How to Kill a Rock Star (42 page)

My heart hurt. So did my head. “Why didn’t you talk Saul out of it?”

“You’re not listening. Saul wasn’t wearing the mask.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, poking at the olives in my glass.

John dropped the
Saul
jive. He suddenly seemed exasperated. “For Christ’s sake, did you know Paul had quit smoking?”

“So he said.”

“He’d been running, too. At night. He liked to run right as it was getting dark.”

“So?”

“You’re not listening, Miss American Pie.”

“Please don’t cal me that.”

“Pay attention because I’m only going to say this once.” John leaned in so close I could smel a mustiness emanating from his clothes. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I were planning on taking a short walk off a tal bridge, I’d be doing al the things I gave up twenty years ago. I’d be smoking up a storm, eating hot dogs at every meal, tossing back the whiskey, I might even be shooting smack in my arm, and I sure as
hell
wouldn’t be watching sunsets at a 10k pace.” I shook my head. “You lost me.”

“Good Lord.” John made his way to the corner of the bar and began rummaging through the leather jacket that hung beside the cash register.

I was wishing I hadn’t come. I wanted to be home, lonely apartment or not. I wasn’t in the mood for John’s nonsensi-cal barroom Zen. I slid a couple dol ars under my glass,
hopped off the stool, and tried to slip out.

“Come back here,” John said.

I returned to stand beside the seat I’d just vacated. John handed me a smal news clipping. “Have you read that?” It was an obituary that had appeared in one of the local alternative music papers after Paul’s death. “Of course,” I said. “I saw it weeks ago.”

“I didn’t ask if you
saw
it, I asked if you
read
it.”

“Yes.”

“Humor me, Miss American Pie. Read it again.” It took me less than a minute to scan the three-paragraph piece of nothing. Basical y, the blurb mentioned Paul’s name and occupation, and had a short list of his accomplishments, but it was written in a way that thoroughly diminished their scope. There was a quote from Feldman, the same one from the police report. And a quote from the eyewitness, also lifted from the police report.

That was it.

I handed it back to John and resumed my trek to the exit.

“See ya ’round, Miss American Pie.”

“Please,” I said, halfway out the door. “I asked you not to cal me that.”

“I know you’re in mourning,” Lucy said over the phone. “But a deadline is a deadline.”

Sonica
had thrown in two quick sentences about Paul’s death in the previous issue. My more in-depth article on his life was now a week overdue, and despite the tremendous urge I had to slam the receiver down hard enough to cause permanent damage to Lucy’s hearing, I assured her that the assignment would be finished by Monday—the last possible day to make publication—and then I politely hung up.

It was Saturday night and I hadn’t written a word. I turned on my laptop and spread the contents of the Paul folder across my bedroom floor. With Bananafish’s CD as background music, I read the transcripts from my lunch with Jack Stone, the chorus to “Death as a Spectator Sport” a disturbingly appropriate soundtrack. Before the song ended, I jotted down a few points and questions on which to focus: • Don’t paint him as a quitter, a loser, or a rock star.

• Don’t glorify his death.

• Has talent become irrelevant?

• Has the industry done to music what McDonald’s has done to eating?

• Specifics of the suicide?

That last one was going to require an examination of the autopsy report, which was adjacent to my right foot, just out of reach, and stil hadn’t been opened, chiefly because the last
thing I wanted was a vision of Paul’s body as nothing more than a broken vestige of the sublime life it once held.

I stared at the envelope and it stared back like an enemy.

Eventual y I dragged it in using my heel, removed the eleven-page document, and lifted the cover sheet with a loud exhale as if I were ripping a band-aid from a fresh wound.

The first page contained basic information: the name, address, sex, and age of the decedent. Underneath that was an anatomical diagnosis listing severe trauma to the spine, a crushed skul , and a broken femur as injuries suffered on impact. Below that was a line where the medical examiner had to fil in the cause of death. He’d written: SUICIDE.

My skin felt prickly, my eyes were changing from solids to liquid, and Paul’s voice was stil bouncing off the wal s as I moved on to the next page—a pathological diagnosis that included blood-alcohol and drug test results, both of which were negative. Despite the rumors that circulated around the Lower East Side after Paul’s death, one of which had him bran-dishing a bottle of red wine in his hand and wailing “Bohemian Rhapsody” as he jumped, he had been neither high nor drunk nor singing. I made a note to include this in the piece.

On the fol owing page there were two simple outlines of a male figure, one front-facing, the other back-facing.The examiner had drawn lines to various body parts connecting physical descriptions of markings found on the decedent’s body to their specific locations, presumably for identification purposes.

From the figure’s left shoulder, a line had been extended out to the middle of the page, next to which the examiner had written: TATTOO ON

UPPER ARM. In parenthesis he’d added: SKULL AND CROSSBONES.

I supposed that, prior to his death, Paul had gotten inked again. The choice of a skul and crossbones seemed morbid and cliché, but so did jumping off the bridge, and for this reason I didn’t give it a second thought.

37Then I resumed scanning the page. Something was wrong. Paul’s other tattoos—the man/boy cherub hanging from the butterfly and the Chinese symbol—had gone unnoted by the examiner.

My chest tightened. Smal gasping sounds were coming from my throat. And although I could only imagine one fantastic explanation, I was too frightened, too shocked, and too gutless to name it.

I studied the drawings until I could trace every line without looking, but they made no sense beyond the context of the page.

After weighing my options for a long time, I forced myself to cal the only person I knew who had gotten a look at the corpse.

“Did you or did you not see Paul’s body before it was cremated?”

Feldman paused. “Eliza?” Another pause. “Christ, do I hear Bananafish?”

I turned off the music. “Please, this is important.”

“You sound strange,” he said.

“Just tel me you’re
sure
it was Paul. You
recognized
him.”

“We went over al this when you interviewed me.” But we hadn’t. I had deliberately refrained from asking Feldman about the body for the same reason I hadn’t looked at the autopsy report—I didn’t want to know.

“I’m trying to finish this
Sonica
piece. There are a couple things that aren’t adding up and I—”

“
Peepers
,” Feldman said, “this hardly needs an in-depth investigation. Paul jumped, he croaked, they fished him out of the river. The end.”

I wanted to shove a pile of shit down Feldman’s throat until
he
croaked. “What about dental records? Don’t they use those? Did they ever check to see if—”

“Wasn’t necessary,” Feldman said quickly. “Paul hadn’t
been in the water long enough. I was able to identify his face.

And he had a picture ID on him.”

“You’re tel ing me you’re positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the body you saw was Paul’s?”

“One hundred percent.” His voice was like a snake slith-ering down my spine. “Now how about you tel me what’s got your panties in such an uproar.”

“Forget it,” I said, suddenly terrified. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I hung up wondering why it hadn’t dawned on me before.

Didn’t matter. It was clear to me now.

Feldman was lying.

For the next two days I hardly spoke to anybody, one exception being the cal I made to Lucy Enfield, to explain that writing about Paul’s death had proven much more emotional y draining than I’d imagined. I told Lucy I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and furthermore, I wouldn’t be coming back to work.

Lucy sounded satisfied, like she and I had been playing a game al along, one in which she had final y emerged the victor.

Terry cal ed within the hour and tried to get me to reconsider. When I told him I’d made up my mind, he said, “Good luck, Mags. We’l miss you.”

Fortunately, Loring had refused to accept rent money from me during the nine months I lived with him, so getting another job wasn’t something I had to worry about right away. I could concentrate al my energies on Paul.

The floor was stil covered in my notes and I scrutinized every page for hours, but with the exception of the discrep-ancy in the autopsy report, I couldn’t find anything else that struck me as even remotely suspicious.

I needed to talk to someone, but Vera was too sensible,
37and I couldn’t turn to Michael without more evidence. He was liable to have me committed.

John the Baptist was rinsing out glasses in the sink when I walked in.

“Miss American Pie,” he said, a dish towel tucked into his pants, his tone implying he knew I was there for purposes having nothing to do with hydration.

I stood on my toes and leaned over the bar. “What were you trying to tel me the other night?” He went to the corner, rifled through his coat pocket as he’d done before, pul ed out the same news clipping he’d shown me then, and slapped it onto the bar like he was dealing me the ace I needed for blackjack.

I picked it up and glanced over the three paragraphs.

Once again, nothing struck me as unusual.

“Jesus, do you have to be half-blind to see it?” John grabbed the clipping, marked a few sentences, and slid it back my way. “One more time,” he said. “And when you get to the part I circled, try using a soft, arrogant-yet-bashful sort of voice, why don’t you?”

I eyed him curiously.

“Do it,” he said.

John had circled the account of Paul’s suicide as described by Wil Lucien, who was referred to by name in the police report, but in print was known simply as “the eyewitness.” According to the police, there was an eyewitness who had been driving westbound at approximately 3

a.m. the morning of October 12 and saw the events unfold. The eyewitness, who was described by the first officer on the scene as “visibly shaken,”

corroborated Mr. Feldman’s story.

The eyewitness said he noticed Mr. Hudson walking
toward the side of the bridge and slowed down to see if the man needed help. Al egedly the eyewitness cal ed out to Mr. Hudson, who never turned around.

“He stepped over the railing and, without looking back, did a swan dive right off the bridge and into the water,” the eyewitness was quoted as saying. “A goddamn swan dive right off the bridge.” I reread the last line three more times and couldn’t get a solid breath. Then I met John’s eyes, wanting to say what I was thinking, but knowing that to do so could be perilous.

“Please tel me you haven’t shown this to anyone else.”

“Just you, Miss American Pie,” John said. “Just you.”
Michael was reaching the end of a long shift. It had been a hectic day, par for the course during the holiday season, but it was the stress, the abstruseness of the last few months that was real y wearing him down.

Everything was final y starting to sink in, and Michael was beginning to realize how much he had gained and lost over the course of the year. In effect, he had been handed his life’s dream, only to watch it get pulverized. And through no fault of his own. He had been the passenger in a head-on col ision. A casualty of someone else’s fate. And yes, he was disappointed. But admitting disappointment was asking for trouble. This he’d seen firsthand with Paul. Left unchecked, disappointment had a way of rendering the good things in life meaningless.

Michael had a wife who loved him, they had food on the table, a little money in the bank, and he would never be able to say he hadn’t tried.

He made the decision to be oblivious rather than bitter, numb instead of heartbroken. Case in point: just two days earlier, he’d told Vera that his music career was over and he’d already submitted his résumé to a few commercial art and graphic design firms in the city.

It’s so much easier to surrender than to fight.

“How’s the shepherd’s pie?”

The customer’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere,
pul ing Michael back into the moment. He was about to tel the man that the shepherd’s pie was his favorite item on the menu when he felt a tug on his arm and turned to see his sister behind him.

“I need to talk to you,” she said breathlessly, as if she’d run al the way there.

He couldn’t tel if she was upset or excited. With Eliza it could go either way. He asked her to wait for him at the bar, and after pawning his current table off on a coworker, he went into the kitchen and threw a plate of pasta together.

“In case you’re hungry,” he said, setting the plate in front of her, taking the seat catty-corner.

She moved the dish out of her way, too busy chewing on a straw to consume food. “Michael, I need you to promise you’l listen to everything I say before you freak out.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Just promise.”

There was passion in her eyes. And she had a glow Michael hadn’t seen in a long time. “Eat something,” he said, taking the straw from her and asking the bartender for two glasses of water.

She picked up her fork and absent-mindedly twirled a mound of pasta Michael knew was never going to reach her mouth. “Okay, what would you say if I told you there’s a chance...” She put down the fork, chuckled once, and then got terribly serious: “Forget it…I’m just going to come right out with this…I think Paul is stil alive.” Michael had a mouthful of water. He coughed half of it back into the glass. The bartender gave him a look but said nothing.