Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel Read Free Book Online

and which has no nutritional value whatsoever.”
    “I may have just the thing.”
    He left the room and she turned to me to say something. But I held up my hand for silence and listened. There was a thunderous noise. “My god,” she said. “What’s that? It sounded like the house falling down.”
    “No, just Tinkler falling down the stairs.”
    “Christ, is he all right?”
    “I’m all right,” called Tinkler.
    She looked at me. “Does he often fall down the stairs?”
    “Only when he’s been smoking dope. But that’s all the time.”
    She leaned back on the sofa, then glanced at me again. Despite the heat in the room, I was still wearing the jacket. I was quite taken with it. She said, “It’s Nevada, by the way.”
    “What is?”
    “My name.”
    I stared at her. “The N in N. Warren?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you’re Nevada Warren.”
    She gave a mild sigh of exasperation. “Yes.”
    “Was it where you were conceived?”
    She spun around on the sofa and glared at me. “No it was not where I was fucking conceived. Why do people always say that? It’s a word. It means ‘snowfall’. It happens to be Spanish, but it’s one of the most beautiful words in any language.”
    She sat fuming silently. Obviously people had floated the conception theory in her presence one time too often. I didn’t break the silence. Instead, I got up and went over to Tinkler’s record collection. I selected an LP and put it on the turntable. Music swelled from the big Tannoys, filling the room. After listening a while she said, grudgingly, “This is nice. What is it?”
    “The Claude Thornhill orchestra,” I said.
    “What’s the tune called?”
    “‘Snowfall’.”
    She looked at me bleakly then gradually cracked a smile. Her head was moving, just ever so slightly, to the music.
    I said, “One of the most beautiful words in any language.”
    “Oh, fuck off,” she said.
    But she was still smiling.
    * * *
    I was anxious to hear what Jerry Muscutt’s research on the Hathor label had revealed, so I went to Styli first thing the next day. But as soon as I got there, it was clear something was wrong. The downstairs room of the shop was crowded with regular customers and members of staff, all looking downcast. Jerry was nowhere in sight. I went over to Kempton, who worked upstairs in jazz, and said, “What’s going on?”
    He looked at me glumly. “It’s Jerry.”
    “What’s happened?”
    Glenallen Brown, who also worked in the shop, came over and joined us. He was the opera specialist. He said, “I knew it would happen. He always went cruising for dangerous types.”
    “What?” I said. I looked at them.
    Kempton shook his head. “Why did they have to kill him?”
    “Kill him?” I said.
    Kempton kept shaking his head. Tears gleamed in his eyes. “They didn’t have to kill him.”
    I turned to Glenallen. He nodded. “Battered him to death.”
    “Oh Jesus,” I said. “Jerry?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who did it?”
    “We don’t know. Some piece of rough trade. Kempton went over there first thing this morning with the van. He was supposed to pick up some records. We’d just bought a big collection. He found Jerry lying there and called the police. The whole place was a mess, apparently. A bombsite. And Jerry kept it so tidy. Kempton said the entire place was torn apart. There were records everywhere. All over the floor. You couldn’t move for them. They’d been pulled off the shelves and strewn everywhere.”
    I said, “Almost as if someone was looking for something.”

4. THE UNKNOWN JAZZ FAN
    We held an improvised wake for Jerry at the shop. There couldn’t be a funeral yet because the police hadn’t released his body, but we felt we had to do something, to mark the occasion, so to speak. Jerry had always made a point of drinking decent single malts and someone went out and bought a couple of pricey bottles of Islay in his memory.
    It felt wrong to be drinking whisky at ten in the morning, but that