The Last Gig

by Norman Green

  “You’re a really sweet guy, Stiles.”

  He hung up on her.

  She decided to stop in Manhattan and take a look at Willy Caughlan’s apartment. It took a half hour to find a parking spot on the street, but no way was she going to spring twenty-five bucks to put the van in a garage.

  Tudor City is a tiny enclave on the East River, just south of the United Nations. The buildings there are all done in Tudor style, hence the name, but the real interesting thing about the place is how it feels cut off from the rest of the island of Manhattan. You walk in here, Al thought, it’s like you’ve taken a step out of time, somehow, and put yourself in some quieter and more civilized New York City than the one you’re used to.

  Imagine that, she thought, feeling a pang of jealousy as she stuck Willy’s key in the front door of his building. What must it be like to have an old man who would get you an apartment in a place like this, just to be sure you had a safe place to sleep? She wondered what her father would do if he had Caughlan’s money. Probably nothing, she thought. Probably let it molder away in some bank, probably go on and live the exact same life. She did not understand the man. You’re not going to figure him out, she told herself for possibly the millionth time. Leave him alone.

  Anyhow, she thought, you couldn’t just change one thing, you’d have to take the whole package. What would it be like to have a father like Daniel Caughlan? Could you stand to have someone like him looking over your shoulder? It did seem a shame, though, how willing he was to bury his son and move on. Families aren’t supposed to be like this, she thought. They’re supposed to be on your side. Aren’t they?

  She rang the super’s bell, told him she was Caughlan’s real estate agent and needed a key to the apartment. He looked doubtful until a fifty-dollar bill reassured him.

  A little old lady was struggling down the hallway, wrestling with an aluminum walker. “Let me get out of your way,” she said when she noticed Alessandra behind her. “You go ahead. Are you new here? I haven’t seen you before. Or have I? I don’t remember so good anymore.”

  “Take your time,” Al told her. “I don’t live here. I work for Mr. Caughlan, the guy that owns 4D.” The words tasted strange in her mouth, made stranger still by the fact that they were true.

  “Willy’s father?” The old lady stopped and turned to look up at Al, her face gray. “My God. He was just a boy. He didn’t even shave regular yet. I used to tease him about it. I used to tell him he could put some cream on his chin and let my cat lick his whiskers off.”

  “Did you know Willy?”

  “He was just a boy. I don’t think he was even twenty yet. My God . . .”

  “Did he have a lot of people over? Make a lot of noise? Things like that?”

  “Honey, when I turn off my hearing aids, you could play the tuba in my kitchen and I’d never hear it. But no, he never gave no trouble. When he practiced his music, he had a gizmo with headphones. I could never hear him. He used to play for me sometimes, though. Can you believe that? A boy like him, hanging around an old lady like me. But he didn’t have no friends. Not that I ever seen.”

  “Didn’t have people over?”

  “No. Well, once in a while this man would come by, but he tried to boss Willy around. You could hear it in his voice. My second husband was like that, he thought he knew what everybody should do, every minute of the day. The son of a bitch. Pardon my French, honey. But men can be like that. You tell yourself how good they are, but they generally turn out to be nothing but a pain in the ass.”

  “That sounds like the voice of experience. Do you remember what this guy looked like? The one who used to visit Willy.”

  “Tall,” the old lady told her, one hand fluttering in the air up over her head. “That’s all I remember.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you very much. Willy’s father will be glad to hear that Willy was happy here.”

  “I never said he was happy. You should have heard the stuff he played on that guitar. So sad, it would make you cry. He would never play nothing regular. I offered him fifty bucks once if he would play ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey,’ but he wouldn’t do it.” She took a couple of steps down the hall. “You wanna know what Willy’s problem was? He didn’t have nobody. All he had was that guitar. And it wasn’t enough.”

  It was a beautiful studio, but it was a boy’s room. It seemed to have been left untouched since the police finished their investigation. Dirty clothes were strewn across a hardwood floor. There was a tall loft bed with a built-in desk and bookcase underneath, piled with comic books and Playboy magazines. The stainless steel appliances in the modern kitchen looked like they had never been cleaned, and the sink was piled with dirty dishes, dry, now, and dusty. The spot on the floor where they’d found Willy was outlined with black tape. A Gibson semi-acoustic and a Fender Strat leaned in a corner. A Martin acoustic lay on the floor nearby. There was a black carry-on suitcase–sized amplifier near the guitars, a snarl of wires attached.

  Spoiled kid, Al thought. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, yapping about messiness indicating a lack of character. It was a grating voice and a familiar speech, usually delivered via long-distance telephone, but she didn’t know if she really disagreed with it.

  Printer on a shelf, blank spot on the desk below where the laptop had been. She wondered if the cops had taken it. She looked carefully at the old wooden double-hung windows. The one in the bath looked like someone had tried to pry it open, but that must have been a generation ago, and the scars in the wood were thick with paint. The front door and the jamb were solid, too, showing little of the damage inflicted on the apartment doors Al had grown up behind.

  Suppose Shine is right, she thought. If someone did kill Willy Caughlan, they walked right into this place. Either they had a key, or Willy let them in.

  Al called O’Hagan’s cell.

  “It’s Alessandra,” she said when he answered.

  “I know,” he said. “You think I’d be after forgetting you already?”

  “Do the police have Willy’s computer?”

  Silence for a moment, then: “I don’t know. You want it?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Can you get it back?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” he said.

  “Did Willy have a cleaning lady?”

  “No. Not unless he paid her himself, which ain’t likely. You making any progress?”

  “Hard to tell. But do me a favor, okay? I don’t want to have to answer a lot of asshole questions about why I’m interested in Willy, so keep this between you and me if you can.”

  “Not a problem. But can I ask? Why are you interested in Willy?”

  Because he didn’t have anyone to look out for him . . . “I don’t know,” she said. “Call it a hunch.”

  “Ah. Woman’s intuition, huh? Well, don’t worry, I know how to keep me mouth shut.”

  “That’s a useful skill,” she told him. “Thanks.”

  Ten

  The place looked like a slightly overgrown movie theater from the days before multiplexes, with a broad stage where there would have been one big screen. It had a big balcony, room for about six or seven hundred seats. Al parked the Astro around the corner and stretched the kinks out of her back. It had been a four and a half hour drive, and the Astro’s front seat had only been comfortable for about half of that. The front door was open, there didn’t seem to be any security, so she wandered in. The interior was dark except for some dim lighting on the stage, the red EXIT signs in the corners, and the daylight filtering in through the open entrance behind her. She walked about a third of the way down one of the aisles and took a seat. She guessed the members of BandX were doing a sound check, although the only sounds she heard were the bickering voices of the guys on the stage. A tall, athletic-looking guy with long orange-blond hair sounded particularly upset. He unclipped the strap that suspended his guitar from his shoulders and let the instrument drop to the floor with a loud clang. “No way, man,” he said, a
fter the electrically amplified protest from the guitar faded away. “I don’t wanna fuckin’ hear it. Where was you, huh? Where was you when we needed you?” He advanced on a shorter, thinner, dark-haired guy who was holding a guitar. “You was fuckin’ wasted, man, you hung the rest of us out to fuckin’ dry. So now you don’t like the new shit, that’s too bad, fuck you, ’cause when we was writing it, you was locked up in Shaky Acres or some shit, drying out. So don’t fuckin’ start, okay?”

  “Trent.” A third man put a hand on the orange-blond guitarist, holding him back. Al assumed the new guy was the singer, because he wasn’t carrying an instrument, and he was better looking than the other two, with chiseled features and theatrically curly blond hair. “I thought we talked about this, Trent.”

  “He needs to hear this, Cliff. He’s back pulling the same shit just like nothing ever happened.”

  “Excuse me.” A guy stood in the aisle next to Alessandra, bent over, his voice low.

  “S’up?” She ignored the guy, trying to concentrate on the argument up on stage. The dark-haired guitar player’s sand-papered voice was harder to hear than the other two. “You asked me,” he said. “You want me to lie? Fine, I’ll lie to you. It’s a great riff, man. It’s classic. It’s gonna make you rich. Okay? You happy now?”

  “Excuse me.” Al finally looked over at the guy in the aisle. He was young, maybe early twenties, clean shaven, short black hair, watery blue eyes, minty breath. His suede jacket looked like it cost more than her entire wardrobe. “Ahh, who are you, please? ’Cause I’m not sure you’re supposed to be here? This session is not open to the public.”

  “Throw me out,” Al told him. Cliff, the singer, was still trying to reason with Trent, who seemed to have a limited appetite for it. Al decided not to use Shine’s name. She wanted to keep a lower profile. “I’m with Knight Ridder.”

  “The newspaper chain?” The guy’s demeanor changed immediately. “Really? No kidding?” He took a step and sat down in the seat in front of Alessandra, half-turned so that he could keep one eye on the stage and one on her. “I’m Sandy Ellison, A&R for Gemini Records.” He stuck a hand over the seat at her. She shook it briefly, sensing the tremor in Ellison’s grip. He was bobbing up and down in the seat, and one of his knees twitched spasmodically. Coke-head, she thought.

  “Hi,” she said, not giving him a name, guessing that he wouldn’t care. She was right, he didn’t appear to notice. If the dude ran into you tomorrow, she thought, he’d never remember you at all.

  “Knight Ridder.” He repeated the words to himself. “Wow. You a stringer or you on staff?”

  “I was on staff, Sandy, I wouldn’t be sitting here. My ass would be in a nice comfy chair in an office somewhere, and we’d be having this conversation on the phone.”

  Ellison snorted. “I hear ya, baby. I hear ya. Ya wanna make the big time, ya gotta do the footwork. How’d you hear about us? From me to you, okay, BandX is gonna hit it, and soon. We ain’t talking flavor of the week, either. These guys are gonna be huge.”

  “That’s what I hear, Sandy. They fight like this all the time?”

  “This is nothing.” He dismissed the current disagreement with a wave of his hand. “Creative differences. Great ideas germinate best in the midst of chaos, under pressure. Take away the pressure and the chaos, these guys would sound just like every other band out there trying to make it. But they don’t, okay? These guys are unbelievable. And what you’re seeing down there is a necessary part of the process. Don’t hold it against them.”

  This kid’s a natural, she thought, except for that Jimmy Swaggart thing he gets in his voice when he’s trying to sell you. He loses that, he’ll be great.

  “No matter what anybody else tells you,” he said, “just remember this one thing, okay? It’s all about the music. Nothing else matters. It’s all about the sound. So, what have you got in mind here? How can I help you?”

  How about shutting the hell up and letting me listen, Al thought, but she didn’t say it. Talk like a reporter, give this guy the same line of shit he’d give you, she told herself, if your positions were reversed. “Well, Sandy, this might be old news to you, but I think there’s a story here. Maybe you see it all the time, but to my readers, this is a snapshot of the New American Dream. A bunch of very talented people bucking the odds, chasing the big one, and paying a big price for it. Hanging in there, fighting obscurity while lesser artists make it. And you know, the arbitrary nature of success, the struggle to be heard—let alone appreciated—all of that, but still knowing all along that one phone call or one gig at the right time can change everything. You with me?”

  “Yeah, oh, absolutely.”

  “It’s gotta be hell, thinking you could catch on fire tomorrow, or you could waste away like a million other bands. I can’t imagine paying dues like these guys do.” A dozen rows down, a guy Alessandra hadn’t noticed was sitting at a darkened console. He was wearing headphones, but he must have overheard the conversation, because she could just make out his face in profile as he turned and looked her way. “BandX has a huge opportunity coming up, did I hear that right? And look at what they’ve been through in the last year. Discord threatening to tear the band apart. Death of a young and promising artist, then the return of the prodigal guitar player. How many years have these guys been riding in buses, trying to make this happen? Working dead-end jobs, living in dumps, playing club dates all over the place, not even making gas money. And then maybe, just maybe, they catch the right break, they play in front of the right crowd, or maybe even just that one right person—it could all pay off. So tell me: do you think they can make it?”

  “Oh, hell yes.” It sounded like real conviction. “Wait until you hear these guys. God, they’ve got a sound, I’m telling you, it’s what rock and roll has always been about. It’s like, stripped, it’s like, skin and bones, babe. These guys are the shit, man. Like, if you brought back a caveman from a hundred thousand years ago, okay, and he caught BandX on a good night, okay, he would dig it. He would get it, you know what I mean, he would fucking feel it. That’s what these guys have got. It’s the music, babe, it’s all about the music. When you hear them, you’ll understand, believe me. Sometimes I think you could take a deaf man, never heard a sound in his life, you could stand him in front of the amps and he’d be able to, like, just feel the shit coming up through the floor, he could sense it coming at him through the air . . .” His voice drifted off as he contemplated the profundity of the concept.

  “So which one of them is the guy?”

  He closed his mouth, came back down to earth, and looked back at her. “Which one of them is what guy?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. Which one of those guys down there gives BandX that elemental sound? That raw, naked edge? Because there are musicians, right, then there are the guys who just have it. You know what I’m saying.”

  He turned away from her, stared down at the stage for a minute. “You must know the answer to that already,” he said, “or else you wouldn’t have asked the question.”

  “Should I ask about their favorite colors instead? Come on, Ellison, give it up. I wanna hear it from you.”

  He nodded. “It’s TJ,” he said.

  “TJ Conrad. The prodigal guitarist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s the one who was in rehab. How was the kid who was standing in for him?”

  “He was okay. I mean, it was tragic and everything, and the kid could play, okay, but TJ’s like, I don’t know, he’s like the fucking Rosetta Stone.” A distant sound of coughing filtered up from the guy at the console, but Ellison ignored it. “Everything gets filtered through him. What makes it tough is that the other guys don’t always understand what TJ’s doing. Because he doesn’t write much. He doesn’t put a lot in. He takes things out. His favorite thing is, like, ‘too many notes.’ And then he like, peels it away, he strips it back until they’ve got that thing you were talking about, that raw, naked thing that everybody on this plan
et can feel. I mean, I was all broken up about that other kid, believe me. But BandX needs TJ. He’s what makes them special.”

  Down below them on the stage, the voices were getting louder and more strident. The guy at the console took off his headphones, stood up and stretched, then leaned over and spoke into a microphone. “Take five, everybody,” he said, his amplified voice booming throughout the nearly empty theater, and he walked up the aisle, past Ellison and Alessandra, and out through the door. The musicians resumed their argument in somewhat softer tones. Ellison watched them, his knee bouncing.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “I gotta go say something. Listen, I’ll get you backstage, I’ll get everyone to talk to you. I mean, I’ll take care of you, I’ll get you hooked up, okay? Anything you need.” He stood up and jittered down the aisle. “Guys . . .”

  Alessandra had been hearing lines like that just about as far back as she could remember. Another guy, promising to watch out for her. Oh, yeah, baby, don’t you worry about anything, you just give me what I want and I’ll make everything go down so good . . . It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. She stood up and walked out.

  “You buying that bullshit Ellison was peddling?” He was a thin, pale bone of a man, medium height, long gray hair parted in the middle and hanging down over both sides of his face, making his sharp beak of a nose seem even larger than it was. Looked like Jeff Beck, or maybe Cousin Itt. Alessandra had been thinking about a cup of coffee. The guy was leaning against a column, smoking a cigarette. She stopped, regarded him without expression.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Come on,” he said. “I had a nickel for every time I heard a line of shit like that, I could retire. Makes me want to hurl.” He pushed himself away from the column, held out a knobby hand. The back of it was veined and spotted. “Luke Rushton,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, Luke,” she said, shaking his hand. “You were the guy inside, right? With the headphones.”