The Last Lyric

By Frank Diekmann

The Last Lyric is the first book in which readers already know every line of dialogue even before they start reading, as each is either a classic rock or music lyric! In this one-of-a-kind compilation, Cleveland Police Detectives Aretha Swift and Elvis Dylan investigate a murder at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, fighting a grand illusion from their boss (Sergeant Pepper), sorting through dozens of alleged murderers and ex-lovers of the deceased (Roxanne, an LA woman, a Jersey girl), fighting department quirks such as mandatory jukebox dance breaks and the motto on their badges (To Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night And to Party During the Day), and trying to overcome a disconcerting trip to Swingtown, and more. On the way to solving the murder, the Last Lyric is packed with too many music references to count, and readers will groove, shake, rattle and roll with every page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Diekmann
• Release date: May 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005365615

Frank Diekmann

Frank J. Diekmann is a 25-year veteran of newspaper reporting and editing, having covered sports, travel and financial services. Along the way this included, sadly, many, many nights in hotels, where a TV was usually on in the background, and many years in vehicles and airplanes listening to classici rock and pop music. Diekmann has reported from more than 500 industry conferences and has leaned on a strong sense of humor to get through them all, building a significant following for both is fiction and non-fiction.

Book preview

The Last Lyric

By

Frank Diekmann

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2021 by Frank Diekmann

All rights reserved.

To Valerie

For your patience, support and especially the willingness to write down a lyric or song title on short notice when inspiration struck

And to Denise

Had it not been for your picnic table and backyard,

The Last Lyric would have never been sung

Table of Contents

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CUT ONE

Sergeant Pepper used his left hand to push what there was of the puzzling evidence across his desk toward Detective Elvis Dylan without so much as a Hello, it’s just me or even a sarcastic, Hey there young fella with the hair that’s colored yellow. Instead, Pepper, who was known to everyone in the department for his wild-colored jackets that had been going in and out of style for years, his porn star mustache and his blackbird-black, moppish hair, announced in a strangely upbeat tone, especially given the news, that someone’s mama had just killed a man. Held a gun against his head, Pepper claimed, tapping his finger on the folder he wanted Dylan to have at a tempo the detective sensed was at least 110 beats per minute.

As if in a fast car, the yellow-haired fella, Dylan, was no slow hand, and he quickly held up an open palm toward Pepper’s face to silence his boss from going on any further, maybe not the best career move for the new kid in town working homicide, but in his free fallin’ excitement he didn’t want the sergeant ruining the moment—or prejudicing his investigation—if that’s what this was. From his side of the black Marshall speaker cabinet that had gone gloriously to its blown-out death in a rainbow of sparks that came close to burning down the house during a 10cc concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in ’76, and which now lay on its side and served as Pepper’s desk, Dylan got so excited he just couldn’t hide it, and he had to fight the tears for fears that if tried to relax and close his eyes, even if only for a moment, that moment would be gone.

Pepper was a former homicide detective himself who was something of a celebrity among those whose ride was a cop car for his many quirks beyond just the electric wardrobe, including always hanging out with three of his friends, for being too busy singing to keep anyone down, and for keeping his busybody hand in other cases. The sergeant also had a reputation for a far out sense of humor. Just yesterday, when Dylan’s troubles had seemed so far away, Pepper had asked him chase down a weird lead in a different case involving an alleged online scam called muskrat love, and after the third or fourth cop started laughing like children in his face the detective finally deduced the joke was on him, and he chose to laugh with the sinners as it just seemed preferable to crying with the saints. Dylan rapidly learned the rumors about the sergeant were true, that his new boss was indeed something of a practical joker, not to mention a smoker and frequent midnight toker. Oh-La-Di, Oh-La-Da, Pepper would laugh every time the victims of one of his pranks confronted him.

At the moment Dylan feared he’d have 19 nervous breakdowns if this turned out to be another of Pepper’s cheap tricks.

Shot through the heart, Pepper persisted, tapping his finger to a different beat before encouraging a new theory that there was a woman to blame in the murder case; a woman who gave love a bad name. It was all so obvious, according to the sergeant. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? he demanded from his side of the speaker cabinet-desk.

Who? responded a genuinely confused Dylan, inquiring about the victim and wondering what had become of the mama identified just a moment ago as the alleged killer.

Guess who? countered Pepper, grinning.

With the discussion leaving nowhere to run, Dylan snatched the evidence folder from Pepper, lovin’ it, squeezin’ it, touchin’ it and hoping like a prayer this was the case he wanted so desperately to catch, like those Cajun girls he still fantasized about as they danced to the Zydeco. Please don’t be cruel, he found himself thinking of Fate, and he anxiously opened the folder to find a single sheet of paper. What is happening? he said to himself. What was this?

In front of him on the paper, in what looked as if it had been written in a mess-around hand, were some indistinguishable markings and horizontal lines and what loosely appeared to be some numbers, maybe?

Mama said there’d be days like this, a nervous Dylan remarked, but he got no response from Pepper, whom the young investigator now noticed for the first time was holding up to his lips a Cor Anglaise for absolutely no particular police-related reason.

Pepper removed the instrument from his lips. With a little luck, we can work this out, reassured the sergeant.

The paper Pepper claimed was evidence seemed to Dylan as if it had been folded up like a tour bus blanket, tossed in a seat where it had been witness to a whole lotta love, and then unfolded without having been washed, and in the corner there was what sure looked to the young cop like blood. Bad blood. Dylan walked the lines on the paper with his eyes and at first glance, whatever it was that had been scrawled upon it struck him as a hot mess and incoherent, as if written in the middle of the night following an epic bender of cold gin and cocaine and too much Puff the Magic Dragon. Or perhaps it had been the Mary Jane or the fine Colombian. Or maybe the author of whatever was scratched on the paper had spent some time with The A Team or mother’s little helper. Dylan speculated whoever was behind the note was likely telling him or herself about now that they can’t feel their face.

But he could feel his own face getting flushed.

Oh, boy! an excited Dylan couldn’t help but begin to think. I read the news today, he blurted out. And it was true--not 10 minutes earlier he had seen the report in the news feed on his cellphone and his heart had leaped with the power of love at the prospect he might catch the assignment. Sure, there was one other case that was center stage in the department right now, something about four dead in Ohio, plus Dylan had also heard some scuttlebutt among the Cleveland cops for no good reason about the shooting of a man in Reno who had been gunned down by another who just wanted to watch him die before he hung his head and cried. But nothing—nothing--could have been a bigger desire for Detective Elvis Dylan than runnin’ down this dream--there had been a murder just outside the main entrance to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and all Dylan knew was he had no interest in kissing anyone in Paris, he harbored no wish to hold someone’s hand in Rome, and he had little interest in running naked in the rain. As for the police training theory that there are two paths you can go by? The detective would leave one of them for others if he could only be assigned to investigate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame murder. He craved to be borne down in what had just became this dead man’s town.

Detective Dylan, suddenly realizing how excited he had sounded with that Oh, boy response, how much like some rookie investigator whose fever was high, tried to feign the victim was his real concern, not the scene of the crime itself, and he quickly babbled a fumbled excuse that there was likely a widowed bride left behind, and the whole thing had touched him deep inside.

Dylan’s shoulders slumped noticeably as Pepper stared back at him. For a young cop who wanted to be seen as a modern day warrior in the department, a man with a mean, mean stride, he realized his words hadn’t sounded warrior-like at all. Instead, he had sounded as silly as a garden full of octopi under a sea somewhere, and Sergeant Pepper smirked from under the bowler hat Dylan hadn’t even seen him put on.

It's sad, so sad, Pepper responded flippantly, repeating it was a sad situation. Dylan wondered if perhaps an apology might be coming, not really realizing sorry seems to be the hardest word to say in police work. In his nervousness, it wouldn’t ring a ding-dong bell with Dylan until he was rockin’ down the highway on the drive home later that night that the report had said nothing about a widowed bride. He felt embarrassed once more, his red face illuminated by the dashboard light.

Upbeat as he was, Sgt. Pepper had 99 problems and he didn’t need the dead vic to be one of them. He didn’t really give a flaming pie about the stiff—he had long been guided by a philosophy of live and let die--and my old lady, she probably didn’t care, either, he thought to himself, which was odd given the current absence of an old lady in Pepper’s life.

What Dylan didn’t know was the sergeant had taken a particularly keen interest in the case and had already warned off several other rivals inside the department, having semi-growled that the crime scene is my prerogative, and all those who had been forced to back off had assumed it was because the case was hot hot hot to the touch.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was, after all, downtown Cleveland’s biggest attraction; its only attraction, really, regularly being visited by the Kings of Leon, the Queen, the Prince or the Duke of Earl. And that meant it would become the main act at city hall, where the Parliament of Funk was now in session, a situation that would soon only become hotter from all the attention from those who would read it in a magazine. Those 99 problems would be flowing downhill, and that meant the case needed to be solved faster than even a speed wagon could get him there.

What the young detective also didn’t know was that earlier, when the case hadn’t even passed through the telephone line for five minutes, Sgt. Pepper had found himself on the receiving end of an unwelcomed personal visit from his boss, Captain Tennille. Under any other circumstances their meeting would have quickly devolved into what often became a heated argument over who had the best outfit, each shouting at the other, You’re so vain! Not this time. Instead, Tennille told Pepper that Cleveland Police Chief Sumner had made it clear he wanted to see the sergeant so quickly he ain’t got time to even take a fast train.

Pepper, who today was attired in an oversized lime green Edwardian military jacket with golden fringed epaulettes, had made a quick decision in choosing Dylan, even though the kid was as green as Al. But Pepper had also been hearing all the rumours of Dylan’s fanaticism for the Hall of Fame almost from the first day the electric youth had shown up at the front door of Cleveland, a city built on rock and roll, less than a decade earlier right out of high school in Kansas. Or maybe it was Chicago—Pepper became excited––maybe the kid had been there on the night Chicago had died! Or maybe it wasn’t Chicago at all, but Boston. No, that couldn’t be it, as Pepper had also heard Dylan was a southern man, but not so far south as to have been born on a bayou, so maybe he had been born and raised in South Detroit? Could it have been Winslow, Arizona? Or maybe, the sergeant entertained for just a quick measure, Dylan was actually a foreigner from Panama or Katmandu or maybe Nazareth? But he quickly quashed that idea, too, as Pepper remembered being told the young cop was not just an Ohio player, but a young American who had been born in the USA in a big little town.

Pepper could discern nothing of Dylan’s background from how this troubled, wonder, boogie, honey child dressed, as unlike Pepper, who came to work each day in one of four garish military uniforms, Dylan arrived every morning very much a sharp-dressed man. On this morning he was sporting a neon blue and red tie-dyed shirt beneath a faded denim jacket with fringe along each sleeve, a dusky pair of blue jeans with widely flared bellbottoms, and a pair of leather sandals. His long blonde hair, which he had tried to tuck up under his hat, now spilled over his jacket collar and he peeped back at Pepper through a pair of orange-tinted glasses with round lenses he did not need, not even for his occasional double vision. The glasses made the sergeant’s jacket appear to Dylan as if it were electric blue.

Elvis Dylan had arrived in town the son of a part-time egg man, a poor man, who had brought little more with him than the shirt on his back after a high school buddy had informed him one day as they were smoking in the boys room that in Cleveland, if he wanted to watch and eat, he was going to need a shirt and tie to get a seat. An eager Dylan had never been to the big city, but he knew he was going to want to both watch and eat, so he dutifully packed a half-dozen shirts bought from a store he had seen advertised on TV, where a man had talked about just how white his shirts could be. Besides the shirts, he had also packed his first real six-string, a guitar he had bought at the five-and-dime store and had played until his fingers had bled.

By the time he shown up with his brave face at the Cleveland PD, the kid from somewhere had gotten good enough to quickly become something of a regular entertainer at the parties the other cops were always throwing, or at least he was a passable opening act. And why not? While other cities said the police were there to protect and to serve, that kind of thinking was just stupid cupid in Cleveland, where the official Cleveland Police Department creed was right there on their badges: To Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night And to Party During the Day. Sure, he was no piano man, but in the department he found plenty of side gigs, a regular number of white weddings, the occasional garden party, and especially retirement soirees where old-timers would turn up with plenty of requests, asking that he play them something, even though they weren’t really sure how the song goes. And he would, often cold-playing it from his own memory.

Pepper wasn’t sure what rockabilly small town full of little pink houses Dylan called home and didn’t much care right now; he knew only that at a time when so many other know-it-all young recruits joining the department showed up convinced they didn’t need any education, they didn’t want any thought control, Dylan had never been among the ladies with that kind of an attitude or fellows that were in that kind of a mood. Even a long-play look at his record revealed he had kept his distance and never grooved with the punks and stooges who rejected mainstream policing and had turned the joint rancid at times. Instead, the young man had ranked high in his academy class, had become a beat-it cop and made detective in a New York minute.

With Captain Tennille’s words an earworm he couldn’t shake—Do that to me one more time! Tennille had warned Pepper after the sergeant put on a pair of headphones to drown out his boss’ warnings over the seriousness of the case—Pepper reminded himself of the real take-me-to-the-top-of-the-world reason he had chosen the kid for the case. Surely his passion for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame meant Dylan would want the case solved fast, too. And if Pepper could speed along a resolution by suggesting somebody’s mama might have been involved in killing the man, hey, you look at relatives first. It was simple. Someone had pulled the trigger, and now he’s dead. Every cop knew that.

Yet Dylan knew something, too. There remained something about Pepper’s insistence that the still unknown victim had been murdered by his mother that made the forever young-appearing detective somehow suspect there was something of a grand illusion going on here.

Over the top of his spectacles Dylan looked up from the folder and its single sheet of paper that he still couldn’t decipher and returned Pepper’s gaze, a gaze he found strangely mesmerizing, almost like Bette Davis’ eyes. He said nothing.

Oh, mama, smirked Pepper once more, claiming he could hear Dylan cryin’, laughing he was afraid and all alone.

The sergeant had a reputation for bringing the sledgehammer to new detectives until they proved themselves, not that they ever proved themselves to the veteran who, after 30 years on the force could at times be little more than one of the bitter bad boys, bad boys who went home alone night after night, mumbled a Hello to his old friend, darkness, inside his empty apartment, and then chose to drink alone, yep, with no one else. Every night it was a single bourbon, a single scotch and a single beer. And yet would the world still love, love, love Pepper when he was 64? It seemed likely, for despite all his faults he had been loved in the department at 34, 44 and the rapidly approaching 54, so it was looking good for 64 and the retirement he had planned in Kokomo in the Florida Keys. If there had been one thing that remained true blue throughout the police career of one Sergeant Pepper, it was he had never had a problem with tainted love.

Again, to Dylan Pepper seemed impatient as he hurriedly started explaining how he was being assigned a partner in the investigation--an investigation he still had yet to confirm. In this case the new partner would be an older female detective the youthful investigator had only met once and whose reputation he knew of as a real tough cookie with a long history of breaking the little hearts of freshman investigators. Like the one in me? the still unseasoned cop suddenly began worrying a bit to himself.

But the sergeant had hardly gotten past the first stanza of an explanation before he was interrupted by some tense shouting bordering on kung fu fighting on the other side of the door.

That's okay, let's see how you do it, a woman’s sturdy but sexy voice could be heard clearly behind closed doors. She challenged the group of men who could also be heard outside that they should put up their dukes and then they would get down to it, inviting each and every one of them to give her their best shot. Fire away, she hollered over all of them.

The ruckus gave Pepper a crooked, unbreakable smile. He liked his women firm and fighters and more than just a girl; he lusted for a maneater. He reveled in the noise, wanting all of them to just shout it all out.

The maneater of a woman letting it all out was Aretha Swift, the tough cookie who gave even better than she got and who dismissed the male homicide detectives once more by reminding them she didn’t need no scrubs. She burst through the sergeant’s door like a hurricane, her voice still echoing in the hallway like a never-ending e-major chord. She just turned and walked away, having nothing to do with all of them and nothing left to say.

Girl on fire! declared Pepper admiringly as she entered.

Swift gave Pepper a grudging nod and said nothing in return, taking took two purposeful steps to a position opposite Pepper’s speaker-desk next to Dylan, without acknowledging