Basket Case (27 page)

"Did my mom say what was for dinner? Better be macaroni and cheese or I'm not leavin' outta this room. It's Tuesday, right?"

"Monday," Juan says.

Something beeps. The kid pulls a pager out of his surfer shorts, glances at the message and snorts. "Douche bag."

"Dommie," I say.

"Kraft macaroni and cheese. Serious, man. Go tell her."

"The music on this hard drive, what kind of—if you had to describe it… "

The kid jeers. "Folk rock. Country rock. Folk country7—I dunno whatcha call it. My folks'd probably like it but not me. See, I'm strictly into a street sound."

"Ah, the street."

"Strictly."

Dommie is stashing the pellet rifle under his bed so that his parents won't find it. I can't look at Juan for fear of busting out laughing. I, too, kept a pellet gun beneath my bed when I was twelve. However, I also had a pet snake, an arrowhead collection, a homemade basketball hoop and three shelves full of books in my room. Dommie's universe exists largely inside electronic boxes; his games, his reading, his music. I wonder when he last went out to run around in the sunshine. I wonder if he owns a mitt and a bat, or if all he knows about baseball comes from chat rooms and video games.

Then I remember that my own pellet gun was employed chiefly to raise welts on the broad pimply shoulders of one Buster Walsh, a teenage neighbor who occasionally beat me up at the school bus stop. For revenge I'd climb a mossy old oak at the end of our street and snipe at Buster on his way home from wrestling practice. He'd hop around, bleating and slapping spastically at himself as if he were being dive-bombed by hornets. I'd lie low for a week or two, then nail him again when his guard was down. Plinking him was my entertainment, arguably more fiendish than Dommie's impulsive assault on an inanimate computer component. In other words, I'm not the most reliable authority on who's normal and well adjusted.

"If not macaroni then a cheeseburger," Dommie is instructing Juan. "Medium rare. Go tell her, okay? And if she asks about the bang she heard, tell her it was you or Jack that accidentally broke the PC. Okay?"

"No problem," Juan says.

"Don't worry, she won't do nuthin'."

"Thanks for your help," I tell the kid. "Have fun at the ball game."

"I'm taking a lobster net for foul balls," Dommie says brightly. "If I catch one I'm signing Mike Piazza's name and selling it for big bucks on eBay."

"Thattaboy." I flash him a thumbs-up.

Emma is worried about using Evan, but he's perfect: He looks exactly like a delivery boy, guileless and spacey. After a short strategy session I gave him twenty bucks and dispatched him to Cleo's favorite gourmet deli for subs and pasta. He should be calling from her place within the hour. Meanwhile I studiously listen to the CDs that Dommie made from the mystery hard drive.

Jimmy Stoma's unfinished opus.

The songs are in strands, but I can almost imagine how they're supposed to sound when woven together. For a fan it's strange to come upon a bare guitar track or a detached piano; free-floating background harmonies—I'm betting it's the lovely Ajax and Maria, whom I met at the funeral; or Jimmy himself taking three or four unaccompanied passes at the lyrics. Astoundingly, all those years of shrieking like a banshee with the Slut Puppies didn't shred his vocal cords. He sounds good on these recordings.

At first I wasn't looking forward to sitting through hours of raw cuts, but it's been interesting to hear the songs evolve—and instructive. On an early vocal of "Cindy's Oyster" (filed as V4oystio), Jimmy began the third verse this way:

The girl who saved her pearl for me

Showed it to the world on MTV…

Obviously a sly dig at his young bride, the former Cynthia Jane Zigler. In a subsequent version Jimmy dropped the caustic pose in favor of a leer:

The girl who saved her pearl for me

Keeps it shiny between her knees…

And by the last cut of the song (Vyoystioall), the line had been altered once more:

The girl who saved her pearl for me

Keeps it hidden in a cold black sea…

He was no Robert Zimmerman, but James Bradley Stomarti knew how to have fun with lyrics. It's the only reference to Cleo Rio that I've heard so far on any of the discs. While she might not have liked the song, I doubt she would have been moved to murder Jimmy and then Jay Burns in order to gain possession of the recording.

Yet, as young Loreal so sagely observed, it's the music business. Maybe Cleo is a paranoid, egomaniacal kook. Maybe she couldn't bear the idea of seeing a snarky column item pegging her as the inspiration for "Cindy's Oyster." Or maybe she couldn't stand the thought of her husband getting pop ink at her expense.

These theories rest on several wobbly assumptions: one, that Cleo heard the song; two, that she got the point of the song; three, that she believed Jimmy would actually finish it; and, four, that a legitimate record label would put it out.

Unfortunately, "Cindy's Oyster" is the closest thing to a motive I've found, which is to say that the story of Jimmy Stoma's death is a long way from making the newspaper.

Now the phone is ringing and I snatch at it, expecting Evan on the other end.

"Has he called in yet? Is he okay?" It's Emma, the mother hen.

"Not yet. But I'm sure he's all right."

"Jack, I don't like this. I'm coming over."

"Fine, but don't be shocked if the place is crawling with strumpets and wenches."

"I'm serious. If anything happens to him—"

"Bring whipped cream," I tell her. "And an English saddle."

Like many police departments, our sheriff's office tapes all incoming calls, even those on non-emergency lines. In Florida such tapes are a public record, which means access must be provided upon request to any member of the unwashed citizenry, including news reporters. The quality of such tapes is uniformly awful, and sure enough, Janet's alleged phone call to the Beckerville substation sounded like it came from a Ukrainian coal mine. The voice seemed to belong to a woman, but I couldn't have told you whether it was Janet Thrush, Cleo Rio or Margaret Thatcher. Between fuzz-pops and crackles the voice can be heard saying not to worry about the commotion at her house—her drunken boyfriend wigged out, nobody got hurt and things are under control.

The call came from a pay phone outside a Denny's in Coral Springs, which makes it worthless as a clue. Of course I'd hoped that the number would trace back to Jimmy's widow, but no such luck. I've been curious about what Cleo's up to, besides dodging my phone calls and blowing her record producer and meeting with her dead husband's ex-bandmates. So I figured what the hell, let's send young Evan to her condo to scope out the domestic situation. The deli bags would get him past the doorman, but then he'd be on his own. Evan said that's cool, he'd know how to play it out. Perhaps I should have let on that Cleo might be a cold-blooded murderess, but there seemed no point in making him more excited than he already was.

Not ten minutes after Emma hangs up, Evan calls from ground zero.

"Yeah, uh, this is Chuck."

We'd worked out a rough script in advance. Evan picked the name "Chuck" because he thought it fit a delivery guy.

"This run to Palmero Towers," he's saying, "you sure it was for 16-G?"

"Hi, Evan. Everything okay?"

"Well, check it again, wouldya," he goes on, '"cause the lady says she didn't call for no subs."

"Cleo's home?"

"Yeah."

"Excellent. She alone?"

"Nope."

"Here's what you do," I tell him. "Tell her your boss is checking on the order and he'll call you right back. I'll wait about five minutes, that ought to be long enough."

"Absolutely."

"Hang out. Be cool. Don't ask too many questions. But try to remember everything you see and hear."

"Hey, ma'am," I hear Evan saying to Cleo on the other end. "My boss says he'll check on this and call me back. What's the number here?"

"Five-five-five"—Cleo, impatiently in the background—"one-six-two-three. What's the problem—did you tell him we didn't order anything? Is that Lester? Let me talk to him—"

"I'm really sorry, ma'am," Evan says, smoothly cutting her off. Then, to me: "Boss, the number's 555-1623. That's right, apartment 16-G, but it ain't her order."

"You're a natural," I tell him.

Six minutes later I'm dialing Cleo's number.

"Chuck here," Evan answers.

"Still cool?"

"Yep." Keeping his voice low. "She got a long-distance call on another line."

"When she gets off, tell her they screwed up. Tell her the order was supposed to be delivered to 16-G instead."

"But now she wants to keep it."

"What?"

"Yeah, she got a whiff of the meatball sub and it made her hungry. What do I do, man? She gave me a fifty."

"Hell, give her the food."

"Sure?"

"Evan, what would a real deli boy do?"

"Guess you're right."

"And don't forget to ask for an autograph."

"Done," he says.

"Fantastic."

Some things they don't teach in journalism school.

Emma's on her way over, and I'm thinking about the last time I slept with a woman. It was the last Friday in March, five months ago, though it seems longer. Karen from the county morgue. She works for my friend Pete, one of the medical examiners. Lovely Karen Penski; we went out four or five times. She was straw blond and nearly as tall as I am—a serious long-distance runner. Age thirty-six, the same as Marilyn Monroe when she died. Also: Bob Marley. Karen couldn't have cared less. She took no stock in fate, karma or black irony. Every morning she saw death on a slab; to her it was just work product.

We met over the phone when I called the morgue for cause-of-death on a Florida state senator named Billie Hubert, whose obituary I was composing. A famous yellow-dog Democrat, Billie had exited this mortal realm at the same age (seventy) and in the same manner as Nelson Rockefeller, a famous moderate Republican—that is to say, porking a woman who was not his legal spouse. And, like Rockefeller's lover, Billie Hubert's companion hastily had attempted to re-dress him post mortem, with comical results. The owner of the motel, not unacquainted with the local vice patrol, offered no theories as to how the dead man in Room 17 had gotten his left shoe on his right foot, and vice versa.

The news story, carrying Griffin's byline, was plenty tawdry enough to make the front page. My chore was the day-after obit, which was to be mildly worded and played solemnly inside the newspaper. The only reporting left was to nail down the medical reason for Senator Billie Hubert's demise, which the autopsy revealed as an aortic aneurism. This fact came from the lovely Karen, who was also kind enough to mention that Billie's right arm bore the explicit scarlet image of a horned vixen riding a pitchfork—a magnificent detail I could not in good conscience omit from the obituary. That, and the squalid setting in which the senator passed on, somewhat diminished his standing with the Christian Coalition, whose members conveyed their disappointment in him (and in the Union-Register) via multiple mass e-mailings.

Two days after the obit was published, Karen and I met for drinks. Right away she sized up my problem, and offered to bring me to the morgue for "immersion therapy," which I declined. She said that being among laid-out corpses would help to "demystify" death. I explained that I wasn't troubled by the mystery of it so much as the finality. Nothing to be seen in an autopsy room, short of a spontaneous resurrection, could alleviate my concern about that.

I persuaded myself I was attracted to Karen because of her lanky athletic figure and quick sense of humor, but in truth it was the dark nature of her work that intrigued me—transcribing the narrated observations of Pete and the other dissecting pathologists. I couldn't imagine how she slept at night, her skull buzzing with such gory entries. She insisted the morgue job was the best she'd ever had, owing to the lack of customer complaints. And I must say she was, if not totally carefree, a vivacious and upbeat spirit. Heaven knows she enjoyed sex, which gave us at least one thing in common.

The last time we made love, the aforementioned Friday in March, we first ate dinner at a seafood house on the Jupiter Inlet. I remember nothing of the meal or the conversation, which means the evening must have gone well. Afterwards we took A1A all the way back to my apartment, where the CD deck happened to kick off with Exile on Main Street. This elicited a groan of disapproval from Karen, who had already stripped down to a sheer bra and panties. An untimely discussion of musical preferences followed, resulting in my grumpy capitulation. The Stones were replaced with Natalie Merchant, who is splendid unless you're in the mood for "Ventilator Blues," which I was.

Needless to say, the sex was less than transcendental for both of us. I carry a crystal recollection of Karen on top, grinding rather listlessly to some fluttery love ballad while I fumed beneath her, yearning for a backbeat. Her faked orgasm was so unconvincing that I mistook the feeble shudder as a delayed gastric response to the conch fritters, which had been criminally overseasoned. It was a dispiriting end to the relationship, and put lust at a distance for some time.