by Dave Daren
“Hello Vicki,” she said. “I have those emails you asked me to bring over.”
“Of course,” Vicki told her. “That’s perfect. Have a seat. Could I get you a cup of coffee?”
Leila shook her head, and Vicki grabbed her a chair and sat down.
I introduced myself and perched on the side of Vicki’s desk, and then the young woman pulled out a manila folder.
“This is everything within the last thirty days on Jerry’s Outlook,” Leila said. “The police have his computers, and they have all of this. But I also had his accounts on my laptop. I tried to find anything, but there was nothing relevant I could find. It was all business contacts, conversations about the film, and between cast members, mainly.”
Vicki grabbed them, and I looked over her shoulder.
“There are some conversations,” Leila added, “that seemed odd. Like the one between him and Allen Wagenschutz. They were arguing about a film concept, and some of the wording sounded a little … dark. It was nothing overt, the tone just seemed off.”
“Uh-huh,” I murmured. “Where is that conversation?”
Leila pointed out where she had flagged it, and Vicki read it over.
“Yeah,” Vicki noted. “The wording is a little cryptic. Hmm.”
I flipped through the rest of the stack, and there was one I found that was interesting. But not in the way Leila had intended.
“He was buying an antique gramophone, huh?” I mused.
He’d answered an ad on The Herald’s classified section for a one thousand dollar record player from the early 1900’s.
“At that price it couldn’t have been a set piece,” I added.
“Oh, yeah,” Leila shrugged dismissively, “he was into a lot of that vintage sound equipment. He’s the one who turned me onto vinyl. Better quality, more raw.”
“Right,” I muttered absentmindedly, but then I had an idea.
I handed the papers back to Vicki, and she and Leila continued to talk about Allen Wagenschutz. There might be something there with the loan shark, but I thought I might have stumbled across another lead.
I turned and looked at the crime photo on my computer screen again, and then I zoomed in. In the background on the office shot was a stack of eight track tapes.
Bingo.
I quickly called the police chief, Hal Durant.
“Has a sweep been made of Jerry’s house?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “We’ve got it cordoned off.”
“I want to see it,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”
He sighed. “Alright, Henry. We’ll let you poke around in there, but we’re coming in with you.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“I’ll meet you there,” he replied.
Leila and Vicki continued to pore over e-mails, and Vicki looked up as I rose to leave.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’re going on a sweep of Jerry’s house with the cops,” I said with a grin.
She raised her eyebrows. “Great idea.”
“Do you have the address?” I asked Leila.
She scrawled it down on a sticky note, and I programmed it into my GPS.
“The cops have already picked over the place,” Leila said. “I let them in a couple of times, just so you know. But you know Jerry. You never know what you might find in there.”
“You never know,” I echoed and rubbed my chin.
“You have an idea,” Vicki accused as she narrowed her eyes at me.
“I do,” I confessed, “but it’s only an idea, so let’s all keep doing what we’re doing.”
I left the office and drove the two miles out to the address Leila gave me. Jerry lived in a gated residential community, in a red stucco one story house with a terracotta roof.
I needed to text Leila for a gate code, but she responded quickly. Then I went in through the winding streets and passed a catch and release fishing pond, a couple of natural fountains, a tennis court, and some hiking trails. Several streets down, I finally found the house peeking out behind towering trees.
There were no vehicles in the driveway. Jerry’s truck was either still at the studio, or under police impound for evidence. At some point, Clare and his mother would have to fight for next of kin rights to the vehicle.
The outside looked decently maintained enough for HOA, I guessed. But it had the sort of sterile look that implied no one cared beyond that. I parked against the curb and looked around a bit at the yard and driveway.
Hal Durant and a couple of cops showed up not long after.
Hal was an overweight man who loved his black Stetson hat and aviator shades. He’d seen more than his fair share of criminals and liars in his day, and had patience for none of them--which, in his estimation, included just about the entire human population.
I didn’t take it personally that I was included in the bunch.
“Alright, Irving,” he sighed as he approached me. “What is it you want to see, here?”
I leaned against my car and took a swig of water as I nodded my head.
“I just want to look around,” I replied, “and see if there’s anything in there that might give us a lead or two.”
“We’ve been through here a few times,” Hal told me. “The place is a dump. But I’ll take you in.”
A couple of bored looking officers got out of their cars, and they stood around with Durant, who nodded slowly.
“Alright, men,” he said, without taking his eyes off me. “Take him inside.”
The officers nodded, and we all headed up the drive to the house. We walked in through the door to a darkened entry, and I coughed from the dust. Then someone flipped on a light switch, and I saw what Hal meant.
“Whoa,” I said as I took in the sight.
Hal’s comment that it was a dump was an understatement. Jerry was a next level of pack rat. He was such a straight up hoarder, it was disturbing.
We entered into what was supposed to be the living room, and I guessed I could make out some couches, under an incredible amount of clutter. Stacks of boxes hit the ceiling in some places, and in others, they were just casually tossed and open.
Everything imaginable was in that room--boxes and boxes of clothes overflowed onto the furniture, with sporting equipment, board games, a box fan, a defunct microwave, and old shoes. An old pizza box on top of a pile grazed my arm, and I noticed the delivery label.
“The date on this label,” I croaked out as my stomach churned, “was in January.”
“Uh-huh,” Officer Durant said.
“It’s June,” I stated.
“Yep.” Durant nodded.
I tried not to gag from disgust and moved on with my search. I walked through the living area and found what looked like an original Beatles Abbey Road LP. I picked it up, pulled out the record, and flipped it around in my fingers. Great condition. I thought about how much my dad would freak out if he saw that--especially thrown in with all of this junk.
“This is probably worth a lot of money,” I told Durant.
Durant eyed me suspiciously, and I gently placed the record in the safest place I could see in the mess.
Then I looked at a stack of books and found a yearbook that appeared it might be of some interest. But when I tried to remove it from a stack, I caused an avalanche with photos from the 1980’s tumbling down, and they were quickly followed by a table and lamp as they clattered to the ground.
“Careful,” Durant warned. “You could get injured in this place. God only knows what’s in this crap.”
“Or what lives in it,” I muttered.
“Exactly,” he grumbled as he looked around at his feet. So far, we had not run across any “tenants” but we knew they were somewhere.
“Do you know what might have been an office?” I asked as I got to the point of my visit.
“It’s back that way,” one of the officers replied as he pointed off down a hallway.
We picked our way through the m
ess and passed the kitchen. I didn’t even want to know what was in that room without a hazmat suit. We finally arrived at an open area designed to be a den, and Jerry had turned it into an enormous cavern of an office.
This was the only room that looked like it might be operable, or at least habitable. A built in bookcase took up an entire wall and overflowed with books and dusty encyclopedias, and more sat in piles on the floor.
I stepped over several stacks of thick volumes and noticed many of them were centered around World War I military history. I guessed those were the ones he’d been studying for the film period.
It would have seemed that he would’ve been more historically aware, based on the number of books he had on the subject. I flipped through a couple and figured out why he hadn’t read them. Just a glance through the subtitles and the grainy black and white photos was enough to put me to sleep.
World War II was about Nazis trying to take over the world, and the good guys trying to save the starving Jews. At least there was a point and a human interest story there.
World War I was much more complex. It was a nebulous bloody trench war that amounted to a European power game of that reality show Survivor, with all of these competing alliances, and everybody making secret deals behind each other’s backs, until one day the archduke got shot and hell broke loose.
That’s much more difficult to follow in black and white. It occured to me that it would make an interesting modernized screenplay adaptation, though.
Oh, God, was I starting to think like Jerry Steele and The Count now?
On the other walls were glass framed movie posters, and a glance at the credits showed they were ones he’d done. There were mostly of the sexy lady gets almost eaten by zombies variety, but then there was one of The Godfather. It figured he would like that movie.
It was there I finally found his collection of vintage audio equipment. As Leila had mentioned, Jerry had built an in shelf system with old electronics in various states of repair.
“This is like a museum,” I remarked.
There were chrome and black VHS players and brown and beige electronics from the 1970’s I didn’t even know what to do with. There were also several record players and what I thought was a cassette boombox from the early 1990’s. Then I found the original Walkman I’d heard once retailed for about a hundred dollars when it came out.
I played with the buttons, and I saw Durant smirk.
“You hit the eject button, there, millennial,” he teased.
“Hey,” I chuckled, “my dad’s a guitarist who opened for CCR. I know how to use a cassette player.”
“I know Moondust,” Durant replied. “That’s your dad, huh?”
I nodded and hit the eject button. That hard, burning electrical scent common to cassette players came back to me. I didn’t use these when I was a kid, but we had one or two laying around. From time to time, my dad would show us an old bootleg live album on a tape, and if I liked what he showed me, I would go download it.
“Irving, yeah,” Durant laughed. “I should have put those together. Well, CCR’s some shit music, and Moondust tells that story about twice a year. But he can play, that’s for damn sure.”
I found a hi-fi player set up in a component cabinet. I hit the power button, and true to form, it took several seconds to come up. When it did, it buzzed with digital VU meters and several components.
“These things are designed to play multiple sound sources,” I said, and I could almost physically feel the neurons firing in my head. “What I want to know, is what he had on record.”
“What do you mean?” Durant asked.
“He’s an audiophile and a reporter,” I replied. “He wants everything ‘on the record,’ or caught on tape. If he was in trouble, he would have something, somewhere here.”
Durant nodded slowly and glanced around the room. “Good luck finding anything in here.”
“No.” I shook my head. “If you were going to record someone threatening your life, or blackmailing you, what would you do with it?”
“Put it somewhere for safekeeping,” Durant said.
“Safekeeping,” I echoed with a nod. “That’s great. Did he have a safe?”
Durant turned to the two officers, who had been largely picking through junk for no real reason.
“Yeah,” one of them said. “There was one in the bedroom. But we don’t have a combination.”
“I have an idea of what it might be,” I responded. “And if not, I know who would know. Where’s the bedroom?”
One of the officers pointed the way, and we all followed them. The bedroom was just as bad as the rest of the house, only this one smelled worse.
The bed looked like the linens hadn’t been washed in years, and it was covered in clothes, papers, and food trash. A seventy-two inch plasma television took up an entire wall, and it still ran a screensaver from the last night Jerry had spent here.
I picked my way through the carpet of beer bottles and clothes, and I approached the closet where the officers revealed a six foot black electronic safe.
“You know the combination?” Durant asked.
“I can try,” I murmured as I pulled up on my phone the license plate keypad combination Horace gave me. Then I quickly punched it into the safe.
It didn’t work.
“Shit,” I cursed.
My next plan was to text Leila, but she might not have it. But she would know likely places to start. Birthdays, anniversaries, and …
Suddenly, I remembered seeing Thad’s birthday party on Facebook.
“Hold a sec, guys,” I said as I pulled up Facebook on my phone.
I found Clare’s profile and scrolled through her photos until I got to Thad’s birthday pictures. He and several friends went dirtbike riding through the Red Rocks on October 10.
“Let’s try 10-10-09,” I said.
Durant put in the code, and boom. It opened.
“For such an artistic mind,” I chuckled, “he’s not that creative when it comes to passwords.”
“I don’t know if I’d ever call him creative at all,” Durant snorted.
We opened the safe, and the four of us--me, Durant, and the two officers--saw the contents. Inside wasn’t money, jewelry, guns or passports. Jerry’s safe was full, six feet high and three feet deep, with eight track cassette tapes.
“All the shit in this house,” I said with a frown, “packed high and low, and this is what he wants to protect? Why?”
Durant nodded thoughtfully. “They’re all dated,” he pointed out.
He was right. On the cases of each tape was an adhesive label with a date. They were arranged by year, and it looked like pretty much every day for several years. I couldn’t tell how far back it went.
“We need to listen to all of this,” I said. “All of it.”
Durant stared at the tapes, and then turned to the officers. “You heard ‘em, men. Let’s get these tapes loaded up.”
The officers sprung into action, and we all loaded up boxes of eight track tapes. We must have taken close to ten file boxes of tapes. While the officers continued to load, I snooped around the museum area for something that could play the tapes. Finally, I snagged the high-fi system, which had an eight track component.
“Alright,” Durant said once we’d loaded up everything. “We’re gonna split this up. Your team do these boxes, we’ll do these.”
“Sounds good,” I replied with a nod.
I took a trunkload of boxes and the hi-fi system back to our office. This project was going to take the rest of the week.
But I had a hunch I was right.
Chapter 9
When I got to the office, AJ was there, but Vicki had left with Leila.
“They’re going to your mom’s yoga class,” AJ told me. “They think Clare might be there. They might be able to get something more out of her.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
“What is all that?” she asked as she pointed to the hi-fi system
under my arm.
I smiled. “Our new project.” Then I put the system in the conference room and started to connect it.
“Okay,” AJ leaned against the wall, “I’ll bite. Care to elaborate?”
I chuckled as I unraveled cords. “Jerry’s safe was full of eight track tapes.”
“Eight tapes, huh?” she asked with a frown. “That’s odd. Why eight?”
I laughed. “No. It’s a type of tape called an eight track. There’s about a thousand of them.”
“A thousand tapes?” she repeated, and her eyes nearly bulged out of her head. “How are we going to go through all of that?”
“The police are going through some,” I told her, “but we’re going to do the lion’s share of the work here.” Then I connected the hi-fi system and motioned to AJ to follow me. “I’ve got about five boxes. We’re going to have to lug them all in.”
“Fun,” she sighed.
AJ and I made several trips bringing in boxes of tapes, and when we were done, they laid all over our conference table.
“This is starting to look like Jerry’s office,” she remarked.
I smirked. “This is how we know we’re on the right track. So, let’s dig in.”
“First, let’s develop some kind of system,” she said as we stared at the boxes.
“Good idea,” I agreed, but then I looked at the dusty boxes of hand lettered cases and was at a loss for how to come up with a plan.
“Okay,” she sighed after a moment, and then she shook her head. “You’re right. Let’s just dig in. There doesn’t look to be any rhyme or reason to this stuff.”
I picked up the tape with the most recent date. “I wonder how he even found these ancient tapes.”
“I guess you could find them online,” she mused with a shrug.
I inserted the tape into the machine, and the VU meter on the amplifier lit up. AJ and I sat around the conference table and listened for the playback.
A computerized voice came through, “August 19, 2018.”
And then, the trance chanting began.
It was a high soprano, and I thought it must have been one of those mezzo sopranos that broke glasses. I didn’t think those existed until I heard this tape.
