Spiral

Wednesday, and Moran’s boyfriend Ford Walton comes visiting with a knife on Wednesday night, apparently believing I murdered his girlfriend. The killer must have given him my name, and that knife as well, because it had Moran’s blood on it Due to my ability to identify Walton, though, and the police lab’s ability to match his prints on the knife used to kill Moran, Walton becomes a liability, too. And I might have softened him up enough for the killer to finish him, dumping his body in that warehouse district
    Which is where Dujong comes back into it. Somehow, she can link the killer to Veronica Held’s death, despite the elimination of both Moran and Walton as potential witnesses. So the killer takes Dujong, too.
    But maybe, just maybe, hasn’t killed her. There’s no corpse yet, and the murderer might keep Malinda Dujong alive to find out how she discovered the link to Veronica’s death. Especially if word gets back that a hired investigator has stumbled onto the same link himself.
    Of course, the only way that gambit could work is if it flushed the killer from the woodline. By targeting me as the next risk to that person getting away with murder.

TWENTY-ONE

    Ten minutes turned into twenty, and twenty into thirty, but nobody left the Held house, either by car or on foot. I decided to give it another half hour, using the cell phone to call the answering service for my Boston office. There were a dozen condolence messages about Nancy and a few regarding cases up there. I returned only the business ones. The final message was from Drew Lynch, a simple, ”Please call us when you get a chance.”
    I wasn’t up to talking with Nancy’s landlord either. Whatever he wanted, it could wait till I went back north.
    After pushing the end button on the cellular, I checked my watch. Seventy minutes since I’d planted the seed with Spi Held and Buford Biggs.
    I started the Achieva again and headed toward the southeast quadrant of Fort Lauderdale.

    ”You’re always in,” I said.
    Mitch Eisen looked up at me from the big judge’s chair as he slid a pair of earphones down over his jawbone, giving himself a high-tech necklace. ”What?”
    I pointed to the cord running back to some stereo equipment. ”Last night’s show?”
    ”Last...? ” He fingered the cord. ” Oh, you mean the Alamo? ”
    ”I thought the name of the place was—”
    ”Not the name. The metaphor.”
    ”That bad?”
    ”Worse. At least the Mexicans had the decency to kill everybody they found there. Spiral, on the other hand, lives to suck another day.”
    I took a chair, asking a question I’d already heard answered. ”Anything specific?”
    ”What, you mean about the band stinking the place out?”
    ”Yes.”
    ”No. No, we’re talking a real team effort. Gordo was high, Buford was nervous, and the kid, Ricky, tried for most of the first set, then just mailed in the second. But Spi was the real star of the show. Pissing off the houseman about the P.A., dissing the audience when they didn’t leap to their feet in idolatrous enthusiasm, and sniffling so bad that you’d think he’d somehow figured out a way to snort a line off his microphone.”
    ”So where does that leave them?”
    ”Dead in the water, far as doing warm-ups in this town.” Eisen settled his narrow shoulders back into the chair. ”Of course, if his old man’s still willing to play Daddy Warbucks—hey, that’s kind of clever.”
    ”What is?”
    ”The Daddy Warbucks thing. I mean, his father was in Vietnam, right, and he did make a lot of money afterwards, so the name kind of—”
    ”Different name.”
    ”Different?”
    ”Malinda Dujong.”
    Eisen’s hair plugs did their march forward. ”I didn’t see her last night.”
    ”Last night.”
    ”At the gig. Shit, even Jeanette didn’t bother to show, which kind of tells you her view of the situation.”
    ”Mitch?”
    ”Yeah?”
    ”I know what she found out.”
    Another hair maneuver. ”What Jeanette found out about what?”
    ”Not Mrs. Held. Ms. Dujong.”
    ”Malinda? I doubt she ever even heard Spiral practice. She wasn’t into music that I could tell.”
    Wasn’t. ”There a reason you used the past tense, Mitch?”
    ”The past tense?”
    ”In talking about Ms. Dujong.”
    ”I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Eisen shrugged. ”Okay, I grant you, Malinda might have heard them out at Spi’s house, although that studio there is fucking state-of-the-art, accoustically