"She was livid, but I didn’t stop there. I told her she’d be left with nothing. Since the murder investigation was going nowhere they were going to have to tell the Insurance Company it was suicide, relieving her of that money. I also told her that I would make sure she never worked again. Her and her kids were never going to know anything other than a cardboard box and a homeless shelter by the time I finished with her. The only way out for her was to kill herself, and I said that if she did that I would let the kids have the insurance.
"I had forgotten how well I could act, so the display served its purpose. I left the still loaded weapon in the room with her and went out into the lobby. It took her less than five minutes to decide that she was ruined whatever happened. She picked up the weapon and killed herself."
"I bet everyone was just thrilled with you," I said, "Driving the woman to suicide is usually frowned upon."
"I didn’t want to go through the trial, and I figured it was justice," Coleman said, "Better the kids to go with good relatives than be raised by that piece of trash. I made sure the kids were provided for. The insurance and the future royalties on the previous albums were set into a trust for them and Trip’s brother took them in. It worked out for the best."
He looked at the clock and decided that it was time to quit for the night. We said our goodnights quickly, put out the fire and I retired to my bed for the first time in days. We had agreed to meet again the next night, and so I waited patiently for the next installment of the story of Justin Cole.
Chapter 7
I enjoyed what I thought was going to be the last day without Myrna. I did my chores and took care of the store, not seeing Mike or Amy all day. They hadn’t checked out, so I knew the storytelling was going to go on again that night. I pulled out three pounds of the better hamburger meat and put it aside for the night's festivities. I knew that more beer wouldn’t be needed, just a bag of ice to make it cold again.
I closed up early, seeing that nobody really needed anything and that I was sick of sitting in the store. I went out and found Mike sitting outside with a ledger book, trying to make heads or tails of the figures. I didn’t disturb him while I put the ice in the cooler. Amy walked out just as I was finishing up and I handed her the bag with the hamburger.
"Same deal as always," I said with a grin, "I provide if you cook."
"You got a deal," she said with a smile, "Give Mike a little while longer, he always gets lost when he has to go over the ledger book."
"What’s the ledger book for?" I asked her, "I thought he was out of the business."
"He still has royalties to worry about," she said, "So he has to back check to make sure they aren’t taking advantage of his absence. He keeps a sharp lookout for anyone using one of his songs without permission and for permissions that didn’t go through him."
"Smart move," I said, "How did it get up here?"
"He has it shipped to the local post office when he stops for a while," she said, "PO Boxes are cheap, and we have about two dozen of them now. Probably even more that date back to before I was with him."
"Ahhh," I said as I pulled a coke out of the cooler, "Guess the business end of it is a pain."
"I don’t want to know," she said with a smile, "'Tis why I stay with him. I don’t want to get back into it. I’m enjoying my life now."
"You love him?" I asked her, quite out of the blue.
"Yes," she said after a few seconds, "I believe I do."
"Going to marry him?" I asked, "Or have you already?"
"Probably not," she said, "He doesn’t think its necessary, and neither do I really. Not to mention the legal troubles it would cause. I think he’s still legally married to Tracie."
I was about to ask who Tracie was when Mike looked up from the ledger and saw us. He grinned and put the ledger down. He then looked around and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it up and took a long drag.
"Sorry guys," he said, "Didn’t know it was that late."
"Not a problem," I said, "I closed up a little bit early and figured I’d head over this way."
"Great!" he said, "I hate doing these ledger checks anyway. Just have to ride herd on these accountant types. As long as they think I check them faithfully, they do it right. Makes life much easier."
"I can see that," I agreed, "I brought over some hamburger from the store. I figure we could have a good meal tonight."
"That works for me," he said, "Amy, you’re the resident cook."
"I know, I know," she said with a mock expression of pain, "Without me here I think both of you would starve."
"No," I said, "He’d starve. I just wouldn’t eat as well."
"That’s what restaurants are for," Mike said with a shrug, "You just are easier than take out."
"Humph." She growled, "See if I make sure your burgers are cooked through tonight."
"It’s ok," I said, "I can cook if you want, if you don’t mind food poisoning."
"That’s ok," she said as her smile returned, "I’ll just drop a little arsenic into Mike’s tonight."
"Promises, Promises," Mike said with a grin, "You keep telling me that."
Amy just laughed and went inside to get the patty mix together. As custom was dictating by now Mike and I proceeded to put together a nice size fire, along with enough wood to keep it going throughout the evening. Amy returned just as the fire was beginning to catch.
"You going to keep us in suspense or are you going to keep going?" Amy asked him as she set up the grill.
"I guess I can," Mike replied as he used his cigarette to light the fire, "Sure I haven’t scared you off yet?"
"Not on your life," she told him, "I didn’t know you were this interesting."
"Yeah," he said, "My life has been a scream."
"You get a 10 on the interesting scale," I said, "A bit on the bloody side for my taste though."
"Just wait," he said with a bitter tone, "It gets worse."
"I’m waiting," Amy said as she laid out the burgers on the grill.
"Well," Mike said as he tried to remember where he left off, "After Trip’s death, we decided to keep on going as a trio. I took a few weeks to get Teri totally up to speed on the bass parts, but it turned out really well. We were a tight band, with all of us totally involved on every track. Teri stepped back from the microphone a bit, preferring to concentrate on her playing when she could.
"We played the circuits and a never ending tour. The Grammys came and went. We performed Broken Places and won four awards, which was enough for me. I even got the best male vocalist trophy, which felt good. I was no longer second best to that whiner Don Henley. After the Grammy’s we rested for a week and then went right back on tour.
"We had resurrected a few more songs from the back catalogue, Red Lines being chief among them. No God got some stage time, though it was a lot harder to get the point in that version. This period really was a golden time for the band. We got along well, Teri and I were still together and we played about 18 months more on tour. It wasn’t until the late part of 1993 that we started slowing down and thinking about what to do next.
"MTV had asked us to do one of their unplugged specials, and we were very interested, but we didn’t just want to do a rehash of our best known songs. We considered doing covers, but Nirvana had already done that, and we didn’t want to come off as mere Nirvana imitators. So we decided to do the show, but do it with all original numbers and a few selected rehashes.
"MTV was wary, but they were willing to go along with it. We had seen an awful lot of each other again by this point and we were starting to fray a little. Ron and Teri took separate vacations and we slid back into the old style a bit, with me writing the bulk of the material.
"Unplugged shows don’t work well with only three instruments, so we had to recruit a few others to play. We snagged Eddie Toner to play the bass instruments so Teri could move back to the keyboards. We picked up a couple of string and horn peopl
e, which really allowed me to push the envelope musically.
"Teri and Ron came back after a few weeks and we all started to work on the music. I had written the bulk of it, but we hashed out what we liked and refined it all. Teri and I were growing apart again, however, and by the time we were ready to put it all down at the unplugged show we had split up yet again.
"The show was an unparalleled success for us. We ranged from the rock songs, to the song I had written about Cookie, a ditty called And Now She Lies Cold. That song had to be one of the most depressing tunes I had ever written, but it made a damned good show closer for the unplugged show. The chorus goes something like this. ‘The world has lost, Death has won, a loss for people everywhere. And now she lies cold, food for the old, reaper on his rocking chair’."
"Damn," Amy said as she pulled the burgers off the grill and passed them out, "I remember that song. I didn’t know that was one of yours!"
"Yep," he said solemnly, "Teri didn’t want the song to go in the show, but I prevailed on that one. She refused to play on it, so it turned out to be just me, Ron, the bass player and the cellist. It came out beautifully, though. It was also going to be the last time we played together in an organized manner. It was April 12th 1994. The same day that Kurt Cobain’s body was found in Seattle. The Inquisition would be dead as well in less than a year, with me being the sole survivor."
"Ouch," I said, "What happened to Teri and Ron?"
"Well," Mike replied, "We had a long hiatus during the rest of 1994. We all needed a rest and figured that the unplugged album would hold up until we recorded another album in January of 1995. Teri and I had split up again just before the Unplugged show, so we all decided to get back together to record again just after new year's day.
"I found out from some friends that Ron and Teri were having an affair. This didn’t surprise me too much, Teri was very tempting and very beautiful, and Ron’s wife was not handling his fame very well. He probably wanted to try something else and Teri was just there. I didn’t know how long it had been going on or if it had been going on before Teri and I had split. I’m not sure I ever want to know."
"Sometimes not knowing is the best thing," I affirmed as I finished off the burgers on my plate, "I wish Myrna had never found out about the affair. Wouldn’t have made her any more pleasant, but it might have kept her talking to me. Then again, she doesn’t nag as much now."
"Anyway," Mike said with a chuckle, "I talked to Ron in July and he confirmed the rumors to me. He swore it hadn’t started earlier, and I wasn’t inclined to care either way. I just suggested that they tone it down a notch and be more discreet, if for no other reason than his kids. I didn’t see Teri again until the final hours of her life.
"It seems that both Teri and Ron had begun to dabble with recreational drugs during their off time. They knew better than to let it interfere with their work periods, and neither of them wanted to be hardcore addicts. They stuck to pot and cocaine, mostly pot. I found this all out later, of course.
"I was producing a song for a movie I was starring in, a film version of the classic Wuthering Heights. Playing Heathcliff was fun, and though the film didn’t make jack, it was worth it just for the experience. Looked nice on the resume as well.
"Cool," Amy said, "What were Teri and Ron doing during this period?"
"Having a lot of sex under the guise of studio sessions," Mike replied, "Seems Ron had been telling his wife that he was going to the studio when in reality they were always over at the apartment that Teri and him had rented. This must have been going on for months when suddenly I got a very alarming call from Teri while I was at the studio.
"I could hear the fear in her voice and she was barely in control. In between the sobs and the screams I pulled out of her that something bad had happened to Ron. I was alarmed by this point in time as another death was the last thing I needed. I got the address from Teri and hauled ass over there as fast as my old Caprice could take me.
"I certainly wasn’t prepared for the scene I found when I entered the apartment. Teri was crying on the kitchen floor, probably where she had been ever since she had called me. It was when I walked into the living room I got the shock of my life. Ron was lying there dead of a bullet wound to the face. The pistol was lying on his lap and most of his head was splattered against the skull."
"My god!" I exclaimed, "He killed himself? Another suicide?"
"Not exactly," Mike told us, "It was an accident. He was zonked out of his mind on Coke, just like Teri was when I found her. Guns were his hobby, and he almost always had one around. It wasn’t surprising there was one in the apartment. From what I was able to pull out of Teri he was playing with his pistol while he was high and it accidentally went off.
"I was flabbergasted to say the least. I placed a call to the one person on the police force I could trust to handle it discreetly, or at least honestly. My father swore when he heard what I told him and said he’d be there as soon as he could. I pulled Teri out on to the deck and sat her down. She was still high at that point and I knew that saying anything would be useless.
"I took the pack of cigarettes off the counter, smelled them to make sure they were tobacco, and smoked my first cigarette in over a decade. Dad showed up about twenty minutes later and had the same reaction I did. I assured him that I’d touched nothing except the phone and the cigarettes and we tried to figure out what to do.
"We ended up calling the meat wagon and it being a busy day it was going to be at least an hour before they showed up. A few more plainclothes officers showed up to help keep the scene secure. Teri was sobering up by that point and was terrified. There were enough illegal drugs in the room to lock her up for a long time, not to mention her lover lying there with his brains splattered all over the room.
"Dad and I started talking about the drugs and how to handle it, with me basically playing her representation. I was trying to figure out how we could handle this with the least amount of jail time for Teri and still trying to cope with yet another loss.
"Teri must have been listening to us the whole time. She knew that she had little going for her at that point. The plainclothesmen were all outside, leaving the inside to my father. Dad had his back to Teri and the body and it wasn’t until the last second that I saw what she was up to."
"What was she doing?" I asked, "Trying to cover up the drugs?"
"No," Mike said sadly, "I wish it was that innocent. She walked over to Ron’s corpse calmly and picked up the revolver up out of his lap. I saw it as she was raising her arm up in the air. Before I could say anything about it, however, Teri had raised it to her temple. She didn’t even give me a chance to stop her. She pulled the trigger and joined Ron Spectre in death."
"Man," I said, "That’s got to be hard to see."
"I nearly broke down at that point," Mike said, "It was by far the worst thing that had happened to me in my life at that point. I was alone again. The Inquisition was wholly and irrevocably gone for me. Two people that I had worked with for over a decade were lying dead on the floor in front of me."
"I bet that was really hard on you," Amy said.
"Hard wasn’t the word for it," Mike said, "It really destroyed me. I stopped working. Someone else had to finish the Wuthering Heights soundtrack for me. If Mary hadn’t come back into my life, I probably would have ended up killing myself as well. Within a span of just under five years every one of the original members of Cole’s Inquisition were now dead. Except for me. That was a hard pill to swallow. I was thirty-four at the time."
"Mary came back to you?" Amy asked, "I thought she couldn’t stand you anymore."
"We met again in late 94," Mike said, "We started seeing what we had seen back in 87 again. I was no longer the high and mighty rock star, I was a man falling apart and reaching his breaking point. I didn’t know what to do with myself. With all of them dead I felt like I had no reason to go on."
At this point the strain of the story was really beginning to show on him. It was still fairly early in the evening, but we didn’t want to push him too far. I’m not sure I could have relived those events for anybody. He didn’t let it get to him too much, but we all knew it was getting to him. Amy suggested that we pack it in for the night and resume again tomorrow.
I was all for it. I didn’t want to watch him break down in front of me. I was considering him a friend by that point and really didn’t want to hurt him anymore. He put out his cigarette in the remains of the fire and let Amy take him into the camper. I told her I’d take care of the fire and that I’d see them the next night. She said she’d look forward to it and took him inside, hopefully for some TLC.
I put out the fire and buried the coals. Then I grabbed another beer and took a hard look at the pack of smokes Coleman had left on the ground. I picked them up, snagged one myself, and left them on the arm of his chair. I walked back to the house, smoking my first cigarette in nearly two decades and draining a beer.
Chapter 8
Amy came breezing into the store at around ten in the morning the next day. She looked like she hadn’t slept much the night before. I offered her a cup of coffee and asked her to sit a spell and rest.
"Thanks," she said, gratefully taking the caffeine infusion, "It was a long night. Seems Mike had been repressing those events for a while, and it just came flooding back to him."
"Yeah," I said, "I saw his face as he was telling it. He looked like he’d seen a ghost."
"He’ll be better by tonight," she said, "He wants to finish this story, at least for me. I figured you deserved to be in on the end of it too."
"Think he’ll finish it tonight?" I asked, hoping that he wouldn’t be able to.
"I think he wants to," she said, "Besides, we have to get moving soon. He got some news from Cali, and it seems he may have to head there in a few days."
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