Dead Wood (17 page)

Thirty-seven

T
eddy lifted the clubhead until it was an inch from my face.

“460 ccs,” he said.

I nodded.

“Big Bertha. Titanium. Graphite shaft.”

“Very nice,” I said.

He leaned down, put a ball on top a rubber tee and turned his body toward Lake St. Clair. We stood on a little raised platform at the back of the house. It had a patch of Astroturf about nine square yards and Teddy had his golf bag and clubs leaning against a little wooden rack.

Teddy addressed the ball and I said, “Keep your head down.”

He turned his granite slab of a body and brought the club back in a swift, fluid motion. His body pivoted and the club bent nearly in half before it sped down with astonishing speed. The ball rocketed off the platform and flew in a direct line out until it made a tiny little splash about three hundred yards away.

“Nice shot,” I said. “I think you nailed a muskie. And you didn’t even call fore.”

“You’re funny,” he said without even cracking a smile. He lined up another ball and repeated the same effort.

“Got a perch that time,” I said. “Do you have someone go out and dive for all those balls?”

“Cheaper just to buy more balls.”

“Are golf balls considered pollution?”

In response, he pointed the handle of the club at me and said, “Wanna give it a shot?”

“I’ve modeled my golf game after Nancy Lopez,” I said and took the club. I put a ball on the tee, set down my beer and took a mighty swing. I barely nicked the little pill and I watched it run off the platform, down to the water’s edge until it sat there like a little lake stone.

“Now if we were on the course and that didn’t make it past the women’s tee,” Teddy said, “You’d have to pull your pants down when you walked up to the ball.”

“Insult to injury,” I noted.

“Why don’t you give me that back before you hurt somebody with it,” he said.

He took the club and rested it on his boulder of a shoulder. “So what are you doing here, John? Besides disgracing the game of golf?”

“Did you know Larry Grasso?” I said.

“I don’t interact with scum,” he said. He was bouncing the giant driver off his shoulder. He looked like he was ready to hit me with it. Knock my head into the lake. I’m sure the impression was intended.

“Did you know the scum was killed?”

“I did hear but I don’t care.”

Shannon’s assistant, Molly, appeared behind me. Had Teddy somehow summoned her?

“Did Shannon still keep in touch with him?”

He laughed. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

He shook his head. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Stay away from Shannon. Stay away from me. But even more importantly, stay away from the game of golf, okay?”

He tilted his chin toward Molly. “See Mr. Rockne to the door,” he said.

I turned to little Molly and saw that she was now flanked by Erma and Freda.

I glanced back at Teddy. He was in the middle of his backswing. “Thanks for taking the time to bullshit me,” I said. His swing caught and he shanked one about fifty yards to the right. His face turned red.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said.

The Hefty Girls moved up on either side of me and I lifted my hands up.

“Easy, girls. I’m going. Don’t get those gigantic undies of yours in a bundle.”

Molly led the way back through the party I found myself back at my car.

“Just so you know, I’ve been told to schedule no more conversations with Shannon for you,” Molly said. Her tone was curt and clipped. She extended a hand.

“This will be the last time we talk,” she said. Erma and Freda stood behind her, their faces showing all the emotion of rubber caulk.

I shook Molly’s hand and felt the soft scrape of paper in my palm.

•  •  •

Lakeshore Drive was deserted as always. The lake was choppy, stirred up no doubt by the constant plopping of Teddy Armbruster’s Titleist Pro Vs. What an arrogant prick. A guy used to having the world at his feet. A guy living off the natural talent of Shannon Sparrow. A wheeler and a dealer and a 15% cut of, what, fifteen or twenty million a year? Not bad.

Something told me that Teddy was the kind of guy who could burn a few million bucks a year without batting an eye.

The piece of paper Molly had shoved into my hand now sat on the passenger seat. Subterfuge was surprising coming from the world’s most efficiently curt assistant.

I had taken a peek at the note. It was a phone number. Probably a cell. I debated calling it immediately but thought better of it. She’d be at that party for a couple more hours and I had a feeling that the conversation she wanted to have, that I
hoped
she wanted to have, would be better done in private. Like when she was on her way home from the boss’s party.

I looked out at the dark green water. I’d had too much to drink at the party because I now saw the pale lifeless eyes of Benjamin Collins. Saw his puffy flesh hanging from his bones in shreds from being in the water, lacerated by the man who’d killed him. The man who’d had the boy turned over to him by me.

What a fuckup I was. Usually, I let the feeling pass. Told myself that everyone makes mistakes. Some more egregious than others. But not tonight. Booze sometimes did that to me. Opened up the old wounds and dumped in the salt. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I just throw the kid in the back of the squad car and let him sleep it off in his own private cell?

There was no right answer, at least not one I wanted to face.

Thirty-eight

T
he only thing worse than having a hangover, in my opinion, is being hungover
and
middle-aged. Waking up in a dorm room feeling like shit because of the kegger in Rastelli’s room is one thing. Waking up with a hangover and facing your daughters, your mortgage payment, your middle-aged life, is really fucking awful.

“What’s wrong?” Anna asked as she shuffled into the kitchen, her bare feet whisking across the wood floor. She had on a pink terry cloth robe and her hair was piled on top of her head like a standard poodle that’s treed a squirrel.

“Too much wine. I hate the fucking French,” I said.

“Wine? You don’t drink wine.”

“Tell that to my liver.”

•  •  •

An hour later I rolled into my office and enjoyed the peace and quiet for a moment. I’d taken three Tylenol and an extra cup of coffee to help push the headache away. I sat in my chair for a moment and absorbed the silence. I let my conversations with Shannon and Teddy roll around in my mind. Shannon had issues, I was sure of that. Teddy was just an arrogant prick.

I checked my mail and tossed it all then sat down and fired up the computer. I did a quick Internet search using the name Teddy Armbruster.

All the expected bullshit. Articles about Shannon, mostly. The quote from the manager, telling the world what a talented, special, lovely person Shannon was. Extolling her virtues as a songwriter. Her dreams. Her hopes. And of course, her work with charitable causes, namely helping the children.

Blah blah blah.

Of course, with Shannon’s name, the search returned only about thirteen thousand items. I closed the search window and picked up the phone.

“Nate,” I said. “It’s me, John”

“I’m busy,” he said.

“So am I.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, your calling me is going to make you less busy and me more busy.”

I sighed. “There’s a new Chinese place over on Jefferson.”

I heard the pause.

“Orchid Gardens?” he said through a mouthful of rapidly rising saliva.

“That’s the one.”

I pulled the review I’d set aside on my desk from Metro Times. Just for this occasion.

“Ginger chicken with a raspberry sauce,” I read. “Saffron soup with steamed clams. Rated five out of five stars by the Metro Times. Have you been there?”

“I want the buffet,” he said.

“The whole thing?”

“The buffet, John.”

“Oh mother of mercy,” I said.

“Goodbye,” he said.

I sighed. With the buffet, the ordeal would turn into a four-hour meal.

“Fine. You got the buffet,” I said.

“Okay, what do you want?”

“Teddy Armbruster.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s Shannon Sparrow’s manager,” I said. “I want to know where he’s from, what he did pre-Shannon. I think he’s evil.”

“Oh, really.”

“Just a hunch.”

“An Orchid Garden buffet and we’ll know,” he said.

“I already said yes.”

“I’ll call you this afternoon,” he said.

“Deal.”

We hung up and I was pleased to note that my headache was gone. Maybe the thought of Chinese food alone was some kind of Eastern cure.

I’d delayed calling the number Molly’d given me because I’d hoped to learn a little more about Teddy before we talked. But now that it looked like I wouldn’t get any dirt for at least a few hours, it was time to make the call.

I punched in the numbers on the slip of paper. Immediately, I heard some gentle static and knew that it was a cell phone.

A voice answered. “Yes?”

“Molly, it’s me. John Rockne.”

“I’ll call you right back,” she said, a hint of panic in her voice. The connection was rudely cut. I wondered how she knew where to call me. But then I remembered she could just check her call log.

The phone rang and I picked it up. That was quick, I thought.

“John Rockne?” the voice asked.

It wasn’t Molly, but I thought I recognized the voice.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s Shannon.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“Well, uh, I was expecting another call—”

“I enjoyed talking to you at the party,” she said. I heard her take a deep inhale. Cigarette or pot?

“You did?”

“Is that so hard to believe?” she said on her exhale. Probably a joint.

“Well, if you ask me, no, not at all. Talk to my friends though…”

“I just wondered if we could meet somewhere and talk,” she said. “Do you have somewhere private we could get together?”

“Like, how private?” I said. Boy, this was weird. Shannon Sparrow wanting to meet me somewhere privately? After she says she enjoyed conversing with me?

“What do you think?” she said.

“How about my office?”

Her silence told me that wasn’t what she had in mind.

Oh boy. I ran through a few options, one of which included saying no. I dismissed it, though.

“I have a sailboat at Windmill Pointe,” I said. It was a piece of shit fixer-upper that I’d been meaning to work on for years. Anna and I just kept it to keep the boat slip. There’s about a ten-year waiting period for those slips.

“Private marina?” she said.

“Even better,” I said, “It’s public and totally empty this time of year. No guard to see your car, no attendants to recognize you. Just park in the parking lot, and walk to my slip. No one will know you’re there.”

“Perfect,” she said.

I gave Shannon directions then said, “I’m in slip 48. Air Fare is the name of the boat.”

“Air Fare?”

“I bought it from a pilot,” I said. “I know, stupid name.”

“I can be there tonight.”

“So around ten?” I said.

“Okay.”

We hung up without saying goodbye. Before I could even contemplate just how weird this was getting, the phone rang again.

“It’s me.”

I recognized the voice as Molly’s. Were she and Shannon trading phones? Handing it back and forth, laughing at how easy it was to trick me?

“I wanted to warn you,” she said. It sounded like she was walking somewhere, probably outside.

“Warn me about what?”

“You’ve asked a lot of questions and there are people who don’t want you to get the answers,” she said.

“Like who?”

“Look, don’t make this difficult—”

“Too late,” I said. “People have died. It’s already difficult.”

“Don’t make it more difficult, then. Enough people have been hurt.”

I had a hunch and played it. “Is that the real reason you called? Just to warn me? Or do you know something I could use? Something that could help?”

She paused just a second and I knew I was right. “I know it’s all about Jesse Barre,” she said.

“Yeah, but—”

I heard another voice, in the background. It sounded like a man’s and I thought I heard him say Molly’s name. Immediately, her voice took on a different tone.

“Look, just make sure the invoices are sent with the proper postage,” Molly barked at me. I waited, wondering who had interrupted her. “Okay, okay,” she said, this time the panic in her voice was clear. “Right, I’ll put it in the mail to you, okay? I’ll send it to your office. Right?”

“Send it via a courier, today,” I said, understanding.

“Fine. Just don’t let this mistake happen again!” she said and then hung up.

Message received, I thought. Did Shannon Sparrow get a lot of invoices? I wondered. Well, creativity wouldn’t be at the top of my list for attributes Molly would have. She seemed like a law and order, by the book kind of gal. But the important thing was, she said she’d send whatever it was to my office. I felt like a linebacker who’d broken through the line and was in the backfield, ready to knock the quarterback on his ass.

Okay, I thought. Shannon at ten o’clock tonight.

Nate would call me this afternoon.

That left me a few hours.

Just enough time to chat with my client.

Thirty-nine

I
found him gardening. A grown man, on his knees in the backyard with dirt all over his arms and his face streaked with peat moss. Some guys go to Florida and play bocce. Clarence digs in the ground. To each his own.

“Aren’t you supposed to plant ‘em deeper than that?” I asked. The little shrubs slash bushes he was planting, you could see the ball of roots sticking out a little bit.

Clarence shook his head. “They’ll drown if you plant them any deeper.”

I nodded.

He took off his gloves and tossed them into a little plastic cart he had next to him. It held a few more of the bushes as well as a variety of clippers and shears and digging tools.

“Speaking of drowning,” Clarence said. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen, find a couple of cold beers and meet me over there.” He gestured to a little bench that sat in the shade of a big maple tree. I followed his instructions to a tee and rejoined my gray-bearded friend with two companions from the Anhueser Busch brewery in St. Louis.

As Clarence sipped his beer, I brought him up to speed on everything that had happened.

“So you think Shannon Sparrow’s ex-husband killed Jesse?” he said.

I nodded. “I can’t prove it yet, but yeah, I think he did.”

“Why?”

“That’s the big question, really,” I said. “I can’t answer it right now. I’ve got a couple of hunches that I’m working on.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Clarence said. “You’re convinced Nevada Hornsby had nothing to do with it?”

“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He loved her.”

“Lots of men kill women they really love. Happens all the time.”

“I don’t deny that,” I said. “I just don’t believe it was the case here.”

He took another long drink and his bottle was empty. He tossed it twenty feet through the air where it landed in his little gardening cart.

“Nice shot,” I said.

It had been easier for him to cope by targeting his anger toward someone. But now he had to face the fact that he may have been wrong.

“You can help me,” I said.

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need to learn more about how star musicians work. Shannon Sparrow has such a fucking huge entourage. Managers, assistants, writers, hangers-on. I feel lost. Who has daily contact with Shannon? Who might be so involved with Shannon that they would resort to murder?”

“Forget the assistants,” Clarence said. “I wasn’t much of a star, but I had a bit of an entourage.”

“That’s why I thought I’d ask you.”

“My assistants came and went,” he said. “Never could remember their names. Usually the manager doesn’t get too involved on a day-to-day basis. Manages from a big office in New York or L.A. Makes a phone call to the record label, charges the star twenty grand.”

“Good work if you can get it.”

“The band mates…it all depends on the star. Some are close to their players, some fire them without batting an eye.”

“Hired hands,” I said.

He nodded. “A producer will say ‘here are the tracks, learn them in six weeks or we’ll find someone who can.’ Of course, that’s not always true. Some guys in the band are key in developing songs and so on, then they’re very valuable and have a lot at stake.”

“What about songwriters?”

Clarence shrugged. “They can be very valuable. But as far as a daily involvement…I don’t think so. Usually they’re perched in some house in Malibu, looking at the Pacific banging out hooks.”

I thought about it. “A lot of what you just told me doesn’t seem to fit Shannon Sparrow,” I said. “Her manager seems very involved. Her band mates all hang out. Her assistant. They seem to all be there all the time.”

“Like I said, I was a very minor player. And that was a long time ago,” Clarence said. “Times have changed. I don’t have a lot of ideas on what a Shannon Sparrow situation might be.”

“Okay.”

“I can tell you one thing that I’m sure hasn’t changed.”

“Shoot.”

“They’re all there for the money,” he said. “And in Shannon’s case, it’s big money. More money than we can probably imagine. So despite all the relationships, the hanging out, it’s all crap. It was that way with me back when I played. Everybody acted like friends but it was always all about the money.”

“The music is incidental.”

“In most cases, yeah. Sometimes the songwriter is the only one genuinely into the creation of music. But I’ve met plenty of jaded songwriters, too. They think what they sell is crap. The signer thinks it’s crap. The manager thinks it’s crap. But they all fucking love it when the royalty checks come in.”

“Do you think that’s how Shannon is?”

He shrugged. “My guess would be yes, that’s how she is. But everyone’s different. When she was a struggling young girl with a guitar, maybe those early songs came right from her heart. Maybe they poured out of her soul. And then the businessmen rushed in and mined her like a sliver of gold in rock. And then maybe it all changed. Who knows?”

I nodded and polished off my beer.

I stood up.

“If Hornsby didn’t kill her,” he started to say, then stopped. I watched his face contort with anger and grief. I didn’t know where he was going with it. It turned out, he wasn’t going anywhere. He stopped. So I finished the thought for him.

“I’ll find out who did.”

•  •  •

It turned out, Nate couldn’t wait for his payment, so we met at the Orchid Gardens for the buffet. The maitre de gave Nate a look that was probably the same expression Custer wore when he realized he wasn’t just going to lose, he was going to lose big.

Nate didn’t disappoint. He loaded a plate full of all the fried stuff first: egg rolls, crab wontons, chicken.

“Lubes up the pipes,” he explained to me.

I got a big plate of chicken fried rice with an egg roll, tossed on some soy sauce and sat across from him. Watching Nate eat Chinese buffet was like watching a conveyor belt dump ingots into a blast furnace.

“Your boy is bad news,” he finally said, after most of his first plate was demolished. Nate signaled the waitress over and ordered a beer, went up to the buffet and loaded on mostly chicken things: garlic chicken, sweet and sour chicken, kung pao chicken.

I stuck with my water and rice.

“Or at least, he
was
bad news,” Nate continued, pausing every now and then to clean the various sauces and juices that accumulated in the corners of his mouth.

Once Nate had demolished his second plate, I figured he’d take a moment to tell me what he’d found. I was right. He pushed away plate #2 and pulled out a notebook.

“Teddy Armbruster as you know him was born in Chicago as Edward Abrucci,” he said. “Born in Chicago in 1960. First arrested at age twelve. Assault. More arrests through his teens which earned him a stay at the juvenile correctional facility near Rockford, Illinois.”

Nate flipped to the next page of his notebook. “Apparently our man moved to Detroit after he was released. His crime pattern changed, too. He graduated from assaults and robberies to extortion.”

“Mob?”

Nate nodded. “As his crimes became more ‘organized’ to make a bad pun, his arrests disappeared. His last brush with the law was in 1987 for extortion. He beat it. Since then, he’s been clean.”

I thought about that while Nate went back up to the buffet. Now he was moving on to seafood: more crab wontons, lobster with soybeans and shrimp fried rice.

“So do you think he’s really clean now? Has he gone legit?” I asked Nate when he got back to the table.

He shrugged his shoulders and shoveled in the food. “He could be clean or just a whole lot more polished,” he said.

“So far three people have been murdered,” I said. “Jesse Barre. Larry Grasso. And Rufus Coltraine. All people within his orbit.”

“They were in a lot of other people’s orbits, too,” Nate said, soy sauce dripping down his chin.

“Maybe Shannon had killed Jesse for her guitars, then framed her husband for it.”

“And why would a woman worth about a hundred million dollars need to kill someone for guitars? They were expensive, but not that expensive.”

“Had to be the ex-husband, then,” I said. “He was still in love with Shannon, tried to win her back by killing Jesse Barre and stealing her guitars. And then he framed Coltraine for it. They were buddies in prison.”

Nate stopped eating. I knew it was big if he stopped eating.

“They were?”

I nodded. “I talked to a guy I know at Jackson.”

“But you don’t think that was the case?” he said.

“Maybe. But I don’t think Grasso was working alone. Someone was pulling his strings, maybe using his love for Shannon against him.”

“Maybe it was Shannon herself.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I heard the woman speak. It wasn’t Shannon. I didn’t recognize the voice.”

Nate pushed his plate away from him and belched, a low rumbling passage of gas that reminded me of a coal mine being exhumed.

“Don’t mess with this guy, John,” he finally said. “I think people who fuck with Teddy Armbruster end up being hurt. And hurt badly.”

“Someone else may be fucking with Teddy Armbruster. And it isn’t me.”

•  •  •

By the time I got back to my office, it was late. The only people more tired than me were the guys at the Chinese restaurant in charge of replenishing the buffet.

I checked my watch. Nearly five o’clock. I checked the mail for a package from Molly but no dice. Most courier services finished up by six. I had a bad feeling in my gut and it was only partially from watching Nate ingest the caloric equivalent of a small family.

Whatever Molly had intended to send me should have been here by now. I wondered about the interruption. Had the man heard Molly? Was she in trouble?

I weighed the pros and cons of waiting. It didn’t take long. There were no cons. Sitting around waiting for a courier made little sense. I thought about calling, but that didn’t seem like a good idea, either. She was constantly in someone’s presence. Someone who was always listening. It would be better just to show up. Be the asshole P.I. who needed to be dealt with. That chore would fall to the lowly personal assistant.

Besides, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my guts I wondered, what if the courier never comes?

The drive back to Shannon Sparrow’s temporary compound took less than five minutes, but as I pulled closer, I saw that someone had gotten there ahead of me.

Blue and red flashing lights pulled me closer. Please, God, no, I thought. Don’t let this happen.

The driveway was choked with police cars. I pulled over into the grass next to the driveway and jogged toward the door. A cop stopped me, a thick-necked bull with a shiny black crewcut. I didn’t recognize him and I didn’t see Ellen around.

I looked past him and saw Erma and Freda being questioned by two detectives.

And on the floor was a body.

Even from here I could see that it was a small body. Swimming in a large pool of blood.

Molly.