The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)(56)

I put the lid on the shoe box and decided it was time to leave.

27

Cam Compton's Monster Music was a twostory white cube on PerrinBeitel Road, right next to the Department of Public Safety. The bottom floor was the store, with burglarbarred windows and a five car parking lot and silver doors plastered with brand name guitar stickers. The top floor was Cam's residence. His front door was on the side of the building, accessed by a metal staircase and a narrow concrete walkway. There was one large picture window so Cam could look out every day and enjoy the scenery—an endless stream of gawky adolescents and bulldogfaced patrolmen engaged in the American ritual of parallel parking between the orange cones.

I tried upstairs first and got no answer. Then I tried the music store, which for a Friday afternoon was not exactly crawling with customers.

The guy behind the sales counter said, "Cam can't talk."

I looked over the guy's shoulder, through the glass wall into the room where Cam was giving a guitar lesson to an adolescent kid whose acne was the same shade of red as his Stratocaster.

Cam was hunched over, examining the kid's fingers as the kid moved them on the fret board. Cam's forehead had a pancakesized yellow and purple hickey on it from our last meeting at the Cactus Cafe. He had a heavy drinker's swollen morningafter face and rumpled clothes that suggested he'd crawled out of bed and down the steps just in time for this lesson. Probably a normal week in the life of a superstar guitarist.

I looked back at the salesman. He was a large man. Flabby large, with arms that had mass but no muscle lines. His face hadn't seen a razor blade or a toothbrush or even a nose hair clipper in a mighty long time. He had a HarleyDavidson Tshirt with cigarette burn holes on the belly.

"Cam's looked better," I said.

Harley grinned. "Some guy's been leaning on him. Some big ass motherf*cker—private detective or something. He slammed Cam's head into a wall.

Then last night he came back and did Cam's ribs."

"You saw this?"

Harley leaned closer to me. "Naw, but you know what I told Cam—I said take me along next time. I'll put that dick motherf*cker in a vise grip."

I smiled appreciatively.

The slow, distorted power chords of Bad Religion seeped through the glass window of the practice room. Cam nodded his head and the adolescent smiled. Talent under development.

"He'll want to talk to me," I told Harley. "Tell him it's the dick motherf*cker."

Harley started to laugh, then he saw I was serious. He scratched his beard. He pointed at me with his thumb and tried to frame a question.

"I don't know about the ribs," I amended. "I just did the forehead. And it was a beer keg. You get prettier bruises with a beer keg."

Harley searched his beard with his fingers a little more. Then slowly he cracked a grin.

He turned and started what he'd been doing before I came in—hanging guitar straps on a rotating display.

"Cam ain't much of a boss," Harley told me. "Be my guest."

I walked into the practice room. Cam was nodding his head and saying encouraging things about the adolescent's Fchord. Then they both saw me.

I winked at the kid and told him to keep up the good work with the Fchord. Then I looked at Cam, whose purplish forehead was turning almost flesh colour. "How you feeling?"

"Got a student," he managed to say.

"He can practice." I turned to the kid. "I bet you know 'Glycerine' already, don't you, Slick?"

The kid got that elated light in his eyes that beginning guitarists get when they actually know a request. He looked down and dutifully began plinking out the Bush song.

"Let's talk," I told Cam.

"Why you think I'd want to—"

"I went to see Alex Blanceagle last night. He looks a lot worse than you do. Jean paid him a visit."

Cam's beady, bloodshot eyes move an inch farther apart. He looked around uncomfortably, at his student, at Harley who was grinning sideways at us through the glass, waiting for some kind of show to start.

Cam put his guitar pick between his lips and spoke around it. "Upstairs. And you ain't gonna f**k with me again, y'hear?"

I held up my hands. Truce.

Harley looked disappointed when he saw we were taking our conversation elsewhere.

Cam led me out into the afternoon heat, then up the stairs and into his place. He headed straight for the refrigerator.

His apartment was about the same size as mine—one main room, closet, bathroom, side kitchen. An unmade twin bed set flush against the south wall was occupied by piles of laundry that still retained the upsidedown shape and crisscrossed texture of laundry baskets, like Jell0 out of the moulds. I counted three guitars in the room— two electrics in open cases on the floor? one black Ovation twelvestring on a corner tripod stand. The coffee table was a Sears appliance box covered with spare guitar tuning pegs and string packets and old Olympia cans and an extra large Funky Bird, the kind with the red hair and the hat and the big butt that bobs up and down. Instead of chairs Cam had guitar amps. The posters on the walls were all from the store downstairs—peeling advertisements of bikini girls showing off the latest thing in mixing boards or speakers or trap sets. The only thing in the room that reflected care and meticulous upkeep was the CD collection. That took up three levels of cinder block and board shelving.