Freeze Out

By Brett Wallach

Felix Brigati, New Jersey rock legend, has been getting threatening, anonymous texts. He hires an old acquaintance, Phil Allman, a private investigator, to safeguard him, not trusting those already in his camp, due to the personal nature of the messages.

Instead of protection, the desolate Allman holds his hero captive in the fortified basement of his deceased uncle’s secluded house in rural Pennsylvania, while they try to determine who is harassing Felix. Upon returning from an errand, Allman finds Brigati gone. Did Brigati somehow escape? Was he abducted by his stalker? If not, by whom? It is crucial that Phil finds Felix before he gets arrested for his own kidnapping, or real harm comes to the music superstar.
Suspenseful, insightful, and surprisingly funny, Freeze Out is a noir elegy on middle-aged loneliness and the duality of fame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett Wallach
• Release date: Mar 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463368473

Brett Wallach

My name is Brett Wallach, and I'm a father of two daughters from the Philadelphia area. The protagonist in my Phil Allman, P.I. series of mysteries is a misanthropic, sentimental, bitter, funny, romantic, lustful, tough, sometimes amoral, slightly (?) insane divorced father of two daughters from Philadelphia. Any resemblance to myself is highly coincidental. I've tried to create a character who often says and does the wrong things, after reading so many books in this genre where the main character, despite quirks, is usually unrealistically virtuous. Think Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, only funnier. My favorite authors are John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and many others. I have no delusions that my novels are on that level, but as my reviews (please see them on Goodreads) show, most people seem to find them entertaining. After my former publisher recently went out of business, I decided to self-publish, and my six books (so far) in the series (Jesse Garon, And I Love Her, Young Blood, Freeze Out, Susceptible, and Torment) are all available on Amazon, and candid, objective reviews are always welcome. My seventh book, The Last MAN On Earth, is a sci-fi/social and sexual satire, and I hope you like that as well. My email address is [e-mail], and feedback is welcome.

Book preview

A Phil Allman P.I. Novel

FREEZE OUT

Book 4

by

Brett Wallach

Cover art by Jennifer Givner

Copyright 2016 by Brett Wallach

SmashWords Edition

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

Phil Allman Series

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DEDICATION

To Valerie and Allison

* * * *

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thinly veiled representations of famous and infamous people are wildly common in books and movies. Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane is clearly based on William Randolph Hearst; Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola employed the same gambit with their representation of Frank Sinatra as Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather. And so on.

Felix Brigati is a fictionalized version of Bruce Springsteen; the operative word is fictionalized. I have boundless respect and admiration for Bruce Springsteen, not only for his incredible music career, but for his class and generosity,

No shit. I love the guy.

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CHAPTER 1

Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, the kings of popular (white) music from the two generations prior to his, lamented having bitten off more than they could chew in their respective covers of My Way. Frank was likely thinking about the starlets that he caught but could not keep; Elvis possibly wondering why his acting career stalled, unlike Frank’s.

But not our boy. He has never recorded a bad album. Or hit a sour note. Or made a false move.

Don’t believe me? Go to YouTube. He has been in the public eye, my generation’s (white) King of Pop for over forty years now. Hundreds of his concerts on video. Interviews. Backstage peeks. Ramblings through the public square. Dozens of albums, hundreds of songs. Thousands of photos, both staged and candid.

And not an awkward moment in the bunch. Always walking tough, always walking cool. Sharing the stage with lesser lights and even greater icons, and he always shines. Looks good and sounds great every time.

Before I had seen him live (either on a concert stage or in a video), the greatest performer in the history of rock music, no question, was mine. It wasn’t only the words to his songs, howls and growls of economic, romantic, and sexual frustration. It was the sound. Not pussy, sensitive rock, like, I don’t know, James Taylor or Christopher Cross, to pick on a couple. And not just loud, crunchy noise like Metallica or Megadeath. It was edgy, guitar-fused rock and roll, but with pianos, organs, a sax, and sometimes even horns or strings to sweeten the whole affair.

The lyrics were always smart, but not like you needed a dictionary to keep up, like with Leonard Cohen or the incomparable Bob Dylan. And never smarmy or mean-spirited like the magnificent Mick Jagger. He didn’t blame others for his angst. He wanted life to be better, not for just himself, but for us too! For me!

His background was just like mine. Shy, outsider kid from a working class home, with the standard sullen (abusive?) father and peacemaking mother. And from just up the road in coastal Jersey, about an hour and a half from my own working class home in lower Northeast Philly. with the sullen (abusive?) father and peacemaking mother.

I completely got him. Dylan’s references were sometimes over my head or out of my sphere, Jagger’s sexual exploits too out of reach, the Beatles’ message of universal peace and love too hopeful and unrealistic in my roughneck world.

Felix Brigati, though, I completely understood. As a teenager, I used to pose like he did on the cover of It’s Dark Outside the City wherever I went, but my petulant pout wasn’t as pretty as his. When his stardom and fame grew from being mostly a regional wunderkind to attaining national and then international superstardom, I felt like he was somehow being taken away from me. I was proud that my boy was appreciated by others, but it was like, hey, I saw him first! I felt like a jealous high school kid whose girl becomes head cheerleader and homecoming queen. And then watching him flirt with the entire civilized world, from my teen years to my middle-aged ones, was often more than I could take.

Are you trying to get to know me better or something, Phil?

No, Felix I said. I want you to get to know me.

It was difficult seeing my hero bound to a chair like that, like something from a bad S&M snuff film. But the squirrelly bastard just would not cooperate, so his bondage was kind of his fault. I was never a boy scout, but Google offers even the layman extremely helpful articles and tips on rope-tying, knots, etc.

Chloroform, of course, is a great squirrel sedative. And Felix Brigati, known to one and all as The Chief of rock and roll, was quite the quarry to capture.

Abandoned for another by my second wife, orphaned by my children who dared to have lives of their own, and bored in semi-retirement as a Private Investigator, I was in a dubious state of mind when Brigati called me out of the blue to work as his personal protector. He and I had gotten acquainted almost a decade earlier when I was working on the Jesse Garon Presley case (Jesse being Elvis’s real life twin, previously thought stillborn, whom I had been hired to find). We had texted maybe a dozen or so times hence, so you could not say that we were friends. Felix Brigati didn’t need friends. He had hundreds of close ones, thousands like me on the periphery, and millions who wanted to be in that exclusive circle.

I, on the other hand, needed friends. The career of a Private Investigator puts you in contact with lots of people, but you’re not hanging out at the bar after work with your co-workers or anything. You’re on your own. And I guess I liked it like that. Until a grey cloud of loneliness enveloped me, and the light could no longer seep in.

Enter The Chief. As he entered my life as a teenager with his two albums, Destined to Go, and It’s Dark Outside the City, classic rock elegies on desolation, frustration, and romantic liberation from a guy living not in a foreign place like Liverpool or Memphis, but from freakin’ Jersey. The records were round, grooved, vinyl Torahs that I wore down to scratches and pops after thousands of spins on my turntable. I connected with Felix and his music so intensely over the next three and a half decades that I found his narcissistic question asking if I wanted to get to know him better very insulting. I already knew him. That’s why he was here.

What the fuck do you want me to know about you, Phil? So indignant.

I’ve spent the last thirty-five years listening to your records, going to your concerts, reading about you in books and magazines, and on posts on the Internet. You haven’t even been here, consciously anyway, for thirty-five minutes yet. So chill out, Chief.

Then he struggled again to wrest himself free of my unbreakable knots, like he tried to liberate himself from coastal New Jersey in all those songs. Since he still lived there, after a short respite in El Lay, I guess you could say that he failed in both endeavors.

So sad to watch this object of worship, with his personal trainer-honed sixty-six year old body, struggle mightily like a dog tethered to a leash. Phil, you’re not stupid, he said after giving up, sweat beading on his expanding, lined forehead. The whole world is looking for me, man. Let me go, and I promise that will be the end of it, no one will know a thing.

I nodded. Like you promised your wives that you’d be faithful? Like you promised your band you’d never leave them? Like you promised your fans loyalty to your home state? You even had a song called A Promise about your old manager fucking you over. But you have proven time and again not to be true to your own word. So how can I trust you now? Right, Chief?

Felix said nothing. He looked around the room, seemingly designed for this purpose. He saw the thick, white concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, the sturdy silver steel door, no windows, an old table with a lit candle and the bottle of chloroform and a rag on it, the tiny utilitarian bathroom tucked into the corner, with its toilet and standup shower, in the cellar of this old house, a long way from anyone or anything else. I am sure that he also realized that there was little chance of escape, or of anyone hearing his well-known, rough-hewn voice sing out for help. He was going nowhere – we both knew it – but we each had our parts to play, after all. I’m a fucking millionaire a couple hundred times over, Phil. What would it take to let me go?

I circled around the heavy wooden chair, rescued from a long-forgotten dining room set upstairs, and pondered. I looked Felix in his famous brown eyes, under his plug-enhanced hair, between his rock star ringed ears, and within his handsome, ethnic-looking, lifted face. This isn’t about money, Felix. I just want a little of your time. That’s all. And then you can leave. Saying it sincerely, not sure though if I meant it.

Felix had told me that he had been getting threatening texts from a private, anonymous number that contained alarmingly specific information about his personal life and itinerary. Felix had his own security people to protect him of course, but in his fearful, paranoid state, he told me that he didn’t know whom to trust, as no stranger would have his schedule replete with addresses, contacts, personal asides, etc. So I guess he flipped through his mental Rolodex, and called a name from the past. Good ol’ Phil Allman, that nice P.I. from Philly that he paid off nearly ten years prior not to pursue Elvis’s once thought dead twin brother, Jesse Garon.

John Lennon was murdered by an obsessed fan, he said. It could happen, he said.

So I would be his bodyguard, and he would be my long-lost pal, to paraphrase Paul Simon. No, it was not I who sent him the menacing messages. I was just living my lack of a life in my apartment in Northeast Philly, taking the occasional cheating spouse case for sustenance, going on the sporadic awful Internet date, and sitting around waiting for my life to begin. Or end.

Guy says he’s gonna torture me and kill me. Can you help me, Phil? Felix had said. At least I assume it’s a guy, but I don’t know.

You should just disappear for a while. Don’t tell anyone – anyone – where you’re going, just those closest to you that you’re going. I’ll help you with that if you want. But to be safe, also make sure that you don’t tell anyone that I’m involved. It was an innocent suggestion to help preserve the man’s safety.

So we both knew that no one was looking for him, because he’d already told a select few that he was vanishing for a while until the threat hopefully blew over. And there we were. In the almost barren basement of a one hundred and fifty year-old cottage, bequeathed to me by a distant uncle, in the middle of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, that practically no one even knew existed any more. The house didn’t even get mail. Or utility service. Just water from its own well. The upstairs was furnished, but Uncle Billy just had the small rectangular wooden table left for me in his basement. Luckily for Felix and me, it was a Saturday in early May, so it wasn’t too hot or too cold in the room. Just right. He could wail out the final notes of Jungletown to his heart’s content, because nobody was within shouting distance.

Was the other threat credible? Who knew? But Felix Brigati was safe and sound. In the bosom of my care.

I’d met Felix for lunch earlier that bright, seasonal Saturday afternoon at the Coastal Diner in Long Branch, New Jersey, his wife having dropped him off. Only his wife and manager knew about me, the texts, and that Felix planned to fade away for a few days until what they hoped was a prankster stopped the harassment. Felix decided to call me and not the authorities so as not to potentially create a media firestorm about something that was probably harmless; also by using me for protection, if the threats were from someone in his camp, they wouldn’t know where he was. Felix told me that he knew he could trust me to keep his confidence, and at least on that score, his judgment was sound.

I’m gonna have to take a leak here pretty soon, Phil.

I know you’re a Senior Citizen now Chief, but don’t worry, we won’t resort to Depends just yet.

Felix actually broke out into his frequently photographed wry smile. I am getting old. People see me flying around on stage, and they have no idea what it takes. And what it takes out of me.

I looked at my hero with the respect that he deserved. Under the circumstances, I know you won’t believe me, but I admire the hell out of you for the kind of show you put on. You’re the best there’s ever been.

The humble, soft spoken Felix died thirty years