Steel Guitar (6 page)

“You too?” she crowed. “Jeez, I didn't know that. Look, it's been a hell of a long day, and I'm starting to crash. Find Dunrobie for me. I always do a good show Saturday night. Find him before then.”

I said, “Four hundred will buy you a day. I can hit all the easy places in a day. Ten to one, I'll find him.”

She looked around the room like she was searching for something. “Hey, damn,” she said when she realized her handbag was gone, “can I pay you later?”

“Company policy,” I said. “I don't work till I get paid.”

“Will a check be okay?”

I hesitated.

“Anytime you want to sell that rotten National guitar, you call me,” she said. “And let me give you some comps for the concert. Six enough?”

“From old friends, I take checks,” I said.

“Okay!” she said, elated, slapping her hands together with a single loud report.

“I don't suppose you want to tell me why you really want to find Dunrobie,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You're suddenly in such a rush, after five years, that you run out of party held in your honor—”

“I hate big parties. And I want him at that concert Saturday.”

“Sure,” I said. “Berklee Performance Center's a big place. You won't exactly be able to stare into his eyes for inspiration.”

She kept her head down while she wrote the check, and she didn't say another word.

Seven

I deposited the check in the BayBank machine near the Central Square Y after playing my regular volleyball match. I didn't want to wait till the bank opened.

By nine, I was glued to my desk telephone, calling sources cultivated through the years, many of whom I met when I was a cop. A clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the regular recipient of a Christmas bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, disappointed me. He couldn't find any cars registered in Dunrobie's name. I took a sip of coffee laced with sugar and cream, and sighed. I'd considered the Registry my best bet.

I punched the next number, gossiped for a few minutes with an old acquaintance who works at the CORI unit of the Office for Children. Patsy Alvarez prefers Swiss chocolates to whiskey for Christmas. I learned that Dunrobie had absolutely no arrest record, not even a “driving while intoxicated,” which fit right in with his having no driver's license.

I'd had visions of a recent “drunk and disorderly” at least. I'd been hoping to track him quickly; impress hell out of Dee, I admitted to myself.

Next phone call: The U.Mass. Alumni Office refused, like all university alumni offices, to give out an address, but I managed to wheedle the fact that they had none to withhold in Dunrobie's case. He hadn't graduated.

Most of the people in our crowd were U.Mass. kids, but Dee had gone to Berklee for a time, so I dialed the Berklee School of Music and spent a lot of time on hold, listening to a decent FM classical station. Dunrobie had not attended Berklee.

Ditto the New England Conservatory of Music.

Under “Labor Unions” in the Yellow Pages, I found the American Guild of Musical Artists. They had no Dunrobie as a member. I hesitated for a long minute, then hung up.

I finished the coffee. Seemed like Davey had dropped far out of sight. No driver's license, no union card. I wondered if Dee had been serious about him trying construction work. I called two carpenter union locals. No Dunrobies.

I changed out of my sweats into khaki pants, a print shirt, and a navy linen blazer, an outfit that makes me look trustworthy and professional. Shoulder bag swinging, I hit the Bureau of Vital Statistics at the State House and struck out on Davey's birth certificate, which would have contained all sorts of useful goodies, like his mom's maiden name, and his date of birth. Dee and I had agreed that he was older than the rest of us, but we weren't sure if it was two years or four years or what.

I walked from the State House to the Public Library, wishing I'd chosen more comfortable shoes, soothed by the thought that the MBTA would be even more unbearably hot than the overland route. You'd think the subways, being underground, would stay cool, but by August they've soaked up all the city heat and stink. Some of the cars are air-conditioned, granted, but you can never count on boarding one. I slowed when I came to Copley Square Park and stared at the homeless men seated like statues on the benches. Would I recognize Davey Dunrobie with ten hard years added, and maybe a beard and a layer of grime?

At the library, I checked telephone directories for the last twelve years, the cross-directories as well. There were no Dunrobies at all, which I found discouraging. I hadn't expected him to be listed, but I'd had hopes of finding a brother or a cousin.

I couldn't help myself; I looked it up. In the 1979 book: Therieux, Calvin and Carlotta. Ma Bell had gotten it wrong as usual; I'd never taken his last name. They'd printed the address correctly, half a low-rent duplex in Cambridgeport.

There was no current listing for Cal.

I breathed a sigh of relief. He and Dunrobie used to be buddies. If I'd found a listing for Cal, I'd have felt honor-bound to call, see if he knew where I might find Davey. I wondered if I'd have disguised my voice.

I asked two friendly librarians if they remembered a guy who looked like Dunrobie gone to seed, especially one who listened to a lot of music. For the first time, I thought about my junk drawer; it would have been useful to flash a photo of Dunrobie, no matter how out-of-date.

“We have a hundred guys like that,” the librarians agreed, which was no help to me. “Especially in winter. Who wouldn't rather listen to music in a heated building than sit and shiver in the cold?”

I visited the Pine Street Inn, a shelter for the homeless, and drew a lot of blank stares. I stuffed a few bills in the donation box, and hoped none of my old friends was sleeping on a charity cot. I dropped in on the Salvation Army. I didn't even try Alcoholics Anonymous. They're just that: anonymous.

The Copley Square/South End area and Dee's old place in Cambridge were the only locales I had for Dunrobie. I visited the appropriate post offices, urged harried clerks to check the records of forwarding addresses, the removal books—but nothing doing.

I saved the Central Square Post Office for last because it was closest to home. I thought about strolling the neighborhood, bumping doors, asking folks if they knew a guy who drank and played the guitar. Without a photo, it rated right up there with Dee handing out ten-spots in a South End park.

So I walked home, opened my junk drawer, and like Pandora, let the demons fly.

Eight

When my Aunt Bea died, she left twenty-two stout cardboard boxes tied with twine in the crawl space off the attic. “Mementos,” she called them. I've never opened them; I try not to think about them.

I'm not big on keepsakes, nor am I much of a collector. Searching crime scenes as a cop cured me of that. I used to find myself feeling doubly sorry for victims; not only had they been raped, robbed, or killed—now they had a troop of strangers snooping through their stained underwear.

After my first scene-of-the-crime search I'd raced home and tossed out bagfuls of potential embarrassments, from mail-order creams guaranteed to increase your breast size in thirty-days-or-your-money-back to gushy poetry written by my ninth-grade sweetheart.

I stared uneasily at the bedside table, at the deep bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the bed, farthest from the doorway, repository of, among other odds and ends, my wedding photos.

I don't own a camera. Roz, my inadequate house-cleaner, resident post-punk artist, and sometime assistant, handles my work-related photographic needs for a fee. I dislike taking photos, but people tend to give them to you, and it somehow seems wrong to discard those beaming frozen faces. I stick them in my junk drawer.

Paolina's school photos are the exception. She's my little sister from the Big Sisters Organization, and I keep her current photo in a silver frame on the living room mantel.

Paolina and I are temporarily estranged. Her mother won't let me see her, thanks to complications left over from a case of mine. I admit that I may have screwed up—and Paolina's life was endangered. But what frosts me is that it's not the danger that's got Paolina's mother in a snit. It's the fact that Paolina learned a few new items about herself, things Mama had been trying to hide.

I've got a social worker trying to reunite us, and I write to Paolina three times a week. I just hope that Marta, her mother, passes along the letters. She won't even let me talk to Paolina on the phone, and the damned social worker keeps saying to give it time, give it time.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, yanked open the drawer, and coughed at the lingering smell of old dusting powder—something cheap I'd thought sexy one summer in my teens. Emerald something. It conjured up a greasy-haired boy named Doug I'd dated twice in high school. A forbidden midnight boat ride.

It's been years since I was a cop, and I guess my fear of scene-of-the-crime searches is starting to fade. Amazing, the idiotic items I've stuck in that drawer. Free samples—everything from face cream to breakfast cereal. Shoulder pads ripped out of jackets that made me look like a defensive lineman. Half-empty cans of birth-control foam. A collection of very personal birthday cards from Sam Gianelli.

Just the stuff I'd love to have cops rooting through. I went downstairs and got an empty grocery sack. I tossed the breakfast cereal samples first, wondering why I hadn't kept them in the kitchen, hoping they hadn't attracted cockroaches. Underneath a tiny box of Raisin Nut Bran, I discovered an even tinier pair of hot-pink bikini panties. Why on earth? Oh, yeah, the elastic had stretched when I'd ignored the wash-by-hand warning. Had I really meant to replace the elastic? I tossed them in the sack. I'm as good a seamstress as Roz is a housecleaner.

I found the wedding photos lodged under a three-year-old issue of
Mother Jones
. They're collected in a slim white album. The bride in the pictures smiled, but I really couldn't connect her blurred face with mine. I made myself search carefully, but the photographer, my mother's half-wit cousin Lou from Kansas City, trying out his third profession in as many months, had blown every possibly useful close-up of the wedding party.

Davey had been a last-minute addition to that select group, pressed into duty as best man in lieu of Cal's no-show alcoholic father.

Since I'd been married in my hometown, Detroit, not many of my Boston friends had attended. I flipped another page. In one surprisingly clear group shot, a sweep of the entire room, Davey Dunrobie was a flyspeck in a corner, nothing you could show around.

All the same, I put the photograph aside. Maybe Roz would know some magical way to enlarge it.

Lorraine's photo must have been stuck in the back of the album. It fluttered to the ground and I stared at it, transfixed by her innocent smile.

“After the first death there is no other,” Dylan Thomas says in one of the few lines of verse I remember without trying. Lorraine was my first. A friend who killed herself at twenty-two.

I picked the print up carefully, held it so the light didn't glare. She hadn't been pretty, although she might have grown handsome with the years she hadn't used. What she looked mainly, I thought, was young. Unformed, unlined, unshaped.

It must have been snapped at a picnic. I could see a card table off to one side, paper tablecloth anchored with baskets of potato chips, bottles of Coke and beer. Someone's blue-jeaned behind was visible off to the left. I couldn't tell if it belonged to a man or a woman.

There was a time when I believed I'd mourn Lorraine every day of my life. But in fact I hadn't thought about her for months, years. Maybe a brief moment on the anniversary of her death, near Halloween with the chill of fall.

I asked myself the old question, why? At the memorial service, Lorraine's mother had confided that her daughter had been seeing a shrink—hardly the commonplace occurrence of today. By the time I saw Lorraine's apartment, her parents had stripped it bare. All her notebooks, all her papers, had been crated and shipped to Norfolk, Virginia. Her mother had given me a Jesse Colin Young album and Lorraine's mandolin as keepsakes. A line from a song on the album came unbidden to my mind.

“
Four in the mornin' and the water is pourin' down
.”

I must have played that cut a hundred times. Then I stuck the record somewhere up in the attic, along with the mandolin and Aunt Bea's untouched boxes.

The first question, why?, was automatically followed by the next, how could I not have known? How could I have partied and sung and joked with Lorraine, and never sensed her sadness and despair? How could I drink a routine cup of coffee with a friend on Friday and learn of her suicide Saturday night?

Oh, Lorraine. I felt a flash of anger, followed by immediate guilt. I put her picture on my bed, then hurriedly stuck it back in the album. I knew I could stare at it forever and provoke nothing more than a bad case of the three
A
.
M
. what-ifs.

I stuck my hand way in the back of the drawer, searching for my stack of little black books.

I've never been tempted to keep a diary, but I do maintain a date book, a business thing, mileage and parking fees, where I've been when. Lunch dates and birthday reminders. I hang on to them more for tax purposes than sentiment.

Had I kept my black books back then? They had to date from my first charge card, an account at the Harvard Coop that made me feel very adult and full of myself at the time. The Coop, pronounced as in “chicken coop” even though it's a contraction of co-operative, sends out an academic year calendar to all members, a tiny thing, less than three by five, black with thinly ruled pages. A new one arrives like clockwork in July, and I toss the old one in the drawer.