Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Death Will Help You Imagine by Elizabeth Zelvin

This new Elizabeth Zelvin story belongs to the New York author’s Bruce Kohler series, which consists, to date, of four novels, a novella, and five previous short stories. Fans can now find all of these earlier cases for recovering alcoholic Bruce and his friends Barbara and Jimmy in unified e-format from Outsider Books.

Running with Barbara in Central Park, I sniffed the air like a hound, trying to decide if seven days’ abstinence from smoking made any difference in my breathing.

“Bruce,” Barbara said, punching my arm to get my attention, “look at the wildlife.”

I looked, prepared to see anything from a red-tailed hawk with a rat in its mouth to a horse-drawn carriage full of apple-cheeked teenagers from Iowa texting instead of admiring the scenery. It was only Define Normal, gender undetermined, who sits on a bench by the lake wearing a white horse’s head with a unicorn horn, black vest and pants, white blouse, red bow tie, and high heels — playing the accordion.

“I love New York characters, don’t you?” Barbara said.

“I am a New York character,” I said. “The only reason I’m not famous is that I’m anonymous.”

“You don’t get your picture in the New York Times for staying sober against death-defying odds.”

“Or a million hits on YouTube.”

A pedicab passed us, its driver’s muscular legs pumping away. He grinned over his shoulder at his passengers, a honeymoon couple by the look of them.

“That’s the Dakota,” he said, “where John Lennon lived. He got shot on the sidewalk right outside. Do you want to see his memorial at Strawberry Fields? You can take pictures of the Imagine sign and listen to the music. I’ll let you out here and meet you on the other side.”

“That’s all the Dakota means to them,” Barbara said. “I’ve got nothing against the Beatles, but what about real history? Like when they put the building up in eighteen eighty-four, it was so far from civilization that it might as well have been in Dakota, which was still Indian territory back then.”

“Aw, now you’re just channeling Jimmy,” I said.

Jimmy, currently home watching the baby, was the history buff among us.

“Speaking of Jimmy, let me call home. Sunshine is due for a feed, and I’m beginning to leak.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

“Oh, Bruce, get over it. You don’t think Cindy’s going to want kids someday?”

“One day at a time,” I said. Cindy and I were barely up to the L word yet, and she was on the brink of making detective. “Let’s cut through Strawberry Fields. You can grab a cab on Central Park West.”

I was glad Barbara chose the left-hand path, not quite as steep as the right-hand path. I didn’t want to do any heavy climbing until I’d racked up ninety days off cigarettes. We pushed through the worshipers kneeling to lay flowers on the round gray stone mosaic and jogged past the Beatles wannabes strumming their acoustic guitars and warbling “Yesterday” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

“You’d think John and Yoko were the first famous people who ever lived in the Dakota,” Barbara said. “What about Judy Garland and Boris Karloff and Rudolf Nureyev and Leonard Bernstein? What about Lauren Bacall?”

She wasn’t even breathing through her mouth between sentences, damn her, and she was just getting back into shape after having a baby. We passed a regular whose singing voice sounded a lot like Dylan’s — not a compliment. He would have stuck to Dylan songs all day except that every time he sang one, the crowd clamored for more Beatles. We passed the Dollar a Joke Man, whose sign says he makes up all his jokes himself and offers you a refund if they don’t make you laugh.

“Have you ever—” I stopped short as a shower of mellow guitar notes fell into the air, spreading a hush around them like raindrops spreading ripples on a pond. A woman’s voice, smooth and dark as molasses and aching with loneliness, sang the first lines of “Eleanor Rigby.” A sweet tenor came in, winding harmony around her melody. The other performers, the hucksters, even the tourists shut up.

“I’ve got to hear this,” Barbara said.

She jogged in place, her arms wrapped around her breasts as if to stop the milk from overflowing onto the Imagine sign. The tourists held up their iPhones and started snapping pictures. You could see the singers didn’t like being photographed, though they were theatrically dressed in medieval minstrels’ garb. They kind of turned their shoulders to the crowd, and when they finished “Eleanor Rigby,” they didn’t start another.

“Who are they?” a guy in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt asked us.

“They’re New York characters,” I said, with a wink at Barbara.

“Everyone calls them the Homeless Troubadour and Lady Lost,” Barbara said.

“But they’re good,” the guy said. “Where do they perform? Where do they live?”

“Here,” Barbara said. “Nowhere.”

“They’re homeless,” I said. “And lost. Sorry, gotta go.”

I grabbed Barbara’s elbow and steered her up the path, past the Lennon Button Man, and through a clot of Europeans off a tour bus blocking traffic as they lined up for chicken and rice at a halal cart at the curb.

“Come on, Barb. Taxi!”

“I could have run longer,” she said. “Come out with me early tomorrow morning?”

“How early?”

“Five-thirty. Please say yes.”

“In the morning? Barb, you’re killing me.”

“Are you seeing Cindy tonight?”

“No, she’s on duty.”

“So come home with me. If you stay over, Sunshine will wake us all up, and you’ll be ready to go when I am. Jimmy can watch her before he goes to work.”

It’s a good thing AA has taught me that sometimes you have no choice but to surrender.

Okay, it was hard to complain about being kissed awake by a soft pink goddaughter with starfish hands clutching my ears and only a little drool on her rosebud lips.

“Good morning, Sunshine.”

“Vav-vav-vav,” she said.

Wasn’t that “father” in Klingon? The kid was precocious, if a little confused about who her daddy was.

It was even almost bearable to run down Central Park West in the pale light of an early morning with very little traffic to spoil the mood. Two triple espresso grande lattes from the Starbucks on Jimmy and Barbara’s corner helped.

“Let’s cut into the park at the Women’s Gate,” Barbara said. “Strawberry Fields is always so packed with tourists, you never get an unobstructed view.”

“Why do you think it’s such a big deal?” I asked. “It’s just a gray circle so small you couldn’t use it as a parking space for a circus-clown car. And most of the people who come weren’t even born when John Lennon died. But they lay down their roses and go away satisfied.”

“For me it’s not Lennon,” she said. “It’s imagining peace. The more people who get teary over that, the better.”

“I’m all for peace,” I said, “but I don’t get teary over it. And Beatles songs are okay, but some of those singers make me want to cry. The Dylan wannabe, for one. I think most of them are singing for free for a reason.”

“Not the Homeless Troubadour and Lady Lost,” Barbara said as we hung a left and jogged east. “They’re amazing singers. I bet they didn’t always play for free and sleep on a park bench. I wonder what their story is.”

The path looked naked with the Lennon Button Man’s stand missing from its usual station.

“For once, we’ll have Imagine to ourselves,” Barbara said.

But we didn’t.

“Oh! Oh no! Oh, my God!”

She stopped so abruptly that I tripped on her heels. I grabbed at her shoulders for balance and nearly toppled both of us. A woman in a purple velvet gown with flowing sleeves and dark blue satin slashings lay facedown across the Imagine mosaic. Her long brown hair fanned out in tangles down her back and shoulders, screening her face.

“I don’t think she’s having a sleep-out, Barb, do you?” The flowers scattered over her body kind of gave it away.

“We have to check anyway,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t touch her with your bare hands.”

“So this is the end of the story for Lady Lost,” she said. “Poor thing.”

We both took out clean bandannas and our cell phones, neither of which a runner in Manhattan should ever be without. Barbara took a few quick pictures on her phone while I used my bandanna to hold her hair away from her face and get in close. There were flowers under her too, but that didn’t make her a pretty sight.

“I’m calling nine-one-one,” Barbara said. “Be careful!”

“I’m just getting close enough to make double sure she’s past helping,” I said. “It looks like she was strangled with some kind of wire. There’s an ugly ridge around her neck.”

“Take a picture of it,” she said, “and get away from the body. You know how easily cops can get the wrong idea if they find you standing over a corpse. Hey, why don’t you call Cindy?”

“She can’t just gallop in and grab a case,” I said. “There’s such a thing as chain of command. And every precinct has its territory.”

“It can’t hurt to have a detective in our corner, even if it’s not her case.”

Within a few minutes, uniformed cops arrived, stashed us on a bench to wait for the detectives, and started putting up crime-scene tape. Through the trees, I could see police cars, red and blue lights whirling, herding the pedicabs and horse-drawn carriages that usually hung out waiting for customers at the 72nd Street entrance to the drive away from the scene. It was seven o’clock by now, and a curious crowd was beginning to gather.

“Well, well.” Detective Natali had been the lead investigator on Cindy’s first homicide case. “Ms. Rose. Kohler.” He nodded at me. “I’m told you reported a body, Ms. Rose.”

“Detective Natali. I’m afraid so.”

“You won’t mind answering a few questions, then,” he said. “Have your name or address changed since we last met?”

“No,” she said, “but I have gotten married and had a baby. I’m nursing, so I’d really appreciate it if we can do this quickly, so I can get home and feed my daughter.”

TMI is Barbara’s middle initial. Initials. But Natali’s face softened, and I knew why. He had a new baby too, and his wife was also nursing. Cindy told me. I also knew he’d transferred to the Central Park precinct, which had its own detective squad.

“We’ll do our best,” he said. “What were you doing in the park during the hours of closure?”

“We weren’t—”

“Barb.” I laid a hand on her arm. “We ran down Central Park West,” I said. “We wanted to see Strawberry Fields without the crowds, but we tried to time it so we didn’t turn into the park before six. Maybe we were a little early.”

He asked his questions while the crime-scene folks and the medical examiner did their thing. Why did we think the victim was already dead? What made us think she had been murdered? Had we touched anything? Had we seen anyone at all on or near the scene? Did we know who she was? That was kind of a trick question, because we did and we didn’t. Sure, we knew her. She was Lady Lost. She was a regular. We’d seen her there almost every time we’d passed through Strawberry Fields for the past couple of years at least. She had a beautiful singing voice. Her real name? We had no idea. She had a partner, the Homeless Troubadour. He could tell them more. His name? Not a clue. Was she homeless too? Where did they stay? In the park? On the street? In the shelters? Maybe one of the other performers knew more than we did.

“Poor Homeless!” Barbara said when Natali finally let us go. “He’ll come today expecting to find her here, and he’ll be devastated.”

“Not your problem, Barb,” I said. “Leave it to the NYPD. Go home.”

Barbara’s hormones made my case by leaking breast milk through her T-shirt. I averted my eyes and shooed her toward the park exit.

“Stick around and see if Homeless shows up,” she called back over her shoulder. “And talk to Cindy!”

I dropped by their apartment again that evening to pick up Jimmy and make a meeting. Sunshine, riding her mother’s hip, removed a saliva-coated fist from her mouth to give me a welcoming poke in the eye.

“Did Homeless come?” Barbara asked. “How did he take the news? Could you hear what he said to Natali? Did you talk to Cindy? What can she tell us about the case? Did you talk to any of the other witnesses?”

“Natali made me leave right after Homeless arrived. He looked broken up, but I couldn’t hear what he said. The cops didn’t let anyone who’d known them — the regulars — talk to each other while I was there. And I haven’t got hold of Cindy yet.”

“Don’t you want to help?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Nobody with a gift like Lady Lost’s sings for tips and sleeps in the park on purpose. Had she dreamed of a second chance? Would she have gotten one if she hadn’t been killed? So far, all I was doing with my second chance was staying sober one day at a time and being the best damn friend and boyfriend and godfather that I could. Maybe helping get some kind of justice for Lady Lost was something I could do to give back.

“How hard will they try to find the killer of a homeless person?”

“That’s not fair, Barb,” I said. “They’ll do their best.”

“They don’t even know who she was.”

“Homeless can tell them,” I said.

“I wonder if she had ID on her,” she said. “Cindy will know. Should I call her?”

“I’ll ask her myself,” I said.

How I got Cindy in the mood to share information was none of Barbara’s business. I told her and Jimmy everything else the following evening, while we ate Chinese food and Sunshine tried out her single tooth on a fortune cookie. She was going to be persistent like her mother.

“So what’s the Homeless Troubadour’s story?” Barbara asked. “What’s his name?”

“Natali dropped the ball on that,” I said. “Cindy says he’s furious with himself. Homeless was so upset when he saw Lady Lost dead that he started wailing and tearing his hair. He was in no state to be interviewed, and Natali couldn’t lock him up for being overcome with grief. He had a squad car take him to the men’s shelter over on East 30th Street. He told him to get some rest and a hot meal, and they’d come and get him in the morning so they could talk about how he could help them find whoever killed his lady and what should be done with her body. But when they showed up, he had disappeared.”

“Natali didn’t even look at his ID?” Barbara asked. “A Medicaid card? Anything?”

“He didn’t have any on him,” I said.

“It’s not a crime to be carrying no ID in New York City,” she said. “Yet.”

“What about Lady Lost?” Jimmy asked. “What do they know about her?”

“Only what the medical examiner could tell them,” I said. “She wasn’t carrying ID either.”

A mug shot of Lady Lost dead and her fingerprints would have been enough to identify her if she’d ever been arrested, but she hadn’t. They also drew a blank with the city’s social-service agencies. The staff at the shelter where they’d left the Homeless Troubadour not only hadn’t seen him that night, they didn’t know him.

Barbara and I went back to Strawberry Fields and chatted up the witnesses ourselves. Barbara had Sunshine in a carrier on her chest, face outward for maximum viewing and general cuteness. We listened to a few songs, bought a few buttons, and generally paid our dues before we started asking questions. I let the Dollar a Joke Man tell me a joke. The baby requested an encore on “Hey, Jude.”

They were perfectly willing to talk once we got them going. The Dylan wannabe looked disgruntled when the others agreed on what phenomenal voices the pair had had.

“No one ever dropped so much as a quarter in his hat,” a white-haired Woodstock-era hippie whispered to me, “when they showed up. Mine either, but so what? They had the gift. You gotta respect that.”

“He wasn’t a bad guitar player,” the Dylan guy said. “You could see he used to be really good, but he had arthritis in his hands.”

“Wasn’t?” Barbara said. “Do you think something’s happened to him too?”

“I didn’t say that!” the Dylan guy said. “He’ll be back once the fuss dies down.”

“Why would it die down?” I asked. “Somebody killed her. He disappeared, and that looks bad. Don’t you think they’ll keep looking for him?”

“Where did he hang out besides here?” Barbara asked. “Did he sleep in one of the shelters?”

“They wouldn’t stay in shelters,” several of them chorused. “Neither of them.”

“So where did they sleep?” I asked. “In the park?”

“Why do you want to know?” This was a young woman of the pierced and tattooed generation who hadn’t been born when Lennon died. I wondered what drew her to his memorial. She frowned, setting the tiny bells on the rings through her eyebrows tinkling.

“We liked their music, same as you,” Barbara said. “I was thinking if he had a special spot — if a friend wanted to warn him how bad his disappearing looked—”

The young woman blushed red under her blue tattoos.

“I don’t know. But if I did — he has to come back!”

“She has it bad for Homeless,” the Woodstock guy murmured in my ear. “But he never saw anyone but Lady Lost.”

“It’s not safe to have one spot,” someone said. “Not that I’m saying they slept out here at all!”

“They said they did,” someone else said, “but I never saw them.”

We looked around. A few people shook their heads. One or two looked cagey. I could see how if you’d found a safe, warm hiding place inside the park you wouldn’t want to share.

“Where else might they have gone?” I asked.

“Here, there, and everywhere,” the Woodstock guy said.

It took me a moment to remember that was a Beatles song.

“Maybe he took a taxi,” the Dollar a Joke Man said.

“You ask too many questions,” Tattoo Girl said. “But I’ll tell you one thing: the Homeless Troubadour is not a derelict. He’s an artist!”

After that, I would have given up, but Barbara kept going back, taking Sunshine and a supply of dollar bills and sticking with it till a couple of them were willing to talk to her one on one. It seemed Lady Lost had always brushed off questions. Homeless had confided a few details of her past, but the story changed every time he told it. He told one person that she was bipolar and had been institutionalized as a teen. To another, he said she was a runaway from Minnesota who got snapped up by a pimp at Port Authority and spent two nightmare years as a sex slave before getting away. We passed these stories on to the NYPD, but they remained unconfirmed. Natali followed up on the whereabouts of the Dylan wannabe and Tattoo Girl at the time of the murder. Neither of them was homeless or unidentified. Neither had an alibi. The Dylan guy lived in Queens with his wife and kids but had been riding the subway all night after a fight with his wife. Tattoo Girl, a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, had attended an all-night party and gone home with a guy whose name she didn’t know at an address to which she had paid no attention.

Cindy was spending every hour she could at work, as if she could shorten the eighteen months she had to carry a white shield before making detective by spending them on the job. I was still temping. I had bookmarked the website of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on my computer, but I hadn’t done anything about it yet. I certainly hadn’t told my girlfriend or my two best friends I was thinking of bettering myself. I wasn’t ready for their opinions. Whenever I wasn’t at work, I could be found at Jimmy and Barbara’s apartment, hanging out with Ms. Sunshine, who could now raise herself on her hands, beam like a beauty queen, and drool all at the same time — a regular multitasker like her dad. She’d be thumbing an iPhone in no time.

“Have you noticed,” Jimmy asked, “that Homeless told different stories to different people about Lady Lost, but none about himself?”

“He’s a man of mystery, all right,” I said. “He’s never used the shelters, and no one’s ever seen him sleeping in the park either. Where do you suppose he’s hiding?”

“I have no patience with that,” Barbara said.

“With what, pumpkin?” Jimmy asked. “Look, she’s trying to roll over. Come on, Sunshine! Sunny side up. Do it for Daddy.”

“Romanticizing homeless people who won’t use social services,” she said. “Or mentally ill people who refuse to take meds. As if it’s a triumph of individualism.”

“What do we know about Homeless, anyway?” I asked.

“He’s got a beautiful voice,” Barbara said. “He’s a good guitar player, but he’d probably be better if he didn’t have arthritis in his hands.”

“He loved Lady Lost,” Jimmy said. “He liked to dress up. What else do you want? He’s homeless.”

“Is he?” I asked. “We only have his word for it. And we know he’s a liar.”

“He’s not homeless?” Barbara asked. “Then who is he?”

“If we can figure that out,” I said, “I bet we can find him.”

We started with the premise that we would find the Homeless Troubadour’s face in some other context than busking in medieval garb, arrest records, or social services. Since cyberspace was Jimmy’s briar patch, he got to do the virtual legwork.

“Look for Lady Lost too,” Barbara said. “If he wasn’t homeless, maybe she wasn’t either. Maybe none of his hard-luck stories about her were true.”

“Or maybe they were,” I said, “but that might have been only part of their story. People do go down the scale.”

Jimmy and I exchanged a glance. We both knew all about hitting bottom.

Barbara caught it. She still watches us like a hawk. It’s her residual codependency. She’s afraid she might miss something interesting.

“Do you think they might have been alcoholics?” she asked.

“I can’t say I’ve never seen anyone dressed like it’s the fourteenth century at a meeting,” Jimmy said, “but not them. I would have noticed.” His fingers sashayed up and down the keyboard. “I’m not getting any hits on the two of them together except performing in the park. Let me play with her image some and try her on her own.”

Barbara put Sunshine down for a nap and I drank a couple of Diet Cokes, which were a lousy substitute for cigarets, while Jimmy searched. Then Barbara napped on the couch and I read Forensics for Dummies on my newly acquired Kindle until Jimmy looked up.

“Do you remember Lily Vidalia?” he asked.

“Sure,” Barbara said. “Are you saying Lady Lost was Lily Vidalia?”

“Who?” I asked.

“They called her the Lily of the West,” Barbara said. “I loved her music. She was a late-blooming folk singer who had a huge success as a crossover artist. But then she dropped out of sight. Are you sure, Jimmy?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

We looked over his shoulder. He had two photos side by side on the screen. One showed Lady Lost in Strawberry Fields, with her flowing hair and her head thrown back as she sang. I recognized the long, swanlike neck that I’d last seen pinched by a strangler’s wire. The other showed Lily Vidalia on the stage at Carnegie Hall in the exact same posture. She wore a shimmering silver evening gown. We all gazed at the screen in silence for a while.

“I want to hear her voice,” Barbara said. “Find ‘Lily of the West.’ Joan Baez and Bob Dylan recorded it, but Lily made it her own. It was her signature song.”

“The Chieftains did it too,” Jimmy said.

Barbara smacked him lightly upside the head.

“TMI, bro,” I said.

“Here she is,” he said, “it’s on YouTube.”

It was the same voice. There was no mistaking it. She looked heartbreakingly young and alive.

“She changed the lyrics,” Barbara said, “because she was the Lily. In the original, it was ‘I courted lovely Flora/ the Lily of the West.’ ”

“Look at the band,” I said. “On the right.”

“It’s him,” she said. “He was her lead guitar. I was right about him. Look at his fingers fly.”

“Let’s find out who he is,” Jimmy said.

He minimized the YouTube screen so Lily could keep on singing while he searched.

“Found him. His name is Bob Gunderson. He wasn’t just her lead guitar. When she switched to pop, he cowrote some of her songs and produced her albums. They won Grammys together.”

“So what happened?”

“She got nodes,” Jimmy said, “whatever that is.”

“I’ve heard singers talk about it in meetings,” she said. “They’re all deathly afraid of getting them. Calluses on your vocal cords. You get them from overusing your voice.”

“Lesions,” Jimmy said, already beamed up to the right page online. “Prolonged vocal abuse.”

“It sounds horrible,” I said. “Can they be fixed?”

“Sometimes,” Barbara said. “But it might have meant she would never sing again. So she dropped out of sight.”

“And he dropped out with her,” Jimmy said. “I’m checking. No references to performances or any professional activity later than five years ago, when she announced she had to give her voice a break. His arthritis might have started up by then too.”

“But he wrote songs,” Barbara said, “and he was a music producer. He wouldn’t have needed his hands to be in virtuoso shape for that, not in the digital age.”

“Maybe he didn’t care about all that,” I said. “Maybe he dropped out to take care of her. When they sang together, they sure looked and sounded like they loved each other.”

“Let’s see if I can find one where they sing together,” Jimmy said, “when she was at her peak. Ah, thank you, YouTube. Here.”

It must have been one of the songs they’d written together. It brought a lump to my throat. It sounded the way I would have liked to tell Cindy I felt about her, only I didn’t have the words or the music and never would.

“They might have faked that for a performance on a concert stage like that,” Jimmy said.

“But not for an audience of tourists in Central Park,” Barbara said. “Why would they have bothered?”

“They wouldn’t,” I said. “They must have really meant it. They sounded just like that in Strawberry Fields.”

“Except they took it easy on her voice,” Barbara said, “and on his hands.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “Now that we know his name, let’s find Bob Gunderson and get some answers. They wouldn’t have been broke. They must have lived somewhere, and I bet that’s where he’s hiding.”

But neither Jimmy nor the NYPD, because we’d have been crazy not to tell Cindy and Natali what we’d discovered, could find a current address for Robert Gunderson in the tristate area or an active credit card, driver’s license, or utilities or phone bill. Their royalty checks went by a roundabout route to a lawyer who was not only bound by confidentiality but convinced a sceptical Natali that he didn’t know where the money went when it left his hands, but he knew the trail had been expertly concealed five years ago. A similar search for Lily Vidalia led to the same lawyer and the same dead end. He had her will, but since Bob Gunderson was her sole beneficiary, it didn’t help.

Cindy and I were sharing one of those postcoital moments that I used to think would be disappointing without cigarets but was realizing could now be devoted to breathing in the scent and feel of her, with maybe a flash of telepathy now and then, when she said, “If they used another name, what would it have been?”

At the same moment, I said, “Why Strawberry Fields?”

“You first,” she said.

“Why the Beatles?” I asked. “Lennon was beside the point for them. They sang folk and their own songs, and the Beatles were long gone by the time they came along.”

“It was part of their disguise,” Cindy said. “When you heard ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ you didn’t think of Lily Vidalia.”

“Why Central Park at all?”

“The Dakota,” she said. “It’s right across the street from Strawberry Fields. We checked there first of all. They could slip in and out whenever they wanted. All they had to do is duck behind a bush or dodge into a restroom and get out of those conspicuous clothes, and they’d be invisible. But there are no residents under their names, and the Dakota is very protective of its residents’ privacy. We asked what questions we could, but we got nowhere, and beyond a certain point we got told to lay off.”

“We?”

“NYPD. Okay, Natali. He was pissed off, and I sympathize. Suppose they bought the co-op in another name. What name?”

“My gut says it would be in her name. She was the diva. How about Flora? In the song, the Lily of the West is Flora. Flora Gunderson.”

“We checked all the Gundersons — not just the Bobs or Roberts, and not just in the Dakota.”

“West, then,” I said. “Flora G. West.”

“It’s worth a try,” Cindy said. “I’ll text Natali.”

I guessed right. The police found Gunderson, still ravaged with grief, in the Dakota, in the apartment he’d shared with Lily. They found the murder weapon too: a steel guitar string. When she was diagnosed with nodes, she’d thought she’d never sing again. But after surgery and therapy and warming up her voice in Strawberry Fields, she’d healed. She was ready to be a pro again. But his arthritic hands were getting worse. She was going to leave him. So he killed her. I’d been right about that too: He didn’t care about songwriting or producing. He’d had only two loves: Lily and playing the guitar. Without them both, his life was over. He came quietly.

© 2017 Elizabeth Zelvin