Felonious Jazz

by Bryan Gilmer

  Jeff’s fury returned, and he squeezed the phone so tightly it hurt his hand.

  “I think it’s the guy I’ve been hunting. My boss’ husband, actually,” Jeff said. “I’m up here in Philly looking for him. And shit, he’s down there, coming after you. How did he get into your room?”

  “Well, either I didn’t close the door completely, or he had a key. Nobody forced the door.”

  “Maggie, are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “I hope so. It felt like I landed a pretty good one. It hurt my heel, anyway, and he groaned like it hurt, and then he scurried away. Thank God.”

  “He climbed into your bed? Was he trying to rape you?”

  “I don’t know. He had this piece of wire in his hand,” Margaret went on. “I think he was planning to choke me with it – but I woke up. Jeff, what if I hadn’t woken up?”

  “You did wake up,” Jeff said, on the driveway now, and leading Caroline down the precipitous driveway to the curb. “You made him run away. Where are you?”

  The Raleigh Police had taken her to their station to get her statement, she said.

  “And he stole your violin?” Jeff couldn’t believe it. He tried to center his swirling thoughts. The burglar must have planned all along to take the instrument, because grabbing it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d think of while you were running away from someone who’d just kicked the shit out of you. “Did they catch him?”

  “No. It was dark, so I didn’t really see him, other than he moved like a man. And that he seemed kind of short. And he’s another string player.”

  Definitely Leonard Noblac. “How do you know?”

  “Calluses. I bit one of his fingers, and the end was just like leather. He didn’t even feel it. You have to play for years to get calluses that big and lose the sensation in your fingertips. I’d say he’s a cellist or something. Makes sense – he would know what the Marquis was worth, then, maybe –”

  “He’s a jazz bassist,” Jeff interrupted. “Upright bass. Do the police have anything?

  “No. There hadn’t been anybody strange in the lobby all night, the hotel managers said. The police searched all the streets and alleys by the hotel. There wasn’t anybody. They said there haven’t been any similar crimes recently. But he could have driven right past them.”

  Caroline was staring at Jeff and taking in the end of the conversation that she could hear, concern lining her face.

  Jeff knew Margaret could take care of herself, but he had some caveman instinct to protect her. “What are you going to do now?”

  “They said they’d send an officer to the hotel with me to get my stuff. We have today off, and then tomorrow the bus takes us to D.C., which is the next tour stop. But I don’t have a violin. I’ll have to see if anyone else brought an extra that I can play. If so, I’ll need to practice my ass off. The Marquis has a different feel than most violins, so I might sound like crap playing something else unless I work.”

  “You should think about taking a concert off.”

  “Can’t do that. Don’t want to.”

  “Well, call and tell me where you check in.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m coming back down there today, Maggie.”

  “I wish you were here now. You could be my bodyguard.” She said it with an affectionate smile in her voice.

  “Like you need one.”

  By now, Jeff and Caroline were climbing back into the Audi. He glanced behind the seat at the briefcase that held the Glock. He realized that he was feeling so angry and worried now that he would have to be extra careful with the gun, be sure not to jump to any conclusions. Just focus on making the next right decision, then the next.

  Margaret gave an ironic laugh. “Ashlyn would pitch a fit, anyway.”

  “Ashlyn and I broke up.” Her end of the line went silent. “It wasn’t your fault. It hadn’t been working for a while, and my sleepover with you just forced the issue. It’s the right thing.”

  Jeff sensed something and looked to his right. Shit. Caroline was still listening, now boring into him with angry eyes.

  “I guess that explains the wine,” Margaret said. “By the way, thank you for that. It was very sweet and generous of you to send it. It touched the softest part of me, just like spending the evening with you again touched me.”

  In trying to do the math on Caroline’s reaction and what he would say to her after the call, Jeff’s mind reacted too slowly to what Margaret had said. What the hell wine was she talking about?

  She was still talking: “It’s why I knew I could call you this morning. But, like I was telling you, I have my own knots to untangle right now, even as I realize how totally in love with you I still am. I need you to give me a little time.”

  “What wine?”

  “The wine you sent to my room.”

  “I didn’t send you wine.”

  “What? 1982 Haut-Brión. From the reserve list? You spent more on a bottle of wine than my boyfriend spends on jewelry for our anniversary of dating. I couldn’t believe that the robber didn’t steal it. But in the dark, it could have been a $10 merlot.”

  Jeff was shaking his head and squeezing his fist in the air now. “A man delivered the wine to your room, last night?”

  “Yeah, a waiter from room service.”

  “Older guy. Salt-and-pepper hair.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I think that’s the same guy who attacked you. What can you remember? You have to see this picture. Check your phone for a picture message after we hang up.”

  Jeff held the phone in front of him, bracing it on the steering wheel as he called up the picture and punched the keys to send it to Margaret.

  “Who is Ashlyn?” Carolyn was asking, “And was she your girlfriend when you were screwing my brains out last week?”

  “Like I said,” Jeff told her. “We broke up.” He hit send.

  “So I’m a rebound thing? And who is Maggie? Is she your rebound too? Just in case I ever have to track the origin of a sexually transmitted disease, how many current sexual partners do you have?”

  “Look,” Jeff said, “none of it has anything to do –” Jeff’s phone rang, and he shrugged to extract himself from the conversation with Caroline and pressed the TALK button.

  “It’s him, but with a beard.” Margaret was strident. “The guy who brought up the wine. Now that you say your guy is a bassist, with the beard, I think it’s the guy from that jazz band we saw at the brew pub. The bassist who knew how to play. I’m pretty sure. Yeah, double-bass fiddle calluses.”

  Caroline was staring out her window, fuming, and Jeff started the car, pulled away from the curb with a yelp of the tires and tried to remember how to get to the airport.

  Fifty

  Leonard had a copy of the Independent Weekly newspaper open on the passenger seat of Marinna’s ice-blue Honda Civic Hybrid. Since he wasn’t hauling anything heavy, this eco-friendly car was a socially conscious choice for the 25-mile trip to Durham. There wasn’t a commuter train.

  He’d stopped at a filling station, called 911 and said he’d heard a struggle. He’d told them how to find Marinna’s apartment. He’d said he wanted to remain anonymous.

  He swallowed past a thick lump as he merged from Interstate 40 onto the Durham Freeway. They had probably found her by now. He focused his thoughts on the newspaper critic’s review of the new exhibit at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art.

  Leonard exited at Duke Street, and just when he could glimpse the old tobacco factory buildings in Durham’s downtown, turned left on Chapel Hill Street. That soon turned into Duke University Road and took him onto the elite campus.

  He pulled into the museum parking lot, got out and used Robert Claypool’s credit card at the kiosk to buy a parking receipt to leave on his dashboard. They would be watching the card now, probably, but he was willing to bet he’d be gone from here before the Raleigh cops could show up or send some
one. Maybe a Leonard sighting here would divert attention from Raleigh for tonight. That would be good.

  The museum building itself was a sculpture by a world-famous architect, an elegant jumble of white steel beams holding up a glass roof over a plaza among three huge galleries set amid a forest. It was a place that meant something. Getting this built had taken focus. Leonard took note.

  He paid his seven dollars at the desk in the center of the plaza and ducked into an exhibit called, “Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubbell Family Collection.”

  The gallery was dark, and in each chamber, a DVD projection by a different video artist played on a wall. Leonard walked briskly through the pale blue glow from the screen in the first chamber, rounded a partition and caught a chill. This was what he was looking for: “Sprawlville” by Sven Påhlsson.

  A projector played Påhlsson’s computer animations across the wall, a series of 3-D scenes – architectural renderings, really, viewed from crazy camera angles over and over:

  A vast, near-empty parking lot as viewed from above, its light standards and stripes like the hairs of a freakishly regular beard, the only detail of interest a couple of curbstones askew in an otherwise monotonous grid of angled parking spaces. The camera dived on the empty scene again and again, crashing the viewer’s nose into the asphalt over and over, the angle changing slightly each time, dizzying you with new perspectives yet revealing nothing new. There were a dozen pans and zooms of a blank billboard in the parking lot, a relentless search for meaning in an object that held none.

  Leonard sat on a bench. Now the camera moved down the street of a generic tract subdivision as if the camera were pointed from the window of a moving station wagon. Identical houses scrolled through the frame, house after house after house, the only differences being whether it was a motorcycle, a car or a boat in the driveway, whether there was a barbecue grill or a lawnchair or not. Påhlsson showed random lumber and cinder blocks strewn in the yards, telling the viewer that the houses were just bland piles of these same prefabricated elements.

  Påhlsson got it. Påhlsson hadn’t bothered to depict any people in this emotional desert landscape. Like the houses, the people were all so similar to each other in the suburbs that they weren’t worth drawing. The people were just the tiny white rocks in the suburbs’ endless sheet of sun-bleached asphalt.

  A new scene: Påhlsson’s virtual camera panned again and again around a shopping mall showing the buildings for what they truly were: a pile of empty boxes with air conditioning units on their roofs.

  Leonard was humming softly to himself. He wanted to work on a project with Påhlsson, compose some music to go with his projections.

  Leonard nodded to himself, felt the energy of communing with another artist, admired the Scandinavian for being so singular in his purpose – indicting American suburbia. The more Leonard thought about it, the more sure he was that this album was his life’s entire purpose.

  On the gallery wall, a plain white garage door closed again and again and again. Leonard wiped his eyes on his sleeve, stood and walked from the gallery.

  As he stepped outdoors, the trees that surrounded the museum yielded to gusts strong enough to flex their sturdy trunks.

  Now all the fragments lined up in his mind; he saw how it would all work.

  The pain in his side tugged at him harder now.

  The people Leonard had chosen to make him famous had to be at least as smart as he thought they were, and they must be close to figuring out who he was.

  He had to finish. It was time for the final track. Today.

  Fifty-one

  Jeff called Cooperton on the way to the airport and told him about Noblac, told him to fill in Raleigh PD about the connection to the attack on Margaret, to put out Noblac’s picture to all the TV stations.

  Cooperton ordered his lead investigator to do a criminal background check.

  “Hey,” Jeff said to Caroline, touching her arm gently. “I know you’re mad, but wait to hear what I have to say. When we get on the plane, I’ll explain. I’ll tell you right now, I’m not toying with you. But right now, we have to get to the airport, because we have to get back to Raleigh and help catch this guy. Let me tell you what he did last night to Margaret.”

  They picked their way through neighborhood streets as Jeff recounted the attack.

  “All of this is stressing me out,” she said, turning her gaze back inside the car. “There’s the freeway, and the airport is south.”

  When Jeff checked in again with Cooperton from the airport, Cooperton said the check on Noblac had come back completely clean, no arrest history or warrants.

  “His last known driver’s license was out of New York in the 1970s. We ain’t got a local address on him. Not listed in the phone book, neither.”

  “Shit.”

  Jeff hung up, found the airport road to the general aviation terminal, and within 15 minutes, he had given the key to his Audi to a dubious looking stranger, and they had shaken hands with their pilot – a trim, crewcut guy in his early 30s who was probably ex-military – and climbed into the cabin of a Beechcraft KingAir C90 B, a small turboprop plane.

  Jeff had to duck when he wasn’t sitting and could easily touch both sides of the little cabin. With seats for seven, all done in creamy white leather and burlwood, it looked like the most luxurious minivan interior Jeff could imagine, with a lavatory in the back.

  The pilot started to taxi and turned around and told them, “Tower just radioed that we’re second for takeoff, so I’ll have you there in a little under two hours. Once we level out, help yourselves to a cocktail.” He pointed out the bar.

  Alcohol was the last thing Jeff wanted, but 10 minutes after takeoff, he reached into a refrigerated compartment and pulled out Diet Cokes for him and Caroline.

  Jeff’s seat faced Caroline’s across a narrow, pull-out table. It was surprisingly quiet in here. As they passed over D.C., Jeff told her everything about Ashlyn, how he’d known the relationship was ending and failed to handle it soon enough, how he had spent the evening with Margaret but not shared a bed with her, how he had thought Caroline was just playing around with him at first. And how it was over with Ashlyn, now.

  She listened to all of it glassy-eyed, looked as if she might start to cry. She said, “I didn’t know I had to take a fucking number,” and then just shook her head. She turned to peer out of one of the circular windows at the freeways and streets and parking lots of the Eastern Seaboard that were flowing beneath the plane.

  Jeff decided to leave her alone. He’d felt a strong bond forming with Caroline, and he wanted to say something to let her know that he hadn’t intended to offend or hurt her, but he was sure he couldn’t come up with it right now. His personal life seemed an insoluble mess. So he pushed his woman troubles aside; catching Noblac was more pressing, anyway.

  He looked out his own window, and his thoughts kept coming back to what Mrs. Noblac had said about her son being obsessed with making an album. He visualized his office windows, considered the stylized nature of the all the burglaries, remembered each carefully crafted bit of graffiti.

  He thought about laying out his theory for Cooperton, then realized it was Margaret he needed to talk to.

  He leaned around the partition, and the pilot pulled his headset away from his ear, and Jeff asked, “Any way to make a phone call from up here?”

  “You got a cell with you?”

  “Yeah. Is it okay to use it?”

  “Sure. The only reason they don’t let you on commercial flights is they want you to pay for their expensive seatback phone service. Best to keep calls short, though. The network has to swap you from tower to tower a lot, so it’s easy to get dropped.”

  Jeff went to a seat farther from Caroline and placed the call.

  “What do you think about the idea that the guy is composing a jazz album of crimes?”

  “God, Jeff, of course,” Margaret said. “That has to be it.”

  “Listen, tha
t apartment that the guy filled with furniture? It was my place.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jeff had a momentary thought that having told her might have kept her safe from being attacked, but that didn’t make any real sense. “I didn’t want to ruin the fun we were having together the other night.”

  She made a little squeaking, incredulous noise, and he could see what a huge mistake it had been to keep it from her. But he pushed ahead in the conversation.

  “Listen, though, the note he left at my place had some weird acronym or word and said, ‘5. Emptiness and Fullness.’ Maybe the five meant ‘Part 5,’” Jeff said. “ ‘Emptiness and Fullness’ sounds like it could be a composition title. He capitalized the nouns in it – at the house where the furniture that turned up at my loft was stolen, there were these two shapes painted on the wall. One was an empty glass, and the other one must have been full. He took their master suite, full of furniture, emptied it and then filled up my place. The other graffiti at the house said, ‘One bedroom apartment, fully furnished.’ Like what he stole from them was enough to furnish a whole apartment. It also said, ‘You won’t really miss it.’”

  “You and your loft were the end of the fifth movement of the composition,” Margaret said.

  “At the bar, the guy said they were recording an album,” she said. “I remember the name of one of the songs because it was so bizarre: Everything Comes Due at Once.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said. Caroline was pulling out her own phone to make a call.

  “Oh my God. So this guy probably felt like I upstaged him,” Margaret said. “So last night, he came to attack me. I thought about it after we talked, and I think that wire he had was some kind of an instrument string. It was thicker than a violin string, though.”

  “Well, probably from a bass fiddle.”

  “Not that thick. The other thing, was, when he woke me up, he was humming. I don’t think I told you that. But I think back, and it had a jazz swing feel to it.”