“You play?” Petra asked him.
“I noodle. He played. He—those fingers were . . . magic.” The driver dabbed at his eye, yanked angrily at the bag, virtually ripped it open. Zzzzzzzip.
“Ready?” he said.
“In a sec.” Petra crouched by the body, took in the details, again. Jotted in her pad.
Yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, shaved head, tiny chin beard. Tattoos blued both arms.
Ponytail walked away looking disgusted. Petra continued studying. Edgar Ray Lee’s mouth hung open exposing broken and rotted teeth that made Petra think: Junkie? But she spotted no track marks among the tattoos.
Baby Boy hadn’t been dead more than an hour, but his face had already taken on that greenish gray pallor. The EMTs had cut the shirt around the stab wound. Three-inch vertical slit up the belly, gaping at the edges.
She sketched the wound and slipped the pad back into her purse. She was stepping away when a photographer behind her announced, “I want to make sure my lighting was okay.” He moved in, lost his balance, fell on his ass. Slid feetfirst into the blood pool.
His camera landed on the asphalt and rattled ominously, but that wasn’t Petra’s concern.
Crimson splotches and speckles decorated her pants. Both trouser legs ruined.
The photographer lay there, stunned. Petra did nothing to help him, muttered something sharp that widened his eyes and everyone else’s.
She stamped away from the scene.
Her own damn fault, going for color.
3
Petra worked the case hard, doing all the usual procedural things as well as researching Baby Boy Lee on the Internet. Soon, she felt immersed in her victim’s world, wondered what it had been like to be Edgar Ray Lee.
The bluesman had started out upper-middle class, the only child of two professors at Emory University in Atlanta. Ten years as a child prodigy on violin and cello had ended when Edgar’s teenage rebellion aimed him at guitar and landed him on a Greyhound to Chicago, where he found a whole new lifestyle: Living on the streets and in borrowed cribs, sitting in with the Butterfield Blues Band, Albert Lee, B. B. King, and any other genius who happened to be passing through. Developing his chops but picking up bad habits.
The older musicians recognized the chubby kid’s talent right away, and one of them gave him the nickname that stuck.
Baby Boy spent two decades scratching a living as a sessions sideman and a bar-band front man, endured big promises that petered, cut records that went nowhere, finally recorded a top-40 hit with a Southern band called Junior Biscuit. The song, penned, sung and guitar-riffed by the big man, was a gut-wrenching lament entitled “A Cold Heart”—the very same ditty Baby Boy had played moments before his death.
The song made it to 19 on the Billboard Top 100, stayed on the charts for a month. Baby Boy bought himself a nice car and a whole bunch of guitars and a house in Nashville. Within a year, all the money was gone, as Lee kicked up his pattern of voracious womanizing and dining, and polydrug use. The next several years were a blur of fruitless rehab stints. Then: obscurity.
No relatives called about the case. Lee’s parents were both dead, he’d never married or sired a child. That, God help her, made her care about him deeply, and the image of his corpse stayed in her head.
The usual procedural things were: having Baby Boy’s apartment taped off before dropping in for a personal look-through, interviewing Baby Boy’s band mates, his manager, the owner of the Snake Pit, bouncers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, the few patrons who’d stuck around to gawk at the crime scene and had gotten their names on a list.
No one had any idea who’d want to hurt Baby Boy. Everyone loved Baby Boy, he was a great big kid, naÏve, good-natured, would give you the shirt off his back—would give you his guitar, for God’s sake.
The high point of usual procedure was an hour in a tiny, close interview room, in the company of star witness Linus Brophy.
When Petra first heard about an eyewitness, her hopes had surged. Then she’d talked to the homeless man and realized his account was next to worthless.