The Rock 'N Roll Detective's Greatest Hits - a Spike Berenger Anthology (67 page)

By nightfall, the boat was no longer a spaceship. The lake was no longer perpendicular to the universe—it was just a flat body of water on which they were floating. Bodies stirred. Stomachs ached. Throats were parched. Skin was sunburned.

When the moon was shining above them once again, the men had found their clothes and put them on. Sylvia lay asleep on deck, still nude. Someone threw a blanket over her. They couldn’t find the sundress, although it was Rodriguez who remembered it had been donated to the aliens. Only the floppy hat was left on board. Everyone laughed.

“What time is it?” Monaco asked.

“Fuck that. What
day
is it?” Brill answered.

More laughter

“It’s not day, it’s night!”

“Should I head back to shore, guys?” Clayton asked.

“I guess.”

“Why not?”

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“Will you look at that universe?”
Laughter. “Shut up with that already!”

“Sylvia, wake up. What do you want to do?”

“Hey, Sylvia!”

Someone shook her. She didn’t move.

“Sylvia! O Goddess of Interplanetary Travel, wake up, wake up!” they sang.

She still didn’t move.

Joe Nance was the first one to become concerned. “Shit, guys. I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“What the hell?”

“Wait, sit her up.”

“Throw water on her.”

“I’m serious! She’s not breathing!”

Suddenly the boat was a beehive of anxiety and pandemonium. Clayton tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then Joe Nance attempted it. Nothing worked.

It took them twenty minutes before someone had the guts to say, “I think she’s dead.”

Tears. Fear. Paranoia.

“What are going to do?”

“We gotta go back. Hurry.”

“Wait, guys, wait a second!” It was Clayton. “We can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, we can’t do that?”

“Do you realize how much trouble we’ll get into? Seven guys and one woman?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Fuck, they’ll do an autopsy and figure out we
all
had sex with her! They’ll find all kinds of drugs in her blood.”

“We don’t know why she died. It’s not our fault.”

“Tell that to the cops!”

“Was it an overdose?”

“Could have been the heat.”

“It was an accident.”

“The cops won’t see it that way.”

“Damn, damn, damn!”

“What do we do?”

“Shut up, let me think!”

“Oh, God!”

The seven men discussed and argued about the situation for the next hour. Because they had not eaten in twenty-four hours, were dehydrated, and were coming off of the most intense psychedelic experience they’d ever had, their judgment was not the best it could have been.

“She has no family here.”

“No one will miss her.”

“She went away a year ago and no one knew where she was, remember?”

“It could be like that again.”

“We have to promise not to say anything to
anyone
.”

“This is a pact, guys, and we’re taking it to our graves.”

“Oh man, oh man, oh man…”

“We have to do it.”

“It’s the only way.”

So they found something to weigh down the body and dropped her overboard.

Sylvia Favero’s corpse was never found. Stuart Clayton filed a missing person’s report two months later, as if none of the band members had any clue as to her whereabouts.

And the secret had been kept for nearly forty years.

B
erenger sat in his chair with tears in his eyes. It was such a sad—and reprehensible—story. Nance refused to look at him. He just stared at the floor and sobbed some more.

“I’ve never told anyone,” the musician said. “I know we did wrong. But there’s something else…”

“What?”

“I don’t really know if we
did
dump her body overboard. We all talked about it a day later, when we’d come down. We all had the same impression of the events. We
think
she died on the boat. We
think
we put her in the water. Well, actually, at least three of the guys kept saying it never happened. They insisted that Sylvia was never on the boat in the first place!”

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know. We were so messed up that weekend. The acid we dropped was the most powerful stuff I’d ever taken. Then there was everything else—the pot, the booze, the coke—we were out of our
heads
! Anything could have happened and I don’t think we would have remembered it succinctly. What I’ve told you is the dream I keep having, over and over. Did it really happen? Spike, I’m telling you—I’m not exactly sure! It might have been some weird hallucination.”

“But if you didn’t do it, then what happened to Sylvia?”

“I don’t know! She went
missing
!”

“Or she’s dead.”

“And if she is, that’s why her ghost has come back to kill us all. Now you know.”

“Joe,” Berenger said softly. “I’m not absolving you of anything. Whether you guys were at fault in her death or not, I… I can’t say. But I can assure you of this. Whoever is killing everyone is
not
a ghost. It’s someone real and it’s probably someone you know. Now
think
. Is there
anyone
who might have had a connection to Sylvia that could have found out about all this?”

Nance shook his head. “I’ve done nothing
but
think about it since the killings started. And I can’t come up with anyone.”

Berenger’s cell rang.

“Berenger.”

“Spike, it’s Mike Case.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Well, I have some news. It’s the suspect, Felix Bushnell.”

“What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Shot and killed by an undercover police officer.”

“Why? How?”

“Caught red-handed in an armed robbery attempt in the First District, not far from Chinatown.”

“No!”

“Yep. And guess what?”

“He was dressed—?”

“Yep. In drag. Blonde wig. Sunglasses. And carrying the Browning nine mil. Same caliber as the musician shootings. Could be a match, but we’ll have to run the tests. But it’s entirely possible that your case is closed.”

Berenger sighed. “Maybe. Maybe not. Thanks, Mike. I’ll get back to you.” He hung up, stood, and went to the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Nance asked.

“To get the Jack Daniel’s.”

O
n Thursday, the day before the benefit concert, Berenger discussed the case with Prescott before phoning Rudy Bishop. As they sat in his hotel room, he related Nance’s sad story to Prescott, who shook her head with pity.

“I suppose if I’d been fifteen or twenty years younger, that could have been me,” she said. “I would have been sucked right in by the whole peace and love thing, just like I was influenced by Goth, punk, and New Wave in the eighties. I was a bit of a bad girl, too.”

“Yeah, but you straightened out,” Berenger noted. “And besides, it’s okay to be a
little
bad, and luckily you still are.”

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Shut up, this isn’t funny.”

“I know.” He then showed her that day’s
Chicago Sun-Times
. “And now there’s this.” One of the smaller headlines on the front page proclaimed, “MUSICIAN KILLER SLAIN.”

“Oh, no,” Prescott said. She picked up the paper and began to read.

“I think they’re jumping the gun. They haven’t finished the ballistics tests, they don’t have the physical evidence to prove that Bushnell was the shooter… all they have is an armed robbery attempt totally unrelated to the musicians. The Chicago PD must really want to close this case.”

“It happens all the time, Spike, you know that. The police will rush to close a high profile case, even if they’ve got the wrong offender. You see it everywhere, especially in the big cities. Look what happened with that Central Park Jogger case in New York, for example.”

“I know. What are you gonna do? It’s out of our hands.” He took out his mobile and started to dial a number, but stopped. “Oh, and I found out that Lucy Nance dyes her hair. A week ago it was blonde.”

“Oh, really?”

“Uh huh.”

“You think there’s anything to it?”

“At this point, I’m not ruling out anything.” He dialed New York and asked Melanie to connect him to Remix.

“Howdy-do, Spikers.”

“How are you doing with collecting that music, Remix?”

“Got most of it. Spent all day yesterday in the Village haunting the vintage record and CD shops. I managed to get all of Red Skyez’s stuff that you didn’t already have, as well as Windy City Engine’s. I’m still missing Joe Nance’s solo album and Stuart Clayton’s two records. But I have a lead on Clayton’s that I should hear about today. I’ve started uploading the music.”

“Thanks. I guess I need to start listening.”

“You really think there’ll be some clues in the music?”

“Well, I found out last night what the big mystery is about, so now I don’t know if your efforts will be of any use.”

“What? You mean I wore a hole in my tennis shoe for nothin’?”

“No. Stay on task. I’m still going to give everything a listen. Did you scan the album covers and upload them, too?”

“Not yet. I was doing the music first. I’ll get on that today as well.”

“Great. Thanks. Transfer me to Tommy, will you?”

After a few seconds, Briggs picked up the phone.

“What’ve you got, Tommy?”

“I was about to call you. Okay, I finally got the Immigration records for Sylvia Favero, Joe Nance, and Stuart Clayton. Sylvia went back and forth from the U.S. to Italy three times in her lifetime. Once when she was young, in nineteen-fifty-five. The next time was nineteen-sixty-two. Then again in nineteen-sixty-eight.”

“That’s when she went to have her baby.”

“She left the U.S. in January of sixty-eight and returned in November. There are no records of her leaving the country after that.”

“That’s because she really was dead. I’m pretty sure about that now.”

“Not a hundred per cent?”

“No. What about the guys?”

“Joe Nance has a long history of traveling in and out of the country. Windy City Engine did eight European tours and three Far East tours over the years. All of those are accounted for.”

“No other instances, not related to a tour?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Okay, what about Clayton?”

“Other than one European tour that Red Skyez did in seventy-two, he left the country in nineteen-eighty. Apparently he went to Italy, but as you know, that doesn’t mean he stayed there. You can travel around Europe and maybe they’ll stamp your passport when you enter a new country, and maybe not. The U.S. doesn’t keep records of that—they just look to see where all you’ve been when you return to America. Unless it raises a red flag—like if you’ve been in a country that supports terrorism or somewhere that’s on the State Department’ no-no list—then usually Immigration doesn’t give a hoot. But I’ve got a source that tells me that Clayton applied for a work visa in Italy, which he renewed a few times. So maybe he did plant some roots in that country. Anyway, he returned to the U.S. in nineteen-ninety-two. Hasn’t left since.”