Killer Riff (16 page)

“Was that an issue?”

“Only when we wanted to tour and he didn’t. But he had this near miss OD when we were playing the Meadowlands with the Dead, and after that, Micah said if he went early, he didn’t want it to end the party.”

“But it did.” In an industry where Elvis topped the charts as often after he died as before, it was interesting that there hadn’t been any new Subject to Change releases after Micah died. Though “interesting” didn’t match the expression on Gray Benedek’s face.

“Because Claire felt there wasn’t anything worth releasing.”

“And she gets final word?”

“She and Russell. But he always deferred to her.” He went back to toweling himself off, the speed and vigor picking up even more. “Same thing with licensing songs. Every major ad agency in the world wants to use our songs in commercials, and she said no, it cheapened the music. Ironman’ sells trucks, Daltry and Townshend are basically TV theme writers, and Claire is worried about the purity of Micah’s almighty artistic legacy. Of course, she can afford to be idealistic.”

“Why don’t you license ‘Icon’? Isn’t that yours?”

Pleasure that I knew the song was his raced across his face for a split second, then disappeared behind his anger. “That’s not the one they ask for.”

“You hardly seem to be scraping by,” I said, pointing to the postcard-perfect vista of Central Park through the window.

“You don’t have to be poor to be cheated,” he snapped. “And she’s not trying to maintain a presence in the marketplace. Who has the Hotel Tapes?”

He grabbed my arm, almost pulling me out of the chair, and his world-renowned hand felt strong enough to yank my shoulder out of the socket if he decided it was necessary. My breath caught in my throat, but more than frightened, I was brokenhearted. All the friends I’d laughed with, all the boys I’d kissed while this same hand played awesome music in the background, all the lazy afternoons and hazy midnights I’d spent listening to this man’s music … I’d been a fan for such a long time. I wanted to like him, and I wasn’t sure I could. I wanted him to like me, and I knew he didn’t. But most of all, I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with him about rock and roll, fame, Olivia, and who might have killed Russell. And he was treating me like the enemy.

“Olivia says Claire has the tapes,” I said, searching his eyes because I was getting upset enough not to be distracted by how gorgeous they were. He glanced away, and I realized, “But you already know that.”

“As we’ve established,” he said, recognizing his mistake and pointedly looking at me again, “you can’t believe everything Olivia says.”

Pain flickered through his gaze, and I seized on it. “Even if you want to?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you suspect Claire of having the tapes, too.”

Releasing my arm with sudden self-consciousness, Gray sat back in his chair. “Of course I don’t.”

I leaned toward him now, wanting to take advantage of the shift in momentum while I could. “Because that would mean Claire is keeping things from you. Which is never good in a relationship. If you can’t be honest with each other, there’s no point in being together. I know, I just went through it myself.”

Gray put his bare foot on the edge of my chair, brushing lightly against my thigh. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to intimidate me or was simply thinking about kicking my chair out from under me. Either way, I knew I’d be better off standing up, which I did. After a moment, he dropped his foot and stood with me.

“Russell used to talk about it in hypotheticals. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could release the Hotel Tapes?’ That sort of thing. Maybe even pair it with a ‘reunion tour,’ with one of the boys in Micah’s place. Claire always shot it down because she assumed the sound quality would be so bad, but Russell insisted that technology had gotten to the point that the tapes could be cleaned up….” He made a frustrated rolling gesture with one hand, indicating that the conversations had rambled on beyond that, and I nodded. “But ultimately, it didn’t matter because no one knew where the tapes were.”

Gray took a deep breath, then continued, “Not too long ago, Russell started talking about the tapes again. ‘If we had them and could clean them up, what would we want to do with them?’ That sort of thing. His biggest worry was that it would look mercenary to release them.” The pain flickered through his eyes again. “Russell was too pure-hearted for his own good.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” I said softly. “When did he start talking about the tour and everything again?”

“Right before he died,” Gray said equally softly, shaking his head and giving me a warning look. He knew how it sounded, and he wasn’t comfortable with the notion, had probably been fighting it since the moment Russell died.

The question was, how much did Gray know about the details of that moment? I’d come into this room hoping he could tell me a little more about the players in a general sense, but standing so close to him, I could feel the anxiety sheeting off him, no matter how many yoga poses he’d struck.

Keeping my voice low, I asked, “If the quality was good, why wouldn’t Claire want the tapes released?”

“She thinks they’d dilute the audience for the boys’ new albums. Why buy the second generation if you can get brand-new stuff from the master? Which is ridiculous, because releasing the tapes would actually be great publicity. The boys are talented enough to handle the comparisons.”

“Boys?” I repeated, confused. Everyone was waiting for Jordan’s new album, I knew that, but how did Adam fit into this?

Gray smiled bitterly. “I’m putting Adam back in the studio. Supposed to be all hush-hush so it doesn’t look like the brothers are competing, but that’s more of Claire’s hysteria.”

“Didn’t Adam quit?”

“He stopped. There’s a difference.” He grabbed my arm again, just as urgently as before. “For some of us, it’s not about wanting to play. It’s about needing to play. You can’t stop. You tell yourself you can walk away, embrace something new, but it’s futile. It drags you back.”

“Is the music dragging Adam back or are you and his mother?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Actually, I do. Millions of dollars are at stake, the balance of power is upended because Russell Elliot’s dead, but we’re all going to pretend it’s about art. I understand completely. And I also understand how maddening this must all be because I bet when you heard what Russell had done with the tapes, they sounded amazing.”

“Incredible.” He nodded with his eyes closed, so completely lost in the memory for a moment that he didn’t quite process what he’d just admitted to: that the tapes were real, and Russell had been preparing them for release. But as his eyes opened again, his hand went slack and I knew it had sunk in. “Incredible that you do understand after all, I mean.”

“I know what you mean, Mr. Benedek.” If Claire hadn’t taken the tapes from Russell by force, there was a distinct possibility Gray had. It might not have been his intention, but it could have been the result. Years of art and commerce colliding could wear down a few moral distinctions, no doubt, and I could see Gray trying to persuade Russell to stand up to Claire with him. And pushing too far.

Whatever Gray saw on my face worried him. Pushing a false smile forward, he said, “We’ve gotten a bit off track. Isn’t your article about Olivia?”

“As you said,” I answered, matching his smile, “the article can go two different ways: look at the brave daughter carrying on her father’s brilliant legacy, or look at the poor orphan surrounded by the people who killed her father.”

What had Olivia told me her father said to her in that final phone call? Something about his work being used against him. Maybe he was referring to work he’d done cleaning up the tapes, which Gray was using as leverage to get him to go against Claire: The tapes sound so great, you’ve worked so hard, it’s a shame not to let people hear them. I could see Gray pouring him a drink or two, maybe not even knowing Russell had taken the pills, just trying to get him malleable enough to give up the tapes. That explained why the tape deck was sitting out so casually in the middle of the room: Russell impetuously wanting to share his work in progress with Gray—and maybe with Claire, too—and pulling out the deck to have them listen right then and there. And setting the wheels in motion himself.

I continued, “The tragedy’s compounded by the fact that if someone killed Russell to get the tapes, how can they do anything with them now without admitting they were involved in Russell’s death?”

Gray snapped the towel between his hands. “The person who has the tapes isn’t necessarily the person who killed Russell.”

I smiled icily. “Prove it.”

His smile was much, much colder. “After you.”

10

“Am I too old
to be a groupie?”

The young lady behind the counter blanched, thinking that Tricia was directing the comment to her and wisely not wanting to enter into a conversation that began in such a treacherous place. I shook my head hurriedly and pointed at myself, but the poor girl still fled to the cappuccino machine with eyes averted while I responded, “No, but I do think you’re a bit mature to be this excited at the prospect.”

Daylight had not diminished Tricia’s giddiness over meeting Jordan Crowley. I couldn’t really blame her: He was handsome, charming, and famous. And she hadn’t been exposed to the venomous oddness of his inner circle yet, which was what was dulling his shine for me. Besides, Tricia had been single for a while now, and that increases your sensitivity to new and exciting potentials, the way not eating before a cocktail party makes that first drink hit you twice as hard. It was nice to see her buzzed. We were just going to have to make sure Jordan didn’t wind up being one huge hangover.

“The issue isn’t your age as much as it is the age of the boy,” Cassady pointed out with a snarky smile.

Tricia narrowed her eyes in warning. “He is not a boy.”

“If he’s younger than you are, he’s a boy,” Cassady said. “It’s an algebraic principle.”

“You’re just jealous because a
man
paid more attention to me than to you. For once,” Tricia insisted.

Key among the immutable facts of life as a friend of Cassady Lynch is you’re always going to be the second one people notice. Men in particular. Tricia and I have learned to accept that, but, as Tricia was revealing, it still chafes from time to time.

Studying the contents of the bakery case with feigned interest, Cassady looked as if she were going to be gracious and let it go, but then she returned the lob after all. “I don’t need to shop. My cart is full.”

“Really?” Tricia asked, eyebrows rising along with her voice. “How long since anyone scanned your basket?”

“Now, now, ladies, let’s be careful,” I said quickly. We were in line at the Dean & DeLuca by Rockefeller Center, a busy and very public place, not the most ideal location for this kind of discussion. We’d already frightened the barista and were well on our way to entertaining the other people in line, a prospect that didn’t entice me in the least, given my recent media exposure.

Following my workout with Gray Benedek, what seemed appropriate was a good stiff drink or a hot-fudge sundae, but it felt self-pitying and irresponsible to give in to either impulse when it wasn’t even noon yet. So I’d called Cassady and Tricia so they could talk me into eating vegetables or something equally saintly, but they’d agreed I should go for the most dessertlike coffee possible in the hopes that tapping into the twin wellsprings of caffeine and sugar at the same time would revive me. I would have preferred a quieter, less touristy venue, but this had worked out to be a central location for where they were each headed for lunch: Cassady was accompanying Olivia to see her lawyer and get some specifics on the intellectual properties aspect of Russell’s estate, and Tricia was meeting up with Jordan again to discuss a party he wanted her to do for him so he could try out some new songs on a select group of friends and family. The two of them were mixing better with the Crowley clan than I was.

That left me to ponder my next move. As I’d left Gray’s, I’d called Kyle, but gotten voice mail, which was probably just as well. I was less apt to get myself in trouble by rambling on about how much I missed him or ranting about how frustrated I’d been by my visit with Gray if I didn’t talk to him until later in the day, when I might, I hoped, have my thoughts about Russell and the tapes analyzed more clearly.

I snapped back to the conversation as Cassady said, “I’m having dinner with Aaron tomorrow night, so I’m planning on checking out then.” The barista froze in the act of handing Cassady her coffee, again looking slightly panicked until she realized Cassady wasn’t talking to her. It had to be miserable to interact all day with people who were having conversations with other people, either in person or on their phones, while you’re trying to serve them. I dumped my change into the tip jar.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Tricia said as we moved outside. It was a gorgeous November morning, with enough sting in the breeze to put color in your cheeks, but not so cold that you dreaded the quickly approaching winter. Even here in a concrete canyon, the scent of fall leaves crushed underfoot added spice to the air, and I was sure I could smell roasted chestnuts just around the corner.

Pulling our jackets around us, we skittered across the street to huddle against the wall and watch the skaters below on the rink, sliding and twirling with varying levels of success. Tricia continued sincerely, “I was starting to worry that you two had hit a serious problem.”

“So was I, but I finally got hold of him yesterday and made him explain,” Cassady said while I imagined sweet, quiet Aaron being on the receiving end of that cross-examination. “Turns out Molly was right with her student meltdown theory. More or less.”

“Meaning?” I asked, reassured that I had been on track with some theory at some point.

“Aaron’s preparing a paper for a conference in Boston, and a few days ago, he discovered a problem with an experiment one of his grad students had done. When he asked her to replicate the results, she couldn’t. Turns out she’d doctored the results, to bolster Aaron’s theory.”

“The things we do for love,” Tricia said with a sigh.

“Excuse me?” Cassady’s eyebrow arched unhappily.

“Oh, I don’t mean that there’s anything going on between them,” Tricia continued quickly, “it’s just that the student must think the world of Aaron to have gone to such lengths, all because she wanted to help him, see him succeed. I can remember a few profs along the way I would’ve bent a few rules for.”

The things we do for love …
Was that an element in Russell’s death that I was missing? Money and fame were the only objects of love in evidence, but I could sense an underlying issue that I hadn’t tapped into yet. Had Gray really loved Claire, maybe even back when Micah was alive, and thought he might be with her someday, only to have her get involved with Russell? I thought of the lyrics of “Icon” again: “Everything I’ve lived for will be the death of me, / Didn’t know till I locked in just how much it means to be free …”

Listening to my inner iPod, I watched as a little girl on the rink, no more than six years old and picture perfect in her bright pink skating outfit with the white fur trim, flung herself into a grand spin, only to crash inelegantly onto her backside. I winced in sympathy. My footwork was all tangled up, too. I was letting myself get pulled into the emotional swirl surrounding Olivia and the Crowley clan, and that was hampering my ability to weigh the evidence empirically, the way Aaron had to.

While I’d gotten Gray to admit that the tapes were real and that he’d heard them recently, it was clear I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him without something substantial to sweeten the bargain. Olivia had all her cards on the table. Jordan was reveling in the chaos. Claire was going to be more unapproachable than ever if Gray went back to her and admitted his slip. I needed to go see Adam.

The more I’d thought about him—and I’d spent way too much time doing that overnight—the more certain I’d become that he was hiding something. What I couldn’t be certain of was how willing he’d be to part with the information. Or what I could offer to persuade him to do so. The really tricky part was that his mother was almost certainly part of what he was hiding, and he was so protective of her that one misstep could shut me out completely.

“I gotta go,” I told Tricia and Cassady, shaking my coffee cup to see if it was worth taking with me in the cab.

“Not without telling us your new inspiration,” Tricia said, grabbing the collar of my coat and pulling me close. “I can see it in your eyes. Along with a fleck of mascara,” she added helpfully, lifting that away gently with the tip of her pinkie.

“I’m going to talk to Adam,” I explained. “Olivia told me where he rehearses. I’m going to apologize for how badly things went last night and see how much that gets me.”

Tricia frowned. “I didn’t know you thought things went badly last night.”

“They didn’t,” I said, “except for missing the fabulous party with Jordan, of course. But I thought a conciliatory approach might get more out of him than the ‘So where exactly did I fling that gauntlet down, because we can pick up from there?’ technique.”

Cassady feigned dismay. “But you’re so good at that one.”

“New dogs, new tricks,” I said as I kissed them good-bye.

Tricia looked genuinely concerned. “Do you really think he’s holding out on you? Isn’t he the good son?”

“Which means you’re running around with the bad son,” Cassady said.

“For a change,” Tricia said with a little spike of triumph at the end. “Besides, if the good might become the bad, the bad might become the good.”

“Hope may be the most devious enemy a single woman has,” Cassady said. “Let us know how it goes with Adam.” They waved as if sending me off to a jousting match as I hurried back to Fifth Avenue to grab a taxi.

My cabbie was Jamie, a fiery-eyed young man from Dublin who told me that while he’d be happy to take me wherever I needed to go, he had an audition for
Law & Order
later in the afternoon, so if I didn’t mind, he was going to work on his audition piece while he drove. I agreed, looking forward to hearing a great theatrical monologue delivered in his rich, rolling brogue. Instead, for the next thirty blocks, I listened to him chant, “Look out, he’s got a gun!” with a variety of emotions, accents, and syllabic stresses.

Between renditions, I tried to think what might be the more persuasive way to elicit information from Adam once I’d apologized. Did I continue to frame my questions just in terms of the article about Olivia, or did I tell him I’d come across some intriguing/disturbing/potentially explosive/all of the above information while researching the article and see what he thought about Gray having actually heard the tapes? And ask where he thought his mother might fit into the scheme of things, aside from her sex life?

By the time he dropped me off, Jamie had decided to go with a “terse yet impassioned” reading with an accent that sounded like Madonna’s British one. I told Jamie to break a leg at the audition, that I’d be watching for him, while I fished my wallet and some Advil out of my purse. It wasn’t until he was pulling away that I took a good look at where I was. There was a name in faded gilt above the front doors of the weary brick building in front of me:
MONTGOMERY PREP.
For a moment, I thought perhaps the name and the halfhearted ivy on the walls predated the current occupants, until the front doors opened and dozens of pretty, perky young girls in elegantly tailored school uniforms spilled down the front stairs, skirts hemmed just below their derrieres and jackets fitted as though they had whalebone stays. Half pulled out cigarettes, and the others pulled out cell phones. Ah, high school lunch break.

An Upper East Side address had struck me as interesting for Adam’s rehearsal space, but this was even odder. Could he be renting space from the school? Maybe someone on the faculty was in his play. Or Olivia had written down the address wrong.

“May we help you?” A knot of leggy, patrician, ponytailed blondes with more poise at sixteen than I’ll have at fifty approached me, the ringleader out in front. “You look a little lost, ma’am.”

I decided to ignore the “ma’am,” especially since her smile told me it was deliberate. “I am,” I admitted. “I think I might have the wrong address.”

“Are you picking up your child? Maybe we know her,” the ringleader asked with a false sweetness beyond her years.

I began to retort with equivalent saccharin that it was mathematically impossible for me to have a child at that school, and then I realized that, had I been careless in my freshman year of college, I might have a freshman here now. I could feel the crow’s-feet etching themselves into my face as I did the math. “I’m actually looking for an adult. A musician. I was told he has a rehearsal—”

The ringleader tossed her ponytail in merriment, and her posse followed suit. “You want to see Mr. Crowley,” she singsonged as the other girls giggled.

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re not a stalker or anything, are you? We do try our best to protect him.”

Like Dracula’s wives, no doubt. “We know each other.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“I’m a magazine writer.”

“For whom do you write?”

“Oh, nice. AP English?”

“Honors. And editor of the school paper.”

“Are you the only one in the group who speaks?” I asked her, failing to repress flashbacks to my own high school days, filled with challenging relationships with the power cliques.

Her nose turned up even farther. “Must be lame, or you’d tell us.”

Happily, I was able to repress my desire to yank on her ponytail and see what would happen. “
Zeitgeist.”

That got a gratifying chorus of oohs and aahs from the posse and an, “Oh man, you’re Molly Forrester!” from one of the girls in the back.

“You read my column?” I asked pleasantly, not too proudly.