by Norman Green
The walls were plaster, crumbling here and there, rippled the way plaster gets after about a century. The house had fallen into that state a lot of guys seemed able to tolerate: if something died in the middle of the floor, someone would eventually get rid of it, but nobody was going to run a vacuum or actually wash anything.
There was a drum kit set up in one corner of the living room, and the rest of the room was packed with all of the other tools of the trade: keyboards, amps, guitars, and a piano. Alessandra paid particular attention to the guitars, but none of them matched the description of the Stevie Ray Vaughn guitar, the one that had gone missing from Willy Caughlan’s studio.
Upstairs, it got worse. This smell is not just from a cat, Al thought. The walls were painted blue, and there was a beat-down wall-to-wall shag carpet, also blue, and dirty white woodwork. Al paused to take a look through one of the windows at the street out front. A long-haired guy in a raincoat walking by had most of the street to himself. Al picked a bedroom, started in.
Jesus, what a hole.
Just get it over with, she told herself, and get out. Dirty clothes in one corner, clean ones in another, an iPod on the floor next to the bed, no books or printed matter aside from a foot-high pile of sheet music. Plastic liter-sized bottle of vodka, half empty, on the floor next to the bed. Ashtray on the nightstand, overflowing with butts and roaches. Two shoe boxes full of junk, the kind of personal stuff people accumulate and can’t bring themselves to discard: pictures, old pennies, cuff links, a couple of watches that weren’t running, an expired passport. There was a laptop on a small desk, already up and running. Al sat down at the computer, plugged in a memory stick and started looking, downloading anything that piqued her curiosity. Most of the stuff she found was of little or no interest: music, sound editors, porn. The room she was in belonged to Cliff, the lead singer, and he seemed to favor two distinct types—Asian women, and the more traditional Hugh Hefner fare: corn-fed, big-breasted, all-American.
No Puerto Ricans, Al thought. She mentally compared herself to the pictures. God never gave breasts that size to a woman without the behind that went with them . . . Not much muscle tone, she thought, nobody who looks like she’s in any kind of shape. And why does it always come back to that, she wondered. Yeah, she might be beautiful, but I can probably kick her ass . . . Is that all you’ve got?
The other bedrooms were similar. One held a desktop instead of a laptop, and she had to boot it up. It asked her for a password, but she’d been ready for that. Passwords and locks only keep out the honest people. Tio Bobby had told her that a hundred times. Working for Marty Stiles had proved the truth of it.
There was another room on the second floor which seemed to be a repository for broken or rejected equipment, mostly keyboards and some outdated recording apparatus. No guitars, though. Maybe guitars don’t change that much, Al thought, or maybe they look cool enough, even silent and disconnected, so they never got thrown away. You could pick one at random, stand it in the corner of a room, and it would look at least as interesting as just about any other piece of art or sculpture.
She found the stairs that led up to the attic behind a door at one end of the second-floor central hallway. She hesitated before going up. She walked back and checked the street out front again, looking through one of the bedroom windows for a few minutes. Nothing out there, she told herself. But if you were on the first floor and somebody started to come in, you could always run out back. On the second floor, you could climb out onto the porch roof, or maybe jump from a window, but if you were on the third floor you were probably screwed. You’ve always got to have an escape hatch, she told herself. If you start feeling boxed in, even just a tiny little bit, you start feeling uncomfortable. Not happy unless you’re damned sure you can run away . . . You ought to go see a therapist about it. She wondered how much money therapists charged, and how you went about finding one. She went and checked through a window at the back of the house, too. Seeing nothing unusual, she hit the stairs and went up into the attic.
Most of the attic space was uninsulated and unfinished, but one small bedroom, along with a tiny bathroom, was framed off in one corner. Both were empty, looked like they had been so for some time. They were dusty, but seemed to hold none of the squalid aura of the other two floors. She stood looking at a Hendrix poster thumbtacked to one wall. Willy lived in this room before he moved to that studio, she thought. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she was sure she was right.
She stood in the middle of the floor in the empty room, caught a glimpse of the long-haired guy on the street out front. He was standing on the sidewalk, right at the property line between the brick house and the place next door. He was half-obscured by the hedges, but as she watched him, he twisted his head to one side, looked like he was talking to an invisible companion. Radio, Alessandra thought, her heart accelerating. The only reason I can see this guy now is because I’m up here on the top floor, high enough to see over those bushes. She ducked back out of his line of sight, took one last quick look around the empty attic room, then ran down the stairs. There was nothing of hers on the second floor, the memory sticks she’d used to pirate computer files were hanging around her neck. She risked one quick peek out a front window. She couldn’t see the guy from this level, but she thought she could just make out the color of his raincoat behind the bushes. She took another few seconds and checked out a back window. There was a guy in the backyard of one of the houses that fronted on the next street behind, watering his grass. She didn’t see anybody else. One for sure, she thought. But if he really had been talking into a mike, there had to be more somewhere.
She was a little more cautious as she descended to the first floor. There were no coverings on the windows down there, which meant she was much more exposed. She got as low as she could when she hit the bottom of the stairs. There was a black man walking up the driveway, big guy, jeans, sweatshirt, running shoes, one hand shading his eyes as he peered at the upper floors of the house. Al dropped to the floor and slithered to the front hall, grabbed her toolbox, then scrabbled on hands and knees back to the kitchen, which was at the rear of the house. She was barely through the door into the kitchen when she heard the crunch of a footstep on the concrete stairs out back. Without pausing, she changed direction and headed into the hallway to her left. There was a door slightly ajar in the hallway, and before she could think about it she was through, into the relative gloom of what had to be the cellar steps. It was an ancient wooden staircase, and it made what sounded to her like a frightfully loud chorus of creaking noises as she went down. She stopped at the foot of the stairs. Two guys, one at the front door, one at the back. Could she really hear them both, or was her imagination in overdrive?
You’re in a hole in the ground, she told herself.
Get out.
Dim light filtered through the few small cellar windows. They were below ground level, sunk in small metal-lined pits next to the house. Pick one, she thought, and she headed for the far end of the basement, where there was an old wooden workbench under the window farthest from the driveway. The window was covered with dust and cobwebs, looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, but when she pushed back the sliding bolts that held it shut, it creaked open readily enough. She climbed up onto the workbench, shoved her toolbox out into the leaf-lined pit. She was about to slide through herself when she heard the voices.
“. . . we gonna explain this?” Male voice, sounded like a brother.
“Reports of a prowler,” another voice answered, also male, probably white. “We’ll just say the door was open. That’s probable cause.”
“The hell it is . . .”
“It’s close enough.”
“Look, man, suppose we find something here. Okay? What then? We won’t be able to use it. A flimsy excuse like ‘the door was open’ ain’t never gonna hold up.”
“Relax. We find what we’re looking for, we leave it right where it is and we go work on getting a warrant. No big dea
l.”
Cops, Alessandra thought. Maybe they hadn’t written Willy off after all. Or maybe there was a tie between BandX and the dope filtering into the country through Penn Trans. Maybe it was Willy himself, using his father’s business to do a little business of his own . . . She stuck her arms out through the open window, then her head and shoulders. It was a tight fit, she’d have to jackknife her body out and up to get through the window. She squeezed through the opening a little farther, but then her foot slipped. There was a big coffee can filled with nails and screws. It had been sitting on one end of the workbench, but she kicked it off onto the floor, where it landed with a loud metallic crash.
Al, you clod, she thought, you really stepped in it now.
She could hear hurried clomping footsteps as the two men on the floor above her reacted. Looking for the steps down here, she thought. She jerked her body the rest of the way through the window, gouging her hip on the window frame in the process, but then she was through, and the window slammed shut behind her.
She crouched down in the hole just outside the window, grabbed her toolbox, then jumped out and ran as hard as she could for the hedges along the property line about fifteen feet away. She thrust herself through the bushes into the neighboring yard. Nobody outside, she thought, at least there’s that . . . She heard an angry shout behind her.
“Hey! Police! Stop right where you are!”
Command voice, just like they teach you in the academy. She turned and glanced back at the house. No way, she thought, no way either one of those two gorillas is gonna fit through that window. That probably buys me thirty seconds . . . She sprinted the length of the hedge, heading for the street, but not the one out front. She headed for the street one block back. One more hedge and she was behind the garage that went with the house just to the rear of the brick house. She slipped along the back of the garage and up the far side, out of sight of the men who had to be hitting the yard right about . . . now.
The window on the far side of the garage was broken, smashed out, and the garage roof had collapsed inward. Al reached through the opening where the window had once been, put her toolbox on a beam inside, down low and out of sight. It was a possibility that the cops might find it there, but maybe not a likelihood. If they found her on the street with it, though, it would be “possession of burglary tools” for sure. She looked down at her side, pulled her jacket and shirt up and the waistband of her pants down to see a red oozing gash. Not horrible, she thought, doesn’t even hurt much. But you left a little bit of yourself back there on that window frame . . .
She walked past the garage, down the long driveway and out onto the street.
The main avenue of the neighborhood was two blocks away, and as she walked down the hill to the avenue she heard a siren. Stay calm, she told herself, don’t look around, just go down the hill.
She found a place around the corner, a storefront that contained an enterprise named Lucky Nail. She went inside, reviewed her finances, decided to go for the full spa treatment—pedicure, manicure, massage, and a wax job. Normally she didn’t much care to be touched or fussed over, but she told herself that it beat the hell out of sitting in a police station and answering a lot of questions. It killed most of the next two and a half hours. She walked out of Lucky Nail a hundred and seventy-five bucks poorer and a little bit sore. She stuffed her blue jacket into a trash can behind Lucky Nail, tucked the memory sticks into a pocket, and hoofed it back up the hill to Tio Bobby’s Astro.
No sweat, she told herself. Don’t be looking around, you’re just another Puerto Rican broad out for a stroll, the city is lousy with ’em. Who’d look twice at another one?
D.
N.
A.
Damn.
She drove Bobby’s ragged little Astro through the streets of the Bronx, trying to concentrate on where she was going. Jail was not something Alessandra spent much time thinking about. In the Brooklyn neighborhoods where she grew up, everyone seemed to have an uncle or a brother or a cousin doing time. Nobody made too big a deal out of it. Maybe it was to be expected, given the nature of job opportunities in the inner reaches of the outer boroughs. Should you fight for that job in the straight life? Six bucks an hour, yo, or an easy tax-free G a week wholesalin’ . . . It always amused her that people from middle America—that strange and foreign place from whence all the loudest complaints about drugs and crime originated—were the weekend warriors, they were the people who drove their cars over the bridge after the sun went down, who came in and cruised the side streets past the atrophy and decay. She’d been watching them all her life. Man, we live here, how can you waltz in here and show us your ass? As a child she’d wanted to say it, but they would have paid her no attention, they were zoned, man, they were locked in. Privately, they were looking for what they publicly condemned so heartily: weed or blow or rock or a piece of strange. And when they’d gotten what they wanted, they’d drive their SUVs back home to their four-bedroom three-bath splits in Limbaugh-land, thinking, Eew. How can people live in those places?
The scratch on her side nagged at her. Hey, she thought, it was just a break-in, happens every day, all over the city. No cop is going to waste time and energy chasing a burglar. It was a fact of life that burglars generally got caught by mistake. Unless you were stupid enough to get yourself a nickname in the press, nobody was going to chase you too hard. The Post starts calling you “The Park Avenue Bandit,” the cops will be annoyed enough to come after you. Otherwise, unless you had the bad luck to bump into a policeman on your way out, the way Alessandra very nearly had, you were probably pretty safe, because it was too much work for too little chance of catching you. And DNA tests were still too expensive to waste on a lousy B&E.
But it wasn’t just a B&E, was it? There was still the drug connection to consider, along with a dead musician and a missing guitar once owned by Stevie Ray Vaughn, not to mention a porn tape whose current value was pegged right around a half million bucks. Any one of those factors could provide the motivation for a much more thorough look at the evidence, including but not limited to the blood and tissue sample generously provided by the recent perpetrator of an unauthorized entry into a domicile occupied by three quarters of the members of BandX.
It’s a hell of a lot more likely, she told herself, that they’ll find your stupid toolbox and backtrack you from that, somehow.
All in all, not a great performance, she told herself.
She got sick of looking for a parking spot, wound up putting the Astro in a lot a couple blocks from Marty’s office. He wasn’t in when she got there, but Sarah Waters was. “You look bored,” Al told her.
Sarah shrugged. “I finished all the stuff he left me this morning,” she said. “I’m gonna have to get a TV or something.”
“You wanna give me a hand?” Al showed her the flash drives. “I need to go through all the files on these things.”
Sarah held out her hand. “Why not,” she said. “Gimme one. What am I looking for?”
“Any files that contain the name ‘Sean Caughlan,’ or ‘Willy Caughlan,’ or any combination thereof. Also a video, probably homemade, that shows a young guy having sex with Shine. You know who she is?”
“Of course I do. Did she make a sex tape?”
“Don’t know for sure. I’m gonna go use the PC in Marty’s office.”
Al came back out a couple of hours later. “You find anything?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said.
“What?”
“Guys are pigs,” she said.
“I meant, anything new and useful,” Al said.
“No. Sorry.”
“Me, neither. If Marty asks, BandX is in a recording studio over in Queens, and I got an invite of sorts to watch them work. It’s probably a waste of time, but it’ll kill the afternoon.”
“See ya.”
Fourteen
They were in full crisis mode by the time she got there.
Sandy Ellison, the A&R guy, had TJ Conrad
pigeonholed in a corridor of the old converted warehouse currently housing Astoria Studios and seemed to be lecturing him sternly, poking his finger into the guitarist’s chest for emphasis. TJ, a cigarette smoldering in his mouth, took it silently until he saw Alessandra watching them from the end of the corridor, and then he exhaled smoke into Ellison’s face and pushed past him. Ellison stared at TJ’s departing back, angry. “Goddammit, TJ . . .”
TJ stopped about ten feet away from Ellison. “Tell you what,” he said, his voice pitched so that Alessandra could hear. “How about this? You tell Trent I said he could go fuck himself. Okay? I’m not getting up on another stage with that asshole.”
“TJ, you’re blowing this out of proportion! You want to risk everything we’ve worked for?” He held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “We’re this close! If we can just get these tracks laid down over the next couple of days, the fucking album is done, and you won’t have to see any of these motherfuckers until the Jones Beach shows. And by that time, the buzz will already be starting. You haven’t heard any of the finished tracks yet, but I’m telling you, this is going to be your Tommy!”
TJ looked at Ellison and snorted. “Tommy? Gimme a fucking break. The Who is a joke. They made one half-decent album in thirty fucking years, and it wasn’t Tommy. Let me tell you something.” He took a step in Ellison’s direction, and Ellison retreated a step. “If I thought the best thing I ever did wasn’t any better than fucking Tommy, I would go climb up to the top of the Empire State Building and jump the fuck off.”
