Written in Dead Wax (34 page)

“The new one?”

“Just came in the mail today.” He nodded at an LP-sized cardboard box sitting on top of an oil drum. I went over and examined it. Sure enough, it was one of our Internet purchases.

“That was quick,” I said. I opened it, or tried to.

“Here, dude,” said Berto. He took a clasp knife out of the pocket of his overalls and handed it to me. Even with the knife it wasn’t easy getting into the box and once I did I found another package, sealed in a ridiculous swathe of sticky transparent tape.

“Like a fucking mummy,” opined Berto. He was right, too.

I sighed and set to work. I’d seen this before. For some reason, some people had a great belief in the protective qualities of sticky tape. The more, the better seemed to be their philosophy. I carefully cut it away. “Okay,” I said. “It looks like there is a record in here after all.”

“Finally,” said Ree. She held out her hand for the knife, and I gave it to her. “You mind if I keep this, Berto?” she said. He shrugged and she folded the knife and put it in her bag as I freed the record from the last of the packaging. It was HL-008, by the great guitarist Howard Roberts. I showed Ree the dead wax and we filled in our chart.

It was dark and the cool of evening had come on by the time we got back to Ree’s house on Acacia Avenue. As we stepped out of the car we saw there was a man waiting on her porch.

A white guy in a suit.

He stepped forward and said, “Miss Esterbridge?”

Ree hesitated and moved imperceptibly closer to me. Night was coming on fast and it was hard to see the man’s face. “Yes,” she said.

“My name is Gordon Hallett. I did some legal work for Dr Tinmouth.”

I felt Ree relax beside me. “We just heard,” she said. “About the fire. We just heard today.”

The man nodded. “It was a terrible tragedy.” I had the sense that he felt it was late and he wanted to get out of here, but he was being polite.

Ree said, “So what can I…”

The man quickly reached in his pocket as though he had been waiting for this cue. “If anything happened to Dr Tinmouth I was instructed to make sure that you got this.” He took out a small padded mailing bag and handed it to her.

“What is it?” said Ree.

“I have no idea.” He turned to the street. “Now if you don’t mind I’ve got a family function to get to.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

We watched him as he left. As soon as he was out of sight she handed me the mailing bag. It fitted snugly into the palm of my hand and weighed nothing. Ree was looking in her bag for something. She took out Berto’s clasp knife.

She gave it to me and I slit the package open and shook it. Out came a small piece of paper with an address written on it.

And a key.

The storage unit was in a district called Alhambra. It was in a dusty industrial park just off Mission Road. We used the key we’d been given and opened the creaking door and took one look inside. Then Ree made a phone call to Berto. He sent a van from the garage and we transferred everything from the storage unit, which proved to be enough boxes to crowd the van.

Ree did her share of carrying as we loaded up the boxes and took them back to the garage, where we unloaded them all again and transferred them to the high-security storage area, where Berto kept his auto parts. Berto looked at us sceptically as we schlepped back and forth, and said, “You really think someone’s going to be interested in stealing a bunch of books and papers? Okay. I got plenty of room. I don’t mind. Put them in the cage.”

Berto was right. The boxes were full of books and papers but also photographs, letters and journals—mostly jazz magazines, including copies of
The JazzLetter
by Gene Lees which I earmarked for special attention later, purely from a point of view of personal pleasure. But no records, sadly. I went through the boxes and took out a selection of books. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had to start somewhere. Berto watched in puzzlement until Ree explained.

“Chef here’s going to be taking the material out, going through it and bringing it back. Maybe like one book at a time, one magazine at a time.”

“So now I’m a public library.”

“Listen,” said Ree, “If you mind…”

“No, no, it’s fine. You can keep your shit here. I’ll make sure nobody steals it. I’ve got plenty of room.”

Each time he said this it came out with less conviction. I looked at the boxes. It was clearly an impossible task, but I said, “Just until I get it into my head.”

“Then you got to watch somebody doesn’t come along and cut off your head,” said Berto. “And then steal that.”

Everybody laughed.

Except me.

* * *

“Okay,” said Tinkler. “So tell me more about this Mexican food. Can you bring some back with you?”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to bring grapes?”

“No, just Mexican food and Rolling Stones albums. Anyway, you were saying that you think this jazz scholar knew something important.”

“Dr Tinmouth. Yes.”

“He sounds like somebody from
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, you think because of what the doctor knew, whatever it was, someone bumped him off. Burned his house down with him inside.”

“Yes, I’m afraid it looks like that.”

“And they made sure they did it before he could talk to Ree.”

“Exactly.”

“But he left you a clue.”

“No. He left us twelve fucking boxes of clues.”

“How many? Twelve?”

“Yes. That’s the problem.” I stared across Ree’s living room. A wide selection of books and magazines from those boxes was strewn on the bare wooden floor. There were also piles of newspaper clippings and photographs and what I’d learned to call “tear sheets”—pages that had been torn from magazines. While working on this lot it seemed strange not to have a cat around to get in the way. If I’d been at home Fanny would have been sitting on any open book within about thirty seconds.

“But he arranged for you, or at least Ree, to get the key. So he wanted her to have this stuff. There must have been something he wanted her to know.”

I said, “It was a classic academic’s solution. Leave us all the necessary research materials so we could work it out for ourselves.”

“Or not.”

“Or not, as it certainly feels at the moment.”

“So it’s just a completely random mess of documents.”

“Documents about jazz, yes. Random except for three things, which might be significant.”

“Actually, come to think of it,” said Tinkler, “
do
bring me some grapes. Californian grapes. Organic would be nice. What three things?”

“Well, all of the material deals with 1955 or earlier.”

“Ah,” said Tinkler. “The year that Hathor Records came and went.”

“And the year that Easy Geary died.”

“Okay, nothing later than 1955. What else?”

“Well, at first it looked like it was just an undifferentiated mass of books and magazines and so on, but I found markers in the articles.”

“Okay, that helps. What sort of markers?”

“Sometimes a section of text has been highlighted. Sometimes there’s a sticky note or a piece of paper stuck in, to indicate what page we should start reading on. Like a bookmark.”

“Well, great.”

“Not so great. I’ve been ploughing through it and unfortunately this marked text seems to refer to just about everyone who ever played a jazz instrument, including a few who never got any further than just thinking about it.”

“Bummer.”

“But on closer inspection, most of the material seems to relate to either Burns Hobartt or Easy Geary.”

“Him again.”

“Yes. And the photographs are almost exclusively of those two, plus Rita Mae Pollini of course.”

“Ree’s grandmother.”

“Right. Which you would have expected, since Dr Tinmouth was going to be talking to Ree. So I’m not sure how significant that is. Some of the documents are about her, but again they may just be some nice souvenirs he wanted to show Ree.”

“You said three things.”

“Say again?”

“What was the third thing that wasn’t random?”

“Oh, yes.” I looked at the papers again, stirring gently in a breeze from the back window. “Like I said, they’re all documents about jazz, naturally enough, except for one item.”

“The suspense is killing me.”

“A Los Angeles medical directory for the years 1948 to 1950.”

“Good luck with that.”

* * *

Ree came back with food and we ate in the kitchen. Just as we were washing the dishes we got a call from Berto to tell us another package had arrived. We drove over to the garage and found it waiting for us in the cage. It was one of the LPs we’d ordered while we were still in England. This one was from Times Square Records in New York. It was Hathor HL-010,
Rita Mae Pollini Sings Professor Jellaway
.

It was the one the late Jimmy Genower had wanted to sell us. I did my best not to think too much about Jimmy, sitting dead in his garden. I studied the cover. The photograph on it depicted a woman of almost unreal beauty. And I could see an echo of Ree in the bones of her grandmother’s face.

But we didn’t even look at the cover until after we’d taken the record out, studied the dead wax, and filled in our chart.

As we walked back through the garage Berto called us over and said, “You remember you said to watch out for a red-haired girl? Good-looking?”

“Nobody said good-looking,” said Ree.

“Right, well, anyhow there was this girl came in today. Had some story about bringing her car in for a service.”

“What kind of car?” said Ree.

“Carrera 911. Said she was having problems with the oil seals.”

I showed him the picture I’d got from Ian the photographer at the record mart in Wembley. He nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”

* * *

“So Nevada is in Los Angeles?” said Tinkler when I phoned him. “You understand I don’t mean in a geographical sense. That would be a map maker’s nightmare.”

“Apparently. Apparently she is.”

“She just can’t stay away from you.”

“Yes, that must be the reason,” I said.

“So, how’s the mystery of the Tinmouth archives progressing?”

“It isn’t. How’s the search for Christian porn?” Tinkler was staying in Maggie’s flat and was convinced, despite his sister’s religious nature, that she had a stash of pornography somewhere. And he wouldn’t rest until he found it.

“Equally a washout. You know, I’m beginning to think my sister doesn’t have a dark side. She’s just not interesting enough.”

“I need your keen analytical mind,” I said. I looked at the stacks of books, magazines, tear sheets and photos. Different from the landscape of data I’d been looking at last time I’d phoned him, but equally enigmatic.

“Oh-oh.”

“Here’s the situation. Virtually all the material points at two men, Burns Hobartt and Easy Geary.”

“You said that last time.”

“Well, trust me, since then I’ve become obsessed with the pair of them.” Across the room a square of morning sunlight fell on the faces of Geary and Hobartt. I had printed out a large black and white photograph of each of them and put it up on the wall.

Burns Hobartt’s face was elegant, haunted, marked with the almost tribal scars, bequeathed him by a dancehall fire, which had earned him his cruel nickname. Easy Geary’s was smooth, serene and nearly Asian. Buddha-like.

“So almost all the marked material concerns the two of them,” said Tinkler.

I picked up a paperback of Gunther Schuller’s
Early Jazz
. “Plus a smattering of background reference on the early history of jazz.”

“Well, that right there doesn’t make sense,” said Tinkler. “That’s what my keen analytical mind tells me. Because neither Geary nor Hobartt belong to that period. They came much later.”

I said, “Well, Burns Hobartt was performing with territory bands in the late twenties and early thirties. But he only began to make his mark around 1935, after he’d recovered from the injuries he sustained in a fire. And Easy Geary was playing in US Army bands in remote postings like the Philippines in the thirties and forties. He returned to the States after World War Two and only rose to prominence around 1949.”