Act of God

expression on his face. “I don’t know either.” Wickmire said, “What?”
    “Skip it. You think I can find Teagle in his apartment?”
    She glanced out the window. “He doesn’t have a practice studio, and it’s a little early for the club scene, you know?”
    “He’s a full-time musician?”
    “No. He’s a part-time musician and a full-time nothing
    else.”
    “Unemployed?”
    “More like unemployable. But wait till you meet him, form your own impression?”
    I wasn’t sorry to be saying good-bye to Trac-i.

7

    Around the corner from Unit 11 with just the single brass “1” was a narrow staircase going down steeply. My knee started to give again on the fourth step, and I felt another twinge in my left shoulder as I reflexively grabbed the bannister to steady myself.
    In the basement, there was only one door that wasn’t marked BOILER-ROOM or STORAGE, and it didn’t have any brass number or letter. The noise coming from behind it was reassuring, though.
    Electric guitar, doing chords in no particular order that I recognized.?
    I knocked on the door. With no break in the guitar-playing, a smoky male voice said, “Go away.”
    I knocked harder. The voice said, “It’s the middle of the fucking afternoon. I can play now unless there’s a fire.”
    “Fire” came out sounding like “far.” I knocked harder still, and the playing stopped.
    The voice said, “I told you to fuck off!”
    With the flat of my hand, I started banging on the door like Krushchev with his shoe at the U.N. No more playing, but a bolt got thrown on the other side, and the door flew open.
    The young guy from the photo on Darbra’s bureau stood in front of me. Six-two plus, we were eye-to-eye. He was naked to the waist, his torso and arms tanned and husky but not muscular, tom shorts with gawky but tanned legs underneath, as though upper and lower bodies had come from different people and been sewn together, then baked to an even brown.
    Into my face, he yelled, “I told—who the fuck are you?” I gave him a flash of my ID holder. “My name’s Cuddy. Darbra Proft’s brother reported her missing, and I’m here to talk with you about it.”
    Teagle tried to follow the ID as I refolded its holder. There’s no badge in it, state law says there can’t be, but I already had his attention.
    The eyes were wary as he looked back at me. “I don’t need no hassling from the cops.”
    “Best way not to get hassled is to cooperate, Teagle.”
    “I don’t got time. I’m like working here.”
    “Here” sounded like “her.”
    “I heard your work. We can talk now, or I can pull you off a gig somewhere when it suits me. Your choice.”
    Teagle mulled that. The expression in the photo was a pose, as most photo expressions are. In real life, he had a hard time maintaining anything but an air of confused stupidity. I thought about Cross calling Abraham Rivkind’s murder “stupidicide,” and I wondered.
    “Awright, awright. I’m getting a little tired anyhow.”
    “Tired” came out “tarred.” As he led me into the apartment, I said, “Where are you from originally, Teagle?”
    “What difference does it make?”
    “That doesn’t sound like cooperation to me.”
    “Fuck. I’m from Baltimore , awright?”
    Ball-a-more. The inside of his apartment was low-ceilinged and sooty, probably from the wood stove in the corner. The stove didn’t look very professionally mounted on the bricks underneath it, the fireplace tools lying on the bricks instead of in their upright stand behind the stove itself. The room was a modified studio, with a king-sized bed, covers unmade, in another corner and a couple of dinette chairs grouped around some music stands near the center. There was a stack of stereo equipment next to a nineteen-inch TV with a VCR, viewable only from the bed. Spoiled smells came from a galley kitchenette, dirty pots on the range. A bathroom, with towels hung over the shower rod and wadded on the floor, was visible through a halfopen door in another wall. There were no windows, and the only light fell from a faint overhead fixture and a candle burning on a heap of dark, bagged shapes.
    Teagle sat in one of the dinette chairs, carefully easing into a soft-shelled black case the guitar from the photo on Darbra Proft’s bureau. “So, like what do you want?”
    I took another chair and straddled it, my forearms resting on its back. “What led you to come up here?”
    “What, you mean like to Boston