“The bastard touched me here.” Gret fingered the bottom of her chin. “Chucked it, you know? Like I was some baby, some stupid little baby thing.” Another shiver. If she was faking her emotion, she was Oscar-quality. “Then he said, ‘I know you didn’t come from me because you got no talent. You sing like shit and I’d rather listen to nails on a chalkboard than to hear you screech like a crow. I knew Janis and she’s the lucky one, being dead so she didn’t have to be subjected to that sorry-ass, ultra-fucked-up abortion you did of her classic. Girl, your voice should never be used except for talking, and not much of that, either.’ ”
She took awhile to catch her breath. Stared at both detectives as if she’d seen the afterlife and it wasn’t pretty.
“Oh, man, that’s cold,” said Lamar.
Baker said, “God, what a bastard.” Sounding as if he meant it.
Greta Barline said, “He’s saying those things…those horrible things…cutting me…cutting my singing…cutting my life…I can’t even speak, it’s like I’m bleeding inside.”
She gnashed her teeth, clawed her hands.
“Then he starts pushing at me, pushing- like to get away. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. He was so big and I’m so little and he’s pushing at me, pushing at me. I was so scared. I don’t know how the knife got into my hand, I promise. All I remember is him holding his neck and looking at me and making this gurgly noise. Then, he fell down and made this thud noise. And then he gurgled some more.”
A strange, distant smile skittered across her lips. “I’m just standing there and I’m thinking about that gurgly noise and I say out loud, ‘You don’t sound so good, yourself, Jack Jeffries.’ After that, he got quiet.”
The room felt as if all the air had been sucked out of it.
Lamar waited for Baker to speak, but El Bee had a funny look on his face, kind of glassy-eyed.
Lamar said, “Thanks for telling us, Gret. Now I’m gonna have to read you your rights.”
“Just like on TV,” she said. Then she perked up. “So what do you think, it’s self-defense, right?”
16
Lamar got home at four thirty AM. Sue was sleeping but she woke up, brewed some decaf and sat with him while he ate cold pasta, a couple of hastily fried breakfast sausages, and five pieces of toast.
The usual case-closed munchies.
“Another one bites the dust,” she said. “Congrats, honey.”
After he told her the details, Sue said, “The girl’s obviously disturbed but you can see her point.”
“About what? She cut the poor man’s throat for insulting her singing.”
“If what she said is true, he was brutal, honey, just dumped on her dreams. Of course, it doesn’t justify what she did. But still, to be rejected like that.” She touched his face. “Maybe I’m being a bleeding heart, but I guess I understand her a little.”
“If it’s even true,” said Lamar. “She lies about everything.” But he knew he was denying the obvious. For all Greta Barline’s lies, he was certain she’d spoken the truth about that final encounter.
Jack Jeffries had paid for it. Now Greta Barline was going to ante up.
They’d closed the case, a high-profile whodunit, they’d get their names in the paper. Maybe even be there at the press conference.
He should’ve felt more satisfaction.
Sue said, “How’d Baker react?”
“To what?”
“The way it ended.”
“He seemed okay.” Lamar immediately regretted the lie. He was always honest with Sue, no reason to change that, now. “Actually, he didn’t react at all, hon. Once she signed the confession and he made sure the tape had recorded he just left. Fondie called Jones and Jones called in to congratulate us and Baker wasn’t there to hear it.”
“Maybe he’s got a point, Lamar.”
“About what?”
“The business, all those dreams, a thousand people come to town, nine hundred ninety-nine get stepped on and shattered and the one who gets a chance doesn’t last long either.”
Lamar didn’t answer. Thinking about his own arrival in Nashville, fifteen years ago, from New Haven. Good solid bass player, he had the moves, extra-long nimble fingers able to span eight, nine frets. A darn good ear, too. After a couple of listens to something, he could often play it back note-perfect.
He couldn’t invent, but still, an ear like that counted for something. Everyone back home telling him he was great.
In Nashville, he was good. Maybe even real good.
Meaning not even close to good enough.
He felt cool hands on the back of his neck. Sue had gotten up and was massaging him. She wore that old Med Center 10K commemorative T-shirt and nothing else. Her smell…her firmness and her softness, pushing against him.
He said, “Let’s hit the hay. Thanks for the grub, Nurse Van Gundy.”
“Anything for you, Favorite Patient.”
“Let’s hear it for Marvin Gaye.”
She laughed, for the thousandth time, at the in-joke. Time for Sexual Healing. Lamar wondered if he should find some phrases that weren’t music-connected.
Sue didn’t seem to mind. She took him by the hand and laughed again.
By the time they reached the bedroom, they were kissing deeply.
17
Baker went home to an empty silent house, popped a beer, and sat in the kitchen with his feet propped up on the Formica dinette table.
Fifty-year-old table, everything in this place was older than he was; since inheriting the house, he’d bought virtually nothing.
Hanging on to all the discount-outlet crap his parents had bought when they moved in.
Danny and Dixie.
When he thought of them that way, they were strangers.
When he used their real names, it was different.
Danville Southerby and Dorothea Baker had met when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, singing in the choir of the First Baptist Church of Newport, Tennessee.
The town, nestled on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, was rich in music and folk art and memory, poor in everything else. Danny’s father barely broke even farming tobacco and Dixie ’s daddy didn’t do much better with corn.
Singing hymns threw the teenagers together. Blinding love soon followed and within two months, Dixie was pregnant. The child, a small, squalling, pink-faced boy they named Baker, was born three weeks premature, one half year after a hastily arranged church wedding. Dixie bled a lot and the doctor told her she’d never conceive again. She cried, as much from relief as regret.
Like a lot of people in the church, the teens were highly musical. Danny had a clear tenor voice, played piano and organ and guitar without ever taking a lesson. Dixie was on a whole other level, a mandolin prodigy with an astounding vibrato and, some said, technique better than Bill Monroe’s. Top of that, her soprano, always nice, smoothed out and stretched following the delivery of her baby. Maybe singing to the cranky little red-faced tot helped, or it could’ve been one of those strange hormonal twists. Either way, listening to her was a privilege.
The young couple lived on the corn farm with her family, doing scut work and sinking low emotionally. In their spare time, when someone else would take the baby, they sat and played and sang- softly, so as not to share the precious thing they had with anyone else. It was the only private time they had. In those moments, each of them wondered if life wasn’t slipping away, but they never shared the thought with each other.
One night, after Dixie’s daddy scolded Danny for indolence, he got up in the middle of the night, woke Dixie and told her to get dressed. She watched him pack a bag, carry it out of the house, then return for his guitar and her mandolin.
“What- ”
He shushed her with a finger. She got dressed, followed him out to the old Dodge his daddy had given him last year but which he never got to drive, being stuck on the corn farm, working like a mutt.