Crime Plus Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

in his arms. First he tried to get her on her feet walking around, but she was like a heavy rag doll in his hands and her feet just dragged along the carpet. He tried to perform CPR as best he could, imitating actions he had seen on television, but he found that he couldn’t even get her mouth open to breathe air into her.
    They weren’t far from the county town, and soon he could hear the sound of an ambulance approaching. Laying Connie gently back on the bed, he dashed down and practically pushed the attendants up the stairs in front of him. They kept him well back as they got Connie on a stretcher and took her to the ambulance. He noticed one of the attendants shake his head and cover her face with the sheet before closing the doors.
    A S T ONY HAD SUSPECTED , HE had been a few hours too late. There was nothing more he could have done, the doctors said. The heroin Connie had injected came from an unusually strong batch. She had hardly had time to get the needle out of her arm. The stuff had already killed two junkies in town, and warnings were out, but nobody listened. Needless to say, the police searched the house from top to bottom, took blood samples from Tony and then “interviewed” him for hours without pause—they had no Police and Criminal Evidence Act to hamper their style back then—but in the end they had to let him go. The media made much of Connie’s death, of course—from the screaming headlines in the tabloids about the sick and immoral culture of rock music to more carefully written and thought out pieces in the quality press by establishment figures educated at Eton and Oxford.
    So began a long dark period of grieving for Tony, a period he thought at times would never end. And perhaps it never really did. For over a year he wrote no songs, performed no concerts, did very little, in fact, except stay in his room or, when the mood took him, go for long walks around the estate. On one of these walks, he came across three women trespassing on his land. He said nothing, as he didn’t really care about property rights, but as he passed, one of them threw something at him, and he heard another hiss, “Murderer!” He ran back to the house, and when he got to the bathroom he saw that he was covered in red paint.
    After that, Tony hardly went out at all. He also never watched television, listened to the radio, or read the newspapers, so he could have no idea of the storm brewing, of Connie’s followers and group members desecrating her grave with anti-Blackbird graffiti and insisting that Tony was responsible for Connie’s death, that he had murdered a far more talented and important artist than he would ever be. According to them, he had introduced her to the drugs lifestyle, then abandoned her for his rock-and-roll life on the road with groupies after every gig. It wasn’t true. Tony had always shied away from groupies every bit as much as he kept clear of hard drugs, but even if he had known what they were saying about him, any attempt he made to defend himself would have only dug him deeper in the hole.
    I handled most of it by ignoring it, issuing the occasional blanket denial and keeping it from Tony, which wasn’t difficult. I didn’t take the matter seriously. I thought it would all blow over soon enough. During these months, I spent a lot of time at the mansion just keeping an eye out. Tony didn’t always know I was there, but I was. For him. We rarely spoke on those occasions when we did see one another, but I will never forget the time he came running downstairs with his hair wild and his cheeks burning, dashing from room to room shouting my name.
    I calmed him down and offered him a Mandrax. As usual, he wouldn’t take anything but a glass of wine. He put his fists to his temples and shook his head, groaning. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me he’d had a dream, the most vivid terrifying dream he had ever had. It