Basket Case

  23

  By the time I got to L.A. it was ten-thirty at night. Most hospitals are penetrable at any hour, so I was surprised to be turned away by the late-shift lobby crew at Cedars-Sinai. My next stop was the emergency room, but heart-wrenching lies failed to thaw the glacial resolve of a senior trauma nurse who had thrust herself, as demurely as Mario Lemieux, in my path.

  At first I figured the problem was me, rusty at double-talk after so long on the sedentary obit beat. Then I remembered this was the Spago of hospitals; every major star of the entertainment industry winds up at Cedars one way or another. Madonna and Mrs. Michael Jackson came here to deliver their babies; Liz Taylor, for brain surgery. This is where they brought Spielberg after his limousine crash, and where Francis Albert Sinatra was pronounced dead of a heart attack at age eighty-two. The place is constantly under siege by tabloid vultures whose subterfuges are elaborate and advanced by fistfuls of cash. No wonder security is tight.

  So I retreated to a habitable motel on Wilshire Boulevard near Alvarado Street, and as a light rain fell I dozed off with a can of Sprite in one hand and my portable Sony tuned to the endless Jimmy Stoma sessions. The rhythm guitar track for one of the numbers seemed distantly familiar, which was odd because it was the first cut of the song—"Gltitle0l"—that I'd called up. Yet I found myself humming the tune in the shower this morning, and it played in my skull all the way to Cedars, where I'm now standing in the elevator holding a preposterously large vase of fresh-cut carnations, sunflowers and daisies.

  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 name—this 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 Times Web 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 lost—a 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 circumstances—and 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 water—sorry, 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 I wanted 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 is—did 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 fish—you 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. Then they 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 Spanish—these 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 on
ce 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.

  The most recent mention of Tito Negraponte in print occurred a few years back, when the Boston Phoenix asked several heavy-metal guitarists for capsule reviews of the classic rock satire, This Is Spinal Tap. Tito said that while he enjoyed the movie, its verisimilitude would have been enhanced "if the bass player had got more pussy."

  The article said Tito was keeping busy doing studio work for solo artists. I don't know what he's been up to lately, but this interview should earn him more ink than he's seen in a decade—providing I can steer him through ten minutes of semi-linear thought. Upon returning to the hospital room, I see that the nurse has turned him over to face the window. I drag a chair into his fuzzy vision and sit myself down. Tito is drifting like a feather in the thermals, but I can't sit here and wait for him to float back to earth. This might be my only chance; a relative or girlfriend could show up any moment to chase me off.

  Firmly I put a hand on his shoulder. "Remember I told you about the computer hard drive we found on Jimmy's boat?"

  His eyelids flutter. "The master."

  "Right. That's what everybody's after, isn't it?"

  Tito coughs out a laugh. "Not everybody, man. Not MCA or Virgin or Arista. Just the vicious bitch Jimmy was married to," he says. "She thought I had a copy but I don't. I told her but she didn't believe me."

  "That was Saturday night at the club."

  "Yeah. I hooked up with some Brazilian chick at the funeral, so I hung around Miami for a few days. Then my manager called and said Cleo was tryin' to reach me about a gig, and would I meet her up in Silver Beach." Again Tito's eyelids droop to half-staff. Licking at his gray lips, he adds, "She ain't the quickest fox in the forest, that girl. I didn't play a lick on those Bahamas sessions, man, not one note. I didn't know what the hell she was talkin' about... "

  As Tito slides into dreamland, I'm scribbling down his quotes, trying not to lose a single phrase. The fact he was able to say "quickest fox in the forest" is impressive, considering his current dosage levels. The same beetle-browed nurse returns with a plump, fresh IV bag. She frowns at the notebook. I smile innocently, but my remaining time here can now be measured in minutes. As soon as she leaves, I nudge Tito awake. "What does Cleo want with the master? Did she say?"

  He snorts groggily. "Stupid twat. She shot the wrong bass player. You believe that?"

  "Then who was playing with Jimmy in the Bahamas?"

  "That'd be Danny." Meaning Danny Gitt, the former lead bass guitarist for the Slut Puppies.

  "Where is he now?" I ask.

  "On a big jet plane, don't you worry. Jimmy's wife'll never find him."

  "Why didn't you tell this to the cops?"

  "That's very funny. Christ, I'm thirsty again."

  Dutifully I fetch the plastic pitcher and pour more water for Tito. He levers himself to one elbow and takes a long noisy guzzle. "The cops, they think those two Mexicans came to my place lookin' for dope. If I told 'em they was hired by a pop singer tryin' to rip off her dead husband, well... " Tito keels back on the pillows. "They'd never believe it."

  I ask him when was the last time he saw Jimmy Stoma. He says four or five months ago.

  "Did he talk to you about the solo project?"

  "I think he felt weird 'cause he hired Danny instead of me. So all we talked about was fish."

  Wincing, Tito repositions himself on the bed. "You wouldn't think it could hurt so much, gettin' popped in the butt cheeks. Fucked me up bad."

  He's fading again and I still haven't pried the answer out of him—depressing evidence that my interviewing skills have waned. In the old days somebody loaded on this much hospital-grade narcotics would have been a pushover. By now I'd have had him confessing to the JFK assassination.

  "Tito, wake up. Why does Cleo want Jimmy's master recording? I can't figure it out."

  "She doesn't want the whole thing," he says irritably. "There's one cut she's hot for, and the rest she couldn't give two shits about."

  I assume he's talking about "Cindy's Oyster," but when I try the title on Tito he says it doesn't ring a bell. However, Tito's bell is made of Jell-O at the moment.

  "Naw, that ain't the song," he insists. "This is one she wants for her own record. She said Jimmy promised to give it to her, but that ain't what Danny told me. He said it was gonna be on Jimmy's own album. His comeback single, he said."

  "Come on, Tito. Try to remember the name of the cut."

  "Back off, guy... "

  "The long-haired kid at the club with Cleo," I say, "you remember him?"

  But Tito is distracted by a stab of pain that causes him to twist around and glower at the door. "Where'd Nurse Wretched go? I believe she shot me up with sugar water."

  "Loreal," I press onward, "that's what he calls himself."

  "Aw, he's just some junior jerkoff with a Pro Tools setup. His job is to lay Cleo's vocals over Jimmy's guitar, once they lift it off the master. That's my read."

  I can't help but notice that Tito has begun to bleat intermittently, like a baby goat. "Think hard," I encourage him. "This is important."

  "Know what? This gettin'-shot shit is strictly for the youngbloods. I'm fifty motherfuckin' years old."

  "Count your blessings. Steve McQueen checked out at fifty." I am powerless to edit myself.

  "That was cigarettes," Tito snaps. "I quit the cigarettes." He curses under his breath. "What's the name of the wife's album again? She told me but I forgot."

  "It's going to be called Shipwrecked Heart."

  He smiles grimly and points a callused finger. "That's it, chico. That's Jimmy's song. The one she wants. The one she sang at the church."

  And just like that, bingo, it all adds up.

  The guitar part I heard last night sounded familiar for a reason. The widow Stomarti had played it at the funeral, while singing the only verse she knew...

  You took me like a storm, tossed me out of reach,

  Left me like the tide, lost and broken on a beach.

  Shipwrecked heart, my shipwrecked heart...

  " 'Shipwrecked Heart.' That's it." Tito is pleased with himself for remembering. "One time Jimmy was gonna let me hear the final mix but we went lobsterin' instead. I remember Jay or Danny, they said it was pretty good."

  "I'd sing it for you myself but you're in enough pain. Cleo says she and Jimmy wrote that song together."

  "What a joke. That girl couldn't write a Christmas card."

  This goes immediately into the notebook. Tito watches the transcribing with an amused resignation. "You're gonna put my name in your newspaper?"

  "It's very possible."


  "Then maybe I should take a long vacation like Danny." He raises himself to look out the window, where the morning sky over Hollywood is pink with sun-tinted smog. "You think they offed Jimmy's sister? I liked her. She was a real decent kid."

  "I liked her, too. May I borrow the phone?"

  "Be my guest." Tito's curly noggin begins to loll. "I believe I'm fixin' to crash."

  It's still early in Florida and Emma's probably in the middle of her workout, but I dial the number anyway because I can't wait. After thirteen days I've finally dug up a motive for the murder of James Bradley Stomarti. It might not have been conspicuous but it was heartbreakingly simple.

  His wife killed him for a song.