Felonious Jazz

by Bryan Gilmer

Leonard had been hired a week before to drive a lift truck part time under the name of Eddie Grant, after the dumbass pop single “Electric Avenue” that had been popular when he was first trying to make serious jazz music in NYC. He had a fake Social Security card in that name that he’d bought for $100 from a guy who sold them mostly to Mexican illegals.

  “Hi Robert. What we got tonight?” Robert was king of the zeros. Sold stuff to yuppies and yupettes for their McHouses for 11 bucks an hour.

  “Load of dehumidifiers need to go into overhead storage. They’re on that trailer right there.” He pointed through the open loading bay. Overhead storage meant the tiers of the racks above customers’ reach.

  “Bunch of cases of framing nails need to go to Aisle Three for the stockers, and in Appliances, I need you to take down these items and bring them back here to Customer Pickup.” He handed Leonard a list. “Check back with me when you’ve got all that done.”

  “Will do, chief.” Leonard turned his DIY Warehouse ball cap backward so he’d be able to see up the tall racks he’d be moving merchandise onto and off of. He hopped onto the forklift and started it up.

  He dragged ass through the tasks, taking just one more small assignment from Robert before his shift ended at 2 a.m. Then he punched out on the time clock and sneaked back to Kitchens. When he was sure no one was looking, he opened a door on a display set of maple cabinets, climbed inside and shut the door behind him. The melody to Track Four played inside his head for the next hour as he waited, the smell of his spearmint chewing gum eventually filling the small space.

  He pushed the door open a crack when he figured everyone should be gone. He was just in time to see the blue-tinged lights flip off in succession. After another 15 minutes, he stood. He sat on a cool granite countertop and waited 20 more minutes. It was quiet.

  He pulled out the list of things he needed and began gathering them. He carried them to an empty shipping pallet he’d placed near the front cash registers. Finally, the stage was set. He went to Receiving and cranked up his forklift again, rolled forward –

  “Eddie!”

  Leonard jerked the lift to a stop. Robert was still here! Leaning out of the little office in Receiving holding a clipboard; must have stayed late to do some paperwork –

  “What are you still doing here, Eddie?”

  This wasn’t in the plan. Leonard’s mouth filled with sourness, the whole project now in jeopardy. Now Robert was walking straight toward him.

  Leonard went with his impulse – he gunned the throttle and pushed the lever to raise the big metal fork, and the front edge of the blade, sharp from scraping against the concrete floor, easily penetrated Robert’s abdomen.

  Robert’s eyebrows arched over frightened eyes. A line of drool dropped from his mouth when the momentum doubled his torso over. Leonard veered left and aimed for a pallet stacked with cardboard boxes. The fork punched the rest of the way through Robert and into a carton like a thumbtack pinning a note to the bulletin board.

  Leonard stopped the truck and just stared. The cat was straightening himself up, gripping with both hands the steel shaft that impaled him. The dude was fully conscious. And barely bleeding.

  “Eddie …” Robert muttered.

  Leonard put the lift truck into reverse. It started to beep – a perfect C sharp, he was amazed to realize. A feeling of calm energy flowed into his fingertips and toenails. He slowly backed 30 feet, looking behind him instead of at the man he held skewered. The tops of Robert’s shoes scraped disagreeably against the concrete floor. Leonard brought the lift to a gentle stop, and raised the fork another foot.

  He put the lift into forward gear, accelerated, slammed on the brakes. Robert slid off the fork and thumped onto the floor. Without the pressure of the metal inside the gaping wound, Robert’s intestines and blood gushed onto the concrete around him.

  Leonard sat and watched him die. He threw up a little inside his mouth. Look what he had done! He felt like a little boy, waiting for his mother to come and scold him for being so stupid, for making a mess, to call him a little idiot, her moron child, and to beat him with the sole of her shoe.

  But Soulless Bitch No. 1 wasn’t really part of his life any more. And suddenly he realized he’d made a breakthrough.

  For the first time in his life, he had done what she, what TSB Two – what everyone – had always told him he couldn’t do, was no good at:

  He had improvised.

  Now inspiration hit him again.

  He used the fork to scoop up the body. It threatened to fall off, so he set it down on an empty pallet and lifted that.

  He putt-putted out to Lawn & Garden, crashing through the double swinging doors. Once he was in the fenced outside area, he stopped and set the pallet with the body at the end of the long tables filled with plants for sale, the same stupid petunias and pansies and crapola you could find at any DIY Warehouse in four freakin’ states.

  This was going to turn out even better than what he had composed! Now he understood what other musicians had been trying to explain for so long. A brilliant written score could be your jumping-off point for something even better... He not only saw what they meant, but for the first time he was able to make – to let – his mind do it.

  He got off the lift for a second, searched through Robert’s pockets, keeping a few things that inspired him.

  Then he picked up another empty pallet with the red half of the fork, so that the rough wood protruded to the side of the lift. He raised the fork to the level of the display tables, and he used the empty pallet to shove whole rows of plants off the ends and onto the ground. The lift beeped each time he backed to make another run; he liked that. He would have to work some C-sharps into his score for a little dissonance… He used the lift and the empty pallet the best he could as a bulldozer to mound the spilled soil and pots and managed a 5-foot pile over Robert. Pretty friggin’ poetic. He got down from the lift and set a single, orange gerbera daisy upright on the pile. He had to laugh.

  Now he dropped the empty pallet and drove the forklift to the registers, where he picked up his pallet of merchandise, which he trucked back to Receiving. He rolled open a dock door and jumped to the ground. He pulled his Ryder around and backed it until it banged into the rubber bumpers.

  Leonard used the forklift to unload the 10 pallets of plants he had brought from the woods. He trucked these out to Lawn & Garden, where it took him nearly three hours to display them on the tables in neat rows. He put out the signs he had printed on his computer. They told what each kind was, what growing conditions it liked and how much it should sell for.

  Finally, he hung up his banner: “Plant Native Species in Your Yard.” He smiled.

  He loaded his pallet of merchandise onto the Ryder. Then he found some bags of the granules that Robert had trained him to use to soak up spills. He dumped them onto the bloody puddle. After they absorbed the liquid, he swept them up and poured them into a trash bin. He closed the loading bay door, started up the panel truck and drove toward home. He was exhausted.

  But improvising for the first time was unquestionably the great victory of this album. He realized later that he hadn’t even thought about taking a shot of sanitizer all night. He understood now why everybody made such a big deal out of it, why they called it the essence of jazz. It was exhilarating.

  THURSDAY

  Nineteen

  Caroline arrived at the Progress-Leader bureau just after dawn to find a new e-mail from bassburbanbourbonturban: “Don’t you think that thing on Rocky Falls Boulevard had something to do with the previous day’s story about the dog and cat? Write me back.”

  “No,” Caroline said out loud. At the risk of beginning a correspondence with the guy, she hit the reply button and typed: “Thanks for your thoughts on my stories. If you have some evidence to show that a criminal fixated on killing pets would also stage a traffic jam, I’d like to see it. Why would any one person do all of that? Best, C. Kramden.”

  Five minutes later, Ca
roline got two new e-mails. One was a news alert from the Sheriff’s Office about a homicide at DIY Warehouse. The other was a note from Bassburbanbourbonturban with the subject line, “Good question.” The body of the message was blank.

  * * *

  As soon as Leonard hit the send button on his computer, he was certain he shouldn’t have sent the reporter the e-mails.

  The weight of a realization tightened his chest: He was a violent felon. A murderer.

  The police would find him, and they would throw him into jail or prison with a bunch of homosexuals and after years and years of them raping him, the court would give him the death penalty.

  He gulped down two mouthfuls of sanitizer and sat to think. It took longer than usual for the fuzziness to cleanse his mind.

  But when the stuff worked, it worked. In one beautiful instant, Leonard gained an entirely new inspiration for the album. It would just have to be renamed – to Everything Comes Due at Once.

  He did a quick Internet search for “violent felonies” and found a neat table. Of course, murder was at the top of the list. But he hadn’t realized that burglary met that standard. A First Degree Felony. He’d already done two. This must have been where the album was leading all along…

  He looked at the others:

  Aggravated assault.

  Kidnapping.

  Arson.

  Stalking.

  Rape.

  Robbery.

  Criminal Use of a Firearm.

  Leonard felt a sudden clarity. He decided to rename the album again: In the First Degree.

  Suddenly, a cacophony of new melodies filled his mind, yet he heard each one in individual clarity playing alongside the others. He pulled out fresh sheets of composing paper and started setting down the notes, and in the exhilaration of the task, he didn’t worry any more about being arrested.

  * * *

  Sarah Rosen reached toward the rear of the top shelf of her maple pantry and felt for the box of cherry Pop Tarts she knew was back there – exactly the junk breakfast she was craving this morning. Her fingers found a flat, triangular shape, and she gave an exasperated grrrr.

  How the hell had a guitar pick wound up way back here? She slid the little piece of plastic toward her. She had been finding dozens of these since the separation: orange Dunlop picks. Medium stiffness, a characteristic that fit her ex-husband perfectly.

  After everything, he had never gotten rid of the guitars, and she’d realized that to get rid of them, she had to get rid of Leonard, too. The man bought guitar picks by the gross. After he’d given up playing the bass, he played the same guitar scales and three songs seemingly every night of their last months of marriage, just over and over and over.

  He always had two or three guitar picks mixed in with his pocket change, and he had kept two different electric guitars and an acoustic on stands in various corners of their house, where people would see them when they came over.

  She grabbed the steppy stool from between the refrigerator and the wall to get a better angle on the Pop Tarts.

  The wall phone rang when she put her foot on the first step, so she sighed again and climbed down to answer it.

  It was Leonard. But he sounded like he was in a better mood than she’d heard since the very beginning of their relationship.

  “I’m calling because I want to settle the division of property without a fight,” he told her.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Just cut me a check for $50,000 and, ah, take the rest. No alimony. You take primary custody of Jacob. Then we go our separate ways.”

  This offer was ridiculously favorable to Sarah. Their combined net worth was close to a million dollars, not even counting her stake in the firm, which was worth at least that much again. She’d earned most of that wealth, not him, but she’d done it during the more than 12 years they had been married. She was pretty sure Leonard didn’t even know how much there was, since she managed their investments, but any decent divorce attorney would find every asset, total them up for Leonard and tell him the courts would be inclined to split it more or less down the middle. She’d advise the same if he were her client. She also guessed the court would make her pay her ex-husband alimony to help him continue the upper-middle-class lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed.

  She felt a sudden, odd surge of compassion for the man and said, “That doesn’t seem fair to you, Lennie,” before her lawyer’s instincts could stop her. She fingered the guitar pick in her palm.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he beamed. “I don’t care about money. I just don’t want us to fight any more.”

  Sarah was concerned about him. This was the first time she’d heard form him in more than a week. She was fed up with being married to him, but she had been nervous about his state of mind ever since they’d separated. He had seemed abjectly depressed every other time they’d talked. Now he seemed over the freaking moon.

  “Let’s sign everything tonight,” he said. “Can you meet me at Rocky Falls Crossroads at 8? Near the food court? Bring the papers.”

  “They really need to be notarized.”

  “Just have the girl in your office do it tomorrow. Or bring your camera and videotape me signing it or whatever, so you can prove it’s legit.”

  Sarah sensed she shouldn’t jeopardize this by insisting on anything right now, so she just said, “Okay.” She’d figure it out later. She paused, then said it: “Lennie, are you okay?”

  “I’m great,” he said. “I’ve been composing. The pieces I’ve been working on? I’m playing them tonight at the mall. You could show up at 5:30 p.m. and hear it. If you want to. I’ll be done around 7.”

  It was a risky thing for him to ask of her. His insistence that he would make it as a jazz musician had been the central, recurring fight in their marriage. Ready to raise kids, she’d argued for them to move from Manhattan to Raleigh so she could accept the job managing this firm. He’d said that amounted to giving up his dream, that leaving New York meant leaving the best opportunities in jazz. As if the best opportunities in law lay in North Carolina …

  The truth was he’d been playing smaller and smaller clubs every year, and finally, just background-music gigs for tourists. Gigs like this mall thing, which couldn’t be paying him a cent. Countless record executives and band leaders had told Leonard he was a technically skilled player but lacked the spontaneous creativity to make it as a jazzman. And he was getting too old to break in, anyway. He should become a studio musician or something, they said. But Leonard had always refused. He wanted to be famous.

  “Come on,” he said, sounding friendlier and less bitter through the phone than she’d heard in a long time. “Nobody will know you’re my wife.”

  As soon as he’d moved out, he’d bought his bass back, she knew. And now he was asking her to come hear him play. That was what he wanted more than his half of two million bucks.

  “I won’t point you out from the stage or anything,” he said now. “Just sit through one last set, and then I’ll sign my life away.”

  The whole thing broke Sarah’s heart, but she knew a fair deal when she heard one.

  Twenty

  Today, Jeff decided, he would track down the phenobarbital angle, something he bet Cooperton’s boys hadn’t been sharp enough to try. He looked around the office for a reasonably up-to-date Yellow Pages. He finally found one less than a year old. He opened it to the “Veterinarians” section and made a quick count. There were more than 40 businesses listed, including one veterinary dermatologist. If you had an itchy dog, you probably wanted to get that taken care of, Jeff reasoned. He decided to start with the vets in Raleigh or Rocky Falls and work his way down the list.

  The first place was a veterinarian inside a national pet supply chain store. Jeff identified himself and asked for the vet listed in the display ad. The clerk put him right through. She sounded like a nice person, the playful, joyful sort you’d want to care for your dog or cat. He introduced himself as an investigator and asked if
any sodium phenobarbital was missing, and a cabinet squeaked open as she checked. She said she didn’t think there was. The office kept just one vial on hand; it was still here. They didn’t put down too many animals. Because she was so nice, Jeff interviewed her a little about how the drug was used, and she seemed happy to help when he explained why he was asking.

  “Has the Wake County Sheriff’s Office already called to ask you about any of this?”

  “Nope. Haven’t heard from any police officers.”

  “Thanks.” Jeff put a black dash next to that entry in the phone book. He dialed the next number. He had to leave a message for the vet. Same at the next place. He worked his way down the listings to a big private practice on Rocky Falls Boulevard with several vets, called PetHealthPlex. The receptionist put him on hold, saying she would have to figure out the right person for him to speak with.

  Before the receptionist came back on, Jeff’s mobile rang. Cooperton. Jeff hung up on PetHealthPlex and answered the call.

  “Buddy, you might want to show up to the big-ass hardware store out here at Falls Commons.”

  “What you got?”

  “Suspicious death. Impaling by forklift.”

  Jeff had heard of death by drowning, lightning strike, electrocution, hanging, beheading and what coroners called “fall from height,” but never an impaling. “A person?”

  “Yeah, for a change. Deceased was supervisor of all the guys that drive forklifts at the store.”

  “I’m there.” Jeff assembled his briefcase and told Sarah where he was going. “Cooperton seems to think it might tie in.” She looked at him with amazement.

  Cooperton saw Jeff arrive at DIY Warehouse and eased up to brief him: The Lawn & Garden staff had found the department’s normal stock of plants in piles on the ground, with different plants and price signs on display in their place. A banner that said, “Plant native species in your yard,” lettered in black marker, was what led Cooperton to believe the crime was related to the residential burglaries. “I can’t take you back there, but trust me, the writing’s the same.”