Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Page A

wheels. It was empty otherwise. The room had no windows.
    He circled behind a tufted leather armchair, ivory to match the desktop, and rested his hands on the back. “You wanted to talk about George Favor.”
    “That’s his music outside,” I said. I stood in the middle of the neutral carpet with my hands in my pockets. His chair was the only one in the room. “Does Candy know him?”
    “Just his music. He has every record Favor ever cut and he can play them all note for note, even the mistakes. The best make them, you know. The difference is after they make them they aren’t mistakes anymore. When Candy auditioned by playing three of Favor’s old standards I hired him on the spot.”
    He spoke careful English without an accent. I guessed Hungarian, but only from his name. “Sweet Joe Wooding says Favor told him he sat in here sometimes.”
    “I thought Wooding was dead.”
    “A lot of people are going to be surprised when they read his obituary in a month or so. Did Favor sit in here?”
    “You haven’t yet told me why you’re looking for him.”
    I told him. After a moment he moved from in back of the chair but left one hand on it. He had large hands for a small man. One of them would have been enough to cover his face. “A few times, very late. Most of the customers who were still here at that hour could not have cared less, and I don’t suppose he did either. He just wanted to play. The musicians were glad enough to have him.”
    “Candy wasn’t one of them?”
    “He’s only been here a few months. He became excited when I mentioned Favor used to come in here and play. He asked me all kinds of questions about him, most of which I couldn’t answer. He’s a true fanatic.”
    “When did Favor stop coming in?”
    The midnight-blue suit moved becomingly with his shoulders. “The nights blur together. How long does it take to notice that someone has stopped coming around? Two years ago, three. He couldn’t have been doing it more than six months, and only eight or ten times then. It wasn’t as if he were a regular.”
    “When Wooding saw him four years ago he told him he was playing here.”
    “It could be three. The nights all blur together as I said.”
    “You never heard where he went?”
    “I assumed he died. He didn’t look healthy at all and his wind wasn’t too good. One solo to a set was as much as he could manage, and he had to sit down and wheeze between them.” He paused. “I wasn’t all that unhappy when he stopped coming in.”
    “I guess a dead man on the bandstand doesn’t do much for business.”
    “It wasn’t that. The musicians’ union looks very darkly upon performers playing anywhere for free. I could have been picketed.”
    “Favor might not have been a member.”
    “That would have been even worse.”
    I took my hands out of my pockets. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Zelinka. Would it be all right if I spoke to Candy?”
    “I don’t know what good it would do. I said he wasn’t here then.”
    “You also said he worships Favor. I can use anything worth knowing about the man I’m looking for, including his taste in ice cream. Who would know but a fan?”
    “Fudge ripple. Or at least it was in the fifties. I don’t know what it would be now. Downbeat hasn’t written about him in thirty years.”
    We were sitting at my table by the ceiling post. The band was between sets, and Domino—the black bass man and the artificial albino—had left the platform, probably to share a wrinkled brown cigarette in the alley. Unlike Zelinka, L. C. Candy looked even younger away from the spot, about twenty-five, and he had the fresh shallow voice of a teenaged boy. A glass of Pepsi Free stood on his side of the table with ice in it and nothing else. He didn’t smoke and I’d have bet my next car payment he never took dope. The new generation of musicians took some getting used to. I said, “How is it you know what Downbeat wrote about him thirty years ago? Your father would