Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t the only thing that felt wrong.
    I got home to find Miss Warren—Nevada—waiting for me on my doorstep. She was fuming. “Where have you been?” she said. Then I brushed past her and she smelled the whisky. “Have you been drinking?”
    “Shouldn’t you be waving a rolling pin?” I said. “And have curlers in your hair?” I took out my keys and tried to open the front door.
    “You’re drunk,” she hissed.
    “Nonsense.” I fumbled with the lock. Actually, I
was
feeling a little light-headed after the morning’s boozing.
    Fanny and Turk sprang out of the dense plot of vegetation that occupied the centre of the square outside my bungalow. It was like a giant concrete planter raised to waist height and protected by a low fence of blue enamelled steel railings. The cats loved it because it was a miniature jungle and they could play hide and seek in it. They jumped up onto the fence and dashed to join us. They had heard me jingling the keys.
    “Oh, look who’s here,” cried Nevada. The cats swirled around her ankles and she bent down to pat them as I struggled with the front door. “Who’s a darling?” she said. “Who’s a honey darling, who’s sweet? Yes, you are, and you are too. Yes, both of you, yes, yes, yes.” And then instantly and without transition she resumed her tirade against me. “It isn’t even lunchtime and you are supposed to be meeting me and spending the day working and instead you are late and you are deeply unprofessional and you are drunk.”
    “I am not drunk.” I got the door open and the cats sped in, followed by Nevada. I was the last through, wrestling the keys out of the lock and clumsily closing the door behind me. “I had a few drinks. All right?”
    “Why in god’s name were you having a few drinks at this time of the morning?”
    “A friend died,” I said. “We held an impromptu wake.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s all right. I mean, you didn’t know him.” I took my coat off and wondered if I had the moral fibre to make us some real coffee. While I was making up my mind I poured out some biscuits for the cats. Turk crunched away at them enthusiastically and immediately. Fanny played hard to get for a while, wandering to her bowl, then wandering away again, but she finally deigned to start eating.
    “Who was it?” said Nevada.
    “Just a friend. A guy I knew. He worked in a record shop. Actually I mentioned him to you. He was the one who told me that the Stravinsky on Everest was bogus. Your little ruse.”
    “It wasn’t a ruse,” she said. “It was your job qualification exam. How did he die?”
    “He went cruising for a playmate and he took the wrong bloke home.”
    “My god.”
    “He got beaten to death.”
    “My god.”
    I belched whisky fumes. I decided I couldn’t face grinding the coffee beans. I was dreading the noise of the grinder as much as the cats. I could already feel the distant painful promise of my looming hangover, like a storm cloud approaching on a summer’s day. I got out the jar of instant and put the kettle on. “I didn’t even know he was gay,” I said. I spooned the freeze-dried granules into the mugs. “I suppose the fifteen thousand albums of show tunes he owned might have been a clue.”
    “Fifteen thousand?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Good lord.”
    “Maybe it was only five thousand.”
    “Still, good lord.”
    The kettle was just approaching the boil. I switched it off. “And that was just a small part of his collection.”
    Nevada shrugged her coat off and sat down. “Any jazz?” she said. And I knew what she was getting at.
    “If he’d had a copy of
Easy Come, Easy Go
, I think he would have told me.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Sure. And if he’d owned an original he wouldn’t have had to run a record shop. He could have sold it and retired on the proceeds. However…”
    She peered at me. “However what?”
    I poured the hot water over the instant coffee. “Jerry had