Soul Siren (26 page)

“You want me to trust you, but you won’t tell me what went on in London. You’d rather tell Michelle. You’re great pals with her—”

“I
know
you can’t be jealous of Michelle, Erica. Come on, she’s—”

“She’s my best friend,” Erica cut through him. “That’s not what I’m saying. You’re punishing me. That’s what it is. I
know
you wrote music in London, Luther. You wrote to me about it, but you won’t play it for me. You think I don’t have my own contacts in London? They say it’s great, and then ask me, well, haven’t you heard it, girl? And I’m on the other end of the phone, sounding like a fool, saying no, he won’t let me see the charts, won’t play—”

“And what collateral are you going to put up, Erica?
No.
You won’t do it. Still playing it safe.”

“Get out,” she barked at him.

She turned to face him, still defiantly nude, tears running down her cheeks. “Go home, Luther.”

“I’m in love with you.”

“Get out!”

She took one skittish step back, thinking he might reach for her again, and she wouldn’t be able to stop herself this time. For a moment, I wondered if Luther would try. He only had two choices. Gather her up or walk out the door.

He invented a third option. He knew one of them had to bridge the gap of trust, and he walked over to the baby grand and sat down. He would play, making love to her this way if he couldn’t touch her with his hands. Two seconds before they reached out to touch the keys, her voice was ready to slam the lid down on his fingers.

“It’s too late.”

But of course, it wasn’t. He began to play the songs he wrote in London—snatches of them, opening bars of a couple and bridges of a couple more. I don’t mean to over-blow this, but you have to imagine how privileged I was, getting the chance, not just once, but several times, to hear virgin creations of Erica, Luther, a couple of other major names. What would it feel like? If you were in a room when Elton John casually played for you the notes of “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”? Or somebody had a guitar and played those signature chords of Peter Gabriel’s “Solisbury Hill” that make you recognise it right away? Or if you were in the room with Quincy Jones when he worked with Michael Jackson? I was down a hall, supposedly asleep, as Luther Banks played the opening of “Resurrect Me” for an audience of one, this woman he loved equal to his art. He played her what became his classic, “Brixton 2
AM
.”

Get out, she’d told him, and now she was a statue, riveted by his compositions. On the monitor, I saw her eyes shine with an epiphany. I covered my mouth with my hand, struggling, too, with my feelings. It wasn’t only because of Luther’s beautiful music, it was the revelation of how he had created it. He wasn’t Morgan playing it safe. He wasn’t Steven sampling and copying her. The songs were original, yet you can hear Erica’s influence in them. I shuddered in my hiding place because I had killed for her, but he made Erica children of notes and chords. She had become an air bubble in his veins, but once it was extinguished by her callousness, he lived again, clean, whole. Every melody was a soundtrack for days of introspection, for the shit he had seen in Hackney, in Lewisham, and, at last, for a grief over her absence in his life, an absence he had forced on himself. They were songs as good as any she had written.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

He didn’t acknowledge this. He kept playing. And she listened.

She listened as I held back my tears down the hall. Her eyes were opened that night. You see, she didn’t fall in love with him because she’d found her creative equal or soul mate—it was richer than that, oh, yes, far richer. Erica had been looking for inspiration all this time in her flings, searching for a man to be her muse. And now she found this gorgeous man who embodied something higher, who took creative sustenance from her and used his own palette. His music said we want to be made better than our normal selves through intimacy and company with our beloved, and for a creative person, to do your work and then discover you’ve provoked a rich tapestry of musical feedback…Joy.

I couldn’t resent Luther in that powerful moment. I was a pedestrian mortal with a stash of high school notebooks full of scribbles and half-finished novel drafts. I had never written anything close to being as good as those songs. Hell, I had never finished a try at a novel. Even if I could, Luther’s playing was a reminder that a page of words couldn’t express a feeling so accurately, so
directly
as a few bars on a piano. Maybe that was why I never finished those stillborn books. Not only because I loved her but because of this simple truth: she made it easy, my abdication from my own creativity.

In my own soft, quiet way, I had competed with Steven and the others for Erica in terms of generosity, attentiveness, loyalty—I thought of her as my reward for being a good person. No one,
no one,
until now had ever assumed that Erica Jones could be incomplete emotionally in terms of the music. Because she was so gifted. But Luther understood. Oh, God, yes, we want to be more than what we are. And as he played on, I knew that love isn’t a slow ballad. It’s the exhilaration of the anthem.

I didn’t resent him that night. That came later.

She interrupted his playing, lifting his hand to her cheek. “Oh, Jesus, baby, it’s taken me so long to find you…”

“Do you want these?” he whispered to her. He didn’t ask:
Do you love me?
They were the same question.

Crying now, his thumbs wiping away her new tears, her voice cracking with feeling as she nodded and said, “I want…I want more than having them…for you to…I want you to make an album out of them,
your
album…”

“All right then,” he said.

“Okay.”

Their foreheads dipped and touched, and then they were kissing again passionately, deeply. Erica’s fingers on his face, his neck, Luther running his hands through her hair. She took him by the hand and led him away. In the sun room, I punched up the monitor for her bedroom. The only reason there was a digital camera in there was the short balcony off the sliding doors, but it took in the entire room.

They were away from the bed, but I could see their reflection in the full-length antique mirror near the vanity table. I heard Erica say
I made you suffer,
and Luther denying it. Erica saying,
Take me.
Luther shedding his trousers as quickly as he could to penetrate her from behind once more. She gripped the ends of the oval mirror as Luther slammed into her, thrusting harder and harder, and I watched the ripple of her ass cheeks with his momentum, the jiggle of her tits. She and Luther captivated by the reflection of their raw need.

In the sun room, I tilted my chair back and perched the soles of my bare feet on the sill of the desk. My eyes were glued to the screen as I slipped my panties off, already drenched, my inner thighs wet with my lubrication, one finger anxiously stroking my clitoris. So beautiful, so beautiful when you make love, darling…

Wishing they’d retreat to the bed, and they did, Luther stripping off his shirt to reveal his well-developed physique, shadows of abs and chunks of muscle on his forearms and biceps from years of his feverish, happy percussion, his legs almost feminine in their perfect shapeliness, smooth and strong. I felt a confusing mixture of arousal, Luther’s balls in a ripe sack of hanging grapes, his ten inches of throbbing penis a dark spear, and I’d thought only one man could reach me, Steven, because of his psych games and his pretty boy androgyny, and yet here was Luther…My mind flashed on the gun barrel nudging into my pussy back in Steven’s house, and I felt a quake in my legs. Erica lay on the bed, opening her legs invitingly, and the dim light of the windows picked up the slickness under her bush.

I had a zoom-in function on the camera.

Erica pounced on Luther as he came over, her thick lips smacking and slurping as she took him into her mouth. I could see the veins like forks of lightning along his girth, and, oh, to have that mouth on me. To have those fingers that played with his balls, cupping them delicately. Erica delighting as always in her own prowess when she gave head. Jerking him with her hand to bring him to a froth, sucking now on just the crimson tip, and he couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could I. But they moved too fast for the camera, and it was a blur, my hand darting to the control panel to zoom out and see them. Luther pushing her down on the bed and hooking his arms under her legs, settling his cock between her pussy lips to float there in heaven on a membrane of her juices for a moment before he greedily thrust himself in.

“Make me come!” Erica cried out. “Make me come, honey!”

Luther thrusting in and out of her, Erica feeling her own tits as she lay there, her eyes closing and opening as the shadows played with the flex of muscles in Luther’s ass.

“I…need…you…”

Me. In the little room, rubbing my flushed breast that had popped out of my brassiere and shoving a nervous finger into my vagina, catching sight of my tortured expression in the black glass of a dead monitor on the side, the cords in my neck taut. I wished Jill were here, Jill tapping one of her magical secret pressure points to send me over the edge, but what I really wanted was down the hall, and, Jesus God, I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you so bad, honey, all this time, while on the monitor Luther was in my place with his dick inside her, prompting her hands to clutch the blades of his shoulders in frantic claps, Erica pumping her hips for
him
as she let out her banshee scream of “So good, so good, fuck me, darling, fuck me!”

“I love you, baby,” Luther rasped. “Always loved you—”

“So good, so good—”

Watching her. On the monitor. Always so beautiful, I thought.

“I need you…”

Their passion so raw, so animalistic. Different from Luther with Jill, different from Erica with all her other guys, throwing herself into lovemaking with her usual abandon, but there was something more this time as she bit into his shoulder to urge him on and came in a sob, in a piteous, child-like wail. For
him
. And as I felt my orgasm shudder through me in my miserable loneliness of the sun room, my mind struggled with the new truth as naked as their sweaty bodies, the truth that was rolled out in strings of notes for Luther’s compositions. She will love
him
. Steven had dazzled her, but it was a genuine article this time. God damn it,
she loves him
.

T
wo days later, Jill called and asked me to come down and meet her at Morgan’s apartment. I asked her what for, but she said she’d better explain when I got there. A bored uniformed police officer waved me into the building when I offered my name, and another cop waited just outside the freight elevator as I came up. Jill was alone behind a string of yellow caution tape. She always said she had pull with New York’s finest, but this was impressive. I thought they only let civilians into crime scenes in the movies, but there she was, nosing around. She watched me as I pulled back the wooden slat door, and I had the presence of mind to hesitate before stepping off. Better make it look good. Subtle shock is best. My heels creaked with slow steps along the floor boards, as if I were entering a cathedral.
God, this is where it happened,
I wanted to show on my face, this is where our poor friend fell.

“Hi,” I said almost under my breath.

“Hi,” she said simply.

I reached out my arms, needing an embrace. She hugged me back, and I could tell her eyes were darting to the uniformed cop in the corner. I couldn’t push for any more overt sign of affection between us. I squeezed her hand, one last small reminder we had been lovers. A telepathic demand of: please, no more of your amateur sleuth third degree.

“Jesus, Jill, why’d you bring me down here?” A soft cry caught in my throat as I saw the tape outline for Morgan’s body.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “You’re the strongest, I think, in some ways. Erica’s a wreck, and the label people don’t know him, and Luther had to go to LA on business—”

“Luther’s here in New York,” I said. “He’s been back about a week.” Which was true.

She looked blankly at me. “Oh. I haven’t heard from him, so I just assumed…”

I gave her a look. Considering how she imitated Erica in doing her wham-bam-thank-you-sirs, did she expect a sunny invitation from Luther for brunch?

Then I stared at the white tape outline.

“I don’t know if I can stay in this room,” I told her.

“Take it easy. Look, I called you down here because I needed someone I could trust, someone who knew him. Do you know where Morgan would have kept his valuables, anything he wanted to protect with his life?”

I shook my head in astonished confusion. “But…didn’t whoever did this to him already clean him out?” I gestured to the open drawers way off near his bed, the head of Beethoven I knocked over to make it look like a struggle. “You think they missed something? I mean, what could Morgan have worth stealing anyway? Look how he lived.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Jill, folding her arms.

“I am?”

“Yeah. Blood doesn’t lie. And in this case, the evidence at the crime scene suggests somebody came here with a specific purpose.” She shrugged. “The cops know this kind of stuff in a matter of hours.”

“How do they, um, figure that out?”

“You sure you want me to talk about this?” she asked. “I mean, the guy was your friend, and this stuff often strikes people as a bit morbid or ghoulish.”

“Jill, you had me come down here,” I said impatiently. “Just…go ahead and tell me.”

“There’s a whole area of study around blood stains and drops. These forensics guys can actually figure out an angle of impact with blunt trauma using a trigonometry formula. Doesn’t matter how far the blood’s travelled. You take the width of a spot, divide by its length and you get the impact angle.”

“Fascinating,” I said in a monotone.

“What I’m saying is, from the blood stains and cast-off blood drips on the nearby furniture, they’ve figured out a bit of the physical profile of our killer.”