’m surprised there was no body down there.”

  “This is my first time I’ve been up here since she was found,” Jim stated.

  “If she was in this house,” the PI figured, “and she was brought to the Mill Stream, whoever did it sure went through a lot of trouble.”

  “That’s what we told the angels,” Jim insisted. “Which one of us would have the strength to carry a body that far and not be seen? But, she did live here, so I can at least understand the suspicion.”

  “Did she have any enemies?” the PI asked, dusting his clothes.

  Jim sat down on the bed and kicked his legs up on a divan. “Are you kidding? In a sex-starved atmosphere like this? Forty guys to every one girl? She was treated like a princess.”

  Gregory picked up Amy’s lyric book. “Maybe one of the ladies got jealous.”

  “Who knows?” the singer attested. “At least she was protected.”

  “What do you mean?” the D asked. “By whom?”

  “Not by whom, by what,” Jim corrected him, cracking open one of Amy’s old, warm beers. “Remember, there’s no government here. The police station is really just called that as a central office for information and order. If anyone tried to force themselves on her, their ID card would automatically empty all credits and they go to lockup.”

  “That’s not to say that people won’t break the law,” the detective surmised. “I think that’s embedded in us somewhere, I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” the bearded one guessed. “If you were a rapist, you wouldn’t have made it to Heaven in the first place. I supposed somebody could change out of desperation, but since I’ve been here, I haven’t seen anybody’s personality change to that extent, but you never know.”

  Just then, the doorbell rang.

  “Looks like we got company,” Jim noted. Getting up, he opened one of the windows and looked down. “Hello?” he shouted.

  “Hey,” Tony said, looking up from the front steps, “I’m looking for my friend, Gregory.”

  Jim brought his head back in the room and turned to the detective, smiling devilishly. “Your young friend’s looking for you.”

  “It’s not what you think,” the PI scolded him.

  “Hey,” Jim said, backing off a bit. “I’m not a judge.”

  “Can he come up?” Gregory asked. “He’s helping with this investigation.”

  The hairy vocalist nodded. “Yeah, sure. I don’t think Amy would mind.”

  “By the way,” the elder detective wondered, “where do the others work?”

  “Jimi and Janis?” Jim asked.

  The detective nodded.

  “I’ll write down their addresses for you,” the singer promised.

  Gregory removed his notepad from his pants’ pocket, ripped out a sheet, and handed it to Jim who went over to the desk and used a wooden pen to scribble something down. The detective also removed his own pen to write in the pad.

  “Mind telling me where you were the night of Friday, July 15th?” he asked the rocker.

  “I was…” the Riders on the Storm singer started saying, then was interrupted when the doorbell rang again. “If we’re finished up here,” Jim suggested, “you wanna check out the basement? I’ll tell you everything down there.”

>   “What’s down there?” Gregory asked.

  “A little recording studio,” Jim stated. “Amy spent a lot of time down there. We all did, really. Half of Woodstock recorded down there at some time or another.”

  “Yeah,” the PI agreed. “Let’s go.”

  Jim, opening the door to the basement, switched on the overhead light and proceeded down the rickety stairs with Gregory and Tony not far behind. Clicking on a second light, it was now apparent they were in some kind of music studio. The basement, atypical for a house of that size, sported a floor-to-ceiling distance of about 12 feet. In the middle of the room was a curved, six-foot long mixing board and chairs with several pieces of gear in racks, musical instruments and assorted equipment lying about. There was a clear line of sight to the room behind the mixing board because of a huge glass window in the door. Jim walked over to an old soda dispenser in one corner while the D’s eyeballed the suite.

  “This must’ve cost a pretty penny,” Gregory wondered.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jim said. “Thousands of credits. Virtual instruments are really the way to go, but a lot of cats prefer the real deal so they sacrificed for this. Nothing here is standard; they all had to be made by hand over in Electrical then transported down. Took forever. You guys want a pop?” he asked his guests. “There’s green apple, lemon lime, black cherry…”

  “None of that flowery stuff?” Gregory asked.

  “Yuck,” Jim smirked. “Too sweet for me.”

  “I’ll have a Cherry,” the PI requested.

  “Same here,” his assistant said as he fiddled with the knobs, switches and slides on a 3-tiered stand of digital and analog synthesizers.

  Jim, depressing the dispenser’s buttons, took a bottle of green apple soda for himself and brought a black cherry to each of the detectives. Seeing the neophyte PI at the suite of keyboards, he called out to him. “Don’t mess with those, man. They’re Ray’s and he hates people meddling with his stuff.” Tony, though stung by the singer’s order, immediately complied. All three men then sat down in rolling office chairs in front of the wide mixing board.