The right to sing the blues an-3

by John Lutz

  Nudger's stomach tilted and zoomed.

  "So I figured I better call the police," Irma Gorman continued. "They came out and looked around, asked some questions, but they didn't seem all that interested. I waited another week, then had the owner's lawyer get me some eviction papers and had her furniture moved out so I could rent the apartment to somebody else."

  "Where's her furniture?"

  "Her boyfriend came and got it. Billy something."

  "Not Willy?"

  "Oh yeah, Willy."

  "Was his last name Hollister?"

  "I can't remember his last name, Mr. Nubber."

  "Blond, good-looking man? Sort of thin?"

  "That's him. He was some kinda musician. Him and some other men came out and loaded Jacqui's furniture into a rented truck and that was the last I seen of any of them. I was surprised to see you here, still interested in what mighta happened to her."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm sure something bad happened to Jacqui, and she ain't coming back or gonna be heard from again. I watched Willy and his friends load the truck and seen what they put in. She left all her clothes in her apartment, and her big stereo that I heard cost over a thousand dollars. Nobody runs away and leaves stuff like that."

  That was true enough, Nudger thought. And it was the sort of thing he'd come here to learn about.

  "That stereo had four speakers and a digital clock and all kinds of gadgets that lit up and went around while it played. My older sister tried to buy it from that Willy guy, but he said no, he wouldn't sell."

  "Did he seem confused or upset about Jacqui's disappearance?"

  Irma Gorman cocked her head and thought back. "No, I can't say he seemed anything but normal, from what I saw of him. He probably figured like the police did, that Jacqui was the type to just up and leave. Leastways that's what the police said about her. But I don't think anybody'd do that right in the middle of supper and leave most everything they owned behind, not even somebody in show business, do you?"

  "I do not," Nudger said. "Did Willy Hollister visit her often?"

  "I can't say for sure; I don't spy. It seemed like he was around her place a lot, though, as I recall."

  A squawk from the next room made Nudger jump. Then he realized the sound was made by a baby.

  "That's okay, Mr. Nubber, it's little Eddie. 'Scuse me." Irma Gorman got up and hurried into the bedroom. The baby started to cry, then was immediately silent.

  Irma's name on the mailbox read "Miss," and she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. None of Nudger's business.

  When she returned from the bedroom she had her blouse open and was nursing an infant. "This here is my Eddie."

  Nudger swallowed self-consciously and stared at the baby tugging on Irma Gorman's brown nipple. "Cute," he said, hoping Irma wouldn't notice his embarrassment. He'd been born at the wrong time and was still laboring under the inhibitions of most men over forty.

  He stood up from the sofa. "I appreciate your help, Miss Gorman. Good-bye. And good-bye, er, Eddie."

  "No trouble," Irma said, carrying the nursing baby across the room to see Nudger out. "And good luck."

  "Good luck?"

  "Sure. I hope you find Jacqui."

  Nudger left without telling her he wasn't looking for her missing tenant. He and Irma Gorman shared the same opinion, that something bad had happened to Jacqui James and she wouldn't be seen again.

  On the drive to Claudia's apartment, Nudger thought about little Eddie. Whatever the circumstances, a kid could do worse for a mother than Irma Gorman. "How was school today?" Nudger asked Claudia.

  She had just entered the apartment and had plopped a blue loose-leaf notebook stuffed with dog-eared papers onto the table by the door. "School was just fine." She smiled at Nudger and walked over and kissed him lightly on the lips, bending down to reach him where he sat on the sofa. She was dressed in a prim-looking gray dress with a red bow at the neck and a red belt cinching the material tight around her slender waist. Red high-heeled shoes showed off her nicely curved, nyloned ankles. A red garter belt would really go great with that outfit, Nudger thought. The kids at Stowe High School had to think Ms. Bettencourt was their sexiest teacher.

  Nudger considered grabbing her and pulling her down to sit on his lap, but she moved away too quickly and walked toward the kitchen. She knew him well enough to have become wily.

  He looked back toward the local TV news he'd been watching. A polar bear at the zoo was pregnant; very rare.

  Claudia returned a few minutes later with a glass of ice water for herself and Budweiser beer in a glass for Nudger. She handed him the glass and sat down beside him on the sofa.

  "I'm going back to New Orleans tonight," Nudger said. He saw her body stiffen slightly, though he continued to watch TV. The news was running a feature; a stout little man in a grocer's apron was telling viewers the things they could do with rutabaga.

  "Why so soon?"

  "Business." He told her about Fat Jack McGee and Ineida Collins/Mann and Willy Hollister.

  "Are you beginning to feel protective toward Miss Mann?" Claudia asked.

  "As an uncle might."

  Claudia took a sip of water and rested a cool, damp hand on Nudger's arm. "You know I appreciate what you've done," she said, "getting me the job at Stowe School-"

  "I didn't get the job, you did," he interrupted.

  She ignored him. "-making it possible for me to live with the pain after my marriage."

  "Dr. Oliver's the guy to thank for that," Nudger said. The psychiatrist was helping her to cope with the guilt that clung to her, guilt laid on by her former husband, Ralph Ferris. Despicable Ralph.

  Claudia smiled and aimed her dark eyes at Nudger. They were deeper than usual and clouded with tears. He didn't want her to cry. "Sure," she said "you weren't any help at all."

  "You're not really worried about me getting involved with that girl Ineida, are you?" Nudger asked. He was embarrassed by her gratitude and wanted away from the subject of Nudger as savior.

  "No."

  He wasn't sure if he believed her. Or if he wanted to believe her.

  "I know you, Nudger. If she were a bird with a broken wing, I'd worry. But she has wealth; she'll be able to fly."

  "If she gets the chance."

  Claudia sloshed the water around in her glass. The ice made faint clinking sounds. "Why don't you go back to New Orleans in the morning instead of tonight?"

  Nudger knew he shouldn't delay going back; he'd been gone long enough as it was. Maybe long enough to allow Willy Hollister to make whatever move he had planned for Ineida. But he said, "I might be able to do that." On the news, a group of irate Webster Groves residents were complaining vociferously about a county plan to widen an old scenic street and cut down dozens of stately trees. Hammersmith lived out in Webster Groves, but as far as Nudger knew, cared nothing for trees.

  "I can fix us dinner here," Claudia said, knowing the way to male hearts over forty, "and we can spend a quiet evening."

  "Do you think it's unrealistic for a forty-three-year-old man to be embarrassed in the presence of a woman breastfeeding her infant?" Nudger asked.

  Claudia cocked her head to the side and looked at him. "Yes."

  "I think so, too. I wonder why I am."

  "It's not unusual. And there might be a lot of reasons. Men your age were subject to youths when female organs were associated with the sex act and nothing else. You're part of the mammary generation, Nudger."

  "Not Pepsi?"

  "That, too."

  "Then I'm sexually repressed?"

  "Maybe." Claudia grinned. "Or maybe you're just jealous of the infant."

  Nudger propped his stockinged feet up on the coffee table, took a sip of Budweiser, and thought about that.

  "Jealous," he said at last.

  Claudia's grin widened and her fingers inched toward the buttons on her dress. "No need for that," she said, moving closer. Nudger definitely would change that airline reservation.
/>   From the corner of his eye he saw an old black-and- white photograph of a young Billy Weep on the TV screen, hugging his saxophone to him as if it were a woman and smiling whitely and broadly. A pretty blond anchorwoman who recited the news as if she were reading The Three Bears to children was telling about how a one-time well-known local jazz musician was found beaten to death in his Hodi- mont Avenue apartment.

  Nudger changed his plans again.

  X

  As the DC-10 dipped a wing and descended to circle the New Orleans airport, the old man in the seat next to Nudger's, who had kept dozing off and resting his head on Nudger's shoulder, sat up straight and stared past him out the window, entranced by the up-rushing ground lights.

  During the flight south, looking out the window at a night salted with wavering bright stars, Nudger had thought about what Hammersmith told him. There was nothing about Billy Weep's death for the law to latch on to. No sign of forced entry, no revealing fingerprints, no blunt instrument that matched the fatal wounds. Nothing but an old black man dead in an old room. Music and memory finally ceased.

  Hammersmith thought maybe it was simply a petty robbery. Weep had been a known user, and there had been no money and nothing drugrelated in the apartment. Billy Weep might have been killed for a few grams of cocaine. Every day, people were murdered for less reason than that.

  Nudger suddenly felt queasy as the plane dropped steeply for its landing approach. His ears began to pop.

  "Fasten your seat belt, young fella," the old man next to him curtly instructed.

  Nudger buckled up for safety. He hadn't done enough of that in life. Early the next morning, Nudger was sitting across from Fat Jack McGee in the club owner's second-floor office. Fat Jack loomed behind his desk like a misplaced mountain. He had on that nifty cream-colored sport jacket, a white shirt, and a blue silk tie with a gold tie bar and a diamond stick pin. Gold cuff links and a gold wristwatch and chain bracelet peeked from beneath his spotless jacket sleeves. Protruding from his jacket pocket was a blue silk handkerchief that matched the tie, folded in a neat triangle. Nudger had never been able to fold a pocket handkerchief that way; he had some of the fake ones folded by the manufacturer and stapled on little sheets of cardboard, but he never wore them. He sat watching Fat Jack talk on the desk phone and wondered how the big man could wear all that stone and metal and not seem overdressed. It had to be his sheer bulk.

  "Hey, yeah," Fat Jack said into the phone. He gave his flesh-upholstered wide grin and winked at Nudger with a glittering piggish eye. "Hey, lemme get back to you later, okay?" He waited a few minutes, then hung up. "Business that'll keep," he explained to Nudger. He placed his elbows on the desk and laced his sausage-sized fingers. Gold glinted. "You got traveling out of your system, old sleuth?"

  "For now," Nudger said. "You remember Billy Weep?"

  Fat Jack nodded. "Vaguely. Sax man, ain't he?"

  "Dead man," Nudger said. "Somebody beat him to death yesterday in his apartment in St. Louis."

  Fat Jack looked concerned. "What was it? Argument, robbery, what?"

  "It was probably what," Nudger said. "I'd just been to see him that morning."

  "Well, now!" Fat Jack said, frowning with meaty brows. "You think there's some connection?"

  "I don't know," Nudger said.

  Fat Jack shook his broad head. "Something else to worry about, as if I ain't got enough problems. What else did you find out in your travels, other than that Billy Weep died?"

  "I went to musicians' unions, jazz people, clubs where Willy Hollister had played, in four cities."

  "Were all those miles and conversations necessary?"

  "As it turns out, yes," Nudger said. "I picked up a pattern, sometimes strong, sometimes subtle, but always there, like in a forties Ellington piece."

  "So tell me about it," Fat Jack said. "I'm an Ellington fan."

  "All the people I talked with, all the old reviews I read, everything pieced together gave me a kind of condensed journal of Willy Hollister's ascending career. He always started strong, but his musical life was checkered with flat spots, lapses, times when there was something missing from his music: the sense of soul and pain that makes a blues man great. During those times, Hollister was just an ordinary performer."

  Fat Jack appeared worried, tucked his chin back into folds of flesh, and said, "That explains why he's falling off here."

  "But the man is still making great music," Nudger said.

  "He's slipping from great to good," Fat Jack said. "Good jazz artists in New Orleans I can hire by the barrelful."

  "There's something else about Willy Hollister," Nudger said. "Something that nobody picked up on because it spanned a lot of years and four cities."

  Fat Jack looked interested.

  "Hollister had a steady girlfriend in each of these cities," Nudger told him. "All four women disappeared."

  Fat Jack drew back in his chair. "Whaddya mean, 'disappeared'? Like 'poof?"

  "Almost like 'poof.' One day they were there, the next day gone. They were women whose disappearances wouldn't be taken all that seriously by all that many people," Nudger said. "Usually they were performers, or hangers-on at the jazz scene. They were the sort whose jobs or personalities sometimes prompted them to leave town without a lot of prior notice."

  "Weren't the police notified of their disappearances?"

  "Two of the women were rumored to have left town on their own, and their sudden disappearances weren't reported to Missing Persons. The first woman, in Cleveland, and the third one, in St. Louis, abruptly dropped out of sight, were reported, and are still in the Missing Persons files."

  "Whoo, boy!" Fat Jack said. He began to sweat. He pulled his white flag-sized handkerchief from an inside pocket of his neat jacket and mopped his brow, just like Satchmo but without the grin and magic trumpet.

  "Sorry," Nudger said. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

  "Hey, you're doing your job, is all," Fat Jack assured him in a wheezy, quavering voice. "But that's bad information to lay on me, Nudger. Bad, bad, bad. I take it you think Hollister had a lot to do with the disappearances of these women."

  Nudger shrugged. He knew better than to snatch at the obvious. "Maybe the women themselves, and not Hollister, had everything to do with why they're gone. We can't discount the fact that they were all the sort who traveled light and often." Nudger gave Fat Jack the women's names. The only one he recognized was Jacqui James, but he'd only met her a few times and didn't know she'd disappeared.

  Fat Jack bowed his head and looked melancholy, almost ready to sob.

  "Maybe the women actually left town of their own accord," Nudger said. "Maybe for some reason they felt they had to get away from Hollister."

  "I wish Ineida would want to get away from the bastard," Fat Jack muttered. Then he realized what he'd said. "But Jeez, not like that. Her old man'd boil me down for axle grease if she just disappeared from here. But then she's not cut from the same bolt as those other girls; she's not what she's trying to be and is strictly local."

  "The one thing she and those other women have in common is Willy Hollister."

  "Ain't no getting away from that," Fat Jack said. He leaned back. Nudger heard the desk chair creak in weary protest. Nudger, who had been hired to solve a problem, had so far only brought to light the seriousness of that problem. Fat Jack was still between a rock and a hard place, and the rock had become larger, the hard place harder. The big man didn't have to ask "What now?" It was written in capital letters on his face.

  "We could tell Ineida about Hollister's missing women," Nudger said. When in doubt, say something.

  "She wouldn't listen, Nudger. Wouldn't believe anything bad about Hollister if she did listen. Love leads people into trouble that way."

  Nudger figured Fat Jack was right. He should know about such things; that was what the blues were about.

  "You could fire Willy Hollister," Nudger said.

  Fat Jack shook his head. "Ineida would follow
him, and maybe get mad at me and sic her dad on the club."

  "And Hollister is still packing customers into the club every night."

  "That, too," Fat Jack admitted. Even the loosest businessman could see the profit in Willy Hollister's genius. "For now," he said, "I guess we'll let things slide while you continue to watch Hollister and Ineida." He dabbed at his forehead again with the wadded handkerchief. "It'd be my big finale for sure if anything happened to that girl. Her dad would see to that."

  "Hollister doesn't know who I am," Nudger said, "but he knows who I'm not and he's worried. My presence might keep him aboveboard for a while."

  "Any amount of time looks pretty valuable to me right now," Fat Jack said.

  "Meanwhile," Nudger told him, "I'll keep probing for more information. Maybe I'll come up with something that will cause Ineida to have a change of heart about Hollister."

  "Fine, as long as a change of scenery isn't involved. I can't afford to have her wind up like those other women, Nudger."

  Or like Billy Weep, Nudger thought, as he stood up from his chair. "I'll phone you if I have any more good news," he said.

  Fat Jack mumbled something unintelligible and nodded, lost in his vast interior gloom. Things weren't turning out at all the way he'd hoped, and in the past several prosperous years he'd become unused to disappointment. He didn't look up as Nudger walked from the stifling office.

  Nudger had his own apprehensions. He had the feeling he'd delved far enough into this matter to have stirred up waters that wouldn't calm easily. What Hammersmith had told him about David Collins' underworld status had caused Nudger's stomach to issue an uncommonly strong warning. His stomach was seldom wrong; it was growling now, something that sounded like "Get ooout!"

  He knew that his future, like Fat Jack's, depended almost exclusively on Ineida Collins' wellbeing. He sure hoped that girl didn't do anything foolish.

  If Fat Jack wound up playing his clarinet for nickles on some skid-row street corner, Nudger would probably be the one passing the hat.