Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

made no move to take it. “Dig it out of anyone I know?”
    “Out of a seat in a lady’s car. You wouldn’t remember her. She was stuck on the edge of the Freeman Shanks case a few years back. I want to put it to a gun. Who do I see while you’re on vacation?”
    “Talk to Hornet.”
    “Next suggestion.”
    He belched. “Try Lieutenant Thaler in Robbery. Use my name. Thaler’s got priority in ballistics in cases not related to homicide. City hall wants to bring down those statistics before the Grand Prix in June.”
    I rewrapped and pocketed the bullet. While I was doing that he finished his beer and went into the kitchen and came back with another. He’d left the empty on the coffee table and now he rearranged some newspapers to make room for it, uncovering the black rubber butt of his revolver in its burgundy leather holster. Just for fun I asked him if he’d ever heard of a jazz trombonist named George Favor.
    “Little Georgie.”
    I’d been looking at the scribbles in my notebook. Now I raised my eyes. His face was a little less grim, like Rushmore in misty light.
    “Dad took me to one of his concerts in the old Walled Lake Pavilion. I was nine or ten. I guess there were better on the trombone, but I didn’t know it. Neither did he. Give me a second.”
    He got up, found his balance, and came over to the sofa. He spent a couple of minutes shuffling through the records piled there, then muttered something and left the room. I helped myself to a slug of his beer while he was gone. I had never seen him swaying before. The house smelled stale. I lit a cigarette.
    He came back carrying a thick record in a stiff green paper sleeve and lifted the lid on the console stereo. “Could have bought a new one for what it cost me to have this thing fixed,” he said, adjusting the controls. “You can’t get 78 rpm anymore.”
    The needle swished and crackled for half a minute, like surf breaking. There was a short guitar lick followed by a piano and then a sweet low sound sliding up and down and all around “Old Rocking Chair” without ever actually touching the melody. It was there, yet not, like the vermouth in a skillfully made martini; a cool cloud drifting. Favor hadn’t the warmth of a Tommy Dorsey or the casual genius of a Jack Teagarden. He wouldn’t have held the public ear long and his talent wouldn’t have earned him underground legend as a musician’s musician. But he was too good to wind up washing dishes in a flapjack joint. I listened to it all the way through, John standing next to the console out of the way of the speakers, and laid a column of ash into an empty tray on the coffee table that hadn’t been used in a while. It meant something that John hadn’t taken up smoking again after quitting eleven times.
    “I’m surprised I never heard of him,” I said.
    “No reason you would have. He didn’t have the stuff to break the color line when it would have counted. What makes him important now?”
    “Woman I’m working for just found out she’s Favor’s daughter.” I told him the rest of it, leaving out the threats against Iris. I didn’t know where they plugged into it myself, or if they did.
    The stereo arm had swung back and switched itself off. He turned the record over. “This the same woman belongs to the bullet?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why don’t these people go to the cops.” It was rhetorical. He turned the stereo back on and picked up his beer. “Try the union?”
    “After I run down this Kitchen lead.”
    Following the opening lick on the second side a woman’s voice came in, clear as grain alcohol:
    I’m yesterday’s lady, tomorrow you’ll be too.
    I’m yesterday’s lady, tomorrow you’ll be too.
    Today this lady’s leaving, lose these yesterday blues.
    “Who’s the singer?”
    “A man’s name. Glen something. It’s on the label.”
    The chorus was repeated and then the band came back on, Favor’s horn laying down background. When the side finished, John took