Charles gave everything in his pockets to Bug before the cops took him away. Car keys, cherry suckers, loose change, lighter, and his phone. Isaiah found the stuff in a candy bowl on the coffee table. He removed the SIM and SD cards from the phone and replaced them with new ones, leaving the phone completely blank. Charles would blame Bug. The phone was working until Bug had it, who else could it be?
Isaiah heard Dodson say: “Isaiah, come and see this.”
Cal’s recording equipment that was supposed to be thrown in the ocean was crowded into a bedroom. Mikes, studio desk, monitors, Mac Pro, sampling station, mixing console. A stack of CDs were on the desk. The hand-printed labels said: GRANDYOSE IS TAKING OVER.
“Grandyose is Charles?” Isaiah said.
“I imagine so,” Dodson said. “And guess who he’s taking over for.”
Isaiah lifted his head. “Somebody’s here.”
They stepped behind the door as a sleepy-eyed buck-naked white girl clumped past in the hall, her booty like a backpack that had slipped down too low. “Bug?” she said. They left while she was in the bathroom.
Back at the house Isaiah sat at the kitchen counter and used a transfer program to move the data on Charles’s memory cards to the MacBook. Charles’s Takin’ Over tracks were on the stereo sounding like the same old same old.
“Noelle’s on his contact list,” Isaiah said, “but it could have been there for years.” Dodson was at the stove, cooking. Isaiah thought about telling him not to but didn’t. “The phone stores a hundred calls,” Isaiah said. “Most of them are to the fellas. Some to Bobby but they weren’t returned. A few to DStar. None to Noelle and I don’t see an area code from anywhere around Fergus but Skip probably used a burner. The rest are to girls.”
“Maybe they’re fake names,” Dodson said.
“I’d have to call every one of them to find out,” Isaiah said, “and I don’t see any clusters of calls on the day we were hired or went to Blue Hill or when Skip was in my house.” Isaiah did a quick scroll through the texts. There were the usual suspects and more girls. A few to DStar about when he was coming over. No Noelle, no area codes, no clusters.
“Well, I’ll tell you this,” Dodson said. “Charles ain’t making no comeback with these tracks. He copied every MC out there.”
Charles didn’t use email much and there were none that caught Isaiah’s eye. He’d have to go through them again with a search app but this wasn’t a good sign. If there was no connection between Charles and Noelle they were still at square zero.
“Are you listening to this?” Dodson said. “Charles did a diss track.”
Black the Knife, down without a fight
A termite, a flea bite,
Got stage fright, no right to life
Boy’s an absentee, a detainee, no number on his caller ID
Nobody home at the addressee
His time is passed, miscast, outta gas, second class
In foreclosure, never sober, I’m in clover, I’m taking over.
“Makes no sense,” Dodson said. “Cal ever hears this Charles and Bug are out of a job.”
“Maybe they don’t think they’ll need one,” Isaiah said. “Listen to the background vocals.”
Charles had done his own background vocals, overdubbing himself to get a thicker sound; a woman’s voice was weaving in and out, roller-coastering up and down three octaves and yeah-ee-yeah-a-ing.
“Hear the woman?” Isaiah said.
“Yeah, what about her?”
“Before Noelle was Cal’s wife she was a singer.”
“I knew that,” Dodson said. If he wasn’t frying okra he would have snapped his fingers.
They sat at the counter eating gumbo over rice and fried okra.
“This is good,” Isaiah said.
“Good?” Dodson said. “That’s all you got to say?”
The gumbo was different than the version Dodson made back in the apartment. Isaiah tasted traces of honey and white vinegar and some kind of herb that tasted a little like root beer. “The okra’s good too,” he said. They’d downloaded one of Noelle’s songs from iTunes and her voice matched the woman on Charles’s track. It didn’t prove anything but at least there was a connection.
“Noelle needs the life insurance money,” Isaiah said, “and if Charles is going solo he’d need money too. They both hate Cal so they partner up. They lived together, might even have had a thing. The question is, who’s going to take out Cal? They could use Charles’s Inglewood boys but it’s too obvious. They need somebody that can’t be traced back to them. They need a hit man.”
Dodson was disappointed Isaiah didn’t remember about the gumbo but what really pissed him off was not catching the thing about Noelle and what pissed him off even more was that he hadn’t made Isaiah stumble once. “So how do Noelle and Charles hook up with somebody like Skip?” Dodson said. “They sit next to each other at the BET Awards?”
“Through DStar,” Isaiah said. “He delivers to Cal’s house twenty-four seven. He had to know both of them.”
“That doesn’t mean DStar knew Skip.”