An excerpt from “Under the Whitestone Bridge: Death at the Music Mansion Reunion” by Kirpal Gordon

 

Chapter 1

 

Playing the birthday concert for Faith, my mentor’s mentor, was a love supreme.

But if I knew that the concert’s aftermath would result in the felony arrest of my mentor Pavel Trzaska, I never would have entertained the idea of going. Nor convinced him to go. Nor convinced him that I, Orfea Goodnight, his twenty-two-year-old female writing apprentice and fellow musician, should come along on the journey from New Orleans to New York City.

From the second story bathroom window of Faith’s house, I watched red and blue colors flash like strobe lights from multiple police vehicles making the officials appear to be moving in slow motion. Under a dark orange moon that rose above Manhattan’s skyline in the west, police were cordoning off the side of the house with yellow NYPD tape just outside the parlor’s window where Faith spent much of her time. That’s where Gil and Red earlier in the evening had unveiled their birthday gift to her: a rocky grotto shaped in a semi-circle with a gurgling water feature. It was landscaped by Gil and the small wooden deer drinking at the pond’s edge was sculpted in wood by Red.

Now it was the scene of a crime.

At the end of a winding unpaved lane the Faith’s property sat hidden on three sides by Norway spruce, cedar of Lebanon and black pine. Bordering the East River near Boosters Beach, between the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to the left and the Throgs Neck Bridge to the right, the house—what everyone calls the Music Mansion—was a sprawling three-story Victorian structure. With its wrap-around porch and large parlor that opened into a living room, it proved to be an excellent location for the Saturday night concert—at least until the last song when a gun shot rang out.

We heard a scream and then a splash.

Immediately, band members rushed to the grotto and pulled the victim’s bloody head out of the small rock-rimmed pond. I happened to be outside at the time talking on my cell phone with my boyfriend Rogelio, and I saw the whole thing go down.

My bandmates checked for a pulse, found none and called 911. A patrol car, which I later learned was sitting at Whitestone Park three blocks away, arrived two minutes later, took one look at what happened and called in. More police cars rolled up.

Watching the cops move around the crime scene showed me how clueless they were.

Compared to what I witnessed, all that they gathered from their interviews with the band and the audience was a four-word chronology: shot, scream, splash, death. How many variations would they consider: Was the victim shot dead by a bullet or frightened to death by getting shot at? Was the shot unrelated to the victim? What was that splash: the sound of a human head hitting the water or maybe just the victim’s foot or a rock that had been dislodged by the bullet? Was the bullet and the splash even related? As for who uttered the scream that followed the shot, was that the victim, the shooter or a third party caught by surprise chancing upon the scene? 

The evidence would not add up; it kept telling a different story.

I’m no expert on forensic science, but things appeared to be getting most foul, mon ami. When the medical examiners’ team patted down the victim, they found no entry wounds and no bullets. Instead, they found wads of cash in the pockets of his pants and shirt. I watched as they photographed and bagged five wallets, a collection of jewelry, a snub-nosed gun (possibly just fired) and a small vial (possibly of poison) from inside his overcoat.

Didn’t this new evidence suggest the alleged victim might also be a victimizer, likely to be found guilty of criminal trespass, theft, possible armed robbery and attempted assassination?

Back to shot-scream-splash-death: What if the victim had been rifling through people’s coats in the vestibule of the house, stashing the valuables in their coat and pockets, got discovered and called on it, ran at top speed out of the front door and down the steps, made a left, headed toward the water feature, turned their head, saw the gun in the hand of their pursuer and at the sound of its discharge simply dove for cover accidentally slipping on the wet mossy rocks and crushing their skull or drowning? That’s certainly not murder, but could be construed as involuntary manslaughter for the trigger-happy pursuer.

Instead, what if the fleeing victim/victimizer approached the water feature, turned their head, fired their snub-nosed gun at their pursuer, turned too quickly, lost their balance, screamed and made a splash by smashing their head into the pool or its rocky edge or its metal pipe? Involuntary manslaughter for the gardening team of Red and Gil would be a long shot. But suicide could be on the table just as easily as an accidental death.  

The slope was getting slippery, and until the arrival of the autopsy and toxicology reports, anything was possible. For example, was the alleged victim in bad health, inebriated or under the influence of drugs? In that case, merely running from a pursuer could give our victim a heart attack. To take it a turn darker and make everyone at the concert a suspect: Since poison is already in possible play and there’s food and drink everywhere, what if the victim had eaten or drank something intended to take their life? Such a possibility would prove pre-meditation and justify a claim of murder. But what if the victim had an allergy and died from eating something as common as peanuts or shellfish—then who’s to blame?

Nothing was clear and so much of the story seemed improvisational.

Who was the victim and who were their victims?

Little was said among the detectives, but the plot was thickening.

With their wall of lights turned up to superbright, the CSI unit inspected the grotto and sculpture. Sure enough, they found a bullet buried in the deer’s wooden left foot at water’s edge. When extracted with needle-nosed pliers and put it a plastic evidence bag, I got a bad feeling. Because the concert’s last song was a solo instrumental played by Hope, the police would soon realize that anyone else in the band—Smokey, Gil, Red, Liv, me or Pavi—could have slipped out of the parlor and onto the lawn or porch with time enough to shoot the escaping victim/victimizer at the grotto.

I’m not saying Pavi shot anyone, only that his return home was growing catastrophic.

The cops finished taking the last of the photos, put the dead body into a black bag, zipped it up and headed toward the flashing vehicles. Once the ambulance left the gray-pebbled driveway, I could see what had been hidden from my view: a blue squad car over whose trunk stood lanky, gray-haired, dumbfounded Pavi, spread eagled. New York’s Finest frisked him and handcuffed him, mirandized him and accordioned all six feet and three inches of him into the back seat.

Hope and Liv ran out from the porch.

“You got the wrong person,” Hope shouted.

“Come back and arrest us,” Liv shouted. “We did it.”

They failed to outrun the squad car which left for the police station.

From her room below me I heard Faith crying.

In the driveway under a taxus shrub Red and Gil were consoling a distraught gal who I had seen at the concert. I got the impression she was their old friend, but the news they shared did not seem good.

As for me, spying on everyone from the safe distance of the second-floor window, I felt less like an observer and more like an accomplice. I ought to have prevented this death from happening, and no matter how I tried to play it off, I knew I was responsible. I may only be Pavi’s sex-crazed, know-nothing writing apprentice and music nerd, but I had promised his girlfriend Cajun Karen in New Orleans that I would look after him. I owed it to her. Not only that, in a long line of writing apprentices he had mentored, I was only his second female apprentice—the first didn’t work out so well—and I felt a sisterly duty to those who might come after me.

I should add that I love the guy, you know, platonically.

I knew I had to do more than just watch the police haul his ass away. So I dashed down the stairs, collected what I thought of as relevant evidence of my own guilt, slipped into my blue Jetta and followed at a safe distance the caravan of civilian and law enforcement vehicles headed for the 109th Precinct in downtown Flushing.