Rhode Island Red

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Rhode Island Red

A Nanette Hayes Mystery

Charlotte Carter

For the music my parents heard, and the music they did not.
And for Frank King.

CHAPTER 1

I mean you

Ask any Negro. They'll tell you: a woman does not play a saxophone.

Except for me.

Actually, I don't play sax. It's more like I noodle. I never studied the horn, but I can get through a
Stars Fell on Alabama
or a
Night and Day
with little or no problem. I was a far from brilliant student of the piano but I can sight read my way through a whole lot of Bach or Bud Powell. See, I'm naturally musical—not talented—I didn't say I was talented—Just musical. At one point—what was I? Three? Four years old?—my father thought I might have been a genuine inheritor in that endless line of black musical geniuses.

But not too many of us blow tenor in front of the Off Track Betting Parlor on Lexington Avenue with a battered old hat inverted on the sidewalk. No, I think I pretty much have the exclusive on that one.

But, wait. Let me explain a few things.

I'm not a homeless beggar. I play music on the sidewalks of New York but I don't sleep there. I'm 5 feet 10 inches tall, I turned twenty-eight in January, I'm more or less a Grace Jones lookalike in terms of coloring and body type (she has the better waist, I win for tits), I'm the former second runner-up in the state spelling bee (I was twelve then), hold a degree in French with a minor in Music from Wellesley (scholarship all the way), and I live in a fairly low rent, nondescript walkup at the edge of Gramercy Park, where that neighborhood starts to bleed into the Methodone-rich valley of drug treatment facilities, hospitals, and drooling academies, at First Avenue.

You know what jazz musicians are like. Always trying to stay cool in the face of the worst kind of hardships. Well, just a couple of days ago, I had come up against a pretty hard one. I was dumped—hard.

I thought I looked especially cool that day.

Mostly because of the two hundred dollar Italian shades Walter had mistakenly left in the apartment when he moved out—again. This break-up was not the kind of nuclear dogfight we had had in the past. It was just about that low level hostility toward each other for months on end; that cold kind of resentment; that sex that's still good but just not right. And then one morning when he goes to work he's carrying a suitcase with his stuff in it along with his briefcase.

Not to worry: Walter Michael Moore had someplace else to go. He is very good at hedging his bets, always has been. He never let go of the small rent controlled place up on Amsterdam and I was pretty sure that around the next corner there was another lady quite willing to sacrifice a little closet space for his buppy perfect Paul Stuart and Hugo Boss suits.

No, no need to worry about Walter. Matter of fact,
fuck
Walter. It was yours truly who now had to worry about keeping body and soul together. Who needed Walt's four fifths of the rent and groceries like Abbott needed Costello. Who wasn't currently
employed
—okay? Who never really got the hang of saving money and had never once been accused of being too future-oriented.

I had long ago incinerated my bridges at the temp agency. The translation gigs I had depended on for the past year were drying up. And how could I ask my mother for anything when, one, she was struggling with bills herself and, two, I was lying through my teeth to her on a regular basis about the terrific part-time position I had teaching French at NYU?

Speaking of
Body and Soul
, I was longing to hear it. Oh, I knew I wasn't ready to play it, I just wanted to hear it. If I kept practicing, I figured, I would be able to do a passable imitation of Ben Webster's licks on it. But it would be just that—an imitation, a homage.

Not that Webster, fabulous as he was, is god number one in my pantheon. There's Parker and Rollins and Coltrane … well, the list goes on endlessly. I think it's a good thing to have an open ended pantheon. When it comes to the piano, though, it's Monk whom I have accepted as my personal savior. All that quirky, absent-minded professor, mad as a hatter, turn-everything-on-its-head brand of genius. Oh, do I love that man. And what about doomed, beautiful, young Clifford Brown with his enchanted horn and Miles with his evil self and—

I'm getting a request from the portly old alcoholic who swings by my corner a couple of times a day.
Violets for Your Fur
, he wants to hear. How sweet. I play it and he gives me five bucks and blows me a kiss in the bargain. Bless his heart, as my mom would say.

Long day. Long day, today. Lot of time to think about all kinds of things: my last trip to France, a couple of years ago; that old white Saab that this guy Jean Yves had—sitting in it, waiting for him, eating french fries while he borrowed money from a wealthy friend who lived on the rue Madame; my old piano teacher, dead; the word I blew at the spelling bee—logarhithms; cigarettes, and how I missed them; Walter's chest, the same color as powdered cocoa and his chipped tooth and his mouth on me and soaping his back and the two of us going out to eat.

I know how much it irritated him when I shaved my head. It's odd, isn't it? Black men like white women's hair, and white guys like black women without hair. Not an iron law, I realize, but it's one of my theories that bears out time and again. Anyway, my locks are coming back nicely now. That kind of gamine look you saw in the magazines a couple of years ago. Only the rest of the body is more Masai warrior than Kate Moss.

Good thing I had those dark glasses. All those melancholy, lost, private things going through my head. Things I wouldn't want anybody to read in my eyes.

I went on playing but I was kind of on automatic pilot.

No doubt about it, I'd come way down in the world from my bourgeois roots.

So there I was on that September afternoon, trying to breathe some life into my limited repertoire of standards.
Mood Indigo
was getting no respect. Not even my spare, self-mocking medley of Monk favorites could impress the ignorant passers-by. In a desperate move, stealing Jimi Hendrix blind, I switched to
America the Beautiful
.

Forget it. The streets were teeming with humorless patriots.

By four o'clock, I had about twenty-one bucks in the hat.

I really started to curse Walt about four-thirty.

People take quitting time seriously in this town. By six o'clock the street was empty. I knew I was licked; there wasn't going to be no Mount Everest of bills in my hat today. In the growing dark I bent down to collect the day's pathetic take.

“You can't play worth shit, man.”

I looked up quickly to see who had spoken. He was a scrawny young white man, lounging against a parking meter and chuckling aloud. I noted his longish sandy hair, his brown suede jacket with fringe, and his dirty Converse running shoes. He looked to be about twenty-three or four. He looked to stand about five-seven or eight.

I stiffened. “What did you say, fool?”

He went on laughing at me, unfazed. “I said you sound like shit. And where did you get that horn at—L.L. Bean?” He began calmly adjusting the many cheap leather bands around each of his wrists.

It wasn't until that moment that I spotted his overage saxophone case. Damn—he
would
be a musician. So my humiliation was going to be complete. I didn't answer him but began to transfer the change to my pocket.

“You know, you'll never make any bread around here,” he said, “even if you could play a lick. Too far east,” he explained smugly. “You gotta go over to Fifth. Sixth and Seventh is good, too—up by Carnegie Hall.”

Still ignoring him, I started downtown, toward my apartment.

“Wait a minute!” he called out suddenly. “Hey, where you going! Wait a minute.”

I looked back over my shoulder. His voice and manner had suddenly changed from pesky terrier to lovesick Great Dane.

“Just a minute, willya. I gotta tell you something.”

“What?”

He paused to take a cigarette out of the pack of Marlboro Lights he carried in the waistband of his black jeans. “I play … on the street … just like you. Well, not just like you. I'm good. But I just gotta tell you I … I'm desperately in love with you. Know what I mean? Totally. Desperate. I mean it, man. And if you don't take me home with you I'm going to just step in front of the downtown fuckin' bus.”

“You got a token?” I asked and kept moving.

I'd gone only about ten paces when I heard a woman scream. I whirled.

He had leapt out about six feet into downtown traffic, in the path of the Lexington Avenue bus. It had swerved and just flicked his arm, but with enough force to slam him back onto the sidewalk about two feet from where I stood. He lay there on his back clutching his horn.

Shaken, I knelt and raised his head a few inches off the ground.

“Hey,” he said, grinning, “I been watching you all day. My name is Sig. And you have nothing to worry about.”

“
I
have nothing to worry about?”

“Yeah. My old lady put me out because I took a pledge of celibacy. So my love for you is pure. I want you for your mind.” And he gave me an angelic, lying smile.

“What's the rest of this story?” I asked wearily.

“I need a place to crash, one night only. I'm tired as hell. I could use something to eat. You look kind. I was hoping you'd feel sorry for a fellow musician.”

For a long moment I stared into his diamond bright green eyes. Then I let his head fall back onto the pavement. I asked myself, Nan, what is the stupidest conceivable decision you could make in this situation?