Sofi and Teresa's morning phonecalls always seemed perfectly timed to sabotage Will's post-workout coffee. Just seeing the words Teresa Ortiz, M.P.D. flash on my phone screen would drive Will from the kitchen with a look of terror, and seconds later he'd leave for work trailing reels of electrical cable behind him.
This time I was still too buzzed from training, and too desperate for news about my guys, to worry about Will's sensitivities. Sofi's voice was clipped, with no sign of her usual giggly surety; I guessed that the case was moving frustratingly slowly for whatever deadlines she had.
"We got a few important documents from Oliver Schmidt when we raided his house, but only a fraction of what must have been in the Finance Office in Sigma."
It didn't surprise me. Ollie was thorough, and wouldn't keep many incriminating documents on his phone or tablets at home. "I remember on the night of the fire Ollie was holding a ton of laptops and drives, with more piled up next to him on the sidewalk. Sigma Security would have put it into a car bound for Central way before fire-fighters arrived."
"What's Central?" asked Teresa.
"Central is the main Sigma office, where Jones and the highest-level managers work. But I don't know where it is, or what happens there." I'd always imagined Central as some huge crumbling vampire castle somewhere in Este, where Jones and his asshole managers slept by day in coffins. "Raheem went there once, when he first arrived in Sigma, but he's kinda...blocked all memories of it outta his mind."
"At least we got Schmidt's laptop and phone, which had documents that he was working on over the past month. It didn't take us long to get more evidence for the charges against him, but there are no historical documents. And there's nothing relating to the documents about Las Olas that were found on Seven's printers."
"You mean those documents that someone wanted you to find," I corrected.
"Yes," Sofi huffed.
"Why do you need more documents about Las Olas if Ollie confessed to the charges?"
"Because he said that he was working alone, and that he didn't receive any instructions from Michael Jones."
Shibal.
I hadn't expected that. I'd totally expected Ollie to incriminate every fucker in Sigma at the first opportunity. Of all the higher-ups in Sigma, Ollie seemed the least capable of surviving jail for Jones, and the other managers he was protecting. If Ollie was going down, there was no way that he was doing it out of loyalty to Sigma. He must have been way less scared of jail than he was of whatever terrifying unknown consequences of betraying Jones might befall him.
"Schmidt said that the Las Olas restaurant is a legitimate business, apart from this single crime of inflating its real estate purchase price to banks for a loan, and deflating its value for the I.R.S.. Why would an accountant single-handedly commit bank fraud for an otherwise law-abiding restaurant business?" Sofi grumbled on.
"Maybe he's telling the truth about Las Olas," I said. "An overpriced restaurant in Huertas full of celebrities and paparazzi would draw too much attention to itself. They must have bought it as a legit investment. Las Olas must make enough money to stand up as a business in its own right."
"I saw the Las Olas chef on a TV chat show last night," Teresa chuckled. "But whoever put those receipts on Seven's printroom computer must have chosen Las Olas documents for a special reason." Looked like Teresa had some sleuthing vibes going on in her neon brain.
"Maybe that's all they could get hold of," I suggested. If it had been one of Ollie's workers trying to drop him in the shit, then they'd need to work with whatever documents they could get.
"Maybe they wanted to draw attention to Las Olas. Like...they want us to raid there. If they had access to Sigma finance documents, they could have chosen any documents to incriminate Schmidt. But they chose Las Olas." Teresa was close to something, but neither Sofi nor I could help her to reach it.
"I don't know if Sigma managers are intelligent enough to think like that, Teresa," I said.
Apart from Noah.
Noah was too careful. He'd keep away from reckless shit like fires and paparazzi and bungling finance managers. Unless there was something for him to gain personally. After all, kidnapping me had been reckless as fuck and he'd still done it.
"Don't trust Ollie," I warned. "If he told you that Las Olas isn't worth pursuing, it probably is. Any rival manager who wants Ollie to go down would make sure that there's something worth raiding there."
Aside from the restaurant part, Las Olas was a huge building; could there be weapons, contraband or drugs stored there?
Or three male rental assets?
"Teresa! Las Olas is huge. There's two bars, the main restaurant, and a little movie theater. They must have a ton of space in the basement, and the floors above. Maybe that's where they took my friends."
Sofi reined me back. "You're right, Zeph. We should find out what they're hiding there. But we'd look like fools in the press if we raided a place like Las Olas and came up with nothing. I'll be in touch, Zeph."
Which probably meant that she'd get Teresa to call me a few days after the raid, if it happened. We were so close to finding my guys. I just knew it.
More brightness to add to the glimmer of hope that my guys were gonna be found soon, was that Gloria had put the Santa Elena Newsletter online at lunchtime, complete with my advertisement for charity piano lessons.
By late afternoon my phone had rung a dozen times with requests from enthusiastic philanthropic parents of would-be piano students. Soon, most of the coming fortnight was booked up with piano and music theory lessons, practice sessions and lesson planning. I hadn't taught anything before, and the thrill of it had me grinning into the keyboard as I practiced scales. I didn't think that the day could get better, when it suddenly did.
I was sitting in the afternoon sun on the back porch surrounded by Will's piano method books when I heard it. A lilting melody and broken semiquaver pulses floated out of the sunroom, lifting me from my raft of sheet music and lesson plans. Craning my neck around the porch doors, I squinted into the sunroom to find Will sitting at the piano, great eyebrows knotted in concentration as he stumbled through a jazz standard that I kinda recognized.
Will was rusty, and seemed to be improvizing the voicings with open harmonies and strange rootless and fifthless chords, while his left hand tripped fumbling fingers up the chromatic scale, always a semitone above or below what I thought would be his target notes.
The piece was so weirdly dissonant that I first thought Will was fucking up the piece because of his lack of practice. But this was deliberate. For all of Will's rustiness, it sounded delightfully, for want of a better word, jazzy.
Will smiled as he played on, stopping abruptly to turn the page, and restarting with plodding tempo until he gained momentum again. His walking bassline was better-timed the longer he played, but he seemed unconcerned about hitting the correct notes in his chords, dropping a root here and a fifth there. His little smile turned into a grin as he went.
I recognized the piece then. I'd played part of it before I'd stopped for lunch, but I'd abandoned it after the first few dissonant clangs of my fingers walking up the keyboard. Will, who evidently had jazz chords and scales wired into his gray matter, had only made minor changes to the chords of the piece to make it sound effortlessly sexy. It was like witchcraft.
Somehow Will was playing the exact same chords as I'd played, but he was dropping just the right notes to give a tense and spicy sound to the melody, pulling my heart along with him like some kind of forbidden magic. Will didn't care about technical perfection or accurate repetition. And he was completely at ease with playing chord voicings that I'd have called dissonant, or wrong, or forbidden, yet he made them sound good, and right, and necessary. I was captivated.
As proficient a pianist as I was, I could see so clearly what Will had inside him, and I didn't. Despite having not played properly for fifteen years or so, Will was music itself.
I didn't know how long I stood there, enchanted by the warm sound, until it stopped abruptly. Will was looking up at me, his fingers hovering above the keyboard. "You OK, Zeph?"
Slack-jawed and breathless, I didn't even attempt to hide my awe. "Wh...what are you playing?"
"'Round Midnight[1]. You had it on the piano, and I love it, so I played it. Well, tried to play it." He held up the brown jazz method book, that was now proving to be the most well-worn book in Will's collection. I hadn't stopped looking at it all day.
Goosebumps of jealousy started to pinprick my skin as I scanned the sheet music, like the answers were written on secret staves that only Will could see. "How do you...just know which notes to drop in those chords? And which scales to match them with to make them sound so...spicy?"
I'd always assumed that jazz was mostly improvization and advanced composition, and that it would be a natural progression from where I already stood as a pianist. But I was beginning to realize that jazz required me to totally rethink piano theory, and Will had a huge head-start on me. He'd already been thinking that way throughout his decade of piano lessons, and through a lifetime of loving jazz and experimental music of all kinds. It was so unfair.
Will burst into laughter. "I'll give you a piano lesson or two," he said, a sly smile dancing on his lips.
"You said that you only played as a kid," I grumbled.
"I did. I stopped when I was sixteen." His smile dropped, perhaps at the brief flash of a bad memory. He paused for a heartbeat, waiting for the memory to pulse with pain, and then fade. "I like that the piano's back in the house," he said with a revived grin, so wide that it made my dumb jealousy take flight and waft out of the sunroom to join the zephyrs outside.
I laughed then at my fickle ego. It was wonderful that Will was playing after so many years, and I needed to learn as much from him as I could in the short time I had with him. "I could do with a few jazz piano lessons," I admitted, slapping the method book back onto the music stand.
His eyes were bright with some new scheme. "It's gonna cost you."
"Name your price, Will Graz," I challenged.
"A Korean lesson."
"Deal, man. I can totally do that." Will was gonna learn as many perfectly-pronounced Korean curse words and dick jokes as I could possibly teach him before I went home.
"What are you two smiling at?" Jules stuck her head around the porch doors. "You giving Will a piano lesson?" She kicked off her shoes and padded in.
"Kinda the other way around," I confessed.
"So he's converted you," Jules groaned, holding up the brown method book like it was an oily rag from the bottom of Clive's skiff.
"Zeph converted himself," Will said.
Jules threw herself onto the sunroom sofa. "Can I have dinner with you guys?" she begged.
Will grinned at Jules with a shake of the head, like he was totally used to her pathetic pleas for food.
"Sure, Jules. But I'm no way as good at cooking as Will," I admitted.
"Come on, Zeph. I'm not fussy about food."
"OK. But you gotta help me cook." I pulled her into the kitchen.
Jules was actually a brilliant sous-chef, toiling away while I instructed her to chop, boil and fry from my perch on the counter, using a handy Asian radish as a conductor's wand. While we cooked, Will made his daily call to Mozhgan, and then made the porch a mess of paint cans, dustsheets and power tools as he painted new beams on the house to replace those that had been warped by years of wind and brine.
Before long Jules slid three bowls of steaming bibimbap along the kitchen table. It tasted awesome and we ate way too much, Will smiling along silently as Jules told us anecdotes about her more embarrassing yoga classes that had me guffawing into my dinner.
Jules covered us with a smattering of kisses before taking bibimbap dregs next door to prove to Clive and Gloria that she'd cooked something for the first time in months.
Will attempted to return to his repairs of the house, but it didn't take much persuasion to drag him out to the beach. Jules, Gloria and Clive flitted in the bright lights of their sunroom as we stretched out in the dark sand beyond the back porch, over-fed and drowsy.
"I think I'm gonna die," I sighed at the cloud-covered night sky.
"Me too. Shouldn't have had the second helping," Will said, lying on his back and pulling his hoodie strings tight.
The back-and-forth of the ocean lulled me into such a restful mood that I fell asleep in the sand, jolting awake when I remembered Charlotte Graz's phonecall. Something told me that Will was gonna refuse Charlotte's request to see him. It had been such a good day that I didn't wanna end it by arguing with Will, who was lying with his arms under his head, eyes closed, at peace. But I'd promised Charlotte.
"Hey, Will. I got some good news. I checked with the D.A.'s Office and I can teach piano until I go home, and donate my fees to Mozhgan's clinic in Maria. Is that OK with you?"
"Wow, Zeph! Of course!" Will sat up, patting sand off himself. "That's so amazing!" Will sounded breathless with excitement. "Are you looking forward to it?"
"Yeah! I spent all day planning and making notes and rearranging compositions, and I haven't even started yet. I can't wait for my first lessons. I hope I'll be an OK piano teacher."
Will sat grinning away at the dark water. "OK is an understatement."
"It's been such a good day, man. Sofi Borbón has a good lead about where my friends are too. And I watched you play piano, and found fun pieces for my students to learn. I haven't explored piano repertoire for so long. I feel like I'm learning stuff again. Moving forward."
Will smiled on at the dark waves crashing mezzo-forte, which tempted me to put off the inevitable. I didn't wanna smash the little nest of good vibes that we were building in the sand, but I had to tell him.
Courage, Zeph.
"And Will? I've got...other news." Will looked at me with furrowed eyebrows. "The D.A.'s Office didn't exactly call me. The D.A. called me. And she wanted to know how you were. And how Mozhgan is. And if she could call you some time."
Will looked down, his face suddenly steeped in sadness and bitterness. "Why?" he asked, curling his head into his chest like he was awaiting a blow. My heart hurt to look at him.
"She just wants to get to know you."
"We don't need to know her, Zeph."
I didn't get it. Nuna and me were like total opposites, but the thought of being away from her kept me awake at night. Why didn't Will wanna talk to his nuna? "What's wrong with saying hi once in a while?" I shuffled closer to Will in the sand. "She misses you."
"She's never met me." Will's voice had dropped to a menacing bass. "She's gonna hurt my Mom." It was his final word on the subject.
"OK. It's none of my business," I said, but I gave one final push. "But she's so nice."
Will gave me a sad smile, as if I'd been dumb enough to eat the Queen of Arenosa's poisoned apple. "You think that everyone is nice, Zeph," he chuckled.
Did I? After nearly three years in Sigma, surrounded by weapons-dealers, counterfeiters and sex traffickers, was I really that gullible? Did Will know so much more about people's intentions than I did?
Doubt set in all the same, and I began to wonder if I had been hoodwinked by Charlotte Graz. I couldn't have been. She'd struck me as being so similar to Will in her awkward manner that I couldn't possibly imagine her being dissembling or conniving, or being anything other than...Will's sister.
Will had gone back to lying in the sand, eyes closed, like he'd just erased the last five minutes of our conversation to maintain the illusion of a pleasant evening. Charlotte wasn't going to get her way. Maybe she'd have to bide her time until Mozhgan was better. If Will wasn't going to do it, perhaps Mozhgan would be the one to give Charlotte a first chance.
Author's Notes:
[1] 'Round Midnight, Thelonious Monk, 1944