Soul Siren (19 page)

God bless America. In Canada, it’s harder than you think to get a handgun. There are rural places like out on the prairies and such where men have rifles, either for sport hunting or killing pests on their farms. But if you want a pistol, you make a written application and the Mounties, our federal police, interview you in your home. And you better have a damn good reason for wanting one. None of this “right to bear arms” shit. You
must
keep it under lock and key at home, you
must
transport it in a sealed case in the back of your car to and from the firing range. Like Britain, guns get smuggled in and sold on the black market, but the odds of getting shot in downtown Toronto are a lot less than if you were walking around Detroit or even Beverly Hills.

In a way, Luther was my unwitting accomplice for Steven Swann. He had taught me how to shoot.

He wasn’t a gun freak the way Steven was, not at all. Growing up in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, he never saw a gangbanger until he began producing. I asked him once about it, and he looked at me with this peculiar expression as if he’d just returned from Beirut.

“It’s fucking Mars, Michelle. I’m sitting in the back of a limo with Chester K and a couple of guys from Furrr, and this Audi pulls up at the stoplight next to us. All I can see is a hand in a white jacket sleeve making signs at Chester, and I can’t hear anything. Chester gets out of the car and pulls out this honking big Magnum! But the Audi rips through the stoplight and tears off before he can do anything, thank God. When he’s inside and sitting down again, I’m saying, ‘Son-of-a-bitch, man, how can you live like this?’ They’re all laughing at me, and he says, ‘Got to get the word out, dog.’ ”

Luther rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I said to him what word? And he started in on this whole thing about how this is
real life,
and I didn’t know it. I said, ‘No, Chester, real life is buying groceries and going to the park and making music if that happens to be your job. You think
real people
go around like bandits capping each other?’ He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said and told me, ‘I’m the genuine shit, Luther. I ain’t posing.’ And I told him yes, I know. I went to his label management the next day and told them I’m out. I’ll finish up Chester’s album, but don’t
ever
ask me to work with this guy again because I don’t want to be standing next to him when his head gets blown off.”

Still, Luther had purchased and registered a gun. A semiautomatic just like Steven had, only his was a Smith & Wesson, I think. And on a whim of modern chivalry, he’d insisted on teaching Erica and me how to use it because we were two single girls living alone in Manhattan. Granted, we were on the Upper East Side, but we were alone. Erica, he said, should buy herself a gun. “No fucking way!” she told him. But she couldn’t resist her morbid curiosity to experience what one felt like in her hand. Neither could I. So there were the two of us wearing those clear protection goggles like they have for surgeons and dentists, Luther standing behind each of us as we took a turn to heft the weight of the thing and squeeze off a few rounds. It sounded jarringly loud, even through the protective headphones.

The next time I saw a gun, it was Steven’s, and he was nudging it inside my pussy.

And now I had it smuggled in my handbag.

I took a breath to calm my nerves and walked over to the recording studio. I stared at him through the glass. The dimmers were on low in the room so that he was almost in shadow, and at last he looked up from the control panel and noticed me. I gave him a puckered half smile, my brow furrowed, as if to say:
all right, I did have to come back. I don’t like you, but I enjoy fucking you.
I couldn’t look too eager for him.

He smiled back at me and killed the music as I walked in. Folding his arms, he remarked, “Well, I guess it wouldn’t be very sexy of me if I played it smug.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

He paused a moment over his board, at last saying, “I knew you had fun. Let me finish up here, and then we can have a couple of drinks.”

I watched him work for a long moment.

“You expecting anyone else this evening?”

“No,” he said, his face clouding for a moment. “Why?”

“Just hoped we’d get some privacy, that’s all.”

“You have me all to yourself.”

Shoot him.
Shoot him now.

I couldn’t just yet. I felt strangely detached from my intention. I didn’t feel sorry for him or have this big attack of morality that, yes, killing was wrong. I wasn’t even nervous. I was so calm that all my outrage seemed to have drained out of me. I was too collected. Ending him would be like exterminating a pest. As bizarre as it sounds, I needed my righteous indignation back. I wanted to feel something, so I kept talking to him.

“Hey, listen,” I said. “When we were doing it the other day, and you had me strangling you…”

“Yeah?”

“Did you think about where you were? That you could die in that room?”

He shook his head, thinking I was making a joke. “No.”

“But you could have died, Steven. That would have been it.
Your spot.
In your home. And it would have been a hell of a way to go.”

“I trusted you, Mish. Wasn’t that a turn-on for you? You know, taking me to the edge and all that? My life in your hands?”

“Maybe it was a bigger turn-on for you than for me,” I suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said in a casual voice. “You can tell yourself that if you want to. If we got to play games, honey, okay, we’ll play games.”

He hit a button on the panel, and as I heard a flood of music, I took the second to dig into my handbag and release the safety.

“You’re gonna love this,” he told me.

I heard the distinctive bass line from “It Was a Pleasure to Burn.” He was weaving it into the mix of his own new single.

I couldn’t believe it. “You think Erica will let you keep permission to do that?”

“Does it matter these days?” he shot back. And then: “But the beauty of it is, I got it during the engagement! She waived royalties on the use. Oooh, oooh, check this out, it’s my idea—”

And before the bridge was an instrumental section with a strange sound. I couldn’t place it. I sat leaning against the dynamically futuristic desk he had in there for his mixer boards and equipment, my hand still touching the gun in my unzipped handbag, and the situation was absurd.
Guess that noise,
as I stood waiting for the right moment to pull out the Colt and shoot him.

“It’s this kid’s squeal in a day care run backwards,” he explained. “Sounds like a girl coming, huh? I pick up all kinds of stuff to throw in.”

He held up a palm-size Sony micro-cassette recorder, punched the play, and, yes, there was the kid in a long joyous giggle,
“Eeeeee!”
He had done an amazing job of sifting out the ambient background noise around it for the mix. He hit the play for the new track, and there was the bass and the keyboards again, plus his creation.

I shook my head at him. “You’re a real heartless bastard, you know that?”

He made a horse whinny of a laugh and fell back against his chair. “
Fuuuuck!
Gimme a break, Michelle. These rappers borrow from Sting, Phil Collins, Bruce Hornsby, who the fuck knows how many other half-buried corpses from our parents’ rock and roll, and you want to get pissy over me using a bit of Erica? Alicia Keys took classical piano, and what? You think Mozart is bitching? That’s what I’m going to do, you goofy chick! These white suburban wannabes
like
the brothers’ music.
I
like the music. I’m not going to apologise for putting my own spin on it or ‘watering it down’ or whatever you want to call it to speak to my kind. What, I’m a thief because I talk to
my
own target audience using their licks? Bullshit.”

I was captivated for a moment by his impromptu diatribe, maybe not so much by his argument but by the fact that for once, Steven was being sincerely
passionate
. He wasn’t pulling his pretty boy Zen aphorism shit, wasn’t being condescending. He actually believed.

“I love the hypocrisy, man,” he said with a wide grin. “Music is music—so goes the big politically correct chant. Except when
we
go to the well and want to pull up a bucket of African rhythms or Indian stuff or whatever the world music flavour is this month. Let Paul Simon and Malcolm McLaren burn in hell, huh?”

“That’s a nice speech,” I countered. “You’re always saying you don’t pretend to be what you’re not. And then you pull that engagement shit to look good—”

“Not this again—”

“Yes, that again.
That’s
hypocrisy.”

“No, that’s marketing,” insisted Steven. “Look, I let you in on what I only
hoped
folks would think. I can’t be sure. And I never came out with any statements about Erica’s politics or crusades or any shit. I never stuck my nose into it. People made their own conclusions about my credibility—”

“You said the album sales—”

“Hey, do you think that says something about me? Or about them?”

I couldn’t answer that one.

“What do you think they’d say about you if they found you naked with a scarf around your neck after sex?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re back to that,” he answered. “You’re talking in circles today.”

“Come on, really, what do you think they’d say?”

He stood up, his fingers drumming along the leather sleeve of the Sony tape recorder, and he reached out to stroke my cheek. “They’d say…That Steven Swann. The guy was coming and going! Get it?”

“You’re a riot,” I told him. “I wish you begged me for your life.”

“Why?” he laughed, backing up a step and glancing down at the mixer board. “Would that have made it more erotic?”

“No,” I said as I withdrew the gun from my handbag, “but maybe I would have felt something. Maybe I’d change my mind about this.”

He stared at me, his mouth slack and his eyes wide and completely bewildered. No cleverness in him at all as he faced the barrel. I fired.

It wasn’t like in the movies. There was a cannon roar in my ears, and the ugly muzzle of the thing spat flame and a tiny cloud. In a fleeting instant, Steven grew a bright red dot in his forehead and cried out, short, sharp, and without hope. Then he appeared to suddenly faint, falling to the side, hitting the control board and slumping to the floor. His right hand flew back and dropped the tape recorder, his other hand fanning out to complete the spread eagle. And all the while, Steven Swann’s voice sang inside the studio. The tiny green light indicators were like an ever-changing bar graph popping and falling with the vocals and the bass.

I paused a minute to make sure he was gone. I wasn’t interested in the ugly red and black hole I had made in his head, I watched for a change in his expression, a stirring of movement. But his face was frozen in its shock.

I had come prepared with a thick flannel cloth and a medium-size makeup pouch inside my handbag. I wiped my prints off the gun and slipped it into the pouch, zipped it closed, and as I slung my handbag over my shoulder, I realised I hadn’t even checked through the glass of the booth to make sure Steven was right, that we were alone. When I turned no one was there, and my body shook in spasms of jangled nerves.
Now get out of here,
I ordered myself. I took another flannel from my handbag and wiped the inside and outside knobs of the studio door, but I didn’t care about my prints being in the rest of the apartment. I had been a regular visitor here with Erica, no suspicion aroused by that. Best to wipe down the front door, though.

Then I was out on the street. I took a short ride on the subway, and half an hour later, I waved goodbye to the makeup pouch as it made a soft splash in the East River. No more gun. Yes, the cops would figure out that Steven’s gun was missing, and that it was probably the murder weapon, but there was no reason I should make life easier for them.

I went home, and Erica was out. I felt the need to take a shower. I liked mystery stories, and I liked cop shows, and I remembered reading that stuff from guns, powder or whatever, can contaminate the shooter. I must have stood under the hot spray for forty-five minutes, obsessively washing my arms, my hands, my face and my neck, as if I could cleanse away both Steven Swann and what I had done to him. I wondered if they’d found him by now. I wondered if it made the news yet.

I told myself I was right to do what I did. He would have ruined Erica’s career, at the very least tarnished her reputation, and he did it not even out of cruelty or revenge over her sleeping around. He targeted her like he was a goddamn plant manager needing to get rid of a few thousand workers on a factory line. She had loved him. She had opened herself so completely to him and even opened up her personal life and her feelings to the world. For him. For the likes of him.

I hated what he did to her. I hated him.

And I hated that Steven made me come.

Questions

I
don’t need
to go over how huge the fallout was from Steven’s death, do I? First the headlines and quotes from shocked friends and BSB management and then the lurid speculation about who might have killed him. The leading theory for fifteen minutes was that the murderer was a secret gay lover—probably pushed by that contingent of fans and press who cynically believe
every
celebrity’s gay and in the closet. Then there was the candlelight vigil outside the townhouse off Park Avenue, Fox News showing kids who said, “Steven’s music was about peace, man, and we can’t forget that.” As if “Skankin’ Around” had a message.

Erica hated the idea of playing the grieving fiancée. The label’s publicity department very politely and steadily kept nudging her to make a statement until I watched her explode in their offices. “I am
not
going to stand in front of a bunch of fucking cameras and cry my eyes out like, like—some beauty queen getting her crown! Steven’s dead! He’s
dead
. Do you understand that? You don’t have to patronise people by giving them a show! You think they have to
guess
how I feel?”

And her hands were balled in fists as streaks of tears poured down both cheeks. What they couldn’t get in front of a camera was wrenched out of her in this private confrontation. As she rushed out the door, I remember one executive appealing to me.

“Michelle, talk to her, will you?”

I turned on my heel and stared at the guy. “How old is your mother?”

“What?”

“You heard me,” I said. “How old is your mother?”

He actually had to think about it. “Seventy-three. Why?”

“When she dies, remind me to send a camera crew to
your
house.”

I hurried for the elevator to catch up to Erica.

I
know, I know. Who was I now? I had detached myself completely. It was another Michelle who had gone over to Steven Swann’s apartment that night and exacted a revenge for Erica’s humiliation. I swear to God that when I looked at the newspapers the morning after,
Newsday, The Post, The Times,
I felt a ripple of genuine astonishment and grief for him. As if killing him hadn’t been real and only the papers made it so. To be completely honest, I didn’t feel a pang of guilt for Erica’s desolation over his death. It struck me as a
wish
for a genuine grief, no more substantial than the zircon pain over their break-up. Maybe because we both knew that, as righteous as she sounded in that BSB office, she wasn’t about to divulge the fact that, oh, yeah, by the way, he broke up with me only a couple of days before he was shot.

Yes, I was detached, disconnected from what I had done. I couldn’t even summon impatience over Erica’s mournful sobs, bringing myself to tell her snap out of it, girl, he dumped you, he was a bad person. We don’t wish him dead, but he doesn’t deserve this many tears. (I did wish him dead, and I had made it so.) Erica cried. I held her. I held my beautiful luscious star, and I basked in the warmth of her body, I let her tears cascade down her face until they touched my lip, and I revelled in their sweet salt. There were dreadful nights when she was close to exhaustion, already in her nightie, and I came into her bedroom out of sincere concern. But as I held her close and she rocked in my arms, barely knowing me, I could feel the press of her pubic bone through her cotton underwear against my thigh. My face in her hair, her breasts crushed against my own in her grief, I felt closer to her than even in the intimacy of our sex games with Steven’s toys at his house out in Santa Fe.

After I finally coaxed her to slip back into her bed, whispering, “Sleep, Erica, come on, sleep, honey,” I went back to my room and my own en suite bathroom. I sat nervously on the sill of the tub. Shivering, gooseflesh on my arms, hot needles in my legs and feet, my panties so drenched, I was peeling them off me. It took only seconds of stimulating myself to reach orgasm. If she had kissed me, God, if she had tilted her face up, her generous breast escaping the silk the way it had so “accidentally” freed itself for Luther, and what if she wasn’t wearing underwear, if I could feel the tight curls of her wedge of fur against my skin? Erica, oh, God, Erica, if I only could comfort you the way I want to…

E
rica didn’t go to Steven’s funeral. The family organised it, and they didn’t deign to inform her where it was. His parents were called all kinds of names over this snub, including “racist” in the press, but Erica said she could understand how they didn’t want the funeral turned into a circus. “He must have told them,” I remembered her whispering in the apartment.

“Told them what?”

“That he broke it off,” she explained, her voice dead of feeling. “He must have told them it was over.”

She never raised the subject of him again. Within a week of the funeral, MTV and Fox were talking about something else, and while I heard rumours that
Vanity Fair
had assigned a reporter to delve into the shooting, even the cops weren’t knocking on the doors at Brown Skin Beats anymore. Life had to go on. The dewy-eyed girls who had made up Steven’s fan base had given him candles that burned brightly but not for very long. When it came down to it, Steven didn’t inspire any moments of pause among household strangers the way people were stunned by the plane crash that killed Aaliyah. With her, you thought, my God, too young, so much potential, an
innocent
talent. No one could ever say Steven Swann was innocent.

Steven’s death, however, prompted one significant decision in Erica’s life. She didn’t talk about it with me first. And I never saw it coming.

B
rown Skin Beats was one of those corporate cultures that loved their frills. As you walk in the marble-floored lobby, you pass a full-service cafeteria and an open plan bullpen for junior management with large aquariums of tropical fish. Somebody had ripped off this décor from the Bloomberg offices. My corner office was small but it was mine, and I also liked to take advantage of a large gym in the BSB basement. There was a room with rowing machines, stationary bikes and other equipment, plus a dance studio with a balance bar and full-size mirrors. Since Erica was my boss and I made up her schedule, which meant I pretty much made up my own, I liked to go down there in the afternoon when no one was around and do some stretches.

It was three o’ clock when I strolled into the studio, expecting to find it empty, and there she was. This tall young woman who couldn’t be much older than me on a stretching mat. Her skin was a
café au lait
shade, and I had a generous view of it as she sat in skimpy shorts, her long shapely legs in a “V.” As she sank down to press her elbows on the floor, her oversized tank top was pulled by gravity, and I saw the divide for two magnificent full breasts. Her hair was cut short, framing an oval face with lustrous dark lashes, hazel eyes and a smile of brilliant white teeth. She gave me a friendly smile as I came in.

I waved back and draped my towel over the balance bar. “I didn’t think anyone else used this space in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Did you book it for yourself? I’m new. I haven’t learned yet how things are done around here.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, and I introduced myself.

“Jill Chandler,” she replied. We shook hands.

There was an awkward pause where both of us didn’t know whether to go on talking or share the space and do our separate exercises. I decided for both. I took up a position close to her side and began doing knee bends, sinking my weight and sending my right leg back in a long stretch.

“So what are you going to be doing for BSB?” I asked politely. “You in marketing? Production?”

“I’ll work with Erica Jones.”

“Oh.” A small but insistent warning rang in my head, like those annoying alarm clocks that buzzed over and over again.

“Yeah,” she went on. “I’m going to tag along on her public appearances, go along to the concerts with her. She’s decided she needs physical therapy because the touring can exhaust you. It’s brutal.”

“Tell me about it,” I chuckled.

“You’re
that
Michelle, aren’t you? You’re her PA. Wow. Been waiting to meet you.” And then we were shaking hands again.

“Why, uh, why would you be waiting to meet me?” I laughed.

Jill went on stretching. I had stopped what I was doing, listening closely to her now, but I was very distracted by her movements. She was twisting and curling her body into the most flexible poses I’d ever seen. They resembled yoga stances, but they were somehow more energetic and suggestive.

“Oh, it’s just I heard you were really nice,” she said.

Aha. A diplomat.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye with a slightly embarrassed smile on her face. “They say you make a lot of the big decisions when it comes to her, and…I mean they did say you were nice, but I know you’re important around here. I was hoping we’d hit it off. You know, new job, first impressions.”

“Hey, I’m a kitten,” I replied. “I’m glad people told you that, umm…what
are
you doing there?”

She stood up, blowing air from her lungs with her exertion, and there was a glow on her forehead and neck now. Her perspiration had an almost sweet smell to it.

Smiling at me, she said, “It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s one of the reasons I usually duck out to use a gym all by myself. This is kind of an ancient African form of exercise and meditation, it’s uh—” She lowered her voice to a girlish whisper. “Kind of an African Tantric yoga.”

“Get out!”
I blurted, laughing. “Come on, there’s no such thing!”

“No, really,” she said.

She gave me the African name, but I couldn’t remember the multiple syllables, and then she touched me lightly on the arm for emphasis, reassuring me the art actually existed. I felt a sudden electrical charge, wondering if she was flirting with me. But my radar was never any good with women. Men were obvious. Girls were subtle and more difficult to read.

“It’s wonderful stuff,” said Jill. “You should try it sometime.”

“Hey, Sting, I’ll just watch you for now,” I joked.

She shrugged an okay and knelt down again on her mat. Then she was falling back on her knees, arching her spine until her shoulder blades touched the floor. A swan neck and such beautiful graceful arms, her thighs so toned and perfectly sculpted.

“Well, you’re just standing there staring, so you might as well get down here with me,” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“Come on, we’ll do some regular stretches. Hey, I give a real good workout.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said.

And for the next forty-five minutes, we exercised together. We gripped each other’s wrists and see-sawed forward and back with our legs spread out. We took turns holding each other gently around the waist as one of us raised a leg high. We ran in short sprinting bursts around the studio to keep ourselves pumped. I told her that was enough for me today, I was going to hit the shower. Jill still had reps to do on the weight machines, and then she’d head out for a jog down several blocks of Fifth.

“Go with God,” I panted, towelling my neck.

As she waved a goodbye at the door, saying she’d see me around, she passed Luther and traded brief hellos. Luther, wearing a tank top and sweatpants, spotted me through the glass in the door and walked into the studio.

“Hey, how you doing?”

“I’m okay,” I answered. “Made the mistake of trying to keep up with Wonder Woman there.”

“She is something. How you holding up?”

“Me?” I asked in surprise. “Why? Holding up under what?”

“Steven’s death. Everybody’s been so focussed on how Erica’s coping with it, I wondered if anyone bothered to give a damn that you were hanging with him, too. He did take you along with Erica to Santa Fe, and I got the sense you two were on good ter—”

“I’m fine, honey, I’m good. I don’t know if I could call Steven and me friends, but…”

I shrugged, wondering what else I could tell him. Typical Luther, the one guy with the thoughtfulness to remember others were affected. Being smitten with Erica never gave him blinkers. But I was at a loss to come up with anything to confide for his trouble.

“I understand,” he said, not truly understanding at all. “You kind of packed it away, haven’t you? I’ve noticed that about you. You’re so quiet, it’s like you think you’ll waste your emotions if you express them in public.” He gave me one of those sideways grins of his. “In a way, you’re the perfect fit for Erica. She’s so out there, so extroverted, she just gives it out in a tidal wave, and you, you’re…”

“A dripping tap,” I suggested.

“No…”

“A birdbath?”

“You don’t have to be so closed off about Steven, you know,” he tried again. “Especially with me. We’re friends, aren’t we, Michelle?”

“Course we are, sweetie.”

“Right. Look, it sucks. Big time. I’m not sure I completely liked the guy, but I worked for him and with him, and I respected his drive. Steven was always so go-go-go, you know what I’m saying? And in the middle of the night, even I’m sometimes so
pissed
at the son-of-a-bitch who took it all away.”

I thought I better give him a little of what he wanted to hear. “I am, too,” I said in a small voice.

“We go on,” he said, still in rallying mode. “We go on and make music and do business. I think it’s a good thing Jill’s come on board. I doubt Erica will need her that much, maybe for the odd wing nut, but she’s got the same kind of
zing,
doesn’t she? She’s really charismatic in her own way. And she seems to know how to be there for Erica without cramping her style.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about anymore. “You’ve lost me,” I said. “What do you mean ‘cramping her style’? She told me she’s Erica’s physical therapist.”

Luther’s mouth grew from a tight-lipped line to bubbling laughter. “Must be Jill’s idea of a joke.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, and I still didn’t.