Against the right wall was a tenfootlong mixing board. A man sat sideways next to it in a battered easy chair, turning control knobs and listening through Walkmanstyle earphones.
He was oddly built, muscular but gangly, his face angular and goofylooking with freckles in a raccoon pattern across his nose and ears that, if not pinned back by headphones, would have made perfect little radar dishes on the sides of his head. A standardissue Hayseed. The only thing not comical about him was the bulge under his beige windbreaker, right about where a shoulder holster would go.
He was most definitely drunk. A nearempty bottle of Captain Morgan's sat next to him on the console. His eyes were heavylidded and his fingers were having trouble with the sound board controls.
I stepped into the room.
When Hayseed finally noticed me, he took a few seconds of blinking and frowning to decide I wasn't just another stack of musical equipment. He brought the easy chair into upright position and spent some time trying to connect both his feet to the floor. He got his hands working, groped up the side of his head until he found the earphones and removed them.
'Evening,' I said.
He looked at me more closely and his ears turned red. 'Goddamn Jean-'
He said Jean the French way, the Claude Van Damme way.
I was about to correct him when he stood up and began staggering toward me, reaching for the now exposed black butt of his gun with one unsteady hand.
That pretty much decided me against the diplomatic approach.
11
I met Hayseed halfway across the room and heel kicked him in the shin to take his mind off the gun. He grunted, stumbled forward one more step, his hands moving down instinctively toward the pain.
I grabbed his shoulders and forced him backward. When he tipped over the side of the easy chair, his knees went up and his butt sank and the back of his head hit the mixing board. The equalizer lights did a crazy little surge. His bottle of Captain Morgan's toppled over, speckling the controls with rum.
Hayseed stayed put, his arms splayed and his knees up around his ears in hogtie position. He made a little groaning sound in his throat, like he was showing displeasure at a very bad pun.
I extracted a. 38 revolver from his shoulder holster, emptied its chambers, threw gun and bullets into a nearby milk crate. I found his wallet in the pocket of his windbreaker and emptied that, too. He had twelve dollars, a driver's license that read ALEXANDER
BLANCEAGLE, 1600 MECCA, HOLLYWOOD PARK, TX, and a Paintbrush Enterprises business card identifying him as Business Manager.
I looked at the mixing board. Rows of equalizer lights still bounced up and down happily. A bank of CD burners and digital disc drives were daisychained together, all with beady little green eyes, ready to go. There were six or seven chunky onegigabyte cartridges scattered across the board. I picked up the earphones Alex had been wearing and listened-country music, recorded live, male singer, nothing I recognized.
Behind the chair was an unzipped black duffel bag filled with more recording cartridges and some microphone cords and a bunch of paper folders and files I didn't have time to look through.
Blanceagle's groaning changed pitch, got a little more insistent.
I helped him untangle his legs from his ears, then got him seated the right way again.
His clothes fit him like a shortsheeted bed and his once nicely combed hair was doing a little swirly unicorn thing on top of his head.
He massaged his shin. 'I need a damn drink.'
'No, you damn don't.'
He tried to sit up, then decided that didn't feel too good and settled back in. He tried to make some thick, fuzzy calculations in his head.
'You ain't Jean.'
'No,' I agreed. 'I'm not.'
'But Sheck…' He knit his eyebrows together, trying to think. 'You look a little-'
'Like Jean,' I supplied. 'So it would seem.'
Alexander Blanceagle rubbed his jaw, pulled his lower lip. There was a little U of blood on the gum line under one of his teeth. 'What'd you want?'
'Not to get mistaken for Jean and killed, preferably.'
He frowned. He didn't understand. Our little dance across the room might've happened a hundred years ago, to somebody else.
'I'm here about a friend of yours,' I said. 'Julie Kearnes.'
The name registered slowly, sinking in through layers of rumhaze until it went off like a depth charge somewhere far under the surface. Blanceagle's freckles darkened into a solid redbrown band across his nose.
'Julie,' he repeated.
'She was murdered.'
His eyebrows went up. His mouth softened. His eyes cast farther afield for something to latch on to. Nostalgia mode. I had maybe five minutes when he might be open to questions.
Not that drunks have predictable emotional cycles, but they do follow a brand of chaos theory that makes sense once you've been around enough of them, or been made an alumni yourself.
I overturned a milk crate, shook the electrical cords out of it, and sat down next to Blanceagle. I unfolded one of the airline receipts I'd taken from Sheckly's desk and handed it across. ' You and Julie went to Europe together a couple of times on Sheckly's tab. Were you close?'
Blanceagle stared at the receipt. His focus dissipated again. His eyes watered up.
'Oh, man.'
He curled forward and put the hand with the airline receipt against his forehead, the Great Karnak reading a card. He scrunched his eyes together and swallowed and started shuddering.
I'll admit to a certain manly discomfort when another guy starts to cry in front of me, even if he is drunk and funnylooking and recently guilty of trying to draw a gun on me.
I sat very still until Blanceagle got his body under control. One Muddy Waters, two Muddy Waters. Twentyseven Muddy Waters later he sat up, wiped his nose with his knuckles. He set the airline receipt on the arm of the chair and patted it.
'I got to go. I got to-'
He looked at the sound board, struggling to remember what he'd been doing. He started gathering up the one gigabyte cartridges, sticking them in his windbreaker pockets that were a little too small to hold them. I handed him one that kept slipping away.
'You're copying a lot of music here.'
He stuffed the last of the discs in his pocket, then made a feeble attempt to clean the drops of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum off the sound board's controls, wiping between the lines of knobs with his fingers. 'Sheck is crazy. I can't just-I'm in six years deep now, he can't expect-'
Alex padded his shoulder holster, realized it was empty.
'Over there.' I pointed. 'Sheckly can't expect what?'
Blanceagle glanced over at his unloaded gun in the milk crate, then at me, suspicious how I'd pulled that off.
'What was your name?' he asked.
I told him. He repeated 'Navarre' three times, trying to place it. 'You know Julie?'
'I was tailing her the day she got murdered. Maybe I helped it happen by applying pressure on her at the wrong time. I don't feel particularly good about that.'
Alex Blanceagle pulled together enough anger to sound almost sober. 'You're another goddamn investigator.'
'Another?'
