Tombs of Endearments (16 page)

Everyone, apparently, but me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me.”

Belinda’s eyes were on her coffee cup, but it was clear her mind was a million miles away. Or more precisely, nearly forty years in the past. “They let
me backstage,” she said, and she smiled. “They said I was cute. That’s when I met him. Damon. Damon, Damon, Damon.” Her eyes lost their focus, and still mumbling, Belinda shuffled away.

A smarter person would have just let her go. But let’s face it, there was something about her insisting that Damon had been in her apartment the night he died that was as fascinating as an auto accident. I couldn’t turn away. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from following her.

Curious to know where she was headed and what she would do when she got there, I trudged behind Belinda through the rain, up the hill, and into the old, ornate part of the cemetery, and by that time, I was breathing hard and wishing I’d been smart enough to follow her in my car. Like I thought she’d walk all the way here? I told myself it wasn’t possible but hey, like I said, there was that whole
crazy
thing to consider. When we got to the main gate and Belinda stopped to look both ways before she crossed the street, I was huffing and puffing, and—not incidentally since the rain started to come down harder than ever—soaked to the skin.

Did I let this stop me?

I’d like to say that in true detective fashion, I refused to give up on my investigation.

I reminded myself of that fact when Belinda paused in front of an old red brick apartment building within spitting distance of Garden View’s main gates. She was just about to go inside (and I was all set to slip in right after her) when a movement in the overgrown rhododendrons to one side
of the front door caught my eye. I saw a flash of gray and a peek of a little black nose.

I may have been soaked to the bone and as chilly as a frozen margarita, but I wasn’t dumb, and I was willing to try just about anything to get Belinda to keep talking. I darted forward, stuck my hand into the bush, and came out holding a cat.

“Hey, look!” Holding up the wet critter so she could see it, I closed in on her and hoped that I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. (I guess that’s a mixed metaphor, but since by this time it really was raining cats and dogs, I figured it counted.) “Is it Alistair? Did I find him?”

Lucky for me, it was the right feline. I knew this because Belinda tried to look stern when she said, “You bad, bad boy!” It might have worked if she wasn’t smiling at the same time.

While she made a move to unlock the door, I kept a firm hold on the cat. “Go on ahead,” I told her. “I’ll bring him up.”

Belinda didn’t argue. A couple of minutes later, we were inside her apartment.

While she clucked and cooed and grabbed Alistair out of my arms to rub him down with a tattered towel and get him something to eat, I took the opportunity to look over the place. It was, to put it charitably, pretty basic. The living room contained nothing but a worn couch and a table across from it that was filled with pictures.

Rude or not, I didn’t care. I reached for the closest gold-colored metal frame. It contained a faded color photograph of Damon. In it, he was standing with his back to the ocean where sunlight glittered like diamonds on the water. He was smiling.

Next to that photo was another one, this of Damon along with his bandmates and Gene Terry, as bald then as he was now. There was another photo of Damon to the right and another next to that one. Interspersed with the pictures was an incense holder filled with ashes and five colored glass cups. Each contained a burning candle. On the wall above the table there were a dozen more photos of Damon. They had been painstakingly hung in a perfect circle. It might not have struck me as odd that the center of the circle was empty—except for the rectangular-shaped patch of lighter colored paint there. And the empty picture hook.

When Belinda came into the room with Alistair in her arms, I was ready for her. “Something’s missing,” I said.

“Alistair was missing.” She smiled down at the cat, who had lost no time and was sleeping soundly. “I told him not to get the mail, but he didn’t listen. He isn’t allowed outside. There are dogs, you know, and dogs eat cats.”

“Then it’s a good thing we found him.” I tapped the empty spot on the wall. “But something’s missing here, too.”

Her eyebrows dipped. They needed a good plucking and an expert’s hand when it came to shaping. “Damon was here,” she said. “He left with Alistair.”

There are those who say I am not the brightest bulb in the box (well, actually, Joel was the only one who’d ever really come out and said it). I was about to prove him wrong. Believe it or not, what Belinda said actually made sense.

“You mean that Alistair disappeared the same day the picture of Damon went missing?”

She nodded. “Alistair went outside. He shouldn’t be able to reach the door handle.”

I couldn’t argue with that. So Belinda didn’t get wind of what I was looking for (and maybe panic), I strolled over to the door that led into the hallway. The wood was raw near the lock, as if it had been scraped. As if the door had been forced open.

As casually as I could, I turned back to her. “Belinda, on the day Alistair went outside and took Damon with him, was anything else missing?”

As if she didn’t understand, she narrowed her eyes.

I tried to explain without frightening her. “You know, a TV or a stereo. Maybe some jewelry or—”

Belinda’s rough laugh cut me short. “Don’t have any of those things. Don’t need them. I won’t be here long. Only until the angel spreads his wings and—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that part.” I did, and honestly, I wasn’t in the mood to hear all about it again. “So nothing else was touched? Nothing else was taken?”

“Only Alistair.” She cuddled the cat. “He’s back. He promises he’ll never do it again.”

I nodded as a way of telling her that if the cat swore he was going to be good, I wasn’t one to argue, and pointed to the empty spot on the wall. I had a feeling that by that time, Belinda had forgotten all about it.

“What was in this picture?” I asked her. “You know, the picture that disappeared the day Alistair
went out for the mail? In the picture, what was Damon doing?”

This question was tougher, and considering it, Belinda sucked on her lower lip and stared at the empty spot on the wall. “It was the night he died,” she said.

At this point, I should have been frustrated but actually, I wasn’t. See, I was too busy realizing that when it came to my investigation, I was finally getting somewhere. Because I knew more now than I had a little while earlier.

Number one, I knew that Alistair the cat hadn’t really gone out for the mail. (Okay, I actually knew that before, but I was sure of it now.) What I thought was that when the door was jimmied open, the cat escaped.

As to why that door was forced open in the first place…

I looked from the scratch marks near the door lock to the empty spot on the wall.

A picture of Damon. The night he died. And call me crazy, but something told me it must have shown more than that.

Whatever was in that picture, it must have been something important. Because somebody was willing to risk breaking into Belinda’s apartment to steal it.

It took me a couple of days, but I finally came up
with a plan of sorts. While I waited to put it into action, I sat in my office, alone and grumbling, trying to make sense of everything I’d found out while I tapped my fingers against my keyboard. Maybe the constant
tap, tap, tap
would jump-start my brain.

That’s when Ella poked her head in the door. “I heard you typing. You’re not too busy for company, are you?”

Since my monitor wasn’t on, she should have seen I wasn’t. I waved her inside, and while she bustled over to my guest chair, I flicked on the computer monitor, just so she didn’t ask any questions.

“You’re so much better at computers than I am,” Ella said. Her cheeks were rosy, just like the sweater she was wearing with a black skirt that brushed her ankles. “All those bytes and bits and such…” She made a face. “It makes me crazy. My girls are terrific with computers, of course. Kids have no fear and they learn things so quickly. But I can’t ask them for help. Not with this.”

When it came to her daughters, Ella was as protective as a lioness with her cubs. I couldn’t help but be curious. What was she up to that she didn’t want the girls to know? Internet compatibility profiles? Internet dating? Internet sex?

I shuddered at the thought and carefully phrased my question. “Is there something you need help finding? I can show you how.”

“Oh, no. I’d rather have you do it for me.” Ella chuckled. She was wearing a dozen strands of black, sparkling beads, and they shimmered when she shook. “I want to surprise the girls. We’re all going to the Mind at Large concert.”

I guess I looked surprised because Ella smiled. “I’m not such an old fogy that I’m not still rockin’ and rollin’.”

“Yeah, I can see you wanting to go, but the girls—”

“Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re hip. They’re down. They’re into the groove. We’ve been talking at home, you see, about the sixties. I think they’ll get a real kick out of seeing one of the bands that defined the era. Of course, now that Vinnie Pal is dead…” She shook her head. “What a shame! I’m glad they didn’t cancel the concert. They said Vinnie would have wanted the show to go on. Even without him. I want to order tickets now. Before they’re all gone. You know how it is, Pepper, once a rock musician dies—especially mysteriously—the legend grows.”

It was so much like what Damon and I had discussed back at the chapel earlier in the week, it was uncanny. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get the opinion of someone who’d lived through the Flower
Power generation and come out the other side
without
frying her brain.

“Is that what happened after Damon Curtis died?” I asked Ella. “Was the group more popular than ever after that?”

“Well, for a while, yes, of course. Not that most of the fans cared much about the rest of the band. Really, all Alistair and Vinnie and the rest of them ever were was Damon’s backup band. But that Damon, now he was another story! He was the one all the girls went to see. What a face! And that voice! Dreamy with a capital D. After he died, the group scattered for a while. I hear that at one time, Mighty Mike was working at a golf course. And Alistair went back home to London and opened a pub. Of course, they had plenty of money. Their old music—the stuff they recorded when Damon was alive—that became more popular than ever. But the stuff they recorded right after his death…” A devotee to the last, Ella shivered.

“Then Vinnie wrote the music for that Disney animated movie. You remember, the one about the aliens in New Jersey. Or was it the one about the stray cats that take over the boarding school? Either way, Vinnie wrote the music and he brought the band back together to record it. After that, they were bound to be famous. All the lite rock stations started playing their songs.”

I cringed on Damon’s behalf. “You know an awful lot about these guys,” I said. “You don’t look like the type who was ever into the psychedelic scene.”

Ella winked. “You never know by looking, kid. I’ve had an adventure or two in my day.”

“And now you want your girls to see what it was all about.” I could relate. My first trip to a spa was with my mom. I logged onto the Internet to search for tickets, and Ella came around from the other side of the desk and watched over my shoulder.

“Just get us four seats, anywhere you can. It probably won’t be near the front or anything. That would be asking too much.”

“I dunno…” I moved the cursor around the screen, clicking at the appropriate spots and checking out ticket availability against the seating chart on another page. “Looks like you can get a ticket just about anywhere.”

“Really?” Ella peered at the screen. “How cool is that? Let’s go…here.” She pointed a finger at the seating chart, and I noted the section number, went back to the ticket page, and added four tickets to the shopping cart.

“There’s always room for one more,” she said, handing me her credit card. “You sure you don’t want to come with us?”

I was sure. At least about the concert. See, what Ella didn’t know was that I already had plans to see Mind at Large up close and personal. The next day, they were scheduled to record the single they were releasing to promote their concert. Clever me, I’d managed to get myself invited to the session.

How?

It wasn’t hard, really. Not once I called their agent, Gene Terry, reintroduced myself, and reminded him about the book I was supposed to be writing. Oh yeah, I reminded him about something else, too. Like that I was the one with Vinnie when
he died and that I had a message for the band—from Vinnie.

Anybody who lives in Cleveland and most people who’ve ever visited know about the Flats. It’s the area along both the east and west banks of the Cuyahoga River, literally the flat land in the center of a city. From what I remember from Ohio history class (and believe me when I say that’s not much), it’s where the first pioneers settled, and a few decades ago, it was home to dozens of industries.

Cleveland’s days as a powerhouse of manufacturing are over, but the Flats still hangs on. I remember when I was back in high school and it was the place to party. It was hopping, night to morning, with nightclubs and bars. A bunch of muggings and a couple of murders put an end to that, and though there are still a few clubs around and a number of developers who are trying to revive the area, most of the party action has moved up the hill to the Warehouse District.

These days, a lot of the Flats is deserted, and the businesses that remain are mostly small manufacturers, lake shippers, and warehouses. The roads that wind under massive bridges and over railroad tracks are pocked with potholes.

I maneuvered my Mustang around one the size of the bathroom back at my apartment and checked the address I’d written on a piece of paper against the numbers on the nearest boarded-up building. It just so happened to be the biggest, the most dilapidated, and the spookiest-looking place on the
block. It was also exactly the place I was looking for—the home of Ajaz Recording Studios.

I parked the car and tiptoed my way across a parking lot dotted with murky puddles, empty beer cans, and bits of paper that scuttled along on a stiff breeze off nearby Lake Erie.

Once inside, I found myself in a long, dark hallway that opened into a gargantuan and very empty warehouse. There were more puddles (I didn’t want to think of what), scritchy and scratchy noises (I didn’t want to know what made them), and an
AJAZ
sign above a doorway that was all the way on the other side of the building.

My heels clicked against the concrete, and the sound echoed up the high walls and off the broken glass of what was left of the windows that faced the river. To my left on the second, third, and fourth stories of the building was a walkway that overlooked the warehouse floor. Beyond it and through the gloom, I could see what must once have been offices.

The door into the studio was secured, and I got buzzed in. Fortunately, the Ajaz offices were lighter, brighter, and far cleaner than what I’d seen outside. The purple-haired receptionist with multiple eyebrow piercings explained that Ajaz’s shabby exterior was a great way to keep burglary to a minimum and showed me into a control room with a panel so chock-full of dials and lights and buttons, it looked like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise. I smiled briefly at Bernie, the Mind at Large bodyguard. He was somehow managing to munch donuts, even though there was a cute girl in a short, short denim skirt and a top that showed
off her belly button ring on his lap. I nodded to the roadies who were standing around looking bored.

Crazy Belinda was there, too, sipping City Roast coffee while she rocked back and forth mumbling something about death and destruction. I was careful not to make eye contact. Yeah, I had plenty I still needed to talk to her about (like what, specifically, was in that missing photograph), but I would handle that sometime when there was nobody else around.

The moment I walked in, I had planned to introduce myself to the two techies sitting behind the control panel and apologize if I was interrupting them while they worked, but it turned out, I didn’t have to bother.

Like everyone else in the room, the two sound technicians weren’t working. They were watching the melee on the other side of the glass wall that separated the control room from the sound studio, where Mind at Large, troubadours to the Make Love, Not War generation, were going at one another like cats and dogs.

“What the bloody hell!” Alistair threw down his sticks, got up from his seat behind the drums, and kicked a hand-tooled leather cowboy boot straight through the bass drum that had
Mind at Large
painted on it in psychedelic purple lettering. Even the resulting noise wasn’t enough to drown his voice. “Are you ruddy amateurs?” he screamed. “Have you forgotten how to make a friggin’ recording? You know to use an eight-beat count-off instead of four. The last two beats are silent, Mike. Did you forget to bring your fuckin’ brain with
you when you crawled out of your bottle this morning?”

Mighty Mike’s eyes were streaked with red and when he threw down his guitar, his hands shook. Since there was a bottle of Southern Comfort open beside him, I didn’t think the trembling had anything to do with how angry he was. The way he jumped out of his chair did, though. Just like the way he got in Alistair’s face.

“Here we go again.” One of the guys at the control panel groaned and flicked a couple of switches, turning off the sound between the studio and the control room. From where we stood on the other side of the glass, we were witnesses to the silent ego war. We could see the bandmates battling, their mouths opening and closing, their fingers pointing and their expressions ranging from livid (the ever-pleasant Alistair) to downright I’m-so-frickin’-mad-I’m-gonna-kill-you (Mike, but that might have had something to do with the fact that when Pete rushed forward to put in his two cents, he kicked over Mike’s bottle of booze). Thank goodness, we couldn’t hear a thing. We really didn’t need to. Lip-reading skills are not required to recognize the f-bomb.

Technician Number One had apparently seen enough. He laid his head on the table in front of him. The other techie sat back and made himself comfortable. He reached for a pack of cigarettes.

“They’ve done this before, huh?” Since nobody else seemed to be paying attention to what was happening in the studio, I directed my question to Techie Number Two. It wasn’t as polite as the introduction I’d been planning, but it was the best
way I could think to remind him I was still there and waiting. “How long is this going to take?”

He grabbed a chair and pushed it in my direction. “You might as well have a seat, honey. If it’s anything like the five or six other fights they’ve already had today, we could be here until the wee hours.”

I reached for the chair, but before I had a chance to sit, Ben, who’d been tossing his opinions into the melee from the fringes, caught sight of me. His eyes lit, not so much with interest as with curiosity. Ben reached around Pete (who was so mad he was hopping up and down) to hit a button on the microphone that allowed him to talk to the control room. “Hey, is this the chick?” he asked.

Techie Number Two looked up at me.

“I’m the chick,” I said.

“Hey, assholes!” We were back to hearing everything that was going on in the studio, and Ben’s voice rose above the babble of voices. “The chick is here.”

Mighty Mike had his back to me. Hanging on to a microphone for balance, he pivoted to get a good look. Pete kicked over a music stand and stomped to the other side of the studio, but not before he glared at me. Alistair shot a death-ray look at both of them, and then, just for good measure, sent one just as nasty my way.

I swallowed hard. “Your agent said I could talk to you.” Though I probably didn’t have to, I automatically raised my voice so they could hear me. “All of you.”

Nobody threw a hissy fit. In my book, that was as good as an engraved invitation. Before anybody
could change their minds, I headed where the technician pointed.

I’ve never been accused of being sensitive (well, except to cheap wool sweaters and pierced earrings that aren’t silver or at least 14-karat gold), but even I could feel the bad blood there in that studio. It was as heavy in the air as the smell of the cigarette Ben was puffing on. I stopped just inside the door, checking out the cramped quarters and gauging the best place to stand and keep out of the way of the toxic vibes.

Was it next to Mighty Mike, who was rummaging through a cooler in search of a new bottle of Southern Comfort? Or Pete, so short and skinny, he looked like a starving refugee from some dusty country? (Which, come to think of it, might have been the reason he was eyeing me up like something he’d ordered in from the deli.)

It wasn’t anywhere near Alistair, that was for sure. I’d seen Alistair in action back at the Rock Hall, and I wasn’t taking the chance of getting in his way, especially not when his face was so red, it looked as if his head was going to shoot off like a bottle rocket.

I opted for Ben, partly because I thought maybe his animosity for his bandmates didn’t run as deep as theirs. After all, he was the newest member of Mind at Large.
Newest
being a relative word, of course. I knew from my research that he’d once belonged to a band called Frame Forward; he’d joined Mind at Large as lead singer after Damon’s death. Besides the benefit of history (or in this case, the lack thereof), there was a tattoo of a crucifix on Ben’s left arm. I figured with tempers run
ning high, a religious guy might be my safest bet.