Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  “No point in that, no point whatsoever,” the man with the top hat said, and then he smiled, flashing a row of white and even teeth. “Or I should say, your knife got a point, but not you. You think you can hurt me?”

  “No,” Shutter said. His hand fell away from his pocket, and he accepted his defeat before the fight had even begun. “What do I have to do, Baron?”

  “I got to pass this hat along,” the man said. “You get to be me, you lucky son of a bitch.”

  “And what will happen to you?” Shutter asked, trying to understand.

  “I get to leave for good,” the Baron said. “We lesser ones, we get tired. Not enough people love us, fear us, feed us. We got to recruit.”

  “What about the raggedy woman, May?” Shutter asked.

  “What about me?” a female voice asked. She stepped out of the shadows at the end of the alley. The clothes were the same, or almost—torn and bloody, ripped and shredded—but the body wearing them was rounder and browner than the last May. Her streaming hair was golden chestnut in the light from the street lamp, and her fingers were curled into the fur of a. God almighty, a bear.

  “Why have you changed?” Shutter asked.

  “We the lesser ones,” the Baron said. “We’ve only got enough spirit left to pass from one body to the other.”

  Shutter said, “All right, then. Let’s get on with it.” He moved his guitar case to the mouth of the alley.

  The Baron reached out his hand, and extracted Shutter’s heart. Shutter’s face went slack, and he fell to the pavement. The Baron crouched over Shutter’s open mouth, and a white wisp passed from the Baron’s lips into the dying man’s mouth. Then somehow, they changed places. The tall, round-faced body lay on the pavement, empty and spent.

  May watched, smiling a little, as the new Baron stood. Of course, now he was a bit shorter, his face narrower, and his body thinner. But the suit still fit and the top hat looked just as jaunty. The new Baron said, “Well, Miss May, I got to find a man and give him a warning.” And May replied, “There’s a singer on down the street waiting for me to give her that one big chance.”

  The two nodded to each other and went on their ways.

  After a time, the big body was picked up by a group of drunks and deposited on the corner, to be removed the next day. Police didn’t come to this area.

  Shutter Washington’s guitar was found the next morning by a little boy who’d gotten up early to shine the shoes of men on their way to work. He hid the guitar so no one else would get it, and he ran on to his station, but he thought about his discovery all day. When he returned home, he pulled the guitar case from the back of the closet under the tenement stairs, and he carried it up to the roof. Once he was sure he was alone, he opened the case and gasped at the beauty of the instrument inside. With hands that shook from excitement, he pulled the guitar out and held it as he’d seen others do. It dwarfed him, but it didn’t scare him, and by and by, he strummed a chord.

  And then another.

  He glanced up, because he thought he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, a flash of white. But then he bent his head again to the instrument.

  13 A Man Feeling Bad

  Toni L.P. Kelner

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN before the underfed cop finally escorted me to the station’s interview room, where the lieutenant in charge was trying to sort out what had happened. I didn’t hold the long wait against him. I’ve been an insurance investigator for five years, and the first thing I learned on the job was that everybody lies. As many people as the cops had had to question before me, they must have already been up to their eyeballs in evasion, confusion, and pure out invention. Besides, it had given me more time to figure out what I wanted to tell him.

  “Ms. Grace Monroe?” the lieutenant asked, checking a notepad covered with some personal form of hieroglyphics.

  I nodded.

  “I’m Lieutenant Johnson. I’d like to ask you some questions. Have you been advised of your rights?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He turned a page on his pad and wrote my name. “What can you tell me about the shooting?”

  “It was after Buddy finished his set. I went backstage to see him, and then we both came out and sat at Akers’ table.”

  “Mr. Kendricks was there as well?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you knew all three men?”

  “I’d seen Akers and Kendricks twice before, and had spoken to Akers, but tonight was the first time I spoke to Kendricks. I suppose you’d call them acquaintances.”

  “And Mr. Bartholomew?”

  “Oh, I’ve known Buddy Bartholomew for over ten years. He was married to my sister, Brandy.”

  Since he didn’t add anything to his notes, I figured he already knew that. “Then what happened?” he asked me.

  “Akers offered Buddy a drink and sent Kendricks up to the bar to get it.”

  Johnson still wasn’t writing, so I knew I still hadn’t told him anything he hadn’t already found out.

  I went on. “Akers told Buddy what a good job he’d done, that it was the best he’d ever heard him play. Buddy said it was because of Akers, and then he came out with the gun.”

  “You hadn’t seen the gun before then?”

  “No, sir. Buddy had a towel in his hand, the one he’d used during the show to wipe his face down. The gun was under the towel.”

  “Then what?”

  “Buddy aimed the gun at Akers, and some woman must have seen it, because there was a scream. Akers just went still, and I grabbed Buddy’s hand and tried to point it away. Then the gun went off.”

  “Just once?”

  “No, sir. It went off twice.”

  Still no notes.

  “Do you have any idea why your brother-in-law would want to shoot Akers?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I know exactly why Buddy wanted to hurt Phillip Akers.”

  TWO WEEKS EARLIER

  The blues club was smoke-fogged and not nearly well enough air-conditioned for early May in the Delta. Though nobody was on the platform that passed for a stage, the place was already crowded, over half of the people gobbling down sausage sandwiches that were dripping with grease.

  There was a battered wooden door to the right of the stage, and I knocked on it under the hand-printed sign that said PRIVATE. A minute later, a harassed-looking older woman stuck her head out. “The bathroom is around back,” she said, already closing the door.

  “I need to see Buddy.” She looked me up and down, making me wonder if he was getting popular enough to attract blues groupies. “Could you tell him his sister-in-law Grace is here?” That must have convinced her that I wasn’t there for a pre-show blow job, because she stepped back to let me in.

  “Down that way,” she said, nodding toward the last of three doors off of the narrow hall. I passed the busy, clattering kitchen and a paper-strewn office before getting to the combination storage and dressing room.

  Buddy Bartholomew, a wiry man with sandy hair that needed a trim, was concentrating so hard on tuning his guitar that he didn’t notice me until I cleared my throat a second time. Then he jerked up, blinking, as if he’d been far away. “Is it time already?” He blinked again. “Grace?”

  “Hi, Buddy.”

  He put the guitar down long enough to give me a hug. “This is a surprise!”

  “I don’t see why. I’ve been leaving messages for the last two weeks. Did your phone get cut off again?” It wouldn’t have been the first time—though it looked as if Buddy had drawn a good crowd this time, there’d been plenty of nights where his take had barely covered gas money.

  “No, I’ve been meaning to call you back. Just got busy.”

  “Busy?” I gave him a look. My messages had stressed that it was urgent. “What about Brandy? Is she so damned busy she can’t pick up a phone?”

  “I guess. I mean … I don’t know.”

 
“Where is she anyway? She wasn’t at your apartment, which is why I tracked you down here.” I didn’t have to tell him how much of a pain that had been, first to figure out which hole-in-the-wall joint he was playing at, and then to find the place. “Is she here?”

  “No.” He swallowed visibly. “The fact is, I don’t know where she is, Grace. Brandy left me.”

  Now it was my turn to blink. “Are you shitting me?”

  “I wish to God I was. I came back from an overnight gig and found a note on the kitchen counter. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

  “When did she go?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “Jesus! When were you planning to tell Mama and me?”

  He shrugged. “I figured she’d tell you herself. Haven’t y’all heard from her?”

  “Would I be here if we’d heard from her?” I rubbed my eyes, which were red and sore from lack of sleep. “I can’t believe you didn’t call.”

  “I thought she’d come back! I’ve been praying for her to come back. I can’t imagine why she’d up and leave like that.”

  I sighed. I knew damned well why Brandy left. She thought she’d married a big-time musician, not realizing how hard it was for a man to make a living playing the blues, one of the few occupations on earth where being white was a liability. Instead of him supporting her, she’d had to support him, and she hadn’t been happy about it.

  “Didn’t she leave a forwarding address, or phone number? Anything?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you even tried to find her?” I asked.

  “Her note said not to.”

  So naturally, he hadn’t bothered. “Look, Buddy, I’ve got to find Brandy.”

  “She’ll come back, I know she will.”

  “I can’t wait. Didn’t you listen to my messages?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Mama. She’s …” I swallowed. “She hasn’t got much time left.”

  That led to the usual questions, which meant I had to repeat all the hateful phrases: lung cancer, fourth stage, hadn’t responded to chemo. Then of course Buddy had to tell me how he’d heard about somebody in way worse health than Mama who’d beaten the Big C and lived for another ten years. I know he meant well—Buddy always meant well—but I didn’t have time for good intentions. So when he said, “If there’s anything I can do, just name it,” I quickly said, “You can help me find Brandy.”

  “But I don’t know where to look.”

  “Didn’t you call her friends? What about her job?”

  “I think she quit her job.”

  “Don’t you know for sure?”

  “Grace, I work nights and sleep days. How am I supposed to call people?” A light seemed to go off in his head. “Wait, you’re a detective. I bet you could find her a lot faster than I could.”

  “I’m an insurance investigator, Buddy. Unless you think Brandy is pretending to have back problems or faking a hearing loss, I’ve got nothing.”

  “It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? Investigating is investigating.”

  I sighed and rubbed my eyes again. Technically, I’m a private investigator—I’ve got the license—but all I’d ever done was claims work, not missing person searches. But I was on leave to tend to Mama, and I couldn’t very well bully Buddy into finding his wife if he didn’t want to. “Fine, I’ll see what I can do, but I need names and phone numbers for her friends, and her job, and anything else you can think of. And I want to go through your apartment to see if she left anything.”

  “You got it. You want to call tomorrow? After lunch, because I sleep late.”

  “Buddy, Mama’s in a bad way. I need you to tell me what you know right now.”

  “But I go on in a few minutes.”

  “Then we don’t have time to mess around.” I dug into my pocketbook and found a notepad, then pulled over a stack of beer crates to lean on. “Let’s get going.”

  A quarter of an hour later, I had all the names I could wring out of him. The visit to his and Brandy’s apartment could wait, since he didn’t have a spare set of keys to give me, but at least I had a place to start the next day without having to wait for him to wake up.

  “What about Brandy’s note?” I asked. “What exactly did she say?”

  “You can read it for yourself.” He pulled out his wallet and unfolded a piece of cheap stationery before handing it to me. I couldn’t imagine why he’d carried it around with him as if it were a love note instead of a Dear John letter—maybe it was like a sore tooth that you just couldn’t help running your tongue over, even when it hurt.

  The note was classic Brandy—short, self-centered, and thoughtlessly cruel.

  Buddy,

  I’m sorry, but I’ve had it. This isn’t what I signed up for, and it’s time for me to go. I wish you luck, but I want more out of life than working all day and hanging around in some lousy bar every night. Don’t come looking for me—I’ll be fine.

  Brandy

  I handed it back to him, and he carefully refolded it and put it back in his wallet. Then the woman who’d let me in the back stuck her head in to say, “Two minutes, Buddy.”

  “Thanks, Lorna.” He absently reached for his guitar.

  “Your boyfriend is here tonight,” she said with a snicker and disappeared again.

  I raised one eyebrow, and Buddy looked embarrassed. “It’s not like that. There’s this guy who comes to a lot of my shows. Always sits in front, always buys me a beer afterward. Big blues fan—you wouldn’t believe how much he knows about the music. He’s given me a lot of good advice, too. He says he’ll help me get a recording contract when I get good enough.”

  “Is that right?” I said, remembering the other times Buddy had claimed this man or that was going to propel him to the big time. At least this one paid for the beer. We started walking toward the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You’re not sticking around for the show?”

  “I’ve got other things on my mind right now.”

  “The music might make you feel better. You know what they say. The blues ain’t nothing but a good man or a good woman feeling bad.”

  “Not tonight, Buddy.”

  “Another time, then. You give my best to your mama.”

  I said I would, and as he stepped toward the stage, I slipped through the crowd, which had grown even larger while I was backstage. The last time I’d come to one of Buddy’s shows, back when he and Brandy had first married, he hadn’t drawn even a quarter of that many people. Maybe he really was improving.

  I thought I spotted his big fan sitting at a table right in front of the stage. He was chunky, with suspiciously dark hair for a man his age and a sweating mug of beer in front of him. There was a tall, lean man with him who looked as bored as the first man looked expectant.

  Buddy wasted no time chatting up the audience, just tore into “It Serves Me Right to Suffer,” as I left. As much as I agreed with his choice of song, I was in no mood to listen to him. I may have grown up in the Delta, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear a man whining about how he’d lost his job, his dog, and his woman, in that order. I’d become a blues fan just as soon as they wrote me a song about having to track down my idiot sister so my dying mother could say goodbye.

  The next morning, I drove to Memphis, more than a little ashamed at how relieved I was to get out of the house. Mama and I lived in Senatobia, a town small enough that people know when there’s illness in the family, and some of the ladies from our church were taking turns staying with her. That meant I didn’t have to be there every minute, but I felt like I should be unless I had a good excuse. The look in Mama’s eyes when I told her I was going out to look for Brandy was as good an excuse as I was going to get.

  My first stop was the moving company where Brandy worked. I’d decided not to mention Brandy was my sister, at least not right away. I had my PI card and my business cards from the agency, and I thought people might be more willing to
talk to somebody official, or at least semi-official. If that didn’t work, I’d tell the truth. Hell, I’d cry if I thought it would help.

  As it was, the boss was perfectly willing to tell me that Brandy had quit about the same time she left Buddy. She’d taken her final paycheck right then and hadn’t left a forwarding address, so he had nothing for me but complaints about her leaving with no notice. It could have been a total waste of time, but one thing I’ve learned as an investigator is that every office has a gossip queen, somebody who knows everything about everybody, and who likes to tell what she knows.

  I had a hunch that the moving company’s reigning queen was an older lady in elastic-waist pants and a flowered top who answered the phones. The whole time I was talking to her boss, she had her mouth squeezed shut, as if she was trying to hold in what she was thinking. It was nearly noon, so before I left, I made a point of asking her if there was some place nearby where I could get a bite to eat. She directed me to a lunch counter just across the street, and I went in, ordered, and watched for her.

  Sure enough, I hadn’t even started on my club sandwich when she came in, and I asked her to join me. Her name was Ethel, and she couldn’t wait to start dishing the dirt on my sister.

  “That girl never really cared about the job,” she said between bites of her chef salad. “She was always watching the clock, coming in a little late, leaving a little early. And expecting somebody else to make up for it.” From the indignant look on her face, I suspected “somebody else” was usually Ethel.

  “Did she talk about her personal life?”

  “Lord, did she! How her husband was such a good musician and she was only working until he got discovered and signed a fat recording contract.” Ethel rolled her eyes. “The bloom came off that rose mighty quick. I don’t know if he’s any good or not, but I do know how hard it is to make a living playing the kind of places she was talking about. I told her he ought to go on American Idol—that’s the way to start a music career. But all he wanted to play was the blues, and that won’t get you the votes on American Idol.”