Turner spoke softly, “It’s okay, Dexter.” He also kept his back up against one of the fiberglass end poles, his feet firmly planted, and his muscles tensed. Clendenen could also make a rush toward him to attempt to throw him off or to get them both to fly off together into the vast nothing between their perch and the floor far below.
Clendenen closed his eyes. Turner took a step toward him. Turner was now closer to the boy than the boy was to the edge or to the strut. He didn’t know if the boy had noticed. Turner wasn’t about to do something rash. He waited. Eyes still closed, Clendenen paced toward him in minuscule increments. When he did reach Turner, the boy crushed him in an embrace. Turner held the kid. If anything the boy was thinner than just a day or so ago. He wondered if the kid had eaten anything since Sunday morning at Mrs. Talucci’s. He felt annoyed when the boy swiveled his hip to place his crotch, now bulging prominently, against his own. Dexter began to slide to the floor.
Turner held him up by his armpits. Clendenen placed his hands on Turner’s ass. Turner took the boy’s arms firmly and held them away. Clendenen met his gaze.
“No,” Turner said. “You met Ben. I love him. I will help you, but I will not be part of seducing you or being seduced. I will not be part of using you or being used by you.”
“I could try to kill myself again.”
“Real or fake attempts at psychological blackmail are not going to work.” Clendenen tried to move his hands. Turner kept a firm grip on them.
Clendenen said, “You wouldn’t hurt me.”
Turner said, “If I wanted to, I could cuff you to the center strut. I’d rather not.”
“Will you hold me some more?”
“You need more help than my holding you.”
“I feel safe with you.”
“I want you to feel safe.”
“Roger wasn’t. Jason wasn’t.”
Turner waited. He assumed a confession was coming. It didn’t. Clendenen shut his eyes and leaned forward to kiss him. Turner gripped Clendenen as tightly as ever and said, “No.”
Clendenen leaned hard against him. He felt the kid’s weight. He eased the two of them onto the platform. He held the young man and let him snuggle close.
Clendenen muttered, “They all fucked me. I let them. I liked it. It made me feel part of the group. For a few minutes I didn’t feel alone.”
“We found your diary.”
“Some of the stuff I made up. Some I left out. The first time we went on an overnight trip. We were in Fresno. Roger was the first. He was nice. The others were rough. Sometimes we did it all together in a hotel room.”
“Everybody watched?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did you kill them?”
“No. I let them fuck me because I wanted the pain to go away. It hurts being the most unpopular kid in school. I wanted them to like me.”
“Did they use condoms? If they were screwing with others, you could have gotten any number of diseases.”
“I’ve been tested. I’m fine.”
The kid snuggled his head into Turner’s chest. Physical closeness was the only safety the kid wanted. Turner appreciated all degrees of touching, from a good hug to a night and day of passionate lovemaking, as much as anyone, but this seemed to be all the kid understood.
“I’d like to stay like this forever,” Clendenen said.
“We have to find out who killed the three of them,” Turner said.
“I don’t care. They’re dead. Most of the time I want to be dead.” He wrenched himself from Turner’s embrace. He leapt to one of the end poles, teetered on the platform edge for several seconds, let go, yodeled in triumph, and set his arms like a diver.
It was the yodel and the diver crap that gave Turner time to lunge after him. He caught the kid’s ankle. There were shouts and a loud scream from below. The kid dangled by one leg. With his other hand Turner gripped the kid’s calf. He heard pounding on the steps behind him. Within seconds Pastern and Davis had latched onto the detective. Moments later, several more hands gripped Dexter. They dragged him back.
When they got him safely back into the middle of the platform, Clendenen began to cry. The members of the Riveting Records entourage began surrounding the nearly deceased band member. Turner said, “We need to take him off this platform very carefully. I suggest handcuffs for his feet and arms.”
Every single one of the entourage began to protest. His mother and father objected the most firmly.
Fenwick puffed up to the platform with several uniformed cops in tow. To the beat cops Turner said, “Surround Dexter Clendenen. Restrain him. Cuff him if you have to.” More uniforms appeared at the top of the steps. Turner said, “I want all the people who are not part of the Chicago Police Department off this platform.”
More protests. Dexter kept his eyes closed and his lips pressed tightly together.
The platform groaned. There were nearly twenty people trying to cram onto it. “This thing is unstable,” Turner said. Hangers-on began to scramble backward. Beat cops hustled the rest away. Along with Turner, four uniforms and Fenwick remained on top.
“Is this thing going to hold?” Fenwick asked.
The platform swayed slightly then stopped. “I hope so,” Turner said. With uniformed cops gripping either elbow and one in front and one behind, they duck-walked Dexter Clendenen down. It took quite some time. When they got to the bottom, Turner looked up at the platform. Workers from the stadium began hurrying up. When the first of them took a step onto the top platform, it groaned and swayed. Workers pelted back down the stairs. Moments later there was a loud crack. The people still on the stairs jumped for their lives. The crowd on the ground scattered. Seconds later the entire structure crashed to the ground.
From the edge of the debris, Turner saw one of the workers from the arena on the ground moaning. He’d broken his leg when he fell. Everyone else had gotten off and out of the way in time.
Clendenen said, “I tried to loosen all the connections.” He smiled as he said it.
“Get him out of my sight,” Turner said. He was more than fed up with the band member. The adrenaline rush was beginning to wear off. He felt the muscles in his shoulders and arms tremble a little. It had been a supreme effort to hold onto the kid and keep him from plummeting to his death.
Mr. and Mrs. Clendenen left with Dexter.
Turner explained everything Dexter had said to Fenwick and Molton, who had arrived on the scene.
Fenwick said, “He’s a raver. Are you okay?”
Turner said, “Nothing a lot of sleep won’t cure.” The area they were standing in was completely sealed off from anyone but Chicago police. Evidence techs were combing the remains of the platform.
“How the hell could that kid be up on the platform and no one notice?” Fenwick asked. “Where the hell was security?”
The guard was summoned. He said, “They all came in that star entrance. They were in and out all night. How was I supposed to know which of them was going to try and commit suicide?” He shuffled off.
Turner looked at the mess. “Dexter conquered his fear. A triumph of modern psychology. They got him to sing and dance fifty feet in the air, but they couldn’t make him happy.”
Fenwick said, “Let’s arrest him for several crimes.”
“I’m not sure destroying their own platform is much of a crime, unless Zawicki wants to press charges.”
“Book him for being a psychotic creep who almost got a bunch of people killed,” Fenwick said.
One of the beat cops brought over Clendenen’s backpack. “This was at the edge of the wreckage.”
Turner looked inside. A small-caliber revolver.
Fenwick said, “Son of a bitch.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Turner said.
On the way out Hinkmeyer came up to them. “The press wants to interview Detective Turner. He saved Dexter’s life. He’s a hero. I already have CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the major print media interested in interviews. We m
anaged to get a picture of Detective Turner holding onto him.”
“Go away,” Turner said. His innate well of courtesy was just about dry.
Hinkmeyer said, “We’ll want pictures of you with Dexter.”
“Your boy is in jail at the moment,” Molton said. “We may be charging him with a crime.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” she asked.
Pastern joined them. “Thank you for saving him.”
23
Turner and Fenwick sat back at their desks. Clendenen had been interrogated for over an hour. In the presence of cops and lawyers he had done little but weep and claim he’d never seen the gun.
Back at his desk, Turner called Mrs. Talucci and asked if she was sure there hadn’t been a gun in the backpack when she looked through it.
“I don’t miss firearms,” she said. “I had everything out. A pink notebook, three pencils, a tiny pencil sharpener, a novel, and a T-shirt.”
Turner hunted for McWilliams to ask if they’d checked Clendenen’s backpack at the stadium when they were searching the first time.
“No,” McWilliams said. “We hadn’t when we found the gun. There was no reason to search once we had it.”
Made sense.
They sent the gun out to be checked for fingerprints. Clendenen was definitely the prime suspect, but they had to be absolutely certain. The killer could have planted the weapon. An incorrect arrest and the media would crucify them.
Turner and Fenwick did detective paperwork for over an hour and weren’t nearly done. They downed vats of coffee. Turner picked up the history Blundlefitz had pulled together. He began a chronological record of the connections between each person involved in the case from the early days to the present.
“Look,” he said to Fenwick, after he’d been working for half an hour. “All these people are intertwined more incestuously than a backwoods Appalachian family.”
Fenwick perused what Turner had done. “They were all in bands at some point?” Turner asked.
“Everybody except the choreographer and she worked with some of them in that capacity, but she never appeared onstage.”
“What happened to all their bands?” Turner asked.
“You heard what we’ve been told. Most don’t succeed. They get their success secondhand by working with this band.”
“Why did all these people fail?”
“Is it important?” Fenwick asked.
Molton trudged up to their desks. He glanced at the papers in Fenwick’s hand. “Anything?”
Fenwick said, “Lots of bands that flopped.”
“A band named ‘Damn Skippy’?” Molton said.
“Yeah, Blundlefitz wrote a review of them,” Turner said.
Molton held out the piece of paper he held in his hand. “This says Jordan Pastern was in that band.”
Turner said, “I think somebody else was, too.” He hunted through the papers on his desk and pulled out the fifth sheet he looked at. “Yeah, Hinkmeyer sang for the group for a while. According to Blundlefitz’s notes they made a small splash in Florida.” He found Blundlefitz’s review. “He saw them when they came through town with one of those rock conglomerations at a summer all-day band festival.” Fenwick and Molton looked over Turner’s shoulder. The review was short and vicious. “More pretension than music occurred at the twenty-four-hour all-rock festival in Tinley Park. Perhaps the most pretentious was the least talented group, Damn Skippy.”
Molton said, “These people were all connected. Let’s get them in here again. They can bring as many of their goddamn lawyers as they want.”
While they waited for them, the detectives continued their research. Turner tapped the Internet connection on his computer and typed in “Damn Skippy” in the search line. He found a Web site that was at least six years out of date.
“Don’t these things ever die?” Fenwick asked.
“Unless the server company cleans house, they must not,” Turner said.
Fenwick said, “Let’s go through all the background that Blundlefitz found on these people.”
Turner stuck the disk into the computer slot and called up the data. Turner found out that Zawicki had grown up in Laguna Beach, California. That he was the valedictorian of his class but never gave the speech—no reason given. That he’d worked his way up through various companies following the Hollywood rule that if you got fired from one company you moved up to a higher position in the next one. Over time he’d managed groups who’d made him rich and his reputation for making people rich made him powerful. He hadn’t had a miss in fifteen years.
Jordan Pastern had been an MP in the military and a cop on the force in Northridge, California, moonlighting in Hollywood as a security guard.
Eudace had been in numerous bands, all of which flopped. He’d been the one who organized each of the bands.
Hinkmeyer, according to Blundlefitz, was the most efficient and well organized of any press person he’d done business with.
Turner called Jeremiah Boissec, Zawicki’s former employee. Turner explained the connections they’d been making.
Boissec said, “They were all in bands. They’d go out drinking sometimes, and they’d get all nostalgic about what could have been. I thought it was pretty pathetic.”
“Who was most pathetic?”
“The whole crowd. They thought they should have been superstars.”
The members of the entourage entered arguing. Pastern, Eudace, Zawicki, and company crowded around the detectives. Some demanded answers. Some began berating Turner and Fenwick.
Fenwick said, “Shut up.”
He got several startled, several huffy, and several enraged looks.
Turner said, “We have a great deal more information than we did a little while ago. Mr. Blundlefitz kept excellent files. My guess is, something he discovered led him to believe he knew who the killer was. All of you are deeply interconnected with one another.”
“So what?” Eudace said.
“There was a band called Damn Skippy,” Turner said.
“Big deal,” Zawicki said.
“They went nowhere because the leader didn’t put out,” Turner said.
“The leader did put out!” Eudace said. “I did put out. I just didn’t want to be in a band with those guys anymore. I wanted to be an agent. Jonathan got me started.”
“You son of a bitch,” Pastern said.
Eudace said, “How do you think you got this job? I felt sorry for you.”
Galyak and Pappas were led to a stark interrogation room. Company lawyers were present.
“What happened to Dexter?” Pappas asked.
Fenwick said, “You all fucked Dexter Clendenen.”
“What?” Galyak said. “That’s not true.”
“He says it is.”
“He’s nuts.”
“You saying you never had sex with Dexter?”
Galyak said, “He sucked my dick a couple times in South America. That’s not really sex. I was horny. It was no big deal.”
Pappas said, “What’s going on?”
Fenwick said, “You all fucked Dexter Clendenen.”
“All of us?” Pappas asked.
“Yep,” Fenwick said.
Pappas said, “He asked me to, begged me.”
“Group sex?”
“A couple times Roger and me took turns with him. We were horny. He enjoyed it. Hey, I’m not gay. I don’t know about the rest of the guys. I just figured Dexter was probably this closet case. Nobody wanted it to get out that one of us might be gay. That would blow the image with all those teenybop girls.”
Fenwick was pissed. “Everybody was having sex. Nobody seemed much interested in anything but making money and fucking. Big egos got in everybody’s way but nobody wanted to kill anybody? This whole thing is totally screwed up.”
Galyak asked, “Why can’t Dexter be the killer? Somebody said he loosened all the bolts on the platform and that’s why it fell down. Maybe he did all the rest. He was nut
s.”
Jonathan Zawicki was the next person they interviewed. He looked pale and shaken. “What the hell is happening?” he asked. This time it didn’t sound to Turner like a demand, but more as if Zawicki was generally distraught.
“What were you trying to do with Randall Blundlefitz?” Fenwick asked.
“I was using the fat fool.”
“When we first talked to him, he thought you did it.”
“Yeah, well, he was stupid and egotistical.”
Fenwick said, “If being egotistical is a crime, we’d have to arrest all of you.”
“Blundlefitz wanted an ‘in’ to the industry. He might have been a medium-sized fish in the very small pond of Midwest critics, but he was a member of the local press. We could use him, and we did.”
“Did he tell you about his investigation?”
“Not really.”
“Do you know who he talked to?”
“I gave him access to everybody.”
“What did he ask you?”
“Mostly he asked about everybody’s history. I guess he must have thought that the killing had something to do with what had gone on in the industry prior to this.”
“And did it?”
“I have no idea.”
Fenwick said, “You have lots of people pretty pissed at you.”
“So do you.”
Fenwick said, “But people I know aren’t dying.”
“Is that by random chance, luck?”
“These people aren’t dying by random chance,” Turner said. “Many of your employees were in bands before working for your company.”
“Many people in the industry work for a variety of bands and companies before they either hit it big, give up and go back to Keokuk, or take mid-level jobs that keep them close to the action, but not out in the spotlight. Being close to center stage is the most they are ever going to get. My question to you is this: If someone is so angry at me, why don’t they kill me? Why bother with the guys in the band, and certainly I wouldn’t be terribly discommoded by the death of a minor critic?”
“Getting revenge is often about making someone suffer, not about killing them. If they’re dead, the revenge is over. If they’re living and suffering, the revenge repeats itself every minute of every hour of every day.”
Dead Egotistical Morons Page 23