“Like a fucking mummy,” opined Berto. He was right, too.
I sighed and set to work. I’d seen this before. For some reason, some people had a great belief in the protective qualities of sticky tape. The more, the better seemed to be their philosophy. I carefully cut it away. “Okay,” I said. “It looks like there is a record in here after all.”
“Finally,” said Ree. She held out her hand for the knife, and I gave it to her. “You mind if I keep this, Berto?” she said. He shrugged and she folded the knife and put it in her bag as I freed the record from the last of the packaging. It was HL-008, by the great guitarist Howard Roberts. I showed Ree the dead wax and we filled in our chart.
It was dark and the cool of evening had come on by the time we got back to Ree’s house on Acacia Avenue. As we stepped out of the car we saw there was a man waiting on her porch.
A white guy in a suit.
He stepped forward and said, “Miss Esterbridge?”
Ree hesitated and moved imperceptibly closer to me. Night was coming on fast and it was hard to see the man’s face. “Yes,” she said.
“My name is Gordon Hallett. I did some legal work for Dr Tinmouth.”
I felt Ree relax beside me. “We just heard,” she said. “About the fire. We just heard today.”
The man nodded. “It was a terrible tragedy.” I had the sense that he felt it was late and he wanted to get out of here, but he was being polite.
Ree said, “So what can I…”
The man quickly reached in his pocket as though he had been waiting for this cue. “If anything happened to Dr Tinmouth I was instructed to make sure that you got this.” He took out a small padded mailing bag and handed it to her.
“What is it?” said Ree.
“I have no idea.” He turned to the street. “Now if you don’t mind I’ve got a family function to get to.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
We watched him as he left. As soon as he was out of sight she handed me the mailing bag. It fitted snugly into the palm of my hand and weighed nothing. Ree was looking in her bag for something. She took out Berto’s clasp knife.
She gave it to me and I slit the package open and shook it. Out came a small piece of paper with an address written on it.
And a key.
24. TWELVE BOXES
The storage unit was in a district called Alhambra. It was in a dusty industrial park just off Mission Road. We used the key we’d been given and opened the creaking door and took one look inside. Then Ree made a phone call to Berto. He sent a van from the garage and we transferred everything from the storage unit, which proved to be enough boxes to crowd the van.
Ree did her share of carrying as we loaded up the boxes and took them back to the garage, where we unloaded them all again and transferred them to the high-security storage area, where Berto kept his auto parts. Berto looked at us sceptically as we schlepped back and forth, and said, “You really think someone’s going to be interested in stealing a bunch of books and papers? Okay. I got plenty of room. I don’t mind. Put them in the cage.”
Berto was right. The boxes were full of books and papers but also photographs, letters and journals—mostly jazz magazines, including copies of The JazzLetter by Gene Lees which I earmarked for special attention later, purely from a point of view of personal pleasure. But no records, sadly. I went through the boxes and took out a selection of books. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had to start somewhere. Berto watched in puzzlement until Ree explained.
“Chef here’s going to be taking the material out, going through it and bringing it back. Maybe like one book at a time, one magazine at a time.”
“So now I’m a public library.”
“Listen,” said Ree, “If you mind…”
“No, no, it’s fine. You can keep your shit here. I’ll make sure nobody steals it. I’ve got plenty of room.”
Each time he said this it came out with less conviction. I looked at the boxes. It was clearly an impossible task, but I said, “Just until I get it into my head.”
“Then you got to watch somebody doesn’t come along and cut off your head,” said Berto. “And then steal that.”
Everybody laughed.
Except me.
* * *
“Okay,” said Tinkler. “So tell me more about this Mexican food. Can you bring some back with you?”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to bring grapes?”
“No, just Mexican food and Rolling Stones albums. Anyway, you were saying that you think this jazz scholar knew something important.”
“Dr Tinmouth. Yes.”
“He sounds like somebody from The Wizard of Oz.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, you think because of what the doctor knew, whatever it was, someone bumped him off. Burned his house down with him inside.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it looks like that.”
“And they made sure they did it before he could talk to Ree.”
“Exactly.”
“But he left you a clue.”
“No. He left us twelve fucking boxes of clues.”
“How many? Twelve?”
“Yes. That’s the problem.” I stared across Ree’s living room. A wide selection of books and magazines from those boxes was strewn on the bare wooden floor. There were also piles of newspaper clippings and photographs and what I’d learned to call “tear sheets”—pages that had been torn from magazines. While working on this lot it seemed strange not to have a cat around to get in the way. If I’d been at home Fanny would have been sitting on any open book within about thirty seconds.
“But he arranged for you, or at least Ree, to get the key. So he wanted her to have this stuff. There must have been something he wanted her to know.”
I said, “It was a classic academic’s solution. Leave us all the necessary research materials so we could work it out for ourselves.”
“Or not.”
“Or not, as it certainly feels at the moment.”
“So it’s just a completely random mess of documents.”
“Documents about jazz, yes. Random except for three things, which might be significant.”
“Actually, come to think of it,” said Tinkler, “do bring me some grapes. Californian grapes. Organic would be nice. What three things?”
“Well, all of the material deals with 1955 or earlier.”
“Ah,” said Tinkler. “The year that Hathor Records came and went.”
“And the year that Easy Geary died.”
“Okay, nothing later than 1955. What else?”
“Well, at first it looked like it was just an undifferentiated mass of books and magazines and so on, but I found markers in the articles.”
“Okay, that helps. What sort of markers?”
“Sometimes a section of text has been highlighted. Sometimes there’s a sticky note or a piece of paper stuck in, to indicate what page we should start reading on. Like a bookmark.”
“Well, great.”
“Not so great. I’ve been ploughing through it and unfortunately this marked text seems to refer to just about everyone who ever played a jazz instrument, including a few who never got any further than just thinking about it.”
“Bummer.”
“But on closer inspection, most of the material seems to relate to either Burns Hobartt or Easy Geary.”
“Him again.”
“Yes. And the photographs are almost exclusively of those two, plus Rita Mae Pollini of course.”
“Ree’s grandmother.”
“Right. Which you would have expected, since Dr Tinmouth was going to be talking to Ree. So I’m not sure how significant that is. Some of the documents are about her, but again they may just be some nice souvenirs he wanted to show Ree.”
“You said three things.”
“Say again?”
“What was the third thing that wasn’t random?”
“Oh, yes.” I looked at the papers again, stirring gently in
a breeze from the back window. “Like I said, they’re all documents about jazz, naturally enough, except for one item.”
“The suspense is killing me.”
“A Los Angeles medical directory for the years 1948 to 1950.”
“Good luck with that.”
* * *
Ree came back with food and we ate in the kitchen. Just as we were washing the dishes we got a call from Berto to tell us another package had arrived. We drove over to the garage and found it waiting for us in the cage. It was one of the LPs we’d ordered while we were still in England. This one was from Times Square Records in New York. It was Hathor HL-010, Rita Mae Pollini Sings Professor Jellaway.
It was the one the late Jimmy Genower had wanted to sell us. I did my best not to think too much about Jimmy, sitting dead in his garden. I studied the cover. The photograph on it depicted a woman of almost unreal beauty. And I could see an echo of Ree in the bones of her grandmother’s face.
But we didn’t even look at the cover until after we’d taken the record out, studied the dead wax, and filled in our chart.
As we walked back through the garage Berto called us over and said, “You remember you said to watch out for a red-haired girl? Good-looking?”
“Nobody said good-looking,” said Ree.
“Right, well, anyhow there was this girl came in today. Had some story about bringing her car in for a service.”
“What kind of car?” said Ree.
“Carrera 911. Said she was having problems with the oil seals.”
I showed him the picture I’d got from Ian the photographer at the record mart in Wembley. He nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”
* * *
“So Nevada is in Los Angeles?” said Tinkler when I phoned him. “You understand I don’t mean in a geographical sense. That would be a map maker’s nightmare.”
“Apparently. Apparently she is.”
“She just can’t stay away from you.”
“Yes, that must be the reason,” I said.
“So, how’s the mystery of the Tinmouth archives progressing?”
“It isn’t. How’s the search for Christian porn?” Tinkler was staying in Maggie’s flat and was convinced, despite his sister’s religious nature, that she had a stash of pornography somewhere. And he wouldn’t rest until he found it.
“Equally a washout. You know, I’m beginning to think my sister doesn’t have a dark side. She’s just not interesting enough.”
“I need your keen analytical mind,” I said. I looked at the stacks of books, magazines, tear sheets and photos. Different from the landscape of data I’d been looking at last time I’d phoned him, but equally enigmatic.
“Oh-oh.”
“Here’s the situation. Virtually all the material points at two men, Burns Hobartt and Easy Geary.”
“You said that last time.”
“Well, trust me, since then I’ve become obsessed with the pair of them.” Across the room a square of morning sunlight fell on the faces of Geary and Hobartt. I had printed out a large black and white photograph of each of them and put it up on the wall.
Burns Hobartt’s face was elegant, haunted, marked with the almost tribal scars, bequeathed him by a dancehall fire, which had earned him his cruel nickname. Easy Geary’s was smooth, serene and nearly Asian. Buddha-like.
“So almost all the marked material concerns the two of them,” said Tinkler.
I picked up a paperback of Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz. “Plus a smattering of background reference on the early history of jazz.”
“Well, that right there doesn’t make sense,” said Tinkler. “That’s what my keen analytical mind tells me. Because neither Geary nor Hobartt belong to that period. They came much later.”
I said, “Well, Burns Hobartt was performing with territory bands in the late twenties and early thirties. But he only began to make his mark around 1935, after he’d recovered from the injuries he sustained in a fire. And Easy Geary was playing in US Army bands in remote postings like the Philippines in the thirties and forties. He returned to the States after World War Two and only rose to prominence around 1949.”
“So basically neither of them has anything to do with early jazz.”
“No, you’re right. They don’t.”
“Okay, so that’s an anomaly right there. And then you’ve got the other one.”
“The other what? The other anomaly?”
“That’s right. The medical dictionary.”
I stared at the thing. “It’s not a medical dictionary. It’s a medical directory.” It was a massive hardcover book with an orange jacket. “And it’s big enough to stun a proverbial ox.”
“But its very presence is significant. There must be some vital information in there.”
I sighed. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. At least some of the time. Other times I wonder if he didn’t just pack it in the box by mistake.”
“Dr Tinmouth?”
“Yes, he seems to have thrown this stuff together in a hell of a hurry. Like he just pulled out the relevant literature, marked everything the best he could, then tossed it all into the boxes and put it in storage. And you know what the worst thing is? When I go through the books sometimes there’s a loose piece of paper lying around—to commemorate the fact that a bookmark has come accidentally and permanently adrift and that we’ll never read what piece of text it was supposed to bring to our attention.”
“Total bummer,” said Tinkler.
“All the more so when it turns out that the medical directory is one of those books that’s lost its marker.”
“I guess you’ll just have to look at every page, then.”
I stared at the huge orange tome. “I don’t seem to have adequately conveyed the scope of the problem. This book is thousands of pages of small text. It’s the size of several telephone directories. It seems to list information on every registered professional physician who worked in the continental United States, plus Alaska and Hawaii, in the years 1948 to 1950.”
“And there’s quite a few of them?”
“It would take days just to flip through it,” I said.
“Have fun.”
A few minutes after I finished speaking to Tinkler I came upon a classic example of the adrift bookmark I’d been talking about. Between two books was pressed a narrow scrap of paper. It could have come from either of them, or from somewhere else entirely.
I put it aside with a pang of despair.
It was only a couple of days later that I turned it over and I realised it was a compliment slip from a firm. The name and address of the firm was printed at the top of the slip. Beneath these, in sprawling, vivid handwriting it read:
I couldn’t decipher the scrawled signature but I didn’t need to. The name was printed clearly above. Ron Longmire.
When Ree got in from her gig that night I said, “Have you ever heard of Ron Longmire?”
“No. Who’s he?”
“A record engineer. Along with Rudy Van Gelder and Roy DuNann he was one of the geniuses who created the sound of jazz as we know it.” I looked at her. “Most importantly from our point of view, he worked with your grandmother at Hathor Records.”
“And he’s still alive?”
I held up the slip of paper. “More than that, I think we’ve got an introduction to go and have a chat with him.” I handed it to her. “This letter, or note, is from him. I thought about not showing it to you.”
“Why not?”
She took it, read it, and laughed.
* * *
We phoned Ron Longmire and made an appointment to see him the following day.
His house in Woodland Hills was a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired stack of redwood and glass boxes arranged on a slope of the hill with a breathtaking view of the dirty brown haze hovering over the San Fernando Valley. As we pulled up outside, Ree was singing quietly to herself. The tune was familiar to me and after a moment I was able to identify it.
“Grandma’s Ha
nds”, by Bill Withers.
Except Ree was singing, “Grandma’s Rack”. I didn’t hear any other words, but I didn’t necessarily feel this boded well. She switched off the engine and we got out. Ree broke off singing when she saw the car parked outside the house.
“Holy shit,” she said.
It was a streamlined silver 1960s creation, its powerful curves built low to the ground. Ree went over and touched its gleaming surface. “A Shelby Cobra,” she said. “The 427. From 1966.”
“Careful with the paintwork.”
We turned to see a suntanned, hawk-faced man with silver hair cropped short in a military style. He was dressed in a safari shirt and khaki shorts. He was of medium height but barrel-chested, and his bustling vigour made him seem bigger than he really was.
He trotted down the steps and shook hands with us. “Ron Longmire. Call me Ron. I guess the first thing you’ll want to see is my recording studio. Everybody does.”
The studio was located in the basement of the house, or rather the lowest of the stacked boxes. We descended to it down a stone staircase in the side of the hill and entered through a small door at one end. It was warm and calm inside, and very quiet. The most surprising thing about it was that it wasn’t a single big open room. Instead, only half of the studio was open space, while the rest consisted of sudden cubbyholes and corners and arbitrary spaces that reminded me of a hedge maze.
“Each of these areas has its own acoustic properties,” said Ron. “If we wanted to reduce the sound level for a given instrument we’d simply choose the right place to put it.”
“Why not just lower the level on the mixing desk in the control room?” said Ree.
“Purity of sound,” I said.
Ron grinned. “Plus we didn’t have a mixing desk in those days.”
On the floor was a vast Persian carpet with an elaborate abstract pattern. Ree was staring at it. “I love this carpet,” she said. Ron shot her a searching glance.
“Do you?”
“Yeah, it’s just my thing.”
Written in Dead Wax Page 27