Written in Dead Wax (40 page)

Now there was nothing.

The natural thing to have done would have been to call Wilburt’s name. But neither of us said anything. There was something about the silence of the house that precluded shouting. And, perhaps, which urged caution. We moved out of the entrance hall into the short corridor that led to the living-room. It was so dark I couldn’t see the living-room door. There was a light switch on the wall and Ree fumbled with it, to no effect.

Like the doorbell, it was dead.

We moved cautiously into the darkness of the house.

I found the living-room door by feel, and opened it. The room was dim, in distinct contrast to our previous visit, when it had been illuminated by the eerie glow of the fish tanks. But there was just enough light coming in through a gap in the curtains to see Wilburt.

He was standing, or rather leaning, against one of the aquarium tanks with his hand dangling limply over the side, immersed in the water. Floating beside it in the otherwise empty glass tank was a thin snaking black shape with a gleam of copper at its tip. I realised it was a power cable, and I began to piece together what must have happened. Wilburt was bent over the tank, turned away from us, so we couldn’t see his face. But on the carpet, around his bare feet, was a ragged black scorch mark.

“He’s been electrocuted,” said Ree.

I noticed a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye and turned to look. The other tanks were a safe distance from where Wilburt had been messing about. In their dark water, fish were moving.

I moved closer. They were still milling around in their coloured hordes, apparently none the worse for wear. That meant their life support apparatus had only been turned off recently.

At the exact instant I realised this, I heard the back door slam.

With no conscious thought at all I was running out of the room, back into the darkness of the corridor, moving the other way. Back through the entrance hall and down the other corridor, towards the other end of the house. I clattered across the tile floor of the dark kitchen, heading for the oblong of pale light that marked the back door.

I threw the door open and found myself in the back yard.

It was a small yard, but deep, with high stone walls. Like a courtyard. Square in section and sunk well below street level, the walls on each side increased its depth. It was a cool, shadowed hollow, lined at the bottom with red and yellow crazy paving. White stone steps led down into it from the kitchen and, on the opposite side, another stone staircase rose up to a gate in the wall.

Standing at the top of those stairs, holding the gate open, was a tall, powerful man wearing a tracksuit and running shoes. Sunglasses, a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt concealed his face. Just below me, in the pit of the garden, heading towards him, was a woman dressed in an almost identical outfit. She was frozen where she was standing, staring up at the man. He had his fist stretched out, index finger extended, pointing at something, something back across the yard.

At the foot of my staircase.

I looked down at where he was pointing and saw it. The small white rectangle lying there.

A clump of pages torn from a book.

She must have dropped them.

The woman turned around and saw them. She saw me standing at the top of the steps and jerked with reaction, then launched herself back towards the pages. At the same moment I threw myself down the stairs and grabbed them. Even in the split second as I seized them, I saw the handwriting on the pages and knew they were exactly what I thought they were.

I went back up the stairs with them as fast as I could. The woman came to a halt at the bottom of the steps, staring up at me fiercely, then looking back at the man on the other side of the yard.

He had a gun in his hand.

He was aiming it at me.

A woman’s voice spoke, from high on the wall to our left.

“Hey, Heinz,” she said.

Everyone turned to look, and I saw Nevada standing there, perched on top of the wall, silhouetted against the sunlight. She had the ridiculous red wig on, but it was her. She had something in her hand and she said, “This is for you,” and threw it down into the yard. As she did so, she jumped off the wall, disappearing into the street on the other side.

Down in the pit of the courtyard, the object hit the crazy paving with a metallic clank and began to roll. It was a yellow and black cylinder. It looked like a can of insect spray with the lid removed. But the white cloud that was spitting from it wasn’t insect spray. As it rolled I read, in revolving black lettering on the yellow can, the words
KROWD-KLEAR
.

If you could call them words.

I saw the white cloud engulf Heidi at the bottom of the stairs. Heinz lowered his gun and started down his stairs, as if to help her. But then he stopped, realising he was going to step straight into the rising cloud of tear gas.

I didn’t stay to see what he did about this quandary.

As I slammed back through the kitchen door I could hear Heidi coughing and choking. Ree was waiting in the shadows. She’d been watching from the kitchen window. I glimpsed the back yard, now entirely filled by the swelling, gleaming cloud. I could see two dark figures moving in it. I grabbed Ree’s hand and we ran for the front door.

In my other hand I had the diary pages.

We punched through the front door and down the steps, out into the street. As we unlocked her car we could hear a gate slam at the back of the house and the sound of violent coughing, approaching fast. Ree gunned the engine and we raced away, bouncing down the tree-shadowed street, taking a left, a right, and then a left again.

Only when we were on Imperial Highway did she begin to relax. By then I was reading the diary.

“Is it all there?”

“Looks like it.”

“Good,” she said. Then, “Was that your girlfriend with the tear gas grenade?”

“Ex-girlfriend. Nevada. Yes.”

She glanced at me, her eyes unreadable. “Is she your guardian angel or something?”

“Or something,” I said.

“Well, it’s a good thing she turned up when she did. That guy had a gun.”

“I noticed.”

“And they were the Aryan Twins?”

“In person.”

She signalled a turn and began to pull towards the slip road, off the highway. We were still miles from home.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“To find a phone booth somewhere. One that isn’t overlooked by a security camera.”

“You’re going to call the cops?”

“And the ASPCA.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“They’ll look after those poor fish.”

* * *

When we got back to Ree’s house, we photographed all the remaining pages of the diary and then I typed them up and sent them to Tinkler while Ree glued them back into the binding with the first half of the diary.

This was what Wilburt hadn’t wanted us to read.

It was what the Aryan Twins had almost snatched from us.

Wednesday April 6th

The last Hathor session today. Easy and Moses and Danny DePriest. And I’m singing on one track. We all want to do it, in memory of Bobby. There’s no money left but Ron has given us the studio for free. He and Ladybird have driven up to Santa Barbara for the day. They left the keys for us. They were gone when we got there.

Ox must have arrived after they left, or they would have warned us.

He was waiting for us.

He had a bottle of whiskey with him and he was drinking out of it. You could smell the booze even over his aftershave. When we pulled up he came over to us.

He had the whiskey in one hand and a gun in the other. He told us to go away. It was all over. Danny DePriest and Moses were scared and so was I.

But Easy Geary just ignored him and made us go into the studio and start recording, like everything was normal. And the session went beautifully. Danny DePriest was very professional, setting everything up in the control room and then running out to play on the takes.

At lunchtime we all went out to get some sun and my stomach sank when I saw that Ox was still there. And he was even drunker. He was waving his gun around and we all went back inside as quickly as we could. But he saw me and I had taken my sweater off. I’ve started to show and he saw right away that I’m pregnant.

He smiled at me and showed me the gun and said, “Irish birth control.”

I was really shaken up but Easy was calm and Danny was still very professional despite it being his first solo session and we all got on with the recording. When we got to my song everything was cooking and we’d forgotten all about Ox.

But then I saw someone moving around in the back of the studio.

It was him.

Ox.

He’d come inside. Easy saw him, too. He waited until a moment came when he could drop out, then he signalled for us to keep playing and he got up from the piano and went into the back. I was singing and I didn’t see what happened but I heard a noise and it frightened me.

But I kept singing.

And Easy came back and sat down and played his solo. We all finished the song and it sounded great and only then did we realise that Easy was bleeding.

The sound had been Ox’s gun. He had shot Easy. Easy had defended himself with his knife and afterwards we found Ox lying there. It’s funny how calm everyone was. I guess we’d known what had happened, even if we didn’t admit it to ourselves, while we were finishing the song.

We worked out what had to be done.

We cleaned the place up. I went and bought a new carpet while Moses and Danny got rid of the old one and everything else. Easy went to a doctor that he knew. I stayed at the studio and supervised while the new carpet was installed. Ron and Ladybird got back just as the carpet men were finishing. They were really pleased. They have no idea what happened.

I’m not sorry about what we did.

I’m glad.

Friday April 8th

Danny was making the acetate of the record today. Easy and I joined him, like we agreed, to put our signatures in the wax. I couldn’t believe Easy had been able to get there. He was bleeding badly through the dressing on his wound. I told him to stay put and I hurried out and got some bandages from the drug store. But when I got back he was gone. Danny told me Easy had said that we’d done it. We’d made our statement for posterity, if anybody ever needed proof. Danny thought he was talking about the music. I knew he wasn’t.

There were no more entries until a week later, when written in big letters across the entire page was:

Friday April 15th

RIP Easy Geary.

The rest of the diary was blank.

Ree read through my transcription before I sent it off to Tinkler. She said, “The part I like best is the way he put paid to that bastard and still got back in time to play his solo. With a bullet in him.”

She looked at me. “She was sleeping with him.”

“Who?” I said. “Your grandmother? With Easy Geary?”

Ree nodded. “From the way she writes about him in the diary. But also the way she used to talk about him.” She nodded again, emphatically. “I’m sure about it.”

“You mean, while she was married to your grandfather?”

“Of course,” said Ree impatiently.

She went to a cupboard and came back with a gold plastic crown large enough for a child. She held it up and said, “My grandmother gave this to me for my birthday, the first birthday I spent with her after my folks died. She called me her little empress and told me everything was going to be all right for me.”

We looked at each other. There was an idea trying to surface at the back of my mind, but every time I reached for it, it slipped away.

We’d made our statement for posterity, if anybody ever needed proof.

I took out our chart and looked at it.

I felt a shiver go down my spine, like cold electricity.

There were still five Hathor LPs left to find, but it was as if we’d reached some crucial tipping point. Suddenly in quick succession we tracked down copies of HL-007 and then HL-012, which was a particularly satisfying find because it was the same Pepper Adams album that the “redhead” had scooped up at Styli just before I got there.

That Nevada had scooped up.

We located these records online and bought them, arranging for them to be shipped to the garage.

Then we got a lead on HL-009, one of the two which were headlined by Ree’s grandmother. A copy was being sold by a dealer in El Sereno. And then the same dealer phoned to say he’d also dug up the Conte Candoli, HL-013. Lucky 13.

Which left just one.

I got out our chart and stared at it.