Black's Beach Shuffle: A Rolly Waters Mystery

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  There was a picture of Curtis Vox. It wasn’t much of a picture, the one notable feature being the long black hair cascading down either side of a bland, androgynous face. It was the same man Rolly had seen floating in the pool Saturday night.

  He looked up from his paper. The sun was still out, but the small steady rhythms of the street life around him had given way to an insistent loud pulse in his head. He read the article again from the start. Found dead at Black’s, that’s what it said. Which meant Curtis Vox had traveled a couple hundred feet to the west and down a steep cliff sometime after becoming a corpse.

  The sun was unbearably hot as it glared down on Rolly’s head. A large bead of sweat dripped down the left side of his face, slid down in front of his ear. Ten minutes ago, he’d had a solution. This had all been about corporate trade secrets, maybe a woman’s embarrassing past. Now dead bodies were moving around. Between the time Rolly had left the house in The Farms on Sunday morning and the time police arrived there, someone had dragged Curtis’ body from the pool to the edge of the cliff. That someone could have been there when Rolly went back to pick up his guitar. That someone knew that Rolly had been there. And that someone knew for certain that Curtis Vox didn’t die from a fall off a cliff.

  Rolly stood up, cleared the table, started walking towards home. He felt exposed, unprotected. The world he’d been watching was now watching him. It was like that bad dream he used to have all the time, the one where the band started a song and he would play out of tune, unable to figure out what key they were in while the band members, the audience all glared at him, disgust and disappointment all over their faces.

  When he got back to the house, he sat down at the table, read through the article again just to seal it. He pulled out the business card Ricky had given him, dialed Ricky’s number. The line rang twice. Someone answered. Alesis.

  “Mr. Roger’s office.”

  “This is Rolly.”

  “Did you hear? Isn’t it terrible?”

  He felt relieved. There was shock in her voice, that sound you can’t hide when someone you know is suddenly gone. She might be guilty of something, but she didn’t know anything about this.

  “Yeah, that’s why I called. I wanted to talk to Ricky.”

  “He’s in a meeting now, all of top management. They’re discussing what we should do.”

  “About Curtis?”

  “Well, yes, about the company. Curtis was a really important person to us.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” He wondered if she had any idea how important Curtis was to him personally right now.

  “Well, just tell Ricky I called.”

  “Rolly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last night… do you think what happened last night had anything to do with this?”

  “You mean Moogus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “I just wondered. He said the guy was asking him about a key.”

  “What do you think that has to do with Curtis?”

  “It’s just all these things happening at once—Curtis losing the key, Moogus, and now Curtis dead.”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. Just have Ricky call me when he gets a chance.”

  “Rolly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  “About last night, I mean this morning.”

  “I had a good time. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Yeah, me too. There’s just a lot going on I need to think about. Sorry, I gotta go.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  He hung up the phone. He didn’t want this kind of trouble, whatever it was. Playing private detective was just a day job, a way to keep busy and bring in a couple of bucks. Why couldn’t his life ever be simple? All he wanted to do was make enough money to spend the rest of his time playing guitar, keeping his chops up, performing a few nights a week.

  He looked around at the guitars in the living room, the sunburst Telecaster, the gold-top Les Paul, the sea-foam green Epiphone, each one displayed in its own special spot. Each one was a woman with a ticklish soul. Each one had a story to tell. He waited for one of his beautiful harem to start talking to him. The Martin Dreadnought caught his eye, with its blonde spruce top and big woody curves. It suckered him in with its abalone eyelets and dark, resonant mouth. He pulled out a bottleneck slide and picked up the guitar. He sat on the sofa and started playing.

  He picked out some blues notes, played sad chords with minor sevenths, the only things he could ever depend on. When he was fourteen, he would hide in his room playing guitar, turning the headphones up loud so he could drown out the sound of his father and mother, the bitter and angry sounds that they made as they fought a war out in the kitchen. He’d keep on playing until he fell asleep with the old Esquire wrapped in his arms.

  He settled into a little groove with the acoustic, ran through “Come on in My Kitchen” and “Crossroads.” He improvised on a riff in B, found a set of chords he liked, and played through them a few times, listening, hearing them a little differently each time. He thought about Alesis, about a secret computer disk, and a dead kid in a swimming pool. He thought about the shadows that were following him.

  Right after the accident, he’d given it up, stopped playing entirely, sold every instrument that he owned. He didn’t trust it, couldn’t separate the music from all of the crazy things that seemed to go with it, the late nights, the ego battles, the dishonest club owners and booking agents, the drugs and alcohol, the easy, unhappy women.

  But he had returned to it, little by little. One day his mother brought home a guitar, something she’d paid fifty dollars for at a garage sale. It was the Gibson ES-335 and it looked as beat up and worn out as he did. He didn’t play it at first; there were no strings. He tried to imagine how it would sound, how it would feel. Then he started repairing it, replacing the truss rod and the tuning pegs, cleaning and polishing. He bought some strings and a case. He let himself play it, fifteen minutes a day. Then he’d put it in the closet, testing himself, making sure that the devil inside him wouldn’t escape from its cage. He collected old records—T-Bone Walker, Tampa Red, Elmore James. He listened to each note they played, the spaces between them, beautiful things he started hearing again in a new way. He played the guitar a little more each month, learning to listen instead of just play, beginning to hear the beautiful things that were inside him, as well.

  He played through the set of chords, running the riff again, repeating it over and over. There was a song in it somewhere, but he didn’t have all the notes yet to connect it together. A lyric popped into his head, something he’d seen on a book cover. He sang it quietly, a little phrase that fit in with chords.

  This is the soul of a new machine.

  This is the soul of a new machine.

  This is the soul of a new machine.

  The Professor

  Rolly found himself on the freeway again, driving north on Interstate 5 along Mission Bay, past Pacific Beach and into the heart of the fault line along Rose Canyon. He was spending a lot of time on Torrey Pines Mesa lately. He pulled off at Genesee Drive and drove up to the UCSD parking kiosk.

  “Can you tell me where Wagner Hall is?” he asked the parking attendant.

  The attendant pulled out a map, drew a winding path in yellow magic marker, took Rolly’s money, and slapped a permit on the Volvo’s windshield. Rolly pulled into the parking lot, climbed out of the car, and headed in the indicated direction towards Wagner Hall.

  He was there to see Mitch Ibanez, the professor quoted in the newspaper article, the one who praised Curtis Vox as a student. While playing his guitar, Rolly had decided he needed more information on Curtis, a different perspective than the one he had heard from Ricky, from Fender and Alesis. Curtis was a genius, but an odd duck, that was the company party line. He was also the man who had last been in possession of the Magic Key. Rolly wanted to hear about Cu
rtis from someone unconnected to Eyebitz.com.

  He called UCSD information, got the professor’s phone number. Then he called the professor’s office, got an answering machine. He left a message introducing himself as Detective Waters, asked the professor to call him back. He waited about fifteen minutes before he got antsy. The message on the machine listed the professor’s office hours—noon to two on Mondays and Thursdays. It was one o’clock when Rolly called. If Professor Ibanez was in his office, Rolly might be able to drive up to the university and catch him before he left. As he entered the building, he glanced at his watch. It was almost two. He walked up the stairs in quick steps, waited and caught his breath at the top before proceeding.

  Wagner Hall Room 302 was small, filled with books and papers from floor to ceiling. A somewhat round, middle-aged man sat behind a desk, looking distracted. He wore reading spectacles, which hung on the end of his nose by the thinnest layer of skin cells imaginable.

  “Professor Ibanez?”

  “Mmm?” Ibanez replied, not looking up from his work.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “My office hours are from noon until two.” The professor looked at his watch, then back at his papers. “It is now 2:04. Office hours are over.”

  “I called earlier…about Mr. Vox.”

  Professor Ibanez looked up from his papers, assessing Rolly. “Are you the detective?”

  “Yes, sir. Roland Waters,” said Rolly, offering his hand. Ibanez remained seated, motioned Rolly to the industrial strength green plastic chair in front of the desk.

  “You don’t look like a detective, Mr. Waters.”

  “What does a detective look like?”

  “Well, I have spent most of my morning talking to several of them. I was just beginning to define a simple heuristic regarding their appearance and manners. I shall have to see if this new rule of thumb needs to be reformulated or if you are just an anomaly. Is there a particular reason the police keep sending people out to talk with me?”

  “I’m not with the police.”

  “Oh . . . you did say you were a detective, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m a private detective. I was hired by Eyebitz.com.”

  “Well, that might explain the difference in appearance and manners. Has the company hired you to investigate Curtis’ death?”

  “No. I was hired to investigate another matter related to Mr. Vox.”

  “Do you think this matter has something to do with his death?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. From what I know, Mr. Vox fell off a cliff when the ground gave way under him. The police say it was an accident.”

  “Yes, that’s what I was told. Well, what did you want to ask me?”

  “I just wanted your take on Curtis Vox.”

  “My take?”

  “Well, what was he like? You seemed to think pretty highly of him in the paper…‘a student of great potential and promise,’ I think you said.”

  “Yes, I might have said that. Curtis was very intelligent.”

  “It’s kind of what you didn’t say that I was interested in,” Rolly said. Playing guitar, back in the house, he had thought about how the space between the notes was sometimes as important as the notes you actually play.

  “What I didn’t say?”

  “Well, the words you used—‘potential,’ ‘promise.’ What do you mean by that? Was he a good student?”

  Professor Ibanez leaned back in his chair, pulled his reading glasses from his nose and clicked the two ends together thoughtfully for a moment.

  “An astute question, Mr. Waters. To answer it directly, I would have to say no. Curtis was not a good student. In fact, as I recall, I gave him a C in my course.”

  “But you said he was intelligent.”

  “Extremely. He could have been an excellent student. He chose not to be. He had a hard time managing the requirements for regular class attendance and completion of assignments. He seemed to find it more worth his time to devise ingenious computational tricks of dubious value.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, he created a program that appeared to delete all of a user’s directory on the lab workstations. It would run the first time a user deleted a file, which made the user think they had done it themselves. It didn’t really do any damage, but he managed to scare several students. Some complained.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, he inserted an item into one of my lectures.”

  “What kind of item?”

  “A scene from a pornographic video.”

  That’s the beginning of a pattern, at least, Rolly thought.

  “I’m not absolutely certain it was Curtis,” the professor continued. “I caught the item before I started the lecture and deleted it. Curtis seemed the most likely suspect, though.”

  “Could you describe the video?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was just wondering if there was anything in particular you noticed about the video.”

  Professor Ibanez glared at Rolly. “I didn’t really watch it once I found out what it was.”

  Rolly decided to change the subject.

  “Did Curtis have any friends, any romances?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “None at all?”

  “You probably know the stereotype of computer programmers, Mr. Waters.”

  “You mean that they’re nerds?”

  “Yes, nerds, dweebs, geeks. It is something of a myth that computer programmers lack social skills, but there are enough around that do to remind you where the stereotype comes from. Let’s just say that Curtis was not the first student we’ve had in the department who lacked social skills.”

  “In what way?”

  “Curtis seemed to have an inborn need to prove he was smarter, or at least more of a smartass, than anyone else. He had a bad habit of taunting other people when they couldn’t keep up with him.”

  “How so?”

  “If someone made a mistake, he’d make fun of him, tell everyone how stupid he’d been. It became harder and harder for Curtis to attract people to work with him. At first, students wanted to work with him because they knew he was smart and could help them do better. After the first year or two, the other students avoided him like a plague.”

  “When did he graduate?”

  “He never graduated. He quit, to work for Eyebitz.com, just before starting his senior year. That was about a year ago.”

  “What can you tell me about Eyebitz.com?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  Rolly was beginning to feel that Professor Ibanez was a man who didn’t like open-ended questions. “Well, I mean, what is it? Do they really have some sort of revolutionary technology like it says in the brochure, some kinds of new algorithms?”

  “Well, I don’t really know much about the company. I’ve heard the buzz and the rumors, but that’s all I’ve heard. They seem to be playing it pretty close to the vest with their product.”

  “You mean they’re hiding something?”

  “I’m not saying that. But they have yet to roll out a real product. They’ve never allowed anyone to go over it, kick the tires, so to speak.”

  “From what I understand, they’re worried about industrial spying, back door engineering.”

  “Backward engineering, I think you mean,” said the professor. “Well, yes, I suppose that’s a legitimate concern, but until you have a product people can use, it’s all vaporware, anyway. That’s how it is these days, in this business environment. A kid like Curtis gets a good idea, works up a couple of algorithms, next thing you know someone’s tossing him ten million dollars in venture capital. Pretty soon everybody else is worried they’re going to miss the next Netscape or Apple Computer and more money starts pouring in.”

  “You don’t seem to think they’ve got much of a product.”

  “I’m not saying that, either. I’m just saying I don’t know what they’ve got and there’s no way
to know until I see something that’s not held together with baling wire and band aids.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The demo versions of the software they’ve released are clearly built on open source technology that’s already out there. You can tell if you poke around in it a little bit. They’ve licensed it and tweaked it a little, but that’s all it is. Nothing revolutionary. On the other hand, maybe the technology doesn’t matter if you know how to sell it. Don’t listen to me if you want investment advice. I put all my money on a company called Kaydell back in the eighties.”

  “They didn’t do well?”

  “Oh, they did worse than that. The CEO absconded with all of the investors’ money.”

  Rolly nodded sympathetically. Was that a Kaydell party he’d played in Del Mar way back in the eighties? It was some kind of computer business everyone was excited about. They had a big cake at the party, shaped like a computer. Rolly got drunk at the party. He tripped over himself. He’d put out his hands to break his fall and stuck them right into the cake. The rest of the guys in the band made him stay in the parking lot the rest of the night when he wasn’t on stage.

  Rolly sat for a moment, waiting to see if Professor Ibanez wanted to volunteer any more information, but there was nothing forthcoming. He stood up, pulled a business card out of his wallet.

  “Thank you, Professor Ibanez. If you think of anything else that might be useful, please give me a call.”

  The Waterfront Bar

  Officer Bonnie Hammond of the San Diego Police Department sat at her regular window table at the Waterfront Bar, nursing a Corona, her once-a-week indulgence and reward for sticking to her six-day-a-week workout schedule. She was out of uniform, wearing a blue plaid Madras shirt that matched her eyes. She wore Doc Marten boots and black Levis. In the late afternoon sun her blonde tomboy haircut reflected a few red highlights that matched her freckles. She was five-foot-six, 170 pounds, and built like a Chargers cornerback, lean, mean, and speedy.

  The Waterfront was a dive in Little Italy (Microscopic Italy, some in town joked) that had managed to survive its age and decay to become popular with people the regulars would have abhorred in its more blue-collar days. Where once it had been the exclusive enclave of tuna fishermen and the longshoreman’s union, it was a more motley crowd that frequented the place now. Salty sea dogs were being squeezed out by well appointed urban professionals, lawyers, accountants, and the India Street arts crowd, dressed up in tattoos and attitude.