The Lola Quartet (19 page)

   "Yeah, he was up there for a long time. Always meant to visit him there." Jack's gaze was distant. Aside from his disastrous foray into South Carolina, Jack had never left the state of Florida.

   "But he's here now?"

"Yeah, he's visiting Anna," Jack said.

"What?"

   "I didn't— I'm sorry," Jack said, "I'm sorry, I always screw up." He was reaching into his pocket. Gavin looked away while he measured three pills into his hand.

   "Did you just say Liam Deval's in Florida because of Anna?"

   "I can't talk about it," Jack said. "I can't talk about Anna. I promised I wouldn't."

   "Promised who?"

   "Deval," Jack said. He looked like he wanted to cry. "Forget I said anything."

   "It's okay," Gavin said. "It's okay. We won't talk about Anna."

   Jack nodded. He was looking at his feet.

   "But maybe you could tell me about Deval," Gavin said. "I really love his music."

   "Yeah, he's good. Really good. I mean, I was sort of good. I maybe had something. But Deval, he had the music." Jack smiled. "He was trying to be Django Reinhardt. And you know what? He might be as good as Reinhardt was."

   "Where's he staying? I'd love to meet him."

   "I don't know," Jack said. "A hotel somewhere, I guess. Oh wait, wait, he told me." Jack rested his head on the back of the chair and stared into space. He was still for so long that Gavin glanced up to see what he was looking at. The leaves of the orange tree were brilliant green against the hazy sky. "The Decker," Jack said.

   "The Decker?"

   "It was something like that. The Dracker, or the Decker, or something."

   "He say if he was coming back?" The heat was making Gavin's head swim. He wanted to lie down.

   "No," Jack said, "but I hope he comes back. He said he was going to go visit Daniel."

   "Of course he was."

   "Did you just say something?"

   "Nothing. Hey, is he playing anywhere while he's here?"

   "Sure," Jack said. "He's got a gig at the Lemon Club."

T h e 
L e m o n  Club had been open for thirty years and in high school Gavin had gone there a few times, trying to be sophisticated, trying to grasp hold of something that he might use to pull himself up toward adulthood, but he could never find it and as a teenager he'd felt uneasy there, pitifully young, out of his depth and unable to swim. The Lemon Club was a stop on the way to Miami and he'd seen a few big names there. The one he remembered best was a trumpet player, Bert Johnston. He'd brought Anna there in his last year of high school. They'd sat together at a round table just big enough for his Pepsi and her ginger ale— he wished he could order wine for both of them but didn't want to risk being laughed at by the bartender in front of her— and they listened to Bert Johnston's trumpet wail and sing. When Anna reached for his hand he didn't notice, only realized later that her hand was in his and he couldn't remember how it had ended up there. It was too warm in the club, the air conditioner laboring and spitting water over the door, and normally this would have bothered him but that night he was transfixed, that night things were becoming clearer. He was watching Bert Johnston and realizing that he wasn't going to be a musician. It wasn't an unpleasant revelation, just an understanding that his life was going to go in one direction and not another.

"I'll never be that good," he told Anna later, not upset, just stating

the fact, but she mistook his tone and tried to console him. The thought of the practice it would take to be a professional musician made him weary. He was reading a lot of noir and wearing a fedora, and he'd already developed backup plans. If he couldn't be a jazz musician he was going to be a newspaperman. If he couldn't be a newspaperman he was going to be a private detective.

   The Lemon Club was already a little decrepit in his memories, but it had declined further since then and now the strip-mall parking lot was cracked and had a small palm tree growing out of the middle of it. Most of the other tenants were gone, sections of the mall boarded up. The only other tenants were an off-track betting parlor, an evangelical church and a pizza place with a torn awning.

   In his memories the interior was glamorous, but all night places are cheaper-looking in daylight and with the curtains opened the light picked up the grit in the upholstery, the swimming galaxies of dust motes in the air.

   "Help you?" the bartender asked, and Gavin realized he was the only customer. The bartender wasn't the sullen-looking old man Gavin remembered. He was young and blond and looked somehow like a lifeguard.

   "I was hoping to see the listings for the next couple months," Gavin said. "I heard a jazz guitarist I like might be coming through town." He realized that it was stupid to say "jazz" in that sentence— it was after all a club devoted to this and no other kind of music— but the new bartender was more forgiving than the old bartender had been and didn't even smirk or tell him to get lost, just produced a photocopy of a calendar from behind the bar and scanned it for a moment before he passed it to Gavin.

   "I think you maybe mean Deval?" he said. "Only guitarist I see here."

   The calendar read
Deval & Morelli
, but Morelli's name had been crossed out.

   "Can I keep this?" Gavin asked. The bartender nodded. Deval was scheduled to play in three nights. Gavin went to Jack's house every day after work and sat with him in the backyard under the orange tree, but Liam Deval didn't appear and Jack revealed nothing except his interest in jazz history and the extent of his pill addiction.

   On Friday Gavin bought a dark red shirt with gray pinstripes, drove to the Lemon Club an hour before the set and established himself at a small table in the darkest corner, farthest from the stage. He wanted to be invisible. Only a few other people were here at this hour— a couple sitting at a table by the stage, a man at the end of the bar with a tattoo of a goldfish on his neck. Gavin ordered a pint of Guinness. He'd brought his notebook with him, as if he really were either a newspaperman or a detective. His new shirt had cufflinks and he caught himself fiddling with them as he waited.

   The club filled slowly. A bass player made his way between the tables and began tuning his instrument. He was followed a few minutes later by a drummer, but there was no sign of Deval. A saxophonist had appeared— a saxophonist? With Deval, who so far as Gavin knew only ever played with Morelli, a bassist, sometimes a drummer?—and he was talking to the bass player while the drummer assembled his kit. At nine twenty the bartender came to the stage and tapped lightly on a microphone. There'd been a substitution, he said. Liam Deval had had to remain in New York at the last minute, a family emergency, but fortunately the great Chicago saxophonist Pedro Lang— who looked too young to be called the great anything, in Gavin's opinion— was in town a day early for his show tomorrow night and had graciously agreed to bless them with his presence two nights in a row and so without further ado, etc., and applause filled the room while Gavin finished his beer.

   He thought about leaving but it was nice to be out in the evening for once, away from the quiet of his apartment with the television and the recorded music and his notes, not waiting in his car outside Daniel's house like a stalker. The saxophone player really was great, mesmerizing actually. Everyone who'd arrived to hear Deval stayed to watch him except for the man at the end of the bar whom Gavin had noticed when he came in, who settled up with the bartender and left just before the music began.

I n  t h e 
morning Gavin sat at his desk in Eilo's rec room looking at yellow-pages listings of local motels with names similar to Decker or Dracker, run-down places by highways—
Cable TV! Jacuzzi in Pent
house Suite!
—and trying to ignore his headache. The saxophonist had been good and it was a pleasure to lose himself in music, to sit alone without having to talk to anyone. There was a span of time when he'd thought of nothing but the sound.

   The Draker Motel had purchased a square ad with a minuscule photograph in the middle of it, so small that it could have been almost any motel anywhere. He looked it up on the Internet and was momentarily dazzled by the website's flashing red text—
Cable TV!!! Conve
nient Location!!!
—and a picture of a small white dog that he supposed must belong to the owner. Convenient to what? He looked it up on a map. It was, he supposed, convenient to the interstate.

   He drove to a part of the suburbs that was close up against the edge of the wilderness, although it had occurred to Gavin that what he thought of as wilderness might just be a band of wildly lush greenery with another suburb approaching undetected from the other side, like two teams of miners tunneling toward one another under the earth. The streets out here were wide and industrial, self-storage facilities, a junkyard. The Draker Motel stood at the end of an almost-deserted cul-de-sac, two stories of stucco with a balcony running along the second floor.

   Gavin stayed in his car for a moment looking out at the heat waves shimmering over the parking lot, put on his fedora and ventured out. The motel office was a small wood-paneled room with tiny palm trees running up and down the wallpaper, an air conditioner rattling in the window. The girl behind the counter looked no older than fifteen.

   "You have a nice website," he said. "I liked the picture of the dog."

   "Thanks," the girl said warily.

   "I'm looking for a guest, a friend of mine. Do you have a Liam Deval staying here?"

   "I'm not supposed to say the names of guests," she said.

   He opened his wallet and laid three twenties on the counter. "If you're not allowed to say," he said, "maybe I could just take a quick glance at your computer?"

   She glanced over her shoulder, slipped the money into her pocket.

   "I might get in trouble," she said.

   He laid another twenty on the counter. "But do you think anyone would notice? It'd only take me a minute."

   She bit her lip.

   " Maybe you were in the back," he said. "You didn't hear me come in."

   She swiveled the computer monitor so he could see it and pushed the keyboard and mouse toward him, took the money and vanished behind a beaded curtain. He wasn't familiar with the software, but it didn't seem complicated. It was possible to bring up a list of guests' names with a few keystrokes. Liam Deval's name wasn't in the registry.

   He went through the list again. There was a D. Reinhardt in room

18. Gavin left the tiny chilled office with its palm-tree-print curtains

and laboring air conditioner, followed the numbers down a line of closed doors. The heat was staggering. This side of the hotel was exposed to the full glare of sunlight, the stucco hot to the touch.

   He knocked on the door of room 18 and the curtains in the window flickered, but too briefly and too slightly to make out a face.

   "Who is it?" The voice came through the window, which he saw now was open just a crack.

   "My name's Gavin Sasaki," he said to the curtains. "I'm looking for Liam Deval."

   "I don't know you, Gavin," the man said. "Why are you here?"

   The heat was making Gavin dizzy. "It's about Anna Montgomery," he said. "May I come in?"

   "I have to make a phone call first," the man said. Was this Liam Deval's voice? He couldn't tell. Deval hadn't talked much at Barbès and everyone sounds different behind a microphone. " Could you wait out there for a moment?"

   "Of course," Gavin said.

   He had been waiting outside for no more than a few minutes when the old fear began to come over him. It was a hundred degrees, heat radiating from the cement and from the building's exterior wall. He was already sweating. Cars shimmered in the parking lot. The angle of the sun was such that the second-floor balcony cast no shade. He glanced at his watch, turned his back on the sun and closed his eyes. Thinking of ice cubes, of orange sherbet, of snow. When he opened his eyes again it seemed to him that a long time had passed so he called out toward the window, "Hello, could I possibly come in?" but there was no answer. He wondered if he was being watched, if Deval— if that voice was Deval, if his instinct that the D. Reinhardt in the hotel log and Deval were the same person was correct and the man in the room wasn't just some malevolent stranger— was still on the phone.

   Gavin was too hot for his fedora, so he took it off. He leaned forward, let his forehead rest on the stucco between the window and the door. He was going to get sick from staying out in the sun like this but the least he could do was wait, wasn't it, with Anna and Chloe perhaps so close? The thought of being a father. It seemed possible that they might be in the motel room, mere feet from him on the other side of the wall. It seemed to him that he'd been waiting for a very long time. He wanted to look at his watch again, but it seemed like too much effort to raise his arm. His thoughts drifted. He could help them in some way, do the right thing. He had a job, he could contribute, maybe even go to Chloe's school plays. Maybe they'd all eat dinner together sometimes, a sort of provisional family. He'd wanted his own family for as long as he could remember. He was having some trouble staying upright. His fedora, he realized, had fallen from his hand.

   "Please!" he called again, toward the window.

   "You're going to have to wait," the voice said. A note of panic. "I can't reach anyone."

   "Who are you calling? Daniel?"

   "How do you know Daniel?"

   "How do I know him? I don't know." Gavin was aware that he was mumbling. He couldn't think of how to explain how he knew Daniel; the whole mundane history of elementary school and high school, first grade field trips to museums and seventh grade parties in basements and the jazz quartet seemed like too much to explain all of a sudden. "It's been a long time." He was having trouble concentrating. "Listen," he said, louder now, "I'm not going to give up. I'll stay here all night. I'm going to keep chasing Anna and Chloe forever if I have to."