Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  “Lovely spot,” I said. She turned to me.

  It wasn’t Nevada.

  It was Heidi.

  “Isn’t it just?” she said. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s been an education following you around.” Whatever her accent was, it wasn’t German. Maybe South African. Or perhaps Australian. She smiled at me. I immediately turned around, thinking whatever her game was, I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  And he was standing right behind me.

  Heinz.

  He had come out of nowhere. Or maybe he had simply followed me up the slope. He smiled, too. “You’re not leaving already, are you, mate?” His accent was definitely Australian. “You’ve only just got here.” He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “We weren’t sure you’d come, what with all the chopping and changing.” He looked happily at Heidi, at me, at the barren mountain slope where we stood.

  Suddenly I realised just how alone I was.

  “You’ve picked a nice place for it, anyway,” he said.

  “Place for what?” I said. I wanted to keep them talking. My mind was racing. I hadn’t seen another car go by since I’d arrived here. We were absolutely isolated, and I’d put myself in their hands.

  “We have a little bone to pick with you, mate,” said Heinz.

  I realised that the only chance I had was to run down the hill and get back into my car. Somehow do it before they caught up with me. I wondered how fast he was. His bulk suggested strength rather than speed.

  She would probably be the real threat, but she was some distance behind me now, since I had started moving away from her and the observation area. “A bone to pick?” I said. “About what?” I took a careful step to my side, keeping my eyes on them. It was not enough to alarm them, but increased my distance from her.

  “Saddling us with a trailer-load of fucking useless records.” I realised he was talking about Lenny and the Vinyl Crypt, the scam I’d arranged. “We didn’t appreciate having our time wasted like that, mate. Going through every single fucking one of them.”

  “I can still smell them,” said Heidi.

  “That’s the mould,” I said, trying to relax and sound conversational. “You know what you have to do about that?” Then I threw myself to one side and started running down the hill.

  He was faster than I could have imagined. Despite his bulk he got in front of me and blocked the way, moving with great rapidity and no apparent effort.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. He had a gun in his hand now. “None of that.”

  I turned and looked back at Heidi. She was holding a pistol, too.

  I began to understand that there was no way out.

  “Let’s get on with it,” she said.

  He looked at her. “What do you think?”

  “Over the edge.” She nodded at the abyss beyond the guardrail. “Just one more careless tourist.”

  “Fair enough.” He pointed the gun at me. I backed away from him slowly. He was forcing me towards her.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Heinz shook his head good-naturedly. “That’s what they always say.” He moved towards me, backing me into the observation area where she waited. I was now on one side of the semi-circle of tarmac. They were on the other, watching me speculatively.

  “It won’t look so good if I’ve got a bullet in me,” I said. “That’s not just one more careless tourist.”

  “He’s right, you know,” said Heinz. “You take his left arm, I’ll take his right.”

  “Don’t forget to get his phone.”

  “Oh yeah. Points for remembering, babe.”

  They moved towards me.

  Just then there was the high thin sound of a motor approaching. We all looked up and saw the headlights of a car coming down the steep slope of the mountain road towards us. Above the headlights a blue light was spinning. Then we heard the brief blurting of a siren.

  The noise a police car makes when they want you to pull over.

  I looked at Heinz and Heidi. They had moved close together and they were both holding their guns out of sight. He looked across at me and said, “If you say anything, we’ll kill the cops and then kill you.” I backed away from him.

  “Hey,” said Heidi. But I kept moving until I was as far away from them as I could get, on the other side of the observation area.

  Then I realised she wasn’t talking to me. They weren’t paying any attention to me.

  Instead, they were both staring up the mountain road.

  Because the car wasn’t stopping. It wasn’t even slowing down. It increased its speed, the engine a rising powerful snarl as it hit the bottom of the steep section of road, bounced up over the kerb and sped headlong into the observation area.

  Heinz and Heidi had started to move, but it was too late. The car hit them both full on, with the sound of a sledgehammer striking a side of beef.

  Then there was the scream of brakes as it pulled up, just short of the guardrail. Heinz and Heidi both continued over it, however, flung by the force of the impact, sailing out into the darkness.

  Heidi was as loose as a rag doll, eyes shut and mouth open. Heinz, on the other hand, had his eyes wide open and was staring at me.

  I saw his look of aggrieved astonishment as he flew out into the void.

  Then they were gone in the darkness.

  Hundreds of feet below them, the rocky floor of the canyon waited, black as night and deep as forever. I stared down, but I could see nothing.

  The door of the car opened and Ree stepped out. She took the blue light off the roof.

  “Who’s your guardian angel now?” she said.

  33. BUSINESS CARD

  We drove for miles in silence. Back down the mountain. Back to the freeway. Finally Ree turned to look at me, with the lights from the dashboard on her face, and said, “It was kill or be killed.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me.” I was still shaking, as if I had a bad fever. And I kept staring in the rear-view mirror as though I was expecting something to come after us. But what? Ghosts? The wrath of God? As the shock wore off, my brain was slowly beginning to work again.

  I said, “You intercepted the messages?”

  She glanced over again and gave me a crooked smile. “You see what happens when you try and sneak off to meet your ex?”

  We were driving through Hidden Hills now, where Ventura Freeway became Ventura Boulevard. “What about my car?” I said. I had suddenly remembered, with a sickly acceleration of my heartbeat, that we’d left it parked back there, just below the observation area.

  “It’s all taken care of,” said Ree. She peered out into the traffic. “In fact…” She slowed down at the lights, signalled and turned right. We were in a residential street. She reversed the signal, turned left, and we pulled into the parking lot of a KFC. At the far end of the building, on the blind side, Berto was waiting for us, standing beside my car.

  We pulled up next to him and got out. He came over and slapped me on the shoulder. “Sorry to rat you out to your old lady, bro, but I could tell something wasn’t right.”

  I said, “When she dropped off the message… They were setting a trap for me. By pretending to be Nevada. The redhead in the Porsche that second time was actually Heidi. But you spotted it was a different girl.”

  “No, dude. All white chicks look the same to me. But I spotted that it was a different car.” He grinned at us. “Anybody want to split a bucket of wings?”

  My stomach turned over. “No thanks.” I looked back at the car we’d driven here in. Besides the dents I could see at the front, there was no doubt all sorts of DNA evidence on it. “What are you going to do with the car?”

  Ree smiled and shrugged. “By tomorrow that car won’t exist.”

  “Speaking of which…” said Berto. He took the keys from her and got behind the wheel.

  “Thanks, Berto,” said Ree. He gave a casual wave and pulled away. We looked at each other. The night was cool and there was a steady rumble of traffic passing o
n the boulevard. Headlights moved across her face. My brain was working now. I couldn’t stop it.

  I said, “It just happened to be the perfect spot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It just happened to be the perfect spot to ambush them. For you to wait up the hill and then come zooming out of nowhere and nail them.”

  She shrugged. “I think I nailed them pretty good. And just in time, by the look of things.”

  “You chose the location,” I said. “It was you who changed the rendezvous. You sent a message to me and you sent a message to them.”

  She nodded. “It was the way it had to be. We had to draw them out. We had to deal with them.”

  “How did you get their number?”

  “It was printed on the bottom of the map she gave to Berto. So we trimmed it off.”

  “And wrote another one on it,” I said. “So when I thought I was calling them, I was calling you.”

  “Right.”

  “And what did you do, text them using my phone? The bugged one, the one you kept in London?”

  “That’s right.”

  I said, “So you set it all up. You laid a trap for them.”

  “I guess.”

  “You staked me out,” I said. “To lure them there. Like a tiger for a goat. I mean, a goat for a tiger.”

  She came to me and put her hand on my chest. “You were right the first time,” she said, “Tiger.”

  For a moment, I almost bought it. But then I took her hand away. I didn’t say anything, but she must have seen it in my eyes. Her voice trembled a little and she looked down.

  “Anything I did, I did to protect us both.”

  I said, “Thanks for keeping me in the loop,” and turned and walked away into the night.

  * * *

  I found a quiet bar and had a few drinks then caught a taxi back home. I mean, to Ree’s house. I didn’t know whether she would be there or not. I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I just wanted to get my stuff and get out, find a hotel. But when I climbed out of the cab the house was dark and silent. I paid the driver and he pulled away. I suddenly thought longingly of Clean Head and I realised how keenly I missed London. I just wanted to go home.

  I turned and walked towards the house.

  A man stepped out of the shadows.

  He was a small man with angular features, dark skin and a pale suit. I must have moved back very abruptly at the sight of him because he said, “I’m sorry to startle you. I came by earlier, but no one was at home.”

  “Who are you?” My voice was curt and hoarse in my own ears.

  “I’m Easy Geary.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t look anything like Easy Geary of course. He was even the wrong height. Geary had been a huge bear of a man. In addition to which, there was the small matter that this guy was, at most, in his early thirties. Whereas Easy Geary would be over a hundred.

  I decided either he was insane, or I’d misheard him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I am Easy Geary. My name.”

  “Okay.”

  There must have been something in my voice because he scrabbled for a business card and handed it to me. “Gordon Hallett gave me your address. Dr Tinmouth wanted that we should meet. He didn’t say why, but he seemed very excited about it.”

  The card read:

  Philip Ysaguirre

  “Philip Easy Geary,” he said.

  I looked at him. I said, “Ysaguirre. So that’s how you pronounce it.”

  * * *

  I was sitting on the steps when Ree pulled up and got out of her car. “Haven’t you got your keys?” she said.

  “I’ve got them. I just don’t feel like going inside. I don’t feel like going anywhere.”

  She sat down beside me. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  I watched the moths attacking the porch light. “So am I.”

  “Once they knew about me, about who my grandfather was, they were going to come after me.” She looked at me. “They would have killed you and then they would have killed me.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  She reached over and squeezed my knee. “I had to take them out. Like I said, kill or be killed. And they were suspicious because we’d changed the place to meet. They would have sniffed it out if you’d known about it. Don’t you see? You had to be in the dark when you arrived there. You couldn’t know anything.” She peered into my face. “When it turned out that it was the Aryan Twins, and not Nevada, your surprise had to be genuine.”

  “Well, it fucking was,” I said.

  She took my hand and we both sat in silence and watched the moths. She said, “They found another box at the garage. Of Dr Tinmouth’s books. It turns out there wasn’t twelve boxes, there were thirteen.”

  “Thirteen,” I said. “Lucky for some.”

  “It was just a small box. When they put it in the storage area it was set behind some boxes of auto parts. So we didn’t notice it until now.”

  “The thirteenth box,” I said.

  “It’s full of books…”

  “About Professor Jellaway.”

  She stared at me with those disconcerting eyes. “How did you know that?”

  “You had a visitor. You just missed him.” I turned and gazed at her. “He was some kind of distant cousin of yours. His name was Philip Easy Geary. Spelled like this.” I handed her the business card. She read it then looked at me.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Ysaguirre was Jellaway’s real surname. And it means that when your grandfather was looking for a new alias he chose a phonetic pronunciation of his original family name.”

  “His original family name?”

  I nodded. “Easy Geary was Burns Hobartt. But Burns Hobartt was Professor Jellaway.”

  She put a hand to her head. “Wait a minute. This is all just a little too…”

  “Tell me about it. But I’ve gone over the timeline, and it all fits. Jellaway vanishes from the scene and Hobartt appears. Hobartt makes an exit and Geary turns up.” I watched it sinking in. “It explains so much,” I said. “Like the reason why Burns Hobartt was content with obscurity, playing in small territory bands, until the fire that disfigured him in 1935.” I looked at her. “Jazz critics have always said it was as if the fire triggered something in him. Sparked his genius. People have surmised that perhaps it was because it gave him an awareness of his own mortality. But it was a lot simpler than that. The fire took away his face. It made him unrecognisable. It freed him.”

  “Holy shit,” said Ree. “All three of them?”

  “There’s a sort of inevitable symmetry to it. Professor Jellaway was screwed by his music publishers the Spike brothers and Burns Hobartt was similarly screwed by the Davenports and Easy Geary was screwed by AMI. But it was all the same corporation. Spike Brothers Music became Davenport Music and Davenport Music became AMI. And it was all the same man—Jellaway, Hobartt, Geary.”

  I looked at her.

  “Which means you don’t just own a chunk of AMI.”

  “No?”

  “No. You own a controlling interest.”

  34. LONDON

  I said, “It’s incredible. He was a great genius of jazz in three different eras. Every time the music changed, he rose to the top. He was like the Stravinsky of jazz.”

  “Never mind that,” said Tinkler in London. “Tell me about the money.”

  “Well, there’s inevitably going to be a battle-royale in the courts, but she’s his direct descendant. So, basically, a cornerstone of the American music and media business belongs to her.”

  “But how much?” said Tinkler.

  “Well, the Davenport cousins were the children of the Spike brothers. Davenport was their real name. ‘Spike’ was a highly appropriate nom de plume or maybe nom de guerre. The kids were the son of one and the daughter of the other. And their company is the same corporation as their fathers’. Clear
so far?”

  “Suppose I say yes?”

  “Basically, when we discovered Ree’s grandfather was Burns Hobartt, she owned a big chunk of that corporation because it was founded on his music. But now we know her grandfather was also Professor Jellaway, that big chunk suddenly gets bigger. In fact, it becomes a majority shareholding.”

  “But how much does she get? Exact numbers, please.”

  “Apparently sixty-two and a half per cent. Of everything.”

  Tinkler whistled tunelessly.

  I said, “Don’t forget to book Clean Head to pick us up at the airport. International arrivals are at Terminal 2.”

  “See if you can remind me half a dozen more times.”

  * * *

  Clean Head did meet us and in fact Tinkler came with her. He’d brought two bottles of champagne to welcome us back. Ree was very touched.

  We drank one bottle on the way home. We dropped Tinkler off at his house in Putney, then headed to my place. As we unloaded our baggage, including the remaining bottle of champagne, Clean Head gave me a sardonic look and said, “Your boy asked me out.”

  “Tinkler?”

  She nodded. “Mmm hmm.”

  “Did you say yes?”

  “I said maybe.”

  We paid her and she drove away. Ree and I hefted our bags and set off across the square towards my bungalow, and the boiler room where the dragon had once slumbered. The dragon was still having his funeral—indeed the crane was even now delving into the basin and winching up a large piece of what had once been the boiler from what had once been the boiler room. The amount of noise and general commotion was impressive.

  I looked down at the work site, cautiously because they still hadn’t replaced the safety rail, and saw to my surprise that some progress had actually been made in our absence. The old boiler room was now well on its way to its new fate as luxury flats, tennis courts or quite possibly a pilates centre.

  The cats came streaking to meet us as we stepped through the door. They swirled around my legs, creating a navigational hazard. Ree watched us with amusement. I said, “See how pleased they are to see me after Uncle Tinkler’s reign of terror.”