Shred of Evidence

Gecko sat in a booth at the back of a club on the Sunset Strip, nursing a beer and trying to tell himself that things were not so bad. They weren’t, not really, at least when compared to his life before Los Angeles. Even that life had not been so bad. Sure, he had had to try to finding bars and halls in Iowa that would let him and his band Hydrahead play for a measly two hundred dollars a night. Life had been hard, but fun. Now he had a huge house, a wife with plastic surgery habit, and Hydrahead was steadily putting out albums on a major label.

There was no reason he should have felt this miserable, and yet he did. Part of that, however, might just have been because of the two people keeping him company at the moment.

“Listen to this,” Danny Z said. “Are you listening? Seriously? Good. Then listen to this. We totally suck.”

“Please tell me we didn’t come all the way down to this God-forsaken place just to hear that,” Gloria said. She suddenly got this distracted look on her face and began nervously glancing around at all the other patrons. “Why couldn’t we have done this in a place with a little more class? The last thing I need is for the paparazzi to catch me in here and sell the pictures to some fucking tabloid.” She fluffed her hair as she said this, but did not seem to realize it. Gecko thought for a second about reminding her that the tabloids had not published any pictures of her since before she had been kicked off One Life to Live three years ago, then thought better of it. That would only get him a month sleeping on their multi-thousand dollar couch.

Danny Z acted like he did not even hear her speak. “Okay, and do you know why we suck? Okay, so we don’t really suck, but obviously people out there must think we suck. Okay? Things are just not good. But that’s okay, okay?”

Gecko did his best not to sigh out loud. The name Danny Z was short of Danforth Zebrowski. Danny said he went by the shorter name become the full name was not cool enough for the bassist of a major heavy metal band, but Gecko suspected the real reason was Danny could not concentrate long enough to remember what his mother had actually named him. “Danny, you say ‘okay’ one more time, and I’m going to smack the shit out of you right here and now. Now do you have a point or not?”

Danny’s mouth formed a tight line and his brow furrowed. Either he was angry that Gecko did not want him using his favorite word, or he was concentrating really hard to in order to form complete sentences. Probably a little of both. “Of course I have a point. And do you want to hear my point? This is my point: people just aren’t buying our albums the way they used to. We have to do something big and we have to do it quick, or in a few years we’ll all be dirt-ass broke.”

Gecko could have reminded Danny that if he had done anything to save any of his cut from the last four albums instead of blowing it all on exotic cocktails of drugs then he would not have to worry about money. However, Gecko had tried saying such things to Danny before and found it similar to talking to a brain-dead frog. Danny had forgotten life before LA, the simpler times. He would not have been taken well to going back to it. And although Danny was the extreme case in the band, the rest of Hydrahead probably would have agreed with him. Gecko looked to his wife next to him, hoping that Gloria’s impatience with the inelegance of the club would provide him with an excuse to get out of here, but the talk of dwindling finances had caught her attention and she was staring at Danny with a solemn expression.

This time Gecko could not help but sigh. “Alright. Fine. Things are tighter than they once were. But The Burning Sensation drops next week, and the first single is already at all the radio stations. You know as well as I do how good this album is, and I think we have a real chance of…”

“The Burning Sensation sucks, Gecko,” Danny said. “I know it, all the other guys know it, you’re the only one that doesn’t know it. Even Gloria knows it.”

“Bullshit,” Gecko said. “Right, baby? You were just telling me the other day how much you liked it, and I’m sure…”

“I was just telling you that so you would be less of a prick when I told you I was getting another boob job,” Gloria said. “He’s right. It’s a real piece of crap.”

Gecko looked from one of them to the other for several seconds, his mouth hanging open in shock, then closed it and tried not to sound like he wanted to cry. Rock stars never cried, especially in public. “Fine, whatever. So you guys aren’t happy with it. That doesn’t mean the fans won’t take to it. And I’m sure that with the tour we can get the sales to decent numbers.”

“Have you actually looked at the venues on our schedule?” Danny said. “Four years ago we were on giant stages opening for Linkin Park, now we’re doing rinky-dink clubs in the middle of nowhere. And did even see what our final stop on the tour is?” Danny leaned forward on the table, his eyes bulging with real fear. Or maybe that was just the drugs. “A county fair. Don’t you get it? A county fair! That’s where careers go to die! Good-bye, farewell, seeya! Dead career! Dead fucking career!”

Gecko actually had to suppress an angry retort. He had indeed seen that the last stop on the tour was a county fair, and he had been really looking forward to it. A day of corn dogs and cotton candy sounded so much better than all the froofroo restaurants Gloria always dragged him to.

“So what then?” Gloria said. “I mean, obviously you have some thoughts on what to do about it? Or did you just drag us down here to rant at us? And why the hell do I need to be here as well?”

“Because I’ve got a plan,” Danny said. “But I can’t do it myself. I’m just the bassist. No one gives two shits about the bassist. It has to be Gecko who does it. He’s the front man. And we’ll probably need you to help us pull it off.”

No good can possibly come of this, Gecko thought. Just grab Gloria by the arm and walk the hell out of here. Do it now, before Danny opens his mouth and something incredibly stupid comes out.

“Well? What’s the plan?” Gloria asked.

“We fake a sex scandal,” Danny said.

I should have left when I had the chance, Gecko thought. He could do nothing but listen in horror as Danny outlined his plan and Gloria approved it with a disturbing enthusiasm.

* * *

Gecko had listened while Danny had outlined his idiotic plan, had even listened with quiet shock as Gloria had approved and refined it, but he had not spoken up to object. He had been sure they would lose interest or maybe come to their senses. It wasn’t until all three of them were in a strip club looking for an unknowing accomplice that the insanity of it all finally caught up with him.

“Okay, no,” Gecko said. They were all standing just inside the door. The hour was late enough that business was winding down for the night, and only a couple of the multiple stages were occupied by dancers. The nearest dancer weakly shimmied her ass at them, a half-hearted attempt to get a few final bills before she called it a night. “We’re not doing this. This is all wrong on so many fucking levels.”

“What the fuck?” Danny said. “Don’t be a dipshit now, okay. No dipshittyness. You’re acting like you’ve never been in a titty bar before.”

“Yeah,” Gloria said as she stared at her surroundings with complete and utter disgust, although that didn’t mean she didn’t like the place. That was the same look she wore for everything. The strip club had actually been her idea. “I’m sure you’ve gone to more than enough when you’re on the road without me.”

“Not the club. I mean what we’re going to do. I’m telling you, if we do this all three of us are getting a one-way ticket to Hell.”

Both Gloria and Danny snorted, Gloria probably because she believed all religion was just a way for Middle America to act superior than the coasts and Danny probably because Hell was commonly mentioned in Hydrahead’s songs. That Gecko was from Middle America and didn’t actually believe any of his own lyrics mattered nothing to either of them.

“You’re joking me, right?” Danny said. “Course you are. Fuck. You can’t joke me. I’ve seen all you’ve done before. I’m talking to the guy who once stuck a live goldfish up a groupie’s cooter.”

Gloria turned to Gecko with wide eyes and dropped jaw. “Oh, that better have fucking been before we met.”

Gecko held up his hands. “Whoa, hold it. That wasn’t even me.” He turned to Danny. “That wasn’t me, don’t you remember? That was Carl.”

“Who?” Danny asked.

“Carl. Our drummer, you dumbfuck.”

“Yeah. Oh yeah.” Danny’s eyes glazed over for a moment as he tried to catch the memory slipping through his brain. “I guess it was. Huh. You know, drummers are really weird. Yeah. It was really cool, though.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it was just so metal.” Gloria gave Gecko a few seconds of raised eyebrow, and he knew she really didn’t believe it, even if Danny himself now did. Danny had been so fried that night that Gecko was surprised he remembered the incident at all.

“Whatever,” Gloria said. “Let’s just fucking do this. Now are you going to choose which of these bags of tits you’re going to molest or am I? Because if you expect me to do it I sure as hell am not going to give you anyone very good looking.”

“But I don’t want to ruin some poor girl’s life,” Gecko said. “And what if you two are wrong? You’ve got it in your heads that this is going to somehow make album sales better, but that doesn’t seem kind of ridiculous to you? I don’t see any way this won’t hurt Hydrahead’s reputation.”

“What did we tell you?” Danny asked. “We told you over and over, whoever you end up with tonight’s not gonna be hurt. You pick her up, make sure she knows you’re Mister Oh-So-Important-Gecko of Hydrahead, take her home and slip her a roofie. And that’s it. Don’t even have to screw her. When she wakes up we all make it look like you’ve taken advantage of her, torn clothes or whatever. She screams to the press but can’t actually prove you did anything. ‘Cuz you didn’t. And boom, publicity you can’t buy.”

“As for your reputation, honey…” Gloria smiled at him, the kind of caring smile Gecko would have thought was a fake if she were actually a good enough actress to pull it off. “Rock and roll is the only career where a sex scandal will actually help your reputation.”

These were the same arguments they had both given him before, and they still weren’t enough to convince him. Still, he couldn’t do anything to stop all this. He could continue to whine and protest like he had all day, but that had not stopped them from getting him here. They were going to stick around, hiding out at the bar and watching him until he had picked up his target, and they would follow him home to make sure he went through with it all. Other than physical violence (and the last time he had picked a fight he had ended up with two black eyes) he could see no way of getting out of this.

As Gloria and Danny stared at him Gecko let his gaze wander to each of the stages. There, on a stage just to their right, a specific girl caught his eye. She looked familiar at first, and it took Gecko a moment to realize that she looked very much like Gloria might have when she was younger, a brunette with a fresh face. She lacked all the fake sheen to her skin that characterized his wife, the result of too much plastic surgery and Botox. As he watched, her own eyes found him and she tried yet failed to hide her surprise and glee in the middle of her dance routine. She recognized him, probably listened to his music. It was possible she even danced here to a few Hydrahead songs.

A beautiful, semi-innocent girl who may very well idolize him. Maybe he would be able to do this after all.

* * *

In the limo on the way home Gecko had learned that she did indeed idolize him. She owned all of Hydrahead’s albums, even their first independent release. She said she listened to his music whenever she was having a bad day. All this had only served to make him queasy with guilt about what he was going to do to her.

She had said her name was Skye, but Gecko had doubted that was anything other than a stage name. He never found out what her real name was. She was dead before he could ask.

After two days in prison Gecko still wasn’t sure how it had happened. Initially he had wanted to deny that he had anything to do with her death and still denied it publicly, but in his mind he could no longer be sure. He remembered taking Skye into his house and getting her a drink, making sure it was from the bottle Danny had specially marked to let Gecko know which one was drugged, while pouring himself something from a different bottle. He was even able to remember the first furtive kisses from Skye, eager yet strangely shy. He remembered thinking how sweet and innocent she seemed for someone who took off her clothes for a living. Then there was a large dark spot in his memory only broken when he woke up in the morning next to Skye’s corpse. The bedspread was maroon with dried blood and her chest was puckered with half a dozen stab wounds. A knife had been lying on the floor next to the bed, although Gecko’s lawyer informed him that there had been no fingerprints on the handle.

Gecko sat in the visiting room of the prison, staring at his lap and waiting for Gloria to show up on the other side of the glass. The knife was the only thing that kept him from truly believing he had done it. If in some drunken fit he had decided to kill the girl, a girl he had known for only half an hour and yet still liked better than his own wife, then he wouldn’t have been lucid enough to think of wiping his prints from the handle, would he? Still, all the evidence seemed to him to be pretty damning. Innocent or not, he was going to be in jail for a long time. His mind wandered, thinking about the tour he was going to miss and the county fair at the end, thinking about corn dogs and funnel cakes and cotton candy. He doubted they served cotton candy in prison.

On the other side of the glass a door opened and Gloria came in. She sat down across from him and picked up the phone receiver on her side with a strange joviality Gecko only half-registered. He was thinking so much about what he would say to her that he didn’t notice the pull at the edge of her lips, the closest thing her perpetually Botoxed face could manage to a smile right now. She hadn’t come to see him at all yet since the arrest, and he figured this was his once chance at getting her to believe him. He picked up his own phone and opened his mouth to speak, but she was already talking.

“Don’t worry. I know you’re innocent.”

“Oh,” he said, and some of the funny feeling that had been in his stomach went away. Not as much as he would have expected, though. Something about the tone of her voice made him uneasy.

“I have some great news,” she said.

Gecko sat straighter in his chair. “They found some evidence of who really did it?”

“Hell no. They’re not going to find that. But guess what, baby? The Burning Sensation dropped yesterday and sales are through the roof. It’s Hydrahead’s biggest seller yet, even bigger than Mouthful of Fungus.”

Gecko blinked several times. “Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t give a shit about how the album’s doing. I can’t think of anything I care about less right now!”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “Because I care about it a great deal.”

She stopped talking, stared at him, waited for him to make the inevitable connections. For several seconds those connections just would not come. He wondered how the hell The Burning Sensation could possibly be so big so quickly, then remembered his arrest was probably national news. He thought about the drinks he had made with Skye, one bottle supposed to be drugged by Gloria or Danny and the other not. Obviously they had both been tampered with.

“You and Danny…” he began but stopped, trying to find any way this could make sense. They were supposed to be his wife and his best friend, people who would never do this. Never mind that Gloria had never been much more to him than a symbol of status and wealth, of things he no longer even wanted in his life, or that Danny had never been the greatest friend to begin with. This was still unthinkable. “You two planned this together?”

“That numbfuck couldn’t plan plugging in a toaster,” she said. “But he’s gone, disappeared yesterday. That makes him the biggest suspect after you, but the cops aren’t going to be able to find him.”

“Aw. Aw, fuck,” Gecko whispered under his breath. He couldn’t continue looking at Gloria. Behind the glass her surgically enhanced face made her look like some strange evil doll. Multiple Murderer Barbie, perhaps. “Aw, Jesus Christ Fuck!”

There was no one else in the visiting room, no way for anyone other than Gecko to hear her, but she dropped her voice low anyway. “Now you better listen very fucking carefully. I made sure there was just enough evidence to make things very hard for you, and I can make just enough of it go away to get you off. In exchange, you’re going to sign all your money from Hydrahead over to me as part of a divorce settlement. All your royalties from albums past, present, and future. And there will be a future. You’re going to continue making albums and touring. If you fail to do any of this, not only will evidence suddenly come to light about that fucking stripper, but the cops will also get an anonymous tip regarding a certain guitarist’s body, complete with thoroughly damning evidence that you killed him. You’ll be totally and thoroughly screwed, got it?”

Out of Gloria’s whole speech, Gecko’s mind latched for a second on one ray of light, feeble as it was. “A divorce?”

“Of course,” she said. “How the hell do you think it would look to the paparazzi if I staid married to a suspected killer? Although I suspect my career may be helped by the brave show of courage I put on.”

Most of her words only barely registered in his head. He thought of the look on Skye’s face when she had recognized him, the look on any fan’s face whenever they saw him. His career might continue, but he somehow doubted a suspected murderer would get those same looks.

Gloria smiled as she stood up to leave, although she didn’t put the phone down just yet. Something in Gecko’s face must have given away his thoughts.

“Aw, don’t look so glum. I’m sure your reputation is safe. An old-fashioned sex scandal, that may be pure rock and roll, but a murder rap?” She held up her hand in a devil-horns sign and stuck out her tongue in parody of practically everyone who had ever been at one of his concerts. “That’s so metal.”