False Negative (Hard Case Crime)

by Joseph Koenig

  “On the contrary, it’s your strongest qualification. The others are hacks telling stories the same way they’ve been doing it since the Coolidge administration, which for many of them is the last time they drew a sober breath. You haven’t picked up their bad habits—not on the printed page. I’ve read some of your pieces. You’re the best of the bunch by far.”

  “I’m flattered,” Jordan said. “It doesn’t change my thinking.”

  “I have no one else, please believe me. If you turn me down, I’ll be forced to fold the magazines. Forty writers, dozens of stringers and photographers, an art director and an editorial assistant will be out of work. You’re being unconscionably selfish in not accepting my offer. Also short-sighted. The job pays ninety-five hundred. If that’s not enough, assign yourself all the freelance work you can handle, and take home a good deal more.”

  Jordan said, “Crap.”

  “Not at all. It’s an opportunity that may not come your way again. You’d be foolish to turn it down.”

  “That’s what I was trying to say. When do I start?”

  He was up half the night, unhappy about letting a woman he didn’t know sell him a bill of goods over the phone, deciding on a graceful way to back out. Drifting off to sleep, he pictured himself in a green eyeshade prodding tortured copy into brilliant prose while a receptionist with Jane Russell’s curves poured coffee. An apartment in a swank midtown tower came into focus, high-ceilinged rooms done up in Danish Modern with spectacular river views. All that was missing was Adam Jordan, who was squandering his talent in a city where the major celebrities were beauty contestants and a high-diving horse.

  In the morning he told his landlord that he’d be gone by the weekend. Cherise called an hour later while he was pushing his sofa out the door.

  “Can’t wait to have grandkids, so I can tell ’em about the time I had the Ship ’N Shore at Tarrantino’s,” she said.

  “Hold off on a family till you try the cheesecake at Lindy’s in New York.”

  “Want to return the favor first. I told Mr. Beach about you. He set aside time to talk.”

  “He knows what I’m after?”

  “Save your questions,” she said. “Find him at 373 Mississippi Avenue, fifth floor. Be there at 4:45, he’ll squeeze you in.”

  “Squeeze me between what?”

  “First thing to ask.”

  The tile minarets of the RKO Alcazaba dominated the 300 block of Mississippi, which it shared with a Chinese wet wash at 371 and a Negro barber shop at 375. Under the marquee Jordan watched serpentine lights hop to a spastic rhythm around strips of peeling paint. The girl in the ticket booth was doing her nails with one eye on a paperback novel. The Alcazaba was fine for summer napping in air-cooled comfort, but television left little reason to stay open the rest of the year.

  Gilt filigree in the tilework hid the outline of a door. Behind it a red Exit sign floated in the caramel-flavored darkness. Jordan was starting upstairs when he was frozen by the screech of tires, the amplified prelude to a crash that rocked the building. He squeezed the banister till Lou Costello’s frightened yawp drew laughs from the spare audience on the other side of the wall.

  A dentist’s pebbled glass door filtered the fifth-story light. More spilled over an orthodontist’s transom, puddling in an alcove where a guitar, bass, and piano offended Jordan with a leaden rhythm-and-blues riff.

  Alone in an office Jordan saw a man drumming his hands on a bare desk. A beret had a tenuous hold of his slick scalp. He had no sideburns or facial hair aside from a single eyebrow that did the work of two. At the final beat he reached over to a turntable and flipped the record. Jordan recognized the new side from the intro—Big Mama Thornton’s hit, “Hound Dog.”

  “You don’t care for Negro music?” the man said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s all over your face.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a Negro record, Mr. Beach. ‘Hound Dog’ was written by a couple of Jewish boys in Los Angeles.”

  Beach looked at him gravely. Since when was a Los Angeles Jew disqualified from being Negro?

  “It’s a lousy tune,” Jordan said, “and the lyric is moronic. Big Mama’s hardly Bessie Smith. Oh yeah, and her band stinks.”

  “Ofays don’t know shit about music,” Beach said.

  Jordan let go of the notion that he would straighten out this strange man on a number of subjects besides music.

  “I’m here to talk to you about something more important.”

  “Nothing is, man.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. About Etta Lee Wyatt, though—”

  “A so-so voice, but you should see the way she moves.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “Girls like Etta come and go. A pretty dancer-singer with a second-rate sound is an A-number-one candidate to vanish.”

  “No one vanishes,” Jordan said.

  “Don’t they?”

  “They leave a body behind.”

  Beach shut his eyes, concentrating on the record. Jordan listened along with him. The ponderous beat was an anchor against the breezy sophistication of swing, and the modern jazz that came from it. It seemed presumptuous to tell a stranger, especially a Negro, a white one in particular, that his taste in black music was retrograde and crude.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t recall. We spoke right before she took a powder.” Beach’s eyes remained closed, his head bobbing. “I needed a young brownskin gal for a party that was right up her alley.”

  “Where?”

  “Newark? Beach Haven? I’d have to check.”

  “Was the customer white or colored?”

  One eye opened, fixed on Jordan. “Colored wouldn’t have use for a black girl. Couldn’t afford white if I trucked ’em in. The customer put in a call for two chicks, personable and clean, affectionate with gentlemen and with each other, if you get my meaning. I sent Etta with an older gal that’s been with me for years.”

  “What went on there?”

  “You’d have to ask the other girl.” Beach nudged the beret back on his head. Jordan noticed a jagged scar in the shiny smooth skin. “And she knows better than to talk to strangers.”

  “I thought you were a theatrical booker,” Jordan said.

  “All my girls are theatrical. Nothing real about them.”

  Beach opened his other eye, pulled back his cuff, and examined the time with a glance for Jordan that said only a fool would waste a precious commodity. “TV, Vegas, the new music, they’re destroying the variety business. Nobody twists my girls’ arms, forces ’em to do this, that, the other thing the customer wants ’em for. They need to eat while I find ’em stage work, there are compromises they have to make. My customers are successful people, not perverts, names you’d know from the papers, but not the headlines. Are they a little kinky when it comes to women? Who ain’t? They want black women for whatever floats their boat? Who don’t?”

  “What happened at that party? You know a damn sight more than you’re letting on.”

  “Cherise said you were smart,” Beach said. “Shows how much she knows men. One of my best earners goes missing, my other girls are afraid to go out on jobs, and you think I’m covering up? Find out who messed with Etta, and I’ll deal with him. Then you got a story.”

  “Ever talk to Etta again?”

  “She called when she got home. I can’t sleep till I know my girls are all right. I’m a father to ’em.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t hear nothing I didn’t hear a million times before. She made a new fan, who was gonna take it on himself to promote her career, didn’t want nothing but the pleasure of seeing her a star—the colored Dinah Shore, the Negro Patti Page, the sepia singing rage. The situation in this country’s changing. America don’t need to be short-changed on talent like hers.”

  “She didn’t laugh in his face?”

  “She reads men like Cherise does,
figures there’s nobody don’t come wrapped around her little finger. If trouble finds her, she’ll send the devil packing, that’s how fucking cute she is.”

  “Any idea about the fan?”

  “A nothing,” Beach said. “A hanger-on.”

  “How do you know?”

  Beach spoke like a white man with a few Negro affectations, but Jordan had never heard anyone of either race laugh with his mirthless howl.

  “It wasn’t the customer. He had the cancelled check to remind him she was bought and paid for. The guests knew why she was there, didn’t have to hand her a line. Who’s that leave? A barman, a bouncer, the cabbie that took her home? Might even’ve just been Etta wanting me scared I’d lose her if I didn’t give her personal attention.”

  “The customer probably can tell us.”

  “Drag him into it, I’ll lose him for a customer. My other customers’ll drop me ’cause I ain’t discreet. My girls’ll be reduced to peddling their ass on the street, ’stead of being the center of attention at high-class smokers where Sir Fucking Galahad wants to rescue ’em from the tragic life they’re leading in my employ, and all on account of you bothering the wrong people with questions.”

  “You’ll have to give up his name to the cops.”

  “Go home, get outta here,” Beach said. “Police don’t know nothing from nothing about a colored girl that might be dead. Anybody hurt Etta, he did it with a get outta jail free card in his pocket.”

  “Your girls know they’re on their own if things get out of hand?”

  “Ain’t the case at all. They got me looking out for ’em.”

  “The way you looked out for Etta? Looking the other way?”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  “You have a sweet racket pimping colored girls to weirdos, freaks, voyeurs, God knows who else. One goes missing—that’s the cost of doing business. They should teach your profit model at Wharton. Unlimited inventory with free replacement in case of theft, damage, depreciation, or death.”

  “Take a look at a map of the United States, you’ll see Atlantic City’s below the Mason-Dixon line,” Beach said. “Nobody cares about those girls like I do.” He put another record on the turntable, Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’.”

  “Ever see your girls in action, Beach? Sorry, I forgot, the customer wouldn’t invite a black man.” Rage flooding the shaved head darkened it, and left Jordan with the idea that for Beach anger delineated race. “I’ve been to parties like those. One of the regulars was a girl built like a young Lana Turner, but with needle tracks up and down her arms, who’d show up with a German Shepherd to entertain. Her pimp was also a humanitarian. He’d slip booties on the Shepherd’s paws so the animal didn’t claw the girl’s back when it got excited.”

  “That vileness amuses you,” Beach said. “Who’s the real freak?”

  “I did an exposé that embarrassed the state police into shutting the parties down. That much I could do. The girl was white.”

  Beach turned up the volume. Jordan was talking to himself, and to Tiny Bradshaw.

  The curtains billowed as a door opened. Before Jordan could turn around he was hoisted out of his chair with an arm bent behind his back, and his head pressed down, concentrating his vision on the tan-and-white uppers of gunboat-size wingtips. Pain came with the understanding that the arm would be wrenched out of its socket if he struggled. The pain lessened, and he had a notion of taking a swipe at his abductor, but realized that he was being baited into something that wouldn’t end well. He let himself be prodded out of the office, didn’t lock his knees till he was staring down a long flight of stairs.

  He had a solid grip on the banister when he was released with a kick in the pants. Over his shoulder he watched a man in a chalk-stripe suit walk toward Beach’s office past a woman holding the hand of a boy about ten.

  “Don’t be afraid, mister,” the boy said. “Go back, it’ll make you feel better.”

  “What?”

  The boy put a finger to his mouth, and lifted his upper lip. An incisor was missing from the top row of teeth.

  “They give you gas,” the boy said. “It doesn’t hurt even a little.”

  Jordan went down the stairs clutching the handrail. He called Cherise from the corner.

  “You saw Mr. Beach?” she said.

  “I just left.”

  “Get anything out of him you can use?”

  “If I was a blackmailer...”

  “You don’t sound right.”

  He didn’t. Not to himself. He sounded like he’d had a whiff of the gas, and the pain hadn’t gone away.

  “Meet me at the Excelsior,” he said.

  “That dump? I got a better place. Be at my corner in ten minutes.”

  She was there first, wearing furry earmuffs and tight dungarees with the cuffs turned up. It was the first time he’d seen her in pants, and he came up on her slowly, giving her the onceover while she frowned.

  “Field clothes,” she said.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “I’m from South Carolina originally, on the coast, worked rice till we come north when I was thirteen. Everybody went around in jeans ’cause we couldn’t afford better. Makes me laugh, seeing white girls here fuss over ’em like they from Mr. Dior. Don’t need you droolin’ all over yourself to know how I look in ’em, but they ain’t my idea of high fashion.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Ain’t far.” She tucked her arm inside his. “Where you parked?”

  An elderly white couple stepping out of a cab had a disgusted look for them. A colored woman averted her head.

  “Know what they’re thinking, do you?” Cherise said.

  “I can imagine.”

  “You’d be wrong. It’s worse than I’m your good-time gal. They think we’re in love.”

  Someone had left a religious tract under the Hornet’s wiper blade. Jordan sailed it toward a trash can as Cherise let herself into the front seat. “Drive to Massachusetts Avenue,” she said. “Take it all the way back to Clam Creek.”

  Jordan turned the car north, then west, away from the boardwalk. “How did you get Beach to see me?”

  “Said you were a big cheese on your newspaper. You’d write nice things about him, and he wouldn’t get in trouble over Etta.”

  “He told me what a solid citizen he is for a whoremaster.”

  “Gonna clear his name anyway?”

  “He isn’t charged with anything.”

  “Get him charged, can’t you dear? Then clear it.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Something in it for everyone,” she said.

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Got no cause to talk to me like that,” she said. “Ain’t my fault you couldn’t get what you want out of him. You’re a reporter. I figured you can squeeze truth from a stone.”

  A light changed to red. They were through the intersection before Jordan brought the car to a stop.

  “Pay some mind to your driving,” Cherise said.

  They rode in silence to Clam Creek, a tidal inlet edged by boat yards and marine repair shops. The smell of cooking oil, not fresh, blew from a cedar shack in the shell lot.

  “The fried scallops,” Cherise said. “That’s all I got to say to you now.”

  They ordered from the take-out window, sat down at a picnic table on a grit beach. The wind swirled sand into the food, and chased them back into the car.

  “There’s a pier on the next street with a view,” Cherise said. “Park there, and we won’t have to look at each other.”

  Jordan’s first date in Atlantic City had brought him to nearby Absecon Inlet to watch the submarine races before pulling him into the back seat. Cherise had nothing else on her agenda but scallops.

  He balanced a bottle of Pepsi against his crotch as he backed out of the lot. After investigating a couple of dead ends they found a concrete dock that was home to a fleet of rustbucket trawlers. The Hornet s
pun its wheels in a sandy windrow, and stalled. Jordan re-started the engine, and the heavy car bounced onto the pier past a small ice house.

  “You’re not paying attention again,” Cherise said. “Slow down.”

  Jordan hit the brakes. The pedal went to the floor, and he pumped it with the same result. Then he wrenched the emergency brake. The car slowed, but not by much. Cherise pressed her foot against the mat. That didn’t help either.

  An old man crabbing at the end of the pier stared down the speeding Hornet, then dropped a rotten chicken breast and jumped out of the way. Jordan slammed the transmission into reverse. The wheels locked to the tune of shrieking gears, and the rear end drifted. He steered into the skid, and the car fish-tailed, straightened, crashed through a railing, and snagged on a piling with the front wheels dangling over the water. Jordan took a deep breath. Before he could let it out, the car nosed into the sea.

  Flung against the steering wheel, he bit his tongue. A crack zigzagged across the windshield from a starburst where Cherise struck it with her jaw. The car dipped under the chop, came level, and bobbed up like a rubber duck in a tub, thin streams entering through the dashboard vents. Looking out at water lapping against the window, Jordan remembered the salesman boasting of what reliable vehicles Hudsons were. But he hadn’t thought to ask if they were seaworthy. He tasted blood in his mouth, which wasn’t the worst thing. Then the front end began to sink, which was.

  “Do something,” Cherise said.

  Jordan swallowed blood, open to all suggestions.

  The car went belly up. It settled hard on the bottom, and Cherise moaned as she was thrown against the roof.

  They had air. No need to panic, Jordan told himself, and kept repeating it until his door refused to open. His hand was on the window crank when Cherise caught him.

  “Roll yours, too,” he said, “so you’re not pushing against the ocean.”

  “Don’t go without me.”

  “You plan on staying?”

  “I heard worse ideas.” She winced as she rubbed her chin. Blood ran up her arm, and she took time to decide whether to become hysterical. “I can’t swim.”

  Jordan cracked open the window, eased himself down to the roof. Cherise began to mutter. He thought she was cursing, but decided it was a prayer. The door still wouldn’t move. He cranked the window all the way down, shivering in blackness as icy water rushed over him. Then he tried the door again, heaved his shoulder against it, lay back and kicked.