Gavin stepped back, stung, and Daniel closed the Jeep door.
"I've known you since the first grade," Gavin said. "All I want is to talk to you for a minute."
"If you knew more, you'd thank me," Daniel said. "Can you just forget about this? All of it? I'm giving you a gift here."
He left Gavin standing alone in the heat of the parking lot. Gavin thought for a moment about whether he could forget about it, but found that he couldn't.
T h e n e x t afternoon at five o'clock Gavin was waiting in the parking lot outside the police station again, but this time he stayed in his car. He had bought pizza and orange soda, and the pizza had given the car a stale pepperoni smell that he knew was going to linger. He had to keep the engine running, because without the air conditioner the car heated quickly and he was afraid he'd black out if it got too hot. He'd run out of orange soda and was debating whether to make a run for another bottle when Daniel emerged from the police station. Daniel crossed the parking lot to his Jeep, and Gavin eased his car out of the lot behind him.
H e h a d two jobs after that. There was the job he did for Eilo, the eight or nine hours he spent at her service. Driving to visit and photograph houses, negotiating with the residents of foreclosed homes, writing up property descriptions at his desk. Eilo liked his work. He neither enjoyed nor particularly disliked the occupation. He wanted only to reach the evening, when the real work began. His secret investigation, the story he was tracking, the focused hours spent waiting for Daniel to appear in the doorway of the police station.
Gavin recognized himself in the evenings— a newspaperman, a private investigator, a man who chased stories and sought out clues— but he didn't recognize Daniel. It was almost inconceivable that this was the same Daniel he'd known all his life until he'd left for New York. He wouldn't have imagined that a person could change so completely, but then, he didn't recognize Jack either.
Daniel always came out of the police station with slumped shoulders, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. He had an air of perpetual distraction, lost to the world, which made it easy to trail him undetected. He seemed to work six days a week. On two of those days he went to the elementary school, where he picked up his four children. They swarmed all around him, a very small set of twins and two a little bigger. They showed him drawings they'd made and ribbons for accomplishments, papers with stars on them that caught the light from a distance, and in those moments Daniel was a changed man. He smiled, he touched their hair and said things that made them giggle, he inspected every ribbon and drawing. He drove them to his home— a house that looked from the outside to be too small for four children— in a new part of the suburbs that at first Gavin didn't know very well, a section that seemed to have radiated outward from the blank epicenter of a golf course.
Divorced, Gavin decided. Because on the other days Daniel took a different route and drove home alone, avoided the vicinity of the elementary school even though driving near the school would have been faster, parked his car in the driveway and walked to the front door without looking up from his feet. A light went on in one room on the ground floor. All the other windows stayed dark. Some time later dinner arrived, usually in a pizza delivery car. Gavin always parked down the street behind another vehicle, cut his engine and opened the window. He sat alone in his car, watching and waiting, sometimes falling asleep.
He was frightening himself.
T h e p r o b l e m was that Gavin wasn't really sure what he was looking for, or whether he'd recognize it if he saw it. Daniel's routine was absolute. It wasn't that Gavin was necessarily expecting Anna or the child to simply appear at Daniel's house, if Anna was even in Florida, if Anna was still alive, if the child hadn't vanished into the hell of a homeless shelter. He was looking for something more subtle, a sign of some kind, but he couldn't imagine what it would look like or if he might have missed it a dozen times already. He brought his beloved 1973 Yashica and took photographs of Daniel leaving the police station, photographs of Daniel's house and of the pizza-delivery guy, but he didn't know what he was documenting aside from Daniel's apparently unremarkable life. He was tired from the late nights, and frustrated. In the office with Eilo he drank cup after cup of coffee until his heart raced.
There was more work than they could handle, a new foreclosure or two every day. She was talking about hiring more people. She had a gardener working for her now, a quiet man named Carlos who mowed lawns and planted flowers in front of the houses they were trying to sell. Sometimes instead of going to the police station to follow Daniel home he stayed at Eilo's house and they ate dinner together picnic-style on the living room floor, the way they had when he'd first come down reeling from New York.
"What do you do with yourself in the evenings?" she asked.
"Not much," he said. "Read, watch TV, do crossword puzzles. Drive around." He'd considered telling her about the search for Anna and the little girl, but there was something he liked about having one part of his life that was only his. He'd lost so much in New York and had been left with so little.
On a Friday afternoon he drove back to Mortimer Street. It was one of those golden-light afternoons when the suburbs are at their most beautiful. The air dense with humidity and the heat like a diving bell, sound muffled within. Gavin rang the doorbell. No one came to the door. He stood for a while on the cracked front step before he remembered Jack's tent in the backyard.
He walked around the side of the house, pushing through overgrown bushes that he couldn't identify, dark waxy leaves and bright flowers. An airplane droned in the sky overhead. He stepped out into the yard, grass up to his knees.
Gavin heard his name, but it was a moment before he saw Jack. He was sitting alone under an orange tree in a white plastic lawn chair, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. There was a book open on his lap.
"You came back," Jack said.
"Of course I did." There were two other plastic chairs in the shade of the orange tree. He sat in the one closest to Jack. "Were you working today?"
Jack was wearing what looked like a uniform, a red polo shirt and black trousers. He was covered in dust. "My friend's got a company," he said. "I help rip carpets out."
"That sounds difficult."
"It's okay. It pays enough to get by." Jack didn't seem to want to talk about it.
"What are you reading?"
Jack passed him the book. Django Reinhardt: A Life. It was dog-eared and battered, small tears along the bottom of the dust jacket. Gavin opened the front cover and read the inscription: To my beloved son Liam on the occasion of his high school graduation with love and congratulations.—G.
"I wonder who Liam was," Gavin said. He'd found similar inscriptions in books he'd bought used.
"Liam? My roommate from college. You just missed him, actually." Jack took the book back from Gavin and set it on the grass by his lawn chair. "He used to do this thing," Jack said, "back in music school. It was pretty funny, he'd be drunk or whatever, and he'd say—" Jack raised his Gatorade bottle and dropped his voice—" 'My name is Liam Deval, and I am going to be famous.' "
"Wait," Gavin said, "Liam Deval? The guitarist? I used to listen to him play in New York."
"Yeah, he was up there for a long time. Always meant to visit him there." Jack's gaze was distant. Aside from his disastrous foray into South Carolina, Jack had never left the state of Florida.
"But he's here now?"
"Yeah, he's visiting Anna," Jack said.
"What?"
"I didn't— I'm sorry," Jack said, "I'm sorry, I always screw up." He was reaching into his pocket. Gavin looked away while he measured three pills into his hand.
"Did you just say Liam Deval's in Florida because of Anna?"
"I can't talk about it," Jack said. "I can't talk about Anna. I promised I wouldn't."
"Promised who?"
"Deval," Jack said. He looked like he wanted to cry. "Forget I said anything."
"It's okay," Gavin said. "It's okay. We won't talk ab
out Anna."
Jack nodded. He was looking at his feet.
"But maybe you could tell me about Deval," Gavin said. "I really love his music."
"Yeah, he's good. Really good. I mean, I was sort of good. I maybe had something. But Deval, he had the music." Jack smiled. "He was trying to be Django Reinhardt. And you know what? He might be as good as Reinhardt was."
"Where's he staying? I'd love to meet him."
"I don't know," Jack said. "A hotel somewhere, I guess. Oh wait, wait, he told me." Jack rested his head on the back of the chair and stared into space. He was still for so long that Gavin glanced up to see what he was looking at. The leaves of the orange tree were brilliant green against the hazy sky. "The Decker," Jack said.
"The Decker?"
"It was something like that. The Dracker, or the Decker, or something."
"He say if he was coming back?" The heat was making Gavin's head swim. He wanted to lie down.
"No," Jack said, "but I hope he comes back. He said he was going to go visit Daniel."
"Of course he was."
"Did you just say something?"
"Nothing. Hey, is he playing anywhere while he's here?"
"Sure," Jack said. "He's got a gig at the Lemon Club."
T h e L e m o n Club had been open for thirty years and in high school Gavin had gone there a few times, trying to be sophisticated, trying to grasp hold of something that he might use to pull himself up toward adulthood, but he could never find it and as a teenager he'd felt uneasy there, pitifully young, out of his depth and unable to swim. The Lemon Club was a stop on the way to Miami and he'd seen a few big names there. The one he remembered best was a trumpet player, Bert Johnston. He'd brought Anna there in his last year of high school. They'd sat together at a round table just big enough for his Pepsi and her ginger ale— he wished he could order wine for both of them but didn't want to risk being laughed at by the bartender in front of her— and they listened to Bert Johnston's trumpet wail and sing. When Anna reached for his hand he didn't notice, only realized later that her hand was in his and he couldn't remember how it had ended up there. It was too warm in the club, the air conditioner laboring and spitting water over the door, and normally this would have bothered him but that night he was transfixed, that night things were becoming clearer. He was watching Bert Johnston and realizing that he wasn't going to be a musician. It wasn't an unpleasant revelation, just an understanding that his life was going to go in one direction and not another.
"I'll never be that good," he told Anna later, not upset, just stating
the fact, but she mistook his tone and tried to console him. The thought of the practice it would take to be a professional musician made him weary. He was reading a lot of noir and wearing a fedora, and he'd already developed backup plans. If he couldn't be a jazz musician he was going to be a newspaperman. If he couldn't be a newspaperman he was going to be a private detective.
The Lemon Club was already a little decrepit in his memories, but it had declined further since then and now the strip-mall parking lot was cracked and had a small palm tree growing out of the middle of it. Most of the other tenants were gone, sections of the mall boarded up. The only other tenants were an off-track betting parlor, an evangelical church and a pizza place with a torn awning.
In his memories the interior was glamorous, but all night places are cheaper-looking in daylight and with the curtains opened the light picked up the grit in the upholstery, the swimming galaxies of dust motes in the air.
"Help you?" the bartender asked, and Gavin realized he was the only customer. The bartender wasn't the sullen-looking old man Gavin remembered. He was young and blond and looked somehow like a lifeguard.
"I was hoping to see the listings for the next couple months," Gavin said. "I heard a jazz guitarist I like might be coming through town." He realized that it was stupid to say "jazz" in that sentence— it was after all a club devoted to this and no other kind of music— but the new bartender was more forgiving than the old bartender had been and didn't even smirk or tell him to get lost, just produced a photocopy of a calendar from behind the bar and scanned it for a moment before he passed it to Gavin.
"I think you maybe mean Deval?" he said. "Only guitarist I see here."
The calendar read Deval & Morelli, but Morelli's name had been crossed out.
"Can I keep this?" Gavin asked. The bartender nodded. Deval was scheduled to play in three nights. Gavin went to Jack's house every day after work and sat with him in the backyard under the orange tree, but Liam Deval didn't appear and Jack revealed nothing except his interest in jazz history and the extent of his pill addiction.
On Friday Gavin bought a dark red shirt with gray pinstripes, drove to the Lemon Club an hour before the set and established himself at a small table in the darkest corner, farthest from the stage. He wanted to be invisible. Only a few other people were here at this hour— a couple sitting at a table by the stage, a man at the end of the bar with a tattoo of a goldfish on his neck. Gavin ordered a pint of Guinness. He'd brought his notebook with him, as if he really were either a newspaperman or a detective. His new shirt had cufflinks and he caught himself fiddling with them as he waited.
The club filled slowly. A bass player made his way between the tables and began tuning his instrument. He was followed a few minutes later by a drummer, but there was no sign of Deval. A saxophonist had appeared— a saxophonist? With Deval, who so far as Gavin knew only ever played with Morelli, a bassist, sometimes a drummer?—and he was talking to the bass player while the drummer assembled his kit. At nine twenty the bartender came to the stage and tapped lightly on a microphone. There'd been a substitution, he said. Liam Deval had had to remain in New York at the last minute, a family emergency, but fortunately the great Chicago saxophonist Pedro Lang— who looked too young to be called the great anything, in Gavin's opinion— was in town a day early for his show tomorrow night and had graciously agreed to bless them with his presence two nights in a row and so without further ado, etc., and applause filled the room while Gavin finished his beer.
He thought about leaving but it was nice to be out in the evening for once, away from the quiet of his apartment with the television and the recorded music and his notes, not waiting in his car outside Daniel's house like a stalker. The saxophone player really was great, mesmerizing actually. Everyone who'd arrived to hear Deval stayed to watch him except for the man at the end of the bar whom Gavin had noticed when he came in, who settled up with the bartender and left just before the music began.
I n t h e morning Gavin sat at his desk in Eilo's rec room looking at yellow-pages listings of local motels with names similar to Decker or Dracker, run-down places by highways— Cable TV! Jacuzzi in Penthouse Suite!—and trying to ignore his headache. The saxophonist had been good and it was a pleasure to lose himself in music, to sit alone without having to talk to anyone. There was a span of time when he'd thought of nothing but the sound.
The Draker Motel had purchased a square ad with a minuscule photograph in the middle of it, so small that it could have been almost any motel anywhere. He looked it up on the Internet and was momentarily dazzled by the website's flashing red text— Cable TV!!! Convenient Location!!!—and a picture of a small white dog that he supposed must belong to the owner. Convenient to what? He looked it up on a map. It was, he supposed, convenient to the interstate.
He drove to a part of the suburbs that was close up against the edge of the wilderness, although it had occurred to Gavin that what he thought of as wilderness might just be a band of wildly lush greenery with another suburb approaching undetected from the other side, like two teams of miners tunneling toward one another under the earth. The streets out here were wide and industrial, self-storage facilities, a junkyard. The Draker Motel stood at the end of an almost-deserted cul-de-sac, two stories of stucco with a balcony running along the second floor.
Gavin stayed in his car for a moment looking out at the heat waves shimmering over th
e parking lot, put on his fedora and ventured out. The motel office was a small wood-paneled room with tiny palm trees running up and down the wallpaper, an air conditioner rattling in the window. The girl behind the counter looked no older than fifteen.
"You have a nice website," he said. "I liked the picture of the dog."
"Thanks," the girl said warily.
"I'm looking for a guest, a friend of mine. Do you have a Liam Deval staying here?"
"I'm not supposed to say the names of guests," she said.
He opened his wallet and laid three twenties on the counter. "If you're not allowed to say," he said, "maybe I could just take a quick glance at your computer?"
She glanced over her shoulder, slipped the money into her pocket.
"I might get in trouble," she said.
He laid another twenty on the counter. "But do you think anyone would notice? It'd only take me a minute."