But Rita Mae was a sporadic diarist.
In fact “sporadic” is a polite word for it.
Then she starts writing again. To make sense of what follows you have to remember that by the 1950s AMI had become a multi-million-dollar corporation, having built an empire with the money they’d earned from the music of Burns Hobartt. Though “earned” isn’t the word I should use. “Stolen” would be more like it. Anyway, they were now extremely powerful, in all sorts of ways.
By the time of the next diary entry the little record company, Hathor, is already reeling from the legal battle with AMI. But they refuse to quit. At one point Rita Mae writes:
It’s like an elephant stomping on a mouse. And then the mouse gets up and comes back to challenge the elephant again.
But by now Bobby Schoolcraft is almost broke. Rita Mae is working for him as a secretary, without pay, to help.
Wednesday February 16th
A man came in to the office just as we were opening up for the day. His aftershave was so strong I couldn’t tell if I smelled booze on him or not. I thought I did. He said his name was Oliver Xavier and Mr Schoolcraft was expecting him. So I let him go back into Bobby’s office.
He came back out a few minutes later and smiled and said, “By the way, are you one of our colored friends?” Bobby must have heard him talking because he came racing out of the office. I told the man that my dark skin is due to my Italianate heritage. “Nice story,” he said and tipped his hat and left. Bobby was white as a sheet. “Do you know who that was?” he said. “That was Ox.”
Thursday February 17th
Something has happened to Bobby’s Mercedes. It has been completely vandalised. I saw it, and it’s a complete wreck. All the windows and headlights smashed, tyres slashed, dents all over the bodywork. The leather seats are slashed too and somebody peed all over them. I’m so upset. I know how he loved that car.
Friday March 4th
Something terrible happened. Bobby and Tilly were coming home from a club last night and, as they drove up towards their house, they saw something in the headlights of their car. Something on the gateposts, on either side of their driveway. They stopped and got out. It was the heads of their little dogs, Duke and Fantasy. Someone had killed them and cut off their heads and left them there, one on each gatepost.
Tilly had to be sedated.
Those poor little dogs.
Saturday March 5th
I went to Bobby’s house. Easy Geary was there too. Bobby said he knows who killed the dogs. It was Ox. He wrecked Bobby’s car, too. Ox is trying to intimidate Bobby, to get him to settle the lawsuit with AMI. Bobby is challenging their right to put the Davenports’ names on Burns Hobartt’s compositions. And it looks like AMI thinks he might win. So they’ve hired Ox as their hammer man. Tilly wants him to cave in. But Easy is urging him to keep fighting. I’ve never seen Easy so angry. If he knew where he could find Ox I think he would do something terrible. He has an awful temper. They say he once pulled a knife on Billy Eckstine.
Tuesday March 15th
Bobby’s colored girlfriend Tilly is in hospital. She was driving home alone last night and Ox pulled her over. He took her into an alley and beat her up. Bobby wants her to tell what happened but she won’t. Ox has two cops who swear she was drunk and attacked him. If she tries to report Ox they will swear charges against her. She’s too frightened to ever report Ox.
He beat her up really badly. He kicked her in the stomach, so she miscarried.
He did it deliberately.
He called it “Irish birth control”.
Thursday March 24th
Bobby is frantic. Tilly has disappeared. Her family won’t tell him where she went. They think it’s his fault she almost got killed. I think she’s gone to Paris. Poor Bobby is beside himself. He says he can’t go on without her.
Thursday March 31st
Bobby is dead. He shot himself.
The phone rang in the middle of the night. Ree woke up before I did. She answered it. “Tinkler,” she said, handing me the phone and crawling back under the covers.
I took the phone into the next room, sleep ebbing from my brain, and said, “You do know what time it is?”
“Of course. When you insist on travelling to the other side of the planet the eight-hour time difference is the price you pay.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“I read the diary entries you sent. And I can’t wait for the next batch. I had to call and get you to read it to me now. Don’t worry about typing it up and emailing it. Just read it to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Look, I’m sorry, I know it’s late and I probably woke up and pissed off your sexy new American girlfriend, in fact I know I definitely did, but forgive me anyway and read me the rest of the diary.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t punish me. Don’t make me wait.”
“No, I mean I literally can’t. That’s all there is.”
There was a pause and then he said, “It can’t be.”
“Rita Mae never wrote another word. At least not in that year’s diary. All the remaining pages are blank.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line as, across the ocean in England, Tinkler came to terms with this.
“Shit,” he said.
The next morning Ree said, “What was all that about?”
“Tinkler couldn’t wait to read the next diary entry. I had to break it to him that there wasn’t one.”
I looked at the diary, lying on the table in a square of morning sunlight. It was a strange feeling to have got this far and to know that it was the end of the line. Now we would never get the story of the recording session. We’d never know exactly what happened on that day in 1955.
I picked up the diary. It was warm to the touch. I flipped through it idly.
As I did so, a slight but emphatic smell rose up to my nostrils. Faintly intoxicating, promising a headache, reminiscent of childhood construction projects.
Glue.
The heat of the sunlight had caused the smell to come out of the pages. I stared at the diary, spread open loosely in my hands. I thumbed carefully through to the last entry and studied it. I got up and carried it to the window and held it in the sunlight. Ree was standing in the kitchen pouring cereal into a bowl. She was watching me.
“What is it?” she said.
I held the diary in the sunlight. The pages were made of high-quality paper, which hadn’t yellowed much in over half a century. They were ruled with thin blue horizontal lines. There were two pages allotted to each day’s entry. The date and the day of the week were printed at the top of the left-hand page.
The final, terse entry only occupied one line of the left-hand page.
I studied the blank page opposite, trying to see any difference in the colour of the paper.
There was none.
As far as I could see, it was exactly the same paper, aged to exactly the same extent of yellowing. It was the same weight and thickness. The pale blue lines were precisely aligned with those on the left-hand page.
Then I noticed it.
There was an extra line at the bottom of the page.
Ree was standing at my side now, drawn over by my intense silence as I scrutinised the diary. “Look,” I said. I put my finger beside the bottom line on the right-hand page. On the page to the left of it there was nothing, just the empty space of the bottom margin.
“Maybe it’s a printing mistake,” said Ree. I flipped through the rest of the diary. The remaining pages were all the same—one extra line.
“If it is, it’s a consistent one,” I said, pausing with it open at the following day, April 1st.
“Maybe it’s an April Fool’s Day joke,” said Ree, “by the printers.”
I stared at the date. That was when I spotted something else.
I flipped back to the previous day, then back to April 1st again. I was right. There wasn’t any doubt about it.
&nbs
p; The typeface for the day and the date on April 1st were different from the one for March 31st. I showed Ree. “It’s almost identical…”
“But not quite.”
We stared at each other. She was still holding the bowl of cereal, forgotten in her hands. I said, “Would you be heartbroken if I was to dismantle your grandmother’s diary?”
“Dismantle it?”
“We can always put it back together again.” I borrowed the clasp knife she had got from Berto. We spread the diary wide and flat on a table, open at the last entry. I ran the knife blade carefully down the join between the left- and right-hand pages. It came apart surprisingly easily.
And a strong smell of glue rose up.
Opened up like this we could see the binding of each set of pages. The pages to the left were bound at the back with red cloth. Those on the right with green cloth. “They’re from two different diaries,” said Ree.
“The little bastard pulled a switch on us.”
“No wonder he was gone such a long time when he went to fetch it. He was busy with scissors and glue.”
29. TEARS
We were back in the sun-dappled cul-de-sac in Downey, on Wilburt Sassman’s doorstep. Ree was standing beside me as I pressed the doorbell. Nothing. Silence. I pressed it again, looking at her.
“It’s dead.” The word rang ominously in the silence.
We tried the door and it opened, into the cool, quiet shadows of the house. We stepped inside, the door easing shut behind us on a hydraulic hinge. There was something odd about the silence, and then I remembered. Last time there had been the bubbling of the fish tanks.
Now there was nothing.
The natural thing to have done would have been to call Wilburt’s name. But neither of us said anything. There was something about the silence of the house that precluded shouting. And, perhaps, which urged caution. We moved out of the entrance hall into the short corridor that led to the living-room. It was so dark I couldn’t see the living-room door. There was a light switch on the wall and Ree fumbled with it, to no effect.
Like the doorbell, it was dead.
We moved cautiously into the darkness of the house.
I found the living-room door by feel, and opened it. The room was dim, in distinct contrast to our previous visit, when it had been illuminated by the eerie glow of the fish tanks. But there was just enough light coming in through a gap in the curtains to see Wilburt.
He was standing, or rather leaning, against one of the aquarium tanks with his hand dangling limply over the side, immersed in the water. Floating beside it in the otherwise empty glass tank was a thin snaking black shape with a gleam of copper at its tip. I realised it was a power cable, and I began to piece together what must have happened. Wilburt was bent over the tank, turned away from us, so we couldn’t see his face. But on the carpet, around his bare feet, was a ragged black scorch mark.
“He’s been electrocuted,” said Ree.
I noticed a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye and turned to look. The other tanks were a safe distance from where Wilburt had been messing about. In their dark water, fish were moving.
I moved closer. They were still milling around in their coloured hordes, apparently none the worse for wear. That meant their life support apparatus had only been turned off recently.
At the exact instant I realised this, I heard the back door slam.
With no conscious thought at all I was running out of the room, back into the darkness of the corridor, moving the other way. Back through the entrance hall and down the other corridor, towards the other end of the house. I clattered across the tile floor of the dark kitchen, heading for the oblong of pale light that marked the back door.
I threw the door open and found myself in the back yard.
It was a small yard, but deep, with high stone walls. Like a courtyard. Square in section and sunk well below street level, the walls on each side increased its depth. It was a cool, shadowed hollow, lined at the bottom with red and yellow crazy paving. White stone steps led down into it from the kitchen and, on the opposite side, another stone staircase rose up to a gate in the wall.
Standing at the top of those stairs, holding the gate open, was a tall, powerful man wearing a tracksuit and running shoes. Sunglasses, a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt concealed his face. Just below me, in the pit of the garden, heading towards him, was a woman dressed in an almost identical outfit. She was frozen where she was standing, staring up at the man. He had his fist stretched out, index finger extended, pointing at something, something back across the yard.
At the foot of my staircase.
I looked down at where he was pointing and saw it. The small white rectangle lying there.
A clump of pages torn from a book.
She must have dropped them.
The woman turned around and saw them. She saw me standing at the top of the steps and jerked with reaction, then launched herself back towards the pages. At the same moment I threw myself down the stairs and grabbed them. Even in the split second as I seized them, I saw the handwriting on the pages and knew they were exactly what I thought they were.
I went back up the stairs with them as fast as I could. The woman came to a halt at the bottom of the steps, staring up at me fiercely, then looking back at the man on the other side of the yard.
He had a gun in his hand.
He was aiming it at me.
A woman’s voice spoke, from high on the wall to our left.
“Hey, Heinz,” she said.
Everyone turned to look, and I saw Nevada standing there, perched on top of the wall, silhouetted against the sunlight. She had the ridiculous red wig on, but it was her. She had something in her hand and she said, “This is for you,” and threw it down into the yard. As she did so, she jumped off the wall, disappearing into the street on the other side.
Down in the pit of the courtyard, the object hit the crazy paving with a metallic clank and began to roll. It was a yellow and black cylinder. It looked like a can of insect spray with the lid removed. But the white cloud that was spitting from it wasn’t insect spray. As it rolled I read, in revolving black lettering on the yellow can, the words KROWD-KLEAR.
If you could call them words.
I saw the white cloud engulf Heidi at the bottom of the stairs. Heinz lowered his gun and started down his stairs, as if to help her. But then he stopped, realising he was going to step straight into the rising cloud of tear gas.
I didn’t stay to see what he did about this quandary.
As I slammed back through the kitchen door I could hear Heidi coughing and choking. Ree was waiting in the shadows. She’d been watching from the kitchen window. I glimpsed the back yard, now entirely filled by the swelling, gleaming cloud. I could see two dark figures moving in it. I grabbed Ree’s hand and we ran for the front door.
In my other hand I had the diary pages.
We punched through the front door and down the steps, out into the street. As we unlocked her car we could hear a gate slam at the back of the house and the sound of violent coughing, approaching fast. Ree gunned the engine and we raced away, bouncing down the tree-shadowed street, taking a left, a right, and then a left again.
Only when we were on Imperial Highway did she begin to relax. By then I was reading the diary.
“Is it all there?”
“Looks like it.”
“Good,” she said. Then, “Was that your girlfriend with the tear gas grenade?”
“Ex-girlfriend. Nevada. Yes.”
She glanced at me, her eyes unreadable. “Is she your guardian angel or something?”
“Or something,” I said.
“Well, it’s a good thing she turned up when she did. That guy had a gun.”
“I noticed.”
“And they were the Aryan Twins?”
“In person.”
She signalled a turn and began to pull towards the slip road, off the highway. We were still miles from home.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“To find a phone booth somewhere. One that isn’t overlooked by a security camera.”
“You’re going to call the cops?”
“And the ASPCA.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“They’ll look after those poor fish.”
* * *
When we got back to Ree’s house, we photographed all the remaining pages of the diary and then I typed them up and sent them to Tinkler while Ree glued them back into the binding with the first half of the diary.
This was what Wilburt hadn’t wanted us to read.
It was what the Aryan Twins had almost snatched from us.
Wednesday April 6th
The last Hathor session today. Easy and Moses and Danny DePriest. And I’m singing on one track. We all want to do it, in memory of Bobby. There’s no money left but Ron has given us the studio for free. He and Ladybird have driven up to Santa Barbara for the day. They left the keys for us. They were gone when we got there.
Ox must have arrived after they left, or they would have warned us.
He was waiting for us.
He had a bottle of whiskey with him and he was drinking out of it. You could smell the booze even over his aftershave. When we pulled up he came over to us.
He had the whiskey in one hand and a gun in the other. He told us to go away. It was all over. Danny DePriest and Moses were scared and so was I.
But Easy Geary just ignored him and made us go into the studio and start recording, like everything was normal. And the session went beautifully. Danny DePriest was very professional, setting everything up in the control room and then running out to play on the takes.
At lunchtime we all went out to get some sun and my stomach sank when I saw that Ox was still there. And he was even drunker. He was waving his gun around and we all went back inside as quickly as we could. But he saw me and I had taken my sweater off. I’ve started to show and he saw right away that I’m pregnant.
He smiled at me and showed me the gun and said, “Irish birth control.”
I was really shaken up but Easy was calm and Danny was still very professional despite it being his first solo session and we all got on with the recording. When we got to my song everything was cooking and we’d forgotten all about Ox.
Written in Dead Wax Page 31