by W E DeVore
“You don’t have to do that, Cincinnati,” she protested, not wanting to owe him any more than she already did.
“Maybe I want to, angel. Look, tonight was a blast and if I’m going to recut those guitar parts, I’m going to need some practice. If I’m going to play for Stanley Gerard, I’m going to need some lessons from you. Do we have a deal?”
“Ok, Derek. You’ve got yourself an Archangel for your concert video.”
He scowled in disappointment. “No, no, no. Do it again. That was too easy. Where’s the banter? Where are the insults? The repartee? I live for our witty back and forth. It’s like foreplay, only slightly more verbally abusive.” He licked his lips and leaned in. “Make me beg for it, angel, otherwise it’s not any fun at all.”
She rolled her eyes and only had to halfway try to sound as put out as possible. “You are a motherfucking freak of nature, do you know that? Fine, Cincinnati. I’ll do it, as long as nothing better comes up. But you’d better be on your best fucking behavior. I mean it. That hand wanders down to my ass like it did during ‘Fiend’ tonight and I’ll cut your fucking nuts off. Have your manager call me tomorrow with that check. I don’t work for free.” She folded her arms over her chest and bit back her own laughter. “Better?”
“So much.” He kissed her squarely on the mouth.
She jumped back in surprise and he climbed into his car. “See you in my dreams, angel.”
“See you in hell, Cincinnati,” she said, flipping him off before turning to walk back into the bar.
As she reached the door, he pulled up alongside her and rolled down the passenger window. He leaned over and she crouched down by the window, saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Goddamn, you like me. You need some new material, Derek.”
Chapter 8
The Garbage Underneath
A few days later, Q sat at the kitchen table waiting for her coffee to brew, her phone dinged and she picked it up to see a new Facebook message appear from someone named Adrian Anderson. The name sounded vaguely familiar and she tried to place it before opening the message, thinking it might be a gig offer.
You slut. How many men are you fucking right now? Does your husband know? Your REAL husband, not that fag that owns Lafitte’s Cove. You are a whore. Derek deserves better.
Q’s stomach turned, and her face grew hot. Her hands shook, and she wasn’t sure what to do. She blinked back cold panic and clicked on the user profile to see a very normal looking woman smiling back at her with blond hair and brown eyes. She inwardly cursed as she recognized the woman who had been flirting with Ben at the Cove the previous Saturday, kicking herself for not being nicer, having been warned repeatedly how obsessive Derek Sharp’s fans could be.
Adrian Anderson’s public profile offered little information except that she had shared every video of Derek and Q in the studio together to her friends and worked at a hospital on the West Bank. Q looked out the window at the sunny morning, debating whether to tell Ben. She decided against it, refusing to let one Internet troll get the best of her, choosing to report the user to Facebook instead, and block her immediately.
When Ben came into the kitchen, she quickly smiled and stood up to get a cup of coffee for each of them.
“Everything ok?” he asked, reading her body language.
“It’s nothing, just a Sharpie being a bitch. I need to tighten up the security on my social media pages. It’ll be ok,” she reassured him. “I already took care of it. His fans are nuts.”
He held her against him. “How nuts?”
“The most nuts.”
“Things are going to change once that album is released.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Hopefully, they’ll turn their attention to whatever poor woman he books to play the Archangel for the tour and leave me be.”
She made a mental note to have Charlie and Tom take over the Beasts’ social media responsibilities for a while, until the fervor around the latest videos of her and Derek performing together died down and she had a chance to talk with Sanger about other precautionary measures.
Ben smiled and said, “I doubt it. You should see something.”
He opened his phone and pulled up the Facebook page for the Cove. He pointed to the video of Q and Derek playing ‘Fiend’ and its 21,903 views.
“That’s good, right?” he asked. “The one of y’all playing ‘Motherless Child’ has almost twelve thousand.”
She nodded and moved to pour herself some coffee. “That’s great. Let’s hope it packs the Cove. Maybe you should do a pre-sale for the next show. Get some bodies in that way, too.”
They’d already started advertising another QT and the Beasts jam featuring Derek Sharp. The Internet was eating it up.
“Do you think Derek will really show up again?” he asked.
She took a large sip of coffee. “I do. I think he’s lonely, Ben. He must be, to want to hang out with a bunch of people who give him as hard a time as the Beasts and me.”
He laughed. “Maybe we should take him to Sunday dinner next week. Pick up another stray.”
“No,” she said. “I’m drawing the line at Sanger. This is not the Bordelon home for abandoned humans. One stray is more than enough.”
Her phone buzzed again, and she looked at the Twitter message on the screen. She cursed and handed it to Ben to read.
You think you can hide from me, cunt. I’m coming for you.
“Motherfuck,” Ben muttered. “Who the hell is Adrian Anderson?”
“Someone who loves Derek more than he probably wants. I should have been nicer the other night.”
He looked at her in confusion.
“She’s that blonde that had you pinned down.” Ben cursed and Q rested her head in her hand. “I’m already over this.”
Her phone started to ring, and she handed it to Ben. “I can’t. Whoever it is, just handle it.”
He squeezed her hand and answered, “Clementine Toledano’s phone. If you call my wife a cunt, I’m gonna fuck you up.”
She laughed as he held out her phone to her. “It’s Aaron.”
Q took it from him and said, “What’s up, cowboy? You engaged to Yvie yet?”
“What was up with Ben?” he asked.
“It’s nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing, Clementine,” Sanger said, serious.
“I’ve got my very own little Internet troll and she seems to be very upset about me not accepting her friend request.”
“You want me to handle it?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “It’ll just give her what she wants. She’ll go away on her own. What’s up?”
“Savion’s awake,” he said. “He has aphasia and is a little confused, but he’s awake. I need you to come to the hospital with me. He wouldn’t answer questions for me and Rex yesterday. Seemed really agitated. He had another seizure in the middle of the night. The doctors told us to come back this morning.”
“Why not ask Tori or Stanley?”
“They were with us yesterday,” he said. “We didn’t get anywhere. Savion just kept looking at Stanley and saying he was sorry.”
◆◆◆
The left half of Savion Gerard’s face looked like it was melting. Q forced herself to smile all the way through her eyes and not avoid his face as she sat on the edge of his bed.
“I’ve been missing those gorgeous brown eyes, mathlete,” she said.
The right half of his face smiled at her.
“Monster,” he slurred.
“Fuck you, mathlete,” she said, pulling back in mock annoyance. “I am not a monster. And I’m not going to visit you no more if you’re just going to lay there and insult me.”
He kept grinning and moved his good hand to his face.
“Me. Not you,” he said, slowly forming each word with care, struggling to make his mouth move correctly.
“Maybe a monster mathematician, but that’s a good thing, right?”
He nodded, and Sanger cleared his throat.
Q gestur
ed to him. “This is my friend, Aaron. You met him yesterday.”
Savion’s eyebrows stitched together, and he squinted at Sanger.
“Not friend,” he said.
“Ok, you got me. He’s a police detective. But he really is my friend. Ben likes him so much he wants him for a brother-in-law. He’s good people.”
Savion didn’t look convinced.
“Look, mathlete. You trust me?”
He nodded his head.
“Then you can trust Aaron. I trusted him with my life and I made it out ok. I think you can trust him with a couple of secrets, too.” She squeezed his hand. “So, you gonna tell me what the fuck gave you the bright idea to snort coke?”
Savion shook his head and struggled to form the words. “Didn’t. Sorry.”
“Aaron’s got some lab work that says you did,” she said. “It’s ok, Savion. You can tell us what happened. I promise I’ll save all of my recriminations until you’re back to yourself, ok? What’s the last thing you remember?”
He shook his head again. “Fight.”
“You had a fight with someone?” Sanger asked.
Savion closed his eyes. “Fight. Baby. Needed pills.”
“What pills, Savion? Your seizure meds?” she asked.
He blinked a couple of times. “Too much force. Needed pills.”
“Force?” she asked, glancing at Sanger.
Savion stared at her helplessly. “Force? Structure?”
Sanger explained, “It’s aphasia. It’s hard to find the right word for something.”
She nodded. “Ok, forget the force, you needed pills. You didn’t have them with you?”
When they’d dated, she’d constantly teased him about his little pink pill box and had bought him an antique snuff box with which to replace it. As far as she knew, he’d carried it with him for years.
“Too late.”
“One of your triggers was making you sick and you waited too long to take a pill and rest and you fought with someone. Yes?” She spoke slowly to make sure she’d understood.
“Yes.”
“Who did you fight with?”
He looked helpless, searching for the right words. “Baby.”
“You fought with your girlfriend?” she guessed.
He shook his head, frustrated. “Baby.”
“Who did you fight with?” she asked again. “Did they give you the coke?”
“No.” He looked at Sanger and back to her. “Fight. Too much force on the house.”
Q held his hand and he stared at her, desperate for her to understand.
“Slow down, mathlete,” she soothed. “It’s ok. You still have a little aphasia. I’m not in any hurry. Take a deep breath. Try to think of a simple concept.”
“Constant of integration. Force.”
The heart rate on the monitor started to speed up and his breathing became rapid.
“Sanger, get the nurse,” she said, recognizing the first signs of a seizure coming on.
She turned back to Savion, his eyes were wild.
“Mmmm…. Water. Water. Water.”
Q grabbed the glass of water from the nightstand and held it to his lips. He knocked it out of her hand and it flew across the room as his body seized and the heart monitor flat-lined.
“Savion!” Q screamed. “Somebody help!”
A tidal wave of medical personnel rushed into the room and pushed her out of the way. She fell back into the doorway and Sanger pulled her out into the hallway while the shrill, steady alarm of the heart monitor blared from inside Savion’s hospital room.
“No!” she shouted, trying to get back into the room.
Sanger held her back and led her to a pair of chairs in the hallway at the entrance of the ICU wing. They sat, silently watching medical personnel race in and out of Savion’s room. Within a few minutes, it was obvious that he wasn’t waking up. Q rested her head against Sanger’s shoulder, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. After the doctor came out to tell them that Savion had died, she sat still, numb.
“I don’t understand, Aaron. He was awake. He was breathing on his own.”
“He had another seizure,” Sanger said, repeating what the doctor had told them earlier. “His heart stopped. There wasn’t anything they could do. It was too much stress on his body.”
“No, that’s not right. What happened? Are they going to do an autopsy?”
“Clementine, it was just an accident.” He took her hand.
“No. Do a toxicology on him. You can make that happen. Please, Aaron.”
“Why? What good will it do?”
“Because Savion didn’t take that cocaine at the party on purpose. I know him. He wouldn’t have done that. Someone poisoned him. They must have given him something yesterday to make the seizures come back. You have to find out who. Please,” she begged, grasping for an explanation. “Was someone there with him, when he had a seizure last night?”
“No, Clementine. It was the middle of the night.”
“Who was his last visitor?” she asked.
Sanger grasped her shoulders firmly and said, “Clementine, Savion Gerard was not murdered. He took some cocaine at a party and he had a massive seizure and a stroke. The stroke made the seizures unmanageable. He’s dead. It’s a horrible accident. That’s all.”
She searched his face, pleading for some sign that he believed her. “Tell me what happened yesterday when you came to see him.”
He stood up and walked towards the exit. “I’m not doing this with you, Clementine. Come on, I’ll get you home to Ben. Your friend just died. You’re not thinking clearly.”
She followed after him and said, “Tell me what happened. Damn it, Sanger. You’re the one not thinking this through, not me.”
As they reached the main lobby, he spun around and said in a low whisper, “You are not a cop, Clementine. You got lucky a couple of times. That’s all. It was an accident. Let it go.”
He caught her elbow and marched her towards the door.
When they got to the parking lot, she shoved him aside and said, “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something that you think is suspicious.”
“No, there’s not,” he said.
“Why didn’t Savion want to talk to you?” she asked. “Why did he say you weren’t a friend?”
He threw his hands up in the air. “How the fuck should I know? He probably thought I’d bust whoever gave him cocaine or bust him for doing it.”
“No, that’s not it. You’re lying to me, Aaron.” She studied his face. “You know something. What are you hiding?”
He leaned down until his face was inches from hers. “I’m not lying to you. I have no idea why he didn’t want to talk to me.”
“Liar.” She put her hands on her hips and held her ground.
“Fuck you.” Sanger turned and walked to his truck.
“Why are you so angry if I’m wrong?” she called after him.
“I don’t know, Clementine. Maybe because my best friend just called me a damned liar.” He reclined back against the truck and crossed one leg over the other, folding his arms.
She stood in front of him. “Tell me what happened yesterday, Aaron.”
“Nothing happened, Clementine. Stop it. Now,” he said, his voice commanding.
“If nothing happened, then you have nothing to hide, Sanger.” She glared at him until he finally turned his head away and flinched.
“Fine,” he said. “As soon as Savion saw me, he shut down. He looked at Tori, then me, then Stanley and said, ‘Sorry, pops.’”
“What else?”
“Nothing. He started to get agitated. Tori left the room to go get a nurse. Stanley gave him a drink of this smoothie thing he was sipping on. Said Savion liked it.” Sanger looked down. “Tori came back in and scolded Stanley for doing it, but the nurse said it was fine. It was just kale and yogurt. It wouldn’t hurt him.” Sanger looked at his feet. “He wouldn’t talk to me, Clementine. I thought he was just diso
riented, but…”
“You think he found out about you and Tori.”
“I know he did. Tori told me. They had a fight at the party about it,” he said.
“What the fuck, Sanger? She was there right before he collapsed both times. They had a fight at the party. He knew she was fucking around on Stanley with you. And you don’t think that’s suspicious?”
He looked at her intently. “No, Clementine. I do not. You are not a cop. I have instincts.”
“Instincts that involve fucking Stanley’s wife. Stop thinking with your cock, Sanger. You don’t want to consider her for murder because you’re in love with her,” she said. “Admit it.”
“I will not,” he said defensively. “Jesus. What is wrong with you?”
“I know you love her. Just admit it.”
“I don’t. I’m not,” he said, refusing to make eye contact with her. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“The hell I don’t. You told Yvie you were in love with another woman. If it’s not Tori, then who are you in love with, Sanger? Or were you lying to Yvie? Or are you lying to me because you know I’m right.”
“Stop it, will you? You’re acting like a lunatic. What the hell is up with you?”
“Nothing’s up with me, Sanger. One of my oldest friends just died and you’re more worried about fucking his stepmother than finding his killer. What kind of a man are you, anyway? You’re going to let her get away with this? She’s a fucking murderer. You’re sharing your bed with a fucking murderer.”
Sanger balled his hand into a fist and punched the side of his truck, muttering to himself, “Elohim, at meshaga'att oti. Lechi le'azazel.”
“Don’t you fucking curse at me in another language, you asshole.”
“Allow me to translate it for you. Go to hell, Clementine,” he said. “Find your own damned ride home. We’re done.”
He climbed into the truck and fired up the engine before she could reply. As she watched the truck roar out of the parking lot, she kicked the tire of the nearest vehicle and walked in the same direction. When she got to the corner, she found Sanger parked on the side of the road. He leaned over and opened the passenger side door.