Written in Dead Wax (41 page)

That morning the garage called to say that two of the records had arrived. We went down to get them. I unwrapped the first, HL-012 by Pepper Adams. I checked the dead wax and filled in the chart.

“And here’s the other one.” Ree handed me the second record. HL-007 by Cy Coleman. I checked it and amended the chart.

I looked at Ree. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said. She looked back at me, bronze eyes clear and level.

We drove over out to El Sereno to collect the two records from the dealer. He operated a small store out of his house. He had one of the records—HL-009,
Rita Mae Pollini Sings Burns Hobartt
, waiting for us when we arrived. He went off to get the other one.

Ree studied the photo of her grandmother on the album cover as I filled in the chart.

Ree and I looked at each other.

I checked what time it was in England and phoned Alan at Jazz House. While I held the phone and Ree waited impatiently, Alan followed my request. After a few minutes, he came back and gave me the information. I thanked him and hung up.

“He’s checked. And it turns out the labels on HL-003, the Richie Kamuca, were glued on the wrong sides of the record.”

“On the wrong sides?”

“Yes. They were reversed. It happens sometimes.”

“Okay,” said Ree. She looked at me. “We both knew it anyway, didn’t we?” I nodded, then corrected the chart. Instead of:

It now read:

The dealer finally came back with HL-013, the Conte Candoli. “I’m sorry. My wife had it filed under ‘Easy Listening’ with the Al Hirt stuff. Because it has a trumpet on the cover. That kind of reasoning.”

I took the record and Ree watched over my shoulder as I added the information to the chart.

We stared at it.

I felt light-headed and weightless. We soon found the final album, HL-002 by Marty Paich, on the Internet. A copy in Hawaii. It seemed to take forever to arrive, even by the most speedy of carrier. But it finally did.

I checked the dead wax as Ree watched.

“It’s SY.”

“Of course it is.”

I looked at the chart.

I inserted the spaces.

The implications slowly began to sink in. Easy Geary and Rita Mae Pollini had signed Hathor HL-014 because it was the conclusion of a message. A statement they wanted to preserve permanently. Instead of carving it in stone they’d carved it in vinyl. Perhaps not the finest choice for permanence, but we’d read it in the end.

Easy Geary had gone to great trouble to code that message into the vinyl. I’d asked Ron Longmire what he knew about the cryptic markings in the run-out, but he didn’t remember anything about them. “I always left the final stage to Danny,” he said. But he did recall that Easy Geary liked to be there with Danny DePriest when he prepared the acetates. “And Rita Mae liked to be with him, too.”

So Danny had been in on it. But what was “it”? Why did they do it?

Easy Geary evidently regarded this message as some kind of summing up of his life’s work. He dragged himself to sign the final LP’s lacquer with a bullet in him, and he died soon afterwards, presumably from that same bullet.

Ree’s grandmother, Rita Mae, had also attached a vital importance to what they’d written in the dead wax. Which is why she’d freaked out when she’d lost her copies of the records. They’d spelled out the true paternity of her child.

And the bloodline of her grandchild.

She understood the implication.

“She called me her little empress and told me everything was going to be all right for me.”

We talked about it as we played chess that evening, sitting on the floor in Ree’s living room with the board between us. I loved playing here with her but I couldn’t help thinking the game would only be improved by a cat attempting to wander across the board, chancing to scatter pawns and kings with equal insouciance.

I said, “This makes you a direct descendant and heir of Easy Geary.”

“I know.”

“And Easy Geary was Burns Hobartt. And Burns Hobartt owned a substantial piece of AMI. Which means you now own that. A chunk of one of the biggest corporations in the world.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother kept the secret at first because she didn’t want her husband to find out that another man had fathered her child. Obviously. Later on she kept the secret because she knew it was potentially dynamite and she wanted to keep you safe. You’re one of the richest women in America.” I looked around at her small, cosy house and wondered what would become of it. “Maybe you can use this place for storing your shoes,” I said.

“I’m not really the shoe-buying type.”

“Anyway,” I said, “the Milkybars are on you.”

“The what?”

“It’s just an expression. It means, like…”

“The drinks are on me?”

“Exactly. The drinks are on you. And for the foreseeable future. Unless you choose to blow it all in Vegas.”

“I don’t like gambling,” said Ree, scrutinising the trap I was trying to set for her with my bishop. “I like chess.” She nimbly avoided the trap and took one of my knights. How could I have missed that? “I think the first thing we’ll do,” she said, “is take a vacation in Hawaii. Finding that last record there got me thinking. And I’ve always wanted to go there. My grandmother was always talking about it.”

I made suitably enthusiastic noises, but I had the strange certainty that Hawaii would never happen. At least not for us.

Even as we made love that night I could feel her slipping away from me. As if the money, even the remote prospect of it, had put a fatal distance between us.

* * *

The following day I borrowed a car from Berto’s garage and drove down to Amoeba Music. It was located in Hollywood, just past the corner of Sunset and Vine.

Now that I had concluded the business aspect of my trip—looking for records—I could get down to the pleasure aspect. Looking for records. I searched the LP racks in Amoeba in a state of happy excitement. I found some nice stuff, mostly on Verve and Cobblestone.

I was on my way out of the store when I spotted a striking young woman looking through the rock albums in the vinyl section.

She held a record bag tightly under one arm as if she was afraid someone might try to take it away from her. She had long red hair. I went over to the adjacent aisle, where I could watch her without being seen. Then I went into her aisle and stood behind her as she searched the new arrivals rack.