by LS Hawker
She pointed the detectives toward the couch in the living room. “Have a seat,” she said.
Treloar did, unbuttoning his jacket, but Dirksen remained standing, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Can I get you some coffee or water?” she said.
“Some water would be great, thanks,” Treloar said. Dirksen shook his head.
She immediately regretted offering, because she’d have to leave the room, and she was afraid they’d go through her stuff, the way she herself had gone through Dirksen’s folder. But of course they wouldn’t. They were cops.
She got two chilled bottles of water from the refrigerator and returned to the living room, where she handed one to Treloar and sat down in the wingback chair. This was so she could keep an eye on Dirksen, who stood in the wide doorway behind her.
“It looks like you’re growing hops out there,” Treloar said, pointing out the back window.
“Yeah, we are,” she said. “Were.” She cleared her throat, trying to keep the tears at bay. “We’d planned to sell them to local craft brewers.”
“Wow,” he said. “Where did you get that idea?”
“Well, John was looking for a small crop that was worth a lot, and marijuana and poppies were out . . . So anyway, we figured all these buildings could be converted to storage and packaging and shipping and all that stuff. John was in charge of all that.”
“So I recorded your radio show the other night.”
She felt her face redden. “Oh, really?” she said, and tried to keep from glancing at Dirksen. She wondered if he meant the night she met Otto. She hoped so.
“It was really interesting,” Treloar said.
Nessa figured this was a little game of good cop/bad cop. Treloar was nice and personable, but before long, Dirksen was going to shine a light in her eyes and start yelling questions. Tension began building in her chest.
“We ran your husband’s name through NCIC and KCIC. We got a hit on NCIC. Seems your husband was arrested in Denver, is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said, her cheeks burning even hotter.
“Indecent exposure, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, drug possession. Does that sound right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you know him then?”
“Yes.”
“We ran you through the computer database too,” Dirksen said, startling her.
Nessa held her breath and spots swam before her eyes.
“Clean as a whistle,” Treloar said.
She expelled her breath slowly.
Dirksen jumped in. “The reason we’re here—”
“I’m sorry,” Nessa said. “First, I wondered if you all could look into something for me. I haven’t mentioned this to you, but I have a troll, and I think it might be someone I knew back in California. He was recently paroled.” She recounted the incidents online. Dirksen looked bored, but Treloar listened intently.
“What makes you believe he’s the troll?” Treloar asked. He pulled out his notebook and jotted down some notes.
She swallowed. “This guy raped a friend of mine back in California about eight years ago, and I testified against him at his trial. I think he may be trying to get back at me.”
Dirksen and Treloar glanced at each other.
“His name is Nathan Zimmer.” Saying it out loud produced a sour taste in her mouth.
Dirksen said, “I don’t think it’s—”
“But it’s not only online harassment,” she said. “My dog was poisoned with antifreeze. I’m afraid maybe he’s come out here to harass me in person.”
“I’ll look into it,” Treloar said.
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
Treloar and Dirksen traded glances again.
“So let’s talk about your husband,” Treloar said. “Did he have any enemies? Any people he’d pissed off?”
“Well, you know how it is in the drug culture—everybody’s always pissed off at everyone. I mean, it’s possible he pissed off a dealer, but—”
“So you know quite a bit about the drug culture, do you, Mrs. Donati?” Dirksen asked.
Her right hand went automatically to the inside of her left elbow, and as soon as she realized what she was doing, she dropped her hands to her sides. “When you’ve got a drug addict for a husband,” she said, “it kind of comes with the territory.” She held his gaze until her eyes watered. But his face showed that he didn’t believe this was the whole truth.
“So, let’s continue our conversation from the other day,” Detective Dirksen said. “Do you own a gun?”
She was ready this time and answered smoothly. “I do.”
“Would you be willing to let us take a look at it? Maybe run a ballistics test?”
Why not? She didn’t have anything to hide. She went upstairs, got the gun, and found the registration papers for good measure.
“How long have you had this?” Dirksen asked.
“Just a month or so,” she said. “I’ve never actually fired it. I felt like I needed protection since my husband lost his mind.”
“May I?” he said.
She handed it to him, butt first.
He opened it, looked inside, then ejected the clip and emptied it.
“This is an eight-round mag, right?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said, but then realized why he’d asked.
She counted five bullets. Her skin felt cold, bloodless. Why hadn’t she thought to check on the gun after she looked at the photos from the police file? Damn it.
Dirksen gave a smug, satisfied smile. “You want to explain this to me?”
She opened her mouth but nothing came out.
“Mrs. Donati?” Dirksen said. “Why are there three bullets missing?”
She cleared her throat. “Maybe that’s how it was when I bought it.”
“Highly, highly unlikely,” the detective said. “You still good with us running ballistics? Or should we get a warrant?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Mrs. Donati?”
And she knew. The bullets in this gun were going to match the ones in the truck bed exactly.
Chapter Thirteen
THEY BAGGED UP her gun and the clip with the missing bullets while she watched, sweating like Nixon during his resignation speech.
“Thank you, Mrs. Donati,” Dirksen said. “As I’m sure you know, we will be in touch soon.”
Treloar shook her moist hand. “Sorry for the intrusion. Call me if you have any questions. We’ll return the gun after the test.”
“Maybe,” Dirksen said, giving her a piranha-like smile.
Treloar made an annoyed face but didn’t say anything.
“And we still need to fingerprint you,” Dirksen said.
They walked around to the front of the house, got in their vehicle, and drove away.
Nessa went back inside and sat on the couch. How could she prevent the police from taking her fingerprints? Should she force them to get a court order? Or should she go ahead and get a lawyer?
She looked at her phone and saw that she still had thirty-five minutes until Isabeau and Daltrey returned.
Boy, did she need . . .
A dangerous, ancient set of emotions bubbled just below the surface. If she didn’t acknowledge it, didn’t let it spring into form, she could tamp it down. She could keep it at bay.
A shot.
The thought slipped through the cracks.
Just one more time. But there was never just one time. She had to remember that.
What she meant to think was that she needed some loud-ass music to dance to. Her savior. She grabbed her phone and dialed through the alphabet until she came to an appropriate song. “Good Lovin’ ” by the Grateful Dead from 1977’s Shakedown Str
eet. (The worst-reviewed album in the Dead’s catalog, but fuck ’em.) Plugging her phone into the speakers, she let it rip.
Sweet relief. Nessa danced as if she were at a real live Grateful Dead show back in the day. Listening to Bobby Weir’s joyful singing let her twirl like a dervish across her lonely living room. The song ended and she fell back on the couch, listening to the rest of the album at a lower volume.
More tea. Fire up the vape. It will be fine.
She stood and paced in front of her laptop, pretend-smoking, trying to get a grip.
John. What did you do to us?
He’d brought that ugliness into their home, that dirty world they’d both escaped—or thought they’d escaped. His very absence, the vacuum he’d left, was filled with crack dust.
Now she got out her copy of 101 Common Clichés of Alcoholics Anonymous: The Sayings the Newcomers Hate and the Old-timers Love. Even though she technically was an old-timer, she hated the sayings, but they had helped her keep it together more than once. She didn’t want to bother Marlon again, even though he always said she should call him any time she was feeling like this. She opened the book at random, as she usually did, as if consulting the I Ching.
We have a disease that tells us we don’t have a disease.
We. There was no “we.” She was alone. Alone in the universe. No one to protect her, and no one to help her protect Daltrey. She went to meetings sporadically and never spoke. She didn’t socialize with the other freaks. She went because Marlon told her to go. When they all held hands at the end of the meetings and recited the serenity prayer in a circle, she never made eye contact with anyone.
She read another one. Damn it.
We are only as sick as our secrets.
MOTHS FLITTED AROUND the light over the front door of the station as Nessa put her key in the lock and turned it. Otto was already there, sitting at the receptionist’s desk and using the desktop computer. Without looking up from the monitor, he shoved a stack of envelopes toward her.
“Mail call,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, picking them up. The Altair website listed a PO box in LA for fans to send mail to. The Altair people collected her mail, bundled it up, and sent it to her at KCMA once a week. Nessa was amazed that anyone would actually write on paper, put it in an envelope, write an address on it, scrounge up a stamp, and put it in a mailbox. But there was the stack, twenty high. Some people still liked the old ways, and she could sort of respect that.
“Let’s turn on some lights,” Nessa said, like she always did. Otto liked sitting in the dark, with only the glow of the screen.
She flipped on the overheads, and he flinched like a mole.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
“Screenplay,” he said.
This week. Last week it was a chapbook. The week before that, a web comic. She had to give it to him, he was always creating something. Unless it was just a big show. But who would do that? Put on a show just to impress her?
She pulled up a chair, opened her iPad, grabbed a letter opener, and started slicing open the envelopes.
Dear Nessa, the first one read. Love your show. But would it kill you to play some Beatles?
She got one of these every week. She shook the paper in Otto’s direction. “Why don’t people understand that there are no Beatles deep cuts? That every song they ever did has been played and overplayed and dissected like the Zapruder film? Do people seriously not understand that?”
The hostilities between them had cooled somewhat, but they were nowhere near friends. Still she needed to talk sometimes.
Otto held up a finger, then continued to type. She tried not to read what he was writing, but she suspected it was The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
“Maybe they’re just messing with you,” he said. “Everybody knows you hate the Beatles.”
“I don’t hate the Beatles,” she said. “All I said was that they were not a rock band. They were a pop band. That’s all I said. And they’re the most overplayed band in history, which isn’t saying much since every sixties and seventies band has been overplayed to the point of—”
“We know. We know. That’s the whole basis of your shtick. That’s the whole reason you got this show.” He pushed up his glasses and focused on her, deadpan.
“That’s not the only reason,” she said, stung. “I also happen to have a pretty vast knowledge of—”
“Right. Anyway. I don’t want to have this same conversation over and over again. It’s boring as hell.”
She was only four years older than he, but the chasm was wide. She felt like a fossil, saying things like, “In my day . . .” But she had to remind herself that he was a jealous brat, a kid whose parents had paid for his college. Nessa had had to do everything herself with no support. But she’d already told him that. Telling him more than once would make her sound like she cared what he thought.
She slit open the next envelope and out tumbled a photo of a guy in a Speedo. She promptly threw the letter and photo away without even reading it because she knew what it was going to say. Any time there was a photo, it was a proposal.
The next envelope enclosed a handwritten letter. Dear Nessa, it said. You have the best deep-cuts show I’ve ever heard. I wondered if you could scrounge up some music from an Australian band that was popular over there in the seventies called the Saturday Night Club.
She made a note of the band name on her iPad, then did a quick search of her music file database. There it was. She’d play a song called “Burns” and give a shout-out to the letter-writer on air.
The next envelope had a letter gushing compliments, along with a flash drive and a request for her to plug the guy’s band during her show. She set a reminder on the iPad so she’d remember to listen to the contents of the flash drive and decide whether she would do as he asked. She didn’t mind promoting good music, but if money or gifts were sent, she promptly returned them with a brief bio of Allan Freed from history-of-rock.com for their information and edification: “ ‘Payola’ is a contraction of the words pay and Victrola (LP record player), and entered the English language via the record business. The first court case involving payola was in 1960. On May 9, Alan Freed was indicted for accepting $2,500 which he claimed was a token of gratitude and did not affect airplay.”
Nessa glanced at the large clock on the wall: eleven thirty-eight. She grabbed a water bottle from the break room fridge, scooped up the rest of the envelopes, and went into the studio. The smell hit her as soon as she got into the room—male BO. She groaned. Dale must have worked a shift, because every time he did, the studio chair reeked.
Otto actually laughed. “I’ll take it,” he said. “I’m not as sensitive as you are.”
They switched chairs.
“Why don’t they do something about that?” she said.
“The general manager is one of those ‘really nice guys’ who doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Otto said. “I guess he got everyone together and said, ‘Let’s not forget to shower before we come in.’ But everyone knows it’s Dale.”
“Why doesn’t the program director do it, then?”
“He’s a coward too.”
“You know what?” Nessa said. “I’m just going to buy my own chair and haul it in here every week.”
“Or you could do the show standing up,” Otto said.
She shrugged and sat in the uncontaminated chair. Otto busied himself turning on the board, doing a sound check, making sure all the machines were in working order like he always did.
Nessa opened her water bottle and took a drink, then picked up her iPad, ready to pull up the requests. But it made a ping sound, indicating a text message. She glanced at Otto—the producer would often text her during broadcasts if he needed to tell her something. But Otto was busy with board stuff, not f
iddling with his phone, plus the number was the cell phone equivalent of an 800 number.
An image appeared on the screen. At first, she didn’t understand what she was looking at. A super-grainy, zoomed-in photo. She couldn’t figure out what it was until she pinched toward the center and the image resolved. Then a sharp intake of breath sent her into a coughing fit, and still she couldn’t take her eyes off the image in her hands.
“You all right?” Otto asked. “You’re on air in two.”
Nessa couldn’t breathe. Her eyes burned as she stared at the picture. It was Daltrey’s face.
With black X’s drawn over his eyes. And the words He Will Die scrawled below.
“What the hell, Ness?” Otto asked. “You’re on in one. Get it together.”
Nessa watched the secondhand sweep mercilessly, faster than normal, it seemed, toward the top of the hour. She took a deep breath and held it, stars swimming before her eyes, trying to focus her mind.
This was not a photo from her collection. Daltrey was wearing his striped overall shorts and a white T-shirt—his outfit from the day before. It was a photo that had been taken yesterday, in the grocery store parking lot with a telephoto lens from some distance away.
Nessa blew out her breath slowly, trying to concentrate. She pulled on her headphones and repositioned the big microphone in front of her.
Otto, eyes full of actual concern and curiosity, counted down. “Five, four,” then the rest of the way with his fingers.
Her theme music played over her introduction.
“It’s midnight on Monday, which means it’s time for Unknown Legends with Nessa, the only radio show that plays the really, really deep cuts.”
Otto pointed at her and she spoke into the mic. “Hey, everybody—”
She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. Only in it, Daltrey was really dead.
“I just got a letter from—” she looked up at the Internet screen above the board “—Chuck, who wanted to hear some Saturday Night Club, an Australian band that played every crap bar in the country during the late seventies. This is ‘Burns.’ ”
