The Octopus on My Head (14 page)

“He was right about the De Haro Street address, wasn't he?”

“Yeah, so? Look what we found there.”

“That is what I'm looking at. Why did he send us there?”

“Because you tricked it out of him.”

“What if I wasn't so smart as we think I was?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if that guy knew Stepnowski was already dead?”

“How would he know that?”

“Because he killed him?”

“Oh, yeah, right. For what? Back rent?”

“For the sound system.”

Now she was amused. “Stepnowski was a nowhere drummer that had over eight thousand bucks on him when he died. The only way he could have gotten that much dough was to sell that sound system. The King said so, Ivy said so, and I say so. If somebody set him up to rip him off for it, they would have cleaned out his pockets, and they sure as hell wouldn't have missed eight grand in hundred-dollar bills. Am I right? Then Garcia's right, too. It was a crime of passion. Stepnowski's wife killed him cause he had a girlfriend. Or his girlfriend killed him because he had a wife. Or they both hired him killed because they were sick of paradiddles. Now please can we go get high?” She touched my cheek and smiled tenderly. “You can fuck me later, if you want.”

My phone rang.

Chapter Fourteen

C
URLY, WHERE ARE YOU
?”

You want to know something about musicians? When somebody they know calls them on the phone, they never have to ask who it is. Sound, to a musician, is identity. “I'm languishing in a purgatory of my own design, Ivy. Where are you?”

“In sunny Oakland, Curly, and I'm higher than Dizzy's double D.”

“That's peachy.”

“You sound like you're still with Lavinia.”

“How perceptive.”

“Don't you know better than to try to make it with your old buddy Ivy's ex-girlfriends? A chick just can't go from the percussion section to the strings, Curly. Not one with ambition, anyway. And don't go trolling among the reeds for cast-offs either, while you're at it. It's like Bird going from Dizzy to Miles. A real comedown.”

“That opinion has been around for a long time, Ivy. Step out your back door and you'll get an argument from a dead man on that one.”

Ivy said, “Miles was buying the Bird's dope for him.”

This rationale of that opinion has been around for as long as the opinion. But what difference did it make to me? Musically, I couldn't hang with any of those guys. The mere fact that such irrelevant op-ed material had even come up represented an anomaly in Ivy's single-minded pursuit of the poppy. Which only meant, of course, that he was momentarily out of the business of pursuing it.

“Call the tune. I gotta go beg a man for meaningless, underpaid employment.”

“Forget that guy. I'm here to make your day meaningful and overpaid. How'd you like to make five hundred bucks in two hours?”

“Oh, no, Ivy,” I laughed. “I have frolicked in lucre's golden shower enough for one week. It was just yesterday in fact. Twice in two days might kill me.”

“Okay,” Ivy said. “Seven-fifty.”

I glanced at Lavinia. Since it was Ivy calling, her radar was on. Avarice had dwindled her pupils to pinpricks.

“Two hours of work,” said Ivy. “Max.”

“Here,” was my answer, “talk to Lavinia.”

Before the phone was even on her ear, she said sweetly, “Hey, needle-dick. What's up?”

As she listened she frowned. Then her face began to darken. Then she shook her head, no, but her mouth said, “Yeah, but
….
”

I looked out the window. Commuters had begun to inch along Beale Street, a block south of us. A double line of their cars had begun to back up from the Harrison Street on-ramp, where it merged eastbound onto the Bay Bridge. It must have become three-thirty, somehow. Time flies until your drugs wear off.

I sighed at the windshield. A seagull overflew the roof of the Lexus, over the automobiles creeping across Beale, and drifted down the last two blocks of Folsom to the waterfront; mulling its options, no doubt, whether to further enguano the statue of Harry Bridges or, if it was built yet, the monument to Herb Caen. Then maybe the gull would glide on down the Embarcadero and around the corner to Fisherman's wharf, there to get in on the remains of one of those rounds of sourdough bread, about the size of a five-eighths frustum of a bowling ball and filled with crab chowder, that the tourists buy and eat a third or half of and discard into the gutters along Jefferson Street. From there, well, who knows, maybe there will be one more good year in which to follow the fleet to the herring before both the fish and its fishermen become extinct.

Altogether, despite the vicissitudes of progress, San Francisco is still a great place to be a seagull.

“Hold on.” Without bothering to put her hand over the microphone, which is hard to figure out how to do on a cellphone anyway, Lavinia said to me, “Ivy checked in with Sal.”

“If they don't talk to each other, nobody else will,” I replied.

“Sal got a call from Angelica Stepnowski.”

If I had any more dog in me than I already do, my ears would have pointed at her. “And?”

“Remember that synthesizer Sal was wondering about?”

“Yeah…?”

“She's got it. Wherever Stepnowski got all that dough, he didn't get it from selling the synthesizer.”

“Good,” I said. “As her public defender bobs and weaves through the many shadows along her path to death row, maybe Angelica will learn one or two Brandenburg Concertos.”

“That's not the proposition.”

I closed my eyes. “Of course it's not. Ivy wouldn't be calling if that were it. Ivy hates Bach. There's no money in Bach for drummers.”

The cellphone emitted incoherent squawking.

I said, “Let me guess. If you, because you have the car, drive to wherever Mrs. Stepnowski is and pick up this synthesizer, and maybe pick up Mrs. Stepnowksi too, and bring it all down to the World of Sound, Sal ‘The King' Kramer will make it well worth your while.” I pointed at the cell phone. “And Ivy's, too. Is that it?”

Lavinia clasped the phone to her breast. “You are so smart.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“Letter N, letter O. Go do it yourself.”

She shook her head. “No way.”

“Why not? It's more bread for you and Ivy.”

The phone emitted incoherent squawks. “What?” Lavinia put it to her ear. “Okay, okay
….
Yeah
….
No.” She began to shake her head. “No,” she said sharply. “The guy's a fucking creep, that's why.” She raised her voice. “I'm not going out there without Curly!” She handed me the phone.

“If you can get the car off that bitch,” Ivy said, “the split will be seven-fifty apiece.”

“How about I just do the whole thing myself and leave both of you out of it?” I suggested. “What then?”

“Curly,” Ivy said patronizingly, “Sal isn't going to hand this contract over to you, because Sal knows that guitar players got no balls. They're too worried about their hands.”

“Listen, Ivy—”

“Let's get one thing straight: This is my gig. You work it for me or you don't work it at all—get it?”

“Fine,” I said. “Adios.”

Ivy's tone changed without missing a beat. “Come on, blood. It's easy money. The chick's waiting for you to come get the thing. It's practically in your lap. Borrow the car.”

I knew what Lavinia would say but I asked anyway.

She mouthed the words: “No fucking way.”

I said into the phone, “No fucking way.”

Ivy said, “Shit. Come get me, then.”

“Go get him, then,” I said to her.

Lavinia looked thoughtful. “Is there any dope left?”

I repeated the question into the phone.

“What dope?” came the response.

Lavinia threw a hand toward Beale Street. “The bridge is already backed up.”

“It'll be an hour before she gets there, plus at least an hour back.”

“Forget it,” Lavinia said loudly.

After a pause Ivy said, “Okay. We're back to fifteen hundred split three ways.”

One month's rent and change for two hours of riding around. I looked at Lavinia. “Five hundred bucks, and I go with you.” She frowned. I waited. She nodded. “Deal,” I told the phone.

“Good.” Ivy cleared his throat. “There's a catch.”

“Oh,” I said to nobody in particular, “there's a catch.”

“What catch?” Lavinia said.

“You gotta front five hundred bucks to the Stepnowski broad.”

“
What?
”

“It's half the down payment. She gets the cash to blow town, Sal gets his synth back. That's the deal.”

“Naturally, I get reimbursed.”

“Naturally.”

“With interest?” I sneered.

I could almost hear Ivy shrug. “Fifty bucks.”

This took me by surprise. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Sal thought this up?”

“I suggested the fifty. The rest is Mrs. Stepnowski's idea. But Sal's game. That keyboard is worth a lot of dough and the guy only made two or three payments on it.”

“This is way too complicated.”

“No it isn't,” Ivy insisted. “Drive over there, give her the five hundred, get the keyboard. As soon as you're out of there, call Sal.”

“What for? He'll be closed by then.”

“He'll be there. He'll be waiting for the call.”

“I smell a rat. What's the big deal?”

Silence.

“Spill it, Ivy. I want to know what I'm getting into.”

After a long pause he said, “As soon as you call Sal, he'll dime her to the cops.”

After a pause I said, “Breathtaking. Simply breathtaking.”

“They want her for killing her old man,” Ivy explained helpfully. “And for reasons too deep and murky for us to plumb, like maybe Sal rents a sound system to the Policeman's Ball every year with no competitive bids, maybe some cop has Sal's nuts in a vice.”

“But Sal wants his action first.”

“That's affirmative. If he doesn't get it now, he'll never get it.”

“That sounds affirmatively shitty to me, Ivy.”

“It's business,” Ivy said. “What's this chick to you? You fuck her or something?”

“Not like you and Sal are going to fuck her.”

“Well, what'd I tell you about drummers? Not to mention guys who run music stores?”

“Nothing I don't already know.”

“Come off it, Curly. I'm being straight with you. That's what's going down. Get a move on.”

“What's the catch?” Lavinia said.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” I replied.

“So what else is new?” Lavinia said.

“What's to stop her from blowing me away like she did her old man?”

“Without you the synth is worth nothing to her,” Ivy explained sensibly. “It's a straight up trade, and Sal knows where you are. So do I, for that matter. She'll play nice.”

“I couldn't feel more secure if I were wearing adult diapers.”

“This is getting more like a job every day,” Ivy groused.

“Until you break a sweat,” I said, “you will know from nothing about jobs.”

“Thanks for reminding me. You remember the address?”

“4514 Anza Street.”

“That's correct. Either she's there or at 4516, right next door. It's the landlord's house.”

“What's he got to do with this?”

“Beats me. Maybe it's the only place she could go. Maybe he's soft on her.”

“That's true. He is.”

Ivy cared about sex like he cared about designer furniture. “Yeah, well, it's a Kurtzweil FX-11.”

“We'll find it.”

“At last. I'm beat. It's time for me to go home.”

“You're beat,” I said wearily. “Where are you?”

“I'm on the pay phone at the columbarium.”

A chilly bank of fog roiled the cypresses in the western reaches of Golden Gate Park, their limbs furled and bucked slowly in the gusts as if they were under water. By the time we got off John F. Kennedy at 36th Avenue, the sky was low and gray enough to have dimmed the Outer Richmond to a preternatural darkness. As we crossed Fulton at the northern boundary of the park, a wind blustering straight off the Pacific T-boned the Lexus hard enough to shake it on its springs. The shattered safety glass on the back shelf spun in the eddies of cold air like so much dust.

Nothing had changed at Anza and 36th, though it seemed like two weeks since we'd been there instead of 24 hours. By what was left of the daylight, 4514 was still the boxy, two-story, nondescript cottage it had been the night before, a single unit with neither garage nor ocean view, typical of the cheaper homes built on the edge of the continent after World War II, painted white then, and gray once since, in 1960 or so. Its foundation plates would prove to be dry-rotted, along with the first foot or two of wood above the ground. The boards of a small laundry porch out back will have rotted through as well. The double-hung windows on the weather side of the building would be painted or nailed shut on the first floor, except for the window in the bathroom, which would be propped open by a long-gone tenant's paperback copy of Philip K. Dick's
Martian Time-Slip
. A fifties-style TV antenna rotted nearly to transparency by the salt air titled and oscillated in the wind that slipstreamed over the flat roof, its vanes and feelers trained eastward like the limbs and even the trunks of coastal cypresses and Monterey pines, sculpted by two lifetimes of relentless afternoon westerlies. The roof itself would prove to have been layered with rolled asphalt time and again, one- or two- or at most three-year protection against the near-horizontal rains fed by the tropical moisture locals call the Pineapple Express, which travels 3,000 miles, all the way from Hawaii, several times per winter, to test every seam, joint, and crack in California construction mores.

Lavinia parked across the street and reached for the glove compartment. I stayed her hand. “Haven't we had enough gunplay for a first date?”

She looked me frankly in the eye. “A girl likes to play with a full hand.”

“I'll keep it full,” I said, moving her hand to my lap, “later. For now, let's just get Sal's keyboard and get out of here.”

Lavinia gave me a tentative squeeze. “I almost forgot what it's like.”

“That's too bad,” I said. “As a rule, it's worth remembering.”

She nodded; whether thoughtfully or skeptically, I couldn't tell. “Let's go.”

Both stories of 4514 were dark, but Lavinia touched the bell button anyway, twice. No answer. We walked next door.

There had probably once been a lawn, but someone had paved it with pink cement. This in turn had faded to a mauvish flavor of gray discoverable in the plumage of road-killed pigeons. A brick path between these two forlorn patches divided around a blasted bird bath of pebbled concrete, streaked with guano, in whose bowl lingered unwanted beach detritus—shards of sand dollars and of mussel and abalone shells, pebbles and bits of coral, the arm of a starfish, collected no doubt by children long since become park bench pensioners—and out of whose center spiraled the corroded remains of two strands of reinforcing wire, about which once perhaps twined a comely cement naiad, her smooth integument reduced by willful teenage baseball bats long since to armature and crumbs.