Soul Siren (20 page)

“Well, maybe Jill was trained once as a physical therapist, I don’t know,” answered Luther, “but that’s not why she’s on the payroll now. With what happened to Steven, Erica thinks maybe it’s time she got some protection. Jill’s her new bodyguard.”

S
o Erica had picked up another shadow, one right beside my own. I met Jill Chandler again that very evening. Erica’s limo collected me at the office, and on the leather seat waiting inside was the newest member of the team. As the car rolled towards our apartment to fetch the star, I asked Jill about her little white lie. She confirmed Luther’s notion that, yeah, she had a bit of an off-beat sense of humour, and besides, it paid to be discreet about her work, even when folks would eventually find out what she did.

“It’s never good to come off as a big enforcer type or throw your weight around,” she explained. “I’ve seen some women try to pull that in this line of work, over-compensating for all the sexist shit they put up with. But look at me. I’m not that big, and I’m not
really
that tall. It’s just better to play it low key.”

It made me wonder how she ended up in her line of work to begin with. Jill said she’d been a New York police officer for three years, and after the brief joy of graduating from the academy she had hated every minute of being on the force. A grind: the ungrateful public, the hazards, the politics, all of it. So she got a job with a high-profile corporate protection service, and after two years of walking two steps behind oil executives and bankers, realised the business depended completely on good customer relations and rapport with clients. When she set up her own bodyguard service, she took an impressive number of clients with her.

“What about all that African Tantric Yoga stuff?”

There was a wicked glint of mischief in her eyes. “Oh, that’s real. I wasn’t making that up.”

I leaned forward in the seat, making the leather upholstery crunch, and I opened the mini-bar. Helping myself to a tiny bottle of Johnnie Walker, I tossed her another one and told her, “I see I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

“Oh, we’ll get on like a house on fire, you’ll see.” She dropped the little bottle into her slim spaghetti-strapped handbag, explaining, “Can’t drink now. These are
my
working hours.”

The car rolled up in front of our building just then, and Erica came down. At Madison Square Garden, I would have normally been watching the audience or Erica dazzle her fans. I had to stay alert and close by for any sudden chores, but tonight the show ran smoothly, and I watched Jill instead. Oddball girl, sure, I thought, but she’s nobody’s fool. Look at her scope out the crowd from the wings, ignoring the usual boisterous fans in the front rows, letting security do the mop-up on them. Jill training her eyes on exits, backstage corridors, places where the disturbed might find access. And when the show was over, hovering over Erica’s right shoulder, one step behind—able to stop anyone from chasing after the star but close enough to intervene if trouble jumped out of the blue ahead of us.

When we went out on tour, most of the nights were uneventful, but early on—the second show in Detroit—I saw how Jill handled trouble. A white guy with a face full of stubble and eyes frosted over with an angry blankness moved out of the crowd and started bitching about how Erica wouldn’t let him see their child, why are you doing this, Erica? Completely made-up insane stuff. His hands extended to either shake her or choke her, and Jill was suddenly
there,
blocking the man’s way, folding his wrist in on itself and spinning him forward and then back in a wide arc. She sent him hurtling to the concrete with a dull thud.

People were shouting things like holy shit and somebody call the cops, and Jill’s calm tone held a demand instead of a polite question:
Erica, you okay?
Erica not moving, staying put exactly as Jill had insisted in their agreed-upon contingency plans. You do as I say when there’s a problem, Jill had told her, or I can’t keep you safe. Erica was probably fixed in her spot more out of shock than anything else, just as I was.

We asked her later: what the hell was that?

“Oh,” said Jill, her voice casual, “a little police take-down, a little aikido. You two did well. I’m glad neither of you panicked.”

The minor incident barely rated a paragraph in the entertainment pages, but it was enough to secure Jill Chandler’s job for a while. The problem for me was that Jill Chandler wouldn’t be satisfied with standing around and playing sentry.

M
ichelle? Call me when you get this, please.”

Morgan. Again.

Morgan had begun to treat the message space on my mobile like he had squatter’s rights there, calling me at all hours to “resolve” his royalty issue. I told him we’d discuss it when I got back to New York. He kept calling. I left a message on his answer machine that royalties were out of the question, but, yes, I was checking with the management of Brown Skin Beats to see if I could get him some kind of “bonus” for his work on
Drum
.

Funnily enough, the decision came down to Luther. His stock had soared since his producing gigs on a couple of Britain’s hottest R&B stars, and BSB got smart and brought him inside, giving him a fancy title like “associate creative director” or some such thing. He still did what he did, only now he scouted talent, he assigned producing jobs, and he had budgets to manage. He made more money. Not enough to party like the stars, but he would be comfortable. When the tour reached LA, he was in town over a movie-scoring thing for one of the label’s acts, and he took me aside to discuss the Morgan issue.

“Mish, why do you want me to sign off on giving him more money? Yes, he’s family, but he got a fair price on
Drum
.”

I considered taking Luther into my confidence. Before his jaunt to the UK, I could have predicted which way he’d go on the issue. He would have called Morgan crazy or a liar over the songwriting credits. He would have taken Erica’s side hands down. No way he could see her objectively. After London, well…Integrity was very big with Luther. He would have raised a huge stink, gone digging for where the bodies were buried, found out if Morgan was right. And if Morgan was right? Well, his shiny spanking new job with BSB wouldn’t stop him insisting on public reparations, future credits in liner notes and in publishing, and if the label wanted the matter ignored, he’d say no and go public.

I had to lie to him. “I’m getting stick from one of the musician unions.”

“
Morgan
went to them?” Luther could scarcely believe it. He knew Morgan was never one for politics in music or for organisations.

“It’s real complicated.”

“Well, what does Erica think?”

“I haven’t told her,” I said. “God, Luther, you know it would break her heart to know he complained. She’d pony up whether he has a case or not! She wants to be such a good friend to the masses over equal pay and rights, but I’m the one who does her books, man. Please. BSB’s got deep enough pockets they can afford it. And you’ll want the option of using Morgan again, won’t you? If the label brass gets wind of this, they’ll put him on a shit list and stamp him as a troublemaker. You won’t get to use him if that happens.”

Luther pursed his lips thoughtfully and scratched his chin. “That’s not
exactly
true. I use who I want when I’m producing, it’s in my contract. But if we bring him in for somebody else’s album…Yeah, you’re right. Erica doesn’t need this shit right now anyway. And I don’t know what’s up with Morgan these days. Maybe he owes money or something. Maybe he’s burned out.”

He told me how Morgan had performed his drunken jazz player routine at another one of his regular gigs in Morningside Heights. The way Luther described it, I was sure our friend had, at least for now, not spouted off about “his” songs on an Erica Jones album. Good. But self-interest aside, I was as concerned as Luther about the man’s steady decline.

What did I say early on about Morgan? That Erica’s father had wanted him to teach his little girl how to love the craft beyond the glory. I called it a bittersweet compliment to Morgan’s talents, since that kind of lesson is best learned from the one who has failed, the one who stays behind to keep watch, to hold the sacred ground. Why now? Why come apart now? He’s tired, I thought. We’ll pay him off, and maybe he’ll get back on an even keel. We’ll be able to talk to him and come around to his place like old times.

I was hanging around with people who booked a corporate jet on weekends and who bought themselves Bulgari watches when they had the blues. Cheques cured worlds of hurt. Morgan still lived in a dump of a loft with a freight elevator, his furniture on creaky boards and his double bed past a beaded curtain, and people thought this was cool because it reminded them of the movies. Bohemian chic. Morgan was probably sick of having lived like this for the better part of his life. Okay, I thought, we can fix that. Naïve yet tarnished as everyone else, I thought Luther’s sign-off on the additional money would solve my biggest problem. I was cynical.

And I should have known better. Erica had told me how her father, good ol’ Duane Jones, and Morgan had a real bust-up before Mr. Jones quit their band and headed off home to Toronto. Sure, they had kind of patched things up over the years, and Erica went to Morgan with her Dad’s blessing, but she knew the stories of how Morgan could be a real spiteful son-of-a-bitch sometimes. He could really dig in his heels when he felt like it. I was about to discover what that was like.

T
here was a break in the tour when we flew back to New York, and Erica worked on a couple of tracks for the latest album. In the morning, I had a window to go over regular business with her like cover art designs and shots for a new magazine spread. When Erica worked on recording she could spend hours without breaks, without meals, and on Tuesday, I begged my way out of sticking around and returned home. I had two D’Agostino bags’ worth of groceries in my arms and my key ring in my teeth as I opened the door. There was Jill, feet up on the desk in the front lounge, pensively examining various objects pulled out of the drawers.

“Make yourself at home,” I snapped. Erica thought her bodyguard should have a key, though she told me she had strict rules on Jill’s use of it.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I thought you two were at work,” said Jill. “I didn’t think anybody would be back for hours.”

“Sorry to disappoint you. What are you doing?”

I put the bags down and took a couple of tentative steps over to the desk. I noticed now that there was a common link between all the objects she had pulled out and was checking. They were all the gifts that Steven Swann had ever given Erica: a plush toy animal, expensive jewellery, a boxed CD set of the best of David Bowie, an Hermès scarf and so on. Erica had shoved the things away after his brutal admission that he couldn’t love her anymore.

“A pattern,” said Jill. “I’m looking for a pattern.”

“A pattern of what?” I asked.

“How Steven thought. What he liked, what he was into, what turned him on.”

“So you let yourself in to
our
place? Go to Barnes & Noble and get his bio if you want to learn about him! There are dozens getting released now. Or Erica can loan you a couple of his albums. You need HMV, not our desk.” I took the groceries into the kitchen and began putting them away.

“Steven’s killer is still out there,” said Jill, raising her voice so that I could hear. “For all we know, maybe the killer wants to go after Erica, too. The best way I can think of for preventing that is to catch the person first.”

I came out of the kitchen and gestured with a cup, offering her tea. Might as well be civil. No thanks, she muttered.

“I’m sure the cops are still investigating his murder,” I said. “It’s not like they need you to play Nancy Drew for them.”

She nodded, conceding the point. “Yeah, that’s true. But I have one client, one long-term contract. And so I’ve got one case. I can devote a lot more of my personal attention than they can.”

I drifted back into the kitchen and poured tea for myself, nervously taking a sip before I gave it a decent chance to steep. What was she doing, sticking her nose into Steven’s murder? She was supposed to be a bodyguard, not a private detective. Trying to keep my voice calm, I called out to the living room, “And you think the best way you can catch the guy is understanding Steven?”

She waited for my return before answering. “I do. I shouldn’t be alarmist about this, Michelle, but I think Erica, you, Luther, a couple of others could be in real danger. It’s so obvious that the killer was someone who knew Steven well. He must have been someone in your inner circle.”

“You’re scaring me,” I said. I didn’t have to lie about it either.

“See, I shouldn’t have said anything,” sighed Jill, taking her feet off the desk. “Now you
are
going to worry. Look, I still have friends on the force, and they’ve given me access to the file. I’m looking into it. And, yes, you’re right, the cops are still investigating.”