Rhode Island Red (12 page)

One of Jeremy's paychecks which had been waylaid for weeks finally arrived. He wanted to celebrate. So he invited Walt and me to join him and Aubrey at a posh supper club uptown where a pianist he knew was performing.

Didn't exactly sound like my scene, a stodgy, rip-off East Side
boîte
. An ungracious Walter put it best, perhaps: the grub's gonna stink and we gonna be the stone only niggers in the place.

It didn't help matters that he and Aubrey did not get along. But I went to work on him; and when the appointed evening rolled around, after he had diddled me nicely in the shower and fought me for a place in front of my full length mirror, Walt was brushing off his latest finery and pestering me to finish my make-up. We were only ten minutes late arriving.

Aubrey had never been a heavy drinker. But she was doing margaritas that night, just to keep pace with Jeremy, who had an apparent fondness for hundred proof Absolut. “Vodka, Nan?” he offered when Walter and I slid into their booth. Only he pronounced it “vodker.”

“Why not, old bean?” I accepted.

I had spent time with Jeremy on two occasions before that night. He and Walter, however, had never met. First off, Walter was floored by the accent. It was almost as if he didn't believe that was Jeremy's real voice. No real black man could sound like that, he seemed to believe. But as we all drank and began to relax, the two men seemed to be stumbling their way onto common ground. It was only when Walt starting talking basketball that he lost Jeremy, who sat through Walt's breathless recitations of Patrick Ewing's stats in dead silence.

“Never went in much for sports,” Jeremy said finally. “I was a wash at football. Don't mind skiing once in a while though.”

Walter looked at me in a kind of horror, then at Aubrey, and finally back at Jeremy, who, Walt had plainly decided, was a Martian.

In the quietly tasteful, tastefully quiet room, Aubrey erupted with raucous laughter. Then she turned to her beloved and kissed him on the mouth. “You know, Jeremy, Nan's a writer too,” she said when that was finished. “They published something she wrote about Remy.”

“Remy? Who's that, luv?”

“Rimbaud,” I explained. “It was in the world's littlest little magazine.”

“Smashing. I've got a soft spot for the surrealists myself. Mate of mine wrote a book about Robert Desnos, you know—the poet who survived Buchenwald.”

I thought I heard Walter groan just then. But he needn't have worried. What promised to be a highly effete conversation was cut short when Jeremy's friend, pianist Brad Weston, took his seat.

The trio led by Weston was good, damn good. I could tell by the crisp solemnity of the chords introducing
Maiden Voyage
that they would be. There followed a heartbreaking version of
I'll Be Seeing You
. And Weston's solo on
My Foolish Heart
quite literally made me cry. If his mission was to bum out this crowd, he was succeeding brilliantly.

When the set was over and the applause had abated, the pianist headed over to our table.

“Trriffick set, mate—trrifick!” Jeremy said, standing to greet him. “Wife didn't leave you or anything, did she?”

Weston smiled a little and shook his head.

Jeremy made the introductions and Walt, Aubrey, and I supplied the compliments. After a few moments of small talk with us, the pianist pushed his scotch aside and removed his eyeglasses in order to massage his temple.

“Headache?” Jeremy asked him.

He shook his head. “No, no, man. I'm just tired. I went to a funeral today and it just wasted me. It was so … terrible … so sad and terrible.”

“Who died?”

“Old cat. He was a trumpeter. Died of a stroke. They collected money at the union hall to bury him. Name was Heywood Tuttle. Ever hear of him?”

Jeremy shook his head. “I can't place him. The name rings some kind of bell though, however faint.”

“Faint is about right, man. Couldn't have been more than ten people at the cat's funeral. It's like he fell through a hole in life, you know. Good musician. Played most of his life up in Providence. I think he gigged once or twice with Bird, as a matter of fact. But he was on junk a lot of the time. Got busted a lot and spent years in the joint.

“By the time he got to New York he was too old to be a junkie. He was just another wino, I guess. Pitiful. I saw him once in a while around Times Square. He was begging for quarters. Playing a damn harmonica and looking like something from the circus. God, I hated seeing him like that. I gave him ten bucks.

“The guy that collected the bread for the funeral told me Tuttle had been flopping at a tenement over by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. An old man like that stuck in all those fumes. Sick. Choking. Forgotten. Like he never gave a thing to the world. Can you imagine that?”

Yes, I could
.

If nobody else could, I could.

He was talking about Wild Bill! Oh Jesus.

So Wild Bill—or Heywood Tuttle—was from Providence. From Rhode Island! New England. Like Henry Valokus and that “family” he was said to be part of.

So Wild Bill had some connection, however fleeting, to Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker was Henry's
raison d'être
, or so he had claimed.

So Rhode Island Red wasn't a thing but a person. Tuttle himself was Rhode Island Red—right? But how was it possible that burned out, bad-tempered little Wild Bill had been the cause of all the death and mayhem?

And then, what had the kidnapping episode been about? Why did those idiots go to such lengths to get me to stop talking about Rhode Island Red? And why hadn't they killed me if shutting me up was so important?

And what did any of it have to do with Henry Valokus?

I couldn't answer a single one of those questions—yet.

This had all the elements of a film student's low budget homage to Godard—a saintly blind girl; a carful of killers; a brutal policeman and a cast of doppelgängers. Everybody had been leading a double life. There were two Sigs, two Wild Bills, two Henrys. I had tried to get them all out of my mind and my heart, but they just would not stay dead for me. Back they came, like a song.

The waste of the whole situation was devastating. Wild Bill, once a good musician, his vitality drained, lost to junk or juice, along with his talent and his pride. Siggy, barely thirty years old, murdered horribly. Diego, friendless and little more than a boy, who'd likely spend the remainder of his life in prison. Henry, who might or might not actually be dead but who was just as lost to me one way as the other.

I must have turned sickly green. Because Aubrey and Jeremy, Brad Weston and Walter were all looking at me with fear and concern. I tried to tell them I was okay, but they hustled me out of there and into a taxi.

No, I couldn't help thinking about the waste. And I couldn't help thinking I had to be the one to put a stop to it. But first I had to understand it.

CHAPTER 11

Straight, no chaser

I recall vividly the first time I was allowed to study in the magnificent main Manhattan library all on my own. I was eleven years old, too cool to go over and pet the lions, but wildly in love with them, secretly. Daddy had dropped me off that morning—school was on spring hiatus—with lunch money and threats to my life if I dared leave the reading room and go traipsing unaccompanied across Forty-second Street. I was doing big time research for my paper on Japanese poetry, thinking of making a living as a haiku poet.

The library had fallen into awful disrepair in my lifetime, the grime and neglect all but burying its majesty. But a major renovation effort over the past three years or so has restored its grandeur. And now, not only does the facade gleam and the lions stand proudly, the park behind it is splendidly kept as well; not one but two lovely cafes have opened—one on either side of the stairs leading up to the entrance; and high atop the building there is a grand style restaurant, with prices to match, from which you can look down into the stacks of the circulating library! A bit much, maybe. But on the whole I approve.

I could have gone to NYU, or borrowed a card from a friend with library privileges up at Columbia But I figured the public library to be a much better bet for the kind of research I needed to do—nothing arcane, like images of water in the poems of Basho. No. More like pop culture.

“V” as in “Valokus.” There was nothing so difficult about that. I was trying to treat the Henry Valokus mystery like a paper I had absolutely no heart for but knew I'd have to tackle before the semester was over.

Who was it who first glamorized the image of the mobster? Was it old Hollywood? Was it Al Capone? Scott Fitzgerald with Gatsby's bootlegging? The mob in all its sundry manifestations seems to be the source of ongoing, inexhaustible fascination. More books get published about gangsters than about women in rotten marriages, which is saying something.

Just what made us so interested in criminals, anyway? Personally, I blamed Coppola for making Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro look so edible in the
Godfather
movies. I must have been about twelve years old when I saw those films on television and I sure wanted me an Italian. Of course the sad realization that blacks and Italians in American cities are locked in a filthy embrace of loathing and violence against one another for as long as the two races exist was still ahead of me then. Still, while I wouldn't drive through parts of Bensonhurst on a bet, I've never met an Italian from Italy that I didn't get along with.

I started with the old newspapers and magazines.

There were mafia bigwig profiles, mob family genealogies, Cosa Nostra wars, inter-ethnic mob contacts, favorite mafia recipes, gangster angst, coming of age horror stories, interior decorating tips.

I skimmed them all.

Didn't see Valokus. But there was Vincent … Little Vince … Big Vince … Vinnie the Bull … Vick the Gimp. Val the Hulk. Vicious Vittorio. Vaseline Eddie.

There was Henry the Barber, Henry the Bomber, Sweet Henry, Hungry Henry, Henry the Hangman.

But those preposterous monikers that shared Henry's initials were about as close as I came to locating Henry Valokus.

Pop out of there, Henry, I whispered to each fresh roll of microfilm. But Henry didn't pop. He wasn't in the newspapers. He wasn't in the magazines. He was no pop idol at all.

Then, undaunted, I gathered to my table virtually all the current titles on the Mob, or La Cosa Nostra, or the Mafia, or the Syndicate. There were fat books by scholars and memoirs by reputed members of the organization, serious sociological treatments of the subject which deplored the stereotypes, bad screenplays, good screenplays, transcripts of crime commission hearings. There were novels that spoofed the mob, recasting its members as comic figures and grisly photo books that gave the lie to the laughter. There was a bonanza right in front of me.

“V” for Valokus.

Eighteen books later I hadn't found a single reference to him.

Now what was I supposed to do? Knock on the door of one of those downtown social clubs and ask if they had any graduation yearbooks?

Wearily, I started returning all the books. I believed those crazies in the van. I believed the gun against my head. If Henry really was a mobster—why hadn't he popped out?

Either because Henry Valokus was not his real name or because he was just too lowly a soldier.

It had been a while since I'd spent the day on a hard wooden chair in the library. My back hurt and I was hungry. I'd had it for the day. I trudged down the marble stairs of the main entrance and toward the exit. But I didn't leave. I had had a perfectly brilliant idea. Twenty-five cents worth.

I rushed to the phone and dialed Aubrey.

I'd remembered her talking about a man—Aubrey had told me about him not long after she started dancing at the Emporium. He dropped in a few times a week to collect the receipts from the safe. He signed the checks, hired and fired. He knew every single person who worked in the club. He was the man.

“Who is it?”

I could hear the tiredness in her voice. I knew that once again I had awakened her.

“It's me, Aubrey,” I said apologetically. “I'm really sorry. But it's kind of an emergency.”

I heard mumbling in the distance.

“Guess I woke Jeremy up too.”

“Morning, Nan,” he called into the receiver.

“Jeremy says you got more emergencies that anybody he knows.”

“Really? Well, tell him when his little book gets published I'll treat it as a matter of no urgency whatever.”

“Ima let you tell him that yourself, Nan. What's the matter now?”

“Can you get me an appointment with that gangster who manages the Emporium?”

“You mean Justin Thorn?”

“Yes. He is a gangster, isn't he?”

“Who ain't?”

“When do you think you might see him again?”

“I don't know—maybe tonight. Nan, what the hell you want with crazy Justin?”

“It's too long a story,” I said in exasperation. “Look, I know he likes you. Do you think you could get him to talk to me? Tell him I swear I won't take up too much of his time.”

“You shoulda gone to Paris, Nan.”

“I know. I want to let you get back to sleep now. Please, just call him for me. Tell him I don't want to know anything about his business and tell him it won't take long.”

She didn't answer for the longest time. I could hear her lighting a cigarette and inhaling.

Then she said: “Okay. Call me back in twenty minutes.”

I hung up and rummaged through the postcards section of the library bookstore. I bought one: an old William Claxton photo, a beautiful night-time shot of a bass player shielding his ax from the rain.

When I called Aubrey back the line was busy. I went back to the bookstore and bought another card; this one of a young Langston Hughes uptown.