Soul Siren (24 page)

Sacrifices

M
usic.
Messages in music everywhere, and as the freight elevator made its slow crawl up a tunnel of brick and darkness, I heard “Pariah” without the vocals. It was playing from the ADAT through the speakers. The melody was carried in a different key, but there was the same unmistakable bass line. He might as well have painted me a billboard. As I undid the chain and slid back the wooden slat door of the elevator, Morgan ambled over and handed me a drink.

“You’re behind,” he said and lifted my glass in a silent toast before he handed it over. Tonight it was gin.

“These days you give yourself a pretty good head start,” I answered.

“Oh, let me guess,” he said coolly, “you think I have a problem now, and it’s because I’m pitying myself, is that it?”

“Not at all,” I replied, taking a small sip of my drink. I wanted to keep a clear head. “I think you’re getting slack on your own discipline, though. You’re the one who always lectured Erica about creative people, aren’t you? People bitch about the big corporate octopuses and how hard it is to get your foot in the door and get a label or an agent, whatever, and they never consider the idea that maybe they fail because they suck. You said it was easier to compose excuses than music. You said if it’s so goddamn good, play it in the street, and people will get magnetised. They’ll come to hear you, and you’ll know.”

“Yeah, I probably said shit like that,” he admitted. He shook his glass to ask if I wanted another. I was barely halfway through my first. “What’s your point, Michelle?”

“That you don’t need to do this. Bring out new stuff.”

“Maybe I don’t
have
new stuff!” he barked. “Maybe that’s the best stuff I’ll ever come up with.”

“Don’t yell at me,” I said in a low voice.

“Maybe it’s my best stuff, now and forever,” he said, eulogising himself on the spot.

“If it is your stuff, Morgan.”

“You actually believe I’d lie about it, don’t you, Michelle?”

“I think you’re looking back on a career and feeling a little desperate,” I said. “I think a person can start out with a lie, and after a while they get so good at repeating it, they start to buy it themselves.”

“I defer to the expert,” he said cryptically.

“What?”

He crossed the floor to light himself a cigarette. I watched him, not knowing what to think. If he was making it up that he helped Erica write those songs or composed them himself then he was contemptible. If he honestly, sincerely believed Erica had ripped him off then I had to question how I’d been handling this. I hadn’t brought in the cavalry on this one.

There was
no way
I would have taken this to the Brown Skin Beats management. Too political, and they would have had me for breakfast, made me a fall guy. I could still go to Luther and ask: is it possible? If not, help me show the guy he’s wrong. But like I mentioned before, I didn’t know where Luther’s head was these days, and he had this integrity thing. If I thought Morgan and Erica could talk this out, I’d push them together, but Morgan said he didn’t plan to take it up with Erica, she’d just deny it. He was taking it up with me. I had sense, I did damage control—

“Talk to Erica, Morgan. She’s reasonable.”

He shook his head. Not an option.

“You still want her,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Is that what this is all about, Morgan? That you feel left behind? Steven dies, and she no longer feels like spending nights here?”

He laughed at me. “Yeah, sure, Michelle. I give away my material out of love then I decide I want royalties on them, but I do that out of love, too…? Mmm-hmm, you got me pegged. Interesting logic, dear.”

“I don’t think love is ever rational.”

“Love!” he groaned. “You got me confused with Luther’s hurt puppy act. Have I ever given you one sign that I’m sentimental? No? Right. Then please get me the money.”

“You’re in love with her,” I insisted. “Why come to me with this? Why don’t you go bug Erica and talk to her about it? Because you want me to open the door for you again.”

“No, I want you to cut me another cheque.”

“You’re in love with her.”

“Michelle,” he said, shaking his head, and fool that I was, I thought he was about to protest too much. “You’re right on one thing. This does have to do with love, but not mine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If I go to Erica, stubborn girl that she is, she’ll tell me to fuck off. ‘See you in court, man.’ Now you, Michelle, you’re calmer. You’re perceptive. You watch, you listen, and you know she’d be making a mistake. You want to protect her. You always want to protect the person you fall in love with.”

“Wha—what?”

“You’re the one who loves Erica, so
that’s
why I came to you, baby. Oh, that’s cute—you’re blushing. Swann was such an idiot, of course, he didn’t notice, and Luther? Well, Luther’s a good boy. Kind of slow when it comes to people, though, and then he wonders why he gets fucked over in contract disputes…”

I couldn’t believe it. I stood there, listening, and he had taken the wind out of my sails. I never thought anyone could have guessed. Yes, I was passionate about how I protected her, I was Erica Jones’s quietly aggressive advocate, but she was my boss and my friend. I’d always thought I hid my feelings well.

“Too bad she likes guys, isn’t it, Mish?”

I was ready to spit blood in that moment, and I couldn’t even put my finger on why, maybe because he talked about my feelings as if they were a dirty little secret.

“Okay, I’m in love with her, I’m not ashamed of it,” I told him. “So what? Before, I didn’t take personally what you’re doing, Morgan, but now you’re making it personal. You’re saying your little shakedown is aimed at me.”

“Naw, I’m just dealing with the person who has her interests at heart.”

“And you’re banking on me to cover up for her again. Because I love her.”

He turned away to light himself another cigarette. “Hey, if you do what you do out of love, then it’s not so bad, is it?”

“You’re right,” I said.

He had his back to me. He had turned his back enough that he was vulnerable, and this was the alarm that rang through my mind.
Do it now when he’ll never see it coming.
There was a statuette sitting on a low coffee table, a modern figurative thing like a Henry Moore sculpture, and I picked it up and raised it high, bringing it down in a savage blow to the back of his head. He grunted a little and staggered. I hit him again, hard. He fell to his knees, and now I was shuddering in panic.
Jesus, I have to finish him.
I hit him the third time, the last time, and he collapsed to the floor.

It was done.

Morgan was dead at my feet, and I paused for a moment. Part of it, yes, was the gruesome selfish instinct that I hadn’t finished the job properly—that he might stir, moan, display some signal of life. And part of it was because it was Morgan. He had been a better man than Steven Swann, and out of some perverse impulse of respect for the dead, I thought I owed him a few seconds. I had seen dead before, the way that people appear smaller than they were when you knew them, as if the soul had weight and
volume
. Whatever Morgan was supposed to be, it was gone and his body wouldn’t finish it. I felt a disconnected sadness, a peculiar objective pity for him as if I was merely an assigned executioner given the job of his time. With Steven, I admit I took some pleasure in it. But Morgan…If only he hadn’t kept making threats. If he had honestly cared about Erica, he would never have made threats like that.

That hardened my resolve again for the cleanup.

In my purse, I had brought along a set of latex medical gloves. Some killer, I thought to myself. Brings gloves but has to improvise the murder weapon.
Shut up.
I had brought wiping cloths. I took a deep breath and got on with my task. I considered removing the sculpture, leaving the cops with no evidence in the same way I had denied them Steven’s gun. It was too bulky to carry away with me. And I had come over, thinking I’d have to make his death look like an interrupted burglary. It looked more plausible to leave the object there. Yes.

I fished his wallet out of his trousers, pocketed the cash. Not much. I hated doing that to him. It sounds perverse, but I felt genuine revulsion for desecrating him like that. Still, it had to be done. I rifled through the drawers of the chest in his bedroom to make it look good. I knocked over the black lacquer bust of Beethoven that sat on its cheap pillar stand near the couch. Another regret, destroying that charming piece of kitsch. But I needed it to look like he had struggled with his attacker.

All this effort wouldn’t be good enough, of course. I couldn’t protect Erica by simply killing Morgan. I had to erase Morgan’s threat. I went over to his desk to search for charts, notes, whatever implied a connection between his compositions and her work.
I wrote those songs,
he told me. Well, no one would ever hear his lies again.

Sitting next to his computer was a loose pile of books, a couple weighing down a padded envelope with a printout clipped to it. Jackpot? No. The printout was a letter from one of the big production studios. Morgan had composed something for
Easy Death in Queens,
the latest “cutting edge” cop drama, and it turned out they didn’t need it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a music chart with a CD—I assumed it must be the demo. The funny thing was that the address on the envelope was written in Morgan’s own handwriting. Hmm.

There were certainly items of minutiae I didn’t know about the music biz, and maybe this was one of them. After all, I had come into the game as Erica was on her way up. Maybe composers had to send their stuff off like writers with a self-addressed stamped envelope, an “SASE” as it’s called in the book publishing game. And before I gave up the idea that I was going to be Maya Angelou or even the black Danielle Steel, I had opened the mailbox countless times back in Toronto with letters written on the front in my own handwriting.

Focus, girl.
This was nothing I needed to worry about. Erica wouldn’t have done theme or background music for a television show. I abandoned it on the desk, putting it neatly back where it was. I couldn’t reseal the envelope, but it was reasonable for anyone to assume Morgan would open his own mail.

I turned on his computer. I didn’t expect to find much, but there could be damning correspondence. He didn’t—I mean
hadn’t
—gone in much for email, so that made the hunt a little easier. I checked the ADAT. Again nothing.

I was starting to get anxious. His body was cooling on the floor only twenty feet away from me, and I couldn’t stay here. If I was going to find what he was talking about, I had better do it fast.

A car’s headlights swung in an arc across the ceiling, and then I heard the engine stop.
Shit.
The sound of doors opening and then closing with a metal crunch, low conversation, and, Jesus, there was only the freight elevator as my way out.

Calm down. I peeked outside the window. Carefully. Whoever they were, they hadn’t come to see Morgan.

Their arrival reminded me of one additional problem. I knew I’d be an unlikely suspect in Morgan’s murder, but after my close call over Steven, I thought I’d better give myself an alibi. How? I had to think fast. I went over to Morgan’s computer and started up his broadband connection. After a few seconds, I typed in the link for a sound effects archive website—Luther used it, that’s how I’d discovered it. They had what I needed, and Real Audio Player waited only for a touch of the mouse. Perfect.

I pulled my mobile phone out of my handbag and impulsively called Jill Chandler. Who better, I thought. Let her be the one.

“Michelle?”

“Hi, what are you up to?”

“Kind of…finishing up a date,” she said sheepishly.

Oh.

“Listen, Mish, I should have talked to you about—”

“No, hey, I’m sorry! I just wondered if you wanted to take in a movie with me, but if you’re with someone…” And behind me, the computer speakers played the ambient noise of a Cineplex crowd.

“No, no, he’s got to go early,” said Jill. “We can still do it. What do you want to go see?”

And on her side of the line, I heard footsteps approaching and a deep murmur of “Call you tomorrow, ’kay?” The smack of lips pecking a cheek.
Luther?
Interesting. I thought it was over between them.

“Michelle?”

“Yeah. I’m…Well, we don’t have to see what’s here. I just got the idea by passing this theatre. Loews in Midtown is showing that British thing.”

“The one with Hugh Grant in it?”

“They all have Hugh Grant in them, Jill.”

“Sure, sure,” she laughed. “Give me about an hour, forty-five minutes if I can catch a fast train. We can always get coffee first if we’re in between the shows.”

“Perfect,” I said. “See you then.”

And I’m covered, I thought as I clicked off my phone. Plenty of time to jump on a train and link up with Jill.

But I still had to find Morgan’s incriminating material.

Hurry
up
. The desk. Maybe he had whatever he’d need stashed away in the desk, and I took a deep breath as I checked the drawers. Locked. Before panic set in, I pulled out the long drawer under the green blotter, and sure enough, a key sat squarely in the middle in plain view. Makes you wonder why one would bother, but people are creatures of habit. It was the bottom drawer that held the goldmine. More and more padded envelopes, each and every one addressed to the loft in Morgan’s own handwriting.

I opened them all.

And looked at the charts for “Drum,” for “Pariah,” for “Hurt Me Again” and others. Some, of course, weren’t what Erica called them, they had different names, but I could read music well enough to recognise the songs. “Son-of-a-bitch,” I whispered softly to myself. He had told me the truth.

She is bigger than this, I told myself. She simply doesn’t know it. After all, she didn’t need Morgan to write “Late Night Promises.” She certainly didn’t steal anything from him for “It Was a Pleasure to Burn” because we took the Ray Bradbury book together in Grade Eleven back in MacDonald High, and I was there when she was fooling around on the piano and hit on the tune. Maybe they had collaborated on a few of the other songs, and they had a spat over who did what and should get the credit. Morgan writing things down shouldn’t prove anything.