We had never heard the waitress speak. The heavily accented owner of the luncheonette wouldn’t have been able to discern where the waitress was from, and Gilbert Rice thought she had a speech impediment that caused her to speak very little.

She’d been picking up dance music from RC Copying, rearranged so it might be played by any size instrumentation, the kind of arrangement someone would take with them on the road.

I’d originally thought Adeline was a patron of RC Copying because she was a composer. But what if she were there because she was a dancer. Among whose specialty numbers was a Parisian Apache dance.

I thought of the neat pirouette Adeline had made after she’d leapt to the ferry landing, and the vaguely familiar birdlike profile made not only by her one-legged stance but by the curving neck that became her chin.

Take away her bleached blond hair (or wig) and the rumpled (or padded) wardrobe, and suddenly we no longer have Adeline Head, aspiring composer and carillonist, leaving town to get married to a boy from Nob Hill.

Instead we have an unemployed French dancer with an ostrichlike visage who is eager to tour in the sticks for low money and is afraid that I may recognize her.

Were it not for the fact that she had died ten days ago, she might well have been Marie Prasquier, whose bloodied body had landed at my feet in the Court of the Moon after having fallen from the Tower of the Sun.

Chapter 39

39

An Intoxicating Evening

I had just enough time to make it to my room, change into my stage suit, and hit the bandstand for the first tune of the set, “The Music Speaks to Me,” which, of course, I was also expected to sing. I would have loved to beg off for the night and sort through all that was seething in my brain, but Dave Wooster had left for San Diego that morning to see his father, and I was hard-pressed simply to fill in all the empty spots that occurred in his absence.

I’d made a reservation for Hewett, party of three, for eight-thirty. Jack had been kind enough to get their cover and music charge lifted, so they were basically getting the evening for whatever they drank, and in Russ’s case, that turned out to be a stiff price.

They arrived at five after nine, which I considered to be the height of bad manners. But it’s a rule of thumb that the people you get in for free are the ones who cause a scene, or insult the management, or arrive late, or leave in the middle.