Dead Wood - By Dani Amore Page 0,69

shrugged. “My guess would be yes, that’s how she is. But everyone’s different. When she was a struggling young girl with a guitar, maybe those early songs came right from her heart. Maybe they poured out of her soul. And then the businessmen rushed in and mined her like a sliver of gold in rock. And then maybe it all changed. Who knows?”

I nodded and polished off my beer.

I stood up.

“If Hornsby didn’t kill her,” he started to say, then stopped. I watched his face contort with anger and grief. I didn’t know where he was going with it. It turned out, he wasn’t going anywhere. He stopped. So I finished the thought for him.

“I’ll find out who did.”

• • •

It turned out, Nate couldn’t wait for his payment, so we met at the Orchid Gardens for the buffet. The maitre de gave Nate a look that was probably the same expression Custer wore when he realized he wasn’t just going to lose, he was going to lose big.

Nate didn’t disappoint. He loaded a plate full of all the fried stuff first: egg rolls, crab wontons, chicken.

“Lubes up the pipes,” he explained to me.

I got a big plate of chicken fried rice with an egg roll, tossed on some soy sauce and sat across from him. Watching Nate eat Chinese buffet was like watching a conveyor belt dump ingots into a blast furnace.

“Your boy is bad news,” he finally said, after most of his first plate was demolished. Nate signaled the waitress over and ordered a beer, went up to the buffet and loaded on mostly chicken things: garlic chicken, sweet and sour chicken, kung pao chicken.

I stuck with my water and rice.

“Or at least, he was bad news,” Nate continued, pausing every now and then to clean the various sauces and juices that accumulated in the corners of his mouth.

Once Nate had demolished his second plate, I figured he’d take a moment to tell me what he’d found. I was right. He pushed away plate #2 and pulled out a notebook.

“Teddy Armbruster as you know him was born in Chicago as Edward Abrucci,” he said. “Born in Chicago in 1960. First arrested at age twelve. Assault. More arrests through his teens which earned him a stay at the juvenile correctional facility near Rockford, Illinois.”

Nate flipped to the next page of his notebook. “Apparently our man moved to Detroit after he was released. His crime pattern changed, too. He graduated from assaults and robberies to extortion.”

“Mob?”

Nate nodded. “As his crimes became more ‘organized’ to make a bad pun, his arrests disappeared. His last brush with the law was in 1987 for extortion. He beat it. Since then, he’s been clean.”

I thought about that while Nate went back up to the buffet. Now he was moving on to seafood: more crab wontons, lobster with soybeans and shrimp fried rice.

“So do you think he’s really clean now? Has he gone legit?” I asked Nate when he got back to the table.

He shrugged his shoulders and shoveled in the food. “He could be clean or just a whole lot more polished,” he said.

“So far three people have been murdered,” I said. “Jesse Barre. Larry Grasso. And Rufus Coltraine. All people within his orbit.”

“They were in a lot of other people’s orbits, too,” Nate said, soy sauce dripping down his chin.

“Maybe Shannon had killed Jesse for her guitars, then framed her husband for it.”

“And why would a woman worth about a hundred million dollars need to kill someone for guitars? They were expensive, but not that expensive.”

“Had to be the ex-husband, then,” I said. “He was still in love with Shannon, tried to win her back by killing Jesse Barre and stealing her guitars. And then he framed Coltraine for it. They were buddies in prison.”

Nate stopped eating. I knew it was big if he stopped eating.

“They were?”

I nodded. “I talked to a guy I know at Jackson.”

“But you don’t think that was the case?” he said.

“Maybe. But I don’t think Grasso was working alone. Someone was pulling his strings, maybe using his love for Shannon against him.”

“Maybe it was Shannon herself.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I heard the woman speak. It wasn’t Shannon. I didn’t recognize the voice.”

Nate pushed his plate away from him and belched, a low rumbling passage of gas that reminded me of a coal mine being exhumed.

“Don’t mess with this guy, John,” he finally said. “I think people who fuck with Teddy Armbruster end up being