Spiral (11 page)

Her husband said, ”Mr. Cuddy wants to ask you some questions about Very.”

Though I wasn’t watching him, there was a definite pause in the impatient voice before he added, ”Alone.” Jeanette Held said, ”I don’t see how I can talk about that without Malinda.”

As her husband began to fume, the dog growled again. Dujong broke in with, ”Jeanette, I have a very strong feeling about Mr. Cuddy.” The ”spiritual advisor” spoke her next Words directly to me. ”He has suffered, too, and recently. This man will not harm you intentionally.”

I felt a little lump in my throat as Malinda Dujong walked toward Spi Held, who left the doorway before she passed through it. After Dujong was gone, I realized I couldn’t have described to you what she’d been wearing.

When I turned back to Jeanette Held, she said, ”If Malinda trusts you, I trust you, too.”

I took an armchair the same caramel color as the leather couch. ”Mrs. Held—”

”Please, call me ‘Jeanette.’ The media people all scream ‘Mrs. Held’ at me, like as long as they’re polite enough to use my last name, they can follow it with any question that pops into their filthy minds.”

As Bowie resettled himself across her feet, I started to revise my initial assessment of Jeanette Held. Hammered as she’d been by what had happened to her daughter, there was intelligence behind the shock shield raised around her. ”Jeanette, I want to make this as easy as possible for you.” A resigned smile seeped through the shield. ‘Too late, but not your fault.” The smile retreated back inside her. ”Ask your questions.”

Start with some easy ones. ”How long have you and your husband been married?”

”Fourteen years. He was thirty, clean and sober. For a while. I was twenty-five.”

Making the Helds forty-four and thirty-nine now. ”How did you meet?”

”Through the program.”

Based on what she’d said, I tried to fill in the blank. ”Alcohol rehab?”

”For me. Both drugs and booze for Spi. He loved to mix and match in his ‘youth.’ I’m more a one-addiction woman, and unfortunately I kind of transferred that from bourbon to Spi. Then, when he started getting back into snorting and drinking, I transferred from him to Very.” pretty frank, so I decided to go with it. ”Did you and your husband think of getting a divorce?”

”Spi? Hunh.”

I thought that last part might have been Held’s way of laughing, but there was no smile on her face now.

”No, John. Spi’s father—the great field marshal himself—kept either one of us from even raising the possibility.”

”How?”

Jeanette Held let her right hand drift to her lap, then closed her fists, watching them with something approaching interest. ”The Colonel had Spi by the balls, John. The money Spiral needed for its comeback had to ‘come’ from somewhere.”

”And his father wouldn’t have financed a divorced son—”

”—who’d deprived a little girl the principal male figure in her life.”

I let it hang there for a moment before saying, ‘Tour husband was a good parent to Veronica?”

”Hunh.” A genuine laugh this time, if the resigned smile was any indication. ”Spi’s idea of being a ‘good parent’ is...
was
to buy Very expensive stuff on her birthday and then ignore his daughter the rest of the time as kind of a drag on his life.”

”What kind of ‘drag’?”

”What kind of ‘life’ would be a better question. Spi and some sidemen Mitch Eisen came up with would—you met Mitch yet?”

”Briefly.”

”That’s the best way, if you can’t avoid meeting him at all.”

The smile seeped back through her shield. ”Spi and these sidemen would tour as ‘Spiral, the great raunch band of the seventies.’” Held looked down at the carpet. ”Christmases were the worst. He’d always want to be away for the holidays, avoid having to see his father. Then money got so tight that we’d barely get by, and even Spi knew he couldn’t take off for Aspen or the Alps.”

”I thought Colonel Helides was financing this big comeback.”

”Only recently, when Spi ‘discovered’ how Very could put across a song. He’d ever attended shows in her elementary school here, my husband would have known a lot sooner.”

”Someone else told me that Veronica was being tutored privately.”

”Privately, yeah. By my father-in-law’s wonderboy, Duy Tranh.” Held softened just a little. ”And I have to say, Duy was doing a good job by her, even if it was one more way the Colonel ran our lives.”

”So, no problems between student and teacher?”

”Not that Very told me about. It was more, ‘Duy showed me this way-cool nature video.’ Or, ‘David taught me this awesome computer game.’”

”David being the Colonel’s other son.”

”Yeah. Very liked him, too, even through the ‘extreme weirdness.’ But no matter how much she learned from those two, it still wasn’t normal.”

”What wasn’t?”

”Her not being in school just so she could rehearse with the band.”

‘You didn’t approve of the comeback?”

”The truth?” Held said sharply.

”That would be nice.”

”The truth.” Less sharply, the shield seeming to lift. ”Well, here’s what I heard of the old days. When the band started getting eaten alive by disco, this drummer I never met named O’D committed suicide. Spi went into a free fall. The other players—Buford, Gordo—they hooked up with other bands or got day jobs.”

”Like what?”

The straight hair shook. ”Don’t know, because I didn’t even know Spi himself then. Oh, I knew of him, of course, at least from the glory days in the early seventies, cause I’d hear Spiral’s sounds on the radio back then. But by the time I met Spi, I’d been through one bad marriage with no kids, and a bout with the bottle that kept coming up knockout every round. So, I got off the booze, and did what I could to get Spi’s monkeys off him, too. And I did, so long as everything was going good.”

”Everything with your family life?”

”Hunh. No. No, I’m afraid that after a fantastic honeymoon and maybe three more months of ’wedded bliss,’ Spi started missing things.”

”Missing things?”

”About being in a rock-’n’-roll band, on tour in one of those stupid buses thinks it’s a Winnebago.” A stalling sound from her throat, then, ”Being the alpha wolf with the groupies, letting the other members of the band scratch for sloppy seconds.”

Franker than frank.

Held said, ”Hey, John, don’t be too shocked. After you’re around a rock band for a while, it’s just kind of hard to stay Polite in mixed company.”

I waited a minute.

The straight hair shook again. ”If you don’t have any more questions, I’d like to get back with Malinda, take my mind off things with what she can do, which is so good but so scary, too, that I almost have to brace myself for it.”

I waited a minute longer.

Held said, ”Hello?”

”Jeanette, I don’t think you answered my question.”

”I don’t think I even remember it.”

”I asked you whether you approved of Spiral’s comeback attempt.”

The shield came down again, hard. ”Wasn’t a question of whether or not I ‘approved.’ Very was the heart of the comeback.”

”You were her mother, half of her parents.”

”Hunh.” Definitely a laugh this time, but no resigned smile. No smile period. Just the beginning of tears, the dog whuffing through its nose.

”I was Very’s mother, John. I remember giving birth to her in a shiny delivery room. I remember breast-feeding her and teaching her to walk. I even remember encouraging her to sing. Sing in the bathtub, sing in the yard, sing whenever there was nobody around to bother. I remember all these things, but that doesn’t mean I was her ‘parent.’”

”Jeanette, I truly don’t follow you here.”

”Then let me spell it out. After Spi and I got married, we decided to get me pregnant real quick because his father had disowned him after my husband—’Spiro,’ then-folded his underwear into a hankie and tied it on a stick. Spi’s running away from home tore the guts out of the old man, especially since his first wife’d died a couple of years before—having David, who turned out to be worse than no kid at all. You met David yet?”

”Not really.”

”Hunh. I don’t know what that means, but it’s probably3 pretty good answer where David’s concerned.”

”I’m more concerned about—”

”Then let me finish, okay? Spi and I decided to have Very because we figured it was the best way to get ahead.

”Get ahead?”

”Yeah. The Colonel’s second son turns into something out of the Twilight Zone, we figured the way to get Spi back into his father’s good graces would be to ‘present him with a grandchild,’ as Martha Stewart might say.”

I thought I finally saw it ”You had Very to heal the family wound.”

”More to steal the family treasure.” Held softened again. ”Or not steal it, really. I mean, Spi just wanted what was his, and we would have put David in a real good home somewhere.”

Off the beaten track and out of their ”normal” life. ”Jeanette, why are you telling me all this?”

”Because none of it fucking matters anymore.” The tears started rolling now, and Held tore some tissues from a dispenser she must have had on the far side of her, since I hadn’t seen it before.

”Why not?”

”Very was supposed to be our tunnel to the Colonel’s money, and she was doing a great job of digging it.”

”At least until the song at the birthday party.”

”Which I still don’t get. I mean, Spi and I ran after her, find out why she’d done it. And she just told the two of us to fuck off”

”Traces of cocaine were found—”

”And Spi denied Very got her junk from him, right?”

”Right.”

”Yeah, well.” The straight hair shook again. ”You haven’t known Spi very long yet, so maybe you can believe him on that”

”Jeanette, what happened after Veronica told you two to let her alone?”

”At the party?”

”Yes.”

”I thought Spi was going to blow his lid, so I got him back to his father in the living room, try to patch the hole a little.”

”And?”

”And everybody seemed to be doing that, drifting toward the old man. But when Tranh found Very, and I saw her lying there...”

”Jeanette—”

”It was just so stupid! Very always knew how to behave around her grandfather, buttering him up even before she knew how sexy she was.”

Reluctantly, I thought back to Mitch Eisen’s ”incest” comment. ”Are you saying there could have been a sexual aspect to Veronica and the Colonel’s—”

”Oh, shove it, will you?” said Held, loudly enough to start the dog growling and even barking. ”Shush, Bowie, shush.” Then, back to me 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.”