Evan Horne [04] Bird Lives!

by Bill Moody

  Jeff starts walking on the last eight, and we take it out. “Yeah,” says Gene. Jeff adjusts his amp slightly, and I start alone, out of tempo, on a Tadd Dameron ballad, “If You Could See Me Now.” I’ve worked out some new chord changes for this, and Jeff studies the keyboard as I play the intro, then decides on the spot to play a chorus solo. I nod my head forward to begin the next chorus, and Jeff comes in with me, one long, aching note that perfectly sets the mood for this haunting tune. Gene scrapes the handle end of his wire brush across the cymbal, then begins to circle the brushes on the snare.

  I fall into the song then, plunging its depths, occasionally surprising myself with turns and twists for two choruses, then leave it to Jeff to sum things up. When we finish on the chord Jeff showed me at the rehearsal, he smiles at me. I feel the familiar rush. There’s one moment of complete silence, as if the audience doesn’t want to interfere, then a burst of applause, and I know we’ve got them.

  For the rest of the set I mix it up with standards, a bossa nova version of “Old Folks,” and one Monk tune, and finish off with Miles’s “All Blues.” The melancholy waltz fits the trio as well as the glove on my right hand.

  I stand up and walk around the piano to the microphone. “Thank you very much,” I say to the audience. “You’ve been listening to Gene Sherman on drums and Jeff Lasorda on bass. I’m Evan Horne. We’ll be back very shortly.”

  I turn and look at the guys. “Let’s go on the road,” Gene says, standing up at his drums. He’s pumped.

  “Yeah, Evan,” says Jeff. “Jesus, what are we going to do next set?”

  “We’ll try a couple of these,” I say, tapping the music on top of the piano.

  I make my way through the maze of tables to Coop and Andie. They’re deep in conversation when I come up. Coop kicks out a chair for me, and I join them.

  “That was wonderful,” Andie says. She’s wearing a black turtleneck sweater and white pants and has on more makeup than I’ve seen before. She touches my shoulder, a gesture not lost on Coop.

  “You on duty?” I ask him, glancing at the tall glass of Coke in front of him on the table. He’s in jeans, T—shirt, and his Metro Team jacket.

  “Yeah, can’t stay, sport. Got some warrants to serve.”

  “Well, thanks for coming by.” I don’t have to look for Natalie. She’d be with Coop if she was here.

  I look at Andie. “Anything?”

  “Yes, there is, but we can talk about it later. I don’t want to spoil the mood.”

  I catch Coop leaning back in his chair, watching me, a nasty little smile playing on his face. When I glare back, he gets busy checking his watch. “Walk me out, sport. Want to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure.” I look at Andie. “Back in a minute.”

  Coop and I shoulder our way through the crowd. There are more people in the foyer waiting to get in. Outside, valet parking is busy. I follow Coop to his car. I know what this is about, but I let Coop get to it. He unlocks his car and I light a cigarette.

  “Natalie called me today,” he says. “She thinks you’re putting the moves on the lovely Miss Lawrence. Anything to that? Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

  “Come on, Coop. I tried to explain to Natalie, but she doesn’t want to know. She came by yesterday when Andie and I were talking.”

  “I heard.” Coop watches for my reaction. When I give him nothing but a long stare, he shrugs, spreads his hands. “Okay, it’s none of my business, but she’s pretty upset.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I can’t not work with Andie, and I can’t tell Natalie what’s going on. Remember the agreement Cook had me sign? Why isn’t she here tonight?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Coop says. He opens the door. “Meanwhile, you’ve got to take Special Agent Lawrence home.”

  “What?”

  Coop grins. “Yeah, she came with me, but I’ve been called away on an emergency, catch some bad guys. See ya.” He pulls away and leaves me staring after his car. I’m getting tired of people doing this to me.

  I hurry back inside and run into Andie on the way out. “You’re not sticking around?”

  “I wish I could,” she says. “Something’s come up on Greg Sims. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

  I stare at her for a moment, silently cursing Coop.

  “Evan? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Jeff and Gene are already waiting for me. I shuffle through the music on the piano. “Want to try one of these?” I ask them. I find the one I’m looking for and hand the bass part to Jeff. He looks it over. “In two for the first part,” I say to Gene. “Then go for it.”

  I look through the stack again for my part, finally find it. “Here we go,” I say, then sit down as if I’ve been pushed. Across the bottom on the lead sheet, in the same red pen that was on the flyer, are the words, Don’t let me down, Evan. Under the sheet is a manila envelope that I don’t recognize.

  “What’s the matter?” Jeff asks.

  I stare at the envelope, wheel around behind me, but the table is empty.

  “What? Oh, nothing.” I push the envelope aside.

  “Never mind,” I say to Jeff and Gene. “Let’s play ‘All of Me.’”

  They look at each other and shrug. It’s going to be a long set.

  I got through the next set somehow, but it was different. My concentration was gone, and I was playing on automatic pilot. The changes to hundreds of tunes were under my fingers, but the heart was gone. It was nothing anybody in the audience would notice, but Jeff and Gene knew. Often you come off the bandstand and hear people say, “You guys sounded great.” And you know it’s a lie.

  Jeff and Gene were quiet as we packed up for the night. I’d let them down as much as myself, and now, standing in front of Andie’s door at two-thirty in the morning, I wonder what I’m doing here.

  I knock twice, hear some kind of noise inside, and then a shadow crosses the peephole as she looks out. There’s a clicking of locks, and the door opens.

  “Evan. What is it?” Her hair is disheveled, and a short robe barely covers her legs.

  “Can I come in?”

  She looks over her shoulder and gathers her robe to her. “Yeah, sure, come in.” She steps aside to let me pass and shuts the door. I look at her and wish I were here for some other reason. She sees the envelope in my hand. “Gillian?”

  “Yeah, she was there tonight at Chadney’s.” I hand the envelope to Andie. “Here, read this.”

  She takes it from me, sits down on the love seat, and turns on a lamp. I unlock the balcony door and go outside. I light a cigarette and lean on the railing. There’s no sound from the pool, no lights on anywhere except for the complex’s outdoor lights. Once I glance back at Andie. She’s totally unaware of me, lost in concentrating on the envelope’s contents, which detail the police reports on Greg Sims’s suicide. At least, that’s the official line.

  Andie has her legs crossed as she squints at the pages. I turn back to the pool, thinking I’ve got to get out of here. When she finishes, she comes outside. She’s changed into a long cloth robe, belted it around her.

  “Where was this?” she asks.

  “On the piano, mixed in with some music. I found it when I came back from the break. Gillian was right there in the club, for God’s sake.”

  Andie is silent for a moment. “She has almost more here than we do. I pulled the file from the San Francisco police.”

  “Well, it was her brother, but how did she get all this?”

  “God, who knows? I was going to tell you then. That’s when I said I didn’t want to destroy the mood. How did the rest of the night go?”

  “Not good. I sort of lost my edge.”

  “I don’t know how you can concentrate at all.” She pauses, thinks of something else, but looks like she’s trying to decide something. “Why did you look at me so strangely when I left Chadney’s?”

  I wait for a moment to answer, just shru
g. “Coop, fooling around. He told me he’d brought you and I’d have to give you a ride home.”

  Irritation flickers across her face for a moment. “And you didn’t want to?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just—”

  “No, you don’t have to say anything.”

  I nod. There isn’t anything to say.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tim’s phone wakes me up. I stumble to the kitchen before the third ring, press the record button, and steel myself for Gillian.

  “Evan, it’s Andie Lawrence. We need you down here as soon as you can make it.”

  “Yeah, okay. Has something happened?”

  “We want to brief you and discuss some plans.”

  “All right. About an hour?”

  “Fine, we’ll be waiting. Lieutenant Cooper will pick you up.”

  I’m relieved that it wasn’t Gillian, but wonder at the formality in Andie’s voice. Cook or Rollins were probably standing nearby while she made the call. I look at my watch, surprised at how long I’ve slept.

  I chug a glass of orange juice, and by the time I’m showered and dressed, Coop is banging on my door. “Let’s go, sport,” he says when I let him in. His car is double-parked in the street, the motor running.

  I follow him to the car, get in, and light my first cigarette of the day. At this rate I could quit if I delayed the first one an hour every day.

  “Thought you’d already be there.” I watch Coop drive, looking straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, one of his little cigars clamped between his teeth. He stays north on Main until Pico Boulevard, then turns right, up the hill past Santa Monica High School.

  There’s a chain-link fence surrounding the campus and a security guard on the gate these days. When Coop and I were at Samohi, playing football and chasing girls, it was an open campus. Different times, different people. Everything changes.

  “Andie called me this morning and filled me in,” Coop says. He turns north on Lincoln and heads for the 10 Freeway. “We’re checking with the valet parking guys at Chadney’s, see if anyone remembers a woman alone in a new car.”

  “Well, will that really narrow it down? Do you know how many women go to Chadney’s alone? The Valley is a little out of your jurisdiction too, isn’t it?”

  Coop shrugs as we hit the on ramp to the Santa Monica Freeway. “Wendell Cook has fixed it so I’m temporarily attached to the FBI’s unit, mainly because the Rodman murder was in Santa Monica and you and I are friends.” He glances over at me. “Give me more latitude, as we say in the law enforcement game.”

  “Yeah, friend. That was cute last night, the bit about me having to take Andie home.”

  Coop smiles. “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it.” He moves to the right lane as we near the San Diego interchange.

  “Don’t encourage Andie,” I say. “I’m having enough trouble with Natalie.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Andie doesn’t need any encouragement. But enough about your love life.” I feel him glance at me. “How are you holding up?”

  “Oh fine, I always like dealing with serial killers, having them at my gigs, calling me, writing me poems.”

  Coop ignores my sarcasm. “I got you into this, so I’m going to be around, but you’re going to be on your own a lot. That’s how Wendell wants to play it. They’re buying into the whole thing, and they’re going to have you at least go through the motions investigating the death of this fruitcake’s brother.”

  We ease onto the 405 and immediately slow in the heavy traffic. “Just enough to keep her under control while they try to track her down. Is that the plan? I hear her voice in my head all the time, Coop. It’s spooky.”

  “Exactly,” Coop says. “First time I’ve heard the word ‘still’ used as a definition for not killing.” He shakes his head and pulls into the exit lane for Wilshire.

  “Can they find her?”

  “There’s a chance,” Coop says. “She’s getting pretty daring. Maybe she’ll slip, give away too much. Sooner or later they always do.”

  “You don’t sound too confident.”

  “I’m not,” Coop says. “If anybody takes her down, it’s going to be because of you.” Coop turns east on Wilshire, then into the underground parking garage. He pulls into a space and turns off the engine. Neither of us speak for a moment as we delay the inevitable elevator ride up to the seventeenth floor.

  I light another cigarette and stare straight ahead. “I don’t know if I can do this, Coop. I just don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “I think you can. Andie thinks you can. Wendell Cook thinks you can. You’re going to have a lot of help.”

  I get out of the car, and Coop follows. On the FBI floor, Coop speaks to the receptionist behind the glass window, and seconds later, Andie comes out. She’s wearing a dark pants suit today and low-heeled shoes.

  She flicks an irritated glance at Coop, which he ignores, barely looks at me, then motions us to follow her without speaking to either of us. Is she feeling ticked at me because I didn’t follow up the chance I had last night? It wouldn’t have taken much for me to cross the line.

  In the conference room, Wendell Cook and Ted Rollins are already there, seated at the big table. They have files and papers spread over the surface. Both have their ties loosened, their sleeves rolled up.

  “Hi, Evan, Coop,” Cook says. “Have a seat. You guys want some coffee?”

  “Definitely,” I say. Coop nods yes too.

  “Ted.” Rollins looks at me for a beat, then goes out.

  “We’ve got a lot to go through, so let’s get to it.” Cook, a silver pen in his hands, leans back in his chair and studies me. The buttons on his shirt look like they’re going to pop off as he takes a deep breath.

  “We’ve come to some decisions, Evan, decisions that none of us are happy about. I’m sure you won’t like them either, but we really have no choice on this. I don’t know how much Lieutenant Cooper has filled you in—probably more than he should—but we’re going to accept Gillian’s demands as genuine. We’ve gone over the tape, the letter, all the other calls, and Andie has filled out the profile considerably. We have a copy for you and the police reports on her brother’s death. It more than matches what she sent you.”

  “Did you think it wouldn’t?”

  “There was always the chance,” Ted Rollins says. He comes in carrying two Styrofoam cups and sets them on the table in front of Coop and me. He sets mine down hard, so that some of the coffee spills out on the table. “Sorry,” he says and starts to say more, but he stops with a warning glance from Wendell Cook

  “We first want to bring you up to date on what we think we know about Gillian. Andie? I want to stress the word think.”

  Andie picks up some computer printouts. “Yes, keep in mind, Evan, a lot of this is speculation,” she says. Her voice still has a formal tone that I don’t understand. “Anyway, this is what we’ve come up with. Gillian is thirty-five to forty years old, drives a late-model automobile, maybe a sports car. She likes expensive things and has the income to buy them, which indicates some kind of well-paying professional job. After analyzing the tape, the speech patterns, her actions, we think she may have been treated for some mental disorder at one time—bipolar mood swings, manic depressive is a possibility—and she is probably on some form of medication, lithium, Prozac.”

  I begin to understand Andie’s aloofness, her formality. Most of this she’s already told me, but she doesn’t want Cook or Rollins to know we’ve seen each other outside the office. Is this to get my trust, or is the whole thing a setup, calculated to ensure my cooperation?

  “Gillian is a smoker and has extensive knowledge of jazz. Her brother died last year of an apparent suicide, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.” She pauses and looks up at me. “His body has not yet been recovered.”

  “Then how—”

  “A friend who was with him at the time, positively identified him, according to the San Francisco Police.”

  “That�
��s somebody you should talk to, isn’t it?” I look to Wendell Cook.

  “We’re coming to that,” he says.

  Andie continues. “We think Gillian may have some kind of music-related job, or at least did have. She’s computer literate and has some knowledge of police procedures regarding phone taps and traces and forensic evidence.”

  “She must have,” I say. “You guys haven’t been able to locate her.”

  “This isn’t, TV, Horne,” Ted Rollins says.

  “He knows that, Rollins,” Coop puts in. He and Rollins lock eyes for a moment.

  “Other than that,” Andie continues, “we don’t have anything else. Of course we’ll be constantly updating this as more information comes in.”

  Wendell Cook leans forward on the table. “Thanks, Andie.”

  “So where do I come in?”

  “I’m assigning Andie to you on this. We’ve decided that’s the best way to work things. We have to assume Gillian will be watching your progress.”

  I glance at Andie, but she’s looking down at her papers. There’s no surprise in her expression, so she’s known all along.

  “You and Andie will go to San Francisco, talk with the local police and our office there—Andie will pave the way on that front—and do anything else you can think of, even if you make it up, that will convince Gillian you’re making an effort.”

  “Make it up?”

  “I don’t know,” Cook says. He spreads his hands. “Talk with some musicians, visit some jazz clubs. We’ll leave that to you.”

  I don’t like the whole idea, but Cook is right. Gillian will no doubt be keeping tabs on me, but I suspect she won’t like it that Andie is tagging along.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I did this alone?”

  “Absolutely out of the question,” Cook says quickly. “This is an FBI operation. It’s totally against policy to have you involved at all, but we’re certainly not going to have you out on your own. Special Agent Lawrence will be in touch with us at all times,” he adds formally.

  Cook’s change of tone is striking. Whenever it’s something official, Andie becomes Special Agent Lawrence. Maybe that’s policy too.