Tiger Rag

by Nicholas Christopher

  The drainage ditch, dug months before, was still waiting to be lined with cement. Raymond Mullen had concluded correctly that additional digging would never be noticed before the cement was poured and the grave sealed. It didn’t have to be a large grave for a girl Frances’s size. Standing with Gus and Frank, Joan watched the wet dirt pile up beside the ditch. Then the diggers stopped abruptly and signaled the forensics chief, who stepped into the ditch and squatted with his small rakes and brushes. After fifteen minutes, there she was, four feet under, the hacksaw on her chest. Her remains looked intact at first. Then they saw that her other foot had been severed, too. Christ, Frank muttered.

  After Gus and Frank drove her home, Joan curled up on the sofa in her raincoat. She didn’t want to go to bed. Didn’t want to dream. She only wanted to blot out what she had seen. And to detach from whatever it was internally that had enabled her to find Frances.

  She attended the funeral with Gus and Frank. John Kelly embraced her outside the church. The fire commissioner was there, and Kelly’s squad, and the chief of detectives. They all watched the hearse and the cortege drive away.

  Don’t call me anymore, Joan told the chief.

  She kissed Gus on the cheek, then Frank.

  Want a ride home? Gus said.

  She shook her head. I need to walk.

  If we can ever do anything for you, Frank said, you know where to find us.

  Sammy LeMond and Joan Neptune had a two-month courtship. He asked her to marry him at his apartment. She knew something was up when he insisted on dining there, ordering up lobster, fried oysters, and grilled peppers from the club. After a champagne toast, LeMond took out a two-carat diamond ring.

  He was fifty-three years old, and she was thirteen years his junior. His friends were astonished. A confirmed bachelor, he hadn’t lived with anyone in years, hadn’t even dated seriously. No one expected he would ever marry.

  They were married by a city judge in his chambers on Centre Street. The members of LeMond’s band and a few friends were on hand. After a festive lunch at the club, the couple drove to Connecticut. She gave up her clients. When she moved into Sammy’s apartment, she added her own touches: black caryatids in the bath, a Japanese screen depicting court musicians, a mosaic of nightingales in the foyer. She had fine taste, and an instinct for what pleased her husband, from honey-colored bedsheets and towels to the dormant fireplace she refurbished, clearing the flue and installing a marble mantelpiece. LeMond was happiest when they curled up before a fire and listened to music. Ever since Joan entered his life, it was as if he were approaching forty again, not sixty. She liked to drive him out to the country in her sky-blue convertible. With her, he began traveling abroad again. And he composed, recorded, and dedicated to her what many considered his finest LP, Mountains of the Moon. It sold so well that RCA renegotiated his contract. Joan had had lovers, but never lived with anyone, and like LeMond, hadn’t considered marriage. What set him apart for her was his abiding faith in himself and his belief in the redemptive power of music. Whether they were alone in his studio or he was onstage somewhere, she knew he was playing for her—not just because he told her so, but because she felt it. Private, even shy, with most people, he never concealed his passion for her. One night, soon after they met, when he took the Bolden cylinder from the armoire and she heard “Tiger Rag” for the first time, she knew he was sharing something sacred to him.

  On the other side of the country, Valentine Owen was back to doing session work. The long road he had taken was mostly downhill. After several fractious years with the Hurricanes—culminating in missed engagements and a barroom brawl—Tex Mayeux fired him. Owen had kicked around Kansas City before hooking up with another Dixieland band. They didn’t tour or record. Local dives, Elks dinners, and smokers were their staple. It was the winter of 1967. Owen was forty-nine years old. When that band dissolved, he had to hustle pickup work at bars to make ends meet. Sometimes that meant playing pop with an electric band. He was back to living in a residence hotel, eating at diners, trying to keep to four drinks a day, spread out. But sometimes that didn’t work out, and afterward he would drink beer, not bourbon, for a couple of weeks.

  He went to Dallas to audition for the house band in a gentlemen’s club named Diamond Jim’s. It was a step up from a strip joint: they called the girls dancers. Owen couldn’t stand the inland heat, the cement landscape and harsh light, the religious nuts. In the Deep Ellum district, doomsday prophets and soapbox preachers outnumbered hookers. And the cops were as crooked as any in New Orleans. But there was work to be had, and he was desperate.

  He passed the audition and joined the band at a salary of forty dollars a week. He found a room with a kitchenette on Valero Street. He ate at taco joints and diners and after work hung out in a bar that served shots of mescal for twenty-five cents. The whorehouses were cheap, but after a couple of weeks he took up with the cashier at the club. Some women still saw something in him at that point, just as Camille Broussard had five years earlier. The cashier’s name was Polly Moore. She had friends. She and Owen were invited to barbecues. They went dancing. He hadn’t danced in years. He got wind of the fact she was seeing another man. A guy named Ralph who worked at a radio station. She thought Owen didn’t suspect. In fact, he didn’t care. She had gone to El Paso for an abortion the previous year. A Mexican doctor who came over the border. Now she was pregnant again.

  She and Owen were sitting in her small apartment having a drink. When she told him it was his child, he brought up Ralph for the first time. She was stunned that he knew his name.

  It couldn’t be him, she said.

  Why not?

  I just know it isn’t. Women know.

  Sure they do.

  Well, I’m not losing another baby, she said defiantly.

  That was it for Owen. He stood up to leave. Do what you like.

  Val—

  I don’t want any part of this.

  You what?

  I’m gone.

  She saw he meant it. You bastard.

  Tell it to Ralph.

  As he turned to the door, Polly grabbed at his coat. He wheeled around and slapped her. She lunged toward him, her hands up to scratch, and he slapped her again, and again.

  By the time he stopped himself, she was bleeding, her mouth badly cut, a gash on her forehead. Jesus Christ, he muttered.

  She curled up on the floor sobbing. You won’t get away with this.

  He opened the door and hurried out.

  He had only hit a woman once before, and that was a hooker who was emptying his wallet. This was different; he didn’t like all that blood.

  Anyway, he was sick of Dallas. Things had soured at the club. Except for the drummer, the other members of the band shunned him. They were tired of hearing what a big shot he’d been and how their gig was only a temporary bump in the road. The club manager had taken a dislike to him, too, after catching him cadging one drink too many. Owen was sure he was on the verge of being canned. This would ice it, if Polly came crying to them, or worse, brought the cops.

  He decided to go back to Kansas City. He collected his paycheck at the club and borrowed fifty bucks from the drummer that he promised to pay back the next day. Then he got on the three o’clock bus.

  This was the second time he had been reckless with some woman he didn’t care about, and he promised himself it would be the last. Maybe Polly went back to El Paso, maybe she had the baby. Maybe it was his and maybe it wasn’t. She had been two-timing him, after all, whether he cared about it or not. He never saw her again, just as he had never seen Camille. Camille had given birth to a daughter and named her Ruby. She would have been five years old at that time. He didn’t think about her much, either. For several years, Camille sent him letters, and once in a while he wrote back. But he was cruising then; after he left the Hurricanes, he didn’t bother. Then she wrote that she had left New Orleans and was getting married, and he didn’t hear from her again.

  Every so often he
contacted Sammy LeMond, asking him to put in a good word with this or that promoter in Chicago or New Orleans, but nothing ever panned out. Owen attributed this to a lack of effort on LeMond’s part, not to his own shortcomings. He resented the fact that LeMond had never invited him back to sit in with the Eclipse Sextet or introduced him to people with real clout in New York. Owen’s anger was intensified by LeMond’s continued success; because Owen had boasted about playing with him, musicians passing through Kansas City often shared bits of information.

  As the years passed, LeMond didn’t give Owen much thought one way or the other. He was just one of many musicians he had helped out. Some drifted in and out of his orbit quickly; others stayed in touch. Joan thought her husband could be overly open and generous, but also knew that those were two of the qualities that had attracted her. When she decided he was crossing the line—expending too much energy on someone who took it for granted or was somehow undeserving—she let him know. Valentine Owen had dropped out of LeMond’s orbit long before Joan appeared, and she had never heard her husband mention his name.

  In 1974 Owen moved to L.A. He had been hanging out in Kansas City with a drummer named Cal Perry who got a gig as a studio sideman for a small record label in L.A., a company that recorded second-rate vocal groups and crooners. Sick of Kansas City, broke again, Owen took a chance and joined Cal. He secured one last reference from LeMond and was hired. He moved into another furnished room, in West Hollywood, a pink stucco building with a dusty palm in front.

  Work was steady and Owen liked the climate. After Kansas, L.A. felt like anything goes.

  One night at a party in Alhambra, two musicians were shooting up in the living room.

  Cal took out a vial and tapped some powder onto the coffee table.

  Coke? Owen said. He had smoked weed with Cal in Kansas City, but that was it.

  Smack. To snort.

  Owen didn’t want to go there. But he was drunk and he snorted two lines and a few minutes later lurched outside and threw up into the bushes. When someone drove him home later, the oncoming headlights on the freeway were like balls of fire.

  He didn’t touch drugs again, but he couldn’t stop drinking. He managed to keep it to a six-pack a day.

  He hated his job, but was able to hold it down for several years. He rented a two-room apartment. He bought a secondhand Pontiac. Then he developed bleeding ulcers. In three weeks he dropped twenty pounds. He had lost his looks; now suddenly he just looked old. Hollow cheeks, thinning hair, a trumpeter’s teeth, which he had neglected. The doctor ordered him to stop drinking immediately. In fact, even if he could have kept it down, a single beer racked his insides so badly that he didn’t want to pick up. Despite himself, he got sober. After a year, his ulcers healed, but his old resentments felt raw as ever—maybe worse now that he could pick over them with a clear head.

  In the fall of 1983, Owen decided to take his chances and move back to New York. He was sixty-five, the oldest guy in his circle of session men. The younger musicians called him “Pops,” which he hated. Though his prospects had flatlined, in his own mind some promising gambit still lay ahead, out of reach but real. In the same vein, during the twilit moments between sleeping and waking he could imagine himself handsome still, and strong, and attractive to women, despite the fact he hadn’t slept beside a woman in years and the only ones he touched cost him sixty dollars for twenty minutes. There were no more Camilles or Pollys in his life.

  He was sick of the West Coast and convinced he was owed one more throw of the dice in New York. His savings were meager and he was terrified of dying broke in a state nursing home—or worse.

  He bought a new black suit and the sort of expensive, splashy shirts he hadn’t worn in years. He cleaned himself up: good haircut, shave, manicure. He dyed his hair himself: it came out coppery, unnatural, but he preferred it to gray. After flying in to Newark, he checked in to a prewar hotel off Times Square, the Lancaster Arms, and ate soup and crackers at a deli.

  He had a plan of sorts. Step one: reintroduce himself to Sammy LeMond; step two: get into LeMond’s good graces again; step three: get the lay of the land. There was still no step four. He had listened to LeMond’s LPs with envy, but knew little about his personal life, aside from the fact he was married. He’d heard he was reclusive, rarely performing in public anymore, but was still generous with his friends. A clarinetist named Harry Madison attested to this one night in L.A., relating to Owen how LeMond had allowed him to eat off the cuff at his club. He knew my eyesight was goin’, Madison said, and he done what he could. If there’s a better man around, I don’t know who he is.

  Owen’s second afternoon in New York, he worked up the nerve to telephone LeMond’s apartment. A woman answered the phone. The new wife. She had a strong low voice. It unnerved him for a moment; it was not what he had imagined. He hung up on her. He waited until the next morning to call again, and this time the housekeeper took a message. That evening LeMond returned his call.

  You’re back, Val. Come by my club tomorrow night.

  Though he had heard about the club’s success, Owen was surprised to discover how ritzy it was, abuzz with well-heeled customers, limos in front, the sidewalk rope line managed by a pair of bouncers. There were eight-foot bronze mirrors behind the bar. The rows of bottles on glass shelves were lit mauve and magenta. Atop Doric columns, marble mermaids surveyed the room. The waitresses wore black pants, white vests, and red bow ties. They sailed out of the kitchen with trays of steaming crab platters, fried shrimp, garlic soup. A quartet of lean young musicians was burning up the stage with a double-time version of “Flying Home.” In a green neon suit and yellow shirt, the handsome trumpeter was obviously their leader. To close the piece, he reared back beneath a gold spotlight and launched into a wicked extended solo. Owen hadn’t heard anyone that good in years: the intricate phrasing at high speed, the tremendous volume. And he had presence. The stage was his.

  Owen found LeMond holding court in a corner booth with three other men. Businessmen. Armani suits and Santoni shoes. The one sitting next to LeMond was the oldest and flashiest: tanned, his silver hair glistening, he wore a purplish suit and a diamond-studded Rolex.

  LeMond himself was wearing a chalk-striped jacket and orange shirt. His brow was unlined and his thick hair streaked gray. He’s gotten older, too, Owen thought, but he still looks younger than me. LeMond had just turned sixty. He was on medication for high blood pressure and arrhythmia. He was plagued by vertigo and insomnia. After an angina attack, he went in for weekly cardiograms, but everything looked all right. His wife put him on a regimen of vegetables, rice, and green tea. But that night, in high spirits, he was drinking more than usual. The champagne, he told himself, would help him sleep.

  He beckoned Owen to join them. As Owen slid into the booth, LeMond introduced him all around. The silver-haired man, Jake Romer, turned out to be president of the jazz division at RCA.

  This is a celebration, Val, LeMond said. Jake signed Lenny there to a three-record contract.

  Lenny was the young trumpeter, just taking his bow.

  Bravo, Jake shouted, raising his Scotch in the direction of the stage.

  Lenny’s conservatory trained, LeMond said. Knows every kind of music. When the applause died down, he turned to Val. What’ll you have?

  Ginger ale, thanks.

  Val’s a fine trumpeter himself, Jake, LeMond said. He’s just in from the coast.

  Jake smiled at Owen, then looked away.

  Owen wished he could disappear at that moment. He was furious at LeMond for inviting him to such an occasion, setting him up for humiliation. His anger made it easy for him to forget that it was he who had called LeMond, fishing for just such an invitation. At the same time, Owen was dazed to find himself in such company—well beyond the realm of his recent fantasies—just two days after walking out of his run-down building in West Hollywood.

  The band left the stage, and Lenny Marquet made his way to their booth. Trumpet tucked under
his arm, he had a confident gait, smiling at friends in the audience, winking at girls. “Conservatory trained,” Owen thought mockingly. He could barely look at him.

  An hour later, they were all at LeMond’s apartment, Lenny and his band, the record executives, and about seventy other people, including two of the girls who had caught Lenny’s eye and were now planted beside him. Valentine Owen was glad to be among them, but at the same time felt even more uncomfortable than he had at the club. He recognized a number of guests: Keith Jarrett’s sidemen, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette—both older than he had imagined; Sonny Rollins; Emile Griffith, the former boxing champion; Eartha Kitt; Craig Toland, the jazz critic for Billboard; and a couple of young film actresses whose names he couldn’t remember. There was a sumptuous buffet, a bartender from the club mixing drinks, and three of those waitresses with the red bow ties floating around with trays of hors d’oeuvres and champagne. Owen could have used a drink, but he resisted. Even spruced up, in his new clothes, he was sure he stuck out. In reality, hardly anyone took notice of him.

  Mostly he stood against the wall, taking the place in. LeMond was flush, all right. The white Steinway was still there and the African sculptures, but plenty had changed in twenty years. The apartment felt warmer, more intimate. The furniture upholstered colorfully, the carpets more ornate, the track lighting soft. The wife’s touches were everywhere: pale satin drapes, French mirrors, a collection of Haitian art. Gilt-framed photographs of the couple adorned a table beside the piano. In Paris and Tangier, on the Ramblas in Barcelona, tossing coins into a fountain in Copenhagen. She was certainly a beautiful woman, Owen thought.

  He filled a plate at the buffet. The stuff his stomach could tolerate: bread, cheese, potato salad. He drifted around the room. The music on the stereo was Lenny Marquet’s forthcoming album. The kid was more than good. He played his own compositions, some reconfigured Ellington, a samba, and two old New Orleans standards, “Riverside Blues” and “Weather Bird,” that he’d made his own. Owen sat by the window and listened. One of the actresses came over for a smoke. She stood with her back to him, gazing at the impressive view. She had long hair, an hourglass figure. Owen could feel the heat off her body. He wished he could touch her.