“Just about,” Ace said. He turned to look at the paper towels, which had landed on the couch, beside yet another guitar, this one a blistered old Martin steel-string. “Almost hit old Marty,” Ace said.
“Sorry, Marty,” I said.
“Marty says it’s okay,” Ace said, apparently seriously. He turned back to me and his eyes slid past, braked, and came back as he tried to snap his fingers. “You’re—I mean, you’re—your name’s not Freddie, is it?”
“Ace,” I said. “You’re amazing.”
“I’m telling you,” he said, tapping his temple again, “once it’s in here, it’s in here. Know what I mean?”
“It’s in there,” I said.
“Way in,” Ace said. “So, ahhh, what brings you here?”
“Came to help you clean that up.” I went past him and got the paper towels, pulled off a couple of yards’ worth, folded them over, and dropped them onto the pool, then repeated the procedure until the floor was littered with sopping brown paper towels. Ace watched me with the concentrated attention of someone who hadn’t seen motion in days.
“Cool,” he said. “Don’t cut yourself.”
“Careful is my middle name.”
“Really?” He nodded a couple of times. “Far out.”
“Jesus,” I said. “The water smells like it got a lot of use.”
“Shame you can’t smoke water,” Ace said. “I tried a couple times, you know? Soaked tobacco in it, let it dry out, rolled it up, and made fire. Coughed so hard my ears fell off.” He sat on the couch and picked up the Martin. He hit the strings once, then again, and then he struck a chord, and I glanced up at him as he sat there, head bent over the guitar, hair hanging in his face, and the chord turned into a chord progression, and his right foot began to tap, and as far as he was concerned I was no longer in the room.
I mounded the sopping towels, avoiding the glass, until I had a little sodden coffee-colored mountain, then wound a couple dozen towels around my right hand, wadded four or five into my left, and gathered up the whole mess. It dripped, but I got it into the kitchen. The big trash container was full, so I shoved the existing crap—mostly vegetable litter—down with my foot and then dropped the wet towels and glass on top of it. I rinsed my hands at the sink, dried them on Ace’s last three towels, and followed the music back into the living room.
Ace’s right hand was a blur, and the left was tiptoeing up and down the neck, hitting the frets with unerring accuracy. I stood there and listened for a couple of impressed minutes, and then sat next to him on the couch.
“Whoaaa,” Ace said, sliding away, his eyes as round as quarters. “Where’d you come—”
“It’s Freddie, Ace. I was in the kitchen.”
“Oh, yeah. Did you have some juice?”
“Great stuff. What were you playing?”
“Riff. Just, you know, whatever was happening to me right then.” He used his right hand to tuck the hair behind his ears. “What do you think about Bad Incision?”
“Sorry?”
“Or Vacancy. How about Vacancy?”
“They’re both swell.”
“The flower power stuff is dead,” he said. It seemed to be news. “You know, no more, uh, Daffodils and Moonbeams, or StarHawk.”
“The Pollen Children,” I contributed.
“Yeah, all that’s over. Edgy, that’s what they want now. Floater, Sealed Tomb, that kind of stuff.”
“How about Phantom Limb?”
“Ohhhh, man,” he said. “Can I have that?”
“All yours. You got the band already, or you just working on names?”
“We’re tight,” he said. “Session guys, tight. Phantom Fucking Limb. We’ll use that tomorrow.”
“You guys playing tomorrow? Where?”
“Same place we play most days,” Ace said. “Guy’s home studio. Up south of Ventura.”
“You changing the band’s name?”
“Different days, different names. Guy who cuts us, he likes to act like he’s putting all sorts of bands through the place, but mostly it’s just the five of us. He always wants a name, so we just, like, tell him who we are that day and he writes it on the tapes. Dig it. He cuts on tape. Gotta be the only guy in America still cuts on tape.”
I waited for a moment, but that seemed to be all he had on his mind. “Cutting on tape, new names all the time. Not exactly business as usual, is it?”
“Not hardly. Hang on a minute.” He did something very fast with the fingers of his left hand, walking them down the neck of the guitar, and brought the run to a close with a four-stroke strum that was faster than I could count. “Gotta finish it off, man. Otherwise it hangs around, makes the air thick. Can’t get a new idea until you’ve tied a knot in the end of the last one.” He reached over and pushed the stop button on a cassette recorder that was jammed down into the couch cushions. “Smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
“Good shit,” he said, putting the Martin aside and reaching down to slide an ashtray from beneath the couch. An open cigarette paper bloomed in the middle of the butts and ash, and a miniature hedge of brownish pot ran down the middle of the paper. Ace rooted around in the butts until he came up with a ball of dark brown opium the size of a marble. He rolled the opium lovingly back and forth between his fingers directly above the pot, and the ball obligingly shed little brown flecks. I could smell the heavy perfume. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m on a program. Nothing but alcohol and airplane glue.”
He looked over at me, weighing it. “Together?”
“It’s amazing,” I said. “Great headaches.”
“Far out,” he said, picking up the paper, expertly rolling it into a perfect cylinder and licking the gummed edge. “I’ll try it sometime. But right now, my girl is Lady O.” He lit the joint and inhaled a third of it.
“So,” I said. “The band names. What’s with the band names?”
“The man pay, the man get his way.” Ace blew out the smoke, closed his eyes, and said, “Oh, yes, mama. The man pay, the man get—”
“But why? Why does he want a new name all the time?”
“Because he can. Rich guy, he can get what he wants. Who was that fat guy? With the fiddle?”
I said, “Got any more data?”
“Oh, come on, man, you know. Whole city’s on fire, this tubbo’s playing—”
“Nero,” I said.
“That’s the dude. So rich they didn’t even give him a ticket. So the man up the hill, he wants us to be The Elbow Benders or the Pink Wrinklies, that’s who we’ll be.”
“What kind of music?”
“Four chords, June Moon Spoon Tune. Verse, verse, hook, verse. Shit you could have heard fifty years ago on American Dance Hall.” He took a deep hit and leaned back, closed his eyes again, and said, “Whoooo.”
“You guys sing, too?”
“Oh, no,” Ace said in a strangled voice, trying not to talk the smoke out. “The boys sing. He brings in one kid after another. They’re all pretty, but.…” He exhaled a cloud of controlled substances. “But they blow. I mean, it’s like the first round of American Idol, just one tone-deaf hood ornament after another. Some of ’em, they’re so bad he doesn’t even record the vocal.”
“The pay okay?”
“Not as good as a real session, but, hey, it’s five days a week.” He carefully scraped the coal at the joint’s end against the edge of the ashtray to shave off the ash. “No waiting for the phone to ring, hoping to get a call from some hot new band that can’t play for shit, looking for something like the riff from ‘Blue Tubes’ so they can put it out and pretend they wrote it.”
I remembered the doorbell. “You played ‘Blue Tubes’?”
He pulled the hair in his face back with the hand that didn’t have the joint in it, squinted at me, and said, “Your name—your name.…”
“Freddie.”
“Shit, Freddie, we can’t be buds if you don’t know I was the fucking guitar player on ‘Blu
e Tubes.’ I’d probably be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if I didn’t have an unlisted number. You know how many times that riff’s been bagged?”
“Who played the French horn?”
He shook his head; the horn didn’t matter. “Some chick. Somebody’s squeeze for the week. High school girl, played in the school band, showed up at the session in her band uniform. Wheeeoooowheeeooooowheeee. Of course, that was when you could look at a high school chick without wearing an ankle bracelet for the rest of your life. That’s what rock and roll was about, man. Swear to God, I don’t know why anybody learns to play the guitar any more. But it wasn’t the horn on that record, man, it was the riff.”
“It’s a great riff,” I said. “Classic.”
He put the joint between his lips, picked up Marty, and did the high triplet that opened the riff. “Can’t stop it, can you?” he asked. “Once it starts, it just finishes itself in your brain, right? Like somebody says one, two, man, you’re gonna go three every time.” He sucked on the joint without putting a finger on it, then hit the triplet again and exhaled over the dying ring of the guitar.
“The guy you’re playing for.”
“Yeah?” He was looking down at the guitar. His left hand hovered a quarter of an inch above the strings and went through a series of ghost-chords, moving down toward the soundbox and then back up again as the fingers curled in and out of the formations for G, C, D, and some others I didn’t recognize. “Maybe,” he said. “Just maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Huh?” He looked up at me as if he were surprised to see me.
“It’s me,” I said. “Freddie.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just—just, um.…” he did the progression again, pressing the strings this time and strumming lightly with his right. “Naahhh,” he said. “Salad oil.”
I said, “Salad oil?”
“Sure, man. We’re all looking for the big one every time the music comes through, all looking to strike oil. And we do. Problem is, most of the time, it’s salad oil.”
“Ace,” I said. “Five days ago.”
Ace took the joint out of his mouth so he could give me his full attention. “Five days ago,” he said.
“That would be Friday,” I said. “This being Wednesday and all.”
“Wednesday,” Ace said.
“Friday,” I said.
Ace looked past me a moment and then brought his eyes approximately to mine. “Next Friday?”
“No, Ace. Five days ago. Five days ago would be last Friday.”
He nodded. Then he nodded again.
I nodded back.
“The Knuckle Dusters,” he said.
“What about them?”
“That’s who we were. Last Friday, I mean. I remember because it was the shittiest session of my life.”
“Last Friday,” I said, “you played a session at DiGaudio’s house.”
“As The Knuckle Dusters.”
“What time?”
Ace said, “Friday.”
“Ace,” I said gently. “Friday is a day of the week. What time on Friday was your session?”
“Friday. The whole fucking day and most of the night. The songs were shit, we played for shit, the kid couldn’t of sung ‘Happy Birthday’ if he’d had a year to work it up. Bad biorhythms, Mercury in retrograde, Year of the Dragon, the whole deal.”
“You were there all day.”
He eyed the remainder of the joint. “Who’s smoking this stuff, you or me? All day. Say eleven in the morning till maybe one, maybe two a.m. Breaks once in a while for dope and munchies.”
“Breaks how long?”
“Half hour, maybe a little more.” He relit the roach, which had died from neglect, and sucked down pretty much everything that was left. “Why do you care about all this, anyway?”
“That’s a really good question,” I said. “Not much gets past you, does it?”
“Not old Ace.”
“And the guy who owns the place, he was there all the time?”
“Stuck to the chair.” He dropped the stub into the ashtray. “So why do you care—”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Play the ‘Blue Tubes’ riff for me again.”
He pointed a finger at me, pistol-style, and grinned. “I knew it, man. Once you hear the beginning.…”
He was still playing when I left.
“I need a perspective,” I said into the phone as I neared the turnoff.
“Meter’s still running,” said Louie the Lost.
“Let’s say you’re suspected of murder.”
“Whoa. Way out of my league.”
“This is a hypothetical.” The light in the intersection where I was going to turn went from green to yellow, and I slowed behind two massive SUVs, their owners doing everything in their power to ensure the future prosperity of Saudi Arabia. “So. Let’s say you’re suspected of murder. Let’s say you know you’re suspected of murder. Let’s say you’re sort of sitting around waiting for the cops to come and get you. You even hire someone to try to do something about it, try to get you off the hook.”
“This has a familiar ring,” Louie said.
“And now let’s say that it turns out you have a perfectly good alibi.”
After a beat, Louie said, “For?”
“For the murder. Let’s say several people can place you at home the entire day when Derek Bigelow, your hypothetical victim, got made dead.”
“How hypothetical is this?”
“Actually, not at all.”
“This is like a word problem,” Louie said. “Remember word problems? If Karen’s on a train going West and Harvey’s on a train going East and one of them’s going fifty-nine miles an hour and the other one is doing eighty-three miles an hour, and Harvey’s in the front car when the trains crash into each other, then how much did Karen weigh?”
I said, “It’s like that? How is it like that?”
“It’s like that because it doesn’t make any sense. If Vinnie’s got an alibi, why does he need you? Why doesn’t he just tell his cousin he was busy?”
“Yeah. That’s sort of the question I called to ask.”
Louie went quiet for a moment. “Well, who were these guys? Were they assembling a suitcase bomb or something?”
“They were playing music. In a recording studio.”
“Must have been awful, if he’d rather go down for murder than admit it.”
The light changed. The SUVs accelerated, running interference against oncoming traffic, and I trailed in their wake, turning left off Ventura and heading south, toward the house that used to be mine. “It was crap, according to one of the guys who played it.”
“But still,” Louie said.
I said, “Yeah,” again. I was getting the heaviness in the chest I always got when I made this drive, and the feeling forced its way out as a sigh. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, if Vinnie would rather get arrested than use his alibi, and I’ve been hired to protect him, maybe I ought to just let him get arrested. If the alibi is somehow worse than the murder charge—”
“Then what you got to do,” Louie said, and it was just this side of a snap, “is look at it different. If Vinnie has an alibi, then you know that he didn’t waste Derek, so there’s the big one out of the way. You just pretend you didn’t find out about no alibi and get him off anyway. Since he didn’t do it and all.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“You want good news, buy yourself a greeting card.”
“I can’t. There’s no category for self-pity. What’s it going to say, I’m sorry I’m feeling sorry for myself?”
“Ahhh, lighten up. Worst thing that can happen is you get convicted on the Hammer robbery, Vinnie gets arrested, and Irwin Dressler has you killed in prison.”
“By golly, you’re right,” I said. “I feel much better.”
“Okay, here’s good news: Our girl’s in San Berdoo. Got some clerk burning oil all night to search property transfers in the nam
es of Huff, spelled two ways, and Pivensey.”
“And traffic tickets.”
“And parking,” Louie said. “Tickets and property are two different places. She barely made it up there in time to get into the County clerk’s office. Tickets first thing tomorrow.”
“Fine. Great. Peachy.”
“Oh, and Stinky’s pissed at you. He figures you ratted him to Dressler.”
“I’m terrified,” I said. “I can barely steer.”
“Stinky may wear velveteen PJs,” Louie said, “but he can hire heat same as anyone else.”
“I’ll put Stinky’s heat on the list of people who are probably right behind me.” My turn was coming up. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Oh, good,” Louie said. “A reason to live through the night.”
This time, Bill opened the door.
“Ah,” he said. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Once again, I had to admit that Rina was right; there was nothing wrong with his nose. It would have looked better broken in four or five places, but it was a perfectly good nose.
“Ah, yourself.” I said. “Nice shirt. Territory Ahead?”
He looked down at it. “L.L. Bean.”
“Everything for the fashionable duck hunter. If you’d step aside, I could get off this porch.”
He blinked. “Does Kathy know you’re coming?”
“I don’t see how that affects you,” I said reasonably. I waited a second or two while reason evaporated, my blood pressure tripled, and spots multiplied in front of my eyes, and then I said, “Let me put it more directly, Bill. Get out of my fucking way.”
He was blinking again as he said, “Hold on,” and I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. Then I kicked his right foot out from under him, spun him halfway around on his left, put my foot up against his butt, and shoved. He staggered forward into the hallway, and I followed him in fast, planning to tie his arms into a square knot.
And stopped.
The hall ended at an antique bureau that Kathy had bought and painted white and gold. Kathy liked white and gold. To the left was the archway to the living room. To the right was the hall that led to the bedrooms. As Bill engaged in a windmill collision with the bureau, I saw Kathy staring at me from the living room, and Rina, with Tyrone behind her, in the hallway. Rina was open-mouthed, and Tyrone looked appraising, like he wanted to see it again, in slow-mo.
Little Elvises Page 17