We got The Racketeers from Davey's father, by the way. He came in one day while we were rehearsing in Davey's living room, and remarked in his Deliberately Dense Parent mode, "This racket you're making ... is it supposed to be music?" Hence The Racketeers, imminently to become The Five Chord the moment Davey's father came up with yet another name for the band. This was after Katie had joined us, there were now five of us in the band. This time Davey's father was in his Learned Elder mode, explaining that rock bands play mostly in the key of G. and the five chord in the key of G is the D triad. That's D, F sharp, and A, if you'd like to try it on your accordion. So what Mr. Fames that's Davey's father's name, Anthony Fames, he sounds Dickensian, too, I just realized. Looked sort of Dickensian, for that matter. Anyway, what he was trying to do was convey the fact that this was a rock band, and there were five of us in it. The five chord, dig? And the five chord in the key of G. which is the key favored ...
"Forget it," Roselli said. "I guess you had to be there." He turned the nozzle of the hose, began spraying another section of lawn. "A nun, huh?" he said. "Who'd have expected it?”
"The Sisters of Christ's Mercy," Carella said.
"I mean ... it wasn't that she was wild or anything, quite the contrary. But a nun? I mean, come on. Katie?”
She may have looked like your kid sister, but this was the girl who wrote songs you could fry eggs on. Five-seven, weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, skinny as a wren, but nice breasts. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail that first time she sang for us, you never expected this sexy voice to come out of her mouth. Turned out she knew all the R&B repertoire, could do all the later rock stuff, too well, everything, for that matter. Pop, Broadway show tunes, you name it, Katie could sing it. I guess we all four of us fell in love with her that very first day. Summertime was just around the corner, this must've been April when we auditioned her.
I remember the booking agent Herbie sent us to wanted to know if the name of the band was supposed to be plural. Hymie Rogers, his name was, a short, fat guy with a cigar he kept chomping. "Is it The Five Chords ?" he wanted to know.
little pissed off that the guy hadn't understood tlae reference, a booking agent for rock bands, for Christ's sake! At the time, I felt this was a mistake on Davey's part, getting so agitated, I mean. I mean, we weren't Pink Floyd, we were a garage band with a girl singer whose voice could shatter concrete. Which, of course, the agent recognized the minute Katie opened her mouth.
Make a long story short, he booked us for "a summer tour of Dixie," as he called it, which meant we'd be following a club circuit that ran through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia before heading into Florida, where we'd play Tampa and St. Pete, and a town near the Everglades, and then back north again to end the tour in Calusa. Every rock band's dream tour, right? This was three years ago.
Well, let me see, I was twenty-five at the time. So that makes it ...
well, wait a minute, it was four years ago. That means I was only twenty-four. Jesus. We all had beards back then, all the guys on the band. Davey was exactly my age, give or take a few weeks. Tote was a little older. You ought to talk to him. I mean, he'd probably give you a different slant. He knew Katie better than any of us.
Anyway, we left the city here on the last day of June, for the beginning of the tour, a Fourth-of July-weekend gig in Richmond, Virginia. The way we traveled was in a sports utility wagon, a used Jeep actually that Davey had picked up cheap from a bass player leaving for a gig in London. There was plenty of room for the five of us plus the instruments, speakers, amps, all o It, lnslae the car.
Every night, we carried everything into whichever cheap motel we were staying at. Some of these towns we played, you wouldn't leave a stick of chewing gum in the car, no less instruments and equipment worth thousands of dollars.
A favorite joke of ours was "Are you sure the Beatles got started this way?" That was whenever anything went wrong. Like when we pulled up in front of a club called The Roadside Palace or some such and it turned out to be this ramshackle dive on the edge of a cliff. Or when we plugged in one night this was in Georgia some place and blew out every light in the club. The owner took a fit till we advised him to put candles on all the tables and find us some acoustic guitars and an upright piano, which for Georgia worked remarkably well, Katie singing all kinds of bluesy shit and all of us playing sort of hushed and reverential behind her, a kind of in time evening, if you dig. Then there was the time ... On and on, Roselli went, reminiscing about that summer tour four years ago, painting it in glowing terms while the sultry afternoon waned and the detectives worried about hitting heavy traffic going back into the city. Finally, he turned off the recitation and the hose.
"I hope I've been helpful," he said.
He hadn't.
He was afraid he might never do another burglary.
Burglary was his entire life. He truly enjoyed what he did, but now he was fearful that he might never frightened that day, he admitted it to himself now. And because he'd been so frightened, he hadn't done another job since. Nor had he baked any cookies. The one enjoyment was linked to the other, and all because of a clumsy accident he'd been deprived of both pleasures. All he could think was that the police would knock on his door at any moment.
They had to know he was the one who'd been in that apartment. He didn't know how they'd found out, but he knew they knew. Otherwise, why had all the television stories stopped? How come there was nothing more about The Cookie Boy? No cute little stories about the burglar who left behind chocolate chip cookies. He was sure the police were behind that. They'd been told to throw a blanket over any news release about him. Probably some trick to keep him complacent while they closed in. Any minute now, they'd knock on his door. Probably were questioning everyone in the neighborhood right this minute. Know anybody who bakes cookies? Tightening the net. See anybody who looks like this man? Did they have a composite drawing of him? Had someone seen him going in or coming out of the building that day? He tried to think of any mistakes he'd made in the apartment. Had he wiped everything clean? He couldn't remember. He usually did that because he knew his fingerprints were on file from his days in the army, but now he couldn't remember. That's because he'd been so frightened. Such a stupid encounter. He sometimes thought he should go to the police, tell them he hadn't killed anybody in that apartment, it was the woman wroo gone al the goddamn shooting, it was the woman who had the weapon! Had he somehow left fingerprints on it? No, his hands were over hers, she was the one with her finger on the trigger, she was the one who'd first, shot the boy and then shot herself. Maybe he should go to the police. Sure, how are you, they'd say, nice you stopped by.
That's two counts of felony murder, so long, fella, see you in a hundred years.
If only ... Well, look, there was no sense second-guessing this. What happened happened. He should have been more careful, he should have listened more intently, he shouldn't have taken a step into that goddamn apartment until he was dead certain nobody was in it. Had he left something behind? He didn't think so.
But had they been able to trace him somehow? Were they this very instant climbing the steps to the fourth floor here, ready to knock on the door, you are under arrest, you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to ... The ring.
The one he'd given that hooker. Could they link him to that? Well, even if they did ... Marilyn Monroe, was that what she'd told him her name was? Jesus, why hadn't he gotten her real name? Jesus, how could he have been so stupid? But even if they did ... Wait a minute here.
Suppose somehow they got to the hooker, and suppose, somehow, she told them how she'd got the ring, and suppose, somehow, they knew this was a ring he'd stolen from an apartment three weeks before that dumb fucking woman shot herself and that stupid little boy, suppose all that. Okay, how could they possibly link the murders to the ring? They couldn't.