by John Lutz
Which was Billy's way of suggesting that Nudger mind his own business. Which was what Nudger did.
“Ever hear of a piano player named Willy Hollister?” he asked. He looked past Billy out the window. Nice view. A boarded-up store next to an auto body shop that seemed to do most of its work outdoors. Three cars were up on blocks near the sidewalk, missing various fenders, hoods, and wheels.
“I heard of him,” Billy said.
A lithe young black man lowered himself onto a wheeled creeper and got himself comfortable on his back, then kicked his way under a car. Nudger waited. Billy's mind was probably in the same sad shape as his hands; he might need time to think.
“White boy, wasn't he? Blond?”
“Sounds like him, Billy.”
“He was a helluva player, that boy,” Billy said, still staring out the window, not seeming at all interested in what was out there. Not seeming interested in anything. The world was a run-down record.
“When did you last see him, Billy?”
“Oh, about four years or so ago. He did a gig at Rush's, then he moved on someplace.”
“Kansas City?”
“Mighta been.” Billy slowly shook his head. “Truth is, I disremember, Nudger. But I do recall how that boy played and sang. We used to jam in at Rush's and listen to him. He was a draw in them days, him and Jack Collins worth and Fat Jack McGee. They all played at Rush's.”
Nudger wasn't really surprised. “You know Fat Jack McGee?”
Billy almost smiled. “Sure, ever'body know the fat man. Jazz be a small world, Nudger.”
“Who were Hollister's friends while he played in St. Louis?” Nudger asked.
“No friends. Hollister kept to himself by himself. Except for that Jacqui.”
“Jacqui?”
“Yeah, spelled it with a q-u-i, said she was some kinda Indian. No chance, the way she looked.”
“Do you remember her last name?”
“James. Jacqui James. Not her real name, I suspect. But then neither is Weep my real name.”
“Tell me about her, Billy.”
“She was a lady in the old true sense, Nudger. She sang a bit, but not much, 'cause she knew she didn't have it musically. What she did have was Hollister.”
Nudger sat down in an ancient wing chair with perpetually exploding cotton batting and leaned toward Billy. “Where can I find Jacqui James?”
Billy laughed a weak, airless kind of chuckle that was almost a gurgle. He didn't have much lung left. “Ain't nobody can find Jacqui James. She just up and went one day. Nobody ever found out where.”
“What about Hollister?”
“What about him? He was heart-an'-soul wrecked by her leavin' like that, Nudger. You could hear the pain of it in his music when he finally admitted to himself that she was gone for good. He played real blues then. The best blues played in them days was at Rush's, but none better than Willy Hollister's blues.”
“Then you think he really loved this Jacqui James.”
Billy's wide bloodless lips curled up in the cruel light. “Ain't no doubt he loved her, Nudger.”
“Do you think he might have had anything to do with her disappearance?” Nudger asked.
Billy shook his head slowly. “Naw, that boy wouldn't have done nothin' to hurt Jacqui. She just up an' gone one day, Nudger. Jacqui was like that. Pretty girl, red hair and green eyes, heart like a cottonwood seed … driftin' here an' away in the easiest wind …
Nudger stood up. He had to get out of there, away from the heat and stench. He wished he could get Billy away, but he knew it was useless to try. He wondered what the frail, used-up jazz man was taking that had eaten him up so from the inside.
“Thanks, Billy,” Nudger put his hands in his pockets, “you, uh … ?”
“I don't need nothin', Nudger. I thank you, but I don't. Never did. I'll continue on that way, if you please.”
Nudger smiled down at him. “Okay. And I was going to offer you an air conditioner for that window.”
Billy grinned a toothy, yellow grin at him. “Your ass, you was, Nudger. The landlord here don't allow no air conditioners. Anyways, you could never even afford a down payment on your bar tab.”
Nudger spread his arms slightly in a brief, helpless gesture. “That hasn't changed, except from time to time.” He moved toward the door. The man under the car across the street began banging a hammer in slow rhythm against metal.
“Poverty's a disease, Nudger, an' you only got the sniffles.” Billy waved a misshapen dark hand around in an encompassing gesture. “This here's what you got to look forward to if you don't straighten out your act. Let me warn you, this is what happens to everybody's good old days.”
“I'll hold that cheerful thought,” Nudger said. “Go easy on yourself, Billy. You deserve it.”
“Hey,” Billy said feebly, when Nudger had opened the door. “You still got that jazz-record collection of yours?”
Nudger shook his head no. “I had to sell most of it. I could only save the best.”
“You save any of mine?”
“Sure I did, Billy.”
The contorted hand yanked the curtains closed again. “That's right,” came the thin voice from the darkness, “you did say the best.”
The relentless banging of metal on metal was still coming from beneath the wrecked car as Nudger walked down the street to his Volkswagen and drove away. The hammer bounced once after each blow: BANG-bang! BANG-bang! BANG-bang! … sending up a flat rhythm. The weary, frustrated sound hung over the ghetto like a cold, inhuman heartbeat that Nudger could hear for blocks. A dirge for dead dreams.
He stopped at a hardware store and bought a cheap two-speed box fan and paid extra to have it delivered to Billy Weep's address. It wasn't an air conditioner, but it was all Nudger could afford at the moment and it would help, if Billy took the trouble to switch it on.
Nudger had spent some good hours at Rush's listening to Billy Weep's smooth and plaintive alto sax. It was time he gave something back.
When he left the hardware store he drove east on Olive toward downtown and the Third District police station. On a scrap of paper from the glove compartment, so he wouldn't forget, he scribbled the name Jacqui James.
EIGHT
“I need to know about a Jacqui James,” Nudger said to Hammersmith, in Hammersmith's office in the Third District station house. “Spelled with a q-u-i.”
Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith leaned his obese self back in his comfortable upholstered desk chair and motioned for Nudger to sit in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs before the desk.
“You been gone for two days, Nudge,” Hammersmith said, “then you walk in here without even phoning you're coming, and ask me about somebody I never heard of. You in some kind of a rush?”
“Sort of.” Nudger sat down. He knew it wouldn't be for long; Hammersmith's visitors' chairs were torture devices designed to keep conversations short and to the point, so the lieutenant would have plenty of time alone for business and smoking his malodorous greenish cigars without anybody complaining or vomiting.
“I phoned your office, Nudge, and talked to nothing but a machine,” Hammersmith said. “I phoned your apartment, Claudia's place, Danny's Donuts, all your haunts.” Hammersmith's blue eyes were twinkling; he was enjoying this. “No Nudger. All gone. Frankly I was concerned.”
“Maybe you should have notified the police.”
Hammersmith smiled, got a cigar out of his shirt pocket, and laid it on the desk in the way a suspicious poker player might lay a revolver on the table before the deal. There would be no nonsense here, or there would be fire and smoke.
“I was in New Orleans,” Nudger said.
“Hard-earned vacation?”
“Business. Why were you trying to contact me?”
Hammersmith toyed with the cigar, rolling it back and forth a few rotations each way on the desk. He liked to tease before answering a question. “I thought you ought to know that Hugo Rumbo is out on bail.”
“You worried?”
“I should be but I'm not. I don't think Rumbo is bright enough to hold a grudge.”
“Maybe not,” Hammersmith said. He stopped rolling the cigar. “So what's a Jacqui James?”
“A female of the disappeared type. She was the girlfriend of a jazz musician here in town about four years ago when she dropped from sight.”
Hammersmith raised his sleek eyebrows. “Foul play?”
“No, he's a hell of a pianist.”
Hammersmith unwrapped the cigar and placed it between even, tobacco-stained teeth. “Each year it's easier for me to understand why you had to quit the department. You're not an organization man, Nudge. There is no hole for a peg shaped like you. I assume you want me to check with Missing Persons to see if they have a file on this woman.”
“Exactly.”
While he pretended to consider this request, Hammersmith fired up the cigar, puffed and wheezed, and exhaled a tremendous dense cloud of greenish smoke. Then, cigar still in his mouth, he lifted the desk phone receiver and punched out the number for the main switchboard. “Get me Mishing Pershons,” he said around the cigar.
Nudger smiled at him. Hammersmith smiled back and blew smoke.
“It'll take a few minutes,” Hammersmith said, after hanging up the phone. “If there is an MP file on Jacqui James and it's in the computer, we can get a printout of it here for you to read.”
“I appreciate this, Jack.”
“And so you should.”
Nudger had never doubted that Hammersmith would let him use police-department files. The two men had a mutual trust and interdependence going back over a decade to when they had been partners in a two-man patrol car. Hammersmith knew why Nudger had quit the department. It was nerves, a stomach that never got used to the everyday stress and occasional violence that was a patrol cop's lot. In a shoot-out with a burglar in the dark, Nudger had saved Hammersmith's life, though he might just as easily have killed him with one of his shaky, panicky shots.
The nerves had become worse after that, and the department had taken Nudger off patrol duty and turned him into Coppy the Clown, a local TV character who taught young children not to be afraid of policemen in our warped society. But a new police chief had decided that a clown wasn't, after all, the most desirable symbol of the department, and Nudger had resigned rather than return to the grinding stress of patrol duty. He'd become, out of necessity born of knowing no other line of work, a private investigator. It enabled him to pay the bills, more or less, in his journey along life's perilous streets. His nervous stomach traveled right along with him.
“What are you working on in New Orleans?” Hammersmith asked.
“I'm investigating an employee,” Nudger said vaguely.
“I won't ask why the employer didn't hire a local,” Hammersmith said. “Maybe an investigator with a Louisiana PI license.”
“My client wanted only me. I came highly recommended by Jeanette Boyington.”
Hammersmith emitted a foul cloud of greenish smoke and chuckled. “Unpredictable bitch, eh?”
“Agreed,” Nudger said. “Actually, I'm trying to find out about a man named Hollister, a jazz musician who used to be chummy with Jacqui James.”
“Why?” Hammersmith asked bluntly.
“He's involved with another woman, a fellow employee who's the daughter of a big-clout guy named Collins.”
Hammersmith removed the cigar from his mouth and looked over its glowing tip at Nudger. There was cool alarm in his blue eyes. “David Collins?”
Nudger shifted his weight to his left haunch, uncomfortable in the hard chair. “How do you know Collins?” he asked. His stomach presaged the answer by arranging itself in what felt like a tight coil.
“I know of Collins,” Hammersmith said, “and that's as close as I care to get. Mostly what I've heard is rumor, but none of it is good rumor. Involvement in a Gulf Coast real estate scam, a series of inflated construction bids and kickbacks when the New Orleans World's Fair was being put together, whispers of a Collins cut in a big South American drug operation that was drop-shipping in southern Florida. Collins is purported to be more of a financier of crime than an actual participant. He keeps himself at least twice-removed and free from prosecution.”
“Interesting,” Nudger said, “but how does a police lieutenant in St. Louis happen to know all about David Collins in New Orleans?”
“There are people who are connected in every major city,” Hammersmith said. “Upper-echelon cops everywhere know who they are, or at least should know, because crime is an interstate business.”
Nudger's stomach lurched into fiery contortions, almost doubling him over in his chair. “‘Connected,’ you said? ‘Business,’ you said?”
Hammersmith nodded. “I said.” He carefully angled the cigar in the glass ashtray so it wouldn't go out, then squinted through the smoke, trying to gauge the effect of his words on Nudger.
“You mean the Mafia?” Nudger asked.
Hammersmith shrugged. “Who can say for sure? But whatever or whoever runs things in a big way has an umbrella over Collins. Don't try to rain on him, Nudge.”
“I'm not,” Nudger said. “Well, not exactly. Maybe just a fine mist.”
Hammersmith grunted dubiously, picked up his cigar, and resumed his smokestack act, leaving Nudger to his own dire thoughts.
A few minutes later there was a respectful light knock on the door and a pimply-faced young civilian clerk entered the office and placed a yellow file folder on Hammersmith's desk. He withdrew quickly, almost genuflecting, and Hammersmith opened the folder and read for several minutes before speaking again to Nudger. Nudger noticed that his old partner was leaning back from the material on his desk and wondered if Hammersmith had reached the age where he needed glasses.
Still without looking up, Hammersmith scratched a jowly, smooth-shaven cheek and said, “Jacqueline Jamison, a.k.a. Jacqui James, was reported missing January twenty-fourth, four years ago. Female Caucasian, twenty-six years old then, average height and weight, auburn hair and green eyes, no distinguishing marks, last seen wearing a white cotton blouse, blue cotton skirt, blah, blah, blah.”
“Who reported her missing?” Nudger asked, trying to envision a cotton blah, blah, blah.
“Says here the apartment manager where she lived, a Miss Irma Gorman, address over on Alabama Avenue. Jacqui James hadn't paid her rent or been seen for a while, so Irma Gorman took legal steps to get her possessions out of the apartment so she could rent it to another tenant.”
“What did the investigation turn up?” Nudger asked.
“Ah, here we get to Jacqui James close up and personal. A show-biz type on the fringes. She worked around town as a singer, had no close family, and drug paraphernalia was found in her apartment. Also, she had an arrest record. Two controlled-substance charges and one misdemeanor—shoplifting under a hundred dollars. Suspended sentences, never served time for anything. Minor stuff, Nudge.”
“What kind of singer?”
“I never caught her act,” Hammersmith said. “I'm no judge of talent anyway. But the report says she sang opera and blues. Humph!”
“Is there a photograph in the file?” Nudger asked.
Hammersmith nodded, turning the open file folder on the desk so Nudger could see inside.
Jacqui James looked young and fresh except for her eyes, which harbored a subtle sadness. Her black-and-white snapshot was slightly out of focus, and she stared out of the file folder at Nudger through a kind of haze, maybe the sun in the camera lens. There were trees and a small lake in the background. She was an ordinary-looking young woman, with a pretty, oval face. If she wasn't the Ineida Collins type, she was far from the opposite.
“Was she ever reported seen anywhere after the landlady said she was missing?” Nudger asked.
Hammersmith closed the file folder and shook his head. “No, this MP report is the last of Jacqui James in St. Louis as far as the police are concerned. And frankly, Nudge, she's not the sort of MP who's searched for around every corner. She was a known user and worked irregularly as an entertainer. Those people tend to be transient. Night people. It's not unusual for them to disappear with the morning light. Maybe she owed her supplier and couldn't come up with payment. Maybe she met a man. Maybe she just got up one morning with an itch to change the scenery around her.” Hammersmith leaned back with his cigar and added to the considerable pollution in the tiny office. “Now, if you don't mind, Nudge, crime of a more recent nature needs tending.”
Nudger stood up, finding the haze denser nearer the ceiling. It made his eyes water. He thanked Hammersmith for the information and started toward the door.
“Don't take chances around David Collins,” Hammersmith cautioned from behind another billowing green cloud. “You're skating on thin ice over deep water. And your few friends who might pull you out and dry you off are here and not in New Orleans.”
Sage advice, Nudger thought, even if offered in the wrong season. He nodded good-bye and left Hammersmith alone in air that only he could breathe.
As he walked across the station house's blacktop parking lot, where his battered Volkswagen squatted patiently in a visitors' slot, Nudger thought about the long-gone Jacqui James. Hammersmith was right; she wasn't the sort of woman who would be searched for with any real effort. Not like Ineida Collins, who would be searched for with everything from bloodhounds to spy satellites. Of course, Willy Hollister didn't know that; to him, Ineida Collins was Ineida Mann, and probably didn't seem much different from Jacqui James, who was or had been the kind of independent, unfettered woman that Ineida only pretended to be. Jacqui James had been burned; Ineida Collins was still flitting experimentally around the alluring flame. It was a flame that might have claimed more than one victim. That still burned fiercely.
Nudger got into the sun-heated Volkswagen and drove to Jacqui James' last known address, wondering if he was the only person anywhere who still cared about what might have happened to her.