The Album of Dr. Moreau

by Daryl Gregory

  Dr. M had kept them all in a cage. “Unleashed” was a joke. They were all chained by their egregious contracts.

  It was time to throw off those chains and go solo. All Devin had to do to make it happen was avoid being accused of Dr. M’s murder.

  * * *

  Devin’s room was emptier without Mrs. M. Also, the tub of trail mix specified in his rider was dangerously low. He scooped out a handful of nuts and cranberries and hoped Mrs. M’s feelings for him hadn’t changed just because her husband had been brutally murdered.

  When the knock came, Devin did not immediately answer. He dusted off his hands, took a cleansing breath, and reached for a sense memory of a sad moment in his past. Something from the tour? Nothing occurred to him. Earlier, maybe? Perhaps on the barge—

  screaming fire water blood cold

  Shit! No! Too far!

  They knocked again. Devin exhaled. Opened the door.

  Detective Delgado, with Detective Banks behind her. Delgado’s eyes narrowed. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Devin said. “Grief. It sneaks up on you, you know?” There were tears in his eyes. Tears! Good job, Devin. He hopped onto the bed and looped his arms around his knees. He’d taken care to dress in a classy but not classist manner: a Tom Ford tuxedo-style shirt open to his navel, low-rise Roberto Cavalli jeans, and a pair of fabulous $1,500 hemp sandals woven by a certified-Native-American craftswoman.

  Banks took one of the only two chairs in the ridiculously small room. Delgado had paused in front of a painting—she’d noticed his artwork!

  “It’s in my rider,” Devin said. “I won’t sleep in a room unless my own pieces are hanging. I painted all of them.”

  “This woman looks familiar,” Delgado asked.

  “That’s Barbara Bush! You didn’t recognize her?”

  “I’ve never seen her nude.”

  Banks showed him a microcassette recorder. “You mind if I record this?”

  “As long as you set the levels right,” Devin said. “I’m more of a bass than people realize.” He smiled winningly.

  Banks flinched. Devin thought, Too much teeth!

  “Why don’t you tell us about last night?” Banks asked.

  “I don’t know what there is to tell you,” Devin said. “I left the party before anything happened.”

  Banks said, “Give it a shot.”

  “Well, I spent most of the party in the Jacuzzi. I find that after a performance a good soak does wonders.”

  Devin heard the balcony door open behind him. Delgado had stepped out and was looking up, toward the roof.

  “And Mrs. Bendix was in the Jacuzzi with you?” Banks asked.

  “And others,” he said. “But yes, that’s right. We’re friends.”

  “Or more than friends,” Banks said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She stayed the night here with you, yes?” Banks said.

  “That’s right. We left the party together.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “Right after the big fight. Mrs. M wanted to leave, so we walked out.”

  “In your towels?”

  “Right. It’s no big deal, I mean, we’re right down the hall.”

  “And you came straight here.”

  “We did. And we stayed here, all night, until Tusk came and told us the news.”

  “Mrs. Bendix will be able to confirm that?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Devin said. “I mean, we were asleep some of the time.”

  Banks all but rolled his eyes.

  “Did she often stay with you?” Delgado asked. Devin liked that there was no judgement in her voice—unlike her partner. She’d been gazing at another of his nudes, the one he’d titled Jane Goodall, Rampant.

  “It’s happened a couple of times before, sure,” Devin said.

  Banks asked, “How long have you two been in a relationship?”

  “I’ve been in relationship since I met her. All of us are in relationships. You and I are in a relationship now. What kind of relationship, well, we can explore that together.”

  “Answer the question,” Banks said. Ooh, he was touchy. Maybe insecure in his own sexuality? Very interesting.

  “Our relationship became physical about a week ago,” Devin said. “I mean, she had hit on me plenty of times, and Tusk always told me to stay away from her. But then, I realized, hey, she’s a beautiful woman who deserves happiness. The tour was ending. We should just do this, you know? And wow, was I surprised. She’s an older woman, but her upper body strength, her stamina, it’s just . . .” He shook his head. “We did some positions I didn’t know were possible. Do you know she used to be a pole dancer?”

  “I’m shocked,” Banks said. “Did Dr. M know about the affair?”

  Affair. Such a value-laden word. “We weren’t hiding it,” Devin said.

  “How did the doctor feel about that?”

  Devin wished Banks would stop asking the questions. It was Delgado he’d like to talk to.

  “I don’t put a lot of energy into negative feelings like jealousy and possessiveness,” Devin said. “But some people . . . do. I don’t understand it. Especially because Dr. M fucked around. Why would he be jealous of Mrs. M?”

  “Maybe it’s because she’s his wife,” Banks said, “and you’re, well—”

  “What? An animal? Is this about Alabama?” Devin was standing now, his arms out. “They dropped the case! No charges.”

  “Young,” Banks finished.

  “Oh,” Devin said. He lowered his arms. “That’s true.”

  “What happened in Alabama?” Banks asked.

  “Let’s stay on track,” Delgado said. She took the seat next to Banks. “Was Dr. M sleeping with anyone last night?”

  “Probably. He usually picked out a zoomie. Or two.”

  “Think about last night,” she said. “Was there anyone in particular he’d ‘picked out’?”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t hanging with him. Like I said—Jacuzzi. But you should talk to Tusk. He saw someone.”

  “We will. What got you and Mrs. Bendix to leave the tub and join the main party?” she asked.

  “Mostly the screaming,” Devin said. “Matt did one of his shrieks, and then people were shouting at each other. Mrs. M wanted to see what was going on. By the time we got out there the energy in the room was very negative and the party was breaking up.”

  “Did you hear the CD that Dr. M played?” Delgado asked.

  “Um, a bit.”

  “Did you recognize it?”

  “It sounded like us, but it must have been an outtake or something. Not a quality track.”

  “What makes one ‘quality’?”

  “All our top-selling songs are centered around my vocals,” Devin explained. “My job is to be the spine, the anchor, the emotional heart. The other guys support what I’m doing, vocally, and yes, they have their own solos, but for most of our songs they’re essentially backup singers.”

  “Right,” Delgado said. “So it wasn’t you on that recording?”

  “I only heard a snippet, and that was over the roar of the Jacuzzi. Maybe I’m in there? But honestly it sounds like something Tusk left on the cutting room floor—not true WyldBoyZ, you know?”

  “Dr. M seemed to think it was,” Banks said. He looked at his notepad. “He said he owned the music, and owned the band—he owned all of you.”

  Devin looked pained. “Dr. M, like many human males, is trapped in a hierarchical mindset—the fear of not being an alpha male.”

  “Human males,” Banks repeated.

  “So does he own all the music?” Delgado asked.

  “He’s on the albums as a co-writer, but that’s just on paper. He didn’t write anything, that’s all Tusk and Tim. Tusk does the music, and Tim does the words.”

  “Tusk does all the music?” Delgado asked.

  “Basically.” Devin explained how Tusk came into the studio with a head full of music, everything worked out in his mind: melo
dies, harmonies, percussion, even string arrangements. He’d teach the melody to Devin and the harmonies to the others, and Tim would sit in a corner and write lyrics. The rest of the album would be recorded with studio musicians. Tusk supervised that, as well as the mixing and editing. “He’s a huge gray pain in the ass,” Devin said, “but I got to admit he’s a musical genius.”

  “I didn’t realize so much depended on him,” Delgado said.

  “Oh, well, of course we all contribute to the songs,” Devin said. “For example, on ‘Get Away’ I improvised the popping noise on the pre-chorus. And in ‘One of a Kind’ I improvised the popping noise in the second verse. It sounds just like a pistol.”

  “And what did Dr. M contribute?” Delgado asked.

  “Tension, mostly.”

  Delgado smiled indulgently, and Devin thought, She likes me! Your armor is cracking, Detective.

  “He was tense!” Devin said. “I tried to keep things calm, because I’m really the peacemaker in the group. But Dr. M was always ramped up about how much time Tusk was spending in the studio, how much everything cost, how every moment we weren’t on the road was lost income. But he couldn’t help us with the songs. He didn’t know how to play an instrument, couldn’t sing, didn’t write lyrics, he couldn’t even run a soundboard. Yet he got a huge cut.”

  Delgado leaned forward, and the top of her blouse opened slightly. Her intensity was captivating.

  “So, what’s going to happen with—” She glanced down, then leaned back in her chair. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Happen with what?” Devin asked innocently.

  “The lawsuit, Devin. What’s going to happen with the lawsuit against Dr. M?”

  “I don’t know, Tusk handles all that.”

  “Don’t play dumb,” Banks said. “Hey. Look at me. Does Mrs. Bendix get her husband’s share of the rights?”

  “I suppose so. We haven’t talked about it. We’re going day by day, experience by experience, staying open to the possibilities. She said she’d help finance my passion project. Getting the rights is going to be tricky, but it’ll blow people’s minds.” He leaned forward. “Inherit the Wind,” he said. “The Musical.”

  “Wow,” said Banks.

  Devin beamed. “I’ll play the Clarence Darrow part.”

  “You plan on shaving?” Banks asked.

  “I say this with love,” Devin said. “I don’t like you.”

  Delgado said, “Was one of the possibilities you and Mrs. M getting married?”

  “What? Whoa.”

  “I’m just wondering if you’ve talked about it,” she said.

  He thought a moment. “I’m not going to rule that out, but . . . then again, she is in love with me.”

  “A marriage would give you two the majority of profits from the band,” Banks said.

  “I guess, but that’s not what our relationship is about.”

  “So now that Dr. M is dead, will you still go through with the suit?” Delgado asked.

  “I don’t know,” Devin said. “I guess that depends on Mrs. M.” A thought occurred to him. “Are you . . . do you think that I had something to do with this?”

  “One last question,” Banks said. “How good are you at climbing? It seems like it would be your thing.”

  “That’s racist,” Devin said. “And I want my lawyer.”

  Track 6: “Girl, You Take Me Higher”

  Featuring Detective Delgado

  Luce closed the door behind her. Banks started to speak and she said, “Over here.” She led him toward the stairwell.

  Banks said, “Did that asshole have a boner?”

  “Don’t worry, I was ready to spray him with the hose,” Luce said.

  “I was surprised you wanted to talk to him first,” Banks said.

  “Something about seeing him with Mrs. M, and what you said about him being a climber,” she said. “You ever read the Edgar Allan Poe story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The first locked-room mystery. It involves a baboon with a straight razor.”

  “Ooh! Are we in a locked-room mystery?”

  “We were, for about ten seconds. Then the first suspect is a guy who can jump fifteen feet, and the next one’s an ape. Now it’s just . . . weird.”

  “Science fiction, then.”

  “Oh God, I hope not.”

  “Devin would have no trouble with the physical part,” Banks said. “That guy is shredded.”

  “It doesn’t work. Devin’s room is on the other side of the hallway, and the wall is sheer glass. There’s no way he can jump balcony to balcony like Bobby, though—shit.”

  “What? You’ve got that look on your face.”

  “Let’s go see the roof.”

  They walked up another story and pushed through the crash bar. Banks held the door so it wouldn’t close behind them.

  The roof, like that of most commercial buildings in Las Vegas, was painted a brilliant white. The heat and light were intense, but at least there was a breeze. Two flags snapped in the wind: the Stars and Stripes and below it the all-but-all-blue Nevada state flag. Luce walked amongst the boxy air-conditioning units, peering closely at their sides. Everything seemed to be freshly painted.

  “You want to tell me what you’re looking for?” Banks called.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to find it.”

  She walked to the edge of the roof, looked down at the wall of glass she’d been looking up at from Devin’s balcony. It was a thirty- or forty-foot drop to the balcony. She walked to the other side and looked down at the balconies on that side: two for the penthouse, a wide one attached to the lounge, and the smaller one outside the master bedroom. To the right of that was the balcony to Bobby’s room, and then Matt’s.

  She looked back across the roof at the flagpole. It was ringed by box lights, which were off at the moment. She stepped over the ring of lights and peered at the base of the pole. Flecks of white paint lay on the black base. Two or so feet above the base, the white paint on the pole had been scraped off. The scraping traveled most of the way around the pole.

  Luce walked back to Banks and they started down. She told him what she’d seen.

  “Which means what?” he asked.

  “Someone attached a rope. Mountain-climbing gear, maybe. I could picture a metal carabiner scraping the paint.”

  “Devin climbed? I knew it.”

  “It’s possible. Sometime before the party or at the start of it, he could go up to the roof the way we did and drop the rope down to his balcony. After the party, he could climb up, cross the roof, then go down to Dr. M’s. The timing’s tight, though. The party breaks up around three. Bobby ends up in Dr. M’s room sometime after four, and somehow Devin times it perfectly?”

  “He doesn’t strike me as a criminal mastermind,” Banks said.

  “Maybe somebody’s doing the thinking for him.”

  “Detective, is that a dick joke?”

  “I meant Mrs. M. Mrs. Bendix. Whatever. An older woman, manipulating him.”

  “Double Indemnity meets Sunset Boulevard. Classic.”

  “You’ve seen Double Indemnity, but you’ve never read Poe?”

  “I was raised by a black-and-white TV. You want to talk Vincent Price in The Pit and the Pendulum, I’m your guy. What the hell happened in Alabama?”

  “Devin was caught sleeping with an underage girl—well, not underage in Alabama; she was sixteen. But the local cops arrested her, on charges of bestiality.”

  “Yikes.”

  “The cops dropped the charges and the case went away. No ruling from a judge on whether or not Devin was, well, a beast or a consenting human. I need to look into that—and everything else we’ve got on the band. We’ve got a shit ton of homework to do. I hate walking into these interviews blind, but every damn one of them is about to lawyer up.”

  “Are we going to arrest Devin?”

  “We can’t keep arresting Wyld
BoyZ, we’ll get crucified. I need to find that rope. Or we get Mrs. M to admit she was covering for him. There’s no way he could pull this off without her.”

  Luce reached the landing at the penthouse level—and nearly bumped into a man in cargo shorts. He was holding a camera with a long lens, aiming through the window in the fire door, trying to get a shot of the penthouse corridor.

  “Hey!” Luce said. “This stairwell is closed!”

  She gave him this: The paparazzo didn’t panic. He swung his camera at her and rattled off a dozen shots.

  “God damn it!” Luce said. She charged him.

  The guy turned and ran down the steps, shouting, “Sorry! Leaving! Sorry!”

  “What did I tell Patrol?” she said to Banks. “No fucking paparazzi!”

  They marched back to the penthouse suite and Luce tore the sergeant a new asshole, which made her feel better.

  Inside the suite the CSD crew were still going at it. As crime scenes went, this was an evidence-rich environment. She called over one of the techs, a white guy she’d worked with before. “After you’re done, I want you to go up on the roof and photograph the flagpole.”

  “Uh, sure.” He knew better than to fight her.

  “Also, check the edges of the roof. Look for any scrape marks. Now, where’s that CD player that was torn out of the wall?”

  He retrieved the player, which had been sealed in a large plastic bag, along with four CDs, each in its own Baggie. Luce pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

  The aluminum rails that had held the player inside its cubby were bent. The player itself was in two pieces. The five-disc tray had been pulled completely out of the machine.

  Banks was looking at the four CDs without opening the bags. “Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life,” he said. “The rest are Beastie Boys, Christopher Cross, and Indigo Girls. That’s some serious whiplash.”

  “Five-disc tray and four CDs,” Luce said. She announced to the room that she was looking for CDs and if anyone found one, especially an unmarked one, to let her know.

  “So what next?” Banks asked.

  “It’s time to interview the big guy.”