Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

“Well, isn’t that interesting? It was just your grandma’s thing, too.” He looked at her and smiled. “In fact she chose it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. She had it put in without me knowing about it. A surprise gift. To celebrate the end of recording on Easy Come, Easy Go. We all knew it would be the last Hathor album and we felt it was kind of a special occasion. So she got this for me.”

  He stared down fondly at the carpet. “She even got rid of the old one for me. An orange monstrosity of a carpet, all stained with beer and cigarette burns and puke.” He smiled at us. “Speaking of beer…”

  We tramped back up the stairs to the living room of the house where a highly polished baby grand piano crouched gleaming. We walked past it into the kitchen, where we sat at the breakfast counter, blinking in the sunlight as Ron poured us Mexican beer from chilled brown bottles.

  There were pictures everywhere of Ron with a sprightly platinum-haired woman. “Is that your wife?” said Ree.

  Ron nodded solemnly. “That’s Ladybird,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  He grinned, his face crinkling. “Don’t be too sorry. She’s only gone to the store. She’ll be back in about half an hour.” He set the beers in front of us and sat down on the other side of the counter with his own. “Okay,” he said, leaning forward on his suntanned elbows. “What can I do for you?”

  I said, “It seems that Dr Tinmouth thought it would be a good idea if we met. Or at least, if you and Ree met.”

  “Poor old Jerry.”

  “You don’t have any idea why he wanted you two to meet?”

  Ron shook his head. “None.”

  I glanced at Ree. “Well, there are a couple of questions I want to ask you.”

  “Fire away,” said Ron.

  “First of all, do you have original copies of any of the Hathor albums?”

  “No.”

  “None of them?”

  “No, sorry. I got rid of all of that stuff years ago.”

  I felt a stab of loss. “Got rid of?”

  “Yeah, I sold them.” He took a sip of beer. “To collectors here and in Europe and Japan. For what seemed a lot of money at the time but was about a tenth of what I could get for them now.” He shrugged.

  “How could you just get rid of them?” I said.

  For the first time his good-natured grin faded and I saw how fierce that hawk face could look. “Listen, kid, they were my records and I could do what I liked with them.”

  “But they were beautiful. They were your masterpieces.”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “I made those recordings over fifty years ago. That was another lifetime. And anyway, I copied all of them onto DAT.”

  Ree chuckled and said, “That won’t cut any ice with the Chef. He’s strictly an analogue man. A vinyl guy.”

  Ron made a non-committal sound and sipped his beer. I cleared my throat. I felt a little awkward, but I pressed ahead. I said, “The other thing is the gunshot.”

  He stared at me. “The what? The gunshot? What gunshot?”

  “On one of the Hathor sessions. There’s a noise in the background. I’m sure it’s a gunshot.”

  Ron laughed a dry rasping laugh and took another hearty sip of his beer. He set the glass down and looked at me. “Listen, kid, I think I’d remember if somebody fired a gun on one of my recording dates.”

  “But it wasn’t your date. It was Easy Come, Easy Go. That was engineered by Danny DePriest, wasn’t it?”

  His face clouded over. “Danny DePriest? That kid was a genius. I let him do that record on his own. It was going to be the last album from the label and I wanted him to get the full credit for it. To launch his career. Which I guess it did.” He shook his head. “He was a hell of an engineer.”

  “What happened to him?” said Ree.

  He looked at her bleakly. “Somebody killed him, in Seattle in 1967.”

  “Killed him?”

  “Slipped him a Mickey Finn. He was in a bar and somebody spiked his drink with some narcotic and killed him.” He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I can’t prove it was murder. Maybe he put the dope in his own drink. Maybe it was a drug thing. I just don’t know. All I know is that kid had a hell of a talent, as an engineer, as a producer, as an arranger. What a waste.” He shook his head.

  “But you’ve got the master tapes for that session,” I said. “The ones Danny did for you.”

  He looked at me like a man coming out of a reverie. Coming back from Seattle, in 1967. “Of course.”

  “Would it be possible to listen to them?”

  “I don’t see why not.” He grinned at me. “And check for a gunshot?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sure, kid. We’ll put paid to this little fantasy of yours.” He rose from his chair. “Which track?”

  “The last track, side two. Ree’s grandmother sings on it. ‘Running from a Spell’.”

  He sat back down again, suddenly looking tired. “Sorry, kid. Forget it.”

  I had been half expecting this, but the disappointment was still woundingly sharp. I said, “Why?”

  “Because the master tape for that track doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “I’d heard that. But I was sure you must have a copy somewhere.”

  He shook his head. “Not me, not anybody.” Ree was staring at us. She was smiling a quizzical half-smile.

  “What happened to it?” I said.

  “Nobody knows.” He abruptly picked up his beer and drained it, then set the glass aside with an air of finality. “Well, you can forget about your mystery gunshot. I’ve got the DAT from the vinyl but that will be third generation. And anything less than first generation and we’re pissing into the wind.”

  “Are you sure?” said Ree.

  Longmire and I both nodded the same decisive nod. We looked at each other. He turned to Ree and said, “There’s no way we can draw any real conclusion without the master tape.” He picked up his empty glass and got up and put it in the sink, shaking his head. “And I have no idea where the hell it is.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Ree.

  25. A LITTLE DEAD

  We both looked at her.

  “You’ve got it?” I said.

  “I knew it.” Ron smacked his fist into the palm of his hand triumphantly. “I knew it had to be somewhere.” He’d certainly changed his tune.

  I looked at Ree. “We’re talking about the original 1955 master tape? From the session itself?” She nodded.

  “My grandmother kept it. And luckily she didn’t keep it in the attic.”

  Ron glanced up quizzically and we explained the great honey calamity. He nodded smugly and said, “You fuck with Mother Nature at your considerable peril. But our problem isn’t going to be that the tape’s too sticky. It’s going to be that it’s not sticky enough. Where is it?”

  “At my house,” said Ree. She looked at me. “We could go get it now.”

  “Yes,” I said. I stood up. My heart was beating hard in my chest. Ree stood up too.

  “We’ll go now and get it and we’ll bring it right back and you can play it for us.”

  Ron shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be that simple.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged and said, “What do you expect? We’re talking about a tape that’s over half a century old. We can’t just play it.”

  “Why not?”

  He sighed. “A tape is made up of three things. There’s the iron oxide particles, which record the sound, right? And then there’s the carrier, which is made of a kind of plastic. In those days it was mostly acetate, which was a bitch because it gets brittle and stretches. But we used an early polyester compound.” He glared at us to see if we understood.

  “And what’s the third thing?” said Ree.

  I said, “The glue that holds them together.”

  Ron grinned and nodded. “That’s right, kid, and it’s the glue that’s our problem
.” He nodded at Ree. “By now the stuff on your grandma’s tape will have let go.”

  I said, “That’s what you meant about it not being sticky enough.”

  He grinned toothily. “Correct. If we tried to play it now, the iron oxide particles would just come off it, they’d shed in a miniature grey blizzard, and you’d have a blank strip of polyester and a pile of iron oxide.” He chuckled. “And then the only thing you could do is get some glue and a microscope and try to put all the oxide molecules back in the right place. And to do that you’d have to be god’s smarter older brother.”

  He smiled into our silence.

  “So we can’t play my grandmother’s tape,” said Ree.

  “Oh hell,” said Ron cheerfully, “of course we can! But first we have to reactivate the glue on it.”

  “We can do that?”

  “Oh yeah, sure.” He beamed at us. “You just take the tape and bake it.”

  “Bake it?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  Ree and I stared at him with identical aghast expressions. I said, “You just take the tape and stick it in an oven?”

  Somehow he managed to laugh heartily while simultaneously sneering. “Hell no, kid, of course we don’t just stick it in an oven. Do you really think we’d do that? We’ve got a special device.”

  * * *

  We drove to Ree’s house, getting there with miraculous speed and fetching the tape from the top shelf of the cupboard where it had sat, undisturbed in a shoebox, for years. I couldn’t believe it was still there, that nothing had gone wrong. I was a little shellshocked with relief, looking at it. Then we set off back and sat in traffic for two hours, with me holding the box gingerly in my lap.

  I expected absolutely anything, including an attack by ninjas from a flying saucer.

  But nothing happened. Except the traffic crawled.

  When we finally got to the Longmire house Ron was standing on the drive, putting an industrial vacuum cleaner back into the garage. He paused when he saw us. He was now dressed in white tennis shorts, a lime green polo shirt and navy blue blazer. He looked the picture of health, like a man luxuriating after a workout.

  “Welcome back!” he said.

  “You look like you’ve been busy.”

  “What you said got me thinking. If somebody fired a gun in my studio then there’d be a bullet hole somewhere. So I went down there with a strong light source and inspected every inch of the place. Every wall. The entire ceiling.” He nodded at the vacuum cleaner. “Even the floor. I rolled up the carpet—had to vacuum the whole place first and wear a mask. You don’t want to breathe in any dust at my age. At any age, really. Anyhow, it was quite a project. Pretty good exercise, though. Where was I? Oh—I even rolled up the carpet and examined the floor. You know what I found?” He looked at us expectantly.

  “A bullet hole?” I said, without much hope.

  “Nothing?” said Ree.

  “Nothing!” Ron snapped his fingers. “That’s right. No bullet hole nowhere.” He looked at me. “You almost had me going, kid. I was actually thinking somebody might have fired a gun during one of my sessions.”

  I said, “I still think somebody did.”

  “Okay, kid, so what happened to the bullet?”

  “It left the studio inside somebody.”

  He looked at me. “Inside some… body?”

  I nodded at the vacuum cleaner. “When did you say you got the new carpet? Right after that session?”

  “That’s right.”

  I glanced at Ree. “I think that’s how they got rid of the evidence.”

  “Evidence?” said Ron.

  “Yes.”

  “And who would they be?”

  “Rita Mae and Easy Geary and whoever else was on that session.”

  Ron’s eyes became distant for a moment as he considered something. “Including Danny DePriest.” His gaze sharpened again and he gave me a hard predatory stare. “So what are you saying? That they got rid of my old orange monstrosity of a carpet because it was covered with blood?”

  “That plus it had a body rolled up in it.”

  “A what?” he said. He stared at me for a moment, and then he pounded his thigh and started to laugh. “A body rolled up in a carpet? Is that what you think?” He punched me on the arm good-naturedly. He had a considerable punch for a man of his age. I resisted the urge to rub the sore spot. “I’ll say this for you, kid, you’ve got a vivid imagination. So vivid you had me going for a while. But anyhow, one good thing came of it.” He beckoned to Ree, looking hungrily at the box she was carrying.

  “Come on into the kitchen. We’ve got us a tape to bake.”

  He led us through the big living room with its baby grand. Nodding at the piano he said, “Who needs recordings? These days if I want some music, I just get Ladybird to play me something.”

  In the kitchen there was a domestic appliance standing on the counter. It was a shiny, squat white cylinder. At first glance I thought it was some kind of salad spinner, but it had a power cable running to it. Ron looked at it proudly, then looked at us.

  I went over and examined the apparatus. I said, “The Smoky Snack Chef 500?”

  He nodded happily. “Yeah.”

  “This is the ‘special device’?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a Crockpot!”

  “No, it’s a professional food dehydrator. Great for my beef jerky and it also makes some mean sun-dried tomatoes for Ladybird. Although they’re not actually sun dried.”

  Ree and I looked at each other, then at the thing, then at him. “You’re actually proposing we put the tape in there?”

  He opened the box and examined the reel. “Yeah, for about ninety minutes at one hundred and thirty Fahrenheit.”

  “You’re serious. You’re going to bake it in the Smoky Snack Chef?”

  He grinned at us. “You wouldn’t want to try it with acetate, true. But, like I told you, this is a polyester carrier.”

  I looked at Ree. “Do you want to let him do this?”

  She shrugged uncertainly. “I guess.”

  Ron patted the Snack Chef. “I’ve used this baby plenty of times. It works great for restoring tapes. And it so happens it’s also great for making food! Just don’t do them at the same time.”

  * * *

  While the tape baked we sat in the living room and listened to Ladybird play the piano. She was a small, spry chubby woman with striking platinum hair. “Don’t mind Ron,” she told us. “His bark is worse than his bite.” She proved to be a good musician, thankfully.

  After a while Ree began to sing along with her and the two of them performed so well together that, at several points, I almost forgot to worry about the priceless audiotape being slowly cooked next door in a branded kitchen appliance.

  And after it was baked it had to cool, of course.

  Then finally we got to play it.

  Ron had a listening system consisting of a classic Revox tape deck, vintage solid-state Quad amps and some superb BBC LS3/5a speakers. I would have gone for the valve Quads myself, but the system was compact, high quality and no-nonsense. Perhaps a little like its owner.

  The loudspeakers were small but reproduced vocals beautifully and Rita Mae Pollini’s voice made the hairs stir on the back of my neck. Ree stared intently into the soundstage, as though trying to see back into 1955. Then it came.

  The gunshot.

  I looked at Ron. He frowned at me and rewound the tape. He played the passage again. Then again. Every time it sounded like a gunshot.

  “So what do you think, Ron?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He gnawed at a knuckle, considering, then looked at me. “Only one way to find out.” He went out and came back with a laptop. He attached it to an analogue-to-digital cable that ran directly into the Revox. Then he put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles and peered intently at the laptop’s screen as he launched some sound analysis software.

  We pla
yed the tape again and he studied the computer screen, colours flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. Finally he sighed and shut the computer down. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at us.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “What do you mean, sorry?”

  “Kid, the waveform is all wrong. It’s not a gunshot. It can’t be.”

  “It sure as hell sounds like one,” I said.

  He shook his head, a trifle mournfully, and patted the laptop. “Not to the analyser it doesn’t, and the analyser never lies. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a gunshot.”

  * * *

  I woke up from a deep sleep to find Ree sitting bolt upright in bed beside me, listening intently. The room was dark and all I could hear was her breathing. Then she murmured softly, “What the hell?”

  Thinking she’d been woken by a nightmare, I wrapped my arms around her. I put my face between her warm, fragrant breasts, ear pressed to her smooth skin, listening to her heart. She said, “I heard a car. I heard an engine.”

  “This is Los Angeles.”

  “Not just any car. Not just any engine.” She hopped off the bed and went to the window. Lifting the curtain, she peered out. “I thought so.” I went and stood beside her.

  Out in the street, parked in the cone of light under a lamppost, was Ron’s gleaming silver Cobra. Ladybird was sitting in the passenger seat, looking immaculate in a headscarf and big movie star sunglasses—despite it being the middle of the night. The driver’s seat was empty and there was no sign of Ron, until we saw an angular shadow move under the porch light and the doorbell rang.

  I pulled on a t-shirt and boxer shorts and padded out to answer it.

  Ron was standing there in a black leather jacket, which made his stout chest look even broader. He was wearing an elaborate pair of eyeglasses that looked like racing goggles. Behind them, his eyes were bright and wide awake. “Look, kid,” he said, “I’m sorry as hell about this. I know it’s the middle of the night.”

  “No,” I said. “Of course. Come in.” We went into the living room together as Ree came in from the bedroom, knotting a black and red flowered kimono around her. She put on lights and then perched beside me on the couch as Ron sank down into an armchair opposite us. He groaned like a man trying to postpone an unhappy duty.