The Rock 'n Roll Detective's Greatest Hits - A Spike Berenger Anthology

by Raymond Benson

  Doherty said sotto voce to Berenger, “We can’t be at a standstill all day.”

  “Wait,” Berenger whispered.

  Clayton slowly shook his head. He wasn’t going to do what she asked.

  There was dead silence in the house. No one moved. The tableau was a still photograph, frozen in time.

  Then, from out of the quiet there came a soft and beautiful singing voice, humming a plaintive, beautiful melody. At first, no one realized it was coming from Julia until she opened her mouth and began to sing lyrics. Berenger recognized the song. It was one of the album tracks. The voice was identical. The album and its cuts were the work of the woman standing next to him.

  Clayton reacted to her voice by closing his eyes and trembling. After a moment, a trickle of tears ran down his face. The pistol, however, never left the underside of his chin.

  Berenger already knew that her music and lyrics were mesmerizing, but hearing her sing them live, a capella, was a revelation. He and everyone else in the theater were spellbound. It was the most surreal and dreamlike drama that Berenger had ever witnessed. He attributed much of his feelings of profundity to the lingering effects of the psychedelic drug to which he was subjected; nevertheless, the tragedy unfolding in front of him would be right up there in the Top Ten List of Strange Tales and Amazing Stories.

  And then a movement on the left side of the stage distracted the PI. Someone was in the wings, not far from where Clayton stood. Berenger glanced at Doherty and saw that the sergeant was making subtle signals to men positioned there. Officers were ready to rush on stage and throw Clayton to the floor. All they needed was for Doherty to give them the Go Ahead.

  The song reached a climax and sent a chill down Berenger’s spine. At the same time, he whispered, “Doherty, no!”

  Julia stopped singing.

  Doherty nodded.

  Three officers burst onto the stage and headed for Clayton.

  “No!” Berenger shouted.

  Clayton saw the men rushing toward him and had the time to do one single act.

  The gun went off, clearly demonstrating its power to blow the back of a man’s skull and brains to bits. The officers, unable to stop their forward momentum, tackled the falling body and crashed onto the floor.

  Julia Faerie cried out, turned to Ponti, and buried her head on his arm. He held her tightly as she began to sob.

  Berenger hung his head. He felt Prescott take his hand. “Christ, Doherty,” he muttered softly. But the sergeant had already jumped onto the stage along with other officers. Someone examining Nance called out, “This one’s gone.” The officer checking Brill on the other side echoed the statement.

  Fuck! Berenger thought. I couldn’t save any of ‘em.

  The hit list was complete. Sylvia Favero had her revenge.

  Case left Berenger’s side and stepped onto the stage. The PI had no wish to follow. He just wanted to get out of there. He turned to Ponti and the woman.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ponti nodded understandingly. The woman separated from him and wiped her face. She sniffed. “He was my father, you know.”

  “Her real name is Julia Favero,” Ponti said.

  Berenger gave her a kind smile. “I imagine you have quite a story to tell.”

  She sniffed and nodded. “I do. And I will. Later.”

  An officer approached them and said that they needed to make formal statements. Berenger sighed and allowed the uniforms to do their jobs. It appeared his immediate future was another long night with Chicago’s finest.

  But as he was being ushered out of the theater, Mike Case sided up to him and put something in his hand.

  “They were taped to the back of one of Clayton’s keyboards,” he whispered.

  Three compact disks. The final three tracks for the album. Berenger swiftly put them in his jacket pocket.

  The big question was—who was the true artist behind the album? Sylvia Favero or Julia Faerie?

  29

  Brain Damage

  (performed by Pink Floyd)

  Berenger spent the rest of Friday night and all day Saturday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The concussion he had suffered was not terribly serious but bad enough that he be given treatment. The doctor on duty in the emergency room that day bandaged the wound on Berenger’s forehead, ordered X-rays of his skull, and, after five hours, determined that there was no fracture. The PI was prescribed heavy-duty analgesics and twenty-fours of strict bed rest, followed by “taking it easy” for the next three weeks. The most important rule was not to drink alcohol for that period of time.

  “For three weeks? No alcohol?” he complained to Prescott as they left the Hospital Saturday night.

  “Relax, Spike, it’ll do you good.”

  “I think I’d rather opt for the brain surgery.”

  “You’re lucky you’re alive. I’m taking you back to the hotel, you’re going to take your pain pills, and you’re going straight to bed. And you’re going to stay there until Sunday night—and then you’re going to sleep again all night and not leave the hotel room until Monday morning. Got that?”

  “Who are you, Florence Nightingale?”

  “No, but I play her on TV.”

  “Do you have one of those little nurse outfits?”

  “Don’t get kinky.”

  “You brought it up.”

  And true to her word, Prescott made sure Berenger never left his room until Monday morning. She fielded all phone calls and took notes. She made the reports to Bishop in New York, talked to Briggs and Remix, and checked in with Mike Case. Sandro Ponti and Julia Faerie remained in town because the singer insisted on telling Berenger her story. Prescott had told her she’d have to wait until Monday, but that was all right with her. She needed some decompression time for herself. In the meantime, Prescott meditated, caught up on her reading, did work on her laptop, and took care of the patient in the next room.

  She was finally able to peruse the material Remix had uploaded to Rockin’ Security’s server. The Trrrrans record album cover was just as Berenger had described. The front cover portrayed Clayton looking into a mirror with no reflection. The back cover was the same photo, except that the image in the mirror was his drag characterization of Sylvia Favero. The man was telling the world what his ailment was. Didn’t someone know about it or care? Prescott now realized that both voices she had heard on Clayton’s Trrrrans session recording belonged to him—his own and the Sylvia’s. They had been working on the recording “together.” Was Stuart Clayton a Norman Bates, the Anthony Perkins character from Hitchcock’s Psycho? Was he the Michael Caine cross-dressing killer in Dressed to Kill? Prescott figured Clayton was both, plus much more. The exacerbation of his affliction had to be Clayton’s guilt over Sylvia Favero’s death, combined with the excessive ingestion of hallucinogens on top of pre-existing schizophrenic tendencies. This triumvirate catapulted the musician into a Twilight Zone of dual identities. What was truly remarkable was that when Clayton was “Sylvia,” he no longer experienced the paresthesia that weakened the left side of his body. As “Sylvia,” he could walk, run, shoot, and fight with the strength and ability of a trained athlete—which “she” was. Only when he assumed the Clayton persona did his body tend to shrink and become frail. Psychosomatic, perhaps? She didn’t know.

  It was certainly weird.

  On Monday morning they met, of all places, at the Cook Country Medical Examiner’s office building on West Harrison Street, not far from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Clayton’s autopsy was scheduled for 8:30. The morgue was overcrowded on Saturday, closed on Sunday, and Monday was the soonest it could be done. Mike Case had arranged for Berenger and Prescott, the “out of town law enforcement officials,” to witness the post-mortem. Faerie still needed to officially identify the body, so she and Ponti were going to arrive in a little while.

  The trio observed the procedure along with several other interested parties, including other Chicago PD, someone from the D.A.’s off
ice, and a psychiatrist. Unlike what one sees in movies and television, there were no cubicle freezers in which individual cadavers are kept. At the Cook County morgue, all the bodies were kept in a large refrigerated room as big as a warehouse. Bodies were stacked horizontally on shelves, lying in plain sight, some completely covered, some half-out of body bags. There must have been a hundred corpses. Most had already been autopsied, while others waited for a turn on the stainless steel table. After Clayton’s procedure, Berenger, Prescott, and Case stepped into the cold, grey space. Two familiar toe-tag names belonged to a couple of cadavers that had been recently added to the “Done” pile.

  “Here’s Joe and Harrison,” Berenger said.

  Prescott gasped, “Oh, gee.” She grasped Berenger’s arm.

  “You’ve been in a morgue before, Suzanne.”

  “I know. It still creeps me out.”

  Berenger had to agree. A morgue was a place that, no matter how well it was lit, still had a dark side. He had never been in one he liked. First of all, they all had a foul, distinctive chemical smell that clung to one’s clothing for hours after a visit. Even shoes absorbed the odor. Secondly, a morgue’s employees developed a gallows-humor objectivity that protected them from the more unpleasant aspects of their jobs. They became so clinically-oriented that the slabs of flesh on the autopsy tables were no longer individuals. While Berenger appreciated the necessity for black humor, he didn’t care for the way bodies were treated so cavalierly. The proceedings only served to drive home how compact and intricately constructed human beings are, and yet how useless the machines are after the souls have departed. Perhaps the most surreal things, in Berenger’s mind, were the numerous fly traps hanging from the ceilings of every room in the building. Every trap was covered with dead flies.

  They met Julia and Ponti in the reception area at the front of the building. Julia filled out the appropriate paperwork, and then they were all taken to a small viewing room. She commented that it wasn’t what she expected.”

  “Another misconception about morgues is that people identify bodies by looking directly at the corpse in the flesh, so to speak,” Case explained. “Not so.” In actuality, a camera is pointed at the cadaver’s head and shoulders and the image is broadcast to a wide, flat screen television on the wall of the viewing room. In a way, the space reminded Berenger of a chapel. There were comfortable chairs and a couch, a piece of art on the wall that symbolized Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and an Extenda Barrier in front of the television to keep distraught family members from touching the screen.

  Stuart Clayton’s head had been draped in white to cover the gunshot wounds; but a good portion of his face was visible.

  Julia stood in front of the screen and stared at the man. Berenger, Prescott, Ponti, and Case respectfully kept their distance but had a close eye on her in case she had a case of waterworks. Berenger got the impression that Julia was a tough lady, for she showed little emotion and seemed to take the death of her father in stride.

  “I thought he was already dead,” she said. She turned to the group. “I was very surprised when Sandro told me what was happening here. I am sorry. It could have been prevented.”

  Berenger quietly asked, “How?”

  Julia turned back to her father and began the story.

  “I was born in Milan in nineteen-sixty-eight. As you know, Sylvia Favero was my mother. She was a selfish person, I think, to have me like that and then just run away. She left me with my grandmother, who raised me. My grandfather went to prison when I was one year old and he died there, so it was just my grandmother and me. I never met my mother—saw only photographs. She went missing when I was two, but I didn’t find out about it until I was much older—when I was twelve.” She indicated Clayton on the screen. “And it was this man—who I knew as my father—who told me.”

  “So he knew about you and knew where you lived?”

  “Apparently so. To tell you the truth, I’m not totally positive he’s my father. He always said he was. Now I understand he might have been one of the other men in the band. But Stuart was convinced he was my father. He sent money every six months after my mother’s disappearance. Quite a nice sum of money, too. He had inherited wealth from his family and he spent most of it on me, as I understand it.”

  “Did you know where the money was coming from?”

  “My grandmother put it in a bank for me until I was old enough to know what money was. She told me that money was coming from America for me to use when I grew up. She didn’t say it was from my father. She said it was from an anonymous relative. Perhaps she didn’t know.”

  Prescott asked, “And then one day he just showed up in Italy?”

  “It was nineteen-eighty. He had released his solo album, Trrrrans, and then decided to move to Milan to be near me. He showed up one day and introduced himself to my grandmother and me. Needless to say, we were taken aback. And suspicious. For one thing, we could see that the man was not well. It was evident on first sight. I was only twelve, so I didn’t completely understand what was wrong with him, but my grandmother did. She told him to go away. He explained that it was he who was sending the money. My grandmother still made him leave. So he did… but he rented a flat not far from ours. He kept watch on me as I grew older. I’d see him on the street, watching me. And then… when I was sixteen, my grandmother died. I had no one. But I was smart and resourceful, and I had money. It was then that I reacquainted myself with the man who claimed to be my father. I never got to know him very well, but we were… friendly. Yes, he was a very strange man. But I felt sorry for him.”

  “What was he doing in Italy?”

  She laughed a little. “For a while he worked in an alternative nightclub called Plastic where drag queens perform. He was totally into it, too. There really was a transformation when he dressed in women’s clothing. The afflictions he normally suffered—having to walk with a cane, a weakness on the left side of his face—they just disappeared when he was a woman. It was only… later… that I realized that the woman he was becoming was meant to be my mother.”

  “So that’s how he was supporting himself? Working as a drag queen?” Berenger asked. The thing just got stranger by the minute.

  “I suppose he still had some of his family’s money left. He stopped the payments to me once I was eighteen. I’m pretty sure he ran out of money, and that’s one of the reasons he left Italy in ninety-two. He wanted to make music again and he felt that the only place he could do it was in Chicago. But that’s skipping ahead.”

  Berenger suddenly felt a chill. He involuntarily shivered at the bizarre notion that they had just been standing in the autopsy room and watching the dissection of the woman’s serial killer father. The story of her relationship with the man suddenly made that lifeless slab of flesh and vessel of organs seem more human.

  Prescott said, “So, Julia, if I may ask… I don’t mean to embarrass you… but your father, did he ever think about having trans-gender surgery or anything like that?”

  “I understand your asking the question, and I think it’s important that you know that my dad wasn’t into the cross-dressing thing for sexual reasons. By that, I mean he wasn’t getting off on it like some men do when they’re into that particular fetish. And, no, he wasn’t a trans-gender candidate. He didn’t want to be a woman. He had no plans to have a sex change or anything like that.”

  “He just wanted Sylvia Favero to still be alive, didn’t he?” Berenger asked.

  “His problem was that he had a split personality. And he knew it, too. He could talk about it rationally, as if he were standing outside his own body and could analyze what was happening.”

  Case added, “We’ve learned that he could do things for Sylvia while he was Stuart Clayton and vice versa. For example, Clayton drove a ninety-eight Chevy Malibu with a hole in the tail end for the sniper rifle. On the evening you two were trapped in the house, Clayton parked his Malibu on the street and put your rental car in his garage. He had the cogni
zance to do that.”

  “I remember seeing that car parked a couple of houses down from his,” Berenger said. “And he must have been following me in it the day I was shadowing Bushnell on Clark Street. That’s how ‘Sylvia’ knew I was following someone when she called. He was watching me the whole time.”

  “And you know how she got your unlisted number?” Case asked.

  “My number’s on my business card, and I gave one to Stuart. And he gave it to… Sylvia.” He nodded to Julia. “Go on.”

  “As time went on,” the woman continued, “he explained it all to me, leaving out the part about my mother dying on his boat. The way he told it was that he felt terribly guilty about my mother’s disappearance. And I’m afraid this was also the theme of several acid trips he took in those days.”

  “We know about the drugs, Julia,” Berenger said. “And we know he was already being treated for mental illness. I spoke to his family doctor. The onset of Stuart Clayton’s schizophrenia was when he was in high school.”

  She nodded. “My mother’s death, the drugs, the stress of being a musician—all that contributed to my father’s digression into a pit of hell. I understand that he tried to commit suicide shortly after that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He tried it again in Italy. The drag queen job at the nightclub had got him into some trouble with some gay-bashing thugs. They thought he was a homosexual since he worked as a drag queen. They beat him up pretty badly one night after a performance, outside behind the building. So he stopped performing. He overdosed on drugs again. I don’t know where he got the psychedelics from—they are very hard to obtain in Italy. At any rate, he went over the edge. He spent longer periods of time as Sylvia Favero until he was her twenty four-seven. The doctors couldn’t get him to change back to his real self. He was in a Milan hospital for three years.”

  Julia turned to them again. “I’m glad you’re not laughing. I know it sounds like a bad comedy.”