Part 40
The London Underground had a tables named for tube stops. This was going to make it easy on the servers. There were openings for bouncers and bartenders and managers. It was an exciting thing for local bands – a new place to try to get a gig.
Yvonne Edwards was confident that her grunge rock bank could get a gig anywhere, locally at least. She'd already played in two barns and one illegal party.
Her father was a well-heeled lawyer. Years ago he had broken off from Baldwin & Baldwin, taking many of their big clients with him. They sued him. Evidently the case had eventually settled.
Now his firm was about half the size of Baldwin & Baldwin, but it made more money, since it took on middle and working class clients in their suits against bigger companies of the type Baldwin & Baldwin represented. Perhaps it was their recognition that if nobody sued their clients, they wouldn't be needed, that prompted Baldwin to tolerate and even make amends with Edwards.
Sitting on her father's lap when she was little and reading a case he had been reading, Yvonne had laughed at the dissenting opinion. Her father had explained to her that the dissenters wrote their own opinion to make their views known, when they were outvoted.
Yvonne had always liked that, so she called her band the Dissenters. Most people were too ignorant to know what that meant, so explaining it gave her something to tell the local rock press.
After her graduation from Port Charles High, she'd started the band, while going to PCU in deference to her father's assumption she should go to college. But he seemed to understand that she was an artist, not an academic. Eventually he became a big supporter of her musical career.
She had gotten, over months, Toby Breyer on guitar, Ian Crane on Bass, and Wylie Doyle on drums.
Of her parents' record collection, Yvonne had always been inspired by the Pretenders. Chrissie Hynde was her heroine.
Yvonne and Wylie went down to the club before it opened. It was abuzz with start-up activity.
A woman in an expensive designer suit sat at the end of the bar.
"Who can we talk to about getting a playing gig?" Yvonne asked her.
"The manager's over there," the woman pointed him out. Then an older man in an expensive suit came over to her and asked her, in a foreign accent, how the publicity plans were going.
The manager said he would consider auditioning them tomorrow. He had a few other bands who were interested. That was no surprise.
Yvonne and Wylie stopped in the coffee shop above. Drinking coffee, they saw a tall man in a business suit, who must have been a lawyer. He was boasting to the girl behind the counter that he had a jury trial going and that the jurors were sucking up everything he said like a vacuum sucks up dust.
That everything he said was dust had apparently not occurred to him.
The boxcar was now an art studio, and when the mood hit V. or Elizabeth, they went there to do some work.
They got many visits from Joe Quinn, who ran errands for them, and from Taryn Polk, who either did that too or asked them for advice, or posed for them, alternatively.
Today, Taryn was concerned about the upcoming homecoming dance and the burning question of whether or not Jeremy Marshall would invite her to it. They had broken up because he wanted to see other girls, in the summer, but now "other girls" seemed to include Taryn, whom he now asked out on occasion.
Taryn also had a problem of whom to invite to Uncle Paul's wedding as her date.
"Do you think I should actually ask Jeremy?" she asked V. and Elizabeth, who didn't usually mind talking to her some while they painted. They were both there, now.
"If you want to," V. said. "If you think you'll have a good time."
"No, ask somebody else," was Elizabeth's advice. Elizabeth was always in favor of moving on from Jeremy.
"I don't know who to ask," Taryn said.
"There's a schoolful of boys," V. observed.
"I guess there's Greg Wentworth, he might go," said Taryn. "Maybe Peter Smith would go. He's nice, and wouldn't take it wrong."
"Ask either one," said Elizabeth.
"You're nuts, Skye," AJ said. "Mom and Dad and Grandfather don't care much about rock and roll clubs, though. But the Emily thing, that's no good. And I don't trust that shyster further than that window. You should check the room for bugs.
"I never thought of that," said Skye. "But it would be like him. He makes like Emily doesn't care, but I'm sure he'd have no problem threatening to tell Mom and Dad and he would think of how he needs evidence."
"Then what are you hanging out with this guy for?"
"I can't explain it to you, AJ, but maybe there's something I can say. If he tells them I'll just say I was setting him up to prove to them that Emily should have nothing to do with him. But how do you check a room for bugs?"
"Gee, I don't have much experience with that," AJ said.
Sergei was kinder than Skye had imagined. He listened to her concerns about her parents and she ended up confiding in him that she needed to check somebody's rooms for bugs.
He didn't ask her why, and she respected him for that. He also said that as a defecting Soviet, he had been paranoid about things like that and knew a little bit about it.
Sean had bragged about trying a jury trial. Skye went by the courthouse and peaked into the courtrooms via the windows of the courtroom doors. She saw Sean sitting at a counsel table with a little old lady who looked like the plaintiff Sean had described as his client in the personal injury suit he was trying.
Sure the coast was clear, she and Sergei went up to Sean's room. Skye had taken Emily's keys as if by mistake. Sure enough, Emily was not organized enough to clear her key ring of keys that she had used years ago. One of them opened the door.
After looking through the room, both satisfied that there were no bugs in it, at least insofar as Sergei would be able to detect them, they went out only for Skye to realize that if Sean had a tape recorder or video camera, he might keep it with him. She remembered something he said about sub rosa investigations, where they filmed people doing things they said they couldn't do.
But if this apparatus was mobile, she'd have a better chance of finding it as he came into or left a room. She could send him down for coffee or get him to take a shower before she left. Or make like she was leaving and then come back in.
She decided she had things under control.