Death Notes

and it turned out that, had the burglar gotten inside, he would have ended up in Match’s music room. When Sharon took me there I forgot all about checking out the jimmied window.
    Standing just inside the door I felt like I was in a shrine. The air was dry and sweet with a vague aftershave scent I hadn’t noticed in the rest of the house. My guess was that Match spent most of his time back here.
    There were a couple of easy chairs, folding chairs, an overstuffed couch against the far wall, and a workhorse upright piano in the comer. Music stands were scattered arbitrarily around the room and mounds and mounds of sheet music lay all over the place. An open cupboard against the wall was crammed full of records and music books, and in the center of the room, on a separate stand next to an open case on the floor, was Match’s saxophone. It glittered like a diamond in the sun, its body engraved with a filigree of design that was a piece of work in itself.
    The last time I’d seen it was at the Riff. Match had made it come alive then when he’d treated it like something sacred.
    ‘I set it up like that for the reporters,’ Sharon explained. ‘They just ate it up.’
    I’d read the stories. Like most of the stuff the local media printed, they were high in sentiment and low on facts. The bulk of the stories had been a simple chronicle of the songs he’d written and performed, most likely played out with tentative first notes on this very sax. With my fingertips, I traced the engraved initials on the stem.
    ‘Do you play?’
    She made a face and shook her head. Her earrings jangled some more.
    ‘Not a note.’
    I forced myself to leave the sax and go to the window. That’s when I noticed the small plug of metal embedded waist-high in the molding left of the window frame. I turned to Sharon.
    ‘You fired at him?’
    ‘Sure, honey. He was a prowler.’
    I was surprised the neighbors hadn’t called it in. Maybe they’d heard it but just wrote it off as a car backfiring.
    I raised the window to study the frame. Deep gouge marks scarred the underside where the burglar had started to jimmy the window. Maybe he’d been professional about choosing the right window, but he was strictly amateur about getting it open.
    I thought again about Match and about the rumors that he’d been an addict.
    ‘What did Match do those fifteen years he didn’t play?’ I asked as I continued to poke around.
    What I really wanted to know was how somebody like her had snagged Match.
    ‘We just got married two years ago, honey. I didn’t know him before that.’
    And she probably never thought to ask.
    ‘How did you meet?’
    ‘Rehab.’ She said it matter-of-factly. ‘We were both in rehab and we hit it off. It was his fifth time there and he started to backslide again but I pulled him through. You heard of tough love? Yeah. Well, that’s me. I made him stick with it. Told him I wasn’t a junkie anymore and I wouldn’t live with a junkie. So he said he needed me to keep him off the stuff and would I marry him. He was in rehab the whole first year we were married. I figured I needed to stick around for him to make it.’
    Somehow I couldn’t picture Sharon being altruistic.
    ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘I figured if he made a comeback, I’d be on easy street. But let me tell you, honey, I’ve paid my dues. These last months he’s been pulling together the band and the new songs, it’s been tough. That took up most of his time. That, and that whining little Cuban.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Dickie.’
    She said the name like she was saying the word ‘slug.’
    ‘You know who he is, honey, he’s Match’s trumpet.’
    The hawk-nosed, snuffling Latino.The one who’d been crying at the Riff.
    ‘They were friends?’
    She snorted. ‘Friends! He’s a little leech, just like all of them. Match could’ve done better. All kinds of people offered to work with him, but who does he choose? Some little Cuban who shows up on his doorstep one day with a trumpet. Match could’ve had his pick of anybody and he picks a bunch of
    unknowns. I told him to fire the Cuban. He refused. I told him to fire them all! But he had no business sense. If it weren’t for me he wouldn’t have been putting the band together in the first place. He’d still be...’ She drew up short and shook her head. Bottle-blonde curls bounced. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
    ‘Did Match ever talk about why he stopped playing?’
    She looked at me like it was a