I couldn’t decide whether Gray was venting his general dislike of the press or if he had some specific issue with me, but the false bonhomie with which we’d begun made his quick turn all the more irritating.
Careful to keep smiling, I said, “Mr. Benedek, if you’re not interested in talking to me, you could have said so on the phone.”
He stood and picked up a towel, wiping the back of his neck first. “But I’m very interested in talking to you. Especially if you call me Gray. This is a wonderful conversation.”
“Because you get to demean what I do?”
He sniffed and wiped his nose with a corner of the towel. “Do you feel I’m being inappropriate? Perhaps you aren’t aware of how your work looks from the receiving end.”
“You know my work?” I asked skeptically.
“Claire had plenty to say about you, so I did a little Googling. The pictures from your publisher’s Christmas party were very nice, by the way. You should wear your hair like that more often.”
The room wasn’t all that warm, but I was suddenly uncomfortable and opened my jacket. “What do you want to know?” I asked him, and felt great satisfaction when his eyebrows shot up.
“You’re the one who asked for this interview.”
“And I can see now that you wouldn’t give someone like me the time of day unless you had a specific goal in mind. Either you want something, or Claire Crowley told you to get information out of me that she doesn’t think I’ll give her myself.”
Gray buffed the back of his neck with the towel with enough vigor that I could tell I was nearing the truth. “How about that? Smarter than she looks.”
I bit my tongue, but only briefly. “Oh, so I can’t draw conclusions about Olivia based on research, but you can judge my intelligence by my looks?”
“Apparently not.” He smiled lazily, and I resisted the temptation to teach him a new pose involving my knee and very specific parts of his body. Perhaps sensing my plan, he sat in a plain wooden chair, crossing his long, well-muscled legs. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Yes, you did,” I said with great certainty.
He smiled with what I chose to interpret as appreciation. “I’d prefer to think of it as figuring out exactly who you are.”
“I’m a reporter. It’s that simple.”
“Not according to Jordan.”
“I can’t be responsible for what he says.”
“Or what Olivia says?”
“Or what Claire tells you. Which you should be accustomed to, since everyone around here tells me not to believe what anyone else says. Have the people in your circle always been so paranoid?”
“Must be all the coke in the eighties. Or everything else in the seventies,” he said, chuckling.
The further we got into this, the more he was enjoying it for some reason. “Doesn’t all that mistrust take a toll on relationships?”
“Please. Life takes a toll.”
I sat across from him, perching on a matching chair, so I could look him directly in the eye. “How long have you been sleeping with Claire Crowley?”
His laugh soared to the ceiling like a beautifully sung note and bounced off the mirrored walls for a moment. In isolation, it was a very nice sound, but right now, especially since it was directed at me, it made my teeth itch. “She’s been screwing me for about thirty years, but I’ve never had sex with her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Why would Jordan say differently?”
Gray blinked incredulously. “I know you’re new around here, but you must have already figured out that Jordan says what he thinks will get the biggest reaction, not necessarily what’s true.”
“Was Claire Crowley sleeping with Russell Elliott?”
Gray blinked again, more slowly, and considered his answer just a few seconds longer than he should have. “It is possible to be friends with a woman without sleeping with her, or haven’t any of the boys in your world figured that out?”
I took that as a “yes” for Claire and Russell but thought it would be best not to linger on the point at the moment. “So you do her bidding just because you’re such good friends.”
“Claire’s been part of my life since I was in college. She’s family.” Gray had no children and had never married, though he’d had several well-documented long-term relationships, mainly with large-eyed, soulful singer-songwriter types who were generally in their mid-twenties even after he’d left his twenties well behind. Unlike the other members of the band, Gray had stayed close to the center of the Crowley universe even after Micah died. So I could buy the “family” label. The question was, did he see her as a wife or a sister or something else?
As suddenly as if someone had flipped on the radio, I could hear “Icon,” one of the few Subject to Change songs Gray had written and on which he sang lead: “The center of my solitude, the locus of my pain, / The reason I’m a madman, but whoever wants to be sane …” The song built to a riveting piano solo that made people freeze in place during parties when I was in high school and college—unless they were making out, in which case it fueled their passion. “Icon” was described as a “blistering anthem to the love/hate relationship the band has with fame,” if I’d memorized the liner notes correctly; but looking Gray Benedek in the face now with the song echoing through my head, I wondered if he’d actually written it about someone he loved who didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t love him back. Someone like Claire. And I wondered if Micah had known.
But I’d pushed on that point as much as I could for the moment, so I swallowed all the questions it raised and said, “People do even more for family than they’ll do for friends.”
“Depends on the family and on the friends, wouldn’t you think?”
“You’re right.”
“I wanted to talk to you. Claire told me something interesting about you, and I wanted to find out for myself.”
“I doubt she finds me either pretty or smart, so it must be something we haven’t covered yet.”
“She says you know where the Hotel Tapes are.”
Now it was my laugh that rocketed forth, but to my chagrin, it sounded closer to the squawk of a seagull than the silver tone he’d produced. I cleared my throat and plowed forward. “And did she also tell you she denied that they exist? That she claimed she burned them?”
Gray’s jaw set. “Maybe she didn’t get them all.”
“Your theory or hers?” He looked out the window, so I pressed on. “And assuming the tapes do exist, I don’t know where they are. They were stolen.”
“Allegedly.”
“So you suspect me of withholding information, but told Claire you’d charm the tapes’ true whereabouts out of me—for what? A share of the royalties?”
“I already have that,” he said with the beginnings of a sneer. “There’s a separate agreement covering anything released after Micah’s death, we all share equally in the royalties.”
“All?”
“Me, Rob, Jeff, David, Claire, Bonnie, Russell. Usually the bulk of royalties goes to the songwriter. That’s why you tour, so the guys who don’t write make some money. Micah wrote almost all our songs, so he was always legions richer than the rest of us.”
“Was that an issue?”
“Only when we wanted to tour and he didn’t. But he had this near miss OD when we were playing the Meadowlands with the Dead, and after that, Micah said if he went early, he didn’t want it to end the party.”
“But it did.” In an industry where Elvis topped the charts as often after he died as before, it was interesting that there hadn’t been any new Subject to Change releases after Micah died. Though “interesting” didn’t match the expression on Gray Benedek’s face.
“Because Claire felt there wasn’t anything worth releasing.”
“And she gets final word?”
“She and Russell. But he always deferred to her.” He went back to toweling himself off, the speed and vigor picking up even more. “Sam
e thing with licensing songs. Every major ad agency in the world wants to use our songs in commercials, and she said no, it cheapened the music. Ironman’ sells trucks, Daltry and Townshend are basically TV theme writers, and Claire is worried about the purity of Micah’s almighty artistic legacy. Of course, she can afford to be idealistic.”
“Why don’t you license ‘Icon’? Isn’t that yours?”
Pleasure that I knew the song was his raced across his face for a split second, then disappeared behind his anger. “That’s not the one they ask for.”
“You hardly seem to be scraping by,” I said, pointing to the postcard-perfect vista of Central Park through the window.
“You don’t have to be poor to be cheated,” he snapped. “And she’s not trying to maintain a presence in the marketplace. Who has the Hotel Tapes?”
He grabbed my arm, almost pulling me out of the chair, and his world-renowned hand felt strong enough to yank my shoulder out of the socket if he decided it was necessary. My breath caught in my throat, but more than frightened, I was brokenhearted. All the friends I’d laughed with, all the boys I’d kissed while this same hand played awesome music in the background, all the lazy afternoons and hazy midnights I’d spent listening to this man’s music … I’d been a fan for such a long time. I wanted to like him, and I wasn’t sure I could. I wanted him to like me, and I knew he didn’t. But most of all, I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with him about rock and roll, fame, Olivia, and who might have killed Russell. And he was treating me like the enemy.
“Olivia says Claire has the tapes,” I said, searching his eyes because I was getting upset enough not to be distracted by how gorgeous they were. He glanced away, and I realized, “But you already know that.”
“As we’ve established,” he said, recognizing his mistake and pointedly looking at me again, “you can’t believe everything Olivia says.”
Pain flickered through his gaze, and I seized on it. “Even if you want to?”
“Why would I?”
“Because you suspect Claire of having the tapes, too.”
Releasing my arm with sudden self-consciousness, Gray sat back in his chair. “Of course I don’t.”
I leaned toward him now, wanting to take advantage of the shift in momentum while I could. “Because that would mean Claire is keeping things from you. Which is never good in a relationship. If you can’t be honest with each other, there’s no point in being together. I know, I just went through it myself.”
Gray put his bare foot on the edge of my chair, brushing lightly against my thigh. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to intimidate me or was simply thinking about kicking my chair out from under me. Either way, I knew I’d be better off standing up, which I did. After a moment, he dropped his foot and stood with me.
“Russell used to talk about it in hypotheticals. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could release the Hotel Tapes?’ That sort of thing. Maybe even pair it with a ‘reunion tour,’ with one of the boys in Micah’s place. Claire always shot it down because she assumed the sound quality would be so bad, but Russell insisted that technology had gotten to the point that the tapes could be cleaned up….” He made a frustrated rolling gesture with one hand, indicating that the conversations had rambled on beyond that, and I nodded. “But ultimately, it didn’t matter because no one knew where the tapes were.”
Gray took a deep breath, then continued, “Not too long ago, Russell started talking about the tapes again. ‘If we had them and could clean them up, what would we want to do with them?’ That sort of thing. His biggest worry was that it would look mercenary to release them.” The pain flickered through his eyes again. “Russell was too pure-hearted for his own good.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” I said softly. “When did he start talking about the tour and everything again?”
“Right before he died,” Gray said equally softly, shaking his head and giving me a warning look. He knew how it sounded, and he wasn’t comfortable with the notion, had probably been fighting it since the moment Russell died.
The question was, how much did Gray know about the details of that moment? I’d come into this room hoping he could tell me a little more about the players in a general sense, but standing so close to him, I could feel the anxiety sheeting off him, no matter how many yoga poses he’d struck.
Keeping my voice low, I asked, “If the quality was good, why wouldn’t Claire want the tapes released?”
“She thinks they’d dilute the audience for the boys’ new albums. Why buy the second generation if you can get brand-new stuff from the master? Which is ridiculous, because releasing the tapes would actually be great publicity. The boys are talented enough to handle the comparisons.”
“Boys?” I repeated, confused. Everyone was waiting for Jordan’s new album, I knew that, but how did Adam fit into this?
Gray smiled bitterly. “I’m putting Adam back in the studio. Supposed to be all hush-hush so it doesn’t look like the brothers are competing, but that’s more of Claire’s hysteria.”
“Didn’t Adam quit?”
“He stopped. There’s a difference.” He grabbed my arm again, just as urgently as before. “For some of us, it’s not about wanting to play. It’s about needing to play. You can’t stop. You tell yourself you can walk away, embrace something new, but it’s futile. It drags you back.”
“Is the music dragging Adam back or are you and his mother?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Actually, I do. Millions of dollars are at stake, the balance of power is upended because Russell Elliot’s dead, but we’re all going to pretend it’s about art. I understand completely. And I also understand how maddening this must all be because I bet when you heard what Russell had done with the tapes, they sounded amazing.”
“Incredible.” He nodded with his eyes closed, so completely lost in the memory for a moment that he didn’t quite process what he’d just admitted to: that the tapes were real, and Russell had been preparing them for release. But as his eyes opened again, his hand went slack and I knew it had sunk in. “Incredible that you do understand after all, I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Mr. Benedek.” If Claire hadn’t taken the tapes from Russell by force, there was a distinct possibility Gray had. It might not have been his intention, but it could have been the result. Years of art and commerce colliding could wear down a few moral distinctions, no doubt, and I could see Gray trying to persuade Russell to stand up to Claire with him. And pushing too far.
Whatever Gray saw on my face worried him. Pushing a false smile forward, he said, “We’ve gotten a bit off track. Isn’t your article about Olivia?”
“As you said,” I answered, matching his smile, “the article can go two different ways: look at the brave daughter carrying on her father’s brilliant legacy, or look at the poor orphan surrounded by the people who killed her father.”
What had Olivia told me her father said to her in that final phone call? Something about his work being used against him. Maybe he was referring to work he’d done cleaning up the tapes, which Gray was using as leverage to get him to go against Claire: The tapes sound so great, you’ve worked so hard, it’s a shame not to let people hear them. I could see Gray pouring him a drink or two, maybe not even knowing Russell had taken the pills, just trying to get him malleable enough to give up the tapes. That explained why the tape deck was sitting out so casually in the middle of the room: Russell impetuously wanting to share his work in progress with Gray—and maybe with Claire, too—and pulling out the deck to have them listen right then and there. And setting the wheels in motion himself.
I continued, “The tragedy’s compounded by the fact that if someone killed Russell to get the tapes, how can they do anything with them now without admitting they were involved in Russell’s death?”
Gray snapped the towel between his hands. “The person who has the tapes isn’t necessarily the person who killed Russell.”
I smiled icily. “Prov
e it.”
His smile was much, much colder. “After you.”
10
“Am I too old to be a groupie?”
The young lady behind the counter blanched, thinking that Tricia was directing the comment to her and wisely not wanting to enter into a conversation that began in such a treacherous place. I shook my head hurriedly and pointed at myself, but the poor girl still fled to the cappuccino machine with eyes averted while I responded, “No, but I do think you’re a bit mature to be this excited at the prospect.”
Daylight had not diminished Tricia’s giddiness over meeting Jordan Crowley. I couldn’t really blame her: He was handsome, charming, and famous. And she hadn’t been exposed to the venomous oddness of his inner circle yet, which was what was dulling his shine for me. Besides, Tricia had been single for a while now, and that increases your sensitivity to new and exciting potentials, the way not eating before a cocktail party makes that first drink hit you twice as hard. It was nice to see her buzzed. We were just going to have to make sure Jordan didn’t wind up being one huge hangover.
“The issue isn’t your age as much as it is the age of the boy,” Cassady pointed out with a snarky smile.
Tricia narrowed her eyes in warning. “He is not a boy.”
“If he’s younger than you are, he’s a boy,” Cassady said. “It’s an algebraic principle.”
“You’re just jealous because a man paid more attention to me than to you. For once,” Tricia insisted.
Key among the immutable facts of life as a friend of Cassady Lynch is you’re always going to be the second one people notice. Men in particular. Tricia and I have learned to accept that, but, as Tricia was revealing, it still chafes from time to time.
Studying the contents of the bakery case with feigned interest, Cassady looked as if she were going to be gracious and let it go, but then she returned the lob after all. “I don’t need to shop. My cart is full.”
“Really?” Tricia asked, eyebrows rising along with her voice. “How long since anyone scanned your basket?”
Killer Riff Page 15
