Clay put his head down on his pillow, beginning to dread the day ahead. “I guess if I refuse, you go anyway?”
Savy sat there. She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.
13
THORNS IN ROSES
Given its rustic seclusion, and relative proximity to L.A., Topanga Canyon had been home to a cornucopia of rock and folk legends. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and so on. Tucked into a lush pocket of topography in the Santa Monica Mountains, musicians, guerrilla filmmakers, nudists, organic farmers, and a multitude of ageless hippies congregated there to this day.
Or so Savy claimed.
Swinging onto a dirt road off Old Topanga Lane, all Clay witnessed was scrub, trailer parks, unseen properties announced by rusting pickups, and scraggly, glaring rednecks with hatchets and Marlboros. They could have been anywhere in Appalachia. The ruts beneath Clay’s Jeep were pitted and unpredictable, forcing him to activate the four-wheel drive. As they bounced, Clay shouted, “What if he’s not here?”
“He’ll be here,” Savy insisted. “He’s either touring or drunk at home, and the Demons’ tour doesn’t start for another six days.”
“At least he’s smart enough to stay put when he’s shitfaced,” Clay said, referring to the unfortunate demise of Hank Ooljee, who had filled his gut with thousand-dollar scotch and gone racing up the Pacific Coast Highway on his Harley. For days the news had reported the former Rocket Throne bassist missing, before the tide north of San Simeon shoved his mangled bike, and one fish-gnawed leg, onto a narrow strip of shore at the base of a cliff. Hank Ooljee. Rode into the ocean in the dead of night. Another suicide? No one could rightly say; Ooljee had never been one to air his grief, but his drinking had been public record. It wouldn’t have been another suicide anyway, Clay reflected. It would’ve the first. A murder, then a suicide in the world’s greatest rock band. Or… Could it have been two murders deftly covered up? Why had Rooster killed Boyle in the first place? Clay’s head spun with the possibilities.
All the way up the 101, they listened to Karney and the Demons, trying to glean new meaning from the base poetry that Davis Karney called lyrics. Not everyone could be Bob Dylan or Nick Cave, but with lines like “Oooo-ah, baby, give it, pow!” Clay had a tendency to quit hearing the vocals as anything but a wordless instrument. Now he forced himself, willing his mind like a pet-owner willing his dog toward the neutering vet. “Did he just say ‘I’m noshing on a plate of ho’s’?”
“I always thought it was ‘I’m nothing if I hate bro’s,’” Savy replied. “Either way, Davis isn’t confessing to anything other than crimes against the English language.”
“What about the opening line of ‘Lunatic Tears,’—‘I make my decisions with a gun’?”
Savy chuckled. “Yeah, might be suspicious, if the ‘gun’ he’s referring to wasn’t obviously his cock.” They hit a rut in the road and Savy jumped in her seat. “You disagree?”
“No,” Clay sighed. “It’s his cock.”
Each time the dirt lane cut sharply to the left or right, Clay expected his windshield to fill with the sight of a massive secluded estate, a plantation-style manner belonging to the last surviving member of Rocket Throne. But there were no houses this far from the asphalt, nothing but vertical rock walls, drought-twisted trees, and emaciated dogs—or were they foraging coyotes?—wandering the edge of the road.
At last, the rock wall withdrew, and the twisting road revealed a U-shaped field dense with wild grass and large stones. Parked in the middle of this unremarkable patch was a double-wide trailer. “There,” Savy said with certainty.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Barrett says he likes his Canyon neighbors better than anyone in Beverly Hills. The parties here are pretty epic.”
Clay braked to a hard stop and a cloud of dust rolled over the Jeep and across the trailer. There were holes in its sheet-metal siding, and some of the dust wandered inside. “I guess he knows we’re here now.”
Only the breeze stirring the trees greeted them as they climbed the flimsy trailer steps. And Clay was still waiting for the punchline. No wildly successful rock drummer lived here. This was just some place Roethke kept for his secret deeds, far from the prying eyes of jackbooted cops. No one answered Savy’s knock, and Clay understood their investigation was already thwarted. Savy’s tenuous connection to Roethke had been their only lead to Davis Karney.
A crow called out listlessly. Savy knocked again, hammering this time, and for fun Clay pounded the door with her, their fists rocking the whole trailer.
Inside someone groaned and called them assholes.
Two minutes later, Roethke’s face appeared in the gaping hole nearest the door, as leering and unshaven as Nicholson in The Shining. The drummer registered confusion at the sight of Clay on his stoop—his memory failing to reach back as far as last night. Then he spotted Savy and his eyes lit up. “Tigress! I was wondering when you’d come crawling back.”
“Hey, Barry.” The door opened to reveal Roethke in the same tight black shirt he’d been wearing the night before, and a pair of ludicrous pineapple-print boxers that clung to his pale hairless thighs. In the narrow space beyond, Clay observed a rat’s-nest kitchen and a five-thousand-dollar DW drum set. He bit his tongue. A murder, then a suicide in the world’s greatest rock band—and this was what was left? Not even noon and the guy was piss-your-jockies drunk? In the impartial glare of daylight, Roethke looked rough, a middle-aged zombie who’d be lucky to see actual middle-age. “We were in the area,” Savy told him. “Thought I’d stop by, see if you made any upgrades to the palace.”
The drummer gestured up at the satellite dish pointed skyward on the roof. “Finally got satellite TV. And you don’t have to flush
