Nine Fingers Read online

  He keeps staring at me. There is a pause. Then he leans his head back, nods. He looks away. As I leave he is reaching for his phone and sitting down all at once. His eyes are gazing at the portrait wall.

  Welcome back.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ken Ridlin

  1100 South State Street

  Friday, January 10

  Ali opens the door and nudges me through. I am considering how I feel about what just happened. I am feeling vindication, I am feeling apprehension, I am feeling relief.

  Ali is feeling a need to get on with it.

  “So, what do you think we’ve got here with this 1812 thing, Ken? You have a chance to think about it yet?” He pivots, turns me out of the foot traffic, backs me up against a pillar.

  “It doesn’t really add up,” I say. “The victim is just getting into town. Here for a convention, some legal thing. He checks into his hotel, leaves his bag sitting on the bed, heads on up Lincoln to the club. He sits at the bar for twenty minutes, nursing a Scotch-and-soda.”

  Ali waits, patiently. I look at my notes, like I’m checking, and continue.

  “He asks the trumpet player if he can sit in, one or two songs. He drops a name or two. They say, ‘Sure, why not?’ He sits down at the piano. Plays one song, starts on a second one. Then bang, through the window. One to the head. A thirty-two, looks like.”

  Ali is looking far away, his forehead twisted up. “I don’t get it,” he says. “This guy…”

  “Tremblay, T-R-E-M-B-L-A-Y, Roger,” I say, flipping a page in the pad. “Male African American, thirty-eight, wife, two kids …”

  “In from…”

  “L.A., on the plane—”

  “This Tremblay, he doesn’t know anyone? Not meeting anyone?” he asks.

  “Some convention appointments, but no, not really—”

  “He doesn’t have a record?”

  “Not here or with the feds. We checked. Pure as the driven snow. A citizen.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “It sounds just like a mob hit, and they hit, who, some nobody?”

  I shrug.

  He puzzles it out. I let him take his time.

  “Maybe the guy had some L.A. history, pissed somebody off. Maybe they didn’t want to do anything in their own backyard. You interface with L.A. Homicide yet?” he asks.

  “Left a message,” I say. “It’s early there yet.” He looks at his watch, nods. I go on.

  “He’d have to piss off somebody important for them to track him fifteen hundred miles just to whack him. It’s easy enough to do him in L.A., make it look random, some drive-by.”

  I consider whether I should say this to a black man who holds my future in his hands. He is not reacting, except for a little nod of his head.

  “There’s something else, something you don’t want to hear,” I say.

  He looks up at me, arches his eyebrows, waits.

  “One of the patrons, in the club, says she sees a bag lady walking by, slowly. Outside the window, at or about the time—”

  He turns his whole body toward me. I can smell the coffee on his breath. “A bag lady?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Footprints lead south to the end of the block, then west for a hundred feet. Looks like a vehicle was there. We cordon it off to run tire prints, footprints, but the storm covers them up before the lab people—”

  He cuts me off. “Were there any other witnesses? Did anyone else see anything?”

  “No. Nothing. The storm…the music…the excitement…”

  We have wandered close to the entrance. I’m looking to escape, and I can see the way out but I know I’m not going to get there, not yet. Ali’s got his hand on my arm again, squeezing my elbow. He dances me over to one side, leads me away from the doors, backs me up against a window. He stands still. He turns his head away from me and stares off into the street beyond the glass. He is running down a list in his head.

  “What about the rest of the people inside—the musicians, the customers, the staff. Any probable targets?”

  “Not so’s you’d know it. The band is clean: the closest individuals to the vic were the drummer, the bass player, and the piano player. The real piano player, the guy this Tremblay was sitting in for.”

  “Any hits in the system?” he asks. “Any of them have records?”

  “No. The band comes up clean. Well, except the saxophone player. Caught with some blow, few years ago, a recreational amount. Nothing else. All the customers come up clean, too,” I continue. “The staff is just the manager, a bartender, and a waitress. They’re nobody we know. It feels like someone professional was on this, but got the wrong guy.”

  He shakes his head.

  “And the right guy wasn’t even there,” I add.

  He mulls it over. “If the shooter is the ‘bag lady,’ and he’s who we think he might be, then it’s a mob thing, right? It’s Joe Zep’s guy, right? He doesn’t work for anyone else, that’s what the profile says, right?”

  “Yeah,” I respond. “If it’s him, he’s Zep’s.”

  “Maybe…” he says, “maybe he screwed up…”

  “Be the first time,” I say. “But it feels like there’s a lot we’re missing. If we could—”

  “Maybe this is the first crack in his armor,” he interjects. “Maybe he messed up, left something we can use.” He’s on a roll, convincing himself. He doesn’t need anything from me. It might spoil the line of his conjecture.

  “This could be big, Ken. You have to stay on it.”

  I nod.

  “You know who to liaison with on this, right? Mindich?” he asks.

  “Yeah, already heard,” I say. “We know each other from…from before.” Mindich was there. He was there with the rest of them. He did nothing, he said nothing. Like the rest of them.

  “Right,” he says, “But you also liaison with me on this, directly, you understand?” I nod. He amplifies it a little. “I’m in this loop, Ken. I have an immediate need to know.”

  One thing he’s learning from Washington is the italics.

  “Right,” I say, “anything I get goes right to you.” I pause. “And to Mindich.”

  With that he looks me in the eyes. He holds the gaze for a second or two, then nods. He lets go of my elbow, turns, and walks past the revolving doors, doing all he can to avoid breaking into a gallop.

  I gaze at the piled-up snow and ice outside the window. I stare at the people leaning into the wind. I’m not sure it’s any colder out there than it is in here.

  I shiver and pull my coat around myself and head out the door.

  CHAPTER 9

  Vinnie Amatucci

  Airport Marriott—Tuning Up

  Saturday, January 11

  After sleeping away almost all of Friday, I got up early on Saturday morning to do my shift with the cab. The weather had cleared; the blinding sun was glaring off the ice and the wind had gone quiet, but the temperature was still in the teens and everything was still frozen solid. The side streets were still impassable, just no way to get any traction, but the main streets and the highways were actually not that bad. The airports were still shut down. What I heard was that they had expected it to melt so they could scoop it up in the morning, but then the temperature dropped, it all turned to ice, and they were fucked.

  No one was going to going anywhere today, unless they really needed to.

  My own car was back at the cab lot, where I had left it on Thursday, and without any wheels I had a hell of a time getting there. I finally made it, on foot and by bus, and old #691 was sitting there, clean as could be, just as The Fat Man had promised. My own car was right next to it, and someone had dug it out as well. They had done a hell of a job; it was the cleanest it had been in years. I unlocked the cab, cranked up the heat, and took off.

  I stuck close to downtown, and there was plenty of business. Most people still hadn’t dug their cars out, and those who were lucky enough to have garaged them were the last ones you’d see taking any chances o
n getting them dinged up. A classic case of demand exceeding supply, which is always good news for those who provide the supply. For a change, my side of the coin had come up heads.

  So I hit the hotels, the stores, and the office buildings, and the doors opened and closed, the meter started and stopped, and the money flowed in. No long trips, no big commitments, no airport runs, of course, just solid simple rides, with no letup, no driving from fare to fare, just one citizen getting out and the next one standing there waiting to get in. I was in the flow, and the other vehicles were other dancers in the dance, sharing the same choreography. Out and in and go and stop; it was as simple as it can get.

  At about 4:00 I had a nice fat roll in my kit. I dropped the cab in the lot, booked back to my place, showered, and changed into some decent rags. By 5:15 I was back in my car, headed out to the Airport Marriott, and making decent time from Hyde Park to the Ryan to the Kennedy. My plan had been to get there by 7:00, and I made it with fifteen minutes of slack.

  We weren’t supposed to start until 9:00, but the early arrival gave me time to get things set up. The Airport Marriott was about the most unlikely place you could think of for a Saturday-night jazz gig: a cavernous room where the sound disappeared like rain in the ocean; a location that was too far off the beaten path to attract anybody; a clientele that was just passing through. And of course the Marriott itself, that bastion of white male Mormon capitalism, was not the kind of chain that featured jazz.

  What the Airport Marriott had was Clarence, and Clarence was a capital-F Fan. The story I had heard, true or not, was that Clarence and Paul Powell had known each other at the U. of C., and Paul had turned him on to the music, and Clarence had turned him on to weed (Clarence could always be counted upon to have the best source of herb in the city—always moist, fresh, consistent, and, at least for us, free). Now, a few years later, Paul rarely smoked anymore—it was way too frivolous for his serious side—but Clarence was still jonesing on the music. Clarence also had some kind of pull with the hotel chain, unusual for a very short, very gay, very black dude, and was able to book us on a regular basis. (The other theory I had heard was that he had a thing for Paul. Sometimes, seeing the look of rapture on his face as he watched Paul play, I gave this hypothesis more credence. You never know: maybe he appreciated Paul’s chiseled ass more than his solid chops. But hey, different strokes, you know. Doesn’t bother me.)

  Whatever the reason, we had been booked there every other Saturday night for almost a year. The pay was solid, the sound system was top-shelf—Harmon-Karden/JBL studio components—the crowds were mid sized but respectful, as pleased to be hearing us as we were to be seeing them, and it was an easy gig, in at nine and out around midnight, three short sets.

  They have a pool there that’s both indoors and outdoors. You start inside, swim under a partition, and you’re out among the stars, the cold air on your face, the warm water cradling everything else. Even on a night like this, with the temperature dropping toward zero, you could still see people swimming outside, if only to be able to tell their friends back home that they had done it. I’ve done the pool thing—Clarence again—and it’s sweet.

  The pool was covered by a large dome that covered the pool and most of the lounge area that backed up against it, separated by a tall glass wall. The bandstand Clarence had constructed was just in front of that. This was acoustic hell, a place where beautiful notes came to die.

  The basic rule of thumb on setting up the acoustics of any room is “dead in the front, live everywhere else.” You don’t want too many flat hard surfaces right behind where the music is coming from; it muddies the sound and also puts you inside a dead envelope where you can’t hear a thing. On the sides and in the back, in contrast, you want a little bounce, to give the sound some warmth. It’s the thing they try to replicate with ambient speakers in home theater systems, a little something to take the hard clinical edge off, to make it more natural.

  This room was exactly the opposite. The glass wall at our backs was a virtual echo machine, and the high sloping ceilings and curved walls on the sides of the dome dispersed the sound every which way. We had convinced Clarence to put up some acoustic paneling behind us to soften the bounce so we could at least hear ourselves playing the notes we were actually playing, but for the rest of the room, we needed the sound system. Luckily enough, it was a powerful system, but a complicated one, and it needed to be both. I was glad to have some time to deal with it, because this space presented a challenging array of compromises.

  Before I started in on the system, I got out my star wrench and my tuning fork and tackled the piano. The combination of the humidity from the pool and the alternating hot and cold drafts of air from the heating system and from the outside part of the pool created a perfect environment for fuck-ing up a piano. This was an excellent one, a Steinway baby grand, but it had no chance in a room like this, and wouldn’t stay in tune for more than a day.

  I hit a middle A and compared it to the fork—not one iota of resonance. The piano was almost half a tone flat. High A was flatter, but Low A was sharp, not just in tune, but overshooting it. This was what you’d expect this crazy microclimate to produce. It was good that I had the time: this was going to take a lot of it. I rapped the 440 Hertz tuning fork again, and started with the A’s.

  Tuning a piano is an awkward process, especially a baby grand like this Steinway. If you wanted to be civilized, you would play a note, walk all the way around to tune the string, walk back to play it again, and on and on. Fuck that shit. The way I do it is to basically sprawl myself on top of the piano so I can reach the keys with my left hand and the tuning pegs on the sounding board with my right without moving. It must look a little weird, like I’m trying to hump this big black beast, but hey, this ain’t some beauty contest; I’m working here.

  At the same time, you can’t help but get some looks when you’re doing it: it’s an announcement that something is going to happen. No one tunes a piano in a club on a Saturday night unless someone is going to be playing it. I was concentrating on my ears, but I could feel the looks, and I could also hear a spasm of quiet ripple through the room.

  I don’t have perfect pitch—that’s why I carry the tuning fork. But I do have perfect relative pitch: give me one note, tell me what it is, and I can pick out what any other note is, pretty much every time. I’ve known a few people who supposedly had perfect pitch, and I mean absolute perfect pitch, the whole auditory genius thing, and I’ll say this: they were all absolutely miserable motherfuckers: nasty, cranky, and depressed. We live in a noisy world, and to hear it all too clearly would probably fuck anyone up. My ear is good enough for tuning, thanks, but no more than that. Some failures are blessings.

  There’s something almost Zen about tuning up. It’s solitary, you get in this zone, you work quicker and easier as you go, and the rest of the world disappears into the background. There’s a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another U. of C. dude, who wrote a book about the Flow. A big best seller, rare for a serious tome. I signed up for one of his classes twice and never got in, but copped the book from Paul. I sense the Flow sometimes when I’m driving, like turning right not knowing why I’m turning right, but knowing that right is just right …and the fare is right there. I sense it sometimes in that moment after the light turns green and we all surge forward, and suddenly there is a pattern established, a current, a tide, and your foot eases off the pedal a hair and you slide right into it.

  It also happens, sometimes, and I’m afraid it’s only sometimes, when the band is really playing our asses off, playing things we hadn’t even thought of considering, and it’s all fitting together like some magical mosaic where all the pieces are slammed into place simultaneously.

  But the flow runs deep, real deep, when I’m tuning. People have come up and tried to interrupt me, asked me what time the show starts. I just wave them off. I can’t recalibrate myself to whatever channel they are on. Probably seems very arrogant, very off-putting. I admi
t it, it’s my guilty little pleasure, my free rush, and I refuse to share a second of it with anybody.

  Although that’s not what I’m thinking in the moment, that’s not what I’m feeling. All I’m thinking is A, C#, A, C#. All I’m feeling is A, C#, A, C#. And the way I do it, laying out on top of the piano, accentuates the kinesthetic part of it. As the strings get closer to harmony, the wood of the piano itself starts to resonate and I can feel the sound flowing into me, running up my spine, making me vibrate as if I’m part of the instrument. I always feel that while I’m tuning the piano, it’s tuning me. I always pass gas, I always get half-hard, I always stop grinding my teeth. When I’m done, I’m always in a very peaceful but focused state.

  A couple of years ago I stumbled into tuning pianos for money. Somebody saw me doing it before a gig and gave me a number to call and that led to other numbers. I liked it so much I had to quit: I lost all desire to play the damn things; it sucked all the initiative out of me. On this night it took me close to forty-five minutes, and I didn’t begrudge a second of it.

  When I got through with the piano, I started in on the sound system. Got the Uher out of my bag, set it down near the piano, popped in a closed-loop tape, hit RECORD, played some chords for about a minute or so, soft and then loud, soft and then loud, set it on top of the piano, turned it to PLAY, and set the volume at three. From there, it looped around and around. I turned to a mixing board that looked as if it belonged at NASA Mission Control, and pressed POWER. I walked around to each of the speakers, clockwise, putting my left ear about eight inches away, listened, and took some notes on a card. After I finished the last speaker, I went around in the opposite direction and did it again with my right ear, just to be sure, augmenting my written notes. Then I went back to the mixing board and started tweaking the equalization on each speaker.

  I’ve been in people’s houses and I’ve been in people’s cars, and let me tell you, when it comes to their sound systems, most people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. So much money, so little knowledge. In houses, the bass is always set too high and it makes the overall sound all cloudy. In cars, the back speakers are set way too high. Why would you have the speakers in the backseat louder than the speakers right in front of you? To replicate the sound of standing with your back to the band? And generally, people tune all the speakers the same way, even if they have a sophisticated system that lets them EQ each one individually.