Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  But then I saw someone moving around in the back of the studio.

  It was him.

  Ox.

  He’d come inside. Easy saw him, too. He waited until a moment came when he could drop out, then he signalled for us to keep playing and he got up from the piano and went into the back. I was singing and I didn’t see what happened but I heard a noise and it frightened me.

  But I kept singing.

  And Easy came back and sat down and played his solo. We all finished the song and it sounded great and only then did we realise that Easy was bleeding.

  The sound had been Ox’s gun. He had shot Easy. Easy had defended himself with his knife and afterwards we found Ox lying there. It’s funny how calm everyone was. I guess we’d known what had happened, even if we didn’t admit it to ourselves, while we were finishing the song.

  We worked out what had to be done.

  We cleaned the place up. I went and bought a new carpet while Moses and Danny got rid of the old one and everything else. Easy went to a doctor that he knew. I stayed at the studio and supervised while the new carpet was installed. Ron and Ladybird got back just as the carpet men were finishing. They were really pleased. They have no idea what happened.

  I’m not sorry about what we did.

  I’m glad.

  Friday April 8th

  Danny was making the acetate of the record today. Easy and I joined him, like we agreed, to put our signatures in the wax. I couldn’t believe Easy had been able to get there. He was bleeding badly through the dressing on his wound. I told him to stay put and I hurried out and got some bandages from the drug store. But when I got back he was gone. Danny told me Easy had said that we’d done it. We’d made our statement for posterity, if anybody ever needed proof. Danny thought he was talking about the music. I knew he wasn’t.

  There were no more entries until a week later, when written in big letters across the entire page was:

  Friday April 15th

  RIP Easy Geary.

  The rest of the diary was blank.

  Ree read through my transcription before I sent it off to Tinkler. She said, “The part I like best is the way he put paid to that bastard and still got back in time to play his solo. With a bullet in him.”

  She looked at me. “She was sleeping with him.”

  “Who?” I said. “Your grandmother? With Easy Geary?”

  Ree nodded. “From the way she writes about him in the diary. But also the way she used to talk about him.” She nodded again, emphatically. “I’m sure about it.”

  “You mean, while she was married to your grandfather?”

  “Of course,” said Ree impatiently.

  She went to a cupboard and came back with a gold plastic crown large enough for a child. She held it up and said, “My grandmother gave this to me for my birthday, the first birthday I spent with her after my folks died. She called me her little empress and told me everything was going to be all right for me.”

  We looked at each other. There was an idea trying to surface at the back of my mind, but every time I reached for it, it slipped away.

  We’d made our statement for posterity, if anybody ever needed proof.

  I took out our chart and looked at it.

  I felt a shiver go down my spine, like cold electricity.

  30. SOLUTION

  There were still five Hathor LPs left to find, but it was as if we’d reached some crucial tipping point. Suddenly in quick succession we tracked down copies of HL-007 and then HL-012, which was a particularly satisfying find because it was the same Pepper Adams album that the “redhead” had scooped up at Styli just before I got there.

  That Nevada had scooped up.

  We located these records online and bought them, arranging for them to be shipped to the garage.

  Then we got a lead on HL-009, one of the two which were headlined by Ree’s grandmother. A copy was being sold by a dealer in El Sereno. And then the same dealer phoned to say he’d also dug up the Conte Candoli, HL-013. Lucky 13.

  Which left just one.

  I got out our chart and stared at it.

  That morning the garage called to say that two of the records had arrived. We went down to get them. I unwrapped the first, HL-012 by Pepper Adams. I checked the dead wax and filled in the chart.

  “And here’s the other one.” Ree handed me the second record. HL-007 by Cy Coleman. I checked it and amended the chart.

  I looked at Ree. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said. She looked back at me, bronze eyes clear and level.

  We drove over out to El Sereno to collect the two records from the dealer. He operated a small store out of his house. He had one of the records—HL-009, Rita Mae Pollini Sings Burns Hobartt, waiting for us when we arrived. He went off to get the other one.

  Ree studied the photo of her grandmother on the album cover as I filled in the chart.

  Ree and I looked at each other.

  I checked what time it was in England and phoned Alan at Jazz House. While I held the phone and Ree waited impatiently, Alan followed my request. After a few minutes, he came back and gave me the information. I thanked him and hung up.

  “He’s checked. And it turns out the labels on HL-003, the Richie Kamuca, were glued on the wrong sides of the record.”

  “On the wrong sides?”

  “Yes. They were reversed. It happens sometimes.”

  “Okay,” said Ree. She looked at me. “We both knew it anyway, didn’t we?” I nodded, then corrected the chart. Instead of:

  It now read:

  The dealer finally came back with HL-013, the Conte Candoli. “I’m sorry. My wife had it filed under ‘Easy Listening’ with the Al Hirt stuff. Because it has a trumpet on the cover. That kind of reasoning.”

  I took the record and Ree watched over my shoulder as I added the information to the chart.

  We stared at it.

  I felt light-headed and weightless. We soon found the final album, HL-002 by Marty Paich, on the Internet. A copy in Hawaii. It seemed to take forever to arrive, even by the most speedy of carrier. But it finally did.

  I checked the dead wax as Ree watched.

  “It’s SY.”

  “Of course it is.”

  I looked at the chart.

  I inserted the spaces.

  31. ENCOUNTER

  The implications slowly began to sink in. Easy Geary and Rita Mae Pollini had signed Hathor HL-014 because it was the conclusion of a message. A statement they wanted to preserve permanently. Instead of carving it in stone they’d carved it in vinyl. Perhaps not the finest choice for permanence, but we’d read it in the end.

  Easy Geary had gone to great trouble to code that message into the vinyl. I’d asked Ron Longmire what he knew about the cryptic markings in the run-out, but he didn’t remember anything about them. “I always left the final stage to Danny,” he said. But he did recall that Easy Geary liked to be there with Danny DePriest when he prepared the acetates. “And Rita Mae liked to be with him, too.”

  So Danny had been in on it. But what was “it”? Why did they do it?

  Easy Geary evidently regarded this message as some kind of summing up of his life’s work. He dragged himself to sign the final LP’s lacquer with a bullet in him, and he died soon afterwards, presumably from that same bullet.

  Ree’s grandmother, Rita Mae, had also attached a vital importance to what they’d written in the dead wax. Which is why she’d freaked out when she’d lost her copies of the records. They’d spelled out the true paternity of her child.

  And the bloodline of her grandchild.

  She understood the implication.

  “She called me her little empress and told me everything was going to be all right for me.”

  We talked about it as we played chess that evening, sitting on the floor in Ree’s living room with the board between us. I loved playing here with her but I couldn’t help thinking the game would only be improved by a cat attempting to wander across the board, chanc
ing to scatter pawns and kings with equal insouciance.

  I said, “This makes you a direct descendant and heir of Easy Geary.”

  “I know.”

  “And Easy Geary was Burns Hobartt. And Burns Hobartt owned a substantial piece of AMI. Which means you now own that. A chunk of one of the biggest corporations in the world.”

  “I know.”

  “Your grandmother kept the secret at first because she didn’t want her husband to find out that another man had fathered her child. Obviously. Later on she kept the secret because she knew it was potentially dynamite and she wanted to keep you safe. You’re one of the richest women in America.” I looked around at her small, cosy house and wondered what would become of it. “Maybe you can use this place for storing your shoes,” I said.

  “I’m not really the shoe-buying type.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “the Milkybars are on you.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s just an expression. It means, like…”

  “The drinks are on me?”

  “Exactly. The drinks are on you. And for the foreseeable future. Unless you choose to blow it all in Vegas.”

  “I don’t like gambling,” said Ree, scrutinising the trap I was trying to set for her with my bishop. “I like chess.” She nimbly avoided the trap and took one of my knights. How could I have missed that? “I think the first thing we’ll do,” she said, “is take a vacation in Hawaii. Finding that last record there got me thinking. And I’ve always wanted to go there. My grandmother was always talking about it.”

  I made suitably enthusiastic noises, but I had the strange certainty that Hawaii would never happen. At least not for us.

  Even as we made love that night I could feel her slipping away from me. As if the money, even the remote prospect of it, had put a fatal distance between us.

  * * *

  The following day I borrowed a car from Berto’s garage and drove down to Amoeba Music. It was located in Hollywood, just past the corner of Sunset and Vine.

  Now that I had concluded the business aspect of my trip—looking for records—I could get down to the pleasure aspect. Looking for records. I searched the LP racks in Amoeba in a state of happy excitement. I found some nice stuff, mostly on Verve and Cobblestone.

  I was on my way out of the store when I spotted a striking young woman looking through the rock albums in the vinyl section.

  She held a record bag tightly under one arm as if she was afraid someone might try to take it away from her. She had long red hair. I went over to the adjacent aisle, where I could watch her without being seen. Then I went into her aisle and stood behind her as she searched the new arrivals rack.

  I said, “Thanks for the tear gas grenade.”

  Nevada turned and stared at me for a moment with genuine astonishment. Then she regained her poise and said, “You’re most welcome. They were on special.”

  “I know,” I said. “Two for twenty bucks.”

  “I never could resist a bargain. What are you doing here, by the way? Are you following me?”

  “No. Are you following me?”

  “For once, no.” She hesitated. “Want to have a coffee?”

  I said, “They make good coffee in LA.”

  “Yes, you’re in clover here, aren’t you?”

  We walked through the morning heat past the glare on glass buildings and into the air-conditioned coolness of the Cinerama Dome. Nevada led the way to the balcony café. She’d obviously been here before. We ordered and sat down in a curving, leather-padded booth.

  “How is Tinkler?” she said.

  “He’s house-sitting for me. And cat-sitting.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “The girls will like that. I was going to ask about them next. How is that going?”

  “Tinkler thinks his chronic flatulence may have permanently alienated Fanny’s affections.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she’d never be that shallow.” Nevada held up the record bag that was on the table beside her. “You keep staring at this.”

  “Do I?” I hadn’t realised I was so obvious.

  “Do you want to know what’s inside? Of course you do.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, you’re not going to find out.” She sipped her coffee. “Oh, all right,” she said. She picked up the bag and took out the record. It was a vintage gatefold copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones, with the original lenticular cover. “It’s a present. For Tinkler.”

  “He’ll love it,” I said.

  She examined the album. “You see it’s got the hologram cover.”

  “Lenticular, actually,” I said. “That’s what we call it.”

  “Anyway you can see Mick Jagger’s little arms move back and forth. Sort of.” She tilted the cover up and down, studying it with satisfaction. “Do you really think he’ll like it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t have it already?”

  “Not the American version.”

  She stared at the record. “Is this the American version?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it says London on it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So the one that’s marked London is the American version?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll never get the hang of this.” I was startled to realise that she sounded on the verge of tears.

  “Listen,” I said quickly. “He’ll be delighted with it. He will be unwholesomely pleased with it.”

  She managed a smile. We finished our coffees in silence and left the café. Back outside, blinking in the glare of the sunlight, we paused for an awkward moment before going our separate ways.

  When I got back to the house I didn’t say anything to Ree about seeing her.

  * * *

  The next morning, as I walked out to my car—I had borrowed it from the garage so often that I’d begun to think of it as my own—the next-door neighbour leaned over the fence and beckoned to me. I struggled to remember her name and came up blank. So I just gave her a big smile instead. She was wearing a red tracksuit and sunglasses.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hi. The guy in the suit was around again.”

  I realised she meant Gordon Hallett, Dr Tinmouth’s lawyer. “The white guy in the suit?”

  “Yeah. With another guy.”

  “Another white guy?”

  “No. He looked Mexican or Indian or something. But he was in a suit, too.”

  Armed with this maddeningly vague information I drove to the garage. As I walked back through the heat and noise Berto came over to me. “I saw that chick again,” he said. “The one with the red hair.”

  “She was here?”

  “With the Porsche Carrera, yeah. She asked me to give you this.”

  It was a printout of a map with a spot marked on it. Above the map a phone number had been written in ballpoint pen. Underneath it was printed an address and a time, and the words:

  32. RENDEZVOUS

  I didn’t tell Ree about my rendezvous with Nevada that evening. She was out doing a gig anyway, so there didn’t seem much point. As we ate lunch together at her house we talked about the possibility of her inheritance, about the legal battle that would surely commence. I suggested a game of chess but she said that she wasn’t in the mood. Once again I felt like a barrier had come down between us, but I had no idea what it was, or how to deal with it.

  Shadows were lengthening and evening was coming on as she left for her gig. I waved as she pulled away.

  As soon as she was out of sight, my phone rang. It was Berto at the garage. “It was that chick again,” he said. “The redhead. She just came around asking for you. She said she had to change the place. The place where you’re meeting.”

  I could feel myself sweating. I was glad I hadn’t got this call while Ree was with me.

  Berto read me the directions to the new rendezvous and I wrote it all down. The new address wa
s near Westlake Village, in the vicinity of the Malibu Hills. I stared at it for a moment then took out my phone again. I found the piece of paper with the map of the original meeting point and dialled the number written on it. It went straight to voicemail, a synthesised generic American voice inviting me to leave a message.

  I said, “Nevada, what’s going on?” and hung up.

  Then I went into the kitchen and started making coffee. As the water was coming to the boil my phone bleated, announcing a text. I picked it up and read the message. Sorry about the changes. Safer this way. Malibu Hills! See you soon. Nx

  * * *

  I drove west along the Ventura Freeway, famed in story and song, and turned off onto Lindero Canyon Road. From there I took a side road sliced into the rock of what at first I thought were tall hills but gradually began to realise were actually small mountains.

  The light was fading to a banked orange glow as I reached the rendezvous, an observation point carved out of the cliff face beside the road. There was a small semicircular area with a low guardrail fitted around it where you could pause to stare out at the sheer drop, then rolling parkland and finally the tiny lights of suburban housing to the east.

  Above the observation area, the road rose into the mountain in a precipitous straight line, which suggested a major feat of either engineering or sheer masochism. About a hundred metres below it was a parking area and I left my car there and walked the rest of the way.

  Nevada was waiting for me in the observation area.

  She waved as I got out of the car and trudged up towards her. She was still wearing the ridiculous red wig. Actually, I thought as I walked up the hill, it wasn’t so ridiculous. It looked quite good on her. The air was clean and cool and smelled of pines and sage.

  As I approached her she was staring out at the vista. She didn’t turn around and now I was almost beside her. I wondered if she was upset about something.