Capital Crimes (19 page)

“But you have no idea what,” said Baker.

“With someone like Jack, could’ve been anything.”

“Someone like Jack?”

“My experience has been that creative and moody go together. Jack had a reputation for being difficult—impatient, sharp-tongued, unable to maintain relationships. I don’t doubt any of that’s true, but with me he was pretty pleasant. Though at times I felt he was working really hard to be amiable.”

“He needed you to get on and off that plane,” said Baker.

“That was probably it,” said Delaware.

“Ribs at Jack’s,” said Lamar. “Any liquid refreshment?”

“Jack had a beer, I had a Coke.”

“Only one beer?”

“Only one.”

“Pretty good self-control.”

“Since I’ve known him, he’s been temperate.”

Lamar said, “This was a guy who skydived on acid and raced motorcycles while driving blind.”

“I’ll amend the statement. Around me, he’s been temperate. He once told me he was slowing down like an old freight train. He rarely divulged his private life to me, even after we built up a rapport.”

“How long did that take—rapport?”

“Couple of weeks. No treatment’s effective unless there’s trust. I’m sure you guys know that.”

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

“Interrogating witnesses is more about developing a relationship than strong-arming.”

Baker rubbed his shaved head. “You counsel the LA po-lice on technique?”

“My friend over there, Lieutenant Sturgis, does pretty well by himself.”

“Sturgis with an
i-s
or an
e-s
?”

“With an
i:
like the motorcycle meet.”

“You’re also a biker?”

“I rode a bit when I was younger,” said Delaware. “Nothing big-bore.”

“Slowed down yourself?”

Delaware smiled. “Don’t we all?”

4

T
hey stayed with the shrink for another twenty minutes, going over the same ground, asking the same questions in different ways in order to tease out discrepancies.

Delaware answered consistently, with no sense of evasiveness. That wasn’t enough for Baker to give him a pass, seeing as he was the last person, so far, to see Jack Jeffries alive and most murders boiled down to someone the vic knew. The guy being a doctor didn’t mean much, either. Then there was the hypnotist deal, which, no matter what Delaware claimed, was a form of mind-bending.

On the other side, there were no visible cuts on the guy, his demeanor was appropriate, his movements could be traced easily until ten thirty, he had no obvious motive, and hadn’t bothered to set up an alibi for the time of the murder.

“Do you know if Jack was married?” Baker asked him.

“He wasn’t.”

“Any special person in his life?”

“No one he told me about.”

“Anyone we should contact in LA about his death?”

“I suppose you could start by calling up his agent…or maybe it’s his ex-agent. I seem to recall something about Jack firing him several years ago. I’m sorry but if he told me a name, I don’t remember it.”

Baker wrote down
agent
on his notepad. “So no one keeping the home fires burning?”

“No one that I know about.”

Lamar said, “What are your plans now, Doctor?”

“I guess there’s no reason for me to stick around.”

“We’d appreciate it if you did.”

“You were planning to be here till after the concert,” Baker said, “so how about at least for a day or so?”

Those pale eyes aimed at them. Small nod. “Sure, but let me know when it’s okay to leave.”

They thanked him, and went up to the eighth floor. After roping the door with yellow crime scene tape, they gloved, turned on the light and proceeded to paw through Jack Jeffries’s magnificent-view suite. During the ten hours Jeffries had lived there, he’d managed to turn it into a sty.

Clothes were strewn everywhere. Empty soda cans, wrinkled bags of chips, nuts, and pork rind whose contents littered the floor. No booze empties, doobies or pills, so maybe Jeffries had told the shrink the truth about slowing down.

In a corner next to a couch, Jeffries’s guitar, a shiny jumbo Gibson with a rhinestone-studded cowboy pick-guard leaned against the wall in a precarious position.

Lamar was about to move it, but checked himself. Finish up and take Polaroids first.

On Jeffries’s nightstand was the room key they hadn’t found in his pocket—so much for that lead. Also, a snapshot, curling at the edges.

The subject was a kid: a big beefy young man, eighteen or so with cropped fair hair. He wore some kind of athletic uniform. Not football, no pads. A wine-colored shirt with a white collar, across the chest
WESTCHESTER
in gold letters.

Smiling like a hero.

Lamar said, “Looks just like Jack. At least what Jack used to look like, right? This is maybe the kid he had with Melinda Raven and that other actress, whatshername?”

Baker lifted the picture with a gloved hand. On the back, genteel handwriting, feminine, in deep red ink.

Dear J: This is Owen after his last big game. Thanks for the anonymous donation to the school. And for giving him space. Love, M.

“M for Melinda,” said Lamar.

Baker said, “What kind of uniform is this?”

“Rugby, El Bee.”

“Isn’t that British?”

“They play it at the prep schools.”

Baker regarded his partner. “You sure know a lot about it.”

“One of my many schools played it, but not all that well,” said Lamar. “Flint Hill. I lasted six whole months there. If it hadn’t been for varsity basketball, I would have been booted in two. Once I discovered guitars and stopped playing sports for the well-heeled alumni, no one had a lick of use for me.”

Baker opened a drawer. “Looky here.” Holding up a sheet of lined paper with crenellated edges that said it had been torn from a spiral notebook.

Verses in black pen filled the sheet. Block-printed lettering but with flourishes on the capitals.

Thought my songs would carry me far

Thought I’d float on my guitar

But The Man says you’re no good for us

Might as well catch that Greyhound Bus

Refrain: Music City Breakdown,

It’s a Music City Breakdown

Just a Music City Shakedown,

A real Music City Takedown

Thought they cared about Mournful Hank

Thought I’d come and break the bank

Then they made me walk the plank

Now I’m here all dark and dank

(Refrain)

“So much for creative output,” Baker said. “This is pretty juvenile.”

The tall man took the sheet, scanned. “Maybe it’s a first draft.”

Baker didn’t answer.

Lamar said, “Guess the guy didn’t figure on getting his throat cut and us archaeologizing all over his shit.” Slapping the paper down on the nightstand.

“We should take it,” said Baker.

“So take it.”

“Someone’s cranky.”

“Hey,” said Lamar, “I’m just feeling for the guy. He beats his fear, manages to fly over here on his own dime just to do some good, and ends up like we just saw him. That’s a rotten deal any way you shake it, El Bee.”

“I’m not denying that.” Baker placed the sheet in an evidence bag. The two of them continued to toss the suite. Going over every square inch and finding nothing interesting except a note on a message pad that seemed to bear out Delaware’s story:
BBQ Jacks B’Way bet 4 &5 Call AD or solo?

The note was in a completely different handwriting from the song lyrics.

“The directions have to be Jack’s handwriting,” Baker said. “So where’d the lyrics come from?”

“Maybe he had a visitor,” Lamar said. “You know, some wannabe using a ruse like room service, then dropping his bad poetry on him.”

“So why didn’t Jack throw it away?”

Lamar said, “Maybe the guy was dry and he was searching for inspiration.”

Baker stared at him. “He musta been desperate to steal from the likes of this.”

“Well, he hadn’t had a hit in a long time.”

“That’s thin, Stretch.”

“Agreed, El Bee, but it’s all I can think of. Let’s see if we can’t get prints off it anyway, run an AFIS.”

Baker jiggled the bag. “What we need to do is bring in the CSers and have ’em print the whole damn pigsty. I’ll take the pictures and then we can book.”

Lamar stood back as Baker walked around snapping Polaroids. Both of them careful not to disturb easily printable surfaces.

Baker said, “You wanna call Melinda Raven tomorrow morning? Find out if Owen is her kid and ask what his relationship was with his daddy.”

“I can do that. Alternatively, we can go to the library and read old
People
magazines. Why play our ace card?”

Baker nodded and continued to snap Polaroids. When he was done, he stowed his camera and headed for the door. Lamar, still gloved, hesitated, then placed Jeffries’s guitar on the bed before he closed the door.

5

B
aker dropped Lamar off at his condo at nine
AM.
They’d made a short stopover at the lab to run an AFIS fingerprint check on the note. The system was down, try again later.

“I’m going to catch a couple hours of shut-eye,” said Lamar. “Okay with you?”

“Better than okay.” Baker drove off.

Sue Van Gundy was up, at the dinette table, eating her Special K with sliced banana, decaf on the side. Planning, as was her habit, to leave in twenty for the beginning of her eleven-to-seven shift.

She lit up when she saw her husband, got up, wrapped her arms around his waist, rested her cheek on his flat, hard chest.

“That,” he said, “feels nice.”

“How’d it go on Jeffries, honey?”

Lamar kissed her hair, they both sat down and he pilfered her decaf. “It went nowhere, babe. We’re starting from nothing. And Baker’s in one of those snits.”

“Because it’s music-related.” Statement, not a question.

“Three years we’ve been working together and he still won’t tell me why he hates anything to do with tone and rhythm.”

“Lamar,” said Sue, “I’m sure it’s something to do with his folks. Just like that nickname you gave him. He really was a lost little boy, growing up on the road, it couldn’t have been anything like a normal childhood. Then they up and
die
on him, Lamar? And he’s all
alone
?”

“I know,” he said. Thinking:
But there’s got to be more.
One time, right after he and Baker had started as a team and he’d learned of his partner’s quirk, he’d done some sniffing around, found out Baker’s parents had been a pair of singers.

Danny and Dixie, traveling the back roads doing honky-tonk, county fairs, roadhouse one-nighters. Danny on guitar, Dixie on the mandolin.

The
mandolin.

A long way from stars, nothing on Google. Lamar dug some more, found the obit in an old newspaper file.

Sue was insightful, but still, there had to be more to it than longtime grief.

She said, “Let me make you some eggs.”

“No, thanks, baby. I just need to sleep.”

“Then I’ll tuck you in.”

Baker went home, stripped naked, fell into bed, was asleep before his face hit the sheet.

Much of the afternoon was spent with the two of them sitting at the center table in the pale purple Murder Squad detectives’ room, working the phone and sifting through the slew of tips that had poured in after Jack Jeffries’s murder hit the news.

TV, broadcast, radio, the final edition of
The Tennessean.
By evening, it would be the national entertainment shows.

Fondebernardi and Lieutenant Jones stopped in to see how everything was going. Both of them too experienced and smart to push because that would accomplish nothing other than make their detectives nervous. But they were edgy, all that media attention.

Baker and Lamar had a data flood on their hands from the blitz of phone tips. Sometimes too much information was worse than none at all. Like a room with fifty different fingerprint patterns. Every call they fielded was from a nut, a psychic or just a well-meaning citizen imagining or exaggerating. Two dozen people claiming to have seen Jeffries in two dozen unfeasible places at impossible times.

A few informants were certain he’d been accompanied by a dangerous-looking person. Half of those described a woman, the other half a man. Details as to height, weight, clothing and demeanor were cloudy to the point of uselessness, but everyone agreed on one thing: a dangerous-looking
black person.
And that included black informants.

The detectives had seen that before, called it The Color Kneejerk, but given a 911 caller who sounded African-American, it couldn’t be dismissed.

Then the 911 caller showed up at headquarters, a former merchant marine, now homeless, named Horace Watson, who lived in an eastside shelter and liked to take long walks by the river. The man was seventy-three, wizened and toothless. He was also as white as Al Gore; his southern Louisiana accent misconstrued as black patois.

Lamar and Baker took him into a room and started in on developing a relationship by giving him a Danish and coffee. Watson was already tipsy but outgoing, a nice drunk and eager to help. Volunteering about how he always walked by that area—that particular piece of land because sometimes you could find aluminum cans for the Redemption Center and one time he’d found a watch. Too bad it didn’t work.

This time, he’d found more than he was looking for. Freaking out when he saw the dead man, he’d hurried back to the shelter to tell someone. Found a pay phone along the way and made the call.

Now he was wondering…ahem…about maybe a
ree
-ward?

“Sorry, sir,” said Lamar, “no rewards for finding bodies, only murderers.”

“Oh,” said Watson. Flashing a sunken grin. “Cain’t blame a guy for trahn.”

They questioned him awhile longer, ran him through the system and got a hit with a few misdemeanors. When Baker suggested a polygraph, Watson loved the idea. “Long as it don’t hoit.”

“Painless, Mr. Watson.”

“Let’s do it, den. Always wanna try new t’ings.”

Lamar and Baker traded looks.

Stretch cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry, sir, no polygraphers on the premises. We’ll call you.”

“Oka-ay,” said Watson. “I got nuttin a do.”

Calls to Jack Jeffries’s credit card company, follow-up chats with a supervisor at Marquis Jet and the limo driver who’d taken Jeffries and Delaware to the hotel, and a brief sit-down with the staff at Jack’s Bar-B-Que confirmed every detail of Dr. Delaware’s story.

No one at the restaurant had noticed where Jeffries had gone.

Baker and Lamar spent the next two hours canvassing neighboring merchants east of the barbecue joint, talking to passersby, anyone who hung out regularly on the numbered streets between Fifth and First.

Nothing.

With little else to go on, the two detectives started making phone calls, splitting the list of the performers for the upcoming “Evening at the Songbird Café for the Benefit and Protection of the First Amendment.”

Among the names were some of Lamar’s idols: Stretch did his police duty with gusto. Baker made the calls with reticence bordering on hostility. The sum total of twenty-two phone calls yielded the same results, which were no results. Everyone was stunned by the news, but no one had seen hide nor hair of Jack Jeffries. Some didn’t even know he had been scheduled to perform. Checking Jeffries’s outgoing cell calls verified the stories. If Jack had attempted to reach former buddies, he’d done so on a landline that the detectives were unaware of.

A seven
PM
call to Lieutenant Milo Sturgis in LA verified Dr. Alexander Delaware’s longtime association with the department. Sturgis termed Delaware as brilliant.

“If you can use him,” the lieutenant said, “do it.”

Baker asked him if he knew Delaware had been treating Jack Jeffries.

Sturgis said, “No, he never talks about his cases. Guy’s ethical.”

“Sounds like you like him.”

“He’s a friend,” said Sturgis. “That’s an effect of his being a good guy, not a cause.”

The AFIS report on the scrap of song lyrics from Jack Jeffries’s room came back negative for any match with an individual in the system. The crime scene people were still working at the scene and the results would start to trickle in tomorrow.

Baker called the coroner’s office and spoke to Dr. Inda Srinivasan. She said, “Obviously tox won’t be back for a few days but this was one unhealthy guy. His heart was enlarged, his coronary arteries were seriously occluded, his liver was cirrhotic and one of his kidneys was atrophied, with a cyst on the other not that long from bursting. Top of that, he’s got noticeable cerebral atrophy, more like what you’d see in an eighty-year-old than a sixty-five-year-old.”

“He was also fat and had dandruff,” said Baker. “Now tell me what killed him.”

“Severed carotid laceration, exsanguination and subsequent shock,” said the pathologist. “My point is, Baker, he probably didn’t have long, either way.”