Finding Abbey Road (3 page)

Caleb and I get out. “Good luck,” says Ari ominously, and with a squeal of tires he's gone.

11:51 a.m.

It's a brilliant day, cloudless and cooler here at the beach. Light curls of mist dance over the pounding surf. A bracing,
salty breeze rustles our hair and clothes. Caleb and I hold hands and make our way through the slow plod of tourists who are either meandering from one trinket shop to another, or lining up for the rides.

“Remember that thing Vic said?” I say to Caleb. “That Eli was staying at Jerrod's house for a while before Allegiance took off?”

He nods but is otherwise silent. Trapped in his own head. A prisoner once again, as other people change his world, over and over, completely out of his control.

We reach the end of the pier. Couples and families pose with the teal ocean behind them. I look around for Jerrod, barely knowing what he looks like.

A short set of warped wooden stairs leads down to a lower level, where fishermen cast their lines.

“There,” says Caleb, pointing to one tall, bulky figure standing alone, leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette.

We walk slowly down the steps.

“Mr. Fletcher?” I say, wondering why I'm speaking to him like a parent or teacher but some polite instinct kicking in anyway.

He glances at us, his face impassive. “Hi, Caleb. Hi, Summer.” He turns back to the water. We join him leaning against the railing. For a second we just stand there, like tourists taking in the scenery.

Jerrod is in his fifties and looks the part of a successful
LA businessman: salt-and-pepper hair that's expertly windblown, still-youthful face but with deep lines around his eyes, short-sleeve button-down shirt with a pastel plaid print, khakis. The sandals are the big clue that he's not only successful, he's rich. There is no longer a need to impress anyone with footwear. They're probably still five-hundred-dollar sandals, but whatever.

I'm wound tight, but with each deep breath of the salty air, I also feel something free-falling inside that may actually be relief. Given our location, I understand that we have reached the end of at least one long lie. I grip Caleb's hand.

Jerrod takes a drag from his cigarette. Still not speaking.

Foamy swells plunk against the pylons below us. An older couple snipes in another language, maybe about fishing techniques, who knows.

“He left his wallet right here,” Jerrod finally says, tapping the railing. “Along with an empty pint bottle of bourbon. There were about ten people scattered around who saw him climb up on the railing and dive out of sight.”

Jerrod flicks his cigarette butt out into the water. “It was after dark, with a decent bank of fog. He was lost from sight pretty quick. A few eyewitnesses kept looking for him, waiting for him to surface, or call out for help . . . but he didn't. And just like that . . .” Jerrod snaps his fingers. “Eli White was gone.”

I don't know what to say. Neither does Caleb.

Jerrod motions to the undulating water. “It's harder than you'd think to swim in those waves. Currents are tricky out there, too.”

I look at all the blue. I've always been a fine swimmer but a tentative one. I have what I think is a pretty rational fear of drowning, and also of sharks and krakens.

“But not for a medal-winning swimmer,” I say cautiously.

Jerrod nods. “A medal-winning JV swimmer, who quit after freshman year and never competed in a varsity meet. The early nineties were just primitive enough, internet-wise, that a fact like that never quite surfaced when Eli died. People like Charity and Randy knew, but for them it only enhanced the narrative: that Eli was strong enough a swimmer to try something stupid like this, especially while he was drunk and high, except this time he got in over his head. . . . So goes the cautionary tale.”

“So you helped him,” I say. “Fake his death.”

Jerrod shrugs, which seems to be an admission. He stays silent, almost like he's not going to say any more . . . but then:

“It wasn't premeditated. Well, not really. If it had been, I'm sure we would have realized it was a crazy idea. The amount of work it's taken ever since, paying people to comb websites, to scrub away mentions of conspiracy theories or the lack of a body, most of all to manage the money. . . . But maybe we knew
that. Knew it was crazy, and that's why we didn't wait. . . .”

Jerrod takes off his sunglasses, squints in the reflection off the water, and puts them back on. “I was young. We both were. Not that much older than you. And I think we just thought everything would work out. I figured there was nothing in this world that couldn't be fixed. Maybe you feel that way sometimes.”

“Not anymore,” says Caleb.

“The point is, you look at the big choices you have to make, and you think you can see the two possible outcomes. But what you can't see are the outcomes beyond that. You have no idea how far the repercussions really go.”

Jerrod pulls another cigarette from his pocket, along with a lighter, and lights up. “That's like, chaos theory, butterflies in China, or something?” He waves the cigarette at the water. “Anyway, we had no idea . . .”

He's being cryptic and it's annoying, but I feel like we need to let him go at his pace. After all, he's admitting to crimes here. I wish I'd thought to have my phone recording. A real gumshoe would be getting this on tape.

“Why did you do it?” Caleb asks.

“It was the money, mainly,” says Jerrod. “You and your band mates are probably still doing all this for the art and the glory. But the first time you see your dream in dollars, it changes everything.”

“We have some experience with that,” I say, “thanks to you.”

“Right. That offer probably threw you guys for a loop.”

“Yeah,” says Caleb.

“It's heartbreaking to watch bands erode,” says Jerrod, “to see the bonds formed over a love of music get torn apart by bickering. You end up fighting about such stupid things: who gets the credit, who will potentially get the earnings on future success that may or may not ever happen. It killed me to watch Allegiance fall apart, to watch them eat each other alive. Eli most of all. But there was no way to stop it. Eli had his own problems that kept making the whole situation worse. He was looking for a way out. . . .”

“So . . . ,” says Caleb, “you're saying that Eli really was thinking about suicide?”

“He couldn't see any other option,” says Jerrod. “He thought death could be a reset button. Death also has a convenient way of defusing people's anger. Does the same for legal disputes.”

“You said it wasn't premeditated,” I point out, “but this sounds pretty well thought-out.”

Jerrod shakes his head. “It was news to me, that night. I mean I should have guessed it. Eli suffered a lot. Depression, addiction, on top of all the band drama. He was always a deeply emotional person. The drugs and the missteps were a response to the way the noise of the world wore him down, rubbed him raw. . . . In a way, it was inevitable that he would try to silence it all.”

“So you decided to help him.”

“I decided to
save
him. But never before that night at my party.” Jerrod makes a face that's either relieved or hurt. Maybe both. It's hard enough to tell what people my own age are thinking, never mind these cryptic adult faces.

“What exactly happened?” Caleb asks.

“I'm getting there,” Jerrod says. At least he knows he's been beating around the bush. I wonder if we are the first people he's ever told this to.

“Eli and I were great friends,” Jerrod continues. “After he ditched out on the band, he shacked up with Melanie in New York. I was the one who got him out of there. I sent him to London, to a rehab facility. He was there for a few weeks, that summer before he died. Got cleaned up for real. Meanwhile, the rest of Allegiance was lawyering up to sue him.

“When he came back to LA that September, he said he was seeing things clearly for the first time. He wanted to make peace with the band, settle the debts, and move on. But almost the second he landed, Kellen and the guys hit him with their lawsuit. They'd built a case to take him for way more than just the tour money he thought he owed them. They wanted all his future royalties on their music, and they wanted those last three songs he'd been holding back for
Into the Ever & After
. They said, and they were right, that until Eli turned over those three songs, he still belonged to Candy Shell. But there was no way Eli was giving them up. He denied they were even written, but we all knew better.

“So, that last night, he came to my house party, same night as Trial by Fire, as fate would have it. He made one last attempt at talking Kellen out of the lawsuit, but Kellen wouldn't listen. He wanted those last songs or there was no deal.”

“But Eli had already hidden them, by then,” I say, “for Caleb to find.”

“Apparently. He never even admitted to
me
they were real, and I was his best friend, his only friend at that point.”

“So you didn't know about these tapes?”

Jerrod shook his head. “Not until you started finding them. After you found the first one, I realized that Eli's old guitar case might be part of his plan. He'd asked me to give that to you, Caleb, when you were older, or if you ever came asking about him. To be honest I'd completely forgotten about it until Kellen and Jason explained to me what they thought you guys were up to. That's why I sent it along.” Jerrod sighs. “It was so weird to see Eli on that tape you gave Kellen, sitting there in that bathroom . . . like seeing a ghost.”

“Yeah,” Caleb agreed quietly.

“I was at the Hollywood Bowl show, when he made that first tape. . . .” Jerrod loses himself in the waves for a second. “Anyway, that night at my party, things got heated. I didn't want there to be a brawl, so I pulled Eli up to my office. He was freaking out. In the biggest panic I'd ever seen. The lawsuit was going to bankrupt him, and it was
going to take all the money he wanted to go to you.” Jerrod pointed his cigarette at Caleb. “Then he tells me he's got a plan. The only thing he can think of. That he's been making preparations all week, and now he's got one last step. He's getting dark as he says this and suddenly I know where it's going.

“He holds up a fresh supply of heroin and a pint of bourbon. Says he's going to go down to the beach. Drink up, take a monster hit, and then swim away into the darkness. Once he's gone, he wanted me to talk Kellen and the guys out of the suit, to let it go out of pity, let his money go to you and your mom.”

Caleb sighs quietly. I put my arm around him.

“He thought it was the only way out,” says Jerrod, “the best way, for everyone. I told him he wasn't thinking clearly. We argued about it, but he wouldn't listen . . . and then suddenly the idea hit me. Maybe Eli was right. Maybe death was the right thing. Maybe it would work . . . if we set it up just right.”

Jerrold takes a long drag from his cigarette. He's silent for a minute.

“So he was actually sober when he came down here,” I say.

“He had his passport on him . . . ,” says Jerrod. “I could see the fog on the water from my office. I called a guy I used for chartering yachts when we needed to show clients a good time. I knew he could be trusted: he'd seen
rock stars and celebrities at their worst.

“And then I gave Eli a ziplock bag for his passport, and a couple hundred bucks in cash. I told him to act drunk and high on his way out. To make a scene. Even throw a punch at Kellen, which he was all too happy to do. Then drive to the pier, and make it look desperate. Car unlocked, spilled liquor on the seat . . . wallet and booze left behind. After he was gone, I took his stash of heroin and laid it out in the bathroom like he'd just used.

“And Eli played his part. He left my house in a perfect wasted, slurring, storming-out scene. Everybody saw it. Then he came right to this very spot and swam right out of his life. The boat was waiting offshore. I booked him on a red-eye to London. This was long before 9/11 and there weren't the same kind of records and scrutiny like now, not that anyone thought to look afterward.”

“What about his body?” I ask.

Jerrod waves to the water. “He dove in with his clothes on, even his boots. Once he'd swam a little ways, he took them off—I had the captain bring a change of clothes—but it would be easy to believe that the clothes and boots would have kept him under. These currents stretch to Mexico. Lots of sharks out there. That part was easy. The trickier part was keeping that detail, the lack of a body, out of the coverage the followed, and the websites that would come along later. But there's people you can pay to keep track of such things, to erase details covertly, to conveniently delete
pages. Probably wouldn't have been possible in today's world, but back then. . . . We nipped it in the bud. And at the end of the day, any conspiracy theory had to go against all of Eli's behavior leading up to that night. It's not like he was Kurt Cobain, with the suicide letter and those photos from the scene. He wasn't that famous anyway. And even back then, news cycles changed pretty quick.

“Once the world thought he was dead, I talked the band down. Instead of the lawsuit, Eli's assets and royalties went into accounts for you, and later your sister. Charity's been able to keep you in Mount Hope with that.”

Caleb is lost in the waves, listening to this. All I can do is rub his back and press on. “So then what?”

“Then that's it,” says Jerrod. “Eli promised to stay off the grid. He kept his word. He's been living under a fake name, I think. I was never in touch with him again directly until last week, when I arranged the meeting in New York. That was probably a mistake. Everything's at risk now. But . . . I knew how much you'd want to see him. That on some level, it wasn't fair that you never got to know him. I'm sorry it didn't work out.”