The Nine-One-Nine was a cellar walk-down where nothing at the moment was moving but the smoke from the bored-looking customers' cigarettes and cigars. At the farther end of the long, cavelike room was a cleared-out space with a small stage filled with amps, drums, a couple of microphones, and a keyboard. Blue lights suspended from a crossbeam were trained on the stage from which the band had departed.
Jury doubted any casuals could have found the place, thus it must have been the regulars who stood and sat about in varying stages of ennui, a curiously epicene crowd. Women with slick-backed dark hair, men with brassy curls and rings in their ears signifying (Jury bet) nothing. They stood in the aisle; they sat at the bar. In this room architecturally bland, the only hat-tipping to affluence was the very long, copper-topped bar behind which were shelved yards of bottles with optics in front. The smoke swirled, drifted, thinned, clouded above the tables, and the benches sat like church pews against the left-hand wall.
Besides this demode crowd there were still some working-class men who sat in tightly knit little groups like clenched fists, hard knuckles grasping their pints.
The customers all looked like they belonged here because they didn't belong anyplace else. Jury remembered a cafe in Berlin that had looked this way: musty, furzy, with the odd gummy smell of resin and old cigars.
Jury could have picked Stan Keeler out of this haze of smoke and thirties' film backdrop even without Morpeth Duckworth's description. There was something about the man at the center table, about his posture and manner, about the several people who sat there, that told Jury who he was. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, jeans, and low boots, his feet parked on one of the chairs, the rest of him slumped in another. There were two women and a man at his table. One of the hero-worshipping women had hair the color of port that nearly drowned her shoulders; the other was a hermetically sealed blonde who looked as if she hadn't moved a muscle in days, as if her mouth would crack and her cheekbones splinter beneath the makeup if she smiled. Leaning against the wall was another woman-tall, serpentinian, smoke curling upward from her cigarette to dissipate into the rest of the smoky scrim. Her hair and black dress looked as if they'd been done with the same shears: both were layered and slashed. Her eyes were nearly shut, weighted with kohl liner and deep shadow sunken in a powder-white face.
As Jury wedged his way through a tight knot of customers, the leather-vested fellow with a sunburst guitar was arguing, leaning forward toward Keeler like a man trying to shoulder into a tree that wouldn't give: "… can you say that git can play blues? He's heavy-metal and a Bach/baroque freak that couldn't do a twelve-bar boogie if his life depended on it." As he spoke he was slapping the guitar up to his knee and doing a wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa progression that earned him a tiny rustle of applause and an urging on to play more. Someone called him Dickie. Dickie didn't notice or didn't care. "So the dumb git's fast-" His fingers slid down the neck to pick the strings at what sounded to Jury like lightning speed, and there was more between-tables applause. "So he's fast? You're fast; I'm fast; and I know a blues baseline when I hear one. He's got nothing to do with that kinda thing. Come on, admit it, Stan."
Stan Keeler just sat there staring at him.
"Either you or me could blow him off the stage. Why don't you admit I'm right?"
"Because, number one, you don't know shit, and number two, you don't know it in Swedish."
Dickie swore under his breath, grabbed up his guitar, and did one of those rolling-thunder John Wayne walks back to the stage at the end of the room. As Jury came up to the table he saw the black Labrador, face on paws and apparently asleep. He seemed happy to be propping up a black guitar case, the neck of which lay across his back as if it were another dog.
"You're Stan Keeler?" said Jury, watching the heads of the girls swivel to gaze up at him. The redhead smiled. The blonde couldn't seem to make it. The one against the wall lowered her lids even more.
Stan Keeler looked at him and Jury knew the meaning of burning eyes. They reminded Jury of brandy just as someone touched a flame to it. The indolent expression beneath the black curly hair was given the lie by those eyes that could have singed Jury where he stood and by the luminous, childlike skin. He was in some way the apotheosis of the gaunt woman behind him; he had the coloring and intensity that she had tried to find in the pots on the dressing table. The high-cheekboned face looked a little emaciated under the tight, dark curls. And the expression on Stan Keeler's face seemed completely passive.
He said in a tone-dead voice: "I'm thirty-two, live in a bed-sit in Clapham. It sucks. Black Orchid's next club date is two weeks hence. I was born in Chiswick; my mum still lives there. My favorite food is jellied eels. I stopped doing drugs when I fell off the stage three years ago. I got a landlady with a nose you could hang your pants on. She sucks. The reason I don't move is because most of London sucks. I smoke some, drink some. That's all. Print it. Good-bye."
"I hardly said hello."
"Hello. Good-bye. Bugger back to Fleet Street. You're from New Dimensions, right?"
"Wrong. I'm from the C.I.D." Jury showed him his warrant card.
Stan Keeler's expression still didn't change as he flicked his eyes over the card and his cigarette at the ashtray. At the same time he took his boots off the chair, motioning Jury to sit, he turned to the redhead and blonde and said, "Go away." He said nothing to the domino leaning against the wall; Jury had the impression she wasn't interested anyway.
The two girls rose as a team and moved their blank eyes off through the customers toward the end of the room. Dickie seemed to be tuning up; a sallow-faced youth with long crimped hair was fooling with the drums; a gaunt-looking black man was sitting with an instrument case by his side.
Stan Keeler crossed one low boot over the other knee and rubbed at it with fingers that looked agile enough to catch butterflies without dusting a wing. He looked almost pleased. "I belt my old lady and they send round the C.I.D.? She deserved it." He scratched his hair into an even greater tangle of curls. "The only guy she missed in Clapham was the flasher on the common and I ain't sure he's telling the truth."
"Your old lady? I was afraid you meant your mum."
"Mum lives in Chiswick. I managed to shock just about everyone except her. God knows I tried. It makes no difference if I go double platinum or what. She just says, 'Stanley, you been to mass?'" His voice was a high-pitched squeal. "So what kind of shit you're laying down here? You mad at me because I messed up Delia?"
"Not particularly."
"You guys are sadists. Hey." He snapped his fingers. "I already talked to your friend. He was cool." Stan laughed, choked on smoke, and wiped away some spittle. "Your friend got by Nose. She thinks she's protecting me from the press. It's got nothing to do with my band; it's because she thinks I'm a Pole. An agent provocateur, or something. She saw me in this newspaper photo with Lech Walesa."
"What were you doing in a photo with Walesa?" Stan looked disgusted, searching Jury's face for signs of intelligent life, apparently. "What the hell would I be in a picture with Walesa for? Do I play Gdansk? It was just some cretin who looked like me. I told Mum this story and she told me Lech goes to mass all the time, and why ain't I more like him? Want a beer? If you drink bottled, I can send Stone. Hey, Stone, man-"He raised his bottle of Abbott's and the Labrador rose, yawning. Keeler held up one finger. The dog burrowed off through the crowd. "He can only get one at a time." He sounded apologetic.
"I can only drink one at a time. Look, Mr. Keeler-"
"Call me Stanislaw. Nose does. Wanna go to Brixton? There's a pub there I play at for free some nights. They're in kind of deep shit, and I help the manager out."
"You're very humane."
"No humanity to it. I'm trying to get it on with his wife."
"Sorry. Brixton's out. I want some information." Two other women had more or less oozed into the empty chairs. They looked like twins. Stan told them to get lost. "You knew Roger Healey, the music critic."
"I didn't know him and I wouldn't call him a critic."
"According to my sergeant, you did." Jury heard Dickie run something by the microphone and the band started up. "Healey didn't seem to care for your music very much. As a matter of fact, the reviews I read made it sound like a vendetta. Why would he be devoting a column to you, anyway. Segue's pop, jazz, rock critic is Morpeth Duckworth."
"You been talking to Rubber Ducky?" His head was turned to watch the band and his eyes squeezed in pain at the high whine of the slide guitar. "Oh, we have certainly got a double platinum."
The customers were beginning to wake up and inch nearer the stage. Stone was back with a bottle clamped in his jaws and Stan took it and snapped the cap off with an opener on his keychain. The dog lay back down again. Stan shoved the Abbott's toward Jury.
"Again, why?"
"Huh?"
"Roger Healey. Why was he trying to get at you?"
"I expect because he was coming on to my old lady."
"Are you saying Healey was having an affair with your wife?"
"Aren't you old-fashioned? I never said she was my wife." He was searching out a butt in the littered tin ashtray. Jury tossed his own packet on the table, but Stan said, "Thanks, but new ones don't taste as schmuzzy." He found half a cigarette and lit it. "Deli's not my wife, though I think she might be several other guys'. She said, no, she wasn't screwing Healey, but Deli couldn't open her mouth without lying. She even lied about the weather. Pathological, right?"
"Deli who?"
Stan's eyes were on the group bathed in blue light. He didn't answer.
"Mr. Keeler?"
His fingers were beating a rhythmic tattoo on the table.
"Deli's last name?" asked Jury patiently.
"I never asked. Dickie's getting better; he must've cleaned the moss off that slide."
"Sounds great to me, but we won't stick around for it. Come on." Jury rose and the lady whom one of the customers had called Karla turned her head slowly to stare at him. People didn't order her boy around, it seemed.
"Come where, for God's sake?"
"New Scotland Yard. You can't seem to keep your mind on answers here."
"You're a real happening guy."
"That's me."
"Look, I don't know if it's her real name." Stan motioned him to sit back down. Karla looked off into the unfiltered air again. "She said it was Magloire. Delia Magloire. No one knew how to say it right, so we just called her Deli MacGee."
Jury had his notebook out. "Where was she from?"
"Martinique. So she said. Well, she did look like she might of come from the islands. Honey-colored skin, hair as black as Stone here." He reached down to scratch the dog's head. "Don't ask me where she went to…" His voice trailed off as he concentrated on the inert dog. Stone was a good name.
"Pretty?"
"Oh, yes. Thick as two planks, but pretty, oh, yes."
"How'd she meet Healey?"
Stan mashed out the butt, searched for another. "She was on her way to the Hammersmith Odeon and stumbled into the Royal Albert Hall by mistake. You believe that, you believe anything. About two a.m. she weaves past Nose and up to the flat and says, 'Love, Eric's got this big new band…' " He raised his eyebrows above the tiny match-flame. "The London Symphony. She wanted me to think she was that dumb. Then she starts talking about this famous music critic and kind of oomphing round the old bed-sit, puts on Robert hootchi-koo Plant and wants to dance. I never could figure out what possible centrifugal force could blow Deli across the path of that pissant Healey."
"When did Deli leave?"
Stan shrugged. "Year ago." He glanced at the small stage where the blue lights made the group look cyanosed. Dickie's slide screamed in Jury's ears. He wondered how Wiggins could make it through a concert without a nosebleed. "If that slide's got moss on it, you couldn't prove it by me," he shouted across the table. "Did you believe her? About Healey?"
Stan shrugged. "Why not? The guy was a lech."
It was getting harder to talk and to hear. The riffs were ear-splitting and the drummer had gone into an epileptic frenzy. Jury's ears seemed to have closed up, as if he were in a plummeting airplane. Stan was pulling a black Stratocaster from the case on the floor.
As he fastened the leather strap around his neck, the dog gave a terse bark. "Sounds like Dickie's picking with the top of a tin again. I think I'll join. Stick around."
"Where's the picks, Stone?"
The dog snuffled in the long arm of the case and brought out a tortoiseshell pick.
"Not that, for chrissakes. Thinner."
Stone spat out the one in his mouth, rooted again, brought out a black one nearly thin enough to see through.
"Thanks." He stuck the pick beneath the strings.
"Did Deli MacGee dump Healey?"
"I'd say so. She made some comment about him 'trading licks' that wasn't-how'd she put it?-'within my venue.' " Stan smiled. "I kinda liked that."
"What did she mean?"
Stan brought his hand away from the tuning knobs, hit a chord. "Comeon, man. What'd'ya think? Healey wasn't an axeman. At best a ladies' man, at second best a lech, at worst a sado. You look surprised. You're a cop; you've seen these squirrely types before."
"And were those reviews written after Deli walked out?"
"You got it."
"Jealousy?"
"Who knows?" Stan shrugged. "Who cares?"
You do, thought Jury, sadly, looking at the smudges under Stan Keeler's eyes. "Martin Smart seems to think he was knowledgeable. How could the man you describe keep such a reputation as a critic?"
Stan reached out his arms slightly, inviting Jury to survey the room. "You see any critics in here? They're sitting in Italian leather swivel chairs in their 'study' recycling shit in their PCs. The only one that comes to Nine-One-Nine is Duckworth. Listen, man, Healey didn't know sod-all about rock, jazz, nothing. What's all this about, anyway?"
"Mrs. Healey. She shot him."
"She deserves a medal, not a fucking police investigation."
Jury rose. "Thanks for your help. But I'm wondering why you didn't tell all of this to my sergeant."
"I had a chain-saw hangover, man. I didn't feel like jamming with a cop. Listen, stick around. We can go to that Brixton place I was saying."
Jury shook his head, smiled, and extended his hand.
The band had slipped into a blues number and the old man by the piano had opened his case and was fitting the mouthpiece to a sax. Several couples had wandered onto the dance floor and stood in dreamy proximity to one another.
"Hey, Stone." The dog was up in a flash. Stan turned and said to Jury, "You going to look for Deli?"
Jury smiled. "If I find her I'll let you know."
"Hell, find me a landlady instead. Come on, Stone, let's lay some shit down."
Stan pushed his way through a crowd that willingly parted for him, followed by the black dog. He leapt onto the raised platform beneath the blue lights, and nearly before his feet hit the floor he let go with a sizzling riff followed by some staccato picking that made Jury's skin prickle, it was that fast. Then he switched over to a murky ghost bend, picking up the blues line of the old man with the sax. Its languor made him feel the poisonous losses of the past were working their way through his bloodstream.
He turned to go, throwing a look at Karla, who was still leaning against the wall, still looking wanton and sad as a long rainy Berlin night.