Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (46 page)

They made, this small gathering drawn together in outrageous
circumstances, a sort of closed circle.

The dog Stranger sat close to the center, eyeing each of them as if
he'd managed to catch and hold them, by transfixing them with his
hypnotic eye.

It was Abby who broke the ring; she walked over to a spot not quite
within Jury's reach, and put out her hand. Abby, with her black hair
unevenly cut around a face pale as a moonbeam, and those navy blue
eyes, reached out a hand that lay for a moment in Jury's like a white
moth.

Then she walked over to Melrose, again extended her hand and looked
up at him gravely.

It was the Deep Blue Good-bye.

Jury was glad he'd seen the theater empty before he saw it packed.
The crowd that had flowed from the Underground tunnel and jumped the
iron railings in the slanting rain, diamond-splinters in the reflection
of the bright marquee, were jammed in the lobby and packed upstairs
where the bar was open.

Jostled by the line in front of the poster and T-shirt concession,
Jury looked up at the huge oval, peopleless yesterday, tonight
thronged with faces peering over the railing and above them the flashy
chandelier that tossed tiny squares of light across some of the faces
and hands. He wished he were here just for the show. It was wonderful,
this climate of expectancy; the ring of faces looked down as if from a
height where they breathed headier air. And from the boozy appearance
of some of them, the air up there was decidedly winey. They talked,
laughed, giggled, yelled down at their mates below, for it seemed in
that magical way thai certain occasions afforded, they were all mates.

Mary Lee was in her element down here and secured behind her
window, where she could, given the line of hopefuls waiting for
no-shows, dispense with infinite largesse what tickets there were to be
had. For the begging, Jury imagined. Mary Lee was dressed in purple
silky stuff, blue shadow with gold glitter on her eyelids.

Wiggins had asked Jury why her shoe was sitting behind the window on
the ticket counter.

It had always been a wonder to Jury and Carole-anne—no matter how
packed the crowd, how large the room—that Carole-anne could always be
seen across or through it, as if people instinctively moved back a
little to allow a clearer view of Miss Palutski, this evening wearing
her Chinese stop-light-red dress over which she'd tossed a short little
silver-sequined coat that gave off fire and glitter like the domed
chandelier. To give off fire and glitter though, Carole-anne only
needed that flaming red-gold hair, those blue eyes.

"Super!" She threw up her hand, jumped up a bit, and seemed
oblivious to the synchronized turn of male heads. Carole-anne, oddly
enough, was not really vain. If you look like that (thought Jury,
pushing his way through the crowd), vanity is redundant.

He searched the people crushed against her for Andrew Starr or one
of the dozen or so males Jury would sometimes pass on the steps of his
digs.

A couple of feet away he heard his name. It was a breathless Mrs.
Wassermann, who had just, apparently, beat her way from the concession
line. Mrs. Wassermann held up a T-shirt.
Sirocco
was scrawled
across the front in silver, and a picture of the members of the band
was outlined in a square on the back. "I do not know if it will fit,
Mr. Jury. It seems small." She held it up to him.

Mrs. Wassermann also looked once again almost like Mrs. Wassermann.
It had been impossible to get the scrunch completely out, but the hair
had been combed back, frizz only round the face; she was dressed in one
of her well-tailored, comfortably familiar dark dresses, with her
silver brooch.

Jury thanked her for the T-shirt, looked at Carole-anne, and bent
down and kissed her. This drew an appreciative little round of applause
from a few itinerant musicians (perhaps hoping some Sirocco magic
would rub off on their gig bags).

"Wait outside the front door when this is over; there's someone I
want you to meet."

"Meet? Who?"

"It's a man . . . musician-type."

Carole-anne tried not to seem pleased by either the kiss or the
mystery and pulled Mrs. Wassermann along.

In the bun at the nape of her neck were two hot pink, sequined
Spanish combs.

With the crowd shoving round him toward the sets of double doors,
Jury felt a tap on his shoulder.

"If you must send me on another mission, make it Lourdes," said
Melrose Plant, who had his cosher under his arm and was peeling off
leather gloves supple enough for a surgeon. "First of all, Trueblood
blackmailed me into going on one of his London shopping sprees, and I
can only thank God it was Upper Sloane Street and not Harrods; he
insisted I buy this." Melrose shook out the lapels of a new overcoat.

"You look like Armani himself. Did you get our man?"

As Melrose wedged himself between a girl with rainbow hair and a
leather-jacketed one who ogled his coat and reminded him a little of
Ellen, he said, "Yes, but I had to leave my Rolex behind."

Over his shoulder, Jury said, "You don't wear a Rolex."

"I bought one for the occasion. Traded it off for this on the way
out." He held up a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses. "I think
she's running a pawnshop."

Jury pulled him over to one side of the stalls and let the crowd
stream by, making for their seats.

"Where's Sergeant Wiggins?" asked Plant.

"Up there." He nodded toward the balcony. "Projection room."

"You've been seeing too many reruns—uh!" His stomach was prodded by
the elbow of a boozy fan. "—of
The Man-churian Candidate
.
God!" The heel of a boot had just crunched down on his shoe.

"Probably," said Jury, checking the Exit signs and the double doors
at the rear. Five men, that was all he could muster, one at the stage
door, one in front, one operating as a scalper, the other two inside.
It was hardly mounting a battalion. The two huge spotlights on each end
of the circle suddenly switched on and started crisscrossing the stage,
which sent up cheers from the audience.

Plant had raised his voice at the next onslaught from a couple of
punches on the shoulder. "For God's sakes, you could get killed in here
just from standing about."

"So you're both down here waiting for some shooter to stand up on a
front-row seat, for chrissakes." The owner of the elbow sounded
disgusted.

"Macalvie?" Jury couldn't believe it.

"Well, you wanted help, didn't you? Lord knows you could use it." He
shoved a couple back who were blowing smoke in his face. "I don't know
anyone at headquarters who likes rock music. So here I am. How many men
have you got here? Not that it'd make much difference, judging from the
crowd."

"Five," said Jury, raising his eyes to the balcony where he was
blinded momentarily by the spotlights. The crisscrossing of the spots
on the stage made him think of the air raids. He remembered that this
theater was the meeting place for Operation Overlord. The audience,
hundreds of people, all of them still standing, might have been waiting
for the last briefing before D-Day.

The stage was empty except for the amplifying equipment, a deep,
double-tiered black platform, and, at the rear of the stage, a long
black backdrop of a curtain with
SIROCCO
spelled out in
silver letters. Behind or offstage must have been a wind machine, for
the curtain rippled and swayed, moving the cursive letters.

All five of them walked on stage together to an explosion of
applause. They were dressed in basic black, shirts and cords. John
Swann was bare-chested except for a glittery silver jacket, sleeveless
and short, that gave the audience a good look at his biceps and
pectorals. Jiminez's loose black jacket had a red satin lining, and Wes
Whelan wore a red satin shirt and a cap made of the same silvery stuff
as

Swann's waistcoat. Whelan quickly took his place behind the drums on
the second tier and Caton Rivers was half-surrounded by keyboards on
the first.

While the spotlights up in the dress circle dropped huge coins on
the stage, a switch thrown somewhere flooded the stage with a
rainbowlike iridescence from the lighting truss. It was the sign to
begin.

This band didn't wind up its audience, didn't grandstand, didn't
preen. As soon as those lights hit them, Wes Whelan hit the drums for
his sizzling solo introduction to the band's signature song,
"Windfall." And the crowd, simultaneously, went crazy. Jiminez kicked
in with that one-note riff building his bass line, and Charlie Raine
stepped a few feet forward and started one of his arpeggio runs. The
huge hall reverberated with the lightning of the music and the thunder
of the crowd echoing it.

"I think I see," said Plant, picking some foreign object from his
new coat, "what you mean."

He looked up, momentarily blinded by the spotlight.

The dress circle was an amorphous mass of moving bodies . . . except
for Carole-anne's, whose glittery jacket was just caught by the
spotlight's edge in the middle of the second or third row of the circle.

Height, he thought.

Obviously, the killer would need height. "Lobby," he said to Plant
and Macalvie.

Mary Lee was holding sway behind her window over an intrepid group
still trying to get in. When the wave of music issuing out through the
doors thwacked shut behind Jury and Plant, she snatched her shoe off
the counter and shouted, "That's
it
, luv!" to a
leathery-skinned couple and secured the little window. The leftover
Sirocco disciples were flapping their arms in gestures signaling
distress.

"You got another one of those?" asked Macalvie, when

Jury yanked up the antennae on his radio. He shook his head as
Wiggins's voice crackled over the receiver.

"Fine, sir, so far. There're two projectionists up here, there's no
way anyone could get in without being seen. I even checked out the old
spotlight that looks like it must've been here when the place opened.
Big enough to hide a body in." He paused to chuckle at his own
inventiveness. "It's a warren of rooms and stairways; we checked out
what we could."

"How much can you see of the theater? The circle?"

A pause as Wiggins apparently looked round. "Nothing much."

"Get down to the dress circle and try to cover the rear."

"Yes, sir."

Music hit them in a wave as the double door slapped open and shut
after Macalvie, who came through talking: "Great band. One thing that
worries me—"

"May I see your ticket, if you
pul-eez
," said Mary Lee,
her tone clearly suggesting he'd sneaked in.

"It's all right dear. I'm from
Juke Blues
."

Her eyebrows shot up. "The mag?"

Macalvie handed her a card that seemed to impress her.

"Well, all right. But they should let us know."

The lobby was not empty. The two fellows who worked the T-shirt
concession were standing at the other set of doors, listening; the
squatters were sitting in surliness near the ticket booth as if extra
tickets might miraculously walk out of Mary Lee's window; a few fans
were wandering toward the open air, stoned.

"Mary Lee—" He looked at her, wondered if she'd have the nerve to
walk out on the stage if he needed her. "Mary Lee. There's something I
might want you to do." He handed her a two-way radio.

"What's this, then?"

"Take this, go backstage."

"
Backstage
. Whatever for?"

"I'll tell you when, // the time comes." He showed her how to work
the radio. "You'll love it."

Mary Lee frowned; she didn't look as if she were about to fall in
love with this contraption. "Well, I dunno—"

Macalvie said, "Just do it, right?
Juke Blues
is doing a
big feature on this concert,
big
, and we're gonna want to
include some behind-the-scenes people." He winked and tapped her
shoulder.

Mary Lee's eyes widened.

Jury went on. "First of all, I want you to get up to the dress
circle, and tell the lady in silver and red—she'll be sitting in the
middle of the second, third row—"

"Oh, I seen '
er
, all right." Mary Lee adjusted her own
decolletage as if competing with the Chinese neckline. "What about 'er?"

"Tell her I want my own personal cheering section if something
happens. Applaud, yell, jump up and down—"

"Won't work, Jury," said Macalvie. "For five seconds, maybe. No
more."

"All I need is five seconds."

"All I need is an explanation," said Melrose.

That the swell beside her apparently wasn't in on this operation
galvanized Mary Lee into action. "Right, luv." And she left to churn up
the stairs.

"Come on," said Macalvie, "let's get up there."

The Odeon might as well have sold Standing Room Only because no one
was sitting down. The rows of seats were superfluous. Jury bet they'd
stand all the way through the concert, given their enthusiasm for the
next two numbers.

Then, keyboard-led by Caton Rivers, John Swann gave himself over to
a solo called "Sunday's Gone Again." Swann had enough available
attitude to spread around a dozen bands, but he also had a
nightingale's voice and an incredible range. The top notes he hit were
as silvery as the jacket he wore. No wonder Jiminez (who kept his own
attitude under subtle wraps) wanted him in the band.

Jury was holding his breath for Charlie Raine's solo. Charlie didn't
move like the others; he didn't wheel round like Jiminez, who was
graceful as a dancer; he wasn't all over the stage like Swann, marking
out each section of the clamoring audience as his provenance. Charlie
was both shy and cool; he stayed still.

As he was doing now, swamped in light by the doubled-spot playing on
him, standing with his amplified acoustic singing "Yesterday's Rain"
into the hush of the theater. He ended with a return to the last verse,
stopped, and there was a silence as heavy as the applause,
foot-stomping, and yelling that followed.