Spiral

spring.”
    ”Exact-o-mundo.”
    ”She came to you, didn’t she?”
    Mitch Eisen could have been one of those modem statues cast from bronze and placed in casual positions on park benches. I’m not sure even his lips moved with ”Came to me?”
    ”When Tommy O’Dell was on the way out, didn’t you meet with Donna Moran, the mother?”
    ”The mother?” Eisen seemed to relax. ”Yeah, yeah. The mother. She claimed Tommy was the father of her little bundle of joy.”
    ”Some of the other band members might be able to back her on that”
    ”Hey, John, you gotta remember the times. Nobody ever heard of sexual harassment or date rape. Shit, you worried about statutory rape—account of a lot of these chicks looked legal—and maybe whether you’d get a case of lice or crabs.”
    ”But not a paternity suit.”
    ”Look, this Donna Moran comes to see me, belly like it oughta be carried in a wheelbarrow. Says she’s pregnant by Tommy, and I’m the manager, and what are we going to do about it?”
    ”We?”
    ”The band, Spiral. I told her we’d pay for an abortion— God bless Roe versus Wade —but Moran says no, she wants the kid but we should pony up for supporting it. I tell her no way, and eventually she sees our side of things.”
    ”And what, just goes away?”
    ”Has the kid, gives it her own name, turns out. Never bothers us again.” Eisen leaned toward me. ”Frankly, I’m surprised she didn’t shoot her mouth off about it to the cops or die media once Very turned up dead.”
    The cops. ”The police don’t know Sundy Moran was Tommy O’Dell’s daughter?”
    Eisen cringed. ”Man, you keep saying that, don’t make it so. Girl’s gonna flash her boobies at some strung-out guy on stage she don’t know from a serial killer, how many other clicks you figure blazed the trail for Tommy’s?”
    I kept my temper. ”Aside from coincidence, any possible connection between the killings of Veronica Held and Sundy Moran?”
    ”Hell, no. I read the paper and see the little piece about the Moran girl, all I can imagine is some high-school friend of the mother thinking, ‘Wait a minute, maybe I can get my fifteen minutes on Montel or Leeza, blow the whistle on who Donna thinks the daddy was.’ But that never happened, so I’m guessing the mother didn’t tell anybody about Tommy.”
    ”Did Sundy Moran ever know?”
    ”That Tommy was —might have been—her father? Beats me. She sure never came around to my office with her hand out, anyway.”
    I thought back to something Buford Biggs had told me , the day before. ”Even if Sundy had shown up on your doorstep, though, Tommy O’Dell really didn’t have any ; estate to leave her, right?”
    ”Right,” a little too quickly.
    ”And that’s because all his composer royalties—”
    ”Lyricist royalties, actually.”
    ”All his royalties from Spiral’s music devolved under his will to you.”
    Eisen swung back around, facing the street again. ”That was the deal we had. My original venture capital, their unrealized potential.”
    ”Which got ‘realized.’”
    ”Yeah, but only because of me.” Eisen began flaring. ”What those fuckheads had before I took them on was pie-in-the sky, over-the-rainbow royalties.”
    Then he hung his head. ”You see this little strip?”
    I swung my legs around to the sidewalk. Eisen was studying a snaking tube embedded in the wave wall. Something within or behind the tube made it glow pink, then blue, then green, then —
    ”It’s a nice touch,” he said. ”You drive north on A1A here at night, you can watch the little strips in the wall change color as you go by. I don’t know how the city does it, but it’s a nice trick.”
    Mitch Eisen looked up at me now, his eager eyes seeming to belong more in a child’s face. ”Like you’re really getting near the end of the rainbow, even.”

SEVENTEEN

    A guard—named Lenny this time—said, ”Ms. Dujong doesn’t answer, sir.”
    Through the Cavalier’s open window, I looked up at him in the sentry box of the tennis club. Fiftyish, solid. ”No answer at all, or just her telephone tape?”
    He thought about it, maybe whether or not he should tell me. ”Her machine.”
    Same as I’d drawn when I tried to call her. ”How about Cornel Radescu?”
    Lenny said, ”I know for a fact he’s playing a featured match on Court One right now.”
    ”Can you interrupt him?”
    ”No, sir.”
    ”Okay. Let’s go with Cassandra Helides.”
    Lenny picked up