“I don’t cut corners.” A sweet grin. “Besides, I never shopped in Oxford Street before.”
“You haven’t missed much.”
“Also, I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
I sucked in air: not as easy as it used to be. “You said a few minutes ago that you just love a good murder mystery. But you’re wrong. Max didn’t kill his wife. Is that good enough for you?”
The corners of her mouth curved down. The crestfallen expression made her look about nineteen; a man could easily be taken in by it and tell her more than it was safe to disclose.
“You were his friend, of course you believed in him. But even at the time, there was gossip. Rumours that the accident was too convenient.”
“Lorna was pretty, and she died young. It’s the stuff that myths are made of.” I made a show of stifling a yawn. “If she’d been a little more talented, a little brighter, people would still remember her name.”
“Some people still do. That’s why I have to mention her in my book.”
“There isn’t a story. She had too much to drink one evening, fell down the stairs of their Long Island mansion, and broke her pretty little neck.”
Alice touched my hand, grazing the palm with her nails. I felt her warm breath on my cheek. “There is a story if her husband murdered her.”
“You haven’t done your homework. Max was innocent. He spent the evening with us. He’d never have had time to get over to the house and kill Lorna.”
She didn’t blink. “Trust me. I always do my research very thoroughly.”
I burst into a racking cough and within a minute the nurse was pulling the curtains around my bed, shooing Alice away. I shut my eyes. I wasn’t ready to step through death’s door. I needed a little space, a little time, to decide what to say and do. Alice was so focused on making sure she got what she wanted.
In my mind, I saw Max again. A July afternoon in ’sixty-eight. The first time we had met since Lorna’s death. He hadn’t attended the funeral. Too sick, too eaten up with grief, so the story went. I sat in the front row at the church, not blinking, just remembering. There was an empty space beside me. Patty was still in shock after what had happened.
Max and I had been keeping our distance. He didn’t call me, I didn’t call him. When I showed up at his apartment on East 61st Street, unable to stay away any longer, I was shocked by the change in him.
He still dressed like Joe College. Plaid pants, baggy crew-neck sweater, white socks, and white US Keds. But his hair was different. Thick as ever, but with patches of grey that hadn’t existed six months before. He kept glancing past me, as if any moment he expected Lorna’s ghost to slink into the room.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
A smell of burnt toast hung in the air. At least it was better than cigarette smoke. The Colts and Packers were playing, but he switched off the set and started bustling in the kitchen. The refrigerator was packed to overflowing with lemons and Pepperidge Farm bread. He kept his gaze away from me as he threw raw eggs and coffee ice into the blender.
“How have you been?”
“Oh well, you know.”
Silly question. I suppose we both must have felt nervous. Were my hands shaking, or is that just an illusion of memory? I kept quiet while he made the coffee milkshake and fiddled with cheese and chopped liver for a Dagwood sandwich.
A baby Steinway sat in an alcove. On the shelves lay half a dozen score pads scooped together with rubber bands. I hazarded a guess that all of the pages were blank.
“Written anything lately?” I asked.
“Not a note,” he said. “You?”
“Uh-uh.”
I sipped the milkshake. “So you and Chrissie aren’t writing together at present?”
He stared at me. “I haven’t seen Chrissie since Lorna died.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” His cheeks, pale until that moment, suffused with colour. “I don’t think so. Everyone believes that they see. Truth is, they see what they want to see. Something bad.”
I swallowed hard. “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch.”
“Why should you have? I was the one who dumped you. Found another lyricist.”
“I couldn’t blame you. Chrissie’s ten years younger and a thousand percent sexier than me.”
“What you aren’t saying is, she never wrote a hit song in her life.”
I shrugged. “Fashions change. The stuff we wrote, it doesn’t make the charts anymore. You were right, we needed a break from each other. Needed to freshen up.”
“Lorna hated me for it. She told me you were worth ten of Chrissie. She was right, but what the hell? Sorry, Steve.”
Awkwardly, he stretched out a hand and I shook it.
“People are whispering, aren’t they?” he said quietly. Not meeting my eyes. Maybe he feared what he might see there.
“What do you mean?”
“C’mon, Steve. We’ve known each other a long time. We’re old friends.”
“The best,” I said fervently. Despite everything, I meant it.
“Then tell me. Everyone thinks I killed Lorna, pushed her down those stairs. Isn’t that the truth?”
“No.” The flat denial startled him, made him catch his breath. “Okay, okay, there are one or two people who love to think the worst.”
“More than one or two. Chrissie’s among them. As usual, she flatters herself.” He paused. “She’s stupid enough to believe I killed Lorna, just to be free for her.”
Next day, with Alice back at my bedside and fiddling with her tape recorder, I said, “I’m not sure Max and I deserve a chapter in your book. We were never Goffin and King, or Leiber and Stoller.”
“You were different, you were a Brit.”
“Who married a girl from Greenwich Village.”
“She was a folk singer,” Alice said, as if I didn’t know. “How romantic.”
“And I was a lyricist whose sole claim to fame was the words to a Cliff Richard B-side. Patty and I met in a club in Soho at the end of the ’fifties. I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was so lovely, so intense.”
“You wrote songs with her?”
“At first. Not a good idea, we both realised in the end. You can’t work with someone you’re passionate about. She was a wannabe Joan Baez, but my heart belonged to Tin Pan Alley. After I followed her to New York, I had a couple of breaks, grabbed a short-term contract with Famous Music. It went from there.”
A dreamy look came into her hazel eyes. “What was it like in those days, working in the Brill Building?”
“One thing it wasn’t, was glamorous. Eleven floors of offices and every one housed a music publisher. Each company had its writers’ rooms, stuffy cubicles with just enough room for a beat-up piano and a couple of chairs. The windows didn’t open; it was hell working with a guy like Max who smoked nonstop.” I coughed to make the point. “I ought to sue, don’t you think? That place surely killed me.”
“You all kept changing partners.”
“Sure. I’d write with one guy in the morning, another in the afternoon. That’s the way it worked. But there was something about Max’s melodies. They seemed to make a better fit with the words I wrote. Bobby Vinton liked our songs, Jay and the Americans gave us a Top Thirty hit. It went on from there. Before long the two of us were a team.”
“You met Lorna Key at a recording session, so the story goes.”
“It’s a true story,” I said. “There was an Isley Brothers session and we had a song on the date. She was one of the girls singing in the background. You couldn’t help but notice her. Even in pigtails and jeans, she was gorgeous. Her voice was raw; even as a kid she was a chain-smoker. Her lungs must have been in worse shape than Max’s, but it wasn’t her lungs that he was interested in. He said she had potential. Nice euphemism, huh? He wanted her to start recording our demos. I went along with it, even though I never cared much for her sound. Subtlety was never her strong point.”