The Perfect Host (30 page)

About ten o’clock it all clicked into the clear. I found myself on Elliott Avenue away out near Kinnear Park—I must’ve walked miles—and everything was squared away.
I hate Lutch Crawford
—I was left with that, the old familiar feeling. And I still had to do something about it because Lutch wasn’t dead.

I walked into a telegraph office and wired Crispin.

They started by giving me something I didn’t want—but wasn’t that the whole trouble? This time it was a sort of surprise party and testimonial dinner. I guess I was a little sour. They didn’t understand. Crispin, he tried to make me feel better by guaranteeing that he’d see to it I was paid twice over for breaking my radio contract. Fawn—well, Fawn shouldn’t have been so sweet to me. That was a huge mistake. Anyway, there was a dinner and some drinks and Crispin and Skid and Moff and them got up one by one and said what a fine cat I was. Then they all sat around playing “remember when” and passing remarks to the empty chair at the head of the table where Lutch’s clarinet was. It was a fine party.

After that I went to work. What they saw me doing was “Is
coming a sizzle-swizzle for
Rum and Coca Cola
, featuring the Id-kid, Skid, and his supercharged git-fiddle, so look out!” And “We got a dream-scheme, kizd, all soft and lofty, smooth, forsooth, but full of nerve-verve. Hey Moff, stroke these quiet cats with
Velvet Paws …
” So—I helped them.

What I was doing was trying to find Lutch so’s I could kill him. You should have been a fly on the wall to hear those slave-sessions. Take a tune, find old Lutch, mix ’em up, make ’em be something new that’s styled like something they wouldn’t let be dead. So—they helped me.

I could have killed Lutch by killing the lot of them. I never did discard that idea. But maybe I’m lazy. Somewhere in that aggregation was the essence of what was Lutch. If I could smoke that out and kill it, he’d be dead. I knew that. It was just a matter of finding out what it was. It shouldn’t have been much trouble. Hell, I knew that outfit inside out—performers, arrangements, even what they liked to eat. I told you—there was damn little turnover there. And in the music business people show up real soon for what they are.

But it wasn’t easy.

That outfit was like a machine made for a very special purpose—but made all out of standard parts you could buy on the open market. That isn’t to say that some of the parts weren’t strictly upper-bracket; all of them were machined to a millionth. But I couldn’t believe that what Lutch called “unit” was the thing that made the group an individual, great one. If Lutch had been around, you could’ve said that Lutch made the difference between a good machine and something alive. But Lutch wasn’t around, and the thing still lived. Lutch had put the life in it, by choosing the right pieces and giving them the right push. After that the thing ran under its own power—the power of life—and Lutch Crawford wouldn’t be dead until that life was gone. It was going to be him or me.

So I helped them. We had club and hotel dates, and we made records, and in keeping Lutch alive, I helped them.

And they helped me. Every time a new tune started climbing the top ten, every time someone came up with a number that looked like a winner, we’d arrange it for the band; and in those sessions the band
and workings of every least part were torn down and inspected and argued over. I never missed a word of this, so—they helped me.

It was hell for me. If you’ve got guts enough to kill a man, you’ve got to finish the job. Lutch was alive. It was bad away from the band, with every radio and juke-box in the whole world blasting out Crawford creations. It was bad with the band—sometimes you could
see
him!

Theme time at a club, and the lights the way they always were, and the band the same, except that now Crispin’s luggage was front and center. The swinging bells of the brass and their “hoo ha” and then Skid’s solo
Daboo Dabay
with Moff taking the obbligato on the clarinet. Moff never stood out front to play, though. He was out of sight like Crispin used to be. Crispin, crushing the beat, whisper-drumming, stared up and out the way he used to when he was in the blackness, and Skid was no different, watching his fingers … all the books say a good guitarist never watches his fingers but I guess Skid never read them … but you could see he was following
someone
, and it wasn’t Crispin, from under his pulled-down eyebrows. But Lutch was there most of all for Fawn, Fawn with the flickering golden light touching and leaving her face, and her head tilted to one side so the heavy hair swung forward past her round bare shoulder; and on her face that look, that half-smile, half-hungry look—hungry like Lutch was there looking at her, not like he was away.

Daboo dabay
 … it hypnotized those cats. We always opened with it, and sometimes we had as many as three half-hour network spots, and that meant theme opening and closing. It was always the same. I often wondered if the customers who faithfully spattered out their applause at the drop of a
hoo ha
had any idea that this was different, this was a—a resurrection, maybe eight times a night.

First I was sure it was the brass—the low brass, where that peculiar vitality came from. You see, that was my protection—Lutch was strong in everything we did, but you couldn’t
see
him in anything but the theme. When we did the theme I concentrated on what I heard, not on what it meant. Anyway, night after night I waited for the theme, and cut out everything but that low brass as I listened. It wasn’t notes I was listening for, but tone—style—
Lutch
. After a
week or so I pinned it down to the second trumpet and a trombone. I was sure I was right; the Crawford quality was somewhere down there where the tone was low and full.

I got a break on it. So did Karpis and Heintz, the sliphorn and trumpet men I’d singled out. See, they roomed together in a hotel we used during Convention Week in Spokane. So one night they didn’t get to the club in time to open. The hotel was an old firetrap—no escapes. The only way out of their room was through the door. No phone. Small transom, and that jammed and painted over. Locking the door from outside, putting a twist of coat hanger in the key so it couldn’t turn, that was easy. It was forty minutes before a bellhop let them out.

I heard the theme twice without those two sides. Crispin put it in a nutshell when I asked him about it later. “Thin,” he said, “but it’s still Lutch.” That was what I thought.

No one found out who had locked those boys in, of course. I don’t operate so I can be found out. No one knew who was responsible when two trumpets and a reed man got left miles behind us when we went to St. Louis. We’d hired a bus and a couple of cars—we had a quartet and two vocalists by then. And one of the cars just quit back there in the fog. Who watered the gasoline? Some shmoe at a gas station, and let’s forget it.

The theme wasn’t the theme on that date. I hadn’t knocked out the thing that was Lutch—I’d knocked out the orchestra by pulling those men; we were just nothing. That was no answer. I had to find the heart of Lutch, and stop it, stop it so it could never beat again.

Somebody slugged Stormy, the bass, while he was asleep the second afternoon in St. Louis. He went to the hospital and they got another man quick. He wasn’t Stormy, but he was good. You could hear that the bass was different—but the orchestra was still Lutch.

How long can you keep it up? Sometimes I thought I’d go crazy. Actually. Sometimes I wanted to run out into the tables and smash the customers around, because I thought that maybe they knew what I was looking for. I was so close to it. That thing that was Lutch could cut in and cut out during a number, and I’d never notice it, being so busy listening to one instrument or combo. Someone out
there could know, right in the same room with me, and I wouldn’t. Sometimes I thought I was going out of my mind.

I even got us a new piano player for a night. I had to come out in the open for that, but it was safe. I hung around the conservatory until I latched on to a kid who was all starry-eyed about Lutch Crawford. I made like a talent scout. The kid was good-looking, with pimples. A jack-rabbit right hand, like Art Tatum, or it would be in a few years. I told Fawn about the boy, and said he was pining away. I laid it on. You know. You know how old Fluke. And Fawn, her and her soft heart! she not only agreed to let the kid in, but persuaded Crispin to let him take a one-night stand!

He did. He was good. He read like crazy, and he played every note that was on the paper and played ’em right; and he played a lot more he dreamed up, and they were right too. But he wasn’t for the Geese. Now, here’s a funny thing. It’s aside from the business of killing Lutch. This kid was wrong for us, but so good Crispin spoke to Forway, the tour manager, and today that kid’s making records that sell three quarters of a million each. All because of the break I got him by way of getting Fawn off the ivory for a night. Now what do you think of that?

I found out that night, though, that Fawn wasn’t the “Lutch” thing that I was hunting. The band sounded like Lutch Crawford with the wrong piano, that’s all. It wasn’t wrong enough to keep Lutch from being there, somewhere in the sharps and flats. I wanted to run up to the stand and rip the music apart with my hands and yell, “Come out of there, you yellow skunk! Come out and let me get to you!”

I was glad it wasn’t Fawn. I’d have stopped her, if it was, but I wouldn’t have liked doing it much …

And I
found
him. I found him!

He had been right there all the time, looking at me, me looking at him, and I hadn’t wits enough to see him.

Virus X and I found him. Virus X is something like flu, and something like dysentery, and it’s no fun. It swept through us like a strong wind. I got it first, and it only lasted a couple of days. Moff, now,
he was out two weeks. We only had to close for two nights, though. We made it the rest of the time, sometimes with something like a full band, sometimes with a skeleton. One of the short-timers was the guy who played guitar—Skid Portly.

Skid always said that any hill-billy could do what he did, given his guitar. I believed him. Why not? I’d diddled around with the instrument myself. Put your finger behind a fret, pluck the string. With a pedal you could make it louder or softer. With push-buttons you could make it warble or snarl or
whuff!
out with a velvet sound. With a switch you could make it sound exactly like a harpsichord or an organ. With a lever under your arm you could make all six strings rise in pitch like six fire sirens rising together, to almost full tone. You didn’t play it. You operated it.

Skid came down with Virus X, and called in a character called Sylviro Giondonato, a glossy-haired, olive-skinned cat from East St. Louis. He was bugeyed at the chance, like the pianist I’d found. He played a whole mess of guitar, and when he got his hands on Skid’s instrument I thought he was going to cry. He spent ten hours in Skid’s hotel room learning the gimmicks on that box, with Skid, who was feeling rotten, coaching him every step of the way. I know he did things on that guitar that Skid wouldn’t dare to do. Giondonato had one of those crazy ears like Rheinhardt or Eddie South—not that Eddie plays guitar.

The band played that night without Lutch.

Gionni—Johnny, we called him—was a star. The customers all but clawed down the ceiling-beams. A big hit. But it wasn’t Lutch.

Crispin ripped off a momma-daddy on the tom after a while, our signal to take fifteen. I don’t think I heard it. I was crouching at the corner of the stand thinking over and over,
No Lutch! No Lutch!
and trying not to laugh. It had been a long time.

When Crispin touched my shoulder I almost jumped out from behind my teeth. “No Lutch!” I said. I couldn’t help it.

“Hey,” said Crispin. “Level off, Fluke. So you noticed too?”

“Brother.”

“You wouldn’t think one man’s work would make that much difference, would you?”

“I don’t get it,” I said. I meant that. “Johnny’s a hell of a guitar player. Man, I think he’s
better
than Skid.”

“He is,” Crispin said. “But—I think I know why Lutch doesn’t show when he plays. Johnny plays terrific guitar. Skid plays terrific electric guitar. Dig me? The two are played pretty much the same—and so are a cello and a viola. But the attack is ’way different. Johnny exploits the guitar as good as I’ve heard it anywhere so far. But Skid plays that instrument out there.”

“What’s that to do with Lutch?”

“Think back, Fluke. When Skid came with us, he was amplified, period. Look what he’s got now—and look where we are now. You know how much we’ve depended on him.”

“I thought we were depending on his guitar.”

Crispin shook his big, straight-nosed head. “It’s Skid. I don’t think I realized it myself until now.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

He looked at me curiously. “For what?”

I threw up my hands. “For—well, I feel better now, that’s all.”

“You’re a large charge of strange change, Fluke,” he said.

I said, “Everybody knows that.”

Three nights later I slugged Skid Portly from behind. I killed Lutch Crawford with a pair of bolt-cutters. And there was Lutch—all of him, all his music, all his jump, his public and his pride, in the palm of my hand—three pinkish slugs with horn at one end and blood at the other. I tossed ’em, caught ’em, put ’em in my pocket and walked off whistling
Daboo Dabay
. It was the first time in eight years I had heard that music and enjoyed it. Sometimes it takes a long time to kill a man.

Rehearsal next day was pretty dismal.

Crispin had everything set up. When we were all there, sort of milling around, he got up on the lower tier of the stand. Everyone shut up, except me, but then, I wasn’t laughing out loud.

Crispin’s mouth was tight. “I asked Fawn what to do,” he said abruptly, “just like Lutch used to. She said, ‘What would Lutch do?’
I think Lutch would first see if we could make it the way we are—find out how bad we’re hurt. Right?”

Everybody uh-huhed. That’s what Lutch would do. Someone said, “How’s Skid?”