Killer Riff
Page 21
14
Showering with a man is a pleasure I’ve experienced only a few times. Showering with two men is one I hadn’t even dreamed of. But had I dreamed it, standing under ice-cold water fully dressed and hoping that one of the men didn’t throw up on the other would not have figured as prominently in the scenario as they did in real life.
Kyle had swept Adam off the hallway floor and into the bathroom before I could even process that he’d collapsed. By the time I joined them, Adam was vomiting furiously into the toilet as Kyle hung on to the back of his jacket with one hand and cranked up the shower with the other. When Adam’s stomach seemed to have emptied itself, Kyle hauled him into the shower, barely allowing me to strip off Adam’s leather jacket, which had to have cost more than my rent. I tossed the jacket into my bedroom and doused the bathroom with Lysol spray. Then Adam lurched and fought him a bit, so even though there wasn’t really room for all three of us, I stepped in to do what I could to help. It was easy to be noble knowing that everything I was wearing was machine washable.
“Good thing you got him in here before he started getting sick,” I said, squinting against the water.
Kyle shrugged, oblivious to the water and the cold. “I induced vomiting.”
Adam moaned. I started to ask Kyle how, then knew I didn’t really want to know, so I clamped my mouth shut. Adam moaned more loudly, eyes struggling to open, flailing a little.
Kyle smiled. “I won’t even make you tell me what you were going to ask that time.”
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Or at least a wetter man.”
“I’d applaud, but I might drop your buddy.”
“No buddy of mine. He made a fool of me, to throw me off course,” I said, angrier than I’d be willing to admit.
“You think he’s involved?”
“Excellent chance.”
Adam roused a bit more, trying to free himself from Kyle’s grasp and getting nowhere. Kyle squinted at him. “Maybe I should drop him.”
“Just do it hard.”
“Not that he’d feel it. He’s not just drunk, he’s on something. Question is, what?”
“Oh no,” I said, my own stomach lurching as an awful thought hit me. “Valium and Jack?”
Kyle recognized the song and remembered the stories about Micah and Russell, but I hadn’t told him about the concert. I filled him in while we hauled Adam back out of the shower and I pulled every towel I had off the shelves. “A combo like that, anyway.”
Adam was awake enough to sit on the toilet while Kyle stripped off wet shoes and shirt. “You seen him naked?”
“Of course not,” I said indignantly.
“Keep it that way. Step out and let me do this. Grab that old blue-and-white bathrobe of yours, I’ll throw him in that.”
“What about you?”
“My old—” He stopped, smiling ruefully. “I don’t have any clothes here anymore, do I?”
We’d been so close to living together that he’d had a nearly complete wardrobe here, but it had all left with him. All but one piece. “Actually, there was a pair of sweats that I never got back to you.”
“Good planning.”
By the time Kyle guided Adam out of the bathroom, I’d changed clothes, too, putting on my favorite Ralph Lauren linen pantsuit, my lucky armor for tough interviews. But as I tried to fluff my damp hair into some sort of shape, I almost changed back into my jeans. What was I thinking? I couldn’t go meet with Claire Crowley while her drug-laden son crashed in my apartment with my boyfriend.
“Why not?” that boyfriend asked. “She doesn’t have to know he’s here. In fact, it’d be interesting to find out where she thinks he is, if she gives any indication that he might be in trouble.”
Propped up in my leather armchair, a flannel throw tucked around him, Adam looked oddly vulnerable. As he struggled back to coherency, it was impossible to see the charming and seductive fellow who had danced me around earlier in the day. The image of the tortured artist, the bad boy with a song to sing, was gone completely. All I saw was a damp, shivering mess. But now that he’d shifted over to the suspect list, I couldn’t feel sorry for him. “Do you think he did this to himself? Another Crowley OD?”
Kyle, on the other hand, looked even better than he had when he’d arrived, although his wet hair was a little crazy and he was wearing gunmetal sweats and an old flannel shirt of mine that he hadn’t gotten around to buttoning yet. Another reason I didn’t want to leave. But Kyle was practically shoving me out the door. “My gut says no, but I’ll sober him up while you’re gone, try to find out.”
“What if he killed Russell?”
“I’ve been around murder suspects before and survived. And if he confesses while you’re gone, I’ll write everything down, I promise.”
“You’re sure he doesn’t need a doctor?”
“I’ll call at the first sign of trouble. I know the number.”
“Mine or the paramedics?”
“Molly, do you trust me?” Kyle grabbed the door and swung it half-closed so I couldn’t go back into the apartment and check on Adam again.
“Of course I do.”
“Then go do your job. I’ll take care of him.” He said it with firmness bordering on irritation, so I backed away from the door.
I didn’t know how to thank him for his help without making it sound as though I thought he was working with or for or through me or whatever. I opened my mouth to see if something lovely and inspired would come out, and he pointed to the elevator. “Go.”
Todd scrambled up to me as I came out of the elevator, babbling something about never having seen a rock star up close and was he going to be staying long. I cut him off. “Do not tell anyone he’s here. Anyone. If word gets out, I’ll know it was you, Todd, and it won’t be pretty.” Todd stood at attention and mimed locking his lips and throwing away the key. I felt so safe.
The true feeling of danger didn’t wrap its icy hands around my digestive tract until Claire Crowley was facing me, sitting on the other side of a dining room table that could double as a bowling lane, given its sheen and length. A fully loaded cocktail tray, deposited on the table by a Filipino steward who had come and gone in silence, sat at her elbow, featuring cut crystal decanters with a rainbow of contents. I wondered which one had the Jack and which had the Valium but decided to hold that question until a more opportune time.
Claire was dressed to intimidate in a plunging Roberto Cavalli silk halter and towering Steve Madden red leather sling-backs. Perhaps she had an event to go to after she finished scratching out my eyes and was confident that she’d do a skilled enough job that she didn’t need to worry about getting blood on her outfit.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she began, her voice measured but her unhappiness coming through loud and clear.
“Not intentionally,” I said, deciding to start with breezy, then see how the conversation devolved from there. “But several of your inner circle have kept me quite busy, so I’m sorry if I’ve appeared neglectful.”
Claire folded her lips into a thin arc that was a distant relative of a smile. “I want you to leave my son alone.” She tapped on the tabletop with a crimson nail for emphasis.
Kyle was right. I was going to get yelled at for kissing Adam. “That implies you think I’ve been bothering Adam,” I said, going for a slightly hurt tone.
“Pursuing, bothering, whatever you’d like to call it.”
“It must be difficult to be the mother of a very handsome, very talented man. My mother wanted to put up an electric fence and my brother was only varsity basketball, with none of Adam’s money and only half his charm. So I understand that you’re compelled to eye every woman who draws breath within a mile of him with suspicion, but I’ve been chasing a story, not your son.”
“How do you explain that picture this afternoon?”
“A joke.” In so many ways. “Ask him. Or his real girlfriend.”
“He isn’t seeing anyone.”
Claire glared at me briefly, impatient with my thoughtful silence, then slid a plain manila envelope across the table to me. It was flat and not obviously ticking, but I was still reluctant to pick it up. “Go ahead,” she urged. “It’s for you.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I said, my hands still in my lap.
“Open it. It’s your article.”
“You couldn’t have.” Incredulous, I opened the envelope and let the contents, photographs and documents that looked like press releases, slide out.
“We didn’t actually write it for you—”
“Thanks for that—”
“—but Gray and I did assemble everything you’ll need to write a lovely and well-balanced piece about Olivia.”
“Without talking to anyone else.”
“Exactly.”
“And by ‘well-balanced,’ you mean a piece that presents your point of view as the only correct one.”
“I think you’ll see that’s best for everyone. Care for a drink?”
Taking a drink from her seemed to rank right up there with taking an apple from a humpbacked witch in the woods, so I declined. Sliding the items back into the envelope, I tried to imagine the thought process that had led up to the filling of the envelope in the first place. Who would think that I would take it with a smile and say thank you? A woman who was awfully used to getting her own way and traveling in pretty tight circles. Still. “I have to ask you, Mrs. Crowley, what makes you think that I’ll take this information and go away?”
“If you refuse, I can either tell your editor and publisher to kill this story … or I can write you a check.”
“My choices are blackmail or bribery? I’m shocked, Mrs. Crowley. Shocked.”
“You’re offended. I get that. I can make the check out to the charity of your choice, if you prefer. If you haven’t embraced a particular cause, I can give you some suggestions.”
Willing not only to bribe me, but to structure the bribe so it was politically correct. Here was a full frontal shot of the control freak who’d been lurking under the surface all along. It was rather amazing to see her reveal herself so blatantly. I pushed the envelope back to her. “No, thank you.”
“You’re being foolish. There’s no story here.”
“Then why are you trying so hard to keep me away from something that doesn’t exist?”
“Because you’re stirring up a lot of ridiculous talk and unnecessary attention that Adam and the others don’t need. They’ve been subjected to it enough in their lives. Forgive a mother for wanting to protect them whenever possible.”
“Even if they don’t deserve protecting?”
Her hands slapped the tabletop with such force that my own palms burned. “This is what I’m talking about. Speculation. Gossip. And the wrong kind of attention. My son didn’t do anything wrong. None of us did anything wrong.”
“But Russell Elliott’s dead.”
“His choice.”
“Like Micah before him.”
“Do not go there.”
I started to ask her where she thought I was going, then I saw it on her face. “You mean, to where the two men who had having you in common both killed themselves?”
She was hurt, and I didn’t feel bad about that at all. She had no trouble impugning my character, so as unused to it as she seemed to be, she could take a little impugning right back. “Is that what you’re worried about? People are going to start talking about that? Aren’t you just glad they’re still talking about you at all?”
Claire stood, nails whisking along the sides of her skirt, looking for something to claw and being restrained from reaching across the table for my face. “How unprofessional.”
“Says the woman who just tried to buy me off.”
“I offered you something for your trouble.”
“Exactly. If there really were no story here, you’d ignore me. You might as well hang Christmas lights on the fact that you’re hiding something.”
She came around the table so quickly, I didn’t have time to back up or get away. Anger had drained most of the color from her face, and her hand was ice cold as it squeezed down on mine, grinding the knuckles of my index finger and pinkie together.
“All I ever tried to do is protect my family,” she said with a grim huskiness. “My husband had a child with another woman, but I kept us together, kept us happy. He died, but I kept us together, kept us happy. Now my best friend is dead, too, and I will not let it destroy us.”
“It’s not me you want to crush, you want to destroy the story. And it’s too late. Everybody’s talking about the Hotel Tapes, about who’s got them. You can get me tossed, but the story’s going to keep bumping along until someone gets an answer they like.”
“Those damn tapes,” she snarled, pushing away from me and retreating to her side of the table again. “I’d burn them again, just give me the chance.”
“Why?” I asked, saving the discussion of whether she’d truly burned them for a later moment.
She dropped one ice cube into a crystal tumbler and stared at it, as though waiting for it to request what should be poured over it. “Imagine being married to Pablo Picasso and discovering an entire warehouse filled with sketches and paintings he’d done while he was apart from you. One day, you get the chance to go through the warehouse and you discover that the art in there is beautiful. Breathtaking. More wonderful than any of the work he’s ever shown you. But in that entire warehouse, you find just one sketch of you. Only one.”
Distracted by the four fingers of vodka she poured over the ice cube, I was a beat behind her. “You burned the Hotel Tapes because there was only one song about you?”
She smiled at me sadly. “I loved Micah Crowley from the moment I saw him, hunched over his guitar, sitting on the brick wall outside the college bookstore. He had nothing and I didn’t care. I believed in him, sacrificed for him, forgave him. And he wrote me one single song. The selfish bastard.”
According to Lennon and McCartney, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Does that imply the existence of other mathematical theorems useful in computing the tipping point of a relationship? To quantify when the love that’s gained is negated by the hurt that’s inflicted, when the promises that are made are overwhelmed by the lies that are told? We all keep tallies, even if we never intend or expect to even the score. Whatever accounting method she’d used, Claire had crunched the numbers and found Micah wanting.
“Which song?”
She shook her head. “He never even recorded it. Except on those damn tapes. So it’s gone forever.”
“Why did you stay with him?”
She wasn’t prepared for the question, and I wasn’t prepared for the spasm of vulnerability that crossed her face. “I have a son.”
Rock-and-roll royalty at its proudest. The dynasty must continue, my son must rule. Even at the expense of other people’s lives. “A high cost for a son who doesn’t care about rock and roll very much,” I said quietly.
I’d meant to offer some perspective, but I could tell by the rage in her eyes that I’d gone too far. “He’s finding his way back, seeking inspiration,” she said in very careful syllables. “His next album will be brilliant.”
“The jazz album.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to vaporize and, just maybe, take me with her. Then she gathered herself with such force that the air pressure in the room shifted. “He must have put on quite a show for you.”
I had my feet too firmly planted and couldn’t dodge that zinger
. “Meaning?”
“This esoteric jazz bullshit. It’s misdirection, to diminish expectations before his second album.” She said it with great authority, but I wasn’t convinced. He might have been feigning a lot of things, including his innocence and his interest in me, but his passion for jazz had been clear. “Rock is in his blood,” Claire continued.
“Like a virus?”
“Like his DNA. He writes and sings just like his father. And all it’ll take is one great song to get back on top.”
“So he mentioned.”
“He’ll write it, he’ll feel that fire, it will all come flooding back.”
“Are we talking about recording music or resurrecting your husband?”
She smiled, a dark and oily smile, pleased that she was seeing some great truth I was missing. “Both,” she said.
Unease gnawed at the base of my neck, teasing the hairs upright. Could this be why I’d been resisting Adam as a suspect? “Did Russell feel the same way?”
“Russell loved Adam and wanted what was best for him. Would have done anything for him.”
“Except give him the Hotel Tapes.”
Claire’s face twisted, her eyes corkscrewing shut as though she were battling an instantaneous migraine. “They’re gone!”
“Russell wanted Adam to find his own way. You wanted your husband back, even if it meant force-feeding your son his music.”
“Good night.”
“Did you drug Russell so you could search his apartment, or did you plan to kill him all along so Adam would have no support?” I hadn’t intended to accuse her, but the pieces were all sliding together so neatly, it practically said itself.
“Get out.” Claire walked out of the room without a look back. The steward appeared to make sure I went straight to the front door, did not pass other doorways, did not collect more hypotheses. But I did sweep the manila envelope off the table for curiosity’s sake.
When Olivia had first suggested Claire was responsible for Russell’s death, I’d been framing it in terms of money and control of the estate. But Claire wanted to control the family. Specifically, her son. Get the fulfillment from him she hadn’t gotten from her husband. Once she got him back into the limelight where she wanted him, Adam had better make sure to write her an awful lot of songs.