"What if she's dead, Jack?"
"Then... I don't know. We chase it down. We get the damn story."
I'm not fooling Emma one bit. She knows I'm rattled.
"Besides the widow, you have any idea where all this might lead? Why people are dying and disappearing?"
"Give me some time," I say.
"A rock singer who hasn't been heard from in years, an out-of-work piano player—"
It sounds as if she's losing her nerve. I tell her we can't give up now. Especially now.
Emma says, "I just don't want anything awful to happen to you. I'm sorry but that's the truth."
She locks on with the jade-green eyes. I hear myself saying, "I wonder who'd write my obituary."
"Write it yourself, smart-ass. We'll keep it in the can."
"All right, but I'll need a good quote from you. Being my boss and all."
"Fine," says Emma. " 'Jack Tagger was a deeply disturbed individual—' "
"—'but a gifted and much-admired reporter. All of us in the newsroom will miss him terribly—' "
"—'for about five minutes—' " Emma re-interjects.
" 'Especially Emma Cole, since she never got to sleep with him and heard he was absolutely spectacular... ' "
"Agghh!" She slaps my arm and pokes me with an elbow and now we're sort of wrestling in the lunch booth, laughing and holding each other loosely. It's nice, bordering on comfortable. Who besides Evan would have imagined—me and my bold plans! The most casual of flirtations and, instead of trying to save Emma, I'm now trying to seduce her. Or hoping to be seduced. In any case, questions of character could be raised.
Emma is saying she phoned her father and told him about the Jimmy Stoma story and Janet's disappearance. He told her to be careful, told her to stay in the newsroom and leave the hairy stuff to the reporters. She says she got mildly annoyed, and I tell her not to take it the wrong way. If I were her dad, I'd have given the same advice.
"Let's talk about something else," Emma says.
"All right. Now don't get upset, but lately I've been having lascivious thoughts about you. And I mean 'lascivious' in the healthiest and most wholesome sense."
"In other words, you want to have sex," she says. "I haven't made up my mind about that yet. Let's try another subject."
"Fair enough. How about this: I no longer have a frozen lizard in my refrigerator."
"Oh?"
"Ever since the night of my burglary. I used it to clobber the guy."
"You're not serious."
"Oh yes. This was one jumbo lizard, too. I'm hoping it messed him up real good."
Emma says, "What's wrong with a good old-fashioned handgun?"
"Hell, anybody can defend themselves with one of those."
Upon returning to the newsroom I find a message on my desk from Griffin, who doesn't believe in e-mail. The coffee-stained note is scrawled in pencil, entirely in capital letters:
COPS DIDN'T GO TO THRUSH HOUSE AFTER 911 BECAUSE SHE'D CALLED THE DAY BEFORE + TOLD THEM NOT TO. SAID IT WAS DRUNK BOYFRIEND WHO TORE UP THE PLACE + IT WAS OVER + SHE DIDN'T WANT TO PRESS CHGS. IF U NEED MORE, LET ME KNOW. G.
When I show the note to Emma, she exclaims: "So she is alive!"
I'm not so optimistic. Janet never spoke of having a boyfriend. She mentioned her ex-husband and her pervo Web-crawlers but no particular guy in her life.
"Maybe she's all right," I tell Emma, "or maybe these phone calls are being made by someone pretending to be her."
"Like who?"
"The widow Stomarti springs to mind. Young Evan's going to do some sniffing around."
Emma emits a worried peep. "Evan? Our Evan?"
20
The kid's name is Dominic Dominguez but he goes by Dommie. His mother leads us to the inner sanctum.
"G'bye," Dommie calls out, having heard us coming down the hall.
His mother knocks lightly. "It's Juan Rodriguez, honey. He had an appointment, remember?"
"What's he got on?" Dommie inquires from behind the door.
Juan has forewarned me that the kid is quirky and short-fused, so I should lay off the wisecracks.
"A Ralph Lauren shirt," Dommie's mother reports, "a nice pale blue. And no neckwear, sweetheart."
The kid has a healthy phobia about grownups in neckties. My Jack Webb model is at the cleaner's. Juan removed his in the car.
"Come on in," Dommie says.
Before slipping away, his mother touches Juan's sleeve. "Would you mind asking if he's ready for din-din?"
Inside Dommie's room it feels about ninety-seven degrees because of all the electronics. There's a low-grade static hum that sounds like one of those coin-operated bed vibrators. I know next to nothing about computers but clearly Dommie is loaded for bear. Walled in by hardware, he toils intently at one of several PCs, his bony back to die door.
Juan says, "Hey, buddy."
The kid doesn't turn around. "Gimme a minute," he mumbles. "Who's that with you?"
"My friend Jack. The one I told you about on the phone."
"Yojack."
"Hi, Dommie."
The kid's speed-shifting a joystick for a video game: dueling skateboarders, set to the vocal stylings of Anthrax. Juan glances my way and shrugs. There's no place to sit. The bed is littered with open boxes: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple. I'm sweating like a stevedore.
Juan says, "Your mom wanted to know if you'd like some dinner."
"Not now!" The skateboarders on the kid's monitor are battling each other on a half-pipe, twirling and seesawing in midair. "Kill him!" Dommie rasps at the animated characters. "Kill that little bastard, Tony!"
I nudge Juan, whose face registers concern.
"Get outta here! Seriously, dudes!" Dommie screeches, apparently at us.
We retreat into the hallway. "You neglected to mention he was a psychopath," I whisper to Juan.
"He's just a little high-strung."
From inside the kid's bedroom we hear a feral yelp, then a sharp crack that sounds like a gun. I lunge for the doorknob but Juan snags my arm. Moments later Dommie's standing there, cool as ice. Now I can see he's wearing Oakley cutaways, baggy surf shorts and an oversized Ken Griffey Jr. jersey. His black hair is buzzed in wedding-cake layers, and a gold stud glints in one pale nostril. He weighs all of eighty-five pounds. He motions us back into his bedroom, where I notice a chemical tinge in the air. Dommie has shot out the tube of his PC with a Daisy pellet rifle. For now he seems at peace.
He glides his chair over to a working monitor, a raspberry-colored Mac. "Dudes," he says, "it's your lucky day."
Juan smiles hopefully. "You cracked the hard drive?"
"Like an egg. But everything was passworded, yo, so it took a while."
"And what was the secret word?"
" 'Detox'!" Dommie chirps. "Now pay attention"—the kid's fingers are flying over the keyboard—"here's a directory of all the files. I'll open one so you can see what it looks like."
The screen brightens with several rows of oscillating waves.
"They're all like that?" I ask.
"What else," says the kid.
"Can't you convert it to text?"
The kid looks at Juan as if to ask: How'd you hook up with this imbecile?
Juan says, "Jack can barely work a car radio. You've got to make things real simple for him, Dommie."
The kid is holding both hands in the air, like a doctor scrubbed for surgery. His fingers haven't quit moving, though, flitting across invisible keys.
"Okay," he says, "in the beginning was Pro Tools. That's software, dudes. High-end software. Lucky I had it, otherwise I couldn't read what's on this drive."
I say, "Dommie, please. Tell me what we're looking at."
The kid reaches for the mouse and guides the arrow to one of the wavy horizontal bands. Then he double-clicks and leans back, pointing to a speaker. "Listen tight," he says.
Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Pause. Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
&nbs
p; "What is it?"
"The file name is DRoysteroi," the kid says.
"Yeah, but what is it?"
"Dudes, come on. It's music."
Dommie shuts it down and spins around to face us. "This hard drive you brought me, it's all sessions. What they call a master. That gorky-gork I just played for you is the bass drum part for a cut called 'Cindy's Oyster,' somethin' like that. If you want I can pull up the guitar track, harmonica, vocals—it's all there."
"Only one song?" I ask.
The kid chortles. "Try, like, thirty. Some are already mixed down, some are still in pieces. I didn't sit through all of it because it's not my thing. Plus it would take, like, days."
Juan says, "Dommie's into rap—"
"Nuh-ugh, hip-hop," the kid protests.
"He mixes original stuff for some of the club DJs."
"Yeah, that's how come I can afford Pro Tools," Dommie says. "It's radical bad. Sixty-four tracks. No hiss, no wow, no flutter. Plus I've got AutoTune so it's always on key, even if some stone-deaf mother is singing. State of the art, dudes. Everybody's got it."
"Not us," I say.
"State of the art. Wave of the future. Reel-to-reel be dead and gone," the kid zooms on. "This program can run off a Power Book—know what that means? You can mix a whole record on a laptop, yo, and it's cleaner'n twenty-four tracks of tape. Serious, man."
Juan says, "Jack wants to hear everything on that hard drive. Every single cut."
"Ha, I pity your white ass," says Rapmeister Dommie, twelve going on twenty-nine. It's good that he's wearing sunglasses; I believe I'd rather not see the size of his pupils. He returns to the Mac, closes down Pro Tools and starts diddling with the plug-in board. When he spins around again, the hard drive box is in his hands. He thrusts it at Juan's chest and says, "Hey, they're only eight games out of first."
"Anything's possible, Dommie."
"I really like that rookie shortstop. What a gun, huh?"
"Yeah, and he can actually hit a slider once in a while." From his pocket Juan digs out a couple of tickets to see the Marlins play the Mets. "Hey, buddy, where could Jack listen to all this stuff you found for us?"
"In his car. Duh."
Laughing, the kid stacks a tall pile of CDs on my lap. "I burned these myself, no charge. I'll print out a file directory so you'll sorta know what you're hearing."
"Thank you, Dommie," I say.
"Did my mom say what was for dinner? Better be macaroni and cheese or I'm not leavin' outta this room. It's Tuesday, right?"
"Monday," Juan says.
Something beeps. The kid pulls a pager out of his surfer shorts, glances at the message and snorts. "Douche bag."
"Dommie," I say.
"Kraft macaroni and cheese. Serious, man. Go tell her."
"The music on this hard drive, what kind of—if you had to describe it... "
The kid jeers. "Folk rock. Country rock. Folk country7—I dunno whatcha call it. My folks'd probably like it but not me. See, I'm strictly into a street sound."
"Ah, the street."
"Strictly."
Dommie is stashing the pellet rifle under his bed so that his parents won't find it. I can't look at Juan for fear of busting out laughing. I, too, kept a pellet gun beneath my bed when I was twelve. However, I also had a pet snake, an arrowhead collection, a homemade basketball hoop and three shelves full of books in my room. Dommie's universe exists largely inside electronic boxes; his games, his reading, his music. I wonder when he last went out to run around in the sunshine. I wonder if he owns a mitt and a bat, or if all he knows about baseball comes from chat rooms and video games.
Then I remember that my own pellet gun was employed chiefly to raise welts on the broad pimply shoulders of one Buster Walsh, a teenage neighbor who occasionally beat me up at the school bus stop. For revenge I'd climb a mossy old oak at the end of our street and snipe at Buster on his way home from wrestling practice. He'd hop around, bleating and slapping spastically at himself as if he were being dive-bombed by hornets. I'd lie low for a week or two, then nail him again when his guard was down. Plinking him was my entertainment, arguably more fiendish than Dommie's impulsive assault on an inanimate computer component. In other words, I'm not the most reliable authority on who's normal and well adjusted.
"If not macaroni then a cheeseburger," Dommie is instructing Juan. "Medium rare. Go tell her, okay? And if she asks about the bang she heard, tell her it was you or Jack that accidentally broke the PC. Okay?"
"No problem," Juan says.
"Don't worry, she won't do nuthin'."
"Thanks for your help," I tell the kid. "Have fun at the ball game."
"I'm taking a lobster net for foul balls," Dommie says brightly. "If I catch one I'm signing Mike Piazza's name and selling it for big bucks on eBay."
"Thattaboy." I flash him a thumbs-up.
Emma is worried about using Evan, but he's perfect: He looks exactly like a delivery boy, guileless and spacey. After a short strategy session I gave him twenty bucks and dispatched him to Cleo's favorite gourmet deli for subs and pasta. He should be calling from her place within the hour. Meanwhile I studiously listen to the CDs that Dommie made from the mystery hard drive.
Jimmy Stoma's unfinished opus.
The songs are in strands, but I can almost imagine how they're supposed to sound when woven together. For a fan it's strange to come upon a bare guitar track or a detached piano; free-floating background harmonies—I'm betting it's the lovely Ajax and Maria, whom I met at the funeral; or Jimmy himself taking three or four unaccompanied passes at the lyrics. Astoundingly, all those years of shrieking like a banshee with the Slut Puppies didn't shred his vocal cords. He sounds good on these recordings.
At first I wasn't looking forward to sitting through hours of raw cuts, but it's been interesting to hear the songs evolve—and instructive. On an early vocal of "Cindy's Oyster" (filed as V4oystio), Jimmy began the third verse this way:
The girl who saved her pearl for me
Showed it to the world on MTV...
Obviously a sly dig at his young bride, the former Cynthia Jane Zigler. In a subsequent version Jimmy dropped the caustic pose in favor of a leer:
The girl who saved her pearl for me
Keeps it shiny between her knees...
And by the last cut of the song (Vyoystioall), the line had been altered once more:
The girl who saved her pearl for me
Keeps it hidden in a cold black sea...
He was no Robert Zimmerman, but James Bradley Stomarti knew how to have fun with lyrics. It's the only reference to Cleo Rio that I've heard so far on any of the discs. While she might not have liked the song, I doubt she would have been moved to murder Jimmy and then Jay Burns in order to gain possession of the recording.
Yet, as young Loreal so sagely observed, it's the music business. Maybe Cleo is a paranoid, egomaniacal kook. Maybe she couldn't bear the idea of seeing a snarky column item pegging her as the inspiration for "Cindy's Oyster." Or maybe she couldn't stand the thought of her husband getting pop ink at her expense.
These theories rest on several wobbly assumptions: one, that Cleo heard the song; two, that she got the point of the song; three, that she believed Jimmy would actually finish it; and, four, that a legitimate record label would put it out.
Unfortunately, "Cindy's Oyster" is the closest thing to a motive I've found, which is to say that the story of Jimmy Stoma's death is a long way from making the newspaper.
Now the phone is ringing and I snatch at it, expecting Evan on the other end.
"Has he called in yet? Is he okay?" It's Emma, the mother hen.
"Not yet. But I'm sure he's all right."
"Jack, I don't like this. I'm coming over."
"Fine, but don't be shocked if the place is crawling with strumpets and wenches."
"I'm serious. If anything happens to him—"
"Bring whipped cream," I tell her. "And an English saddle."
Like many poli
ce departments, our sheriff's office tapes all incoming calls, even those on non-emergency lines. In Florida such tapes are a public record, which means access must be provided upon request to any member of the unwashed citizenry, including news reporters. The quality of such tapes is uniformly awful, and sure enough, Janet's alleged phone call to the Beckerville substation sounded like it came from a Ukrainian coal mine. The voice seemed to belong to a woman, but I couldn't have told you whether it was Janet Thrush, Cleo Rio or Margaret Thatcher. Between fuzz-pops and crackles the voice can be heard saying not to worry about the commotion at her house—her drunken boyfriend wigged out, nobody got hurt and things are under control.