by Rick Blechta
“And from whom did you hear this?”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“But can you help me?”
“I fear not, but I can tell you that Fräulein Braun is of interest to us. She is mixed up in the trade of drugs, no?”
“I believe so.”
“We have been keeping a watch on her apartment, but we now think that she has found out that Hamburg is too hot to hold her.”
“So she hasn’t been seen? How long have you watched?”
The female cop opened a folder on the side of her desk, consulting it. “It has been just short of two weeks.”
Shannon’s heart sank. Another damned dead end! “You’ll let me know if you find out anything? I know this isn’t regular, but it’s sort of a special situation.”
The cop had smiled for the first time, but there was sadness behind it. Because of this, a small bond had been made. “Yes, we will inform you. You see, I am a mother also.”
***
Weary in mind and spirit, Shannon made her way down the hotelcorridor to her room, the overnight bag a dead weight on her shoulder. She felt as if she could sleep for a week straight.
She wondered what the hell she was going to tell Michael.
About to slip her key card into the door, Shannon noticed that the green light was already on. The hair on the back of her neck stood up as she backed away. Something was very wrong, and she knew better than to enter that room.
Moving back down the corridor at something between a walk and a run, she found the elevator still at her floor.
Back in the lobby, the sleepy-looking desk clerk didn’t seem inclined to believe her when she told him she thought her room might have been broken into.
“So it’s normal for the lock to show green before you open it?” Shannon asked peevishly.
“No,” he had to admit, “but Mr. O’Brien might not have shut it properly when he came in.”
“You saw him come in?”
“Well, no, but I came on at eleven. He might have come in earlier.”
“Look, I want someone to at least come up and help me check my room. Is that too much to ask?”
Turned out that it wasn’t, but because of the late hour, it took time to round up a couple of people to go up with her. Shannon tried to remain patient. If she’d had her gun with her, she would have done it by herself.
Finally, she was again walking down the corridor to her room, a cleaner and the late-night bellman with her. The bellman at least had a walkie-talkie.
About ten feet away, Shannon stopped her little posse and said to them in a low voice, “When we get to the door, I’m going to try the handle. If the door is unlocked, I’m going in, and it’s going to be sudden. I’ll yell out if it’s clear. No yell and you get on the blower for help. Don’t come in. Got that?”
“You talk like a cop,” the bellman whispered.
As Shannon moved to the door, she said grimly. “That’s because I used to be one.”
Trying the door handle, she discovered that the door was indeed unlocked. Opening it fast, she dropped down and rolled into the blackness of the room. She felt clothes against her face, but nothing else happened, no lights going on, no drawn guns, just silence. Standing up, she quickly found the light switch by the door. Flicking it on, she told the two out in the hall to come on in.
Someone had tossed the room but good. Clothes were ripped and strewn all over the place, the mattress had been flung off the bed, and all the drawers turned over and dumped.
“Christ!” the waiter said under his breath. The bellman was on the walkie-talkie, telling the desk clerk to call the police.
Shannon righted a chair and sat in it. “Don’t touch anything else,” she said wearily.
As she waited for the arrival of the law, Shannon felt sick. Where was Michael, and had he been there when the bad guys had arrived?
***
My dream that night I stayed at the Hilton was the worst I’d ever experienced. This time, there was none of the distortion you usually get in dreams. The corridors weren’t endless and winding, turning in on themselves like a writhing snake. Everything was exactly as I remembered it, down to the cream-coloured wallpaper and burgundy carpet.
It began as it had in reality: Angus waking me from a deep sleep by pounding on my door. In those days I could sleep through an air raid. The bedside clock read 3:18 a.m.
“Michael, you bugger, you’ve got to come with me!” Angus practically erupted into the room as I opened the door. “Something really bad has happened.”
“What? The lads actually went to bed early?”
“This is no time for jokes. Get some clothes on. I need your help!” He wouldn’t tell me anything, but it was easy to see that whatever had happened was bad. Angus was normally the calm centre of the Neurotica storm.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we left my room.
“Rolly’s room.”
“Is Rolly all right?”
Knowing his propensity for booze, and more recently, drugs, I had immediately thought of an OD situation.
“Rolly’s fine. That’s not the problem.”
“What is then?”
Angus didn’t answer, just continued stomping down the hall ahead of me.
Knowing what the band was like on the road, I’d insisted on my room being far away from theirs, and since this hotel was one of the huge American ones, that meant very far indeed. The building was shaped like the letter C, and I was at one end, while the rest of the Neurotica road show was at the other. The walk seemed to take forever.
At Rolly’s door, Angus took out a room key and let us in.
The main room of the suite was a mess, showing the obvious signs of a big party. Rolly had been insisting on a suite for a year now, mainly because he liked having the extra room when “friends dropped in”. Rolly could take a young lady off to his room for a romp then come back to rejoin the party. Often the sex spilled out into the room, and that’s when things could get really out of hand.
“Where the hell is Rolly?” I asked Angus as I righted a coffee table.
“There,” Angus said, indicating the closed bedroom door, “along with something else.”
Fed up with his dodging about, I opened the door and walked in.
The room looked as if a hurricane had just come through. Clothes, furniture, food, bottles, were strewn all over the place. Rolly, naked and looking totally spaced out, was leaning crookedly against the headboard of his bed, legs drawn up. His whole body was shaking.
I went over to him. “Rolly, mate, you okay?”
He looked up at me, eyes rolling around in his head. “I’m a little wasted at the moment, Michael.”
“Drugs or alcohol?”
“Both,” Angus said behind me, then reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “What you need to see is in the bathroom.”
Standing to the side, he turned the knob and pushed the door open, allowing me to walk past.
On the bathroom floor lay a girl, and except for the pallor of her skin and the impossible angle of her neck, she might have been asleep.
Up to that point, the dream had been a completely accurate recreation of what had happened that awful, awful night. But so many years later, as I slept in the Glasgow Hilton and my dream self stood there looking down in shock, something was horribly different.
What made this rendition of my dream dreadful beyond belief was the fact that it was Shannon lying dead on the floor of Rolly’s bathroom. Not Shannon as she was now, though. This was Shannon as she would have been twenty-four years ago, Shannon at almost the same age as the real girl had been.
Twenty-Six
Shannon had gone beyond frantic by the time the police arrived. The mess in the room could have been caused by a violent search, or it could have been due to a fight with a search after, as two chairs and a lamp were broken.
Had they finally succeeded in nabbing Michael? The desk clerk swore he’d seen nothing, but the bellman
admitted privately that the desk clerk had been known to fall asleep when things were quiet.
“I suppose they could have gone out the back, and if they’d been careful, no one would be the wiser,” he’d added.
As the Glasgow police quietly took over, Shannon was taken down to the manager’s office to have her statement taken. Her police training began asserting itself as she calmed down. That’s when she realized several things she’d seen, but which hadn’t registered at the time: Michael’s overcoat wasn’t there, nor were his computer, shoulder bag and cell phone. Maybe he hadn’t come back to the hotel. Of course, another logical answer could be that the bad guys had grabbed him and taken everything else along with them.
She pulled out her own cell. “Mind if I make a call?” she asked the constable taking down her statement, but went right ahead without waiting for an objection.
Shannon tried to keep her hopes down while she waited for the connections to be made. Never had a cell phone taken this long!
Michael’s phone rang several times, to the point where Shannon was sure his voicemail would kick in, then someone answered.
She heard heavy breathing for several seconds, then a husky voice croaked out, “Yes?”
“Michael, is that you?”
“Shannon, oh God, Shannon...” he almost sobbed.
“Michael, we may only have a few seconds—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Michael, where have they taken you?”
“Who?”
Shannon realized they were talking at cross purposes. “Michael, where are you?”
“I’m at the Hilton. I came back with the lads tonight after rehearsal, and by the time things broke up, I was too tired to go to our hotel.”
She squeezed her eyes shut with relief and turned to the officer. “I’ve found him. He’s at another hotel. He wasn’t in the room. You should tell your superior that.”
“Who are you talking to?” Michael asked.
“A cop. I’m in the manager’s office at our hotel. Someone tossed our room. The place is a disaster. I thought they’d gotten you.”
Michael was silent as that sank in. “I should have left a message. I did a right balls up on this one, didn’t I?”
Shannon picked up something in the way he was speaking. His voice was pitched too high, and he was speaking quickly, his words tumbling out all over each other. This was one seriously distressed man.
“Michael, what’s wrong? You must have been asleep when I called.”
“No, I was awake, thank God! I just couldn’t find my goddamned phone.”
That’s not what I meant.”
“Shannon, can you come over here?”
“Right now? I haven’t finished giving my statement, and God only knows what we have left in the way of clothes and other belongings.
”
“Sod all that!” Michael answered, his voice rising. “I really need to speak to you.”
“About what?”
“When you get here.” He gave her the room number. “Please hurry.” He hung up before she could answer.
***
I felt truly awful as I opened the door for Shannon. From her expression as she looked at me, I could tell that it showed.
“Michael,” she said as she put her palm against my cheek, “what’s happened?”
I knew I had to tell her, no matter what the consequences—but how to start? I’d kept the secret bottled up for so long, I found I didn’t know how to let it out.
Shannon got me to sit on one of the beds with her. “Now, tell me what’s wrong.”
When I’d woken from my dream, I’d actually been sobbing, and I lay there sweaty and tangled in the bed clothes for quite some time, unable to pull myself together. In my heart, I was certain my dream meant that Shannon had been killed. Don’t ask me how I thought I knew this, but it was beyond a doubt. It was a devastating blow, because until that point, I’d had no idea of the depth of my feelings for her.
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you’re here,” I said giving her hands a squeeze, then leaned forward and just wrapped my arms around her, pulling her tightly against me.
At first she resisted, then gave in. I held her for a long time.
“I dreamed that you’d died,” I finally was able to say, my face buried in her hair.
“Was it part of a dream like you had the other night?”
“It’s almost always the same dream, Shannon. Tonight was different because of the awful twist at the end, something that’s never happened before.”
“This is all about why you left Neurotica, isn’t it?”
Her saying that somehow made it easier for me to continue. If she hadn’t possessed that slim wedge, I don’t know if I ever could have started—and that would have been the end of any chance of our relationship continuing.
“Yes... Something very bad happened, something I’m so ashamed of... I guess you could say that it’s blighted my life—if that isn’t too flowery a term.”
I suddenly couldn’t sit still. Getting up, I walked over to the window. From so high up, I could see a faint glow in the sky on the faraway horizon. Dawn wasn’t far off.
“I know I spoke in my sleep the other night.”
She nodded.
“What did you hear?”
“You said something about someone being dead, a girl, I think. There were also a few words about Rolly, and you seemed to be talking to your dead friend, Angus. That’s all I know.”
“Twenty-four years ago... I was party to something that I am totally ashamed of. Even now, I couldn’t tell you why I did it. When it happened, I just acted without thinking, like my brain had switched off. I’ve never spoken about this to anyone, not even the people who were involved as deeply as I was.” Taking a deep breath, I plunged on. “And now, I’m petrified of telling you, because I have no idea what you’ll think or do after you know.”
Shannon nodded, concern on her face. “You didn’t kill someone, did you?”
Even though I knew why she’d said it, I was still completely appalled. “No! Of course not!”
“But someone did die.”
Now it was my turn to nod. “I’m telling this inside out.”
“Starting at the beginning would probably be best.”
To gain a spot of time, I went to the bar fridge and took out a soft drink. “Care for one?”
“Yes, please.”
I handed her a Coke, and we sat there sipping as if nothing were wrong, but I’m sure both our brains were going a mile a minute. I drained my can before I spoke again. She waited patiently.
“Neurotica was in Chicago. The tour had been going quite well, but things were getting out of hand offstage. Everyone but me seemed to be getting sucked into some bad things. Our manager and the record company execs did nothing to stop it, even though the lads trashed a hotel room in Miami, even though our playing began suffering. My only solution had been to withdraw as much as I could. It was like watching a plane crash in slow motion.
“Funny thing was my withdrawal added to my mystique. Even you’ve made reference to it. That’s what attracted you to me when you were in high school, wasn’t it? The lonely genius thing?”
“Yeah.”
“You weren’t the only one. Every tour stop, the groupies were there. Most of the time, I just ignored them. Most of the time...
“So we were in Chicago, with three days off. I was hoping we’d rehearse and regroup, get our bearings again, but the lads had other ideas. Rolly’s suite, as usual, became party central. Being bored, I joined them one night, just to hang out. Frankly, I felt like my band was drifting away from me or vice versa, and I’d worked far too hard to let that happen.
“Rolly was in his bedroom shagging someone, and everyone in the sitting room was completely pissed, high or both. I sat on the chesterfield next to John, who had a girl on each knee. This young girl came over and sat down next to me. She reminded me of a china doll: very deli
cate features, pale skin, long blonde hair, huge eyes. She was stick-thin, and her jeans looked as if they could have been painted on her.
“Since everyone else was occupied, we began to talk. It took about five minutes before she’d respond in more than single words. I got the feeling that if I’d said ‘boo’, she would have fainted dead away.”
Shannon looked at me, her mouth a tight line of understanding. “You were her favourite.”
I nodded. “So I found out afterwards.”
“She must have been petrified. I know I would have been.”
The final scene of my earlier dream flashed through my head, and it took me a few moments to pull myself together.
“At some point, I went out on the balcony for a bit of fresh air and a little quiet. The girl followed after. She had a joint, and I even took a few hits. For several minutes we stood leaning on the rail, looking out at the lights of the city.
“Finally, I turned to leave. It was late, and I was tired. ‘Take me back to your room with you,’ the girl blurted out. I actually thought about it for a moment then decided that it wouldn’t be a good thing. I wish to God now that I had!
“When I told her no, she got very upset. ‘Don’t you like me? Aren’t I pretty enough?’
“‘That has nothing to do with it. I’m tired and want to sleep. Maybe I’ll see you around tomorrow, yes?’”
“Her lip was trembling, and tears started running down her face. ‘I came to see you, to be with you. You can’t turn me down! They all said I wouldn’t have the nerve!’
“‘Who did?’
“‘My friends!’
“She cuddled up against me and asked again if I’d take her to my room. The whole situation stank, and I just wanted to get out of there. I pulled myself away, went back into the smoky room and crossed to the door. Looking back, I saw her framed in the doorway out to the balcony. The girl didn’t look to be over eighteen. What I should have done was pull her out of the room, but I didn’t. I just turned and left.”
I couldn’t read anything in Shannon’s expression, so I plowed on with the story, telling her how Angus had woken me up about an hour later and taken me back to Rolly’s room.