A Cold Heart

She arrived at the scene and conferred with the assistant coroner. He informed her that the morgue was backlogged and the autopsy would take a while. But cause of death didn’t look to be any great mystery.

Single knife wound, exsanguination, most of the blood pooled beneath the DB, establishing the kill spot. Petra, in powder blue, was glad there wasn’t more gore.

Then she read the victim’s license and got sad because, for the first time since she’d been a detective, this was a name she recognized. She’d never been into the blues- not musically, anyway- but you didn’t have to be to know who Edgar Ray Lee was.

AKA Baby Boy. The driver’s license in his pocket just stated the basics: male Caucasian, a DOB that put him at fifty-one. Height: six-two, weight: two-seventy. Petra thought he looked bigger than that.

As she recorded the data in her pad, she overheard someone- one of the morgue drivers- remark that the guy was a guitar god, had jammed with Bloomfield, Mayall, Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Petra turned and saw a ponytailed and bearded ex-hippie type in morgue coveralls staring at the body. White ponytail. Wet-eyed.

“Talented,” she said.

“Those fingers,” said the driver, as he unfolded a black plastic body bag.

“You play?” Petra asked him.

“I noodle. He played. He- those fingers were… magic.” The driver dabbed at his eye, yanked angrily at the bag, virtually ripped it open. Zzzzzzzip.

“Ready?” he said.

“In a sec.” Petra crouched by the body, took in the details, again. Jotted in her pad.

Yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, shaved head, tiny chin beard. Tattoos blued both arms.

Ponytail walked away looking disgusted. Petra continued studying. Edgar Ray Lee’s mouth hung open exposing broken and rotted teeth that made Petra think: Junkie? But she spotted no track marks among the tattoos.

Baby Boy hadn’t been dead more than an hour, but his face had already taken on that greenish gray pallor. The EMTs had cut the shirt around the stab wound. Three-inch vertical slit up the belly, gaping at the edges.

She sketched the wound and slipped the pad back into her purse. She was stepping away when a photographer behind her a

His camera landed on the asphalt and rattled ominously, but that wasn’t Petra ’s concern.

Crimson splotches and speckles decorated her pants. Both trouser legs ruined.

The photographer lay there, stu

She stamped away from the scene.

Her own damn fault, going for color.

3

Petra worked the case hard, doing all the usual procedural things as well as researching Baby Boy Lee on the Internet. Soon, she felt immersed in her victim’s world, wondered what it had been like to be Edgar Ray Lee.

The bluesman had started out upper-middle class, the only child of two professors at Emory University in Atlanta. Ten years as a child prodigy on violin and cello had ended when Edgar’s teenage rebellion aimed him at guitar and landed him on a Greyhound to Chicago, where he found a whole new lifestyle: Living on the streets and in borrowed cribs, sitting in with the Butterfield Blues Band, Albert Lee, B. B. King, and any other genius who happened to be passing through. Developing his chops but picking up bad habits.

The older musicians recognized the chubby kid’s talent right away, and one of them gave him the nickname that stuck.

Baby Boy spent two decades scratching a living as a sessions sideman and a bar-band front man, endured big promises that petered, cut records that went nowhere, finally recorded a top-40 hit with a Southern band called Junior Biscuit. The song, pe

The song made it to 19 on the Billboard Top 100, stayed on the charts for a month. Baby Boy bought himself a nice car and a whole bunch of guitars and a house in Nashville. Within a year, all the money was gone, as Lee kicked up his pattern of voracious womanizing and dining, and polydrug use. The next several years were a blur of fruitless rehab stints. Then: obscurity.

No relatives called about the case. Lee’s parents were both dead, he’d never married or sired a child. That, God help her, made her care about him deeply, and the image of his corpse stayed in her head.

The usual procedural things were: having Baby Boy’s apartment taped off before dropping in for a personal look-through, interviewing Baby Boy’s band mates, his manager, the owner of the Snake Pit, bouncers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, the few patrons who’d stuck around to gawk at the crime scene and had gotten their names on a list.

No one had any idea who’d want to hurt Baby Boy. Everyone loved Baby Boy, he was a great big kid, naÏve, good-natured, would give you the shirt off his back- would give you his guitar, for God’s sake.

The high point of usual procedure was an hour in a tiny, close interview room, in the company of star witness Linus Brophy.

When Petra first heard about an eyewitness, her hopes had surged. Then she’d talked to the homeless man and realized his account was next to worthless.

Brophy’s description boiled down to a tall man.

Age? No idea.

Race? No idea.

Clothing? Not a clue.

It was real dark, Detective Lady.

If that wasn’t enough to endear her to Brophy, the bum had a media jones, kept pestering her, wanting to know if someone from TV would be talking to him. Petra wondered how long till Brophy tried to peddle a screenplay. Hawking his story to the tabloids: I WATCHED ALIENS MURDER BABY BOY LEE.

Only problem was, the tabs couldn’t care less. Because comeback attempt notwithstanding, Baby Boy was no celebrity. It had been eighteen years since the hit with Junior Biscuit, and in the age of rock-as-porn, Lee was just what MTV didn’t want.

The gawkers from the scene said volumes. All were kids young enough to be Baby Boy’s offspring and every single one admired him only by association: last year Baby Boy had played backup guitar on an album by a twentysomething band called Tic 439, a disc that had gone platinum and had fueled the big man’s rebound attempt.

Still, Petra wondered if Baby Boy had taken in some heavy cash from the hit- big money was always a good motive. But that idea was quashed quickly when she spoke to Lee’s manager.

“Nah, it didn’t make Baby rich. Didn’t make him squat.” The former custodian of Lee’s career was a big-haired, stoop-shouldered, denimed ferret named Jackie True, who spoke in a clinically depressed mumble.

“Why not, sir?”

“Cause it was bullshit, a scam,” said True. “Those kids, they hooked him in by telling him they idolized him, he was God’s answer to whatever. Then guess what they paid him: double scale. I tried to get a piece of the profits, at least the net, but…” True blew out air and shook his head. “I didn’t even take my cut. Baby needed every pe

“Too bad,” said Petra.

“Too bad was Baby’s theme song.”

She was talking to True in the manager’s crappy North Hollywood apartment. Jackie’s boots were scuffed, and his nails were ragged. What did managers get- ten, fifteen percent? This one didn’t come across like he had a stable full of thoroughbreds. Did Baby being gone mean that fresh footwear and manicures would remain dreams for Jackie? If so, scratch another motive.