Bird Lives! Page 9

  I give her a mock salute. She shepherds me through security, and we go up to the seventeenth floor. This time it’s not Wendell’s office but a different room that’s set up with several agents managing recording equipment, some small tables, and the whiteboard.

  Wendell Cook is talking with one of the agents, and Ted Rollins is looking over some computer printouts. They both turn to us when Andie and I come in.

  Cook comes over and is almost consoling as he shakes my hand. “Don’t worry, Evan, we’re really on this, and with your help we hope to wrap it up very quickly.”

  “Thanks, I feel better already.”

  “I know,” Cook says, picking up my sarcasm. “But we do know what we’re doing. If it turns out the caller is the killer, we have a great advantage in this one.”

  “What?”

  “You,” Cook says. “I think Andie will agree. Granted, this is not the usual scenario, there are some different twists, but we’ve also never had someone with the inside knowledge you have.”

  I look at Andie. “He’s right, Evan. The more you help, the quicker we can reach a solution. You know things it wouldn’t even occur to us to ask, so jump in when something comes up, no matter how small. This is a two-way street. We’ll be as forthcoming as possible.”

  I can translate that on my own. The FBI will decide what and if I need to know.

  “Okay,” Cook says. “Let’s get started. The first thing we want to do is go over the transcript of the call.”

  We gather around the table, and Andie passes out copies. When I get mine, I look at it, surprised to see my own words in print. “Look this over,” Andie says. “If there’s anything that doesn’t look right, tell us.”

  It’s like the first reading of a play. I scan through it slowly, the sound of the voice ringing in my head as the words come into focus. Andie or someone has typed it up in script format. All the lines are numbered.

  1 E.H.: Hello? Hello? Anybody there? (music playing, John Coltrane, “Good Bait.” Composer: Tadd Dameron)

  2 E.H.: Who is this?

  3 Voice: Oh, you know who it is. This is a test, Evan. Who’s that playing?

  4 E.H.: John Coltrane.

  My eyes go back to the first line. “How did you know Tadd Dameron wrote ‘Good Bait’?” I ask Andie.

  “I bought the CD last night on the way home.”

  “Okay, okay, enough with the music,” Rollins says. “Why didn’t you just hang up?”

  I glance up at Rollins. We’ve somehow come to an unspoken though probably temporary truce. “I don’t know. Doesn’t everybody do this? I thought maybe there was a bad connection—sometimes people are distracted for a few seconds when you answer the phone. Then I heard the music.”

  “What did you think then?” Cook wants to know.

  “I thought maybe I was going to hear some musician’s voice, someone playing music in the background when they called.”

  Cook nods, satisfied with my answer. We all turn back to the pages of transcript. I read it all the way through. “Yeah, I think that’s it.”

  “And you’re sure that was the sequence about the bird feathers? You didn’t maybe get smart and see if she knew about them, ask her, I mean?” Rollins asks.

  Andie jumps in quickly. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ted. Back off.”

  “Okay, okay,” Rollins says. “I thought we were going to check everything.”

  “No, Ted,” I say evenly. “This is the sequence.”

  “Okay,” Andie says. “We’re looking for voice inflection, speech patterns, and you’re the only one who knows about that. Does anything else come to mind? What about when she says, ‘Shut up and listen.’ What happened there?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She really sounded angry there. Her voice went up in pitch, and then there was a few seconds’ silence. When she came back, her voice was back to the original pitch. Like she’d taken the time to get control of herself.”

  Andie, Cook, and Rollins all exchange glances. Cook may be in charge, but he’s clearly deferring to Andie.

  “Can you characterize her voice in the rest of the conversation?” Andie looks up, shrugs, searching her mind for words “Was it sincere, flip, emotional, anything like that?”

  I lean back in my chair and think for a moment. “I have the impression she was smiling, amused, kind of a dreamlike quality, like she’d had a couple of drinks or was smoking grass.”

  “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” Rollins puts in.

  Somehow I manage to ignore him. “Except for the shut up part. Then at the end, when she said I was going to help her, it was, I guess you could say, earnest, determined.”

  “Good,” Andie says. “That helps a lot.” She makes some notes on her copy. “Now, for the big question. Any idea at all what she meant by that?”

  I don’t have to think about that one. “None. I don’t have a clue.”

  “And it wasn’t any voice you recognized. You’re sure of that.”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  We start over then, going through every word until I feel like a wrung-out sponge.

  Andie looks at me and then her watch. “Let’s take a break. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  On the way out, one of the technicians stops her and hands her a slip of paper. “You had two calls,” she says, catching me off guard. “Jeff Lasorda and Paul Westbrook.”

  I take the slip of paper from her. “How do you know that?”

  “We accessed your answering machine,” she says, as if it’s routine.

  “I need to answer these,” I say. “Jeff is my bass player, and Westbrook is the CD producer. What do I tell them? They’re probably calling about the news stories, and Westbrook probably wants to cancel the date.”

  Andie thinks for a moment. “Yes, answer them. Tell them—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing about what we’re doing, just that the press exaggerated your involvement, something like that.”

  “That might work with Jeff, but Westbrook is about to invest some money in me. He’s going to want to know if this is going to interfere with the record.”

  “Tell him not to worry. He’s a businessman. Tell him you were assisting the FBI in a very minor way.” Andie looks at me directly then. “We can help there, you know, intervene if necessary. I don’t want you to lose the recording date.”

  “Hold off on that,” I say. “I don’t want the FBI leaning on the guy I’m going to record for. Let me see what he says first.”

  “Okay, you handle it,” Andie says. “Use the phone in my office. I’ll bring us some coffee.”

  I call Jeff first, and it seems to work on him. I assure him the record is still on, we’ll rehearse again this week, and well, you know, the press.

  “Hey, man,” Jeff says. “That’s cool. You can call the album Misterioso.”

  “Think Monk already took that one, Jeff.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’ll think of something. Listen, if you need a place, you know, to get away from things, you can always crash here.”

  “Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it. I’ll be in touch.”

  Paul Westbrook isn’t so easy when I call him.

  “Listen, Evan, I don’t believe everything I read or see on TV either, but the FBI?”

  “It’s all been blown out of proportion, Paul. They just wanted some information about the musicians who were killed. Did I know them, what kind of music did they play, that kind of thing.”

  “How were they killed? Stabbings, I think the papers said.”

  “I don’t know any more than you,” I say. “You know how the FBI is.”

  Westbrook relents, but he doesn’t sound totally convinced. “I just want you to be able to concentrate on the music without distractions.” He laughs. “Hell, it’s not the publicity. That might even help with marketing, you know?”

  I wonder what Westbrook would say if he knew I’d had a phone call from the killer herself.

  “Believe me, Paul, I wan
t the same thing,” I say. Andie comes in, carrying two cups of coffee. She sits them on her desk and hauls out the ashtray. She goes to the window and opens it, but I know she’s listening. “I’ll keep you up to date, but there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay, Evan. Thanks for getting back to me.”

  I hang up the phone and look at Andie.

  “Is he okay with things?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I think so. At least for now.” I take a sip of coffee and light a cigarette. “There’s someone else I want to ask you about.”

  “Natalie, right? She’s a very attractive woman.”

  “That’s what she says about you. Calls you the FBI babe.” Andie colors slightly.

  She grins and nods her head. “Well, that’s a first. Coming from Natalie, I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  “I’m just wondering…if this, the calls, continue, I don’t want her in any danger. We kind of halfway live together. She stays at my place a lot unless she’s really studying.”

  “Yeah, law school is tough. She was a cop for a while too, right?”

  “Santa Monica Police. She’s known Coop for a long time. He introduced us.”

  Andie taps her fingers on the desk. “Okay, you can give her the cell phone number, but if you need to”—she hesitates, looking for the right phrase—”spend time with her, do it in public.” She stops, flustered. “That didn’t come out right, did it? I don’t think she should stay with you until we see where we are. In the meantime, Wendell wants me to handle working with you when and if we get another call.”

  “Natalie is going to love that.”

  “I don’t think she’d like Ted much either.”

  “Trust me, she’d like Ted a lot better, but I wouldn’t.”

  We go back to the other room and spend another two hours going over the transcript until there doesn’t seem to be one more ounce of meaning that can be extracted. By two-thirty I’ve had enough, and from the looks of them, so has everyone else.

  “I guess that’s it for today,” Cook says.

  Rollins throws his pen down. “I don’t know, I think this is just somebody fucking with us.”

  “Wrong, Ted,” Andie says. “What about the bird feathers? Nobody knew about that except us and the killer.”

  “Horne knew.” He throws it out like a challenge, and I’m just tired and irritated enough to take him up on it.

  Andie starts to say something more, but I hold up my hand. “Rollins, the FBI must have been desperate when they hired you. Are you so stupid that you think I’d make up this call, get myself into all this, just so I could see the inside of the Federal Building? Don’t you think I hear every word of that conversation in my mind forever?”

  Rollins just sits there, looking at me. Andie and Cook are silent for a moment, and I catch the technicians across the room stopping to listen. Finally, Cook breaks through the hum of the air-conditioning.

  “Well, like I said, I guess that’s all for today.”

  “Thanks, Evan. This has been a big help,” Andie says.

  I go back downstairs and through the lobby doors. The demonstrators are gone, but some of the flyers have been dropped on the sidewalk. I head for my car, digging for my keys, anxious to call Natalie. When I insert the key, my hand freezes. It’s already unlocked.

  I open the door and see a piece of paper on the driver’s seat. It’s one of the flyers. I glance at it briefly and start to throw it away. But it’s the writing at the bottom of the page that suddenly grips my attention. The printing is done with a red felt-tip pen in a white space on the flyer.

  I take out my cell phone and use it for the first time. Andie picks up immediately. “Evan?”

  “Andie, you better come down to the parking garage. There’s something you need to see.”

  “On the way.”

  I light a cigarette and lean against my car. Wendell Cook was wrong.

  That’s not all for today.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On Coltrane’s Soultrane

  Jazz is always great Good Bait

  Tadd’s Long Gone—Delight

  “What the hell is that?” Ted Rollins asks, squinting over Andie’s shoulder at the flyer. She’s holding it carefully by one corner.

  “Do you know what haiku is?” Andie ignores Rollins and nods her head like she’s counting silently. She’s talking to me.

  “Isn’t it some kind of Japanese poetry?”

  “Did you touch it?” Rollins asks me. He looks like he wants to draw his gun.

  I roll my eyes. “No, Ted, it just flew into my hands by magic.”

  “Come on,” Andie says. “Let’s get this upstairs.”

  “Do you need me?” Andie stops, turns around, and looks at me like I’m crazy. “Just checking,” I say and follow her and Rollins back inside.

  We wait in her office for a fingerprint report, but she’s already copied the poem onto a notepad. My ashtray is still out, so I smoke while Andie is on the phone to the UCLA English department.

  While she’s put on hold, she tells me, “I’ve known this guy for quite a while. I want to check something.” She looks away and grabs a pencil. “Dr. Collier? It’s Andie Lawrence. I’m fine. Glad to hear it. Listen, I’ve got a quick question for you. What’s the format for a haiku?”

  I watch Andie as she listens, takes some notes, underlines the number 17. “Got it. Thanks so much,” she says. “No, I’m not studying poetry.” She laughs. “You too. Bye.”

  She hangs up the phone and counts the syllables in the poem again, marking each with her pencil. She looks at it for a moment, then drops the pencil on the desk and swivels toward me.

  “It is haiku,” she says. “Seventeen syllables and usually broken down into three-line patterns of five, seven, and five for each line. That’s exactly what we’ve got here.” She taps the pad again.

  “Well, so what? You look worried.”

  “I am. We’re dealing with someone extremely bright here.”

  “Why, because she can write a three-line poem about jazz? I don’t get it.”

  Andie shakes her head. “No, it’s not only that. Haiku form is taught in a lot of English classes. Haikus are usually about nature, but she’s able to use the pattern, incorporate dialogue from her phone call with you. Clever and very smart.” She taps the pad again, continues to look at the poem. “I recognize everything from the call. Coltrane, Soultrane, but what about the last line? Tadd’s long gone—Delight. Tadd is for Tadd Dameron, who wrote ‘Good Bait,’ but what about the long gone and the last word, delight?”

  “You’re right, she is clever,” I say. “Tadd Dameron is dead—long gone—and ‘Tadd’s Delight’ is—”

  “Also one of his compositions?” Andie looks up from the pad.

  “Exactly.” I stand by the window, looking out at the San Diego Freeway, choked with traffic, a narrow layer of yellow smog on the horizon. For once I wish I was out there, with nothing to worry about but getting home.

  “What about the title ‘Good Bait’? Does it have any significance? I mean, did Dameron have something in mind?” Andie asks.

  “Hard to tell. Sometimes a composer has someone or something—a word, a phrase—in mind with a title, but a lot of tunes are named after they’re recorded.”

  I remember seeing a documentary film about Charlie Parker. A very earnest interviewer asked him about the titles of several tracks he had recorded. Bird just smiled patiently and said, “I have no idea. Those tunes were named after I left the studio.”

  I crush out my cigarette and sit down again. “So what do you think she’s doing?” I ask Andie.

  “There’s the obvious connotation of good bait.”

  “Well, she’s on the same page as the FBI. Wendell’s plan worked just fine. I’m the bait, right?”

  “Maybe,” Andie concedes. “She’s showing off, for one thing. She wants us to know how smart and clever she is, how much she knows about jazz. The poem itself is to confirm the call, let you know she
’s still around and knows where you are.”

  “Great,” I say, “my car is not even safe in the FBI garage.”

  Before Andie can answer, there’s a knock on the door. “Come in,” Andie calls.

  A man in a short-sleeved shirt and tie and a brush cut opens the door and holds up a plastic bag with the flyer inside. “Zero, couple of smudges is all,” he says.

  Andie nods her head. “Thanks,” she says. He hands her the bag, glances at me, and goes out. “I didn’t expect any,” she says to me, “but at least we’ve got another little piece of information. It adds up quickly.”

  “Are you getting a picture of her now?”

  “Yeah, she’s not only clever, she’s a bit arrogant, and I don’t like that. She’s enjoying this. She wants someone to acknowledge her cleverness. That’s going to be you, Evan. You’re the link.”

  “Me?”

  “When she calls again, you’re going to have to keep her talking.”

  I leave Andie still pondering the poem at the Federal Building and drive aimlessly down Wilshire Boulevard toward the beach.

  By the time I reach Lincoln, I realize I’m famished and thirsty. I pull into a drive-through for a couple of tacos and the largest Coke they have. At 3rd Street, I stop for a paper at a corner news rack, then ease down the California Incline to the Pacific Coast Highway and start looking for a beach parking lot.

  I find an almost deserted lot and park close to the beach. Pulling up at the edge of the sand, I roll down the window and wolf down the empty calories, watching the surf roll in and the huge clouds on the horizon, feeling the glare of the sun, and breathing in the sea air.

  Having grown up here, I’ve always found the beach to be a special place for me to clear my head, get a perspective on things. I try to focus on songs and arrangements for the CD, but it’s no use. The voice, the call, and now, the poem, keep breaking in on any thoughts about music. I get out of the car—this time I remember the cell phone and make sure the call forwarding is on—dump the remains of my lunch in a trash can, sit on the concrete wall, and get a cigarette going. A few strollers pass by, nod, but it’s mostly noisy seagulls I have for company.