Looking for Chet Baker (13 page)

The clerk thinks a minute. “Ah yes, Chet Baker. I remember now. We talked about his music. I too am a fan, and of course, Baker died here.”

“Yes, that’s right. These were typed pages he had copied. What did the man look like?”

“Hmm…very tall, he had a beard, I think. And yes, American.”

“Wait a minute.” I take out my passport case and show him the photo of Ace. “Is this him?”

The clerk takes the photo and looks at it. “Yes, this is the man.”

“Do you remember when this was?”

The clerk shrugs. “Only a few days, perhaps. No more than a week.”

I nod. “Thanks, thanks very much.”

“Not at all.”

I go outside in the busy square again, traffic and people buzzing all around me, but only hearing that voice in my head, asking another question: Why would Ace need to copy the entire contents of his portfolio?

Chapter Eleven

It’s a little too quiet when I get back to the flat. No music playing, no sound of Fletcher’s saxophone. Nothing. I close the door and listen for a moment. “Fletch, you in?”

“In here,” he calls from his room. I breathe a sigh of relief and walk down the hall. His horn is set aside, lying on the neatly made bed. He’s in jeans, T-shirt, and sandals, holding something up to a high-intensity light at his desk with one hand. In his other hand is a small knife. He pauses for a moment to push his glasses up. I look around his room for the first time.

“Be with you in a minute,” he says. He glances over for a second, looking at me over the top of his glasses, then turns back to what he’s working on. “I’m a neatnik, huh?”

He is. Not only is the bed made, everything seems to have a place. Books in low cases along one wall, and I know without looking they’re in alphabetical order by author. There are a few strays stacked neatly on the nightstand by size. The pictures on the wall, the posters of jazz festivals, are arranged symmetrically. The closet door is open to several suits, hangers spaced evenly.

“Getting these how I like them too,” he says without looking at me. I see now he has a saxophone reed in his hand, shaving the edge carefully with a small knife. He blows on it, checks it again. “Want to hand me my horn?” I get it and bring it over. He puts the reed in the mouthpiece and tightens it in place. He blows a few notes, his eyes open, listening, then runs through the first few bars of “Body and Soul” before he puts the horn down. “Yeah, that’s it. Don’t know why they can’t make them like that out of the box.” He looks at me now. “Hey, man, you been out early.” He pads out of his room and lights a cigarette.

“Yeah, I called the police. Dekker wanted me to come down and go through Ace’s portfolio again.” Fletcher looks at me through a cloud of smoke and laughs. “What?”

“I was just thinking.
You
called the police.”

“Okay, okay. He wanted me to see if anything was missing or if something had been added.” I watch the smoke curl over his head. “What happened to the smoking rule?”

He shrugs and looks for the ashtray. “Hell, Margo ain’t here. We can always air the place out. Anyway, this thing has me keyed up. Find anything?”

“Just a receipt for some photocopying. Everything in the portfolio was copied. I checked at the store, showed the guy the photo. He remembered all right. It was Ace.”

Fletcher sits down and looks at me. “Let me see the photo of Ace. I didn’t know you had one.”

“Yeah, guess I forgot to tell you.” I take it out and show Fletcher. He studies it for a moment.

“Yeah, that’s the guy I talked to all right. Just wanted to make sure. This was in the portfolio?”

“Yes, there were a couple. I…okay, I kept this one.”

Fletcher nods knowingly. “Why would he copy everything?”

“My question exactly.”

Fletcher is still squinting at the photo. “We’re missing something here,” he says, “but damn if I can figure what it is.” He hands it back to me.

“I know. Nothing about this makes any sense.”

Fletcher goes to the window, pulls the drapes apart, and turns the crank to open the window. Cool air rushes into the room. “Want some coffee? I was just gettin’ ready to.”

“Yeah, sounds good.” We walk back to the kitchen. Fletcher puts on the kettle to boil water, gets coffee out of a canister, and spoons some into a French press. “You ever been married, Fletcher?”

“Oh, yeah. Twice. My second wife and I split about ten years ago, but we’d been separated a long time before that.”

“Kids?”

Fletcher grins. “Yeah, one daughter. Prettiest thing you ever seen. She’s married, made me a granddaddy a few years ago. Lives in Portland. She’s a lawyer.”

“Hmmm. My ex-girlfriend is about to become a lawyer.”

“Ex?” He cocks his head to the side. “You ain’t got no ladies waitin’ for you back home?”

“Well, one maybe. I talked to my cop friend this morning. He says the FBI agent I worked with in L.A. is asking about me.”

Fletcher gets two mugs out of the cabinet. He pours the hot water just short of boiling into the glass press and takes everything to the table. We sit down, and he lets the coffee sit for a minute before pouring it into the mugs. I add cream and sugar to mine.

“FBI, huh?” He stirs in sugar for his coffee. “FBI girlfriend, cop friend, ex gonna be a lawyer. Man, you the most law-enforcement-involved piano player I ever knew. Lucky you don’t do anything illegal.”

“Well, nothing much happened with Andie. It could have, though. We were kind of thrown together, made a trip to San Francisco and spent the night. She was pretty up front about things, let me know how it was, how it could be, but I was still involved with the ex-girlfriend.”

Fletcher grins. “And let me guess. This FBI agent is a fine lady, and the girlfriend got jealous, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Oh, I know that song, man.” He shakes his head slowly from side to side. “Women sure can mess you up. Slow as a Shirley Horn ballad, but it happens.” He looks at me again. “Is the ex really an ex, or are you still deciding that?”

“I think so. When I was working with the FBI, I couldn’t tell her what I was doing, and she took all the time I spent with the agent the wrong way. Even later, when I could explain things, maybe too much damage was already done.”

“Yeah, it happens,” Fletcher says. “Sounds like you got some decisions to make. You haven’t talked to either of them since you left home?”

“No. Natalie, she’s the ex, is still in L.A. Andie, the FBI agent, is in San Francisco.”

Fletcher grins. “Well, maybe you should invite one of them over for a visit.”

“Yeah, that’s just what I need now.”

“Well, like Prez said, ‘Man does not live by jazz alone.’”

“Lester Young said that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sounds like something he’d say. He did say, ‘Stan Getz the money for playin’ me.’”

“So you’re a philosopher too, huh?”

“No, just an observer of the human condition.” Fletcher sips his coffee and looks at me. “So, got any plans?”

I’d thought it through on the way back to the flat. The best course seemed to be to check out Rotterdam, the clubs there, see if Ace had been there, then work our way back to Amsterdam. “I want to go to the Dizzy Café and the Thelonious. You still want to come?”

“Yeah. We can drive or take a train. There’s several every day, but might be good to have the car, so we can get around while we’re there.”

“What I was thinking.”

“When?”

“Let’s go today, later this afternoon.” I’m anxious to get going, do something. I hate waiting around, not hearing anything.

“Cool,” Fletcher says. “You want to play some first?”

“Sure.” We take our coffee and go back to the living room. Fletcher gets his horn, and I walk over to the piano and warm up a little. Fletcher takes some sheet music from on the piano. “Let’s try this. New one of mine.”

It’s called “Canal Bridge Stroll.” I look over the chord changes and try them out. “What’s the tempo?”

Fletcher closes his eyes, moves his head up and down, walks in place for a minute. “About here. Play that first four bars, and then I’ll come in.”

I play the setup, then follow Fletcher’s line, following the chords on the sheet. We clash a couple of times, back up, and start again until it makes sense. “You want to play with those chords, go ahead.”

“Okay.” I try some substitutions, do a little reharmonizing, and it starts to jell.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Fletcher says.

We work on it for a half hour or so until we’re both satisfied, then try some tunes we’ve already played. The interplay is even better now as we follow each other’s thoughts, mixing lines, playing off each other. With no drummer or bassist to follow, it’s just him and me, getting into one another’s head, a kind of musical telepathy. The more we do it, the better it gets.

“We need a couple of bebop tunes. You know ‘Billie’s Bounce’?”

“Yeah.” We take it fairly up, and we both know we’ll add it to the repertoire.

“I like that,” Fletcher says. “Got us plenty of music to play.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Now all we have to do is keep you focused. Let me make some calls. Then we can pack a bag, have some lunch, and head out.”

“You think this is a good idea?” I’m already having reservations, but at the same time, I can’t just let it go. I know I won’t rest till I find out where Ace is and what happened to him.

Fletcher pauses a moment. “Now, don’t take this the wrong way. If we’re looking for your friend, I understand that. I’d do the same. But if you get hung up on Chet Baker and what happened to him, we might go on a detour, go down the wrong road.”

“I don’t think so, Fletch. I think they’re the same road.”

***

After lunch, we each pack enough for an overnight stay, throw the bags in Fletcher’s car, and head south on the A4 Expressway for Rotterdam. I let my mind wander, thinking about Chet Baker making this same drive over eleven years ago for his gig at the Thelonious, weak, hurting, and unaware he’s going to find only a handful of customers, not even enough to get paid. How did that feel? Is that what set him off to wander the streets, lose his car, and hustle back to Amsterdam to fix?

“Got it figured out?” Fletcher asks. He’s a careful driver, both hands on the wheel, shaking his head as car after car passes us. He’s found a music station on the radio, and it plays softly in the background.

“What? This trip?”

“Why your friend would copy all that shit in his portfolio?”

“Oh, I’ve got a wild theory or two.” I look out the window, watching the green fields flash by; I still haven’t seen a windmill.

“When don’t you?” Fletcher laughs and looks at me. “I’m just keeping your feet on the ground.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Well? What is it?” Fletcher keeps his eyes on the road but turns down the radio.

I shift in my seat, light a cigarette, and crack the window a couple of inches. “Well, let’s suppose he did leave the portfolio, hoping I’d find it. Then, he knows I did, but wants to keep on with his research and needs his notes and the articles. So he steals it back, copies all the papers, and then makes sure it turns up again.”

Fletcher is already frowning. “And just leaves it somewhere, hoping somebody will find it, turn it in to the police, and they’ll call you and give it back?” Fletcher laughs. “Man, your imagination is something else.”

“Well, I told you it was a wild theory. I don’t think he consciously left it to be recovered. I think it was stolen, something he hadn’t counted on.”

“Well, that’s slightly better,” Fletcher says. He frowns again. “Tell me again why he wanted you to have it in the first place.”

“Because he wanted me to help him research Chet Baker. I turned him down flat in London, but he knows from past experience I would follow the leads in that material. You know, go to the archives, check out musicians, see the film. I’m sure he thought the temptation would be too great.”

Fletcher looks at me again. “Yeah, just like you’re doing. He was right.”

Maybe he was. I’d thought about it a lot. If I’m honest, I have to admit my fascination with solving mysteries. Dekker’s story about Hemingway’s suitcase opened the flow for a lot of juices. But when the mysteries deal with jazz musicians, the pull is even stronger, especially when I discover not many people have bothered to solve them. So far, Chet Baker’s death is unsolved, on record as an accident because nobody could come up with anything better.

“Yeah, maybe he is. Don’t you wonder what really happened to Chet?”

Fletcher shrugs. “I’d be interested, but not enough to want to do all this research and spend all this time on it.” He laughs out loud then.

“What?”

“I was just thinking about what some guy in Maynard Ferguson’s band told me. They were on the bus, going to some gig. Maynard was going to take a nap and said, ‘Don’t wake me up unless they find Glen Miller.’” He holds out his palm for me to slap.

I laugh too. From what I’ve heard about him, that sounds like Maynard. Glen Miller’s plane was never found after it went down somewhere in the English Channel.

Fletcher turns up the radio again. I put out my cigarette and lean back on the seat and close my eyes. “Well, remember what Maynard said.” I drift off, and before I know it, Fletcher is shaking me.

“No Glen Miller, but we’re in Rotterdam.”

***

We check in to a hotel Fletcher knows from previous visits. It’s small, clean, and Spartan, but the price is right for two singles, and we’re not going to be spending much time in the room. We grab something to eat, and Fletcher makes a couple of calls from the restaurant. I’m finishing coffee and a cigarette when he comes back.

“The Thelonious is closed, but the owner was there.” He shakes his head. “Tried to get me to come down cheap for a weekend. Anyway, he hasn’t talked to anyone asking questions about Chet Baker.”

I put out my cigarette, feeling really disappointed. “So, any other ideas?”

“We can try Dizzy’s. They’re open, but no guarantee we’ll find anything there either.”

“Worth a shot, I guess.” I didn’t really expect to find the pianist from the film after all this time. I pay the check, and we go outside.

“Let’s walk,” Fletcher says. “I need some exercise.” He laughs. “Maybe we’ll find Chet’s car.”

Fletcher leads the way. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk to the small club. A trio is playing a lackluster set of standards to a handful of people in the room. “Shit, wish I’d brought my horn,” Fletcher says. “Might shake these guys up.”

We go to the bar and order a couple of beers. The bartender recognizes Fletcher, and they have a brief reunion before he introduces me. “This is one bad piano player,” Fletcher says. “Evan Horne.”

I shake hands with Jan and, after the pleasantries are over, ask him about Ace, showing him the photo. He looks at it, shakes his head. “No, nobody like that,” he says. “Chet Baker. Haven’t thought about him in years.” Fletcher gives me an I-told-you-so look.

“Well, thanks for your time,” I say, then remember the pianist from the film. “He was in a band called Bad Circuits.” But this draws another blank.