Bright Midnight

by Chris Formant

  Gantry was riveted. He soaked it all up like a sponge.

  The car began to slow and turn into the now familiar security gate. In a matter of minutes, they would know whether Hank had been able to identify the messenger—or maybe even the killer.

  Alex Jaeger’s Apartment, New York City

  Alex was getting antsy. Perhaps it was the pounding headache from last night’s pre-wedding dinner party.

  “It’s only been three days since Gantry called the FBI. You are obsessed with this.” Daniel told him. The two men were having coffee, and Daniel was making his traditional omelet. Both had horrific hangovers. Alex requested hash browns, the greasier the better.

  “I told him to touch base every day,” Alex said, pacing.

  “Alex, I know you want to get this story, but personally, I think you’re letting the money side of this cloud your judgment,” Daniel implored.

  “Christ, you’re already incredibly wealthy. How much more do you want?”

  Alex sat on the purple chair. The sunlight was filtering down through a cloudy sky. He poured four Motrin out of the bottle, grabbed his coffee, and downed them all in one swallow.

  “Christ, my head aches. Are we arguing already?”

  Silence.

  “I know. It’s not really about the money, though. You know as well as I do that’s just a way to keep score. But it got me thinking about starting another magazine, one for boomers only,” Alex said.

  “You mean like AARP?”

  “Shit, no! Something that nobody else has thought of. Something that really tweaks their interest, their common interest. I just keep seeing that number: eighty million people. Stone is one-point-three, give or take. If you multiply eighty mil by just one-quarter of one percent in subscriptions, that’s two hundred thousand! That’s what drives the ad revenues.”

  “Alex, you’re way over your skis on this. Just slow all this down before it gets out and damages your reputation. That demographic has moved on. I know it and you know it. Just keep rotating your focus to Millennials not to a declining segment. If you love me, you’ll stop this nonsense and just focus on our new life together.”

  Alex nodded as he let Daniel’s personal and rational concern for him sink in.

  When the phone rang, Alex said, “Maybe that’s him.” Daniel grabbed it before Alex could react.

  “Hello, Daniel Culain,” He answered abruptly.

  “Daniel, it’s Gantry Elliot, can I speak to Alex?”

  “Gantry, he can’t talk to you right now…Listen, we have spent just about enough time on your hallucinations. We have a business to run, not take sentimental trips to a bygone age.” Daniel condescendingly explained.

  Alex grabbed the phone before Daniel could hang up and without explanation. “Gantry, it’s about time. Whatcha got?”

  “Jesus, what’s that all about?”

  Alex didn’t answer.

  “Are you sitting down?” Gantry slyly asked.

  Alex answered yes as he paced in a circle.

  “Raphael and I just left the FBI computer lab.”

  “And?”

  “They were able to identify the messenger with facial recognition software.”

  “Is he the killer?”

  “Don’t know yet. Raphael doesn’t seem to think it’s likely. I’m going to stay here for a couple more days. There’s a ton of work to do now.”

  “Fine. You do that. Keep working. Who is the guy?”

  “That’s a little less clear at this point. We expect to find out more this morning.”

  “That’s great. I can’t wait. I just keep thinking of all those boomers—” he caught himself.

  “What boomers? What are you talking about?” But Gantry instinctively knew even before he’d finished his question. I know him. It’s all about the money.

  Silence.

  Daniel was staring daggers at him, obviously sensing that Gantry was drawing Alex in more and more.

  “Alex, are you there?”

  “Yeah, buddy. I’m here.”

  “What are you cooking up?”

  “Nothing. You’re doing a great job.”

  “Alex, I know you. You’re planning something.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to be a little creative with all this.”

  “What do you mean, ‘creative’?”

  “I’m not going to go into it over the phone, Gantry,” Alex snapped. “Just do your fucking job. I gave you the time you needed, the money, the opportunity. Now do something with it. Find this guy. Let’s get this story.”

  “Oh, I’m going to get the story. You can take that to the bank — just like you always do,” Gantry said. “But this is bigger than your turning a story into revenue.”

  Gantry was standing outside the BAU building, pacing with his cell phone, fighting his irritation and trying to be calm. He’d been excited with the discovery of the mystery messenger, and now he was really agitated. He took a deep breath.

  “Alex, think about it this way. You gave me a job forty-six years ago. I was a nobody with a passion for rock and roll. You were just starting, and you were creating this incredible new magazine, a unique approach to journalism and music—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Alex, don’t interrupt. Give me a chance.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not belittling what you did back then, but you did it with the help of a lot of other people. From that beginning, and when I joined you with the same dream, you built an empire, an enormous empire. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You literally built it on the backs of these artists, these musicians, these singers and songwriters. If it hadn’t been for their incredible talent, neither of us would have had the chance to live this dream. Those were the days you’ve forgotten—when you had a little bit of money and a whole lot of chutzpah. Same goes for me.”

  Gantry felt calm now, almost serene.

  “I don’t want to get all misty-eyed about it, but I know you’re going to try to turn this into some gaudy sideshow, a TV movie or something. Just try to remember how we were in 1969, how people were creating new music forms, experimenting—and fearless. We were all in it together, you, me, them.”

  He paused to catch his breath.

  “The reason we’ve had this great life, and this opportunity, is because they existed. We didn’t create the music, they did. All we did was write about it after the fact.”

  After a long pause, Alex said slowly, “Well, you have a point, a good one, I guess. I never thought of it that way. But it’s not like they didn’t make a boatload of money, too.”

  “That’s true. But I’m still going to dig as deep as I can,” Gantry said. “To me, it’s like their ghosts are reaching out from the graves to us, pleading for justice. I think these people were murdered. I know you want to know why as much as I do.”

  Gantry could hear Alex slurping his coffee.

  “I’m just yankin’ your chain, Gantry. I’m a little hung-over. You missed a hell of a party, but listen. Believe it or not, I do get it. We do owe them, but that’s no reason why we can’t also make the magazine bigger and better.”

  Gantry said, “Remember another thing about those days: we were groundbreakers. This is groundbreaking. This is one of the biggest fucking stories in the world right now, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Alex took a deep breath and glanced peevishly at Daniel, “You’re right…keep me posted.”

  Alex walked out of the room without talking to Daniel.

  FBI HQ, Quantico, VA

  “Commonalities,” Melendez said, almost to himself.

  Gantry was seated across from Melendez, who was behind his desk reviewing the security file Hank had given him. Attached to the manila file with two paper clips were a black-and-white photo of the messenger dropping a package on the mail counter, and a shot Hank had pulled off the Web. It was a forty-year-old picture of a man identified as Angus Hislop, a tax accountant at Coopers & Lybrand’s London
office. That was the only reference to date, nothing on him since. Hank had even managed to pull up an ancient bio on the man.

  “A very unlikely suspect,” Melendez said. Standing behind him, Hank frowned but said nothing.

  He slid the file across to Gantry.

  “I don’t get it, Hank. We have an old picture of a tax accountant, and nothing else since?”

  “Can’t find a thing. But we are just starting,”

  “We’ll find more,” Melendez assured Gantry—and himself.

  “How could someone like that be so stupid as to think he wouldn’t be recognized—especially with that hat?” Gantry asked.

  “He isn’t stupid. Remember, most of these guys want to be caught, that’s part of the profile. But I’m far from convinced that he is a killer. Maybe he just wants to guide us with these breadcrumbs.”

  He stood up.

  “Let’s go into the conference room and use the whiteboard.”

  Gantry followed Melendez to a large conference room with an enormous whiteboard at the head of it. Melendez told Gantry to take a seat in any of the twenty or so chairs, as he picked a black marker out of the tray.

  “This is going to be what I call ‘Commonalities 101.’ I teach it early in the first part of my classes. If we assume—for now—that this fellow is a killer, and we further assume he is responsible for at least the seven deaths you’ve brought me, we first need to start with what all the deceased have in common.”

  As he spoke, he drew a matrix on the whiteboard with the names of the rock stars along the vertical and topics along the horizontal.

  “This is where you come in, Gantry. You’ve interviewed them, broken bread with them, and I’m sure shared more than a little whiskey and wine? Here.” He handed Gantry the marker. “Start writing.”

  “Gladly. Let’s see. How about the most obvious first?” He said, writing friends, enemies, recordings, concerts, acquaintances, neighbors in a long vertical column.

  He stopped to think.

  “You’ve got a long way to go, my friend. Keep thinking. How about bankers, roadies, lovers, ex-lovers ...”

  “Oh, great one. Shoulda thought of that one first.”

  “…managers, PR and marketing agents, club owners, studio engineers, drug dealers.”

  By the time Gantry had run out of ideas, there wasn’t much white space in the matrix.

  “Good start.” Melendez said. “Now, we need to build a cross tabulation.”

  “What’s —” Gantry interjected.

  Melendez continued, “It’s a way to cross-reference all of this information. Keep going. You have all afternoon. When you’re done, I’ll have one of the analysts take a picture of the board and then load the information into VICAP. From there we’ll cross-reference all the info, and everything else we can find from our data sources, and try to boil the commonalities down to actual connections that we can use. We also have access to all the Library of Congress digital files for recordings, books, articles, posters and such, if we need it. Tomorrow we’ll reach out to Scotland Yard. Lots of work to do.”

  “Will we need to go to London?”

  “First things first.”

  As excited as Gantry was, his sleep that night was understandably fitful. He’d had his confrontation with Alex, and he was glad that was over. He really didn’t like the idea that Daniel was trying to insert himself into this, but that was Alex’s problem. For now, his mind was whirling with ideas, cross references, commonalities, links…He couldn’t sleep at all.

  Sitting up in the queen-size bed with its grotesque quilted cover, he wanted three things: a joint, a glass of Chianti, and some music. He couldn’t remember seeing a liquor store or even a grocery store on the way back to the hotel. Melendez had dropped him off at ten o’clock. It had been one hell of a long day and the next one would start at seven sharp.

  Then in the dimness he spotted something he’d overlooked in his hurry to get into bed: a small college student refrigerator, nearly hidden behind a large chair. He swung his legs out of bed, walked over and opened it to find it nicely stocked with airplane bottles of vodka and cheap chardonnay—and a Snickers bar.

  Pouring both of the bottles of wine into a water glass, he returned to bed, propped himself up on a pillow and took a taste. Not terrible.

  As long as his mind wasn’t going to let him stop thinking, he wouldn’t fight it. For some reason, Janis popped into his mind again, and he started thinking about the time they’d spent together, especially when she came to Austin. Janis had been just twenty-three that year. No one would ever have guessed how incredibly famous she would become, and how quickly.

  She wasn’t even pretty, not really. Wiry dark hair, a just-a-little-too-big nose, and smallish breasts. A country girl. But those eyes—deep, dark, chocolate brown, and she just exuded sex from every pore. Thing is, she was a perfect example of what he’d reminded Alex about—she was brilliant in herself. Nothing else mattered.

  He took another swallow of the cheap wine and remembered something that Janis had said to him one night. “Whatever the limitations of a hippie rock star, it’s better than being a provincial matron or a lonely weirdo.”

  Janis had metamorphosed from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury, but she’d always been beautiful to him.

  A beauty born of energy, a deep soul, and her invented conceit. Later, when she became famous and Gantry had only been with Rolling Stone for about two years, he realized that she’d single-handedly changed society’s ideas about strength and independence for women all over the world. The fast-evolving culture of liberation and rebellion forever changed the equation between men and women. She definitely had a part in it. Her part. Her way.

  By the time he’d finished the wine, Gantry finally felt tired. He could feel himself slipping, and he was glad. A quick glance at the clock told him he’d be getting about four hours of sleep.Unfortunately, even with the wine, he tossed and turned. Thoughts of the FBI, mingled with memories of the dead played out in vivid detail all night…

  In his dream, Gantry was reliving the meeting between himself and Al Wilson when Canned Heat was in town for a performance at the Fillmore West in July of 1969. The Everly Brothers split the bill. He remembered Wilson walking through the dingy coffee shop near Union Square the morning of the concert, and seeing distress in Wilson’s face. Wilson told him that there had been tension within the group and that Mike Bloomfield was filling in on guitar.

  Gantry could almost taste the lukewarm, bitter coffee in his reverie. How unlikely Wilson had seemed as leader and front man for a top band with his Coke-bottle glasses and baby-blue-striped mock turtleneck that looked borrowed from the Beach Boys. Wilson definitely wasn’t the Haight-Ashbury type. But what a student of the blues. He knew the styles of all the old Delta and Chicago blues masters and could imitate them perfectly.

  Half-dreaming, Gantry reached for the water glass beside the bed. He saw Wilson as clearly as if he was standing next to him, when he asked, “What was your proudest moment?”

  Expecting to hear, “The Grammys” or something about the group’s success, he was surprised when Wilson sat erect and proclaimed, “When John Lee Hooker said I was the best harmonica player ever. Not bad for a nerdy white boy from Boston.”

  The words “Muir Woods” popped into his head, and he remembered that, as he was saying goodbye, Wilson asked him how far out of town Muir Woods was. He thought the giant redwoods were the most magnificent trees in the world, and said he couldn’t come this far and not see them firsthand. Gantry never realized how touched Wilson was by their majesty until he heard that his family had posthumously dedicated a redwood grove in his memory...

  Snap!

  It was time to go to work.

  The morning greetings were quick and perfunctory. Melendez had apparently put his happy face away, and Gantry could see he was all business—a good sign as far as he was concerned. He was part of the team now, and he felt the surge of energy he gu
essed these agents felt each time they started a challenging new case. The hunt was on. Gantry could sense it in Melendez’s intensity and in the sharp orders he gave those around him.

  “Are you ready?” Melendez asked, picking up an armful of files from his desk. “Follow me. It’s a bit of a hike.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’re going to the boardroom. It’s quiet, and it’s a great place to display commonalities for quick visual comparisons.”

  Melendez had another agenda, though. He needed Gantry, but he also had to hide him to a certain extent, and keep him low profile out of view of his boss, Mayflower. All he needed was word to get out to his boss that he had a reporter in the FBI’s Emerging Tech Lab. That would not go over well.

  Gantry had to kick it up a gear to keep up as the two men hustled down the long gray hallway, barely lit with small recessed lights casting down halos of yellow every thirty feet.

  As they came to an intersection of four hallways, Melendez steered right and then turned right again. The boardroom was twenty by thirty feet and contained a long Steelcase-type conference table with ten high-back chairs, a cabinet at one end, no windows, no pictures, walls covered with whiteboards running the length of the room on both sides, and one occupant. Someone had transferred all of Gantry’s work from the day before onto one of the boards in neat handwriting.

  “This used to be our war room, before we built the Emerging Tech Lab facilities. If these walls could talk! I still like to use it from time to time,” Melendez said, thinking to himself that it was also as far away from the lab as he could get them. Gesturing to the agent sitting at the conference table, he said, “Gantry, this is Agent Tanner. Tanner, Gantry Elliot.”