Roscoe Niles spent the next five minutes denying he knew Roger Bascom. Jesse let him, sitting silently across the table as the DJ swore up and down he’d never met the man. He figured Roscoe had to get it out of his system and he hoped Roscoe would say something to make this easier.
“Phone records don’t lie,” Jesse said. He was bluffing because it would take a little time before they got the LUDs, but Roscoe didn’t know that. “And then there’s this.” Jesse tapped his cell phone screen, then handed it to the man across the table. “Scroll right to left. There’s also dashboard-camera footage of you. Tells an interesting story.”
Roscoe Niles’s whole body sagged as he handed the phone back to Jesse.
“Pretty damning evidence, Roscoe: you getting out of your car with the gun case, you holding the rifle, you walking up into the woods... The man who took those photos is the retired head of the state Homicide Bureau,” Jesse said. “So don’t bullshit me. Understand?”
Niles nodded.
“Explain it to me.”
“Nothing I say is going to change anything, is it?”
“Probably not legally, but it may help with the way I feel about you.”
“That means a lot to me, man.”
“Apparently not enough.”
“I’m sorry, Jesse. You have to believe me. I really am, but I was desperate. You see what my place looks like. I’m tapped out and deep into the guys on the street. I haven’t made any real money in years. There are so many mortgages on this dump that I’d have to live two hundred more years to pay them off. I sold everything I had in the world just to make my vig payments until this thing was over with.”
“I figured you had to be desperate, but there are a lot of desperate people in the world who don’t murder other people.”
“Bascom needed killing.” Niles lifted up the bottle, waved it at Jesse. “You want one?”
Jesse shook his head and watched his old friend fill his coffee mug with Red Label.
“To Diana.” Niles lifted his coffee mug to drink.
Jesse slapped the mug out of Niles’s hand. “Don’t you speak her name in front of me again.”
“Sorry, man.”
“Why didn’t you run, Roscoe? You had the money and you didn’t know I had someone on you. With six mill, you could have been anywhere by now.”
Niles laughed a coarse laugh like ripping fabric. “I wasn’t going anywhere without Bella.”
Jesse shook his head. “What was your cut going to be?”
“A mill.”
Jesse said, “You undersold yourself.”
“Story of my life. You have any idea of how much money, how many women I could have had when I was on the air in New York? But not me, no, sir, not Mr. Integrity.”
“You’re a saint.”
There was that laugh again. “Ain’t I, though?”
“Without you to authenticate the tape none of it would have worked. Why didn’t you ask for a bigger cut?”
“At the time, a mill seemed like a fortune to me.”
“But I bet Bella explained to you how it could all be for the two of you. Kill Bascom and cut White out. White couldn’t go to the cops.”
The slump went out of Niles’s body. “No, it was all my idea. Bella had nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said, “I bet. Pure as the driven snow. Don’t be an idiot, Roscoe. You know she was probably sleeping with Bascom, too.”
Niles’s face turned bright red and he seemed ready to pounce.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jesse said, placing his hand around the grip of his nine-millimeter. “You don’t have a rifle in your hand now. It was you who shot at me in the woods the other day, but that wasn’t part of the plan, was it? You followed Bella to my house that morning. You thought she was sleeping with me, too.”
“Stop pushing me about Bella. You say another word about her and I’ll ask for a lawyer.”
“You’re in no position to make threats, but okay, we’ll leave her out of it for now.”
Niles relaxed, the angry red bleaching out of his cheeks.
“It’s all bullshit, isn’t it, Roscoe? The poem, the tape, it’s all smoke and mirrors. There never was a Hangman’s Sonnet album. There was nothing on the tape. It was just a prop.”
“The poem’s real, man, but no, there was nothing on the tape. It wasn’t a scam to begin with all those years ago. They meant to make the album, but Jester went over the edge before the project got started. Terry hasn’t been functional since. The cost of his hospitalization has bankrupted them.”
“What about royalties?” Jesse asked. “They play Jester’s stuff on the radio all the time. He still sells.”
“Stan has Jester’s power of attorney. He sold the publishing rights about seven years ago when Jester’s condition worsened and White needed the cash infusion to keep up Terry’s level of care.”
“Did you know there was no album before White approached you?”
Niles looked insulted, hurt. “Are you kidding me, man? No, I believed like the rest of the world. Everyone believed because we all want to believe in the Holy Grail or El Dorado or that the Walrus was Paul. Where would we be without myths, man? That’s why it worked.”
“Almost worked, Roscoe. Almost. So White came to you and...”
“And what choice did I have? I needed bread any way I could get it. But I wasn’t in on this early. White came to me a few months ago because, as Mr. Integrity, I had credibility in the industry. He knew people who might be putting up big bucks would want more than his word alone that the tape was real.”
“But it was you who suggested using me to vouch for you.”
Niles couldn’t look Jesse in the eye. “It was me. After Diana was killed I knew you’d... Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“What if I didn’t come to you to ask about Jester and The Hangman’s Sonnet?”
“Who else would you go to?” Niles smirked. “If you didn’t come on your own, White or Bella would’ve nudged you in my direction or I might’ve called to say hi and taken the conversation that way.”
“So it was White, Bascom, you, and Bella. Is Evan Updike part of it?”
Niles was still determined to protect Bella. “It was White and Bascom. Bella wasn’t part of it.”
“If you only had as much respect for Diana’s memory as for Bella, we wouldn’t be here.”
“I was desperate, man.”
“So you say. What about Updike?”
“He was the straw man, the guy White wanted you to chase while we got out of Dodge.”
“So he had no part in this?”
Niles shrugged. “At first, yeah, I guess, when it went down in the seventies. I mean, he was the only other person who knew there was no real Hangman’s Sonnet album, but I’ve never seen him and he was never mentioned as anything except as the fall guy. I can tell you this, though, Stan hates Updike’s guts.”
“You’re going away for the rest of your life.”
Niles dispensed with the coffee cup and took a slug straight from the bottle. “What life?”