by W E DeVore
“Eyes up here, big boy,” she said, pointing to her own face and putting her hands on her hips.
Sanger let out a low whistle and stood back out of the potential blast zone.
“I like your shirt,” Rex said meekly.
“Yeah, I bet you do. You look like a huge fan of Swedish death metal. I’ll lift up my shirt right now if you can name me three more bands.” She turned to Sanger. “You gonna introduce me, cowboy?”
“Rex, this is my friend, Clementine Toledano,” Sanger said, introducing her. “Clementine, this is my very rude partner, Rex Landry.”
“I thought you said she was a jazz musician.” Rex looked confused.
“I’ve got layers, Rex,” she replied, still not sure if she was going to get along with Sanger’s new partner or not. She finally held out her hand and Rex shook it. “You should chill on the porn. It’ll make you go blind. It also makes Aaron uncomfortable. Keep your proclivities to yourself.”
Rex turned bright red and tried to stammer an excuse. Q stood on her toes and kissed Sanger on the cheek.
“Thanks for the driving lesson, Aaron. Good luck with the joint search and breaking that one in. Maybe explain to him that it isn’t polite to stare.”
As she let herself in through the front gate, Rex called after her, “Hey, I’m sorry, but if you don’t want men to look, maybe you should cover up…”
Oh, this asshole definitely has me confused for someone else.
“Read the back of the shirt, big boy,” she called back without turning around.
She smiled to herself as Sanger caught her joke and started to laugh out loud. ‘This is fucking war’ was printed in large Cyrillic font on the back of today’s shirt. Satisfied that her joke had landed and tickled Sanger before what would be a long day of police work, she continued to walk through the side gate and around the house to the studio entrance without looking back to see Rex’s reaction.
When she walked towards the courtyard, she heard a trumpet and a trombone playing a steadily crescendoing octave horn line. Charlie and Stanley’s long-time trombone player and younger brother, Walter, were practicing their combined tone, sitting on the bottom steps that led up to the main house.
Charlie finished the note he was playing before telling her that Stanley was at the hospital with Savion and would be about an hour late. He handed her a chart for the song they’d be recording that day and she went upstairs to practice in Stanley’s music room, carefully avoiding the long cables that had been run up the stairs from the studio that took up most of the first floor.
Stanley’s piano was already mic’d and she sat at the bench to look over the charts for ‘Bourbon Street Baby,’ smiling at the name, already knowing that this was going to be a fun day. She played the chords and sang through the first verse.
“Son of a bitch. Why did it have to be in B-flat? I hate singing in B-flat,” she muttered to herself after struggling to hit the higher notes in the chorus three times in a row.
Tori entered the room and asked, “You want some hot lemon water and honey?”
“That good, huh?” Q asked.
“Come on,” Tori replied. “I already have a kettle on. Stanley said this was going to be a tough one for you. Thought he’d get it out of the way first.”
Q stood up and followed her into the kitchen. She watched Tori squeeze half a lemon into a mug and drop it inside before pouring boiling water over it. She handed the mug to Q and pointed to the honey pot on the counter.
“Help yourself.”
As Q drizzled some honey into the water, Tori said, “I suppose he told you.”
She swallowed back tears just thinking about it. “Yeah. He already knows my darkest secret, so I guess it’s fair that he tells me his. I don’t know how he’s going to do this, Tori. Recording an album is exhausting when you’re healthy.”
Tori shook her head. “Not Stanley, Q. Aaron. Did he tell you?”
Her familial protection circuit went off and Q struggled not to call Stanley’s wife a lying, cheating whore.
She measured her words and said instead, “You mean, did Aaron tell me that you and he have been fucking behind Stanley’s back for the last month? Yes, he did.”
Q wasn’t in a forgiving mood, knowing what finding out that he’d committed adultery was doing to one friend, and what finding out that his wife was running around on him would do to the other.
Tori folded her arms and leaned back against the stove. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. I know there isn’t an excuse. It’s been so hard, since Stanley got sick and then I ran into Aaron. I needed a friend. I thought I could keep it under control. It had been so long since we’d seen each other. But when we were alone…” She looked away for a moment. “I don’t know what to do, Q.”
“Take care of your husband, Tori.”
“I wish it were that simple. I lied to Aaron about why I left Dallas all those years ago. I was miserable that first year Stanley and I were married. All the whispers about him and Loretta still seeing each other…”
“I remember,” Q said.
Stanley’s first wife and Savion’s mother, Loretta Benoit, was a bad habit he couldn’t kick. It had ruined his third marriage and most of the mid-90s for him.
“At first, it was ok. I was still hung up on Aaron, Stanley was still hung up on his first wife. But we enjoyed each other, and I thought it would work. But it just didn’t. So I went to Dallas to see Aaron. My plan was to tell him, that night, that first night as soon as I landed, that I wanted to be with him. That I’d move to Dallas if that’s what he wanted. That I wanted to give us a shot at being together. But as soon as I got there, all I could think about was that maybe I’d been discounting something more real with Stanley because of our age difference. When Aaron asked me to stay, I just wanted to go back to my husband.” Tori’s eyebrows stitched together and she suddenly looked very sad.
“Does Stanley know?”
“He knows I went to Dallas. He knows I spent three days getting my ex out of my system. He forgave me. He stopped seeing Loretta and we’ve had a really great four years together. But he doesn’t know it was Aaron. When he was all over the news last fall, I told Stanley that we’d grown up together. That our families had been really close, but I hadn’t seen him for years. I didn’t know he’d moved to New Orleans and I panicked. Please don’t tell him, Q. I know what I did was wrong. I don’t want to make the last few months of my life with Stanley into something ugly.”
Q was willing to concede that Tori had her reasons to escape her marriage, but not willing to concede that what she’d done to Aaron was fair. She took a sip of her lemon water and regarded Stanley’s wife from behind the cup.
“It’s not my business what happens between you and Stanley. That’s your marriage. But Aaron saved my life, Tori. He saved my husband’s life, too. Ben and I would do the same for him. Right now, we’re all he has and to us, he’s family. So, please don’t be offended when I tell you to stay away from him. I mean it. Leave him be. He was really upset about being tricked into adultery.”
Tori looked away from her and out the windowed wall of the back porch. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I should have told him. I tried to tell him. It was just nice to be young again, I think. I suppose you hate me.”
“Your husband’s dying. It’s got to be hard.” Q paused for a moment, struggling to find calm words to explain. “There have been three men in my life who saved me from myself. One is my husband, another is yours, and the third is Aaron. I won’t let anyone hurt them.”
She stared in awe at Q. “My god, you’re just like Yael, Aaron’s mom. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. She was like a fucking grizzly bear about those boys. Their father, too.”
Q was very flattered, knowing how much her friend loved his mother. “Guess there’s a new bear in town, Tori.”
Tori grinned. “I’m glad. That he has you and Ben.” She thought hard for several minutes. “Can you do me a favor, Q? Set him up with someo
ne who deserves him, please. If he’s seeing somebody, it’ll make it easier for me to stay away. Right now, my marriage is a three-legged stool and one of those legs has never really worked the way it should. But Stanley’s a good husband. He really is. I don’t want to ruin what little time we have left, because I’m weak. It took everything I had, not to take Aaron up to my bedroom at the party and burn my marriage to the ground, just for one more night with him. So, you’re going to have to help me out with that. Because there’s a part of me that still loves him very much.” Her eyes pleaded with Q. “Please, Q. I know I have no right to ask, but you have to help me.”
Q picked up the warm mug and took another sip. “He hit it off with one of Ben’s sisters last night. If you get a chance, you might want to tell him to move on. That you want him to be happy. Might make things easier for you, too.”
Tori walked around the island and hugged her. “Thank you.”
Q hugged her back, surprised at the surge of empathy she felt for a woman she’d never really bothered to get to know. When Stanley had married a woman just a few years older than she and Savion, Q hadn’t been surprised. Stanley’s reputation among the women of New Orleans was almost as legendary as his songwriting ability. But she’d had her reservations and Savion and Walter had them as well. They’d come to her and asked her what she thought. She’d told them that she thought it was happening too fast and Stanley was too old to be running around with a woman that young. But she’d also reminded them that there’d be an airtight prenup and Stanley was on his fifth marriage, so what did it matter if the three of them thought it was a good idea or not. They’d wanted her to talk Tori out of it and she’d refused. Now, she wished that she’d at least tried.
Tori excused herself and Q went back to the piano. She sat down and sipped her lemon water, humming through the melody in an easier key to get it into her head. She found herself missing Ben so badly she could barely sit still and do the work she knew she had to do. Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she pulled it out to read the text from her husband.
I miss you. Kick ass today. I love you. -bjb
She texted him back a similar message, adding a little more graphic description of exactly what she was missing at this particular moment, before setting down her cup on the floor and showing ‘Bourbon Street Baby’ who was boss. She couldn’t solve Stanley’s marital problems, but she could and would help him to make this album everything he wanted it to be.
◆◆◆
By the time Stanley returned from the hospital, it was nearly lunch. After a quick sandwich, QT, The Beasts, and the two founding members of the Gerard Group were ready to start making a little magic. Unfortunately for Q, that magic was in the worst possible key for her voice, but Stanley insisted that they push forward with it. He’d already recorded one of the funkiest piano takes any of them had ever heard and if they changed the key now, it would be lost forever and Q would be held responsible.
The leggy banjo player that Charlie had picked up the night of the party, turned out to be the even leggier audio engineer, named Lorene, that Stanley employed for his personal studio. Through her frustration at blowing take after take in the vocal booth, Q was enjoying watching Charlie squirm as his intended one-night-stand made it obvious that she intended it to blossom into a full-fledged relationship.
Q was in the middle of her twentieth attempt to master a chorus that refused to be dominated, when Sanger walked into the control room. She waved at him through the vocal booth glass and sang:
Bourbon street baby
Don’t you leave me high and dry
I’m begging you baby
Can’t you hear me cry
Her voice cracked for the tenth straight take in a row and Lorene stopped the playback with an exaggerated eye roll. Q wiped her face with both hands, cursing to herself before she finally spoke into the microphone.
“I’m sorry, y’all, this is right at the break in my voice. I think we’re going to have to drop it down or change the melody,” she apologized.
Charlie leaned over Lorene’s shoulder and spoke into the talkback microphone. “Come on, Q, grow a set, already. We already laid down the horns and the rhythm section. We’ll lose a whole day.”
Q put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. “Just because it’s an easy key for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy for me. How about we move it to D-flat and see how you like it?”
She could see Stanley laughing through the window. Everyone in the control room was talking and she couldn’t hear a thing. She sipped her tea, waiting for them to include her in their discussion.
Stanley finally spoke up, “One more take, young blood. We all think you can do it. Let’s take it from the top. I’ll let you go home to that handsome husband of yours if you hit that note. But if you don’t, I’m going to let everyone in here listen to that Champagne Nights solo you butchered when you were twenty-two.”
“You should have been a motivational speaker,” she replied sarcastically.
He winked at her and the playback started again. She took a deep breath.
Okey-dokey. Twenty-first time’s the charm.
The playback started and the drums pounded out a second line rhythm in her headphones before Stanley’s best imitation of a Professor Longhair piano part began to play. She sang:
Down the way
Down in New Orleans
There lived the prettiest woman
That you ever seen
She ran away
Before I took my shot
So, I’m following her
I’m gonna show her what I got
Oh, Bourbon Street baby
Don’t you leave me high and dry
I am begging you baby
Can’t you hear me cry
Everyone in the control room applauded her only error-free take of the day and she finished up the song. She left the isolation booth and joined them, flopping down next to Sanger on the black leather couch at the back of the room.
“You just had to pick that key, didn’t you?” she teased Stanley.
“I like playing in it, but I sure do hate singing in it. Why did you think you were going solo, young blood?”
She flipped him off and said, “Oh, fuck you, old man.”
She coughed as her voice reminded her that she’d been trying to sing the same song for going on two hours.
“Let’s call it a night,” Stanley said.
He looked tired. Too tired for seven o’clock at night. As they were leaving, he asked Q and Sanger to hang back. After the control room was empty, he closed the door and said to Sanger, “I’ve got a favor to ask, detective.”
“I’ll do what I can, sir,” Sanger replied.
“You think you can get Q into the ICU to see my son? I asked this morning, but they said only immediate family.” He looked at Q. “Savion and I haven’t gotten on very well the past year or so. I don’t think he’ll wake up for me, but maybe he will for you. I don’t think he ever stopped loving you, sweet girl. Please. I need him to wake up. I need a chance to make things right with him. Go talk to him. Maybe you can get through.”
Stanley looked so small and Q embraced him.
“I’ll do my best, old man,” she whispered.
Stanley asked Sanger, “You think you can do this for me?”
He nodded. “We’ll stop by the hospital on the way home.”
◆◆◆
Savion Gerard lay still in his hospital bed. His chest rose and fell at regular intervals as the machine that was helping him to breath bellowed in and out. His rich complexion was unnaturally sallow and Q rushed to hold the hand not attached to some tube or monitoring device. She leaned down and kissed his cheek.
“Oh, mathlete, what did you go and do?” she asked.
She looked up at Sanger. His arms were folded and he leaned against the wall near the heart monitor. She bent down and kissed Savion’s hand.
“Your daddy has a crazy notion, Savion,” she said quietly. “He thinks y
ou’ve been pining after me all these years. You need to wake up and tell him he’s an old fool. Tell him that he’s the one that’s been wanting us to get back together all this time, not you.”
She stared at the face of the first man she thought she loved. He was older but just as handsome as he’d been at twenty-one. She remembered how shy he’d been when he’d kissed her the first time. How nervous and embarrassed he’d been when she’d taken off her clothes for him and he’d finally admitted that he’d never made love to a woman before. She smiled at the memory of the next three days they’d spent together.
“You remember that trip we took to Destin?” she asked. “I made you cut classes on Friday and we just got in your car and drove until we saw blue water. We ate shrimp and went dancing and screwed in that big hotel bed until you more than got the hang of it. You didn’t want to come back on Sunday. Remember? You said we should just stay there, at the beach, swimming and making love and never come back to New Orleans. I know where you are right now is warm and safe and you don’t want to come back. But you have to, mathlete. I need you to come back to me. Just open your eyes and come home.”
She stood up and kissed his cheek again. “Come home, mathlete. Please come back to us.”
Sanger wrapped his arm around her waist as they left the ICU. “So, Yvie wasn’t joking the other night. You really were his first lover.”
“In a parallel universe, I’m most likely Mrs. Savion Gerard, FBI agent extraordinaire.” She leaned against him and they walked out of the hospital. “Any luck finding out what happened to him?”
“No, not much. Tori mentioned that she thought he may have been doing drugs. He wasn’t the same after he lost the funding for his research. He was burning the candle at both ends, helping with some kind of art installation while still teaching his classes. She said he was forgetting to take his meds on time, too. He’s been having more seizures than he used to. It’s looking more and more like an accident,” he explained as they climbed into the truck. “She also told me that you told her about Yvie and I hitting it off last night. Why would you do that?”