Just enough time to chat with my client.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I found him gardening. A grown man, on his knees in the backyard with dirt all over his arms and his face streaked with peat moss. Some guys go to Florida and play bocce. Clarence digs in the ground. To each his own.

“Aren’t you supposed to plant ’em deeper than that?” I asked. The little shrubs slash bushes he was planting . . . you could see the ball of roots sticking out a little bit.

Clarence shook his head. “They’ll drown if you plant them any deeper.”

I nodded.

He took off his gloves and tossed them into a little plastic cart he had next to him. It held a few more of the bushes as well as a variety of clippers and shears and digging tools.

“Speaking of drowning,” Clarence said. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen, find a couple of cold beers, and meet me over there.” He gestured to a little bench that sat in the shade of a big maple tree. I followed his instructions to a tee and rejoined my gray-bearded friend with two companions from the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis.

As Clarence sipped his beer, I brought him up to speed on everything that had happened.

“So you think Shannon Sparrow’s ex-husband killed Jesse?” he said.

I nodded. “I can’t prove it yet, but yeah, I think he did.”

“Why?”

“That’s the big question really,” I said. “I can’t answer it right now. I’ve got a couple of hunches that I’m working on.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Clarence said. “You’re convinced Nevada Hornsby had nothing to do with it?”

“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He loved her.”

“Lots of men kill women they really love. Happens all the time.”

“I don’t deny that,” I said. “I just don’t believe it was the case here.”

He took another long drink, and his bottle was empty. He tossed it twenty feet through the air where it landed in his little gardening cart.

“Nice shot,” I said.

It had been easier for him to cope by targeting his anger toward someone. But now he had to face the fact that he may have been wrong.

“You can help me,” I said.

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need to learn more about how star musicians work. Shannon Sparrow has such a fucking huge entourage. Managers, assistants, writers, hangers-on. I feel lost. Who has daily contact with Shannon? Who might be so involved with Shannon that they would resort to murder?”

“Forget the assistants,” Clarence said. “I wasn’t much of a star, but I had a bit of an entourage.”

“That’s why I thought I’d ask you.”

“My assistants came and went,” he said. “Never could remember their names. Usually the manager doesn’t get too involved on a day-to-day basis. Manages from a big office in New York or L.A. Makes a phone call to the record label, charges the star twenty grand.”

“Good work if you can get it.”

“The band mates . . . it all depends on the star. Some are close to their players. Some fire them without batting an eye.”

“Hired hands,” I said.

He nodded. “A producer will say, ‘Here are the tracks, learn them in six weeks or we’ll find someone who can.’ Of course, that’s not always true. Some guys in the band are key in developing songs and so on, then they’re very valuable and have a lot at stake.”

“What about songwriters?”

Clarence shrugged. “They can be very valuable. But as far as a daily involvement . . . I don’t think so. Usually they’re perched in some house in Malibu, looking at the Pacific, banging out hooks.”

I thought about it. “A lot of what you just told me doesn’t seem to fit Shannon Sparrow,” I said. “Her manager seems very involved. Her band mates all hang out. Her assistant. They seem to all be there all the time.”

“Like I said, I was a very minor player. And that was a long time ago,” Clarence said. “Times have changed. I don’t have a lot of ideas on what a Shannon Sparrow situation might be.”

“Okay.”

“I can tell you one thing that I’m sure hasn’t changed.”

“Shoot.”

“They’re all there for the money,” he said. “And in Shannon’s case, it’s big money. More money than we can probably imagine. So despite all the relationships, the hanging out, it’s all crap. It was that way with me back when I played. Everybody acted like friends but it was always all about the money.”

“The music is incidental.”

“In most cases, yeah. Sometimes the songwriter is the only one genuinely into the creation of music. But I’ve met plenty of jaded songwriters too. They think what they sell is crap. The signer thinks it’s crap. The manager thinks it’s crap. But they all fucking love it when the royalty checks come in.”

“Do you think that’s how Shannon is?”

He shrugged. “My guess would be yes, that’s how she is. But everyone’s different. When she was a struggling young girl with a guitar, maybe those early songs came right from her heart. Maybe they poured out of her soul. And then the businessmen rushed in and mined her like a sliver of gold in rock. And then maybe it all changed. Who knows?”

I nodded and polished off my beer. I stood up.

“If Hornsby didn’t kill her,” he started to say then stopped. I watched his face contort with anger and grief. I didn’t know where he was going with this. It turned out, he wasn’t going anywhere. He stopped. So I finished the thought for him.

“I’ll find out who did.”

•

It turned out that Nate couldn’t wait for his payment, so we met at the Orchid Gardens for the buffet. The maitre d' gave Nate a look that was probably the same expression Custer wore when he realized he wasn’t just going to lose, but he was going to lose big.

Nate didn’t disappoint. He loaded a plate full of all the fried stuff first: egg rolls, crab wontons, chicken.

“Lubes up the pipes,” he explained to me.

I got a big plate of chicken fried rice with an egg roll, tossed on some soy sauce, and sat across from him. Watching Nate eat Chinese buffet was like watching a conveyor belt dump ingots into a blast furnace.

“Your boy is bad news,” he finally said, after most of his first plate was demolished. Nate signaled the waitress over and ordered a beer, went up to the buffet, and loaded on mostly chicken things: garlic chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken, Kung Pao chicken.

I stuck with my water and rice.

“Or at least, he was bad news,” Nate continued, pausing every now and then to clean the various sauces and juices that accumulated in the corners of his mouth.

Once Nate had demolished his second plate, I figured he’d take a moment to tell me what he’d found. I was right. He pushed away plate number two and pulled out a notebook.

“Teddy Armbruster, as you know him, was born in Chicago as Edward Abrucci,” he said. “Born in Chicago in 1960. First arrested at age twelve. Assault. More arrests through his teens, which earned him a stay at the juvenile correctional facility near Rockford, Illinois.”

Nate flipped to the next page of his notebook. “Apparently our man moved to Detroit after he was released. His crime pattern changed too. He graduated from assaults and robberies to extortion.”

“Mob?”

Nate nodded. “As his crimes became more ‘organized,’ to make a bad pun, his arrests disappeared. His last brush with the law was in 1987 for extortion. He beat it. Since then, he’s been clean.”

I thought about that while Nate went back up to the buffet. Now he was moving on to seafood: more crab wontons, lobster with soybeans, and shrimp fried rice.

“So do you think he’s really clean now? Has he gone legit?” I asked Nate when he got back to the table.

He shrugged his shoulders and shoveled in the food. “He could be clean or just a whole lot more polished,” he said.