Justin stepped off Hsieh, found the cuffs on his belt, and shackled the man’s wrists. I helped him up, walked him over to the casket. He leaned back desperately, but his legs never stopped walking. I took him under the shoulders and Justin lifted his ankles. Up and in, the casket wobbly on the riser.
I closed the bottom half of the lid and leaned close to the detective’s ear. “I promise, someone will get you out soon. Yell all you want, but no one will hear.”
“Anything,” he said, slurred like a bad drunk. “I’ll do anything. Not this, please.” Tears leaking, face a nightmare, body under the influence.
I shook my head. “You’re the one wanted to play hero, bring in one of your teenage idols, maybe? Reminisce about how you used to rip off my guitar player’s solos, tried to cop our hairstyles, in front of a press conference? You’re worse than the ones trying to expose me.”
“It’s my job.”
I said, “Yeah, you’re right. And I’m a drummer. Figure out how that got us here. You’ve got plenty of time.”
I closed the lid to a sad, long moan that faded to whimpering. I locked the casket and turned to Justin. He looked like he might throw up.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Maybe this was a bad idea.”
I patted the casket, the echo ramping up Hsieh’s crying.
“Hey, you’re in it now. I don’t think ‘Sorry’ will work at this point.”
Justin let out a breath and said, “So let’s start thinking up my new name.”
25
Justin dropped me off near the Windsor Court Hotel. I hoped he could calm Beth down, at least explain why I had to lie to her. The little voice in my head said, You should be the one telling her. What are you trying to accomplish?
“I don’t really know,” I mumbled. The guy coming my way on the sidewalk thought I was talking to him for a second, looked at me funny.
You’re more scared of her than anything else.
“Maybe.”
I needed a pay phone and some story to get her out of the hotel alone. When I said Windsor Court was “nice digs,” it was an understatement. Todd chose International House because it was the contemporary glamour joint of the moment, but Sylvia had become accustomed to sheer elegance, real hardcore upper crust. All the hair metal style was gone from her, even back near the end of the group. She shifted from hairspray to expensive salons, from fishnets and leather to designer outfits, from her Vette to a Benz. It suited her, really. Maybe not so much the rich part, but rather the softness. Windsor Court was like an English manor, nothing modern in the rooms except cable TV and internet jacks. Staying there meant you expected to be pampered.
I hunkered down outside a souvenir shop on Canal, the streets thick with people arriving for the annual Grambling vs. Southern game at the Dome, two historically black colleges, one in Orleans and the other in Baton Rouge. Alumni filled the hotels, bringing the whole family. The students stayed five to a room and brought their tricked-out Navigators and mid-eighties Olds, cruised in parade formation around the CBD. The pay phone was on its last legs and I could barely hear, the speaker busted or something, but it was good enough.
“S. G. Halston’s room, please.”
“One moment.”
A couple of rings.
Then, “Hello?”
It was her voice. Years hadn’t changed it. All the emotions, good and bad, were right in my face again.
“Hey, anybody there?” she said.
“Ms. Halston, correct?”
“Yes. Who’s speaking?”
I said, “Sylvia.”
It caught her off-guard. I was damned sure my voice wasn’t the same. Much rougher, and I used the New Orleans accent. Tried to flatten it, go a little higher.
“Who are you?”
Here it was: “I’m writing a piece for Esquire on your ex-husband and the rumors on Calvin Christopher being alive. I was hoping I could get a comment from you.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said, no elegance at all, just like the girl I knew in Florida. She acted tough when she had to, and it was convincing. “I don’t know how you got this number, but how dare you.”
“I know it’s a hard time, and I’m sorry for your loss, but maybe we could just meet, talk a while.”
“I have no comment. Don’t want to meet you, don’t give a shit about your story. I’m here to take my husband’s remains back home.”
“Florida?”
“No, asshole. California. Oh, I see, there’s another tidbit. You’re like a crab or something.”
“Just fifteen minutes.”
“Not interested,” she said, and I sensed her about to do a fake-cheery good-bye and hang up.
So I said, “I thought you might wanna hear what Cal had to say about all this.”
Bingo. She stayed on the line, quiet. I heard a woman in the background say, “Hang up on him.”
Sylvia cleared her throat.
“Hello?” I said.
All sound went blank for a few seconds, probably her hand over the mouthpiece, and when it slid away, I heard the door to her room close. Sending the hired help away, best guess. Then Sylvia: “You’ve spoken to him?”
“The man they say he is, this Merle Johnson guy? I have some statements. I taped them, if you’d like to give a listen.”
Another long silence. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking it over, or was just truly shocked.
Then, “What did he say?”
“Promise me a meeting. I’ll play you the whole tape.”
“Okay, yeah, I can do that.”
“Come alone. No handlers to intimidate me. I’ve got copies of the tape anyway.”
“Where and when?”
“There’s a fountain near the Riverwalk, right at the end of Canal. You can walk it.”
“Walking? Come on.”
“Take a cab, then. Shit. Just hurry. I’ve got a deadline.”
“What’s your name? How will I know you?”
I smiled, couldn’t help it. “I’ll know you. Half an hour or less.” I hung up.
*
She sat on the stone bench that rounded the fountain, which was built for the World’s Fair in ’84, a sunken sculpted wonder. Lots of royal crests painted on the sloping walls above the bench. The air was chilly, the wind blowing, but there she was, Sylvia, not minding a little spray as she waited.
I had watched her leave the hotel and grab a cab. That meant I’d be a little late, preferring to walk, but it was only a ten-minute stroll. I wasn’t tired anymore, all the aches evaporated. Funny how adrenaline and hope can do that. I’d be sore as hell tomorrow when I woke, whether that would be in Sylvia’s bed, Beth’s arms, or a jail cell facing attempted murder of a police officer. Or murder one for Todd. How did I sink so low?
Sylvia was alone, I’d made sure. Walked the circuit, knowing where a person would need to hide to get an eyeful. She fidgeted, craned her neck looking left and right, left and right. My first real look at her in over a decade. She was in good shape, thin but curved nice and tight. She wore flare-legged jeans, sleek black boots, and a peach-colored sweater that probably cost more than the budget of one of our videos. Legs crossed, a nervous kick, and a little digital camera in her hands, held in check on her lap.
The hair was up, a hurried solution, but still elegant, and her eyes were shaded by small oval sunglasses.
Oh Sylvia. Little worry lines around her mouth, chin a little saggy—I was surprised she didn’t touch them up with surgery—but still Sylvia on the outside. As for the internal, I was about to find out if her romantic side had survived the years.
At first she ignored me. The closer I stepped, though, she paid notice, her grin dying. And then I was beside her. I sat down on the bench, watched the fountain.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“I’m the one who called, Sylvia.”
Sylvia covered the camera, reached into her purse. She said, “So what about this tape? Let’s hear it.”
“There’s no tape.”
The nervous kick stopped and she planted both feet on the ground. Her hand came out of the purse with the phone, and I reached for it, grabbed her wrist.
She hissed at me. “You let go or I will scream, buddy.”
“Sylvia,” I said, dropping the accent, dropping everything I’d cloaked myself with. “Listen for a minute. Listen to my voice. Listen, baby.”
She stopped struggling and went damn near limp. Her mouth was a little “o”, and her hands trembled. Her fingers went for my hair, brushing through, felt like old times.
“Holy shit,” she said, barely enough breath to carry it to me. “Really? I didn’t believe the way Todd did.”
“It’s me.”
“I don’t know, though. You could be another imposter.”
“What imposter?”
“Out in LA, a few years ago. He just wanted money.” Her fingers traced my forehead, my nose. She giggled like she used to after we’d made love. “Prove it.”
“Your hotel name, the fake one. How else did I know how to reach you?”
“Prove it again.”
I was lost for a moment. I reached for her sunglasses, slipped them off.
“Doug,” I said. “I’m the one who called you about Doug. Right before I got the shit kicked out of me.”
“Where?”
“A pub in England.”
Our bodies drifted closer without either of us noticing, like true magnetic force, and then she pulled me in for a hug just as her eyes squinted and the tears ran.
“You bastard,” she said into my shoulder. “You sorry, sorry bastard. Oh, Jesus, Cal, Jesus.”
“It’s okay.”
“What am I going to do without him?”
I stroked the back of her neck. “You’ll make it. You’ll make it stronger and better than before.”
Then she gripped my arms hard and wrenched away from me, looked into my eyes, unblinking. “They said you killed him. Did you? You didn’t, did you?”
“Sylvia, come on.”
“Why would he kill himself? Why would he do that?”
I told her, “To get back in the spotlight.”
*
We went to a coffee shop on Royale Street and sat in the courtyard.
I explained as much as I could to Sylvia, working backwards from what she heard on the news. “I found him in a coma. He’d written a suicide note spilling the secret, all of it, said he couldn’t live as a has-been. He was dead by the time the paramedics showed up.”
Her face was sour, matched her tone. “They didn’t tell me about that.”
“They don’t know. I took the note.”
“Thank you, really. It’s better this way.”
“Suicide makes rock stars gods.”
“Not Todd. He’d be a laughing stock. It’s not like he turned into Robert Plant or Sting after the band. I tried so hard.” She pounded her fist on her thigh weakly. “He was determined, though, wanted to go against the grain, go for the big pop target. I told him that would come later if he played it safe first. Keep the old fans.”
“Sure, exactly. You know what you’re doing.”
She grinned and it faded fast as lightning. “Just intuition, know the market, that sort of thing. But he wanted to dive back in, get a new band, the old Diamond Dave model. But the difference was that he needed the right people to help write the songs, shape the sound. Jesus, he tried writing with C.C. DeVille. What the hell, you know?”
“Poison, yeah.”
“More ways than one.” She focused on nothing in particular, lost in her memories. I wondered how many were of me. Very few, I guess, my own damn fault. “I finally got him to calm down, abandon the project, and think about doing something more earthy, maybe talk to Noel from Oasis.”
“He didn’t?”
She shook her head. “After that, he didn’t want to work much at all. Spent most of his time on the beach, up in Vegas, lost in the woods, doing God knew what with whom. But suicide, I never expected suicide.”
I opened my mouth to tell her it wasn’t quite suicide, but the words wouldn’t form. I’d been beating myself up over killing Todd, but listening to Sylvia, thinking about his mood that last night, I gave up and locked my guilt away. Suicide. That’s what he wanted it to be. I could live with that.
“That last album didn’t do so well.”
“By that point, why bother trying? We’d passed the stage where people wanted him to come back. It was like starting over.” Her lips tightened and her voice went flat. “Let him play around in the studio, sure. I’m surprised we even got a deal. It wasn’t much money, more about calling some old favors in. People in the business kept their word, can you believe it?”
I Spocked my eyebrow. “I can’t say I have a track record there.”
“If Todd hadn’t shown me the evidence about you, I wouldn’t have believed him. I didn’t want him flying out here, though. Another few weeks, I’d told him. We weren’t solid on it yet.”
“Some plan to come get me?”
“What did you expect? It never mattered how badly you left us. We still cared about you.” She put her hand on my knee. “Todd even more than me, I’d say. When the calls started coming in, it was like he was twenty again, in the van out to L.A.”
I turned to her. “You said calls? Todd said it was one call.”
“No, it was several. We never found out who it was, they gave some story about working for the casino, but we checked and couldn’t find anything. And then the packages showed up. Photos, a noisy recording that kind of sounded like you, maps showing where you hung out.”
So Todd had lied to me. It wasn’t luck. Someone had cased me and clued him in much more than just a chance sighting. Maybe the same person who knew about the funeral home. David. So who the hell was David?
“How long have you known?” I said.
She shrugged. “About a month. Just he and I, we didn’t tell anyone.”
“I believe you. You never gave away Doug’s secret, either.”
“How is he?”
My face fell numb, involuntary, and she caught it. Her hand on my knee patted softly. She said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You two were so close, I just assumed you’d have kept up.”
“I did for a year or so. I checked on the investments I had left for him, but then they changed the passwords, so I couldn’t keep tabs. Todd said he hasn’t been in touch. You haven’t heard anything? From Alison?”
“Alison can rot in hell.” Sylvia’s tone was iceberg cold. “You don’t know how she was, Doug’s Svengali. She did all the talking, all the dealing, and we’d only hear from Doug when we demanded it, usually by phone. So after five years of that, and the final decision on your insurance, they just took off. No warning, no nothing. I mean, they weren’t like you, because we had an idea they went back to Florida, tried to get in touch, but after that we only heard from lawyers.”
“He didn’t get the insurance.” I wasn’t really asking.
“They didn’t have a choice. They waited, did every test, looked under every rock. But what the hell else could they do?”
I felt suddenly tired. I slumped against the back of my chair. Sylvia’s story was another reminder of why I had dropped out of sight in the first place. Maybe these people wanted me in their lives, but I would have been a constant disappointment, not much of a friend, maybe even making things worse.
In Doug’s case, I’d made a will soon after he told me he was HIV positive, and in it I left him my portion of all future band monies. Then I took out a life insurance policy and made him the benefactor. I was probably thinking real suicide at the time, too whacked out of my head with grief, pills, booze, and what looked like a world falling apart to see past one more day. I can’t say why I chose the charade instead of the Real Big Sleep except that I wanted to enjoy my money, my freedom, once and for all without having to play the showbiz game.
The insurance was a given, so I believed. Without it,
the comfortable lifestyle with all the medical benefits wasn’t possible. Here I was thinking I’d saved him. Better just to have drowned myself in the pool.
Good show, jackass.
Sylvia asked about my wrapped hand. She seemed real about it.
“Shaving accident.”
“What?”
“Never mind, it’s nothing. Listen, once you and Todd knew about me, did you tell anyone else?”
She shook her head. “No, not a soul. We both wanted to be sure first.”
“And the map just showed places where I’d been drinking, right? Not a home or anything.”
“That’s all. What are you asking?”
“I want to know if you hired anyone to scout me out.”
Sylvia’s face was drawn, broken-spirited. “It never occurred to us. When we knew for certain, we wanted to approach you quietly.” She sighed, her sight drifting down the sidewalk. “I guess Todd was a little eager.”
I found a spot on a building to stare at. “Todd said he hid the info on some disks in his house. How about that?”
“I didn’t know that either.”
“Cops searched his place yet?”
She reacted like she’d been bit, snapping back to the here-and-now. “They haven’t. I need to call the lawyers, keep people out of there until I can get back.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Do that later.”
Still difficult to look at her, and I could feel the same vibe coming across the table as she pretended to examine the architecture.
“You don’t seem too emotional about all this,” I said.
“Wasn’t I crying earlier?”
“Yeah, but, I don’t know. I always thought you and Todd were a bad match, but also inseparable. You’re not so torn up.”
She covered another grin and mumbled, “Well, well.”
“Problem?”
“You disappear for over a decade and think you still know me? You think I haven’t learned and changed and grown?”
I didn’t answer. She was pretty loud. Other coffee drinkers were sneaking glances at us.
“Expect me to open my soul to you and lean on your shoulder because Todd is dead?” A rude laugh in her throat. “You don’t get privilege. Just because I’m glad you’re not dead doesn’t mean I’m glad you’re alive.”
The Drummer Page 15
