Determined to preserve the cylinder, LeMond eventually restricted himself to playing it once a year, on Bolden’s birthday, September 6. He would sit alone in his study, sipping cognac, attach the fourteen-inch brass horn to the phonograph, and turn the brass crank. By then, Monique was long gone, and there was no woman to speak of in his life. He only shared the cylinder with two men who understood its significance and whom he trusted implicitly: his longtime engineer, Felix Girard, and his bass player, Isaiah Wells. Felix helped LeMond preserve the cylinder by brushing it lightly with a solution of tannic acid and aluminum oxide that prevented mold and ensured the integrity of the grooves. He also made two tape recordings off the cylinder, using the most sophisticated acoustical devices available in the mid-fifties. LeMond stored the tapes in a safe deposit box at the Chemical Bank on Eighty-sixth Street. He kept the key to the armoire cabinet in a small drawer at the base of his humidor, behind the matchboxes and cigar clippers.
LeMond was one of the least selfish men imaginable, yet for all those years he had chosen not to share the contents of that cylinder with the rest of the world. He was aware that at a time when jazz musicology and history were being studied in universities, and the early musicians’ lives chronicled, Buddy Bolden was no longer a forgotten figure. In fact, Bolden had been so mythologized that the cylinder would be hailed as a major discovery that put to rest a great musical mystery. But still LeMond could not part with it. When he had qualms—and he did—he rationalized that, having always been generous, sharing his good fortune, he wanted this one thing for himself. At least for a while—or maybe even until after his death. It was not a rationalization he found altogether convincing, or took pride in, but he was willing to live with it, telling himself that for all the critical interest the cylinder would arouse, there were people whose sole interest would be to exploit it. With Bolden’s legend growing, the same record company executives who had ignored or insulted Willie Cornish would see dollar signs and start jockeying. LeMond wanted no part of that. He respected how loyal Cornish had been to Bolden’s memory, and he was still amazed that Leonard Bechet had entrusted the cylinder to him rather than to his own brother. LeMond would see to it that the cylinder took its place in the world, shining a light on Bolden as the inventor of jazz, but it would be done properly, respectfully, and to maximum effect.
But not just yet, LeMond thought on September 6, 1978, as he sat in his study and was thrilled once again listening to King Bolden play his fierce opening solo before Willie Cornish’s trombone joined in on the ninth measure. His joy was such that he felt sure he was about to get lucky in a way he never had before. He just didn’t know what that was.
The following night, the city sky velvety blue, the trees in the park fresh with rain, he met Joan Neptune for the first time.
She walked into Sammy LeMond’s club at nine o’clock wearing a dark green dress. He was sitting at his customary table, with a clear view of both the stage and the front entrance. She scanned the room—for a moment he thought she might leave—and then asked the maître d’ for a table for one.
Though she had yet to look at him, LeMond was certain this woman hadn’t just walked into his club, but his life. He stared at her profile, five tables away. She was around forty years old. Tall and elegant. Her face unlined, unblemished, planed like one of his mahogany busts from West Africa, with a high forehead and full lips. A pleasingly symmetrical face. Her straight black hair was drawn back with an ebony barrette.
She ordered a Manhattan. As her waiter headed for the bar, LeMond beckoned him over. A few minutes later, the waiter brought her a 1964 Dom Pérignon. When she protested, he told her the owner had sent it and pointed out LeMond, who nodded, smiling. She thought about this, and then asked him to invite Mr. LeMond over, and to bring a glass for him.
The waiters and bartenders had known LeMond to order up drinks on the house for Sonny Rollins and Max Roach, and to send Duke Ellington’s table a bottle of the maestro’s favorite Scotch, twenty-year-old Talisker, but they had never seen him do this for an unattached woman.
Mr. LeMond, she said, extending her hand. I’m Joan Neptune. Thank you, and please join me. I know your music. I’m honored.
It was her voice that finished him, not her words. Soft but resonant. The honor is all mine, he smiled.
The waiter uncorked and poured the champagne, then took the pianist a request from LeMond.
He asked if you’d play “All My Life,” the waiter said. In D.
Joan Neptune was a psychic. By her definition that meant someone with exceptional powers of perception, sometimes extending beyond the five senses. If you wanted to call that “paranormal,” it was fine with her. But she thought of it as perfectly normal, a highly developed sense of intuition, perhaps, coupled with a belief that the world is composed of more than three dimensions and time is measurable in units other than hours, days, and years when it is measurable at all. She operated in a realm far removed from the fortune-tellers and palm readers in seedy storefronts and the charlatans who spoke in tongues on late-night television. She had made a niche for herself, working on commission on her own terms. Some of her clients were well-heeled people for whom she was more therapist than soothsayer, exploring their pasts in order to anticipate their futures. They were easy to deal with, and she only worked with people she liked. Other clients were executives, often young, the type who had made The Art of War their business manual. She offered them a simple concept: Learn how to think in the future. Not to imagine, but to inhabit, it, so you can arrive there before your competitors and make the terrain your own. Last, there was the New York City Police Department, who outsourced her for more esoteric—and grisly—work.
She brought no formal business background to her sessions with MBAs and no prior connection to crime detection to her dealings with the police. Her business clientele grew rapidly after one of her first clients, the CEO of a fiber optics company, credited her in an interview with giving him the tools—his “psychic tool kit,” he called it—to outmaneuver two larger companies and land a contract laying cable in Brazil. Despite the praise, and the lucrative pay, she felt this aspect of her work was antiseptic.
With the police, the pay, when she accepted it, was meager, and the work was anything but antiseptic. It was not work she had sought. The city’s chief of detectives, frustrated by an unsolved crime that was inflaming the public, heard about Joan from the deputy mayor’s wife, who was a client. The chief had enlisted conventional psychics on previous cases, with mixed results, but never one who came so highly recommended. So he called Joan and then drove up to her apartment on Riverside Drive.
On its surface, the crime was not complicated. Four months earlier, the ten-year-old daughter of a Queens firefighter had disappeared on her way to school in Rego Park. The firefighter was a widower and she was his only child. Her smiling face—blond, brown-eyed, with a gap in her front teeth—had beamed from newspapers, televisions, and posters plastered around the city. No witnesses came forward, and no trace of her was found. There was also no ransom demand, always a bad sign. The manhunt occupied hundreds of policemen in four states. A squad of city detectives worked overtime without pay. Dozens of sex offenders were hauled in for questioning. The fire department posted a $25,000 reward. A Mafia capo in Flushing let it be known that his soldiers would pass along any information they picked up. For two months, not a single lead surfaced. The papers stopped covering the case. All but two detectives were pulled from it. Then one afternoon a patrolman investigating a car theft at an outdoor parking lot found a size 4 sneaker caked with blood wedged into a gap in a brick wall. He pulled the sneaker out, and there was still a foot inside it. The missing girl had been wearing sneakers. And the parking lot was just ten blocks from her house. The cops were certain now that she was dead—but where was the rest of her? The newspapers jumped back on the story. Again there was a massive search, for a body this time, but after two more months, they found nothing.
After relating th
e facts, the chief asked Joan for assistance.
She possessed certain abilities she was uncomfortable tapping for an assignment like this. She was aware there could be serious repercussions for her personally. She would need to channel at least two people, picking up traces of their thoughts, memories, emotions: the girl and her killer. And that wasn’t a place she wanted to go. It would mean focusing on the girl’s home and possessions, and the one object they knew the killer had handled, her severed foot, and the place where they had almost certainly been together, the parking lot. If she was successful, it would be because she managed to enter a nightmare and remain there long enough to decipher its contents.
She agreed to help. Her only condition was that the chief promise to keep her name out of the papers, no matter how things turned out. She visited the parking lot, behind an old supermarket. The asphalt was cracked, and it was littered with trash. There were ten rows of parking spaces, nine spaces to a row. On that particular morning, there were only fourteen cars parked there. Joan examined the gap in the wall and studied photos of the sneaker when it was discovered there.
Then she went to the girl’s house. She met the father, John Kelly, a broken man on indefinite leave from his job. He was sitting alone in his dining room. On the table, a plate, napkin, and cutlery were set at the girl’s place, for the dinner she had never come home to. Her name was Frances. Joan went upstairs to her bedroom alone. She could hardly bear to touch the T-shirts and underwear in the dresser and the dresses in the closet, to pick up the doll propped on the bed and uncap the tiny bottle of Two Hearts perfume that smelled like roses. After placing several strands from a hairbrush into an envelope, Joan sat down on the bed and wept.
When she returned to the dining room, John Kelly was drinking a can of beer. A beefy man with a crew cut, he had lost fifty pounds. He hadn’t shaved that week. Without looking up, he pushed two photo albums over to Joan. She studied every shot of Frances: Christmas under the tree, age four; riding a bicycle in the park, age six; first day at school; first communion; curled up on a couch with a gray terrier. There was no dog in the house now. The photos were arranged in reverse chronology, so Joan ended on a photograph taken in winter light, of a smiling young woman with fair hair and the same eyes her daughter would have, cradling a swaddled newborn in front of Queens Hospital.
John Kelly studied Joan. His eyes were not friendly or unfriendly. Something had struck him, and Joan picked up on it at once: he had never had a black woman in his house.
Your wife was beautiful, Mr. Kelly. And Frances was very special. Thank you for showing me these.
He nodded.
I’m so sorry.
He looked away. No pity, he mumbled.
I want to help.
So many times he’d been disappointed, but he believed she meant it.
I do mean it, she said softly.
He looked back at her, surprised.
We will find her, she said. I promise you.
Her voice was soothing, but he had also seen how hard her eyes were when she came downstairs.
Through the bay window, at the curb, two gold-shield detectives were sitting in an unmarked sedan. They had been specially chosen by the chief to accompany Joan everywhere, gain her access wherever she wanted, do whatever she asked of them.
They drove her downtown to Police Plaza and took her to the pathology lab. A technician gave her latex gloves. He brought the bloody sneaker to an examining table. It was torn and black. Once it had been pink, with red laces. She held it in her palm. It seemed weightless. The technician took a clear box from a refrigerator. The severed foot was at its center, in dry ice. It, too, was black. And the elements had done their work: it looked even smaller than Joan expected, shriveled, two toes gone, the heel eaten away.
It was sawed off by hand, the technician said, just above the talus. Most likely a hacksaw.
Joan had seen her share of ugliness, among the living and the dead, but this was the worst. She went numb, her mouth so dry she couldn’t swallow.
Can you leave me alone for a minute? she said to the detectives, and they took the technician with them.
She placed her fingertips on the clear box and moved around the table, studying the foot from every angle.
She returned to Queens with the detectives. They drove to the parking lot, this time with the patrolman who had found the sneaker. Joan stood at the wall alone, her back against the rough brick. Then she crisscrossed the lot, covering different ground each time. The third time she stopped in the fourth parking space in the second row. She stepped in and out of it. A cool shiver ran up her legs. She planted her feet and closed her eyes for what felt like an hour.
One of the detectives came over.
They were parked here, Joan said.
What did you see?
She shook her head. She felt light-headed. Her stomach was tied in knots. What she had seen was Frances’s face flash by, then a blaze of blue light. Frances did not appear as she had in any of those photographs. She looked terrified.
It was a blue van, Joan said.
For the next three days the detectives did their work, cataloging every blue van in Queens, attempting in vain to find a match on the list of vehicles registered to sex offenders. They established which vans could have been in the vicinity of the parking lot the day Frances disappeared, then systematically winnowed that list down. Joan couldn’t eat or sleep. She kept the strands of Frances’s hair in a glass jar on her dressing table beside a photograph of the girl. It was the most recent photograph her father had, taken for the school yearbook two weeks before her disappearance. Sixty children had lined up and posed singly, one after the other, before a white screen. Frances was smiling, but looked not quite ready for the photographer to snap.
Joan took the F train to Queens and walked around for hours, on random streets. She returned home and ate some rice. It was all she could tolerate. That night, around nine, the detectives called. Gus and Frank. They had something. She got dressed and made a pot of coffee.
Frank Ramos lived in Brooklyn. He was married, with two kids. Gus Albanese was divorced. He lived in the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood near Tremont Avenue. He was taken with Joan’s looks, voice, the easy manner beneath which you sensed her intensity. He sat down in her living room, with its leather sofa and Moroccan carpets, and stirred his coffee.
We’ve narrowed it to three vans, Frank said. None registered to prior offenders. We have addresses. Before we obtain warrants or do forensics, we want you to check out the vans. Are you up for it?
The first van belonged to a laundry on Ditmars Boulevard. It was parked outside a two-family house in Jamaica. The driver was a Chinese kid, working for his uncle. He was petrified when the detectives asked him to step outside. Joan circled the van, laying her hands on it. She looked at the kid and shook her head.
The second van was driven by the owner of a hardware store. He was sixty-four years old, Polish, living in an apartment in Corona. The van was parked in the building’s garage. Joan circled it and touched it. They knocked at the man’s door, and he was bewildered at the sight of the grim detectives and the tall black woman. He was five four, maybe 120 pounds. His left arm was so arthritic he could barely lift it. His wife was in a wheelchair in front of the TV.
Their third stop was on a street of rowhouses in St. Albans, near Montefiore Cemetery. The houses were all on the right side of the street, facing a strip of woods. A blue Chevy van was parked in front of Number 40. The house was dark. A window on the second floor lit up when Gus pressed the doorbell. Then a second window. A heavyset middle-aged woman opened the door but kept the chain fastened until she saw Gus’s badge up close. She had gray hair and doughy skin. A second woman, even older and grayer, ambled up behind her. They were retired nurses, sisters.
What is it? the second sister said.
They said they mostly used the van to travel to arts and crafts fairs. They were certain they hadn’t been out driving that day.
How can you be so sure? Gus said.
The housepainters were here for two weeks in April, the first sister said, and we never left them in the house alone.
What’s this about? the second sister said.
Does anyone else ever drive your van? Frank asked.
The sisters looked at each other.
Only my brother, the first sister replied. He borrows it sometimes.
Where does he live?
Linden Boulevard. But he wouldn’t go to Rego Park.
How do you know that? Gus said.
What would he want there? the second sister replied.
Gus glanced over his shoulder at Joan, who was backing away from the van, edging toward the woods across the street. Her spine was stiff and her expression was frozen.
Gus squeezed Frank’s arm and said, I’ll go with Joan.
He had his flashlight out as he caught up to her in the woods. They have a brother who uses the van, he said.
Joan nodded. He has red hands, a flushed face, thick lips. Asthma, maybe, that makes him wheeze.
It was true, he had all of those things. And a temper that had gotten him fired from his last job, custodian at a technical school, where he had stolen the many tools discovered in his cluttered one-room apartment—and one tool that wasn’t found.
Thirty minutes later, the forensics squad and four cops arrived in two vans. Two other detectives were dispatched to 467 Linden Boulevard, awaiting the go-ahead to make an arrest. At one A.M., beneath portable floodlights, two of the cops began digging in a drainage ditch across the woods to which Joan had directed them. The scent of Two Hearts perfume filled her head as she threaded the trees. But Frances’s screams, which had rung in her ears when she approached the van, stopped abruptly.
Tiger Rag Page 16