“I saw something,” I interrupted, staring in through the dirty storefront window.
“Saw something in there?” He clearly didn’t believe me.
“Humor me,” I said.
“My brother,” he answered, “our entire relationship is based on my humoring you.”
“So why stop now?” I asked him, getting out of the truck.
He turned off the engine and followed me to the door of Etta’s place. It was locked.
We stared in. The place had been left exactly as it had always been. Mismatched Formica tables, a wild variety of chairs, even tablecloths and napkins were all still in attendance. Sometimes people would go in and sit there, eating a sack lunch of some terrible fast food, just to remember when they’d had it better. I was, in fact, a little surprised to find the door locked.
“Try around back,” I mumbled. “She never locked the kitchen door.”
“But,” Andrews protested, “she’s not here anymore.”
“Didn’t I just say ‘humor me’?”
“God,” Andrews whispered.
But he followed me.
To get to the back of the building was a simple matter. Only a wooden gate guarded a small alleyway between two buildings. It had been nailed shut but was nearly rotted at the ground and easy to squeeze by. Then it was only a matter of sidestepping bricks and trash and the occasional dead animal, and there you were, around the corner from the back door of Miss Etta’s place. Andrews had never gone that way, but he was enjoying following me.
“This is disgusting back here,” he muttered. “Is that a cat?”
“Well,” I said, eyeing the bones and hank of hair, “it probably used to be.”
Through the tall weeds and over a pile of bricks that had obviously fallen from near the top of the old building, we made it to the narrow confines of the back driveway, the primary home of perhaps the smelliest Dumpster in America.
“What the hell!” Andrews covered his nose and mouth with both arms.
“Yes,” I agreed, “it’s quite a remarkable stench.”
“Call somebody,” he said from behind his sleeves. “Have this Dumpster removed. To Cleveland. And even then we might still smell it.”
“What have you got against Cleveland?” I took hold of the solid metal back door to Miss Etta’s.
The door swung inward toward the old kitchen and I heard shuffling noises. I shot a look back to Andrews. He’d heard them too. I took another step inside, trying to be quiet, but the door scraped the floor, and the floorboards creaked. I froze, but it was too late, the noise I’d made was already in the air.
A figure appeared, backlit and difficult to see, but the voice was unmistakable.
“What took you so long, boy?” he asked me in his thick Creole accent. “I been waiting for you for a couple of hours. You got your faithful Indian sidekick, Tonto, with you?”
Andrews stepped up next to me. “I’m not Tonto,” he complained. “I’m Watson. Sometimes I’m even Holmes.”
The old man laughed at that. “Okay. I guess if I can be the Earl of Huntingdon, you can be anybody you want.”
“Thanks,” Andrews said in a very insulting tone.
“This is something of a—weird coincidence.” I stammered. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?” he asked. “Come on in. Sit down.”
We followed him into the dining area, past the giant old stove. It was colder, by at least three hundred degrees, than I’d ever known it to be—and that added to my sadness.
“Why in the world you want to go over to the hospital and ask about me?” he began before Andrews and I were even in the dining room. “Nobody there knows me.”
“Wait, how would you know that we were at the hospital?” Andrews asked. “We didn’t mention that.”
“Not important,” he snapped, ignoring the question, staring at me. “And this is not a coincidence, Sherlock. I told you to meet me here today. Apparently you just don’t remember it.”
Andrews stopped walking. “You told him to meet you here?”
“You think I don’t know who he is?” the man asked, his obvious irritation growing. “You think I don’t know he’s got a sentimental feeling about this place? About this food? Food is a power. It’s more than just fuel for your tank. He knows that. I know that. You’re from England, so it’s harder for you to understand, because you didn’t ever have a good meal in your life until your old girlfriend took you to Tamarind on Queen Street for some of that hot Indian stuff. I believe her name was Hyacinth. That’s a pretty name. Come on. Sit down.”
Andrews stared. I did too.
“You knew I was coming here?” I asked, feeling very thickheaded.
“Damn, didn’t I just say I told you to meet me here?” He shook his head. “You got to believe that I know what I’m doing. And that I’m here to help you.”
“How the hell would you know about Hyacinth?” It was clear that Andrews couldn’t decide whether to be in awe or to take a swing at the old man.
“You put some sort of—you made some kind of posthypnotic suggestion,” I said slowly, “when you gave me tea, that obviously drugged tea, at my house.”
“Something like that.” He nodded slowly.
I examined the man for, really, the first time. His face wore the genuine serenity of the enlightened mind. There was nothing hidden, nothing guarded, nothing sinister about that face. He seemed otherworldly in exactly the same way as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn had seemed when I’d seen that man speaking in Atlanta. In fact the resemblance was striking—except for the fact that this man, the self-proclaimed Earl of Huntingdon, was obviously insane.
He read my face and smiled. “When you don’t know anything,” he said softly, “the truth sounds like madness.”
I was startled to have been so transparent to the man, but an overwhelming curiosity about him supplanted every other instinct or observation about him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Why are you doing this to me?”
He turned to Andrews. “Hyacinth Burke was a lovely girl. She runs a theatre now. My family comes from England, you understand, and we know a lot of people, and we keep in touch pretty good. I believe she is currently producing a very nice version of The Birds.”
“How do you know about Hyacinth?” Andrews demanded, his voice rumbling.
The man sat down and folded his hands across his chest, beaming at us both. “You boys, you’re just like everyone else in America. You’re too quick to judge a book by its cover. I am the Earl of Huntingdon, a human repository of knowledge in a time when knowledge is dangerous. We are guardians of that knowledge, our whole family. I can name and date the lineage of a thousand families from our origins in England. Including the Wakefields. Including their vile poison. Now you listen and you listen good.”
For some reason beyond reasoning, I felt compelled to be silent, ordained to listen. Andrews, apparently, felt the same compulsion.
“When you were shot,” the man began in very soothing, story-telling tones, “I heard the noise. I heard it because we watch out for our own. I got to the hospital, took care of you, whispered in your ear so that, even in your coma state, you would dream. You would dream the story the way it happened, and it would be easier for you to hear it now. You would wake up troubled. And it is truly said, ‘Let everyone who seeks continue seeking until they find. When they find, they will become troubled. When they become troubled, they will be astonished, and then they will rule over the All.’”
“What am I supposed to be seeking?” I asked slowly. “Because you’re talking about something more than just my looking for the person who shot me, I can see that.”
“That’s right,” he answered, his smile growing. “So let me tell you a part of the story, something you ought to be prepared for. It’s about a woman named Lisa Simard.”
“I know that name,” I said, trying to figure out why it would be familiar to me.
“You know i
t because I told it to you in the hospital while you were asleep. She ran a nightclub in Paris in the 1920s. She fell in love with a man called T-Bone Morton. Saved his life. He was a saxophone player, and his natural father was Jelly Roll Morton, and you know who he is.”
I nodded. “The man who invented jazz.”
“Maybe,” he said curtly, “but the point is, this T-Bone, he fell in love with Lisa right back, and they had a baby. Everything would have been just fine, but Lisa was a woman who spoke her mind. That’s something to be proud of. Unfortunately she ran up against some of these men who didn’t care for the way she talked, and they killed her. T-Bone almost killed himself then, and he might have, except for the fact that he had a little baby daughter to take care of. He didn’t know what to do. He was laid down low with grief, and a little afraid for his own life, so he came back to America.”
“He played with King Oliver,” I said, feeling as if I might be in some sort of fugue state, “in Chicago.”
“Yes,” he said gently, “but now we have to go back in time to T-Bone’s mother, a woman called Eulalie.”
“Eulalie Echo,” I whispered.
“She had T-Bone by Jelly Roll—and now that I say that out loud it’s funny sounding, but that’s the truth. She also had another boy by another man, and that other boy, T-Bone’s half brother, was called Chester.”
“Chester,” I repeated.
“Now this boy Chester,” the man went on, “he could be the poster child for a certain kind of American poison: he was raised to hate. He was taught to hate. He was fed on burning coals of bile. He slept in the broken glass of rage. Wait.”
He leaned forward, took out a red mechanical pencil and a small spiral notepad from his coat pocket, clicked the pencil, and wrote.
“What’d I say? ‘The broken glass of rage,’” he said to himself. “I got to remember that. That’s good.”
“What?” I glared at the pad.
“Oh,” he answered absently, “I give this speech a lot and sometime I’ll say a new phrase or sentence that’s too good to use just once. Don’t you like ‘the broken glass of rage’?”
“It’s a good image.” I nodded. “And the fact that he slept in it, very powerful.”
“What in the hell?” Andrews began.
“Sorry,” the man said quickly, putting away his pad. “The point is, Chester was a white-hot Yankee racist of the first order because, you see, he was white, and his mother was white, and T-Bone wasn’t because Jelly Roll wasn’t.”
“I’m confused,” Andrews muttered.
“I don’t understand a lot of this myself,” the man admitted. “I’m just trying to get through the story.”
“Why?” Andrews demanded. “What does any of this have to do with anything?”
“Because,” the man answered in a stronger voice, “Chester tried to kill T-Bone, and Lisa killed Chester. Lisa saved T-Bone’s life by killing Chester. That’s a matter of record.”
“Why did Chester want to kill his own half brother?” I asked.
“What does it matter?” Andrews roared, slapping the table with his hand. “Jesus!”
“Because T-Bone was evidence,” the man said looking directly into my eyes, “that Chester’s mother laid down with a black man. Chester had been taught that it polluted the purity of his whole family’s white blood. T-Bone had to be extinguished from the family line, you see. He couldn’t be allowed to go on, him nor his baby daughter. That’s what Chester was taught by his mother. They couldn’t have a whole branch of the family that sprung from Jelly Roll Morton, you understand.”
“But Lisa Simard killed Chester instead,” I said softly. “Stabbed him in her own club.”
“That’s right.” The old man nodded.
“And shortly thereafter, T-Bone came back to America.” I realized that I was grinding my teeth.
“But Chester’s mother, Eulalie, she found out about that. Found out that T-Bone was back home in Chicago, and she sent men to finish the job that Chester had started, and to avenge her white son’s death. She sent men to the Lincoln Gardens ballroom one night. T-Bone was playing there. But angels once again guarded T-Bone’s life, and he escaped harm. A strange bargain was made after that.”
“It was Bix’s idea,” I mumbled. “Bix Beiderbecke.”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “T-Bone gave his daughter to distant relatives, kin in New Orleans, thanks to Bix. Then T-Bone disappeared.”
“That kin in New Orleans,” I whispered, “was your family?”
“Eulalie vowed then to keep her hate alive,” he went on, ignoring my question. “Her desire for revenge, it lived for generations, searching for the missing man and daughter. She was sure and certain that T-Bone and the girl would eventually be found. And when they were found they would be expunged. She wanted to wipe out any trace of nonwhite blood in her family, you see. She was absolutely insane—not entirely human. As sometimes happens with these demon-people, Chester’s mother lived a long time and poisoned the minds of her children and grandchildren, and their generations.”
“Wait.” I was struggling with some deeply embedded, nearly lost information from the deepest caves of Mnemosyne.
But he wouldn’t allow me to finish the process.
“You didn’t get what you needed from those boys over at Fit’s Mill,” he said urgently, his eyes burning holes in my cornea. “Go back and get into the basement under the meeting hall. They keep records. Go now.”
“Wait,” I said again, feeling dizzy.
I was just about to come to some fuller understanding of something, like a realization of something that had always bothered me, or the removal of a bullet that had been stuck in my chest for a while, when we were all startled by a loud banging on the locked front door of Miss Etta’s establishment.
Sheriff Skidmore Needle was standing there, scowling at the three of us with a fervor that threatened to break the front window.
“Uh-oh,” the old man said, rising so quickly that he knocked over his chair. “Got to go.”
He shot toward the back door of Miss Etta’s faster than I would have imagined he could move.
“Wait!” I jumped up.
Skidmore began pounding on the glass and yelling for us to let him in.
“What’s the rest of the story?” I called out after the old man, but he had vanished through the kitchen and out the back door.
Andrews shot to the front door and unlocked it for Skid.
“I’ve a great mind to draw my gun and shoot you both,” he fumed. “I locked this place up for a reason!”
“The back door was open,” Andrews began innocently.
“No it wasn’t,” Skid snapped. “Not at six thirty this morning when I checked it.”
He raced past us after the so-called Earl of Huntingdon. I followed at only a slightly slower pace, suddenly afraid that Skid might inadvertently hurt the old man. My feet hit the ground of the back alleyway immediately after his did.
The Earl of Huntingdon was gone.
23.
Skid spent six or seven minutes yelling at us before I could get a word in edgewise.
“This man is trying to help me,” I finally managed to insist.
“This man could very well be the person who shot you!” Skidmore countered. “He’s been identified at the hospital. Even though he’s never actually been employed there, several people recall seeing an older man with a funny accent in your room, dressed like an orderly. They assumed at the time he was a private nurse.”
“But, see,” I began, “that probably means he’s not the man who tried to kill me since, you know, I was in a coma and he was alone with me in the room and all he would have needed to do was to take a pillow—”
“Shut up!” Skid growled.
“Okay,” I agreed.
Always best to agree with an angry, armed officer of the law.
“Now I discover that you know him? That you’re talking to him?” Skidmore asked, doing his best to seem calm, though his
face resembled nothing so much as a Cherokee Purple tomato. “Who the hell is he?”
“He is the Earl of Huntingdon,” I said, doing my best to sound serious.
Skidmore turned his ire on Andrews. “If you don’t tell me what you know about this man,” he snarled, “I will lock you up and I mean it.”
We could see that he did, in fact, mean it.
“What, exactly, is the matter, Skid?” I asked calmly. “You’re mad that he broke into Miss Etta’s? Everybody does that. We eat lunch in here all the time. We bring our sad little sack lunches and bottles of pop. We miss her. And as to the old man, he’s really not the person who tried to kill me. He’s helping me find who did that.”
“What?” Skid turned to me sharply. “So you do know him!”
“No.”
“Then why would he be trying to help you?”
Skidmore wasn’t calming down, and that was cause for concern.
“Seriously, Skid,” I tried again, “what’s going on? Why are you so riled up?”
“Could it be that I’m worried about my oldest friend?” he demanded, his voice getting higher. “Could it be that I can’t find the man who almost killed him? And it’s been more than three months and I still don’t have the first clue?”
I looked at Andrews. He looked back at me. Then we both answered Skidmore’s questions together.
“No.”
Skidmore stood silently for long seconds, and then he exhaled so ferociously that it hurt my feelings.
“It’s Melissa Mathews,” Skid began softly. “She has cancer.”
It’s funny what happens to most people when they hear that kind of news, when they discover that someone they care about is in trouble. Suddenly I lost all interest in my own concerns, I completely forgot what I had been thinking about so intensely for days. All I could think about was Melissa, and Skidmore, who loved her in an altogether chaste and brotherly way.
“Okay.” I took several steps closer to him and put my hand on his arm. “You just found out.”
He wouldn’t look at me. “Coincidentally, I found out kind of because of all this mess. You were just at the hospital talking to Becky Mayfield.”
“Who?” I asked vaguely.
A Corpse's Nightmare Page 19