The Rock 'N Roll Detective's Greatest Hits - a Spike Berenger Anthology (8 page)

The two men filled out the paperwork, declared they had no weapons, and were admitted into a room manned by three guards. A couple of prisoners sat at separate tables, speaking to their respective lawyers. Another was having a tearful reunion with his mother.

Berenger and Patterson sat at the only empty table and waited five minutes before the steel door at the end of the room squealed and opened. An officer led Adrian Duncan, dressed in standard issue prison overalls, to the table. Berenger noted that he appeared tired and defeated.

“How are you, Adrian?” Patterson asked.

“Okay,” Duncan replied. He looked at Berenger and wrinkled his brow.

“Adrian, this is Spike Berenger,” Patterson said. “He’s a private investigator that we’ve hired to help us with your case.”

Berenger leaned over the table to shake Duncan’s hand.

“I know you, don’t I?” Duncan asked.

“We met many years ago,” Berenger answered. “In the eighties.”

“Yeah, I remember. Weren’t you a manager for a band or something?”

“Back then, yeah.”

“How are they treating you?” Patterson asked.

Duncan shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m pretty much alone all the time. I’m going stir crazy, to tell you the truth. There’s one guard that’s a real prick, but he’s that way to everybody.” He looked out the barred window onto a field, where teams of bulky African-American and Hispanic inmates played ball. “At least I don’t have to go out there with them.”

“We’ve made the motion for a speedy trial,” Patterson said. “I’m sorry about the bail thing, it’s just the way the DA wants to play it. Besides, you do realize you’re safer here than anywhere else?”

Duncan barely nodded his head. “There are even some Flame fans in
here
that would like to get their hands on me.” He slumped in his chair and sighed.

“Mister Berenger would like to ask you some questions. All right?”

Duncan rolled his eyes and said, “Sure. I don’t know what good it’ll do.”

Berenger had always possessed fairly good intuition when it came to interrogating suspects but he had to be face to face with them.

“Adrian, I’d like you to look at me,” he said.

Duncan glanced up. “Yeah?”

“Tell me the truth. Did you kill your father?”

Duncan frowned. “Fuck no.” He looked at Patterson and said, “What the hell is this? You bring this guy in here to ask me that? You’re my lawyer, you’re supposed to believe I’m innocent.”

Berenger answered, “Adrian, I had to ask you before I begin, it’s just the way I work. Chill out. I’m here to help you.”

Duncan waved at him, indicating that he was ready to continue.

“Why do you think the police suspected you?” Berenger asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“I want to hear what
you
think.”

Duncan looked away and mumbled something.

“Excuse me?” Berenger asked. He was sure that the young man had cursed at him.

“Nothing,” Duncan said. “Look, what’s the use? They’ve got their evidence and they’re gonna crucify me because it’s convenient for them. I mean, I understand why they picked me. I was the
obvious
suspect, you know? Everyone knew my father and I hated each other.”

“Adrian, your mother asked me to help,” Berenger said. “I know this is a shitty place to be and I know you feel persecuted. But really, if you talk to me you’ll go a long way toward helping yourself get the hell out of here. It’s up to you. If you want to stay here and rot, be my guest.”

Duncan was quiet for a moment as all this sunk in. Finally, he looked at Berenger and asked, “What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about the relationship between you and your father. Whatever comes to mind.”

The prisoner reflected on this and said, “When I think of my father, all I remember are the fights. We were fighting since I crawled out of the crib. He hated me. He didn’t like me because he didn’t like my mother anymore. I don’t think he ever
once
told me he loved me, or anything like that. Ever. Even when I was a kid. He never supported anything I ever did. He never came to the school for parent/teacher talks, he never saw me perform in the band, he didn’t want me to become a musician… The man is a first class bastard. Er, he was.”

There wasn’t much Berenger could say to that. “Tell me about the night of the murder. I know you’ve told the cops, you told Mister Patterson here, now please tell me. I need to hear it from you.”

“My mother was in town from LA. My dad was playing his final show of the current tour at the Beacon Theater and his manager sent me a couple of tickets.”

“Al Patton?”

“Yeah, him. He’s a real piece of work, that guy. What an asshole. Anyway, I think he always had the hots for my mom, and he knew she was in town or something. So he sent over a couple of tickets and backstage passes. I didn’t want to go but mom thought we should act like we cared. So we went. What a mistake that was.”

“What happened at the theater?”

“Well, we got there early and went backstage. Dad had finished sound check and was in his dressing room with that weird girlfriend of his, Brenda. She made some excuse to leave us all alone for a big family reunion, you know, so it was just mom, dad, and me. So he talks to mom about what she’s doing in LA and all, and he seems pretty friendly. But he doesn’t even look at me. When I try to talk to him he just changes the subject, like I’m some kind of bug. Finally mom picked up on what was going on and she told him to please talk to me. She stepped out of the room so dad and I were alone.

“I asked him for the second or third time if he would do me a favor, a father to son thing, you know? There’s this album he recorded in the seventies that he never released. I thought if he’d give me the rights to it, I could remix it, you know, as a kind of techno-dance thing. I could produce it and release it myself. It would be just the thing to get me started as a record producer. Hell, it would probably set up my mom and me for the rest of our lives. But no, his response was the same as it always was. Back in, what, 1987, I think, I asked him to help me get a record deal for my own band. He wouldn’t do it. He kept saying if I was going to play music, I had to do it on my own. And I knew that. Hell, I was really young then, but I knew I had to
make
it on my own, on the strength of my own material. But he could have at the very
least
helped me a little. He could have made a phone call or two. He could have put in a good word here or there. Hell, he’s so goddamn rich that he could have paid for the studio time and never batted an eye. You know, as a
gift
. But he didn’t do it. I ended up spending my entire life’s savings to make that record, do you remember it? It came out in 1989.”

“I do,” Berenger said. He could see that Duncan was in denial about the album. It had not been a good one. It suffered the same fate as the products made by many other famous rock stars’ children—they were always unfavorably compared to the parents’ work.

“Anyway, we practically got into a fist fight there in the dressing room. He started yelling at me to get off my ass, stop being a lazy bum, that kind of shit. As if he had any idea what I do every day.”

“Then what happened?”

“So I left the dressing room. I found my mom and wanted to leave, but she insisted that we stay for the show. So we did. And I really,
really
hate the crap he’s doing now—damn, I keep thinking the bastard’s still alive—I mean what he was doing before he… you know.”

“You mean the religious music?”

“Yeah. What garbage.”

“So you stayed for the show and then what?”

“Mom and I went to the Meet ‘n’ Greet. I refused to talk to him. He was surrounded by those weird Messenger freaks. Finally, when even my mom couldn’t get near him, we left.”

Berenger nodded and then asked, “Okay, now what about later? Witnesses saw you outside of his townhouse.”

“Yeah, I went over there,” Duncan admitted. “I was drunk. After mom went back to her hotel, I went to a bar and got smashed. I was really mad at my father, man, and I wanted to do something about it. At the same time, I thought if maybe I let out some of my anger I could, I don’t know, maybe
apologize
for whatever it was he hated about me. And then, out of nowhere, he calls me on my cell phone.”

“Flame did?”

“Yeah. He said he was at his townhouse and he sounded drunker than I was. He wanted to apologize to
me
, can you believe that? He wanted me to come downtown to talk to him, right then. So I took the subway downtown and walked over to his place on Charles Street.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know. Pretty late. Maybe one-thirty or two?”

“What did you do when you got there?”

“I let myself in the office door.”

“How did you do that?”

“I have a key. I had one made a long time ago. I don’t think my dad knew about it. He hasn’t changed the locks in, like, forever. I never went there but that night I did. So I go inside and I remember being a little disoriented. He had remodeled the place or something and I really wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not. Of course, I was pretty drunk. Anyway, I went into the main office and saw that it was a mess. There was a bottle of booze spilled everywhere and a bunch of papers and stuff on the floor. I remember stepping on a piece of broken glass.”

“Did you pick up the bottle of booze?”

“I don’t remember. I might have. Yeah, I think I did. I probably took a drink.”

“Then what?”

“It’s hard to remember. I’m pretty sure that’s when I noticed all his gold records on the wall. For some reason I just lost my cool. I started picking up things from the desk and throwing them at the gold records. The frames shattered and everything. One fell down, I think. It made a lot of noise. I was just waiting for him to come downstairs and find me tearing up the place. I swear if he had, I probably
would
have killed him. He never did though.”

Duncan fell silent for a moment. Berenger allowed him to pick it up at his own speed.

“Then, I guess when I finished smashing the gold records, I heard the music,” Duncan said.

“The music?”

“It was coming from upstairs, in the living quarters. There’s a door at the back of the office that opens to the stairway leading to the rest of the house. And I heard this music coming through it, faintly, like he was playing a CD in one of the rooms upstairs. So I opened the door. I called up the stairs. I said something like, ‘Come down here, you bastard!’ No one answered me. So I started climbing the stairs. I let the music lead me. When I got halfway up I realized that something was wrong with the music. It was skipping, you know, like a record with a scratch? In fact, that’s what it was… he had put on an old 45 of one of his hits. And it was scratched.”

Duncan turned away, a look of panic in his eyes. “It was awful. I got up to the third floor and went into the bedroom. And there he was. Hanging from the ceiling. I think I lost it and puked. I stumbled through the bedroom and went into the bathroom.”

“The master bathroom?”

“Yeah. I threw up there. I took some time to wash my face and stuff. Now I realize I left my goddamn fingerprints everywhere. I went back into the bedroom and looked at him again and I guess I just panicked. I really thought he’d killed himself and I might be the reason for it. I ran. I fucking ran down the stairs, through the office, and out to the street. I ran all the way to the subway and I took the train home.”

“Do you remember seeing anyone else on the street? Someone that saw you?”

Duncan shook his head. “No. Wait, a cab almost ran over me. I couldn’t see inside of it. I just kept running. That’s all I remember, I swear.”

Berenger nodded. “Okay, Adrian. Now I’d like you tell me what was going on between you and the Jimmys.”

Duncan glowered at Berenger and then turned his head to Patterson. The lawyer shrugged and said, “I told him you wouldn’t tell me about them. What was I supposed to do?”

“What did the cops find in your apartment, Adrian? What’s going on? You gotta tell us,” Berenger said.

Duncan tapped his foot in annoyance and finally said, “I’ve been working for them, all right? I had access to some… people… they wanted for clients.”