by Dan Ames
Just enough time to chat with my client.
39
I found him gardening. A grown man, on his knees in the backyard with dirt all over his arms and his face streaked with peat moss. Some guys go to Florida and play bocce. Clarence digs in the ground. To each his own.
“Aren’t you supposed to plant ’em deeper than that?” I asked. The little shrubs slash bushes he was planting . . . you could see the ball of roots sticking out a little bit.
Clarence shook his head. “They’ll drown if you plant them any deeper.”
I nodded.
He took off his gloves and tossed them into a little plastic cart he had next to him. It held a few more of the bushes as well as a variety of clippers and shears and digging tools.
“Speaking of drowning,” Clarence said. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen, find a couple of cold beers, and meet me over there.” He gestured to a little bench that sat in the shade of a big maple tree. I followed his instructions to a tee and rejoined my gray-bearded friend with two companions from the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis.
As Clarence sipped his beer, I brought him up to speed on everything that had happened.
“So you think Shannon Sparrow’s ex-husband killed Jesse?” he said.
I nodded. “I can’t prove it yet, but yeah, I think he did.”
“Why?”
“That’s the big question really,” I said. “I can’t answer it right now. I’ve got a couple of hunches that I’m working on.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Clarence said. “You’re convinced Nevada Hornsby had nothing to do with it?”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He loved her.”
“Lots of men kill women they really love. Happens all the time.”
“I don’t deny that,” I said. “I just don’t believe it was the case here.”
He took another long drink, and his bottle was empty. He tossed it twenty feet through the air where it landed in his little gardening cart.
“Nice shot,” I said.
It had been easier for him to cope by targeting his anger toward someone. But now he had to face the fact that he may have been wrong.
“You can help me,” I said.
“Tell me what you need.”
“I need to learn more about how star musicians work. Shannon Sparrow has such a fucking huge entourage. Managers, assistants, writers, hangers-on. I feel lost. Who has daily contact with Shannon? Who might be so involved with Shannon that they would resort to murder?”
“Forget the assistants,” Clarence said. “I wasn’t much of a star, but I had a bit of an entourage.”
“That’s why I thought I’d ask you.”
“My assistants came and went,” he said. “Never could remember their names. Usually the manager doesn’t get too involved on a day-to-day basis. Manages from a big office in New York or L.A. Makes a phone call to the record label, charges the star twenty grand.”
“Good work if you can get it.”
“The band mates . . . it all depends on the star. Some are close to their players. Some fire them without batting an eye.”
“Hired hands,” I said.
He nodded. “A producer will say, ‘Here are the tracks, learn them in six weeks or we’ll find someone who can.’ Of course, that’s not always true. Some guys in the band are key in developing songs and so on, then they’re very valuable and have a lot at stake.”
“What about songwriters?”
Clarence shrugged. “They can be very valuable. But as far as a daily involvement . . . I don’t think so. Usually they’re perched in some house in Malibu, looking at the Pacific, banging out hooks.”
I thought about it. “A lot of what you just told me doesn’t seem to fit Shannon Sparrow,” I said. “Her manager seems very involved. Her band mates all hang out. Her assistant. They seem to all be there all the time.”
“Like I said, I was a very minor player. And that was a long time ago,” Clarence said. “Times have changed. I don’t have a lot of ideas on what a Shannon Sparrow situation might be.”
“Okay.”
“I can tell you one thing that I’m sure hasn’t changed.”
“Shoot.”
“They’re all there for the money,” he said. “And in Shannon’s case, it’s big money. More money than we can probably imagine. So despite all the relationships, the hanging out, it’s all crap. It was that way with me back when I played. Everybody acted like friends but it was always all about the money.”
“The music is incidental.”
“In most cases, yeah. Sometimes the songwriter is the only one genuinely into the creation of music. But I’ve met plenty of jaded songwriters too. They think what they sell is crap. The singer thinks it’s crap. The manager thinks it’s crap. But they all fucking love it when the royalty checks come in.”
“Do you think that’s how Shannon is?”
He shrugged. “My guess would be yes, that’s how she is. But everyone’s different. When she was a struggling young girl with a guitar, maybe those early songs came right from her heart. Maybe they poured out of her soul. And then the businessmen rushed in and mined her like a sliver of gold in rock. And then maybe it all changed. Who knows?”
I nodded and polished off my beer. I stood up.
“If Hornsby didn’t kill her,” he started to say then stopped. I watched his face contort with anger and grief. I didn’t know where he was going with this. It turned out, he wasn’t going anywhere. He stopped. So I finished the thought for him.
“I’ll find out who did.”
•
It turned out that Nate couldn’t wait for his payment, so we met at the Orchid Gardens for the buffet. The maitre d' gave Nate a look that was probably the same expression Custer wore when he realized he wasn’t just going to lose, but he was going to lose big.
Nate didn’t disappoint. He loaded a plate full of all the fried stuff first: egg rolls, crab wontons, chicken.
“Lubes up the pipes,” he explained to me.
I got a big plate of chicken fried rice with an egg roll, tossed on some soy sauce, and sat across from him. Watching Nate eat Chinese buffet was like watching a conveyor belt dump ingots into a blast furnace.
“Your boy is bad news,” he finally said, after most of his first plate was demolished. Nate signaled the waitress over and ordered a beer, went up to the buffet, and loaded on mostly chicken things: garlic chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken, Kung Pao chicken.
I stuck with my water and rice.
“Or at least, he was bad news,” Nate continued, pausing every now and then to clean the various sauces and juices that accumulated in the corners of his mouth.
Once Nate had demolished his second plate, I figured he’d take a moment to tell me what he’d found. I was right. He pushed away plate number two and pulled out a notebook.
“Teddy Armbruster, as you know him, was born in Chicago as Edward Abrucci,” he said. “Born in Chicago in 1960. First arrested at age twelve. Assault. More arrests through his teens, which earned him a stay at the juvenile correctional facility near Rockford, Illinois.”
Nate flipped to the next page of his notebook. “Apparently our man moved to Detroit after he was released. His crime pattern changed too. He graduated from assaults and robberies to extortion.”
“Mob?”
Nate nodded. “As his crimes became more ‘organized,’ to make a bad pun, his arrests disappeared. His last brush with the law was in 1987 for extortion. He beat it. Since then, he’s been clean.”
I thought about that while Nate went back up to the buffet. Now he was moving on to seafood: more crab wontons, lobster with soybeans, and shrimp fried rice.
“So do you think he’s really clean now? Has he gone legit?” I asked Nate when he got back to the table.
He shrugged his shoulders and shoveled in the food. “He could be clean or just a whole lot more polished,” he said.
“So far three people have been murde
red,” I said. “Jesse Barre. Larry Grasso. And Rufus Coltraine. All people within his orbit.”
“They were in a lot of other people’s orbits too,” Nate said, soy sauce dripping down his chin.
“Maybe Shannon had killed Jesse for her guitars, then framed her husband for it,” I suggested.
“And why would a woman worth about a hundred million dollars need to kill someone for guitars? They were expensive, but not that expensive.”
“Had to be the ex-husband then,” I said. “He was still in love with Shannon, tried to win her back by killing Jesse Barre and stealing her guitars. And then he framed Coltraine for it. They were buddies in prison.”
Nate stopped eating. I knew it was big if he stopped eating.
“They were?”
I nodded. “I talked to a guy I know at Jackson.”
“So you think that was the case?” he said.
“It’s a definite possibility. But I don’t think Grasso was working alone. Someone was pulling his strings, maybe using his love for Shannon against him.”
“Maybe it was Shannon herself.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I heard the woman speak. It wasn’t Shannon. I didn’t recognize the voice.”
Nate pushed his plate away from him and belched, a low rumbling passage of gas that reminded me of a coal mine being exhumed.
“Don’t mess with this guy, John,” he finally said. “I think people who fuck with Teddy Armbruster end up being hurt. And hurt badly.”
“Someone else may be fucking with Teddy Armbruster. And it isn’t me.”
•
By the time I got back to my office, it was late. The only people more tired than me were the guys at the Chinese restaurant in charge of replenishing the buffet.
I checked my watch. Nearly five o’clock. I checked the mail for a package from Molly but no dice. Most courier services finished up by six. I had a bad feeling in my gut, and it was only partially from watching Nate ingest the caloric equivalent of a small family.
Whatever Molly had intended to send me should have been here by now. I wondered about the interruption. Had the man heard Molly? Was she in trouble?
I weighed the pros and cons of waiting. It didn’t take long. Sitting around waiting for a courier made little sense. I thought about calling, but that didn’t seem like a good idea either. She was constantly in someone’s presence. Someone who was always listening. It would be better just to show up. Be the asshole PI who needed to be dealt with. That chore would fall to the lowly personal assistant.
Besides, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my guts, I wondered, what if the courier never comes?
The drive back to Shannon Sparrow’s temporary compound took less than five minutes, but as I pulled closer, I saw that someone had gotten there ahead of me.
Blue and red flashing lights pulled me closer. Please, God, no, I thought. Don’t let this happen.
The driveway was choked with police cars. I pulled over into the grass next to the driveway and jogged toward the door. A cop stopped me, a thick-necked bull with a shiny black crew cut. I didn’t recognize him, and I didn’t see Ellen around.
I looked past him and saw Erma and Freda being questioned by two detectives.
And on the floor was a body.
Even from here I could see that it was a small body. Swimming in a large pool of blood.
Molly.
40
“How did you manage to get here before me?” a voice asked. I turned, and Ellen walked toward me, her thumbs hooked in her gun belt.
I was staring out at Lake St. Clair. The water was smooth and green, waiting for a giant freighter to plow through the center of its body.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how another life had been taken and how Molly had tried to get in touch with me. I should have done more. I should have driven to see her immediately after her call was interrupted. Goddamnit, I thought.
“John,” my sister said.
“I should have known,” I said.
“Just start at the beginning,” she said. So I did. I detailed my conversation with Molly, the note with the phone number, waiting for a courier that never showed up, and the decision to drive over here on my own.
Ellen didn’t respond when I finished.
“So what’s your best guess?” she said.
“Honestly,” I said. “I have no clue.”
“You don’t know what she was trying to get to you?”
I shook my head. Ellen turned and looked out at the lake.
“Her neck was broken,” she said. “Apparently.”
“Ah, Jesus.”
“They’re saying she fell down the stairs.”
That brought me off the car. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Fell down the stairs? I don’t think so.”
“No other signs of injury. Two witnesses say they saw it happen.”
“The pork queens? Erma and Freda?”
“They heard a loud crash,” Ellen said. “Rushed in and found the victim at the foot of the steps.” I could tell Ellen wasn’t buying it either; she was just laying out the official story so far.
“Oh my God,” I said. “What total bullshit.”
“It isn’t bullshit until it’s proven to be bullshit.” I heard what she was saying.
“If it’s the last goddamned thing I do,” I said.
I kept thinking of Molly. Of her crisp way of speaking, her little daily planner clutched to her chest. So in control. And then the vision of her sprawled out at the base of the stairs.
“We did a quick search on the vic,” Ellen said. “She looks clean as a whistle. No record, not even a speeding ticket.”
I thought about my interaction with Molly. Precise. Efficient. Maybe a tad on the cold side. But that was her job. To protect her boss.
It looked now like she should have been a little more worried about protecting herself. Whatever it was she’d found, she was trying to get to me. But why me? If it had something to do with the murder of Jesse Barre, why not go to the cops? I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question.
She was worried about what might happen to her.
So she was going to let me get the evidence.
In short, she wanted me to take the fall.
I winced at the irony.
•
Ellen went back into the crime scene where I still wasn’t allowed, so I turned my attention once again to the lake. When you lived in Grosse Pointe, you couldn’t help but associate the lake with events in your life. Lake St. Clair sat there, a silent witness of the community next to it. I had my own personal history with the lake. Culminating in the death of Benjamin Collins. His life ended in the lake. Along with what used to be mine.
And now, here I was back at the lake, working a case that was spiraling out of control. Every one of my instincts told me that my meeting with Shannon later tonight was a setup. Shannon luring me to the park after dark. The death of her assistant only a few hours old. Someone was trying to tie up loose ends.
But I didn’t believe Shannon was in on it. She was kooky. She played the star thing to the hilt. But for some reason, I didn’t think she was a killer. Maybe I’d been taken in a bit by her beauty. No, not her beauty. The warmth of her beauty. Some women are beautiful like crystal. Cold, cool lines. Others have the beauty of a glowing fire. I felt Shannon was the latter.
But I’d been wrong plenty of times before.
Something was nagging at me. Like a hair-trigger on the verge of being pulled. My mind kept going back to Laurence Grasso. He was a trigger too.
Rufus Coltraine had been the second to die. There was something about his role in this thing too. Something about him that kept coming back to my mind but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Something about—
Family.
And then something sparked in my mind. Family. Joe Puhy, the prison guard at Jackson had said he thought Coltraine would head South to see his family. So why hadn’t he? And Puhy had said that Coltraine
didn’t get any letters—so how did he know he had family in . . . where was it?
Goddamnit. I pulled out my cell phone. I almost had it, and then it would slip away. If Puhy worked at Jackson, he probably lived in the area. There were only a few small towns nearby. Plymouth. Ann Arbor.
I punched in the number for information and asked for Joe Puhy’s number. There were three of them. I jotted them down and called the first. I got a machine, but when the voice of the answering machine clicked on, I knew I didn’t have the right one. The Puhy I’d spoken to was older and gruff.
Exactly the voice I got on the second try.
“I’m very sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Puhy,” I said. “This is John Rockne, the private investigator. We spoke earlier about Rufus Coltraine and Laurence Grasso.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, not happy at all. “I remember. Look, we’re about to sit down to dinner.” I could hear voices in the background.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. This won’t take more than a minute.”
He sighed. “You’re a friend of House, right?”
House was my buddy who worked on Cell Block A, who’d initially put me in touch with Puhy. Thank God for House. I owed him one.
“Yeah,” I said.
“All right, go ahead.”
“I was just looking back through my notes, and I saw that you said you thought Rufus Coltraine would go down South to see his family. Or that you thought he had family there.”
“Uh-huh.” More dishes clattering in the background. I had to make this fast.
“But you also said that you didn’t recall him getting any letters or anything from family members,” I said.
There was a pause as Puhy thought about the contradiction.
“Uh . . . right.”
“So how did you know he had family down there?”
This time the pause was longer. I heard more voices in the background, including a woman calling out, “Joe!” She had that kind of voice that you ignored at your own peril. Kind of like my wife’s.