Authors: Aisha Duquesne
“But you said yourself, they can’t devote all their attention to it,” I replied, letting my voice quaver a bit. “Shit, you mean his killer could be one of
us
? I just can’t believe it. Look, I’m sorry I was catty with you when I walked in. You do have to help figure it out, don’t you? The cops get murders every day, and they—”
“Oh, they’ll find a suspect eventually,” she argued.
“Why so certain?”
“Because of the gun.”
The gun?
There was a flutter of nerves on my insides like startled pigeons being chased from a square. “What do you mean the gun? I thought they never found a gun.”
“Oh, not the murder weapon,” said Jill quickly. “No, they didn’t find that. Swann had all kinds of guns all over his house, and they found a .45 under his pillow. The cops, they, uh…How can I put this politely? When the forensics guy put the barrel close to his nose to smell if it had been fired recently, he—uh—picked up something else.”
Stupid. Stupid, stupid,
stupid
. Showing off his collection, all his BS talk about the Old West, his rifles and even a goddamn flintlock in his display case, and it never, ever occurred to me that Steven would have more than one handgun. I had thought the pistol looked different when I picked it up. I knew what she was going to tell me.
“Swann owned a couple of .45 Colts, and from what I hear, he liked to do the whole John Woo thing sometimes out at his property in New Mexico,” explained Jill. She raised her index fingers at me. “Bang, bang, bang, bang! Boys with toys. When he was in New York, he split up the twins for home protection, and he must have been playing some kinky games in his spare time. The lab found traces of vaginal secretions on the barrel of the gun.”
I couldn’t say anything. She took my reaction for regular shock. At last I ventured, “Where, um, where did they find it?”
“Swann had it under his pillow.”
Keep a poker face. Don’t react.
“The cops are interpreting that as a fearful response,” said Jill. She didn’t sound convinced. “They think he must have been threatened either by a crazed fan, or maybe there’s a gang with hip-hop or rap ties that didn’t like him and made it clear. So he felt his life was in danger, and that’s why he kept a gun under his pillow.”
“But…you don’t think that.” I wasn’t asking.
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve thought it through,” replied Jill. “If you’re in fear for your life, yeah, sure, maybe you sleep with a gun under your pillow. But here’s a young guy making gazillions, and he doesn’t hire a bodyguard. The others have bodyguards, the Jacksons, the J-Los, the action stars. What was Erica’s response to Steven’s murder?
Hire me.
And Steven didn’t beef up security at the townhouse.”
“He had a burglar alarm already, didn’t he?” I tried to sound as ignorant as possible.
“Yep. One of the best. Which leads to the next obvious thing. If the cops are right, and he’s killed by someone threatening him, why no forced entry to the house? The cops come back to me with some half-assed reply that he must have known who was threatening him and been trying to talk his way out, let bygones be bygones. That’s a bit of a reach, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“It makes far more sense that either he invited his killer over since the door was unlocked—which is less likely, I mean, hey, we’re in New York—or the killer had her own key.”
I shrugged. “Why? Why does that follow?”
“Steven was in his recording studio when he was murdered. There was no sign of a struggle. Here’s a victim who supposedly doesn’t feel safe enough in his own home that he sleeps with a handgun,
but he doesn’t bring it along with him when he’s in a sound-proof room.
He’s working on tracks. He’s mixing. He’s playing back stuff. And what’s more, he’s playing it back for someone else.”
I was really astonished now. And getting nervous. “How can you be so sure he was playing stuff back for someone else?”
“This little Sony micro-cassette recorder had fallen out of his hand when he was shot.”
I didn’t get it. “So?”
“So no patch cord from the tape machine to the board,” said Jill, smiling in wonder that I didn’t make the jump in logic. “You’re mixing sound, putting together your song, and you whip out a little tape recorder to suddenly hear something? That presumes you need it. He didn’t scribble down any notes on paper, and he didn’t have the tape recorder hooked up or one of the micro-cassettes popped in a deck.”
“Maybe he was about to,” I suggested.
Jill sucked on the tip of her index finger, looking pensive again. “Maybe. I doubt it. I think he was playing something for his killer, and she shot him right afterwards.”
“You keep saying ‘she.’
She
killed him.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why can’t it be a guy?”
“Goes back to those vaginal secretions on the gun barrel,” offered Jill. “Like I said, the boy liked his kink.
That’s
why he slept with that gun under his pillow, it was a little joke he was having with himself. I think perhaps he took it too far, and the girl got righteously pissed off. She came back later and showed him a new place to stick it. Vengeance for a sexual assault.”
Oh, Jesus.
“It’s only a matter of time before she’s found,” she went on. “Big pop star like that, of course, he’d be working his way through rows A to M at his concerts, but I’m sure they’ll find a match eventually, sooner or later.”
She was right. I had to take a big gamble.
“Jill. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this girl was his killer.”
“No?”
“No. Because…because if I gave the cops a DNA sample, they’d find out it was me.”
“You?”
I nodded.
“People told me you’re…Never mind.” She let out a long sigh. “Shit, Michelle. You know I have to go back to the police with this, don’t you? And you’re going to have to talk to them, too.”
“I know.”
She looked at me, just looked at me. Waiting. “I visited Steven at the townhouse two days before he was killed,” I said. “We had sex. It wasn’t rape. There was always an attraction between us, and he started laying it on thick about how he knew Erica had guys on the side, but he planned to be faithful to her
after
the wedding. And he would expect the same of her. He figured if she could play around before the wedding, he should sow a few last oats of his own.”
“And you decided to be one of them. Help him cheat on her.”
“Don’t judge me, Jill,” I snapped. “You haven’t worked for Erica as long as I have. You’ll see plenty of shit. Yes, maybe you’ve worked for other celebrities, but she is
insatiable
. And it’s not in your job description or mine, but you
will
be expected to cover up for her and make excuses for her, and sometimes you’ll be in a corner and have to watch. She’s the star. It was a hell of an ego boost for
me
to have Steven Swann say let’s make it, honey. Yes, he was twisted. The gun was his idea. He said to me, here’s a
real
dildo for you. It wasn’t loaded or anything, and I let him do it to me. And the scary part is, I did get off on it.”
Jill didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said in a small voice, “Well, that’s not a crime. Still. They’ll want to talk to you.”
“Okay. Please, please don’t tell Erica about this! She was devastated over Steven. She may have fucked around on him, but I think she genuinely loved him. I’m sure of it. No good will come out of talking about his private little quirks now.”
“No, I suppose not,” she said, nodding slowly.
I realised I was making a mistake and quickly added, “And you know I don’t want to lose my job.”
Her head was still nodding, deep in thought. “Course. Of course you don’t. Let’s go talk to the cops.”
T
he police questioned me for two hours down at a station house that looked like a set from
NYPD Blue
or something. Drab green walls, an interrogation room with busted plastic chairs and a Formica table, and posters that were woefully out of date with the temper of the times. One had a pen-and-ink drawing of a blond, blue-eyed boy in a Fifties-style shirt with tears in his eyes under a slogan that read: ARE YOU LOST? DON’T KNOW YOUR WAY BACK HOME TO MOMMY AND DADDY? In the hall, a skinhead type with multiple piercings in his face was led past me in shackles. I watched but couldn’t hear Jill talking to a plain-clothes detective. She nodded towards me, shrugging her shoulders, and then the detective was pointing.
After a few minutes, I was led into the interrogation room and had to sit across from a ginger-haired sergeant of detectives who cracked his knuckles and frowned at me. “If you’re a lesbian, what did you sleep with the guy for?”
Jill was in a corner of the room, watching. “Holland, don’t be an asshole,” she piped up.
He gave her a dirty look, grimacing in a way that was supposed to tell her he was
allowing
her to be here. It was a courtesy that she could stay, since she wasn’t my lawyer. She was only a former cop and my current work colleague.
“At any point, did he, uh, use any restraints on you? You know, tie you up? Or, umm…” The cop cleared his throat noisily. I figured he enjoyed the seamier aspects of this case but he was too button-down to talk about it without embarrassment. “Look, did he hit you or anything? Did you hit him?”
“Why are you asking me that?” I demanded. “What does that have to do with someone coming along later and shooting him?”
“Goes to motive,” said the detective.
Jill walked over to the table. “They found this contraption of his. Solid gold handcuffs on chains.” She passed me a blown-up photograph of it.
“There’s an apparatus for, um, holding up his weight,” the detective added.
Jill rolled her eyes. “An apparatus! Jesus, Holland, it was a fuck swing, okay?”
“No, he didn’t use that with me,” I said. “I heard he had it, but—”
The detective pounced on that one. “How did you hear about it?”
Jill and I traded quick looks. She knew I was lying when I said, “Parties. People talk.”
She didn’t contradict me.
“And that got you interested in him?” asked Holland the Prude.
“Is that important?”
“Maybe.”
“No.”
“Sounds like you two were playing pretty rough.”
“He didn’t hit me. But he did want me to use a scarf on him.”
Now it was the detective’s turn to trade looks with Jill. They explained that the pathologist had discovered bruising on Steven’s neck, and, yes, the obvious conclusion was he was up to some kinky sex days before his murder.
“So because of that, I’m a suspect,” I groaned.
The detective leaned back in his seat, scratching his un-combed mess of red hair. “I’m inclined to rule you out. Especially since you decided to come forward.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If you had wanted to kill him, you could have done him in with the scarf, and it would probably be written off as death by misadventure. It happens. People get stupid. They play dangerous games. Now if he had wanted
you
in the scarf or maybe snapped you into those cuffs, well, perhaps you’d want to erase him for mistreating you. But Miss Chandler here tells me that you don’t look like you’re physically injured in any way, you don’t appear to have suffered any trauma, physical, psychological or whatever.”
I waited, expecting to hear more. He sat in his chair and simply stared at me. “So that’s it?”
“Unless you have something else you want to tell us.”
Strange how you can feel the compulsion to volunteer something.
“No,” I answered.
“Then you’re free to go,” said the detective. He handed me a business card in case I thought of anything else.
Outside the precinct house, Jill saw the question forming on my lips: why? Why didn’t you give up Erica as Steven’s other playmate?
“The same logic that says you two had consensual sex and no one got hurt—much—goes for whatever Erica did with him, too,” she explained. “It rules her out as a suspect on that score. Cops enjoy gossip like everyone else, and I’m not about to confirm for Holland that Erica Jones gets hot over guys chained up. I’m her bodyguard. The way I see my job, it’s not just about the physical threats. Besides, Holland can be a bit of an asshole.”
She paused a moment then added nonchalantly, “I notice you didn’t mention anything about Erica and those handcuffs either. That’s how you heard about them, right? She told you?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well. She was his fiancée. You’d think the cops would have asked her about them when they questioned her anyway, right?”
I said I didn’t know. When Erica had emerged from her own interview with the cops—hers at our apartment—it was one of the few times she was actually reticent with me. She didn’t feel like talking about her own inquisition. And I didn’t press.
“Did they?” I asked. “Get nosy with her about the cuffs?”
“No, they didn’t,” said Jill. “I asked her about it at the time. But
you
couldn’t have known that for sure before Holland spoke with you.”
I stopped and studied her. I wondered if she were somehow testing me. Or playing games.
“You’re very loyal,” remarked Jill in a breezy voice. “That’s rare. Hey, I guess we should get back to Erica at the studio. Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll bring my car around.”
She was sniffing around a lot for a bodyguard. I didn’t know how I was going to get rid of her, but I resolved to find a way. The funny thing was, I never did, and when the issues over Steven’s murder cooled down and began to fade, I was glad I hadn’t.
Attractions
L
ife went back
to what passed for normal in the pop music business. Any remaining friction between Jill and me dissolved as we went about our separate jobs, and we even developed the camaraderie of the entourage. You need it when you work on big headliner tours. Things turned a corner in Boston when Jill and I went to fetch Erica in her dressing room after the show, and too late, Jill opened the door without knocking. I should have warned her: Erica gets horny as hell after concerts. There she was, naked and dripping with sweat, one of the white stagehands eating her pussy while a black sound guy was fighting to control coming into her mouth, Erica bleating and squeezing her eyes shut as her release made her belly and breasts shudder. She didn’t even notice us come in.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry!” Jill said, slamming the door shut.
“Chances are, she didn’t hear you,” I said in the tone of the veteran. We walked back towards the wings of the stage, watching the roadies tear down the set and pack up. “Told you you’d see plenty of shit. Tomorrow night it could be another guy—or guys.”
“She’s crazy,” said Jill. “There’s all kinds of nasty stuff going around out there.”
“She’s spontaneous in the moment,” I explained. “Doesn’t mean she’s not
selective
. She has these guys checked out.”
“She does?”
“Who do you think gets to ask the difficult questions?” I replied. “You’ll probably get enlisted to help.”
“This doesn’t bother you?” she asked.
“You’re not going to call me Erica’s pimp, are you?” I asked. “I’ve heard that one before. From guys usually.”
“Good Lord, of course not!” she laughed. “What I meant was, it doesn’t bother you what she’s doing to herself? She’s one of the nice ones. I’ve had to baby-sit some real creeps, and she’s not bossy, she’s not a diva. She’s smart and fun and talented, and she’s just folding in on herself. Hell of a way to grieve.”
“She did this stuff before Steven died,” I pointed out. “She’s simply doing it more. I’m hoping she’ll come out of it. And, yes, it does bother me. It breaks my heart.”
“Maybe she needs one steady guy, a good guy,” remarked Jill.
I shook my head, forgetting myself for a moment. “I can’t stand that pop psychology stuff that says a guy will solve all your problems—”
“Hey, I’m not saying that.”
“It’s the
kind
of love she needs,” I argued. “Erica’s more complex than anyone knows…”
The truth is that I didn’t look forward to the time when Erica would move on and find another steady guy. Her casual screwing around meant that I was her reassuring continuity. I was the one she confided in and relied on.
I didn’t notice for a moment how Jill was looking at me. It was disconcerting how she studied everybody and everything so intensely. To fill the pause, I added, “Erica is very choosy.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
Yes, it did sound ridiculous after what we’d just seen.
“It’s remarkable how you love her,” said Jill. “As a friend, I mean. You’ve known her since high school, right? She’s very lucky to have someone like you who’s got her back.”
The compliment made me blush. “Thanks, I guess.”
“We’re going to miss our flight if we don’t get moving. You think they’ve finished by now?”
I
was surprised as well at how the tension seemed to dissipate between Luther and Erica. No awkward pauses, no hidden meanings in casual conversation. They were friendly to each other and fell into their easy rhythms of working together on the songs. For a while, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. She had become as reticent about him as he was over her—at least this is the way they were with me, perhaps because I was a friend to both of them. If Erica wanted to try again with Luther, she seemed resigned to the fact that he was no longer willing. A reminder of that—a surprise to me—was that Luther had hooked up with Jill.
He told me about it over dinner one night. Ever since I had met him at that first party in the hotel, Luther and I had a “brother-sister” kind of friendship. It was so relaxed and easy between us that there was hardly a blip on the screen for Luther when he learned I preferred women. He liked having female friends when there was no burden of sexual tension. I think it demonstrated a guy who could genuinely appreciate women. And he confided in me. We were in this Peruvian restaurant called The Courtyard on 57th Street, all candles and Tapada paintings and Inca-style jugs for decoration, and he rolled out the tale of how Jill went after him with a vengeance. He wasn’t bragging. He said her attention just blew him away.
“She has a small house out in Brooklyn, and she wants me to help her repair her kitchen roof,” he explained, smiling shyly as he studied his red wineglass. He had done his share of carpentry and handyman work years ago before music paid the bills. “She says she had this leak from the washroom upstairs, and the water’s collected for who knows how long, and she’s got this big hump coming out of her ceiling now. I say, ‘Well, get yourself a good contractor, honey.’ She tells me, Hey, big producer-man, maybe you make the big money, but I can’t afford some guy to come out for x-hundred bucks! I need a tall guy and an extra set of hands and blah, blah, blah, she gets me out there.”
Right where she wanted him. Jill’s house in Brooklyn, he said, had echoes of both Erica and Morgan in its decoration. Great shelves of books, every picture hung on the wall in black and white, discerning choices in plush white furniture. But her bedrooms and basement all had modest towers of boxes stacked and gathering dust, as if her work and solitary life never allowed her a chance to settle. Jill greeted him at the door in a tartan shirt with the tails knotted, showing off a nice midriff and cut-off jeans, instantly handing him a rum and Coke.
“This better be my first and last unless you want everything crooked,” he joked.
“Well, do the job right, honey, and you will be rewarded.”
He let that one go by without comment. She asked him if he wanted some lunch first, since he’d come all this way, which only confused him further. We’d better get to it, he said.
“Oh, we’re okay for time, I did the Polyfill in the ceiling holes already.”
Then what did she need him for? She couldn’t be sure she had done the job properly, she explained. And she knew it would take her forever to paint the ceiling all by herself. With a sigh, he said let’s start—the sun will go down soon enough. Yes, they’d have the lights on, but natural light always helps.
They were chatting about nothing important, just work and artists they liked, movies they ought to see together. Painting a ceiling, they were bound to get drips and drabs spattering them thanks to gravity. Jill soon had plenty of white splotches on her bare legs.
“Damn, I thought life would be easier if I wore less,” she told him. “Instead of wrecking my clothes, I thought I’d just take a good bath. I mean I was going to paint naked if I had to do it all by myself, but this stuff is drying hard. I got to scratch it off my skin. Ugh.” She came over to him with a wet cloth and washed a tough stain off his forearm. “See?”
He couldn’t resist. “Hey, you can still paint naked if you want. I’m not stopping you.”
She patted his face with her hand and said, “Get back to work.”
As they kept at it, Jill said it was funny talking about painting naked, strange how people could get about their own bodies. She’d heard a story about Steven Swann, how he’d actually paid to have a gold set of manacles suspended from his bedroom ceiling. Luther said it wouldn’t surprise him in the least.
They were done about a third of the way when Luther noticed large cracks emerging in the stucco plaster. “Jill, when did you do the job with the Polyfill?”
“About an hour ago, why?”
“Look at this,” he told her. Pushing the paint roller over the filled-in holes had disturbed the repairs. All their hard work was crumbling apart.
“Shit!” she hissed. “What do we do?”
And perfect timing, there was a modest but ominous
crack,
Luther dropping his brush onto the newspapers on the tiled floor and thrusting up two hands to catch the buckling ceiling.
Jesus,
he muttered, and Jill was saying, Oh, God, oh, this is just great. Defeated, she clapped her hand on her lovely bare thigh and told him you might as well let it go, just let it come crashing down. Luther was telling her not to give up, they could jump in the car and hit a hardware shop to buy new plaster board sheets, but right now she should fetch a bin before they had a gigantic mess all over her floor.
“No,” said Jill.
“What?”
“No,”
she said, flashing a smile of dazzling white teeth at him.
He didn’t know what to think as he gazed down at her from the short stepladder, hands over his head, playing Atlas. “What do you mean no, Jill? Look, my arms are getting tired and—”
She began to unbuckle his trousers.
“Jill, what are you doing? I have to let go of this thing, and it’ll break into a gazillion pieces on our heads unless you go get a trash can or something—”
“You’re not going to drop it on us, are you?” she asked. She laughed as she pulled his trousers down to his ankles.
“Jill! Come on, my arms are getting tired. What are you—”
“Luther, I’m counting on you, babe. Don’t let my ceiling cave in, just keep your arms up there.” Her hands caressing his legs, giggling all the time as her fingers stroked his thighs and dug under his Jockey shorts to grip his buttocks.
He couldn’t help but laugh, but he felt completely vulnerable. “Jill, this is crazy—”
“Just hold your position, soldier. I want to talk to little soldier. Hi, there.” Tugging down his underwear in one smooth yank, her mouth sending a hot breath on his testicles and the thick girth of him springing to life.
“What’s this
little
soldier crap? Jill, my arms—”
“Hold still, baby.”
Laughing all the while as she rested her head and moaned happily against his thigh, feeling the heat of his cock against her cheek, her fingers tracing the globe of a buttock and then reaching up to find hard muscles in the small of his back. He felt ridiculous even while he was aroused, his laughter taking a bit of energy out of his hard-on, until she slipped off her shirt and pushed his cock between her two large breasts, rubbing him between them. When she brought her mouth down on him, he couldn’t take it anymore—
As if ducking away from a bomb explosion, he bent over to shield her from a rain of plaster and paint. Both of them laughed helplessly as shards of plaster dropped off the scarf around her hair and Luther’s shoulders. He had obediently kept his position on the stepladder. Jill helped free one leg from the trap of his bunched trousers and underwear, and he jumped down to take her in his arms. Filthy, dusty, white speckles over writhing brown bodies, Luther slipping her jeans over her narrow hips to reveal she was wearing no panties at all, and he lifted her with those strong biceps muscles that could drum congas and barrels, raising her high enough that he could enter her in a wet rush. He moved her to the kitchen counter, Jill’s ass sliding on a drape cloth over gas burners as Luther pounded inside her, wrapping her arms around his neck, his broad back, whispering hoarsely, “Bed—Bedroom…”
He said she made love like no woman he’d ever had before. I asked him: This African Tantric Yoga stuff? Yeah, he said, looking away at his glass again. He couldn’t remember everything she did, feeling so swept away, but it was amazing. “Her middle finger would fire out like a shiatsu therapist or something,” he said, and she’d spear a muscle in his groin, light pressure at the base of his cock, making him feel like a steel bar. Fingers massaging his glutes as he thrust inside her, unravelling him and making him feel like he was about to come, only to have her hands withdraw and the tide subside, her expert touch discovering a new point, sending a fresh charge through him. Gazing down at her, spatters of white paint on her lovely brown skin, her breasts heaving, touching him and making him feel so powerful, more attractive than he ever saw himself except in his days of drumming on stage. His muscles expanding and contracting, biceps and abs chiselled and defined just as her gorgeous athletic body showed him what she could do.
We’re like two zebras, dirty like this, she laughed, cupping his balls and running a nail down the inside of his thigh past an island of hardened white paint. It made him shiver with delight.
They showered together and cleaned up for their second bout, and as the ochre sunlight spilled into her bedroom, they were like children at play, Jill setting the tone, contorting herself for her amusement and to drive them wild. Lying on top of him faceup as he sagged his body against her headboard, his cock inside her, Jill touching her clit as she craned her neck back to bite his lip and tickle herself with his goatee. She slipped her tongue under his, his hands rubbing circles around her nipples as her right hand reached around and found this exquisite point in the nape of his neck, and
uhh
…His chin on her shoulder, looking down at her glistening beautiful wetness under her one finger, loving to watch this woman stimulate herself, the way he disappeared into her under those tight black curls—
I had never listened to a guy describe sex from his point of view, and to have a guy like Luther, who would never be crude about it, who created a picture of the two of them with words and who talked about Jill in ways both lyrical and tantalising…I was fascinated. I could see her as she felt him start to come, moving her hips just enough so that she could reach down with her small hand and grip his engorged cock, her vaginal lips still encasing the crimson head, summoning a cry out of him he had never given in any intimate encounter before, burying his cock into her again in slow motion that made them both spasm violently. And then another tender kiss, her fingers on the nape of his neck—
“She made love like it was choreography,” said Luther. “You know I don’t want to sound sexist, Mish, but some girls, they expect you to do all the work. They let things be
done
to them. Jill is one of the most sensual women I’ve…I mean, Jesus, it’s too bad we couldn’t have something.”