With the All-Stars she shimmied during Satchmo’s medley of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” “Black and Blue,” and “Shine.” Band members remembered nothing out of the ordinary at Saturday’s late show. When Etta Lee missed the Sunday performances, and failed to call in, the All-Stars’ drummer and reed player visited her rooming house off Missouri Avenue. Fannie Potts, the 83-year-old landlady, told them she had last seen her young tenant around 8:30 on the day she vanished.
“She was wearing sandals and a summer shift, and I could see the straps of her bathing suit under her coat collar,” the old woman was quoted as saying. “Dearie, I told her, are you looking to come down with the grippe? She told me she had business on the beach. Weren’t none of my business what kind. I let her go, for which I’m sorry. She’s a lovely child, but God didn’t give her the sense to keep warm or safe.”
Armstrong’s management reported Etta Lee missing to Atlantic City police, who were told by Fannie Potts that the girl had walked off along Missouri Avenue in the direction of Chicken Bone Beach. Detectives concluded that the young dancer left town with a new boyfriend. The article, and the investigation, ended there. An editorial denounced the police for abandoning the case without an inspection of the beach. A Negro gone missing, the paper charged, was not a major priority.
There was more to the editorial, but Jordan dripped brown sauce on the final paragraphs. Eating barbecue in the car wasn’t a great idea. Each time he did it he promised would be the last. He pinched a handkerchief from his pants, and blotted his face, his shirt, the seat, the mats and the dashboard. Then he drove the few blocks to the beach. A good reporter followed up on everything the cops did. Without newsmen looking over their shoulder, Jordan believed most police departments were worthless bureaucracies.
Chicken Bone Beach, Atlantic City’s colored beach, had acquired its name because Negro bathers packed their lunch hampers with fried chicken on hot summer days. Off-season the name did not ring true. Nothing distinguished the deserted black beach from the white beaches surrounding it on both sides. Other than newspapers propelled by the wind the sand was immaculate. Not a chicken bone in sight to spoil the view.
Ducking into the blowing sand, Jordan went to the water’s edge. A mile off shore freighters ploughed toward the port of New York. He wished he could put out his thumb, and hitch a ride. There was nothing to see here. Etta Lee Wyatt was not playing hide and seek, waiting to be found. He looked back at the boardwalk done up for summer, like a vacant stage set. “Business,” Etta Lee’s landlady said had brought her boarder to the beach. What business did anyone have here now?
The odds were that Etta Lee was okay. The police might have it right, and she was with a new beau. She was only 21, but parading onstage in humiliating costumes for the amusement of leering strangers grew stale fast. Easy to understand why she would take off without letting anyone try to talk her into a change of heart. Why had she stopped first at the beach? The smaller mystery cast the larger one in an intriguing gloss, a gold mine for a writer if things turned out bad for Etta Lee.
Wet sand pulled at Jordan’s heels as he dodged a breaker crawling up the tide line. Chicken Bone Beach, between the Convention Hall and the Ocean One Pier, was the finest beach on the municipal oceanfront. Segregation wasn’t official in Atlantic City. This was New Jersey, after all, not the South, and a Negro could go to any beach he pleased. If he used his head, though, he came here. An isolated Negro or two would be tolerated on the white beaches, but Negroes showing up in large numbers on a sweltering August afternoon might be a different story. Maybe that was why the city fathers had given the Negroes the nicest beach—as a bribe to keep them in their place.
Jordan enjoyed these conversations with himself, the arguments that he never lost. But they didn’t put him closer to Etta Lee. He stared out to sea, half expecting to spot the girl in her tropical get-up riding the waves. There was only the gray water under grayer skies dissolving into foam at his toes. Soon he began to shiver. He went to his car, and drove back along Missouri Avenue.
Fannie Potts’ rooming house was two gloomy stories in a popular Japanese style that fell out of fashion on the Jersey Shore after the First World War. The once-grand homes in the Negro district had seen better days. Miss Potts’ was a foreboding place. Most of a chimney had toppled off the roof. Several windows were glazed with cardboard. Beach grasses sprouting from cracks in the mortar caricatured a haunted house. In Jordan’s head as he pulled up to the curb was a list of questions for Fannie Potts, and her possible answers. They were quotable answers, touching recollections good for a second-day lead, which wouldn’t advance a story for a detective magazine. If he were writing for a paper, he would storm Fannie Potts’ door. But he didn’t need anything she was likely to give him. The evidence pointed in another direction.
Jordan checked the Press to see how McAvoy was playing Etta Lee’s vanishing act. There was nothing—not even a mention that she was gone. Like most mid-size east coast dailies the Press gave little ink to Negroes. Sure, Negro criminals preying on whites made for good copy. But if you played up the disappearance of a Negro girl, you would be expected to cover her friends’ weddings, and the births of their children, and to make space on the obituary page, too. The readers did not want integration with their morning coffee. A good many might cancel their subscriptions, and take a suburban daily for which Negroes did not exist. If Etta Lee turned up dead, she would not be ignored by the Press. McAvoy wasn’t heartless. The death of a pretty colored girl with connections to Satchmo Armstrong, everyone’s favorite Negro, had the makings of a good story. The Press was a progressive paper with a commendable outlook on civil rights, but wasn’t prepared to cover the meanderings of a 21-year-old Negro dancer. McAvoy would say that he was saving Etta Lee embarrassment by not playing up her case. What if he was? thought Jordan. Since when was that his job?
Jordan didn’t care who he embarrassed, even if it was himself. His talk with Fannie Potts would come at another time. A word with the police couldn’t be put off. Noticing a speck of beef on the upholstery between his legs, he picked it up with his fingertip. It didn’t taste bad. He found more.
Atlantic City police headquarters was located near City Hall and the central fire station in the part of town caption writers called the nerve center. Jordan had an easy relationship with the local cops, who deferred to the troopers in major investigations that invited criticism from the Press. For taking a kitten down from a tree, or walking an old lady across a busy intersection, Jordan endorsed the Atlantic City police. The cops didn’t care what he said privately about them, as long as he kept it out of the paper.
Captain Eamon Halloran was chief of detectives, a retired Army lifer with six years of service under General MacArthur in the Philippines before the war, and Guadalcanal vet. He was from the old school of policing, and regularly sent men into bad neighborhoods to beat up the hard cases with fists and saps. The Press didn’t always look the other way. But when Halloran was called to account, he denied that the beatings happened. Since crime in Atlantic City was at low levels, the public supported the roughhouse tactics. The Press never called for Halloran’s badge, and everyone remained on good terms.
But Halloran wasn’t happy to see Jordan coming to his door. Jordan supposed that no cop ever was. He took it as evidence that he did his job well.
“What can I do for you today, Adam?” Halloran’s County Mayo brogue was for news conferences, police funerals, and grade school assemblies, and made Jordan feel like a fourth-grader sent to see the principal.
“You can give me a few minutes to hear what I have to tell you.”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“It should,” Jordan said. “But we’d both get nothing.”
Halloran’s lip retracted from his upper teeth. He had perfected his small grin in the Philippines under orders not to let the locals know what he thought of them. “Nothing about what.”
“Etta Lee Wyatt.”
Halloran had to think. “The shine dancer? I’ve got something for you. Take a load off, I’ll fill you in.”
Jordan remained on his feet.
“You’ve got the wrong face on, patronizing when it should be grateful,” Halloran said. “You come to see me as you do from time to time, like you have me in your pocket. But my sources are more reliable than yours, they give me information I can use. You won’t tell me who your sources are. You’ve promised them confidentiality, you say. I say your sources are voices in your head.”
Jordan pulled up a chair. “You first.”
“That’s polite of you, Adam. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think something terrible hadn’t happened to your dancer, something we can make hay with in our separate ways. Sorry to disappoint. I’ve got two witnesses, not a disembodied voice, but flesh and blood human beings—” He put up two fingers, and waggled them. “They tell me she’s fine.”
“Who—?”
“First is a trucker who noticed Etta Lee roll up in a pre-war Ford to a motor court outside Trenton. An older gent was at the wheel. For luggage they had several brown paper bags, and a bucket of ice. The Ford was still there when the trucker left in the morning.”
“How does he know it’s her?”
“He saw her picture in a Negro newspaper,” Halloran said.
“How do you know he’s right?”
“They may all appear alike to you, but not to this fellow, he’s several parts colored himself. The other witness is a cashier in a Negro restaurant on U.S. 1 near Baltimore. Your wayward entertainer stopped for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, hold the mayo, around eleven last night.”
“With the older gent?”
“The witness didn’t say. We didn’t ask. She’s Negro herself, Negro through and through. It’s a good ID, which makes two independent sightings. Don’t tell me we don’t know what’s going on with the girl.”
“Two sightings in opposite directions a hundred miles apart,” Jordan said. “If Etta Lee Wyatt was headed north toward Trenton, why did she show up in Baltimore to the south?”
“I’m a policeman, not a guardian angel. She hasn’t been harmed, no law’s been broken. She’s free...uh, free, and twenty-one. She can go anywhere she pleases, even in circles.”
Jordan shook his head.
“Who are you to say she can’t?”
“She’s dead.”
“You’ve mentioned that you want to be a novelist, but haven’t gotten anywhere. You’re trying out your fictions on me, aren’t you, to see how they play?”
“I’ve given up writing novels. She was killed.”
“This is a moving performance, Adam. Have you considered your real talent may be for the stage?”
Jordan said, “I have an idea where to find her.”
“How do you explain this sudden helpfulness? I heard you lost your job. Now you’re doing mine. Do you want it for yourself? If you can’t get the facts straight when they’re spelled out for you, what will you do with them?” Halloran glanced out the window at Jordan’s Hudson. “You parked in the spot reserved for the Press. You’re taking a chance you’ll be towed away.”
“Do you know the Chase case?” Jordan said. “The woman found by state police on the beach at Little Egg Harbor?”
“You have your facts wrong again. It wasn’t troopers who found her, it was a reporter.”
“I beat them to the scene by a few minutes, yeah,” Jordan said.
“You’re not telling me you discovered the Wyatt girl’s body, too? Even a failed novelist should know that’s too great a coincidence.”
“I think she ended up the same as Mrs. Chase.”
“You don’t listen. My witness saw her alive and well last night.”
“She left home the last time headed for Chicken Bone Beach. No one goes to the beach this time of year, but Suzie Chase was murdered on one just a few miles away.”
“An enterprising newsman, former newsman, would hunt for the Wyatt girl before trying to sell me on his pet theory with nothing to back it up,” Halloran said.
“The body could be buried in the sand, and I missed it. It might have been carried away by a wave, and is riding the tide, or lying in a morgue anywhere on the coast.”
“Where does someone who can’t hold down a reporter’s job come off thinking he knows about criminal investigation?”
“I’ve been reading up on murder, studying it. I learned more than I ever did trailing after your detectives.”
“Have you now, Adam? What text do you use?”
Jordan turned toward the window as a patrolman went by with a summons book in his hand. The officer walked around the Hudson, then unlocked a green DeSoto coupe in the adjacent spot, and drove away.
“One woman is dead on the beach and another is missing after visiting a beach off-season, and I’m supposed to believe the cases are unrelated?”
“Your imagination has let you down again,” Halloran said. “There is no connection between a colored tramp and the young lady who might have become our next Miss America. Don’t take my word for it. Ask your friends with the state police.”
“They’re deliberately blind, same as you. There’s nothing in it for them if they make headway in one of your cases.”
“The jazz musicians passing through town are Southern Negroes, many of them, scarcely civilized. On the road, without the restraints that keep them in line at home, they become animalistic. One of them could easily have...picked her up.”
Jordan didn’t contradict him. The players he brushed shoulders with were braggarts whose favorite riffs (after stories about marathon jam sessions when they achieved ecstatic breakthroughs with their music that tragically went unrecorded) were wild tales of whiskey-guzzling, smoking reefer and occasionally skin-popping heroin, and of the armies of women who ambushed them at every stop.
“Which is not to say,” Halloran went on, “that we aren’t concerned about the girl. The well-being of each of our citizens, white and colored, is important. If we find the witnesses are mistaken, we’ll speak to the band and the employees at the club, and look into her relationships. But first we need evidence she’s been harmed.”
“Is Satchmo—Louis Armstrong a suspect?”
“I caught his act opening night. A handful of elected officials and police are expected to be on hand when the stars come out. Etta Wyatt was there in the flesh. If you’d seen her, you’d have a better understanding of her popularity with men.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“You have no place to publish the answer.”
Jordan nodded. Halloran hadn’t asked if he was making note of everything and would use it when he could. The detective chief, who did not like being quoted, wouldn’t allow his name in a pulp magazine even if Pelfrey campaigned for him as Real Detective’s police officer of the month. “Between you and me.”
“He’s one of the best-liked figures in America,” Halloran said. “You’ve got to hand it to him, a Negro in the public eye who doesn’t have an enemy. It’s to the department’s credit that we won’t let him hide behind his celebrity. The day we have knowledge that a crime was committed he’ll be interrogated. He hired Etta Wyatt, he put her onstage. Presumably he knows the kind of girl she is, and where her real value to his troupe lay.”
Jordan had mixed feelings about Armstrong. The man was a genius, the greatest trumpet player ever—but his music had been in decline for twenty years. He’d deliberately diminished his art to be assured of steady work, a performer who’d turned himself into a brand name. To younger jazzmen he was an embarrassment who’d sold out musically and on race. “No one Toms like Louis,” Billie Holiday said. “Louis Toms from the heart.”
Jordan was fourteen, a Gene Autry fan, when he discovered Armstrong’s early recordings at a secondhand music shop. He’d worn them out, and never replaced them, but Armstrong remained his idol. Louis Armstrong had made jazz the world’s music. More important, he’d made it Adam Jordan’s
. He deserved better than to be dragged into a seamy missing persons case touching on murder. Jordan wanted to talk to him, to get his take on Etta Lee Wyatt, and to warn him to be careful around a cop who would try to bring him down. And, if they hit it off, to ask for an autograph.
At 8:30 he was nursing a beer in the Ruckus Room on Ventnor Avenue. He saw no one he recognized, few people his own age. Armstrong drew a crowd too square to get a handle on the modern jazz that was Jordan’s passion. At the clubs where he went to hear the boppers Jordan was sometimes the only ofay in the house. At the Ruckus Room there were no Negroes. Black audiences, young blacks in particular, had turned their back on Armstrong, whose fans—middle-class, middle-age, frumpy—reminded Jordan of his aunts and uncles. But his aunts and uncles were too hip for the Louis Armstrong of 1953.
The set began with “Back Home Again in Indiana,” the same number Armstrong had opened with when Jordan caught him at Roseland during the war. Not a jazz tune, or Tin Pan Alley standard, but a cornball jingle with a rah-rah chorus. What could be less cool? More deliberately unhip? Armstrong was stingy with his playing, a minimalist who blew the notes that were the heart of the song and discarded the rest. Jordan surveyed the house. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be clapping and tapping his feet like the squares.
After a slow blues Armstrong waved his dancers out of the wings, three high yellows in satin shorts, halters, and tap shoes. Jordan couldn’t help thinking of the Harlem Globetrotters, but with lousy footwork. The girl in the middle was half a step behind her partners. Jordan figured she’d been called in on short notice to pinch hit for Etta Lee Wyatt.
Armstrong announced “West End Blues,” skipping over the famous cadenza at the start to get to the melody. His playing was uninspired, while his eyes popped and he grinned like an old lecher at the shimmying girls. Billie Holiday told only part of the story. No one tommed like Louis because Louis was a parody of a tomming Negro, a parody of a parody, the joke turned back on itself so many times that the crowd squirmed until a wink and a nod let them know that it was okay to laugh.
False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Page 8