Steel Guitar (23 page)

She was in there a long time. I could hear an occasional retching noise.

I used the interval to make a call of my own. Mooney agreed to meet us in the lobby.

When Dee ventured out, she seemed okay, her face washed pale, no makeup, wet washcloth to her mouth. I checked the medicine cabinet, the bathroom wastebasket, found nothing with which she could have done herself much harm.

“You scared, Dee?” I asked gently when I found her stretched lifelessly on the sofa.

“Of AIDS? Shit, I been tested so many times. Everybody in the business has, except the Singing Nun. I haven't got it. Not because I took such good care of myself and never screwed around with guys whose names I didn't know, and guys who shot drugs, and guys who slept with other guys. There's nothing wrong with me. I just feel rotten, rotten, rotten.”

“Mooney, the cop I told you about, the one you met at the station, will be downstairs in ten minutes. You want him to come up here?”

“Here?” She stared at the elegant room as if it were a prison cell. “Shit, no. I need to get out. There's a bar in the lobby. We can have a drink.”

“You could have one here. Room service.”

“Hal told them to cut off the liquor supply. Nice, huh?”

“He can do that?”

“He pays the bills.”

We had to wait until Mooney phoned up and called off the door guards. Dee spent most of the time in the bathroom, and when she emerged, she was subtly different. She still looked pale and sad, don't get me wrong, but she'd managed a faint radiant glow. A damn good makeup job. No blush, pale lipstick. Like a bride, I thought. Maybe the reason I can never figure Dee out is that part of her is always onstage.

Even if I hadn't known her for twelve years, I'd have been impressed by the way she handled herself in the lobby, by the way she tried to handle Mooney.

“Have you caught him yet?” she asked quickly, taking Mooney's hand and hanging on a little too long for a routine shake. “Brenda's boyfriend?”

To Mooney, the line must have read like overwhelming concern. To me, it seemed a calculated opener: if the cops have already caught the murderer, then I won't have to talk about Lorraine.

No such luck. No Ray, Mooney said.

We moved into the bar, which was really a lounge, full of linen-covered tables, potted palm trees, and gold-framed oil paintings of the Public Garden. The hostess tried to seat us near a window. Dee murmured something and we wound up at a table near the back of the room, secluded behind the greenery.

“Do you know where the bastard lives?” Dee asked as soon as she'd ordered a Scotch and soda. Mooney and I stuck to coffee.

“We've got an address, thanks to Carlotta. I took some troops out there. Seems like he moved the night Brenda died.”

“Moved,” Dee echoed.

I noticed the way her eyes never left Mooney's face, except to slip occasionally to his hands. Musicians are vain about their hands. I wondered if Mooney was.

“No forwarding address,” Mooney said. “Scooted owing money to the landlord.”

The waitress arranged Dee's drink on a coaster. Our coffee came in a large silver pot.

“Dammit,” Dee said as soon as the waitress was out of earshot. She acknowledged my presence at the table, stared at me for a long time. I nodded encouragement.

She stared down at her hands, rock-steady on the glass, and said, “Brenda was killed to scare me, to send me a message.”

“Do you want a lawyer present during this conversation, Miss Willis?” Mooney asked.

“No. No. Call me Dee, please. I'm not making any sort of confession here, any official statement, except—”

“It's the ‘excepts' I worry about,” Mooney said.

“Just listen,” Dee said. “Please. I don't want any freaking lawyer. I just want to tell you the truth.”

I'm not saying Dee lied. But the way she told the story to Mooney—well, the focus was slightly different. It was a miracle that she—Dee—had emerged alive from that harrowing night. It was no longer the story of Lorraine's declaration of love, its rejection, her suicide. It was Dee's tale, about Dee's terror, Dee's survival.

Mooney said, “So you figure Brenda's boyfriend knew the gist of it from what he overheard at the hospice, right? And he wanted to set the stage, show you he knew what happened at Lorraine's, so you'd better pay up or else.”

Dee answered in a husky murmur, and I was aware of the power of that ever so controlled voice. “I don't see why he had to kill her. Just finding her drunk, or unconscious, would have sent me the same message.”

“Did the two of you have a thing going? You and Brenda?” Mooney asked.

Dee didn't approve of his question. I did. Mooney was treating her like a suspect, not worshiping at her feet like one of her adoring fans.

“Does that matter?” she snapped. “I didn't kill her. And no, we did not have a ‘thing' going.”

I sipped at my coffee and said, “The way I read it, Brenda helped Ray out with the blackmail, only she didn't know it.”

“How?” Mooney said.

I asked Dee, “Do you remember when Brenda started going with Ray?”

“It was one quick pick-up, let me tell you. Guy made the play for her, sent her flowers, said he'd loved listening to her with Silverhawk, her last group. Brenda—well, she was flattered. Who the hell wouldn't be? The guys in the band all have young chickies who wait at the hotels, hoping some guy who can play a C chord will give them a toss. It's a little different for women on the road. Some women, anyway. Brenda didn't have a guy in every port. She's getting—she was getting older. A young lover's not bad for the road.”

Mooney raised an eyebrow.

I said, “Stuart Lockwood claims he turned Ray—that's Ray pretending to be Davey—down the first time he came to the office because Ray hadn't brought any proof. So Ray goes to work. First he steals old pictures of Dee from Davey. But that's not enough, so he makes a play for Brenda. Once she's hooked, he hands her a line: I'm such a fan, maybe you could give me your sheet music to copy? Or maybe he asked her to get him the originals. It would be easy to come up with a story: I'm broke, and some collector will pay big bucks for the original transcription. Maybe he just stole her sheet music and to hell with finesse. He didn't know music; he never figured Brenda would just have the bass line.”

“Wait up,” Mooney said. “Why didn't he steal the music from Davey? If he could rip off all this other stuff? Why'd he need Brenda at all?”

Dee signaled the waitress for a second drink and said, “I can tell you that: Davey wouldn't have music. He couldn't read music. He could play like an angel, back you on any song in any key—but he never learned to read.”

Mooney sighed. “Three hundred thousand dollars. People have done stranger things to get it.”

“If he'd asked for a thousand, forged Davey's name to a note, I'd have paid, no questions asked,” Dee said.

“See, Mooney,” I said. “That's the whole thing. Ray went for too much. Davey—Davey's sickness—must have talked the money angle way up. He's in and out. Sometimes he makes sense; sometimes he doesn't. Maybe he really believes, sometimes, that he wrote part of ‘For Tonight,' or maybe he believes Dee owes him the royalties for that song because she wrote it about Lorraine, and he kept quiet about Lorraine. And Ray listens to him babble and figures Dee for the perfect golden goose. Brenda must have realized something was going on. Maybe Ray was too insistent about the music, maybe she noticed how jumpy Dee was getting.”

“So she asked the boyfriend what it was really all about,” Mooney said.

“She could have suspected the sudden come-on. She asked a question too many, that's for sure. Maybe she threatened to tell Dee she'd given Ray some music. That alone would have started Dee thinking, maybe ruined the whole plan. If Dee even suspected it wasn't really Davey demanding the money, no way she'd pay, right? I mean, Ray can't exactly stand up in court and give evidence about Lorraine's death, no matter what he might have overheard at the hospital. It's not only hearsay, it's hearsay from Davey, and a dozen doctors will testify that Davey is out of it most of the time, with AIDS-related dementia, or drug-induced hallucinations. Ray had to go through a lawyer, through some kind of go-between. Hell, have you seen him? He looks like he was in diapers when Dee wrote ‘For Tonight.'”

“I've seen his mug shot,” Mooney said.

“Not a citizen?” I asked.

“Amazing he had gainful employment. Must have lied on his application, unless the hospital's big on taking Deer Island alumni. Saint John's is probably missing half its equipment.”

I said, “He ever work in a hotel?”

“I can run a check,” Mooney said. “He could have killed Brenda in her own room and moved her to Dee's with a maid's cart. Remade the bed in Brenda's room with linen off the cart and stuffed the dirty sheets into a laundry bag. He was an orderly, right? So even if he didn't do hotel stuff, he'd be able to make a bed.”

I said, “Remember the two circles on the magazine cover, two drinks, but just one glass? I think he got Brenda started in her own room, maybe fed her most of the booze and pills there, made the mess there, cleaned up there, like you said. Brenda was probably pretty pissed off at Dee; Dee had yelled at her during rehearsal. So Ray says something like, let's go see the bitch, and half carries Brenda down the hall. Who's gonna see them in the middle of the night? And if somebody sees them, he can change his plans. Maybe he knew Dee was out; maybe he figured he'd leave Brenda's body in the living room if Dee was asleep in the bedroom. We can assume he got a key from a desk clerk; it wouldn't have been hard. Dee's not in, so he says to Brenda, let's do it in her bed, show the bitch what we think of her. And he keeps feeding Brenda pills, giving her booze, till she passes out.”

“I'll buy it,” Mooney said. “And he'd have the syringe for the finishing touch. Two birds, one stone. Get Brenda out of the way. Scare Dee.”

Dee's second drink arrived. She moistened her lips, said, mainly to me, “Then you don't think Ray snatched Lorraine's suicide note when he was stealing Davey's stuff?”

I said, “Come on, Dee. If he had it, if it reads as ugly as you say it does, he'd have made a direct approach, tried to sell it to you. Davey probably destroyed it years ago. He loved you, Dee. Lorraine loved you. Hell, we all loved you. Cal, the whole damn group, I suppose. Isn't that what you want? For everybody to freaking love you?”

I kept my voice low. Both Mooney and Dee pretended they hadn't heard my outburst.

A young man wearing a suit, a tie, and an overeager grin approached our table. “Excuse me,” he said, “but aren't you Dee Willis?”

“I'm going up to the room,” she said abruptly, finishing her drink in a single gulp. “No, mister, I'm not. You made a mistake.”

Thirty-Seven

I glanced up and saw Roz waving at me from an alcove behind a palm. I almost choked on my coffee.

“Can you wait a minute, Mooney?” I said calmly, glad he was carefully eyeing Dee's departure, making sure she headed straight for the elevators. “I need to hit the bathroom.”

“I'll dial upstairs,” he said. “Meet you back here.”

A waitress pointed me in the direction of a small hallway. The ladies' room had three stalls, three complete bathrooms, really, each with its own sink, so you wouldn't have to wash up in semipublic view. Roz joined me while I was drying my hands on an individually rolled towel I'd taken from a decorative basket. No brown paper towels from a dispenser here.

For her role as undercover groupie, Roz had dyed her hair the color of red licorice, then cornrowed a small section near her right temple. The corresponding section at the left temple, crimped and puffed, looked like some exotic foodstuff, not hair. Starting from the bottom she wore black boots, ultra-tight shiny black stirrup pants, and one of her most prized T-shirts, a souvenir of a trip to New Orleans. Purple, with a row of oysters across her more than ample breasts. Beneath them, three lines of print said it all:

“
Shuck me, suck me, eat me raw
.”

Just the tone the manager sought to cultivate in her hotel. I could imagine her urgent memo to her supervisor: No more rock groups. No more blues groups. No more music groups. Perhaps a dispensation could be considered for the Vienna Boys Choir.

“Subtle,” I said to Roz, as we exchanged glances in the mirror.

“I didn't know groupies went for subtle,” she said while applying lipstick to a mouth that could hardly have been redder. “And I haven't even met a guy I'd like to shake hands with, anyway. The drummer's strictly off-limits, according to Mimi. The keyboard man's so drugged out he hasn't gotten it up in years, also according to Mimi. The lead guitar's a hunk-and-a-half, but he's so stuck on himself he probably does it with mirrors.”

“Cut to the good part, Roz. Mimi may decide to visit the little girls' room.”

“There aren't a whole lot of good parts,” Roz said. “Little bitch doesn't want a sister or a best girlfriend, that's for sure. I'm the competition.”

“So what have you got?”

“For starters, Mimi is not Mimi. Try Matilda Hooper. Honest. I borrowed her wallet. I'll bet my T-shirt she has a rap sheet, but it's probably a sealed juvie. Fifteen, she says, but I'd make it seventeen. Been on the scene since she was ten, but I think most of what she says she makes up on the spot. She brags about dealing drugs, using drugs, doing guys, doing break-ins. If she does half what she says, she's gonna be dead by the time she's twenty.”

“She do our break-in?”

“She was busy that night, and she giggled when she said busy. If she was having sex with one of the guys in the band, one of the techies, one of the roadies, she'd have told every detail, no giggles. Sex with musicians—that's, like, her business. She keeps their names written down in a book.”