“Shelly, come in here, please,” Freeport called.
Sighing, he hastened to do as he was bid, thinking:
But Mistah Lincoln done tole us we was free.
THREE
For the better part of four and one half hours, a superlatively-trained corps of yawn-makers had dispensed boredom by means of platitude, homey homily, grandiose visions of Kentucky futures, and soggy reminiscence.
The testimonial dinner had been a walloping success.
Shelly Morgenstern contemplated killing himself.
There had to be easier ways to go. Boredom was such a slow, despicable demise. “Oh, God, oh for a barrel of absinthe and free passage to dissolution,” he burbled into the too-sweet martini. “Bartender, give me another fruit punch.” He indicated the martini glass.
When the bartender brought the refill, Shelly stared at his bald head for a long instant and refrained from saying: Your head, sir, is shining in my eyes.
That’s pretty damned cornball, Morgenstern, he chided himself.
I know, he snapped the reply, but I’m not nearly drunk enough to be quick and clever. Oh, God, this town!
“Where’s the action tonight, fella?” he asked the passing bartender. The man paused on his way to the orange squeezer and assayed the questioner.
“What are you looking for?”
Shelly shrugged. He was too tired for wenching. Maybe a good cool game of cards. He relayed his desire.
The bartender said, “Wait a minute.” He moved up to the other end of the bar, took out a pad and pencil, and jotted down a quick address. He came back, handed it to Shelly and said, “Ask for Luther. He’ll know what’s on tonight.”
Shelly thanked him, paid for the drinks, and slid off the barstool. The note said: Dixie Hotel, 5th and Broadway.
Louisville at night was a combination of Coney Island at ten PM and deepest Brooklyn at five in the morning. A short stretch of naked neon insensibly wiggling—and then silence. The centerstripe rolled up like a long tongue. The fleshpots, and the closed shops. He walked quite steadily, waiting for the right recognition symbol to be tripped in his head.
Ding!
The sign was a bilious green. DIXIE HOTEL—ROOMS.
He pushed through the revolving door, finding himself in one of those B-movie sleazy lobbies cut from the same cheap pattern. Brass lamps with hanging beaded pull-chains, sofas that gave off small puffs of dust when sat upon, a long oak table from some esoteric period covered with copies of The Farmer’s Weekly, Look from seven months before and three battered copies of Radio-TV Mirror. The three Radio-TV Mirrors had subscription stickers on their covers. One of them had been left out in the rain; it was wrinkled.
“Room, buddy?” The voice drifted to Shelly from behind the high plywood counter. He turned and saw the top of a balding head.
Stepping closer, the head-top became only the top of a head that topped a shrunken, yellowed body barely in the same species with Morgenstern. “Where can I find—uh—” he consulted the slip of paper, “somebody named Luther?”
“Luther?” The room clerk sighed resignedly. “Wait a minute.” He reached across with a foot and jabbed a red button on the board. “He’ll be right down.”
The little man continued to stare at Shelly from dark eyes with yellow rings under them. “Is my monkey bothering you?” Shelly asked.
“What?”
“The one on my back.”
The clerk looked disgusted. “Comedian,” he mumbled. Shelly lit a cigarette, staring at those obscure places in every room that seldom command attention: the juncture of ceiling and wall, ornate filigree along the upper walls, worn spots on the seedy rug. I should have gone with Freeport to that business conference. Couldn’t have been any worse than this.
The elevator sighed open, and a tall, thin kid with too much hair came out. He wore a faded blue bellhop’s uniform, and the most monumentally bored expression Shelly had ever encountered.
The boy walked to the check-in desk. “George-O,” he said, and the balding dwarf jerked a thumb at Shelly. “He asked for ya,” George-O said. The boy turned to stare at Shelly. His eyes narrowed.
Morgenstern could see the question process-server? in the gleam of them.
“Yeah, you want me, Mistuh?” The accent was a flat Kentucky modulation. Neither cultivated nor overly rough on the ear. But there was the sound of I’ve-been-around in it. Shelly dumped ash on the rug.
“Bartender over at The Brown told me I might find some action here; told me to ask for Luther. You Luther?”
The boy nodded. “What ’chu aftuh, Mistuh?”
The way he said it was very much like rolling out a brochure. With listings under J for junk, B for broads, Q for queers and G for shuffle them. “I heard there might be some poker hereabouts,” Shelly said.
Luther studied the man before him with casual carefulness. Then, reassuring himself by means of those nebulous signs and auras known to the hungry ones on the fringes, he nodded. “Yessuh, big man, we got a little game goin’.”
Shelly made a negligent motion with his hand. “Lead the way, son.”
Luther shied at the word “son” and his dark eyes narrowed. “Stakes goin’ five, ten, twenny-five, big man, you figuh you can stand the action?”
Shelly dropped the butt on the rug and ground it in with his heel. “You figure on making your steering money talking me to death in this lobby?”
The bellboy turned and re-entered the elevator. Shelly followed him, watching the swaggering, self-contained way the boy walked. Loose. He had indeed been around. There was something hard, something coolly dangerous about Luther.
The elevator door closed and the machine started up. Then Luther flicked out the lights.
“Hey! What the hell is this?” Shelly backed into a corner, seeing himself being rolled by a teen-ager.
Luther’s soft voice came out of the darkness. “Stay loose, big man. This’s just so’s you don’t know what floor you’re on. We don’t want no trouble from The Man.”
The elevator whined to a stop (How did he know when they’d reached the correct floor, Shelly wondered?), and Luther reached out through the opened door, and clicked another switch. The hall went dark beyond the elevator car: “C’mawn, big man,” Luther said, taking Shelly by the arm.
A sharp fear clutched Shelly Morgenstern as the boy hustled him down the hall. This could be the easiest sucker trap in the world. Pow! We never saw no New York bigmouth, Officuh; he musta got rolled someplace else. Musta been seven other guys, Officuh. We all clean around heah. Oh, this could be so sweet a set-up.
Luther reached a door and rapped on it three times, quickly, waited, then twice again, slowly.
The door opened, and Shelly knew he was all right.
The card-players’ smoke was thick enough to butter on bread. He fished a five out of his pocket; Luther took it.
He entered the room, Luther falling in behind, and saw the big green-topped poker table, surrounded by six men, three of whom wore expensive suits. This was no rigged roll set-up in any case. The game might or might not be fixed…that was another matter. It would take some careful scrutiny.
“Stay loose, big man,” Luther said, and elbowed past, opening a side door and disappearing beyond.
A florid-faced man with a tie too thin for his fat, too bright for his pink eyelet shirt, got up from the table and extended a hand to Shelly. “Name’s Walter Swatt,” he said jovially, “do me a favor and don’t make any cracks about getting the Flit.” He chuckled, and the men around the table smiled lamely, as though this was their five hundredth exposure to the remark.
“Sheldon…Lewis,” Shelly answered, grinning just as widely. “In town for the Fair, thought I’d like to play a little friendly poker.”
Swatt led him to the table, and the men scooted around to leave an open space, quickly filled by a chair Swatt pulled up. “This’s the place, Mr. Lewis. We’re all local businessmen, get together here every week for a little game. Whyn’cha
sit, y’hear?” Shelly plopped into the chair.
The sound of a guitar drifted to him in the momentary silence of the pre-shuffle. He turned toward the sound; the small room where Luther had disappeared.
Swatt caught the glance, said, “Oh, that’s just the kid, Luther. We let him practice in there, he’s a good kid. Sings, plays a little. Ain’t too good, but, well…what the hell…you know.”
Shelly nodded. “Hey, deal me in this hand.”
It only took him seven hands to establish that the game was neither rigged nor very deadly. Despite the stakes, which were high for a “stranger game,” the other players were open-faced and easy to out-maneuver. He began winning steadily, but not outrageously. It was a friendly game.
With the solving of the puzzle of the players’ methods and the gradual disinterest that comes with knowledge of superiority in the game, Shelly found himself listening more and more to the peculiar strains of music coming from the little side room.
After a while, he excused himself from the table, pocketed his winnings with the promise of returning shortly, and went to the side door. He hesitated a long moment, hearing the rhythms of back-country blues coming from the room; then he knocked sharply.
The players looked up, then returned to their hands.
Luther’s voice, muffled, offered him entrance.
Shelly opened the door and saw a room as yellow and bare as a monk’s cell, the only furniture being a slat-back chair and a washstand with a pitcher of water and a glass on it. “Somethin’, big man?” the boy asked, looking up from the steelstringed guitar. It was a cheap guitar, but there was whiteness around the boy’s knuckles as he clutched it tightly to himself. He looks like he’s afraid someone will rip it away from him, Shelly thought suddenly.
“I heard you playing,” he said.
“Sorry if ah was too loud. I’ll cool it,” the boy answered, surliness in his tones.
“No, you weren’t too loud,” Shelly replied. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.
“Then what’s the mattuh?”
“Nothing, just wanted to hear you play,” Shelly admitted.
The boy set the guitar behind the chair and looked up from under his awning of auburn hair. “I don’t play for nothin’, Mistuh.”
“Well, I’m not about to pay, Elvis,” Shelly retorted. The boy started at the name, his eyes narrowing down.
“Why don’t you get the hell outta heah, big man, an’ let me be? You wanted to play some pokuh, so I brought you up, whyn’t you g’wan back out theah?” His fists were white with suppressed fury.
“Maybe I’d like to hear you play?” Shelly said; he was sure he could handle the kid, wiry and tall though he appeared, even slouched into an “S” on the chair.
“What foah?”
“I’m from New York. I’m with Colonel Jack Freeport, you ever hear of him?”
The boy shook his head slowly. He wasn’t giving an inch. “What’s your trouble, Mistuh? You want somethin’ from me?”
Like a primitive, Shelly thought, taking in the narrowed eyes, the thin mouth, the wary expression, the hostility so near the surface.
“Nothing at all, Luther. I’m just with the Colonel, and he’s judging the big talent show at the Fair; you’ve heard about that, haven’t you?” He stared at the boy openly. Interested in him, without knowing why. There was a quality about Luther that interested Shelly. Vaguely. Disquietingly. Peculiarly.
The boy’s eyes now acquired a brightness, a gleam. “I know all about it. I’m entered.”
“Go ahead and play for me,” Shelly said. He slouched back against the wall, waiting.
Luther stared for another moment, then reached back, took out the guitar and slung the cord around his neck. Then he began to play, and to sing.
It was mostly rock’n’roll garbage, with occasional folk songs and Negro blues numbers included, either shuffle-rhythmed for backbeat, or delivered in a strange-to-Shelly mournful manner. He was impressed. The boy had a talent. It had been there distinctly, distantly, through the door as Shelly played cards, and now Morgenstern realized it had been nagging at him for some time.
He had wanted to hear this boy more closely.
Abruptly, he realized he might have stumbled on something more than amusing. At first it had been idle curiosity, then mild amusement and interest. But now…
“Get your coat,” he told the boy, when Luther paused in his strumming.
The boy stared at him suspiciously, half-confused, half-terrified. “Whut foah?”
“You’re coming over to The Brown to meet the Colonel.” You’re thirty-three years old, Shelly Morgenstern, he thought, and you’ve been losing a long while now. This time, just maybe, just may-damn-be, you’ll win. “C’mon, Luther, let’s get moving!”
Oh, you beautiful twanging Louisville delinquent, you!
The card players were plenty mad to see their dough slamming out of the room, out of the game. And who’d bring ice if that damned bellboy cut out?
Colonel Jack Freeport, when he slept, very much resembled a whale in shoal. Or the Île de France in drydock. Rousing him was very much a salvage job.
He finally burrowed out from under the covers and the oppressively stuffy closeness of the sealed, darkened bedroom, to blink at his wee-small-hours invaders.
“Just what the cursed devil do you think you’re doing, Shelly?” His face grew red as a stop sign, his otherwise pleasant features contorting in annoyance and frustration, verging on an infantile expression.
“Colonel—” Shelly began, shoving Luther forward.
Freeport exploded once more. “Do you have any idea how late I was in that meeting? This is inexcusable, Shelly. I’ve warned you about drinking, and if this is a sample of—”
Shelly stood over the bed, his mouth tightening down into a line of ricocheted annoyance. The Colonel had a right to be angry, but he had no right to stay angry, particularly with what Shelly had brought. “Colonel? If you’ll only listen a minute!”
“Listen to what?” the Colonel cried, frustrated fury in every syllable.
“To this goddamn kid, that’s to what!” Shelly screamed back.
There was a long silence. An awkward silence, in which Luther made a hesitant step toward the door. “You stay put!” Shelly snapped, without completely turning.
Freeport sat up in the bed, running a hand through his thick, white hair. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the boy. Then he spoke calmly, as though deciding if he paid this man so much money, it might be worth his time to trust him. “All right, Shelly, explain why you want me to hear this boy.”
Shelly quickly gave him a rundown on the poker game, the music he had heard, and his excitement. “I felt you should hear Luther before the talent contest tomorrow. He’s entered in it, but that isn’t what counts. I thought—if you liked what he sounds like—we could…”
He sketched a promotional plan, and at its conclusion, Freeport was sitting on the edge of the bed in a deep purple silk bathrobe, nodding carefully at each point his PR man ticked off.
“It’s good, Shelly. Very good. And the contest, too?”
Morgenstern nodded, a crafty light flickering in his eyes. “The contest, too, as a starter. We can see how he does cold, with no fanfare, no puff at all. If the kid swings on his own, we’ve got us a hot property.”
Luther stood listening. What might have passed for an innocent, confused expression rested on his face. But that was precisely what it did; it rested there, a mask. He was listening. He was hearing everything being said, and applying it.
“Well, let’s hear him sing,” the Colonel said, shifting on the edge of the rumpled bed.
“Let me hear what you can do, son.”
Shelly said, “Just take it easy, Luther, don’t press. Just sing for the Col—”
“Knock it off, big man,” Luther snarled. “I’m cooling it, I’m singin’, and you don’t hafta worry whut I’m gonna do.” The hardness of the streets was in his voice, mixed wi
th the pleasant susurration of the Kentucky accent.
He pulled a plush chair to him, planted his foot directly in the middle of it, and began tuning the guitar. He did it hurriedly, expertly, and abruptly launched into a rockabilly version of “Birmingham Train” while the Colonel stared open-mouthed. So sudden had been the explosion of sound that neither Shelly nor his employer could quite grab a breath till the second verse.
By then, Luther had made it.
He was on his way.
He had come up with a product for which there was—at the moment—no demand whatsoever. But he had two of the most silken supply-and-demand men in the country on his side, seeing him not as a tall, willowy Kentucky street-snot with a guitar, but as a seven-figure bank account in the Chase Manhattan.
Luther What’shisname was about to become famous. “Shelly,” the Colonel said reverentially, when the boy had stopped playing, “you have dipped into pig slop and come up with a diamond.”
Luther Whateverhisname smiled. Knowingly. Complacently.
Cool.
FOUR
Big men, happy men, are often equated with stupid men, slow men…men who substitute camaraderie for the sleek slyness of the professional sharpie. There had been such equations made of Colonel Jack Freeport. They had been made when he was in college, a penniless undergrad with pretensions to Southern nobility. Those who had seen in him a slightly overweight Good Time Jack had been rudely awakened; Freeport had managed to become a power on the campus, had talked any number of the most eligible co-eds into his bed, had promoted several offbeat deals that had made his financial way through higher education infinitely easier, and when he graduated, was labeled by the yearbook NOT NECESSARILY MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED, BUT A SHOO-IN TO GET ANYTHING WORTH HAVING.
Jack Freeport had started small.
His first promotion was a string of girlie shows made up of local talent recruited from eight of the widest-open towns in the decadent South. Ostensibly song and dance grinds, the girls were emotionally and physically equipped to do double service as prostitutes, and in little over eighteen months, Freeport was able to sell the operation to three brothers (one-quarter Seminole) and invest his capital in the next ventures…
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