Rumpelstiltskin

10

I called Dale just before I left the house to tell her there was something else I had to do before I’d be through for the night.

“What time do you think that’ll be?”

“About ten, I’d guess. In fact, I’ll make sure it’s ten.”

“Where will you be?”

“At the Public Safety Building.”

“That’ll mean at least forty minutes to my house.”

“Will that be too late?”

“No. Come when you’re finished. Whenever you’re finished.”

“I’ll call you if there are any problems.”

“Please don’t let there be any problems,” she said.

Neil Sadowsky was a man in his mid-thirties, about five feet seven inches tall, weighing a good hundred and sixty pounds, I guessed, with blond hair and brown eyes. A full beard covered his chin and his jowls and blended into the mustache over his upper lip, all of it as blond as the hair on his head and lending to his face a look of Victorian aristocracy that was strengthened by his straight slender nose and the deepness of his eyes. He was wearing blue slacks and a paler blue Ultrasuede jacket, a navy blue T-shirt, and black patent leather Gucci loafers. We were sitting in the captain’s office; I was beginning to wonder if the captain ever came to work.

“So,” Bloom said, “it was nice of you to fly over, Mr. Sadowsky, I really appreciate it. We’ve had a hell of a time finding you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been in Miami since before Christmas,” Sadowsky said.

“That’s what your mother told the New York cops.”

“I wish you hadn’t bothered my mother.”

I’m sorry about that.” Bloom paused, and then said, “I guess you know Vicky Miller and her daughter were killed.”

“Yes.”

“When did you find out, Mr. Sadowsky?”

“About Vicky, last Monday. About the daughter...”

“Well, let’s talk about Vicky first. You found out about her Monday, huh? Day after the murder.”

“Yes.”

“Where were you the night she got killed? Were you working?”

“No, I’ve got Sunday off.”

“So where were you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, Mr. Sadowsky, I wish you’d try to...”

“Listen, I came here because I thought I could be of some help to you. If I knew this was going to be a third degree...”

“This isn’t a third degree, Mr. Sadowsky.”

“No? Then what is it? If you think I killed Vicky and her kid, you’re out of your mind.”

“So where were you?”

“I told you, I don’t remember. When I get back to Miami, I’ll look at my calendar, I’ll tell you where I was. How the hell can you possibly believe I had anything to do with Vicky’s murder?”

“A nice Jewish kid like you, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Where were you on Sunday night, the thirteenth of January, Mr. Sadowsky?”

“I keep telling him I don’t remember,” Sadowsky said to me, “and he keeps asking me. Vicky and I were good friends, can you understand that?” he said, turning back to Bloom. “There was nothing romantic between us, like with her and Eddie, but we were friends, can you understand friends? Can you get friends through your thick head? So why would anybody kill his friend?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Bloom said. “Why did Cain kill Abel?”

“Jesus,” Sadowsky said, and shook his head, and let out his breath, and then said, “I can’t believe this. For Christ’s sake, can’t you understand how close we all were? I mean, it happened to all of us together, like a dream, what was happening to us. I mean, what the hell were we? A bunch of kids rehearsing in garages until we became Wheat? Without Vicky... well, without Eddie, I guess... we’d still be playing toilets in every shitty alley in the South. Eddie’s a genius. Have you ever met a genius? There isn’t anything he doesn’t know about music. You should’ve heard us back then, when we were auditioning for Regal. You’d have thrown us out of that studio in a minute. Even Georgie, who was better than any of us, maybe improved five hundred percent once Eddie started working with us. Me, I was just a half-ass dope banging on pots and pans till Eddie came along. Taught me everything I know about drumming. Hell, taught me everything I know about music. Before I met him, I didn’t know a paradiddle from a pair of chopsticks. He was a giant in his profession, a giant. Had a temper could level you flat, used to explode at the slightest thing, but who says a genius has to have patience besides? I mean, he was the one responsible for Wheat. And for Vicky Miller, too.”

“How so?” Bloom asked.

“Well, you know, after our audition...” Sadowsky shook his head. “I mean, who would’ve thought there was anything there at all?”

The audition had been a total disaster.

Vicky’s voice may have served in the past to mollify the scant audiences of drunks to whom she’d played in the saloons of Arkansas, but this was the big-time world of record production, and — even amplified — she had a difficult time being heard over Hamilton’s driving lead guitar, the bass player’s sonorous chords, and Sadowsky’s own pounding. Happily for her, Regal’s producer wandered by just as Vicky and the still-unbaptized group were winding up the second cut. Standing in the control booth, he listened and watched. What he heard, by Sadowsky’s own admission now, was just awful — but what he saw was something else again. He saw what Konig had seen earlier: nineteen-year-old Victoria Miller, tall and leggy, with midnight-black hair and eyes the color of anthracite, backed now by three not unattractive young men who, as fate might have ordained, all happened to be shorter than she was and exceedingly blond besides.

In the record business, or so Sadowsky now explained to us, a “producer” is really a combination of an arranger, a conductor, and what would be called a director if cutting a record were in any way similar to making a movie or putting on a play. The producer working for Konig was the young Eddie Marshall — originally Marciano, or Mariani, or Mastroianni, or Marielli, Sadowsky simply couldn’t remember — who’d been born in Los Angeles of Italian descent, and who was working his way up in the music business doing work “far beneath his obvious talents,” his constant complaint to the group. He saw in Vicky and the three young men backing her the visual nucleus of another of those overnight sensations that could happen only in the rock music business — if only he could get a performance out of them. Krantz and Sadowsky were better musicians than the lead guitarist Vicky and her father had picked up in Nashville, nineteen years old and another of those sixties kids who’d learned three basic chords and who’d then gone out to buy umpteen thousand dollars’ worth of amplifiers and speakers so he could rehearse a “group.” He was, however, not entirely hopeless. Blond and good-looking, with china blue eyes and an engaging smile, Geoff Hamilton would get by with a little help from his friends, and he’d fit in beautifully besides with the other two blonds Eddie planned to use as Vicky’s backup. In his mind, and solely based on the color of their hair, Eddie had already decided to name the nascent group “Wheat.”

The problem was Victoria Miller herself, and her pushy father. Dwayne Miller was something of a madman, a cross between a religious fanatic, a carny barker, a con man, and a shrewd entrepreneur who visualized himself as an impresario with but a single artiste in his stable: his daughter Victoria. He would settle for nothing but complete stardom for her, this despite her notable lack of a vocal instrument and an almost tone-deaf ear. But miracles had been known to happen, and Eddie Marshall was eager to try his hand at producing his first one—

“Even for Moses and Jesus,” Sadowsky said, “there had to be a first one.”

Eddie locked himself in with Vicky and the three musicians (whom he now officially baptized Wheat), and for three weeks they labored to produce the single that would later become part of the hit album. Eddie had written the tune himself and had titled it “Frenzy” for no other reason than that the word “frenzy” was repeated in it a total of twenty-six times, accompanied by a great many supportive lyrics like “I’m in a,” and “You’re in a,” and “We’re in a,” prophetic in that the moment the album was released, everyone was in a.

If it took three weeks to perfect the single from which the album would derive its title, it took an equal number of months to record the other nine songs on it. Electronic wizardry aside, Eddie worked in those next three months (“This was November and December of 1964, and January of 1965,” Sadowsky said) harder than he ever had in his life. His raw material consisted of a scarcely accomplished bass guitarist, a loud drummer, a lead guitarist whose repertoire had now expanded to eight chords, and a singer who — though extravagantly beautiful — could barely carry a tune. The miracle of his miracle was that he pulled it off. With more dazzling tricks and effects than anyone save Steinmetz, Edison, or Marconi had ever contrived, he produced an album that made “Victoria Miller and Wheat” — as they were billed in blood-red letters on the album sleeve — sound like the freshest thing on the rock scene since the Beatles had broken out of their Liverpool basement.

“ ‘Frenzy’ was released in April of ’65, around Eastertime,” Sadowsky said, “when Eddie and Konig figured there’d be bunches of kids home from school on vacation and roaming the record shops in search of hot new talent. The album shot to the number-one spot on the charts within three weeks, and passed the million-copy gold-record mark at the beginning of June. By then we’d pulled the single from the album, and it was in the number-two spot on the singles charts. In the long run the single sold a little less than a million copies, robbing us of a gold record in that category, but we guessed that was because so many people already owned the album.”

Vicky had told me, on the night she was killed, that her producer hadn’t wanted her to perform live because he “said it was bad for the records, he wanted everybody to go out and buy the records, you see.” Given the paucity of her talent, virtually nonexistent without the help of studio gimmickry, Eddie’s decision had been a wise one. The next album, appropriately titled “More Frenzy,” was released in 1966 and copped another gold record. The third and last album was simply titled “Vicky.” By then it had become apparent that she alone was the star here; it was Victoria Miller who was directly responsible for all that bread Regal Records was making, and Wheat might just as well have been chaff.

Her refusal to perform in public, her refusal even to appear on any of the television talk shows, was attributed to an innate shyness that caused severe stagefright, an ailment — according to Sadowsky — suffered even by the likes of Carly Simon. Vicky’s millions of fans, the press releases explained, would have to be content with whatever glimpses of her personal life were revealed in the seemingly endless flow of newspaper and magazine interviews she granted, including a lengthy one in TV Guide, the voice of the medium on which she had never appeared. “Vicky” was released in 1967 and earned yet another gold record. It was her last album.

“How come?” Bloom asked.

“She got married,” Sadowsky said, and shrugged. “To Tony Konig, in March of ’68. And she got pregnant almost the minute after. Miscarried while we were working on the fourth album, as a matter of fact. Something called ‘More Vicky’ which was never released. She quit halfway through, when she lost the baby. She blamed the miscarriage on the long days and hard hours she’d been putting in. Told all the newspapers her personal life was more important than all the gold records in the world. Ended her career and also Wheat’s and Eddie Marshall’s. He started messing around with dope, ended up working as a disc jockey at some hick radio station in...”

“Mr. Hope,” Kenyon said, poking his head into the room. “Telephone call for you, you can take it out here if you like.”

“Thank you. Excuse me,” I said and pushed back my chair. I went out to the reception room and took the receiver Kenyon extended to me. “Hello?” I said.

“Guess who?” Dale said.

“Hi.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I know precisely what time it is.”

“Five minutes to ten.”

“So it is.”

“You said you’d be finished there at ten.”

“I will be finished here at ten.”

“Just checking,” she said. “Why don’t you leave right now?”

“I will.”

“Matthew, I...”

“Yes?”

“Nothing, just hurry,” she said.

There was a click on the line. I put the receiver back on the wall hook, thanked Kenyon, and went back in to the captain’s office.

“Everything all right?” Bloom asked.

“Yes, but I’ve got to leave,” I said. “I had a previous appointment, but when you called...”

“This may take a while here yet,” Bloom said. “Go on, if you got to.”

“He still thinks I’m involved in this fucking thing,” Sadowsky said to me.

“Convince me you’re not,” Bloom said.

I didn’t get to Dale’s house on Whisper Key until twenty minutes to eleven. I was ravenously hungry, and when I told her I hadn’t had any dinner yet she whipped out a leftover roast beef and a huge ripe tomato, sliced both, put up some toast for a sandwich, and then took a bottle of cold beer from the fridge. Out on the patio, I plunged into my meal while she sipped at the drink she’d mixed for herself. The night had turned a bit humid, the outdoor furniture was sticky and damp. Dale was wearing a pale blue nylon wrapper, her hair loose around her face. She kept watching me as I wolfed my sandwich and guzzled my beer, telling her with a full mouth all about the Heibel sisters out on Fatback, and then the “interview” — as the police euphemistically called it — with Neil Sadowsky. But she seemed preoccupied. When at last I finished, I opened my arms wide to her, and she came to me where I was sitting, and snuggled onto my lap, and put her head on my shoulder, and sighed.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Bad day at Black Rock,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Top to bottom,” she said. “First appointment to last. It would bore you.”

“Tell me, anyway.”

The thing that was troubling her most, aside from the little maddening routine annoyances that can drive any attorney clear around the bend, was a visit she’d had at the end of the day from a lawyer representing the husband in a divorce action. Dale was representing the wife, a role that displeased her to begin with because it seemed entirely too sexist for a man to be representing the husband and a woman to be representing the wife, all the lines neatly drawn according to gender, all the parts distributed according to sex, the boys with the boys and the girls with the girls. My hand was resting on her nylon-covered breast as she said this, and when I yanked my hand back as though burned, she pulled it immediately to her again, and said, “Don’t be a jackass,” and slid it into the V-neck of the wrapper and onto the naked breast itself.

She had thought, at first, that when the opposing attorney asked to see her he’d wanted to talk settlement. They’d been haggling for the past several months over alimony and support payments, and Dale naturally assumed he’d come there this afternoon to offer something more reasonable than the figures he’d adamantly clung to since before Christmas. But he didn’t mention anything at all about alimony or support for the first twenty minutes of his visit, preferring instead to talk about the new speedboat he’d bought, and eliciting from Dale the information that she was, yes, single and, well, relatively unattached, but that she didn’t much care for water sports and would really appreciate getting to the purpose of his visit, if indeed there was a purpose.

“He was really beginning to annoy me by then, Matthew,” she said, “and yes, darling, I know, I know, the last thing in the world any lawyer should do is lose her temper with opposing counsel, I know that, but the man was angling for a date, for God’s sake, instead of getting to the important matter — to me, anyway — of a divorce my client’s been trying to get for the past eight weeks now, since long before Christmas when she left her husband’s bed and board and took her seven-month-old son with her.”

This was the second time Dale had mentioned Christmas; I suddenly thought of Vicky exchanging cards with Eddie Marshall each year. I recalled, too — and it had bothered me enough at the funeral to have questioned Marshall about it on the spot — that Vicky had made no mention in her card of her imminent opening at the Greenery, to take place less than three weeks after Christmas. This still seemed odd to me — but Dale was talking.

“... in the next five minutes that what he was really after was two things. The first was to establish his client’s lily-white purity, and the second was a fairly subtle — but not that fucking subtle — fishing expedition. As to his client’s honesty, virtue, chastity, godliness, mercy, generosity, honesty — did I say honesty? — and ability as a second baseman for the First Presbyterian Church’s baseball team, he left no stone unturned. He laid it all out as though it had been computerized — my client is so honest that once he; my client is so virtuous that he even; my client is so chaste that he sometimes; my client is so godly and so on and so on, ad nauseam. And if that wasn’t enough, he repeated it all over again, my client is this, my client is that, like an armed robber who’s been seen going into a liquor store at eight p.m. with a shotgun under his arm, and who’s memorized exactly what time a movie goes on — at seven-thirty, as it so happens — and who can tell you just who was kissing whom at eight p.m. sharp up there on the screen in the darkness of the old Bijou on Main Street, since torn down, m’dear, to make way for yet another shopping center. Do you understand what I’m saying, Matthew? He was alibi-ing his client, painting him as a goddamn saint, as if his wife hadn’t been wearing a pair of shiners the first time she came into my office, given to her because she’d had the audacity to find him in bed with a cheap broad who shucks oysters at Downtown Marine. She later showed me the bruises on her breasts and legs, a true paragon of Southern gentlemanliness and godliness, her husband, who plays great second base for the church team. That was the first thing. The alibi. The establishing of credentials.”

I was still thinking about my talk with Eddie Marshall, and about how curious it was that Vicky hadn’t mentioned the opening to him. And although it hadn’t occurred to me at the time, it now seemed to me that Eddie had talked much too long and far too loud about where he’d been on the night Vicky was murdered. I thought now how sweet an alibi a boat on the open water could provide. Dwayne Miller hadn’t heard about his granddaughter’s death because he’d been out on the water with two fishing cronies. Eddie Marshall hadn’t heard about Vicky’s murder because he, too, had been conveniently out on the water — “Didn’t come back in till last night. Didn’t even know Vicky was planning a comeback, learned all about it in the paper. I’d have been down here in a flash if I’d known...”

“... quite a different matter. We have all been subjected to fishing expeditions of one stripe or — are you listening to me?”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“You have a glazed look on your face. Maybe you’d better let go of that breast.”

“No, no, go on.”

“Well, it occurred to me, as my learned opponent launched into his clever Snoop-and-Peep routine, that he had trotted out his client’s credentials only to...”

“Borrowed a boat from a friend of mine in Islamorada Sunday, when I got there...”

“... and was now attempting to discover, in his sly, devious way, whether I knew what the clod had been up to for the past eight weeks, ever since my client walked out on him, taking only the baby in her arms, the clothes on her back, a pair of black eyes, and twelve dollars and eighty-six cents in cash.”

“Stopped off at Disneyworld first — have you ever been to Disneyworld in Orlando? — drove right on down afterward and went out on the water.”

“Mind you, we do not drag our round little heels at Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock. We had put a gumshoe onto Abby’s... her name is Abby... husband right after the holidays were over, and I had a report sitting in the top drawer of my desk right that minute indicating that Harlow, for such is the wife-beating bastard’s name, was still seeing the cheap oyster-shucker with whom he’d been caught in bed, had in fact taken her into the shack Abby had wisely abandoned, and was now living with her in open sin — as we might have said twenty years ago. Having been through the mill yourself, you must undoubtedly know that under F.S. 61.052, no judgment of dissolution of marriage can be granted unless a) the marriage is irretrievably broken or b) one of the parties is mentally incompetent. In short, this is a marital no-fault state, so to speak, and it wouldn’t have mattered if old Harlow had kept a harem before Abby walked out on him. Except, and this is the big except, except as 61.08 declares that the court may consider the adultery of a spouse and the circumstances thereof in determining whether alimony shall be awarded to such spouse and the amount of alimony, if any, to be awarded, unquote. A male chauvinist provision if ever I saw one, in that the wife’s adultery is the determining factor, never mind if the husband was fucking every available woman in the state.

“But turnabout is fair play, m’dear, and I figured I could argue under 61.08 — if it ever came to that — that if alimony can be reduced or even denied because of a wife’s adultery, then by the same token it should be increased because of a husband’s adultery. I knew for sure that old Harlow was still busily engaged in extramarital fornication — the detective’s report detailed his round-the-clock comings and goings, no pun intended — and now his attorney was trying to find out just how much I knew, asking me questions to which he already knew the answers, oh, that smart little shyster...”

“At Greensleeves is that the name of the place?”

“The Greenery.”

“How’d she sound?”

“Not very good.”

“... leading me down the garden, suspecting I’d put a P.I. on his man, and asking me all sorts of questions like did I know where his client lived, he knew I knew where his client lived; and did I know he’d been living alone there since his wife walked out, a bald-faced lie, he was living with his oyster-shucker girlfriend; and had I ever tried to call him there, which I certainly knew was unethical, but what he was trying to find out was whether Abby had ever called there, and whether or not the oyster-shucker had answered the phone, and whether or not Abby had reported this to me, her attorney — a fishing expedition pure and simple. I finally tipped to what he was doing, but only when he’d about run down, and then I sat there listening to him as though he’d suddenly been stripped naked and was standing there with all his circumlocutions hanging out for one and all to...”

“Had someone threatened her, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, did she mention any threats?”

“No.”

“A threatening letter maybe?”

“When he was finished, I sat very still for several minutes, and then I opened the top drawer of my desk, very dramatically I must say, and took out the detective’s report, and placed it on the desk before him, and said, ‘I think you’d better decide on what kind of alimony and support you’re going to come up with because your client may play great second base, but that’s not going to cut any ice when we lay this on the judge.’ Well, his face went absolutely white. He knew he’d been caught fishing and he knew further that the fish had bit back, he was the one on the hook now, he was the one who... Matthew?”

“Yes, Dale.”

“What is it? My God, what’s the matter?”

I had suddenly remembered something else about that day at the funeral. I had suddenly remembered Marshall walking me to where I’d parked the Karmann Ghia.

“I have to call Bloom,” I said, and eased her off my lap.

He was there at the police station, but the woman who answered the phone told me he was still busy interviewing Sadowsky. I left word that this was urgent, and asked her to have Bloom call back as soon as he could. Dale was watching me.

“Did you hear a word I said?” she asked.

“Every word.”

“Do you think I was an idiot not to have realized sooner what was going on?”

“No. I think you’re marvelous.”

“Sure.”

I kissed her. I held her close. I kissed her again. And then we went into the bedroom and Dale pulled back the cover on the bed, and excused herself and went into the bathroom. I undressed in the darkness, and then lay on the bed, listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach outside the window. From the bathroom, I heard the sound of water running in the sink. Dale turned off the tap, and there was silence, except for the sound of the surf. The bathroom door opened. Light spilled into the bedroom, but only for a moment. Dale flicked the switch and padded naked in the darkness to the bed. We were moving into each other’s arms when the telephone rang.

“Shit,” Dale said, and turned on the bedside lamp and lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle. “Hello?” she said, and listened. “Yes, just a moment,” she said, and handed the receiver to me. “It’s Bloom.”

“Hello?” I said.

“What’s up, Matthew?”

“I just remembered something.”

“What?”

“At the funeral last Wednesday, when you left Marshall and me, we talked for a while. I think he was on a fishing expedition, Morrie. I think he was trying to find out how much I knew about those phone calls. The ones...”

“Yes, so?”

“He walked me to my car.”

“Matthew...”

“Morrie, he knew my car. He stopped at the car before I did. The rear plate reads HOPE-1, but he couldn’t have seen that because we were approaching from the front. If he knew my car, which was parked in Vicky’s driveway the night she was...”

“I’ve got you,” Bloom said. “Come on down here, I want you to fill me in on the conversation you had. I’d better hold Sadowsky. He’s clean as a whistle, but I think he’s got some work to do for us.”