Written in Dead Wax (36 page)

I said, “The glue that holds them together.”

Ron grinned and nodded. “That’s right, kid, and it’s the glue that’s our problem.” He nodded at Ree. “By now the stuff on your grandma’s tape will have let go.”

I said, “That’s what you meant about it not being sticky enough.”

He grinned toothily. “Correct. If we tried to play it now, the iron oxide particles would just come off it, they’d shed in a miniature grey blizzard, and you’d have a blank strip of polyester and a pile of iron oxide.” He chuckled. “And then the only thing you could do is get some glue and a microscope and try to put all the oxide molecules back in the right place. And to do that you’d have to be god’s smarter older brother.”

He smiled into our silence.

“So we can’t play my grandmother’s tape,” said Ree.

“Oh hell,” said Ron cheerfully, “of course we can! But first we have to reactivate the glue on it.”

“We can do that?”

“Oh yeah, sure.” He beamed at us. “You just take the tape and bake it.”

“
Bake
it?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Ree and I stared at him with identical aghast expressions. I said, “You just take the tape and stick it in an oven?”

Somehow he managed to laugh heartily while simultaneously sneering. “Hell no, kid, of course we don’t just stick it in an oven. Do you really think we’d do that? We’ve got a
special device
.”

* * *

We drove to Ree’s house, getting there with miraculous speed and fetching the tape from the top shelf of the cupboard where it had sat, undisturbed in a shoebox, for years. I couldn’t believe it was still there, that nothing had gone wrong. I was a little shellshocked with relief, looking at it. Then we set off back and sat in traffic for two hours, with me holding the box gingerly in my lap.

I expected absolutely anything, including an attack by ninjas from a flying saucer.

But nothing happened. Except the traffic crawled.

When we finally got to the Longmire house Ron was standing on the drive, putting an industrial vacuum cleaner back into the garage. He paused when he saw us. He was now dressed in white tennis shorts, a lime green polo shirt and navy blue blazer. He looked the picture of health, like a man luxuriating after a workout.

“Welcome back!” he said.

“You look like you’ve been busy.”

“What you said got me thinking. If somebody fired a gun in my studio then there’d be a bullet hole somewhere. So I went down there with a strong light source and inspected every inch of the place. Every wall. The entire ceiling.” He nodded at the vacuum cleaner. “Even the floor. I rolled up the carpet—had to vacuum the whole place first and wear a mask. You don’t want to breathe in any dust at my age. At any age, really. Anyhow, it was quite a project. Pretty good exercise, though. Where was I? Oh—I even rolled up the carpet and examined the floor. You know what I found?” He looked at us expectantly.

“A bullet hole?” I said, without much hope.

“Nothing?” said Ree.

“Nothing!” Ron snapped his fingers. “That’s right. No bullet hole nowhere.” He looked at me. “You almost had me going, kid. I was actually thinking somebody might have fired a gun during one of my sessions.”

I said, “I still think somebody did.”

“Okay, kid, so what happened to the bullet?”

“It left the studio inside somebody.”

He looked at me. “Inside some… body?”

I nodded at the vacuum cleaner. “When did you say you got the new carpet? Right after that session?”

“That’s right.”

I glanced at Ree. “I think that’s how they got rid of the evidence.”

“Evidence?” said Ron.

“Yes.”

“And who would
they
be?”

“Rita Mae and Easy Geary and whoever else was on that session.”

Ron’s eyes became distant for a moment as he considered something. “Including Danny DePriest.” His gaze sharpened again and he gave me a hard predatory stare. “So what are you saying? That they got rid of my old orange monstrosity of a carpet because it was covered with blood?”

“That plus it had a body rolled up in it.”

“A what?” he said. He stared at me for a moment, and then he pounded his thigh and started to laugh. “A body rolled up in a carpet? Is that what you think?” He punched me on the arm good-naturedly. He had a considerable punch for a man of his age. I resisted the urge to rub the sore spot. “I’ll say this for you, kid, you’ve got a vivid imagination. So vivid you had me going for a while. But anyhow, one good thing came of it.” He beckoned to Ree, looking hungrily at the box she was carrying.

“Come on into the kitchen. We’ve got us a tape to bake.”

He led us through the big living room with its baby grand. Nodding at the piano he said, “Who needs recordings? These days if I want some music, I just get Ladybird to play me something.”

In the kitchen there was a domestic appliance standing on the counter. It was a shiny, squat white cylinder. At first glance I thought it was some kind of salad spinner, but it had a power cable running to it. Ron looked at it proudly, then looked at us.

I went over and examined the apparatus. I said, “The Smoky Snack Chef 500?”

He nodded happily. “Yeah.”

“This is the ‘special device’?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a Crockpot!”

“No, it’s a professional food dehydrator. Great for my beef jerky and it also makes some mean sun-dried tomatoes for Ladybird. Although they’re not actually
sun
dried.”

Ree and I looked at each other, then at the thing, then at him. “You’re actually proposing we put the tape in there?”

He opened the box and examined the reel. “Yeah, for about ninety minutes at one hundred and thirty Fahrenheit.”

“You’re serious. You’re going to bake it in the Smoky Snack Chef?”

He grinned at us. “You wouldn’t want to try it with acetate, true. But, like I told you, this is a polyester carrier.”

I looked at Ree. “Do you want to let him do this?”

She shrugged uncertainly. “I guess.”

Ron patted the Snack Chef. “I’ve used this baby plenty of times. It works great for restoring tapes. And it so happens it’s also great for making food! Just don’t do them at the same time.”

* * *

While the tape baked we sat in the living room and listened to Ladybird play the piano. She was a small, spry chubby woman with striking platinum hair. “Don’t mind Ron,” she told us. “His bark is worse than his bite.” She proved to be a good musician, thankfully.

After a while Ree began to sing along with her and the two of them performed so well together that, at several points, I almost forgot to worry about the priceless audiotape being slowly cooked next door in a branded kitchen appliance.

And after it was baked it had to cool, of course.

Then finally we got to play it.

Ron had a listening system consisting of a classic Revox tape deck, vintage solid-state Quad amps and some superb BBC LS3/5a speakers. I would have gone for the valve Quads myself, but the system was compact, high quality and no-nonsense. Perhaps a little like its owner.

The loudspeakers were small but reproduced vocals beautifully and Rita Mae Pollini’s voice made the hairs stir on the back of my neck. Ree stared intently into the soundstage, as though trying to see back into 1955. Then it came.

The gunshot.

I looked at Ron. He frowned at me and rewound the tape. He played the passage again. Then again. Every time it sounded like a gunshot.

“So what do you think, Ron?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He gnawed at a knuckle, considering, then looked at me. “Only one way to find out.” He went out and came back with a laptop. He attached it to an analogue-to-digital cable that ran directly into the Revox. Then he put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles and peered intently at the laptop’s screen as he launched some sound analysis software.

We played the tape again and he studied the computer screen, colours flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. Finally he sighed and shut the computer down. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at us.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What do you mean, sorry?”

“Kid, the waveform is all wrong. It’s not a gunshot. It can’t be.”

“It sure as hell sounds like one,” I said.

He shook his head, a trifle mournfully, and patted the laptop. “Not to the analyser it doesn’t, and the analyser never lies. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a gunshot.”

* * *

I woke up from a deep sleep to find Ree sitting bolt upright in bed beside me, listening intently. The room was dark and all I could hear was her breathing. Then she murmured softly, “What the hell?”

Thinking she’d been woken by a nightmare, I wrapped my arms around her. I put my face between her warm, fragrant breasts, ear pressed to her smooth skin, listening to her heart. She said, “I heard a car. I heard an engine.”

“This is Los Angeles.”

“Not just any car. Not just any engine.” She hopped off the bed and went to the window. Lifting the curtain, she peered out. “I thought so.” I went and stood beside her.

Out in the street, parked in the cone of light under a lamppost, was Ron’s gleaming silver Cobra. Ladybird was sitting in the passenger seat, looking immaculate in a headscarf and big movie star sunglasses—despite it being the middle of the night. The driver’s seat was empty and there was no sign of Ron, until we saw an angular shadow move under the porch light and the doorbell rang.

I pulled on a t-shirt and boxer shorts and padded out to answer it.

Ron was standing there in a black leather jacket, which made his stout chest look even broader. He was wearing an elaborate pair of eyeglasses that looked like racing goggles. Behind them, his eyes were bright and wide awake. “Look, kid,” he said, “I’m sorry as hell about this. I know it’s the middle of the night.”

“No,” I said. “Of course. Come in.” We went into the living room together as Ree came in from the bedroom, knotting a black and red flowered kimono around her. She put on lights and then perched beside me on the couch as Ron sank down into an armchair opposite us. He groaned like a man trying to postpone an unhappy duty.

“Is Ladybird okay?” said Ree. “Wouldn’t she like to come in, too?”

“No, she’s fine out there. We go out driving in the middle of the night all the time. Neither of us sleeps much these days. We’re a pair of night owls. Might as well be high noon out there, as far as we’re concerned…” He trailed off, looking at us. “Listen,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

“How so?”

He unzipped his jacket about half an inch, as though that was as far as he’d allow himself to relax. “Let me explain. A few years ago these guys in Holland licensed some Hathor tracks to release on CD. They had access to our tapes, all the original elements, but when the CD came out it sounded like crap. No one could figure out why.”

I said, “It was a CD, that’s why.” Ree gave a muffled snort of amusement.

Ron shook his head stubbornly. “No, it should have sounded fine. Those original recordings were great. But these CDs sounded flat, lifeless. It was a mystery.” He looked at us, his glasses glinting. “Then I remembered.”

“What?” I said.

“Our studio is a wonderful recording environment. But it’s a little dead.”

“A little dead?” said Ree.

“Acoustically speaking. People are accustomed to hearing music played in a concert hall or a club or a bar. Compared to those, any recording studio can sound a little dead. Because there’s no echo, you see, no reverberation. Now, that’s a good thing, as far as it goes. But when we did the Hathor recordings we discovered that they sounded a little dry. A little airless. Think of it this way. The studio made the music sound a bit artificial. And we wanted to put the reality back in. So I got Danny to sweeten the recordings with a little reverb. He added some echo to the mastertape.”

He took off his glasses and massaged his face wearily. “That’s what I remembered tonight,” he said. “And I had to come and tell you right away.”

“About putting the reverb on the recordings.”

“About
not
putting it on.” He stared at me. “I suddenly thought to myself, what if Danny put the reverb on everything on that tape but
not
on the gunshot? He could have done it. The kid was a genius. He could ride the levels, listening with the headphones, and drop out the reverb just for the duration of the gunshot. Do you get it?”

I nodded. “I think so. And if he did that…”

“Then the gunshot wouldn’t be identifiable as a gunshot. It wouldn’t give the right waveform. It disguised the sound—and it would fool the software. Even though the software wasn’t going to be invented for fifty years.” He stared off into space. “Danny DePriest was a genius. It’s such a pity about that kid.” He focused on me again. “What he did could fool the equipment, but it couldn’t fool your ears.”

Ree kneaded my shoulder. “They can’t fool the Chef.”

“So, as soon as I thought that,” said Ron, “I took the copy I made of your tape, and I dubbed reverb over the section in question, and I ran it through the analyser and I got the waveform.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “And it was a gunshot,” he said. He put his glasses on and sighed, leaning forward in the chair.

“Kid, you were right and I was wrong. There I was, laying down the law like I was King Shit and telling you your ears were wrong and it wasn’t a gunshot. And I’m sorry as hell about that.”

“There’s no need,” said Ree. “We know now. You’ve told us.”

“Still,” said Ron. “I’m sorry. And if there’s anything I could do…”

Ree smiled. “You could let me take your car for a drive.”

“Okay, well, let me wrap my head around that notion. In the meantime me and Ladybird wanted you to have this. She reminded me that we had it.” He unzipped his jacket and took out an LP.

It was the Manny Albam. Hathor HL-011. It was framed like a picture, in glass and black metal. As he spoke, Ron unclipped the back of the frame and took the LP out.

“I thought you’d got rid of all of them?” I said.

“We did. We only kept this one because Ladybird liked the cover.” He separated the album from the frame and handed it to me.