Chapter Eight

The address Clarence Barre had given me was on a street called Rivenoak, along the small strip of homes east of Jefferson. It was a valuable stretch of property, bordered on one side by Lake St. Clair. On the other side of Jefferson was the bulk of Grosse Pointe, acting as a thick layer of insulation from the depravity of Detroit proper.

The neighborhoods here were very upscale. Big lots, big houses, big money. The royalties from Clarence’s backlist must have been both large and frequent.

The house itself was a statuesque colonial. It was between two larger Tudors and just a few houses in from Lake St. Clair. A small cul-de-sac with benches and wildflowers was at the end of the street. Clarence could stroll down here after dinner, smoke a cigar, and watch the boats pass by and the gulls doing their thing. He probably would have done something like that before his daughter’s death. Now, my guess was that if he did come down and look out over the water, he’d think the kind of thoughts no parents should have to entertain. Someone once said the most painful thing in the world is to outlive your children. Seemed to me to be a pretty safe bet.

I parked my car, a utilitarian gray Taurus, in the stamped concrete driveway. I went to the door and used the brass knocker, trying to tap out the bass line to Clarence’s “Mississippi Honey.”

He answered the door wearing the same kind of outfit he’d worn to my office: jeans, a colorful shirt, and a black leather vest. Shiny, pointed-toe cowboy boots as well. They looked to be of the same kind of leather as the bolo tie around his neck.

We shook hands, and then he showed me in to his living room. It was like the man himself—warm, rugged, and comfortable. Leather furniture, dark Persian rugs, some gold records on the wall as well as some pictures of a younger Clarence Barre with some minor and not-so-minor celebrities.

“Can I get you anything, Mr. Rockne?” he asked.

“Please, call me John. No thanks, I’m fine.” We each took a leather club chair, and he looked at me questioningly.

“So . . .”

“What can you tell me about Nevada Hornsby?”

An almost imperceptible smile crossed Clarence’s face. He knew I was taking the case. In fact, he’d probably known before I had.

“He runs a salvage operation out of St. Clair Shores,” Clarence said.

“Salvage, like sunken ships?”

“Wood. Old lumber that sunk hundreds of years ago. It’s valuable stuff. Jesse used it to make her guitars.”

“So that’s how they met,” I said.

He nodded. “Ironically, in my mind, when she started using that salvaged lumber was when her career really took off. She’d tried different stuff, built a pretty big following with exotic woods. But when she started using the stuff from Hornsby, everything changed. For the better.”

“Even her personal life,” I added.

He didn’t like that. “That’s how she saw it, I’m sure. But I never liked the guy from day one. Real quiet. Standoffish. Like he had something to hide.”

“Such as . . .”

“Who knows?”

I looked at my notes. “He’s got an alibi.”

“The alibi is bullshit,” he said. “Probably bought and paid for.”

Clarence’s face had turned slightly reddish in color. I had a feeling pissing him off wouldn’t be a good idea.

“What is the alibi? Do you know?”

Clarence shook his head. “The cops wouldn’t tell me. Said it was an official matter. Official, my ass.”

“If you don’t know what the alibi is, how can you be so convinced it isn’t valid?” I asked.

“Because of what Jesse said,” he said. His voice was full of exasperation. I felt like the dumb kid in class and no matter how hard the teacher tried, I just couldn’t grasp the concept at hand.

“That he was possessive,” Clarence said. “Jealous. Christ, the guy’s practically a hermit. Just him, his ship, and dragging dead wood out of the lake. No wonder he latched on to Jesse.”

A silence hung in the air for a few moments.

“Are you going to help me?” he asked.

“Here’s what I think,” I said, leaning forward. “My advice is if you are determined to have the outcome of this investigation be the uncovering of a complex murder plot involving your daughter, don’t hire me.”

He looked at me, almost a glint in his eye. It reminded me of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that if I do further investigation,” I continued, “I’m going to find that it was, in fact, a burglary gone wrong. Maybe you’ll get mad and won’t want to pay me or maybe you’ll just try to beat the shit out of me. Whatever. If, however, you truly are interested in uncovering the truth—even if that truth isn’t something you agree with—then we can talk. So you tell me what you want out of this, and we’ll see what we can work out.”

He eased himself out of his chair and walked toward the pictures on the wall. He passed by the ones featuring himself and other celebrities. He paused at the end of the row. I couldn’t see what he was looking at. But his big shoulders slumped slightly. For just a moment, he looked like a tired old man.

“My wife was a pessimist,” he said. His voice was low and gentle. “Back then, I was just a studio musician and a songwriter doing small solo gigs at backwoods clubs. She was a secretary who came to see me play once. Introduced herself. She was so goddamn beautiful. Blond hair, gray eyes that could twist your insides if she looked at you a certain way. This was before my would-be manager approached me and told me he could make a star out of me. That I was a hit-making machine waiting to be put into production.”

I leaned forward in my chair, trying to get a better look at the photos on the wall as he told his story.

“Anyway, we started seeing each other and got married only a few months later,” he said. “I was writing, singing, and playing whenever I could. Hell, all the time. But it was just me and her back then. That wasn’t just love. It was intense love.”

He turned back to me, and his eyes blazed. Jesus, I thought, this guy is old school.

“See, she didn’t want to have kids,” he said. “It was that pessimist in her. She thought most people were bastards through and through. A truly low opinion of human nature, of society in general. She was sort of a split personality, which I found very attractive. She had a heart of gold, but her take on the world was that it was the equivalent of a pack of hyenas trying to rip off a chunk of the carcass.”

“Why did she think that?” I said.

He just shrugged his big shoulders. “She never really said. I think her parents splitting up had something to do with it. I don’t think her childhood was the greatest. But it’s not like she was a sad sack either. She was happy go lucky most of the time. But it was hard to get her to give people the benefit of the doubt, you know?”

“I do.”

“She loved me, though. I guess she thought I was the exception to the rule.”

I nodded. Like so many theories on human behavior, there was a grain of truth to it.

“But when it came to people and the world around me, I was Mr. Fucking Optimistic. The world was my oyster, boy. I knew I could make good music. The future was full of joy, happiness, and success. And money too. To me, that was all a given. But what I really wanted was a family. I wanted kids, man. To me, that was the end all in life. And hell, I didn’t think people were all bad. Sure, there were jackals. But there are good people too.”

He walked back and sat down in his chair. There were tears in his eyes, and he didn’t try to hide them. By now, they were probably old friends to him. “So we had Jesse. And my wife died of cancer a few years later. And now . . . Jesse’s gone. I feel like my wife was right. I never should have brought a child into this world unless I could protect that child completely and indefinitely. It’s my fault she’s dead. I couldn’t protect her. But I can find out who did it. Find out which jackal it was. And I can make them pay. It won’t bring her back. But . . . I guess . . .” He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I guess it’s all I can do,” he said.