by Ray Celestin
Michael entered. Carrasco was right, the place was deserted except for someone unseen putting the church’s organ through its paces. The sound filled the nave, bounced off its stone walls and high ceiling. Michael sat in a pew near the back and waited, thinking, watching the steam of his breath in the cold air, the candles flickering in their holders, the light streaming in through the Gothic stained-glass windows. Despite the boom of the organ, the place felt peaceful, especially after Michael had navigated the torrents of people out on the streets.
He heard a noise behind him, turned to see Carrasco enter holding a briefcase. He looked around, saw they were alone and sat next to Michael.
‘Goddamn, it’s cold,’ Carrasco said.
‘Language, Carrasco,’ said Michael, smiling. ‘You’re in a church.’
Carrasco put his briefcase between them on the pew, opened it up. Took out a folder and passed it over.
‘Gene Cleveland’s rap sheet,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty thin. Your mystery hotel guest only has one offense. He was rousted in a bebop club in Midtown at the start of the year, selling dope to the patrons there.’
‘What the hell’s bebop?’
‘Language, Michael. Apparently, it’s a type of jazz.’
Michael took the folder and opened it up, two mostly blank sheets of paper and a photo of Cleveland affixed to the top. The photo showed a Negro man in his early thirties with short hair and the dazed expression you often saw on people whose mugshots had been taken in the middle of the night.
He had a soft face, puffy cheeks, small eyes. He looked unassuming, unremarkable. Michael scanned the sheets; the date of birth made him thirty-two, the place of birth made him Missourian, no registered address. Michael flipped to the arrest details; January of that year, picked up in a sweep of a nightclub on 52nd Street.
‘I spoke to the arresting officers,’ said Carrasco. ‘They picked him up after some of his customers fingered him. He’s small fish. Part-time musician, part-time pusher. He plays in a band and sells horse to people out of the clubs they gig at.’
Michael nodded and looked through the rest of the record.
‘There’s no address, or known associates,’ he said. ‘You get any leads on that?’
Carrasco shook his head.
Michael thought. Narcotics officers must have been involved in having Cleveland set up, and Carrasco had been sniffing around the Narcotics Division for information, a division that only had a handful of officers.
‘Who’d you speak to in the Division?’
‘Lieutenant called Wilson.’
‘You trust him?’
‘As much as I do any other cop.’
‘What cover story’d you use?’
‘I told him we had a murder suspect we caught in possession who’d fingered Cleveland as his dealer and I wanted to know if the man existed. He bought it.’
‘Thanks, Carrasco,’ said Michael. ‘This is great.’
‘I got you a précis.’ Carrasco passed him over a sheet of paper.
In the depths of the church, the organist reached the end of the sonata he was playing, launched into a fugue. Michael remembered what Ida had told him about the man at the temple, how he mentioned the Powell brothers had been spooked by a mobster they’d seen casing the hotel.
‘You get anything on this Faron character?’ he asked.
‘There’s no file on Faron.’
‘He’s clean?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Carrasco. ‘I asked around. The guy’s pretty much a myth, a street legend. You ever hear about the Pike Slip Diner massacre?’
Michael shook his head.
‘Back in ’33, a guy walked into a diner on Pike Slip at gone two in the morning, hosed everyone in there with bullets and disappeared. Turned out two of the victims were off-duty cops. Crooked ones. People figured it as a Mob hit but none of the families ever looked like they were involved. Rumor was the shooter was called Faron. A gun for hire from out of town. That’s basically it. The guy, if he is a guy and not just a name, is more of a myth than anything else. You sure you got the name right? Faron?’
‘That’s what Ida said,’ Michael replied.
He thought about Faron going into the diner and killing everyone, drew parallels with the massacre in the Palmer Hotel.
‘Anything else from back in ’33?’ he asked.
Carrasco shrugged. ‘There was a rumor he jumped on a ship to Italy. No one ever heard from him again.’
‘No rumors about where he was from?’ Michael asked.
Carrasco shook his head. ‘It was the thirties,’ he said. ‘The Depression. The homicide rate was through the roof, Murder Inc was killing people every week. Guns for hire were moving city to city. The only description for him I got was that he was big and had a funny way of talking, like an accent.’
‘What kind of accent?’
‘The kind that’s hard to place.’
Michael nodded. ‘Thanks, pal,’ he said. ‘Not just for this. For everything. I know what you’re risking. I appreciate it.’
‘If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here today,’ Carrasco said. ‘I’m not a man who forgets. Plus I’m getting to work a case with the two best detectives Chicago ever saw.’
‘Please’, said Michael, ‘just be careful, OK? You know what they say, you play it both sides of the fence, you end up with your pants split.’
Carrasco smiled. ‘Sure, pal. I’ll take care. Listen, I need to get back to the office before this music drives me crazy.’
Michael grinned. They rose and headed for the door.
‘Say, how’d you figure out there was an extra guest in the hotel?’ Carrasco asked.
‘I didn’t,’ said Michael. ‘Ida did.’
‘Sharp lady.’
Michael nodded.
They stepped out of the church and squinted in the sunlight, looked around. People were streaming down the sidewalks. The autumn sun was still gilding everything with freezing light.
‘Shame there ain’t really any leads to go on in that file,’ Carrasco said.
‘The jazz club’s a lead,’ said Michael.
‘How’s that?’
‘Ida’s got a pal who’s a jazz musician.’
PART EIGHT
TIME
Monday, November 3rd 1947
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
THE END OF THE BIG BAND ERA
The era of swing music, that mainstay of the radio-waves for more than a decade, is coming to an end, if reports from the music industry are to be believed. In the past eight weeks, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Les Brown and Jack Teagarden have decided to disband. Gene Krupa and Jimmy Dorsey have cut salaries. This week Woody Herman gave up, too. The ‘Herman herd’ came to a stop just one year after it won the band-of-the-year poll run by the jazz magazine Metronome. The large staff of musicians required by the big band orchestras means they are expensive to run, but perhaps the main reason for the downturn is that people are simply not enjoying the music anymore. In empty ballrooms up and down the country, bands are playing mainly for the waiters. Our music correspondent, Giles Boardman spoke to Tommy Dorsey last week at the Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue …
18
Thursday 6th, 3.30 a.m.
A battered old tour bus, mud-caked and rickety, drove into the 38th Street bus station on the West Side of Manhattan and came to a stop in the middle of its vast, empty forecourt. The driver killed the engine and its death rattle ceased, but he made no move to open the doors. The passengers did it themselves, and shuffled out single-file, seventeen Negro jazz musicians in rumpled, slept-in tuxedos, among them the band’s leader, Louis Armstrong.
Louis descended the steps, rubbed his face, wished he had some water to drink, to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He’d been asleep for much of the night. The band had smoked some joints in the back of the bus and while the others played yet another of their endless card games, Louis had passed out, somewhere East of Harrisburg. A lifetime of being
on the road had taught him the trick of falling asleep anywhere, buses, airplanes, ferry decks, freezing cold dressing rooms, colored-only waiting rooms, benches at the ends of platforms in deadly Jim Crow railroad stations.
He yawned and lit a cigarette while he waited for the luggage to be unloaded. There was no one at the bus station to meet him. He’d told Lucille he didn’t want her driving crosstown so late at night. He’d catch a cab home to Queens, displaying a faith in the goodness of humanity that was far-fetched enough to believe a colored man in Hell’s Kitchen at gone three in the morning could get a cab driver to stop for him. More likely he’d be catching the subway and wouldn’t be home any time soon.
He yawned again, leaned against the side of the bus and smoked with his eyes closed. The tour had been a disaster. A bigger disaster than the tour before that – which, in turn, had been a bigger disaster, too. And so on, back into the mists of time, to when Louis was an actual star. He was forty-seven years old, and if this latest debacle of a tour had proved anything to him, it was exactly how washed up he was. Somehow he had slid from poster-boy of jazz to has-been.
Angry voices made him open his eyes. He looked about him to see, a few yards away, some of the band members arguing with the driver. He wasn’t surprised. The driver was a white man from South Carolina, gray-haired and unshaven, with a nose that drinking had taken through the spectrum from red to purple to blue. He’d stayed just sober enough not to crash the bus, and drunk or not, had referred to them all as niggers throughout the six-week tour.
The band’s bassist and one of the trombonists were at the heart of the dispute. It looked like the prelude to a ruckus. The trombonist groaned, turned and walked over to Louis. He was a young, light-skinned twenty-four-year-old from the Bronx called Shelton. Louis liked him, even though he knew that the kid would rather be playing at bebop jams over in Harlem than touring with a fusty old outfit like Louis Armstrong’s Big Band, that he had only taken the gig for the money. But then most of the band were only there for the money, Louis included.
‘What’s going on?’ Louis asked.
‘Motherfucking redneck won’t give us our luggage,’ Shelton said.
‘Why not?’
‘He just went into the depot and they told him the company’s not been paid,’ Shelton explained. ‘He’s not releasing our things till he’s got payment.’
Louis saw how riled up Shelton was. He knew the kid carried a knife, a pearl-handled, stiletto-bladed switch, even took it on stage with him. Many of the band members brought along weapons when they toured the South.
‘Shit,’ said Louis. He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and walked over to the driver.
‘Now what’s the problem, sir?’ Louis asked.
‘We ain’t got our money is the problem,’ said the driver, turning his beetroot of a head in Louis’ direction. Louis got the impression the man was enjoying the fact that his passengers had come up short, proving correct his prejudices about black incompetence, untrustworthiness.
‘We were supposed to receive fifty percent up front, and fifty percent before the end of the tour. Well, guess what? Tour’s ended and we ain’t seen the second fifty percent. This is the last time I ever take a booking from a bunch of niggers.’
‘Sir—’ Louis said, but was interrupted by Shelton.
‘The fuck you calling him “sir” for, Louis?’ he said.
‘Learn some manners, boy,’ the driver said.
‘Don’t call me boy,’ Shelton said, coiling up.
Louis raised his hands, gesturing for everyone to calm down, thinking about the knife in Shelton’s pocket and the angry streak in his character.
Why had Louis called the driver sir? Because he’d grown up in New Orleans, forty years back, and that was just how you talked to white people, even lowdown trash.
‘Now,’ said Louis. ‘My management company were supposed to pay you by check; you sure it’s not in the office in there, maybe it’s been mislaid?’
‘Nothing’s been mislaid, boy,’ said the driver. ‘You get us our money. In cash. You’ll get your things back.’
Groans of anger rose up from the band. Louis noticed white people were congregating to watch the exchange, in the shadows of the barns where other buses were parked up, in the kiosk-like offices that littered the yard, along the entrance to the depot, where it gave out onto the street. These men were Hell’s Kitchen whites. Rough Irish. Mechanics, night-birds, drunks, fighters. Louis didn’t like where this was going.
‘OK, sir,’ he said, using the word once more without thinking, knowing how this was making him look to his much younger, much less accommodating band-mates. ‘How much are you missing?’
‘One hundred twenty-five dollars.’
Louis didn’t have that kind of money on him. The banks wouldn’t be open for hours. He could call Lucille, drag her out of bed, tell her to go to the safe and see what money was in there. If there was enough, get her to drive it out from Queens to Manhattan for them.
‘All right,’ said Louis. ‘Lemme call my manager. There’s been some misunderstanding. That’s all. I’ll call him up, you’ll get your money. Now, you got a phone I can use?’
‘There’s a payphone over there,’ said the driver, grinning. He nodded to the other end of the depot, across the cement wasteland of the forecourt, to a spot where there were a few gas pumps and a razor-blade-and-condom concession.
Louis turned to his band-mates. ‘I’ll get the money,’ he said.
‘You do that,’ came back the voice of the bassist. ‘We been stiffed enough on our pay checks this damn tour.’
Noises of agreement rose up from the band.
Louis turned and made the long walk of shame to the payphone.
He fished through his pockets for some change. Lifted up the receiver and dropped a coin into the slot. He gave the operator Joe’s number and waited to be connected. He’d get Joe out of bed, get him down here with the money. He was fed up of this shit.
He looked across the depot to the tour bus in the distance with the sign on its side – Louis Armstrong’s Big Band. It embarrassed him. The beached whale of the tour bus that ferried his dying band across the country. The young men standing in front of the bus embarrassed him, too. Their tuxedos rumpled, bowties loose, their eyes red from sleeplessness and tea.
Maybe they treated it all like a joke because they sensed things were coming to an end. They were working for a has-been, a one-time great who was on the skids. That was why they didn’t practice, turned up late, with stains on their suits, stoned or drunk, why they missed their cues, played bum notes.
Crazy thing was, Louis didn’t blame them. He wasn’t a band leader. He didn’t have the cut for it. He was a trumpet virtuoso, a gifted singer, arranger and composer. But he didn’t have that ruthless streak you needed to be in charge of a score of unruly jazz musicians, to take all those egos and conflicting interests and hone them into something better than the sum of their parts.
Somehow, without him even noticing, Louis had ended up in charge of one of the worst jazz bands in the country and the paying public knew it and they’d stopped turning up to his shows. The one-nighters and long hops wouldn’t be so bad if the gigs they played weren’t half empty. Some nights it felt there were more people on stage than in the audience.
‘Hello?’ said a groggy voice coming through the receiver.
‘Mr Glaser, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s Louis.’
‘What time is it?’
Louis checked his watch. ‘It’s coming up to four a.m., sir.’
‘Is everything all right?’
Louis explained the situation and Joe said he’d have the cash couriered over within forty minutes. He seemed genuinely embarrassed. Joe was normally meticulous with the band’s itinerary, schedule, roster, with all the paperwork. Louis wondered if this hiccup – that was what Joe had called it – was the sign of some change at the management company, of Louis becoming less of a priority, slipping down the rankings.
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Louis thanked Joe and replaced the receiver. He stared across the forecourt to the band in the distance, to the clapped-out bus, to the bloated, dying whale of his career. He walked back towards them.
‘My manager’s going to have the money couriered over. Said it’ll be here in forty minutes,’ Louis said to the driver.
The driver glared at him.
‘I guess you’ll have to wait, then,’ said the driver.
He turned and headed for the office.
‘Can you at least open up the bus so we can sit down while we wait?’ the trombonist called after him.
‘Nope,’ shouted the driver without looking back.
‘It’s goddamn freezing out!’ the bassist pleaded.
The driver acted like he hadn’t heard, disappeared into the shadows.
The bassist turned to look at Louis. He had sixteen pissed-off faces staring at him, not to mention the fighting Irish dotted about.
‘This is bullshit,’ shouted the bassist.
‘I know,’ said Louis.
He walked round the end of the bus, slumped down onto the cold macadam, leaned his back against one of the bus’s wheels, and closed his eyes. Not for the first time in the last few years, he asked himself how the hell he’d ended up like this. He needed to change something before things got worse. Half the jazzmen he’d grown up with in New Orleans had ended up destitute. Men who’d had a hand in inventing the music, who’d been rich and famous at one point. The precariousness of life as a jazz musician was enough to drive you mad, if the drink and drugs and race hate, long hours and unending travel didn’t take you first.
‘Mind if I join you?’ said a voice.
Louis opened his eyes. Shelton.
‘Sure.’
Shelton sat down next to him. Pulled a joint from his tuxedo pocket, lit it, took a toke, shared it with Louis.
‘Ain’t this a bitch,’ said Shelton. ‘Dig the shit on that white trash motherfucker.’
