Killer Riff

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  “Now, now, ladies, let’s be careful,” I said quickly. We were in line at the Dean & DeLuca by Rockefeller Center, a busy and very public place, not the most ideal location for this kind of discussion. We’d already frightened the barista and were well on our way to entertaining the other people in line, a prospect that didn’t entice me in the least, given my recent media exposure.

  Following my workout with Gray Benedek, what seemed appropriate was a good stiff drink or a hot-fudge sundae, but it felt self-pitying and irresponsible to give in to either impulse when it wasn’t even noon yet. So I’d called Cassady and Tricia so they could talk me into eating vegetables or something equally saintly, but they’d agreed I should go for the most dessertlike coffee possible in the hopes that tapping into the twin wellsprings of caffeine and sugar at the same time would revive me. I would have preferred a quieter, less touristy venue, but this had worked out to be a central location for where they were each headed for lunch: Cassady was accompanying Olivia to see her lawyer and get some specifics on the intellectual properties aspect of Russell’s estate, and Tricia was meeting up with Jordan again to discuss a party he wanted her to do for him so he could try out some new songs on a select group of friends and family. The two of them were mixing better with the Crowley clan than I was.

  That left me to ponder my next move. As I’d left Gray’s, I’d called Kyle, but gotten voice mail, which was probably just as well. I was less apt to get myself in trouble by rambling on about how much I missed him or ranting about how frustrated I’d been by my visit with Gray if I didn’t talk to him until later in the day, when I might, I hoped, have my thoughts about Russell and the tapes analyzed more clearly.

  I snapped back to the conversation as Cassady said, “I’m having dinner with Aaron tomorrow night, so I’m planning on checking out then.” The barista froze in the act of handing Cassady her coffee, again looking slightly panicked until she realized Cassady wasn’t talking to her. It had to be miserable to interact all day with people who were having conversations with other people, either in person or on their phones, while you’re trying to serve them. I dumped my change into the tip jar.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Tricia said as we moved outside. It was a gorgeous November morning, with enough sting in the breeze to put color in your cheeks, but not so cold that you dreaded the quickly approaching winter. Even here in a concrete canyon, the scent of fall leaves crushed underfoot added spice to the air, and I was sure I could smell roasted chestnuts just around the corner.

  Pulling our jackets around us, we skittered across the street to huddle against the wall and watch the skaters below on the rink, sliding and twirling with varying levels of success. Tricia continued sincerely, “I was starting to worry that you two had hit a serious problem.”

  “So was I, but I finally got hold of him yesterday and made him explain,” Cassady said while I imagined sweet, quiet Aaron being on the receiving end of that cross-examination. “Turns out Molly was right with her student meltdown theory. More or less.”

  “Meaning?” I asked, reassured that I had been on track with some theory at some point.

  “Aaron’s preparing a paper for a conference in Boston, and a few days ago, he discovered a problem with an experiment one of his grad students had done. When he asked her to replicate the results, she couldn’t. Turns out she’d doctored the results, to bolster Aaron’s theory.”

  “The things we do for love,” Tricia said with a sigh.

  “Excuse me?” Cassady’s eyebrow arched unhappily.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that there’s anything going on between them,” Tricia continued quickly, “it’s just that the student must think the world of Aaron to have gone to such lengths, all because she wanted to help him, see him succeed. I can remember a few profs along the way I would’ve bent a few rules for.”

  The things we do for love … Was that an element in Russell’s death that I was missing? Money and fame were the only objects of love in evidence, but I could sense an underlying issue that I hadn’t tapped into yet. Had Gray really loved Claire, maybe even back when Micah was alive, and thought he might be with her someday, only to have her get involved with Russell? I thought of the lyrics of “Icon” again: “Everything I’ve lived for will be the death of me, / Didn’t know till I locked in just how much it means to be free …”

  Listening to my inner iPod, I watched as a little girl on the rink, no more than six years old and picture perfect in her bright pink skating outfit with the white fur trim, flung herself into a grand spin, only to crash inelegantly onto her backside. I winced in sympathy. My footwork was all tangled up, too. I was letting myself get pulled into the emotional swirl surrounding Olivia and the Crowley clan, and that was hampering my ability to weigh the evidence empirically, the way Aaron had to.

  While I’d gotten Gray to admit that the tapes were real and that he’d heard them recently, it was clear I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him without something substantial to sweeten the bargain. Olivia had all her cards on the table. Jordan was reveling in the chaos. Claire was going to be more unapproachable than ever if Gray went back to her and admitted his slip. I needed to go see Adam.

  The more I’d thought about him—and I’d spent way too much time doing that overnight—the more certain I’d become that he was hiding something. What I couldn’t be certain of was how willing he’d be to part with the information. Or what I could offer to persuade him to do so. The really tricky part was that his mother was almost certainly part of what he was hiding, and he was so protective of her that one misstep could shut me out completely.

  “I gotta go,” I told Tricia and Cassady, shaking my coffee cup to see if it was worth taking with me in the cab.

  “Not without telling us your new inspiration,” Tricia said, grabbing the collar of my coat and pulling me close. “I can see it in your eyes. Along with a fleck of mascara,” she added helpfully, lifting that away gently with the tip of her pinkie.

  “I’m going to talk to Adam,” I explained. “Olivia told me where he rehearses. I’m going to apologize for how badly things went last night and see how much that gets me.”

  Tricia frowned. “I didn’t know you thought things went badly last night.”

  “They didn’t,” I said, “except for missing the fabulous party with Jordan, of course. But I thought a conciliatory approach might get more out of him than the ‘So where exactly did I fling that gauntlet down, because we can pick up from there?’ technique.”

  Cassady feigned dismay. “But you’re so good at that one.”

  “New dogs, new tricks,” I said as I kissed them good-bye.

  Tricia looked genuinely concerned. “Do you really think he’s holding out on you? Isn’t he the good son?”

  “Which means you’re running around with the bad son,” Cassady said.

  “For a change,” Tricia said with a little spike of triumph at the end. “Besides, if the good might become the bad, the bad might become the good.”

  “Hope may be the most devious enemy a single woman has,” Cassady said. “Let us know how it goes with Adam.” They waved as if sending me off to a jousting match as I hurried back to Fifth Avenue to grab a taxi.

  My cabbie was Jamie, a fiery-eyed young man from Dublin who told me that while he’d be happy to take me wherever I needed to go, he had an audition for Law & Order later in the afternoon, so if I didn’t mind, he was going to work on his audition piece while he drove. I agreed, looking forward to hearing a great theatrical monologue delivered in his rich, rolling brogue. Instead, for the next thirty blocks, I listened to him chant, “Look out, he’s got a gun!” with a variety of emotions, accents, and syllabic stresses.

  Between renditions, I tried to think what might be the more persuasive way to elicit information from Adam once I’d apologized. Did I continue to frame my questions just in terms of the article about Olivia, or did I tell him I’d come across some intriguing/disturbing/potentially explosive/all of the abo
ve information while researching the article and see what he thought about Gray having actually heard the tapes? And ask where he thought his mother might fit into the scheme of things, aside from her sex life?

  By the time he dropped me off, Jamie had decided to go with a “terse yet impassioned” reading with an accent that sounded like Madonna’s British one. I told Jamie to break a leg at the audition, that I’d be watching for him, while I fished my wallet and some Advil out of my purse. It wasn’t until he was pulling away that I took a good look at where I was. There was a name in faded gilt above the front doors of the weary brick building in front of me: MONTGOMERY PREP. For a moment, I thought perhaps the name and the halfhearted ivy on the walls predated the current occupants, until the front doors opened and dozens of pretty, perky young girls in elegantly tailored school uniforms spilled down the front stairs, skirts hemmed just below their derrieres and jackets fitted as though they had whalebone stays. Half pulled out cigarettes, and the others pulled out cell phones. Ah, high school lunch break.

  An Upper East Side address had struck me as interesting for Adam’s rehearsal space, but this was even odder. Could he be renting space from the school? Maybe someone on the faculty was in his play. Or Olivia had written down the address wrong.

  “May we help you?” A knot of leggy, patrician, ponytailed blondes with more poise at sixteen than I’ll have at fifty approached me, the ringleader out in front. “You look a little lost, ma’am.”

  I decided to ignore the “ma’am,” especially since her smile told me it was deliberate. “I am,” I admitted. “I think I might have the wrong address.”

  “Are you picking up your child? Maybe we know her,” the ringleader asked with a false sweetness beyond her years.

  I began to retort with equivalent saccharin that it was mathematically impossible for me to have a child at that school, and then I realized that, had I been careless in my freshman year of college, I might have a freshman here now. I could feel the crow’s-feet etching themselves into my face as I did the math. “I’m actually looking for an adult. A musician. I was told he has a rehearsal—”

  The ringleader tossed her ponytail in merriment, and her posse followed suit. “You want to see Mr. Crowley,” she singsonged as the other girls giggled.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’re not a stalker or anything, are you? We do try our best to protect him.”

  Like Dracula’s wives, no doubt. “We know each other.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “I’m a magazine writer.”

  “For whom do you write?”

  “Oh, nice. AP English?”

  “Honors. And editor of the school paper.”

  “Are you the only one in the group who speaks?” I asked her, failing to repress flashbacks to my own high school days, filled with challenging relationships with the power cliques.

  Her nose turned up even farther. “Must be lame, or you’d tell us.”

  Happily, I was able to repress my desire to yank on her ponytail and see what would happen. “Zeitgeist.”

  That got a gratifying chorus of oohs and aahs from the posse and an, “Oh man, you’re Molly Forrester!” from one of the girls in the back.

  “You read my column?” I asked pleasantly, not too proudly.

  She looked offended for a moment, as though I’d suggested she still read Dr. Seuss. “No, you were in yesterday’s Post with Mr. Crowley. He told us all about you!”

  Not the reaction I was hoping for, but I’d take it since it caused them to sweep me along before them like so many chattering ladies-in-waiting delivering the new dancing girl to the king.

  Inside, the school’s age had been covered up a bit more, though there was still that essential mustiness all old buildings have, where the dust just hunkers down along the bottoms of your nostrils and taints every breath you take. My young escorts, who must have developed a tolerance for it, laughed and peppered me with unanswerable questions about Adam and Jordan as we hurried through the hallways, drawing interested looks from other knots of students but, fortunately, not picking up any other hangers-on.

  Adam was in the dark and echoing auditorium, seated at the grand piano in the pit and playing something warm but mournful. The scene was more Robert Walker in Song of Love than Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, and I found I was glad to see him again. He looked quite dashing and extremely handsome sitting there and smiled warmly as he looked up and saw us, so I had to remind myself that I’d come to talk to him about murder.

  “They come bearing gifts!” he said, laughing and meeting us halfway up the aisle, allowing the girls to coo around him for a moment before sending them on their way. “This is a surprise,” he said as the double doors closed behind them.

  “Likewise. Olivia told me you were in rehearsal for a musical—”

  “And you assumed I was workshopping some angst-ridden Off-Broadway rock opera.” He walked back toward the pit, and I followed him, trying to regain my bearings.

  “Something along those lines.”

  “Well, they don’t come much more angst-ridden or further from Broadway than the ladies of Montgomery Prep.”

  “You teach here?” I asked as he sat back down at the piano and leaned into a wistful, bluesy chord progression.

  “Sort of. I’m a ‘visiting artist.’ Which means I have a friend on the faculty who wanted to figure out a way to bring me in, despite my lack of academic credentials. Which is a polite way of saying I never finished school. And none of this needs to be in your article.”

  “Why not? It’s nice, that you’re taking the time to work with kids like this.”

  Adam lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re my guinea pigs. I really am workshopping a musical, I’m just trying it out here first. It’s a musical version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. With a jazz score. A girls’ prep school is practically required.”

  As the chord progression worked its way into a song, his hands moved as though they were autonomous, effortlessly coaxing the notes forward while the rest of Adam was engaged in conversation with me. It was fascinating, until I found myself remembering that movie where the concert pianist’s hands are replaced with a murderer’s hands after an accident and the hands start killing people despite the pianist’s best efforts to stop them. I took a step back.

  He didn’t react. “I like the kids and they like me, it is what it is.”

  “But what is it?” I asked.

  “Adam Crowley’s search for redemption.” The song turned so sorrowful, it gave me chills.

  This was not the way I’d expected this visit to unfold, but I knew enough to surrender to the current. “Why do you need redemption?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “I had an amazing chance, and I blew it. Wasted something most people would kill for.”

  His choice of words was not lost on me, and I swallowed before asking him, “What did you blow?”

  “My succession to the throne. Russell lined it all up for me. All I had to do was step into the shoes and pow. Rock royalty, the lineage continues …” He thumped, the chords suddenly discordant, building to an unresolved chord.

  “You were young.”

  “One of my excuses. I’ve got tons. Wanna hear them?”

  “You didn’t fail, Adam.”

  “I didn’t measure up. What’s the difference?”

  “Do another album.”

  “Yeah, it’s that easy. Talk to my brother.”

  “I actually wanted to talk about your mother. And Gray.”

  Adam snatched his hands back from the keys as though they’d suddenly gone molten. “Ah, Molly. And we were having such a nice time.” He rose from the piano, avoiding my eyes, and climbed the steps from the pit up to the empty stage.

  “Don’t you like your mother?” I asked, staying put to give him a little space.

  “I love her,” he said with his back to me and his voice devoid of emotion. “All sons love their mot
hers, right?”

  “Let me check with Norman Bates.”

  Chuckling, he turned around, flexing his fingers to keep them warmed up. “Why do you care about how I get along with my mother?”

  Because I want to know what she’d be willing to do for you, I thought. “Olivia has a very difficult time with her, and Jordan doesn’t do much better. If you and Claire get along beautifully, it paints her relationship with them differently than if she’s a woman who doesn’t get along with any of the children who grew up in her sphere of influence.”

  He held out a hand to me as though he were inviting me to dance. Willing to play along for the moment, I picked my way up the rickety steps and joined him on the stage, taking his hand. He spun me slightly so I was looking out at the house. “My mother thinks this is what it’s all about. Being center stage. Looking down at the audience. My father didn’t hang on to it long enough, I barely touched it, and yet she’s the one who feels cheated. The dynasty must continue. But Jordan doesn’t take it seriously enough to suit her, and Olivia was never interested in music, which offended her.”

  “Where does that leave you?” I asked.

  “Teaching little girls to sing.” He tugged on my hand gently, and I remembered enough cotillion lessons to spin back to him. Settling his other hand into the small of my back, he whispered, “Trying to escape.”

  “From her?”

  “From all of it. Her. Gray. Everybody wants me back in the studio, aping my father.”

  “And that doesn’t interest you.”

  He pulled me in even more tightly, almost uncomfortably so. “You like your dad?”

  “I love my dad. He’s an amazing man.”

  “Is he a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “So you love him, but you didn’t follow in his footsteps.”

  “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” I said, getting a little breathless from the rigidity of his grasp.

  “Tell my mother that.” He stopped so abruptly, I almost stumbled over his feet. Taking a step back, I was caught by the rage darkening his face. “She demands that I love him, she demands that I be like him, and I don’t want to do either.”