From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  “So?” Jackie asked.

  “So how old is this movie?” I asked. “Four, five years? That song is about two months old.”

  The women were silent for a moment and then Leigh scrolled back, listened again. “You know, even though they’re very similar, they’re not exact.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed.

  “Seems to me Lippy would have had a tough time proving that a melody in an obscure porn film was ripped off.”

  “That’s true, too,” I said. “Still, Lippy told his sister he was onto some kind of treasure. He didn’t tell her what. Maybe this was it? Maybe he was bargaining with the thief for a cut. Maybe the thief didn’t want to pay it . . . or maybe he or she didn’t want to be exposed. That kind of theft could be a career ender.”

  “So they killed him instead?” Leigh said dubiously. “Premeditated with poison?”

  “That kind of thing could sink a company,” I said.

  Jackie shook her head. “Even if the song was ripped off, you said Tippi didn’t know what the treasure was. Why kill her?”

  “Yeah, that’s a big hole in the theory,” I admitted.

  The two women sat there, quite still; whatever mood had been building, I’d killed it deader than a salami. I felt bad about that. I had never really had sexual power over anyone or any situation. It figured I’d have it where it did me absolutely no good.

  “You want another beverage?” Jackie asked after a time.

  “No thanks.”

  Jackie got up to get refills for herself and Leigh. Leigh popped the DVD from the player, put it in a plastic sleeve, and handed it to me. She shut off the TV; clearly, we weren’t going back to the porn flick. I thanked her for the movie and took out my cell phone to Google the song.

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  “What is?” Leigh asked.

  “It says ‘More Coffee’ was written by De F Chicken.”

  Jackie returned with two bottles of beer and another can of 7-Up. “Maybe a pseudonym for a group—like a jam session?”

  “Or it could be some kind of joke,” Leigh said.

  I thought for a moment. “‘F Chicken’ has to be Funky Chicken, but hip-hop-ified—‘def’ Chicken.”

  “As in ‘Do the Funky Chicken’?” Leigh asked, demonstrating her herky-jerky moves.

  I nodded charitably.

  “Why would anybody come up with an obviously phony name like that one?” Jackie asked.

  “To throw the real composer off the scent,” I suggested.

  Jackie was shaking her head again. “I still think the odds are pretty ‘out there’ that someone would have seen this nothing little flick, heard a couple of bars of a song playing in the background—when what they came to see is in the foreground—and decided that it would make a great hit to launch an international singing career.”

  I had to agree that she made more sense than I did.

  Until, thinking about a connection between the song and Lippy, I went back to the trumpet case— “What if that wasn’t where the person heard it?” I said. I still had my cell phone out and looked at my photos. I found the picture I had taken of the back side of the paste. I showed it to the ladies. “What do you make of this?”

  “A ‘pp,’” Leigh said.

  “Or an upside-down ‘bb,’” Jackie remarked.

  Leigh hunched closer to me. “It could be a mirror image of letters, like ‘dd.’”

  “But it’s not!” I said suddenly, with a “eureka” all but preceding the statement. “What if they’re musical notes? Or an indication—what the hell is it?” I thought back to my ill-fated piano lessons. “What did ‘pp’ stand for—very soft?”

  The women looked from the phone to me. They clearly didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It meant something in music.

  “The treasure,” I said. “Lippy must have written the song down at some point. Maybe he’d worked on it for years. I’m guessing he knew he had a good, catchy tune and was busy patschkieing with it on his street corner.”

  “He was what?” Leigh asked.

  “Just horsing around with it, riffing. Someone heard it. Someone knew he had a written copy stuffed in a loose flap in the case. Someone decided they needed to get that copy.”

  “That’s a lot of conjecture, still,” Leigh said.

  “It is, but that record came out on Fly Saucer’s label—and both he and Lippy were in the deli at the time he was poisoned.”

  Leigh whistled. “That’s a big accusation, girl.”

  “I’m not making one, yet—only saying it’s a possibility.”

  “Maybe you can tell the police informally,” Jackie suggested. “Are you still friendly with that detective?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

  “But you can still tell him what you think?” Jackie asked.

  Actually, I never could, I thought. “I don’t know. I’m going to sleep on this. Let’s keep this between us, okay?”

  “Of course,” Jackie said.

  “I don’t suppose you want to see another movie,” Leigh said.

  “I think I’m done for the day. But this was really helpful, and you two were great. Nice place and perfect hosts.”

  We agreed to do a less abbreviated girls’ movie night when things were a little calmer. The seductive undercurrent aside, they were nice ladies and I enjoyed hanging with them. In fact, I relished the change.

  But I had other things on my mind as I left, such as how I was going to get to Fly Saucer without going through Grant or Andrew Dickson III or any of the other men who were always getting in my way. Because, for want of anything more pressing, that independence was suddenly very, very important.

  Chapter 23

  I drove home in a muddle.

  On the one hand, I was suddenly energized. On the other, I had nowhere to put it. Going to Fly Saucer’s home—even assuming I could get the address, which wasn’t on the card Raylene had given me—was not an option.

  Or was it?

  Fly had obviously been with Dickson when he saw who was calling and handed over the phone. What if I sent him something he couldn’t pass over and couldn’t ignore?

  I thought about it on the way home—then decided to go to the deli instead. I didn’t want to be where the Wiccans could spy on me. About the only ones I trusted in my life—with my life—were my staff and the two gal-pals.

  Because it was Sunday evening, I had no trouble parking out front. I went in, locked the door behind me, and kept the lights off until I went to my office. I shut the door and sat with my cell phone in front of me. I felt like I did when I was a kid and held a siddur, a Jewish prayer book, in front of me. There were big, unknowable mysteries “out there” but here was a key to solving some of them. Two people were dead. I had already been attacked. This wasn’t a game I was playing. But I felt I was on a path to solving a big, knowable mystery. My heart pumping hard, I started thumb-typing.

  I sent a text to the same cell number I’d called earlier:

  I’d like to talk to you tonight, alone.

  I set down the phone and waited. It took less than a minute for Fly to send his reply:

  Y?

  I was ready for that. I was also aware that if he meant to harm me, he would need my phone if there were potentially incriminating texts on it. Rather than parcel it out, I hit him with the full blast:

  Lippy played “More Coffee” in old Tippi film.

  I have it.

  I added a second message, the good cop to my own bad cop:

  No Dickson. Just us. Just talk.

  It took a little over a minute for Fly to write:

  Where?

  I told him to come to the deli. He wrote back:

  U solo 2

  I wasn’t sure whether that was a question or a command. It didn’t matter. I assured him I would be alone. He said he would be here in about a half-hour. I didn’t bother asking him to park out front where I could see. He could always drop someone off down the street.
There wasn’t a lot of pedestrian traffic but there was enough. We’d sit in the dining room with the lights on. I would leave the door unlocked. If he tried to hurt me, someone would see or hear. But I didn’t think he would. Not with my cell phone in a plastic bag stuck deep in one of four tubs of coleslaw. I made sure to leave the big pickle containers in full view on the prep table so he would have to go through those first. If he made me do it, brine in the eyes wouldn’t be the most pleasant thing he’d ever experienced.

  The wait was longer than a half-hour. As it came up to nearly an hour, I was starting to feel as though I’d been had: that he wouldn’t show or, less appealing, that he had stopped to pick up his posse and he’d show with thugs to strong-arm me into telling them where the phone was before poisoning me with my own tainted herring. I was actually considering calling Grant when a black Escalade pulled up. The windows were President of the United States-dark and, as the damn thing just sat there, I wouldn’t have known whether it was Fly waiting to make sure we were alone or four armed killers. Even after the music mogul cracked the driver’s side door of the Cadillac SUV and stepped out, I had no way of knowing whether he was alone. He stepped around the front of the big vehicle looking up and down the street—and not for traffic. He came around the car looking different than usual: he was dressed in blue jeans, a button-down long-sleeve white shirt—tails untucked—and a pair of Nike Dunks, which are over two grand a pair. I know that because Dani was always saying to Luke how she wished she could buy him a pair but couldn’t on her salary. That topic always seemed to come up when the lovebirds were around me. The last time she said it, I told her I couldn’t afford the footwear on my salary, either. Though it was dark, Fly was wearing the obligatory sunglasses. They were Luxuriator with white gold frames and cut diamonds on the hinges.

  He wasn’t wearing his ear-buds. That was a first.

  Fly came to the door with purpose and confidence, a man who was unaccustomed to being barred from any club, any woman’s door.

  He saw me and came over without hesitation, sat without ceremony or acknowledgement, folded his ringed fingers in front of him, and peered at me through those opaque lenses.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said affably. “Sunday night construction on Twenty-four.”

  And down the drain went another stereotype.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Want anything?”

  “Where’s your water at?” he asked.

  “Ice?”

  “Yeah. Please.”

  I went and got some. This was as chastened a Fly as I had ever seen, but I still wasn’t convinced it wasn’t an act. And I wasn’t sure whether that made me smart or pitiful.

  Neither, I told myself. Just cautious. Regardless, I never took my eyes from the table, watching it in the mirror above the counter or peripherally or directly.

  “My Hire says I shouldn’t talk to you,” he said as I returned.

  “Your—?”

  “My Hire. My Liar Hire. My legal.”

  “Ah. So why are you?”

  “’Cause I gotta tell someone who I’m not payin’,” he said. “Or who isn’t payin’ me.”

  “Mr. Strong wasn’t too happy having this on his shoe, was he?”

  “You know that,” Fly said, looking over his sunglasses. “But you were here, you saw me—I didn’t go anywhere near him.”

  I wanted to tell him I hadn’t exactly been paying attention, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. Based on his deferential manner, my guess was he came here looking for an ally in case he moved from being a potential person-of-interest to a person-on-trial-for-murder.

  “So why are we here?” I asked. “What did you do?”

  He was still looking at me. “You not wearin’ a wire?” He shook the salt shaker from side to side. “Ain’t no bug in here?”

  “No to both,” I replied. “Trust me, Fly. I didn’t call Grant. If I thought you were a killer, I wouldn’t be here alone with you.”

  He considered that. “All true, all true.”

  “But wouldn’t doing time be a good thing?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Give some weight to your street cred?”

  “Girl, you are so not-street,” he said. “That’s for rappers. Ducers like me—uh-uh.”

  “Ducers?”

  “Producers,” he said, clearly annoyed that he was going to have to speak something like traditional English with me.

  He sat back, hid behind his glasses again, continued to move the salt shaker back and forth. He was apparently thinking about how to confess whatever he wanted to confess.

  “I truly did not realize what I had done,” Fly said with uncharacteristic introspection and—it wasn’t so much fear as . . . humility? “I woke up with this song in my head. I hummed it into my recorder and went back to sleep. I woke up and took it to the studio where I developed it with my crew. I didn’t realize until—jeez, it was five or six months later, when I heard it again, that I realized where I heard it.”

  “On the street corner,” I said with sudden realization.

  “On the street corner,” he said quietly. “I didn’t say anything about it. I should have but I didn’t. A couple months after that, when Lippy heard ‘More Coffee,’ he checked it out online and came to the same conclusion you did—that I was part of De F Chicken.”

  “Did you try to make it good with him?”

  “I did. We met here, in fact. He showed me this crib sheet where he wrote out his melodies. Okay, I figured he could’ve forged that. Then he told me about the movie he’d made with his sister and how the song was in it.”

  “You checked?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Just making sure,” I said.

  He shook his head at the memory. “I tried to fix this even though talkin’ to that boy was like talkin’ to a pancake. I explained nice an’ slow that I could give him money right away, but I couldn’t put his name on the song. I said I could make him part of De F Chicken and he could work with us on the next things we did, share in the creative process, but he could not, must not ever tell anyone about our little deal. Our friend wasn’t happy with that but he didn’t reject it. At least, not outright.”

  “How long was that before he was poisoned?”

  “Two, three weeks. He said he had to talk to his sister about it first.”

  “But according to her, he didn’t,” I said. “Not really. He just told her there was ‘something’ brewing.”

  “I know,” Fly said. “I think it was a stall. He wanted to get credit for ‘More Coffee.’ Every time he heard it, he said it was like a knife in his ears.”

  “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure, but he was still being unreasonable,” Fly said. “We talked again in my car. He said he wanted to record his own stuff, not with De F Chicken, and I told him okay but to slow down. That was when he just started backin’ off the whole deal. He said he could probably get more money, more attention, if he just went to some dinowhore like Candy Sommerton and announced that he wrote this big hit song—even though a big part of its success was the arrangement, not anything that he did.”

  “Dinowhore?” I said, half in horror, half in admiration.

  Fly didn’t seem to hear me. He was somewhere between angry and scared.

  “Lippy didn’t seem to have much of a business sense,” I said. “What do you think put that idea in his head?”

  “He was just—I don’t the hell know. Fed up? Tired of living a life on the edge of nowhere? Suddenly feeling like an artist who shouldn’t compromise? All of that?”

  “And maybe wanting to get his sister out of her business,” I thought aloud.

  “Porn?”

  “No. She is an escort in Atlanta.”

  “A ho-bag? Man, I can see how that might have pushed Lippy.”

  “So getting back to this crib sheet—You figured if you could get that from the trumpet case, no one was likely to hear it in the movie.”

  “I saw him go down
and I knew where it was. I just wanted to pull the damn thing out, put the case back, and leave. But the uber chav pasted it in there.”

  “Uber chav?”

  “Dude thinks he bigger and smarter than he is,” Fly said with disinterest.

  “He messed you up,” I pointed out.

  “With kindergarten paste, jack. That’s not cool.”

  “Neither is stealing a dead man’s property,” I pointed out. “Do you still have it?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “But Strong knows because Detective Daniels traced the case to you forensically.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “But you’re in the clear, legally, as long as there isn’t some distant relative who comes calling,” I said. “No estate, no trial. No trial, no theft.”

  “Guilt without guilty,” he said. “I ain’t proud of what happened with the tune, but it was an accident I tried to fix. And the major talking point here is I ain’t no killa.”

  I believed him. His story fit the facts from top to bottom, including why Lippy was so huggy toward the trumpet case on the morning he was killed.

  A short silence followed. It felt like the moments after the last out in a losing ball game, when the stress kind of wafts away leaving a hole. I didn’t know where to turn for a next step.

  “You got a ‘game over’ face,” he said.

  “Funny. I was just thinking that.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t bow out,” Fly said. “You know anything that I don’t? That can help me?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “You know who else was here, the regulars?” he said. “I don’t.”

  I told him who was here. He didn’t know any of them except for Mad.

  “You got a sense about any of ’em?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “There doesn’t seem to be any connection anywhere. Even Barron, who’s an unscrupulous schmuck, doesn’t have a role here.”

  “You sure Tippi got to town when she said she did?” he asked.

  I frowned, hard. “That’s harsh.”

  “Sibling rivalry. Wouldn’t be the first time.”