by Robin Ray
CHAPTER 13
The private sanctuary/domain/fortress of solitude belonging to one Amy Jade Winehouse from London, England, looked exactly like what Gregory imagined the den of a troubled person would resemble – to say her personal space was a mismatch of contrasting styles would be the understatement of the century. First, there was the floor. Relatively simple in design, it was painted as a black and white checkerboard. In the black spaces were stickers of stars, constellations and other planets. Some of the white squares had splotches of red paint which, eerily, resembled blood stains. Some of the other white squares were painted to look like mint candies; that is, 2” red stripes jutted from the peripheries of the squares towards the middle. All four walls were covered with stickers and pictures that bared little resemblance to each other. For instance, next to a blacklight picture of Bela Lugosi was a cutout of a broken mountain bike which, itself, was next to a picture of Madonna with goat’s legs embedded in a laminated pine board next to a vintage IH truck hubcap serving as the belly button for a life-sized poster of the Empress Dowager Cixi from China beneath an upside cutout of the Three Stooges, and so on. A psychological nightmare, to be sure.
It also didn’t help that, wait, what were those? Florentine axes dangling off the ceiling? Were they real? In the sunlight, they sure looked like they could decapitate an armadillo. The closet, stuffed to the hilt with vintage clothes, had some of their innards spilled out to the floor. The three or four ashtrays in the room were overfilled with butts. Beer bottles, some still unopened, were littered about the room and on the bed which, itself, looked like there might be a body beneath the sheets; if not a missing body then certainly the corks of at least 100 bottles of wine. Over on her cluttered desk sat, finally, a sign that the PI was in the room of a musician – an open notebook with lyrics to songs yet to be recorded.
“They left everything exactly the way she left it,” Jim explained.
“I can just imagine what’s under that bed,” Gregory mused.
Getting on his knees, he checked beneath the bed anyway. Nothing came up but empty cans of beer, dust, a few spent lipsticks, dust, a handful of music magazines, dust, eyeliners, dust, more sheets of lyrics, dust, a rolled-up poster of The Beatles’ “supposedly pornographic” Apple Corps logo from the Abbey Road album, and more dust.
“Geez,” the PI exclaimed, getting up. “I’m surprised there was no body down there.”
“This is my first time I’ve been up here since she was found,” Jim stated.
“If she was in this house,” the PI figured, “and she was brought to the Mill Stream, whoever did it sure went through a lot of trouble.”
“That’s what we told the angels,” Jim insisted. “Which one of us would have the strength to carry a body that far and not be seen? But, she did live here, so I can at least understand the suspicion.”
“Did she have any enemies?” the PI asked, dusting his clothes.
Jim sat down on the bed and kicked his legs up on a divan. “Are you kidding? In a sex-starved atmosphere like this? Forty guys to every one girl? She was treated like a princess.”
Gregory picked up Amy’s lyric book. “Maybe one of the ladies got jealous.”
“Who knows?” the singer attested. “At least she was protected.”
“What do you mean?” the D asked. “By whom?”
“Not by whom, by what,” Jim corrected him, cracking open one of Amy’s old, warm beers. “Remember, there’s no government here. The police station is really just called that as a central office for information and order. If anyone tried to force themselves on her, their ID card would automatically empty all credits and they go to lockup.”
“That’s not to say that people won’t break the law,” the detective surmised. “I think that’s embedded in us somewhere, I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” the bearded one guessed. “If you were a rapist, you wouldn’t have made it to Heaven in the first place. I supposed somebody could change out of desperation, but since I’ve been here, I haven’t seen anybody’s personality change to that extent, but you never know.”
Just then, the doorbell rang.
“Looks like we got company,” Jim noted. Getting up, he opened one of the windows and looked down. “Hello?” he shouted.
“Hey,” Tony said, looking up from the front steps, “I’m looking for my friend, Gregory.”
Jim brought his head back in the room and turned to the detective, smiling devilishly. “Your young friend’s looking for you.”
“It’s not what you think,” the PI scolded him.
“Hey,” Jim said, backing off a bit. “I’m not a judge.”
“Can he come up?” Gregory asked. “He’s helping with this investigation.”
The hairy vocalist nodded. “Yeah, sure. I don’t think Amy would mind.”
“By the way,” the elder detective wondered, “where do the others work?”
“Jimi and Janis?” Jim asked.
The detective nodded.
“I’ll write down their addresses for you,” the singer promised.
Gregory removed his notepad from his pants’ pocket, ripped out a sheet, and handed it to Jim who went over to the desk and used a wooden pen to scribble something down. The detective also removed his own pen to write in the pad.
“Mind telling me where you were the night of Friday, July 15th?” he asked the rocker.
“I was…” the Riders on the Storm singer started saying, then was interrupted when the doorbell rang again. “If we’re finished up here,” Jim suggested, “you wanna check out the basement? I’ll tell you everything down there.”
“What’s down there?” Gregory asked.
“A little recording studio,” Jim stated. “Amy spent a lot of time down there. We all did, really. Half of Woodstock recorded down there at some time or another.”
“Yeah,” the PI agreed. “Let’s go.”
Jim, opening the door to the basement, switched on the overhead light and proceeded down the rickety stairs with Gregory and Tony not far behind. Clicking on a second light, it was now apparent they were in some kind of music studio. The basement, atypical for a house of that size, sported a floor-to-ceiling distance of about 12 feet. In the middle of the room was a curved, six-foot long mixing board and chairs with several pieces of gear in racks, musical instruments and assorted equipment lying about. There was a clear line of sight to the room behind the mixing board because of a huge glass window in the door. Jim walked over to an old soda dispenser in one corner while the D’s eyeballed the suite.
“This must’ve cost a pretty penny,” Gregory wondered.
“Oh, yeah,” Jim said. “Thousands of credits. Virtual instruments are really the way to go, but a lot of cats prefer the real deal so they sacrificed for this. Nothing here is standard; they all had to be made by hand over in Electrical then transported down. Took forever. You guys want a pop?” he asked his guests. “There’s green apple, lemon lime, black cherry…”
“None of that flowery stuff?” Gregory asked.
“Yuck,” Jim smirked. “Too sweet for me.”
“I’ll have a Cherry,” the PI requested.
“Same here,” his assistant said as he fiddled with the knobs, switches and slides on a 3-tiered stand of digital and analog synthesizers.
Jim, depressing the dispenser’s buttons, took a bottle of green apple soda for himself and brought a black cherry to each of the detectives. Seeing the neophyte PI at the suite of keyboards, he called out to him. “Don’t mess with those, man. They’re Ray’s and he hates people meddling with his stuff.” Tony, though stung by the singer’s order, immediately complied. All three men then sat down in rolling office chairs in front of the wide mixing board.
“Where’d you get that soda machine?” Tony asked, spinning his bottle top off.
“Why do you ask?” the green apple soda-sipping musician asked. “It’s just a dispenser.”
“I just didn’t think Woodstock, being so small, wo
uld have the industry to create something like that,” the young PI guessed.
“It was here when I got here,” Jim asserted. “Where it came from, I don’t have a clue. The sodas we get for free because the people who work in those farm record here for nothing. Sometimes we even volunteer to pick the fruits and whatnot. Can’t complain.”
“They’re pretty self-servient around here,” Gregory noticed. “What about utilities? Water, electricity, sewage…”
“Yeah,” Black Beard said, sipping his pop. “We have that.”
“I mean,” the detective clarified, “are those plants all here in Woodstock?”
“Man, you ask more questions than the judges at Nuremberg,” Jim joked. “Ah, I’m just twisting your tits. As far as I know, the sewers, the infrastructure, utilities, all that stuff was built by angels and workers from the Industrial Heavens. Woodstock runs solely on hydro-electric power. They tap into the water at Northern Falls, you know, the falls on Green Mountain. Pretty slick. The senior workers are engineers who live here in town; the others are basically musicians and industry types. They go through some training. I’ve even thought about it myself but that technical stuff’s not my type of thing. People like Manzarek, Jon Lord, Bob Moog, the Japanese Yamaha crew, Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream, Bob Casale from Devo, they work there. All those guys come down here to jam sometimes, too.”
“So, Jim,” the PI asked, removing his pad and pen from his pocket, “you were telling me your whereabouts on July 15 of this year?”
“It was a typical day,” he explained. “I work at Blueberry Hill Farm just off Blueberry Hill Road on the west side.”
“I found my thrill…” Tony started singing. When he saw so one was interested, clammed up immediately.
“I take it blueberries are their main crop there?” Gregory queried the curly-haired singer.
“You’d think so, but no,” Jim attested, leaning back in his chair. “Maybe back in the day, it was. Now it’s wine grapes, specifically, Prié blanc and Coda di Volpe. They’ve also been experimenting with tomato wine so there are a couple of patches of heirloom tomatoes around.”
“Tomato wine?” the PI asked.
“Wouldn’t that be, like, a Bloody Mary?” Tony guessed.
“That’s made with vodka,” Gregory informed his young assistant.
“It looks like white wine,” Jim assured them, “because it has no tannins. It is stronger, though, like 14%.”
“What are tannins?” the junior D asked.
“Ingredients in the grape skins and seeds that give wine its astringency,” Jim answered. “More tannins give you a dryer wine.”
“Why do you want a dry wine?” Tony beseeched the bearded one.
Jim considered his answer for a second. “It’s a personal taste, really. Some people don’t like sweet wine. To them it’s like drinking liquid candy.”
“I used to work for this hoity-toity woman named Elizabeth Bathory,” Gregory interjected. “She used to say she couldn’t tell the difference between sweet wine and menstrual piss but, you know, that’s just some high-class nonsense. T-bone steak, hamburger…they’ll both fill you up. Just personal taste.”
“Thanks for that image,” Jim groaned. “Now I can’t go near a woman for a year till the trauma’s gone.”
“My bad,” the D apologized. “They say I go too far sometimes.”
“I’d like to taste that tomato wine someday,” Tony hoped.
“There might me a little upstairs,” Jim said. “That’s Ray’s main poison.”
“Who’s Ray?” Gregory asked, stretching out the sudden cramping in his legs.
“Manzarek,” the singer replied. “A cat I’ve known for donkey’s years. Anyway, to get back to your question, I was at work, then came back here, practiced some stuff, went to bed.”
“That can be verified?” the PI asked.
“Yep,” Jim answered. Getting up, he reached into a draw below the mixing desk, brought out a marble notebook and handed it to Gregory. “My poems.”
The PI leafed through a few pages as the singer returned to his reclining seat. Tony rolled his chair closer to his mentor so he could have a peek at the book.
“I don’t know much about poetry,” Gregory admitted, “but I guess it’s deep. So, that’s all you did? Practiced and slept?”
“Sometimes we have little get togethers with neighbors upstairs,” Jim revealed, “you know, play charades or some other time-wasting foolishness. Jimi, Janis and Amy went out around 9 or 10 so I just sat around watching movies, dozing off…nothing, really. I wasn’t feeling that good anyway.”
“Then you went to bed?” the PI asked, continuing his perusal of the book.
The singer nodded. “Right there on the couch. Next thing I know, I’m being waken up the next morning by Jimi and Janis coming back home.”
“Where did your roommates go the night before?” Gregory asked, turning a page.
Jim shrugged. “Probably one of the bars in town, I don’t know.”
“Did you wonder where Amy was when you didn’t see her on Saturday?” the older detective asked.
“Nah, she’s a big girl,” the musician explained, stretching out the kink that had formed in his back. “Hell, I’m surprised Jimi and Janis were even here Saturday. I mean, we’re all party freaks, but everybody here is like that. What else is there to do? Work, see a therapist, get a massage, go swimming, go for a walk, strum these guitars a little? You know, I think I’ve read every book in the Woodstock Library. Not so much the romance stuff but, you know, Turgenev, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Rand, Nietzsche before he went crazy, Greek mythology, the biographies and works of the old ‘uns – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, basically anything without Harlequin stamped on it.”
“So now you must get real bored,” Tony posed.
“Out of my fucking skull,” Jim admitted. “How many times can I read the poems, novels, short stories, essays of Aldous Huxley? I mean, there’s good and bad to Heaven, you know? Hell, I’ve been thinking about moving up to the next level lately.”
“What do you mean?” Tony asked.
“Asceticism,” Jim answered. “You know, upward through the Heavens.”
“Shave your head and become a monk?” Gregory asked jokingly.
“Yep,” the singer answered, ignoring the intended slight. “I’ve been contemplating it. I studied a lot of the stuff Huxley got in to, like Vedanta. That’s an Indian philosophy centered around Upanishad, texts that have vegetarianism, meditation and non-violence as some of their main tenets. Hard to give up the booze, though. And the women.”
“There’s hardly any females here,” Tony noticed.
“Kid,” Jim bragged, “you’re in Rock & Roll Heaven. Since when is that an issue? Anyway, despite what you might be thinking, we get regular visitors from Runway Heaven, so it’s not so bad. They dig rock stars, we dig models. I’d say that’s a pretty fair deal.”
“What do you do as a monk,” Tony waxed insolently, “sit on top of a mountain all day giving people advice?”
“It’s actually a life of extreme poverty,” Jim corrected him. “You beg for food, have no possessions, want no possessions, practice chastity, things like that.”
“To purify the soul, right?” Gregory asked.
The singer nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
“Sounds like torture to me,” the young D admitted.
“At your age, it would be,” Jim agreed, “You’d have to change your mindset completely around, 180 degrees. You’re happy because you want nothing. You’ve already gotten there.”
“Except food,” Tony added.
“Right,” Black Beard nodded. “You live off the charity of others.”
“And then you move on up / to the east side!” Tony, the perpetual clown, sang.
“Didn’t you say you had something to do,” the frustrated singer groaned, speaking to the youngster, “like go mow a lawn or something?”
“Geez.
I’m just trying to be friendly,” the dejected Latino-Korean muttered.
“I’m just bustin’ your chops, man,” Jim let on. “I’m not that serious.”
“You know,” Gregory mentioned to his host, “I’d meant to ask L’Da about transporting between the heavens, when we could do it, and so forth.”
“In due time,” Jim promised. “You know what’s weird? We’re free to move through the heavens, you know, once we petition, but people always seem to go back to where they feel the most comfortable. Each to his own, I guess. And you’re not a musician, right?”
Gregory shook his head. “Nope.”
Jim glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearing 11AM. “I have to step out for a while,” he cautioned the detectives.
“So, do we,” the PI claimed. “Oh, by the way, would you have time today to take a polygraph test at the station?”
“I did one already,” Jim objected.
“Yeah, I know,” Gregory realized, adopting a tone as non-threatening as possible. “Disclosure testing, what you probably did, is usually the norm – denial of details, denial of culpability, denial of understanding and denial of effect, and there are lots of different tests, but I have a different approach. I kind of combine them.”
“Geez, Louise,” the bearded singer moaned, “how long does that take?”
“Not long,” the elder PI assured him. “Maybe an hour or so.”
“Oy,” Jim shook his head. “You’re killing me.”
Gregory handed the book of poems back to its author. “So, I take that as a yes?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he assented. “What time do you want me over there?”
The PI squinted. “Try for 2PM.”
“3PM,” Jim suggested instead. “I don’t wanna rush up here from West Beach. Gonna take in a little skinny dipping while I have the chance.”
Gregory nodded, standing up. “3PM it is.”