The Last Songbird

Book 1: A Pacific Coast Highway Mystery

by Daniel Weizmann

Genres: General Fiction; Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Hard-Boiled; Noir

Synopsis

“Blending the bright lights of celebrity and fame with the primal urges and darkness … Weizmann is a confident, polished storyteller who honors his influences and while weaving his amateur detective through a complex mystery that will keep you turning the pages until you’ve reached the haunting finale. A sharp, memorable debut.” -- Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity

A gritty, fast-paced neo-noir that explores the consumptive nature of fame, celebrity, and motherhood through the lens of a driver lost in the gig economy.

A struggling songwriter and Lyft driver, Adam Zantz’s life changes when he accepts a ride request in Malibu and 1970s music icon Annie Linden enters his dented VW Jetta. Bonding during that initial ride, the two quickly go off app— over the next three years, Adam becomes her exclusive driver and Annie listens to his music, encouraging Adam even as he finds himself driving more often than songwriting.

Then, Annie disappears, and her body washes up under a pier. Left with a final, cryptic text— ‘come to my arms’— a grieving Adam plays amateur detective, only to be charged as accomplice-after-the-fact. Desperate to clear his name and discover who killed the one person who believed in his music when no one else in his life did, Adam digs deep into Annie’s past, turning up an old guitar teacher, sworn enemies and lovers, and a long-held secret that spills into the dark world of a shocking underground Men’s Rights movement. As he drives the outskirts of Los Angeles in California, Adam comes to question how well he, or anyone else, knew Annie— if at all. 

The Last Songbird is a poignant novel about love, obsession, the price of fame and the burden of broken dreams, with a shifting, twisting plot that's full of unexpected turns.

Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 256

Sample

1: here it comes here comes the night
 
The night Annie Linden disappeared, my world spun out with double-time speed.
I was thirty-seven, she was seventy-three. I was a Lyft driver and she was a pop icon—once. She was my pickup and I was running late.
I had already failed as a songwriter.
As a song plugger, a pop critic, a recording engineer.
No way could I afford to flop out as a Lyft driver.
Pacific Coast Highway opened up and I shot through the gap, gunned it for the last stretch of Zuma trying to make up for lost minutes. One lone cop car idled about a hundred yards from Annie’s estate—I thought nothing of it. Then I pulled the silver ’16 Jetta with the rear dent onto the gravel loop and saw the whirling red-and-blue lights. The gate was wide open—two more cop cars idled. Potted purple catmint wavered in their hot white beams.
A policeman got out of one of the black-and-whites, approaching with the look of a man ready for violence. Big guy but short, built like a brick oven.
“Name?”
“Adam Zantz.”
“Who you here to see, Mr. Zantz.”
I pointed at my light-up Lyft Amp. “Ms. Linden—she’s my regular. She just called for an eight o’clock pickup.”
 “Called?”
“About an hour ago—we’re . . . off-app.”
“How’s that work?”
“I—she has my number, she wouldn’t use the app after our first ride.”
He grumbled. “You don’t look like a Lyft driver.” I wasn’t sure what a Lyft driver was supposed to look like. Me, I was a five-foot-eight skinny Jew with a big schnoz and eyes that telegraphed every damn thing I was feeling—present worry included. I zipped up my black hoodie as his Motorola rang. He turned his back to me. “I’m here at beachfront—the Linden residence.  . . . Yeah, her. There’s a 187 on the premises—beach adjacent, maybe more.” My heart thumped, gooseflesh. The cop went on. “I got two guys inside, so send another two units. . . . Huh? . . . No, surveillance went down forty minutes ago.” He signed off, then gave me the glare. “You know the place?”
“Pretty well, yeah. There’s a security man named Troy by the main gate.” Troy’s booth was a Tudor octagon of one-way mirrors that made it look like one of those zoetrope whirligigs. Too small for anyone—way too small for Troy.
 “This where you planned to pick up Ms. Linden, right here?”
“No. She stays down in the beach house. There’s actually four properties here. Pool house, guest house, beach house. And the main house she doesn’t visit too much.”
“Whyzat?” He seemed jumpy.
“She likes the beach house?” I said. “It’s small, manageable, conducive to the creative process? Listen, you going to tell me what the heck is going on here?”
“Why don’t you get creative and call her. Now, on your phone.”
I tried—no answer. I didn’t leave a message. I looked up at the cop, held back worst-case scenarios. I had gotten her text at 7:24—AZ beach house 8pm come to my arms. Classic Annie corniness—she sent lyrics in texts: “let’s chase the moonlight,” “we sell seashells,” “when the jungle shadows fall.” But tonight was different. Only days before, she had said, “I’m almost ready for that thing we talked about.” I thought come to my arms was maybe code for let’s go look into those people I wanted you to find. Then again it just as easily could’ve been get over here, let’s cruise, I’m restless. Vaguery, typical Annie—but my pulse was racing.
“Let me try her PA—he mostly stays in the main house.” I left out that Bix Gelden had been recently fired since he’d been fired and rehired so many times. For all I knew, he was in the main house. But his line just rang and rang too. This time, I left a message. “Bix, it’s Adam—can you let Annie know I’m out in the loop?” I shot the cop a questioning look and he nodded, so I went on. “Also, there are some police out front here—looks like there’s been some trouble, so . . . get back to me A-SAP, alright?” I hung up, shrugged.
“How come you’re so sure the PA’s on the premises?”
“He pretty much lives here.”
Two more police cars screeched into the loop. Now we were a fleet, five vehicles strong.
 “Take a ride down the hill,” the cop said. “Show us where you planned to pick up Ms. Linden.”
“You got it.” For his compadres, he waved a finger to the sky and moved back to his car. I put the Jetta in drive. We caravanned down the long, sloping private road to the beach house gate, also already open. The ocean roared and crashed its looping rhythm—white sand and gray-black Pacific horizon came into view. The lights were out in her place, no candles. That was not unusual though, since she wrote songs in the pitch dark. Outside, the lonely hemp hammock hung between sloping palms, empty and jiggling in the cool night breeze.
I stopped the car. A different cop came out and said, “Hang back,” and they entered, hands on gun belts. From my vantage point, I could see their shadows casing the place in the dark. My mind was trying to outrace my pulse: No Annie, no Gelden, 187, what the—. The deck chairs were moist from fog, the heat lamps off. Annie’s estate was one of about two dozen mansions along the point that lined up in front of the mighty Pacific like giant beasts stopped in their tracks. Other homes had long, jutting staircases down to the beach. That wouldn’t do for a seventy-three-year-old chain smoker. I was about one minute from panic with my hand on the inside door handle when I heard and then saw an ambulance coming down the hill behind us. Two people in some kind of red uniforms I didn’t recognize got out—a guy and a girl, with a stretcher.
“Oh fuck,” I whispered to the ocean, in full dread now. Anyone who worked for a senior had the kind of thoughts I was having—I didn’t burst into tears. But I did say: Be prepared to mourn—later. I dialed Troy, the security man—my third no answer. In one hectic move, I got out of the car, slammed the car door, and made for the beach house and its searching cops. The automatic lights didn’t go on—that was odd but not supernatural, since they were faulty when there were too many headlights nearby. A strong salt breeze held me in place. I cursed myself a second time for being late.
Now I stood in the dizzying red-blue crosshatch of police lights coming through the hedges that flanked Annie’s beach bungalow driveway. The cop blocking the door made a flat hand gesture—as in, get back into your car, but I didn’t. My heart was not yet completely pounding. I stood alongside the Jetta for about three minutes, which felt like ten. A new cop exited the beach house, a tall African American with a boyish, handsome face.
I approached and said, “Excuse me, sir? I’m Ms. Linden’s driver. She was expecting me about fifteen minutes ago.”
He went incredulous. “Annie Linden uses Lyft?”
“Is she—”
“Sir, I’m going to need you to stay by your car until we’re ready to question you.”
Two more cops came out of the beach house, expressionless. One asked a question I didn’t hear. The other said, “No, she’s missing.”
 “And he was found where?”
“On the periphery, they’ve got some storage units up there on the highway side.”
The units were garages. Annie had a six-car garage and one beat-up Cortina she never drove. And who was “he”? He could be Baxter “Bix” Gelden. Bix could have OD’d. Bix could have I-don’t-know-what. Bix was an accidental fatality waiting to happen. But then one of the cops said, “Now who is it I’m supposed to call?” and soon the crew in red came down the path with a stretcher carrying a body wrapped in a white sheet and I knew it was Troy because nobody was that long and lean. His black and yellow steel-toe Skechers poked out at the edge like two big orioles standing at attention. I got off the hood and stepped to the battalion.
“Can somebody tell me what the hell is going on here? Ms. Linden is a client of mine, I’m basically staff here—”
With a single, solemn nod, he broke out a notepad. “So you were planning on taking Ms. Linden where exactly?”
“I’m not sure, she usually tells me when I get here. If that. Sometimes she just wants to drive the coast. She intimated she might just want to ride. Who is that in the sheet?” I was hoping against hope.
“Intimated how?’
“I don’t know. She said to get her at eight, but that’s it.”
A fifth cop car screeched up and an older man in a Patagonia windrunner got out of the passenger seat with the administrative stride of a non-listener.
“Can we rope this off already?” he announced. “You got a slowdown on PCH, eyeballs everywhere.”
“Chief, this guy’s from Uber. He says Annie Linden called him for a ride.”
“This is the Annie Linden, I take it?” the Chief asked, still acting like I wasn’t there.
The young cop said, “Annie who?” 
 “You kiddin’ me?” the Chief said. “Only the greatest songbird of our time.”
 “Your time, Chief,” the young cop said, and his partners tittered.
The Chief ignored them, turned to me like he trusted me more than his underlings, even though I was closer to their age than his.
“You ever meet staff here?”
“Yes, sir.”
His tone went grave. “Would you be willing to identify a body?”
I nodded and we hoofed it back up the hill to the idling ambulance. They opened the back door and pulled the sheet off Troy’s young and shocked face. A wave of anguish crashed down upon me.
“His name is Troy,” I said—the muscles of my jaw pulled into a deep scowl. “Troy Banks. He’s grounds security.” Was.
The Chief said, “You have a way of contacting Ms. Linden at this time?”
“I can try her private line again.” I listened to two rings in the bracing sea-salt air and smarted when it went straight to voicemail. I shook my head.
The Chief gestured to the beach house. “Let’s go inside.” He made it sound like I was invited.
Raised off the sand by a smooth wooden deck, the bungalow lay still, as placid as the ocean wasn’t. By instinct, my hands reached to flip the indoor lights. The simple living room stared back at us, looking empty and dumbfounded. Just an innocent little studio apartment that had no idea it was attached to a chateau on the beach. Some disarray, toppled cassettes, half a bottle of red and one empty glass. Little blue kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, empty. The Chief rummaged around and I kept my mouth shut.
I’d left one thing out of our little conversation, a favor Annie had asked of me, only days earlier. She’d been anxious, halting. “I’ve got an idea. You told me you did some investigation work once, right?”
“Well, yeah, I worked for an investigator a long time ago,” I said, “but I was just a lackey . . . you know, doing repos, serving papers, lame stuff.”
But she was adamant. “I need to find out about someone, some people from my past. Something isn’t what I thought, I—”
“Are you being harassed?”
“No no, nothing like that.” But she sounded distracted, keyed up, almost confused. “I’m just—look, I’m getting older. And I want to, I need to . . . close some circles, look into some people.”  
“Whatever it is,” I’d said with a shrug, “Say when, I’m your man.”
“Now that’s what I like to hear.”
And then she took my hand, and hers was cool, bony, trembling a little as she reeled off her list and—
“Adam—no joking. You’re more than a driver to me. I value our conversations. And I would never ask you to do this if I didn’t trust you.”
The haunted look in her eyes was dogging me now.
The Chief picked up a stray cassette and shook his head to no one in particular. The ocean mocked us with its rolling, crashing rumble song.
 
They cut me loose at midnight. Sleep was out of the question. I headed back down PCH, radio off, a new melody looping, distant, driving me on, driving me mad.
The jukebox id was at it again.
The jukebox id was telling me she’s not there.
The jukebox id was saying Annie had secrets, secrets that bring tears.
Not everybody had the jukebox id, but if you had it, you knew it. Song fragments spun in your head, nonstop. You didn’t solicit, they sprang from nowhere, little 45s collapsing onto the turntable of your soul—then the needle drops. Please don’t bother trying to find her—