Killer Riff (26 page)

“She’s disrupting the concert,” Kyle whispered. “Tell Trida to get security on the stage. Now.”

As I fumbled for my phone, Jordan approached Bonnie. “Mom,” he said, “don’t do this.”

He reached out for her, but she stepped back, defiantly pulling a simple cassette tape out of the ruffled Yves Saint Laurent bag on her shoulder and raising it above her head. The audience oohed as though she were holding up a great religious relic, which I guess to her mind she was. “I’m glad you’re all here tonight,” she told the guests, “because Micah loved an audience.”

“Like you know what Micah loved,” Claire scoffed.

“He loved me. He felt sorry for you,” Bonnie said, turning to give the guests a special smile, acknowledging that she knew they were on her side. Chuckles fluttered through the audience, the tension level dropping as people sat back in anticipation of the next fight on the night’s card. “I loved him most of all, so I should be the one to bring his music back. I deserve it.”

“No, you deserve this,” Olivia said, stepping up onstage and pointing a pistol at Bonnie.

The tension level rocketed back up through the roof. People screamed and ducked under pillows, flashes exploded, and Adam dragged Claire out of the line of fire. Jordan froze, his gaze fixed on the gun, and Gray pulled him out of the way. Knowing security would come of their own accord now, I raced onto the stage, half a step behind Kyle. When he stopped ten feet from Olivia, I assumed that he had an excellent, field-tested reason for doing so and stopped next to him.

“Olivia, put the gun down,” I said as firmly as my quaking voice would allow.

“Everyone really needs to stop telling me what to do. You included, Molly,” Olivia said with wholly inappropriate calm.

“I want to help you protect the tapes, that’s all,” I said.

All three women looked at me as if I were the one acting crazy. “What?” Olivia asked.

“Everyone’s here because of the tapes, right?” I wasn’t looking for an audience reaction, but I got one: a smattering of applause and some whoops of agreement. I flashed a strained smile at the crowd to be polite, but Kyle gestured brusquely for me to keep focused on Olivia. “So it would be a huge shame if you took a shot at Bonnie and missed and hit the tapes.”

Bonnie huffed in offense, but otherwise she didn’t move, her arm still above her head and her eyes locked on Olivia’s gun.

“Why don’t I take the tapes?” Claire offered.

“Don’t move, Claire,” Olivia warned. “You’re hardly a neutral party here.”

“How about I take the tapes?” I offered, taking a tentative step forward.

Bonnie pinned the bag to her side with her elbow. “I am not giving up these tapes.”

“Over your dead body, huh, Bonnie?” Olivia said. “The same way my father felt, but that didn’t stop you.”

“I didn’t kill your father!”

“Don’t you lie to me!” Olivia took a step closer, steadying the pistol at nose level on Bonnie.

“It was an accident!” Bonnie blurted.

With everyone gasping at the same time, the air pressure in the club had to have dropped several points. I could swear my ears popped.

Bonnie pressed on, eyes still focused on the gun. “Russell wasn’t supposed to know anything about our plan, and then Jordan had to play him his new demo tape, beg for his approval.”

“Stop it, Mom,” Jordan said, his voice dark and heavy.

“But Russell thought he recognized the song and wanted to compare it with the Hotel Tapes and realized a few were missing. He was so angry, he went a little crazy. Jordan called me, I came right over and tried to calm him down. I just mixed him something to make him settle down and give me some time to think. I didn’t realize how much he’d already had. Olivia, I’m so sorry.”

There wasn’t a sound; not a single flash went off. People throughout the club froze in the face of naked emotion and the magnitude of the confession. Only Claire was smiling, her blatant joy at her rival’s collapse disconcerting.

So Bonnie had taken a couple of Russell’s tapes, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Then once he was dead, she’d gone back and taken all the tapes so no one else would be able to play them and expose Jordan as an actual copy of his dad.

“Give me back my tapes,” Olivia said, yanking the bag off Bonnie’s shoulder with her gun-free hand.

Bonnie caught the purse strap. “No, don’t take the tapes. It’s not like I did it deliberately.”

Claire threw herself at Bonnie as Bonnie yanked back on the purse strap, throwing off Olivia’s center of gravity. For a moment, I thought she might bobble the gun, but she tried to use the purse strap to pull herself back upright against Bonnie’s weight. The strap flew off Bonnie’s shoulder and the purse crashed to the floor, disgorging its load of nearly a dozen tapes. Bonnie landed right beside them, Claire on top of her, screaming and kicking and biting. Olivia toppled over, the gun skittering away from her.

Patrons attempted to storm the stage, whether to help or to see better, I wasn’t sure, but then others pulled them away or perhaps pushed them away in their own flight toward the doors. The party disintegrated into a multilevel meltdown.

Onstage, Kyle grabbed the gun and pulled Olivia away from the other two by her ankle. Jordan, Adam, and Gray dove to the floor like football players covering a fumble, not to separate the women, but to gather up the tapes, especially before guests could get to them. It was left to me to jump into the catfight and peel Bonnie and Claire off each other.

Men fight nasty, but women fight mean. In the brief time in which I writhed on the stage floor with the two of them, I dodged far more elbows, knees, and incisors than made mathematical sense. It was like falling into a pit of hyenas, and when security finally arrived and pulled the three of us apart, I was winded, bruised, and grateful.

Kyle handed Olivia over to them, too; she wasn’t going to be able to get away with brandishing the gun in a crowded club, even though no one had gotten hurt.

Kyle helped me up off the floor while the guys finished collecting the tapes and themselves. Cassady and Aaron hurried up to make sure we were all right while Tricia took the microphone to announce that although the concert was over, the police were going to need a few statements, so people should feel free to stay awhile. A moment of silence followed her announcement, then, unbelievably, everyone applauded. In the blink of an eye, people were chatting, laughing, texting, and making calls, spreading the news all over town before we could even get out the door.

“You’re all going to need to talk to the police,” Kyle told the guys.

Gray indicated their fistfuls of tapes. “Can’t we secure these somewhere first?”

“They could be considered evidence. We’ll have to discuss it with the responding officers,” Kyle said.

“Evidence? They’ll be tied up for years,” Gray moaned.

“We should just burn them,” Jordan said grimly. He laid his hand on Adam’s shoulder, and Adam nodded forlornly.

“Not until the police are done with them,” I said.

Kyle gestured for the guys to go down the stage stairs first, then turned back to take my hand. “Let’s go.”

“No, I’m respecting your boundaries. It’s in your hands from here on in,” I said.

“There’s a difference between respecting boundaries and passing off a problem,” he said wryly. “I appreciate the thought, but we’re both going to talk to them.”

“I never intended to get you this involved,” I said by way of apology.

“Good.”

“But I appreciate your help.”

“Yeah, but it has its limits.”

“Such as?” I asked as I took his hand.

“Don’t expect me to buy the boxed set.”

20

“What made you think
you could get away with it?”

It was a question worth asking a number of the people in my life at the moment, with Bonnie in custody in connection with Russell’s death, Claire raising a ruckus, and Olivia, Jordan, and Adam trying to stay out of the crossfire and the public eye. Of course, it was also the first thing Ben, Kyle’s partner, asked me when he joined the confab at the precinct house as Kyle and the officers from the First Precinct sorted through the chaos.

“It actually seemed logical at the time,” I told Ben.

“There’s a difference between logic and adrenaline, and we ought to get you familiar with that,” Ben said.

“It worked,” I said, allowing myself a little victory.

“Yes, it did.”

“And I think he’s still speaking to me,” I continued, working hard to make it a statement and not a question.

“Yes, he is,” Ben agreed. “Good to see you two back together.”

“Yes, it is,” I said with a smile. Because as the adrenaline burned off, there was no queasy doubt rumbling in my stomach or musty guilt lingering in my head. I’d been honest and direct with Kyle the entire time, and it felt great. The fact that he smiled reassuringly every time he caught my eye across the frenetic office felt even better.

What felt best of all was locking my apartment door behind us several hours later. “You locking us in or them out?” Kyle asked with a knowing smile.

It would take days for everything to be sorted out, but for the moment, anyway, we had a quiet space, a few free hours, and absolutely no company. Tricia had proclaimed her intention to sleep all weekend, Cassady and Aaron were going to celebrate privately, and the Crowley-Elliott clan was in the process of issuing a statement that stated they hoped their fans would respect their privacy during a difficult time.

“Kyle, I don’t know how to thank you,” I said quickly, worried that he was going to tell me he couldn’t stay long.

“Let me count the ways,” he offered, taking my hand and kissing the palm. “And then we’ll go through them, one at a time,” he continued, tracing each finger lightly with his own while I tried not to tremble. “Because neither one of us is working this weekend.”

So we let the voice mail and e-mail accumulate, picking up the phone only to order in, and spent the weekend getting thoroughly and intimately reacquainted—one way at a time.

As magnificent as it was, the real world demanded our presence on Monday morning, which meant Kyle had to go back to his precinct and I had to sit down in the conference room at
Zeitgeist
, the bogus audition letter on the table in front of me and Dorrie across from me. Adrienne’s desk had been my first stop, and she’d turned over the key without comment, though I knew Skyler had whispered into more than a few ears. But the word must not have reached Dorrie, because when I sought her out and asked her if we could have a word, she gave me a bright, pleased smile.

The smile had vanished now. Plucking a tissue into a fuzzy mess, she refused to look me in the eye as she pondered my question. “They wanted another you,” she said after a long pause.

“We want a new voice for the column,” I said quietly. “Eileen would probably be thrilled by a completely different approach. A fresh start.”

Dorrie shook her head defiantly. “But the column’s great the way it is.”

“It’s fun. But you can’t have fun with it—with anything—if you’re not being yourself.” Watching Dorrie maul the tissue, I thought of Adam and Jordan, wrestling with their father’s shadow and struggling to find their own voices, fearful that those voices didn’t exist or wouldn’t be valued. “What were you going to do if you got the gig?”

“I hadn’t figured that part out yet,” Dorrie said, nose running. “You’ve written a lot of columns.”

“And you didn’t think I’d recognize any of them?”

“I thought you’d be flattered by how exactly I’d captured your voice,” she said, a subtle tone of pride creeping into her voice.

“In this case, imitation isn’t flattery, it’s plagiarism, Dorrie.”

“Are you going to fire me?”

“That’s not my call. I have to discuss it with Henry and Eileen.”

“But you want to fire me.”

“No, I want to help you find the way to be yourself.”

“I’m not sure who that is yet,” she said, the pride sliding away again.

“It’s a moving target for most of us,” I admitted.

But I wanted to dig down and find an opportunity, a teachable moment, in all this because Dorrie seemed like a good person at heart and because I felt guilty that she’d emulated a wreck like me to this degree. And I wanted to be generous, out of superstition if nothing else, because things were working out so well for me.

Right up until the moment I walked into Eileen’s office, Dorrie’s letter in my hand, and saw the triumphant, cat-that -shredded-the-canary smile on her face. Henry stood beside her, his smile more tempered.

“We were just talking about you!” Eileen said, throwing her arms open to me in a gesture that she may have found warm and welcoming but evoked a Roman empress asking the crowds whether the slave should be executed or set free.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to see either of you at Pillow Friday night,” I said. “Things got a little hectic.”

“Some of us had the sense to leave when things got ‘hectic.’ No need for us to again suffer wounds just because you started a war. You never like the simple approach, do you?” Eileen asked, smile still too bright, arms drifting down to her sides.

“Should be quite an article,” Henry said genuinely. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you. Both. For the opportunity, most of all.”

Henry nodded. “You deserve it. Continued good luck.”

I had only a moment to register the fact that that sounded as though Henry wouldn’t be here for my next article before Eileen said, “Fabulous things are happening for everyone. Did you hear? Henry’s moving up and out!”

“Congratulations,” I said, offering my hand automatically while I tried desperately to decode the brittleness of Eileen’s tone. Was she jealous because Henry was getting a job she wanted, or was she having trouble containing her glee at her vision of what she could accomplish in a Henry-free environment?

“The official announcement is coming later this week, but I ran into Peter Mulcahey at Pillow and he’d already heard, so I was concerned it was leaking out,” Henry said.

“With Peter, that’s a valid concern,” I said. “Are you going over to
Need to Know?”

“The Publisher is buying it,” Henry said, nodding, “and he’s asked me to oversee the revamp. Hands-on and all that.”

“That’s wonderful. I hope you have a great time. We’ll miss you,” I said, knowing he’d understand that I would miss his leveling influence and, frankly, his support.

“Yes, we will,” Eileen trumpeted. “But we’ll manage somehow, won’t we, Molly? Because The Publisher is looking for a little revamp here at
Zeitgeist
as well, so we’re going to have to take a hard look at ourselves and decide exactly where we all fit together in a new and improved
Zeitgeist.”

About to release the lions, Empress Eileen smiled while I tap-danced. “Which brings us to the new advice columnist,” I said, bracing myself for Eileen to tell me that I wasn’t moving up after all, that with Henry leaving, her new vision included me in my old job.

“I heard we had a little problem,” Henry said.

“A misguided applicant,” I said, still debating the proper way to handle Dorrie.

“But who do you think gets the job?” Eileen asked.

“I’m proposing a completely new take on the column, in keeping with Eileen’s suggestion about looking for things to change. What if we give the column to Skyler and Carlos and let them do a ‘he said, she said’ approach, which gives our readers dual insight and, as a publication, brings us some male pass-on readership that could elevate our profile?” I was pleased; it sounded almost as good in Eileen’s office as it had in the shower earlier that morning when I’d suggested it to Kyle.

Henry grinned. “Wonderful solution. I agree, they had the strongest responses, and this way we don’t have to choose between them. I’m so glad to have this decided before I go.”

“Decided?” Eileen asked stiffly.

“We agreed the three of us would make the choice,” Henry reminded her.

“And of course I agree, it’s a delightful solution,” Eileen vamped. “I thought we might have to have The Publisher sign off.”

“No, he’s knee-deep with the new mag. He’ll love it. Let’s bring in Carlos and Skyler and let them know.”

“Wait. What are we going to do about Dorrie?” Eileen asked.

“You’re going to need a new assistant,” I said quickly, “and I think you have a real opportunity here to reach out and get her on the right track by letting her observe you up close on a daily basis and inspire her to be true to herself, like you always have been.”

Henry frowned quizzically, but Eileen beamed. “You’re absolutely right. She’s clearly looking for a role model, and she’d be much better off with me.”

And, I thought, Dorrie does deserve some punishment, and having to sit on Eileen’s desk was only fitting.

We called in Carlos and Skyler first to tell them the good news, then brought in Dorrie to explain that she was being given a second chance and a great opportunity. Henry went to assemble everyone in the conference room to make a general announcement, and I stood in Eileen’s doorway, savoring the fact that I was walking out of there feeling good about the magazine and about life.

Until Eileen called me back in. “One last thing,” she said, coming around her desk and advancing on me. “This is my revamp. Not Henry’s and certainly not yours. Do yourself a favor and don’t start regarding yourself as irreplaceable around here. Because you’re not.”

“No one is,” I answered simply, and walked away before any of the several emotions colliding in the pit of my stomach could show.

“To the unknown,” I said, raising my glass as I sat at a table at Bemelmans that night with Kyle, Cassady, Aaron, and Tricia.

“Too bad she’s not the one leaving,” Tricia said after we drank. “There’s a farewell party I’d love to throw.”

“She could be, you never know,” Cassady said. “If anyone can outlast her, Molly can.”

“There’s a lot to be said for the unknown, right, Aaron?” Kyle asked.

“Keeps us both employed,” Aaron agreed.

“I was thinking, it makes us appreciate the known even more,” Kyle said, squeezing my hand.

He was right. The crucial elements in my life were at this table—the man I loved, my best friends, a new friend marrying into the circle. Instead of dreading the unknown, I should welcome it. “Besides,” I said, watching the man walking up behind Tricia, “if you’re not open to the unknown, you can never be surprised.”

“Hey, mind if I join you?” Jordan asked, putting a gentle hand on Tricia’s shoulder as she started in delight. He clinked the ice cubes in the highball glass in his other hand. “I brought my own drink.”

Tricia scooted over as Kyle pulled up a chair from the next table, occupied by a couple who were so focused on the argument they were having that we could have pulled over their table and they wouldn’t have noticed. “How’d you find us?” Tricia asked.

“I called Kenny to see if he’d spotted you anywhere tonight.” Jordan smiled.

I hadn’t realized we’d stayed on Kenny’s radar, but it was nice to know we’d stayed on Jordan’s. Olivia had already promised “full access” while I completed the article, but I wasn’t sure how the guys felt about how things had unfolded. “I’m surprised to see you out and about,” I said.

“Why should I hide? I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said with a sigh. “And I had to get out. Adam and I have been working all day, and I seriously needed a break.”

“Working on …?” Cassady asked.

“Writing music,” Jordan said. “Together. Kind of a catharsis thing, I think, but we actually … I dunno, it’s too soon to tell. Gotta just see how it all plays out.”

An enviable attitude, especially in the face of everything he was going through. But it made sense. Forcing things to happen never works and usually causes bigger problems than you start with. You have to believe that what matters most in life—love, faith, truth—will support you through the rough times and make the good times even more special.

“To letting it all play out,” I toasted, and as they lifted their glasses again, I made a vow then and there to be more patient and trusting and not try to impose my will on the world.

At least until the next story came along.