The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  He started praying. It was odd hearing a man like MacDonald say the Hail Mary and Our Father, but he spoke them with his usual harshness, so they came off more curse than prayer.

  Then he said, “Fuck you up there! I ain’t gonna admit shit!”

  After another fifteen minutes, I leaned into the emergency hatch and said:

  “You didn’t need to kill her, MacDonald.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “You didn’t know her. She never would’ve turned you in. She loved you too much.” The words weren’t easy for me to say, but they were the truth. She’d told me that herself. “I loved her, MacDonald, and I would’ve taken her back and we would’ve moved away and eventually she would’ve forgotten all about you. You didn’t need to kill her.”

  And that’s when I realized how badly my elevator-phobia plan was going. MacDonald wasn’t crying over Sara; I was. This was turning into a kind of therapy session for me: I was saying all the flinty things I’d kept in my stony heart during prison.

  They needed to be said for me, not for him, and I didn’t even give a damn if he listened or not.

  I must’ve talked another ten minutes.

  After an hour and a half, with Delia sitting out in the parking lot surely sensing that yet another of my plans had gone wrong, I started to wonder if MacDonald wouldn’t beat me at his own phobia.

  He phased in and out of terror, never getting quite so bad that he gave in to me. Of course, then he’d erupt again, panic overtaking him, screaming, screeching, crying out for his mother, pounding and pounding and pounding the walls.

  I needed one more thing that was one more thing too many—one more thing that—

  I’d been crouching on top of the elevator, my recorder sitting on the edge of the emergency hatch.

  My legs were dead from crouching so long. I needed to stand up.

  And when I did—

  Something fell, clanking from my pocket. And when I reached down to get it…

  “You’re dead, you fucker!” I shouted down through the open emergency hatch.

  I was jubilant.

  MacDonald was going to be confessing real soon now.

  Real soon.

  I didn’t get out of the police station till much before dawn.

  Delia was waiting for me in the freezing gray morning.

  When I got in the car, she handed me an empty paper cup and poured some steaming coffee into it.

  “So what did our fine friends the flatfoots make of the tape you played ‘em?”

  “They said that the DA wouldn’t be happy that I got the confession that way, but that it would still be useful in prosecuting MacDonald.”

  “So they are going to prosecute him?”

  I nodded. “The cops hate him as much as I do. They’ve wanted to nail him for years.

  Now they think they can get him on a first-degree murder rap. They’re very happy.”

  She looked over at me, her wise eyes gentle. “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “You happy, Bob?”

  “I guess.”

  “You really loved her, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “in my imperfect way.”

  “Your imperfect way, my ass. You’re a good man, Bob, even if you won’t admit it.”

  She put the taxi in gear and we pulled out of the lot. When we were streaking down the street, pulling into a Hardee’s drive-through for breakfast, she said, “You know, I was startin’ to think you weren’t ever gonna get him to confess.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, so was I. Then that lighter Sara gave me for our anniversary fell out and …Well, as soon as I started lighting paper and dropping it into the elevator car…Well, MacDonald started talking right away. Claustrophobia and pyrophobia is a pretty deadly combination. Of course, he’s really going to have claustrophobia in that little cell of his.”

  “You want cheese on your eggs this morning, Bob?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling almost ridiculously good about everything all of a sudden, “cheese sounds great.”

  Even seeing my parole officer Ralph DeConcini a few hours from now sounded great.

  Hell, everything sounded great.

  RIFF

  Just before dawn I wake up and listen to the hushed sounds from the room next to mine. When I hear these particular sounds at this particular time on a cancer floor in a hospital— three or four rushed whispering voices; faint squeaks of gurney wheels; and then elevator doors opening down the hall, eight floors down to the basement and the morgue—I know what’s happened.

  Charlie Grady died. I’d see him a couple times a day on my little walks up and down the hall. The nurses don’t make me walk. I do it on my own.

  I sort of knew Charlie wasn’t going to hang on much longer. His wife was talking to a hospice woman but I figured Charlie wouldn’t make it even that long. He was a nice old guy, real estate rich, never asking me the standard questions I get about my so-called fame. In fact, he said right out one day that he didn’t care much for jazz. And he hoped that didn’t offend me. His kind of money can give you that kind of confidence. He didn’t give a damn if it offended me or not.

  His wife is a weeper. She came twice a day to see him—his lung cancer and his eighty pounds overweight were shaping up to bring on one massive heart attack—and she never left but she was wailing. I sure don’t blame her. She loves her man. But that doesn’t make it any easier to take when you’re in the room next door and trying to deal with your own problems. Health-wise, I mean. And every-other-wise, for that matter.

  I have a 7:00 am visitor, right after the doc making his rounds leaves my room. Guy named Larry Donnelly. Kind of a fix-it guy for jazz folk. Very serious jazz cat, Larry is. Really got into it in the slam where he served ten years for torching a building with a janitor still in it.

  Larry had no idea, of course. I called Larry a couple of days ago, asked him to stop up. He hesitates in the doorway now. Some people get like that about cancer. Scared. Like it’s a plague you can pick up. “C’mon in, Larry.”

  He’s only there ten minutes. And is kind’ve junkie-twitchy all the time. Can probably feel the cancer working its way through his veins as he stands there trembling. Then he’s gone.

  I fall back asleep and wake up for a second time. This time it’s the nurse with the rattling breakfast cart. They keep telling me to eat but my appetite has gone with all the rest of it. I’m in pretty much the same shape as Charlie Grady was. Except mine’s in the pancreas. I’m hoping I’m as lucky as Charlie. A heart attack like that, you’re one lucky man. And so are your loved ones. Quick and clean. Instead of hanging on.

  Hanging on.

  That’s what I’ve done with my wife Karen the last five years. Met her in a jazz club in Chicago. She was a singer, then. Not much of one. But she had the Look. That slender body, that melancholy face, the dark eyes, the tumbling dark hair. She was from Omaha but she made you think international. Paris in spring, where I gigged with Brubeck. And London in autumn, where I gigged with Miles. Milan, baking in the summer while we were working on my live album. I dumped wife number four for her, just as I’d dumped all the old ones for new ones. I never said I was proud of myself. But you get on the road, you’re six, seven months out from seeing the wife and the kiddies, you’re just naturally going to fall in love with somebody else.

  What I didn’t know that night in Chicago was that it was payback time. I’m sitting in the back of this tiny, draughty club and people are coming up asking for my autograph and if she isn’t singing they ask me did I dig playing with Brubeck, was Miles as much of a diva prick as people said, was my label ever going to do a box set of my music— and hey, that was one fine article in Time, “The Legend of The Saddest Sax in Jazz History: Mike Thorne.” It was actually the usual thing, that Time piece, how I’d managed to survive and prosper in a music world dominated by rock and rap, and how I was the Chet Baker of my time—handsome, media friendly and probably the best sax man
of the past two decades. Thank God, the article concluded, that I never got hooked on junk the way poor Chet had. You read about Chet, man, and you want to cut your wrists.

  So I’m sitting there trying to be nice to the people who come up but I’m paying more and more serious attention to this singer Karen Miller. The clarity of her beauty is astonishing.

  Between her sets, I ask her over to my table for a drink. I can see how flustered she is. Mike Thorne, fifty-three-year-old jazz legend, asking twenty-two-year-old nobody to have a drink with him.

  I get to play the cool dude that night. I’m properly humble when she’s flattering me, I’m properly appreciative when we talk about her own performance, and I’m properly matter-of-fact when I drop some big jazz names I’m meeting later that night for drinks. What I am really is so smitten I’m like I was at the tenth grade dance when I could never quite work up nerve enough to ask Marietta Courtney to dance slow with me.

  But that wasn’t what was really going on at all. Subtext they call it. You know, where it seems like you’re really saying this but you’re really saying that, just below the surface.

  What I was really doing was setting myself up for payback. For every time I’d ever cheated on a woman, for every promise I’d broken to my three daughters, for every heartbreak I’d caused—old numero uno was about to get his. Maybe this Karen Miller from Omaha couldn’t sing worth a damn. But she sure knew how to lie, cheat, steal, betray and humiliate you.

  If there is a Green Beret unit of heartbreakers and ballbusters, Karen Leigh Miller of Omaha, Nebraska was Commander-in-Chief.

  Thirty-eight years I play clubs. When I’m in my prime I’m hitting Letterman and Leno and guest playing on albums by big rock stars who want the cachet of having a jazz star on their CD. They don’t know diddly about jazz but they think it sounds cool to the reviewers.

  This is when I start collecting jazz memorabilia. I’m in places where Satchmo and Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan and people like that have played and so I start buying up things they left behind in the clubs and that the club owners might otherwise throw out in a box in the back.

  This is also the time I get the critics on my back for playing Vegas. Just once, for God’s sake. I don’t have a right to make a fucking living? I can’t take the scorn. A serious jazz musician playing Vegas as the opening act for some jiggle-titted TV star who thinks she can sing? Karen digs it, of course. Me being in Vegas. While I’m on stage, she’s sitting at a table out front with Cameron Diaz and Bruce Willis, who are in town shooting a picture together. Your regular jazz clubs—the kind I usually play in—you don’t get Cameron Diaz and Bruce Willis, let me tell you.

  Sam Caine is with them, too. Sam is my agent and manager. I met him twenty years ago when he was just one of the many hungry young men you see running up and down the halls of William Morris in search of clients who might have stumbled and fallen and would appreciate the hungry young man who helped pick them up.

  Sam was then the assistant to my agent. By the time I decide to do a lot of my own booking, Sam is a full-fledged agent who is just about to open up a small shop of his own. He wants clients, I’m sick of big agencies. I handle most of the small gigs, he books the big ones. He’s a failed actor, our Sam. You always hear about how many beautiful failed wanna-be actresses there are in Hollywood. There are an equal number of beautiful failed wanna-be actors.

  Sam has no interest in jazz. He’s a club lizard. If you can’t hustle chicks while it’s being played, Sam doesn’t want to hear it. But he’s funny and shrewd and gets me bookings I couldn’t get for myself.

  The years go by, my CDs aren’t selling the way they used to, Letterman and Leno’s people don’t return Sam’s calls, and you know what? By now, I don’t care. I’m married to Karen.

  The fourth year of our marriage, I learn three things.

  1. Karen has spent most of the nearly two million dollars that was for my retirement. You should see our house, our cars, her clothes. It sounds like a joke but two million isn’t what it used to be. My accountant keeps saying you gotta do something about this, Mike. But I never do. I’m scared she’ll leave me. That started the second year, the way she’d get whatever she wanted by saying, just kind of off-handed, “I’ve gotta be honest, Mike. Sometimes, I wonder if we did the right thing.” And of course I’d give in and say, sure, baby, buy whatever you want. She went right straight through my money.

  2. I find a note that she threw away in the tiny basket next to her dressing table—you could land a fighter jet on that table; an aircraft carrier should be so lucky to have that room—and right away I see what it says. And right away I recognize the handwriting. Now, I know she’s had little nights when she’s strayed. A couple of her boys got so hot for her they even broke the rules and called the house for her. I listened in on the extension. The first couple of times, I literally rush to the john and throw up. Now I know what I put all those women through. This time somebody else is holding the gun. But I don’t confront her. It’s the same with the money she spends. If I confront her, she’ll leave me. But this time it’s different. This time it’s Sam and in the note he talks about how much they’re in love. I do a lot of throwing up for several days running. And that’s not so unheard of, you know. They say when Sinatra caught Ava Gardner cheating on him, he started puking around the clock, lost his voice, and ended up trying to kill himself.

  3. I start losing weight. My skin color changes. Nothing drastic. But there’s a peculiar faint yellow tone. The maid—of course we have a maid—she’s the first one to say anything. She says I should see a doctor right away. All I can think of though is Karen and Sam. It was only a week ago that I found the note. The maid is insistent; and then Karen starts in on me about how I’m looking all of a sudden. I go to the doctor, there are so many tests I lose count at twelve, and the diagnosis is pancreatic cancer. Now I’m in the hospital. I hear Karen and the lady from the hospital in the hall the other day. “A cancer like this,” the hospice lady says, “it never takes long, Mrs. Thorne.”

  Karen says, “You really look good in those pajamas, Mike.”

  “Thanks for getting them for me, honey.”

  Night. You know how it is, night in a hospital. You can always tell the rooms where death has no dominion. There’s laughter and maybe grandkids and a lot of plans about what’s going to happen when the patient finally gets out of here. But the other rooms—there’s a whispery quality and a tension and long terrible aching silences and both sides prepare themselves for the flap flap flap of houseslippers that come down the hall in the middle of the night. An elderly obscene gent who puts his gnarled papery hand in yours and leads you into a world you cannot fathom.

  Sam says, “You sound a lot better than you did last night.”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d go dancing later.”

  Karen laughs, leans over and gives me a little kiss. They’re on opposite sides of my bed. “Oh, honey, it’s so good you’ve kept your sense of humor.”

  Sam looks at his watch. “Well, guess I’ll push off, Mike. But I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  They’ve been here fifteen minutes. Talk about strained conversations.

  What he’s going to do, of course, is go downstairs and wait for her. She’ll stay another ten, maybe fifteen minutes and then leave.

  I notice the strain on Sam’s face. The strain isn’t entirely because of the situation with Karen. He’s lost his three biggest clients this year. The sniffling sounds he makes—nobody wants a coke head for an agent. Sam’s deep in debt. Deep.

  “Take care, Mike,” he says and leaves the room.

  “He’s such a good friend to you,” Karen says after he leaves.

  “Loyal,” I said. “Nobody more loyal than Sam.”

  I say that staring right into those elegant violet eyes of hers. She looks uncomfortable. “Yes, loyal.”

  The tone sounds. Visiting hours will be over in ten minutes.

  As she bends over to me for her goodnight kiss, I see a
moment of distaste in her eyes. I got a glimpse of myself this morning. I’m a lurid dirty yellow color. Even my eyes have a yellow tint to them. I’ve lost twenty-six pounds in just under seven weeks.

  “You’re all I think about, babe,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re all I think about, too.”

  “You’re such a good husband,” she says. And the tears come right on time. Fed Ex delivers them. You can order them in pints, quarters or gallons. “Such a good husband.”

  Fondling her hand. “And you’re such a good wife.”

  The tone rings again and she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow night. I thought I’d run up the coast tomorrow. See Shirley.”

  The good friend “Shirley” she’s been talking about for three years. I’ve never met “Shirley” because she doesn’t exist.

  She gives me a peck on the cheek and then gives me another look at those pure glistening tears you order from Fed Ex. And then she goes.

  Larry calls just after nine. He knows better than to say anything meaningful. He just says, “Just wanted to say it was good seeing you today, Mike. Guess I’ll have me a beer and watch the news.”

  “Sure wish I could have a beer,” I say. “Guess I’ll just have to settle for the news.”

  It’s the fifth story on the ten o’clock news. “The home of jazz legend Mike Thorne was destroyed by fire tonight. First estimate is that everything was destroyed, including his collection of jazz memorabilia said to be worth between two and three million dollars.”