AHMM, July-August 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Talbot held up a finger when Barnes walked in, then closed a cell phone. His face held slightly more color than melted ice cream. Barnes could feel his tension from across the room.

  "Christ.” He tucked the phone into his pocket. “Debra's mother. What do I say to her?"

  "How about, ‘I'm sorry?'” Barnes suggested.

  "Yeah. After that."

  "You've got me there.” Barnes surveyed Jimmy's minimalist office, a calendar open on the computer, dates for the now-canceled Promise tour in red. He knew that Talbot gave Meg some of her early breaks in the studio, which meant he'd already put in a long life at a thankless job. Now the one gold ring he might have had waiting was gone.

  "Jimmy, how could someone have lifted Sugar's guitar last night?"

  Talbot rubbed his red eyes. “It had to happen between the stage and the truck. We've got six roadies moving stuff in and out, so someone probably snuck in while they were tearing down the amps."

  "How about guests?” Barnes asked. “People like Meg and me?"

  "Uh, counting the media guys, about fifty. I always invite some women. Chuck likes a few broads around, good for his ego."

  "But not the others?"

  "Sugar's a grownup, he doesn't chase tail. And you saw Frank's wife at the party, that brunette with legs up to here? Quince and Deb have been together pretty much since they met. Except for that blowup a few months ago."

  "Do you see Sugar doing this, Jimmy? Killing Debra?"

  "No way. I mean, even if he did knock her up—"

  "Which he says he didn't,” Barnes inserted.

  "Like I said, he's a grownup. And when the hell would he and Debra get together anyway?"

  Barnes wondered the same thing.

  "Are the roadies around? I'd like to talk to Sugar's guitar man."

  Talbot led the way into an adjoining warehouse jammed with equipment. Two by fours raised the amplifiers a few inches off the floor to protect them from any ground moisture. Barnes counted fifty Marshall cabinets, enough to recreate the bombing of Dresden. He saw a few smaller Fender amps and cabinets to one side, and a metal shelf unit full of effects pedals and guitar cables.

  "Who uses the Fenders?” he asked. He had a small Fender amplifier in his own basement.

  "Sugar. He hates the distortion with the Marshalls. Which is good because it makes his solos stand out from the other guys. And Quince uses a Telecaster with the treble up full. You probably noticed it last night? Sounds like iced dental floss going through your back teeth."

  "Yeah, I remember."

  Talbot gestured to a wiry man in a Jack Daniel's T-shirt and introduced Barnes to Waldo the Guitar Guy. Waldo's muttonchop whiskers and shaved head made his face appear to be upside down, and when he shook hands with Barnes, his white arms showed long ropy muscles. His face might have been thirty or seventy.

  "I took Sugar's axes off the stage, put them in the cases, locked them, and put them on the cart,” he said.

  "How many guitars does Sugar have?” Barnes asked.

  "Six.” Waldo gestured to another row of shelves beyond the amplifiers. His eyes were slightly red. If Barnes stayed downwind, he could get a contact high from the smell of weed drifting off the guy's clothes. “Three of them are seven strings."

  "But this was his favorite? The one that's missing?"

  "Yeah. He was using it last night, but he always has another one ready in case he breaks a string or something. I took them both off together, and the other one's fine. It was right on the truck where it should have been."

  "Jimmy thinks maybe someone got in while you guys were busy moving everything to the truck. Is there any other possibility?"

  "That's the only time I can think of,” Waldo said. “I put the guitars on the cart, and they go into a cabinet in the front of the truck. We put the amps in after them. That way we've got a nice square load so nothing can shift.” The cagey vibe of Waldo's body language reminded Barnes of a rat.

  "And everyone was so busy that nobody would notice a stranger hanging around?” Barnes tried to remember if there was a fence behind the Rhodes Theater.

  "Well, Marshalls. You can drop them out of a plane and they'll still work, but they're heavy as shit, so we all pitch in.” Waldo dug into his jeans and found a crumpled pack of Marlboros. “But who'd come around that way? The chicks all come in the stage door on the other side. And Jimmy gives out enough passes that the Bolshoi Ballet could sneak in with them and nobody'd notice."

  "Maybe a girl came in and distracted someone?” Barnes asked.

  Waldo blew a funnel of smoke out his nostrils. “Not a chance. You slow down with a cart of amps behind you, we'll roll right up your ass. Besides, if a lady wants to party, we'll be glad to help her see the sights after we're done. Offer her a little refreshment, maybe she'd like to go to Boston, you know."

  "Nobody came by last night, though?"

  "Nope.” Waldo dragged on his cigarette and blew more smoke. “Dammit."

  * * * *

  "But what would he do with it once he had it?” Quince Peters had a hangover that Barnes could feel from across the room. “He sure as hell can't put it on eBay, any guitar player in the world would recognize it."

  "Maybe just to frame Sugar?” Barnes suggested. “So the cops wouldn't look at anyone else?"

  "Shit.” Quince's breath would drop a rhino in mid stride. “Who'd want to kill Debra?"

  "Maybe you,” Barnes said. “If you knew she was sleeping with someone else."

  Peters tried to look threatening, but with his hangover, he failed miserably.

  "That's bull. Deb wasn't sleeping with anyone else."

  "So she was carrying your baby?"

  "I guess.” Quince looked toward the bathroom and Barnes stepped out of his path. When Quince returned moments later, his face had a little more color.

  "How long were you and Deb together?"

  "About two years. We were both kind of looking for something else to do, and she was writing songs. I looked at some of them, had a few ideas, suggestions. Mostly harmonies, things like that. But she wrote great lyrics."

  "Did she play any instrument?” Barnes asked.

  "She could pick stuff out on piano a little.” Peters gestured toward a keyboard crowded into a corner of the room. “Just well enough for the writing. Most of the stuff we wrote together, she'd sing the words to me and we'd write it down together. She had absolutely perfect pitch."

  Quince took a mouthful of ginger ale and it seemed to stay down. “Jimmy wanted us to incorporate for the writing, but we never got around to it. We talked about doing it now that the CD was finished."

  "Would it have been worth it?"

  Quince looked out the window at a brick wall across an alley. “The CD's great. It would have sold like candy at a nursery school. Now, with Deb dead . . ."

  He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the heels of his hands against them. In the cold harsh light of a hangover the next day, he finally seemed to realize that the woman was dead. “It's probably gonna go platinum in a day or two, even faster than it would have anyway."

  "Will Debra's death really boost the sales like that?” Barnes wondered if anyone in the band was that greedy, never mind that ghoulish.

  "When John Lennon was killed, his double LP sold millions of copies the next few days,” Peters said. “Promise wasn't the Beatles, but the story's online and we've already had like fifty thousand downloads."

  "What does that translate to in money?” Barnes asked.

  "A lot,” Peters said. “I can't do the math exactly, but Jimmy sure as hell can. That's one reason why he's the manager."

  He stared through the bedroom door. Barnes saw light colors lying on a bureau and belatedly realized he was looking at Debra Yearning's underwear. They must have done laundry the previous afternoon and were packing for this morning's canceled flight to Boston.

  "I heard Jimmy say last night that you've already written some more songs."

 
; Peters pointed to a stack of paper on the piano. “Six or seven, ready to go. Deb was starting to put words to mine, and I was fooling around with melody for hers. Almost enough for another CD. We could have burned some demos on the tour, maybe gone into the studio as soon as we came back."

  Peters looked out that same window at that same brick wall.

  * * * *

  An hour later, Barnes ascertained that the back lot of the Rhodes Theater did indeed have a seven-foot chain link fence surrounding it. He kicked off his shoes, locked his gun and jacket in his car, then slid into coveralls and heaved himself over the edge of the Dumpster and into a crinkling lake of hot dog wrappers, plastic cups with traces of fermenting beer, sticky candy wrappers, and far worse. The July sun beat down and raised the temperature ten degrees—twenty with him in the coveralls—and the stench was so thick he could almost see it drifting up toward the roofs of the adjacent buildings.

  Thankfully, he remembered his gloves too. The gunk was probably carcinogenic, or at least enough to make him sterile. He moved the debris by the armful, starting at one corner of the container and telling himself he wouldn't have to cover the entire twenty-foot length before he found what he wanted. He was right: Fifteen feet and nearly two hours later, his foot touched a large black case. He dragged it out from under a pile of coffee grounds and more beer cups and stood up, his clothes sticking to him under the coveralls and his hair plastered to his forehead.

  Scuff marks along the narrow end seemed to be the only damage, and they might not even have been new. Two stylized cubes covered the top, a psychedelic S in one and C in the other. Sugar Crisp. Barnes leaned his find against the side of the Dumpster, then gingerly straddled the edge. It was only a five-foot drop, and he made it cradling his find in both hands like a baby.

  His coveralls reeked with the detritus of the previous night's concert, and his gloves shone with multicolored indeterminate slime, but he didn't care. He avoided touching the handle and the latches at each end of the guitar case and laid it next to his car. He peeled off the coveralls and stuck them into a garbage bag in his trunk, and pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

  "Max,” he said, “guess what I found."

  * * * *

  "Pretty,” Max said. “Not that I play myself."

  "I do,” Barnes told him. “And you're right. It's beautiful.” He found a smudge on the guitar's body and took a tissue from Max's desk. “Don't your lab boys clean up after themselves when they check for fingerprints?"

  "Nah,” Lowe said. “You know how hard it is to find good help nowadays."

  Barnes liked the way the guitar rested under his rib cage, not as tightly as the Fender Stratocaster he'd played for years, but close. This guitar felt odd with the wider neck to accommodate a seventh string; he strummed it and learned that Sugar tuned it to a “C,” but wondered if that was standard. The black fingerboard had letters at the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and twelfth frets, and from above, they spelled out “raguS."

  "What would this guitar go for over the counter?” Lowe asked.

  "Don't know,” Barnes told him. “Four figures easy, but I'll bet the inlaid letters double it. And a collector would spend even more because it's Sugar's."

  "So are the fingerprints,” Max said. “They found thirty-two prints and partials on it and the case, and they're all either Crisp's or the roadie's."

  "Nobody else? Not even a partial?"

  "Nope. If the asshole just grabbed it by the handle of the case, that would make sense. The handle's too narrow for a full print."

  Barnes admired the black lacquered finish again before he put the guitar back into the case. The case bore scars from a long life on the road, but the guitar was nearly immaculate.

  "I don't get it,” he said. “It looks like the guy just took it and dropped it into the Dumpster. He didn't even try to open it. And the strings were all still there, just like I figured. So why did he even take it?"

  "Who the hell knows?” Max's hand went to his shirt pocket again. “But even if we agree that this is all just smoke so we'll look at Crisp, we don't have anyone else with a motive. I mean, it's his baby the girl was carrying."

  * * * *

  "So Sugar's off the hook."

  Meg's T-shirt read “That's Ms. Bitch to you.” She sat on the piano bench, her fingers idly playing one of the Goldberg Variations. Her bare feet stroked the pedals, and her fingers scarcely seemed to move while beautiful sounds filled her living room. Bonnie curled up on the leather couch and Clydesdale groomed himself on the bay window seat, the late afternoon sun splashing over him and filling the living room with a rich honeycomb gold.

  "Not yet,” Barnes said. “He's still the only one the cops see with a motive."

  "Barnes, Sugar was like a father to me in the studio. And with Basia—Deb—too. He was one of the guys who showed us both the way it works. I can't believe he could have done this."

  "Funny you should say ‘father,'” Barnes said. “Considering that Debra might have threatened to abort his child."

  Meg's eyes widened and her mouth sagged open; Barnes watched her struggle to reboot.

  "He had the same reaction. Not even Johnny Depp could fake it that well."

  "Why would she even say that?” Meg asked. “Did she want an abortion and think that Quince would agree if he thought the child wasn't his?"

  The Bach piece slowly morphed into “Promises in the Dark,” a song Meg heard for the first—and only—time the night before. Barnes realized he should have shopped for food on the way over. It was his turn to cook supper, but he didn't want to walk into a grocery store smelling like the Dumpster.

  "Especially if he thought it would be half black?” he asked.

  "God.” Meg stopped playing, and the silence made the room feel bigger than the Rhodes Theater. “That's not the girl I remember."

  Barnes watched the cats trot out to the kitchen together. “But she hadn't told Quince yet, and she'd have to pretty soon. She'd start to show, maybe even before the end of the tour."

  He sat on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. “Valerie's mother knows Basia's mom from church, so Valerie's going over with her to visit tonight."

  The sound of crunching drifted through Meg's dining room. She joined him on the couch. Her bare feet stroked his shins and he shivered.

  "Think she'll learn anything?"

  Even though Meg encouraged him to hire Valerie away from the strip joints, he knew the blonde girl's youth and “three-dimensional vitality"—Meg's euphemism—made her nervous.

  "We'll have to wait and see."

  "If she goes back to school this fall, you'll have to find another receptionist.” Meg's voice sounded completely non-committal, a trick she must have picked up while playing in the studios when everyone else was having a testosterone rush.

  Barnes stood again. “I want to talk to the drummer and the bass player too."

  Meg retrieved her sandals from under the piano. “I'll drive."

  * * * *

  Chuck Boyle greeted them with a Budweiser in his hand and Dorito crumbs in his mustache. He showed them to chairs facing his couch across a coffee table littered with beer cans and a crumpled Doritos bag. His eyes seemed to be searching for the girl in the halter from the night before.

  "Chuck.” Barnes watched the drummer's eyes focus on his face. “Did you have regular sleeping arrangements on tour?"

  "Quince and Deb in one room,” the drummer said. “Me and Sugar in another, Jimmy and Frank in a third."

  "Always?” Barnes asked.

  "Uh-huh. Jimmy snores like hell. Frank was the only one who could sleep through it."

  "So you and Sugar have been together whenever you've been on the road."

  "Yeah."

  Barnes felt Meg's eyes on him. “Tell us about the blowup before Debra stopped drinking."

  "Shoot, they both had pretty short fuses, especially with a buzz on, but the real dustup was the last night of the tour."

&n
bsp; "Indianapolis? I think that's what Jimmy said."

  "Uh-huh.” Chuck held up another Bud can. Barnes and Meg both shook their heads, and he cracked it for himself. “We had a few more gigs after Indy. The last one was . . . Buffalo—that's where she split. We couldn't find her anywhere. Quince was apeshit the next day when he sobered up. Jimmy was worried sick. He looked like some animal, you know, ready to gnaw his own leg off to get out of a trap."

  Chuck put down the can and it already sounded empty. “Two days later, she called Quince's cell and told him she was at her sister's."

  "Hamtramck?” Meg asked.

  "Farther north. One of the Tri Cities."

  "And she stopped drinking after that?” Barnes asked.

  "Yeah. Told me she'd done enough stupid things for one lifetime."

  "Did she explain what she meant?"

  The drummer rattled the Doritos bag, but it was empty too. “I just figured she meant the fights."

  "How do you read this, Chuck? You think Sugar got her pregnant?"

  Chuck's eyes seemed to lose the beat. He crumpled up the bag and tossed it toward the wastebasket, but it rimmed out. Barnes repeated his question, and Chuck shook his head. “Not in this life. Sugar liked Deb, sure, we all did. But not that way."

  "So do you have any idea who the father is?"

  "I didn't even know Deb was pregnant."

  He dug through the cans on the table for the TV remote and let Barnes and Meg find their own way out.

  * * * *

  Beverly Tolliver, almost Barnes's height in sandals, looked like she'd been up all night with a sick child, and Frank looked only slightly better than Chuck Boyle. His stage tattoos were gone, leaving his forearms the color of plaster. Beverly plunked mugs of coffee in front of the guests, and Barnes knew he'd be her friend for life.

  "Frank,” he asked. “Did Sugar have a thing for Debra?"

  "No way.” Frank shook his head and added sweetener to his mug.

  "How about Chuck?"

  "Nah.” Frank shook his head again, exactly the same tempo. You could tell he was a musician. “Sugar's straight."

  "Wise ass.” His wife slapped his arm. “Chuck likes them younger than Deb, anyway,” she added.