“Well, I suppose in your job you have to be very aware of your health,” I said. I felt like I was trying to communicate with an alien. I needed Richard Dreyfuss to start playing notes on an organ.

Shannon Sparrow took the opportunity to respond by producing a huge joint. She took a monstrous hit from it. She then set the joint back in an ashtray, picked up the razor, and sheared off another half inch of pubic hair. It was like she was trimming the shrubs.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question or two?” I said.

“Shoot,” she said and shook off another batch of clippings into the envelope.

“Jesse Barre.”

“Technically that’s a statement,” she said.

“Let me rephrase. What do you know about Jesse Barre?”

“So sad,” she said, without a trace of emotion in her voice. She lifted the joint and gave it a good two-second suck. Maybe that was how she grieved. Boy, I had enough to go to the tabloids. I wondered what the National Enquirer would pay. I could see the headline: P.I. Claims Famous Singer Shaves Pubic Hair while Smoking Marijuana!!!

“How well did you know her?” I said.

“We bumped into each other once in a while,” she said. “Well, when I wasn’t traveling. You know her dad right? You’re working for him?”

I smiled. “I don’t remember telling you that.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Someone did.”

The stench of the marijuana smoke was getting to me. Or maybe it was the little scene unfolding in front of me. Probably both. I felt like I was stuck in some kind of 1960s experimental film and soon a man in all black with a long goatee would come out and start rambling about the symbolic roots of fascism.

“Tell me about the guitar she was making for you.”

“Oh, Christ, I’d practically forgotten about it,” she said. She shook her head, a vaguely self-condemning act. “I’ve got quite a few, but this one was going to be special. Jesse said she was making it just for me—you know, my size, my playing style, my sound, as it were.”

“Did you approach her or did she approach you?”

She sucked on the joint then answered while exhaling. “I approached her. I’d seen a lot of her guitars around. Studio guys love to record them. A lot of dumbasses think they’re only for looks, but the sound is truly incredible.”

“So you asked her to—”

“I told her to spare no expense,” she said. “I just wanted her to make her masterpiece. She told me she loved it so much, you know.

“The guitar?”

“Building guitars. It was what she lived for.” Now, for the first time, some emotion crept into Shannon’s voice. She and Jesse had obviously enjoyed some sort of relationship. How deep it had gone, I wasn’t sure.

“I guess in that sense, she died happy, doing what she loved to do,” Shannon said. “We should all be so lucky.”

She licked the envelope and sealed it closed, then rolled her panties back up. What, no aftershave lotion?

“If she had finished it, how much do you think a guitar like that would have been worth?” I said.

“Fifty grand. A hundred grand,” she said. “More if I’d actually played it.” No boastfulness on her part, just a statement of fact.

“Do you know if she finished it?” I said. “Do you have it?”

“Nope. She must have been close to finishing it. I was going to play it at the concert, which is just a week or so away. But I never got it.”

“She never contacted you and told you it was ready?”

“No, she didn’t work that way. You didn’t rush Jesse. She did what she did, and she told you when it was ready.”

“If she loved building guitars so much, why do you think she was going to take a sabbatical?” I said, using the word Nevada Hornsby had used.

The joint stopped halfway to her mouth. “Sabbatical? What sabbatical?”

I shrugged. “Someone told me she was maybe going to take some time off from her work. Do something else.”

Shannon inhaled a few cubic feet of pot smoke. “Not Jesse. She couldn’t stop building guitars any easier than Van Gogh could have stopped painting. I think it was more than a passion, it was her calling in life.”

She took another hit. Her eyes were bloodshot and I felt a little faint.

“Thanks for your time,” I said. “How did you find out about her death?”

“My manager.” I waited, thinking maybe she’d like to add thoughts about her reaction, but nothing happened.

“Can I call if I have any more questions?” I said.

“You have Molly’s number?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. Anytime. You coming to the concert?”

“You bet,” I said.

“I’ll have Molly give you a backstage pass,” she said. “Do you have kids?”

“Two of the biggest Shannon Sparrow fans in the world,” I said. It was a little bit of a lie. They actually liked the Dixie Chicks a lot more, but brutal honesty wasn’t needed right now.

“I’ll have Molly hook you up. I try to make the shows good for families, you know. Some of my biggest fans are young kids.”

I was sure her pubic mound was raw and angry, and my eyes were dry and irritated from the marijuana, but damn if she wasn’t making herself sound like the poster girl for family fun.

“Okay, thank you,” I said. “But I guess I do have one more question. How often do you have to . . . shave?”

“It’s kind of when I feel like it.” She scowled, looking down at her crotch. “This is always the tough part.”

“You should borrow some Aqua Velva from Freda,” I said.

“Who’s Freda?”

I left then, Shannon reaching for the joint, me gasping for fresh air.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Molly instantly appeared and produced four backstage passes as if she’d been present during my conversation with Shannon. Maybe she had.

“She seems very normal and down to earth,” I said. I thought I saw a little smile creep onto Molly’s face. New in the self-help section of your local bookstore: Building Better Relationships through Sarcasm by John Rockne.

She walked me all the way to the front door without saying a word. Then just as she was about to show me out, her pager went off.

“Hold on,” she said to me. She flipped open a cell phone and listened for a moment, then snapped it back closed.

“Teddy wants to see you,” she said.

“Who—?” I started to ask, but she’d already turned on her heel and was headed back into the house. Thanks for asking, I thought. Why yes, I do have time to chat with someone else.

I caught up to her just as we entered what would normally be considered a library. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, made of some dark wood, like cherry or mahogany, surrounded the place and matched the dark wood trim throughout the room.

But under these circumstances, it wasn’t a study. It looked like some kind of slinky private room at a nightclub.

Chairs and sofas were scattered around, filled with what I assumed could euphemistically be described as “Shannon’s people.” There were probably about twenty of them all together. They were sort of an odd mixture. A few looked like New York runway models, some refugees from the 1970s, others prim and proper Wall Street types.

Now I knew where the term hangers-on came from. Maybe it should be changed to hangers-around. Because if there were ever a group of people who looked like they had no place to go, no job to do, not a care in the world, it was this group. Most of them were drinking. Beer, wine, cocktails. You name it. Same with the smoking. Cigarettes, cigars, joints, maybe even a crack pipe somewhere.

I wondered if they had business cards that simply said Professional Leech.

Music blared from some kind of sound system whose camouflage rendered it completely invisible. Not that it mattered, because guitars were being strummed, clashing with the music as well as with each other.