Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Page B

night before.”
    “Not for this groom. Maybe you misplaced Favor’s card. He was sitting in at the Kitchen as recently as three years ago.”
    “Says who?”
    “Joe Wooding, for one.”
    “Sweet Joe? He should talk.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Nothing. I talked out of turn.”
    “No, I need to know if he’s any kind of a source.”
    “It’s just that they were still using him as a textbook case when I came on here. It’s against union rules to perform free for anything but charity benefits and he was blowing bass and horn gratis all over town. The union yanked his card several times and finally didn’t give it back. Sweet Joe Wooding. You sure he isn’t dead?”
    I reassured him. “Maybe he just liked to play.”
    “Then he should’ve locked himself in his bedroom and put on a command performance for the wallpaper. You offer your talent for free, pretty soon they think that’s all any musician’s worth. Bad all around.”
    “What do you play?”
    “Pinochle.”
    I gave him that one. “Got anything on a female vocalist named Glen Dexter? She used to sing with Favor.”
    He flipped through some more cards. “Dexter, nope.”
    “Try Edwina. That’s her niece.”
    “No Dexters.”
    I stopped talking to him and got out the metropolitan directory. There was only one Edwina Dexter listed in Ypsilanti. I dialed it and got a throaty voice on a recording and a number in Detroit for emergencies. I stretched the definition and tried that. A man answered.
    “Sound Management.”
    “Edwina Dexter, please.”
    “Wye?”
    “What makes it your business?”
    “No, I mean Wye Dexter.”
    “Because that’s her name.”
    “Wye’s what we call her,” he said patiently. “Second.”
    I waited several. Abbott and Costello would have had fun with the telephone conversations I’d been having lately. The voice came back on.
    “She’s recording right now. Can I take a message?”
    “Where are you located?”
    “East Grand at Mack. Big cinderblock building with the name out front. You can’t miss it.”
    I didn’t. It had almost no windows and a small paved parking lot with three cars in it. I banged on a big blank steel door. A man in faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt opened it and looked me over. He had white hair in bangs and glasses on top of his head and was at least thirty years too old for that look.
    “I’m here to see Edwina Dexter,” I said.
    “Wye?”
    I recognized his voice. “You won’t get me with that one again.”
    “You’re the one who called. Listen, she’s still in the booth, but she’ll be breaking soon. You can come in and sit if you’re quiet.”
    They hadn’t done anything with the place except haul in a lot of electronic equipment and some used furniture to sit on. The walls and floor were bare concrete and nobody was going broke heating the place. I kept on my hat and coat—no one had offered to take them anyway—and followed him between rows of reel recorders and knobbed panels to a sofa with a loose tasseled cover and sat down. Placing a finger to his lips, he walked on thick-soled sneakers to a row of stools at a tilted control board and took one. The others were occupied by a younger man and woman wearing earphones. They all shared the same tailor.
    From where I sat I could see them and a partitioned-off room across from them with a big window, behind which a woman sat speaking into the microphone attached to her headset. From time to time she lifted a hand to turn pages in a looseleaf notebook propped on a music stand in front of her. She was broadcasting into the rest of the building in the throaty voice I’d heard on her telephone recording and it took me a few minutes to realize she was reading Dickens. Compared to what I’d been speaking lately it was a foreign language.
    After ten minutes or so the aging campus radical at the control board called for a break. The woman in the booth stretched, arching her back, and took off the headset. She had short black hair and