The Song is You (2009) by Arthur Phillips
“We’re all worried. She’s playing brave, but she’s worried, too. She won’t admit it, but she is, and she should be.” Ian stopped to think, careful to say nothing that could land himself in any real trouble. He considered his cousin’s crimes and Cait’s ruthlessness, hiding her latest flame in the lyrics of a song she made Ian write. “You may not think much of what she and I do, but—”
“Why would you say I don’t think much of—”
“—but after a while you get a good eye for the dangerous ones.”
“Wow: a hunch.”
“I called you because you’re family.” Ian recalled a wedding party in a restaurant when he was about eleven, so his cousin must have been twenty or twenty-five. Stan called the police when he smelled pot in a bathroom stall, and a groomsman was nearly arrested but for the intervention of Stan’s father, a cop, who had to lecture his son—after talking off the uniformed guys with some cake and wine—about perspective, context, and us versus them. And now Ian regretted the whole prank: to send Stan off to harass Cartoon Guy would have been supremely fantastic, but to lure the imbecile into Cait’s life bristled as unnecessarily mean, even to her, and since he couldn’t pull off one without the other, he decided at this late hour to call it off, apologize for wasting Stan’s time, say it had been nice to catch up. “Listen, you know, the more I talk about this with you, maybe I’ve over—”
“Hold on.” Stan raised an eyebrow at the screen of his phone. “I need to take this.”
Ian took the opportunity to check his own messages, and they both made calls as the sauce on their plates congealed like drying, darkening blood.
“Did you pull the jacket?” Stan asked his phone.
“Ian, it’s me,” voice-mailed Cait said in Ian’s ear, as if she’d just caught him in his dumb gag, beat him again. “I want… I need … I’m sorry to be so inarticulate. I had meant to say this to your face, but somehow I’m too … God, I feel such a fool. I’ll just say it, throw caution to the wind, right? Okay, I… I… I, oh, Jaysus, Cait, just say it. Fine, here goes: Ian, I think that you and I should move rehearsal to three o’clock. Can you call the boys and make it happen? Thanks, love.”
“Anything usable or did the EMTs muck it up? Great.” He closed his phone. “Sorry about that, cousin—homicide still takes priority over scared musicians, but with time, that’ll change. Oh, don’t be sore, I’m just playing. You were getting to the point.”
Fine: she deserves a little dose of Stan for a while. “She’s being stalked.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“What’s he actually done? A little window peeping? Heavy breathing on the phone? Rat in the mail?”
“Yeah, yeah, all that. And more. A ton more.”
“I’ll have someone come by and talk to her. Rest everyone easy.”
“I’d rather it was you is the thing. I trust you to keep me out of it. And Cait’ll trust you—she needs someone with your confidence.” Ian looked down for something to cover his mouth. He chugged Chianti.
“I’m going to need a name or at least a description. Maybe you can point him out to me at one of your little concerts, if I can bear it.”
“I have a video of him. I’ll email it to you.”
“I’m a monkey!” screamed a voice off-camera, rotten music, while a Caucasian male in a black leather jacket, light brown hair, average height, medium build, approximately forty-five years of age, kept his head low and out of the light, as if accustomed to ducking attention, but he eventually slipped up, as they usually do, and Stan froze the video, a bar light hitting the face of a man far too old to be in a room like that. Stan captured the image, emailed it as a JPEG to Records.
5
NEW BASS WAS ILL AGAIN, or still ill, and Cait asked him if he’d seriously considered the rigors of a professional musician’s existence or if she should hire a tubercular old woman instead. New Bass—a midsize refrigerator with hands like coffeepots and a fleecy set of mutton chops—laughed and apologized while projectile sweating like an adult-comic-book pervert, then stiffly withdrew to the club’s bathroom, from which the explosive horror of his thundering distress was in no way lessened by Cait pushing Ian in after him with a live microphone. New Bass emerged, some minutes later, the color of clay, but not at all embarrassed by the loop Ian now played over the club’s sound system of his recent percussive solo, while the barman arranged his shelves for the evening ahead. “Ready for soundcheck, are we, my delicate flower?” Cait asked.
“Miss O’Dwyer?” The voice of movie previews and safety bulletins resonated from the dark end of the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt your—what is this we’re listening to?” A man in a black suit and black silk tie pointed to the ceiling speakers. “This is your music?”
“Oh, yes, quite.” She held her instant distaste for him and his attitude at a simmer. “Ambient indigestion is my thing.”
He nodded officiously and dealt her a business card from a silver case, saying, “I’m looking into a possible criminal situation, and I understand you may be able to be of some assistance to me in that.” Ian and New Bass crouched facing each other and tuned to an electric box between them, willing its guide lights into place. “Is there somewhere private you and I could speak for a few minutes?” The occasional charge in being the arriving protector was always heightened when the victim was this attractive.
Cait laughed outright at this unlikely approach, her distrust of policemen exacerbated by this one’s clumsy air of official mystery. “Yes, we must protect these young fellows from adult matters.” Ian fiddled with his pedals and plugs, Drums tapped his sticks on his thigh, and New Bass groaned and wiped his forehead with the front of his Weepy Fag T-shirt.
“So you’re a rock star, huh? Madonna and all that?” he asked as they sat at a table near the door.
“Madonna? I see. And you are, let me speculate, not a fan of all this dreadful noise. I suppose you still put up with Tony Bennett, in a pinch, Inspector, but music history ended with Sinatra’s death.”
He smiled. “Wow. That’s very good. You could be in my line of work. I’m always amazed by people who have a natural knack for reading faces.”
“People often say I’m very inspectory.”
“No, really. A lot of guys I know have to work very hard to do what you just did. That’s just a remarkable gift you have, miss. And you’re absolutely dead-on: I am a Sinatra man. So what is your music like?”
“Like? It’s like something you wouldn’t like, I think.”
“And that annoys you?”
“No, Inspector.”
“That means something else in this country. I’m just a detective. You can call me Detective, or Stan.”
He was to burning up their soundcheck time with his fake friendliness, refused to arrive at his dreary business, likely a matter of Drums and drugs that would screw up schedules and recording and everything else for weeks to come. “Very well, Detective. What brings you here today? Oooh—I’ve never had the chance to say that before.”
“Oh, I doubt that. No troubles with the constabulary back in the old country, Miss O’Dwyer? No surprises for me if I call the Wicklow garda?”
“Very well done. Excellent footwork. Yes, I’m wanted for a serial killing.”
“You really don’t like Sinatra? Honestly? Isn’t he the—don’t people like you know he’s the source of all pop singing?”
“People like me? That’s an exceedingly narrow category, Inspector. I won’t speak for myself, but I will say that people like me think he wasn’t any good as a jazz singer—he couldn’t swing. And he wasn’t any good as a pop singer—he couldn’t arouse. He was a court minstrel for thugs. He could scarcely carry a tune. A visual artist, not a singer.”
“The provocative Miss O’Dwyer.”
“And my provocations are the reason you’ve come to interrogate me? Arrest me?”
“Arrest you? I owe you an apology. I wasn’t clear. Let me begin again.” The
“Have you seen this man?” the detective asked. He watched her face as she examined the picture, her eye-movement vectors, the involuntary micro-muscular reactions at the zygomas, the forehead, the corners of the eyes and lips, the dilation of her pupils when she looked up and said, “I have.” She seemed confused: “Well, sure. That actor, the one in the spy film.” He couldn’t tell if she was lying or joking or serious, and he began to cover his confusion with a laugh, then stopped himself and watched her more closely. “Is he in some sort of trouble?” she asked, a smile wiping away the traces of what he’d hoped to read. “Do the police need my help saving him? Is it Irish trouble?”
She was openly laughing at him, and that hid the truth just as well. He couldn’t tell if she recognized the picture or not, and the first window for seeing her clearly had clearly shut. “I’m glad I could bring a little amusement to your day, miss.”
“Oh, don’t be a big girl’s pillow, Inspector. Tell all, please.”
“If you’ve truly never seen that man, then that’s outstanding—”
“Outstanding.” What nonsense game was this? She heard Ian’s guitar onstage behind her.
“—since it means I’m here in plenty of time, or you’re in no danger at all.” He saw her making fun of him, but instead of her abuse beading up and blowing right off him, he was feeling uncomfortably aware of himself, his failures of projection. “But I have reason to think you may have seen him. I’m sorry, but I do. And I have to wonder why you’d lie about it.” He smiled with these last words.
The interview—the general path of which he’d known before he left the precinct that afternoon—now meandered into places he couldn’t understand. She didn’t know the dirtbag’s face? Then his homosexual cousin was lying or goofing on police time, but lying to a cop would have given Ian sunburn. So she did know the dirtbag’s face but was denying it? She was so frightened or brave or hated the police or thought she could handle the whole thing herself without publicity?
“What we have here is a predator, a dirtbag who gets his kicks scaring famous women. He’s done this before, plenty, so we’re trying to warn you.”
“Well, I’m safe then, as I’m not terribly famous.”
He considered her, nodding slowly. “Are you very brave, Miss O’Dwyer? Can take care of yourself just fine? Very admirable.”
“Not at all, Inspector. But let’s say I’m easily terrified. Still, why do you think he’s any threat to me? I’ve never seen him. What brought you to me, saying I should worry about this man, of whom you have only one blurry photo? And, if this dirtbag is as dangerous as all that, Inspector, why don’t you have a better photo of him? One of those nice front-and-profile portrait sets with the numbers at the bottom?”
She was laughing at his fool’s errand, laughing at him lying to protect his dim cousin’s folly of a job, laughing at him by refusing to turn off that recording of flatulence that still rattled over their heads, but Ian’s reedy anonymity stood in his way, so he just kept lying, each time more weakly than the last. “We’ve had complaints, from female singers, and so now we watch him pretty closely.”
“What singers?”
“Look, miss, you have me at a disadvantage. I was given the file and your name. I understand that a standard protective surveillance list had led us to watch him, and we’ve seen him watching you—that’s where this surveillance photo is from. We have an undercover team called Team Cyclops that is tasked with exactly this nature of problem. They shot this footage, and that’s when I was given the file, and so, just to advise you as to how the NYPD views matters of this nature, we’re not passive, not absolute beginners. Learned some hard lessons. Old days, used to wait around saying, ‘Oh, until he acts, there’s no problem.’ But that’s—if you’ll allow me, I’ll tell you some dark truths about how these things go.” His verbiage embarrassed him, fit him like a boy in his father’s letter sweater, and still he couldn’t do the simplest, most basic thing in the world: shut up.
“Mmmm,” she moaned. “Does it all end in blood? And you, standing over the body, despite all your warnings, ignored, she ignored you, and the brass—that is the term, isn’t it?—the brass ignored you, and now, tsk tsk tsk, there it all is, quite as bloody as you foresaw, and it makes you sick, but you look anyhow because you have to. Am I close?”
He couldn’t stop laughing. “Those little boys over there must think you’re just the niftiest girl they’ve ever met. Okay fair enough. Miss O’Dwyer, you have my card. If you feel the need to talk to a grown-up about this, you call me. I truly hope you don’t need to make that call.”
“Don’t be offended, please, Inspector. I can be a little off-putting, I know. I really apologize. Tell me, truly: How does the NYPD view such matters?”
He drew a breath to illustrate limited patience. “Do you know this man?”
“I don’t.”
“Never noticed him around?”
“Not once.”
He still couldn’t tell, and now he was laughing just to cover his annoyance at her opacity.
“Did he kill anyone?” she asked.
“Not that we know of, no. But he’s been questioned about some threatening behavior, trespassing, harassment, deviancy, issues of that nature.”
“But if he didn’t commit homicide, why are you here in Brooklyn, with that very impressive business card saying you are a detective in a homicide unit in a precinct in Manhattan?”
“We are occasionally cross-disciplinary, miss,” he said as if to a bright and praiseworthy child. “Don’t kid yourself. You find yourself in a bad situation.”
“Fair enough. I appreciate your coming to warn me. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Can I only ask in return that you deploy Team Cyclops to send me a list of the other singers he’s pursued? I may know some, and I would very much like to know in what company I find myself, whether I should feel a little pride or no.” She stood and offered her hand, which he took. She squeezed his and covered it with her other hand and asked, “What’s the hooligan’s name?”
He was caught looking down at her hands—pale, young, soft—folded over his like tulip petals, the last two fingers of her left hand reaching all the way to his linked cuff, nestling between shirt and jacket, and when he looked up, all he could find to say was, “I can’t release that to you. If he’s no bother to you, then we’re not in the business of blackening names.”
She smiled. They were the same height. “I wonder, Inspector,” she said, “if we’ve had a totally candid chat?”
She enjoyed soundcheck enormously after his departure. “What are you smirking about?” Ian asked with hot nonchalance, worried the dolt had already spoiled the joke and hung him out for her to hose down with mockery.
“I just love soundcheck. I love it love it love it.” She flared and glowed, the warm yellow center of a solar system planeted by these concentric eccentrics. Ian was showing at least enough spine to have hired that actor, had gone to the expense of the police business cards. That was a tribute, and rather nice. She would play along, let him feel he’d fooled her, had thrown a wrench, though his feeble semi-competence at wrench tossing fell somewhere between amusing and appalling. The actor, too, had entertained, the comic bluster and posing, the efforts at improvisation that became more spastic as she blew him into increasingly well-painted corners. And the cause of all this fun: her musing cartoonist, her distinguished adviser, and the best photographer she’d ever had, who, unlike every other suitor rubbing himself against her as soon as possible, had been trying not to let her see his handsome face or learn his name and who, she would discover that very same night, had responded to “Key’s Under the Mat,” hadn’t grown tired of her at all but had found his way into her apartment
6
RACHEL HAD PICKED HIM UP, though she let him think he’d picked her up, all while she was deflecting two other men’s advances, one crude, one boyish. She used to have that effect.
Late, a Saturday night, coming home buoyant (maybe even a little near the manic end of her personality, she could admit now), she had left her friends after a party, come downstairs to the Second Avenue F-train station, been overwhelmed by the beauty of a violinist’s music (yes, definitely toward the manic end). She stood and listened and after a little while noticed the man on the platform bench watching her listen. What had first attracted her to Julian? His attraction to her, certainly, and the amusement on his face, his resemblance to—none of that mattered now. She pretended not to see him watching, reabsorbed herself in the puppyish bow pulling the busker’s arm up and down. At his feet, a few coins and crumpled bills blemished the fluffy maroon interior of his violin case. Rachel, her back to the tracks and the few people who ignored the live music in favor of headphones, nodded to the piece—Vivaldi—and gently laid a five-dollar bill in his case, its largest denomination by 400 percent. She was aware of the man on the bench who stayed while she listened long enough and well enough that she (and he) let a train come and leave behind her without ever turning her head to look at it. The violinist opened his eyes now and again, each time obviously more pleased to find the same woman enjoying his music, and he played with increased commitment for her. She liked that, of course, and felt her attractions flowing out of her in all directions (definitely manic) and knew that the man on the bench would come to her without her having to do a thing.