The Rock 'N Roll Detective's Greatest Hits - a Spike Berenger Anthology (76 page)

“Apparently so. To tell you the truth, I’m not totally positive he’s my father. He always said he was. Now I understand he might have been one of the other men in the band. But Stuart was convinced he was my father. He sent money every six months after my mother’s disappearance. Quite a nice sum of money, too. He had inherited wealth from his family and he spent most of it on me, as I understand it.”

“Did you know where the money was coming from?”

“My grandmother put it in a bank for me until I was old enough to know what money was. She told me that money was coming from America for me to use when I grew up. She didn’t say it was from my father. She said it was from an anonymous relative. Perhaps she didn’t know.”

Prescott asked, “And then one day he just showed up in Italy?”

“It was nineteen-eighty. He had released his solo album,
Trrrrans
, and then decided to move to Milan to be near me. He showed up one day and introduced himself to my grandmother and me. Needless to say, we were taken aback. And suspicious. For one thing, we could see that the man was not well. It was evident on first sight. I was only twelve, so I didn’t completely understand what was wrong with him, but my grandmother did. She told him to go away. He explained that it was he who was sending the money. My grandmother still made him leave. So he did… but he rented a flat not far from ours. He kept watch on me as I grew older. I’d see him on the street, watching me. And then… when I was sixteen, my grandmother died. I had no one. But I was smart and resourceful, and I had money. It was then that I reacquainted myself with the man who claimed to be my father. I never got to know him very well, but we were… friendly. Yes, he was a very strange man. But I felt sorry for him.”

“What was he doing in Italy?”

She laughed a little. “For a while he worked in an alternative nightclub called Plastic where drag queens perform. He was totally into it, too. There really was a transformation when he dressed in women’s clothing. The afflictions he normally suffered—having to walk with a cane, a weakness on the left side of his face—they just disappeared when he was a woman. It was only… later… that I realized that the woman he was becoming was meant to be my mother.”

“So that’s how he was supporting himself? Working as a drag queen?” Berenger asked. The thing just got stranger by the minute.

“I suppose he still had some of his family’s money left. He stopped the payments to me once I was eighteen. I’m pretty sure he ran out of money, and that’s one of the reasons he left Italy in ninety-two. He wanted to make music again and he felt that the only place he could do it was in Chicago. But that’s skipping ahead.”

Berenger suddenly felt a chill. He involuntarily shivered at the bizarre notion that they had just been standing in the autopsy room and watching the dissection of the woman’s serial killer father. The story of her relationship with the man suddenly made that lifeless slab of flesh and vessel of organs seem more human.

Prescott said, “So, Julia, if I may ask… I don’t mean to embarrass you… but your father, did he ever think about having trans-gender surgery or anything like that?”

“I understand your asking the question, and I think it’s important that you know that my dad wasn’t into the cross-dressing thing for sexual reasons. By that, I mean he wasn’t getting off on it like some men do when they’re into that particular fetish. And, no, he wasn’t a trans-gender candidate. He didn’t
want
to be a woman. He had no plans to have a sex change or anything like that.”

“He just wanted Sylvia Favero to still be alive, didn’t he?” Berenger asked.

“His problem was that he had a split personality. And he knew it, too. He could talk about it rationally, as if he were standing outside his own body and could analyze what was happening.”

Case added, “We’ve learned that he could do things for Sylvia while he was Stuart Clayton and vice versa. For example, Clayton drove a ninety-eight Chevy Malibu with a hole in the tail end for the sniper rifle. On the evening you two were trapped in the house, Clayton parked his Malibu on the street and put your rental car in his garage. He had the cognizance to do that.”

“I remember seeing that car parked a couple of houses down from his,” Berenger said. “And he must have been following me in it the day I was shadowing Bushnell on Clark Street. That’s how ‘Sylvia’ knew I was following someone when she called. He was watching me the whole time.”

“And you know how she got your unlisted number?” Case asked.

“My number’s on my business card, and I gave one to Stuart. And he gave it to… Sylvia.” He nodded to Julia. “Go on.”

“As time went on,” the woman continued, “he explained it all to me, leaving out the part about my mother dying on his boat. The way he told it was that he felt terribly guilty about my mother’s
disappearance
. And I’m afraid this was also the theme of several acid trips he took in those days.”

“We know about the drugs, Julia,” Berenger said. “And we know he was already being treated for mental illness. I spoke to his family doctor. The onset of Stuart Clayton’s schizophrenia was when he was in high school.”

She nodded. “My mother’s death, the drugs, the stress of being a musician—all that contributed to my father’s digression into a pit of hell. I understand that he tried to commit suicide shortly after that.”

“That’s right.”

“He tried it again in Italy. The drag queen job at the nightclub had got him into some trouble with some gay-bashing thugs. They thought he was a homosexual since he worked as a drag queen. They beat him up pretty badly one night after a performance, outside behind the building. So he stopped performing. He overdosed on drugs again. I don’t know where he got the psychedelics from—they are very hard to obtain in Italy. At any rate, he went over the edge. He spent longer periods of time as Sylvia Favero until he was her twenty four-seven. The doctors couldn’t get him to change back to his real self. He was in a Milan hospital for three years.”

Julia turned to them again. “I’m glad you’re not laughing. I know it sounds like a bad comedy.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Prescott answered. “It’s sad.”

“Anyway, I didn’t think he was violent—that is, violent towards other people. I knew he was a danger to himself. But something happened that brought him out of the ditch he was in.”

“What was that?”

“He heard me sing.”

“Tell us about that.”

“I had been singing all my life. I joined the church choir and sang in the choirs at school. When I was on my own as a teenager, I started performing with an ensemble that traveled the country and sang church music. It was good experience, but I wanted to write and sing my own songs. So I did. It was a very difficult life. For a while I lived in Rome and tried to make it in the music scene there, but eventually I came back to Milan. And then Stuart gave me a tape. He said it was some demos that my mother had made before she… disappeared. He urged me to learn them. And I did. They were a perfect fit for me. I loved the songs. In fact, they inspired me in my own writing, and I could say that my songs are very similar in style to hers.

“Anyway, Stuart became obsessed with my making an album. He was convinced that my studio recordings were great. Mostly I did my own original songs, but I covered a couple of my mother’s. But, I don’t know, Father somehow mixed up everything. He called me Sylvia at times. He forgot I was her daughter. And then
he
was Sylvia at times, and
she
was telling him that it was
her
album and that he owed it to her to get it made.” Julia gave them a sad smile. “My friends… my father had a very, very troubled mind. By the time he left for Chicago in nineteen-ninety-two, he didn’t know if I was Sylvia or Julia, or if he was Stuart or Sylvia. I feared for him. I tried to keep in touch, but he stopped writing. He moved and changed his contact details. It was as if he cut me out of his life. After a while, I was afraid that he may have died. I had no way of knowing.”

“I think I understand what happened,” Prescott said. “The Sylvia persona was so strong in him, that he couldn’t accept
you
as a surrogate Sylvia. There was only one Sylvia, and she was within him.”

“I think you’re right.”

“But why did he start killing his former band members?” Case asked.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Julia answered.

“I can guess,” Berenger said. “It was the guilt. All the guys contributed to Sylvia’s death. They all covered it up. He lived with that horrible secret and it tortured his weak and sick mind. Finally, after so many years, it culminated in murder. It was the only way he could live with himself. He had to fulfill two goals. One was seeing that your album was made because in his mind it was some kind of tribute to Sylvia. Atonement. The second was avenging Sylvia’s death, and that including killing Stuart Clayton—himself.”

Everyone was quiet until Ponti said, “
Mama mia
.” That brought a few chuckles of relief from everyone in the room.

Berenger thought of the two familiar names he saw in the large body room. “I wonder how much guilt weighed on Joe, for instance?” he asked. “How much did it trouble any of the other guys? Surely they had nightmares about it. Surely they were haunted by Sylvia’s ghost.”

Prescott said, “It’s probably why they were all so ready to believe that it
was
her ghost that was killing them all off.”

Then they were all quiet for a moment. Case eventually asked Julia if she was finished. She nodded.

“I’ll tell the attendant,” Case said. “Then I guess we can get out of here.”

Julia turned to them. “Thank you for listening. I’ve never told that story to anyone.”

“You’re welcome,” Berenger said. “It had to be told and I’m glad you trusted us enough to do so.”

She smiled. “Are you still going to try and get the album made?”

He nodded. “It’s a good record. I think I know some people who can get it in the right hands at a major label. Credited to you, of course. I figure the songwriting credits will be shared by you and your mother. Is that fair?”

“Yes, thank you. I would be very grateful. It’s been a long, hard road for me. It will be ironic that I make my first album when I’m in my forties.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

She looked down at her father. “That’s certainly true.”

B
erenger and Prescott returned to New York that evening, having said their goodbyes to their friends in Chicago, officially informed the kind folks at the Fourteenth District and Area Five of their departure, and paid the parking ticket they had received on the previous Friday night. Berenger was warned that his headache may worsen while he flew—and it did. By the time they had picked up their luggage at Baggage Claim, the PI truly felt like crap.

The couple shared a taxi from LaGuardia. Since Prescott lived in the East Village and Berenger lived on the Upper East Side, it was more practical to drop him off first. The cab pulled up to his building on East 68
^th
Street and he turned to Prescott.

“I’ll call you?”

Prescott wasn’t sure why he felt the need to ask that question. “Sure.” She gave a little shrug.

Berenger nodded.

“You rest,” she told him. “You know, you’re a lucky man.”

He nodded again. “See ya.” He got out, closed the door, and walked away.

Berenger picked up the week’s worth of junk mail and took the elevator to his apartment. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and dropped his luggage on the floor, went to the kitchen, and placed the mail on the counter. The red light on the answering machine was blinking. He punched the button and heard Linda’s voice.

“Hi, Spike, I’m calling you from the hotel in Chicago. I tried to reach you while you were still here, but they said you’d checked out. I, uhm, wanted to let you know that Richard and I have decided to just go ahead and take the plunge. We’re going to get married this week. I know it’s kind of sudden, but it’s what we feel like doing. We’re flying to Las Vegas tonight—assuming it’s still Monday when you get this message—to do the deed. I know, it’s pretty crazy and you probably can’t believe
I’m
going to get married in Las Vegas. Well, it’s true. Unless I get cold feet at the last minute, which I don’t think will happen, I’m going to do it. So, even though you didn’t have to be, I wanted you to be the first to know, Spike. I’m going to call Michael and Pam now and tell them. So now you can’t say I let your kids know before I told you.