Spiral

with, ”No, John. No actual sex. Very would have told me.” That laughing sound. ”Flaunted it, actually. Once she learned about sex, she was fascinated by the concept, by what she could get from teasing with it.” I tried to remember that I was talking to the bereaved mother who needed a spiritual advisor. ”Do you mean Veronica was sexually active with somebody else?”
    Jeanette Held suddenly hung her head, tears dropping visibly onto her lap. ”God, I can’t believe we’re talking about this. It’s really bringing me down again.”
    ”I’m sorry if—”
    Her face snapped back up at mine. ”Look, let me just give you the bottom line, okay?”
    Bowie began growling some more, and I didn’t think I’d get much more from Held, so I said, ”Okay.”
    ”Very as a gimmick was the ticket to Spiral’s comeback, and not just the onstage part as ‘Lolita, lead singer.’ The old man bought this house for us thirteen years ago because ‘No grandchild of mine will grow up in a two-bit apartment.’ ” Held had lowered her voice a few octaves for that last part. She went back to her own with, ”The generous gramps even put up enough cash for the band to get back on its feet—almost a quarter of a million for the production costs of the CD alone. And you know why he laid out that kind of money?”
    I thought back to Kalil’s wanting to video the party. ”Because Veronica asked him to.”
    ”That’s right. And now we don’t have Very anymore, so even if Spi can come up with a decent set of songs, I don’t know what the ex-gramps is going to do about backing the band. Or backing us, for that matter.”
    ”Us.”
    ”In this house, the cars and all, too. Without a real comeback for Spiral, I could lose my whole life here.”
    I was about to say, ”On top of your daughter,” before remembering that Malinda Dujong had made my own life a little easier by telling Jeanette Held that I wouldn’t intentionally hurt her.
    Leaving the sunken living room, I didn’t see Dujong, but there was an African-American male crossing the intersecting hallway at the back end of the entry corridor, a soda can in his left hand. He stopped awkwardly and turned my way. Buford Biggs, from the videos.
    ”Help you with something?”
    I nodded. ”Mr. Biggs.”
    He cocked his head to the right. ”You the man Spi’s daddy send?”
    I nodded again. ”John Cuddy.”
    Another cocking of the head, this time to the left, as Biggs showed me a pack of cigarettes he’d palmed in his right hand. ”Just going outside for a smoke, babe. You want, we can talk while I’m having it.”
    Given my day so for, a little semi-fresh air sounded good.
    Show me the way.”
    Biggs waited until I reached the end of the corridor. In person, he was about six feet tall and more stick-skinny than just slim, a sleeveless sweatshirt and contrasting sweatpants almost falling off him. The hair was stylishly razored half-an-inch off his scalp. His face looked drawn, though, the whites of his eyes sallow around the brown irises. Almost ebony in skin tone, Biggs had several irregular blotches on his neck that looked purplish in the hallway lighting. A single gold earring pierced the lobe of his left ear, and what I at first thought was an insignia on the sweatshirt turned out to be the looped and pinned red ribbon of AIDS Awareness.
    ”Most times, now, I take my nicotine break out by the pool.” A pause. ”Family don’t use it much no more.”
    I didn’t nod this time, but I did follow him through another corridor of white tile and walls into a matching kitchen with a large central island and murals of mountain scenes over the wide counters. Biggs slid open half of a double glass door onto a patio that acted as an apron around a pool with water the color of a glacier. Everything else—tiles, lounges and chairs, resin cocktail tables—was white, though, Biggs seeming like a piece of abstract art as he crossed to a shaded alcove with a pair of chairs and one of the small tables between them. The air felt warm but kind of... real, after the antiseptic, reconditioned atmosphere in the house itself.
    Lowering himself into the chair farther away from the pool, Biggs said, ”Not crazy about the sun myself, but you want, pull this other one out a ways.”
    ”Shade’s fine with me, too.”
    Biggs set the soda can on the table, then lit up as I sat down. ”Expect you want me to talk about Very.”
    ”Eventually. I’d rather start with how you came to