Tombs of Endearments (13 page)

“Get your bloody mitts off me, you bloody little ponce.” Alistair slapped the man’s hands away. “I’m right as rain, and if you can’t see that for yourself, then you’re in the wrong business.”

Quinn turned his back on the scene. He acknowledged me with a nod, and he was just about to turn to the short, bald man who stood at his side when he stopped and squinted in my direction. “What happened to your mouth? Your lip is bleeding.”

“My lip…” Until I tried to talk, I didn’t realize that in addition to being raw, my lips were swollen. Like I’d gotten a whopping dose of Novocain, my mouth was numb. I tried to answer Quinn again, slower and more carefully this time. “I wan into…”

A dead man’s lips?

Couldn’t exactly say that, so I waved a hand in the direction of the revolving door where we’d entered the hall. If Quinn wasn’t so preoccupied, he might have noticed that there was nothing over there I could possibly have run into. The way it was, he took my story at face value.

He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it into my hand before he turned back to the man at his side. “This is Gene Terry, Mind at Large’s business manager and agent,” Quinn said. “I was just telling him that you saw Vinnie this morning.”

“Talk about bad luck!” Gene had a Brooklyn accent as thick as a deli pastrami on rye and really good taste in clothes. His navy blue suit was Armani. His white dress shirt must have been made-to-order or it wouldn’t have fit so well over his broad shoulders. Unfortunately, the effect was lost when he paired the outfit with black-and-white sneakers. He was a head shorter than me and com
pletely bald. Since I had the hankie in my right hand, he grabbed my left hand and pumped it. He looked at my chest before he looked me in the eye. “Officer Harrison here tells me you were with Vinnie this morning when he kicked it. Did he say anything? I mean, anything for the boys in the band? Anything for me?”

Carefully, I touched the hankie to my lip. When I lifted it away, it was stained with red. “Vinnie was weally woozy,” I said. “I twied to talk to him but as for wesponding…” I screeched my frustration and chose my words carefully. “He didn’t say much.”

Terry had a round body and heavy jowls. When he frowned, his face folded in on itself. “Did he tell you who—?”

“Bloody hell!”

Alistair’s shout split Gene’s question in two. I spun around just in time to see him grappling with two strapping paramedics. He was far older than either of them, but he was having one heck of a hissy fit, and he had rock stardom on his side. He pushed himself to his feet and stood, and the paramedics backed off to give him plenty of distance. When he walked over to where we stood, he wobbled.

“Get rid of these bleeding idiots, Gene. I can’t take it anymore. They’re fussing over me like I’m a bloody retard. Call my personal doctor.”

“We’ve done that, Al.” I could tell Gene had been through this song-and-dance before. He moved in on Alistair and took charge, lowering his voice like he was talking to a child. Or a wild
animal. “Dr. Brighton is in L.A. He’s canceled his appointments for the rest of the week and he’s going to be on the first plane.”

“As if there are planes between L.A. and this bloody place!” Alistair’s face was red. A vein bulged at the side of his neck. “Who the hell ever thought of doing a concert in this hellhole? It’s a death trap, that’s what it is.”

“It was an accident.” Gene put a hand on Alistair’s arm, made eye contact, and refused to look away. I’d seen one of my uncles do the same thing with a cocker spaniel that was impossible to train. “One of the lights fell. You just happened to be under it at the time. It’s not going to happen again. This isn’t even the stage you’ll be using for the concert. That will be outside. What were you doing here anyway, Al? You told me you were going to be home this morning.”

“Shit.” As if he didn’t realize he was holding on to them, Alistair looked at the bent and twisted glasses in his hand. He tossed them on the floor. “I thought it would be fun just to pay a visit. You know, see the place and get the lay of the land. I couldn’t resist jumping up on that stage. You know, for a look. It’s going to be hell getting the sound right in this place.”

“That’s what the sound team is for. They’ll get it right.”

“And the crowds…” Alistair looked past the soaring windows to the plaza beyond. “How the hell many people do they think they can get out there? It won’t be like Shea.”

I don’t know if Quinn had heard enough or if he had a legitimate place to go. Either way, he didn’t
bother excusing himself before he moved toward where a couple of guys in blue windbreakers were looking over the wreckage of lights and wires that littered the stage.

Gene Terry watched him go, then returned to the matter at hand. “Shea was a long time ago,” he reminded Alistair. “You know we don’t get the crowds we used to.”

“Well we bloody well should,” Alistair grumbled. “And who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked, turning on me. “I told them, no damned reporters.”

“I’m not a weporter.” I winced “My name is Pepper. I was with Vinnie this morning and when I heard what happened to you…” I tasted blood on my lips and held the hankie to my mouth again. It was the first I noticed that Quinn’s initials were embroidered on it. “It seems stwange, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s awfully cuwious…Vinnie was murdered. And then this.”

Something told me this was something Alistair had yet to consider. He squinched up his eyes and stared at me hard. “What the hell is this woman jabbering about?” he asked Gene, as if I wasn’t even there. “Is she interrogating me?”

“She’s concerned.”

I tried to thank the agent for his support with a smile, but it hurt too much.

“I’m not intewwogating…” I clenched my teeth. “I just think we need to talk about it. That’s all.”

“The cops say Vinnie’s place was burglarized.” This came from Gene, and I was grateful. It was more than I knew when I left the condo.

“If it was a wobbery—”

I grimaced.

“If it was wandom—”

I counted to ten, searching for patience and words that didn’t include any Rs.

“We can’t dismiss this,” I said and congratulated myself when I managed to not sound like Elmer Fudd for a whole sentence. “What if it isn’t a coincidence?”

It was my turn to come under Terry’s ministering care. He dropped his hand from Alistair’s arm and patted mine. “You’re right,” he said. “We do need to talk. Hearing about Vinnie’s last moments will help give us all closure. But you’re jumping to conclusions as far as what happened to Alistair is concerned. It was an accident.”

“Pwobably.”

I’d been so busy concentrating on my vocabulary, I didn’t notice that Quinn had joined us. He looked over his shoulder back toward the stage and the crime scene technicians who were working there.

“The techs aren’t sure yet, but it doesn’t look as if the wires were cut. We’ll know more in a little while.”

“I don’t care what they say. This place is dangerous.” Alistair didn’t wait to hear any more. He shoved his way through the crowd, and Gene Terry followed. Even when Bernie the bodyguard appeared out of nowhere and ushered them away, I could still hear Alistair’s high-pitched bitching.

Gingerly, I touched the hankie to my lip. There was less blood than before. “Were you telling the twuth? Was it an accident?”

“You mean Alistair? And the lights?”

“And Vinnie. It’s awfully coincidental.”

Maybe, but if Quinn saw the connection, he didn’t have time to tell me about it. His cell phone rang.

He talked for a minute, and when he snapped his phone shut, I snapped myself out of my thoughts and fell into step behind him. “I have to go,” he said.

“You’re going to let me wide along, aren’t you? I mean, I can come with you, wight?”

“Not to the scene of a murder/suicide.” The crowd of uniformed cops in front of him parted and Quinn didn’t waste any time. He strode toward the revolving doors that led outside.

“But—” I scrambled to catch up. “But what about me? How am I going to get back to the cemetewy?”

He paused for a fraction of a second before he pushed through the doors. A smile crinkled one corner of his mouth. “You can always take the bus.”

I had the perfect comeback. Honest. But two things happened before I had a chance to deliver it. Number one, Quinn headed out the door and was gone. And number two…well, that might have had something to do with the voice I heard behind me. The one that stopped me cold.

“The angel of death circles overhead like a dove.”

It sounded like something Damon would say. Or at least something he might have written in a song. But this wasn’t Damon’s voice. I turned just in time to see a thin woman with long, stringy hair shuffle
past. I recognized her at once. She was the one who’d been cleaning Damon’s exhibit the first time I visited the Rock Hall. And she’d been in Vinnie’s class, too. Just like she had been that night, she was wearing beat-up jeans and a shirt decorated with beads and sequins. It was all topped off with a dirty denim jacket.

Now—as then—she had a coffee cup in her hands. It had
City Roast
printed on the side of it. The cup was empty, and she twisted it in bony fingers, breaking off tiny bits of Styrofoam and scattering them like a trail of breadcrumbs.

Or clues.

Remembering something I’d seen in Vinnie’s apartment and, come to think of it, at Damon’s grave, too, I perked right up. City Roast wasn’t one of the big chains in the area. As a matter of fact, as far as I knew, their coffee was sold at only one place in the city, the West Side Market, an open-air extravaganza sort of shopping place not too far away.

Before she had a chance to get by me, I intercepted the woman. “Hey!” I tried for a friendly smile, but it hurt too much, so I gave her a wave before I pointed to what was left of her cup. “That’s my favorite coffee, too. Vinnie liked City Woast. I know because he had some of the cups in his apartment. Were you a fwiend of his?”

She frowned. “He forgot to stop. He promised he’d come for me and he passed right by.”

Something told me we weren’t talking about Vinnie. Or even about coffee. I didn’t have the luxury of wimping out, so I gulped down the heebie-
jeebies. “You mean the angel of death? What, you guys had an appointment or something?”

“He’s coming for me.” The woman’s eyes were so pale, they were nearly colorless. “He said he would, and he’d never lie. He won’t disappoint me. Not again.”

I was getting nowhere fast. I decided on another tack. “Alistair’s glad the angel of death didn’t stop for him.”

“Alistair’s my cat. He’s a sweet little thing.” Her brows dipped low over her eyes. “He doesn’t like the dog next door. No, he doesn’t. But my Alistair doesn’t have to worry about the angel. I won’t let him go outside so the dog can’t eat him.”

“That’s weally smart.” Since I couldn’t smile, I nodded. “But I was talking about this Alistair. Alistair Cromwell. He almost got smashed by a light. And Vinnie…” Again, I pictured the coffee cups strewn around the penthouse. “When was the last time you saw Vinnie?”

“Vinnie’s aura is all wrong. He’s not a cat.”

“No, he’s not.” It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that there might be anyone who hadn’t heard what happened to Vinnie. It was obvious this woman was one bottle short of a six-pack. If I broke it to her, how would she take the news of Vinnie’s death?

Or maybe I didn’t need to tell her. If she knew Vinnie well enough to visit and leave her signature coffee cups behind, did she know him well enough to know what had happened to him?

Well enough to kill him?

I considered the possibility while I carefully
formed my question. “You know Vinnie is dead, wight? He died this morning.”

“He died too young.” A single tear slid down the woman’s cheek. “He thought sandwiches were mother’s milk. And all the sunshine was killing poison. He’s circling now.” She looked up and beyond the glass walls that soared overhead. When she smiled, I saw she had a couple of missing teeth. “He’ll be back. He’s coming for me. My lover.” She was still smiling and mumbling when she shambled away.

“All wighty, then.” Watching her go, I shivered and hugged my arms around myself.

“She bothering you?” Gene Terry was back from wherever—minus Alistair and Bernie—and when he saw me watching the woman as she got on the escalator, and headed toward the downstairs exhibits, he came to stand beside me. “Belinda’s harmless.”

“You know her? I thought she was on the staff here. You know, maintenance.”

He laughed. “Belinda’s not a cleaning woman. She’s—”

“As cwazy as a loon.”

“Yeah, she is that.” Gene shook his head. “The psychedelic movement was kinder to some than others.”

“So all that stuff about the angel of death and sandwiches…?”

From where we stood, we could still see Crazy Belinda. She got off the escalator, and I wasn’t surprised when she headed in the direction of Damon’s exhibit. Gene was watching her, too. “Believe
it or not,” he said, “she was beautiful once. We were wild about her.”

“We? As in the band?”

Gene nodded. “She spent a lot of time hanging with the guys. Then she just sort of dropped out of sight. When we arrived in Cleveland for this gig, she showed up out of nowhere. Acted like nothing had changed. Like we could just pick up where we left off so many years ago.”

“And the guys in the band…” Yeah, I was being nosy. But remember, I was talking murder. Even if Gene didn’t know that’s what I was talking about. “Were they happy to see her?”

“What do you think?”

“I think she’s got some cwazy fixation with death. And with Mind at Large. It’s cweepy.” I was sounding cwazy and cweepy, too, and I vowed to choose my words more carefully.

Gene dismissed the whole thing with a wave of one hand. “Belinda, she’s just talking nonsense. Even before she destroyed her brain cells, she was a space cadet. She’s harmless.”

“And very cwee…Stwange…odd.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

I couldn’t see Belinda anymore, so I turned toward Gene and found him looking at the stage and the light that had crashed down on it so hard, it left a crater the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. His expression clouded. “I can’t believe we almost lost two of the guys today. Brings the whole thing back like it was yesterday. You know, about Damon.”