Honky-Tonk Girl (6 page)

“Don't worry about her. She won't give you any trouble as far as complications. Besides, you haven't got a motive. She hardly knew the guy. Question her enough to make it look good. Then let her go. I'm not worried about her. It's that damned Honky-Tonk Street whore I'm afraid of....”

Cowles stopped a moment to think, then went on. “I don't want you to handle Nickles by yourself. Go pick up Gene. I'll call him. Take him with you. Rough up Nickles if you have to. But get that damned pin away from him, by any means. And impress on him that he'd better keep his nose out of this case. Tell him that—just that way. I want that tin horn trumpet player shut up! And I want that streetwalker picked up!”

Fred plodded hurriedly out and walked back down the hall. In a room near the front door, the cute secretary was sitting at a desk. Her well-shaped legs were crossed and she had the hem of her dress pulled above her knees as she just happened to be adjusting a garter when he passed. Botello pulled his hat down, looked the other way and slammed out of the house, muttering unhappily to himself.

CHAPTER SIX

TOUGH BOY

Wednesday Night, 11:00 P.M.

Gene Hargiss-Jones lived in a three-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment that looked to Fred Botello like a surrealistic nightmare of glass and chromium and oddly shaped walls. Fred stabbed at the doorbell with a vicious finger.

Chimes sounded softly from the other side of the door. In a moment, Hargiss-Jones opened the door. No small man himself, Botello always felt a jolt when confronted by this human tank.

Hargiss-Jones was a head taller than Botello. He was built like a well developed dancer or swimmer, not a weight lifter. His muscles were flat and hard, but beautifully shaped. He would have made a marvelous bronze statue, Botello often thought.

Fred wasn't entirely sure of Gene Hargiss-Jones' official position in the Cowles' organization. Right hand man, secretary, bodyguard and general tough boy for Cowles would about cover his duties.

He was dressed in a red silk dressing-gown with a green Chinese dragon woven into the fabric over the left breast. The robe was open down to the waist displaying his magnificent golden brown torso.

“Oh, come in old boy,” he greeted Botello in his well modulated Harvard accent. “Sam called, so I was expecting you, you know. Have a chair and I'll be right with you.”

Fred sat down gingerly on a modernistic bench with spidery chromium legs. Hargiss-Jones gave him the creeps. The man was profoundly well educated. Books lined the shelves in all the rooms. He talked softly and dressed like a dude. His appearance, manner and voice made him seem like a sissy.

But Fred had once seen him hold a man with one hand while, with his other, he broke both the man's arms, one at a time, like snapping toothpicks. And while he was doing it, Fred had observed the look in his eyes of a boy gleefully pulling the wings off a fly.

Fred shivered. In addition, Hargiss-Jones practiced all sorts of yogi contortions like standing on his head for hours. He read books by obscure Tibetan philosophers which he claimed gave him secrets of physical endurance and powers beyond ordinary man's.

Fred didn't understand any of that baloney. He just wished they'd get the stinking murder mess cleared up fast.

At length, Hargiss-Jones emerged from the bedroom. He was dressed in pale yellow flannel slacks, moccasins, a white T-shirt and a blue sport coat.

“There,” he exclaimed, “we're all set, old chap. You may brief me on the details of this situation on our way. Sam told me it was something about a musician fellow?”

Fred plodded down the hall stairs. Hargiss-Jones followed him, his steps soundless, like those of a padding cat. Fred had the uncomfortable sensation that he was leading a giant ape out to turn him loose on somebody. He thought to himself, he sure wouldn't like to be in Johnny Nickles shoes tonight....

CHAPTER SEVEN

STALKING SHADOWS

Thursday Morning, 12:30 A.M.

When Johnny left his apartment he walked down the street two blocks to the parking lot where he kept the prewar Ford he was currently driving. He choked it into life and drove down the boulevard along the shoreline to the hospital where Ruth Jordon was a patient.

The soft night wind off the water was warm and damp. It coated his windshield with a sticky mist. He flipped the wipers into life and leaned back against the cushions. The unsatisfied passions of a few minutes before still clamored inside him for fulfillment. Jean's perfume seemed to cling to him as a poignant reminder of her embrace. He lit a cigarette with a quick furious movement, forcing himself to cool off. It had taken something really urgent to make him get up and walk off from something like that.

As he drove, he thought about the girl in the hospital, Ruth Jordon, whom he had known now for two months. He had first seen her one night at the old
Hesperus
nightclub on the waterfront. All the musicians in town had gone there that night to hear Blind Joe Mamba, the great Negro pianist, perform. Mamba had come to town for only one night.

Johnny had walked in and, across the milling crowd and thick blue layers of smoke, he saw Mamba, a wizened old man by then, looking like a shriveled, mahogany-colored spider with claws for fingers. But the greatness of his music had not diminished. Like Jelly Roll Morton and those other early masters of the eighty-eight, Joe Mamba had played in Storyville in the early 1900s in places like the
Frenchman's
on Bienville and
Lulu White's
on Basin Street. When Johnny saw the old man, his eyes misted and the years fell away.

Mamba was playing an old blues. A girl was standing beside him singing into a microphone. She was a cute, long-legged blonde. She wore a plum-colored sweater that hugged her curves and a brown wool skirt and brown suede high heeled pumps. There was a blue ribbon in her hair. She looked like somebody's kid sister away at college, eyes filled with the expectancy of excitement.

When she sang, it was with her head tilted to one side and her voice was husky and very good.

“
In old New Orleans....

In old New Orleans Town....
”

She was one of the few white women Johnny had ever heard really sing the blues. She was better, even, than Christine.

The
Hesperus
was a rickety, tumbledown building on the waterfront. The room was stuffy, and had low, smoke blackened ceilings, cardboard patched windows and a few dim, fly-spotted light bulbs. The concert was closed except to musicians and jazz lovers who could appreciate what was being done up there on the bandstand where the spindly old man sat bent over the keyboard, his head shining like a polished mahogany knob.

There wouldn't be many more concerts like this. Blind Joe Mamba was one of the few early pioneers still alive and there weren't many more tunes left in his tired fingers. Johnny's heart contracted with pain when he saw how frail the old man had grown.

When the girl finished singing, Mamba played some of his own compositions—
Salty Dog Blues
,
Glory Morning
, and
Red, Red Woman
. And when he finished, there wasn't even the sound of breathing in the room. It was the finest kind of applause they could have given him. The old man turned and bowed to them, grinning and nodding his head, flashing the diamond set in his front tooth.

He was dressed in the flamboyant sartorial splendor of the gay dogs who had strutted down Rampart Street when he was in his waisted trousers and brown and white shoes.

Johnny pushed through the crowd to the stand. “Hi, Pops,” Johnny said huskily.

Mamba half-rose from the piano bench, holding out his hand for silence. His face was agitated. “Was that Johnny Nickles' voice I jes' hear? Or is the good Lord foolin' these tired ol' ears?”

A path opened magically for Johnny. “You know the good Lord ain't going to play tricks on the finest pair of ears in the business,” Johnny answered in his gravel voice.

“Johnny boy!” The old man reached for him happily and wrapped his arms around him, and patted him on the back. Tears were trickling down his parchment-like cheeks. In his excitement he lapsed into Cajun French. Johnny laughed and answered in the same dialect.

“Lor', Johnny I jes' never know where you'll turn up! Last I heard about you was when you made that record album with your new band. It's fine, boy, mighty wonderful. You got a nice bunch of boys there. Miff Smith, Richey, Tizzy Mole. I know 'em all. They're all my boys, all from my home town. All except that boy on the clarinet. I reckon he's a Chicago boy or a New York boy. But he play good horn, too—jes' like ol' Teegerstrom hisself used to play in the Twenties.”

Then his face sobered. “An' Zack Turner. He grew up right in our neighborhood, Johnny. I sure grieved to hear of his passing so sudden.”

He suddenly pulled Johnny off the stand with him. “I want you to meet the young lady who rendered the songs for us. Make me think Bessie Smith herself come back to life!” Painfully, the old blind man fumbled his way around the stand as he talked, to a table where the girl sat by herself.

“Johnny, this here's Miss Ruth Jordon. She met me at the train today. She's fixin' to write a book 'bout me,” he said proudly. “Miss Jordon, you shake hands with one of my boys, Johnny Nickles. He come to me as a youngster and I taught him how to blow his horn.”

She put down her drink and smiled. “Johnny Nickles,” she said, in her sweet singer's voice. “I've known you for years. At least I've known your trumpet for years. I have every record you've ever made.” She shook his hand warmly.

“He come from a breedin' place of good trumpet players, Missie,” the old piano player grinned. “Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, they all grew up right in the same town where this boy come from.”

Johnny swaggered a little. “Yeah, they played a little horn, too, Pops.”

The old man jabbed his ribs playfully. “Same ol' Johnny. Cocky as a game rooster, but goodhearted down inside. You git your horn now, boy, and let's make a little music for these people, the way we used to in the
Vieux Carré
.”

The girl's blue-eyed gaze followed Johnny back to the stand.

Mamba struck a diminished chord, a gray and lonely sound, then there was a breath of harmony like lacy shadows of Spanish moss, rising suddenly to a martial crescendo.

Johnny lifted his horn and closed his eyes. He knew the girl was watching him and he had the sudden puerile desire to show off, like a little boy walking a high board fence.

He thought back to when he was a ragged kid selling the
Picayune
newspaper on street corners. He remembered following the funeral bands and the advertising bandwagons on Sundays to catch a glimpse of his idols, King Oliver and Armstrong. He remembered the high yellow girls in the tenderloin district, the fruit he swiped at the French market, the licorice taste of absinthe. And always the music, the driving two-beat rhythm with the weaving polyphonic patterns and counterpoint and old Mamba telling him over and over, “Play a pretty ho'n, boy. Don't try for a lot of screeching notes that don't mean nothing. Keep the melody and the harmony clear in your mind. Then play your riffs from that.”

Johnny tried to remember those things and put them in his music that night. But other things popped up and got in the way. His mind was fuzzy and uncertain. Instead of thinking about the music, he kept seeing a grinning skull on a scrap of torn manuscript paper and the penciled notes blowing off the paper, whirling away into the dark and empty sky....

What he played was weak and uncertain. It wasn't the old Johnny Nickles. The sharp suits and the diamond ring and the swagger were still there. But they were a front. The heart had gone out of his music.

When they had finished, there was a smattering of applause, but it was only a polite gesture. Johnny put his horn back in the case and went to the bar. He ordered a fifth of Scotch. A half-hour later he had gotten on the outside of most of it, and he was still sober.

He was seated, morose and thoughtful at the bar, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Old Mamba had taken another rest from the stand. “That ain't goin' to bring it back, boy,” he said sadly, touching the bottle.

“What the hell you talkin' about?” Johnny snapped. His face was dripping with perspiration. It soaked through his coat and glued the tumbling strands of his curly black hair to his forehead. “There ain't nothing wrong with my trumpet playing. You kept screwing up the rhythm. How's a man going to take a decent chorus when the beat isn't there?”

Mamba looked grieved. “Johnny, boy,” he whispered, his bottom lip trembling, “I heard you been down on your luck and drinkin' a lot. But—”

Johnny swore. “That's a lot of baloney! There's nothing wrong with Johnny Nickles or his trumpet playing. Understand?”

“Sure, boy, sure...,” Mamba said soothingly.

“Hell, I should have had more sense than to get up on the stand with you. You can't play any more. You're too damned old. You're a damned lousy old whorehouse piano player that can't find the beat any more.”

The old Negro's blind eyes filled with tears. “I'm—I'm sorry, Johnny. Sorry, I—”

“Why don't you—” Johnny's voice suddenly broke. He grabbed his trumpet case and stumbled through the crowd, out into the night. Then he leaned against a lamp post out in the dark fog beside the lapping water and dry sobs shook his body. He was suddenly very sick and for a while he was occupied in emptying the Scotch he'd drunk into the bay. Then he wiped his face shakily with a handkerchief. After a bit he stumbled to where he had parked his car.

The dripping fog had wrapped everything in a blanket of gray cotton. Ruth Jordon, the girl who had sung the blues with Mamba, was standing beside Johnny's Ford, smoking a cigarette and shivering.

Johnny stopped. “What the hell do you want?”

She smiled at him. “L-lift, mister. Or would I be imposing?”

He shrugged. “I don't care.” He unlocked the car and she slid in gratefully and reached over to unlock the door on his side.

Johnny crawled in behind the wheel, tossed his trumpet onto the back seat, and kicked the starter roughly.

They drove in silence, Johnny directing the coupe viciously around slippery, wet corners.

After a bit, still shivering, she said, “I don't want to be a nuisance, but could we turn the heater on?”

“No.”

“N-no?”

“No heater.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “Well, then could I sit closer to you with absolutely no intentions of arousing any elemental instincts or anything like that? I wouldn't want to have to walk home on a night like this.”

“Don't flatter yourself,” Johnny grunted sourly.

“Ouch!” she said. “Well, I guess I asked for it.” She slid nearer, until one leg rested against his.

“There's a drink in the glove compartment if you're so damned cold,” he told her grudgingly.

She shook her head.

“Well, if you don't mind....” Johnny reached for the glove compartment door, opened it and removed a pint of liquor. He unscrewed the cap and sipped at it while he drove. His stomach was still squeamish from the recent attack of vomiting. “Where,” he asked, trying to get his mind off it, “did you learn to sing?”

“Off records. I've been a jazz hound all my life. I'm going to the university, working on my master's in music. I'm writing my thesis now, on American jazz. That's what I wanted to see Mamba about.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she looked at him. “Johnny, I—” her eyes faltered. Her voice went on in a rush. “I've sorta hero-worshipped you for years. You're—you're one of the greatest. All the kids think so.” She looked at the bottle. “D-don't bring yourself down....”

He stopped the car with a dangerous skid on the wet pavement. Then he turned to her and said through his teeth, “There's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with my playing. If you want a ride home, okay. If I want advice from a bobby-soxer, I'll ask for it!”

Her blue eyes flashed and her chin went up. She looked mad and cute. “Oh, you and your damned precious musician's ego. You can't face it, can you, Johnny Nickles? You won't admit, even to yourself, that your playing stinks these days. You have to blame it on a poor old blind Negro who could play more with one hand than you ever—”

The slap of his palm across her mouth was loud in the small car. A choked scream worked free of her throat. Her eyes were blazing as she yanked open the door. She half-slid out of the car, twisting the hem of her skirt above her stocking tops.

Johnny swore and pulled her back into the car. He slammed the door shut and threw the car into motion. “You can't walk home from here. You'd drown. Give me your address and shut up and I'll take you home.”

She gave him her address and shut up. They both shut up and Johnny drove on with the bottle in one hand, taking a swallow from it every few minutes.

Then he began to talk—softly, half to himself. “...okay, so I've had a lot on my mind. Everybody has an off night now and then. I still play the best horn in town....”

They pulled up before the address she'd given him.

She sat silently for a moment, stiffly. Then she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “I'm sorry, Johnny. I'm sorry I said that about you.” She turned to open the door.

She got out and stood on the sidewalk in the rain, then impulsively ducked her head back into the car. “I'd like to come around to where you play, Johnny. I want to dig your band—it would help my research for my thesis. Can I? If I promise no more advice?”

He shrugged. “I don't own the place.” He lit a cigarette. A terrific struggle was going on inside him. Finally he said, “Look, you'll be seeing Mamba before he leaves town. I—I wonder if you'd tell him—”