Night Strike

by Rodney Mountain

  "Sounds like she was on the freight train to hell," I added.

  "Not far off," Mike agreed, "The end came in early September 1989. Mary and I were with some friends, having a couple drinks and relaxing. I had just finished shooting on an action flick, and I sorely needed some rest and relaxation. We were all talking, much like we are here tonight, and I asked them if they’d heard from Cookie in a while. Nobody had, and I started to get curious. We all called a few people, and Cookie had been suspiciously absent from the party and club scene for the past two or three weeks.

  "We decided that we’d best take a ride over and check on her. Five of us piled into my 84 Caprice, which I drove until it died in 97, and headed over to Cookie’s place. Cookie’s place was not very much, it was an apartment that was paid for automatically out of her residual checks from CRI, the holding company I set up for handling royalties on the Inquisition albums. It was a tax thing. Cookie and the others were officially contract employees of CRI. It did their health insurance and their royalties. I had Cookie’s apartment paid for so she wouldn’t lose it. She never objected, though she needed the money.

  "Cookie’s apartment was silent, but we could smell something in the hall. Nobody was quite sure what that smell was, though I had a sneaking suspicion about it. We tried to find the super to get him to let us in, but he was nowhere to be found. I took a good look at the door, and saw that the deadbolt wasn’t engaged. I took a credit card and slipped the lock on the door.

  "The smell bowled us over when we entered. Mary and the rest were gagging, and one of the stragglers went outside to throw up. I pushed all of them out and made my way into the darkened apartment slowly. I used a handkerchief to keep from leaving prints as I turned on some lights. I found Cookie, or more precisely what little was left of her, lying on the couch. She was naked and had an empty pill bottle in her hand. I looked at the bottle, careful not to touch and saw that she’d committed suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills."

  "You really know how to tell a story before dinner," Amy said with a groan, "You’re lucky that this is going to be a dinner good enough to overcome that story."

  "Should be just about time to eat anyway," I said, "What did you do after you found her body?"

  "Called the police," Mike said, "And wouldn’t you know it, I had to run into my father for the first time since I had left home, over a decade earlier."

  "He was assigned to the case?" I asked.

  "Yep," he continued after tossing his cigarette into the fire, "There was no problem though. He’d finally quit drinking and we got along fairly well considering our history. Cookie’s death was ruled a suicide, which it probably was. She’d pretty well destroyed her life and she knew it. Cookie joined the forever 27 club on September eighth, 1989."

  It was at this point that Amy pulled the roasts out of the fire and declared them finished. She gave each of us a package, along with a set of silverware. The talking ceased as we tore into the meal. She’d given the meat a heavy dose of the seasoning, along with putting a liberal dose of onion and other cut vegetables. It was easily the best roast I had had in years. It was over thirty minutes before any of us spoke again.

  Just as Mike was getting ready to talk again, lighting his cigarette and finishing his cola, one of the tenants came over and said he needed to quickly settle his account as he’d been called back for an emergency. Mike said to go on and that he’d take a break from talking and smoke another cigarette.

  "You guys in the mood for beer or wine?" I asked them, "If you like, I’ll bring some back with me."

  "You have a decent red wine?" Amy asked hopefully.

  "Some that’s grown about twenty miles from here," I told her, "It’s not too bad. You want some too, Mike?"

  "Sure," he said, "That will go well with what’s in the stomach."

  I headed in to check the hurried man out, and went over to the lot that he had rented to make sure that everything was in order. That being done I started to hurry back over towards the store when a young couple from Georgia stopped me. They bombarded me with questions about the area, which delayed me further.

  Before I could make it back to the store, I was stopped yet again. This time by our local constable who’d been called about one of my rowdy tenants bothering one of the neighbors. I went with him to talk to the youngsters in that lot. I spent the next hour or so playing mediator, and getting ready to evict them just to get them out of my hair. About two hours later, I finally did just that.

  Chapter 6

  I finally made it back to Mike and Amy at around nine in the evening. The police had arrested one of the ruffians and I kicked the others off the property. I was grumbling as I went back to the store and pulled two bottles of a decent wine off the shelf. I thought about it and grabbed a bag of ice and a case of beer as well.

  I walked over and handed the bag and the case of beer to Mike. He grinned and put the ice in the cooler and dropped the beer and wine in there. I don’t know if Red Wine is supposed to be chilled or not, but at that point I just didn’t care.

  "Everything all right?" Mike asked me, "I saw the police come in."

  "A couple of ruffians who were pestering the neighbors," I told him, "I get a few tourists like that every year, mainly college kids who don’t know any better. Sheriff tossed one of them in the can and I tossed the rest out the park. I don’t deal with them anymore. I like my park nice and peaceful."

  "That’s part of the charm," Amy agreed.

  Mike sat back down in his chair and pulled a beer out of the cooler. Amy briefly disappeared into the camper and came back with a corkscrew and some plastic wineglasses. Coleman opened the bottle for her and she poured herself a glass, putting the rest of the bottle back in the cooler. He then tossed me a beer, which I happily took, seeing as my night hadn’t been so great.

  "So how did you get the band back together?" I asked him, "One of my kids worshipped you guys all through high school, and he didn’t graduate until 94."

  "Cookie’s death put things back in perspective for me," Mike said, "It took a while for me to figure out what I really wanted. I enjoyed the acting and producing, but I just needed more. I needed to get back into the game. I wanted to change music for the better. It needed a swift kick in the ass after the complacency of the 1980’s, a complacency that I had been a big contribution to.

  "In late 90 I ran into Teri Brakeman again. We started hanging around some and, as my relationship with Mary started to deteriorate, started sleeping together again. We both were thinking about putting the band back together again. In early 1991 she and I were taking a shower together while Mary was off making a movie somewhere when I came up with something.

  "I started singing a tune which had come to my head. It was nothing like we’d done before, much much harder. I sang the lyric I had in my head to Teri and she loved it. She loved it so much that as she raised her arms to hug me tightly she knocked Mary’s bottle of bleach over onto my head."

  "So that’s how you ended up with that blonde stringy hairdo!" Amy exclaimed, "I always wondered how you came up with doing that to yourself."

  "It was purely accidental," Mike said with a grin, "I had Teri finish the process because my hair was going to look very stupid being black with some large white spots. My hair was about shoulder length by that point and I looked like a completely different person."

  "I’ll say you did," I told him, "I remembered your 80’s stuff from one of my older kids. When the younger one told me who he was in to, I couldn’t believe it was the same person."

  "You and the rest of the world," Mike said wistfully, "At any rate, I’m getting ahead of myself. That also turned out to be the night that Mary came home from her shoot early, the typhoon season starting and her being either unable or unwilling to contact me to let me know she was coming home early."

  "Busted?" Amy asked with a grin.

  "Big time," He said, "She caught Teri and Me in th
e act on the couch. She damn near killed me. She went to her cousin’s house for the night and told me to be out before she came back in the morning."

  "Ouch," I said, "Though I often wish Myrna would do that to me."

  "It’s no fun, though I didn’t have that much in the apartment to begin with," he said, "Teri called Trip Davis and the three of us loaded up my stuff in a rented U-haul. I paid for about three days of the U-Haul before I found another apartment. It was six months before I bothered unpacking it."

  "Let me guess," Amy said with a smile, "Since you had three quarters of the band there, you asked them if they wanted to reform."

  "You got it," Mike replied, "The timing was right. I needed a new project and I wanted to make an album that would truly change the musical landscape, much like I had tried to with the first Inquisition album. Ron Spectre wasn’t all that hard to talk into coming back, his stint with the Dead had ended six months earlier and he was ready to get back into a real gig again, instead of subbing.

  "The first new Inquisition sessions occurred in early June 1991. It was a much more collaborative effort than any of the first three albums had been. I continued writing most of the lyrics, but I pulled Teri out from behind the keyboards to play some backing guitars. Our collective hatred for 80’s synth sounds had grown exponentially since we went on Hiatus. Even Teri had no interest in playing those lines, preferring to do backing vocals and some guitars.

  "The sound was harder rocking, and Teri even did vocals on quite a few songs. While her voice wasn’t as silky or smooth as Cookie’s had been, she had the rock and soul quality of some of Janis Joplin’s recordings. We made our usual thirty tracks or so for the album, but for a change not one of them was just my composition. The music was almost entirely a collaborative effort.

  "We weren’t the only ones who were about to introduce this sound. Nirvana was about to clobber the charts right along with us, as was Pearl Jam. Thing was, I had the record company connections to get my album out first. Getting the album out in a way that was not going to be foiled by the present 80’s backlash was going to be the problem.

  "I solved the problem with a simple advertising campaign. Throughout July and August 1991 ads were appearing with darkened pictures of the band and the low sounds of the song that I was planning on releasing as a single came out. The single was distributed as being from ‘The Inquisition’, fooling a lot of college DJ’s into thinking that the song, entitled Broken Places was from an entirely new band.

  "As the song climbed up the college charts, I finished up the artwork and made sure that the only pictures of the band were blurry and had me, with my stringy blonde hair, up front. In the pictures Teri looked a lot like me, as she was wearing a similar hairstyle.

  "The buzz was good and the single shot up the charts," Mike continued after lighting another cigarette, "Even made the success of DLE look anemic. When we released the full album, curiously entitled Crackin’ Up, it debuted at #1 despite the fact that we had already been revealed for who we really were.

  "The thing was, nobody cared. We were telling people what they wanted to hear, and the fact that one of the bands most infamous for the 80’s sound was telling it to take a flying leap was the final nail in the coffin of the yuppie generation. It was funny in a way. We were back, and we were back very big."

  "Was it better the second time around?" I asked him as I drained my beer and reached for another one.

  "Much better," Mike said with a smile, "We all were able to handle it better this time around. It was a more equitable atmosphere. It was the way we had wanted it to go the first time. Teri and I were getting along better than we had ever done before. The live shows were fun for the first time since the first shows in 1985 and the music was raw and real.

  "There was no orchestration of live shows, and we almost never rehearsed. Teri took up whatever instrument we needed at the time, and the new material only needed three or four people at most anyway. We had abandoned most of the tracks from the first three albums and what ones we did carry over were heavily worked over. That was Then, This is Now went from a synth pop ballad to a heavy rock piece. Timing for Jenny was the least changed, but it had a harder edge to it. Does Love Exist was tossed out of the band’s repertoire entirely as none of us could figure out to make the song do anything but suck.

  "The only one of us not having such a great time was Trip Davis. He was married with two small kids by this point, and his wife was a cast iron bitch. She hated the rest of the band and the band couldn’t stand her either."

  "I know that feeling well," I grumbled, "None of my old friends could ever stand Myrna, and now that I’m getting up in years I can’t stand her much anymore either."

  "I noticed that," Amy said, "She didn’t look particularly nice when we went in there the other day."

  "She hates this campground," I said with a shrug, "Has ever since I started it. The only reason she tolerates it and me is the fact that nobody else will have her and that it provides her with a good living. She and I haven’t even said a civil word since '94, when she found out that I had been cheating on her.

  "She won’t leave because she has nowhere to go, and I won’t leave because I can’t run it alone. So she runs the store and I take care of the campground. Probably will be that way until one of us croaks."

  "Not a great way to live," Mike said, "Not a great way at all."

  "Not too bad most of the time," I said with a shrug, "I get to meet lots of nice folks like you. Better than retiring to a house to live alone with Myrna."

  "Amen to that," Amy said, "So what happened with Trip and his wife?"

  "Yeah, guess I got off track," Mike said as he tossed his smoke into the fire, "Trip became moodier as 1991 ended and 1992 started. We were on our third single of the album by the time the spring concert season started for us. We set out upon another mini tour of the US, to be capped off by a six-show stint in LA."

  "How’d it go?" Amy asked him.

  "Really well," Mike said as he took a long pull from his beer, "He was away from Rhonda, so his spirits improved. I think he was getting ready to divorce the bitch. The shows during the time were great. We even played a couple joint shows with Nirvana, and the crowd went wild when their two favorite singers with the wild stringy hair took the stage. It wasn’t hard to tell who was who, though. I think I’m about six inches taller than Kurt Cobain was. He was really cool though, shame about how he went out."

  "Did you know him well?" Amy asked him, "I was a big Nirvana fan at the time."

  "Not very," Mike admitted, "He was a little distant and I knew he was into the drugs, so I never made much of an attempt to get to know him. Saw him about twice a year. I’d either see him in the halls at Geffen or on the way to something. We were different types. He was more of a true artist type than I am.

  "Anyway, the tour was great until we made it back to LA," he continued, "Trip went down a little bit because Rhonda was there, but the first couple of shows went as planned. We had planned a week’s hiatus between the first batch of three shows and the second batch of three shows.

  "Teri and I spent the hiatus in a motel, I don’t think I need to say what we did the whole time," Coleman added with a sly grin, "Trip disappeared and Ron went home to spend some time with his wife and kids. Teri and I showed up at the theatre to rehearse a little and get the sound checks over with. Ron showed up around six in the evening, which was about par for him. Trip, alas, didn’t show up at all."

  "Were you getting worried?" Amy asked him.

  "Very," he replied, "Especially since Teri didn’t know the bass that well yet. It hadn’t entered our minds that something could have happened to him. We thought it was more of his instability getting the best of him. We didn’t have time to go look for him, however. Teri had to take up the bass for the night."

  "How did she do?" I asked and opened another beer.

  "Not bad, considering she had no practice time,
" Mike said, "After the show, however, we started hunting for him. We found out that he hadn’t been home for three days. We started searching, and like the search for Cookie, it didn’t take us long to find him."

  "He committed suicide too?" I asked incredulously, thinking it odd that two people from the same band would go out the same way.

  "That’s the way it looked when I entered his motel room," Mike affirmed, "Trip was lying there on the bed. Hand around the gun, which was lying on the bed, he was dead as a doornail, with his gray matter spread out over the wall behind him. I called the police, and they thought it was a suicide as well."

  "Well, wasn’t it a suicide?" Amy asked him.

  "I’d guess it wasn’t, from the way he’s telling it," I said.

  "Good guess," Mike said with a sigh, "The police did a tox screen on him. He was so overloaded with Barbiturates that he would have died by morning even if he hadn’t been shot. There was also no way that he could have picked up the gun with that much of the drug in his system. He would have been fast asleep."

  "Murder?" I asked incredulously, "I don’t remember hearing about that."

  "Very few people did," Mike told us, "The police kept it to themselves and we spent the next week trying to figure out who did it. They finally brought in Rhonda, who was really the only person with a motive to kill him. Rhonda was a hard nut to crack. We all knew she was the one who wanted to kill him, so they let me take a crack at her. She hadn’t asked for a lawyer yet, and I was truly pissed at how the mess had come about.

  "Rhonda Davis really wasn’t a very bright killer. Even if she had succeeded she would have lost nearly two million in insurance money, which would not have been paid if it had been ruled suicide. The barbiturates were an even dumber touch, being easily detectable in a tox screen. So I decided to up the ante. My father was working the case, and he let me go in with the gun. I noticed the gun hadn’t been unloaded from when it was used to kill Trip.

  "I placed the gun on the table, still in the bag and just started talking to her. I never told my father what I said, but I’ll tell you now, as you’re unlikely to report me. I told her that she was going to be ruined. The police had no shred of evidence against her, and would probably let her go. But I told her that I knew that she did it. I told her that I would make sure that she would never have a chance to use any of his money. I lied to her and said that according to the partnership agreement once a member of the group dies their royalties go back to the surviving members.