Steel Guitar (14 page)

“She's Dee Willis. I don't want some city councillor or the mayor getting on my case about how we treat the rich and famous one way and the poor another.”

“Is there any heat to arrest her?”

“Not till after the autopsy. Probably not till after the concert. She brings bucks to our fair city.”

“Justice for all,” I said.

“I'm glad you're asking questions,” he said.

“You are?”

“It makes me think you don't know a whole lot more than I do.”

I crushed the pizza carton so it would fit in the bag with the empty soft-drink cups.

“You are planning to tell me about the park,” Mooney repeated.

I wondered if I should introduce Dunrobie's name. Mooney might be able to find him faster than I could.

“She was looking for an old friend,” I said. “A guy we both used to know, come way down in the world.”

“Usually those are the friends you don't want to find. They find you.”

“Well, Dee wants to find him.”

“Romance?”

I pretended to consider it. “Maybe guilt. She made it in the business; he didn't.”

“Guilt's funny, huh? A couple of my guys would like to arrest Willis just 'cause she's acting so damned guilty. I mean, why's she running around yelling she should have called the doctor, maybe this Brenda was still alive? That babe—excuse me—that lady had been dead for hours.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, “I heard her say that stuff, but she didn't seem like herself, you know, didn't seem connected to what was going on.”

“Shock?” he said. “Drugs?”

“No,” I said. “More like she thought she was somewhere else, like she was remembering something.…”

“Go on,” Mooney said.

“This could be total crap, but Dee—Dee and I—had a friend who killed herself. A woman—a girl then—Lorraine Holbrook. Dee was one of the people who discovered her body, I think. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that. But even on the phone, Dee sounded weird, like she was flashing back—”

“Acid?” Mooney said.

“I'm not talking about any drug-induced hallucination. I just mean another death, a similar death, could have thrown her, made her remember that other time.”

Lorraine, I thought suddenly. “Sweet Lorraine.” A song title. A song.

“How'd you get mixed up with this whole weird crew?” Mooney asked.

“Huh?”

“Not that cops aren't weird. I was just wondering. You okay?”

I kept my face carefully blank. “You mean, how I met Dee? Through the music. Dee and I once played together in a group. We're old guitar friends from a lifetime ago.”

“Old guitar friends” didn't say half of it. For me, a kid who'd picked up most of what I knew about the blues off scratchy 78's, watching Dee play was a revelation and an education. If I'd been a novice painter in nineteenth-century Holland, it would have been like having van Gogh, that weird guy down the street, teach me a little about color.

I tried again. “I even thought about turning professional. I don't think I was ever quite good enough, but I was backing Dee, and she makes you sound so damn fine. She studied with the Reverend Gary Davis. You know who that is?”

I expected Mooney's negative nod and went right on. “Just one of the greatest of the great old bluesmen. She was one of his last students; he left her his guitar when he died. Reverend Davis—I saw him play once—the highest praise he ever gave another player, he'd say: ‘Right sportin' playin'.” I remember every single time Dee said that to me. Just about gave me chills.”

“You sound like you'd be more than willing to do her a favor,” Mooney said softly.

“Look, there was a time I'd have given my left leg to be Dee Willis. I admire her, and I love her, and I guess I hate her too. And it plain doesn't matter. She's a music person. Nothing really matters to her but the music.”

“But the two of you were real close?”

“Yeah. We were best buddies.”

Mooney shifted on the bench, stared at a tuft of brownish grass. “Dee—uh, she ever come on to you?”

“You want to hit me with that again?” I said.

“Look, Carlotta, we found this Brenda woman bare-ass in Dee's bed. I'm not saying—Shit. I'm just asking: She ever come on to you?”

“We used to massage each other's feet. That turn you on?”

“Might of at the time,” Mooney said.

“Dee Willis has always had an eye for guys,” I said.

He wiped his face with a paper napkin, scrunched it into a ball, and sighed reproachfully. “And you never introduced me.”

I said dryly, “I introduced a guy to Willis once.”

“Yeah?”

“My ex-husband. That's the last guy I introduced to Dee Willis.”

Mooney grinned ear to ear. “I didn't know you cared,” he said.

“You ready to go?”

“One more thing. I happened to see a memo on Joanne Triola's desk.”

Shit, I thought.

“Why are you asking about Mickey Manganero?”

“I met him at a party,” I said truthfully.

“And you're having Triola check him out as a future date?”

“Mooney,” I said, “the party was a big free-for-all tossed by Dee's recording company. I wondered what he was doing there, that's all.”

“You see him talk to Brenda? To anybody?”

“Yeah. He was talking to me.”

“He's a piece of shit,” Mooney said.

“That's why I called Triola instead of Boy Scouts of America,” I said.

“Ask your boyfriend about him yet?”

“I haven't seen Sam lately.”

“Good,” Mooney said.

“You'd rather I was dating Dee Willis?”

“Geez,” Mooney said. “You're impossible.”

Twenty

“What do you mean, you don't know where the tube went? A yard-long bright red tube? Ouch!” Hot bacon grease spattered my arm as I let the flame get too high under the skillet.

“
Az der moygen iz leydik der moyekh oykh leydik
.” “When the stomach is empty, so is the brain.” That's another one of the Yiddish sayings my grandmother passed along to my mom. It must be true. I certainly felt lightheaded listening to Roz.

“Calm down,” Roz murmured. My mother used to say that a lot, too, in Yiddish and in English. Not when I was frying bacon. My mother, rest her soul, would have had heart failure if anybody had tried to cook bacon in her kosher kitchen.

Bacon is one of my favorite foods. Anything unkosher is one of my favorite foods. I sometimes wonder if this indicates unacknowledged hostility toward my mother—or just a good set of taste buds.

Lemon, that wise teacher of the martial arts, said nothing.

“It went in,” Roz reported. “Nine forty-two, mailman brought it.”

“And?”

“Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Me and Lemon, we're both looking for a red tube.”

“Yeah?”

“So some guy comes out with a big box, a real big brown cardboard box. Like for a TV set or something.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“After he drove away, Lemon said something about how the box seemed light, you know, for its size.”

“Right,” I said, spearing bacon slices with a fork, flipping them over.

“I went up to the secretarial-service place and the tube was gone. Guy picked it up twenty minutes ago.”

“Tell me more,” I said.

“Stop waving that fork at me!”

I lowered it. “Well?”

“Well, they're a mailing service, right?” Roz said defensively. “First off, they don't want to tell me anything. Then one of the young chicks, maybe a newcomer, says that the guy started out the door with the tube, then turned around and asked if he could buy a carton, something the tube would fit in. He bought their largest size.”

“Smart,” I said. “Too damned smart.”

“Then this frizzy-haired biddy started yelling at the girl, saying, ‘We never discuss the clientele.' I got bounced.”

I said, “And he just drove away?”

“Pickup truck.” Roz stared at the dirty linoleum. “And we didn't get the license. We weren't interested in a guy moving a TV set.”

“You sure it was a guy?”

“Uh, not a hundred percent.”

“What did he or she look like?”

“He wore a cap. I only saw his back. Thin. Sneakers. I'm pretty sure it was a man, but I couldn't swear to it.”

“Limp?”

“Huh?”

“Did the guy, the girl, whatever, limp? Walk funny?”

Roz looked at Lemon. He stared back at her. “I, uh, don't think so,” Roz said faintly.

“Damn.” I lowered the flame, broke two eggs directly into the pan, fished out a sliver of shell with a fingertip. My mother used to break each egg separately in a small glass dish, so that if any shell got in the egg or, God-forbid, a rotten or blood-blemished egg appeared, she wouldn't have to start over again.

I'd been hoping Dunrobie would stroll unthinkingly into the trap and make my list of music bars—my proposed evening's entertainment—unnecessary.

“I'm real sorry.” Lemon finally said something, shrugging his sloping shoulders. “I won't even charge you for the time. And believe me, business is bad.”

Lemon's “business,” besides free-lance karate lessons, involves juggling and passing a hat in Harvard Square. The pass-a-hat line has never been lucrative.

“Going out tonight?” I asked Roz.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” It would have been a shame to waste her outfit on me. She was wearing a Day-Glo lime-green T-shirt that proclaimed: “Sailors get blown offshore.” To complement it, she'd chosen hot-pink spandex tights and orange hightop sneakers. The ensemble went well with her skunk-striped hair.

“Yeah.”

“The Rat?” I inquired, naming one of her favorite Kenmore Square dives, where groups with names like “Slimeball Slugs on Meth” play to audiences dressed in dog chains.

“The Rat, the Roxy, a couple others.”

I said, “Can you ask around for a guitar player named Davey. Six feet, white, skinny. Heavy drinker. Druggie. If you get a hit, see if they know his last name.”

“Which is?”

“Dunrobie. Don't spread it around.”

“So then I'll be working for you tonight?”

I raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You want me to pay you?” I couldn't blame her for asking. The only way I'd go to those places is if somebody else paid. “Forget it,” I said.

“Hey,” she said. “Worth a try. Don't worry. I'll ask about the guy. To make up for today, okay?”

I carefully slid the eggs out of the pan, breaking both.

And I forgot to ask about the locks.

Twenty-One

I changed clothes several times before deciding on the appropriate attire for a bar crawl. I wanted to look approachable, but not eager. Above all, I did not want to look like a working woman, and prostitutes are hard to peg, since they don't constrain themselves to TV producers' ideas of what they ought to wear.

Unaccompanied men can walk into bars without raising many eyebrows, but you need a bit of protective coloring to fit in as a lone woman. A waitress's outfit would be ideal. Or a nun's habit, the old-fashioned full-dress version, complete with wimple.

Lacking such body armor, the best way to avoid trouble is to arrive with an escort. I considered my choices. Mooney would be delighted, if he wasn't working. But Mooney looks too much like what he is, and his presence often gives the most willing gossip a temporary case of lockjaw. My other option was Sam Gianelli.

I met Gianelli when I first drove a cab for Green & White, back in college. He hired me, and taught me many things, like never sleep with your boss. I'm descended from cops; he's descended from robbers, his dad being a local Mafia underboss. The only thing we have in common is that old boy-girl stuff I never understand. There are probably a thousand guys who'd be better for me than Sam Gianelli.

What I could use right now is a twenty-year-old bimbo-lifeguard type, unmarriageable and unchallenging. Restful.

What Sam needs is a submissive Italian Catholic virgin, certified fertile, so Papa Gianelli can have a pack of grandkids.

We've both been married before. After Cal, I retired; never again. Sam, on the other hand, just got back from Italy, where he visited the old-country side of the family. One of the items on his agenda turned out to be a surprise trip to the Vatican to petition for an annulment. Papa arranged it; he believes in marriage even more than Sam does.

Half-Jewish divorcée that I am, if I
did
want to marry Sam, his father would probably have me garroted, shot for good measure, and dropped into Boston Harbor.

I decided to go alone. I called a cab. Cheaper than a traffic ticket or a parking lot.

Midnight the Kat's was the fourth bar I hit, after Harper's Ferry, Ryles, and Dixie's. I'd started out on beer and was still sober because I'd long since switched to club soda with a twist of lime, a drink that can pass for a vodka-and-tonic anyday.

Midnight's is near Auditorium Station. I remember when it was called the Vanity, which dates me, but I got into the blues scene young. The Vanity's where I heard the Reverend Gary Davis, the awesome blues preacher himself, play. He was an old man then. Dee got me the tickets. She was studying with him, five bucks a lesson, paid up front, and the lesson could last all day if the teacher stayed pleased with his pupil.

Midnight's is half bar, half performance-hall. You walk into the bar first, heavy with cigarette smoke, then descend three steps to the music room with its pine-board floor and rickety tables.

The sign over the door says the fire department allows fifty-five patrons. I've never counted, but I think the management must pay somebody off, weekends at least. You don't get the superstars at a small place like this, not even the second rank. People on the way up, or the way down. Some are pretty damn good, and often the best seem on the slide rather than on the make.