“And your point is?”
Lamar tugged a moustache end. “Someone didn’t take his Midol. Why do you hate the damn thing when it’s like the most important thing you own?”
Baker shrugged and smiled and tried not to think about a little boy’s voice cracking, honky-tonk smoke, loose laughter. Curled on the backseat as the old van bumped over country roads. The greasy way headlights could wash over rural asphalt.
Lamar saw Baker’s smile as consistent with his partner’s quiet manner and sometimes that would be End of Topic. Three years they’d been working together, but the big man had no clue Baker’s show of teeth was forced. For the most part, Lamar could read people real well, but he had his blind spots.
Times when Lamar wouldn’t let go, his next comment was so predictable it could be from a script. “You own a treasure and your alarm system sucks.”
“I’m well-armed, Stretch.”
“Like someone couldn’t break in when you’re on the job.” Deep sigh. “One seventy, oh Lord, that’s serious money.”
“Who knows I own it other than you, Stretch?”
“Don’t give me ideas. Hell, George Gruhn could probably unload it for you in like five seconds.”
“Is it dropping in value as we speak?”
This time, it was Lamar who was hard of hearing. “I consigned my ’62 Precision with George last year. Got twenty times what I paid for it, bought a three-year-old Hamer that sounds just as cool and I can take it to gigs without worrying about a scratch being tragic. George has the contacts. I had enough left over to buy Sue flowers plus a necklace for our anniversary. The rest we used to pay off a little of the condo.”
“Look at you,” said Baker, “a regular Warren Buffett.” Having enough, he rose to his feet before Lamar had time to reply, went to the men’s room and washed his hands and face and checked the lie of his buttondown collar. He ran a sandpaper tongue over the surface of his teeth. Returning to find all the food gone and Lamar tapping a rhythm on the table, he crooked a thumb at the door. “Unless you’re planning on eating the plate, Stretch, let’s go look at some blood.”
The two of them were a Mutt-and-Jeff Murder Squad detective team operating out of the spiffy brick Metro Police Headquarters on James Robertson Parkway. Lamar was six-five, thirty-two, skinny as a shoestring potato with wispy brown hair and a walrus moustache like an old-time gunslinger. Born in New Haven, but he learned southern ways quickly.
Baker Southerby was two years older, compact and ruddy with skin that always looked razor-burned, bulky muscles with a tendency to go soft, thin lips and a shaved head. Despite Lamar’s tendency to digress, he’d never had a better partner.
Nashville homicides had dropped to sixty-three last year, most of them open-and-shuts worked by district detectives. The routine killings tended to be gang shootings, random domestics, and dope dealers cruising into town on the I-40 and getting into trouble.
The three, two-man Murder Squad teams were called out on whodunits and the occasional high-profile case.
The last new murder Southerby and Van Gundy had worked was a month ago, the shooting of a foulmouthed, substance-abusing Music Row promoter named Darren Chenoweth. Chenoweth had been found slumped in his Mercedes behind the crappy-looking warehouse that served as his Sixteenth Avenue office. An unindicted co-conspirator in the Cashbox payola scandal, his death was a head-scratcher with serious financial overtones, possibly a revenge hit. But it closed four days later as just another domestic gone bad, Mrs. Chenoweth coming in with her lawyer and confessing. A quick plea down to involuntary manslaughter, because fifteen witnesses were willing to testify Darren had been beating the crap out of her regularly. Since then Baker and Lamar had been working cold cases and closing a nice number of the green folders.
Lamar was happily married to a Vanderbilt Med Center pediatric nurse with whom he’d just bought a fifth-floor two-plus-two condo in the Veridian Tower on Church Street. Stretch and Sue used overtime to pay off the mortgage and they treasured their meager free time, so Baker, living alone, volunteered to take all the late-night and early-morning calls. Do wake-up duty in a nice, quiet voice.
He’d been up watching old NFL reruns on ESPN Classic when the phone rang at three twenty AM on a cool April night. Not Dispatch, Brian Fondebernardi calling direct. The squad sergeant’s voice was low and even, the way it got when things were serious. Baker heard voices in the background and immediately thought, Complications.
“What’s up?”
“I disturb your beauty sleep, Baker?”
“Nope. Where’s the body?”
“East Bay,” said Fondebernardi. “First, below Taylor, in a vacant lot full of trash and other nasty stuff. Almost a river view. But you asked the wrong question, Baker.”
“Who’s the body?”
“There you go. Jack Jeffries.”
Baker didn’t answer.
Fondebernardi said, “As in Jeffries, Bolt, and Ziff—”
“I got it.”
“Mr. Even Keel,” said the sergeant. A Brooklyn native, he worked at a whole different pace, had taken awhile to understand Baker’s slogo style. “Central Detectives buttoned down the scene, M.E. investigator’s down there now, but that won’t take long. We got a single stab wound in the neck, looks to be right in the carotid. Lots of blood all around so it happened here. Lieutenant’s on her way, you don’t want to miss the party. Call the midget and get the heck down here.”
“Hi, Baker,” Sue Van Gundy answered in her throaty, Alabama voice. Too fatigued to be sexy at this hour, but that was the exception and though Baker thought of her as a sister, he wondered if maybe he should’ve agreed to date her cousin the teacher who’d visited last summer from Chicago. Lamar had shown him her picture, a pretty brunette, just like Sue. Baker thinking Cute, then Who am I to be picky? Then figuring it would never work, why start.
Now, he said, “Sorry to wake you, Sue. Jack Jeffries got himself stabbed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Jack Jeffries,” she said. “Wow, Baker. Lamar loves his music.”
Baker restrained himself from saying what he knew: Lamar loves everyone’s music. Maybe that’s the problem.
He said, “Millions of people agree with Lamar.”
“Jack Jeffries, unbelievable,” said Sue. “Lamar’s out like a light but I’ll nudge him—oh, look, he’s waking up by himself, got that cute look—honey, it’s Baker. You’ve got to work—he’s comin’ round, I’ll make some coffee. For you, too, Baker?”
“No, thanks, had some,” Baker lied. “I’ll be by in a jif.”
Sue said, “He’s so tired—up doing our taxes. I’ll make sure his socks match.”
Baker drove his department Caprice to Lamar’s high-rise and waited on the dark street until Lamar’s whooping-crane form lurched out the front door, a paper bag dangling from one gangly arm. Lamar’s walrus moustache flared to the periphery of his bony face. His hair was flying and his eyes were half-shut.
Baker wore the unofficial Murder Squad uniform: crisp buttondown shirt, pressed chinos, shiny shoes, and a holstered semi-auto. The shirt was Oxford blue, the shoes and the gun-sack, black. His sore feet craved running shoes but he settled for crepe-soled brown Payless loafers to look professional. His Kmart preppy special shirt was broadcloth laundered spotless, the collar starched up high the way his mother had done it when he was little and they all went to church.
Lamar got in the car, groaned, pulled two bagels out of the bag, handed one to Baker, got to work on the other, filling his stash with crumbs.
Baker sped to the scene and munched, his mouth still fuzzy, not tasting much. Maybe Lamar was thinking about that when he swallowed hard and dropped the mostly uneaten bagel into the bag.
“Jack Jeffries. He’s pure LA, right? Think he came here to record?”
“Who knows?” Or cares. Baker filled his partner in on the little he knew.
Lamar said, “Guy’s not married, right?
”
“I don’t follow the celebrity world, Stretch.”
“My point,” said Lamar, “is that if there’s no wife involved, maybe it won’t dud out to a stupid domestic like Chenoweth.”
“A four-day close bothers you.”
“We didn’t close squat, we took dictation.”
“You were happy at the time,” said Baker.
“It was my anniversary. I owed Sue a nice dinner. But looking back…” He shook his head. “Total dud. Like a solo that dies.”
“You prefer a sleep-destroying WhoDun,” said Baker. Thinking: I sound like a shrink.
Lamar took a long time to answer. “I don’t know what I like.”
2
John Wallace “Jack” Jeffries, a natural Irish tenor prone to baby fat and tantrums, grew up in Beverly Hills, the only child of two doctors. Alternately doted upon and ignored, Jackie, as he was known back then, attended a slew of prep schools, each of whose rules he violated at every turn. Dropping out of high school one month short of graduation, he bought a cheap guitar, taught himself a few chords and began thumbing his way eastward. Living on handouts, petty theft, and whatever chump change landed in his guitar case as he offered renditions of classic folk songs in that high, clear voice.
In 1963, at the age of twenty-three, usually drunk or high and twice treated for syphilis, he settled in Greenwich Village and attempted to insinuate himself into the folk music scene. Sitting at the feet of Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs, Zimmerman, Baez, the Farinas was educational. He had a better shot actually jamming with some of the younger lights—Crosby, Sebastian, the heavy girl with the great pipes who’d begun calling herself Cass Elliot, John Phillips who’d do a favor for anyone.
Everyone liked California Boy’s voice but his temperament was edgy, pugilistic, his lifestyle an all-you-can-smoke-snort-swallow buffet.
In 1966, having failed to snag a record deal and watching everyone else do so, Jeffries contemplated suicide, decided instead to return to California, where at least the weather was mellow. Settling in Marin, he hooked up with two struggling folkies named Denny Ziff and Mark Bolt whom he’d seen playing for not much better than chump change in an Oakland Shakey’s Pizza.
In what subsequent armies of publicists termed a “magical moment” Jeffries claimed to be munching on a double-cheese extra-large and admiring the duo, while realizing something was missing. Rising to his feet, he hopped on stage during a spirited a capella delivery of “Sloop John B” and added high harmony. The resulting melding of voices created a whole much greater than the sum of the parts and brought down the house. Word of mouth seared through the Bay Area like wildfire and the rest was music history.
The real story was that a speed-shooting promoter named Lanny Sokolow had been trying to get Ziff and Bolt past the pizza circuit for two years when he happened across a chubby, longhaired, bearded dude crooning to a giggly bevy of porn actresses at a Wesson Oil party sponsored by the O’Leary Brothers, San Francisco’s favorite adult theater tycoons. Even if Sokolow hadn’t been racing on amphetamine, that high, clear voice would’ve tweaked his ear. The fat guy sounded like an entire angels’ chorus. Hell if this wasn’t exactly what his two borderline-intelligence baritones could use.
Jack Jeffries’s response to Sokolow’s greeting and attempted power shake was, “Fuck you, man, I’m busy.”
Lanny Sokolow smiled and bided his time, stalking the fat kid, finally getting him to sit down and listen to some demos of Ziff and Bolt. Caught at a weak moment, Jeffries agreed to take in the Shakey’s show.
Now, Sokolow figured, if three edgy temperaments could coexist…
One thing about the official version was true: word of mouth was instantaneous and super-charged, nudged along by a new electric thing called folk-rock. Lanny Sokolow got his trio amplified backup and a series of freelance drummers, and booked them as opening acts at Parrish Hall and the other free venues on the Haight. Soon, The Three, as they called themselves, were opening for midsized acts, then major headliners, actually bringing in serious money.
An Oedipus Records scout listened to them lead in for Janis on a particularly good night and phoned LA. A week later, Lanny Sokolow was out of the picture, replaced by Saul Wineman who, as head man at Oedipus, rechristened the group Jeffries, Ziff and Bolt, the sequence of names determined by a coin toss (four tosses, really; each of the three demanded a turn but none was happy until Wineman stepped in).
The trio’s first three singles made Top Ten. The fourth, “My Lady Lies Sweetly,” hit Number One With A Bullet and so did the LP, Crystal Morning. Every song on the album credited the trio as writers but the real work had been done by Brill Building hacks who sold out for a flat fee and a strict nondisclosure pact.
That exposé was among the almanac of allegations listed in Lanny Sokolow’s breach-of-contract lawsuit, a marathon feast for attorneys that dragged on for six years and ultimately settled out of court, three weeks prior to Sokolow’s death from kidney disease.
Six subsequent albums were penned with some help from Saul Wineman. Four of the five went platinum, My Dark Shadows dipped to gold, and We’re Still Alive tanked. In 1982, the group broke up due to “creative differences.” Saul Wineman had moved on to movies and each of the trio had earned more than enough to live as a rich man. Residuals, though tapering each year, added cream to the coffee.
Denny Ziff burned through his fortune by backing a series of unfortunately written and directed independent films. By 1985, he was living in Taos and painting muddy landscapes. In ’87, he was diagnosed with small-cell carcinoma of the lung that killed him in three months.
Mark Bolt moved to France, bought vineyard land and turned out some decent Bordeaux. Marrying and divorcing four times, he sired twelve children, converted to Buddhism, sold his vineyards and settled in Belize.
Jack Jeffries chased women, nearly lost his life in a helicopter flight over the Alaskan tundra, vowed never to fly again and bunked down in Malibu, overindulging in any corporeal pleasure at hand. In 1995, he donated sperm to a pair of lesbian actresses who wanted a “creative” kid. The match took and one of the actresses gave birth to a son. Jeffries was curious and asked to see the boy, but after the first few visits where Jeffries showed up toasted, the mothers termed him unfit and filed a cease-and-desist. Jack never fought for contact with his son, now a high-achieving high school senior living in Rye, New York. Rug-rats had never been his thing and there was all that music yet to be made.
He slept till three, kept a small staff that pilfered from him regularly, drank and doped and stuffed his face with no eye toward moderation. The residuals had trickled to a hundred G a year but passive income afforded him the house on the beach, cars and motorcycles, a boat docked in Newport Beach that he never used.
From time to time, he sang on other people’s records, gratis. When he performed, it was as a solo act at local benefits and venues that got smaller and smaller. Each year he put on more weight, refused to cut his hair, now white and frizzy, even though every other m.f. had sold out to Corporate Amerika.
He hadn’t been to Nashville since That Time but remembered it as a cool place, but too far to drive. So when the owner of the Songbird Café sent out a mass e-mail requesting participants in a First Amendment concert inveighing against federal snooping in public libraries, he tossed it. Then he retrieved it, read the list of those who’d agreed to attend, and felt crappy about having to say no.
Hemmed in, like maybe the cure was worse than the disease.
Then he happened to bring his guitar for repair into The Chick With the Magic Hands and started talking to her and she made a suggestion and…why not, even though he didn’t have much hope.
Give it a try, maybe it was time to show some cojones.
Two months later, would you believe it, it worked.
Ready to fly.
Good name for a song.
Jack Jeffries, lying dead in a weed-choked, garbage-flecked lot a short walk from the Cumberland River, w
ould be a no-show at the Songbird concert.
Cleared by the M.E., Lamar Van Gundy and Baker Southerby gloved up and went to take a look at the body. The okay didn’t come from an investigator; an actual pathologist had shown up, meaning high priority.
Ditto for the appearance of Lieutenant Shirley Jones, Sergeant Brian Fondebernardi, and a host of media types kept at bay by a small army of uniformed cops. The two local homicide detectives had signed off to the Murder Squad, more than happy to be free of what was looking like the worst combo: publicity and a mystery.
Lieutenant Jones handled the press with her usual charm, promising facts as soon as they were in, and urging the newshounds to clear the scene. After some grumbling, they complied. Jones offered words of encouragement to her detectives, then left. As the morgue drivers hovered in the background, Sergeant Fondebernardi, trim, dark-haired, economical of movement, led the way to the corpse.
The kill-spot was a shadowed wicked place reeking of trash and dogshit. Not really a vacant lot, just a sliver of clumped earth shaded by the remnants of an old cement wall that probably dated to the days when riverboats unloaded their wares.
Jack Jeffries lay on the ground, just feet from the wall, vacant eyes staring up at a charcoal sky. Dawn was an hour away. Cool night, midfifties; Nashville weather could be anything, anytime, but in this range, nothing would weirdly accelerate or slow down decomposition.
Both detectives circled the scene before nearing the body. Each thinking: Dark as sin: a body could walk right by it at night and never know.
Fondebernardi sensed what was on their minds. “Anonymous tip, some guy slurring his words, sounds like a homeless.”
“The bad guy?” said Lamar.
“Anything’s possible, Stretch, but on the tape he sounded pretty shook up—surprised. You’ll listen when you’re finished here.”
Lamar got closer to the body. The man was obese. He kept that to himself.
His partner said, “Looks like he let himself go.”
Capital Crimes Page 18