Love & Death (19 page)

“When you think about it, why was she suddenly so anxious that day to put a motion detector on this tiny upstairs room that nobody even uses? I realize now that when Dylan and I failed to find Kurt’s body on Thursday as she had intended, Courtney made sure the electrician had an excuse to go up there and find the body,” Grant recalls.

He had not yet made this leap of logic at the time of his conversation with Kirkland, but, as he shares some of the suspicious information he has gathered to date, the detective is clearly uninterested. There is a “rock stars will be rock stars” weariness to his tone: “I’ve been in homicide eight years, my partner’s been in homicide thirteen years and Cameron’s been in homicide for twenty-five years, and I am firmly convinced Kurt Cobain killed himself. There is nothing there to indicate that he did not.”

The next time Grant speaks to Rosemary Carroll, she has some news: She tells him that a reporter from the
Seattle Times
is investigating the possibility that Kurt’s death might not have been a suicide, but that Dylan Carlson and Courtney had conspired to have him killed. Grant asks her whether she has the name of the reporter. She tells him that the Seattle chief of police had told this to Courtney’s Seattle attorney, Allen Draher. She said the Seattle police had apparently “pooh-poohed” the possibility. Carroll then urges Grant to contact her husband, Danny Goldberg, about their mutual misgivings over the suicide verdict. She says she wants her husband to realize that she “is not completely insane” for raising doubts about Kurt’s suicide. Grant is hesitant, saying that Goldberg is known to be very supportive of Courtney and singing her praises to the media, but Carroll is insistent, telling Grant that’s just what Goldberg “says publicly.” A few days later, Carroll calls Grant to find out how his meeting with Goldberg went.

Grant tells her that their encounter was unproductive, explaining that he couldn’t really reveal to Goldberg a lot of his strongest evidence for fear of incriminating Carroll. Citing an example, Grant says he couldn’t tell Goldberg that Carroll had given him Courtney’s Peninsula Hotel phone records as well as the “Get Arrested” note. Grant says he can understand Goldberg’s skepticism and reveals that he is also somewhat skeptical about the whole thing. The last thing he wants to do, he tells Carroll, is to create some “conspiracy theory like they did with Kennedy, and like they try to do with everybody, if it’s not there.”

Carroll asks whether Grant told her husband about some of the incongruities that she had observed about the case. She is particularly skeptical about the claim that Kurt was with Dylan when he bought the shotgun. Carroll believes Dylan concocted the story.

But Grant tells her he thinks it was a waste of time talking to Goldberg because it was obvious that Goldberg doesn’t want to hear anything Grant has to say.

Since he last talked to Carroll, Grant has hired two document examiners to analyze the unsigned note he and Dylan had found on the stairs of the Lake Washington house. Their conclusion was that Cali had written it. Grant shares his impressions with Carroll, explaining that when he picked up the note from the stairway of the Lake Washington house, he thought it sounded “phony.” Carroll concurs, telling him that she also thought the note sounded “terribly phony.”

Grant tells her it sounded like “a set-up letter,” explaining that when he found the note, he had no doubt that Cali had written it, but that it still looked strange to him. The note just didn’t make sense.

Carroll agrees. She believes it wasn’t a sincere letter and says she believes Cali wrote it because he “knew that Kurt was dead.”

They continue to talk about Cali’s potential role.

Grant believes Cali might have found Kurt’s dead body in the greenhouse and taken the credit card out of his wallet without reporting what he had found.

Carroll says she had thought exactly the same thing.

By the time of their next conversation, the
Seattle Times
had published the first article to appear in the media detailing unanswered questions about Cobain’s death. “Kurt Cobain’s death a month ago wasn’t the open-and-shut suicide case Seattle police originally indicated,” the article began, before detailing some of the inconsistencies. In this article, Dylan Carlson, asked why he didn’t look for Kurt in the greenhouse when he went searching with Grant on April 7, tells the
Times
reporter that he didn’t know there was a greenhouse above the garage.

“For all the times I’d been there, I didn’t even realize there was a room above it associated with the house,” Dylan is quoted as saying.

When Grant calls Carroll after this article is published, he tells her that Dylan had denied knowing the greenhouse was even there.

“That’s a lie,” Carroll responds.

That day, Grant calls
Times
reporter Duff Wilson to let him know what Dylan had told him about the greenhouse on April 8 after they heard Kurt’s body was found, that it was just “a dirty little room above the garage” where Kurt and Courtney stored lumber. Dylan subsequently receives a call from Wilson asking about the apparent contradiction, which prompts Dylan to call Grant. He is clearly upset. He says the article implies that Dylan was concealing something because Grant said he knew about the room above the garage.

Grant reminds him of their conversation immediately after the radio reported Kurt’s body had been found in the greenhouse. When Grant asked, “What’s the greenhouse?” Dylan had replied, “It’s the room above the garage.” To this, Grant asked Dylan why they had never looked there.

Dylan recalls the conversation and says it was because he had never “thought of it” and that he had never actually been inside the greenhouse.

Grant notes that Dylan had indeed told him that he had been up there, but that he said there was “just some stuff stored up there and that it was just a small room or something.”

Dylan’s memory refreshed, he says, “Well, yeah. I said it wasn’t part of the house.”

In fact, recalls Grant, Dylan had told him that he had once “walked around the greenhouse.”

“Yeah,” Dylan agrees.

When Dylan accuses Grant of implying to the
Times
reporter that he knew about Kurt lying dead in the greenhouse and didn’t tell anybody, Grant explains that he was simply talking about what happened after Courtney asked him to “check the greenhouse….”

Dylan denies it. Courtney didn’t say anything to him about “that place.”

Grant tells him that he had spoken to “other people” who said they were with Courtney when she asked Dylan to check the greenhouse.

Again, Dylan denies it, but Carroll sticks to her story.

“Wow! It’s obvious that they’re lying,” she says to Grant later, when he reports this conversation.

Meanwhile, the media has published a number of demonstrably false accounts of the events surrounding Kurt’s death, relying on anonymous sources, each of whom revealed new facts bolstering the idea that Kurt had committed suicide. On April 12, for example, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that after Kurt left rehab, “One report had him buying a shotgun and calling a friend to ask the best way to shoot yourself in the head.”
Esquire
reported that, before leaving rehab, he had called Courtney at the Peninsula on April 1 and told her, “No matter what happens, I want you to know you made a really good record.” In addition, a number of reports were already claiming that Kurt’s death was the result of a suicide pact between him and Courtney. On April 26, the
Globe
wrote, “Incredibly, at exactly the same time Kurt blew his brains out, police say his wife, Courtney Love, shot herself up with a toxic cocktail of heroin and Xanax.”

As Grant and Carroll discuss this array of false reports, they agree that Courtney must be leaking the false information to the media.

Carroll says it’s “amazing” that she can do this.

Was Grant convinced yet? “It’s difficult to say for sure when I finally came to the conclusion that this was a murder, and that Courtney was involved,” he recalls. “After a while, I had uncovered enough information to remove my last few doubts. Some of them will only come out in court.”

By May 8, Grant was finally ready to put Courtney on notice about his suspicions. He sent her a letter hinting for the first time at his doubts:

“I just figured Courtney would hit the roof after she received this letter,” Grant recalls.

Instead, he receives a somewhat unusual call a few days later from Courtney, who is in Ithaca, New York, at the time, staying at a Buddhist monastery. The last time he had heard from her, on April 25, she had called Grant from an Arizona “health and well-ness” detox resort called Canyon Ranch, where, she told him, she was sleeping with her old boyfriend Billy Corgan, lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. “Billy’s so nice,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? It feels right.” This call came only about two and a half weeks after Kurt died, at a time when Courtney was being portrayed in the media as a deeply grieving widow overcome with depression about Kurt’s death. The same week that she was with Corgan at Canyon Ranch,
People
magazine reported, “For now, Love is with Frances Bean in Seattle in the quiet lakefront home where Cobain died three weeks ago. ‘She’s grieving and trying to absorb everything that’s happening to her,’ says a friend. ‘She’s doing as well as can be expected, considering.’ ” Years later, after Grant’s revelation had already been widely circulated, Courtney came up with a slightly revised version about Corgan’s visit, telling a reporter from the
Chicago Tribune,
“After Kurt died, Billy came out to the Canyon Ranch and he like took care of me for a couple of days, but it wasn’t like sex. I kept trying to make him fuck me, but he wouldn’t fuck me. Everybody thinks we had something, but I was so fucking high that I would have made the maid fuck me.” Yet three months after her stay at Canyon Ranch,
Entertainment Weekly
reported, “Her friends insist that she has not used drugs since entering detox just prior to Cobain’s suicide, and she has been encouraging others in her entourage to clean up, even helping a few, including one of Frances Bean’s former nannies, get into rehab.”