“You want a beer or anything?” Barragan asked.
“Not allowed,” Carella said, “but thanks.”
“Mind if I have one? I’ve been practicing the past three hours, my throat’s kinda dry.”
“No, go right ahead,” Carella said.
He waited in the foyer. In the kitchen, he saw Barragan opening first the refrigerator door, and then a can of beer. When he came back into the foyer again, he was carrying the beer can in one hand and a glass in the other. Together, they went into the living room and sat side by side on the couch. Through the large rain-streaked living room windows, Carella could see in the distance the elevated Calm’s Point Expressway, bustling with traffic that edged slowly through the heavy rain.
Barragan poured beer into his glass, took a deep swallow, said, “Ahhh, good,” and then put the can on the floor, and began sipping more leisurely from the glass. “What do you want to know?” he said.
“You played in a band years ago with George and—”
“Yes, I did,” Barragan said.
“—and his brother Santo, is that right?”
“Santo, yeah. He played bongos. We had Georgie on guitar, me on flute, Santo on bongos, and a guy named Freddie Bones on the steel drum. That’s his real name, Freddie Bones. Black guy from Jamaica. It wasn’t such a bad combo. I heard worse,” Barragan said, and smiled. His teeth looked startlingly white under the thick black mustache.
“I want to know what happened seven years ago,” Carella said.
“When Santo split, do you mean?”
“Did he split? Or did something happen to him?”
“Who knows?” Barragan said, and shrugged. “I’m assuming he split of his own accord. I mean, Georgie checked with the police later, and there was no kind of report about anything happening to Santo, so I figure he just decided to go, and he went.”
“Where?” Carella said.
“I don’t know where. California? Mexico? Europe? Who knows where somebody goes when he decides to go?”
“Why’d he decide to go?”
“Same reason the band broke up later.”
“What was that?”
“Too much star power. Too much Georgie Chadderton. I hate to speak bad about the dead, but the man was a pain in the ass, you dig? A full-time ego trip. Thought the rest of us were there just to make him look good. I mean, shit, man, I’m a fair flute player, and Freddie was terrific on that steel drum, he could make that thing sound like a fuckin orchestra. So Georgie takes all the solos. On a guitar, no less. Like, man, unless you’re really outstanding on the guitar, all it’s good for is laying down chords for instruments that can run the melody line. You find very few guitar players can do justice to a melody. So here’s a band with a flute and a steel drum in it — now what are those two instruments for, huh, man? For melody, am I right? Well, Georgie had us playing riffs behind his half-ass guitar stuff. Whang, whang, whang, and behind him is me doing tootle-ee-oo-doo over and over, and Freddie hitting two-note chords on the steel drum. For the birds, man. We finally had enough of it.”
“When was this? When did the band break up?”
“A year after Santo split, I guess it was.”
“Tell me what happened that night.”
“That was a long time ago, man. I’m not sure I can remember it all.”
“As much as you can remember,” Carella said. “First of all, when was it, exactly? Can you remember the date?”
“Sometime in September,” Barragan said. “A Saturday night the first or second week in September, I’m not sure.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“It was raining, I remember that. The band used to have this VW van we traveled in, maroon and white, we used to take it everywhere we played. The gig that night—”
“Who owned the van?”
“We all did. We chipped in for it. When the band broke up, Freddie bought us out.”
“Sorry, go ahead.”
“Like I said, it was raining very hard that night. The gig was at the Hotel Palomar in Isola — downtown, you know the place? Near the Palomar Theater? Very big hotel, very classy affair. We were the relief band, we were playing a lot of Latin shit in those days, rumbas, sambas, cha-chas, the whole bag. This was before Georgie got on his calypso trip. The other band — I forget the name of it — Archie Cooper? Artie Cooper? Something like that. Big band, ten or twelve pieces. This was a big fancy-dress ball — costumes, you know? A benefit of some kind, I forget now what it was — multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, one of the two. Georgie got us the relief gig through a guy playing second trumpet on the Cooper band — Archie was it? Arnie? Georgie’d done the horn man some favors a while back, and when the kid heard they needed a Latin band as relief, he thought of Georgie and gave him a ring. It was a good gig. We used to play some good gigs when we were together. Well, like I told you, I’ve heard worse bands.”
The rain lashed the living room windows. Carella kept staring at the dissolving panes of glass, listening to Barragan as he told now about the rain on the night seven years ago, rain coming down in buckets as the musicians, the gig over, their instruments packed, ran for the parked VW van at two-thirty in the morning, Freddie Bones with a newspaper tented over his head, his steel drum hanging from a strap on his left shoulder and banging against his hip as he ran through the rain, Georgie cursing and complaining that his new guitar case would get wet, Barragan himself laughing and running, slipping and almost falling, his flute case tucked under his raincoat to protect it. He was the one who slid open the door of the van, he was the one who climbed in first, George getting in behind the wheel and still complaining about the rain. Bones lighted a cigarette. Georgie started the engine, and then wiped off the windshield with his gloved hand, and looked toward the revolving doors at the front of the hotel, where men and women were coming out under the canopy and looking for taxis. “Where’s Santo?” Georgie said, and the three of them looked at each other, and Barragan said, “He was right behind me when we came out of the John,” and Georgie said, “So where’s he now?” and wiped the windshield again, and again looked toward the revolving doors. “He’ll be here in a minute,” Bones said. “Calm down, why don’t you? You’re always up there on the ceiling someplace.”
They waited another ten minutes, and then Georgie got out of the van and went back into the hotel to look for his brother. He himself was gone for ten minutes before Barragan and Bones decided to go inside to look for him. “This fuckin hotel is swallowing up the whole Chadderton family tonight,” Bones said, and both men laughed and went through the revolving doors, and then upstairs to what was called the Stardust Ballroom, which wasn’t the Grand Ballroom, but a smaller ballroom on the mezzanine floor of the hotel. There were still some guests around, laughing and talking, but most of them had split when the musicians began packing. Barragan and Bones went into the ballroom, and talked to a sax player on the Cooper band — Harvey Cooper, that was it! — and asked him if he’d seen Georgie around, and he said last he’d seen of Georgie was him going into the men’s room down the hall. So they went down the hall to the men’s room, Bones making a crack about maybe both Santo and Georgie having fallen in, and Barragan laughed, and they pushed open the door to the men’s room, but Georgie wasn’t in there, and neither was Santo. They found Georgie outside the hotel’s side entrance, talking to the doorman there, asking him about Santo. The doorman hadn’t seen anybody come out carrying a set of bongo drums. George described his brother. The doorman hadn’t seen anybody answering that description, either.