Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  “ ‘Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln,’ ” I quote the old line, “ ‘how did you like the play?’”

  He almost chuckles. “Detective, you got me; I’m in awe.”

  “What about outside the music?” I ask.

  “I don’t know much. Troubled childhood, dysfunctional family. He has some formal training from somewhere, but I don’t know where or when. I don’t think he’s married, don’t think he has any kids, don’t think he does anything but practice and play, play and practice.”

  “And sleep,” I say.

  Powell glances back at him in the rearview mirror. “Actually, he doesn’t even do very much of that. He once told me he read something about Thomas Edison, the inventor, and how he never slept, and only sleeps about twenty minutes at a time every couple of hours.”

  If that’s true, I think, time’s almost up.

  “What do you know about him?” Powell asks. “You must have been checking.”

  I wonder how much to tell him. I also listen to hear if Landreau is asleep.

  “Far as we can tell?” I say, quietly. “He doesn’t even exist.”

  Powell looks at me.

  “He gave me his mother’s name and address, long deceased. It checks out. Found a birth certificate, matches up pretty well. Except he looks maybe five years younger than the certificate.”

  “All that sleep deprivation must be keeping him young,” he says.

  “Could be,” I say. “Except the certificate also says he has blue eyes, not brown.”

  “That could be developmental,” Powell says. “A lot of babies, Caucasian babies, are born with blue eyes which turn brown or green within a couple of weeks.”

  “You know,” I say, “I heard that from somebody. Didn’t really believe it.”

  “You can believe it,” he says. “It’s true.”

  “Well,” I say, “that could explain the blue eyes, then.”

  I hesitate. I’m not sure why I’m laying out my hand for him. It’s a gut thing, feels right.

  “One thing it doesn’t explain,” I say.

  Powell waits for me.

  “We found the birth certificate, like I said,” I say. “We also found his death certificate, and that checks out, too. Jack Landreau died a few months after he was born. Died as an infant, crib death, what do they call it—?”

  “SIDS,” he says. “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”

  “Right,” I say.

  Powell ponders this. “Any chance of a mistake?” he asks.

  “Well,” I say, “it is government work. But still…”

  “Why would somebody, I don’t know, change names like that?” he asks.

  “This used to be a pretty standard way of getting an alias. Go to the library, look up birth certificates, cross-reference them with deaths, find somebody who died young. Get a copy of the birth certificate. Tell them you lost yours. The feds have a database of all births, and they have a database of all the deaths. Two different systems. Take the birth certificate, get a Social Security number, use that to get a driver’s license. Get that, you can get anything—credit cards, whatever. No chance of running into the real Jack Landreau—he’s dead.”

  “You’ve been very clear about the ‘how’ of it; I was asking more about the ‘why’ of it.”

  “Thought you might be able to help with that,” I say.

  He thinks again.

  “I would imagine that people who do that are hiding. People who do that are running from something.”

  “But what is he running from?” he asks.

  I look at him. “Do you want to ask him?”

  He turns to me, shakes his head, once. No. We fall silent, The miles pass.

  There is a stirring in back. Landreau sits up, rubs his eyes. “Where are we?” he asks.

  “On our way to Wisconsin,” Powell says. “We’re almost there; it won’t be long now.”

  So we keep driving. The roads get narrower and slower and eventually there we are. It’s a huge house, looks the size of a golf clubhouse. A big porch, all the way around, dark hunter-green canvas awnings covering it.

  Worrell and Jones are already there, and they join us. It is foggy and dank and cold. We walk around to the side facing the lake. Nothing much to see until it parts and maybe half a mile away we see this house, all long horizontal lines. Landreau whistles, Powell stares.

  “What an amazing structure,” Powell says. “I wonder if it’s a real Frank Lloyd Wright or a knockoff. Too bad Vinnie isn’t here—he knows them all by heart.”

  “I imagine that would be a much more commodious place to play than this monstrosity,” the professor says, jerking his head over his shoulder at the country club.

  And a voice comes from behind us and says, “I’m afraid you gentlemen will never get the opportunity to discover that for yourselves.”

  We turn. There is a guy there, mid-fifties, clean-shaven bald head. Dressed in tails, of all things, little white vest. Is this the owner? No. There is something about his look.

  “You must be the entertainment portion of the evening, am I correct?”

  We nod.

  “I was informed of your arrival, and told I should transact with a Mr. Amatucci…?”

  This is the butler, the majordomo, whatever.

  Worrell jumps in. “Mr. Amatucci is temporarily indisposed and will not be joining us, unfortunately. But we have secured a more than adequate replacement.” He pauses. “I am curious—why did you say that we would never have the pleasure of playing there, in that glorious house? Is the owner not a fan of indigenous music?”

  The butler probably doesn’t know what “indigenous” means, but makes a quick recovery.

  “I only mean,” he says, “that the owner of that house never mingles with our little community up here, and jealously guards her privacy. Some call her “The Lady of the Lake.” I would imagine that you might be a trifle…loud…for her tastes.”

  The little snot.

  “We’ll try not to disturb her,” I say, “you show us where to go.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Ken Ridlin

  To Milwaukee

  Saturday, January 18

  It is nine o’clock when Powell comes bouncing down the stairs. He sits. We wait for Landreau. His bag is sitting there but he’s not around. Ten minutes later he shows up, coming in from outside. Has on a hat and gloves, and steam is coming off him.

  I put my coffee cup down on the table, and it makes a little clink.

  Landreau turns to Powell, mutters something. Powell grins.

  “What?” I ask. “What is it?”

  Powell looks at Landreau, who shrugs. Powell turns to me and speaks.

  “He was telling me it was a G,” he says.

  “A G?” I repeat. “What’s a G? What do you mean?”

  Powell reaches past me and picks up the coffee cup, flicks his finger nail against it. “G,” he sings, “G, G, G.”

  I turn to Landreau. “You one of those people with perfect pitch?” I ask him.

  He looks at me. Squints. “Nothing’s perfect,” he says.

  I’m not sure what to say to this. I reach over and pick up my cases.

  “Should we wait for the others?” he asks.

  “Sidney has already left,” Powell says. “He took off with Akiko at dawn.”

  “We might as well head out, if you’re ready to go.”

  I look at Landreau. He shrugs, picks up his case.

  The trip to Milwaukee is uneventful. Mostly back roads, four lanes, forty miles an hour. No traffic. The weather is cold. The roads are clear. Nice scenery, trees hanging low under a cloak of snow. No one talks, we just look out the windows.

  We get to the club way too early. Jones has already been there, setting up her kit. There’s a string-bass case, locked to a radiator with a cable and a padlock. All present and accounted for.

  The place is called The Joint, and could be called The Cave. Under street level, just a little light filtering in from the half
-windows. Strong smell of beer and cigarettes. Music posters on the walls—Clapton, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Guns N’ Roses, Beck. Beck? What the hell?

  The gig is just OK. Not like last night, which I can’t even find the words to talk about. We’re playing OK, but not great. The crowd is into it. They applaud for every little thing, even the parts that don’t really work. The piano is flat. Powell and I have to adjust all the way open to get close to it. Throws everybody’s intonation off. The crowd doesn’t notice. Landreau notices. He has a look on his face like he’s got bugs stuck in his teeth.

  The crowd is couples in their thirties, forties, and fifties. No singles to speak of. There seems to be a pitcher of beer on every table, no mixed drinks. The food is bratwurst, knackwurst, weisswurst, and hot dogs, and they all come with sauerkraut and french fries. I look a little closer. There’s not a soul in here less than fifty pounds overweight, men and women both.

  Powell tries to do what he can, but the rest of us are stuck with our feet in the mud. Landreau? He plays beautifully, he can’t help it. The crowd doesn’t really notice. He gets less applause after his solos than even I do. That’s just wrong.

  After the first song, whenever someone else solos I’m scanning the crowd. No Laura.

  We play a set. Take a break. Play another set. More applause. The worse we play the more they like it. It’s Saturday night—they want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. And they’re getting beer-drunk, happy and sentimental. I look at all the bottles lined up so pretty behind the bar. Sparkling in the light. Singing their songs in color. I look at the glass of flat ginger ale on the floor next to me.

  The last set, I lean over to Powell, “Let’s play some blues, just jam.” He nods. Powell calls out “C-Jam Blues,” an old Lester Young sax classic. I start with the tenor and Powell comes in on the trumpet. I take it back, on the alto, hand it to Landreau. Take it back again on the soprano. A chorus, another chorus, another chorus. I have stopped thinking about my fingers. Jones is working the drums, Worrell is slapping the bass. Another chorus. We go on and on and on. I swing my sax in a circle. They all join in, pushing to the finish.

  Wild applause. Almost deserved.

  Powell vamps into the band’s theme song. Introduces the band. We each play a half a chorus, then we’re done.

  Manager comes up and gives Powell a fat envelope. He opens it. Counts it. They shake hands. Powell turns to the band, divvies up the cash. Except for me. Which is right. We pack up.

  Coats on. Handshakes all around. We’re all in a better mood than a few hours ago. It’s the music is what it is. And then we’re into the cars and into the night. Back to Chicago.

  No Laura. Not a glimpse. But there was the music, and that will have to carry me for now.

  CHAPTER 32

  Ken Ridlin

  Back to Chicago

  Saturday, January 18

  After the gig, we’re ready to go. Last second, Landreau jumps up, says he’s going with Worrell and Jones.

  I have the thought: is he going to skip? Back to Detroit? Iowa? Slip away?

  No. It comes to me immediately—it’s just a definite No. He’s staying, for now. The fact that I know this but don’t know how I know it gnaws at me.

  We watch him walk away; then we’re gone.

  We wind through the city streets. The wind is howling. Everything is shades of gray. It’s quiet, cold, dark. I let Powell drive for a while, get settled in. Then I interrupt.

  “What can you tell me about Amatucci?” I ask.

  “I could tell you a lot, but we’re only going to Chicago, not Los Angeles. What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever,” I say. “Background.”

  He pauses, gathers his thoughts. I remind myself: he does this.

  “Born in New York, got his BS at Columbia—”

  “That where he gets his BS?” I say. “He sure has plenty of it.”

  He pauses again, tightens his mouth.

  “I mean,” I say, backing up. “The guy can sure talk, and about the craziest things. Night I saw him at the hospital, he is going on and on about the thermometer, the battery thing they use now, on that rolling stand, and how it figures out the temperature with electricity. I mean, details like you wouldn’t believe—”

  “Ohm’s law?” he asks.

  That stops me. I turn to him.

  “He give you the same rant?” I ask.

  “Did he say more than two sentences?” he asks.

  “You kidding? He goes on for three, four minutes—”

  “Then it’s the truth,” he says. “When Vinnie just says something brief, it may be a fact, it may be that he’s bullshitting you, it may be that’s he’s testing you, it may be that he’s just trying some idea on for size.”

  He pauses, lets this sink in.

  “But when he goes on for more than two sentences, he knows exactly what he’s talking about; he’s researched it, he can cite references.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “He got his BS at Columbia, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with two majors and a 3.9 GPA. And he got all A’s here in graduate school and I never saw him study for a single minute.”

  “Two majors?”

  “Mechanical engineering and psychology,” he says. “A somewhat unusual combination.”

  “I’d say,” I said. “How’d that happen?”

  He’s one of these people who drives sitting straight up.

  He shifts in his seat, sits straighter.

  “He was always interested in the way things worked; gadgets, gizmos, appliances, machines of all kinds. He won a number of engineering contests in high school. He got accepted at MIT, Purdue, Rensselaer, all the big engineering schools, but he got a scholarship at Columbia, and his folks pushed him to stay close to home. He took a class, sophomore year, called ‘Invention and Inventors,’ and what interested him was not just the machines but the fact that they had all been invented by people, most of them very curious people. He started to get interested in those people: How did they do what they did? What separated Thomas Edison from his siblings? Ben Franklin from his brothers? Cyrus McCormick from his peers? One Intro Psych course and he was hooked. He couldn’t get enough—child development, sensation and perception, physiology, cognitive, disorders. He kept up the mechanical engineering all the while, and ended up with credits enough for both. Next, graduate school at the U. of C., strictly cognitive psychology. That’s where we met.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened that he hasn’t finished?”

  “Epistemology,” he says. There is no pause this time.

  “E-what?” I ask. I have heard this word before, but can’t place where, or what it means.

  “Epistemology. The study of how we know what we know.”

  I look at him. He must be able to read my blank look.

  “How do you know I’m driving this car?” he asks. “You have what you think is the objective sensory evidence of your eyes and your ears and your kinesthetic sense. You can see the world moving outside the window. But it could be a dream, a hallucination. Take it further: how do you know I don’t have a dead body stuffed in the trunk, or two kilos of heroin under the seat?” He pauses. “Assumption, interpretation, implication, deduction. No direct evidence.”

  “Yeah…” I say.

  “Epistemology looks at the sources of our knowledge, and our beliefs, and the deeper you look at the former, the more you see the latter. We don’t experience the world, we create it. The field Vinnie was in was cognitive psychology, and epistemology messed him up. He got to the point where he saw that most of what we know about ourselves is just metaphor, simile, analogy. Emotions are ‘like a teakettle.’ The mind is ‘like a computer.’ Even the whole notion that there is something called a ‘mind’ and not just an actual physical brain, three pounds of hamburger between your ears. He had ended up studying and testing the metaphor, not t
he brain itself, so there was no ‘there’ there. All the research he was working on was all assumption, interpretation, implication, deduction. No direct evidence. No sensory data. Just abstract theory.”

  I nod.

  “It stalled him. Here he was, studying how we process information, how we interpret the world, and he’s seeing that the basic data we all start with is not data at all, but a chimera, a dream, a shadow on the wall of a cave.”

  “Plato,” I say.

  He looks at me, cocks an eyebrow.

  “Cook County Community College,” I say. “They’ve heard of him, even there.”

  He nods. Pauses.

  “Meanwhile, we had started the band, and epistemology does not apply. With music, you know going in that it’s all opinion, you know there’s never going to be any direct objective evidence of whether something you play is good or not. You’ve got the sensory evidence of your ears, and the social evidence of your peers, and sometimes they’re just wrong. Vinnie was good enough that he saw he could get better, and he has. And he doesn’t have to know how he knows he’s getting better, he can hear it. So he got deeper into the music, and backed off on his thesis.”

  I think about this.

  “I can kind of see what you’re saying,” I say. “It’s like he’s doing something he thinks is important, is true, and it gets pulled out from under him.”

  There is a pause. There’s not much traffic, but he’s keeping it at the speed limit.

  “So why the cab? Even without the degree, must be something better he could do,” I say. “The Merchandise Mart, finance, teaching, whatever?”

  He looks straight ahead. Then glances over at me.

  “What he’s trying to do is to see how far he can go with his music. Driving a cab gives him the flexibility to work on that. It’s his way of not letting himself get interested in anything else. You mentioned teaching; he’s done that. This sounds like heresy, but he put a ridiculous amount of thought into it; three or four versions of a one-hour class outline were the norm. It was taking him twelve hours a day to prepare for one hour; he had no time for anything else. It seems to be part of his nature to be prone to sudden enthusiasms, and to immerse himself completely in them.”