The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  I ran my fingers along the worn tops of the album covers, the cardboard fuzzy with years of use. Someone had let go of all of these. Someone had moved on, packed them up, said good-bye, and left them for someone else. There are no used-MP3 stores; you never have to delete an e-mail from someone you’ve all but forgotten. Everything we own is ours to keep locked up in our own private towers. Only rent receipts show that not everything is ours to possess.

  I had almost psyched myself out of record shopping when a bit of blue caught my eye. I pushed a few Thompson Twins records aside and there it was: the Vapors, New Clear Days. The sleeve was pretty battered, but it was all there—“News at Ten,” “Bunkers,” and, of course, “Turning Japanese.”

  I plucked it from the crate like I was picking up the Holy Grail. “Nice.” Cassie nodded her head. “I haven’t thought about that album in decades. My girlfriends and I used to dance to ‘Turning Japanese’ all the time.”

  “It’s my friend Sid’s favorite,” I said. “He’s been looking for it for months. He’s got it digitally, of course, but—”

  “But vinyl is so much better,” she agreed. “He’ll love it.”

  We resumed flipping through bins until she pulled out Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul. “This was my college boyfriend’s favorite album,” she said, clutching the record to her chest. “I bought it for him and we used to drink cheap red wine and play the whole thing by candlelight.” She sighed, her eyes getting distant. “He was the only man I ever wrote a love song for,” she said. “I almost didn’t put ‘Secret Girlfriend’ on the album, but I wanted everyone in the world to know how I felt about him.”

  I knew she was talking about George, but I wasn’t about to open that wound back up. “It’s a beautiful song,” I said. “It really captures what it feels like to be in love, those first early, uncertain pangs.” I hadn’t let myself think about that song after the incident at the Bitter End, but now, knowing that Sid would be coming home to me tonight, her lyrics took on a new gravitas.

  “Thanks,” she said. “There’s nothing like being in love in your early twenties. Everything is so intense, so pure—it’s just the two of you against the whole world. You must know what that’s like.” She dropped the record back into the crate. “But I guess he didn’t feel that way—he got the house, the wife, the soul-sucking job. I doubt he’s even picked up his drumsticks in years, just goes to work, teaches music theory without any of the heart, without having to really feel the music, the way he used to.”

  George hadn’t even mentioned that he’d played drums. I thought about Catch’s trumpet, stashed somewhere in the basement with the Christmas decorations, the case cracking with moisture and neglect.

  “I would give anything just to see that ex one more time. Like maybe I could save him, we could run off and start over.” She sighed. “It’s a dream I’ve been having since I got out of rehab. But I guess he thinks he’s happy, so I guess I wish him well. Makes me sad, though.”

  I imagined Catch going to work in his three-hundred-dollar suit, coming home and kissing Amanda on the cheek, listening to Top 40 radio in the car on his way to the mall during the weekend’s excursion to Bed Bath & Beyond for holiday-themed dish towels. I wondered if he was happy, if he felt at peace, if he had some switch that I lacked that allowed him to just turn off all the frustration that he had poured into his music as a balm for the ugliness of the world. I felt sorry for him. And I envied him for a moment—until I remembered what I had waiting for me at home.

  I half-listened as she told me her side of George’s same story. She’d been married briefly to a guy who’d knocked her around and ended it when he got picked up for selling heroin. She’d gone to rehab for her own habit, then recorded her first album, opened for Joan Osborne, toured with Lilith Fair. Now she freelanced ad jingles and played small clubs.

  “Look,” she continued. “I may not be the most successful musician in the world, but at least I’m doing what I love. I still feel things, here, in my heart.” She tapped her chest, then reached out and tapped mine, her fingers warm through my shirt. “You feel things too, I can tell. You won’t ever sell out.”

  I wanted to clutch her hand to my breastbone. Was this what a kindred spirit felt like? Someone who read your thoughts before you had words to put to them? Was Cassie my Iona, like Pretty in Pink—the cool older sister I never had? We were in a record store together, even if neither of us worked there.

  The light caught her bracelet and sent silver sparks scattering through the store. I made out just a few quick words on the plate, a dream or two . . .

  “What’s your bracelet engraved with?” I asked.

  Her face went strange and she pulled her sleeve down over it. “Some bullshit love quote,” she said. “I liked the chain; my boss let me have it cheap when the customer returned it. Guess his girlfriend thought it was lame. We get that a lot. That store keeps me decked out in more bling than any boyfriend ever did.”

  When I was a kid, I used to get this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach when my body knew I needed to escape before my brain did. It would start at the back of my gut and climb up my spine into my shoulders, and I would go to my room and get in my bed and play a tape until it went away. I had that same feeling now—the claustrophobic sense that there were too many people around me, hearing my thoughts and my heartbeat, even though it was just me and Cassie and a record store clerk who was ignoring us.

  I couldn’t let go of that feeling, even as we paid for our records. It got stronger, harder, like food poisoning.

  “I’m going into the studio next month,” she said once we were outside again. “And when my new album comes out, I want you to be the first person to listen to it. If you hate it, I won’t hold it against you, but I really want you to do my press kit. I looked up some of your reviews and you do good work.”

  I hadn’t heard that in months, but even her compliment couldn’t ward off my discomfort. The walk back to Astor seemed to be a thousand miles. She hugged me good-bye, thanked me for the record, told me she’d call. But that brick at the bottom of my stomach didn’t budge, and it wasn’t until I was halfway back to Brooklyn that my idiot brain put all the pieces together.

  I’d just given a Billy Joel record to KitKat’s killer.

  Chapter 50

  MIKE POST THEME

  Sid just stared at me with his big swollen bug eyes as I told him the story, the damaged parts of his face now a shade of yellow like hospital walls. “How can you be sure?” he asked. “You could walk outside right now and I guarantee you every other girl you see has something on her person with the word dream on it.”

  I was frantic when I got home from Astor Place. I was so close to closing KitKat’s case that I couldn’t think straight. I went out to buy groceries for dinner and had to go back twice because I forgot mozzarella and cat food. And now Sid was cooking dinner while I drank wine and sat on the counter and explained the whole case to him, stumbling over my evidence with excitement and nerves.

  Cassie had the bracelet. Her story matched George’s in everything but the names given.

  “So why did she hide it?” I said, taking a drink. “I could see that it was part of a longer quote, and George told me he sent KitKat a bracelet with the lyric I will do what I can do to make a dream or two come true. It’s her bracelet. I’m sure of it.”

  “That’s a hell of a sick trophy to be wearing around,” he said, turning from the stove to shred mozzarella into a bowl. “So what’s your big plan now, Commish?”

  “If I’m going to be a Michael Chiklis cop, can I at least be Vic Mackey?”

  “I think you’re more like Lem,” he said. “Sweet, kind of goofy, good-hearted.”

  “And dead by grenade with my guts hanging out.” I accepted the bowl of pasta he handed me and took a bite, talking with my mouth full. “Does that make you Shane Vendrell or Ronnie Gardocki?”

  He put his hand to the stubble on his chin, pondering the ceiling tiles like he was giving the a
nswer serious thought. “Shane,” he said. “Accent and all.”

  I finished chewing, swallowed some wine to wash the taste of garlic out of my mouth, and kissed him, grinning. “Great,” I teased. “This relationship is off to a doomed start.”

  “Either way it ends badly,” he said, twirling linguine around his bowl in a gesture that reminded me of the way his tongue had wound pinwheels between my legs the night I’d found out about Catch’s engagement. It was all I could do not to drop my pasta all over the floor and devour him instead. “But if you insist on being Mackey, does this mean you’re planning to smash her face in with a phone book?”

  “No,” I said, my arousal cooled by implied violence. “I’m going to call George and ask him to meet with her. She might confess if he asks the right questions.”

  “And if she doesn’t admit it?”

  “Then I helped two long-lost lovers reunite,” I said sarcastically. “And Bronco gets life in prison. Happy ending for all, right?”

  “Now”—he gestured with his fork and a smirk—“you sound like Dutch Wagenbach.”

  I LET SID play through the A-side of Men at Work’s Business as Usual while I waited for George to return my call. In the last minutes of “Underground,” the phone rang with his 607 number and I removed myself into the bedroom, closing the door.

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” he said. “Has there been a break in the case?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And I need your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “I was talking with Cassie Brennen today,” I began. “I’ve got this bad feeling that she might have . . .” I swallowed the sick in my throat. “I think she was wearing KitKat’s bracelet, the one you gave her. I think she might have killed KitKat.”

  The line went dead for a minute and I thought I’d lost him. “George? Are you still there?” I asked into silence.

  “I’m here,” he murmured. I heard the creak of a screen door and children shouting in the distance. Passing traffic hovered in the stillness between both our phones. “I should have said something,” he said. “I didn’t make the connection, didn’t think it meant anything.”

  “What connection, what are you talking about?”

  “The bracelet,” he said. “When I called the jeweler to have it made, she answered. I could never forget that voice. When I gave her my name, she confirmed that it was her. We talked for half an hour, but she never asked me who the bracelet was for. She even friended me on Facebook, offered to come up and visit until she found out I was married. And when I posted on Facebook that I’d found her tape, she was so excited—until I mentioned that I’d passed it along to a friend. Hell, I even offered to introduce her to KitKat, told her that was who I’d had her engrave the bracelet for. She sent me a whole series of nasty messages—I wrote that for you, how could you give it to some skank, all that—before deleting her profile. I thought she was using again and didn’t think anything of it, not even when you said KitKat had been killed. I just thought . . .”

  It all fell into place for both of us. I rubbed my temples, imagined him doing the same.

  “This is my fault,” he murmured. “It’s all my fault.”

  “You had no idea,” I said. “How could you know she would track down KitKat and kill her over one lousy song?”

  “People have killed for less,” he said. “A lot less.”

  I didn’t have time to play therapist, not when playing detective was a more important role. “I need you to get her to admit it,” I said. “She still loves you; she’ll tell you if she thinks it’ll bring you back.”

  “How?” he said, his voice taking on that bitterness I’d come to recognize as his trademark. “Am I just supposed to show up at her apartment, pretend she didn’t kill the love of my life, until she confesses, Oh, by the way, I killed your girlfriend?”

  “However you have to do it,” I snapped. “But figure it out. I need this favor, George. For an innocent man. For KitKat.”

  Another moment of silence. “I’ll do it,” he said. “For KitKat.”

  For the first time since I’d unlocked KitKat’s front door a month ago, I let out a real sigh of relief. “Set it up,” I said. “Just let me know when and where.”

  Chapter 51

  ALL MY LITTLE WORDS

  All the notes were falling into place. With George trying to set up a meeting with Cassie, it was my job to make sure we had the right people in place to arrest her. My own bracelet was heavy on my wrist when Philip called me out of the proofreaders’ room and into his office. I was about to ask him for the biggest favor he could ever grant me and I gripped his bag of clean lingerie so tightly I was afraid my shaking hands would catapult them right onto the floor in front of him.

  “Relax,” his assistant said as she opened the door. “He won’t bite.”

  That much I knew, but that didn’t mean he would rubber-stamp an approval on anything I asked him, even if he did smile when I walked in. I pulled down my shirt cuff and held it in my fist, trying to gather up the confidence to speak. “I need your help,” I blurted. “With my case.”

  He sat up straighter and folded his hands on the desk, like a father in a fifties sitcom. “I’m not sure what other help I can provide, but I’ll do what I can,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “My friend KitKat,” I said. “I think I might have found who killed her.”

  I told him about the bracelet Cassie wouldn’t let me read, the engraving shop, her angry conversation with George. “I don’t know if I can prove she did it,” I said. “But I have to try. I can’t let Bronco go to prison. I know he didn’t do this.”

  Philip leaned back in his leather chair and I held my breath. “If she really is the killer, you’ve done some pretty impressive detective work,” he said, cracking a grin like broken glass. “Let me make some calls and see if I can’t pull a favor. I’ve got a few friends in New York’s finest, might be able to get one of them to listen in on your setup, make it official.”

  “Thank you,” I gushed. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said, sitting up. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

  THE TRAIN HOME felt eerily silent; everyone was lost in their music or a game, reading a digital novel or watching tiny porn. For a few stops I was paranoid that Cassie might find me, get on the train in a sea of people, and know what I was up to. I cranked up my music a little louder, as though that could drown out my thoughts. It did nothing but make my ears ring.

  Sid was making pork chops when I got home. He waved to me with an oversized red silicone oven mitt. “I picked us up a cast-iron skillet,” he said. “Now that there’s two of us, I thought we could share kitchen duties. I got some summer squash in the oven, if you want to set the table.”

  It was such a perfect “Our House” moment that I almost hated it. There’s a reason they never show domestic scenes in crime shows or novels; when a case gets ahold of you, there’s no time for dinner or setting the table or watching television. It’s an all-consuming madness, I told myself as I laid out the placemats, the plates, the wineglasses, the knives. I was so close to finishing this that it was almost worse than when I didn’t know anything at all. Now it was just waiting, anxiously ticking down hours until something got done, until the awful weight of KitKat’s murder and Bronco’s innocence could be lifted from my shoulders.

  “What did Philip say?” Sid called over the popping sounds of frying pork fat.

  “He said he’d make some calls, get us a surveillance team,” I replied. “I just need to find out when they’re meeting.”

  Sid abandoned dinner for a moment to see me in the dining room. “That’s great news,” he said, lacing his fingers with mine. “You must be so relieved.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Not until she confesses. Not until she’s arrested. And not until Bronco’s free to go.”

  He squeezed my hands and kissed my forehead. “You’re at the fort
y-minute mark,” he said. “You’ve just got a little ways to go before the credits roll. It’s all down to the confession now.”

  “Except that now I have to wait for George to connect with her,” I said to his back as he ducked into the kitchen. “Maybe she’s onto me and she skipped town.”

  “That could be,” he said. “But you won’t know until you know. So do yourself a favor and focus your thoughts elsewhere for a minute—you got a postcard. I put it on the coffee table.”

  I set down the forks and got the postcard. My grandmother and Royale were in Prague; it was beautiful; they were nearing the end of their trip and would be home in the next month. I had no way of telling her that Sid had moved in, no way to ask how much longer I could stay. I couldn’t tell if the world was unraveling at my feet or coming together like a tight-fitting corset.

  We ate dinner. We put on Go West. And just before “Call Me,” there came that low static hum that rattles off all electronics just before a text comes in.

  Saturday, George wrote.

  Chapter 52

  POLICY OF TRUTH

  I met George at Grand Central Terminal with a cup of coffee and a stomach that felt like Pop Rocks and Coke. He surprised me with a hug and I stood awkwardly in his embrace, one outstretched arm holding an Au Bon Pain cup that was burning me through the cardboard sleeve. A bum relieved me of the pain, snatching it out of my hand and hobbling down the stairs, spilling most of it on the rolling briefcase of a pissed-looking businessman coming off the train from Port Chester.