“What? Not at the same time.”

“Yup, same time. High school boys.” I started singing the theme to Three’s Company—“Come an’ knock on our doooor—”

“No. Way.”

“Yes way. Ya know, early eighties, which came just after the seventies, which was also some kind of strange branch off the sixties—pre-AIDS and all that. Free love was still in the air.”

“Nice pay for gardening services.”

“I don’t think it was an accident these two horny teenagers showed up with their rakes or whatever. They’d probably heard all kinds of rumors about Cinnamon’s mom. I mean, the way Rey’s cousin Professor Durazo painted it, Mrs. Persky was gunning for trouble. She ran with musicians, players—she was a scenemaker and she was crazy sexy—I mean, even her beautiful daughter felt outshined.”

“That and she was married to a gay movie producer.”

“Exactly—so Appelfeld and Rey and Marjorie had their little, uh, after-school special, and nobody got their feathers ruffled. But when Appelfeld got kicked out of the group, Marj knew she had to kick him out of the sack too—”

“Because sleeping with Pete Best is the ultimate groupie fail.”

“So, she quote fired her gardeners unquote, canceled services. But Durazo was still in the band—” I threw a wide arm out. “—he rehearsed across the street. And then he came back for more. Solo.”

“And Appelfeld caught them in flagrante?”

“Yup, and that’s how Durazo got naked before he got dead. Then Appelfeld planted the bloody lamp in the trunk of Emil’s MG.”

“Brutal. All because Emil stole his slot in the band?”

“That and—they really humiliated him when they kicked him out, it was ugly.”

“You think Marjorie helped the frame-up?”

“She might not have participated, but she kept her mouth shut.”

Fry grew somber. “Why—why would she do that?”

“Appelfeld threatened her, for one. And maybe she was involved. But I have this crazy gut thing that she also didn’t love Emil as much as she claimed.”

“Why not?”

“Because her daughter found true love and a real family? Because maybe she even made a pass at Emil and got rejected? I really don’t know—it’s a feeling. But I do know she practically sent Cinnamon away. I mean, really talked her into going on the lam.”

“To set her free?”

“I’m not sure it was that innocent.”

“Yeah—maybe not. Some moms just cannot bear to pass the torch.” Fry cast a glance around the giant tomb of his mother’s living room and sighed. “What’d you learn about the singer?”

“Mickey Sandoz?”

“Yeah—what did the autopsy say?”

“Inconclusive, last I heard—the coroner stopped answering my calls.”

Fry took it in, smarted. “I guess,” he said, “I guess either way, he got killed by rock-and-roll dreams.”

Against the backdrop of the clanging, bright, arabesque melody, I shook my head in wonder. “You know what’s really messed up? I mean, above and beyond this tragedy—here’s this guy, Appelfeld, he’s barely even in the band. He’s running on pure fantasy—the dream of being a big star, a rock star—and, okay, he’s nuts, obviously, he’s a murderer. But so many people live under the weird pressure of that same fucking dream.”

“The star thing?” Fry said. “Totally—everybody Twittering their balls off, Instagramming themselves to death. I saw something in Forbes—one in four gainfully employed white collar workers say they would quit their job to be famous. I’m talking med students, topflight engineers. No—they’d give it all up for more likes, more little red hearts.”

“What’s it really about?” I asked. “Like Bahari says, what’s the why behind the why?”

“The dream of being a big star?”

“Yeah, man—why does it have so much force?”

“Well,” Fry said, “it’s about power, of course—superiority. I mean, I don’t want to get all moralistic, but the whole fame thing—it’s kinda got a touch of Nazi in it, right? Bow to the superhuman!”

“Like just being a human is somehow a curse,” I said. “A lizard skin you gotta get out of.”

We tripped on it together, the madness of it.

“I guess,” Fry said, “the why behind the why is for some reason we all actually just feel so fucking small. The universe is shrinking us, the population is shrinking us, the robots are shrinking us—” Fry pinched an invisible point out of the air. “We’re like that tiny dot on the old TV, right before it cuts to black.”

“Ahhh, right—that’s why these fantasies prevail. From smallness…bigness. Yup. That’s it.”

Fry thumbed his joint and put it out in the crystal ashtray, shook his head, and raised a hand to his mouth like he was calculating something, but the dreamy music of The Daily Telegraph twinkling in the background took over, and then he looked at me and smiled. “This one’s my favorite right here—launch the lightning!—light up the sky! Hell yeah.”

I burst out laughing.

He pointed at me. “Somebody’s gotta put this out.”

43

There was no way to prove or disprove Marjorie Persky’s involvement in the murder of Reynaldo Durazo. The next week, with Fry’s help, I made the first of three attempts to present a request for inquiry, but both Lanterman and the two detectives who had been assigned to the case quashed it. The last time we went down to Newton Station to speak with the cops, they seemed gently annoyed that we wouldn’t let it go—the thief who they thought had killed Hawley had been released, and as far as they were concerned, Marjorie Persky was an upstanding member of her community, an octogenarian. There was nothing to point to. Anyway, her daughter stayed by Charles Elkaim’s side as she vowed and never contacted her mother once. I had to believe that, for Marjorie Persky, that was some kind of punishment enough.

I had just a few more things to do before walking away from the case once and for all, and so, on a Saturday afternoon, I parked at the Grove and made my way through the open mall, just as the Saturday night crowd was starting to pour in: Koreans, Persians, Mexicans, Black, white, everyone dressed for summer in bright colors and white things, hanging by the giant fountain as it spritzed in time to piped-in Sinatra while the trolley car ding-ding-dinged down the track. It was a funny collage of the past, but nobody would really mistake this for Olde Time Main Street, USA. The sense of the present was everywhere—people were here to shop, eat, laugh, love. The twentieth century was long gone, and far as I could see, nobody in this crowd cared.

Nobody except good ol’ Larry Lazerbeam, that is.

He was waiting for me under the pagoda at the Farmers Market bar, nursing a Bloody Mary and clocking the Dodgers on the widescreen.

He smiled as he saw me saunter up. “Here comes Dick Tracy!”

I shook my head, laughing, and handed him a canvas bag. “For you,” I said.

He reached in and pulled out the original acetate.

“Wowie zowie.” His grin went wide. “I thought you were gonna try to sell this baby on the black market.”

“Naw. Far as I’m concerned, this is your piece of the rock. And it’s yours to keep.”