Flowers will get you practically anywhere in a hospital. I've told the front desk I'm taking them to my brother in Room 621. Because my arms were full and I acted like I knew the drill, nobody made me sign in; a plastic pass was clipped to my shirt and here I am, getting off on the sixth floor.
Tito Negraponte was admitted under his own namethis I'd discovered earlier when, pretending to be a florist, I phoned the hospital switchboard. His private room number was disclosed so offhandedly I had to conclude that neither a Grammy Award nor a gunshot wound is enough to elevate a bass player to the A-list at Cedars. I'm feeling optimistic about a one-on-one interview until Tito's door is opened by a cheerless Los Angeles County detective. Even minus the badge on his belt I would have figured him as a cop. Luckily he's on his way out, and I receive only a nod and a cursory glance at my floor pass.
"How is he?" I whisper in the tone of a concerned friend.
"Lucky," says the detective, stepping aside so that I and my flowers may enter the room. Once the door closes I'm alone with the fallen Slut Puppy, who is propped on his side, two pillows lumped beneath his head. Plainly he's not at death's door.
"Now what?" he mutters with a healthy scowl.
Before getting on the plane I'd looked up the news story about Tito's shooting on the Los Angeles TimesWeb site, which gave more details than the short AP item. The attempted murder had occurred inside the musician's Culver City townhouse. A police spokesman was quoted as saying Mr. Negraponte had returned from a trip to Florida and surprised a pair of armed burglars. After a struggle the guitarist was shot twice "in the lower torso" with a semiautomatic machine pistol of a brand favored by street gangs and drug dealers. The article ended with a paragraph about the salad years of the Slut Puppies, and a solemn mention of Jimmy Stoma's recent death "on a scuba-diving expedition in the Bahamas."
"Who sent the flowers?" Tito hoists his head and suspiciously eyes the arrangement. I introduce myself and deposit a business card on his medicine tray. "You came all the way to California to write how I got capped in the ass? Great." He chuckles in a droopy-lidded way that suggests liberal access to Dilaudid. A tandem IV rig hangs by the bed.
"I saw you at Jimmy's funeral," I tell Tito, "and I was at Jizz the other night when you met his widow."
"You some kinda groupie, or what?"
"I told you what I am. I flew out here because I'm working on a story about how Jimmy died. Jay Burns, too. And now you, almost."
Here's the moment when Tito Negraponte could tell me to get losta reasonable response from a man with a .45 caliber hole in each buttock. But instead of kicking me out of his room, Tito invites me to sit. He says, "You think it wasn't an accident, Jimmy dying the way he did?"
"I've had a lousy feeling about it from the beginning. You sure you're up for an interview?"
" 'Up' is definitely the word for it. You shoulda been here before they took away the morphine pump." This time Tito's laugh dissolves into a grimace.
"Let me tell you what's happened so far." And I do, recounting the non-autopsy in Nassau, the balcony scene between Cleo and Loreal, my interview with Jay Burns, the burglaries of Jimmy's boat and my apartment, Jay's bizarre demise, Janet's disappearance under murky circumstancesand the discovery of Jimmy's hard drive hidden aboard the Rio Rio.
By the time I've finished, Tito's eyes are shut and his breathing is heavy. When I step closer to see if he's asleep, he blinks and says, "If this is a joke, it ain't so funny. You're saying they got Janet?"
"I'm not sure. She's gone and it doesn't look pretty."
"Fuckers."
"Tell me what's going on," I say.
"What's the difference? I can't prove nuthin'."
"Let's start with what you gave the cops."
"Can you pour me more watersorry, what's your name again? More ice, too."
"It's Jack."
He takes the cup and gulps at it wolfishly. Soon the tips of his Pancho Villa mustache are dripping.
"All I tole the cops," he says, "is what I can say for a fact: I walk in the front door and some asshole puts a gun in my ribs while another asshole turns the place upside-fucking-down. Meanwhile the one with the gun keeps saying, 'Where is it? Where is it?'"
"Where is what?" I open my notebook.
"That's what Iwanted to know. Where's what? And the asshole says, 'You know damn well what.'And after maybe an hour of this shit they tie my hands and put me on my knees. Then the one with the machine gun says he's gonna blow my head off if I don't tell 'em where it isdid I mention they shot my fucking fish? I could use some more water, you mind?"
After the refill, Tito tumbles ahead: "I had a hunnerd-gallon 'quarium full of tropicals. Fact, Jimmy helped me catch a few. I had angelfish and triggerfish and sergeant majors and clown fishyou know anything about tropicals? Oh yeah, I had some cool rock shrimp, too."
Painkillers are one of the miracles of modern medicine, but cogency is not among the documented side effects. I lead Tito back to his account of the home invasion, but not before sitting through a monologue on the mating habits of the orange wrasse.
"The shooting," I remind him. "What happened?"
"Oh. Right. These two bastards scoop all the fish outta my 'quarium and toss 'em on the floor. Then they shoot em! It took like two dozen goddamn rounds, too, 'cause they're floppin' and squirming all over the tiles, plus they're real small ... "
"And then they shot you?"
"No, man," Tito says. "First I got up and ran. Thenthey shot me."
"That would explain"
"How I took two caps in the ass. But I hit the door and kept on runnin'," he says. "These fuckers, on their way out, they stole a DVD and three Rickenbacker 4004s. But I know that ain't why they broke in."
"Do you know who they were?"
"Naw," Tito says, "but here's what: They knew me.Called me by name. 'We gonna kill you, Tito,' they kept saying in Spanishthese were Mexicans. Local wets, by the accent. And I believe they did mean to kill me, too, and make it look like a robbery."
"What do you think they were after?"
Tito grunts as he reaches for the call button. "I need another shot. Maybe three. You in a hurry?"
Briskly I step outside as a beetle-browed nurse prepares to re-medicate the wounded musician, cleanse his wounds and change his dressing. A stroll around the floor yields no glimpses of other bedridden celebs, though a detour to the vending machines leads to a casual chat with an orderly who claims once to have swiped a bedpan from beneath Robert Mitchum. "I sold it for seventy-five bucks to a memorabilia shop on Sunset," he says matter-of-factly.
No such market exists, I suspect, for Tito Negraponte's used personal effects. The databases I'd scanned yielded only meager biographical material. He was born in Guadalajara and as a teenager made his way first to San Diego and then to Los Angeles, where he bounced between rock and Latin jazz in a series of obscure groups. In a 1985 interview, Jimmy Stoma said he recruited Tito after seeing him play drums with a bilingual punk band called Canker. Jimmy tore through drummers like barbiturates, but he liked Tito's furtive smoky presence onstage so he kept him on as a second bass man. "You can never have too much bass," Jimmy explained to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Although Tito was the eldest of the original Slut Puppies by ten years, the press clippings indicated he had no trouble keeping pace, socially or pharmaceutically, with the other band members. Three drug arrests and an equal number of paternity suits put his name in the entertainment columns, as did his gloating arrival at the Grammys with the freakishly bosomy wife of the same record-company executive who'd originally rejected "Mouthful of Muscle," the Slut Puppies' breakthrough single. After Jimmy disbanded the band in the late eighties, Tito formed his own group called Montezuma, which opened exactly once for Carlos Santana. A CD featuring a peppy Spanish version of "Hey Joe" was never released.