In Big Trouble Page 10

  "We had something like that in Baltimore, the Power Plant. But it went bankrupt. Now the Inner Harbor has all the usual theme restaurants—Hard Rock Cafe, ESPN Zone, Planet Hollywood. Anne Tyler was being whimsical when she wrote The Accidental Tourist, but it's come true."

  "Yeah, the more people travel, the more they like to stay at home. They got a point. I mean, you ever heard mariachi music? I pay those guys to stop."

  They smiled cautiously at each other, pleased they had found something on which they could agree. "So do you think this band is still at the Morgue?"

  "Could be. All I know is that Fast Eddie isn't my problem anymore. It's Friday night, go check out the scene yourself. You'd have a better time here, though. You know what we say, ‘Primo's is primo!'" He dropped the butt end of his cigarette into the dregs of his Coke, where it sizzled and sank.

  "Maybe some other time."

  Kleinschmidt eyed Tess thoughtfully. She couldn't help feeling he was wondering what she would taste like broiled, with a baked potato on the side. "You look like the demographic I really want—out of college, a little more money to spend than some of these kids. What would make you come here?"

  A knife at my throat. But Tess, long the sounding board for Kitty's money-making schemes, couldn't help being engaged by the question. "I don't know—something pop culturish, slightly ironic and totally self-referential. They may call us Generation X, but we're more like Generation Self-Obsessed. Which makes us exactly like the boomers, come to think of it. How about…lunchbox night?"

  "Lunchbox night?"

  "Everyone brings their lunchbox from fifth grade. In this age range, you'll probably get a lot of ALF, The Cosby Show, Family Ties. You could give prizes for people who can sing the theme songs, play TV trivia. What was the name of Cosby's youngest daughter, that kind of stuff."

  "Lunchbox night. I like it! And lunchbox sounds kind of dirty, if you say it right."

  "I hadn't thought of that."

  "Well, that's what separates the true entrepreneur from the rest of the population," Kleinschmidt said, smug as a Cheshire cat. "I know how to take an idea and run with it."

  "Without ever getting out of your chair," Tess said.

  The Morgue stood at the intersection of Broadway and McCullough, two streets that began their lives parallel, then somehow managed to meet. Tess, who knew Baltimore so well that she could visualize its every joint and connection, had gotten lost for the second time today, and it made her grumpy. What kind of place had parallel streets that met? For that matter, what was with the street names here? Who was Hildebrand, for Christ's sake, or MacAllister? She wanted streets named Paca, Calvert, and Charles. Those were good names. Here, it was Austin, Houston, Milam, and according to her map book, one called Gomer Pyle. Well, Gollll-eeee.

  Back in Baltimore, it was eleven o'clock—the perfect time to leave another cryptic message on Tyner's machine. Here, it was ten o'clock, early in clubland, but late enough so the band should be well into its first set. She wanted them to be onstage, wanted a chance to watch and study Crow without him seeing her. Then—well, she hadn't figured that part out yet. Technically, all she had to do was tap him on his shoulder, tell him to call his parents, and start driving back to Baltimore as fast as she could. If she really pushed it, she could be in her own bed by Sunday night.

  But there was still the little matter of a dead guy up on the property where Crow had recently stayed. She wasn't buying into Marianna Barrett Conyers's theory of context, coincidence, and elephant-patting, not just yet.

  She paid the ten-dollar cover, had her hand stamped, then lingered for a moment in case anyone wanted to see her ID. As someone who had looked twenty-one when she was fifteen then twenty when she was twenty-nine, Tess wasn't used to looking her age. It didn't seem that long ago that she had been scrounging up fake IDs and now she was flicking her braid at convenience store clerks, practically begging them to challenge her right to buy a six-pack.

  "Where would I find Little Girl in Big Trouble?" she asked the young man who had taken her money, a broad-shouldered blond who was trying, without much success, to effect a bored, East Coast ennui. "The punk room?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know any band by that name." She unfolded the newspaper photo for him. "Oh, our eighties band, the Breakfast Club. They're on the third floor. Pure pop for now people. Not as hot as it was a year ago, but still a good time if you're in the right mood. You know—‘I want my MTV.'"

  "Money for nothing," Tess finished for him, pretending to be in on the joke. Truth was, she felt stranded between the Morgue's bipolar sensibilities of nostaglia and irony. She had been an adolescent in the eighties and the memories—Madonna, rubber bracelets and bulimia—could still chafe. It didn't help that two of the three were still going strong, and that rubber bracelets had attempted a small comeback not that long ago.

  But although the eighties were twice-over over, the eighties room was enjoying a boom time on this particular night. Couples who looked to be in their late thirties were packed into the small space, dancing gleefully to music they had probably scorned when it was new. The tune was catchy and as familiar as a toothpaste jingle. Tess needed a few seconds to identify it, then hated herself for knowing it at all.

  "Wham," she said to herself, her eyes adjusting to the sudden darkness of the room. Goddamn Wham. George Michael and that guy whose name no one could remember. Wake Me Up Before You Go-go. This was Big Trouble indeed, for someone who had fancied himself a cutting edge musician just six months ago.

  Her eyes went to the girl first Woman, technically, but she was playing the vulnerable waif for all it was worth, skinny limbs exposed and fragile in her torn party frock. The outfit was a little anachronistic, first-generation Courtney Love, more early nineties than late eighties. No smeared lipstick, though, and no roots—this blond hair was real. Yes, Emmie "Dutch" Sterne was the real thing, all right.

  She sang prettily but perfunctorily, as if her mind were somewhere else. A doll, yes, but more the windup variety than the china type. Still, she caught one's eye and held it. Emmie had that ineluctable quality called charisma. No two people remembered her the same way, but everyone remembered her.

  A burst of harmony on the chorus, a man's sweet tenor. Head down, Tess let her eyes track to the right and saw the new Crow. With his long hair gone, the sharp, thin planes of his face were revealed. Yet even as his face had narrowed, his shoulders had broadened, his body thickened. He wasn't fat, far from it, but his boyish gangle was gone. He looked good—even in that ridiculous jacket and skinny tie, and with his hair moussed into a ruffled coxcomb.

  She raised her head a little higher, feeling slightly voyeuristic, a peeping Tess hidden behind the bouncing dancers. She noticed she wasn't the only one watching in this way. A few partner-less women stood along one wall, eyeing the band's male members with bird-dog intensity. Wake me up before you go-go, yes indeed.

  What is it about women and musicians? Over the brief course of her relationship with Crow, Tess had stood in dozens of clubs and watched little girls sigh over him and the other boys in his band as if they were Mick Jagger and John Lennon combined. To tell the truth, she had sighed herself in her time, had found herself nodding and smiling at some semi-attractive stranger just because he had a guitar, stood on a stage, and sang someone else's words. It didn't work the other way, for some reason. Men might lust for a female rock singer as they lusted for anyone, but the music, the performance, was incidental. Sure, there were men here tonight who were staring hungrily at Emmie, but not because she was singing. As Kitty had said, there were men who specialized in damaged goods, and Emmie Sterne was putting out the I-am-screwed-up vibe for all it was worth.

  For women, the music was the point. You date a musician and—well, what had Tess thought? That Crow would serenade her from the alley below her Fells Point apartment, that her life would turn into some MGM production number? She still wasn't sure. All she knew was that the reality of dating a musician wasn't the same as th
e prospect. There was nothing like the feeling you had when you stood in a dark club and watched a man lean close to a microphone and imagined the microphone was your ear. Or your mouth. But the only way to hold on to such anticipation was not to act on it.

  New song. Wham segued into Culture Club. "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" For a brief, paranoid moment, Tess thought Crow had seen her in the crowd. Who wants to hurt anyone? She had thought she was being so honorable last winter, breaking up with Crow when another man had filled her line of vision. She had hoped the small hurt would be better than the large-scale betrayal that seemed to loom. Now she wondered, and not for the first time, how monogamy worked. Did there ever come a time when you were impervious to stirrings for another person, or did you just learn to ignore those feelings? But if you pretended they didn't exist, weren't you a hypocrite?

  In the Bible, if you felt it in your heart, you were busted. Might as well do the crime, because you were going to do the time. But in fairy tales, it was the test that mattered—one couldn't avoid temptation, but one could avoid giving in. The heart triumphed, time and again. Only how could the heart hope to make itself heard over the screeching chorus of one's hormones?

  "We're going to take a break, folks. See you in fifteen." Emmie's speaking voice was huskier, rougher than her singing voice. The couples in the room didn't applaud, for that would require letting go of each other. It dawned on Tess that the real purpose of the Morgue was providing people with a series of semidark caves in which to grope each other. No wonder it was such a success with conventioneers.

  Tess walked to the front, head down, as if Crow might not recognize the top of her head. His back was to her, anyway. He was crouching over a speaker, fiddling with the connection.

  "Piece of crap," he said dispassionately. The two other guys in the band had already left the stage and been embraced by their ladies in waiting, the human coolie cups who had the honor of holding their beers throughout the set. Emmie stood where she was, twirling with a lock of hair, appraising Tess with the unabashed stare of a child. She didn't seem particularly surprised, or threatened. Probably lots of ladies tried to approach Crow between sets.

  "Hey," Tess said to Crow's back.

  "What?" he said, not turning away from the troublesome speaker, his voice irritable and impatient.

  "Nice set," she said. "It's not Poe White Trash, but then, what is?"

  Not one of the more immortal lines after a silence of almost six months, but it got his attention.

  Chapter 9

  He turned on his heel, bat still in a crouch, so he was eye-level with her knees. When he glanced up, there was an unguarded moment, and some unidentifiable emotion flitted past Whatever it was, it was quickly overtaken and vanquished by wariness, a most un-Crow-like expression.

  "Tess Monaghan," he said flatly, in the tone of someone diagnosing a rash to which he was prone.

  "Hi, Crow. Only I hear it's Ed these days. Sometimes Eddie."

  "Eduardo in these environs." He stood up, sticking his hands in his pockets, lest she try to reach for one.

  "They called you Crow back there?" This was Emmie. Tess kept expecting her to move forward, to stake her claim with an arm around Crow's waist, or a hand in the small of his back, but her interest was polite at best. She didn't even seem to expect an answer to her question, and Crow didn't give her one.

  "This isn't what I do," he told Tess.

  "You have another job?"

  "I mean—" He waved his arm at the emptying room. "Wham songs, for Christ's sake. Boy George, Culture Club. You spin me right 'round."

  "Don't forget Manic Mondays, 'Til Tuesday Tuesdays, and it's Friday, I'm in love," Emmie put in, singing the last, the title of a Cure song, one that a Baltimore radio station, in a display of great originality, had been playing every Friday for almost a decade. "We're still working on themes for Wednesdays and Thursdays."

  "But if we ever move to the seventies room, we always have the Bay City Rollers to fall back on," Crow said. "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night! S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!"

  There was something nervous in their chatter, like children who had done something wrong, and were still trying to assess if Mommy knew.

  "So what brings you to the Alamo City?" Crow asked. "A convention of—what are you now, anyway?"

  As if he didn't know she was a licensed investigator. Then again, his letter had come to Tyner's office, not hers. Suddenly, she was angry that he didn't know all she had accomplished over the past summer—the new business, getting on her feet financially, solving a murder case everyone else thought had been solved long ago.

  "My Toyota brought me here," she said. "Along with your parents' retainer."

  This bad the desired effect. "My parents hired you? I'm 24-fucking-years old and my parents are paying people to come look for me just because I don't want to take their checks anymore? They're only proving my point—I have to disappear if I'm ever going to be truly independent. What more do I have to do? Leave the country? Change my name? As for hiring you—well, that's beyond insulting."

  "I happen to be a pretty good investigator, as evidenced by my ability to find you in three days in a state where I didn't know one goddamn person."

  "How did you find us, anyway?" This was Emmie, and although she spoke in the same spaced-out, affectless tone, she couldn't quite conceal her interest in Tess's answer.

  "I found Gary, Crow's old drummer, in Austin. He told me you had left Austin for Twin Sisters. That led me to Marianna Barrett Conyers's place, and that led me to Marianna Barrett Conyers."

  "My godmother would never speak to some stranger," Emmie said with swift conviction. "Especially not about me."

  "She didn't tell me much about you. In fact, I think she led me on a bit of a wild-goose chase." Tess was remembering how deep Marianna had dug into her pile of newspapers, providentially finding one almost a month old. She had to have known Little Girl in Big Trouble had already taken on a new incarnation. Obviously, she wanted Tess to run into a dead-end at Primo's, or at least a cul-de-sac.

  "Marianna worries about me," Emmie said. "She worries about everything."

  "Funny. She didn't seem too concerned that I went to Twin Sisters to find Crow, and discovered a dead body instead."

  Ignorance, although a natural state for much of the population, is incongruously tough to fake. But Emmie and Crow seemed truly stunned by this information. His mouth gaped a little, and he stole a quick look at Emmie, who was staring at Tess in wide-eyed dismay. Tess, now used to the dim light of the eighties room, saw for the first time how blue Emmie's eyes were, as blue as the flowers on the postcard Crow had sent his parents. Blue-bonnets. But you didn't notice the eyes so much as the shadows under them. Not bags, just shadows, dark as bruises. Strangely, they only made her more beautiful.

  "A body?" she asked. "At Marianna's place? But we haven't—it couldn't…"

  "We haven't been there for weeks," Crow put in. "Weeks and weeks. We stayed there after we left Austin, before we found a place to crash in San Antonio. It had the advantage of being free, but it was a little far to commute once we started getting gigs down here."

  A young Mexican-American security guard came over, carrying a cup of water. "I thought you might be thirsty, Miss Sterne."

  She took the glass without looking at him, her gaze still fixed on Tess. "Thanks, Steve. I sounded like crap, didn't I?"

  "Oh no, you were great," he assured her. "Better than ever. You need anything else?"

  "I could use a smoke. A joint would be better."

  "Not in here," the guard said a little nervously. He wasn't much older than Emmie—perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six—and he had a moon-round face shiny with sweat "Remember, the manager said—"

  "Relax, Steve, I don't have any contraband on me. I'm going downstairs to the main bar, so I can buy a pack off the bartender. Do we have time?"

  The question was for Crow. "Sure," he said. "No rush."

  She jumped off the stage, landing lightly, thr
eading her way quickly through the crowd as if worried someone might try to stop her. The security guard watched her go, then retreated into the backstage shadows.

  "So what are you going to do?" Crow asked. "Call my parents, tell them where I am?"

  "That's what they paid me for."

  "Give me a week. I'll call them a week from today if you don't tell them that you found me."

  "That doesn't seem right somehow. They're worried about you, all they want to know is you're all right."

  "And all I want is a chance to prove I can take care of myself," Crow countered. "What's seven days in the scheme of things? Look, I promise. You can go home, and I'll check in with them next Saturday. I bet you're missing Baltimore already, aren't you? Missing home, and all your little routines. Besides, Esskay's probably pretty lonesome."

  "Esskay's not even two mites from here, snoring at a motel on Broadway."

  "Really? I wouldn't have minded seeing her."

  The implication was clear that he did mind seeing Tess.

  "I could ask you the same thing, you know. What's seven days? Why can't your parents know now that you're safe and sound?"

  Crow rolled his eyes, as if maddened that he had to explain himself to her. "There's a guy from a record company, someone who's interested in the band. He's coming in for the All Soul festival and he's going to listen to our real music, in this after-hours place we play. It would be nice to call home with good news."

  "What if he doesn't sign you?" The question came out crueller than she had intended. She couldn't help being skeptical. Then again, Emmie had been offered a record contract once before, according to Marianna. Maybe she wouldn't be so reluctant to leave Texas, now that she had Crow at her side.