Lowell shook his head.
“Then I think it’s time for a search warrant.”
He picked up the phone and called the DA’s office, explained the situation and requested the warrant be issued. Due to the high profile of the case, this was carried out expeditiously. He handed the warrant to Murphy and sent him, along with two uniforms, to pick up Marty.
“I think you’re wrong, Lieutenant. This guy hasn’t got the resources to do this.”
“Yeah and what about the other eight guys he sent that email to?”
“Mort is checking them out. They are all musicians in their fifties or sixties.”
“You think between them nine guys could pull this off?”
Lowell had to admit the possibility. “I suppose so.”
Chapter Sixteen
Marty walked into the kitchen and sat at the table. The apartment’s only two windows faced northeast, giving him a partial view of the East River. This was such a peaceful neighborhood. Sometimes in the morning he would take his coffee and sit on the stoop at 1700 York with a few of his neighbors just to chat. Asphalt Green, once an actual asphalt plant now transformed into a recreation center, was one block north and he’d often go there and watch the kids and their parents come to this quiet oasis in an otherwise loud and hectic city.
He took a container of yogurt from the fridge and grabbed a spoon from the mismatched set of silverware in a drawer that stuck every time he pushed it closed. He picked up his acoustic guitar and sat on the couch. He began to finger-pick “Freight Train,” one of the first songs he ever learned on the guitar using the Travis picking style he’d studied many years before. He meandered around the instrument for a few minutes until an idea came to him, and he began to develop a melody. It sounds familiar, he thought, not too familiar I think. A great song is one that you think you’ve heard before. Once it exists it’s as if it always did, and you wonder why nobody ever thought of it before. Sometimes someone had. That’s what copyright lawyers were for.
His computer beeped. He put the guitar down and walked over to the desk and read the message. It was from Steve Whoo, a drummer he knew. It was in response to the email he had sent.
This one said: “You’re either really lucky or a lot meaner than you look.”
He laughed. Then he wrote back: “The first two were on your list as well, if I remember correctly. Maybe this one was just to throw us off the track.”
He chuckled again, and then pushed send. He printed out Steve’s email and his own response and gathered up the papers. He went back to the couch and opened the coffee table drawer. He took out the death album and went to the last page, which had two pockets attached, one on either side. He was about to put the emails into the right side pocket when realized there were only two where there should have been three, the two from today and the one he had sent out yesterday. Where was that one? He searched the entire house, not a daunting project, but still could not find it.
He knew he had printed it and was sure he had left it in the printer tray to put away later. This wasn’t something he would forget.
He opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and took out a tiny wooden chest. He sat on the couch and opened it, while he pondered the mystery of the missing email. He took out his medicine container and pipe, and poured a bit of the substance into the bowl. He was just about to light it when his buzzer rang. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and people rarely popped in. Maybe it was Beth, his girlfriend. But she was on the Cape with her sister and wasn’t due back for days. Besides, she had her own key. Well, maybe she came back early and forgot the key.
He hit the intercom button and spoke. “Yes, who is it?”
“Marty Winebeck?”
“Yes, who are you?”
“My name is Sergeant Murphy. NYPD. May we come up?”
What the fuck? “Sure…sorry about the stairs.”
He buzzed them up and rushed back to the table, now very glad he hadn’t had time to light the pipe. He put it back into the wooden box and placed it all in the coffee table drawer.
A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. Marty opened it and let Sergeant Murphy and two other cops into his apartment.
“What’s this all about?” asked Marty.
The Sergeant took a piece of paper from his pocket and said: “Marty Winebeck?”
“You know who I am.”
“Marty Winebeck?” repeated the policeman, adhering to protocol.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m him.”
“We have a warrant to search your apartment and we wish the pleasure of your company at the 19th precinct.”
“A search warrant! What the hell do you expect to find here?”
“We’ll let you know when we find it.” Murphy waved the two cops past him. Marty watched open-mouthed as they started to open drawers and go through his desk.
“I really object …”
“Nothing to hide, no problem. Mr. Winebeck, are you willing to accompany me to the precinct voluntarily?” asked Murphy.
“Ha, voluntarily, or what? You’ll voluntarily toss me down the stairs and into your car?”
“Sir,” indignation in the officer’s voice, “I am a member of New York finest. If you’d rather not join me now, it’ll be necessary for the Lieutenant to issue a warrant for your arrest. Then I’ll have to come back here and read you your rights, handcuff you, take you downstairs past your neighbors, drive you to the precinct, process you through the system, which will be on your record…”
“All right, I get it. Sure I’ll accompany you.”
One of the two uniformed cops came up to Murphy and whispered something to him.
“Yes,” said Murphy, aloud, “take the computer and the scrapbook. What else did you find?”
“Well,” the cop held up Marty’s stash box, “we found this.” He opened it and took out the pipe and a small sandwich baggie of pot.
“Take that too. We’ll see what the Lieutenant wants to do about it later.”
They took Marty down to the street where a patrol car and a plain sedan sat waiting. Murphy gestured for Marty to sit in front.
“You’re not under arrest,” said Murphy getting into the sedan’s diver’s seat, “despite the marijuana, so you might as well sit up here with me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Marty was placed in a room with a table and three chairs. There was a mirror covering one wall. On the other side of the mirror sat Lowell, Roland, and an assistant DA.
“You go in there first,” said Lowell, “and I’ll come later.”
Roland entered the interrogation room and sat at the desk opposite Marty.
“How you doing?”
“Well, I was sitting quietly in my home about to make myself something to eat, and now I’m sitting in a police station scared to death. How do you think I’m doing?”
“I understand how you feel.”
“Good, then I can go home now?”
“Not just yet. First of all, you were found in the possession of a controlled substance.”
Marty was more furious than scared. “You clowns wave some trumped up search warrant in my face, rummage through my belongings and come up with about forty dollars worth of pot, and you’re threatening me? What ever happened to due process, civil rights, privacy?”
“This is post nine-eleven America, buddy, so don’t go screaming your liberal crap at me.” He took a deep breath. “We’ll discuss the drug charges later. But first, do you mind explaining this to me?” He held up the email and the pictures Lowell had taken of the scrapbook.
The musician took the email from Roland’s hand and chuckled. “So that’s where it went. Thank god, I thought I was losing my mind. I assume this has something to do with Freddie’s murder? Do you want to know what this is all about?”
“Very much.” Roland looked over at the mirror. “And while you’re at it, you can tell me about your relationship with Freddie Finger. I understand you two didn’t get along.”
�
�That’s quite an understatement. You’ve brought it up, so obviously you know about my history with that twerp.”
“You’re not exactly helping yourself here.”
“What am I going to do, lie about it? You know that asshole broke my leg and collar bone, and made it impossible for me to get a decent gig. What should I tell you, that I forgot all about it? Am I sorry Freddie’s dead? Hell no, it should have happened decades ago.”
“What about the other two musicians who were killed?”
“Wally was another jerk. The world is no worse off without him. But Gene was a nice guy, a gentleman. And he was a good songwriter, nice ballads, not head-banger crap like the other two.”
“So you’re sorry that Gene is dead, but not Freddie?” probed the policeman.
“Look, I’m sorry for everybody that’s dead, all right?”
“You were going to tell me about this scrapbook and email.” Just then the door opened and Lowell entered. “This is David Lowell, a private consultant. He’ll be sitting in on the rest of this interview.”
“Good,” said the musician. “It’s easier than shouting through the phony mirror.”
Lowell chuckled and sat on the third chair.
“So what about this email?”
Marty began. “All right, I’ll tell you. It’s really quite an interesting story. It was the late nineties. I was making a decent living, for a musician anyway, playing out in the Hamptons in the summers and here in City the rest of the year. There was a group of ten of us, all long-time players, many I had worked with in bands. None of us was exactly setting the world on fire, but we were all good musicians and could at least make a living. And at any time one or more of us could hit it big with a record.
“I played piano bar on the Upper East Side in places frequented by the Wall Street crowd. I was around for years, and eventually made friends with a few of them. The big story that year was about how low the price of gold had dropped. It got to about two-eighty, or something, I don’t know that much about it. Anyway, we all got together one night at J.P.’s on First Avenue with our girlfriends to listen to one of the bands some of our group had put together. Someone had a little blow, and someone else had a little smoke, and after the band finished we all went back to my apartment.
“We started playing a variation on Dead Rock Stars. Each of us took a piece of paper and wrote down the names of the four rockers we thought would die first. What was really funny, turned out none of us had chosen the same four. There were some overlaps, but not as many as you would think, although I think Freddie might have been on a lot of lists. Then again, picking a rock star to die young isn’t that difficult. But it was a question of who would go first. As dawn hit and some of the girlfriends wanted to go home we felt there had to be closure to the game, so we all agreed to go downtown that week and buy ten-thousand dollars worth of gold coins each and put them in a safe deposit box. I had just been paid $25,000 for an album I worked on, and believed my career was finally taking off, so I reluctantly agreed to the bet. The key was left with a law firm and none of us could get it without the signatures of all of the survivors of the bet. How many times since I’ve wished I’d kept that money. Anyway, with fees and whatnot, we paid about three-hundred an ounce with the total for the ten of us coming to a hundred grand. We each got ownership of thirty-three and a third ounces.”
Roland whistled. “What’s that worth today?”
Lowell did some quick math. “With gold trading around seventeen hundred an ounce it would be a grand total of five-hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars. Give or take.”
“And the three murdered musicians just happen to be on your list,” said Roland. “It sure seems like a motive to me.”
The musician shook his head. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“The problem is,” said Roland, “that I simply don’t believe in coincidence”.
Lowell pondered Marty’s story. If it was a ruse it was easy to check out.
“Who was the fourth?”
“Jesus, do you think I put the whammy on them by putting them on my list? How fucking weird is that?” The musician took a few deep breaths. “The fourth isn’t like the others. He didn’t drink or smoke cigarettes, didn’t chase women or do cocaine for a week at a time. I chose him for a different reason.”
“So,” said Roland, “who was he?”
“Bobby Ludlum.”
Both Roland and Lowell were taken aback.
“Why Bobby Ludlum?” asked Lowell. “He’s the cleanest, most all American singer in the country, seems the least likely to die young.”
“Ludlum has a compulsion for fast cars. He races professionally and has had several crack ups that could have killed him. Frankly, he should have been the first to go.”
“Well,” said Roland, “this is how I see it. Someone else killed Gene and Wally and you figured this was your best chance of getting back at Freddie and getting closer to that money. So you killed Freddie and hoped we would think they were all done by the same person.”
“Where were you the night of June twenty-ninth?” asked Lowell.
Marty reached into his pocket and took out a small date book. “Here it is. I was playing the piano at El Greco’s, a Spanish restaurant on 3rd Avenue, from eight until eleven thirty. Call them up, they’ll verify it.”
“Freddie was probably killed a little bit after midnight, right in that neighborhood.” Roland was tapping a pencil on the table. “You may have had time to do it, or had help from someone.”
“Do I need a lawyer? Are going to keep me any longer, or can I go home now?”
Roland waved his hands. “Go on and get out of here. But don’t go too far.”
“Like I have anyplace to go.” He looked down at the pot. “Can I have my stuff back?”
“What do you think?”
Marty got up and walked out the door.
“I’ll be back,” said Lowell.
“Where are you going?” asked Roland, “I want to compare notes on this.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I’ll be back later.” And he rushed out.
He caught up to Marty at the elevators. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“Yeah, that’s all right. I just wish they’d give me a ride home. I mean, they were nice enough to drag me out of my house, the least they could do is drag me back again.”
“Come on. I’ll give you a ride. There’s a few things I’d like to ask you.”
“You got a car?”
Chapter Eighteen
Fat Jimmy DeAngelo sat on his oversized ass on his oversized lounge chair on the oversized terrace of his Battery Park City apartment. His feet were hurting, as they often did, and he was getting a headache. The skinnier man was talking and talking, and Fat Jimmy was tired of hearing his voice.
He took a sip of peppermint tea. His acid reflux was so bad that he couldn’t keep anything else down. He hated skinny people. Truth be told, he hated everybody, but especially skinny people. They could eat and drink whatever they wanted to and their feet didn’t hurt all the time. If he had his way he wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody, but he needed certain people and tolerated their presence. This little putz was one of them.
He stood up and looked over his terrace wall at the Hudson River. He liked living in Battery Park City. It was like being in a suburb but without a packed commuter train and a stupid yard to maintain. Few people came from uptown to visit, and that suited him just fine.
“You let them go.”
“But Uncle Jimmy, they had a limo that smashed into me,” said Skinny Jimmy. “What was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to scare them off,” he sneered, “that’s what you were supposed to do. Not get the crap beat out of two guys and crack up a car.”
“Well, if you had been there you would have understood.”
The fat man took a sip of tea, and then belched loudly. “Damn.” He held his stomach as he looked over at his nephew eating a meatball sub. “I sent you t
o take care of something, and now we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands.”
“Why? They can’t track us. The car was stolen and there was nobody to identify.”
“And you think this puts us in the clear?”
The skinny one took a big bite of the overstuffed sandwich. Skinny Jimmy weighed in at about two twenty. He was only skinny in comparison to his uncle.
Fat Jimmy watched as a dollop of the sauce dribbled down the other man’s chin and landed on his pants. “Here,” he handed his nephew a napkin, “wipe your pants.”
“Huh?”
“Huh?” mimicked Fat Jimmy. If I didn’t love my sister so much, he thought, I never would have hired you, you imbecile.
Life wasn’t fair, he’d known so since he was twelve and started blowing up like a blimp. Before that he was a normal child with the typical New Jersey life. Then he started putting on weight and nothing he did seemed to make any difference at all. If he dieted he gained ten pounds. If he starved himself, something that he did periodically, he ended up in the hospital. He came to feel that doctors were all morons and diet books, clinics, and regimens all fraudulent.
Adolescence was a particularly painful time for him. He always fell in love with the pretty, skinny girls, and when they didn’t reciprocate it hurt, causing him to build more walls, only strengthening his need for self-reliance.
Other kids spent their time obsessed with each other, listening to songs about love, sneaking off to deserted spots to explore sex, fending their way through the jungle of the teenage years. But all he saw was the view from the eyes of a fat adolescent with no particularly interesting skills or talents, and an abrasive personality, which grew more so with his increased bulk. He was teased and pitied. He hated the pity most of all. Now, at three hundred and eighty pounds, he had given up on personal relationships and had become obsessed with the accumulation of wealth.
Death in the 12th House Page 10