Killer Riff (12 page)

Trying to keep my heart heel-less, I refrained from commenting on how surprised she sounded and just said, “Thanks very much.” Leaning back as far as I could without taking an actual step, I prepared to bolt from her office. I could practically hear my life crashing down around me, like icicles popping off the rain gutters because the house has caught fire, but there was very little I could do about it until the Dragon Lady deigned to release me.

“I was expecting something more girly, about unrequited love and sleeping with people you shouldn’t and that sort of thing,” Eileen continued. “But this really applies on several levels, so it’s an excellent litmus test for the next person to fill your heels.”

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. Experience is a fine teacher, and I’d worked for Eileen too long not to recognize a setup when I heard one. She was getting ready to hand me something—a diatribe, a reprimand, perhaps my head on a plate.

Sadly, not without cause. The moment Jordan announced to the paparazzi that he believed his father had been murdered, I prayed for some sort of miracle that would roll back the clocks and begin my day again. Perhaps my week.

In the time it had taken me to have breakfast with Olivia and Jordan, his comment about my “investigation” had taken on a life of its own. It was something akin to tossing a pebble in a still lake and watching the ripples spread to mind-boggling size. But in this case, Jordan had lofted a boulder into a shark-infested pool and not only churned up the water, but riled the inhabitants. Between the blogs and Web sites and “entertainment reporters” on a whole range of outlets, it was now being reported as acknowledged fact that Russell and Micah had been killed by the same individual, and I was tracking down that individual. And I was now flooded with calls from a dozen fellow journalists and two former boyfriends who wanted to know what I knew.

So, Eileen was winding up for her swing at me, and I had no choice but to brace myself and take it. She smiled icily. “Assuming you’re still pursuing the profile of Olivia Elliott.”

“Absolutely.”

“That was your original assignment, wasn’t it? I could call and check with Henry to be sure. In case you’ve forgotten. Or gotten distracted. Or inventive.” She put down the hard copy of the test question and stretched her hand out toward her phone.

“I’ll call Henry and bring him up-to-date myself, but thanks for offering to help.”

“I wasn’t being helpful.”

“I know, but I was being polite anyway.”

Eileen pursed her fake smile into a pucker of distaste. “What on earth have you done, Molly Forrester?”

“I’ve allowed Jordan Crowley to exercise his First Amendment right to free speech. That’s all. I don’t believe I can be held responsible for his being a media whore.”

Eileen pulled back into her chair. She’s hard to surprise, and here I’d done it twice in one morning. Maybe it wasn’t such a disastrous day after all. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t believe him,” I said. “I don’t think the same person killed Russell Elliott and Micah Crowley.”

“But you do believe they were both murdered?” she asked, her voice inching up into the coppery register of irritation.

“I’m keeping an open mind. Isn’t that a journalist’s goal?”

“A journalist’s goal is to do the story that’s been assigned.” She tossed the letter on her desk and let her indignation inflate enough to lift her out of her chair. “You must think you have a tremendous amount of luck to press it this hard.” She grasped her hips with her spidery hands, but she would have been happier if those hands had been around my throat. “If you tick off Henry, I won’t be able to defend you.”

“Only because you don’t want to.”

“Go away very, very quickly,” she commanded.

“But the letter works for you?” I asked as I backpedaled out of the room.

“Better than you do!” she spat with satisfaction.

It would buy me a long stretch of peace and quiet to let her have the last word, so I closed the door and bit my lip to keep from responding. It wasn’t until I turned around that I realized Skyler was watching me with a big smile. “Did she like the letter?” she asked brightly.

“Does she like anything?”

“It’s all relative.”

“Distantly related.”

“Can you give us any hints about the test question, what you’ll be looking for in the answers, what you think are the most important qualities in an advice columnist?” Carlos, one of the editorial assistants, had suddenly appeared at Skyler’s desk with PDA in hand, ready to take notes. Behind him, four other assistants were working their way forward with varying degrees of casualness, eager to catch any inside information I was willing to share.

Nice perspective check. A job I was so anxious to be done with, to get past, was something they were all more than ready to fight for. Wanting to move up was admirable, and I needed to make sure I didn’t taint their goal with my own agenda. “Answer from the heart,” I said. “From what you believe to be true. It’s what will make your voice stand out and let people know you really care.”

There was a brief pause as they soaked in the insight and before Skyler started to laugh. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that no one joined her, most of them watching me nervously for a reaction. “Okay, Skyler, share the joke,” I said, trying not to sound like a kindergarten teacher.

“Sincerity’s not going to get anyone anywhere at this magazine,” she said, still amused. “We preach crafting a facade.”

“Life is about your choice of facades,” countered Irina, a gaunt, intense young woman who always dressed as though it were snowing outside.

Dorrie elbowed Carlos aside to stand right in front of Skyler. “That’s terrible,” she exclaimed breathlessly. “Just because you sit at that desk, you think you’re better than the rest of us, and you’re not.”

“Did I even mention you?” Skyler asked.

“Stop it,” I said, as uncomfortable with the sniping as with asserting my dubious authority to end it.

“The way Molly’s been doing the column is perfect. That tone and quality should be maintained,” Carlos offered.

“Suck up on your own time, there’s work to do,” Skyler said dismissively, sounding more ready to take over Eileen’s job than mine. Shooing them away from her desk, she turned her back to them and made a great show of getting to work.

They drifted away obediently, though both Carlos and Dorrie looked back over their shoulders upon realizing that I hadn’t moved. Instead, I leaned over Skyler’s desk and, resisting the impulse to pinch her perfectly upturned nose, said, “You can get over yourself anytime now.”

Skyler blinked slowly. “I’m entitled to my opinion.”

“And your colleagues are entitled to their dignity.”

“Which is why you treat Eileen so well?”

I straightened up, debating whether to confide in her or try to get her fired. While I admired her assertiveness, it was also irritating in this context—namely, that she had a point. “You’re pretty fast with the judgments for somebody who just got here.”

“I learn quickly.”

“Then learn the right things. And log a little time before you start dispensing attitude.”

She sensed a boundary and pulled back, giving a little snap of the head that was half nod, half hair flip. “Thanks for the advice.”

“On the other hand, given your gift for cutting through to the heart of the matter, I look forward to your submission.”

She looked at me suspiciously, and I knew she was trying to figure out whether she’d damaged her chances. I actually hadn’t decided yet. Both of us would have to ponder that while I gave Cassady a quick call, then went to visit the very first rock star I ever met.

Once upon a time, Risa van Doren was the music editor and I was a lifestyle reporter at a teen magazine called
Fresh.
We were roughly the same age, but while I was newly out of college, Risa had just retired from her first career, drumming for a punk girl band called Estrogen. The band had formed in Risa’s backyard in San Diego when the members were freshmen in high school. Novelty launched them, talent sustained them. But when the lead singer drove her brand-new Porsche over a cliff and into the Pacific Ocean at the ripe old age of twenty-one, Risa hung up her drumsticks and headed east. “I’ve decided to fade away rather than burn out,” she told me when we first met, though it was hard to imagine Risa fading at all. What she’d done was reinvent herself with admirable efficiency and success. We’d kept in touch after we moved on from the magazine, so I’d given her a call that morning, requesting to meet her and ask a couple of research questions.

It was easy to pick her out at the bar at Boqueria, a noisy but delightful tapas bar in the Flatiron District. She still sported a spiky platinum haircut ten years later, but she claimed it was because she’d bleached her hair so many times that it was damaged at a cellular level and wouldn’t grow any other way. Her style of dress had swung from Courtney Love to Annie Lennox now that she was head of A&R for The Vault, an indie label with a small but successful following.

“You look fabulous,” I said, sliding onto the stool next to her after we’d hugged.

“Once you’re a public person, you learn to be prepared at all times for your picture to be taken. You’ll see,” she said with a delighted crinkle of her nose.

“The most amazing part of this whole experience is discovering how many of my friends read the tabloids,” I said, and sighed.

She shook her head. “Randy Dunn e-mailed me the link to Gawker this morning.” Randy was a former associate of ours from
Fresh
, and I sighed again, trying to imagine the snide and snarky messages jostling for space in my e-mail in-box. Risa laughed and patted my knee. “Not to worry, you looked great. And those two boys—what a delicious rock and hard place to be stuck between. Though I hear Adam’s a little crazy, so be careful.”

“Adam’s crazy?”

“This is off the record, right?” I nodded, and she continued, her tone frank and nonjudgmental. “A music journalist I know met him at a concert last year, started dating him, but it got really ugly very quickly. She said he was a little too into the anguished artist thing, mood swings, that whole deal. Not that the girl couldn’t use a solid regimen of Zoloft herself, but it definitely got weird.” Her eyes narrowed as she smiled. “Was that your research question—which one to date?”

“No, no.”

“Don’t dismiss the idea so quickly,” she said.

“Seriously, I have a hypothetical question that’s inspired by meeting them, that’s all,” I said, feeling my way into the topic gently.

“Okay. Ask away.”

“What do you suppose the market is for previously unreleased recordings by someone like Micah Crowley?”

Risa took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Don’t screw with me.”

“What?”

She gripped my hand a little tighter than was comfortable. “Have you heard them?”

“Heard what?” I tap-danced. “I’m just looking for some context—”

“Bullshit. Have you heard the Hotel Tapes?”

One thing I learned from Kyle early on is that most people get themselves into trouble because they answer more than what the question asks. Risa was asking me a simple question, and I didn’t need to complicate things or implicate myself by getting into how much I knew about the tapes and when I was hoping to hear them. I just needed to say, “No,” and leave it at that, tough as that was for me.

Her grip on my hand eased slightly while she searched my face for some telltale sign of dishonesty. Remarkably, she didn’t seem to find one and decided to answer my question. “If the Hotel Tapes are in decent condition, and if they were engineered and packaged properly, we’re talking millions of units. Tens of millions of dollars.”

Tens of millions of dollars that might wind up in brand-new hands now that Russell Elliott was dead. I nodded to acknowledge the size of what she was saying but still hoping not to tip her off. Olivia and the boys had the right to make the information public when they were ready, but I needed a context in which to understand the value of the tapes. In dollars and in human life. If anything material could ever be worth a human life. But I’d been around enough murders to know that people all too often decide that’s the case.

“Let’s trade hypotheticals,” Risa continued, an unfamiliar gleam in her eye. “The Vault is a small label, but we’re all about the artist. Or his family. And if we were entrusted with something like those tapes, we would produce them with the utmost care and respect for the artist, his family, and his legacy.” She flashed a twisted smile. “And pay through the nose for the right to do so.”

I’d never seen Risa in sales mode, but it was effective. Except that her hand trembled as it lay over mine. She hadn’t heard the tapes, wasn’t even sure I’d heard them, couldn’t even be sure they existed, but her desire for them was palpable. Could someone’s desire for them have been so keen that murdering Russell Elliott was a viable step in the plan to get them? Who could have been in the apartment that night long enough to kill Russell, but not long enough to get the tapes? It had to be someone in the inner circle, or selling the tapes would be impossible. Was the intention to get the tapes that night or to put them in play as part of his estate? Were they specifically mentioned in Russell’s will? Olivia had them now, but that didn’t mean she had any right to keep them. Perhaps the killer was hanging back, waiting for the estate to be administered. But who was it?