FAREWELL GHOST Read online

  The autopsy report had noted multiple carpet burns to her knees and elbows and concluded that Boyle’s girlfriend had crawled, in a heroin-induced stupor, up the front stairs and down the long hall to the bedroom. And what had all that effort been for? To call 9-1-1? To climb into bed? Maybe she just didn’t want to die sprawled on a cold floor. In the end, maybe all anyone wanted was a little dignity before they went. The thought filled Clay with a sudden sadness and he turned from the spot, fearing Savy would see the change in his eyes.

  The boy, Mickey, asked if he could take pictures, and Clay told him, “The owners enforce a strict no-picture policy—I’m kidding, go ahead.”

  Mo angled his brother this way and that, failing to note the irony in one addict paying such close attention to another’s demise. “Enough,” Savy said at last, and they followed Clay out to the back yard, which had been the site of many of Throne’s private shows and—even if Boyle had been over his wild days by the time he arrived in Burbank—a few legendary parties too.

  “Cristina Scabbia once swam here,” Clay told them on the pool deck. “So did all of the Chili Peppers.”

  “Cristina Scabbia, oh man,” Mo said, palming his crotch, “bottle some of that water for me.”

  Savy rolled her eyes and flicked her brother’s ear. It was a sibling thing, automatic, as was Mo’s instinct to grab her belt and sling her into the pool. Savy took an off-balance step toward the water, then set her feet wider and shrugged him off. Hands held out like someone moving through a mosh pit of drunken brutes, she circled her brother, and her whole body swung into the punch she delivered to his thigh. It happened so quickly that Clay wouldn’t have believed he’d seen it, if not for Mo’s dramatic hobbling. “Dead-leg,” he explained, limping off. “No one’s better at them than my puta sis.”

  Savy took neither pride nor offense, just gathered the dangling hairs that had come loose in the struggle, her bracelets Slinkying along her arms as she retied her ponytail. She was grace and thrash in a perfect two-part harmony. A Simon and Garfunkel hit set to a punk-rock backbeat. “Save your pics for the Generator,” she told Mickey. Then caught herself. “If we’re going into the Generator.”

  “What’s the Generator?” Clay asked, straight-faced. For a moment, he thought Savy would dead-leg him too—and would that make him wary of her or just more helplessly enamored?—before she smirked back.

  At the door, Clay turned full-fledged tour guide, spewing out everything he knew—the music Boyle had recorded here, the musicians (Eddie Vedder, Neko Case, what’s-his-name from Tool) who’d jammed here, the good times before his end. “Boyle said his creativity flowed here like power out of a generator. He swore he’d never record another album anywhere else.”

  Clay could feel the weight of Savy’s attention. At the height of his monologue, he also spotted his father, back on the deck. Peter made no attempt to interrupt, but Clay read his body language easily enough.

  Inside, the Generator was quiet and bright, the sun alive in the windows; an entirely different space than the previous night, and the events of those hours felt suddenly implausible. Clay’s guests moved tentatively, as if treading over sacred ground. “It hasn’t changed much,” Mickey observed.

  “With one exception.” Mo gestured at the ceiling, where the naked bulb that had been Clay’s nocturnal companion dangled.

  “His weight tore the chandelier loose after a few hours,” Savy said quietly.

  Mo gave a nod, his attention already moving on. Clay followed his eyes and cringed inwardly. The Rickenbacker was in the open, leaning against the wall. He’d forgotten to hide it. “Woah,” Mo said, “isn’t that a Boyle guitar? That come with the house too?”

  You have no idea, man.

  Clay offered the vaguest of shrugs, feeling self-conscious again. A real-deal Rocco Boyle Rick—just another jewel he’d been handed in life. Clay scooped the guitar up before Mo could and delivered it into Savy’s arms. “You play hard,” she said, of the scratches and divots in the wood. There wasn’t a strap on the guitar, so she threw a Doc Marten up on the weightlifting bench and rested her elbow on her knee. She grinned at the mini-amp and twisted the volume all the way up. Then, quickly, effortlessly, the guitar sprang to life under her fingers. And Fiasco Joe might have been an elitist asshole, but he was dead-on about Savy’s ability; if anything, he’d undersold her. For over a minute, she shredded, string-bending, fret-massaging, finishing with the lightning finger-work of Throne’s “All My Heroes Turned Coward,” ripping through the solo like it was nothing at all.

  Everyone was silent in the aftermath.

  “A little out of tune, but what a beauty.” Savy handed the guitar back. “I play a Gibson SG myself.”

  Clay sensed that they wanted him to play now, to unleash some musical flourish to prove himself worthy of the high-end Rick. Clay only laid it aside.

  “You going to turn this place into a museum or something?” Mo asked.

  “My old man wants to use it as a gym. I’m lobbying to make it a rehearsal space.” Clay looked to Savy, hoping to gauge her interest in coming back. Except she was already heading toward the loft steps.

  “Okay to go up?”

  “Sure.” Clay waited a minute, then followed.

  He found her standing in the sun thrown down from the skylight, biting at the nail of her middle finger. Feeling him creeping up, she drew a breath and composed herself. Clay wondered if her visit to the place where her idol had fallen—where her hero had turned coward—wasn’t getting to her. Or maybe it was more complicated than that; emotions almost always were. “I think you know this, but—you’re standing right where Boyle recorded vocals for The Disharmonic.”

  Savy nodded. “By himself up here. In the dark. Singing to us, through time and space.”

  “He had it all here, didn’t he?”

  “He was drug-free. He had an amazing band and a hot girlfriend that loved him. He had creative freedom and a bottomless bank account. He could’ve traveled anywhere he wanted, played any venue, done anything, and…”

  “…and in the end it wasn’t enough for him,” Clay finished.

  Her brothers joined them briefly in the loft; then, sensing the conversation had taken a sentimental turn, they reversed course and hurried back down. “I’d give anything for a taste of the life he had,” Savy admitted, when she and Clay were alone again.

  It was hot up here, the central air switched off, and Clay was standing close enough to smell Savy’s soapy-clean scent. “I saw Throne when they headlined Coachella,” she went on. “I was only 14, but Mo knew someone who knew someone who got us backstage. I had my acoustic with me and when the band was walking past after their set, I started playing ‘Hallelujah’. Was just hoping for a little wave, but Rocco and Deidre both came over. They gave me these huge hugs and Rocco told me, ‘Never stop playing.’ Which I sort of took to heart.” Savy shook her head and chewed at her nail. “Two months later they were dead. And that’s what’s so hard to accept. Rocco was living his dream. He was living my dream.”

  “Why the hell would he kill himself?” Clay had asked that question once or twice himself. But addiction had a way of sapping your hope—was it his latest relapse that had forced Boyle to face the inevitable? Had Deidre’s overdose pushed him over the edge? Was there anything to one of the thousand conspiracies about that night? All of these questions met the same inconclusive conclusion: No concrete answer. “It’s probably why some fans prefer to think he was murdered. Easier to wrap our minds around that.”

  No sooner did he say it did Clay wonder if Savy was a conspiracy theorist herself. She gave him a look, measuring him, before she said, “I started coming here after his funeral. Trying to deal with it, you know? I’d sit out front of the gate or walk around the fence like you caught us doing the other night. I hiked the trails behind the property. There’s this bluff up there, if you’re brave enough.” She pointed to the mountains looming in the skylight, toward a cluster of yellow boulders above the t
ree line. “It’s a distance away, but you can see down into your yard. You can see this very skylight, in fact. And there was a full moon that night and… oh, fuck, never mind.”

  “No. What?”

  “I saw someone standing here. Right where we’re standing now. The Ganeks were living here by then, but their cars weren’t in the driveway, so I thought it was strange anyone would be on the property. The figure was moving around, lifting his hands and tensing his shoulders. Like he was… singing…. and—alright, you promise not to call the psychiatric swat team?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I saw it was him, Clay. Rocco. Even from way up on that cliff, there was no mistaking him. He was standing right here, three years after his death.”

  Clay opened his mouth and tried very hard to control his voice. “You serious?”

  Her eyes rose to his own. She was putting herself on the line here, dragging a would-be skeleton from her closet. She wanted him to understand—maybe needed him to. “I don’t know your beliefs. If you’re like my brothers, and my band, even me sometimes, you think I’m cray-cray. But I know what I saw. Rocco’s spirit is still here in some way. So respect his memory. Don’t let just anyone in. Even if you already lowered yourself with us.”

  Clay was quiet a moment. Before last night, the ghost story that Savy was telling him might have been a red flag. Now? Living in a paranormal investigator’s wet dream, Clay was finding his mind a bit more open. So he told her, “I don’t think you’re crazy. Anymore than I am.”

  Savy regarded him cynically.

  For a second, half a second, he thought of telling her about the night he saw the devil in a dark hallway. But he wasn’t willing to reveal that to anyone.

  Her brothers had wandered outside and appeared on the grass in the yard. Mo was waving wildly up at them, while Mickey pointed his camera. “Smile,” Savy told Clay, with no expression at all.

  At the gates, she jotted her info on an old concert flyer—not her number, Clay noticed, but an e-mail at least—and told him, “Thursday night, we’re jamming at work.”

  Clay read the logo on her shirt again. “Where’s The Knickerbocker?”

  “Hollywood. It’s a hotel—sort of a hotel. Come by around ten.”

  She wasn’t asking and Clay preferred it that way. After the incident with Fiasco Joe, he would need Savy’s insistence just to show up. “I trust you’ve got the charm to seal the deal,” Mo told him, brushing at Clay’s shoulders. “I’ll be best man at the wedding and we can all move into this palace together.”

  Then Mickey shook Clay’s hand, all business, in a way that was funny and sad.

  Savy thanked him, with eye contact but no physical contact, and her family piled into an ancient white Datsun, and it was a miracle that the crankshaft turned and the spark plugs fired and the wheels turned in concert with the jerk of the wheel.

  Five minutes later, Clay was finishing cold eggs on the deck when his father appeared in a suit, hair slicked back, waving his phone back and forth like it was something nasty he’d found under Clay’s mattress. “Please don’t give my cell number to anyone. That flower woman left six messages.”

  Clay laughed. But when Peter drew his posture to full attention, Clay understood it was time to get down to it. “You know a lot about Rocco Boyle.”

  “I guess.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a fan.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Living in the place he died? We moved across the country to recover from a death.”

  “Really? I thought we came out so you could work in the movie biz.”

  “I don’t like your new friends. You think I don’t know a junkie when I see one?”

  Clay blinked. And he almost told him, No, you don’t. Because for nearly a year Clay had been experimenting with every drug under the moon and Peter was as ignorant to it as a deaf man to the beauty of a vinyl record.

  Clay’s mother had asked him what he wanted for his eighteenth birthday that year and Clay had replied, “Nothing. You’ve literally provided me with everything I need, contrary to our capitalist nature.” So Peter had thrown him a party instead, at a hotel banquet hall reserved for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs, and populated it with his law-firm cronies. Clay’s handful of friends had come, and of course his sometime-girlfriend, Renee, who’d raided the cash from Clay’s birthday cards, and even endorsed a few checks, and went over to South Street to buy him a gift of her own. They’d ended up in a stall in the ladies’ room, snorting lines off the back of one another’s hands, and Clay’s heart had been going and his mind had been spinning and Renee had been wearing this ridiculous red prom dress with a big girlish bow in back, and how he’d wanted to tear it right in two. Except Renee had denied him, once again, her eyes saucer-big, gleaming with virginal pride. So Clay had grunted and returned to the party to dance with every female but Renee—even Gwen, his father’s secretary, who he’d held inappropriately close while the DJ spun one awkward ballad after another. And what had Peter told him? He’d stared Clay straight in the dilated pupils and shouted, “I’ve never seen you happier, son!”

  “I saw scumbags like that at the courthouse all the time,” his father told him now. “They’ll win your trust, then rob us blind, first chance they get.”

  “Savy’s clean. She’s the only one I want to be friends with.”

  “Friends, right. You think it’s a smart idea to lose your head over some girl right now? She’ll wrap you around her finger, like Renee did.”

  “I ditched Renee,” Clay reminded him.

  “If you’re hip to Rocco Boyle, fine. I liked Eric Clapton in my day. Just don’t start thinking you’re some kind of L.A. rock star. There’s no future in that for that.”

  “Anything else, meine Fuhrer?”

  “Yeah—don’t forget your appointment with Alexander today.” Peter’s phone rang and he winced. “And for shit’s sake, never give my number to crazy flower women!”

  Despite the tension, their laughter erupted on the patio.

  It would be the last bit of levity between them for a long time. But of course neither of them could know that, nor see what was coming.

  4

  ENJOY THE SILENCE

  Payton Alexander kept his office in an anonymous plain stucco building in Sherman Oaks, of the variety that were abundant in the Valley. By the time Clay located the correct one, he was fifteen minutes late. But Alexander—“Payton, call me Payton.”—epitomized the laid-back SoCal stereotype, with his trimmed goatee and sandals and peach-colored polo. His face had the reddish hue of a beach bum and the long hair sprouting around his male pattern baldness was gray and pulled into a sloppy ponytail. He might have spent his nights playing maracas in Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band.

  The office, likewise, was different from other shrinks that Clay had been required to visit in the last year. Abstract paintings crowded the walls—vague animal shapes and Rorschach ejaculations on canvas. Tropical fish swam in a large utopian tank. A twelve-inch Godzilla was dancing with Barbie among a forest of well-kept bonsai on Alexander’s desk. “Are these La-Z-Boys?” Clay asked of the two recliners parked in the center of the room.

  “I don’t enjoy couches,” the therapist replied. “In fact, I loathe clichés. Don’t you?”

  Clay cranked his feet up and they shot the shit about Philadelphia, where Dr. Alexander—Payton—was also from (“The parking still suck there?” “Yup!”), before coming around to the point. “So what would you like to talk to me about, Clay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Well.” Clay stared for a while at the painting over Payton’s head. The smears of paint seemed to combine to form a pair of nude women tonguing each other’s breasts. And you don’t think you have anything to talk to this guy about? “I told my father I wanted a break before I entered the ‘real world’ and now he’s worried I’ll be a royal fuck-up.”

  “Why would he think that?�
��

  “It’s not what he would’ve done at my age. He had to scratch and claw his way out of the gutter, as he reminds me. Then there was my mother and me to worry about.”

  Payton had turned his chair to face the fish tank and was watching a school of electric-blue cichlids circle their submerged castle. “Your mother is no longer in the picture?”

  “She died last November. Was carrying laundry down to our basement when she slipped. We had one of those old Philly row homes. Real narrow stairs, long fall. I didn’t find her till hours later.”

  “You found her?”

  “Yeah.” Clay shrugged it off. “It wasn’t great.”

  “So what do you hope to do in Los Angeles?”

  Clay didn’t know how to answer that. He had been so certain that Payton would lock on to the trauma of his mother’s death that the question threw him; he actually had to think about it before his mind settled on the obvious: “I want to play in a band.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Oh, you know, Jimmy Buffet. Bob Marley.”

  Payton grinned approvingly. “Clever. But there’s no room for pandering here.”

  “I like rock in all its forms,” Clay conceded. “From Chuck Berry to Karney and the Demons.”

  “Were you in a band back east?”

  “Not a working one. I jammed with people, but they either didn’t have much talent or they would never show up, or they had a lot of talent and they showed up with egos as big as the Walt Whitman Bridge.”

  “Welcome to the music world.”

  “You play too,” Clay said.

  Payton lifted his palms, as if Clay had accused him. “Alto sax. Surf rock mostly—and saying I do it part time would be flattering myself. My claim to fame was playing in a David Lynch movie. This bar scene where two characters have their hands around each other’s throats. They’re killing each other and shrieking that they love each other at the same time. And behind them on stage is a sax player blasting away—and that sax player is me.”