Death leaped and whirled, screamed and strutted, faked a split, rolled around on the planks as Taxes, Blow Me Baby’s drummer, laid down an uncertain riff on his Tama Star Classics metal-head big boy kit that was to die for as far as heavy metal bands were concerned. Four K just for the drums, dude, another K for the Zyldajian cymbals that he was now clashing with reckless abandon and no recognizable beat.
Death did a one-legged bounce-bounce-bounce across the stage to nestle up against Love on the Gibson Flying V rhythm guitar, the so-called teen dream special that ran $1,500 and was so favored by aspiring rock bands.
The scrubbed their axes cheek-to-cheek. They looked enough alike to be brothers, as did all the members of the band, who had started playing together two years ago in high school — though it was a generic, not genetic, similarity.
The only variation was Hate, across the stage working his Fender Precision Bass (a mere $800, but since none of the equipment was paid for anyway, what the hell?), who had long blond hair down to the middle of his back, while the other three had long black hair.
“That bitch is mine!” Death was yelling of the pimple-faced girl in the front row.
“I got her buddy, man!” shouted Love.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. What else did you form a band for? Death spun away to the middle of the stage, leaped up into the air splay-legged again, banged to earth like a sun-singed Icarus for the next verse of “Euridice” (he had seen the name on some old black-and-white French movie, Orfée et Eurydice, in the video store, and pronounced it Euro-dyce:
O’B began working his way through the sea of nonstop bopping bodies and waving hands raised arena style above the bouncing heads toward the backstage area and the dressing room assigned to Blow Me Baby. He figured he was so bizarre for Eureka, even at the Rainbow, that it would get him through the security groupies guarding the dressing room.
Thank God. Too much of this would drive him back to drink, sure as Death or Taxes. Or, come to that, Love and Hate.
Blow me baby. Big-time. Yeah!
Rosencranktz and Guildenstern had just told a filthy joke, and Ballard was on his feet; the four of them had been sitting in Amalia’s living room.
“Listen, you fuckers, we don’t have to—”
“Yeah, actually, you do,” said Guildenstern.
“You’ve been turning up just too many goddam places in this investigation,” said Rosenstern.
“So siddown an’ shudda fuck up.”
Ballard was suddenly out of anger; he sat meekly down again. This was not the Larry Amalia had come to know and... well, maybe not love, but... but why was he being so passive?
“I don’t know anything about the Georgi Petlaroc murder and I don’t want to know anything about it.”
Guildenstern leaned toward Amalia. “What do you know about Petrock’s murder?” he asked her in an affable voice.
“Just like Larry. Nothing.”
“What were you doing when he got hit?”
“You asked me that before. Then I was in bed with a guy. Now, I still was.”
“What was... is... his name, Ms. Pelotti?”
“I told you that before, too.”
Ballard knew they wanted him to lose control, but he couldn’t. Thank God for martial-arts training; the successful blow was the one stopped a millimeter away from living flesh. Three years ago he wouldn’t have had that discipline.
One of them had gotten out a notebook, licked the tip of an old-fashioned pencil, and was writing down the name she was giving him as if he didn’t already have it down somewhere else.
“And where can we get in touch with him, Ms. Pelotti?”
“I don’t know, but he’s signed up for picket duty at the St. Mark tomorrow afternoon.” She added, “What did you mean about Larry showing up at too many places in this investigation?”
Rosenkrantz cleared his throat and winked at Ballard.
“Well, this afternoon we go talk with the partner of a possible missing witness in the Petrock murder, as sexy a little blonde as you’d want to see, and what do we find? Good old Larry Ballard there looking like he’s just about to dip the old wick. We come around here tonight to talk to you, as sexy a brunette as you’d want to see, about a possible missing witness in the Petrock murder, and what do we find? Good old Larry Ballard again — looking like he just did dip the old wick.”
“Now I ask you,” said Guildenstern, “is that a suspicious circumstance or what?”
“I told you this afternoon I was trying to find out what happened to Danny Marenne. I met Amalia when I dropped around to Danny’s union to see if anybody had any ideas of where he was.”
“That you did,” said Rosenkrantz in a suddenly thoughtful, albeit not bad W. C. Fields imitation, “that you did indeed.”
As if to some secret signal, the two policemen were on their feet. They looked at Larry and nodded together.
“We’ll come up with where we’ve seen you, pal.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Ballard.
They looked over at Amalia, who seemed to be smoldering, and grinned their nastiest grins — which were very nasty indeed. Then they went on down the stairs without any other goodbye. They paused on the sidewalk. It was a clear, chilly night.
They pointed at one another.
“A bite to eat...”
“Then Mood Indigo.”
Upstairs, Ballard turned to Amalia with his arms opened wide. She stepped toward him, eyes intense with a strange light.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything to stop them when they were going after you, but I’ve got a situation that you don’t know about, and—”
“I know about it now,” said Amalia silkily.
And swung a totally unforeseen roundhouse right that knocked him right down the stairs, thud, clump, crunch, oww-w-w...
Ballard landed in a crumpled heap against the inside of the front door. Amalia yelled down the stairwell after him, “And don’t bother even trying to drag your sorry ass back up here again, ever, maledetto stronzo!”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Every stool along the stick was full, and half the tables besides; Bart Heslip had not seen it that way before on a weeknight. Another difference: Mood Indigo’s crowd was usually whitebread except for Sleepy Ray, but tonight it was half black.
The stitches in Bart’s knife-slashed shoulder were itching. Supposed to mean you were healing up. He twisted the caps off three longneck beers, poured out a brace of shots of the house blended, put them all on a tray, and swung open the serving arm of the bar to take them to one of the tables.
“Hear Mood Indigo is going back to live entertainment,” said one of the men he was serving.
He was as plum black as Bart himself, but bulky enough to be a 49er defensive lineman. Hell, maybe he was. But if so, what was he doing in a lousy joint like this?
“Was a sister in here beltin’ the blues last night,” said the man’s lady, who was the color of chocolate milk and had on vivid red lipstick and a gold-colored wide-shouldered dress and wore her hair in a 1940s style Bart recognized from old films.