Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  The man climbed slowly down; he was a lad really, proba-bly nineteen or so, wiped his dirty hands on a towel that he stuffed in the rear pocket of his jeans, all the while backing up and looking at his handiwork. Another boy, probably about this one's age, and carrying what looked like three or four instrument cases and a black amp, had crossed the street and was apparently asking directions as he hitched one of the two gig bags more comfortably over his shoulder. He wiped his windblown hair out of his face, pushed his Silva-thin sunglasses back on his nose and entered through a pair of double doors.

  The artist of the marquee-board walked backward to get a better look at his artistry and nearly stepped on Jury's feet. "Oh, sorry." Then, as if Jury had come for the same reason, as adviser or overseer of this enterprise, the kid said to him, "Think it adds a bit of class, right?" He shook his longish hair from his forehead and folded his arms across his chest, hands clamped under his armpits.

  "It's ingenious. Especially that line that trails off from the bottom of the S. How'd you do that?"

  "With three I's, flat down. Hard to do tricky stuff with a marquee, I can tell you. See, I was trying to get the idea of a wind blowing through the name. That's what it means, you know—'sirocco'—a wind blowing," he added instructively. A stiff wind gusted from the alley the cat had bellied along, a good omen, perhaps. They both shivered. "Bleedin' cold. I been out here over an hour working on that lot. Think they'll like it, then?"

  Jury smiled. "Absolutely."

  "You come for tickets? Been sold out since it was announced. Listen: I'll give you a tip. Come round on Friday, day of performance, ten a.m. The doors are open, but returns don't go on sale until twelve. Mary Lee, though, she keeps back five, maybe six in case some nob comes along." The boy's laugh was wheezy. "A couple did once. I think they were some duke's kids. Mary Lee really kept 'em on the ropes. I think she permed her hair while they hung around the window looking like they had to pee. After you." With a grand gesture he opened the door.

  "Thanks. And thanks for the tip."

  The boy waved and hustled across the big lobby and took the wide stairs two at a time. Jury looked round at the emptiness and pictured what a crush it would be two nights from then. The deserted lobby still had that gummy smell of packed bodies, sweat, and beer. Breathing must be difficult. Did Wiggins really go to these concerts? He craned his neck upward to gaze at the huge, open circle over whose railing hundreds of beery smiles would look down on that night. And farther up in space to a baroque ceiling that brought his fancy back to those long-ago afternoons. The picture palace.

  "We're sold out!" The childishly nasal voice pulled Jury from his fancies of picture palaces and he turned and saw a youngish woman with a haircut that looked done by a lawn mower on burnt grass hitting a cold-drink machine. Her face looked as parched as her hair, as if this mirage of a machine was the only thing that would keep her from dying of thirst.

  "Mary Lee?"

  That did surprise her out of her rotten mood, at least long enough to ask, "Who're you?"

  Instead of answering, Jury walked over to the machine and with a hand on each side tried to sway it a little. The can plonked down into the opening. Mary Lee made a little sound, popped the cap, and then arranged her miniskirted thighs and scoop-necked sweater to their best advantage. "Well, wherever'd you learn that?"

  "From when I was broke."

  "How'd you know me?" Mary Lee glanced up from the Coke can she was licking her tongue around and slowly blinked her sand-colored lashes.

  Poor girl, she could have done with a bit of lipstick for some color. But at least there was some glitter in the hoop earrings and the rhinestone-studded locket that lay strategi-cally placed above the cleavage. "Friend told me you more-or-less managed the place. I just wanted a look round."

  From the way she ran her long pearlescent fingernails through her half-cropped hair and tried to look like a manager, it was clear she hardly knew what to do with this information—she certainly didn't want to out-and-out deny it. "Well, I expect I wouldn't say that, exactly. I'm more his assistant. I can't auth-or-ize you going over the place. In-side's about as pretty as an airplane hangar. Whatcha want to see it for? The roadies are in there anyways, setting up. For Sirocco." Her eyes glinted like the shiny aluminum of the can. "All I want's to meet Charlie."

  "Do you get to meet the stars who come here?"

  "I did Eric Clapton. I nearly shook for a week." Realizing the persona might be slipping, she added, "Of course, there aren't many like him. Most are pretty run-of-the-mill."

  The door to the auditorium opened and the young man, one of the "roadies" upon whom she cast an experienced and disdainful look, came through and walked over to the soft-drink machine.

  As he was about to put in a coin, she called, "That's for staff, if you don't mind. You got your own up in the dressing rooms."

  He turned, surprised, looked a little helpless, and Jury recognized him as the same person who'd passed by them under the marquee. "Sorry," he said and retreated into the auditorium.

  "I don't know why they're mucking about here a day ahead of time."

  "Do they use the place for practice sessions?"

  "Them? Wouldn't be caught dead outside their suite at the Ritz. I expect when you're that famous you don't need to do sessions. Ever so handsome, ihn't he?"

  "Who? The chap that just walked out here?"

  'Wo. Charlie Raine. He's single, too."

  She sighed, looked down at her obviously new shoes, and lifted an ankle. "Do you like them? Paid nearly thirty quid for these ones and that was sale price." She brought the ankle down and drew the other one in straight and bent her head to stare at them appreciatively. "Look like glass, don't they?"

  Not precisely. More like acrylic, the uppers clear, the high heels smoke-toned, and the ankle straps thin slivers of acrylic dotted with tiny beads to match the heels. "Beautiful," said Jury. "They're very smart; you'd have to pay twice that for the ones I saw in the window of—" Jury thought for a moment. "—Fortnum and Mason."

  "You never." Mary Lee breathed this out in a whispery way.

  Jury couldn't, actually, remember the last time he'd looked in the windows of Fortnum and Mason. Much too pricey. Yet people actually bought produce there: carrots, lettuces, cabbages, kings, no doubt. But he merely nodded his head solemnly.

  Mary Lee turned at the sound of the telephone, disgusted, and started off on swaying ankles to the ticket window to answer, then came back quickly and whispered, "Look, you just want a deco, go on in. But don't tell no one, okay?" She gave him a wink and hurried toward the repeated brr brr.

  That morning, before taking the tube to Hammersmith, the first thing he had done was to start his search for the copy of Time Out that he hadn't been able to find before he went to sleep on the sofa, fully clothed.

  Jury fingered through stacks of spilled magazines and papers, turned over cushions, flayed the sheets on the bed, vandalized drawers and cupboards. If the place had been a mess before, it was now a shambles. And he knew all the while the search was useless; the magazine had been on top of that pile . . . Carole-anne ... of course.

  Jury yanked off his jacket and pulled a heavy sweater over his head, dark brown with a sort of lopsided moose woven into its woolly strands. It was a present from Carole-anne, who seemed to be as interested in dressing him down as she was in dressing Mrs. Wassermann up.

  Down the stone front steps and right to a smaller set of steps leading to Mrs. Wassermann's basement flat Jury ran.

  At his first knock, she opened the door and threw up her hands as if she'd just been delivered from a family of thieves. "At last, at last you are back." The hands then clasped beneath her chin in a gesture of thanks to the angels.

  But this Mrs. Wassermann was not quite the one he'd left. Her gray hair was frizzed out with a new perm that did not strike Jury as a viable alternative to the ordinarily neat, pulled-back hair tucked in a bun at the nape of the neck. Carole-anne had obviously been raiding his f
lat and commandeering Mrs. Wassermann round the beauty salons. But he merely smiled and complimented her on the wave.

  "No, no. Not a perm, Mr. Jury. It's scrunched."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Scrunched. Sassoon. They only scrunch and diffuse." She waved her hand back and forth slowly, in simulation of a hair-dryer. "No brushes, just diffusion. Sassoon believes in letting the hair be natural."

  Jury leaned against the doorjamb. "Tell me, did Carole-anne sit in for some scrunching, too? Or some diffusion?"

  "Oh, no. Not with her hair. Sassoon said it was so glorious just to let it be." Mrs. Wassermann made it sound as if Vidal himself had been in attendance.

  "Of course. Well, do you think I could have the extra key to the Glorious One's flat?"

  "Of course, of course." She turned to her bookshelves. "It's right behind Mr. le Carre."

  Mrs. Wassermann always referred to her books by the surnames of the authors. Miss Austen. Mr. Dickens. Miss Krantz.

  She placed the key in his hand and asked for no information in return. It was Mrs. Wassermann's great virtue; she never intruded with questions. She was the greatest re-specter of privacy he had ever known. Too bad Miss Palut-ski didn't take a page from that book.

  "I wish she'd stop using my room as if it were a waiting lounge between flights."

  "Ah, yes, but you know she cannot afford to be on the phone."

  "Why should she? She's on mine. And I wish she'd stop taking things. I had a copy of Time Out and I need it"

  "Oh, that I have it right here . . ." She swept away again. "She thought I should know what's going on around town."

  That boded ill. "Thanks, Mis. Wassermann . . ."

  "Do not be too upset with Carole-anne, Mr. Jury. You know she's been under great stress lately."

  Jury turned back, his foot on the steps leading upward. "Yes, she was going totally crazy when I left."

  Mrs. Wassermann lowered her eyelids and made a tch-tching with her tongue as if he were speaking ill of the dead.

  Looking grave, Mrs. Wassermann said, "No, she does not read her maps—"

  Her maps? Everything seemed to come under Carole-anne's provenance, including the Atlantic. She shouldn't be reading the Tarot and telling fortunes down at the Starrdust; she should join up with whatever Balboas and Byrds were still around.

  "—and she has grown very dismal."

  "Dismal. No, that I'll never believe." Crazy, yes. Dismal, no. He was happy her obsession was only with maps and the schedules of the ferries from Cork and Belfast. What dangerous waters she was charting on her way to Atlantis, he couldn't imagine; he only knew that Carole-anne would skim across seas with total confidence, and God save the sharks.

  "She's down-in-the-mouth, Mr. Jury. You should see her, cheer her up. It must be that she didn't get that part she'd been working so hard on."

  Carole-anne had been, he thought, extremely vague about this acting "part," except that she was doing a good bit of practicing blindness. White cane, tapping, face held slightly askew, eyes attempting to glaze over.

  This (Jury thought, smiling inwardly again) was impossible. The lapis-lazuli eyes attempting to appear expressionless and empty—that would be too much for anyone, much less a part-time actress with a limited repertoire.

  Actually, Carole-anne was a full-time actress with a vast repertoire, the result merely of being Carole-anne. It was extremely difficult to get down to some central core of being with the girl. Woman. Young lady. He was never sure; her age kept changing.

  "Thanks." He saluted Mrs. Wassermann with the rolled-up magazine. "I'll see her."

  Charlie Raine was, apparently, quite well known for his ability to avoid interviews and evade the media.

  Jury read the article on Sirocco, went back and read it again. Then he read it a third time. The other members of the band—Alvaro Jiminez, Caton Rivers, a towering John Swann (sex symbol, and he knew it), the drummer, Wes Whelan—all of them had been interviewed, all of them had made comments. Jiminez scored top points for genuineness and intelligence. Swann scored only monosyllabic, self-aggrandizing points, like a man playing tennis with himself. Whelan and Rivers were fairly quiet. But Charlie Raine hadn't even been in the hotel suite, and the reporter-cum-pseudo-critic wasn't at all happy about that.

  Thus the only information the reader could get about one of their lead guitarists and vocalists was whatever the others said. It was clear Jiminez was far more reliable than someone like Swann, who was being upstaged all over the place. Not even that double-necked guitar he kept on display could convince anyone that he was the main man in this outfit.

  If anyone was, it was Alvaro Jiminez, the original organizer of the band, a black man from the Delta, a master of blues. Whelan was a Dubliner, Rivers from Chicago, and

  Swann and Raine were British. A strange assortment, the interviewer said (with all the grace of a double-dose of Whicker's World). No one took him up on "assortment"; no one enlightened him as to how they'd come together. Jimi-nez said, "We just done fall into each other's arms."

  Nor could anyone answer the jackpot question: Why was Charlie Raine leaving the band? "I expect—" (Jury smiled, sure Jiminez would leave off the t) "—Charlie, he just want to."

  And the future of the band?

  "Same as the past, mate," Swann had said (offensively, according to the thin-skinned reporter).

  In various poses of self-indulgence or insouciance, they were photographed in their roughed-up clothes and booted feet, lounging in their suite at the Ritz.

  It was a soppy, sappy interview. Jury liked the band, even Swann, in some old-fashioned pasteboard-hero sort of way. At least all of them were in concert when it came to this interview.

  Jury put aside the magazine and folded his hands behind his head, sitting down low on his sofa. No, they'd said, they didn't know why Charlie was quitting. No, again. They hadn't a clue.

  Jury thought he might.

  28

  Jury went through the middle of the set of double doors. The auditorium was empty except for a man to his right in one of the mixing bays. Sound engineer, he supposed, for Sirocco. The fellow barely grazed Jury with a glance, obviously too intent on his equipment to bother with who should or shouldn't be here. More likely, he thought Jury was one of the Odeon's staff. He probably didn't care one way or the other; his interest was the long bank of equipment, with its complex of knobs, levers, buttons, and slightly glowing lights that made Jury think of a starship.

  Mary Lee's appraisal of the auditorium was as far off the mark as one could get. Far from resembling an airplane hangar or warehouse, it still held on to the remnants of its old Art Deco splendor. Probably the lighting fixtures weren't the originals, but it was hard to tell.

  The distance from the center of the stage to where he was standing at the rear must have been eighty or ninety feet, and the entire stage was probably as much in width. It must have had the largest proscenium arch in all of London, he thought.

  A phalanx of lights had been set up on the side and overhead a couple of technicians were working on the huge lighting strut, two or three dozen lights positioned in lines along steel bands. High up as it was, it seemed a precarious perch for the workers, unless they were trapeze artists. The big strut swayed there, twenty feet or so above the stage. They finished what they were doing, climbed down, and disappeared off to the right. Jury could see part of a metal staircase that must lead to private rooms up on the level above.

  One of the humpers came in, deposited another amplifier, walked out through the stage door off to the right. It was out there that Jury had seen the vans parked.

  The only one of the road crew left on the stage now was trailing some sort of cable along the side of the stage and pulling a microphone—there were five of them—over to center stage and out toward the edge. It was the fellow Mary Lee had warned off the soft-drink machine. He adjusted the mike and gave his attention to a voice that must have issued from the steps on the right. All Jury could hear was s
omething about "lights."

  The young man's answer was a laugh and a "What for?" Then he shaded his eyes and looked toward the rear of the theater—Jury thought at first he was about to get thrown out—but the fellow on the stage was apparently directing his attention to the other one in the mixing bay. The sound man raised his hand as a sign.

  He picked a guitar from one of the cases, drew the strap across his shoulder, and moved into a classic introduction to a Spanish song that Jury thought he remembered as a Segovia number.

  Mary Lee hadn't recognized him and it was her chief object in life to meet him. As he listened to the staccato picking and arpeggiated runs of the song, Jury thought that anonymity was not that hard to come by. Here this lad had come face-to-face with someone who had seen his picture again and again and she hadn't twigged it. Even in the context of the theater he was performing in the next night, still he'd gone unrecognized. It was perhaps not so astonishing, after all. You see what you expect to see, and you don't expect to see the lead guitarist of a famous rock group humping his own equipment or trying to get himself a Coke when a half-dozen minions—not to mention Mary Lee herself—would crawl on their knees for the privilege of supply-ing him with whatever he needed. And you certainly wouldn't expect to see him without the rest of his band.

  And there was nothing about him that said star. Not his appearance (jeans and a washed-out denim shirt), not his stage presence. Rather remarkably (Jury thought) not his stage presence. Charlie Raine didn't seem to have what Wiggins and Macalvie had called "attitude." It wasn't attitude that made this classical Spanish piece take wing. The guitar might as well have been playing him rather than the other way round.

  It was plain, raw exposure. He had to be more accurate and more precise than if he'd been playing electric; like nerve endings, every note was exposed.

  The notes seemed to crystallize in the air, long notes arced out and kicked back and into a lightning riff, like tracer bullets, so that Jury felt he was caught in some sort of crossfire.

  The music was fluid and frenetic at the same time. The piece stopped, suddenly, with a thunderous succession of sustained chords.