Dead Wood

“Big meeting?”

“Big laughs,” she said, smirking.

I waited for the punch line.

“That conference room looks out on the parking lot. We saw this middle-aged loser pull up in a white Sunbird. Trying to park as far away as possible to avoid the humiliation. It didn’t work.”

“It’s a rental.”

“All this schmuck needed was a bald spot and a gold chain, and we’ve got a mid-life crisis in full alert.”

“If that was a meeting about Rufus Coltraine, I’m mad I wasn’t invited,” I said, ignoring her delight at my ride. Actually, the more she made fun of me, usually the better her mood. Sometimes, though, it was just the opposite. I wondered if she’d found something out, and more importantly, if she pla

“It was, and your invite must’ve gotten lost in the mail.” Her expression resembled newly dried concrete. Flat, emotionless, and no sign of cracks.

“What’d you find out?” I said.

“None of your fucking business, Mister Sunbird.”

I waited a moment then said in my most caring, parent voice possible, “Mom and Dad were very clear on the importance of sharing.”

She sat down and rubbed her hand over the top of her head. In Ellen’s repertoire of tells, this meant she was frustrated.

“All the music stores and pawn shops turned up squat,” she said. “No Rufus Coltraine. No Jesse Barre guitar. We even sent emissaries down to fucking Toledo. No dice. If he hawked a guitar, it most likely wasn’t around here.”

“And if he didn’t hawk it,” I said, “how’d he get the dope and why was a valuable guitar sitting in his apartment?”

“Twenty bucks buys enough dope for what he had in him,” she said. “You don’t need a guitar for that.”

I didn’t rise to the bait. Instead I said, “How’d you get the call on him?”

“Landlord. Neighbor said they saw someone in that apartment doing drugs.”

“Which neighbor?”

“Landlord didn’t know.”

I nodded. “Ever hear that one about the big pink elephant in the room?”

She crossed her eyes at me.

“They say it’s like living with an alcoholic who won’t admit the problem,” I said. “It’s like a big pink elephant sitting in the room, but everyone pretends it’s not there.”

When she saw where I was going, she flushed a little.

“Coltraine was set up,” I said. “No one wants to admit it, but he was.”

“Prove it,” she said.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“No, you’re speculating.”

“Which is the first step in proving something,” I pointed out.

“I need evidence.”

Which meant that maybe Ellen felt something was wrong but didn’t want to come out and say it.

“Right now I’ve got evidence that links Rufus Coltraine to the murder of Jesse Barre,” she said. “Maybe he was walking by, saw her in the workshop alone, and did what he felt he had to do. Maybe he killed her and then got high right away, pla

“What about the Sha

She didn’t have an answer for that.

Her phone rang, and she picked up the receiver, “Hold on just a second,” she said. She grabbed a few sheets of paper and shoved them at me then lifted her chin at the door.

“The Sunbird is calling,” she said.

Chapter Thirty

My mind was on Jesse Barre. Thoughts about the case were hopping and skittering across my brain like stones skipped across a lake. Rufus Coltraine, aspiring musician, dead from an overdose. The co

I fired up the Internet, and after less than an hour, I’d dragged about fifty articles onto my desktop. I tried to read them in a rough chronological order, and by the time I’d gone through five or six, I started speed reading, passing over the expected redundancies. There were the obvious details: an early gift for music, a great ear, a few important teachers, and breaks along the way.

And then there were a few surprises. Her parents had both died in a plane crash in Mexico a few years before their daughter broke through. There were unsubstantiated rumors of drug use that may or may not have had anything to do with the tragedy.

Sha

The next twenty articles or so all said the same thing, talking about what kind of makeup she wore, which boy toy she was currently seeing, her inspiration for her latest album. I noticed that not long after she really exploded –when her first hit began to climb the charts and she signed on with powerhouse manager Teddy Armbruster—all the articles started to sound the same. In fact, they’d changed from the more direct, more honest appraisals to a glossy version, highlighting all that was great and grand about Sha

By the time I was three-quarters of the way through my cyber-stack, I realized I wasn’t going to find anything else. I started to drag the whole fucking mess into my trash can, and then I stopped. Maybe if I went back through the articles and information before she signed on with slick Mr. Armbruster, there would be something I could uncover. So I trashed the later articles, made a folder for the earlier stuff, and then dug in.

After another half hour of poring over most of the articles I’d already skimmed, I came across a surprise. It was a reference in one article to a different interview Sha

I immediately searched and found that the magazine was defunct. Still, I wasn’t about to give up. I did a search for the individual Women on the Rock issue that featured Sha

The other one led me to pure gold.

A devoted fan of the magazine had put all the issues online, and I found the one I was looking for. It had each page sca

Apparently the magazine was for women recovering from domestic violence or abuse of some kind. And the article was really small, just a sidebar interview of sorts, but in the interview Sha

Alarm bells started going off, and I immediately went back to the computer. I did a search under different headings for Sha

The article was from the Free Press, nearly eight years ago, just before Sha

DETROIT MAN CONVICTED OF ATTEMPTED MURDER

Associated Press—Laurence Grasso, thirty, of Detroit was convicted in Wayne County Circuit Court of first-degree attempted murder, intent to commit bodily harm, and violation of a restraining order. He has been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Grasso, married briefly to singer Sha