Dead Egotistical Morons

by Mark Richard Zubro

  Fenwick said, “Another one of his band boys is missing.”

  “What?”

  The door swung open. Zawicki, still fully dressed, appeared in the entrance. “Who’s missing?”

  “Dexter Clendenen.”

  “He’s not missing, you fool. He’s here in this suite with me.”

  “In your bed?” Fenwick asked.

  Zawicki banged the door shut. They arranged for a guard outside the suite and left.

  16

  “You are not making any friends in this case,” Turner said as they drove back to headquarters.

  Fenwick said, “My goal in life is to be best friends with all our suspects.”

  “I must have been absent the day they taught that at the academy.” Turner sighed. “Why’d he go get the kid? Is he covering something up? Does he really care? What is it with these people?”

  “Terminal egotistical bullshit.”

  At headquarters they talked with Fred Falcoli, the night-shift lieutenant. His response to all their information was, “Be sure to get started on the paperwork.”

  On the way to their desks on the third floor Fenwick said, “I hope a tree falls on Falcoli some day. I think that would be great revenge for all the forests he’s destroyed with his insistence on paperwork.”

  “An environmentally sensitive Fenwick is a new concept,” Turner said.

  “And still not true. I don’t care so much about the tree as I do about poetic justice. Him dying under a falling tree fits my sense of what is right in the world.”

  “Which is getting a little macabre.”

  Arnie Krempe was at his desk writing. He looked up at the detectives, gave a brief wave, and walked over. Turner kind of liked Krempe. He thought they needed fresh faces on the squad. The new guy was young and enthusiastic.

  Krempe said, “You guys having any luck?”

  “Not much,” Fenwick said.

  “That Carruthers guy was here,” Krempe said. “He just came back from vacation. I hadn’t met him before. Is he nuts?”

  “Pretty much,” Fenwick said.

  “He wanted to talk about your case. I told him I didn’t know anything. He talked on and on. Can anybody stand the poor guy?”

  “You’ve learned one of the most important lessons of the Area Ten detective squad,” Fenwick said. “Avoid Carruthers at all costs.”

  Krempe smiled. “I’ll remember.” He returned to his desk.

  Carruthers was the one on the squad who organized all the social events. He’d turned being inept into a lifestyle. It’s not that some of the detectives didn’t socialize or honor important events in each other’s lives such as promotions and retirements. Carruthers wanted to turn them into intimate events on an incessant basis. No one cared as much as Carruthers, and their failure to be at his level of caring irritated him. He irritated all of them all the time.

  Turner and Fenwick went over the records of the people the beat cops had interviewed to check if any of them had seen anything out of the ordinary or heard gunshots. They found nothing.

  They pored over their notes from the recently completed interviews. Then they spent a half hour making a chart of the whereabouts of everyone in the immediate entourage since early Sunday morning after the meeting Zawicki had with all of them. When they finished, they examined their handiwork.

  Fenwick said, “It’s a perfectly done chart. A thing of beauty, wondrous to behold. I don’t see a thing here that’s going to help.”

  Turner agreed.

  They read over the band’s schedule during the performance, particularly the timing of the special effects with the chart they had of people’s movements during the concert. Nobody appeared to be out of place. Even though many people had very specific functions and could report where they were, few of the schedules were perfectly exact. While the special-effects people had to perform their assigned tasks with split-second precision at the same place and time, others were less rigidly structured. The venues might change, but the tasks remained the same. Also, people busy performing essential tasks were not likely to be consciously looking for strangers.

  One of the beat cops from downstairs entered with a phone message from Mickey Pendyce. All it had was a name. Jose Oxaka. Turner called the Plaza Mart and found Jose Oxaka was registered there. He showed it to Fenwick who said, “We should go see this guy now. We’ve got to move before this entire band is dead.”

  Fenwick agreed. They arranged with the lieutenant for beat cops to help with interviewing the rest of the crew. They had to find out where all these people had been at the time of this new death. Someone might criticize the detectives for making a lot of useless charts and doing extra work. More of their dogged police work than Turner cared to admit was useless but until criminals came equipped with an instant confession button, the detectives had no choice. They didn’t know which bit of apparently useless information would turn out to be the golden nugget that led to a killer.

  They hurried through the bitter cold. The wind blew harder than it had when they were at the lakeshore. Record cold was predicted to continue for the next three days.

  They found an agitated crowd babbling away in the Plaza Mart lobby. The news of the second death had spread like wildfire. They arranged for beat cops to begin interviews. Turner and Fenwick started with Jose Oxaka. He was in his mid-twenties. He wore a gray sweatshirt with the band’s logo on it, black jeans, and running shoes. He was five foot six and might have weighed one twenty. They talked in the office of the head of security of the Plaza Mart.

  Turner said, “We talked to Mickey Pendyce early tonight.”

  “He called me. I said he could give you my name.”

  “We need the real story behind these guys,” Turner said. “What can you tell us?”

  “A lot. Sometimes the guys in the crew see things. We hear stuff. Some of us become friends with the guys. I went with them for those early tours to South America and Asia. You learn a lot about each other when you’re stuck together, and you don’t speak the language, and you aren’t very famous, and you don’t have a lot of money.”

  Turner said, “How was Roger Stendar’s relationship with the rest of the band?”

  “Roger was basically a good guy, but he was driven. They all are, but he was more than most. The other guys resented it sometimes, but most times not. Roger insisted on practice and perfection. He’d stay longer than anybody else most days. He’d work with the choreographer for hours. And he’d help the other guys.”

  Turner said, “Dexter told us he helped him a lot.”

  “Definitely. And Dexter needed a lot of help at the beginning. He wasn’t real coordinated. When he started, he was just out of high school. He was a little young, but hell, they all were. Dexter had sung in school choirs since the fifth grade, but he’d never had any formal training.”

  “Which guys were friends outside of the band?” Turner asked.

  “There wasn’t really any ‘outside the band.’ They didn’t go over to each other’s houses, because they all lived in the same house when they were practicing. When they were touring, they all lived in the same hotel. There hasn’t been a lot of time in the last few years when they weren’t touring or practicing. They got along. I’d say Danny and Ivan were closest. Danny could be kind of a pain. I haven’t laughed at one of his jokes in three or four years. Pappas was the most like a real adult, very responsible. Jason was buddies with everyone. Dexter kind of clung to everyone. He clung to Roger the most, and Roger put up with him the most.”

  “How’d they get along with Mr. Zawicki?” Turner asked.

  “You mean the sex?”

  “The crew knew about that?”

  “Everybody knew about that.”

  “They said they never told anybody about it.”

  “You hang around long enough, you begin to see a pattern. Us guys on the crew never said much. Zawicki used to enjoy making Roger have sex.”

  “He made him service him often?” Fenwick asked.


  “Roger was very independent. He wanted things his way. Zawicki liked forcing Roger to do his bidding. That’s how Sherri Haupmin got to be an opening act. Technically, she might be under contract to the band’s production company, but Zawicki gets his way when he wants to get his way. If Roger wanted her to sing, then he had to let himself get screwed. Zawicki worked that way a lot. He’d play the guys off against each other. He’d play different bands in the company off against each other.”

  “What for?” Fenwick asked.

  “To make more money. To push guys to the edge. To get them to perform better.”

  “What’s the point?” Fenwick asked. “These guys were at the top.”

  “There’s always more money to be made, and Zawicki was about making money,” Oxaka said. “You sell three million CDs in a week, your next one needs to sell more. Who cares if three million makes a huge profit? It’s a style of leadership more suited to the army than a band. The atmosphere around the band might be different from a marine boot camp, but the discipline isn’t. Zawicki spoke and the boys bent over.”

  “But none of these guys were gay?”

  “They hung around with women, if that’s what you mean. I never saw them with any kind of boyfriend. If I had to pick one as gay, I’d say Dexter, but I’ve got no actual evidence of that. You guys think the pressure of having to give in to Zawicki could have driven Stendar over the edge?”

  While Turner conceded to himself that that was a possibility, it didn’t make much sense as a motive for this murder. If Stendar had been driven over the edge, most likely Zawicki would be dead. “We’re not sure,” he said. “Who were their enemies? Who’d they have fights with?”

  “Some of it was simple stuff. The personal assistants were at each other’s throats half the time, but for most of them it’s an entry-level position. If the boys wanted bagels on the buffet in Buffalo and there were no bagels on the buffet, you could lose your job.”

  “Their positions are that insecure?”

  “The guys in the band might be rich, and a few people in the permanent crew are well paid, but people who do the bidding and fetching are on the lowest rungs of the music-business ladder. They do it to be close to fame. They aren’t getting rich. Lots of intense competition among some of them and jockeying for position to be noticed by Zawicki and other executives.

  “Haupmin was a cause of dissension. She had all kinds of plans for herself and none of those included Roger being in this band. I think she was jealous of the time he spent with the guys. Being on the road is hell on relationships.”

  “What’s the story on Eudace?” Fenwick asked.

  “Their agent? He and Zawicki are close buddies.”

  “Would Eudace be using them for sex?”

  “I never heard anything like that. He’d be using them to make himself rich, and he would get rid of anything that stood in the way of him becoming rich.”

  “Even one of the members of his own band?” Turner asked.

  “If he thought they were going to break up, maybe. The CDs are going to sell through the roof for the next few months. He’ll get his percentage of that. He’d make a lot more from years and years of CDs.”

  “If they weren’t breaking up,” Turner said.

  “Nobody in the crew knew anything about a band breakup.”

  “What about Jordan Pastern?”

  “He’s a funny guy. The crew doesn’t like him. He considers us beneath him. To him, we were nothing more than the hired help and needed to stay away from the band and security. He’d find minor rules for us to comply with. Keep us away from the band when there was no point in us being away from them. I don’t think he’d harm them. He really liked them.”

  “We heard he was going to be fired.”

  “That rumor flew every time he had a dust-up with some executive from Riveting Records. I never believed it.” He shook his head. “I still think this was all done by a sicko fan. These guys live under constant pressure. If these fans were given the slightest chance, they’d trample these guys like blades of grass before herds of stampeding buffaloes.”

  “Dexter seems to have had some kind of breakdown,” Turner said.

  “Yeah. We all kind of liked Dexter. He was sort of the crew’s pet. He never hassled us. As the other guys got more famous, they got more demanding about little things, special attentions. They weren’t as bad as some bands. Heavy metal guys are usually the worst. Dexter said he always trusted us. He was really sweet. I think Zawicki took advantage of him most of all, screwed him the most, but Dex was messed up before he got to us. Dexter didn’t get along real well with his parents. This band was a great thing for him.”

  “Any special connection you know of between Stendar and Devane?”

  “They sang together before joining the band is all I know.”

  After another fruitless round of interviews and talking to the beat cops about the people they had spoken with, Turner and Fenwick returned to headquarters.

  Turner said, “I think we need to find out if there’s some unique connection between Stendar and Devane.”

  “Nobody said so. We’ve got charts and movements, but we’ve got too many people with too few or too many alibis. They were either standing around in a lobby and talking to a herd of people, or they were fast asleep. I’m not sure which I prefer.”

  They spent an hour wading through a depressing amount of paperwork.

  17

  Breakfast was its Monday self. It was Brian’s turn to cook for the week. He’d chosen to do baked eggs with broccoli, zucchini, and onions. Paul hated zucchini. He ate every bit. He wasn’t about to be anti-vegetable with a teenage boy who was willing to eat them. Jeff picked all the zucchini and broccoli out of his. Then he slathered the entire concoction with mustard. Paul had no notion where his younger son picked up the mustard habit. Five months ago he’d been burying everything he ate, except oatmeal, under heaps of salsa. He figured maybe Jeff was trying to establish his own niche by matching his older brother in having odd food habits. Jeff’s requests were never the same as Brian’s, but lately, every time Brian came up with one oddity, Jeff came up with another. Sibling competition. So far this wasn’t causing squabbles, so Paul was willing to let it be.

  Ben said to Paul, “You going to be able to get some rest?”

  “I hope so.”

  After making sure all three of them were sufficiently bundled against the bitter cold, Paul decided to finish a couple of calls before getting some sleep. He stacked the dishwasher then called his friend Grannett. The psychologist hadn’t left for his office. Grannett said, “At the hospital Zawicki showed up with an entourage which included a very insistent lawyer. They demanded to see the kid. I advised against it, but Dexter was awake. He said it was okay. I was explicitly told I was unwanted. That I couldn’t possibly understand the rich and famous. If I hadn’t walked out of his room, I’d of been thrown out.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “Guy named Eudace and a woman named Hinkmeyer plus the lawyer. Eudace talked the most, with the other two as a kind of chorus. The lawyer reminded me that I wasn’t a relative. I pointed out that they weren’t, either. There was nothing I could do. I had no standing. Next I knew, they were all marching toward the exit.”

  “You did your best,” Paul said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Kid’s going to need more help and soon, if I’m any judge of these things.”

  Turner agreed. He called the office. Nothing new had been reported. He switched on CNN. They announced there was going to be a press conference with a statement concerning major developments in the case. The announcer said, “Since early this morning unconfirmed rumors of Jonathan Zawicki’s resignation from Riveting Records are all over the Internet, many contradictory. After such a devastating loss of two of the members of the most popular band in the world…” The background for the CNN telecast was the ballroom of the Hotel Chicago. A mass of reporters surged between the walls. As he surfed through the channel
s, he saw that all the major cable networks were doing all-dead-Boys4u all the time. Fox had a right-wing religious nut masquerading as a normal human being claiming, “It is safe to assume that these boys led a lifestyle that is all too familiar to the rock musicians of today.” MSNBC had a therapist who was saying, “It is safe to assume that the lifestyle of these boys—and we can’t really call them men, can we?—is incredibly stressful. It’s more stress than they can handle. In my book…” The CNN reporter was saying, “Again, this is an unconfirmed report. The head of Riveting Records is expected to resign today. A scandal of major proportions that is expected to rock the music world is in the making. This follows on the heels of the murder of two members of the most famous band in the world. The streets of Chicago are dangerous this morning.”

  Turner loved this last exaggeration as if the millions of people in the city had all suddenly woken up and gone to work looking over their shoulders.

  Turner called Ian. He knew calling before ten in the morning was unlikely to get a response, but he wanted to see what his friend knew. He was surprised when the phone was picked up on the first ring. “Haven’t been to bed,” Ian told him.

  “You need to look at the news reports.” Turner waited for Ian to switch to CNN.

  A new reporter spoke into the camera. “The police are saying nothing. Some are suggesting that perhaps the police themselves are hiding something. Conspiracy theorists are flooding the Web with…”

  Ian snorted. “Because I have a computer, I have wisdom and credibility? The story is not serious enough or complicated enough that they have to quote from the World Wide fucking Web?”

  Turner said, “I’d go with an alien pod-people theory.”

  “You’ve heard those theories?” Ian asked.

  “Don’t need to. If there isn’t an alien pod-people theory about who killed these guys, there should be, or there will be. On the Web and on call-in right-wing radio and television shows.”