Dead Man’s Blues Read online

  At this point the waitress returned and took away Lena’s empty glass and replaced it with a fresh one As she did so, Ida peered about the room once more and her gaze alighted on the peacock-tail wallpaper. The circles at the center of each tail looked like so many eyes splayed all over the walls, and they gave Ida the feeling of being watched, of standing in the center of a poultry farm.

  After a moment, the waitress departed and Ida turned her gaze to Lena once more.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Jansen, you’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘I’m glad to help. I’ve been worried sick about Gwendolyn. Anything I can do.’ She smiled at Ida and Ida smiled back, thinking how the woman had looked and acted far from worried about her friend.

  ‘And if you’d like to come swimming with me . . .’ said Lena, taking a calling card from her purse, ‘here are my details.’

  She handed over her card and smiled, a gleam in her eye, that same unsettling look Ida normally only saw in men. Lena lit a new cigarette, and Ida watched the smoke from it languidly coil upwards, all the way to the ceiling fan, whose blades chopped it into pieces with the grim efficiency of an executioner. Ida was reminded of the processing machines she had seen in the Stockyards, the precision of their timing, the rhythmic doling out of death.

  Five minutes later she was in an elevator heading back down to the city, out of the clouds, positing the following as the most likely explanation for what had happened: Gwen had met the go-between on the day she’d disappeared. He’d given her some way of finding Chuck. She’d found Chuck, told him she wanted to split up from him, and something had gone horribly wrong. She’d gone home, packed her bags and tried to leave town, but Chuck, or Severyn, or the go-between, or maybe all three of them, had caught up with her at the station and abducted her. Coulton’s father was trying to cover it up, had leaned on the police to can the investigation, had got the State’s Attorney’s involved.

  The explanation fitted all the evidence. But that’s all it was, an explanation, a hypothesis, conjecture. They’d have to look into Gwendolyn’s fiancé, but also his father with the murky past. Initially she’d thought the Van Harens were odd, but now the Coulton family seemed even more so, as did the friend, Lloyd Severyn, and the go-between, Randall Taylor. Plenty of leads to be getting on with.

  The elevator reached the ground floor, dinged open, and Ida strode through the foyer. Gwendolyn’s friends, wayward and wealthy, went slumming in the Black Belt, and they employed a go-between who Gwendolyn had spoken to the day she disappeared. Ida smiled. If go-betweens and Bronzeville jazz clubs were involved, she knew exactly who to call for help.

  PART THREE

  BRIDGE

  ‘Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place governed by a proconsul . . . Beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like the water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly.’

  ALVA JOHNSTON, NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, 1928

  ‘There were many evidences that the Police Department was demoralized; that there were distinct and well-known alliances between the police and under-world celebrities; that gambling and liquor-running were not to be interfered with, and that it was risky for any police official to exercise any initiative on his beat or in his district without specific orders from headquarters. It was demonstrated early in the survey that the office of State’s Attorney was being used extensively for political purposes and many habitual offenders and dangerous criminals were being released with little or no punishment.’

  THE ILLINOIS ASSOCIATION FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE, 1928

  17

  A rent party was in full swing on the top floor of the Mecca Flats, a block-sized housing complex on 34th and State Street. The Mecca had been built for the World’s Fair back in the 1890s, and something of its former grandeur could still be seen in its marble floors and art nouveau ironwork. But like much of the Southside, the Flats had slowly fallen into disrepair, and its middle-class tenants had moved out to be replaced by blue-collar workers, prostitutes and pimps, and a bohemian set of aspiring artists, writers and musicians.

  When those same tenants were in arrears and didn’t have any money, they’d host a rent party and charge an entry fee to scrape together the cash that’d keep the eviction notices from being pasted to their doors for another few days. Typically, as well as the booze, the hosts laid on the music, which due to the size of the apartments was normally just a Victrola or an upright piano, played boogie-woogie style, so the sound was full enough to dance to. It was a style that was exceptionally hard to play, the hands having to leap great distances across the keyboard with lightning speed. The man at the piano in the rent party that night was doing a good job of it, and the sound boomed through the apartment and echoed around the vastness of the courtyard.

  At some point just after midnight, four young men in sharp suits walked through the overspill on the balcony and into the party proper – Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Zutty Singleton and Wild Bill Davison – and they found the place stiflingly hot, dangerously overcrowded, and dripping with good times.

  Earl Hines was mobbed by the crowd as soon as they recognized him. Chicago’s greatest piano player was ushered straight over to the upright, and much to the annoyance of the man already seated at the instrument, Earl was put on the stool, and ordered to play in his trademark ‘trumpet style’. The crowd got even more frenetic in their dancing when he broke into his first number, an up-tempo rendition of ‘Muskrat Ramble’. A girl who’d been leaning against the piano looking a little worse for wear perked up on hearing the melody, straightened her back and began singing the lyrics, straining to project her voice over Earl’s playing. Louis, Zutty and Wild Bill – the only white man at the party – slunk off to the far side of the dance floor and claimed a spot by the windows, where they hoped there might be something of a breeze. Wild Bill sat on the sills and commenced rolling a reefer and Louis squeezed his way back through the crowd to buy them all some drinks.

  He pushed past the people dancing and chatting and the couples in corners reaching all over each other and he made it to the kitchen where a crowd was waiting to refill their cups. He got in line and a few people looked his way and recognized him, and nodded hello or clapped him on the back. It had been six years since Louis had left New Orleans and arrived in Chicago. Six years since he’d gotten off that train and stepped into the Lincoln Gardens and been dazzled by what he saw, and in those six years, he’d become something of a star, not only to the people of the Southside, but to jazz fans all over the world.

  He reached the front of the line, grabbed some drinks, and returned to the living room. He sat on the windowsill next to Wild Bill and Zutty, handed out the drinks and surveyed the crowd. It was the kind which always flocked to these sorts of parties – blues people that worked six days a week for subsistence wages, ground between the millstones of poverty and race hate, letting loose in the few free hours they had between clocking off on Saturday afternoon and church on Sunday morning.

  He felt something scrape along his back and turned around to see what it was. Flypaper. A half-dozen rolls of it had been glued to the top of the window frame and left to dangle. The long brown strips were covered with scores of dead flies, and the thumping of the dancers’ feet was shaking the strips of paper, making all those dead flies pulse with the music. Louis stared at it all a moment, the strips jumping in front of the clear night sky.

  ‘Louis, I don’t mean to alarm you,’ said Wild Bill as he finished rolling the reefer, ‘but ain’t that Lil that just walked in?’

  At the mention of his estranged wife ‘s name, Louis’ heart skipped a beat. He sat up and craned his neck to look through the crowd. And there she was, in a slinky dress and pearls, hair combed back into a perfect bob. Louis panicked, his thoughts helter-skelter. He was supposed to be meeting Alpha, his girlfriend, at the party, and he couldn�
�t face dealing with a scene.

  ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ he asked, and Wild Bill shrugged.

  Lil was an airs-and-graces kind of girl, from a good family, university-educated. She spent her nights at the theater, at the opera, at classical music recitals. A ratty rent party in the heart of the Southside was the very last place he’d expect her to be.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bill said, ‘but she’s seen you and she’s heading this way.’

  He grinned and together with Zutty, got up off the sill and disappeared into the crowd, leaving Louis alone. As Lil slipped through the crowd toward him, Louis noticed her pass the piano and turn to look at who was playing it. When she saw it was Earl Hines, she tried not to let the sting of it show on her face – Earl was the man who had effectively replaced her as the piano player in Louis’ band.

  ‘Hello, Louis,’ she said in her hoity-toity tone of voice. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m doing good, Lil. How are you?’ he said, hoisting a smile onto his face.

  ‘Fine,’ she replied, and both of them looked embarrassed at how awkward they were with each other, as shy as when they had first met, when Lil was the piano player with Joe Oliver’s band, and Louis still an awkward greenhorn from down south.

  ‘Quite the party,’ she said, and Louis wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, mocking the blue-collar people there and the low-down form their entertainment took. ‘I see your boy Earl has no trouble turning his talents to the house style,’ she said, nodding in Earl’s direction, and Louis kept silent, not rising to the bait.

  He nodded and they watched the man play a moment, letting loose a cascade of melody and rhythm. Hines was a classically trained pianist, just like Lil, but unlike Louis’ wife, Earl was supremely talented, as talented as Louis. His timing was so perfect the drummers he played with complained at having to keep up, his chord changes so inventive and startling the rest of the band complained at having to follow his melodic line. It was only Louis that could match him, the two of them spurring each other on. When they played together, with Louis’ perfect tone, and Hines’s trumpet style punching through the rest of the band, the effect was something like a tornado.

  ‘I heard you got a gig going at the Savoy,’ said Lil.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Me and Earl and Zutty. We’re doing good.’ He looked at her and smiled. He wanted to ask her what the hell she was doing there, and a paranoid notion rose up in his mind that she had followed him. He tried to think of something to say to her, figured he should ask after someone, but whom?

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he said finally, and before the words had even left his mouth his heart was sinking. Lil gave him a look. It was Lil’s mother that had given her all those airs and graces, who upon learning her daughter was dating an uneducated jazz player – and one from New Orleans, at that – had done everything in her power to stop them being together.

  ‘Okay . . .’ said Lil, still a little confused, and the two of them settled into another awkward silence, and they both stared out across the crowd. Earl finished the song he was playing, and the crowd whooped and he slid straight into the opening bars of ‘Mecca Flat Blues’, Jimmy Blythe’s song about the housing project they were currently in. When the crowd recognized the melody they cheered, and began dancing once more, and the girl by the piano began singing the lyrics.

  . . . Talk about blues but I’ve got the meanest kind

  Blue and disgusted, dissatisfied in mind . . .

  ‘He’s good,’ said Lil, nodding at Earl.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ve been hearing those records you two have been putting out,’ she said. ‘They’re real nice, Louis.’

  Something about the way she said it made Louis feel there was a ‘but’ at the end of the sentence that had been left unsaid. Don’t bite, he thought, and then a second later he ignored his own good advice.

  ‘But . . .’ he said.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘You were going to say “but”, and then you didn’t.’

  He turned to look at her and she shrugged, her face all innocence.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ she said, and the way she pronounced the ‘Oh’ – so rounded, so enunciated – rankled him.

  . . . My Mecca flat man, he really don’t understand . . .

  ‘You know, I was in Lyon and Healy’s the other day,’ she said airily, ‘and they had a Victrola set up there, and they were playing a piece by Fletcher Henderson, and one of the customers said it was only after he’d starting buying records that he’d ever really heard jazz, and I thought that was so strange, you know? So I asked him what he meant, and he said that he ‘d heard it in clubs and parties, played live, but it was only once it was on record, in the peace of his own home, that he’d been able to sit down and really hear it, you know? Been able to study it.’

  ‘What’s your point, Lil?’ said Louis, annoyed at her mention of Henderson.

  ‘The point is,’ Lil explained, ‘I think there’s an opportunity there. At the moment it’s just jazz on records, but sooner or later someone’s going to come along and turn it into more than that, turn it into art, into culture, into something that lasts. The only question is, who’s that person gonna be? Who’s gonna take jazz out of the nightclubs and turn it into art? Something that stands the test of time?’

  . . . Mecca flat woman must be a jazzing hound

  Keep fooling with me and I’ll cut you down . . .

  Louis looked at her and she smiled coyly. ‘You’re better than every other jazz player in this city,’ she said, her tone rueful, as if she was talking about something she’d lost. ‘It’d be nice if you lived up to your potential.’

  She said it so resolutely, so disconsolately, that Louis couldn’t even muster up any anger at how patronizing she was being. Beneath the words, he got the feeling that to Lil, Louis Armstrong was something she’d helped construct, something she still had an interest in. And Louis knew there was some truth in her view. He had always been shy, wanting to stay out of the limelight. He was happy playing second cornet, covering up Joe Oliver’s mistakes. It was Lil who convinced him that Oliver was short-changing him, financially and artistically. She was the one who persuaded him to strike out on his own, had got him music lessons with the teacher at Kimball Hall, the German who had in turn been taught by Brahms. She had bought him sheet music to perfect his technique, drilled him for months on end so he learned classical fingering styles, pushed him to be as good as he could be, and even though they were now estranged, on the down slope to divorce, she was still pushing him on, goading him, managing him.

  . . . Mecca flat woman stings like a stingaree Mecca flat woman take your teeth out of me . . .

  ‘Lil . . .’ He turned to stare at her and saw her expression, a mix of shock and anxiety, and he followed her gaze across the dance floor to the far side of the room, but couldn’t make out what had startled her.

  ‘I gotta be going,’ she said suddenly. She looked at him and smiled. ‘I’ll see you round.’

  Louis peered once more to the other side of the room. Had she seen Alpha there? Lil stood and whisked herself off into the crowd and Louis lost sight of her, and then she resurfaced on the other side of the room and everything was made plain. She was by the door to the kitchen, talking to a man, trying to convince him of something, trying to convince him to leave. The man was good-looking, tall, light-skinned, and at least a few years younger than Louis. He wrapped his arm around Lil, and the two of them turned and headed for the exit.

  ‘Shit,’ said Louis, and his heart sank. That was how she’d ended up in the depths of the Southside: she was on a date with a man who was everything Louis wasn’t.

  . . . I’m going to find my Mecca flat man today Got the Mecca flat blues and somebody’s going to pay . . .

  ‘I thought she’d never leave,’ said a voice, and Louis looked up to see Wild Bill and Zutty standing in front of him, the two of them snickering.

  ‘She put you through the
wringer?’ asked Zutty, passing Louis a reefer. How was it she could get him so riled up in such a short space of time?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Louis, with what must have been a forlorn expression because his two friends burst out laughing.

  A few drinks later, Louis was still slumped on the window-sill watching the other people having a good time, the dead flies dancing. He was still feeling put out, still annoyed, still hearing Lil’s words looping over and over. Was he not living up to his potential? Was he not producing hit records? Was he not playing to packed houses every night? Had he not become the poster boy for the artistic blossoming that was occurring in the city? What else did she expect from him? He was annoyed he hadn’t justified himself to her, but the justifications he had by now perfected had come too late, so what was the point? Should he memorize them for when he next bumped into her? Waste all that energy carrying around arguments in his head?

  Then there was the thought that maybe he was annoyed because she was telling the truth. He was looking for an artistic breakthrough – a new way to craft solos, to arrange them into a song. He’d been experimenting with Earl, who was likewise attempting to innovate, to elevate the piano beyond being just a rhythmic accompaniment, and they’d been successful, but something was still eluding him, and Lil had chimed right into it, the innovation he knew was there, lurking somewhere in the fledgling art form they’d all had a stake in creating.

  Then he wondered about her mention of Fletcher Henderson; if it was supposed to be a dig at him, a reminder of his humiliation in New York. After Louis had been in Chicago a couple of years, Joe Oliver’s band had split up and Louis had found work in one of the country’s premier orchestras – Fletcher Henderson’s band, which was based in New York. But the move out to the east coast turned into a bust. Louis became a joke amongst his colleagues, and a flop with the audiences, and after just a year he’d been kicked out of the band and, humiliated, he’d had to scurry back to Chicago. When he arrived in the city for a second time, he’d discovered Lil had been playing the field in his absence – something that Louis had likewise been doing in the Big Apple.