Four

The first thing I noticed about the lobby was the air-conditioning; the place could have doubled as a refrigerator. I sucked in the icy air gratefully, felt my thin shirt start to stiffen and chill.

We skirted carefully composed groups of furniture facing off across Oriental rugs. I wondered if anyone dared to sit in the antique chairs. Although we were the only passengers, we didn’t speak in the elevator. Dee hit the lowest button on the right. Top floor.

You know how your tongue always strays to the sore spot in your mouth? Mine does.

And add another character flaw: when I was a kid, after it rained, there was this one rock in the backyard that positively demanded to be turned over. I’d shiver a little before I did it, because I never failed to find some mushy crawly thing underneath it—but it never occurred to me not to look.

I watched the indicator lights wink the passing floors, and realized that after all this time, Cal still feels like a sore spot in my mouth, a big unturned rock in my yard. Calvin Therieux, my ex-husband. The one who left town with Dee Willis.

That’s right. Waltzed off with my best friend, Dee, the woman with whom I’d sung five thousand songs and shared more than a few men. I’d layered her unruly hair and taught her how to wield a blow-dryer. She’d ironed my curls till they were fashionably straight. Dee and Cee, they called us. Dee and Carlotta, always together back then. Such a striking duo.

She had the boobs, the dimples, the Southern charm. I had the boyish ass, the long legs, the blazing red hair. We used to kid each other that we had one great body between the two of us.

And then there was Cal.

So why hadn’t I deserted her in the park?

More to the point, what the hell was I doing in the elevator?

I remember taking a biology test for Dee right before she dropped out of college. My hand shook when I forged her name to the blue book. What I can’t remember is why I agreed to do it.

And Cal? Well, Cal didn’t really leave me for Dee, not that way, or not exclusively that way. He dropped me for cocaine, pure and simple. Dee was forming a band at the perfect time, setting out on a six-month tour. Cal had a choice: He could stay with me, get clean, get a local job; he could go with Dee, play the music, stay stoned, and party.

Uh-huh. Some choice.

The elevator door slid open.

The hallway was carpeted in wine-colored pile. The walls wore maroon-and-white-striped paper; gold-framed prints hung under brass lamps. Music poured through open double doors to the right, and from the way it stopped and started, it had to be live. Chatter mixed with the music. In the hushed lobby below, it was close to two A.M. On the eighth floor, it was party time.

“Shit,” Dee muttered under her breath. “I can’t believe this bash is still pumping along. MGA/America—that’s my new label—flew a planeload of company stiffs out to cha-cha. Christ, I headached my way out hours ago.”

She touched a conspiratorial finger to her lips and we slipped down the corridor unnoticed. She had the key in a back pocket of her tight black pants, except it was a card, not a key, which must have made it more comfy to sit on. She slipped it into a slot next to the door. A light flashed from red to green, and the door eased open when she turned the knob.

I was glad she hadn’t kept the card in her handbag.

“Who’s that?” a low voice demanded as we entered. A woman giggled, and someone grunted and told her to shut up. The only illumination was the glow from a distant heavily-shaded lamp. Dee hit a switch and the room’s size was revealed in the harsh overhead light.

At first glance it looked a little smaller than my house. The wall-to-wall was gold plush. A spray of orchids and lilies was shoved to one side of a mirrored cocktail table that separated two low ivory couches.

“Shit, Dee, you like to scare me to death.” A black man wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt and Day-Glo-orange wristbands and a matching headband knelt on the carpet in front of the table. A blonde teenager, sixteen tops, sprawled next to him, blinking mascaraed lashes. Her long hair was dyed and curled to within an inch of its life, and she was wearing hot-pink tights and a lacy black thing that looked like a bra.

“Oh, great,” Dee mumbled, “this is all I need.”

It was a bra. A hot-pink shirt, crumpled like an exotic flower, lay on the gold rug.

“You okay, hon?” a dark-haired woman asked Dee in a raspy voice. She seemed drunk or stoned, and was supporting herself with an arm draped around a man who must have been ten years younger than she was, a thin wisp of a guy in jeans and a denim jacket. He had a slightly foreign air, dark smudgy eyes.

A bearded man was lying on the carpet, moving his arms and legs like he was making angels in the snow. Some kind of weird calisthenics, maybe. Another man was sitting on the low couch with his head in his cupped hands. All I could see was tangled sandy curls. A young woman was massaging his shoulders with practiced boredom.

“Hey,” the blonde wearing the bra called, without waiting for an introduction. “I know you! You’re Dee Willis! I was sure you’d come back! I’m Mimi. I’m with Freddie. And I know Hal from when he was touring with the Bow-Wows. I was with their lead guitar for practically a month.”

I figured the wiry black man lining white powder on the cocktail table for either Freddie or Hal.

“Freddie plays drums,” Dee said, pointing to the black man as if “drums” explained everything from snorting coke to screwing sixteen-year-olds. She tossed her cape over the back of a chair. “Brenda”—she nodded toward the dark-haired woman who’d asked after her health—“is my bass player. Why they’re partying in here, I don’t have the faintest. I mean, don’t I get any privacy?” Dee’s voice turned cooler than the air-conditioning. “You can answer on the way out,” she said.

“Lock the door, Dee,” Freddie, the drummer, replied, unintimidated. “And hush up unless you want company. Who’s your friend? Come on, we don’t want the suits next door barging in. I don’t have unlimited product, but what I do have is damn good Peruvian flake.” He flashed a quick smile at Dee and deftly rolled a bill into a straw.

“Hal said use the room,” the dark-haired woman offered. “He didn’t exactly want us sniffing shit as a demo for the MGA execs, Dee.” She was almost as tall as I am, with a stockier build. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, the old-fashioned kind, two circles connected by a bridge and held with plain earpieces. For the rest, she was round-faced, barefooted, and blue-jeaned, and looked comfortable in a sleeveless blue top. “You disappeared, and the room’s perfect. Connecting door, so we don’t have to stumble out in the hallway. And every once in a while we go out and make nice to the money men. The right people”—she glanced at the guy making angels on the floor as if she wasn’t sure about him—“the ones who want to tank up on something that doesn’t come in a glass, knock three times, then two.”

Dee glanced at me speculatively. I wasn’t surprised or shocked by the coke on the table, but neither was I pleased. Keep coke prices high enough so only rock stars can afford it, and I don’t mind if they snort till their noses fall off.

Dee raised an eyebrow and said, “Better flush the stash, Freddie.”

“Yeah, right.” Day-Glo Freddie made a neat job of sniffing a line. The sixteen-year-old was untying his shoes, maybe the better to yank his pants down. And here I’d thought groupies were out of style.

I glanced at Dee. She kept a straight face while she asked, “Are you an officer of the court, Carlotta? Do you have to turn them in, or can you let them go this once?”

“Whatever you want,” I said, playing along with the gag. “Up to you.”

Freddie narrowed his eyes and looked cautiously from Dee to me. His tongue poked out of a corner of his mouth. He started shoveling his precious white powder into a silver cigarette case, using a six-inch metal ruler to scrape the mirrored surface clean.

The blonde giggled and pointed at me. “Forget it, Freddie. No way she’s a cop.”

“Freddie,” Dee said warningly. “Swear to God, you’re just trouble waiting to happen. I can’t decide if you’re gonna go down for jailbait or dope.”

“Oh, preach it, Mama,” Freddie chanted sarcastically, brushing whatever powder he’d missed into a neat little line and offering the straw to the sandy-haired man on the couch. He didn’t notice, but the shoulder-rubbing woman took a hit.

“Carlotta,” Dee said, “would you believe he sings harmony like God’s own angel? Not to mention he can keep time like a clock.”

“Life isn’t fair,” I said.

The dark-haired woman flashed me a sloppy grin of total agreement and clung even tighter to the much younger man at her side.

“What’s with you, Bren,” Dee said, “encouraging this kind of shit?”

“Oh, Dee,” Brenda responded in a tired whine, “come off it. You haven’t been out there kissing ass all night. I’ve been telling everybody what a great goddamn guitar player and what a great goddamn singer you are for four freaking hours. It wears thin, you know.”

“Bren, I don’t set up the parties—”

“No. You just run off and leave us to pick up the pieces. Those guys expected to party with the very famous Dee Willis. Then she walks out, and they’re stuck with her very un-famous bass player.”

“Who’d much rather be doing other things,” Freddie said with a twinkle in his voice.

“Shut the mouth, Fred. Nothing good comes out of it unless you’re singing,” Brenda retorted.

Dee didn’t seem to notice their animosity. She kept talking to the bass player. “So tell ’em you’re gonna throw up, Bren. Leave. Nobody told you to be so goddamn super-responsible. Now, all of you, get out, or I’m gonna have Carlotta bust you. Show ’em your license, Carlotta.”

At the word “license,” Freddie stuffed his cigarette case into his girlfriend’s canvas throw-all, a very streetwise thing to do, the golden rule being: Never get caught with the goods on you. He wasn’t quite sure if Dee was pulling his leg or not, but he wasn’t taking chances. The blonde didn’t seem to realize she was holding enough to earn her a stay at MCI-Framingham.

Freddie sniffed and said, “Well, if your friend’s not gonna arrest me, I been working on that bridge, that two-four A flat major shit, and you gotta hear it. You gotta tell Bren that—”

Brenda said, “Nobody’s gotta tell me you’re a showboat, Freddie.”

“Ooh, Bren,” Freddie said, a hard edge to his teasing voice, “hold tight to lover boy. You ain’t gonna find a livelier specimen. Not at your age.”

A knock on the connecting door, three raps, then two, interrupted the bickering. Dee quickly crossed the carpet and stood behind the door as she edged it open.

A frowning gnomelike man walked in. I was surprised by the flood of sound that entered with him. This hotel, unlike every fleabag I’ve ever stayed in, had terrific soundproofing.

Dee leaned back against the door as she shut it and folded her arms deliberately across her chest. Her red shirt glittered with embroidered gold dragons. “Hal, for chrissakes, can’t you keep people out of my goddamn room?”

He was in his mid-forties, maybe fifty. When he saw Dee, he started to smile, as if smiling were his natural state, but he killed the grin and spoke sternly. “You want to go out,” he said flatly, “you notify me. I’ll get you a driver. Okay? You want to drive around all night, fine. You come to me. You want to jog or something, I get you somebody to jog with. You don’t just disappear on me. Ever.”

Dee started to flare, the way she used to if you crossed her, and I braced myself for a shouting match. She surprised me by making a visible effort at self-control. She closed her eyes for a long ten-count, blew out her breath in a deep sigh. “I forgot, Hal,” she said, aiming for contrite but not quite hitting it. “I mean, I’m not used to being a goddamn industry. So what if I go out?”

She looked at the other members of the band for support but none was forthcoming. She was meal ticket number one for the moment and everybody seemed to want to keep a close eye on her.

Hal said, “I know the thing next door’s not your kind of scene, but MGA went to a whole lot of trouble and expense to arrange it.”

“They can afford it,” Dee said. “Don’t ask me to bleed for them.”

Mimi, the blonde groupie, said, “Well, Freddie was really worried about you, Dee, you know. He knocked and knocked, and you did say you had a splitting headache and were going straight to bed.”

Dee glanced sharply at the gnome. “You got a key to my room, Hal? I mean, I am a grown-up. There are times when I don’t want people busting into my room.”

Mimi kept yapping. “Well, you didn’t have the Do Not Disturb sign on your door. And we checked Ronny’s room—”

“Ron and I are not an exclusive item,” Dee said evenly.

“Yeah, well, that’s good,” Mimi said, with a big smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “’Cause he was having a little party of his own.”

“Shut up,” Freddie said.

The gnome shrugged. “Just let me know if you feel the urge to travel after midnight, okay?”

“Carlotta,” Dee said after a brief pause, “this is my road manager, Hal Grady. Thinks he’s my baby-sitter too. Just let me be, everybody. Okay?”

The dark woman lit a cigarette and nodded in my direction. “So who is she?”

“Bren, this is an old buddy of mine lives in Cambridge. Carlotta, meet Brenda.”

We shook hands and Brenda gave me a steady onceover. “You really a cop?” she said.

“No.”

“But something like a cop, right?”

“Right,” I admitted.

Freddie piped up, “Dee, we really need to fix that A flat major stuff. And this would be a great time. I can really feel it, you know.” He smacked the cocktail table like it was a conga drum. “Let me get my trap-set. Hal, you think the people next door would like to hear it?”

“Freddie,” Dee said sternly. “Out. And take your girlie with you, okay?”

Mimi, blouse over her arm, made a rush at Dee and gave her an unwanted, enthusiastic hug. She even grabbed my hands in her excitement, and I got a tiny taste of stardom by association.

“Weird Bren gonna get her boy-toy out too?” Freddie asked with a nasty grin.

Brenda patted her companion on his skinny arm, and gave Freddie a look that should have scorched him. The wispy boy on her arm just smiled.

“See you, Dee,” the bass player said coolly. “We need to talk, I think. Real soon.”

“About the A flat major break?”

“Nah. Freddie’s just being stupid about the changes. The stuff works fine. You sure you’re okay?”

“Okay,” Dee said.

Brenda and her boyfriend exited through the connecting door, heading to the MGA-sponsored bash. Dee gave the drummer the eye until he and his blonde huffed their way out.

The others filed out with no words, just nods. I wasn’t sure if Dee even knew them, but Hal, the road manager, did. He asked the sandy-haired guy who’d been sitting on the couch to stay for a second.

“Hal, how’d you get in here?” Dee asked. “Or were those guys in before you?”

“Freddie came by when you didn’t answer his knock. I worry too much. I mean, you know, I thought you might be sick or something. I got a spare key at the desk.”

“How?”

“Asked for it.”

“Tight security,” I commented.

Dee said, “Look, Hal. I don’t want you thinking I’m passed out any time I don’t answer my damn door. I’m not drinking like that anymore.”

The road manager studied his running shoes. “It would make a lot of guys happy if you’d come next door for maybe five minutes, ten at the most, shake a few hands.”

“Shit,” Dee said.

Hal took that for a yes. “Jody,” he said to the sandy-haired man. “Get Travis and Marshall and a couple of the other veeps and head them over to the front door. If I walk her through the room, she’ll never get out.”

Dee gave the sandy-haired man a once-over as he left. Late twenties, early thirties. Thin. Good muscles.

“He work for you?” she asked Hal.

“He works for you,” Hal corrected.

“Yeah, well, like I said, I’m a goddamn industry. I oughta get to know my employees better, huh?”

She turned to me. “Come on, Carlotta. Come with me. You ought to see this thing.” Then she added under her breath, “And see if you can grab us something to eat. I’m starving to death.”