He stopped playing. “Nothing that out of the ordinary. I’d done a few of these gigs with those guys before. Not a lot. This was just another one, that’s all.”
“Did Rebecca seem, I don’t know, like her normal self?”
He strummed another chord, as if buying himself a little time. “Becca was always high-strung. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell when she was wired and when she was just being Becca.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said, softening my voice just a bit. “After the performance was over.”
“Well,” he drawled, “a bunch of us hung around, tossing back a few beers, trying to unwind.”
If Dwight Parmenter unwound any more, I thought to myself, we’d have to check his pulse. “Did you talk to Rebecca?”
“Sure. I was always talking to Becca.” He hesitated, like he’d said too much then. I let it slip by unnoticed.
“I mean,” he continued, “Becca and I talked a lot.”
I nodded. “What’d you talk about that night?”
He shrugged, the skin on his unshaven jaw stretching around his chin. “Same old stuff.”
I shifted on the sofa and brought a little iron into my voice. “C’mon, Dwight. I feel like there’s something here I’m not getting.”
“Like what?” His brow furrowed as he stopped midlick on the guitar.
“I’ve heard from several people that you and Rebecca Gibson had something going on. That you two were involved romantically.”
He leaned over the side of the chair and placed the guitar on the floor. He released it in such a way that it plonked onto the wooden floor. The plonk reverberated and hung there for a few moments.
“People say a lot that ain’t true.”
“So you weren’t involved with her?”
“Not like people think,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. I already told all this stuff to the police.”
“Maybe you’re talking to me for the same reason I’m asking so many questions. Rebecca Gibson may have been difficult, but she was still one of the most attractive women I’ve ever seen in my life. She sure as hell didn’t deserve to die that way.”
His jaw locked up and quivered a bit, the sallow skin on his cheeks pale almost to the point of blue.
“No,” he said, a hitch in his voice, “she didn’t.”
I let that hang there for a few seconds, then: “You loved her, didn’t you?”
He stared off into space, unfocused, silent. His eyes watered, and I saw for the first time evidence of what was hidden real deep inside of him. Mac Ford had been wrong. Dwight Parmenter had his passions; it was just that nobody else saw them.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I loved her. And I’d been watching out for her, taking care of her. She needed me. There’s so goddamn many sharks out there. Nobody she could trust.”
“That’s true,” I said. “It’s a lousy business.”
“That ain’t the word for it.”
“Were you her lover?”
He brought his gaze back to my face. “You don’t pull no punches, do you?”
“Sorry, pal. I’m not in the punch-pulling business.”
He chuckled at that. “No, we weren’t sleeping together steady. It’s not from a want of trying, though. Hell, I knew she’d been with a trooptrain full of men. Didn’t make any difference to me. I loved her for what she was, not what she’d been. She used to tell me she loved me.…”
His voice faded to silence. “But not that way,” I said, filling in his blanks.
“She might have one day. I was the only man who ever stuck by her. I’d have never left her. The only way she’d ever gotten rid of me was by running me off.”
Or die by trying, I thought. But for once I had sense enough to engage my brain before putting my mouth in gear.
“Did you take her home that night?”
He shook his head. “No. I wanted to. It was damn near the middle of the night, after all. But she said she’d be fine, that she had to tend to something-and I should quit worrying about her.”
He teared up again, and this time he lost control and covered his face with his hands. “God,” he sobbed, his shoulders shaking, “if I’d just gone with her. If I’d just made her let me take her home. You don’t think she was afraid of me, do you? Was that it?”
He looked back up at me, his face wet. “Was she afraid to let me go home with her?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that was it.”
“If I’d taken her home, none of this would’ve happened. Or maybe it would have happened to me. Yeah, maybe it would’ve been me. I’d have done that, you know. I would have, swear to God.”
I stood up. I’d done about as much damage here as I could, without learning much beyond the fact that I could bet the rent money on Dwight Parmenter being innocent of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. If he killed her, he deserves a freaking Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor Before They Attach the Electrodes.
“If it’d bring her back, I’d die for her right now,” he said. “I’d have died for her in a heartbeat.”
“Yeah, Mr. Parmenter, I believe you would have.”
No matter how much Rebecca Gibson had been the temperamental prima donna from hell, she had one decent man who loved her and mourned her death. Her memorial service had been nothing but a public display of envy, malice, greed, and networking. But here, in a solitary, run-down apartment, one man wept for her alone out of no other motive beyond simple human grief.
Maybe the thought of grieving for a lost woman pushed a few buttons of my own. Or maybe in this sea of lying, treacherous bastards, I found the thought of someone without ulterior motive touching. In any case, I spent the drive over to my office thinking about my short interview with Dwight Parmenter. I’d meant to ask him more details about that last night, about who he thought might have killed her. All that went out the window when I saw how deeply pained he was by talking about her at all. I felt like I hadn’t learned much, outside of the comfort I could take from Thomas Edison’s dictum: I’ve learned lots of things that don’t work.
The downtown rush-hour traffic had thinned more than I expected, until I checked my watch and realized it was almost six o’clock. I made it back to my office without too much agony and found a parking space on one of the lower floors of the garage. I kept replaying my conversation with Parmenter in my head, and wanted to get upstairs to make my notes as quickly as I could. With my degree of mental fragmentation these days, I needed to get everything down on paper.
One thing did bother me, though. Dwight Parmenter said Rebecca didn’t want him to take her home because she had something she had to take care of. What was it, I wondered, that someone could do at four A.M. on a Monday morning? Did she have to put the cat out? Wash her hair? Slap another coat of paint on the living-room wall?
What the hell was it?
The front door was still open, even though it was technically after business hours. I let it squish shut behind me and took the stairs two at a time. Behind me, I heard Mr. Porter open his door a crack and check me out.
“Hi, Mr. Porter,” I said behind me. He grunted and closed the door.
I hit the landing, turned, and headed up the last half flight to my office. Dwight Parmenter’s voice was replaying itself in my head, his sobs echoing between my ears. I felt awful for the guy, I thought as I dug my hand into my jeans pocket to retrieve my keys.