Pickin' Murder: An Antique Hunters Mystery Read online

  Pickin’ Murder

  (An Antique Hunters Mystery)

  Vicki Vass

  A special thank you to the real Bradley at the Hermitage Hotel.

  For always telling me I could follow my dreams, I’d like to dedicate this book to my mother, Joyce Vass.

  Chapter One

  Anne stood on the corner of the stage, just to the right of the large Marshall amps. Looking down, she admired the all-access pass hanging around her neck. She felt important. She was important, with a thousand eyes staring at her from the darkness, envying her. Dave Southwell, rising country star and Nashville hunk, gave her a wink as he took the stage.

  “One, two, three,” the drummer counted off, tapping his sticks together. The opening notes of “Young Hearts” started. Southwell slung his 1961 Fender Stratocaster over his shoulder. The Lake Placid blue guitar was worn and faded with a buckle rash across the back and pick scars across the front from where he’d beat each note out of the workhouse. He cradled the Shure microphone in both hands and sang the opening verse. The spotlights danced above him as he sang, reflecting blue, green and red. The audience sang along.

  Standing next to Anne, CC turned her head away from the stage and lifted her camera to take pictures of the light rigging that hung high over the stage. “Anne, this is great. The rigging is made out of airplane quality aluminum so it’s light but strong. This will be a perfect photo for my article for Modern Steel.”

  Anne turned a frustrated glance at CC. “That’s fascinating but I’m trying to watch Dave.” She turned her attention back to the stage, which was dark except for the halo spotlight over Dave’s head. The motorized light spun around to illuminate Dave as he started his solo. With his back to the audience, he held his Strat up against his Marshall stack and hammered an A power chord. The Marshall’s tubes glowed red hot, pushing their limits as the Celestion speakers filled the air. The crowd cheered.The halo spotlight swiveled, creaked, broke off, crashing down onto the young star’s head. He crumpled to the ground. The audience was silent for a moment, and then screams broke out.

  Still with her back to the stage, CC was explaining the strength of the light rigging to Anne who waved her off as she watched the terror unfold. CC continued talking until roadies yelled, “Clear the stage!” She stood silent as EMTs pushed past her. She stared in disbelief and then instinct kicked in. She snapped several photos before a large 300-pound roadie with a greasy black ponytail knocked her camera onto the ground. The badge around his neck read Roger.

  “Hey, watch it!” CC said, picking the camera up and checking it for cracks.

  “Off the stage!” he repeated. Half lifting them, he pushed them off the Naperville Last Fling stage and into the frantic crowd below.

  Anne struggled to retain her footing. She turned around to face him. She half-heartedly held up her all-access pass to show the roadie. He grabbed it off her neck and escorted them to the guest room, a makeshift trailer. “We’re not groupies,” CC protested.

  “Didn’t think you were,” he said as he slammed the door closed behind them.

  CC eyed the room. All she saw was tall hair and short skirts. At 40 years old, she was probably old enough to be a very attractive older sister to many of these girls. Anne’s Capri-flowered pants did not fit in nor did CC’s plaid Bermuda shorts. “CC, do they realize who we are? Do they realize that Dave Southwell asked us to be here?” Anne asked.

  “Anne, I think things have changed. I don’t think Dave Southwell is going to be needing the microphone,” CC said, checking out her camera.

  Anne reached into her large orange Prada bag and retrieved the 1956 RCA microphone once used by Johnny Cash. They had discovered it at an estate sale of a former music producer. It had been buried deep in the basement behind some power tools.

  A short while later, a Naperville police officer walked up to Anne and CC. “Ladies, can I ask you a few questions? Did you see what happened?” He looked at CC’s all-access backstage pass. “Were you on stage when the accident happened?”

  “Yes, we were guests of Mr. Southwell,” CC said.

  Anne interrupted, holding up the microphone. “We were commissioned to find this microphone for Dave Southwell. Johnny Cash used it in a Nashville recording. We found it. . .”

  The officer interrupted her, “Who commissioned you?”

  “We found it for our friend, Betsy. Her boyfriend is in the music industry,” CC said.

  Anne interrupted again, “We’re the Spoon Sisters. That’s the name of our business; we’re not really sisters.” Anne reached into her large orange Prada bag and handed him a business card, which read “Spoon Sisters, Antique Hunters.” He took the card and jotted some notes down in his notebook.

  Anne continued, “When he first went on stage, he walked by and gave me a wink. He recognized me because we had Face-timed each other after I found the microphone. He was very excited. We don’t usually deal with musical instruments but this is an antique with a lot of history. Imagine Johnny Cash is holding this microphone in his hands in a small studio in Nashville. June is sitting on a stool in front of him. Their eyes lock. He gives her a little crooked smile, and she blushes.” Anne paused, closing her eyes for a second. “We help connect people with orphaned artifacts––you know––antiques.” Anne took a large breath. “Is Dave okay?”

  “I need to know only what you saw tonight,” the officer said, not even trying to hide his annoyance.

  “After Dave winked at me, he took the stage,” Anne said. “The song started. It was his hit ‘Young Hearts.’ CC was bothering me, saying something about the lighting. I couldn’t see around her so I missed what happened.”

  The officer turned to CC. “What about you?”

  “My back was to the stage while I,” CC paused, gave Anne a look and continued, “was bothering Anne.”

  “Is he okay?” Anne repeated.

  The officer didn’t answer her question, keeping his gaze on the notes he was scribbling in his notebook.

  Anne pulled out her iPhone and brought up a picture of a man in a Chicago police uniform. “This is my boyfriend, the very tall and very British Detective Nigel Towers with the Chicago Police Department. Do you know him?”

  The officer still didn’t answer.

  “We actually met when I helped him break a big case. You might have heard of it. The estate sale murders,” Anne continued.

  The officer still didn’t answer.

  “It happened on Chicago’s North Shore about a year ago. It made all the local papers. It must have made it out to the burbs,” Anne continued.

  “Thank you. I’ve got your names and information,” the officer said, closing his notebook and walking over to the group of groupies.

  “I hope Dave’s going to be okay,” Anne said, turning to CC.

  Anne and CC exited the trailer and watched the action on the stage. They heard the shrill of the sirens in the distance as they walked through the lingering crowd toward CC’s Volkswagen microbus. The 1968 bus was a barn find, not much more than rust, nuts and bolts. After a year of tender loving care, CC had finally brought it back to life. She had become quite the shade tree mechanic since the divorce.

  The early fall night was cool; the leaves were starting to turn. Naperville’s Last Fling celebration marked the end of the summer festival season. Held at the city’s Riverwalk, which led along the DuPage River, the festival attracted national musical acts with thousands of attendees. Walking past the food vendors, Anne was too concerned to be tempted by the pork chops on a stick or corndogs. Wait, the funnel cake smelled good. Covered in powdered sugar. Maybe it would help her forget what happened. She shuddered as she relive
d the image in her mind of Dave lying on the stage.

  CC pulled her along. Voices chattered as they walked, many expressing disbelief, others crying. The festival air had turned sour. Anne and CC joined the march; they shared a common bond with these people. Dave’s music had brought them together in joy, now it tore them apart in sorrow.

  They trudged up the sled hill to wait at the crosswalk. At the top of the hill, CC turned around to look down at the stage. It was pitch black except for flashlights flickering like fireflies. The stage lights had been extinguished; CC feared the same for Dave.

  When the light changed, Anne and CC followed the crowd across the street to the high school where CC had parked. The parking lot was packed. Cars were pulling haphazardly out of spaces and lining up in uneven, impatient rows.

  “What do we do now?” Anne asked, getting in the car still clutching the microphone.

  “Let’s head home,” CC said. She turned the key, and the VW came to life. CC backed out of the space and joined the line of cars. In her mind, the first line of “Young Hearts,” and the last words Dave Southwell would ever sing repeated in her head, “I’m gonna live until I die.”

  Chapter Two

  The day after the accident, CC stood in her basement darkroom. She rinsed the print paper in the developer, rocking it back and forth. Then she rinsed the print in water followed by the stop bath. When she was done, she squeegeed the paper and hung the print on the clothesline for drying. She hoped that she’d be able to use some of the pictures for her article on structural steel. For the past fifteen years, she had been reporting on steel for trade magazines. Not quite the career she had pictured when she’d graduated from journalism school, but it still paid the bills and required her to use her investigative skills. Sure, there wasn’t a Pulitzer in her future, but her readers counted on her to be accurate and insightful.

  With all the chaos from the onstage accident, she couldn’t remember what she had shot. While the photos dried, she filled a mug with fresh-pressed French roast coffee, topped it with Redi-Whip and sat by the Ben Franklin stove in her sunroom, her favorite room in the house. The early fall morning was cool. The fire was warm. Bandit, her Australian shepherd, lay on her feet. He was better than the plushest slippers.

  After a while, she went back to the darkroom and took the dried prints off the clothesline. She brought them to her drafting table in her sunroom, a find at a local furniture resale shop. After her divorce, CC had redone her house, decorating to her taste, scouring thrift stores and flea markets for bargains that needed a little love. She appreciated craftsmanship and the opportunity to bring these pieces back to life.

  CC placed the pictures on her light box, a relic from her early days as a newspaper reporter. There were some great shots of the light rigging. In the background of one of the later shots, she could see Dave Southwell’s body underneath the light. Southwell was obscured by the arm of Roger, the 300-pound roadie with the greasy ponytail. She was furious with him for knocking her camera down. Her 1947 Nikon lens was ruined. It was hard to find replacement parts for her model 6091 Nikon.

  She took out her loupe to get a closer look. The resolution was beautiful, crisp. She preferred film to digital. It was more alive, more human. She found a perfect shot to illustrate her article. It was a close-up of the line of Par 64 lights attached to the lighting rig over Dave Southwell’s head. That’s when something caught her eye.

  She lifted the picture up and put her loupe back to her eye. Several of the lights had wires with mountain climber hooks attaching them to the rigging. The four cans directly over Dave Southwell had the same wires but they were not attached. She Googled stage lighting. After watching several videos on YouTube, she realized that those wires were called safety wires and were used as a backup precaution. For some reason, the wires had not been attached properly.

  Grabbing the pictures, she drove out to the Naperville Riverwalk. When she walked up the sled hill and to the stage, the crew was packing Dave Southwell’s equipment. CC saw Roger, the roadie, supervising the evacuation. Naperville security stopped her before she could reach the stage. She pulled out her press pass that she carried everywhere. She flashed it at them and then threw it around her neck.

  “Roger!” she yelled, running up to the stage.

  He was sitting on a Marshall anvil steel case, smoking a cigarette. He turned as he heard his name.

  CC climbed up the stage. “Roger, I’m CC. I was backstage yesterday.”

  He took another puff and gave her an uninterested look. “I know.”

  “I developed my photos.” She pulled the 8 x 10 from her backpack. “These are the lights over Dave Southwell’s head. The safety wires weren’t attached. They could have saved his life.”

  He looked it over quickly. “I don’t see it. ”

  CC pointed to the wires. “Look, you can tell they’re not attached. They’re next to the lights.” She paused, reached back into her backpack, trying to find her loupe. “You have to look through a loupe.”

  Roger took a last drag of his cigarette, flicked it to the ground and stomped it out with his boot. “We checked all the lights before Dave came out.” He shoved the photo back at her and then walked away.

  CC stood stunned. She watched as a worker scrubbed the aluminum stage floor and the last remnants of Dave Southwell. She looked up at the lights but there was nothing there. The entire rigging had been dismantled.

  Chapter Three

  Dave Southwell’s death shocked the country music world. A week had passed since the Mayhem in Naperville tragedy as Anne referred to it. She was still not able to get the picture out of her mind. The Spoon Sisters’ blog’s fans shared their grief, but life went on. Anne had to return to the serious work of antique hunting.

  She arrived at CC’s house early Saturday morning. The front of the suburban split-level was decorated with corn stalks, pumpkins, gourds and a scarecrow couple CC had made in her craft room. The scarecrow couple was very sad and coming apart at the seams. Craft room, Anne thought. CC threw that word around kind of loosely. Anne sat down on the cement bench that CC’s ex husband had built, the only handyman project left standing. Scattered around it were orange mums in decorative planters.

  Normally, Anne resented getting up this early, but weekends were a different story. Saturdays and Sundays were spent shopping––and not just any shopping––true antique hunting. On the weekends, Anne and CC scoured antique stores, estate sales, flea markets, garage and barn sales searching for items on their lists of fan requests. They went where the bargains were.

  For the occasion, Anne was wearing her antique hunting uniform, a pair of flowered Capri pants once worn by 1960s Hollywood starlet Stevie Vann. The flowered pants had become a Spoon Sisters’ symbol of empowerment, plus they looked damned good on her.

  Since starting the Spoon Sisters’ blog, their fan base had exploded. Hundreds of requests came in every week and Anne took a personal interest in each one. On a weekly basis, she scanned and mapped out their shopping expeditions, reading the classifieds, Craigslist and estatesales.net. She reviewed the photos and descriptions, comparing them against listings on eBay, Sotheby’s and her own personal database, which was larger than both. She cataloged all her purchases in handwritten notebooks, which were organized by date, item, location and how much she had paid, also the estimated value. This was almost a full-time job. To keep up with the demand, she had switched her daytime job as a research chemist to part time. She had found her true calling––antique hunting.

  CC and Bandit walked up behind her, disturbing Anne’s thoughts. “Anne, you’re early,” CC said.

  Anne jumped. “I was anxious to get started today. In fact, I couldn’t sleep.”

  “How’s Nigel? Did he like the poster?” CC asked after Anne’s friend, the very tall and very British Chicago police detective Nigel Towers.

  “He thought it was fabulous,” Anne enthused, recalling Nigel’s delight when she had given him an original Maltese F
alcon movie poster. Nigel shared Anne’s love of film noir.

  CC opened the front door and took off Bandit’s leash. She deposited it in a basket. Anne followed her into the house. “Sit down. I want to show you something,” CC said.

  Anne sat down at the dining room table, a 1960s-era Danish modern. Not Anne’s taste, but it catered to CC’s pragmatism and love of clean lines. Anne preferred her furniture more ornate.

  CC pulled the photos out of her backpack and handed them to Anne. “What am I looking at?” Anne asked.

  CC handed her the loupe. “Look closely at the overhead lights. Do you notice anything?”

  Anne took a closer look through the loupe. “Not really.”

  “Look again.” CC wondered if her imagination was playing tricks on her. She was starting to doubt her journalistic eye. “Check out the safety wires over Dave Southwell’s head. They’re not connected to the lights. If they were, it might have saved his life.”

  Anne pulled the loupe back up to her eye and examined the photo again. “I can kind of see it.” She put the photo down on the table.

  CC sat down next to her. “I went to the Riverwalk and showed it to Roger, the roadie who kicked us off the stage.”

  “What did he say about it?”

  “He didn’t see it either. He said all the lights were checked and secure.”

  “Obviously they weren’t secure otherwise Dave would still be alive,” Anne said.

  “The official report says that the motorized halo light was not balanced correctly, and the weight pulled down the rest of the lights. I have a friend who works for the city of Naperville. She gave me a copy of the police report. Officially, they’re calling it an accident.” CC cradled her coffee cup.

  “You don’t feel it was?” Anne asked.

  “After the year we had last year, I don’t want to take anything at face value,” CC said.