Basket Case (31 page)

The obliging archives of the Palm Beach Post reveal that the Sea Urchins, the chief beneficiary of Jimmy's estate, is an old and well-regarded charity that sponsors children's marine camps in Key Largo, the Bahamas and the Caribbean. The kids are of elementary-school age, and come from impoverished neighborhoods throughout the United States and Canada. The seven stories on file contain no hint of scandals or misdeeds connected to the program. A recent feature piece about prominent Sea Urchins boosters includes a quote from a "James B. Stomartie" that I assume to be Jimmy, surname misspelled. "Every kid, no matter how poor, deserves a chance to dive into an ocean at least once in his life," he said.

Janet's brother wasn't a complicated man, and his bequest was born of uncomplicated motives. He probably figured that a glimpse of the undersea world would do for those kids what it did for him. Cleo might be fuming about the terms of her husband's will but she'd be an idiot to challenge it now. The headlines alone would annihilate her career (Pop Star Widow Sues to Claim Kiddie Charity's Loot). As

Janet said, if Cleo wanted Jimmy's money, she'd have been better off divorcing him than killing him. If she did murder him, it surely was over something else.

I hope to learn much more when, at noon sharp the day after tomorrow, the phone should ring in a booth at the end of the Silver Beach fishing pier. Maybe it'll be Cleo calling, maybe somebody in her posse.

Or maybe the phone won't ring at all, and then I'm stuck again. Maybe she never found the "Cindy's Oyster" disc with the phone number. What if she's allergic to coleslaw, and tossed the bag in the garbage?

"Jack."

It's Emma, sneaking up on me like in the old days. Only now, instead of acting officious, she seems rattled and hesitant.

"Do you have a credit card?" she says. "Because I haven't figured out how to get the paper to pay for this yet. But I will, don't worry. I'm waiting to corner Abkazion between the five- and six o'clock news meetings."

"Pay for what? "I ask.

"A plane ticket to Los Angeles. Here, look." She hands me a printout of a short piece from the Associated Press. Before I can begin to read it, Emma blurts: "Tito Negraponte was shot last night."

"No shit," I hear myself saying. "You were right… "

"He's not dead. They've got him listed as serious at Cedars-Sinai. You want to take a crack at an interview?"

I'm dumbstruck. "You mean it? You want me to get on an airplane and go chasing a story, just like a real reporter?"

Emma reaches out lightly to touch my arm, as if she's brushing away a fleck of lint. "You've got to promise you'll be careful."

Already I'm groping in my desk for extra notebooks and pens. "Emma, you were right. You were absolutely right!"

"Sure looks that way."

"Somebody's killing off the Slut Puppies!" Then I clutch her pale startled face and smooch her lustily on the forehead, right there in the newsroom in front of God, the assistant city editors, everybody.

23

By the time I got to L.A. it was ten-thirty at night. Most hospitals are penetrable at any hour, so I was surprised to be turned away by the late-shift lobby crew at Cedars-Sinai. My next stop was the emergency room, but heart-wrenching lies failed to thaw the glacial resolve of a senior trauma nurse who had thrust herself, as demurely as Mario Lemieux, in my path.

At first I figured the problem was me, rusty at double-talk after so long on the sedentary obit beat. Then I remembered this was the Spago of hospitals; every major star of the entertainment industry winds up at Cedars one way or another. Madonna and Mrs. Michael Jackson came here to deliver their babies; Liz Taylor, for brain surgery. This is where they brought Spielberg after his limousine crash, and where Francis Albert Sinatra was pronounced dead of a heart attack at age eighty-two. The place is constantly under siege by tabloid vultures whose subterfuges are elaborate and advanced by fistfuls of cash. No wonder security is tight.

So I retreated to a habitable motel on Wilshire Boulevard near Alvarado Street, and as a light rain fell I dozed off with a can of Sprite in one hand and my portable Sony tuned to the endless Jimmy Stoma sessions. The rhythm guitar track for one of the numbers seemed distantly familiar, which was odd because it was the first cut of the song—"Gltitle0l"—that I'd called up. Yet I found myself humming the tune in the shower this morning, and it played in my skull all the way to Cedars, where I'm now standing in the elevator holding a preposterously large vase of fresh-cut carnations, sunflowers and daisies.

Flowers will get you practically anywhere in a hospital. I've told the front desk I'm taking them to my brother in Room 621. Because my arms were full and I acted like I knew the drill, nobody made me sign in; a plastic pass was clipped to my shirt and here I am, getting off on the sixth floor.

Tito Negraponte was admitted under his own name—this I'd discovered earlier when, pretending to be a florist, I phoned the hospital switchboard. His private room number was disclosed so offhandedly I had to conclude that neither a Grammy Award nor a gunshot wound is enough to elevate a bass player to the A-list at Cedars. I'm feeling optimistic about a one-on-one interview until Tito's door is opened by a cheerless Los Angeles County detective. Even minus the badge on his belt I would have figured him as a cop. Luckily he's on his way out, and I receive only a nod and a cursory glance at my floor pass.

"How is he?" I whisper in the tone of a concerned friend.

"Lucky," says the detective, stepping aside so that I and my flowers may enter the room. Once the door closes I'm alone with the fallen Slut Puppy, who is propped on his side, two pillows lumped beneath his head. Plainly he's not at death's door.

"Now what?" he mutters with a healthy scowl.

Before getting on the plane I'd looked up the news story about Tito's shooting on the Los Angeles Times Web site, which gave more details than the short AP item. The attempted murder had occurred inside the musician's Culver City townhouse. A police spokesman was quoted as saying Mr. Negraponte had returned from a trip to Florida and surprised a pair of armed burglars. After a struggle the guitarist was shot twice "in the lower torso" with a semiautomatic machine pistol of a brand favored by street gangs and drug dealers. The article ended with a paragraph about the salad years of the Slut Puppies, and a solemn mention of Jimmy Stoma's recent death "on a scuba-diving expedition in the Bahamas."

"Who sent the flowers?" Tito hoists his head and suspiciously eyes the arrangement. I introduce myself and deposit a business card on his medicine tray. "You came all the way to California to write how I got capped in the ass? Great." He chuckles in a droopy-lidded way that suggests liberal access to Dilaudid. A tandem IV rig hangs by the bed.

"I saw you at Jimmy's funeral," I tell Tito, "and I was at Jizz the other night when you met his widow."

"You some kinda groupie, or what?"

"I told you what I am. I flew out here because I'm working on a story about how Jimmy died. Jay Burns, too. And now you, almost."

Here's the moment when Tito Negraponte could tell me to get lost—a reasonable response from a man with a.45 caliber hole in each buttock. But instead of kicking me out of his room, Tito invites me to sit. He says, "You think it wasn't an accident, Jimmy dying the way he did?"

"I've had a lousy feeling about it from the beginning. You sure you're up for an interview?"

" 'Up' is definitely the word for it. You shoulda been here before they took away the morphine pump." This time Tito's laugh dissolves into a grimace.

"Let me tell you what's happened so far." And I do, recounting the non-autopsy in Nassau, the balcony scene between Cleo and Loreal, my interview with Jay Burns, the burglaries of Jimmy's boat and my apartment, Jay's bizarre demise, Janet's disappearance under murky circumstances—and the discovery of Jimmy's hard drive hidden aboard the Rio Rio.

By the time I've finished, Tito's eyes are shut and his breathing is heavy. When I step closer to see if he's asleep, he blinks and says, "If this is a joke, it ain't so funny. You're saying they got Janet?"

"I'm not sure. She's gone and it doesn't look pretty."

"Fuckers."

"Tell me what's going on," I say.

"What's the difference? I can't prove nuthin'."

"Let's start with what you gave the cops."

"Can you pour me more water—sorry, what's your name again? More ice, too."

"It's Jack."

He takes the cup and gulps at it wolfishly. Soon the tips of his Pancho Villa mustache are dripping.

"All I tole the cops," he says, "is what I can say for a fact: I walk in the front door and some asshole puts a gun in my ribs while another asshole turns the place upside-fucking-down. Meanwhile the one with the gun keeps saying, 'Where is it? Where is it?'"

"Where is what?" I open my notebook.

"That's what I wanted to know. Where's what? And the asshole says, 'You know damn well what.' And after maybe an hour of this shit they tie my hands and put me on my knees. Then the one with the machine gun says he's gonna blow my head off if I don't tell 'em where it is—did I mention they shot my fucking fish? I could use some more water, you mind?"

After the refill, Tito tumbles ahead: "I had a hunnerd-gallon 'quarium full of tropicals. Fact, Jimmy helped me catch a few. I had angelfish and triggerfish and sergeant majors and clown fish—you know anything about tropicals? Oh yeah, I had some cool rock shrimp, too."

Painkillers are one of the miracles of modern medicine, but cogency is not among the documented side effects. I lead Tito back to his account of the home invasion, but not before sitting through a monologue on the mating habits of the orange wrasse.

"The shooting," I remind him. "What happened?"

"Oh. Right. These two bastards scoop all the fish outta my 'quarium and toss 'em on the floor. Then they shoot em! It took like two dozen goddamn rounds, too, 'cause they're floppin' and squirming all over the tiles, plus they're real small… "

"And then they shot you?"

"No, man," Tito says. "First I got up and ran. Then they shot me."

"That would explain—"

"How I took two caps in the ass. But I hit the door and kept on runnin'," he says. "These fuckers, on their way out, they stole a DVD and three Rickenbacker 4004s. But I know that ain't why they broke in."

"Do you know who they were?"

"Naw," Tito says, "but here's what: They knew me. Called me by name. 'We gonna kill you, Tito,' they kept saying in Spanish—these were Mexicans. Local wets, by the accent. And I believe they did mean to kill me, too, and make it look like a robbery."

"What do you think they were after?"

Tito grunts as he reaches for the call button. "I need another shot. Maybe three. You in a hurry?"

Briskly I step outside as a beetle-browed nurse prepares to re-medicate the wounded musician, cleanse his wounds and change his dressing. A stroll around the floor yields no glimpses of other bedridden celebs, though a detour to the vending machines leads to a casual chat with an orderly who claims once to have swiped a bedpan from beneath Robert Mitchum. "I sold it for seventy-five bucks to a memorabilia shop on Sunset," he says matter-of-factly.

No such market exists, I suspect, for Tito Negraponte's used personal effects. The databases I'd scanned yielded only meager biographical material. He was born in Guadalajara and as a teenager made his way first to San Diego and then to Los Angeles, where he bounced between rock and Latin jazz in a series of obscure groups. In a 1985 interview, Jimmy Stoma said he recruited Tito after seeing him play drums with a bilingual punk band called Canker. Jimmy tore through drummers like barbiturates, but he liked Tito's furtive smoky presence onstage so he kept him on as a second bass man. "You can never have too much bass," Jimmy explained to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Although Tito was the eldest of the original Slut Puppies by ten years, the press clippings indicated he had no trouble keeping pace, socially or pharmaceutically, with the other band members. Three drug arrests and an equal number of paternity suits put his name in the entertainment columns, as did his gloating arrival at the Grammys with the freakishly bosomy wife of the same record-company executive who'd originally rejected "Mouthful of Muscle," the Slut Puppies' breakthrough single. After Jimmy disbanded the band in the late eighties, Tito formed his own group called Montezuma, which opened exactly once for Carlos Santana. A CD featuring a peppy Spanish version of "Hey Joe" was never released.

The most recent mention of Tito Negraponte in print occurred a few years back, when the Boston Phoenix asked several heavy-metal guitarists for capsule reviews of the classic rock satire, This Is Spinal Tap. Tito said that while he enjoyed the movie, its verisimilitude would have been enhanced "if the bass player had got more pussy."

The article said Tito was keeping busy doing studio work for solo artists. I don't know what he's been up to lately, but this interview should earn him more ink than he's seen in a decade—providing I can steer him through ten minutes of semi-linear thought. Upon returning to the hospital room, I see that the nurse has turned him over to face the window. I drag a chair into his fuzzy vision and sit myself down. Tito is drifting like a feather in the thermals, but I can't sit here and wait for him to float back to earth. This might be my only chance; a relative or girlfriend could show up any moment to chase me off.