Steel Guitar

by Linda Barnes

  I could have asked a lot of questions, but people who work for answering services and mail drops are trained not to answer inquiries about the clientele. Instead, I walked myself down Winter Street toward the Common, resisting the impulse to enter Filene’s Basement to shop for shoes.

  They rarely carry size 11’s, but when they do, I stock up.

  By the time I hit the Public Garden I was taking note of the picnickers lounging near the “Don’t sit on the grass” signs, the popcorn vendors, and balloon hawkers. I stopped and bought a late-lunch hot dog slathered with mustard, and wolfed it down sitting on a park bench.

  I tossed a leftover chunk of hot-dog bun to a squirrel with a ragged tail, got up, and dusted crumbs off my suit. The brazen squirrel made a beeline for them.

  Why the hell would Dunrobie be using a mail drop? Was he homeless? If so, how the hell could he afford one? Had Lockwood, the lawyer, rented it for him so they could keep in touch?

  I strolled back downtown.

  On Washington Street, in front of Filene’s, the city allows pushcart merchants to set up shop, hawking homemade jewelry, T-shirts, wind chimes, stained-glass dew-drops. One cart held a cargo of kites. A huge yellow one made me think of my little sister, Paolina. Yellow’s her favorite color, so I bought it immediately. It made a long, skinny package, and the woman running the stand asked if I wanted a mailing tube. She had a stock of them in rainbow colors. I inspected them with growing enthusiasm, and finally chose a large matching yellow one. I let her put the kite inside. Then I selected another mailing tube, an even larger red one.

  At the Arch Street post office, I addressed the yellow tube to Paolina, hoping her mother would let her keep the gift. Then I addressed the red mailing tube to Mr. David Dunrobie, 825 Winter Street, Suite 505D, etc., using Lockwood’s Somerville office for the return address. I stood in line to mail them.

  The man behind the counter disagreed with my decision to mail the red tube first-class. “This close,” he urged, “you just send it regular parcel post and it’ll get delivered day after tomorrow at the latest.”

  “If I send it first-class, will it go with tomorrow’s delivery?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but it’ll cost you two-forty instead of eighty-five cents.”

  I forked over the money for next-day delivery, feeling pretty damn good about my chances of tracking Davey. The glow lasted me through a Filene’s Basement shoe spree—two pairs, a real haul—and a long walk to the Copley Square T station with frequent stops to stare at homeless men along the way. In Harvard Square, still feeling confident that Dunrobie was in the bag, I checked out the bill at the old Brattle Theater and decided impulsively to treat myself to a replay of To Have and Have Not.

  Reality didn’t catch up with me till I got home, hastily unlatched my three front-door locks, and raced into the living room in time to catch the ringing phone.

  The voice was a whisper.

  “Dee?” I said. “Is that you?”

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” the whisper said.

  “Dee, where are you?”

  “Oh, Carlotta.”

  “Where are you, Dee? Is anybody with you?”

  “Come to the room, Carlotta. Oh, please come. I should have called the doctor. I should have stayed. I should have stayed.”

  I’d been looking forward to a very late dinner. I was glad I’d taken time to eat the hot dog in the park.

  Fifteen

  Dee’s drunk, I told myself as I punched the button to summon the elevator. Stoned. Coked to a stupor. Or maybe just her usual melodramatic self.

  No cops were camped in the hotel lobby; the disaster couldn’t be that bad.

  That’s what I said to myself, but I practically stood on my toes to speed the elevator, and I hurried down the silent eighth-floor corridor. Then I paused for a moment, unsure which of the suite’s doors to bang. I picked 812—the living room, I thought—knocking softly, restraining my volume with effort. No need to cause a disturbance unless one was already under way.

  “Oh, for chrissakes, uh, uh, who is it?” stammered a startled voice.

  I said, “Carlyle. Dee called me.”

  I could hear the buzz of arguing voices. I hit the door again, harder. “Come on,” I said. “Open up.”

  “Shhh.” The door eased open a cautious three inches. Mimi, the blonde groupie, frowned and reluctantly let me pass.

  Dee was seated in the center of a white sofa, her face pale and blank, her arms crossed like she was warding off a chill. Her hands moved restlessly, squeezing her bare arms. She wore black. It looked like a silk jumpsuit, but it could have been pants and a matching sleeveless shirt. Beads spilled down her chest, gold like the ones scattered in the park. “Oh, my God,” she murmured without looking up. “My God. What time is it?”

  “Shhh,” a man said, “hush, now.” But Dee spoke over his voice as if he hadn’t said a thing.

  “Where were you all?” she said, still without looking up. “I should have called a doctor. Oh, God, I should have called a doctor. Maybe she isn’t dead.”

  “Dead?” I echoed.

  Jimmy Ranger had been pointed out to me at the party. I recognized him as the man who was trying to shush Dee. Before he got to be one of the hottest record producers around, he’d sung a little blues himself. I’d seen him on a double bill with Taj Mahal at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge. He had hair then. Now he had shoulder-length fringe surrounding a bald spot. He ignored me and said, “You’ve got to stop this, Dee. Pull yourself together.”

  Hal Grady smiled weakly from a kneeling position near Dee’s feet. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned across the back with Change Up, THE TOUR. He said, “We’ve got to consider the public relations angle here.”

  “Carlotta,” Dee said, breathing quickly and shallowly, “he’s just trying to scare me. I know he’s trying to scare me.”

  “Is somebody going to give me a clue?” I asked slowly, biting off each separate word.

  The road manager exchanged a long glance with the record producer. Then he nodded toward the connecting door that led to the bedroom with the canopied gold bed. “You got a sensitive stomach?” he asked.

  I was already moving.

  Brenda, the dark-haired bass player with the strong handshake and the short fuse, lay across the bed, her skin so pale, it seemed a shade of blue. The sheet almost covered her bare shoulders. Her face looked like it had been carved in ice.

  Both times I’d seen her, at the party in Dee’s room and on the Berklee stage, she’d been commanding, assured. Now she seemed delicate, almost frail.

  Just shorter lying down, I said to myself. Snap out of it. You’ve seen corpses before. I rested my knuckles lightly against her throat. No pulse. I hadn’t expected one.

  I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

  I tucked my hands into the pockets of my suit jacket. Reflex. Mooney used to make the uniforms grab a pencil and a notebook. If you weren’t toting a notebook, you stuck your hands in your pockets.

  I’m no compulsive housecleaner, but I always feel a tug to touch something at a crime scene, to tidy away a cigarette butt, to smooth a tangled curl. Maybe it’s just a way of pinching myself to make sure I’m awake.

  On the marble-topped bedside table sat a squat bottle of tequila, a drinking glass, two prescription pill bottles. One glass. No lipstick on the rim. Brenda’s wire-rimmed glasses. A copy of Guitar magazine. The cover had wet circles on it, as if it had been used as a coaster.

  The white sheet had frilly lace edging.

  “You cover her?” I found that Jimmy Ranger had followed me into the room, so I addressed the question to him.

  “We didn’t touch anything,” he said defensively.

  “You use that phone?”

  “Uh, I guess Dee did. Yes. To call you.”

  “You were here when she called?”

  “Yeah. Sure. We all got back to the room t
ogether.” He stared me right in the eye.

  “Who’s all?”

  “Me. Hal. Mimi and Freddie. I think Ron was with us. Yeah. We didn’t see why everybody should wait. Ron and Freddie were whacked-out. They went to bed.”

  “And since then you’ve been sitting on the sofas, probably using the bathroom.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “You find somebody dead,” I said harshly, because I hate being lied to, “you get out of the room. If you’re alone, you call for help. If there are two of you, one stands guard, the other calls for help.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll remember that the next time I find a corpse.”

  “How long since you called the cops?”

  “Uh, we, uh—we’ve been thinking what to do. Dee thought maybe you could, uh—”

  “So your bass player’s dead in your lead singer’s bed, and you’re sitting around holding a panel discussion about PR implications?”

  “Don’t get snotty with me,” he said. “It sure ain’t gonna matter to Brenda whether she died in this bed or her own.”

  I said, “I have to use the phone.”

  “No,” he said.

  “What are you going to do? Stop me?”

  “Please, honey, call the doctor.” Dee entered from the other room on unsteady legs, followed closely by Hal. “I should have called. I should have called. Maybe she was still alive.” She stumbled and Hal helped her into a chair. She leaned her head over, forehead to knees, and clasped her thighs, rocking in silent misery. “He did this,” she muttered. “He’s trying to ruin me.”

  “Shh, now,” the road manager murmured soothingly.

  A white phone was perched on a white desk, just like in the living room.

  “Don’t touch a damn thing while I’m gone,” I ordered, thinking how useless the words were even as I said them. I used a fold of my shirt to cover the door handle on my way out. There was a maid’s cart two doors down. My Spanish was good enough to convince her to let me into an empty room.

  It had a white phone too. I dialed 9 first to get a dial tone. I considered 911, punched Mooney’s number instead. In Massachusetts, nobody’s dead until they’ve been pronounced dead by a medical examiner, but in my opinion Brenda no longer rated emergency status. After I gave Mooney the outline, I added, “No sirens, okay?”

  That’s what the uniforms say when they find a dead politician in a strange bed.

  I hung up. The maid, reluctant to leave me alone in the unoccupied room, regarded me with stony eyes.

  “When did you make up 812?” I asked, fumbling with the numbers in Spanish.

  She nodded a few times, then spat back a torrent about the loco music people, how they sleep all day, party all night, and never get out of the rooms, so she can’t do her work. They leave dishes in the bathtub. Broken dishes. Her eyes flashed as if she were glad some retribution had justly struck.

  This time I knocked on the bedroom door. Mimi, like a faithful attendant, let me in. I wondered who she’d been with tonight. Probably the now sleeping Freddie. Jimmy Ranger? The lead guitar, Ron? Or was he Dee’s main action? Chunky little Hal? Would a road manager have the glamour to attract Mimi? Would she work him into a free evening so he’d let her backstage whenever he was touring a show?

  Hal was patting Dee’s hand when I came in, comforting her like a child. “She’s suffering from shock,” he announced, stepping between us like some knight in aging armor. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  I asked, “When did you really get here? Not till after Dee called me, right?”

  Jimmy Ranger said, “Shut up.” His warning glance included everyone in the room.

  I wondered if last night’s rehearsal had proceeded without the bass player. Had Brenda relented, come back? And without her, how would the tour go on?

  “If that’s your line,” I said to the gnome, “about her not knowing what she’s saying, you’d better get a tame doctor in here and keep her from chatting with any cops.”

  Hal exchanged a brief glance with Jimmy Ranger and walked to the desk with commendable speed.

  “Not that phone,” I snapped. “Matter of fact, it would be better if we all got out of this room.”

  The road manager knelt in front of Dee; tilted her chin so she’d see him. “Don’t say anything till I get back, Dee, honey,” he said softly.

  Dee raised her eyes to me. “You know,” she said tremulously.

  I didn’t, but I went over and helped her to her feet. I figured if I got her back onto the white sofa, the rest would follow like sheep. The fewer visitors to the scene of a crime the better. The shorter the duration of each visit the better. As I walked Dee through the connecting doors I murmured, “Does this mean you want me to keep doing what I’m doing? Looking for Davey?”

  “No,” she said quickly, her hand to her throat. “Oh, no. Just let it be. Please. I never should have started this. Oh, poor Bren.” She got a funny faraway look on her face. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I should have called the doctor.”

  “Cut the crap, Dee,” Ranger said. “At least cut it when the cops get here. We all got here together. And she was dead. She was ice-cold.”

  This from a man who’d assured me he’d touched nothing.

  He went on, but whether he was talking to Dee, or for my benefit, I wasn’t sure. “She killed herself, that’s bad enough. Don’t, for chrissake, make it worse.”

  I got Dee settled on the sofa. Mimi sat on the carpet, wide-eyed, spacey. The others used furniture.

  “Dee,” I said, “you think there’s something funny here, you tell the cops.”

  “And kiss the tour good-bye, Dee,” Ranger said. “Kiss the MGA/America deal good-bye.”

  Dee put her hands over her ears.

  Ranger muttered, “If it wasn’t her room, the damage would be minimal. Brenda was in a funk. Everybody saw her walk out of rehearsal. Nobody could find her the whole damned day. And Dee’s talked about replacing her before.”

  The hall door opened, and we all jumped involuntarily. Hal breezed in, a glow of achievement on his face. Before he could report his success at finding a willing physician, Ranger asked, “Is the room in Dee’s name, or the tour’s name? Do we have a block, Hal, or is this room specifically in her name?”

  “Block,” Hal said, after a moment’s thought.

  “Let’s get Dee moved out quick. Somebody—Freddie or Ron—can move his stuff in—”

  “The hell with that,” Mimi said, leading me to believe she was sharing the drummer’s room, and maybe not as stoned as she appeared to be.

  “Right,” I said. “You give the best room in the hotel to the drummer, and Dee Willis has to stick her stuff in the broom closet. The cops will buy it easy.”

  “Cops are dumb.”

  “Yeah, except I didn’t call the dumb ones.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Hal said sarcastically.

  “Before the dumb cops get here, can somebody tell me the story?” I asked.

  “There’s no story,” Ranger insisted. “We walked in, we sat down, we were gonna order from room service. Dee, or maybe it was Mimi, peeked in the bedroom and said, ‘Hey, they haven’t cleaned up the room yet,’ or something like that, because the bed wasn’t made. Then we, uh, we saw it, saw what happened.”

  “Who went in first?” I asked.

  Nobody answered.

  “Dee, why don’t you lie down on the couch?” Hal quickly filled the silence. “The doctor will be here in a minute or two. It’ll look better if you lie down.”

  “What?” Dee said, plainly bewildered. “Oh, God, Bren, I’m so sorry.” She hunched over and her shoulders started to shake.

  The cops beat the doctor by seven minutes.

  Sixteen

  The first team—a uniform I didn’t know and an older plainclothes I remembered—showed up with the hotel manager in tow. She had to be the manager; no lowly desk clerk could afford her snakeskin heels, much less her suit. Totally unruffled, she breezed down the hall as if a
dead bass player or two were all in a day’s work. With her help, the cops quietly commandeered the bedroom and living room of Dee’s suite as well as the adjoining function room where the MGA/America stiffs had partied two nights ago.

  That’s where they sent the witnesses to wait.

  The room had been transformed. It was sedate, ready for a high-society wedding. The Mylar balloons had disappeared along with the rock band setup. Twelve linen-covered round tables ringed the dance floor. Mimi sat alone at a table for eight until Freddie, blinking and looking hastily roused from sleep, joined her. Jimmy Ranger and Hal Grady huddled at another table, their balding heads close together. I could hear them mumbling in low tones. The lead guitar, Ron, came in, still buttoning his shirt, and I marveled at how close he was in build to my ex-husband, Cal. Dee and I just liked the same sort of men. I thought about introducing myself to Ron, but he quickly surveyed the room and joined Freddie and Mimi. Nobody invited me to rub elbows, and I found myself too restless to sit. I wanted to reexamine the scene of Brenda’s death, ask Dee a few questions. Alone.

  Like why I should stop looking for Davey Dunrobie.

  Like who had arranged the invitations for the MGA bash and included Mickey on the list.

  Like exactly what Lockwood had said on the phone besides three hundred thousand bucks.

  Like whether she’d be willing to swear on something she held holy, like the Reverend’s guitar, that she’d really written “For Tonight.”

  I paced a narrow track by the windows, staring down at the lights that sparkled the trees on Boston Common. If the windows could have been opened, I would have opened one just to hear a car honk, a siren wail, anything to break the heavy silence of the room.

  Instead I walked faster, clacking my heels against the parquet floor.

  I wondered where Dee was, whether the road manager’s quack would keep her from mumbling that she should have called the doctor because maybe stone-cold Brenda was still alive.

  The young cop summoned Mimi first, then Freddie, then Ron, then Ranger, then Hal Grady. I wondered if I’d have drawn a lower number wearing the hotel manager’s charcoal suit and cream silk blouse.