by G. M. Ford
"Damn good question. Whoever it was knew, like, instantly. Hell, my old man couldn't have found it out that fast on his best day. I only bought the death certificate day before yesterday. Whoever this is must have serious connections."
"All the more reason to be careful," he said.
I finished my story. I knew he was with me when he said, "I am, after all, the woman's attorney of record."
"You most certainly are," I agreed.
"It's my duty as an officer of the court to see to it that her rights are represented as vigorously as possible."
"Yes, it is."*
"We wouldn't, after all, want to be participants in yet another example of corporate greed run amok at the expense of the rapidly disappearing middle class."
"We certainly wouldn't."
"Okay, then," he said. "As your attorney, I advise you to watch your ass at all times. There's gonna be some noses seriously out of joint when I stick the monkey wrench in the works tomorrow morning."
"Trust me, I shall pay the utmost attention," I said, gently massaging my shin.
"I'll file a restraining order first thing on Monday, which by the way, Leo, in this part of the globe, is tomorrow. So if you don't mind "
I said I didn't. Before I could hang up, he said, "And, uh, Leo, you don't suppose you could put in a little time on this case I'm paying you for, do you? Just in your free time, say." Click. Hmmm.
I cleaned up my breakfast mess, grabbed my keys off the hook, and headed for the garage. The newspaper articles I'd collected on Lukkas Terry said he'd recorded the much anticipated Crotch Cannibals in a state-of-the-art recording studio attached to his manager's house. What better way to spend this glorious Sunday morning than meeting Mr. Seattle Rock and Roll himself, Gregory Conover?
Everybody knew the story. Wangled a late-night DJ job on KXR when he was only twenty. Back in about fifty nine, Top 40 format. Separated himself from the pack when he began to promote rock-and-roll shows at the Spanish Castle, an old roadhouse about halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. My personal connection to Gregory Conover was the summer of sixty-seven. The summer of love, when he got the city to let him use the old band shell in Volunteer Park for a series of concerts. He combined local acts like Crome Syrcus and Magic Fern with California acts like Moby Grape and the Quicksilver Messenger Service and set the town on its ear. What I remember of it was great.
He'd had his ups and downs, disappearing from the public eye for most of the seventies, unfortunately surfacing only long enough to buy a white disco suit and matching belt and pronounce himself the Northwest Disco King. Six months later, not being one to let art cloud reason, he'd been right up there shoveling disco records into the fire when they'd staged Disco Inferno Night down hi the King dome parking lot. Whatever he may have lacked in consistency of vision, he more than made up for in continuity of effort. No craze was too crazed. No fad too fucked.
By the time the mid-eighties rolled around, Gregory Con over found himself on the outside looking in. To the local punk and grunge players, he was just a nasty reminder of the omnipresent sixties, which, as far as they were concerned, relics like Conover and I could feel free to stick where the sun didn't shine. They were looking for walls to break down; they wanted to thrash rather than embrace that which had come before. Who could blame them? Rock and roll was never meant to be polite.
Conover went back to doing his radio program, classic rock now. Led Zeppelin and Traffic. Never missing an opportunity to rail embarrassingly about the myriad failings of modern music. Until that day when a skinny kid dropped a two-dollar tape on the desk in front of him and said his name was Lukkas Terry.
Four albums later, the rest was history. Once more, he was the man. The man who, if the papers were to be believed, stood to end up with no less than half of Lukkas Terry's estate and royalty checks once the current court case got sorted out. He had moved from being the ringmaster to being the Godfather. All things considered, this was a man I needed to meet.
I knew where the house was the minute I saw the picture in the paper. It was that white stone mansion that lounged out over the side of the hill on lower Broadway. The house had always fascinated me. From the street it seemed completely surrounded by a stone wall, covered since my childhood with ivy. The single entrance was an ivy-covered arch cut into the wall, barred by a black iron gate. The look called for a monk in a hooded robe.
From the waters of Lake Union, however, the place looked more like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, as it cascaded in a series of vine-covered terraces down toward the lake. Whatever ascetic quality it may have possessed from the street, the view from the west most surely denied.
It was a party. At eleven o'clock on a friggin' Sunday morning, it was a full-blown bacchanalia. The street was filled with cars. The private alley that ran next to the house was stacked. Fleetwood Mac drifted out into the street. Something middle-aged in me was nearly offended. I got over it in a Hurry.
I pushed the buzzer again. Up close, it wasn't ivy at all, but instead some wiry little African vine with leathery leaves and needle-sharp thorns the size of my thumb. Body piercing au naturel.
He waddled up the brick walk, whistling, twirling a gold key on a silver chain, his right index finger pointed right at me as it circled. He waddled because his thighs were so monstrously muscled as to have nowhere to go but out. Hell, his calves nearly touched. Spotless white shorts, just a bit too tight. Nice little woven belt. A behemoth with a twenty-four-inch neck, maybe bigger. Easily the biggest mass of muscle I'd ever seen in the flesh. Thinning blond hair combed straight back. Blue eyes, almost white. A living testament to the power of anabolic steroids and the joys of protracted leisure.
"Yo," he said.
"I'd like to see Mr. Conover."
"Your name?' "
"Leo Waterman."
He scanned the clipboard in his left hand. A plastic picture badge was clipped to the collar of his bright yellow shirt. It said Cherokee. I guess, with some guys, one name is enough.
"You're not here," he announced.
"I wasn't expected," I admitted.
"Then you don't come in."
I pulled out a business card and a pen. On the back I wrote "Representing Lukkas Terry's mother." I stuck it through the bars.
Cherokee used the clipboard to knock it to the ground.
"Beat it, bub."
"Bub?" I said. "You would bub a guy this early? On a Sunday?"
"What I'd do is beat your ass, you don't get out of here, bub."
I reached through the bars and snatched the badge from his shirt. I took a step back and looked it over. "You got your own bar code. Dude. How about that? If they run that little wand over you, you'll come up as yourself. Could completely eliminate the need for therapy. You ever think of that?"
Apparently he hadn't. "Gimme that thing," he snarled.
"Wait a second." I stepped over to the right of the gate.
"Don't make me come out there, motherfucker."
"Tell you what "
Cherokee was a poor listener. He untwirled the key, stuck it in the inside lock, and came barreling out through the gate. The second his shoulders came through, I hooked him hard with my left arm, getting an arm under like a defensive lineman, hurrying him the way he was already moving, using his own bulk for momentum. As he staggered past, I stepped into the breach, pulled the key from the lock, and closed the gate behind me. I stood two paces back, twirling the key.
"Beat it, bub," I said.
"I'll break you," he said. "I'll tear your -"
"See. It doesn't feel good to be bubbed, now does it?"
"-and stuff it up your-"
"Especially not on a nice Sunday morning."
"-and use your tongue for a-"
I pocketed the key and left him to reflect upon the error of his ways. If his red-faced attempt to tear the gate from its moorings, however, was any measure of his contrition, I believed further anger management work was going to be required.
14
The entire center of the house was open. Six French doors at each end created a tiled breezeway running from street to garden. On the right, down a short flight of stairs, what I imagined used to be the solarium had been transformed into a recording studio. The control panel ran the length of the room. Tilted my way, its maze of gauges, needles, switches, and slides suggested a NASA moon shot. A stooped guy with waist-length hair and granny glasses was fiddling with the controls.
Out in the garden, knots of people wandered in and out of my field of vision, clutching highball glasses and passing joints to the throbbing of the music. Players only love you when they 're playing.
Except for the guy in the studio, the house seemed empty. I walked down the three steps and stepped through the open door into the glassed-in control room, which served more as a crowded balcony, hovering over another large room six feet below, where pools of coiled cable surrounded numbered islands of green carpet where the musicians stood.
The longhaired guy looked my way as I stepped into the room. Despite the hair, he was no kid, closer to forty than twenty, his kinky locks flecked with gray. He said, "How ya doin'?"
"Doing great," I said. "This is some setup."
"The best that money can buy. Can I help ya?"
"I was looking for Gregory Conover."
"He's probably outside"--he waved that way--"where the party never ends." He went back to moving slides and tapping the glass faces of dials. "Got a bad relay in here somewhere," he mused.
"You ever work with Lukkas Terry?" I asked.
"Nobody worked with Lukkas Terry. You just opened the door and threw cheese sandwiches and Pepsi at him."
"Nobody?"
"Lukkas didn't need any help."
He stopped his fiddling and seemed to take me in for the first time.
"Hey, uh--"
"Leo Waterman," I said, offering a hand. His grip was firm, his hand surprisingly hard and rough, like a carpenter's.
"Marty Stocker. Nice to meet ya," he said. "You know Mr. Conover or something?"
"I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure."
He found this amusing. "How'd you get past Cherokee?"
"Cherokee stepped out," I said.
He liked this too. "Far out." He looked around. "Keep away from that fucker," he admonished. "He's crazy. Likes to hurt people."
I promised I would. "Did he really do it all on his own, like they say?"
"Swear to God," he said. Again, he checked the general area.
"Let me tell you a little story. When I first met Lukkas, we were still over in Bothell at the old place, but we had pretty much the same shit in the studio. You know, we've upgraded a few things since then, but it was pretty much the way you see it. Anyway, Mr. Conover brings this skinny kid in and introduces us. Happens all the time. Friends of friends. Plain old wanna-bes who hitchhiked in from Minnesota. The whole thing. Hands me this cheap shit tape the kid put together. I stick it in the deck and, you know, I'm ready to run the usual number on the kid, yeah, not bad, got a hell of a future, don't call us, we'll call you, the whole dog-and-pony show. But I notice right away that the boss's got this gleam in his eye." He stopped.
"And?"
"So I actually listen, for once. And it takes about one minute to figure out that this kid's got more music floatin' around loose in his head than most anybody else is ever gonna see."
"Just off a little demo?"
"One minute flat was all it took."
"Amazing."
"No. Here's the amazing part. He leaves the kid with me. Lukkas starts asking me what everything is, what it does. He knows from nothing. Never seen a real tape machine before. We've got a couple of Studer 800 MK3s that just blow his mind. He wants to know everything. We go through the whole shebang. I start him out with the tracking console, the mixing consoles, the Nevi and SSI compressors, the Moogs and the expanders, the sequencers, the pre's, the eqs. Everything, all the way down to the guitar pedals. He's like this sponge, just takin' it all in." He took a deep breath.
I folded my arms over my chest and waited for him to continue.
"So anyway, later that afternoon Mr. Conover sends me down to the Moore to fix some sequencer problems they're having down there. Things are a mess. I don't get back into the studio for about two days, and guess what?" He didn't make me guess. "I walk back in here two days later and the kid is still here. Never left. Been sitting right here playing with the equipment all that time."
"Really?" I said.
"And here's the wild part he's got it all figured out. He's already recorded three songs. The first three on his first album. Absolutely unbelievable. I've been engineering for twenty-two years, and I've never seen anything like it. He's sittin' in here singing all the parts in all these different voices. The stuff comes out of him whole. It's not like he writes one part and then another; he hears the entire song at one time. Damndest thing I ever saw. After that, all you did was just leave him alone."
"What was he like? I mean personally."
He was tapping gauges again, flipping switches. "Hard to say. It's.that genius-madness thing, man. You always hear about that fine line between them. But this was the real deal. First time I ever really saw it. Talked to himself in all these voices while he worked. The boss had to remind him to take showers. Couldn't care less about anything except his music. The ultimate perfectionist. Kept going over and over everything, until it drove everyone crazy. Always late on deadline. Heck, on the last one, Crotch Cannibals, he was three months late and talking about trashing the whole thing and starting over. One weird dude.''
He stepped around me, walked to the far end of the console, and made some adjustments. "World isn't made for people like Lukkas Terry," he said finally. He walked to the door at the far end of the room. "I gotta get to work here," he said.
"Thanks for the help."
"Try outside. The boss is probably out there."
The outdoor festivities consisted of maybe thirty-five people, settled in knots of five or six, milling about die three levels, nursing cocktails and pretending to listen to one another. Fleetwood Mac had been replaced by the Stones. Mick was on his way down to the demonstration to get his fair share of abuse.
As I came through the doors, I stepped to the right, liberated a glass of champagne from the buffet table, and took stock. Two Korean men in spotless white livery attended the table from either end. Ornamental cold cuts. A little ice sculpture of a dolphin. Lots of fruits and salads.
Gathered to the right of the food and drink, five young women stood transfixed, facing my way, forming a loose ilarc about Gregory Conover, whose arms swung expressively from the loose sleeves of a gold caftan as he held them, mesmerized.
I went down to the Chelsea drugstore, to get my...
They were all maybe twenty-five or so. I'm not good with ages anymore. They all look like kids to me. Black was the predominant color. Black boots, black tights, black leather jackets, four miles of chain, and enough black eye shadow to paint the porch. As I approached him from the rear, their expressions caused him to turn my way. He looked me over carefully, from head to toe and back, before he spoke.
"Can I help you?" he said in a neutral tone. ... but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get...
If the hair was all his, it was truly a gift from God. A wondrous thick mass of salt-and-pepper plumage, it feathered back about his head like a storm cloud helmet, nearly forming a mane or perhaps the vestige of wings. Despite a general puffiness, his face still retained its youthful sheen of accessibility. His big brown eyes seemed open to the moment, making the lines in his face seem out of place and artificial.
.. . And she said one word to me, and it was...
I stuck out my hand. "Leo Waterman," I said.
He was a two-hand shaker. "Gregory Conover," he replied.
"I was wondering if I might have a word with you," I started.
He was focused back out over my shoulder toward the house, as if expecting s
omeone. The whole chorus sang.
... You can't always get what you want...
"Regarding?" he said, without making eye contact.
"Lukkas Terry."
For the first time, I had his full attention. "And you're from?"
I handed him a card. He read it carefully. "Perhaps we should step into my office," he said with a smile.
Without a word to the young women, he spun on his heel, took me by the elbow, and guided me back the way I'd come, through the French doors, down the long breezeway, and through the last door on the right.
I was expecting a dark gentleman's-club decor. I was wrong. The room looked out over the alley beside the house through a half a dozen large leaded windows, which bathed the room in gentle southern light. The wallpaper was a small floral print. The furniture was bleached oak. The paintings on the walls were Impressionist garden portraits.
He closed the door behind us and then read my card again. "If you don't mind my asking, Mr. Waterman, how did you get in here?"
I pulled the gold key and chain from my pocket and handed it to Conover. "I had a difference of opinion with a guy called Cherokee." I He looked shocked. "About what?"
"Manners."
"And you--"
"Locked him out," I finished.
"You didn't--" he started. "I mean, there was no violence?" "Nope."
He gave me a big smile. "Extraordinary," he said. "So, now he's outside, and--" He pointed at me.
"And I'm in here," I said.
"Far out," he enthused. Again he glanced at my card, as we stood in the center of the room. "And what interest would a private detective have in poor Lukkas at this late date?"
"I represent an attorney who has taken an interest in the case."
"That's not terribly informative."
"I know."
He seemed to be losing patience with me. I expected him to throw me out. Instead he asked, "Do you have a license or some such thing?"
I showed it to him. He took his time going over it, and then handed it back. "I have to be very careful about the press," he said. "They'd keep poor Lukkas's death on the front page forever, if they could."