Death Notes

no longer wanted to be with her husband.’
    ‘So she killed him in a room full of people while she was standing on the elevated bandstand?’
    He smoothed his black hair back and his expression turned rueful.
    ‘Perhaps she didn’t kill Match. But in my opinion, it would be a fair and just world if Sharon went to jail.’
    I laughed. He looked at me and shrugged.
    ‘Just and fair, but impossible, eh?’
    He knew he’d redeemed himself for screwing me over in front of the band. I asked him how long he’d known Match. ‘About six months.’
    ‘You just showed up on his doorstep?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Why?’
    His face filled with grief. ‘I liked his music. I have talent.
    I wanted him to perform again. So... I took a chance. Very quickly we became true compadres, you know, musically. I worshipped him.’
    His voice quavered and he looked away quickly, but his hands, wrapped loosely around his bottle of beer, trembled. I watched him without saying a word. After a moment, he turned back to me, his dark Latin eyes intense, on fire. His rage burned right through me, raw and pure, like something he’d been handed and didn’t quite know what to do with.
    He said, ‘I get angry every time I think about it.’
    Then he drained his beer and set the empty precisely in the center of the napkin on the counter. His hands had quit shaking.
    ‘I learned a lot from Match,’ Dickie said. ‘Things I shall never forget as long as I live. But a lot of good that does me now, eh? Do you know what a Marielito is, Ronnie? Everyone says it’s when Castro emptied his prisons and sent the convicts to these shores. But I am a Marielito, Ronnie, and I will tell you that we were not convicts. We confessed to crimes we did not commit in order to win passage to America. Our crime was wanting to leave Cuba. But here, no one wants to know the truth. They only see that I was a convict. But Match, he was the only one who ever asked.’
    Dickie had seemed close to tears while he spoke but once he’d finished, the fury and hurt disappeared from his face, like he’d closed up his hurt feelings in a little box and put them away.
    ‘Life,’ he said, then raised his empty bottle and touched it to mine. ‘To jazz.’
    As if on cue, the music started up again. I raised my voice and leaned in closer to be heard.
    ‘Tell me about the band. What are they like?’
    He glanced at the two jamming with the group onstage and hesitated. ‘They’re all pretty great musicians, you know. But we limit our talk to music and that’s it. I don’t know much about their day jobs. Hank Nesbitt sells furniture in Marin and Rochelle is a floor manager at some kind of warehouse in Richmond.’
    ‘What about Les Barton and Cheese Herman?’
    The bartender had brought us fresh beers, so Dickie took a gulp and said, ‘Les does actuary work - I think that’s what he said - for an insurance company. And Cheese, he’s retired from the Post Office and hustles pool at the Corner Pocket most afternoons. He doesn’t work at all.’
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘Me? I work in a ceramics factory in South City. Big deal, huh? Well, it pays the rent and lets me play. That’s all that matters to me.’
    ‘Did you talk among yourselves about Saturday night?’
    ‘Not really. Nobody saw anything, if that’s what you want to know.’
    ‘What about you? Do you remember what Match did after he finished that last set? He turned around and said something to somebody, didn’t he?’
    Dickie wasn’t listening. I followed his gaze to the corner of the bar. Rochelle Posner’s yellow cougar eyes were trained on us. Her lips tightened to a narrow line and her face seemed to say, ‘Don’t you dare.’ She was concentrating all her energy on Dickie, like some high priestess of voodoo or something.
    Dickie turned back to me, obviously unnerved.
    ‘That’s... uh... right. I—I’d forgotten.’
    ‘Was it you?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    My heart jumped. ‘What did he say?’
    Dickie shrugged. ‘Nothing. I couldn’t hear him over the crowd. They were clapping, you know.’
    ‘No. Wait. Think back. He blew out that last note. Then he set the sax down in its stand. The spotlights went down, then came right back up again. Then what?’
    He thought for a moment, glanced nervously in Rochelle’s direction, then shifted slightly in his chair so I blocked him from her line of sight. Good.
    ‘He talked to Sharon. He told her to pick up the scores and put them in the folder. Then he left