The right to sing the blues an-3

by John Lutz

  Ineida placed her fists on her hips and jutted out her smooth fighting chin. Nudger thought she might have a brighter future as an actress than as a singer. "If my father didn't hire you to spy on me, who did?"

  "I'm not spying on you, Ineida. And you enter into my job only in a way that could prove beneficial to you."

  "That's vague, Nudger. I didn't come here to listen to you be vague."

  "Sorry. I feel vague this morning."

  Standing in such a dramatic spread-legged fashion in those high heels must have gotten to her ankles. She stood up straighter and more naturally, her feet closer together so her weight bore down evenly and more comfortably on the thin spike heels.

  "Why are you dressed that way?" Nudger asked.

  "Dressed what way?"

  "Like a dominatrix in a cheap whorehouse."

  She blinked at him; she didn't know what he meant. Women who whipped masochistic men for pay were beyond her experience and imagination. Her ignorance was inexcusable, she figured, so without answering she reached into her purse and tossed a fat white envelope into Nudger's lap.

  "What's this?" Nudger asked, leaving the envelope alone. But he knew what it was, just not how much.

  She told him. "Twenty thousand dollars."

  He was impressed, and not nearly so altruistic and unswerving. Then, when he saw Ineida smile at him, he picked up the envelope and tossed it back to her. To his surprise, she caught it left handed with the ease of a major league first baseman and stood holding it.

  The smile stayed, a confident curve above the arrogant chin. "You don't believe me," she said. "Would you like to see the money? Count it?"

  "No," he told her, "seeing all that money might break down my resolve. I'm not made of wood; mostly I'm papier- mache made from unpaid bills."

  "Then accept this." She extended the envelope toward him but didn't toss it this time. "Go back to where you came from and forget this job. But first, tell me who hired you. And why."

  "I can't do that, Ineida. Ethics." He thought about her love letters he'd stolen, now missing from his possession, and his stomach twitched.

  She saw that he was serious, then stopped smiling and replaced the bulging envelope in her purse. Nudger watched its fat white form disappear; absently he wiped his hand across his mouth. "You really do have ethics," she said, almost in amazement.

  "Sure. You find them in unexpected places," he told her, "like lost buttons." Probably she hadn't seen much in the way of ethics, being David Collins' daughter. "Have you talked to your father about this?"

  "No. What good would it do? If he did hire you, or knew who did, he'd just lie to me about it. He considers me too young to know certain things, still a child."

  "Where did you get the twenty thousand dollars?" Nudger asked.

  "It's mine; I have money of my own." She gazed curiously at Nudger. "Are you working for my father and afraid to accept the money?"

  "No."

  "If that's the situation, twenty thousand dollars can take you a long way from New Orleans."

  "Not that I'm working for him," Nudger said, "but if we got into a contest to see who could afford the most one-way tickets, he'd win."

  She knew Old Dad well enough not to argue with Nudger on that point. "I don't like being watched over as if I'm a twelve-year-old," she said.

  "Most people don't. Especially twelve-year-olds. Does Willy Hollister know you came here?"

  The chin was out again. "Of course not! He doesn't know my family has money. No one in the jazz scene knows it, or knows my true identity."

  "They won't learn who you are from me," Nudger told her.

  "How did you find out who I am, if Daddy didn't tell you?"

  "I learned from someone else. You're from New Orleans, Ineida; how long do you think you can sing in a club without someone recognizing you?"

  "I've spent the last six years away from the city, and the kind of people in my old circles don't go to jazz clubs off Bourbon Street." She smiled again with that unassailable blind confidence. "And I don't look at all the way I used to, Nudger; I've grown up."

  "In some very obvious ways," Nudger said, letting his gaze flick up and down her tightly clad body. She liked that, he could tell. Would she try to bribe him with something other than money?

  "Now," she said, lowering her head and fixing him with an upcast, direct stare, still smiling.

  "Now what?" Nudger asked, wondering if a lot of people had been wrong about Ineida.

  But the thought of tit for tat, sex for that, hadn't entered her naive young mind. Or if it had; it had fled through the pure driven snow. "Now are you going to tell me who hired you if Daddy didn't?"

  "Nope," Nudger said, wondering if he was disappointed.

  There was a polite knock on the door. Ineida looked in that direction, then back at Nudger, and he nodded, motioning for her to answer the knock. "That would be Room Service."

  Ineida went to the door, opened it, and stood back.

  A scrawny young bellhop Nudger hadn't seen before pushed a cart with Nudger's breakfast on it into the room. When he saw Ineida in her Hustler magazine outfit, his Adam's apple jumped but his expression remained professionally bland. The cart's wheels squeaked as he ran it through a kind of loose figure eight.

  "For him," Ineida said, pointing toward Nudger.

  The kid gulped noisily and pushed the cart over to the blue chair. Nudger nodded thanks to him and tried to reach into his hip pocket for his wallet without standing up. He found that the pocket was empty, and he saw his wallet on the dresser where Sandra Reckoner had put it after it had fallen onto the floor while she was helping him to undress last night.

  "Here," Ineida said, holding out a five-dollar bill for the scrawny kid. He accepted the money and grinned at her; he liked her, all right. Nudger wished he'd take her out for a PG movie and a hamburger and a Coke and make her forget all about Willy Hollister.

  When the bellhop had gone, she turned again to Nudger, who was meticulously placing a napkin in his lap and lifting the silver cover off his plate. Eggs, toast, and coffee had never smelled so good.

  "Your last chance," she said, tilting her halfopen purse so he could see a corner of the white envelope. With the sight seemed to come the faint perfumed scent of money to mingle with his breakfast aromas.

  Nudger ignored her, tried not to look at the envelope.

  "Aren't you even tempted?"

  "Of course I am."

  "Then why don't you accept my offer?"

  "You said it earlier: scruples."

  "I said ethics."

  "Same thing."

  "Same price, too. I don't think you're not for sale, Nudger; I think it's simply that someone is paying you more than my offer. How much more?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. No one has more money than you do."

  Nudger's refusal was puzzling and infuriated her. This visit wasn't going as she'd anticipated. She hadn't planned on a smitten bellhop and a private investigator dumb enough to have more of an appetite for food than for money. Life was too damned tricky and unpredictable. Unfair, unfair. Something inside her began to cave in. She suddenly looked even more ridiculous in the MTV clothes she'd worn to impress him with her authority. Different dress and mannerisms hadn't taken her where she wanted to go.

  "I want you to leave me alone," she said, almost crying because she couldn't buy what she wanted. "I want you to stop sneaking around and badgering me and Willy and threatening our happiness."

  "You have a few things backward," Nudger told her.

  "No, I don't. And I get what I want, Nudger." Her eyes were brimming; she looked so young and unknowing, standing there on the edge of tears and rage, ready to topple forward on those high heels and fall in. So very, very determined. "I'll get you to leave Willy and me alone, no matter what it takes."

  "A threat?"

  "A threat," she confirmed. She was trembling, about to lose any semblance of control over her emotions.

  "Do you want half of my omel
et?" Nudger asked her.

  "No! Do me a favor and choke on your goddamned omelet!"

  Unwilling to break down in front of him, she stalked from the room quickly so he couldn't see the sobbing that he heard. She slammed the door so hard that the omelet quivered on its plate like something alive and neurotic.

  Nudger sat in the reverberating silence for a few minutes, then pushed his plate away and poured himself a cup of coffee. Ineida and her tears and her twenty thousand dollars had ruined his appetite.

  After coffee and half a piece of buttered toast, Nudger went to the bed and sat down with the phone. He dialed direct to the Third District station house in St. Louis and got Hammersmith.

  "This is Nudger, Jack."

  "I know," Hammersmith said, "I was warned."

  Nudger made a mental note not to leave his name next time with Ellis the desk sergeant. "I need some information."

  "I assume you're still in New Orleans, or you'd be here in the flesh to bring to bear the full force of your personality behind your request. What specifically do you want to know?"

  "Nothing specifically," Nudger said. "I want your feeling on the Billy Weep murder."

  "You mean Benjamin Harrison Jefferson?"

  "You know who I mean," Nudger said.

  "My feeling, huh?" Hammersmith understood what Nudger was requesting.

  Nudger heard the labored wheezing sounds of Hammersmith lighting a cigar and was glad that over six hundred miles separated them. Even at that he considered glancing out the window to check wind direction.

  "We found a gram of heroin hidden in Weep's apartment, Nudge," Hammersmith said.

  "I thought you searched his apartment and came up with nothing."

  "This was wrapped in a cut-off prophylactic and tucked down into a light socket with a bulb screwed in on top of it. Would you have found it?"

  "No," Nudger said, letting Hammersmith extract his price for whatever information he was going to divulge, making a resolution not to take burned-out light bulbs for granted. They and burned-out people could surprise.

  "The most likely theory is that someone knew Weep had the junk hidden in the apartment and killed him for it but didn't find it." Hammersmith couldn't quite make himself sound as if he believed that theory.

  "How would they know he had it or how much it was?"

  "Could be they saw him get it from his supplier and followed him home."

  Nudger remembered the wasted Billy Weep slouched in his chair in the shadows. It was hard to imagine him having the strength even to go out and score for a fix. And it wasn't easy to find a supplier who delivered heroin like pizza to go. Something softer, maybe, but not heroin. "Was there evidence of heroin in his blood?" Nudger asked.

  "No. There was a two-point-five alcohol reading and there were traces of THC in him. Marijuana. He was on two kinds of high when he was killed."

  "Maybe not," Nudger said. "THC stays around in the body for a long time, and when I talked to him just before his death, Billy told me he wasn't drinking."

  "That may or may not be true about the drinking, Nudge. The ME says his liver was about gone and he'd have probably died within six months on his own if somebody hadn't helped him across."

  "How about needle tracks?" Nudger asked. "Did the ME find any on Billy's body?"

  Hammersmith smacked his lips and puffed on his cigar; over the phone he sounded like a locomotive in heat. "How astute of you to ask, Nudge. No needle-entry signs, not under the tongue or between the toes or anywhere else."

  "Do you know what was used to beat him to death?"

  "No. It could have been a number of things. He actually died of asphyxiation."

  "Asphyxiation?" Nudger repeated. "Somebody choked him?"

  "Whatever was used on him hit him in the throat, crushed his larynx and windpipe cartilage, made it impossible for him to get air."

  Nudger couldn't help it; he imagined for a moment how it would be, the final, horrible panic: thrashing around wildly on the floor, struggling futilely to suck in oxygen, feeling your heart sledgehammer against your ribs, your entire body about to crumple inward around its internal airless ruins. The rage. The terror.

  Hammersmith surprised Nudger. "I'm sorry, Nudge. Was he a pretty good friend?"

  "To a lot of music lovers," Nudger said. "You haven't answered my question, Jack."

  "I know. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Could be the obvious-old junkie followed home and killed for his stash."

  "Or it could be that somebody planted the heroin to make it look that way."

  "A guy that clever," Hammersmith said, "he's smart enough to buy a plane ticket south. All the way to New Orleans." Slurp, wheeze on the cigar. "You see any connection down there with Weep's death?"

  "Nothing firm. Hollister maybe, but I checked him out. He didn't have a chance to leave town and get back here the night Billy was murdered. The times don't quite fit."

  "My clothes don't quite fit, either," Hammersmith said, "but I wear them." Which was a lie; the obese Hammersmith had most of his clothes tailored to his sleek bulk. "Maybe Hollister found a way."

  "That would be like a thirty-eight short on you," Nudger said.

  Hammersmith said something that sounded like a growl.

  "I'll let you know if anything down here does gel," Nudger told him.

  "Do that," Hammersmith said. He made another disgusting airy slurping sound with the cigar. "In the meantime, I'll be here standing tall between the citizens and the savages."

  "How do you know who's who?" Nudger asked, but a dial tone hit him in the ear. Hammersmith, who had a thing about getting in the last word on the phone, had hung up.

  That was okay. He couldn't have answered Nudger's question anyway. Nobody could. That was the world's and Nudger's problem.

  XXIV

  Who's he working for?" Hollister asked. "I don't know. He won't say." Ineida didn't tell Hollister that she'd offered Nudger money to pull away from whatever his business was in New Orleans. Whatever his interest was in her and Willy.

  They were in the Croissant Bar in the French Quarter, where they often shared breakfast in a back booth. Neither was eating today. A blueberry croissant with one small bite out of it lay growing stale on a napkin next to Hollister's steaming coffee cup. There was nothing but an untouched glass of orange juice on the table in front of Ineida. She wasn't feeling well this morning.

  "It doesn't matter who he is or who he's working for," Ineida said. "We're not doing anything illegal; he can't do anything about us or to us. We can ignore him." She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself more than Hollister.

  After a lot of thought, Hollister had decided on this one last attempt to learn more about Nudger. He wasn't surprised Ineida had failed to do so. But she was right; they weren't breaking any laws. No one could be arrested for what they were thinking, or for the pain to be.

  Long after his mother's death, he had learned to play the blues, the music of the lost. The very core of suffering. He'd learned to draw on the emptiness brought about by his mother dying and the years that followed. He had thought a lot about pain. In school in Illinois. Later in New York. His mother had loved him, and his father had told him after her death how much she had been loved by both of them. Had told him over and over again. Willy had sensed the fear in his father, and the agony. He'd played his father's pain and it had worked; it had permeated his music in the little New York clubs he'd played, then in the blues cities of the Midwest. And when his father died, Hollister found that he could no longer draw on that pain. It didn't matter, he discovered. His own pain worked even better. So much better. But he needed a fix now and then to sustain him. Like a masochist, though he knew he wasn't that; just the opposite. Like a vampire. Just like a vampire. Hollister shuddered. He didn't like the comparison.

  "You look tired," Ineida was telling him. "You okay, babe?"

  "Didn't sleep much last night," he said. He smiled at her. "I'm not sure why. Thinking of you, maybe. Wishing yo
u were with me even while my mind was working on every other thing that drifted into it."

  She touched his hand, returned the smile. She really was a beautiful woman, he thought. He was lucky. The need rose powerfully in him, the terrible need and the regret. Looking into her unknowing eyes, he was pulled in every direction, while something small but wise seemed to walk around the inside of his skull, understanding what it was all about, stage-directing his thoughts and longings.

  "Nothing matters to us but us," Ineida said fiercely to him.

  Which was almost true, Hollister realized. Almost. He could, if he chose, spend the rest of his life with this woman. He did love her. He looked into her eyes again and told her so.

  He could hear the music, now, beckoning him, urging him. But it would be slightly different this time. It would be better.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, listening inside himself.

  It was time, he knew. In music, timing was everything.

  XXV

  Nudger thought he'd feel stronger after breakfast.

  Instead he was slightly nauseated and weaker.

  Maybe his conversation with Hammersmith had done that to him; maybe the cigar had worked psychologically, even over the phone and all that distance.

  When he stood up, a wave of dizziness almost forced him to sit back down. He managed to push the cart with the breakfast dishes outside into the hall, hang the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob, then lock himself in his room and walk to the bed.

  Tired. He hadn't realized how tired he was. Everything that had happened recently seemed to be catching up, enveloping him now. Or was he seeking escape into sleep? Escape from this entire mad business. There were plenty of maybes that might apply. Nudger couldn't figure out exactly why he was suddenly exhausted, but he was; that he knew for sure. He half fell onto the bed and lay on his stomach.

  He slept until early evening, then got up in the quiet dusk and staggered into the bathroom to switch on the light and lean over the toilet bowl. He noted with satisfaction that his urine wasn't quite so red. Gee, how could a guy see that and not feel that everything was right with the world?