“Sure,” says Pinky Bleistiff. “But how will I know you?”
“Easy,” I say. “I’ll be the oldest guy there. Without my Dodgers cap on I have gray hair. It hasn’t been combed in a while. You’ll probably think I need a haircut. Oh, and I’ll be wearing my old bomber jacket from World War II.”
“You were in World War II?”
“The jacket. Not me.”
“Okay,” he says, “fine. See you in half an hour or so.”
I turn around and start hiking in the other direction. I don’t know what this nudnik wants from me. And I don’t trust him already. Something smarmy there in his voice. This is not about a job, no, he wants a donation, probably, for some farkakte cause. He’s a salesman. I should plant a tree in Israel. Come on, I’ll tell him. Israel’s a tiny country. How many goddamn trees do they need? He won’t know what to say when I put it to him that way. It may not stop him, though. He’ll buy me a doughnut and a cup of coffee and I’ll end up telling him everything I know. What kind of deal is that? On the other hand, he mentioned Marlborough. That counts.
The last time Denny and I worked together it had to do with a well-dressed corpse they found in an alley behind a gay bar on La Cienega. The body belonged to a pharmaceutical salesman from Denver named Norman Hearst. Marlborough, who was not naturally inclined toward homosexuals, thought the bar owner might possibly have had a hand in it. They took him downtown, chatted with him, and somehow, after the first hour, my name came up. He told them I could vouch for him. Which wasn’t so surprising, really. The owner’s name was Simon Goldblatt. We went to Hebrew school together. I knew him pretty well; he was a sweet pimply guy back then, and even if his voice cracked, he was never shy about chanting the blessings over the Torah.
Simon hired me a few days later to help clear his reputation. What I found out was it was way too dark inside his establishment. You could barely see the menu, let alone a stranger’s face. None of the regulars noticed Norman Hearst enter or exit. And it turned out Hearst had been a happily married man, at least until the week he left Denver. His wife swore up and down that he was straight. His kids did, too. Someone had come along and emptied the cash out of his wallet, but what he was doing in the alley in the first place, God only knows. And that’s where we left it. The good news is, Denny and I became friends, so I guess you could say it wasn’t a total loss.
It takes a good twenty-five minutes to reach Fairfax. There are three tourist buses parked along the curb near the Farmers Market and people are milling around outside, waiting to get a table at Du-par’s. A homeless woman with a cane and a cardboard sign is hobbling back and forth at the intersection and chanting incoherently to herself. She’s got on a long gray overcoat, or maybe it’s some kind of bathrobe. Rhinestone cowboy boots on her feet. A smile on her face. All the pedestrians studiously ignore her, I notice, but she’s not crazy. She only moves forward when the light turns green, and then she stands there on the opposite corner, chanting and praying until it changes again. Her cardboard sign doesn’t say she’s hungry. It doesn’t say her children have been taken away from her. It doesn’t say she has nowhere to sleep tonight. It simply says, Jesus wants you to love me.
He’s waiting for me at the bakery counter. Pacing back and forth with his pudgy hands behind his back. I appreciate that, somebody who gets to an appointment before I do. At first glance he reminds me of my best friend Maury’s dad, Al. Al was a gambler. He played the ponies at Hollywood Park. He played poker. He bet on dog races and boxing matches. Basically, anything that moved. Sometimes he won, but mostly he lost. Which was sad, for a whole bunch of reasons. Maury was a smart kid. He probably could have gone to Harvard on the money Al left behind at the track. That was Al, just couldn’t stop himself. This guy, he has the same intense, go-for-broke look in his eye. He’s got on a black sport coat with three silver buttons and black slacks. The sport coat is bigger than he is. I’m thinking he got it off the sale rack at Ross. Salt-and-pepper hair, a black dress shirt and a white bow tie. Even with his shoes on, if he’s over five feet tall, I’d be surprised.
I tap him on the shoulder. “You must be Pinky.”
He smiles. “Mr. Parisman. Look at you. You’re not the oldest guy here. Come on, let’s get a table, huh?”
There’s a small line of patrons ahead of us, but it moves fast. Doris, who’s been here a thousand years, recognizes me. She pulls two large plastic menus from the stack and leads us to an empty booth in the rear. “Will this be okay, Amos?”
“This’ll be fine, Doris. Can you send some coffee our way? We’ll order more later on.”
Pinky folds his hands in front of him and waits for the coffees to arrive before he opens up. Then, as soon as the waiter walks away he says, “I’m glad you could find the time, Mr. Parisman. You know, short notice and all.” He pours some half-and-half into his cup, stirs it around, then tears open two sugar packets and dumps them in, too.
I sip mine black. “So what’s the story, Mr. Bleistiff?”
“Please, it’s Pinky.”
“Whatever.”
“The story. Okay. I’m in the music business.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Musician? Really? I have to tell you, you don’t look like any musician I’ve ever met. What do you play?”
“I don’t play anything,” he says. “Chopsticks now and then on the piano.” He passes me a business card, which I pay no attention to. “I manage a few local bands. Some of them are getting some buzz right now. Maybe you’ve heard of Fever Pitch? Or Eros in Amber?”
“These are rock groups?” I say. “I stopped listening to that about thirty years ago.”
“I guess you could call them rock. They’re more indie pop in my view.”
“Since I don’t know what the hell that means, I’ll assume it’s like rock n’ roll, just for my own peace of mind.” I smile at him. “So you run these groups. And what’s the problem?”
“Not with those groups,” he says. “They’re doing the clubs. They’re doing fine.” He shifts himself around in the booth, then leans forward. “I take care of some other bands. I don’t make as much money from them, but they’re steady. Know what I mean? I run a wedding band. The Altar Boys. They do pretty well. And a klezmer group. There’s always a call for a klezmer band these days. Well, not always, but sometimes. Bar mitzvahs. Anniversaries. All the Jewish holidays, of course. I figured it’d be a gold mine.”
“And it’s not?”
All at once he gets this sad expression on his face. “Well, it might be. Only, it seems like one by one they’re disappearing.”
“Who’s disappearing?”
“Band members. Last year when I took them on, there were eight people. Seven guys and Risa Barsky, the lady singer. You ever hear of her?”
I shake my head. “Sorry.”
“She’s something,” he continues. “Anyway, seven guys and a torch. That’s the band. They call themselves Dark Dreidel. Actually, that’s what I named them. A clarinet. Two violins. A trombone. An accordion. A guitar. Oh, and a drummer.”
“You can’t do without a drummer.” I say this tongue in cheek, of course. I could leap in right about now, tell him that I’d been in bands back in the day, not klezmer bands, but so what? And we always had a drummer, but the drummer was usually the odd man out. What do you call a guy who hangs around with a bunch of musicians? A drummer. Some jokes are harder to forget than others.
When I say this, though, his mood gets even darker. “That’s part of the trouble,” he says. “The drummer has gone missing. And now two more