by Peter Straub
When I left, only the man with the gold chain was left of the original four, and he had already been once in and out of the back room. None of them looked at me when I paid up and left through the arched door into the St. Alwyn’s lobby.
I forgot about them and went up to the desk clerk to ask if Glenroy Breakstone was in his room.
“Yeah, Glenroy’s up there,” he said and pointed to a row of house phones. One old man in a gray suit with fat lapels sat on the long couch in the lobby, smoking a cigar and mumbling to himself. The clerk told me to dial 925.
A thick, raspy voice said, “You have reached Glenroy Breakstone’s residence. He is home. If you have a message, now’s the time.”
“Mr. Breakstone?”
“Didn’t I say that? Now it’s your turn.”
I told him my name and said that I was downstairs in the lobby. I could hear the sound of Nat “King” Cole singing “Blame It on My Youth” in the background. “I was hoping that I could come up to see you.”
“You some kind of musician, Tim Underhill?”
“Just a fan,” I said. “I’ve loved your playing for years, and I’d be honored to meet you, but what I wanted to talk about with you was the man who used to be the day manager here in the fifties and sixties.”
“You want to talk about Bad Bob Bandolier?” I had surprised him, and he laughed. “Man, nobody wants to talk about Bad Bob anymore. That subject is talked out.”
“It has to do with the Blue Rose murders,” I said.
There was a long pause. “Are you some kind of reporter?”
“I could probably tell you some things you don’t know about those murders. You might be interested, if only for James Tread-well’s sake.”
Another pause while he considered this. I was afraid that I had gone too far, but he said, “You claim you’re a jazz fan?”
I said that I was.
“Tell me who played the tenor solo on Lionel Hampton’s ‘Flyin’ Home,’ who played tenor for the Billy Eckstine band with Charlie Parker, and the name of the man who wrote ‘Lush Life.’ ”
“Illinois Jacquet, I think both Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon, and Billy Strayhorn.”
“I should have asked you some hard questions. What was Ben Webster’s birthday?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” he said. “Pick up a pack of Luckies at the desk before you come up.”
Before I had taken three steps back toward the desk, the clerk was already holding out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He waved away the bills I offered him. “Glenroy’s got an account, but I almost never charge him for cigarettes. What the hell, he’s Glenroy Breakstone.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said.
13
ON THE ST. ALWYN’S TOP FLOOR, the dull black door of 925 stood at the end of the long corridor to the right of the elevators. Patterned yellow paper covered the walls. I knocked on the door, and a wiry man of about five-eight with tight, close-cropped white hair and bright, curious eyes opened it and stood before me. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that said LAREN JAZZFEST across its front and loose black trousers. His face was thinner and his cheekbones sharper than when he had recorded Blue Rose. He held out his hand for the cigarettes and smiled with strong white teeth. I could hear Nat Cole singing behind him.
“Get in here, now,” he said. “You got me more interested than an old man ought to be.” He tossed the pack onto a table and shooed me into the room.
Sun streaming in the big windows at the front of the room fell on a long, colorful Navaho rug, a telescope on a black metal mount, an octagonal table stacked with sheet music, compact discs, and paperback books. Just out of the sunlight, a group of chairs faced a fifteen-foot-long hotel dresser unit flanked with speakers. Two large, framed posters hung on the exposed wall, one for the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice, the other for a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Glenroy Breakstone’s name figured prominently on both. Framed photographs were propped against his shelves of records—a younger Breakstone in a dressing room with Duke Ellington, with Benny Carter and Ben Webster, playing side by side on a stage with Phil Woods and Scott Hamilton.
Two tenor saxophone cases sat on the floor like suitcases, and a baritone saxophone and a clarinet capped with mouthpieces stood upright on a stand beside them. The room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke only partially masked by incense.
I turned around to find Glenroy Breakstone smiling at me and knew that he had seen my surprise. “I didn’t know you played clarinet and baritone,” I said.
“I don’t play them anywhere but in this room,” he said. “About 1970, I bought a soprano in Paris, but I got so frustrated with the thing I gave it away. Now I’m thinking of getting another one, so I can get frustrated all over again.”
“I love Blue Rose,” I said. “I was just listening to it last night.”
“Yeah, people go for those ballad albums.” He looked at me a second, half-amused. “People like you, you ought to go out and get new records instead of playing the old ones over and over. I made one with Tommy Flanagan in Italy last year. We used Tommy’s trio—I like that one.” He moved toward the bedroom door. “You want fruit juice or something? I got a lot of good juice in here, mango, papaya, passion fruit, all kinds of stuff.”
I said I’d have whatever he was having, and he went into the bedroom. I began inspecting the posters and photographs.
He came back carrying two tall glasses and handed me one. He gestured with his own glass toward what I had been looking at. “See, this is how it goes. Everything’s overseas. In a week, I go to France for the festivals. When I’m there I’m gonna make a record with Warren Vaché, that’s all set up, then I spend the rest of the summer in England and Scotland. If I’m lucky, I get on a cruise and do a couple of the jazz parties. It sounds like a lot, but it ain’t. I spend a lot of time in this place, practicing my horns and listening to the people I like. Tell you the truth.” He smiled again. “I almost always listen to old records, too. You like that juice?” He was waiting for me to tell him what it was.
I sipped it. I had no idea what it was. “Is it mango?”
He gave me a disgusted look. “You don’t know much about fruit juice, I guess. What you have there is papaya. See how sweet that is? That’s a natural sweetness.”
“How long have you been living at the St. Alwyn?”
He nodded. “Long time. First year I moved in here, in ’45, I had a room on the third floor. Little tiny room. I was with Basie in those years, hardly ever got home. When I quit to form my own group, they moved me up to the fifth floor, way at the back, because I wanted be able to have rehearsals in my room. In ’61, Ralph Ransom said I could have one of the big rooms on the seventh floor, same rent, after the guy who lived there died. Ralph was being good to me, because right around then the music business went to hell, and sometimes I couldn’t make the rent. After Ralph sold out, I made a deal with the new people and moved up here and made the place safe.”
I asked him what he meant.
“I got the only rooms in the place with new locks.”
I remembered someone telling me that the locks in the St. Alwyn were no good. “So someone could keep his key when he checked out, come back a year later and get back into the same room?”
“All I know is, I lost my Balanced Action tenor and a new clarinet, and that ain’t gonna happen anymore. The way things are now, you have one of those locks, you can come home, find a body parked in your bed. And if you’re a cop in Millhaven, maybe you’re even dumb enough to think a boy called Walter Dragonette put her there.” He stepped away from the wall and gestured toward the chairs. “I been doing a lot of talking, but I think it’s your turn now, Mr. Underhill.”
We sat down on two sides of a low square table with an ashtray, a lighter, a pack of Luckies, and a flat black object that looked like a mirror folded into a case. A picture of Krazy Kat was stamped onto the case. Beside it was a flat wooden box with decorative inserts. Br
eakstone set his glass beside the box and lit a cigarette. “You think you can tell me something new about the Blue Rose murders? I’d be interested in hearing what that would be.” He looked at me without a trace of humor. “For James Treadwell’s sake.”
I told him about Glendenning Upshaw and Buzz Laing and how I thought William Damrosch had died. Breakstone got more excited as I went along.
“I know damn well everybody was tellin’ themselves a lie about Bill Damrosch,” he said. “For one thing, Bill used to come to see us now and then, when we were playing in that club on Second Street, the Black and Tan Review Bar. He used to get out there, you know, he’d have blackouts, but I never saw any of that. He just liked our music.”
He drew in smoke, exhaled, and looked at me grimly. “So old Upshaw killed Bill. But who killed James? James grew up around the corner from my folks, and when I heard how he could play, I put him in my band. That was forty years ago. Hardly as much as a week goes by without my thinking about James.”
“Murder injures the survivors,” I said.
He looked up at me, startled, and then nodded. “Yeah. It does that. I was no good for about two months afterward—couldn’t touch my horn.” He went inward for a moment, and the Nat Cole record stopped playing. Breakstone seemed not to hear it. “Why do you say that the man who killed him probably knew him to look at?”
“I think he worked in the hotel,” I said, and went over some of what Tom Pasmore and I had talked about.
He tilted his head and looked at me almost slyly. “You know Tom? You sit around with Tom at his nice crib up there on the lake and talk with the man?”
I nodded, remembering Tom’s wink when he looked up Breakstone’s address.
“Why didn’t you say so? Once every blue moon, Tom and I spend a night hanging out and listening to music. He likes hearing those old Louis Armstrong records I got.” He pronounced the final s in Louis. He thought for a second, and then grinned at me, astonished by what had just occurred to him. “Tom’s finally going to start thinking about that Blue Rose business. He must have been waiting for you to come along and help him.”
“No, it’s because of the new murders—the woman left in James’s old room, and the other one, downstairs in the alley.”
“I knew he’d see that,” Breakstone said. “I knew it. The police don’t see it, but Tom Pasmore does. And you do.”
“And April Ransom’s husband. He’s the one who called me first.”
Glenroy Breakstone asked about that, and I told him about John and The Divided Man and wound up telling him about my sister, too.
“So that little girl was your sister? Then your father was that elevator man, Al.” He looked at me wonderingly.
“Yes, he was,” I said.
“Al was a nice guy.” He wanted to change the subject, and looked toward the bright windows. “I always thought your sister was part of what happened afterward. But when Bill wound up dead, they didn’t care if it was right, as long as it was neat.”
“Damrosch thought so, too?”
“Told me that right downstairs in the bar.” He finished off his juice. “You want me to think about who got fired way back then? First of all, Ralph Ransom never fired anybody directly. Bob Bandolier and the night manager, Dicky Lambert, did that.”
So maybe it had been Blue Rose who had forced Bandolier to change his telephone number a couple of times.
“Okay. I remember a bellhop name of Tiny Ruggles, he got fired. Tiny sometimes used to go into empty rooms, help himself to towels and shit. Bad Bob caught him at it and fired him. And there was a guy named Lopez, Nando we used to call him, who worked in the kitchen. Nando was crazy about Cuban music, and he had a couple Machito records he used to play for me sometimes. Bob Bandolier got rid of him, said he ate too much. And he had a friend called Eggs—Eggs Benson, but we called him Eggs Benedict. Bob axed him too, and him and Nando went to Florida together, I think. That happened a month or two before James and the others got killed.”
“So they didn’t kill anybody.”
“Just a lot of bottles.” He frowned at his empty glass. “Drinking and stealing, that’s what most of ’em got fired for.” He looked embarrassed for a moment, then tried to soften it. “Truth is, everybody who works in a hotel helps themselves to stuff now and then.”
“Can you think of anyone else who would have had a grudge against Ralph Ransom?”
Glenroy shook his head. “Ralph was okay. The man never had enemies or anything like that. Dicky and Bob Bandolier, they might have made some enemies, because of letting people go and playing a few angles here and there. I think Dicky had a deal going with the laundry, stuff like that.”
“What happened to him?”
“Dropped dead right at the bar downstairs twenty years ago. A stroke.”
“What about Bandolier?”
Glenroy smiled. “Well, that’s the one who should have had the stroke. Dicky was easygoing, but old Bob never relaxed a day in his life. Most uptight guy I ever knew. Heart attack and Vine! Bad Bob, that’s right. He had the wrong job—they should of put Bad Bob in charge of the toilets, man, he would of made them sparkle and shine like Christmas lights. He never should of been in charge of people, ’cause people are never gonna be as neat as Bob Bandolier wanted them to be.” He shook his head and lit a fresh cigarette. “Bob kept his cool in front of the guests, but he sure raised hell with the staff. The man acted like a little god. He never really saw you, the man never really saw other people, he just saw if you were going to mess him up or not. And once he got going on religion—”
“Ralph told me he was religious.”
“Well, there’s different ways of being religious, you know. Church I went to when I was a little boy was about being happy. Everybody sang all the time, sang that gospel music. Bob, Bob thought religion was about punishment. The world was nothing but wickedness, according to Bob. He came up with some crazy shit, once he got going.”
He laughed, genuinely amused by some memory. “One time, Bad Bob thought everybody on days ought to get together for a prayer meeting at the start of the shift. They had to get together in the kitchen five minutes before work started. I guess most showed up, too, but Bob Bandolier started off telling how God was always watching, and if you didn’t do your job right, God was gonna make you spend eternity having your fingernails pulled out. He got so wound up, the shift started ten minutes late, and Ralph told him there wouldn’t be any more prayer meetings.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Far as I know, the man was too nasty to die. He finally retired in nineteen seventy-one or ’two, sometime around there. ’Seventy-one, I think. Probably went somewhere he could make a whole new lot of people feel miserable.”
Bandolier had retired a year before he had vanished and left his house to the Dumkys. “Do you have any idea where I could find him?”
“Travel around until you find a place where you hear the sound of everybody grinding their teeth at once, that’s all I can say.” He laughed again. “Let’s put on some more music. Anything you’d like to hear?”
I asked if he would play his new CD with Tommy Flanagan.
“I can take it if you can.” He jumped up and pulled a disc from the shelf, put it in the player, and punched a couple of buttons. That broad, glowing sound floated out of the speakers, playing a Charlie Parker song called “Bluebird.” Glenroy Breakstone was playing with all of his old passionate invention, and he could still turn long, flowing phrases over in midair.
I asked him why he had always lived in Millhaven, instead of moving to New York.
“I can travel anywhere from here. I park my car at O’Hare and get to New York in less than two hours, if I have something to do there. But Millhaven’s a lot cheaper than New York. And by now I know most of what’s going on, you see? I know what to stay away from—like Bob Bandolier. Just from my window I see about half the action in Millhaven.”
That reminded me of what I had seen in the restaurant down
stairs, and I asked him about it.
“Those guys at the back table? That’s what I was talking about, the stuff you want to stay away from.”
“Are they criminals?”
He narrowed his eyes and smiled at me. “Let’s say, those are guys who know things. They talk to Billy Ritz. He might help them or not, but they all know one thing. Billy Ritz can make sure their lives’ll take a turn for the worse, if they hold out on him.”
“He’s a gangster? Mafia?”
He grinned and shook his head. “Nothing like that. He’s in the middle. He’s a contact. I’m not saying he doesn’t do something dirty from time to time, but mainly he makes certain kinds of deals. And if you don’t talk to Billy Ritz, so he can talk to the people he talks to, you could wind up taking a lot of weight.”
“What happens if you don’t play the game?”
“I guess you could find out you were playing the game all along, only you didn’t know it.”
“Who does Billy Ritz talk to?”
“You don’t want to know that, if you live in Millhaven.”
“Is Millhaven that corrupt?”
He shook his head. “Someone in the middle, he helps out both sides. See, everybody needs someone like Billy.” He looked at me, trying to see if I was as naive as I sounded. Then he checked his watch. “Tell you what, there’s a chance you can get a look at him, you’re so curious. Around this time, Billy generally walks across Widow Street and does a little business in the Home Plate Lounge.”
He stood up, and I followed him to the window. We both looked down nine stories to the pavement. The shadow of the St. Alwyn darkened Widow Street and fell in a harsh diagonal across the brick buildings on the other side. A dwarf man in a tiny baseball cap walked into the grocery store down the block, and a dwarf woman pushed a stroller the size of a pea toward Livermore Avenue.