Blood hammered my eardrums. Sweat tickled the back of my neck like a spider’s caress. The soles of my feet vibrated. The light in the room shifted subtly as feathery clots of snow drifted silently past the window. My breath caught as I reached out a hand and pressed the button.
$2,863.27.
Damn.
I stared at the numbers on the page before me as they blurred and melted. I blinked.
I would not cry.
A dark hand descended into my field of vision and covered the page.
Startled, I looked up to see another hand moving toward me. Then I was unplugged and the sound rushed in — the rhythmic crash of drums coming up from the basement; a mellow, sinuous horn from overhead; a swell of organ from across the hall; and a rough voice fighting to be heard from a distance.
Another voice — closer, louder, insistent — coming from the man who was holding my earplug: Moses Fogg, retired cop, friend, tenant, and business partner in Fogg and Caliban Investigations. “Cat, I been trying to get your attention.”
I pulled myself up from the sinkhole of my despair and remembered: the Battle of the Bands had come to the Catatonia Arms.
It had all started with Leon Jakes, the neighborhood’s leading teen entrepreneur and a pal of ours. His latest project involved the rehab of a building on Hamilton Avenue, which ran through the middle of the business district in Northside and connected our neighborhood with Clifton to the south and College Hill to the north. The new owner intended to restore the site to its former glory days as a popular music venue. The Park Theatre building had undergone many transformations since it had opened its doors in 1913, both before and after its brief ascension to national prominence for the quality of the bands and individual performers it booked as Northside Park. My tenant Kevin O’Neill, a fountain of fascinating trivia, had told me that in its longtime incarnation as the Alpha Theatre, it had first specialized in adult films and later in more highbrow — but not necessarily less risqué — “art films.” Most recently, it had served as a bakery. I assumed that Leon had been hired to help clean the sugar and confetti sprinkles off the floors and paint the walls, not to rewire the building or upgrade the plumbing. But in the process of cleaning the place out, someone had found a complete drum set in a storage closet and bestowed it on Leon. He was thrilled.
Our erstwhile paper girl, Hope Smith — now playing in a successful all-girl band — had offered to give him lessons on the drums. Unfortunately, there was no place in the Jakes’ house to set them up. Leon’s three older brothers had colonized the basement with weights and exercise equipment they were unwilling to move out, even though they no longer lived at home. And when I recalled the basement of my former family home in the suburbs, I imagined the basement in the Jakes’ modest house similarly crammed with the excess baggage of five family members. Leon’s newly rebuilt storage shed was stuffed with the tools of his many trades, not to mention the god-awful greeting cards he peddled, and the overflow rubbed elbows with two cars, one functional and one not, in the Jakes’ garage.
That’s how we came to be hosting a drum lesson in our basement.
In my previous career as a suburban housewife, I’d frequently been called upon to negotiate agreements between family members that could rival the Camp David Accords in complexity, not to mention emotional intensity, so this was one skill I’d carried over into my new career as landlady and private investigator. In fact, motherhood had prepared me well to run a small apartment building; though relations were generally amicable, there were minor eruptions within my new family at times and they weren’t always predictable.
Moses, whose bike repair equipment took up more space in the basement than anything else, had been surprisingly receptive to the idea.
“Some folks been talking about starting up a little jazz band,” he’d said, looking thoughtful. “If we had drums set up down there, we could maybe use it for a practice space.”
You might not think that cops, even retired cops, would be musical. “I didn’t know you played the drums,” I’d said.
“Not me. I play the horn. George, is the one that plays the drums. No way Delia gonna let him set up the drums at his house.”
So that was one tenant down. Melanie Carter and Alice Rosenberg, who lived in the apartment above Kevin’s, had a reputation to uphold as patrons of the arts, since Mel was a potter as well as a martial artist. I worried that Al, an attorney for Legal Aid, would want a contract covering hours of practice, decibel levels, and so on, but they were buffered from basement noise by Kevin’s apartment and inclined to be magnanimous.
“Sure,” Al said. “Mel can lug their equipment for them when they go on tour. And provide security.”
“How long do we think it will take for Leon to become bored with this?” Mel asked. “I need to be starting seeds down there in March. I don’t need that much space, but I don’t know what the racket will do to the seedlings.”
I was pretty sure that my two cats Sophie and Sadie would have voted paws down on the proposal to disrupt their naps with loud, obnoxious noises, so I didn’t consult them. Our two wild animals, on the other hand — Moses’s beagle, Winnie, and her sidekick, my small, black feline hellraiser Sidney, were all in.
Kevin O’Neill, bartender and resident with the longest tenure at the Catatonia Arms, was the toughest sell, not only because he worked late and slept late, but also because he was on the ground floor. I took Leon with me to ask him.
He had not looked pleased. He frowned at me. “Why does it have to be drums? Why couldn’t it be something softer and sweeter, like a flute? Why couldn’t he take flute lessons?”
Leon shrugged. “Ain’t nobody never g-g-give me no f-flute,” he said reasonably. “’Sides, I like the d-drums.”
In the end, Kevin had capitulated, though I suspected that he, like Mel, was hoping for a quick disillusionment on Leon’s part. But Leon wasn’t a quitter, as indicated by his long-term commitment to becoming a detective and his long-standing role as my operative.
As for me, my hair was already white and so short that I doubted it could be curled by a little drumming in the vicinity. My eardrums were another matter — hence the earplugs.
Today was Leon’s first lesson. To drown it out, everyone was playing music but me. Until Moses had unplugged me, I had been cocooned in silence, alone with my misery.
Now Moses nodded at the papers on my desk. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve added these goddamned numbers five times and gotten five different results. It’s hopeless. I started early, but I’m already watching the deadline slip away.”
“You ought to let your cousin Delbert teach you how to do your taxes on the computer. I’ll bet he can set it up so all you have to do is type in the numbers and push a button. That’s what I hear, anyway. No need to make yourself miserable, Cat. This is 1988. You ought to move with the times.”
We both looked at the machine I was trying to ignore, even though it occupied most of the space on my desk. My cousin Delbert had tried to drag me into the digital age by purchasing and installing a shitload of equipment while my back was turned and I’d been working around it ever since.
“This from the guy who can’t figure out his answering machine,” I grumbled. “You’re hardly an appropriate spokesperson for advanced electronics. Anyway, why were you trying to get my attention?”
“We got a client. That’s what I came to tell you.”
A rumble started up from the basement — a drum roll.
I looked down at the numbers littering my desk.
“A paying one?”
“Didn’t say he wasn’t.”
The drums crescendod, cymbals crashed.
I smiled.
Then a series of sonic booms erupted, and I winced. “Where are the animals?”
“I’m keeping them upstairs to save their hearing. The ones with taste are in my apartment, grooving to Dizzy and Charlie.”
Those would be the older cats, Sadie and Sophie, who were probably curled up in a closet.
“Winnie and Sidney hanging out at Al and Mel’s. I guess they dig Janis Joplin.”
“Well,” I said, “every family needs a rebel.”
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