Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  “Okay, Claresholm it is. But next time I want Honolulu.”

  “I’ll pick you up at nine tomorrow morning.”

  Seven

  Claresholm is a little more than an hour south of Calgary. Cobb was uncharacteristically late getting to my place, so we rolled into Claresholm a little before eleven and stopped at Roy’s Place, a restaurant situated on the highway going through town at the one intersection that sported a traffic light. I quickly learned two things: neither member of the couple that ran the place was named Roy, and the food was terrific.

  We took our time over a couple of omelettes, then made a valiant attempt to get through a cinnamon bun chaser that was the size of a small aircraft. Only a person with the body shape and bulk of Roosevelt Park could get through one of those things in a single sitting. A rancher sitting at the next table recommended Bloat-Aid, a product apparently given to cattle that have overeaten. I thanked him for the advice and made up my mind to purchase several bottles prior to my next visit to Roy’s.

  Our first half hour at the Cottonwood was spent wheeling Lex Carrington around the grounds. It felt a little strange, wandering here and there with a man neither of us knew, and with all three of us saying nothing until the walk part of the visit was completed.

  Finally we took up a spot at a vacant picnic table. Carrington rolled expertly up to one end, politely refusing my offer of help. He clearly didn’t need it. Cobb fetched coffee for the three of us, and once the delivery and distribution was completed, Lex Carrington stared at us over the top of his Styrofoam cup.

  “You want to talk about Ellie Foster,” he said finally.

  Cobb nodded and explained our interest in the case.

  “Julia told me you were wanting to talk about that, so I’ve been thinkin’, you know? Rememberin’. Bitch of a thing.” Carrington shook his head sadly. “We worked it hard, thought we had a couple of suspects, but the leads dried up faster than dog piss in the desert.”

  He spoke slowly, and there was a gentle but persistent tremor to both his head and hands.

  “Who made your suspects list, Lex?”

  “Big black guy, forget his name, different name —”

  “Roosevelt Park,” I said.

  “Yeah, him. She was staying at his place. Wardlow, my partner, thought for sure Park was shaggin’ her and liked him for one of the killers, but the one wit we had said it was two white guys in the alley that night, and besides, the guy had a solid alibi. Even so, Wardlow kept on him. Figured maybe he hired the guys who grabbed her that night. When I asked him what he figured the guy’s motive was, he had this cockeyed theory about Park killing the band guys because one of them was also shaggin’ her, then kidnapping her for his love slave. Even wanted to get a warrant to search the basement of Park’s house — figured we’d find her chained up down there. Wardlow was a good cop except for one thing: He was the most racist bastard I ever knew. Hated pretty well everybody who wasn’t white. And he hated blacks most of all. Couldn’t stand ’em.”

  Cobb was digesting all of that.

  “Park told us she didn’t sleep there every night. He figured she had a boyfriend she was spending time with. You do anything with that?”

  Carrington stared at the cloudless sky for a while. “Yeah, I remember him saying something about that, and I seem to remember we checked it out. Decided she was a woman who liked the occasional one-nighter, you know? No boyfriend, just sex partners.”

  “You check them out?”

  “Tried to. Didn’t get far. We didn’t have any names, and after she disappeared none of them apparently felt like coming forward.”

  I wondered if Wardlow’s leaning toward Roosevelt Park as a possible suspect might have been the reason Ellie’s male companions weren’t pursued with a little more diligence. And I wondered, too, if Carrington had kept mentions of Park’s name to a minimum to protect a racist partner.

  I could see Cobb was working at not being critical of the earlier investigation — probably a good idea. I figured Carrington would dry up fast, maybe even faster than dog piss in the desert, if it looked like we were finding fault with the detectives’ work.

  I leaned forward. “One thing, Lex — we’re hearing two conflicting stories about the kind of person she was. You or Wardlow have any kind of take on that?”

  He looked at me for a while before answering. “Yeah, that was one of the things I had trouble with. People talked about how she was great with the audience, but not nearly so great with everybody else. I remember talking to the owner of The Depression about that. He said it hadn’t always been like that. She’d played the place before, and she was a sweetheart. But not that last time. It was like she was pissed off. Political and pissed off.”

  “Political?”

  “Yeah, like strident: ‘This is what I believe, and if you don’t think like me you’re an asshole.’”

  “Can you remember who characterized her that way?”

  A pause, then a head shake. “No, I can’t, but I’m thinking it was more than one person said the same thing.”

  “And she hadn’t been like that on her previous time in Calgary?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Anybody suggest what it was that precipitated the change in attitude?”

  “Well, you ask people something like that, they’re going to speculate … but nobody gave us anything more than maybes and possiblys. We checked out every damn one of their suggestions. Or at least the ones that weren’t totally nutso. End of the day, it was like every other lead we chased: nothing.”

  I was amazed at how much Carrington was able to remember and how well he could articulate those memories. Especially if, as had been suggested to Cobb, he was suffering from a little dementia, or at least short-term memory loss. There was damn sure not a lot wrong with his long-term memory.

  One of the caregivers from the centre came by carrying a blanket. She was both pretty and friendly.

  “Are you warm enough, Mr. Carrington?”

  He grinned up at her. “I’m cold as hell, C, but nothing a couple of hugs wouldn’t cure.”

  “C” shook her head and laughed. “Blanket’s the best I can do, Mr. Carrington.”

  “Damn,” he said, chuckling. “I’m fine, C, but thanks.”

  The pretty caregiver moved off and, once out of Carrington’s sightline, signalled to us that we had ten minutes. Cobb looked at me, eyebrows raised, inviting me to join the discussion if I had something more. I did.

  “Lex, you ever hear of a place called The Tumbling Mustard?”

  Carrington looked blankly at me for a few seconds, then shook his head. “What the hell is it?”

  “Just a name that came up — a folk club from back then. Ottawa.”

  Carrington shook his head again. “We checked out Ottawa. Wardlow went down there — budgets said only one of us goes. But I never heard him say anything about that place. Either it never came up, or he checked it out and didn’t think there was anything there. Anyway, when he got back here we went over every conversation he’d had out there, everything he’d learned. And I guarantee you he never mentioned anything called The Tumbling … what was it?”

  “Mustard,” I said. “The Tumbling Mustard.”

  “But he checked out Le Hibou?” Cobb asked.

  “The place she played right before she came here?” Carrington nodded. “That was the main reason he went down there. Like I said, Norris was a good detective, other than the racial thing. I think he got all there was down there. If he didn’t mention that other place, then it didn’t need mentioning.”

  I was starting to re-evaluate the work the two men had done on the case. Even if Cobb and I were wrong and The Tumbling Mustard was meaningless, it damn sure warranted at least a mention in their reports. I wondered whether Carrington didn’t have an overinflated appreciation of his partner’s talents. I admired
the loyalty, but wasn’t sure I could agree with his faith in Norris Wardlow, at least based on what I’d seen so far.

  I looked over at Cobb and nodded, giving the ball back to him. Cobb turned back to the former police investigator.

  “I imagine you’ve thought about it in the years since that night,” Cobb said. “Ever come up with any other thoughts, something you think we should maybe follow up on?”

  Again, Carrington took his time answering.

  “I look back at it and I ask myself whether we tried hard enough. And I honestly don’t know what more we could have done. I know there was something we missed; somebody shot those guys and took Ellie Foster. We didn’t find out who, and we didn’t make an arrest. That was our job, and we failed, plain and simple. Even now, I wish there was something I could give you that would help you find the truth.” He shook his head slowly from side to side, lips pursed, shoulders slumped. “But I can’t.”

  On the way back to Calgary, Cobb was moody. Or at least pensive. I figured it was because he felt pulled in two directions by the earlier investigation. As a former cop himself, he wanted to give Carrington and Wardlow the benefit of the doubt. More than that, he wanted to believe they had done a thorough and effective job, but after our chat with Lex Carrington, he may have been having some trouble maintaining that belief.

  Finally, he inhaled, let the air out slowly, then spoke: “I think we need to make some follow-up calls, see if we can find out more about what might have precipitated the mood change. We’ve heard about that from a few sources now. We need to chase that down, if we can.”

  “Might be tough. Hell, she could have found out she was pregnant, or had a fight with one of those boyfriends Park talked about. It’s just as likely something like that as some weird thing to do with the other coffee house.” I realized in saying that I probably sounded exactly like Norris Wardlow had sounded.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Cobb said. “But we have to try. Any luck finding anybody connected to that place?”

  I shook my head, inwardly glad that Cobb had assumed I’d already tried.

  “Might be worth another shot,” he said.

  “Fair enough. I’ll get back on that right away.”

  It’s easy to say, I’ll get back on that right away. It’s a little harder to get back on that. Especially when you’ve already exhausted what you’d thought was pretty much every possible lead out there.

  Cobb dropped me off at Kennedy’s place just before 6:00. I spent a couple of hours on the surveillance vigil, but it would be a lie to say I gave it my undivided attention. There was something else occupying my mind, and for the second night in a row, I set out to do something I was dreading but felt I had to do.

  Again, my plan ended in frustration — a waste of an evening. Maybe it was a sign that I should abandon a plan as foolish and precarious as this one, but I knew I’d be back out there trying again.

  Soon.

  I’d promised Cobb, so the next morning, after the obligatory check of tapes and the two scenes under surveillance, I set about trying to find out more about The Tumbling Mustard. I did have one idea. I was, after all, first and foremost a newspaper guy. I figured that there had to be a print source, whether in an ad or the occasional promo piece for upcoming gigs — something in the Ottawa Citizen that mentioned The Tumbling Mustard (surely a sixties name if ever there was one).

  I packed up keys, reading glasses, wallet, and cellphone and headed for the downtown central branch of the public library. I spent a couple of mind-numbing hours poring over the Citizen’s archives, during which time I learned that the hottest day of 1965 was June 28, when the thermometer reached thirty-two degrees Celsius, that the CFL’s outstanding player that year was Ottawa’s Russ Jackson, and that a 1965 Ford Fairlane 500 two-door sedan could have been purchased for $2,312.

  And finally, on page 27 of the October 19, 1964, edition of the paper was a small ad for The Tumbling Mustard, noting that Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee would be performing at the club from October 25 through 29, and that the Saskatoon Princess, Paula Pendergast, would be there the following week. I stayed at it another hour, but that was it. Not even an ad in the days leading up to Ellie Foster’s performing there.

  That left me with one shot. I knew that both Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee had long since passed away, which meant that the Saskatoon Princess was my lone hope. All I needed was for Paula Pendergast to be (a) alive, (b) findable, (c) in possession of her mental faculties, and (d) willing to talk to me.

  Piece of cake.

  Back home. Jesus, I’ve begun to think of Kennedy’s place as home. Google time. With Heart (Dreamboat Annie) and The Hip (Yer Favourites) providing the soundtrack (the oldies radio station had clearly inspired me), I went to work. There was a three-line Wikipedia item on Paula Pendergast saying she had been a teenage sensation who had played blues and folk clubs in the sixties and early seventies. She had left the business in 1974 to start a family. She had one recording, an album called Rhythm of the Ramble. I called Hot Wax Records on 10th Street in Kensington. The place was amazing. Probably 20 percent of the albums in the collection that covered much of my living room floor had come from there. I’d never called and come up empty.

  That record remained intact. One copy of Rhythm of the Ramble was put away for me — twenty-eight bucks.

  I had planned to go get the record the next day, but after another fruitless Google search for the Saskatoon Princess and twenty minutes of looking at the two houses through Kennedy’s cameras, I decided instead to pick up the record right away, congratulating myself on my earlier decision to bring my CD player/turntable unit back with me.

  The trip to Kensington was quick except for the last couple of blocks, when inner-city traffic slowed to sloth speed. I visited with the guys at Hot Wax, collected the album, and was back at the house in just under an hour.

  I was more interested in the liner notes than the music, but was surprised at the quality of both the songwriting and the performance of those songs by the Saskatoon Princess. The liner notes, on the other hand, were a disappointment, telling me virtually nothing about Paula Pendergast, offering instead a few paragraphs of what I guessed was sixties social philosophy that left me scratching my head.

  Nevertheless, I figured I was on a roll, so my next plan was to start calling telephone information services and to hope like hell that Ms. Pendergast had kept her maiden name or gotten divorced and gone back to her original name.

  I decided on a Montreal theme to backdrop my calls and put Arcade Fire, then The Dears on the CD player, noting, as I had many times before, the difference fifty years made in the popular music of the day. Yet I was also aware that there was an interrelationship, however thin. It was, after all, music; there was kinship and connections, however tenuous.

  I was mildly optimistic. If the Saskatoon Princess had begun raising a family in the midseventies, I reasoned she would have been maybe twenty-five to thirty-five at that time. Add forty-ish years, and there was a reasonable chance she was still alive.

  I started with Saskatoon, then hit other Saskatchewan cities. When I had struck out in the Wheat Province, I moved over to Alberta. I started in the south with Lethbridge and Calgary and then worked my way north, again with zero results.

  Until Grande Prairie. There, I learned that there was a P. Pendergast living in a small community just outside the city, a place called Wanham. I got the number and made the call, convinced I would soon be talking to Peter or Patricia Pendergast. I was wrong.

  The female voice that said hello was soft but firm. And I guessed it belonged to an older person.

  “Hello,” I said, willing my voice not to sound like someone who was sick of talking on the phone. “I was hoping I might be speaking to Paula Pendergast, the former folksinger who was known as the Saskatoon Princess.”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t know if she was saying, Ye
s, I understand the reason for your call, or Yes, I am the Saskatoon Princess.

  “Are you that person?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “My name is Adam Cullen. I’m a journalist in Calgary, and I’m working on a story on Ellie Foster, a contemporary of Paula’s. I’m trying to get information on The Tumbling Mustard, a club both women played in the sixties. So I guess that brings us back to my earlier question — are you Paula?”

  The answer was a throaty chuckle, then, “Isn’t that the dumbest name ever?”

  “The Tumbling Mustard?”

  “Well, that too.” The chuckle again. “But actually I was thinking of the Saskatoon Princess. Oh, and yes, I am that Paula Pendergast.”

  “Wow,” I said, meaning that I was stunned at my luck in having found her as quickly as I had.

  She may have taken the wow for something quite different.

  “Oh, I wasn’t really that big a deal,” she said.

  I thought about telling her how much I loved Rhythm of the Ramble, but I thought that might be laying it on a bit thick. Instead, I said, “Is now an okay time for you to chat?”

  “Ellie Foster,” she said, drawing out the name. “I never thought I’d hear those two words again.”

  “Did you know her, Ms. Pendergast?”

  “Not well.… In fact, I barely knew her at all. I met her and heard her a few times, of course. She was … enchanting on stage. I admired that so much because I wasn’t like that at all. I was never really able to captivate, to beguile an audience like she could. In fact, performing wasn’t really the part of the music business I particularly liked. For me it was the writing and recording — I preferred the studio to the stage.”

  “Rhythm of the Ramble,” I said.