I noticed the dark-haired woman as soon as she walked into Mojo on that Friday night in May when it all began.
She was inappropriately dressed for the laid-back blues bar, wearing a severe dark pantsuit, her hair tightly pulled back from her face, black high heels with red soles, which I knew she had a weakness for, and a cool smile. Several eyes, including mine, followed her to the bar, where she ordered a drink from fair-haired Ricky.
She had a striking face. Dark among the blond, blue-eyed Danes. She took her glass of what I guessed was whiskey—she used to be a Johnnie girl—and walked up to the end of the room, right by the smoking booth. She held her drink in one hand, and the other was in her pocket. She leaned against the wall, confidence oozing out of her, as if she were saying, “You sure you want to talk to me?” to the men who wondered if they should try their luck with her.
Mojo, the place you went in Copenhagen if you were into the blues, was anything but fancy or chic. It was a hole in the wall. It was also atmospheric, inexpensive, and had been delivering live blues (or jazz or folk music) every day since the mid-eighties. It was not pretentious, and the only thing you had to worry about was arriving early enough not to get stuck at a table behind a pillar, with a partial view of the stage.
There were almost always musicians milling outside the bar with a beer and a cigarette, awaiting their turn onstage. It was a small community of blues musicians and most of us knew one another. I usually played with my band but others, less established, came by on Blues Jam Night on Thursdays, taking turns to play with familiar and new musicians. There were always one or two who were deemed too drunk to perform and kicked off the stage by Thomas, who ran the joint with an iron fist and a friendly smile on his dark face.
We were playing one of the last sets of the night. I was on guitar, while Bobby K finished singing, I'm gonna shoot you right down.
It was John Lee Hooker Night.
The woman I couldn’t keep my eyes off sipped her golden whiskey slowly as we began to play one of my favorites, “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.”
I watched her watch me as my solo wound down and the clapping began.
“Give it up for my man Gabriel Præst on guitar,” Bobby K said, and the crowd applauded. I bowed. “And let’s give a hand to John Reinhardt on bass, the elegant Nuru Kimathi on drums, and my drinking partner Valdemar Vong on the sax.”
Nuru, a Kenyan who had moved to Denmark after she met and married a Dane, smiled and waved at the crowd, leaned into her microphone, and, in a two-pack-a-day voice, said, “Let’s not forget our fearless leader and a man who sings to make angels weep, Bobby K.”
After the applause quieted, Bobby K told the crowd that we would wet our whistles and be right back with “Shake It Baby” and a few other precious gems to close the evening.
I picked up my beer from the bar and walked up to the dark-haired woman.
“Still singing the blues,” she mused.
I smiled and leaned in to give her a perfunctory, almost platonic hug and said, “Hej.”
She didn’t flinch but she didn’t lean into my hug either. I would’ve gone with a handshake, but I perversely wanted to see her response. Now that I had, I had no clue what I was after.
“How are you, Leila?”
She nodded, and something twinkled in her eyes. “When are you done? I need your help.”
I raised my eyebrows. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine after . . . what, nearly a decade?
“My help?” I sipped my beer, simply to have something to do with my hands.
“Yes,” she confirmed.
I gave myself a moment to think before I responded, even though I knew I didn’t need the time. No matter what was or was not there between us, if she was asking for my help, I’d give it to her.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s going to be another hour. If it’s urgent . . .”
She shook her head.
“Buy me another Johnnie Walker,” she held up her nearly empty glass, “and I’ll wait.”
“You need my help, but I have to buy the Johnnie?” I waved to Ricky, the barman, and pointed to Leila’s glass. He nodded.
“Yes. After all you are making me wait.” She was lightening the mood between us, asking me to join in and play.
I smiled as I watched the bartender make a beeline for us, Johnnie in hand. “My man Ricky will take care of you.”
As I was leaving, my back turned to her, I heard her softly whisper, “Thank you, Gabriel.”
I walked my bicycle, my guitar strapped to my back, beside Leila to Southern Cross Pub on Løngangstræde close to Mojo and Rådhus, the city hall. I knew the pub well, because it was open until 5:00 a.m., and people like me who stayed out late into the morning went there when they didn’t want to go home. And the bartender made an old-fashioned that could beat the pants off the designer crap they sold in chic Copenhagen bars, where it cost twice as much.
It was three in the morning and the crowd was winding down. Once I parked my bicycle and locked it, we sat at one of the outdoor tables warmed by an overhead infrared heat lamp. I didn’t pick up the blanket that was draped on the chair to cover myself. I was wearing my Burberry trench, because Mojo was a good fifteen-minute ride on my bicycle to my apartment, and even though summer was in the air, the spring chill hadn’t quite left the party. I set my guitar case on the chair next to me.
Smokers stood outside, around the door, their alcohol-laden voices carrying through the night.
Leila draped a blanket across her lap.
“You cold?” I asked. “We can go in.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
A waiter came along, and I ordered an old-fashioned while she ordered another Johnnie Walker, still neat. Her third of the night, I counted, and those were the ones I knew about. One thing about Leila, she could drink most people under the table.
“How can I help you?” I asked once we were settled in, waiting for our drinks.
“You’ve gotten better,” she said and then on a smile added, “at the guitar.”
I could’ve responded with a double entendre about other things I’d gotten better at, but it was too easy and a little unsophisticated, so I said, “Time and practice.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I waited for her to tell me how I could help her.
Knowing Leila, coming to me was a last resort. The relationship hadn’t ended well. There had been yelling and screaming, and plenty of fighting. She had thrown a few things at me. I had maybe made a few churlish and snide remarks, which had instigated the throwing of things at me. That had been a decade ago. We’d both grown up since then. I didn’t enter relationships anymore, so I hadn’t had to end any—there was always less drama with relationships that lasted a couple of months than there was for ones that lasted a couple of years and rocked your world.
“If I could have gotten anyone else to do it, trust me . . . ,” she trailed off, telling me she was as uncomfortable as I had thought she might be, coming to me for help. It didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t know why.
The waiter brought our drinks. I took the first sip and sighed in pleasure. I was pumped after playing, as I usually was, and knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep for another hour or so. I was in no rush to get her talking. She’d get there when she got there. In the meantime, I was sitting across from one of the most beautiful women I had ever had the pleasure of seeing naked, with a perfect cocktail in my hand—it was a very good moment.
She toyed with her whiskey glass, took a sip, and then announced, “Yousef Ahmed.”
I nodded.
“You know who he is?” she asked.
“Yes, as I don’t live under a stone.”
“I’ve taken him on as a client. We intend to appeal.”
My eyebrows rose. “Appeal what? The case is over, Leila. The man has been convicted.”
She looked me in the eyes, straight, focused, and clear. “I don’t think he did it.”
“Well, skat, they’re all innocent, except they’re not,” I provoked her by calling her darling. The irony of the Danish language is that skat also means “tax,” very apropos.
She didn’t take the bait. “He didn’t do it.”
“A jury found him guilty. There’s nothing left to do except work on an early release,” I retorted. “Which I don’t see happening.”
“I was in London when the trial took place and I couldn’t help him then.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. She was affected. “But I intend to help him now.”
“How?” I was baffled.
Leila took a deep breath. “I need you to investigate this.”
“This? As in the murder of Sanne Melgaard?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t want to once again say that such an investigation was pointless so I went another route. “Okay. What if I find out he did it?”
She raised her hands, palms up. “Then that’s that.”
She finished her drink, set the empty glass on the table, and waved at the waiter.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why even take him on?”
“I know . . . knew his son,” Leila explained. “I know the family. It’s been devastating for them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I shut up. I had never gone wrong shutting up.
Someone called out to an Andreas, who was apparently a son of a bitch, followed by a string of obscenities and drunken laughter.
The waiter came back with a fresh drink and took Leila’s empty glass away. He looked at me pointedly and I shook my head. If I drank any more, I wouldn’t be able to bicycle home—this was my third and final drink of the evening. Leila, as always, held her liquor better than I did.
“If you knew him, you’d know he couldn’t have killed Sanne Melgaard. He’s not that man. And I don’t give a shit who says what about him. It’s like Muslim man plus angry equals murderer,” she hissed, and I recognized the fire in her that had drawn me to her.
Leila was a passionate woman. When she believed in something, she went all out. For a short time there, she’d believed in us.
“My law firm will pay you.”
“I wasn’t planning to do this for free, if I was planning to do it.”
“And are you planning to do it?” she asked.
“There’s a good chance of that happening,” I offered, and she smiled, as I wanted her to. Even after a decade, I still wanted to make her happy, I realized, more than a little disturbed by that thought.
“You can talk to your police friends, just make sure they did everything the way it was supposed to be done,” she pleaded.
“You know I don’t have many police friends.” When you ratted out the national chief of police, your former colleagues tended to feel sore about you.
“Meet his daughter,” Leila suggested. “She was thirteen when they took him away. She’s Sophie’s age.”
Which made her about eighteen now. Sophie, my daughter, had just turned twenty. Leila certainly had the violins out for this one.
“I can bring her to your office next week. Just meet her and . . . ,” Leila faltered.
I raised a hand. “I’ll do it. I mean, I’ll meet her. I’m saying yes, I’ll look into the case.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because you asked me to,” I said truthfully.
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