by Ry Cooder
“How’d you get started in the beauty line?” I asked.
“I was a bartender in Amarillo. The L.A. cops won’t let a woman tend bar in their precious town. I went to cosmetology school, I’m legal.”
Russell brought fresh drinks. “This whiskey sour is not bad,” I said.
“Look, I can’t figure you out. I mean, you’re all right, aren’t you? Upstairs?” She pointed to her head and made a circle with her finger. “It’s no act — the book and your job and all that?”
“It’s no act. I work very hard. My boss is a bastard, like your landlord. I’ll tell you a little story if you want to hear it.”
“Fire away, Frankie. Fire away and fall back.”
“I had one friend here on the Hill. Mr. John, an Italian opera singer. But he doesn’t sing anymore, and you want to know why? Because he’s dead, that’s why. He jumped off the roof of the New Grand Hotel.”
“A jumper.”
“You come back to my place and I’ll show you something you never seen in a month of Sundays. I can’t believe it myself.”
“I got to get down the Hill before the train stops. Tomorrow is another day to be beautiful, right, Frankie boy?”
“You don’t believe me. You think I’m one of those mad dogs, like you said.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Whiskey sour is a damn good drink.” She got up and left, just like that.
Russell walked by, checking tables for tips. “Can’t win ’em all!” he said, clapping me on the back so hard I almost choked. I thought about leaving, but then Louie Castro walked up. Louie is a very fat, oily man with a fat, oily voice. Not the kind of man you’d care to know too well. He owns the Los Amigos and lives upstairs.
“Nice to see you, Frank. Always nice to see an old friend.” He slid into the booth. “Of course I heard about Mr. John. Tragic.” I nodded, like I was too sad to say anything. “I understand you came into a nice little bequest. That’s the kind of man he was, generous to his friends.” Louie makes it his business to know about things; he likes to know the value of people and things. He sat there, looking at me, sizing me up.
I had to say something. “That’s right. Records and books, Italian stuff. I don’t understand Italian.” Basically true.
“Sentimental, that’s the kind of man Mr. John was. And I’m very emotional, Frank. That’s why I’m so upset about Mr. John.” Louie waited for a reply, but I couldn’t think of anything emotional, so I kept quiet. “I’m glad we had this little talk,” he said. He maneuvered his big body out of the booth and went upstairs. Russell fussed around for a while. “Gotta close, pal. See you real soon!” I left.
Down below, the city sparkled and hummed like a giant beehive. I walked home. My apartment building is the oldest wooden structure on Bunker Hill. Each floor has a covered porch across the front, and the rooms open out onto it. At night, you can see the lights of the city stretching away to the east. The river, the train tracks, the gasworks, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, and beyond. I like living there, even though the showers are downstairs. When I got back I checked the directory to make sure the money was all there. I listened to some opera records and looked at the poetry books. I hadn’t been doing so well with my lessons. I knew some of the words but I didn’t understand the poems. “Try harder,” Cousin Lizzie kept saying.
Next morning I went out to buy a paper from Lou Lubin, the gray-haired newsboy who hangs out by the Angel’s Flight platform. “ ’Lo, Lou.” I said. I always use that line with him. “What’s this I hear about war?”
“Where you been, in the jug?” He’s short, and he cocks his head to the side, looking up.
“I’m a working man, Lou, I don’t have time to know all these things. Fill me in.”
“Hitler and Mussolini got it all sewn up tight. I haven’t heard from the family in two years, don’t know where they’re at. It’s all sewn up tighter’n Aunt Fannie’s girdle.” Lou used to be a nightclub dancer and an extra in the movies.
“Sorry to hear it, Lou. I hope they’re okay.”
“Thanks.”
“You know anything about Mr. John?”
Lou turned so that his back was to the street. “Some guys were talking to him. Very tough guys in a Cadillac. A Cadillac sticks out.”
“What’d they want?”
“I’m just the newsy on the street here. Gotta keep the nose clean. You were a friend of his. It was something they thought he had. Something small, something he had hidden in his place. They didn’t find it, and they went away. Then they came back.”
“The police said it was suicide.”
“The Catholics would be out of business.”
“Where would a man go for clarinet lessons?”
“Look it up.”
Lou was getting nervous, he wanted me to leave. I looked up “Music Teachers.” It was mostly women teaching in the home. Mostly piano and violin. I came across The Saxophone Shop, Leo Schenck, 319 Spring St. R1121. I called the number from a pay phone. He sounded like an older man.
“This is Leo.”
“Do you teach clarinet?”
“Age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Too old.”
“I’d like to try.”
“Why?”
“I was given a clarinet.”
“Bring it in.” Leo sounded tired, and it was only eleven in the morning. I walked there. It was Saturday and the downtown streets were crowded with shoppers. Every restaurant had a line of people waiting to eat, but I had a salami sandwich in my pocket. The shop on Spring Street was tiny and dark, with saxophones hanging up and saxophone parts lying all around. Leo was a skinny bald man with horn-rim glasses and a green visor like pawnbrokers wear. He opened the clarinet case and stood there looking at it. Inside the case, the clarinet was broken down into four sections. You could see it was old, but it had been well cared for. Leo looked at me through his thick glasses.
“I don’t want to know how you got this,” he said. “I don’t want to know about you or who sent you.” He closed the lid and snapped the latches. “I got a sawed-off. I made it myself. You try anything, I’m taking you with me.”
“I represent the City Directory. No other medium can —”
“I got double-ought buck here. They’ll just turn the hose on you and wash you into the street.” He brought it up from under the counter and showed it to me, the meanest looking little thing I ever saw. I took the case and left. I started walking fast down Spring Street. I walked right through every red light and didn’t stop until I got to my bench in Pershing Square.
I tried to calm down. People were coming and going all around me: kids, old folks, men and women, laughing and talking, friends meeting and calling out to each other. I was too scared to move. After a while, I opened up the case and looked at the four sections of the clarinet as Leo had done. I took the pieces out and turned them around in my hands, but it meant nothing. It was just one more thing I didn’t understand.
“You don’t look like a reed man,” said a voice next me. I jumped, but it was only Finchley, the retired hobo. He took the case and began assembling the pieces like he knew all about it. “Le Blanc, very nice. Something’s stuck in here.” He fingered around inside one of the sections and brought out a rolled-up piece of paper. “There’s your problem,” he said, handing it to me. There was a little box in the case and thin pieces of wood inside the box. He took one out and moistened it with his tongue; then he fitted the wood into the end of the clarinet and put the end in his mouth and began to play a little tune. I recognized it. “Over the Waves,” which everyone has heard at some point. The woman in black appeared. She came out from behind a palm tree holding her arms straight out to the side and twirling around with the music. She had her Bible in one hand, but she seemed to have forgotten about it. People passing by stopped to watch her. She was a sight, with her torn black dress and her matted hair and those fingernails! After a while, Finchley stopped playing and tipped his hat. “Thank you, frien
ds and neighbors, you’re very kind, I’m sure.” He passed it around. Some people put money in the hat, others walked off. The woman sat down on her bench across the path and seemed to go right to sleep. “We did good business,” Finchley said. “Let us repair to a nice, cool bar. Should we ask your friend?” I shook my head. “She’ll be fine,” I said “I need a drink bad.”
The nice, cool bar turned out to be the Tokyo Big Shot.
“Finchley!” said the Japanese bartender. His gold teeth lit up.
“And the shecker,” said the snaggletooth woman at the end of the bar.
“My friend is in a quandary, at a crossroads, and we have come here today to find resolution. For this purpose, we require your back table and a bottle of your cheapest whiskey, tout suite,” Finchley said. The woman grabbed her glass and made a beeline for the curtain behind the bar, but Finchley said, “You’d best remain on watch, my dear. Be on the lookout for a midget carrying an umbrella.”
Behind the curtain was a tiny room with a round table and four chairs. There was nothing else in the room except a telephone and a Mexican pinup calendar from 1936. A lightbulb hung from a nail in the ceiling. The bartender brought a bottle and two glasses. “That will be all, Sammy. We’ll call if we need you.” Sammy laughed and went back out front.
“A man conceals something inside a clarinet. He assumes it will be found by someone in particular, someone who will understand.” Finchley unrolled the paper and smoothed it out on the table. It was a photograph of three men, taken at a restaurant table. The men were looking straight at the camera. Their faces were flat and bright, like a flashbulb had been used. The picture was old, and the men were wearing clothes from another time.
I recognized one man. “It’s Mr. John,” I said. “He was my friend, up on the Hill. He’s dead now. But this is him, a long time ago. I know it’s him.”
“You have the clarinet, and you know this man.”
“But I don’t know why I have it,” I said. I explained how the widow Clark mistook me for someone else.
“But you might have been the right man. She was expecting somebody. She blamed them.” I told Finchley about Leo and the shotgun. “We’ll get to that presently,” he said.
“But what if they’re looking for me now?” I said. “Leo was scared. I’m scared.”
“That’s good. Danger sharpens up the mind.” The woman came in through the curtain. “The midget was ashking for you. I shaid you’d been here and gone,” she said.
“That’s fine, Lydia. Have a drink.”
“Well, I don’ mind if I do.” She held out her glass. Finchley poured her a tall one, and she tossed it down in one gulp.
“Shammysh rotgut is the worsht shince canned heat,” she said.
“Have one more,” said Finchley. She took her drink in both hands and went out through the curtain.
“What’s that about a midget?” I asked.
“Just a fellow I know. Trouble follows him, he’s like a human lightning rod. A sure sign that something’s up. ” Finchley rubbed his hands with enthusiasm.
I was beginning to form an opinion of Finchley. Had I fallen in with a madman? I kept hearing Leo, “They’ll wash you into the street.” It wasn’t hard to imagine: The gutter on Spring Street. Sewer pipes. Garbage in the riverbed down by Aliso Flats. “What about the dead man on Utah Street?” I said.
“Omit nothing,” said Finchley. I tried to remember details. The blood caught his attention. “Blood on the walls, delightful! Sprayed, smeared, how was it done? Think, man, think!”
“Smeared, I would say. I didn’t stick around there, I had to find a telephone.”
“Smeared how? Up high? Down low?”
“Low, definitely. It looked a little like letters. Maybe it meant something.”
“Close your eyes. What do you see? You knock. You open the screen door. You look about for someone in the house. Something makes you look down. Is something moving?”
“No, it’s just feet.”
“Do you smell anything?”
“Frying lard.”
“Music?”
“A radio. A soap opera. Ma Perkins?”
“Excellent. Eleven o’clock to eleven fifteen, followed by Our Gal Sunday. You get the idea?”
“No, I don’t.”
“My friend, consider. A man is listening to the radio while making lunch, sometime between eleven and eleven fifteen. But by the time you arrive, he’s been murdered, his blood smeared on the wall down by the floor. I suggest he named the killer with his own blood, then crawled into the kitchen and died. What did the blood spell?”
Then I saw it. “It spelled ‘Book.’ ” Finchley picked up the telephone and dialed.
“Homicide,” he said into the receiver. He waited. Then he said, “They’re putting me through.”
After what seemed like days and days, a big man in a suit came into the room and sat down at the desk. I was handcuffed to a chair. He shuffled some papers around and looked over at me.
“So, Mr. St. Claire. Frank St. Claire. I wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t waste my time, but there’s too many connections.”
My mouth was dry and my tongue felt like an ironing board, but I had to say something. “What do you mean, connections?”
“A suicide on Bunker Hill, a dead musician in hock to the bookies, and a spic dismemberment down in the Flats. And Frank St. Claire knew them all.”
“I meet people in my job, I don’t know them. Except for Mr. John.”
“John Casaroli jumps off the roof and you inherit. Why? Tell me that. Make it sound good.”
“I really don’t know.”
“A couple of bright boys were seen hanging around there. Friends of yours?”
“I don’t have any friends since Mr. John died.”
“You create a disturbance at the Clark home while a service is going on. No respect for the dead, it seems. Why’s that?”
“I was doing my job, how could I know?”
“The widow says you told her to hand over the clarinet. Says you threatened her.”
“She’s lying. She gave it to me.”
“Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right, Utah Street. Some character slices this guy’s arm off and beats him with it. There’s blood on the walls. Maybe it spells ‘book,’ maybe he was overdue at the library, I wouldn’t know. But, here’s Frank St. Claire at the scene, within minutes, and that’s just one too many times in my book.”
“The supervisor makes all the decisions. I think he was punishing me for the trouble with Howdy Clark. Nobody wants to work the Flats.”
The detective got up. “Nobody’s as dumb as you act,” he said. He left the room. After a while, an officer in uniform came and took me down the hall to another room. A man in a white coat was seated behind a desk. He told me to sit down and relax. Relax! How could I?
“I’m Dr. Sonderborg,” the man said. “I’m going to ask you some questions.”
“I’ve done nothing,” I said.
“Begin, if you will, by telling me about yourself. Anything that comes to mind.”
“Nothing comes to mind.”
“I see you’re a single man, living alone. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“I know a girl. I know three girls altogether, but I recently met one in particular.”
“Tell me about her. What’s her name?”
“Rene. She runs a beauty parlor on Olive and Fifth.”
“Is she kind to you, is she affectionate? Responsive?”
“She says I might be a mad dog from hell. ‘The jury’s out,’ is how she puts it.”
“And that makes you angry.”
“No.”
“Would you say her behavior towards you is cruel? Belittling?”
“Oh, no. She’s really a nice person.”
“Do you ever ask her to hurt you, to punish you?”
“What? What is this, who are you?” Maybe the police are crazy, I thoug
ht.
“Do you hate the police?”
“No.”
“Are you plotting against the government of the United States?”
“No.”
“Are you a Communist?”
“What’s that?” I said. The doctor pushed a button on the desk and the detective came in the room.
“What do we got?” he asked.
“Why do you waste my time? Get him out of my office. Drop him off in Griffith Park. I went to medical school for eight years, Spangler. Eight goddamn years.”
“And you got a very tough job here, Sonderborg,” Spangler said with obvious distaste.
Detective Spangler gave me back my briefcase and told me not to leave town. I left the police building and walked up the Hill. The police believe everything is a pattern. Once they see a pattern, they think they know it all, and they think they got you. That’s not the way life is. Take it from me, life is random and inscrutable, like the City Directory. Or my name isn’t St. Claire, Frank, chkr, Alta Vista Apts 255 Alta Vista Ave., Ls Angls.
Who do you know that I don't?
1949
THE STREETCAR STOPPED on the corner to pick up a load of early risers on their way to the little piece of job. A solitary rider got out and walked south on Berendo, a dusty street in a dingy neighborhood just west of downtown. He unlocked the front door at number 39, a two-story brick building in need of paint since elephants roamed the La Brea Tar Pits.
“Jazz Man Records” read the sign in the front window, unwashed since Joaquin Murietta shot up Laurel Canyon. The man stooped to pick up the circulars from the scarred linoleum floor and then closed and locked the door behind him. Shelves lined the walls. On the shelves were paper sleeves, one-foot square, and in the sleeves were ancient 78-speed records, thousands of them. There was a small desk covered with dust, a desk lamp designed by Abraham Lincoln, and a black telephone. The man pulled a curtain aside and walked back to another room lined with shelves. 78s, thousands more. A portable record player sat on a small table next to an overstuffed chair salvaged from the Edwin Hotel fire of 1910. The man took a disc over to the table. “Clarinet Marmalade” with Johnny Dodds, on the Okeh label, recorded in 1927. He sat back in the chair, lit his pipe, and closed his eyes. The scratchy old record played, and the little tune got moving — an unsolved riddle from the past: 4/4 time on the bass drum by brother Baby Dodds, top melody from the clarinet, suggestive interplay on trumpet and trombone. Chankchankchank went the banjo. The man’s face settled into an unconscious mask. In four minutes the record was done, and the steel needle in the heavy stylus arm began to drag across the center grooves, making a sshh, sshh, sshh sound that went on and on.