Written in Dead Wax (37 page)

“Is it just the cover?” said Ree.

“No,” I said, examining it. “It’s still got the record in it.”

Ron shrugged, grinning at us. “What the hell would be the point of keeping the cover and throwing out the record? Anyway, you can have it.”

“Have it?” I said. “You’re giving it to us?”

He inclined his head. “It’s the least I can do.”

“We can pay you for it,” said Ree.

“No. Just get a full-colour photocopy of the cover for us sometime, or a scan or whatever the hell you kids call it, and we’ll put that in the frame. That’ll be good enough for us.” He stood up and re-zipped his jacket. “I better get going before Ladybird gets cold.”

His car rumbled away in the night as I checked the dead wax and filled in our chart.

“Okay, so we know it’s a gunshot,” said Tinkler. “What does that tell us?”

“Surprisingly little.”

“Well, do we know who was playing at the session?”

“The instrumentation is very sparse on that track.”

“Talk like a human being.”

“It’s just a small band. Piano, bass and drums. Plus Rita Mae singing of course.”

“So, let me see,” murmured Tinkler. “That’s four plus whoever was in the control room.”

“Which was Danny DePriest, but he was also playing bass on this track.”

“So it was Easy Geary on piano. This DePriest guy on bass. Rita Mae on vocals…”

“And the drummer was Moses Gunther. He only died a few weeks ago.”

“Is that suspicious? Him suddenly dying, I mean.”

“Not too suspicious considering he was over a hundred.”

“Wow,” said Tinkler.

“Yes. Ree said the old boy and her grandmother used to see each other occasionally. Not often, but when they did get together they always seemed very chummy.”

“Is that what she said, ‘chummy’?”

“What she actually said is that they were thick as thieves.”

On the other side of the world Tinkler made a thoughtful noise. “Which would make sense if they shared a secret.”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“So anyway that’s four all told. People at the session.”

“Yes and unfortunately they’re all dead.”

“Which is really spooky,” said Tinkler.

“No it’s not. Moses was over a hundred. And Ree’s granny was eighty-something when she pegged it.”

“Okay, so four people. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out who shot who. Or is it whom?”

I said, “I think it was someone who wasn’t there at all.”

“You’re not making any sense. All that sex and California sunshine is rotting your brain.”

“California smog.”

“What do you mean someone who was not there?”

“I mean not officially. Jerry told me there was this goon who was putting the frighteners on Hathor.”

“Goon? Frighteners? This really isn’t you. Maybe we should talk about hi-fi instead.”

“It was this guy called Ox. A brutal ex-cop.”

“Is there any other kind?” said Tinkler.

“He was putting the frighteners on everyone who worked for Hathor.”

“You just had to say ‘frighteners’ again, didn’t you?”

“But that’s all I’ve been able to surmise.”

“What about your other clue?” said Tinkler. “I mean twelve boxes of clues.”

I sighed and decided to lie down on the couch and give up any pretence of working. I had the phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “I haven’t got any further than last time we spoke.” I glanced at the photos on the wall. “It’s all about Burns Hobartt and Easy Geary. But I have no idea what ‘it’ is.”

“Let’s think about this rationally.”

“I’m willing to try anything.”

“Now, what is the common factor between them?”

“They both got screwed by the music business. But then so did virtually every other jazz artist, especially if his skin tone didn’t happen to be whiter than white.”

“Focus. Hobartt and Geary. What
specifically
happened to them?”

I forced myself to think. “Burns Hobartt was operating one of the best swing bands of all time. It was right up there with Lunceford and Ellington. And like Ellington he was also writing for his band. He was coming up with great dance hits and popular songs. But to get his music onto the radio he had to sign a slave contract with AMI—American Music Industries. Which was run by the Davenport cousins.”

“The creepy cousins.”

“Correct.”

“Boy and girl cousins.”

“Correct. They took half the money and two thirds of the credit on everything Burns ever wrote.”

“That’s insane.”

“Well, eventually it did drive him insane. Or close to it. There’s an urban legend that he flipped out and killed both the Davenports at their house in Lake Tahoe.”

“
Their
house? They lived together, the cousins?”

“Yes.”

“In a creepy, we’re-first-cousins-so-it’s-incestuous kind of way?”

“Yes, according to the urban legends.”

“Well, what do we know according to urban non-legends?”

“That Burns Hobartt and the Davenport cousins were all in the Lake Tahoe house when it burned down. And none of them got out.” This had been the second, and final, catastrophic fire that had marked Hobartt’s life.

“So, end of Hobartt. What about Easy Geary? Hang on—can I call you back later?”

I told Tinkler he could indeed call me back later. I went to the kitchen and found an avocado to eat. I was becoming addicted to them. They seemed to attain a state of ripeness here in California that was unknown back home on my chilly island. When I finished, I put the slick skin and giant seed in the compost bin and started making some more coffee. It was ready when the phone rang. Tinkler again.

“I won’t tell you what happened during that interruption. You see, all your talk of mouth-watering Mexican food drove me to order in a bunch of takeaways last night. It was like getting in a bunch of hookers for an orgy, but in this case it was an orgy of eating and the fiery prostitutes were nine kinds of chilli and various other spicy, allegedly Mexican, dishes. Anyway, today my guts have basically exploded. It’s as though my poor quivering bowels are connected directly to the sewers.”

“I thought you weren’t going to tell me about it.”

“Anyway, we were talking about Easy Geary.”

I said, “I was about to say he got screwed by the same people who screwed Burns Hobartt.”

“AMI?”

“Yes.”

“The company that the Davenports set up?”

“Yes, then as now an unstoppable colossus of American commerce.” I sipped my coffee. “Their legal people went after Easy Geary because he recorded an album of Burns Hobartt material.”

“I know, I know, and left the Davenports’ names off the credits.”

“And when their legal people didn’t get immediate results, they sent in their
illegal
people.”

“Meaning your friend Ox?”

“No friend of mine.” I set my empty coffee cup aside. I tried to shape the caffeine buzz into an impulse to attack the stack of books sitting in front of me. But the best I could come up with was a strong desire to crawl back into bed.

“I feel like I’m studying for an exam I can never pass.”

“That’s right, think positive.”

“In fact, an exam I’ll probably never even take.”

“A little more positive than that.”

I picked up one of the books I’d gone through yesterday. “Let me give you an example.” I flipped through it. “An entire book and just one word is underlined.”

“One word?”

I found the page. “It’s a name, actually.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t trust me?”

I stared at it. “No, I mean I actually can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have no idea how to pronounce it. Here, let me text it to you.” I sent him the name,
Ysaguirre
.

“That is a weird one. Listen, let me help you out here. I’ll set about doing some research of my own and I’ll find out who it is.” I could hear him eagerly typing on his computer.

I chuckled. “As much as I appreciate your eagerness to sleuth, Sherlock, I already know who it is.”

“Oh.” I could hear his disappointment.

“It’s Red Jellaway’s real name. His family name. They came from somewhere in Central America.”

“So Professor Jellaway is part of this too?”

I shook my head, which is a stupid thing to do when someone can’t see you. “I very much doubt it,” I said. “I’ve been through twelve boxes of books and I’ve found exactly one sentence in one book that relates to him.”

“One sentence in one book?”

“Yes. Referring to that family name.”

“You’re right.”

“Am I? About what?”

“It does sound like an exam you’re not going to pass.”

“Thanks.”

“Any time. Listen, could you get me something from LA?”

“Mexican food?”

Tinkler groaned. “No. Please.”

“Grapes? Rolling Stones albums?”

“Well, all those too, of course. But I’d also really like a postcard from LA. To impress people. And the more tacky the better.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll do that for you. And you do something for me. If you come up with a theory that might explain all this, no matter how wild or weird, call me. Any time of the day or night.”

“My day or night, or your day or night?”

“Both. Either. All four.”

* * *

The rest of the week passed. Ree was singing in clubs and I was working my way through the archives that Dr Tinmouth had bequeathed us. When she was home we settled into a rhythm of sex, food, sleep and chess, which was very much her game.

I must say that chess, like proper Mexican food, had been a real eye-opener for me. I’d never really played before. Now I played badly, but with total attention and a kind of fierce analytical joy I’d never experienced anywhere else.

Well, almost never anywhere else.

Staring at the board, imagining the moves, I could feel it doing my brain good. Ree consistently creamed me, assassinating my queen from a sudden ambush or checking my king with subtle insurrections. Out of a blue sky she could turn a game around and suddenly I’d be demolished in three moves, my pieces rolling shamefully as I set them down on the table beside the board. The fallen.

But I was getting better with every game. And I was loving it.

Unlike my research project.

I was growing to hate the piles of reading matter, the constantly changing but always unwanted invasive presence in Ree’s little house. Stubborn, defiant piles of books and journals and documents. I stared at them and despaired.

But Ree expected me to figure it out. She never doubted that I would.

Neither, in their own way, did the guys at the garage who had taken to calling me Library Boy, as I came and went, borrowing literature from the high-security storage room. But despite all their derision they seemed touchingly certain that eventually Library Boy would piece it all together.

I wasn’t so certain.

Especially late at night, working as I waited for Ree to return. With the faces of Easy Geary and Burns Hobartt looking mockingly down from the wall at me. To my weary brain their expressions were beginning to converge in an identical, pitying disdain for the poor buffoon who was trying to understand what was going on.

One evening Ree came home and said, “I’ve got something for Tinkler.” She showed me an assortment of postcards. “You asked for tacky,” she said. The postcards were great. Dogs wearing clothes, freaks of the vegetable kingdom, historical photographs of Los Angeles street life with snarky comments.

I was particularly taken with a shot of the Hollywood sign done in the most garish Bollywood colours.

“I know what I’m going to do,” I said. I found a printout with pictures of Burns Hobartt and Easy Geary on it. I chose shots of about the right size and cut their heads out with a pair of scissors. Ree saw what I was doing and got me some glue.

I pasted the faces of Geary and Hobartt onto the postcard, over the two adjacent O’s in the
WOOD
in
HOLLYWOOD
. Then I wrote on the back:

“Poor Chef,” said Ree, reading over my shoulder. She kissed me. “Come to bed. I’ll show you something else LA has to offer.”

That night my sleep was haunted by endless, repetitive dreams from which there was no escape. Sequences of letters kept cycling through my anxious brain. First I saw the letters on our chart, those tantalising fragments gleaned from the dead wax on the records.

But then these got mixed up with the letters from the Hollywood sign. Everything kept shifting and altering as I made frantic, fevered efforts to try and keep up with it. It was like one of those dreams where you urgently need to dial a number on your phone, but the numbers keep changing.

And, sure enough, the letters on the Hollywood sign began to change. The two O’s merged into one, so it now read
HOLLYWOD
.

I opened my eyes. My pillow was soaked with sweat and my heart was pounding. Beside me Ree breathed softly in her sleep. I was wide awake. I had never been more awake. I got out of bed and went into the living room. I switched on a lamp and looked at the photos of Geary and Hobartt on the wall. Then I looked at the postcard with their images pasted onto it.