Born To Be Wild
Toni went home but didn’t go to sleep right away. She placed a call to the office of an attorney she’d used on several previous occasions. When the voicemail picked up, she said, “Mr. Snell, this is Toni Taylor. One of the club’s employees was murdered in her apartment yesterday. Please call me at the club no later than ten o’clock this morning. I assume that the standard fee will apply. Thanks.”
She broke the connection and leaned forward on her dining room table. Martin Snell could tie up any trial in a blizzard of paperwork long enough to – how did he put it? – yes, to “readjust the facts” to benefit his client. She hoped he was available tomorrow and not meeting with that new client he’d mentioned briefly that one time. Toni had asked about that new client indirectly more than once, but Snell had always deflected such inquiries by claiming attorney-client privilege. He’d also mentioned once that if he had any new clients – which he was neither confirming nor denying – he wouldn’t mention the Metro Club in casual conversation with them unless Toni or Johnny had explicitly authorized him to do so. Toni wouldn’t do such a thing, and she hoped Johnny was smart enough –
The thought of Johnny stopped her cold. He’d been acting odd for a couple of days, especially about Christie. And he’d taken up with a new girlfriend before Christie had been banished back to drink hustler, even before they’d learned that she was dead. Could Johnny possibly have anything to do with –
She thrust the notion away from her with both hands. No! He couldn’t have done anything so stupid as to kill his girlfriend! That wasn’t Johnny’s way. He’d eventually get tired of a woman and send her on her way with a few hundred dollars in her purse and a promise to call her – a promise which he never kept.
But Johnny’s relationship with Christie had been different almost from the start. He’d never set a girlfriend up in a fancy apartment before. He’d never knocked himself out pushing her to be a musical star at the club before. He’d gotten them jobs, yes, but Christie was the first one he’d hired a whole band for. The Mountaintops could have played in any number of places in and around Metropolis for several weeks, but Johnny had paid a premium fee to get them to appear for six consecutive weeks. And then he’d paid more to entice them to be the backup band to Christie. Surely he wouldn’t kill her, not when she seemed to be finally settling in as a singer.
The reports Toni had received about her rendition of “Fever” were that she’d been nothing short of amazing, that it was the best song she’d ever sung on the Metro Club’s stage. Toni had missed it for a conference call with some associates in Las Vegas over some reciprocal business arrangements, but everyone from the club staff said that the crowd had loved it. Even Charlie King had said that it was the best he’d heard her sing.
It had to be something else, someone else. Maybe someone was trying to get to Johnny. Maybe it was a jealousy thing – Linda! Of course! She could throw suspicion on Linda the naked waitress. That was it! She’d killed Christie in a fight over Johnny! That had to be it! And even if it wasn’t, she could make it look that way to the police.
That was the tack she’d suggest to Snell when they met, to point to Linda as the real guilty party. It didn’t matter whether or not she’d ever spoken directly to Christie. Snell could make her look like Charles Manson’s murder mentor. His exorbitant fee would be more than worth it if he could divert the attention of the police and the district attorney in some other direction, any direction away from the club and away from Johnny.
And away from her.
She poured herself a drink and wondered again who Snell’s mysterious other major client might be. She mentally flipped through the short list of names of the high-profile crooks in Metropolis – without false modesty, she included herself on that list – and came up with one name which felt right to her.
Lex Luthor.
She was one of the very few outside Luthor’s organization who knew about his criminal enterprises. And since she’d stumbled on that knowledge by accident and had never let anyone suspect what she knew, she was fairly certain Luthor was not aware of her knowledge. The philanthropic face he showed to the world was quite convincing. Toni believed that he would now have complete control of Earth’s entire space program if not for the first appearance of the man the tabloids were calling the Silent Vigilante. Whoever the man in black was, he’d yanked that bomb out of the shuttle at the last moment and thrown it out of range just before liftoff. And no one had been able to explain how the man had accomplished that feat, not to mention how he’d known about the bomb in the first place.
Toni was certain that Luthor had planted the bomb through his very scary associate Nigel St. John. The tall, distinguished, icy man had appeared at Lex Luthor’s side about three years before and seemed to be connected to him by an invisible umbilical cord. Toni had grown up around men who would murder another person at the word of a mob boss, but none of them had ever frightened her. Nigel frightened her. And because he served his employer faithfully, Luthor also frightened her. Even more, the fact that almost no one else in the state suspected he was a criminal frightened her. He could have her killed with little or no fear that her death would lead back to him.
She downed the last of the scotch and considered another, then decided against it. She’d need her wits about her when she spoke with Snell later that morning, and she couldn’t risk any hint of hangover if she could arrange a face-to-face with him.
That thought made her hand rise to her mouth and feel the bruise Johnny had given her earlier. Her scalp was still tender where he’d yanked her up by the hair, too. Some over-the-counter pain medication and judicial application of make-up would hide the damage.
But Johnny had crossed a line with those blows. If he was involved in Christie’s death somehow, Toni vowed that he’d be the one to pay the price. His way – Pop’s way – was the way to prison or even death, and if he wanted to walk that path Toni was willing to let him.
But he’d walk it alone. She was through picking up after him.
*****
Lois made sure Lucy went to bed and went to sleep. Then she took the phone directory into the bathroom and began looking for a lawyer. She knew that any shyster Toni dug up would be dirtier than a newborn’s diaper, and she didn’t want a mob lawyer representing any of them in what might turn out to be a murder trial.
She ignored the quarter-page and larger ads touting the legal services and specialties of one lawyer or another. She needed someone who was honest and had no mob ties at all, someone who would fight for the truth instead of just defending a client.
Lois knew she hadn’t killed Christie, and she was just as sure that none of the other women in the band had killed her. Lucy was hiding something from them, but murder wasn’t it. Lucy was too emotional to have killed anyone and hidden it. If she had killed Christie, she would have told Lois right away.
They had to have their own lawyer. Her contact from Gotham, Vicky Vale, had mentioned an honest lawyer in Metropolis about a year before in one of their rare phone conversations, and Lois was scanning the names while trying to remember it. The woman’s last name had been Howard, or Huntzinger, something starting with an ‘h’ –
Hunter! Connie Hunter. That was the name, and there was her phone number. And there was no splashy ad in the Yellow Pages about Ms. Hunter promising to get her clients off scott-free from DUI charges, excessive tickets, back child support, or anything else. To Lois, that was a big plus. It meant that she wasn’t overly successful, which meant she was probably not ‘connected’ like whatever sleazeball Toni was sure to come up with would be.
Lois jotted down the number on her notepad and sighed. Maybe Connie Hunter could help them. Maybe she’d be in her office at nine-thirty, when Lois’ bedside alarm clock would go off after a very short night of sleep.
Lois groaned to herself and changed for bed. The triple burden of watching out for her baby sister, playing for the Mountaintops and doing most of the vocal arrangements, all while moonlighting as Wanda Detroit was taking its toll on her. In the past two years and a few months, her stories had contributed to at least fifteen mob bosses or high-ranking gangsters being charged with major crimes and six presumably ‘honest’ politicians suffering the loss of their elected offices. Two of those had been arraigned on criminal charges, and the other four were currently under investigation. Nineteen crooked police officers in Gotham City alone had been fired or were under investigation by Internal Affairs. The FBI had arrested five major players in Las Vegas, two in Atlantic City, and three in Central City. And two corrupt state-appointed judges in Florida had lost their seats because of her work.
It was a good score by any measure. Maybe it was time to give Wanda an extended vacation. Lois surely needed the break. She was almost twenty-seven years old and she wasn’t getting any younger. Yes, it was time for her to give herself some time for herself.
As soon as this murder case was resolved. There was no way she’d let a talent-poor junkie like Christie Baldwin stop the Mountaintops, whether dead or alive.
She slid under the covers and let out a long sigh, then fluffed her pillow and closed her eyes. Her usual go-to-sleep technique was to think about something involved with the band, something pleasant and fulfilling. Instead of notes on a page or a memory from a previous set, however, her mind was suddenly filled with an image of a tall, handsome, bespectacled, very fit young man sitting behind the sound board.
Who, according to Ramona and Connie, was most assuredly not gay.
Their hands had touched just a short time ago, quite by accident, but the contact had startled Lois in a way she’d never felt before. For a moment, there had been only Lois and Charlie in the room. She’d momentarily forgotten about the other members of the Mountaintops, about Christie and all the trouble she’d brought to the band, about the meeting with the police they had been about to enter. All else had faded to nothingness. And when she’d looked into Charlie’s eyes, she’d felt as if she were seeing right down into his soul.
It was a beautiful soul, so beautiful that it took an act of will to tear her gaze away. And when she had pulled her eyes away, she’d felt a sense of loss that she couldn’t explain.
She wondered what portion of her feelings about him was accurate and what portion was due to exhaustion and stress. And she wondered if he’d felt anything in return.
She didn’t know if she hoped he’d felt anything or not. That was exactly the kind of complication she didn’t need. Besides, relationships with traveling musicians rarely lasted. Lois wasn’t about to leave the group, and there was no way Charlie could go with them or follow them. She had living examples in both Ramona and Connie, both of whom had seen relationships crumble under the burden of the road. She’d lost too much sleep sitting up with them to have any illusions of that sort left in her mind.
She tried to push his face away from her mind, but he smiled and refused to leave, even when she all but begged him to. He did, at least, step back and allow her to go to sleep.
And when she finally drifted away to the land of Nod, he filled her dreams with softness and security and comfort and contented smiles.
*****
As she changed clothes and got ready for bed in her apartment, Linda didn’t know whether to be excited or frightened. On the one hand, she was close to getting hard evidence to use against the Metro gang, which would improve her standing in Perry’s eyes and put her that much closer to an award nomination. On the other hand, what she was about to do was highly illegal and dangerous, and she wasn’t sure the police would look the other way when they found out what she was doing, despite her reasons for doing it.
And she had no idea how Clark would react. Would he understand her need to prove herself? Would he respect her more after she’d shown how willing she was to get the story no matter what the danger? Would he be angry at her for exposing herself to peril, or would he be thankful that she’d gotten away with it?
That, of course, assumed she would get away with it.
The wild card in all of this wasn’t Johnny. Linda knew what he’d do if he found out that his new ‘girlfriend’ was an undercover reporter. She’d be dead, no question about it. If Johnny wasn’t in police custody when her real identity became known, he’d have her killed. It didn’t matter what kind of sweet nothings he’d whispered in her ear the night before. He might do it himself, he might tell George, the sweet-looking but lethal night doorman, to do it, or he might have one of his many henchmen do it. Any way he decided, she’d die.
No, the real wild card was Toni Taylor. Toni was trying to shift the gang’s emphasis from rough and tumble to the genteel and respectable. She was trying to change the gang’s image from down and dirty to upstanding and clean. And she might be able to do it, too, if Johnny were out of the way.
That thought gave her pause. If Toni could get Johnny out of the way, she could take over and reshape the gang in her own image. And if Linda were tied too closely to Johnny, she might go under with him. Toni cared nothing for Linda’s well-being, except where it intersected with her goals. If Linda could help Toni, Toni would be nice to Linda.
And if Toni could use Linda to take down Johnny, she probably wouldn’t think twice about it. Linda hoped her alibi for the time when Christie was killed would hold up under scrutiny.
Christie’s murder had scrambled the lines of power at the club and in the gang. Linda had allowed Johnny to seduce her before she’d known that Christie was dead, thinking that Johnny would either show Christie the door right away or let her leave when the band did. If Johnny didn’t break it off with Christie, then Linda would be able to play them against each other for her own multiple advantages. Either way, Linda would have the inside track on the gang’s real business transactions.
But Christie was dead and Linda had little or no leverage to use on Johnny. Her options had been reduced to two – either play along as the grateful new girlfriend or leave now with the job unfinished. And she had to complete the job. Clark would never respect a girlfriend who didn’t finish what she started.
She was committed, and she had to see it through, no matter what.
