I still felt dazed and numb from losing Gail, though nowhere near numb enough for my liking. I turned to the one arena where I still felt competent, and played through Adeline’s Self-Portrait on Gail’s piano once again.

At this point I was viewing my rumored intellect with such jaundice that my eyes were turning yellow. If there was any part of me I still trusted, it was my ability to comprehend music. So I tried to hear between the notes the way a more astute mind than mine might read between the lines in a stranger’s diary.

Listening to Ada Head’s bittersweet waltz—taking the composer at her word that this was some sort of “self-portrait”—I tried considering the composition as a kind of musical mug shot. The image it conjured in my mind looked very little like the extremely part-time waitress and Lake Merritt Mata Hari who had leapt from pier to ferry to pier in a pirouette. And I sensed that the answer to much of what was baffling me could be found in the little fanfare that lurked behind the bars of both the reverie I was playing and Gail Prentice’s Swing.

Chapter 45

45

A Major Discovery

I couldn’t find a cab to hail on Fruitvale Avenue. I took a bus into Oakland, and from there a trolley direct to Bancroft Way.

Gail was not in at the Berkeley Club. “She hasn’t been back since she left early this morning to go to the morgue,” said a young woman at the desk rather breathlessly, who was immediately called over by an older woman and informed that the next time she gave out such information about the residents to a gentleman caller, she’d be given notice.

During our hours laboring over Swing, I had finally pried from Gail one of Cal Berkeley’s most intensely guarded secrets: the location of its music department. It was sequestered in one of the dwindling number of wood buildings on campus, a handsome, boxy barn with banded windows that overlooked the campus’s Strawberry Creek. By now it was six on Saturday evening, but practice rooms are as coveted at a music school as phone booths in a maternity ward, and I could hear plenty of wood-shedding in progress as I stepped through the timbered entrance.

A handsome young man, who knew he was, sat at a low desk. He was clearly not only serving as receptionist but in full charge of a clipboard that determined who had rights to what practice rooms and for how long.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Hi there,” I said. “I was just trying to track down a composition major named Gail Prentice and I thought I’d pop in and ask if anyone’s seen her.”

“Pop in and ask who?” he queried, none too politely.

“Well, I guess I could start with you,” I said.

“You know Gail well?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.