Steel Guitar (3 page)

If I was going to help her, I needed to cut her loose before some fan wised up—or worse, a jailhouse reporter. I drew Mooney into a corner and used up a good many points, promising to explain later.

If Mooney and I had met any other way, I'm sure we'd have wound up in bed by now. But for years I steeled myself against thinking about him as a possible bedmate, and by the time he finally became accessible, the chemistry just wasn't there.

Like sleeping with a brother, I tell him whenever he asks me out.

Other than my feeling that intimacy would be incestuous, I have nothing against Mooney. He's good-looking if you like them tall, solid, and Irish. He's got deceptively mild brown eyes that can freeze you with a glance. He's close to forty, but you can only tell by the fine little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His waistline hasn't expanded.

Mooney explains our lack of romance in other terms. He says I flat out prefer outlaws to cops anyday—my current beau, Sam Gianelli, son of a Boston mob underboss, is a case in point.

Mooney said a few words to the officers who'd brought us in and they made apologetic noises. Dee's accuser wound up with a lecture on public intoxication that he was too far gone to understand. The cops offered him a ride back to the park, which I thought was decent of them.

Mooney said he'd be more than happy to drive me and my friend. I would have opted for the smelly cruiser and a quick escape from his close scrutiny, but before I could decline, Dee said thank you in a fervent tone. Mooney hustled us out the back door and commandeered a new unit with working A/C. His old Buick is a wreck.

Dee kept her face shielded from the light, grabbed the back door handle, and ducked quickly inside. I sat up front and aimed all the vents full on my face.

We drove back to the scene of the non-crime.

Dee mumbled her thanks to Mooney as she left the car, head bent, cape fastened, dark glasses in place.

“I sure like your new stuff, Dee,” Mooney said with a warm smile. He squealed the tires when he pulled away. Boys will be boys.

“Shit,” Dee said, with a pleased grin, as she squeezed behind the meter into the front seat of my cab. “How'd he recognize me?”

I didn't answer because I was busy staring at the red ticket plastered to the cab's windshield. Parking at a hydrant is a hundred-buck fine, and the cab company sure won't pay it.

Like my mother always used to say, “Don't mix in.”

Three

I started the motor. Dee pushed back the torn sleeve of her shirt and a thin red trickle oozed down her arm.

“Got a Kleenex or something?” she asked.

“Try the dash.” My pal, Gloria, dispatcher and co-owner of the Green & White Cab Company, stocks the cabs with first-aid kits, but some of the bozos who pilot them steal anything, including Band-Aids.

Dee rummaged in silence for a while, then said, “Here's one of those things you clean your hands with after you eat Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“If it's still in the wrapper, use it,” I advised.

Caught by a traffic light near the Public Garden, I watched as Dee wiped her arm and cranked down the passenger window, presumably to toss the used towelette. Instead she kept a tight grip on it, leaned back, and giggled. The sound echoed off the dividing shield.

“Something funny?” I asked.

“I was just thinking I'd probably get arrested for littering,” she said. “Jesus,” she gasped, squeezing out words between eruptions of laughter, “of all the cabs in all the cities in all the world … Is that how it goes? You know, that line from
Casablanca
. Bogie says it. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the—'”

“‘You had to walk into mine,'” I quoted with feeling. “Calm down.” Some people throw giggle-fits when they realize they won't have to spend the night in jail. Relief takes mysterious forms.

“Shit, I'm sorry, Carlotta. Not recognizing you right off, I mean. I wasn't expecting … What I mean”—her laughter took on a bitter, self-mocking tone—” I mean, here I go skulking out of the hotel, all incognito and anonymous, and first thing, right off, I take a cab with you at the wheel. I mean, I'm doing everything just right, you know?”

Her voice had begun to waver.

“Lose a lot of cash?” I asked.

She hesitated. I gave her a raised eyebrow and she apparently decided that saving her ass twice in a single night gave me the right to a question or two.

“Around a hundred bucks,” she muttered. “Maybe two.”

My eyebrow went up another notch. I know what's in my wallet down to the last dime.

“Back to the hotel?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You staying there? Nice place,” I said.

“Remember my apartment on Mass. Ave.? What a toilet that was.”

“But the parties were good,” I said. You get enough people together in a one-room dive and nobody notices the decor.

We drove another three blocks. The silence grew as heavy and uncomfortable as the heat.

“Carlotta,” Dee said slowly, “that license you showed the cops—are you the kind of investigator who finds people?”

“I'm a private investigator. I do missing persons work.”

“Can you get rid of the cab?”

“I suppose I could,” I said doubtfully.

She was suddenly eager. “Come upstairs. You can help me out. I mean, you're perfect. You're like a gift. I'll pay for your time. I'll pay for what you lose tonight with the cab. I'll pay your damn parking ticket. I mean, even if you won't do it, I'll pay.”

I pulled up in front of the Four Winds. The doorman hurried down the walk, but Dee waved him off.

My hand hovered at the ignition. I straightened up and turned to look at her. I could feel my jaw muscles clench. “Is Cal with you?” I asked finally, breaking a long pause.

She looked searchingly at my face. I concentrated on a nearby traffic light.

“He left,” she said. “Long time ago.”

“You don't want me to find him, do you?”

“Hell, no.”

Four

The first thing I noticed about the lobby was the air-conditioning; the place could have doubled as a refrigerator. I sucked in the icy air gratefully, felt my thin shirt start to stiffen and chill.

We skirted carefully composed groups of furniture facing off across Oriental rugs. I wondered if anyone dared to sit in the antique chairs. Although we were the only passengers, we didn't speak in the elevator. Dee hit the lowest button on the right. Top floor.

You know how your tongue always strays to the sore spot in your mouth? Mine does.

And add another character flaw: when I was a kid, after it rained, there was this one rock in the backyard that positively demanded to be turned over. I'd shiver a little before I did it, because I never failed to find some mushy crawly thing underneath it—but it never occurred to me not to look.

I watched the indicator lights wink the passing floors, and realized that after all this time, Cal still feels like a sore spot in my mouth, a big unturned rock in my yard. Calvin Therieux, my ex-husband. The one who left town with Dee Willis.

That's right. Waltzed off with my best friend, Dee, the woman with whom I'd sung five thousand songs and shared more than a few men. I'd layered her unruly hair and taught her how to wield a blow-dryer. She'd ironed my curls till they were fashionably straight. Dee and Cee, they called us. Dee and Carlotta, always together back then. Such a striking duo.

She had the boobs, the dimples, the Southern charm. I had the boyish ass, the long legs, the blazing red hair. We used to kid each other that we had one great body between the two of us.

And then there was Cal.

So why hadn't I deserted her in the park?

More to the point, what the hell was I doing in the elevator?

I remember taking a biology test for Dee right before she dropped out of college. My hand shook when I forged her name to the blue book. What I can't remember is why I agreed to do it.

And Cal? Well, Cal didn't really leave me for Dee, not that way, or not exclusively that way. He dropped me for cocaine, pure and simple. Dee was forming a band at the perfect time, setting out on a six-month tour. Cal had a choice: He could stay with me, get clean, get a local job; he could go with Dee, play the music, stay stoned, and party.

Uh-huh. Some choice.

The elevator door slid open.

The hallway was carpeted in wine-colored pile. The walls wore maroon-and-white-striped paper; gold-framed prints hung under brass lamps. Music poured through open double doors to the right, and from the way it stopped and started, it had to be live. Chatter mixed with the music. In the hushed lobby below, it was close to two
A
.
M
. On the eighth floor, it was party time.

“Shit,” Dee muttered under her breath. “I can't believe this bash is still pumping along. MGA/America—that's my new label—flew a planeload of company stiffs out to cha-cha. Christ, I headached my way out hours ago.”

She touched a conspiratorial finger to her lips and we slipped down the corridor unnoticed. She had the key in a back pocket of her tight black pants, except it was a card, not a key, which must have made it more comfy to sit on. She slipped it into a slot next to the door. A light flashed from red to green, and the door eased open when she turned the knob.

I was glad she hadn't kept the card in her handbag.

“Who's that?” a low voice demanded as we entered. A woman giggled, and someone grunted and told her to shut up. The only illumination was the glow from a distant heavily-shaded lamp. Dee hit a switch and the room's size was revealed in the harsh overhead light.

At first glance it looked a little smaller than my house. The wall-to-wall was gold plush. A spray of orchids and lilies was shoved to one side of a mirrored cocktail table that separated two low ivory couches.

“Shit, Dee, you like to scare me to death.” A black man wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt and Day-Glo-orange wristbands and a matching headband knelt on the carpet in front of the table. A blonde teenager, sixteen tops, sprawled next to him, blinking mascaraed lashes. Her long hair was dyed and curled to within an inch of its life, and she was wearing hot-pink tights and a lacy black thing that looked like a bra.

“Oh, great,” Dee mumbled, “this is all I need.”

It was a bra. A hot-pink shirt, crumpled like an exotic flower, lay on the gold rug.

“You okay, hon?” a dark-haired woman asked Dee in a raspy voice. She seemed drunk or stoned, and was supporting herself with an arm draped around a man who must have been ten years younger than she was, a thin wisp of a guy in jeans and a denim jacket. He had a slightly foreign air, dark smudgy eyes.

A bearded man was lying on the carpet, moving his arms and legs like he was making angels in the snow. Some kind of weird calisthenics, maybe. Another man was sitting on the low couch with his head in his cupped hands. All I could see was tangled sandy curls. A young woman was massaging his shoulders with practiced boredom.

“Hey,” the blonde wearing the bra called, without waiting for an introduction. “I know you! You're Dee Willis! I was sure you'd come back! I'm Mimi. I'm with Freddie. And I know Hal from when he was touring with the Bow-Wows. I was with their lead guitar for practically a month.”

I figured the wiry black man lining white powder on the cocktail table for either Freddie or Hal.

“Freddie plays drums,” Dee said, pointing to the black man as if “drums” explained everything from snorting coke to screwing sixteen-year-olds. She tossed her cape over the back of a chair. “Brenda”—she nodded toward the dark-haired woman who'd asked after her health—“is my bass player. Why they're partying in here, I don't have the faintest. I mean, don't I get any privacy?” Dee's voice turned cooler than the air-conditioning. “You can answer on the way out,” she said.

“Lock the door, Dee,” Freddie, the drummer, replied, unintimidated. “And hush up unless you want company. Who's your friend? Come on, we don't want the suits next door barging in. I don't have unlimited product, but what I do have is damn good Peruvian flake.” He flashed a quick smile at Dee and deftly rolled a bill into a straw.

“Hal said use the room,” the dark-haired woman offered. “He didn't exactly want us sniffing shit as a demo for the MGA execs, Dee.” She was almost as tall as I am, with a stockier build. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, the old-fashioned kind, two circles connected by a bridge and held with plain earpieces. For the rest, she was round-faced, barefooted, and blue-jeaned, and looked comfortable in a sleeveless blue top. “You disappeared, and the room's perfect. Connecting door, so we don't have to stumble out in the hallway. And every once in a while we go out and make nice to the money men. The right people”—she glanced at the guy making angels on the floor as if she wasn't sure about him—“the ones who want to tank up on something that doesn't come in a glass, knock three times, then two.”

Dee glanced at me speculatively. I wasn't surprised or shocked by the coke on the table, but neither was I pleased. Keep coke prices high enough so only rock stars can afford it, and I don't mind if they snort till their noses fall off.

Dee raised an eyebrow and said, “Better flush the stash, Freddie.”

“Yeah, right.” Day-Glo Freddie made a neat job of sniffing a line. The sixteen-year-old was untying his shoes, maybe the better to yank his pants down. And here I'd thought groupies were out of style.

I glanced at Dee. She kept a straight face while she asked, “Are you an officer of the court, Carlotta? Do you have to turn them in, or can you let them go this once?”

“Whatever you want,” I said, playing along with the gag. “Up to you.”

Freddie narrowed his eyes and looked cautiously from Dee to me. His tongue poked out of a corner of his mouth. He started shoveling his precious white powder into a silver cigarette case, using a six-inch metal ruler to scrape the mirrored surface clean.