PRAISE FOR GIRL MOST LIKELY
“Collins’s latest, Girl Most Likely, is unlike any of his previous novels—except in one respect: it’s an addictive, propulsive read that lingers with the reader, loaded with the kind of thrilling, memorable characters that appear almost fully formed.”
—The Big Thrill
“Will there be another thrilling Krista Larson book? Overall, this book was a fun, easy, and fast-paced read.”
—Bestsellersworld.com
“This is a fantastic whodunit, a quality mystery that people who like such dramas will find most engrossing.”
—Monster Librarian
“Girl Most Likely is an enjoyable traditional-ish mystery with enough action to keep the pages turning . . . an entertaining mystery.”
—Gravetapping
“A well-wrought tale . . .”
—Booklist
“In Girl Most Likely, small-town America and its characters come to life under Collins’s deft touch. Fans of Road to Perdition will enjoy this book.”
—Authorlink
“Max Allan Collins’s novel soars.”
—Associated Press
“Collins is a talented storyteller and his clean, straightforward style shines in this novel.”
—Criminal Element
“Max Allan Collins writes a killer thriller . . . He’s definitely at the top of his game here.”
—Bookreporter
“It’s never too late for revenge in this thrilling novel by New York Times bestselling and award-winning crime master Max Allan Collins.”
—Suspense Magazine
“Sit back and enjoy Girl Most Likely, the latest triumph from the justifiably lauded mind of Max Allan Collins.”
—Alan Cranis, Bookgasm
“Written by a multitalented author, whose other novels have been translated into television and movie versions, this thriller will leave the reader satisfied.”
—Toni V. Sweeney, New York Journal of Books
Other Titles by Max Allan Collins
Krista Larson series
Girl Most Likely
The Reeder and Rogers Trilogy
Executive Order
Supreme Justice
Fate of the Union
Thrillers
What Doesn’t Kill Her
Midnight Haul
Regeneration (with Barbara Collins as “Barbara Allan”)
Bombshell (with Barbara Collins as “Barbara Allan”)
Nathan Heller novels
Do No Harm
Better Dead
Ask Not
Target Lancer
Bye Bye, Baby
Chicago Confidential
Angel in Black
Majic Man
Flying Blind
Damned in Paradise
Blood and Thunder
Carnal Hours
Stolen Away
Neon Mirage
The Million-Dollar Wound
True Crime
True Detective
Triple Play (novellas)
Chicago Lightning (short stories)
Mallory novels
No Cure for Death
The Baby Blue Rip-Off
Kill Your Darlings
A Shroud for Aquarius
Nice Weekend for a Murder
The “Disaster” series
The Titanic Murders
The Hindenburg Murders
The Pearl Harbor Murders
The Lusitania Murders
The London Blitz Murders
The War of the Worlds Murder
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Max Allan Collins. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542042536
ISBN-10: 1542042534
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
In memory of
Paul Thomas
Bruce Peters
Chuck Bunn
Terry Beckey
fallen stars of Iowa rock
CONTENTS
START READING
THINGS TO DO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’m very much a gentleman in what I do.
—Little Richard
THINGS TO DO IN ARNOLDS PARK
Arnolds Park—with its many rides and attractions, from its 65-foot Ferris Wheel with its view of West Lake Okoboji to the wooden roller coaster known as “the Legend”—makes a fabulous setting for Iowa’s tribute to its storied rock ‘n’ roll past.
In the heart of Buddy Holly country, the park’s Roof Garden Ballroom once attracted the biggest names in rock ‘n’ roll—’50s stars including Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Bobby Rydell, ’60s names like the Beach Boys, Yardbirds, Buckinghams, Shangri-Las, and the Guess Who . . . even Jimi Hendrix, appearing as a lowly backup musician for Peppermint Twisters, Joey Dee & the Starliters.
Sadly, the second-floor Coney Island–style dance hall, with its first-floor fun house beneath, eventually fell on hard times and was burned to the ground in 1988 by the local fire department for practice. But soon local businessmen and citizens came together to purchase the amusement park, erecting new facilities, rebuilding the roller coaster, and restoring its pavilion.
Tragedy seemed about to strike again, however, when a developer in 1999 purchased the historic park with a hotel, retail complex, and condos in mind, but the Iowa Great Lakes community rallied to save the landmark, in six weeks raising more than $7 million. The Iowa Great Lakes Maritime Museum now owns the park, sharing space with the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Music Association.
That association works to preserve the legacy of rock ‘n’ roll in Iowa, honoring achievements, educating youth, and inspiring musicians. Established in 1997, IRRMA is a nonprofit statewide organization with four service areas: Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum, community events, educational outreach, and Hall of Fame recognition.
Every Labor Day weekend, IRRMA inducts members into the Hall of Fame, artists who appear at the annual induction concert . . .
from OkobojiVacation.com
ONE
Murder was the last thing on her mind.
Really, it hadn’t even been on her mind at all. But saying the side trip to Arnolds Park had been a whim would be a lie. Two things had come together to bring her here on this warm Sunday evening of a Labor Day weekend.
First had been that write-up in the Dubuque T
elegraph Herald about Hot Rod & the Pistons making it into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and how members of the band would be regrouping after over three decades to appear at the induction concert at the newly rebuilt Roof Garden at the famous amusement park.
Second, a wholly unrelated function in Sioux City came up that would put her less than two hours away from Arnolds Park, an event that would be over by Sunday afternoon. She wouldn’t even have to decide whether she really would go to the concert until the gathering was over, and she could see if the urge had hit her.
But she’d known it would.
After all these years, a chance to see the boys play again—the boys! They were in their fifties, too, all but Brian on bass, barely out of his twenties, filling in for his late father. Funny thing was, she saw all of the former Pistons, at least now and then, back in Galena, where she and they lived—all but Rick, who was still out there on the road playing somewhere.
She wasn’t even sure they recognized her when they passed on the street, with a nod and maybe a smile. She had only moved back to Galena, what? Ten, twelve years ago? And she looked different. Not platinum blonde anymore, not so zaftig either.
But she looked good. She knew she looked good. Trim from watching her carbs and toned from her regular fitness center visits.
Take the event at Sioux City—several men, younger men, had hit on her in the bar. She didn’t take any of them up on it. But she sat there quietly thinking, You’ve still got it, honey.
So she’d made the trip to Arnolds Park, listening over and over to both Pistons CDs from back in the day. This was a crazy jaunt, since it would put her something like five hours from home. And she realized hotel rooms on this last big weekend of the summer would be impossible in the Lake Okoboji area, though she might find some motel to crash in on the way back, if she got too punchy to make it home.
Still, the concert program online put the Pistons on at eight o’clock, for just a half-hour set. She had no plans to do anything but watch their brief reunion and maybe wave and smile and see if any of the boys waved and smiled back. Without a stop, she might be home by 2:00 a.m.
Back then, two in the morning was when things were just getting started . . .
For all her excitement, and the wave of nostalgia that hit her with every new track on those thirty-some-year-old albums (the CDs were reissues—the boys weren’t entirely forgotten), she somewhat ironically recalled her only other time at Arnolds Park as anything but her warmest memory of those days.
Those days. Back when her friends, who like her had just graduated from high school, called her a groupie and worse, following the band from gig to gig. She knew that wasn’t fair. She’d been Rick’s girl that summer. True, it hadn’t gone anywhere really, after that. She had started college and put those wild days, and nights, behind her.
And, oddly enough, the last of those days and nights had been at Arnolds Park, Labor Day weekend 1984, long before the Hall of Fame induction concerts even existed, long before the Hall of Fame itself. The Pistons were opening for the Romantics. Only a few years later the ballroom would be torn down. Burned down.
The Roof Garden had been a shabby thing, a ghost of itself, but the kids were packed in that night. The Romantics were a hot group—“Talking in Your Sleep,” “What I Like About You,” still great songs—but so were the Pistons, with their classic cover of “The Girl Can’t Help It” hitting the top ten.
“We blew the roof off the dump,” Rick had said, and they’d all gone back to the cabin at Spirit Lake, where admittedly things had gotten out of hand. Maybe because she’d known it was the last night, she gave in and went along, sticking not just with weed but coke. She didn’t like what that stupid nose candy did to her and she’d never done it again. And had there been something in her glass besides bourbon after bourbon?
Maybe that had been a good thing, ending on a less than happy note, a final memory not worth revisiting, when so many good times, so much good pot, all that great music, had given her a summer mostly worth remembering. And this concert would put a new, happier ending on everything, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it?
After the drive from Sioux City through farmland and sharing the highway with only occasional cars, the traffic in Arnolds Park told the story of what the end of summer inevitably brought to a little tourist town like this—human and vehicular congestion. Back home, in Galena, it would be much the same.
But finally she was able to pull into the amusement park lane and even find a parking place in the lot to her right, while the ancient wooden roller coaster loomed to her left. Like garish mushrooms, the tilt-a-whirl and other lower-slung carnival rides popped up at eye level, and most impressively, the newly rebuilt brightly white ballroom announced itself with two tall stories, the upper one lined with twenty rectangular windows over the words
ROOF GARDEN
above a gray-pillared walkway.
She took this in with an astonished smile—it was as if a rather shabby memory had suddenly spruced itself up. When she had been here, for the Pistons and the Romantics, the riverboat-like structure had been a paint-peeling near shambles, a few years away from having those firemen burn it down. This must have been what the ballroom had been like in a heyday that stretched back to Gene Vincent, Freddy Cannon, and Bobby Darin.
Wearing white shorts and a vintage Hot Rods & the Pistons T-shirt she’d stowed away all these years—black with a red cartoon dragster—she fit in fine with a crowd whose age range really was the fabled eight to eighty, with some even younger and older to test those parameters. Lots of shrill childish laughter was in the air, as well as hearty adult chuckles, and the music on the loudspeakers was ’50s and ’60s.
Just past the parking lot, the lane that led to the pier and the lake was closed off for pedestrian traffic, into a sort of boardwalk area called the Queen’s Court. Here were the expected mini-doughnuts, caramel corn, and cotton candy, as well as the infamous ice cream Nutty Bars. Her nostrils consumed the yummy smells but she did not give in to temptation—she didn’t keep her figure without an ongoing effort.
Amid the T-shirt shops and other touristy gift outlets she discovered, to her surprise, a very hip clothing outlet called Blond Genius. She bought a couple of designer items and walked the sacks back to the car. The parking lot faced the pavilion and her eye was caught by a sign with a pointing arrow to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. She strolled over for a look inside.
With wide, wistful eyes, she took in the displayed guitars autographed by Hall of Famers; framed Roof Garden posters announcing Bobby Vee, the Box Tops, and the Grass Roots; and eight-by-ten photos of nationally known Iowa bands like Dee Jay and the Runaways, the Pete Klint Quintet, and the Daybreakers, as well as regional faves the Rumbles and the XLs. A display of sticks and pics celebrated famous drummers from the state, for such groups as Little Feat, America, and the Doobie Brothers.
But what really caught her eye, of course, was the generous wall space given to the only Iowa band that had really broken out in the New Wave era of the early ’80s—Hot Rod & the Pistons, “Iowa’s answer to the Stray Cats,” as Goldmine called them, with an array of photos and the two album covers. She leaned in to read the words behind the glass.
HOT ROD & THE PISTONS
When five students at the University of Dubuque formed their garage band in 1981, they had their sights set on playing weekend gigs in the so-called Driftless Area where Iowa/Illinois/Wisconsin meet. But glory days beckoned beyond those modest ambitions.
As part of the subgenre of retro-rockabilly in the New Wave rock of the ’70s and early ’80s, Hot Rod & the Pistons leapt from local heroes to national names when Jerry Lee Lewis himself used them as an opening act on a Midwestern tour in 1983. Signed by a scout for the UK’s Chrysalis Records, the band soon had a debut album from which a single rocketed to the top ten—its cover version of Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” (the Bobby Troup–penned title song of the 1956 Frank Tashlin–di
rected film starring Jayne Mansfield and a gaggle of early rock stars).
After a follow-up album of mostly original material saw less success, lead singer/keyboardist Rodney Penniston returned to college, and other original members—Danny Davies (rhythm guitar), Steve Pike (drums), and the late Tom Paulen (bass)—drifted away from the band, leaving Rick Jonsen (lead guitar) to head up subsequent incarnations of the Pistons into the aughts.
Hot Rod & the Pistons
2019 Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Inductees
She left and returned to the Queen’s Court and made her way past all the evil food to her one side, and the raucous entryway to the amusement park area to the other. The mechanical murmur of go-karts and more kiddie squeals joined circling gulls and putt-putting motorboats as she wandered onto the pier, where a few fishing poles had been cast out into the sparkling gray-blue expanse. Cool air came in and kissed her. She hadn’t been this happy in years.
What the hell. She had a Nutty Bar. The last time she was here she’d had three—her strength of will was improving. She sat on a bench outside the ice cream concession and people-watched. Funny, only a few kids or for that matter adults were pausing to check their phones, as if social media were on vacation, too.
It was like all the years since last she and the Pistons were here had fallen away. But for hairstyles and clothing that revealed considerable young flesh, this could have been the ’30s or ’40s. Carnivals were timeless that way.
The concert started late afternoon. She went up a wide stairway to the second-floor ballroom and was met by tables of T-shirts, CDs, and other merch sales. The place looked and smelled new, as white as clean sheets. She got a cup of beer and a hot dog with mustard and relish, with the requisite napkins.
The stage was tall, wide, roomy, and well elevated, with huge speakers bookending it, while white tables and chairs, for parties of various sizes, filled much of the room up to and along the edges of the dance floor. She took a small table toward the front, to the left of the stage. The place began to fill up and she was joined by a middle-aged couple from Altoona; they exchanged names and smiles and enthusiasm for native Iowa rock.
That nobody else from Dubuque or Galena had apparently made the trek came as a relief to her. That she was here alone—that she’d come alone—would only embarrass her. She didn’t care to be seen as some sad, aging fan. And, anyway, while she didn’t mind a little chitchat with strangers, she didn’t want anyone from home intruding on her mood. Her fun. This vibe.
Girl Can't Help It: A Thriller (Krista Larson Book 2) Page 1
