Written in Dead Wax (35 page)

“So basically neither of them has anything to do with early jazz.”

“No, you’re right. They don’t.”

“Okay, so that’s an anomaly right there. And then you’ve got the other one.”

“The other what? The other anomaly?”

“That’s right. The medical dictionary.”

I stared at the thing. “It’s not a medical dictionary. It’s a medical
directory
.” It was a massive hardcover book with an orange jacket. “And it’s big enough to stun a proverbial ox.”

“But its very presence is significant. There must be some vital information in there.”

I sighed. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. At least some of the time. Other times I wonder if he didn’t just pack it in the box by mistake.”

“Dr Tinmouth?”

“Yes, he seems to have thrown this stuff together in a hell of a hurry. Like he just pulled out the relevant literature, marked everything the best he could, then tossed it all into the boxes and put it in storage. And you know what the worst thing is? When I go through the books sometimes there’s a loose piece of paper lying around—to commemorate the fact that a bookmark has come accidentally and permanently adrift and that we’ll never read what piece of text it was supposed to bring to our attention.”

“Total bummer,” said Tinkler.

“All the more so when it turns out that the medical directory is one of those books that’s lost its marker.”

“I guess you’ll just have to look at every page, then.”

I stared at the huge orange tome. “I don’t seem to have adequately conveyed the scope of the problem. This book is thousands of pages of small text. It’s the size of several telephone directories. It seems to list information on every registered professional physician who worked in the continental United States, plus Alaska and Hawaii, in the years 1948 to 1950.”

“And there’s quite a few of them?”

“It would take days just to flip through it,” I said.

“Have fun.”

A few minutes after I finished speaking to Tinkler I came upon a classic example of the adrift bookmark I’d been talking about. Between two books was pressed a narrow scrap of paper. It could have come from either of them, or from somewhere else entirely.

I put it aside with a pang of despair.

It was only a couple of days later that I turned it over and I realised it was a compliment slip from a firm. The name and address of the firm was printed at the top of the slip. Beneath these, in sprawling, vivid handwriting it read:

I couldn’t decipher the scrawled signature but I didn’t need to. The name was printed clearly above. Ron Longmire.

When Ree got in from her gig that night I said, “Have you ever heard of Ron Longmire?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“A record engineer. Along with Rudy Van Gelder and Roy DuNann he was one of the geniuses who created the sound of jazz as we know it.” I looked at her. “Most importantly from our point of view, he worked with your grandmother at Hathor Records.”

“And he’s still alive?”

I held up the slip of paper. “More than that, I think we’ve got an introduction to go and have a chat with him.” I handed it to her. “This letter, or note, is from him. I thought about not showing it to you.”

“Why not?”

She took it, read it, and laughed.

* * *

We phoned Ron Longmire and made an appointment to see him the following day.

His house in Woodland Hills was a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired stack of redwood and glass boxes arranged on a slope of the hill with a breathtaking view of the dirty brown haze hovering over the San Fernando Valley. As we pulled up outside, Ree was singing quietly to herself. The tune was familiar to me and after a moment I was able to identify it.

“Grandma’s Hands”, by Bill Withers.

Except Ree was singing, “Grandma’s Rack”. I didn’t hear any other words, but I didn’t necessarily feel this boded well. She switched off the engine and we got out. Ree broke off singing when she saw the car parked outside the house.

“Holy shit,” she said.

It was a streamlined silver 1960s creation, its powerful curves built low to the ground. Ree went over and touched its gleaming surface. “A Shelby Cobra,” she said. “The 427. From 1966.”

“Careful with the paintwork.”

We turned to see a suntanned, hawk-faced man with silver hair cropped short in a military style. He was dressed in a safari shirt and khaki shorts. He was of medium height but barrel-chested, and his bustling vigour made him seem bigger than he really was.

He trotted down the steps and shook hands with us. “Ron Longmire. Call me Ron. I guess the first thing you’ll want to see is my recording studio. Everybody does.”

The studio was located in the basement of the house, or rather the lowest of the stacked boxes. We descended to it down a stone staircase in the side of the hill and entered through a small door at one end. It was warm and calm inside, and very quiet. The most surprising thing about it was that it wasn’t a single big open room. Instead, only half of the studio was open space, while the rest consisted of sudden cubbyholes and corners and arbitrary spaces that reminded me of a hedge maze.

“Each of these areas has its own acoustic properties,” said Ron. “If we wanted to reduce the sound level for a given instrument we’d simply choose the right place to put it.”

“Why not just lower the level on the mixing desk in the control room?” said Ree.

“Purity of sound,” I said.

Ron grinned. “Plus we didn’t have a mixing desk in those days.”

On the floor was a vast Persian carpet with an elaborate abstract pattern. Ree was staring at it. “I love this carpet,” she said. Ron shot her a searching glance.

“Do you?”

“Yeah, it’s just my thing.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting? It was just your grandma’s thing, too.” He looked at her and smiled. “In fact she chose it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. She had it put in without me knowing about it. A surprise gift. To celebrate the end of recording on
Easy Come, Easy Go
. We all knew it would be the last Hathor album and we felt it was kind of a special occasion. So she got this for me.”

He stared down fondly at the carpet. “She even got rid of the old one for me. An orange monstrosity of a carpet, all stained with beer and cigarette burns and puke.” He smiled at us. “Speaking of beer…”

We tramped back up the stairs to the living room of the house where a highly polished baby grand piano crouched gleaming. We walked past it into the kitchen, where we sat at the breakfast counter, blinking in the sunlight as Ron poured us Mexican beer from chilled brown bottles.

There were pictures everywhere of Ron with a sprightly platinum-haired woman. “Is that your wife?” said Ree.

Ron nodded solemnly. “That’s Ladybird,” he said. “She’s gone.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

He grinned, his face crinkling. “Don’t be too sorry. She’s only gone to the store. She’ll be back in about half an hour.” He set the beers in front of us and sat down on the other side of the counter with his own. “Okay,” he said, leaning forward on his suntanned elbows. “What can I do for you?”

I said, “It seems that Dr Tinmouth thought it would be a good idea if we met. Or at least, if you and Ree met.”

“Poor old Jerry.”

“You don’t have any idea why he wanted you two to meet?”

Ron shook his head. “None.”

I glanced at Ree. “Well, there are a couple of questions I want to ask you.”

“Fire away,” said Ron.

“First of all, do you have original copies of any of the Hathor albums?”

“No.”

“None of them?”

“No, sorry. I got rid of all of that stuff years ago.”

I felt a stab of loss. “Got rid of?”

“Yeah, I sold them.” He took a sip of beer. “To collectors here and in Europe and Japan. For what seemed a lot of money at the time but was about a tenth of what I could get for them now.” He shrugged.

“How could you just get rid of them?” I said.

For the first time his good-natured grin faded and I saw how fierce that hawk face could look. “Listen, kid, they were my records and I could do what I liked with them.”

“But they were beautiful. They were your masterpieces.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I made those recordings over fifty years ago. That was another lifetime. And anyway, I copied all of them onto DAT.”

Ree chuckled and said, “That won’t cut any ice with the Chef. He’s strictly an analogue man. A vinyl guy.”

Ron made a non-committal sound and sipped his beer. I cleared my throat. I felt a little awkward, but I pressed ahead. I said, “The other thing is the gunshot.”

He stared at me. “The what? The gunshot? What gunshot?”

“On one of the Hathor sessions. There’s a noise in the background. I’m sure it’s a gunshot.”

Ron laughed a dry rasping laugh and took another hearty sip of his beer. He set the glass down and looked at me. “Listen, kid, I think I’d remember if somebody fired a gun on one of my recording dates.”

“But it wasn’t your date. It was
Easy Come, Easy Go
. That was engineered by Danny DePriest, wasn’t it?”

His face clouded over. “Danny DePriest? That kid was a genius. I let him do that record on his own. It was going to be the last album from the label and I wanted him to get the full credit for it. To launch his career. Which I guess it did.” He shook his head. “He was a hell of an engineer.”

“What happened to him?” said Ree.

He looked at her bleakly. “Somebody killed him, in Seattle in 1967.”

“Killed him?”

“Slipped him a Mickey Finn. He was in a bar and somebody spiked his drink with some narcotic and killed him.” He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I can’t prove it was murder. Maybe he put the dope in his own drink. Maybe it was a drug thing. I just don’t know. All I know is that kid had a hell of a talent, as an engineer, as a producer, as an arranger. What a waste.” He shook his head.

“But you’ve got the master tapes for that session,” I said. “The ones Danny did for you.”

He looked at me like a man coming out of a reverie. Coming back from Seattle, in 1967. “Of course.”

“Would it be possible to listen to them?”

“I don’t see why not.” He grinned at me. “And check for a gunshot?”

“That’s right.”

“Sure, kid. We’ll put paid to this little fantasy of yours.” He rose from his chair. “Which track?”

“The last track, side two. Ree’s grandmother sings on it. ‘Running from a Spell’.”

He sat back down again, suddenly looking tired. “Sorry, kid. Forget it.”

I had been half expecting this, but the disappointment was still woundingly sharp. I said, “Why?”

“Because the master tape for that track doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’d heard that. But I was sure you must have a copy somewhere.”

He shook his head. “Not me, not anybody.” Ree was staring at us. She was smiling a quizzical half-smile.

“What happened to it?” I said.

“Nobody knows.” He abruptly picked up his beer and drained it, then set the glass aside with an air of finality. “Well, you can forget about your mystery gunshot. I’ve got the DAT from the vinyl but that will be third generation. And anything less than first generation and we’re pissing into the wind.”

“Are you sure?” said Ree.

Longmire and I both nodded the same decisive nod. We looked at each other. He turned to Ree and said, “There’s no way we can draw any real conclusion without the master tape.” He picked up his empty glass and got up and put it in the sink, shaking his head. “And I have no idea where the hell it is.”

“I’ve got it,” said Ree.

We both looked at her.

“You’ve got it?” I said.

“I knew it.” Ron smacked his fist into the palm of his hand triumphantly. “I knew it had to be somewhere.” He’d certainly changed his tune.

I looked at Ree. “We’re talking about the original 1955 master tape? From the session itself?” She nodded.

“My grandmother kept it. And luckily she didn’t keep it in the attic.”

Ron glanced up quizzically and we explained the great honey calamity. He nodded smugly and said, “You fuck with Mother Nature at your considerable peril. But our problem isn’t going to be that the tape’s too sticky. It’s going to be that it’s not sticky enough. Where is it?”

“At my house,” said Ree. She looked at me. “We could go get it now.”

“Yes,” I said. I stood up. My heart was beating hard in my chest. Ree stood up too.

“We’ll go now and get it and we’ll bring it right back and you can play it for us.”

Ron shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged and said, “What do you expect? We’re talking about a tape that’s over half a century old. We can’t just
play
it.”

“Why not?”

He sighed. “A tape is made up of three things. There’s the iron oxide particles, which record the sound, right? And then there’s the carrier, which is made of a kind of plastic. In those days it was mostly acetate, which was a bitch because it gets brittle and stretches. But we used an early polyester compound.” He glared at us to see if we understood.

“And what’s the third thing?” said Ree.