The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  PART TEN

  ‘Without exception, the young musicians today, the jazzmen who believe in modern music and appreciate the art of improvisation, pay tribute to the man they consider a real genius, the living legend of our time – Charlie “Yardbird” Parker.’

  LEONARD FEATHER, INSIDE BEBOP, 1949

  22

  Thursday 6th, 2.00 p.m.

  Ida milled about the benches on the corner of 59th. Behind her were the stone walls of Central Park, in front was 6th Avenue, wide and shadowed by towers, running south all the way to the horizon, cradling a roar of traffic. The sun was shining, making the city gleam, cold and hard.

  After a few minutes, Louis appeared, walking down 59th. They grinned when they saw each other, hugged. They hadn’t seen one another in two and a half years, and Ida was glad to see that despite the troubles she’d heard her friend was in, it hadn’t affected his appearance, his smile or his manner.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ he said. ‘What do you wanna do?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Ida replied. ‘Let’s go for a walk, maybe get some food.’

  ‘Cool,’ he said.

  They turned and crossed the road, heading down 6th.

  They walked and talked of this and that, caught up on each other’s lives – Jacob graduating from high school early and going to Berkeley to study law, Louis’ new wife, whom Ida had yet to meet, how they had passed the last couple of years, news from down South. They talked of old times in New Orleans and Chicago. Remembering those shared memories, those long-gone worlds, defined the emptiness their passing had created, even as it provided consolation.

  ‘So how comes you’re in town?’ Louis asked.

  She gave him a breakdown of the case, of the position Michael’s son was in, of the link to a missing jazz musician called Gene Cleveland that the murders seemed to be centering on. She’d always enjoyed telling Louis about her work. She often found that explaining a case to a third person helped organize and reinforce its structure in her own mind, that the best way to learn something was to teach it.

  Louis listened and nodded, and when she had finished his face assumed a sad sort of look.

  ‘I’ll be honest, Ida,’ he said. ‘Those clubs on Fifty-second Street ain’t my world. Bebop’s what the kids play. I don’t know them. And they don’t know me. But let me ask around. There’s some people I was just on tour with who play in some of those joints. I’ll speak to ’em.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, thinking about the articles she’d read in the press – the younger generation of jazz musicians criticizing Louis for betraying his talent, for pandering to whites, for selling out. The stream of disapproval he had to deal with just as the big band scene seemed to be floundering.

  ‘How’s it all going?’ she asked. ‘I heard about all the swing bands breaking up.’

  ‘Yeah, left, right and center,’ he said. ‘We’re all going out of business. It’s getting harder to make a buck. Come Christmas, I’ll have done three hundred nights on the road this year.’

  Ida nodded, wondering what toll it was taking on his health, and his marriage.

  ‘You need to take it easier,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘Tell the truth, I spend more than a few days at home, I get antsy. I have to keep moving, keeping playing. It’s just … jazz music these days is either bebop or that New Orleans revival stuff. I’m too old for bebop, and the revival feels like leaning back too long into the past.’

  Ida got a sense of Louis’ confusion, befuddlement. Exasperation even. When they’d met earlier, she’d thought he was his same old self, but now she was wondering if his recent troubles weren’t weighing him down, if his brightness wasn’t forced. In his youth Louis had been cutting edge. Now the music he’d helped define had been taken up by a younger generation, and so had been taken away from him. Ida knew his dilemma; she was facing a similar one – how did you adapt to the new without losing who you were? How did you change when you were unsure of what you might become?

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.

  Louis shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I’m trying something new at a concert next week.’

  He told her all about it as they turned off 6th and wandered through the Rockefeller Center, the sleek, monolithic towers shooting into the sky, its fountain and golden statue of Prometheus sparkling in the sun, drawing crowds.

  ‘You should see it at Christmas,’ said Louis. ‘With the tree and the skating rink. Snow-globe Manhattan. How’re you enjoying it anyway?’

  ‘New York? I’m hardly getting to see it,’ she said. ‘But what I have seen isn’t a patch on Paris.’

  ‘Nah, it ain’t. Paris was something,’ he said, referring to the time the two of them had spent there before the war.

  They walked down a narrow street, past the entrance to Radio City Music Hall, then on the other side of the road from it, the RCA building. Along its first-floor windows were glossy headshots of the radio personalities, the Hollywood stars, the comedians and singers who had hosted shows at the NBC studios that were housed in the building. Outside one of the windows, a crowd had formed, peering in like they were looking at a Christmas display. Ida and Louis walked over to see what the fuss was. Inside the window stood a stack of television sets, placed one on top of the other like bricks, broadcasting a small, flickering ghostly image – one of the shows being aired by the network.

  In front of the screens, a gaggle of excited children and their parents watched the grainy gray image of a handsome, middle-aged white man speaking into a microphone at some kind of assembly meeting.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Louis asked.

  ‘Ronald Reagan,’ Ida replied.

  ‘The b-movie actor?’

  Ida nodded. She watched him continue his address, wearing a sharp suit, wire-framed glasses, his dark hair slicked upwards and back.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ one of the children asked his parents.

  ‘He’s testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee,’ said one of the parents.

  ‘He’s naming names is what he’s doing,’ said another voice, irate, laced with derision.

  Louis gave Ida a look and they headed on down the street.

  ‘This HUAC shit,’ Louis said. ‘I did a movie last year called New Orleans.’

  Ida remembered the film coming and going in the cinemas that summer before she’d had a chance to see it.

  ‘It was a cash-in on all that old-time revival stuff everyone’s so keen on,’ he said. ‘Joe got me and Billie parts in it.’

  Ida nodded. Louis and Billie Holiday shared the same manager, a former Capone stooge from Chicago called Joe Glaser.

  ‘Our parts got cut down to nothing by the producers ’cos they didn’t want the audience thinking black people invented jazz. Dig that shit,’ Louis said. ‘Then it turned out the scriptwriter was a communist, went up in front of HUAC and pleaded the fifth. Now he’s one of the Hollywood Ten. The studio got scared and buried the film with a half-assed release.’

  Ida thought on Hollywood, HUAC, the anti-communism hysteria that had been running in the papers over the summer. She thought of the men she’d seen in newspaper photos, standing on the steps of Congress, hunched nervously behind microphones while they were grilled by the government. She thought of the agency being set up in Washington she’d been asked to join. The war against the Germans had barely ended and the war against the Russians had started. Perhaps they were the same war. Perhaps that was the state of things. The eternal war the politicians promised would bring about eternal peace.

  ‘You and Billie still with the same manager?’ she asked.

  She was a fan of the singer, had used Louis’ connection to score tickets to her gigs in Chicago.

  Louis nodded.

  ‘For all the good it’s done her,’ he said. ‘Glaser set her up on that rap she’s in prison for. At least, I think he did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ida asked, frowning. She’d heard Holiday had been
imprisoned in West Virginia on a heroin possession charge, but hadn’t realized her manager was involved.

  ‘Billie’s fella’s a big-time heroin dealer,’ said Louis. ‘Keeps her doped up so he’s got a line on her cash. Glaser figured maybe if she did time, it’d break his hold on her. So he let the cops arrest her. And when she was on trial, he didn’t even send her a lawyer. She had to face a possession charge on her own while she was sick from coming off the dope. The judge gave her the full whack.’

  ‘You know that for sure?’ Ida asked, incredulous that the singer’s own manager would arrange for her imprisonment.

  Louis shook his head. ‘Not a hundred percent. Glaser’s been telling me about this hospital here in Manhattan, somewhere uptown that does something called narcotics rehabilitation. You go in there and stay for a few months and the doctors clean you up so you never wanna get high again. Glaser’s saying he’ll send her there. They ain’t got a problem accepting Negro patients if the money’s right.’

  Ida nodded. She thought about Holiday locked up on a drugs charge. She thought about the men she’d seen in the soup kitchen the previous night. She wondered if they weren’t all living on a knife-edge.

  They carried on going, past some roadworks where men in overalls were digging into the street. Orange hazard lights had been set up, a red-and-white funnel, through which steam plumed into the icy skies. They cut south down 5th, came upon a bar and grill on the corner of 42nd. Through its sheet-glass window they saw the sandwich counter, a steam table with beef briskets, lamb and pork joints, pastrami, glazed hams, laid out across its silver top.

  As they stood there staring at the food, a customer stepped out of the place with a lunch order wrapped up in grease-paper under his arm. He looked at them and guessed they were deliberating going in.

  ‘Best sandwiches in all New York,’ he said with a grin, before hurrying off down the street.

  ‘You hungry?’ said Louis, turning to look at her.

  They went in and ordered thick ham sandwiches and coffees.

  ‘How about we get these to go,’ he said. ‘We can eat them in the park’

  ‘It’s freezing out,’ said Ida.

  ‘Exactly, we’ll have the place to ourselves.’

  They got their food and walked past the library, to Bryant Park.

  They really did have the place to themselves. They went to the southern edge of the park, sat on an empty row of benches that faced north, so they could take in the extent of it. It was a tiny space compared to Central Park, but it was beautiful, its grass and bare trees glittering with frost.

  They ate their sandwiches and drank their coffees. Ida thought about the man who’d spoken to them outside the bar and grill, telling them the place made the best sandwiches in the city. She’d noticed on her previous visits to New York how everyone talked in superlatives, how the locals were so quick to tell her where she could find the best sandwiches, the best cocktails, the best nightclub, the best hotel. It was as if New Yorkers were all involved in a collective effort to catalogue and order everything the city had to offer.

  ‘How are you getting along now that Jacob’s off at college?’ Louis asked her, breaking her train of thought.

  She shrugged. She confessed she didn’t like it much, which was true, but that she was getting used to it, which was a lie. She told him about the job offer in LA.

  ‘Working for the government?’ Louis asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Ida shrugged. Felt a pang of embarrassment, shame even, at what it would mean, becoming part of the establishment, maybe being co-opted by it.

  ‘Los Angeles is rough on colored folks,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  She’d heard rumors. The city had gained a reputation as a hotbed of racial hatred and violence and police brutality.

  ‘Real rough,’ continued Louis. ‘You know what jazz musicians call it?’

  Ida shrugged.

  ‘Mississippi with palm trees.’ He smiled, rueful, dry. ‘You don’t wanna run your own agency anymore?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure I do,’ she replied. ‘But I like the idea of leaving Chicago. A fresh start. That’s kinda why I came here. See if I can hack moving to a new city.’

  ‘C’mon, Ida,’ he said. ‘You moved cities before, you can do it again.’

  ‘I was nineteen when I left New Orleans. I’m forty-seven now. It’s different.’

  ‘It ain’t different,’ Louis said. ‘The only thing that’s changed is your head.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘The longer you live somewhere, the more that place fills with ghosts. But you move somewhere new, you become the ghost.’

  Louis paused, then nodded.

  He took a tobacco tin from his pocket, blew on his fingers to warm them, then opened up the tin. Ida realized that this was the reason he’d wanted to go to the empty park. He took a few pinches of tea from the tin, cigarette papers. He quickly rolled a joint in his lap.

  ‘I haven’t smoked that stuff in years,’ she said.

  ‘Lucky you. Your tolerance’ll be real low.’

  He finished rolling the joint and lit it and they passed it back and forth. Maybe it was the cold or the years since she’d last gotten high, but within a minute her head was buzzing, alive, thoughts whirling upwards through her mind. The wintry park, the cold hard sun, the glittering frost, the dull roar of New York in the background, all of it seemed to come alive. She saw how the city could seduce you – the buildings, the buzz, the feeling it left in you that you were at the heart of things, that none of the other parties happening anywhere else in the world were as good as the ones in New York City.

  Ida looked at her friend and something passed between them, some wordless acknowledgment of a bond that was both painful and precious.

  ‘I only ever smoke this shit with you,’ she said, as if to undercut things.

  ‘What you complaining about?’ he said. ‘Means you always getting it for free.’

  They stared at each other and burst out laughing, and they couldn’t stop, and in those moments, it was like they were twenty-one again in the Chicago summer, when there was still so much of the world to explore, and everything was full of possibility, of new and wonderful things. For that tiny slice of time, sitting in the coldness of the park, they had respite from fear and lucklessness, bewilderment and the pressing weight of things that were supposed to matter.

  23

  Thursday 6th, 10.14 a.m.

  Michael descended the Third Avenue El at 129th and walked ten blocks to the Harlem Hospital on Lenox Avenue, a towering brick building set behind tree-studded lawns. At the reception desk he asked for Dr Miller and was directed to the surgery unit, spoke to the nurses there and was told to wait. There were some chairs opposite the nurses’ station. He sat in one and waited, wondered again if he was doing the right thing coming here.

  Tom had told him about Dr Miller years ago, how he’d studied under him at the hospital, and the two had gotten along. Michael hoped Miller might be able to shed some light on Tom’s behavior, on why he quit working at the hospital. He hoped Miller might be able to provide him with something, anything, that would help the case.

  After half an hour of waiting, a portly, light-skinned colored man in a three-piece suit walked into the unit and approached the nurses’ station and chatted to them. A few moments later, one of the nurses pointed to Michael. The man turned and with a frown, approached.

  Michael rose, nodded at the man.

  ‘I’m Dr Miller,’ he said. ‘The nurses said you wanted to speak to me.’

  He had a slight Southern inflection, muffled now by years of academia and living in the North. Tom had told Michael how, when Miller had been hired in the 1920s, many of the hospital’s white doctors walked out in protest, and the superintendent responsible for his recruitment was demoted to the information booth at Bellevue.

  ‘Dr Miller. My name’s Michael Talbot. You know my son, Dr Thomas James Talbot. You were his superior when he worked here.�
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  Dr Miller frowned at Michael, trying to square the old white man in front of him, with the young colored man who’d been his assistant.

  ‘Tom never told you his father was white?’ Michael asked.

  Miller paused. ‘He may have done. If he did, I’d forgotten. How can I help?’

  Miller raised a hand to the chairs where Michael had been waiting and they both sat.

  ‘You heard what happened to him?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miller. ‘I was shocked when I read about it in the newspaper. I remember Tom as a gentle, good-natured boy. I couldn’t imagine him doing something like that.’

  ‘You haven’t been contacted by his lawyer?’ Michael asked. ‘To come to the trial as a character witness?’

  Miller shook his head.

  ‘I see,’ said Michael, wondering why the lawyer hadn’t gone through the list of character witnesses he’d supplied him with, thinking again they needed to ditch the man and find someone better.

  ‘But I’d be glad to help out however I can,’ said Miller.

  ‘I was wondering if you could talk to me about how Tom was acting before he resigned from his job here. If he spoke to you about why he left?’

  ‘Isn’t that something you should be asking your son, Mr Talbot?’

  ‘Tom’s not forthcoming on the matter.’

  Miller frowned, gave Michael a suspicious look. ‘Tom resigned to go and fight in the war,’ he said, bluntly.

  Now it was Michael’s turn to frown. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But Tom came back from the war, rejoined the staff here, but then resigned again, a few months before the murders in August.’

  Miller looked confused. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Talbot,’ he said. ‘May I see some identification, please?’

  Michael thought about it, nodded. He took his wallet out, passed the doctor his driver’s license. Miller took it, looked at it, handed it back.

  ‘Mr Talbot,’ Miller said, ‘I’m not sure what Tom told you, but there was no second time. Tom resigned from his post here to go and fight in the war. He never came back. He never rejoined the staff. I haven’t seen him since before his army service.’