Spiral, page 9
part #13 of John F Cuddy Series
But only briefly.
I said, ”Busy morning for you, huh?”
”Uh, yes. Mr.... uh—”
”Oh, come on now. You can’t have forgotten already? You had it right ten minutes ago when you spoke with Detective Cascadden.”
”I don’t think—”
”Unfortunately, though, Cascadden is a little free with his information. He let slip how firm you were about a certain personal... conviction.”
The clerk flinched.
I said, ”What’s your name?”
”Damon.”
I leaned into him over the counter. ”Damon, the problem with information about any kind of conviction is, once you share it, things can get out of hand.”
A nod.
”I don’t intend to share this information any further, but I want something in return.”
”They don’t pay me enough here to—”
”Different coin of the realm, Damon. All I want is advanced notice from you.”
Hope and confusion both. ”Notice?”
”Of any trouble headed my way that you sniff out first.”
”Trouble.”
”That’s right. Either Detective Cascadden or anybody else. You think you can do that for me?”
Damon glanced around before nodding. Vigorously.
”I’m going out now.”
”Uh, have a nice day.”
”I’ll try to, Damon. I’ll really try.”
Mitch Eisen’s office showed an address in what I thought of as the southeast quadrant of Fort Lauderdale. I used the shore route A1A to reach it, partly because I wanted to get the hang of handling the Cavalier but mostly to clear my head of the feelings Kyle Cascadden and Damon had left in me. Watching people jog, race-walk, and roller-blade along the oceanside path helped, especially with the beach, turquoise water, and swaying palm trees as backdrops.
South of Broward Boulevard, I turned back west until I found a strip mall lying between the right avenues. There was no sign on the three-story building that read like the business name of a rock group’s manager, maybe because the Dunkin’ Donuts and Mail Boxes, Etc., on the ground floor had taken up all the available advertising space. I parked the Cavalier across from the short line buying fresh-brewed coffee and fresh-baked health food.
Between the two establishments, I found a glass and chrome door with three apartment-style mailboxes inside it. The middle one showed a piece of masking tape with ”M. Eisen, Ltd.,” so I climbed the flight of stairs to the second floor.
There was only one door, a plastic faux-grained plaque not quite centered on it but reading ”M. Eisen, Ltd.” as well. Knocking, I wondered why the manager of even a faded rock group couldn’t spring for at least a second plaque downstairs.
A muffled ”It’s open” came through the door, so I turned the knob. A man was sitting at the secretarial desk in the outer office, a threshold behind it leading to an inner one. I recognized the hair transplant from the video of the birthday party that Sergeant Lourdes Pintana had shown me back at police headquarters. It looked like nursery rows of Christmas trees, planted at identical intervals.
Eisen glanced up at me. ”Yeah?”
I went through the formalities anyway. ”Mr. Eisen?”
”No, Mick Jagger. The fuck are you?”
I realized that it hadn’t been so much the door muffling his voice as the voice itself. There was a breathy quality to it that wouldn’t carry five feet in an empty church, even though he didn’t seem older than fifty or so. Eisen looked thinner than he had in the video. I’d always heard that the camera adds ten pounds, but in this case, the subtraction made the guy almost emaciated, the name spiral over a tornado logo on his black T-shirt almost completely covering his narrow chest.
”My name’s John Cuddy. Nicolas Helides thought I should talk to you.”
”Oh, the private eye, right?”
”Right.”
”Tranh told me I might get a visit. How come you didn’t call, let me know you were coming?”
”Thought I’d just drive over.”
”Yeah, but why not use your cellular from the car?”
”Tranh told you he’d given me a cell phone?”
Eisen blinked. ”No. No, he didn’t. I just—shit, man, everybody who’s anybody has one now.”
”I wonder if we could talk about Veronica Held.”
A frown this time. ”You know, my lawyer doesn’t think I should be talking to you at all.”
”But Nicolas Helides does.”
The frown evolved into a shrewd grin. ”John, I like a man knows when he has leverage for negotiating.” Eisen glanced behind him. ”Let’s go into my office. I can’t stand the fucking clutter out here.”
The desk Eisen rose from sported folded correspondence and waxy faxes, eight-by-ten photos and tape cassettes. ”Secretary out sick?”
”Huh?” he said over his shoulder as he led me through the inner doorway.
”Your secretary. He or she out sick for a while?”
”Oh, I don’t have what you’d call a formal secretary. Got this single-mother chick, used to work for a temp agency, but she got tired of having to go to different places all the time. So I pay her less to come here more. Only one of her yard-apes is sick with something, so I’m up to my ass in shit from people I don’t even know.”
”I’m surprised they can find you, Mitch.”
Eisen waved me to a seat before collapsing as heavily as his weight would let him into a high-backed judge’s chair behind a desk at least as cluttered as the one we’d just left. ”Find me?”
”Without any advertising downstairs.”
”Oh, that doesn’t stop the wanna-bes. I could change my name and move to Tahiti, and I’d still be getting demo tapes recorded in somebody’s fucking garage.”
”You ever find new clients that way?”
”What, off the street, so to speak?”
‘Yes.”
”Once in a great while.” Eisen pursed his lips, which somehow caused the hair plugs to march like a drill team toward his forehead. ”Was how I found Spi Held, tell you the truth. Or how he found me.”
”And when was this?”
”Back in seventy.” Eisen swung in his chair, waving this time at the wall of photos to his left and my right. ”That’s us, whole first row there.”
I followed his hand gesture to a vertical line of framed shots, some posed, some candid. Most had a younger, heavier version of Eisen in them, with four even younger men around him. I recognized Buford Biggs despite the Jimi Hendryx Afro and husky build. I also recognized the fat, bald one called Gordo, but you would have been hard-pressed to pick the man Lourdes Pintana identified to me as Spi Held, and the fourth man with dishwater-blond hair falling onto his shoulders was clearly not the young drummer I’d seen in the video of the party.
I said, ”Who’s the guy with the long blond hair?”
”The...? Oh, that was O’D.”
”Oh-Dee?”
”Tommy O’Dell. Original drummer in the band. Called him ‘O’D’ for short, because of his last name.” A cough that I realized stood for a grunted laugh. ”Or because of how he checked out. Always thought that’s how the stone should have read.”
”I don’t follow you, Mitch.”
”His tombstone. O’D died of an ‘OD,’ get it?”
Beth’s own grave flashed behind my eyes as I said, O’Dell died from a drug overdose?”
”Yeah. Fucking would have killed the band, too, disco didn’t do them in first.”
”Why is that?”
Eisen sized me up. ”You’re old enough, John, you would have been listening to their music in the early seventies, right?”
”I remember the name, anyway.”
”Okay. Spiral had a couple of hits, mainly songs that Spi and O’D wrote together—Spi on the music, O’D the lyrics, which is funny for a drummer, you think about it.”
”Funny?”
”Drummer, he’s got to keep the beat when they play a song, you don’t usually peg him as a word guy.”
”Got it.”
”Okay. Well, even with those couple of hits, Spiral as a band never had enough name recognition once they fell off CHR.”
”What’s CHR, Mitch?”
‘”Contemporary Hit Radio,’ top-40 tunes, follow?”
”I think so.”
”CHR is different from AOR.”
”Which is?”
”‘Album-Oriented Rock.’ Or ‘Radio,’ doesn’t matter. What matters is, groups like Pink Floyd or even Black Sabbath could make it without top-40 hits, because those bands got played on AOR”
”The album stations.”
”Right, right. A band like Spiral, though—with no superstar, only don’t let Spi know I said that—needs play on the CHR outlets to stay popular. Otherwise, it’s out of hearing, out of mind, follow?”
”And this O’Dell had a knack for writing lyrics that CHR stations liked.”
”Yeah. But once—look, John, how much do you really know about the music?”
”Like you said, I listened to it, but I never studied it”
”Okay ” Eisen settled deeper in his chair, like a kid visiting Dad’s office when the old man was attending a meeting-”The history of rock-’n’-roll, short course. Fast forward through Elvis, the Beach Boys, and the British Invasion. Stop at the late sixties, when you had the whole San Francisco scene. Jefferson Airplane with Gracie Slick—God, what a voice she had for the psychedelic sound. Then the second wave of Brits: Elton John, Peter Frampton—talk about a guy should have become a legend, but that’s another story. Weave in Carlos Santana and his salsa-rock, the Allman Brothers and their Southern-rock, the Eagles and their country—”
”How about Spiral, Mitch?”
A pause and another lip purse, the hair plugs marching forward again. ”They had a kind of raunchy-rock sound. O’D was a genius at writing lyrics just this side of what a record company wouldn’t put on albums. Nice counterpoint to Fleetwood Mac and their romance-rock, E.L.O. — that’s Electric Light Orchestra—and their symphony-rock, etc., etc.”
”So Spiral found its own niche and filled it.”
”Right, right. But like I said, only CHR play, not the album stations.”
”And then Tommy O’Dell died.”
”Right, though he was getting so drugged out even before he took the big one, I don’t know how much longer he could have produced new lyrics. Didn’t really matter though, because in seventy-six, seventy-seven, along came... disco!”
I had the feeling Eisen had delivered this speech before.
”Which...?”
”... fucking killed the CHR-driven rock groups like Spiral. I mean, all you heard was Donna Summer, Barry White, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King—funny, a lot of the performers were black, but most of the fans weren’t. Even so, Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta gets released, and the ballgame was over for Spiral and twenty other bands like them.”
”What happened then?”
”Late seventies, we got punk-rock as a kind of a ‘death-to-disco’ protest. You had the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, not *o mention—”
”I meant more, what happened to Spiral.”
”Couldn’t get them gigs, man. Or only little store-front clubs. No decent promoter wanted their sound anymore. At most, the middle-road rock fans who couldn’t stand pu^ had migrated to corporate-rock, like Journey, Air Supply. Not too harsh, not too sweet, kind of Baby-Bear music, follow?” The fairy tale. ”Baby-Bear, as in ‘just right.’”
”Exact-a-mundo, John. Even quality bands like—that accent, you’re from Boston?”
”Yes.”
”Okay. Bands from up there—J. Geils and Aerosmith-were monster-big in the early seventies, but even they struggled against the tide. And it was like Spiral forgot how to swim.”
That brought back an image of the Skipper’s pool, and Veronica Held. But I wanted more background from Eisen before asking him about the birthday party. ”You were the band’s manager from the beginning?”
”Yeah. In fact, they wouldn’t have had the little name recognition they did, wasn’t for me.”
”How so?”
”I came up with the name. I mean, can you imagine? A lead singer in seventy with the same first name as Nixon’s veep?”
Spiro Agnew. ”You changed it to ‘Spi’?”
”No. No, he’d already done that himself, running away from home and all. But I’m the one came up with ‘Spiral-Spi tends to remember that different, but the idea was mine. ‘Spi,’ lead singer of’Spiral.’ Get it?”
”Catchy.”
”Subliminal signature.”
”Sorry?”
”It’s like an actor does, make a role his own by some kind of little mannerism or bit of business. I figured to get positive name bounce from the jazz-fusion group Spyro Gyra, then have ‘Spi’ and ‘Spiral’ and even the logo”—he pointed to the tornado symbol on his T-shirt—”reinforce each other subliminally in the fan’s mind, follow me?”
”I think so. Is that why you thought the band could make a comeback?”
”No,” said Eisen. ”No, I was the one thought they couldn’t.”
”How come?”
”Back to that difference between CHR and AOR. It’s the same today, John. The album-oriented stations that never played Spiral’s old stuff wouldn’t play any new music they came up with, and the contemporary-hit stations never heard of them.”
”So why did Spi Held think the comeback would be a success?”
”Boils down to one word. Very.”
”Meaning his daughter.”
”Meaning Lolita with a mike in her hand. You ever see her live?”
I didn’t think Eisen meant ”alive,” but I still shifted a little in my chair. ”No.”
”Wait a sec.” He started shuffling through a stack of unboxed VHS cassettes on the corner of his desk. ”I think I got one of their—yeah, here it is. Watch.”
My day for videos. ”What’s that?”
Eisen was already pedaling his chair over to a VCR under the monitor on a side table. ”Dry run for a music video. Unedited, which is probably how I’d want to see it, I was you.”
Eisen picked up a remote device and pushed some buttons before inserting the tape. ”Okay, John, fasten your seat belt.”
The screen came alive with color, a kaleidoscopic background constantly shifting shape and shade. Then some yelling offstage, and the camera zoomed in on Veronica Held and her cornrowed hair. There was some blurring of the men in the background before the camera operator caught on and evened out the range, Spi Held and his band members becoming clearer.
That’s when Veronica said, ”What is this bullshit? Like, the fucking camera’s supposed to be on me, right?”
Eisen’s breathy, grunted laugh. ”Lovely, isn’t she?”
Not the word I’d have used. Veronica Held was dressed in a spandex outfit again, at least below the waist. Above it, bare midriff, a gold ring through her navel, and a leopard-skin bikini top that did its best to give her thirteen-year-old chest some cleavage.
I shook my head.
”Wait,” said Eisen to me. ”It gets better.”
Veronica stomped over to her father, him letting the big, flashy guitar sag against the strap around his shoulders.
She said, ”The fuck did you get this clown? The cunt doesn’t even know who’s the star?”
Spi Held said, ”Very, honey—”
”Fuck you. She goes, or I’m like gone yesterday.”
The screen went to snow.
Eisen said, ”This next take really captures her.”
When the picture resolved again, there was no doubt who ”the star” was. Veronica Held fondled a bulbous portable mike between her hands, the fingers looking delicate, even fragile against it.
Until she began to sing. Or wail.
As with the party tape, the voice wasn’t a schoolgirl’s. Nor were her hand movements on the mike.
”Lolita,” said Eisen. ”Crossed with her namesake.”
”Her namesake?”
”Janis, Very’s middle name. After Janis Joplin. You know, Big Brother and the Holding Company, then—”
”I remember Joplin.”
”That Bette Midler in The Rose, she did a better-than-okay job, but Very’s the closest I’ve ever seen. The sex-kitten looks of a Spice Girl, but the voice, the voice...”
All I could think was, Thirteen years old.
Veronica Held gyrated through the rest of the tune, the lyric a poorly rhymed stanza of barely disguised sexual desire for a teacher, her hips grinding against the microphone she rubbed along her thighs during the instrumental sections. After a crescendo of wail and music both, the screen went to snow again.
”I didn’t recognize the song, Mitch.”
Eisen gave his breathy grunt as he pressed another button on the remote and swung back around to me. ”I’m not surprised. It was one of the new ones Spi wrote for the comeback.”
”Not very good lyrics.”
”No, but what do you want from an eighth-grader?”
I stared at him. ”You’re not serious.”
”So, okay. She had a tutor the last few months, not a real school and classroom, but—”
”Wait a minute. Veronica wrote those lyrics?”
”Yeah.” Eisen seemed surprised now. ”Like I said before, Spi was the music guy, and O’D wrote the words.”
”And Veronica replaced O’Dell?”
”Hey, they’re not so bad, John, you compare them with the current crop of crap out there. Nothing you’d mistake for Paul Simon or Carole King, maybe, but—”
”I also don’t remember hearing about any ‘tutor.’”
”Hearing about? Shit, man, you already met him.”
”Who?”
”Very’s tutor. Tranh.”
That stopped me a minute.
”Hey, John, you okay?”
”Fine.” I gestured toward the now-dark screen. ”Was Veronica always like that?”
”Like that ‘cock-tease,’ or like that ‘bitchy’?”
”Both.”
Eisen pursed his lips again, the rug doing its little glide on his forehead. ”Depended on the circumstance.”
