Free Lost Light by Michael Connelly Page B

clippings were a thing of the past.
    “Sure, I can do that. You have a fax or an e-mail?”
    I had neither.
    “Maybe you can just mail them to me. Regular mail, I mean.”
    I heard her laugh.
    “Harry, you won’t make it as a modern private detective like that. I bet all you have is a trench coat.”
    “I’ve got a cell phone.”
    “Well, that’s a start then.”
    I smiled and gave her my address. She said the clips would go out in the afternoon mail. She asked for my cell number so she could call me the following week and I gave her that, too.
    Then I thanked her and closed the phone. I sat there for a moment considering things. I had taken an interest in the Martha Gessler case at the time. I didn’t know her but my former wife had. They had worked together in the bureau’s bank robbery unit many years before. Her disappearance had held in the news for several days, then the reports were more sporadic and then they just dropped off completely. I had forgotten about her until now.
    I felt a burning in my chest and I knew it wasn’t the midday martini backing up. I felt like I was closing in on something. Like when a child can’t see something in the dark but is sure it is there just the same.

9
    I got the instrument case out of the back of the Benz and carried it up the sidewalk to the double doors of the retirement home. I nodded to the woman behind the counter and walked by. She didn’t stop me. She knew me by now. I went down the hallway to the right and opened the door to the music room. There was a piano and an organ at the front of the room and a small grouping of chairs lined up for watching performances, but I knew that those were few. Quentin McKinzie was sitting on a seat in the front row. He was slouched and his chin was down, his eyes closed. I gently nudged his shoulder and immediately his face and eyes came up.
    “Sorry, I’m late, Sugar Ray.”
    I think he liked that I called him by his stage name. He had been known professionally as Sugar Ray McK because when he played he would dodge and weave on the stage like Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring.
    I pulled a chair out of the front row and brought it around so it faced him. I sat down and put the case on the ground. I flipped up the snaps and opened it, revealing the shining instrument held snug in its maroon velvet lining.
    “This has got to be short today,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment at four in Westwood.”
    “Retired guys don’t have appointments,” Sugar Ray said, his voice sounding like he grew up just down the street from Louis Armstrong. “Retired guys have all the time in the world.”
    “Well, I’ve got something working and I might… well, I’m going to try to keep our schedule but the next couple weeks might be tough. I’ll call the desk and get a message to you if I can’t make the next lesson.”
    We had been meeting two afternoons a week for six months. I had first seen Sugar Ray play on a hospital ship in the South China Sea. He had been part of the Bob Hope entourage that came to entertain the wounded during Christmastime 1969. Many years later, in fact one of my last cases as a cop, I was working a homicide and came across a stolen saxophone with his name engraved inside the mouth. I tracked him to Splendid Age and returned it. But he was too old to play it anymore. His lungs no longer had the push.
    Still, I had done the right thing. It was like returning a lost child to a parent. He invited me to Christmas dinner. We stayed in touch and after I pulled the pin I came back to him with a plan that would save his instrument from gathering dust.
    Sugar Ray was a good teacher because he didn’t know how to teach. He told me stories and told me how to love the instrument, how to draw from it the sounds of life. Any note I could sound could bring out a memory and a story. I knew I was never going to be any good at playing the sax but I came twice a week to spend an hour with him and hear his stories about jazz and