by P. N. Elrod
My jaw was hanging by the time the man finished; he’d transfixed me so I was slow to come out of his spell and join the applause. I hadn’t heard a voice like that since my last visit to Coldfield’s place, but this guy was white. And yet it wasn’t all to do with his voice, a lot of it was the feeling he put into his song. There was something special here; I had to hear more, and to hell with the Sommerfeld case.
The singer picked things up with a faster number. He went from brokenhearted misery to triumphant satisfaction, with everyone clapping a beat out for him, then traveled back to heartache again. That’s what the blues were about, after all.
And then all too soon he was finished and passing a hat. I grabbed a business card from my wallet, scribbled a three-word message, and folded a five-dollar bill around it, dropping it in when my turn came. The other money was all quarters and dimes. The bill would get his attention.
When the hat got back to him his eyes widened with surprise, and he looked around the joint. I raised my hand slightly. He thought about it, frowning, probably measuring the five dollars against my flashy suit. I was the only one in the audience who could have given him such a huge tip. He finally nodded and set his guitar down, picking up a sturdy cane. There was something with his legs that gave him a stiff, strutlike walk as he came over to my table, and when he stood still he braced himself with the stick. He held my card and the folded bill between two fingers like a cigarette as I stood to greet him.
“‘Come see me’?” he quoted from it. His speaking voice was just as husky as the one he used for singing. “If you’re wanting company, I don’t play that game.” He put the card and bill on the table.
I chuckled once. “Nothing like that. My name’s Jack Fleming.”
“Jim Waters,” he said, and briefly shook my offered hand. We sat down. He had to lower into his chair, stretching his legs out straight. “What do you want, Mr. Jack Fleming?”
“You don’t waste time.”
“A guy dressed like you doesn’t walk into a place like this without some kind of angle; I’d as soon you get to the point so I can get on with my drinkin’.”
“Fair enough.” I started to turn for a waiter, but one was already on his way to the table. “What’ll you have?”
Waters said he wanted his usual, and I asked for a coffee. The waiter came back with the coffee and a bottle of beer. I gave him a quarter and said to keep the change.
“You are a big spender, young fella,” said Waters after taking a long swig.
“I like to make a good impression.”
“You did that right enough. Was this a joke or is it funny money?” He held up the five. “If I’m lucky I might make this on a Saturday night after payday.”
“It’s not a joke. You impressed the hell out of me.”
“Well, thank you kindly. But what’s the angle?”
“First I want to know why I’ve never heard of you. I’ve been to just about every blues place in this town—”
“Except this one.” His eyes crinkled.
“It doesn’t exactly advertise itself. You only play here? Only here?”
“Why not? It’s close to where I live and work.”
“Where’s that?”
“I got a little shoe-repair business up the street. Sweet, ain’t it, a guy with no feet fixing shoes?” He tapped one of his legs in illustration.
“I guess it is. Was it the war?” I couldn’t tell his age, he had one of those forty-to-sixty faces.
“Oh, yeah. Got in the wrong place at the wrong time. They give me a medal for it and a pension, but that ain’t enough to get by these days, so I fix shoes and play guitar.” His accent wasn’t from Chicago, but from farther south, not too far. St. Louis maybe. That was a major blues town.
“Where’d you learn to play like that?” I asked.
“It’s just something I picked up.”
“And the songs?”
“Those are mine.”
“My God.”
“Impress easy, do you?” His eyes twinkled and he tilted his beer.
“Just the opposite, Mr. Waters. I’ve heard a lot of ’em. The best of the best in this city. I think you could hold your own onstage with any of ’em, and they’d agree with me.”
“Well, that’s mighty nice of you to say so. Now . . . you tell me your story.”
I hesitated. The way things stood I didn’t really have one. I’d just have to blunder through and hope for the best. “I’m going to be opening a nightclub and will need good acts to play there.”
He snorted. “Uh-huh. An’ you think you want me for your bill?”
“I know I do.”
“Me and who else?”
“Ever hear of Bobbi Smythe?”
His disbelief wavered. “Yeah, she’s one of the club singers around town. I seen her name in the papers.”
“Right now she’s starring over at the Nightcrawler, but when I get things set up she’ll be starring at mine. That’s the level of acts I’m putting in.”
“Uh-huh. And when’ll that be?”
I gave him a rueful face. “You got me there, Mr. Waters. Right now I’ve let my ambitions get ahead of my schedule, but I had to talk with you while I could. I can’t give you an opening date for the place, but I would like to know if you’d be interested in playing once it got going.”
He shook his head and shrugged. “Yeah, sure, why not?”
“You think I don’t know how this must sound to you?”
“Son, at this point you are a big bucketful of ifs.” He drained away a fourth of his beer. “But for a tip like that and a cold one I can at least listen to you. You come back to me when you get your club going and we’ll see about things then.”
“Deal,” I said, holding my hand out again.
He started to take it, then pulled back. “Hey, now, how much you plan to pay me?”
I calculated it against what I knew other singers made in the kind of club I planned to open and made him a generous offer. “That, plus whatever tips you get, and I have someone drive you there and home again.”
He rocked back in his chair and couldn’t talk for a while. “You crazy? You just walk in here cold, listen to a couple my songs, and give me a pitch like that?”
“You’ll be worth it,” I said. “Will you accept? I’ll put it in writing later.”
He laughed, shaking his head again. “Why the hell not?” And we closed the deal.
“Another beer?” I asked.
Waters didn’t answer, but glanced sharply up and past my shoulder. I knew what was coming, and quickly stood to face it.
McCallen strode over fast. He had five or six friends behind him, emerging from a curtained-off opening in the back wall. It must have been a private-party room. He was the biggest in the pack, but the others made up for it with numbers. He stopped an arm’s length away, eyes narrow, shoulders hunched, fists closed and ready to strike. The others formed an ominous half circle around us.
“I know you,” he said. “What’d y’do, follow me here?”
I looked him hard in the eye, but had my doubts about being able to get past his anger, so I tried something else instead of hypnosis. “Let’s talk outside. You wouldn’t want to scare the ladies.” People were staring, not the least of whom was Waters.
“Damn right we’re gonna talk,” McCallen rumbled.
I smiled reassuringly at my prospective nightclub star. “Mr. Waters, I apologize for the intrusion. This is a separate piece of business I need to settle with this gentleman, so I’ll have to talk with you later.”
Waters was obviously mystified and alarmed at why so many hostile customers were interested in me. “Later it is,” he said.
I surveyed McCallen and his troops. They seemed to be young collegiate types except for Paterno, who was somewhat older. I recognized him by his coat and hat. He had thick black hair and glasses and watched me with high curiosity. I smiled at him, at McCallen. “Gentlemen? Shall we proceed out of doors?”
&nbs
p; McCallen moved his big shoulders sideways by half a foot. It didn’t give me much room, but it was enough. I nodded at him politely, still smiling.
Then I bolted past them all and slammed out the front door, running like hell.
A graceless exit, but better than getting pounded flat or having to vanish in front of a bunch of bewildered witnesses. The hoots and laughter that trailed me were soon replaced by a thunderous stampede made by a determined McCallen and his friends. He was close after me, cursing a blue streak. I shot across the street and past the drugstore and spotted the alley running behind it. Perfect. I ducked into it—and disappeared.
My momentum from running carried me forward a few yards. I eased to a halt and waited for them to rush in. It didn’t take them long to discover their problem.
“Hey, where the hell is he?” asked Paterno.
“Hiding,” snarled McCallen. “Come on, flush him out.”
As though through a wall, because my ears weren’t so good in this form, I heard the banging of trash cans as the men rooted around for me. A big dog began barking frantically at the noise. Other canines took up the boisterous chorus.
“Two of you run ahead in case he got to the other end,” McCallen ordered.
“But he couldn’t have. We were right behind him.”
“He must have gone over the fence. Look in that yard.”
“You kiddin’? I think Rin Tin Tin lives there, and he sounds pissed.”
A woman’s shrill and highly annoyed voice cut in on my fun. “Hey, you drunks! I’m calling the cops if you don’t get out!”
That decided it for them. McCallen wanted to stay, but his friends persuaded him to abandon the search. If I moved that fast, they argued, I was long gone by now. Everyone withdrew, and I tagged invisibly along to see if I could learn any more about his plans for Miss Sommerfeld.
Most of them didn’t want to go back to the bar minus their prize—me—and McCallen was in no mood to return either. After some discussion they settled things: they’d go to another place to finish their interrupted drinking. Everyone piled into McCallen’s Ford. No one noticed me; I sieved into the trunk again.
The next ride was shorter, with no startling traffic encounters. When they stopped, I counted twenty and slipped from my hiding place, materializing crouched behind the car. They headed for a larger, brighter, and considerably noisier place, whose chief virtue seemed to be two-for-a-nickel beers. The music was raucous and loud. I could forget invisibly eavesdropping on McCallen and his group; I’d not be able to hear a damn thing. Ambushing him afterward I could also forget. Even that cheap a beer would make the job too difficult if he had enough of them.
I knew the neighborhood, which was only a couple miles from the Sommerfeld house. Flagging a cab was not a problem, as the dispatching office for a company was just down the block. I gave the driver the street, sat back, and listened to him talk about how he would fix things in Europe. He favored the idea of making the leaders all get into a prizefighting ring with baseball bats. He had a point-and-handicap system all worked out so no one man would have the advantage. It made as much sense as anything I’d heard lately. I told him he should write to the prime minister of England with the suggestion.
“Why not to Roosevelt?” he asked.
“England’s closer to what’s going on. If that war in Spain spreads out, they’ll feel it sooner than we would.”
“Maybe I should write the king of England instead. Whoever the hell it is now,” he said.
In summing up ’36, the press had called it the “year of three kings” because of the old king’s death, that business with the abdication, and the crown going to the next brother in the line. Escott had been singularly uninterested in any of it beyond a comment that the so-called scandal was nothing compared to those the previous generation of royalty had been embroiled in. To prove his point he related a few juicy stories that never made it to the history books, then went back to reading the papers without revealing his sources.
My driver got very detailed about his handicapping system, enough to keep me entertained on the trip back. I gave him a good tip when we arrived and checked the area on the off chance that McCallen had changed his mind and returned. The street was clear except for my Buick and the cars that had been there before. No Escott yet, so I let myself into Mary Sommerfeld’s house and straightened books and paintings while waiting for him.
She had quite a collection of reading material, and just to be nosy I studied spine titles. She seemed to have a little of everything, from classics to the new stuff being touted as the next batch of classic literature. I had my doubts on that since I couldn’t recall the name of last year’s critically acclaimed opus. The fact that I’d not bothered to read it may have had something to do with the lapse of memory. My tastes ran to more lurid stuff. At least it could be relied upon to have a plot.
Once I tried to get through Anthony Adverse and finally gave up when I found myself passing over whole pages at a time to find plot developments. I didn’t much like the ending either when I skipped ahead to read it. I fared better with Gone with the Wind because all the detail on the Civil War was pretty interesting. Bobbi had liked the book, so I read it to talk about it with her. She thought Scarlett should have wised up faster about Ashley and told Rhett Butler to jump in the lake at the end. I thought she should have picked up stakes and moved west right after Gettysburg and to hell with Tara. For that I got a pillow thrown in my face.
Mary Sommerfeld was also quite a theatergoer, to judge by her collection of old program books, many from New York. With her money she probably wouldn’t think anything of hopping a train east to take in the Broadway season. She read plays as well, and had several books containing scripts of everything from Shakespeare to George S. Kaufman.
Before I got too far in my cultural education I heard a car door slam. Escott was coming up the walk. I let him in and asked about our client.
“She’s presently checked in under an assumed name in one of the upper floors of a hotel in the Loop, hopefully enjoying a room-service drink and a fine view of the lake. The more time she had to think about things the more agitated she got. I was wishing I possessed your powers of enforced persuasion by the time I had her settled in. She is not at all pleased at this turn of events.”
“It’s her own fault. You warned her, and tonight I told her she should burn the stuff, but it put her nose all out of joint. I’ve got a new turn for you, too.”
“Indeed?” He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs.
I told him about my hitching a ride with McCallen and his conversation with the new man, Paterno. “He sounded pretty thick with this bird. The impression I got was that Paterno was a go-between for some other players. McCallen’s apparently trying to get the papers so either he or Paterno can sell them to an unknown party with plenty of cash.”
“He did say it was worth ten times more than the two hundred I offered him,” Escott recalled.
“Which is a lot of dough in anyone’s bakery. Maybe it’s a news outfit. ‘Cracker Heiress Slums with Scotch Madman’ would make a catchy headline for the seamier rags, especially if they had some purple-passion love letters to print with it.”
He looked pained. “That’s ‘Scots.’ Scotch is a drink.”
“You catch my drift, though. McCallen’s hurt feelings for her might translate into that kind of vindictiveness.”
“For a mere two thousand dollars?”
“That’s enough for anyone to start over anywhere and have plenty of fun along the way.”
“I suppose, but it’s just one possibility.”
“You got others?”
“Suppose the family of her fiancé, Prince Ravellia, objects to Miss Sommerfeld as hers objected to McCallen? They might be trying to find a way of discrediting her in order to call off the marriage.”
“I thought poor princes marrying American heiresses was still in fashion.”
“Except that his family is not poor. Their
objections could be based on the young lady’s commoner bloodline.”
“You’re kidding. That’s crazy.”
“So speaks a man born in a democracy. But there are class issues to consider, and his family might think Miss Sommerfeld too inferior no matter how rich she is or will be.”
I remembered the shock over the divorced American Mrs. Simpson marrying a king, and figured Escott had a point. We talked back and forth for a while, but came to the same conclusion in the end—I’d have to see McCallen.
“Fine,” I said. “Invite him over to the office for a meeting. I’ll deal with him there.”
“Very well.”
“Hey, Charles, I meant it as a joke!”
“Oh, yes, of course, but it is a most sensible suggestion.”
“‘Sensible’ is not the word. He was ready to break me in two tonight and would just as cheerfully fold you in half the wrong way if he got the chance. You’re not inviting him over there unless I’m along to keep him in line.”
“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t think of depriving you of the opportunity. I’m well aware that he might be feeling a touch annoyed at your invasion of his house, but have no doubt you’ll be able to sort him out.”
“Good.”
“And if I’ve not ascertained by then the identity of this Paterno fellow and his comrades, you can make inquiries directly with Mr. McCallen.”
I was going to advise Escott to be careful, but bit it back. He knew his business, and actually looked interested in it for a change. The case had some ups and downs, but it wasn’t exactly riveting for him. Now that things had gotten more complicated, he’d have something to do tomorrow besides turn away divorce work.
We shut most of the lights off and hauled ourselves out of there. Escott locked up while I headed on to my car. I thought about going back to Moe’s to see if Jim Waters was still playing, but decided to leave well enough alone for the moment. I’d already made a hell of a first impression on him, anything more on top of it might make things worse. Better to try again another night, preferably after my talk with McCallen.