Felonious Jazz

by Bryan Gilmer

  She didn’t realize that he’d played “Softly as a Morning Sunrise” note for note the way Wilbur Ware had played it behind Sonny Rollins the night of their great live recording together in ‘57, and Leonard sure as hell didn’t tell her. She’d just walked her parents up to bed, she said. They were visiting from Connecticut. And the girl gave him a lip-curling smirk when the bartender set down her drink, and she told him she’d sit in the front row for the second set.

  Afterward, she and Leonard ended up at her closet-sized apartment on the Upper West Side, his bass case parked underneath the little loft that held her bed. They spent the whole night up there screwing, her bumping her head on the ceiling when she was on top, sucking the thick calluses that gave his fingertips the shape of lightbulbs and loving that he was a musician.

  He’d always heard guys say they found the hottest action behind beige doors. That was true about her. She had a soft but sexy body under those boring clothes, and man, did she put it on him that night.

  And that was how TSB-2 had sucked him in; she’d been into him because he was an artist, screwed him like a porn star, then spent the next few years trying to turn him into a zero like her and her folks. His continuing fondness for the memory of that first night made him even more pissed at her now, false friggin’ advertising.

  A fucking divorce…

  Leonard walked straight to the Statesman’s front desk. The hotel clerk smiled at him. He gave her a sheepish grin. “I wonder whether you can help me to be a gentleman.”

  She narrowed an eyelid and looked back at him.

  He cleared his throat. “I imagine that sounds strange. Well, Margaret Samuels, the Cincinnati Symphony’s associate concertmaster, was supposed to stay with me and my wife this weekend, but we were called out of town unexpectedly. So she had to check in here instead.” He was losing her again, and he quickly figured out why. “You have a very nice hotel, of course, but her father is my oldest friend, and we feel terrible for not hosting her as planned. I’d like to take care of her hotel bill to make up for it.” He slid a credit card across the strip of black granite between them, just the way a bigshot would do. It felt fantastic.

  “Certainly, Mr…” She couldn’t read the stamped letters upside down.

  “Claypool. Robert Claypool.” Middle initial zero.

  “That’s very nice of you, sir.”

  “Heck! It’s the least I can do.” He gave a mild smile.

  She pulled up the record, hit some keys and swiped the card, and he was relieved when it went through, though he’d brought cash as a backup. Citibank didn’t yet know Robert was dead. The laser printer to her right spit out a sheet of paper.

  “Please sign here, Mr. Claypool.”

  Damn, $976. More than two months’ rent for his doomed farm. Leonard took her pen and glanced at the top of the page. He memorized the Cincinnati address and noted the room number, 512. He made a scribble on the line by the X. The clerk thankfully didn’t check the card to see if the signature matched. Instead, she rudely answered a phone call while he was standing there. She nodded and mouthed, “thank you” as she handed him a copy of the invoice pressed against the card. That made him smile. He’d sold the part. Maybe he should have been an actor. Jazz guys in New York always told him he should get in with a theater pit orchestra…

  Leonard went to the elevators and picked up the house phone, making sure to stand where the front desk clerk could see him. He pantomimed his half of a happy reunion conversation with Margaret Samuels while a dial tone and then an off-the-hook warning siren played in his ear. He grinned ear to ear as he imagined her inviting him up. He replaced the phone and pressed the elevator button.

  He watched the green numbers ding down, 3, 2, L, and the doors slid open. He brushed past a guy coming out dressed about how he was. The zero uniform. Leonard turned around and hit 5. The doors closed. He tugged off the sweater, pulled a chef’s coat from the briefcase and put it on. He stuffed the sweater into the case. The door slid open, and he stepped out.

  Leonard smiled at a room service tray full of dirty dishes on the floor just two doors down from the elevator. He didn’t even have to hunt one. This was going so friggin’ smooth.

  He looked both ways, quietly set the dishes on the floor and took the tray. He went into the little room with the vending machines and pulled from his briefcase a bottle of the Haut-Brión, a white cloth napkin and two wine glasses he’d stolen from the Rocky Falls Brewery and Grille. Ah, and the waiter’s corkscrew. Nice touch. He stashed the briefcase next to the candy machine and set up his tray on top of the little ice machine: napkin, bottle, glasses, corkscrew. Man, he friggin’ hated being a waiter. But tonight it would be fun.

  He smoothed the front of his chef’s coat, picked up the tray, and walked down to knock on the door.

  The hot brunette opened the door about a foot and peeped out at him with one clear, green eye.

  “Wine for you, ma’am, compliments of Mr. J. Davis Swaine.”

  The eye widened, and she opened the door. She wore a white terry-cloth robe with the gold embroidered emblem of the hotel on it. Leonard’s eye automatically went to the vee at her throat where the halves of the robe met, but he moved his gaze quickly to the floor. He wondered if he was starting to blush. She was so damn hot it was making him lose his confidence. Suddenly, he got a rush off of it. He was in control here. Him.

  He forced himself to remain professional and stepped into the room, looking not at her but at all of the flat surfaces. Within five seconds, he’d spotted the three things he wanted. One for now, the other two for later tonight. Perfect.

  “I wonder why he felt like he had to do this,” she was saying. “I should be the one sending something to him.” Then her voice went quiet when Leonard lifted the bottle and put the blade of his corkscrew against the foil at its neck. She’d spotted the label, understood what a fine wine had been set before her. He had to give her credit for that.

  “Wait,” she said. “May I see it?”

  He handed her the bottle, looking at his feet again but thinking, holy crap was he selling this routine. What a buzz.

  “Oh my God,” she said, reading the label. “Are you sure you brought the right bottle?”

  “I’m positive, ma’am. Mr. Swaine’s exact words were, ‘a special bottle for a special lady who loves wine.’ ”

  “How much did this cost?”

  “Quite a lot, ma’am. It’s a selection from our reserve cellar, and we have only three bottles left.”

  “Eighty-two Haut-Brión … how could he spend this much on me?” she was saying, smiling through her protest. “I can’t drink this tonight. Please don’t open it. I’ll take it home with me.”

  She was hugging the bottle to her chest. So hot. Leonard folded the corkscrew and looked to her expectantly with his hand extended. “I’ll leave this and the glasses in case you change your mind.”

  When she set down the wine and turned to dig into the purse on the nightstand, he slid the keycard off the table behind him and into his back pocket. He had a spare second to steal a peek at her terry-covered caboose. She gave him twenty bucks – wasn’t cheap like those people from Track Five. He’d take that into consideration, too. He turned to leave and then stopped at the door.

  “Mr. Swaine also wanted me to give you a message,” Leonard said. She waited rapt to hear what it would be, and the moment thrilled him. “He asked that you not try to contact him until tomorrow. He said you would understand why. Good night, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Mount Airy’s Crandall Hotel was down to one room, and it had two double beds. Right after the room’s door shut behind them, Jeff and Caroline stripped each other’s clothes and had urgent, infatuated, noisy sex on one bed, defiling every square foot of the mattress over several hours until Jeff felt a near chemical high from it.

  “My God,” Caroline breathed. “You know how to rock my world.”

  Then they kissed wetly for another minute, moved to the clean bed
, had sex once more, sweetly, then fell asleep naked, tangled together, each smelling of the other.

  * * *

  EmmaJane woke when Dylin cried. His little footie sleeper thing was totally grungy now, with drool and spitup and even a little stain from poop on it. But Dylin seemed like he was getting to know her – like her, even. He would settle down a lot faster now whenever she picked him up. He would quiet down and stare into her eyes and sometimes even give her a little grin.

  She mixed him up a new bottle of formula and realized the big creeper had been gone all day long. She started to worry that maybe he wouldn’t ever come back, just leave them locked in here until all the food and water and stuff ran out.

  In case he did come back, and in case her diaper trick didn’t work, EmmaJane had a couple of the sharp-edged metal lids in the pockets of her jeans now.

  MONDAY

  Forty-six

  After playing a couple of sets at a steakhouse in Cary with the band, Leonard parked again downtown near the Statesman at five after midnight. This week had been exhausting, but as he thought about what he would do now, artistic energy replaced his fatigue. Yeah, man, Leonard was jammin’. A jazzman’s always ready to play another set.

  He focused on the righteous feeling he’d gotten from killing Robert. The guy had lorded his power over Leonard, and it was only reasonable to expect an oppressed person to lash back if you painted them into a corner like that. It was just natural justice.

  He walked through the lobby again, and there was no one at the front desk now. A guy, the night manager or something, peeked out from an office off to the side behind the desk, and Leonard raised his left hand in a magnanimous wave as he pulled the smooth, white keycard from his right pants pocket. The guy turned back into the office.

  Leonard zipped up the elevator to 521. There was no light at the crack under the door. Very nice. He put his ear to it just to double check. Just the hum of the vending machines down the hall, the dissonant whine of a fluorescent light a few feet to the right of his head. He shuddered. They were wrong notes, sounds that should never make it into any musical composition.

  He pulled a square paper envelope from his hip pocket and gently pulled out the thinnest string from the set of four bass guitar strings – the ones from Landrake’s Musical Instruments in the old neighborhood. Finding them in an old cardboard box a few months ago and remembering how he’d obtained them had been the first inspiration for the whole album. That exhilarating feeling… Then, as he’d noodled around with ideas, all of the pieces had fallen into place, making it clear to him that making this album was his destiny.

  The yellowed paper crinkled as he pulled out the coiled string. He loosed one end from where it was tucked into the tight circle. The tension in the metal released after all these years, straightened the string in an instant with a sound like a whip slicing air. The string dangled between his knees. Tonight he had options. He had the .380 in his right pants pocket and a capped syringe loaded with phenobarb in his left. He probably wouldn’t need to use either of them.

  He slid the white card into the slot – yeah, baby, just like that. A little green light flashed, and metal scraped, and the lever stiffened under his grip. He pressed down, then paused. In a hotel, you always heard this sound of a door opening during the night, and it always turned out to be next door or across the hall. You stirred and then fell right back asleep. He gave her a few moments to do it. Didn’t want any screaming, no matter how on-pitch it was bound to be, coming from her.

  He opened the door, stepped into the little hallway that led past the bathroom, onto the nice thick carpet that yielded under his stiff leather shoes. He pushed down the lever on the inside of the door, closed it silently behind him. He was safe now.

  His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then he could see her. He smelled something like bourbon whiskey. He was enchanted.

  In the light that seeped between the drapes she looked like a fairytale princess. No wonder J. Davis had fallen in love with her. She lay near the far edge of the king-size bed, face down. She had fallen asleep there under the covers, then cast them off, he guessed. She wore some kind of little tank top. And that perfect, tight little booty, with nothing in his way now but a flimsy pair of low-rider panties over part of it. He raked his gaze across the hemispheres of her ass and down those out-of-this-world legs. He’d never seen a body this perfect in person, only on the Internet. It was inspiring, man.

  Here on the desk was the precious violin. She’d left an instrument worth hundreds of thousands just lying in its open case, like maybe she’d played a little before bed. He guessed living with something precious like that made you forget to treat it special, made you forget other people would try to take it. He closed the case and latched it quietly, fixed its location in his memory.

  He found his way to the overstuffed chair he’d seen earlier.

  He sat in it quietly, resting the bass string across his lap. He watched her for several minutes, which had nothing to do with his plan. He savored the feeling that he was again about to fix something, was about to commit another act of justice. He would get J. Davis back for fathering a child with his woman through this girl, who meant the same to J. Davis. His dark-vision grew keener by the minute. He could see her face, see dark hair fanned out like a skydiver’s on the pillow above her, hear the smooth breaths through her nose, see her shoulder blades flexing with each one.

  He pressed the string between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, stretched it taut across his thighs without meaning to, until the pressure was as painful as his constrained erection.

  For some reason, she’d left her toothbrush on the table out here. He leaned over and picked it up. Still damp. He put it in his mouth and sucked, getting a strong spearmint flavor but searching for a taste of her, thinking about being in her mouth like the brush had.

  He sat watching, the brush clamped between his right molars, and he fell in love with her, too. She was the girl in the black dress in the club next to the table of record producers, his most reliable fantasy since high school.

  She was everything he was always supposed to have but didn’t get. She had a perfect life in some country club neighborhood, had been born with all the advantages. She’d used them to live out her dreams.

  It would be both fitting and very personal for him to make her a part of his perfect jazz album, he decided. He scraped a thumb across the string’s metal winding, making the faintest harmonic sound, and knew he was truly an artist, and she was his muse.

  * * *

  Leonard paced the moonlit yard outside his farmhouse. He yanked out a tall weed and beat the roots against the ground until the earth fell away from them. He was so friggin’ pissed at himself. He had run away! Total stagefright. It hadn’t happened to him in years.

  He’d had one knee on the mattress next to her pretty ass, was ready to throw his other leg over, press his crotch against that butt and lean his weight against her, be close to her, commune with his muse. Sitting in the chair in her room, he had imagined that, though she would be surprised at first to find him in her bed, she might simply throw her head back in ecstasy and welcome the embrace of a fellow musical prodigy…

  But as he had leaned down to smell her neck, somehow that woke her up.

  And just like all the other others, she had turned from a perfect princess to a fucking castrating bitch in one instant. She had rolled him off of her and kicked him hard in the ribs before he could press his weight against her – he felt the sore spot now each time he breathed in.

  Instead of calmly coming back in at the next measure like a good musician – jumping back on top of her to pick up the part as if he hadn’t been ready to play a waltz when a hot jam was next on the set list, he had just grabbed the violin and run out of the room. What a friggin’ wuss. Damn, he hated himself for that.

  At least he’d grabbed the violin.

  What had happened in the hotel room was why he hadn’t been much of an improviser before now.
What if you fucked up? What if you played wrong notes? With that possibility out there every time you strayed from the score, who could let himself go, be creative enough to make up something awesome in an instant? It didn’t always come as naturally as at the home center. You weren’t always in the zone. Things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to every time.

  As Leonard had driven away in the Lexus borrowed from another body shop, he’d seen the police coming to the hotel, lights and sirens. That had freaked him out. Everywhere he went these days, some cop car was on his tail…

  Now he had the violin over there on the seat of his station wagon. It was evidence. He wondered whether he should maybe ditch it. He walked to the car and looked through the open passenger window at it. Next to it was the still-unplayed bass guitar string that served to mock him.

  Then he’d gotten back here, and the babysitter girl was on some kind of monster period, bleeding on everything, so she was too disgusting to even consider, and anyhow, she looked like a skinny, scared little kid now, nothing like the confident little thing he’d first spotted or the sophisticated musician he’d BLOWN IT with. He had already broken her spirit. So he’d find another way to write her into his composition.

  He pulled another weed and just threw this one as far as he could. Disappointingly, it wasn’t very far.

  He hated doubting himself like this. Hating himself like this. He couldn’t stand it. He had to do something. He was angry enough to go ahead and lay down the final track, but that wasn’t what he needed right now. He was lonely. He needed the love of a good woman, someone to understand and be sweet to him. And suddenly he knew exactly how to make the feeling go away. Marinna. Nothing could make her anything but sweet.