FOUR
People spend thousands of dollars on stereos, sometimes tens of thousands. There is a specialist industry right here in the States which builds stereo gear to a standard you wouldn’t believe. Tubed amplifiers which cost more than a house. Speakers taller than me. Cables thicker than a garden hose. Some army guys had that stuff. I’d heard it on bases around the world. Wonderful. But they were wasting their money. Because the best stereo in the world is free. Inside your head. It sounds as good as you want it to. As loud as you want it to be.
I was leaning up in my corner running a Bobby Bland number through my head. An old favourite. It was cranked up real loud. `Further On up the Road’. Bobby Bland sings it in G major. That key gives it a strange, sunny, cheerful cast. Takes out the spiteful sting from the lyric. Makes it a lament, a prediction, a consolation. Makes it do what the blues is supposed to do. The relaxed G major misting it almost into sweetness. Not vicious.
But then I saw the fat police chief walk by.
Morrison, on his way past the cells, toward the big office in back. Just in time for the start of the third verse. I crunched the song down into E flat. A dark and menacing key. The real blues key. I deleted the amiable Bobby Bland. I needed a harder voice. Something much more vicious. Musical, but a real cigarettes-and-whisky rasp. Maybe Wild Child Butler. Someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. I wound the level in my head up higher, for the part about reaping what you sow, further on up the road.
Morrison was lying about last night. I hadn’t been there at midnight. For a while I had been prepared to accept the possibility of a mistake. Maybe he had seen someone who looked like me. But that was giving him the benefit of the doubt. Right now I wanted to give him a forearm smash to the face. Burst his fat nose all over the place. I closed my eyes. Wild Child Butler and I promised ourselves it would happen. Further on up the road.
I opened my eyes and switched off the music in my head. Standing in front of me on the other side of the bars was the fingerprint officer. She was on her way back from the coffee hotplate.
`Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ she asked me.
`Sure,’ I said. `Great. No cream, no sugar.’
She put her own cup down on the nearest desk and went back to the machine. Poured me a cup from the flask and walked back. This was a goodlooking woman. About thirty, dark, not tall. But to call her medium would be unfair to her. She had a kind of vitality. It had come across as a sympathetic briskness in that first interview room. A professional bustle. Now she seemed unofficial. Probably was. Probably against the fat chief’s rules
to bring coffee to the condemned man. It made me like her.
She passed the cup in through the bars. Up close she looked good. Smelled good. I didn’t recall that from earlier. I remembered thinking of her like a dentist’s nurse. If dentist’s nurses all looked that good, I’d have gone more often. I took the cup. I was glad of it. I was thirsty and I love coffee. Give me the chance and I drink coffee like an alcoholic drinks vodka. I took a sip. Good coffee. I raised the Styrofoam cup like a toast.
`Thank you,’ I said.
`You’re welcome,’ she said, and she smiled, with her eyes too. I smiled back. Her eyes were like a welcome blast of sunshine on a rotten afternoon.
`So you think I didn’t do it?’ I asked her.
She picked up her own cup from where she’d put it down.
`You think I don’t bring coffee to the guilty ones?’ she said.
`Maybe you don’t even talk to the guilty ones,’ I said.
`I know you’re not guilty of much,’ she said. `How can you tell?’ I said. `Because my eyes aren’t too close together?’