After listening attentively to my tale, in a confession of his own he admitted, “The Haskins case is one that still occupies my mind. Even to this day.”
“Because you never caught the murderer, you mean,” said Andre.
“Yes, of course,” answered Simard. “Of course because of that. But I also thought every other element of the case was, well, strange, for lack of a better word. The newspapers—and many of my colleagues, alas—either ignored this poor man’s tragic death or dismissed it as a seamy sort of thing—as though Monsieur Haskins had probably lived the violent, dissipated life as a barroom performer and could expect no more than to die terribly.”
“Just how terribly did he die?” I asked. “I remember one article referring to a ‘mangled’ body.”
“Oh, believe me, it was a vicious murder. The hatred behind it—the passion, if you will—was quite apparent. But as for your acquaintance—the old gentleman who told you that Monsieur Haskins was involved in a drunken brawl—I’m afraid he has the story all wrong.
“Monsieur Haskins, who probably was a bit drunk at the time of his death, was cornered late at night in a little cul-de-sac and struck with a car. But that was not enough for the killer. He or she ran over the body repeatedly, deliberately. It made for a revolting sight.”
The inspector sniffed at the air a bit and then lit a cigarette.
My God, I found myself thinking, are you French! I was captivated by the old man. Andre was, too, apparently. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the inspector. I wondered fleetingly whether Andre would grow into a version of this kind of elderly gentleman—part De Gaulle, part Jackson (Milt, that is, the one from the MJQ).
“No,” Inspector Simard continued, “there was no evidence that Monsieur Haskins had seduced anyone’s wife or been involved in anything the least bit scandalous. He had no enemies as far as I could determine. He seemed to have been a decent man who was serious about his music and happy to be able to make a living out of it. Happy to have found a home in Paris, where he had a decidedly small but loyal following. The whole thing was not only a mystery but a pity. I’ve always liked and respected artists, you know.”
“Don’t tell me,” Andre said, incredulous, “that you were a fan of Little Rube’s.”
“No,” the inspector said, “I never heard of the man until he showed up as a file on my desk. I don’t know a great deal about the American blues genre. Though I quite enjoyed the jazz I heard in New York years ago, when I was posted for a year with an anti-terrorist mission to the United Nations. I particularly enjoyed hearing Monsieur Getz at the Café Au Go Go. Tell me, is it still there?”
Andre and I exchanged amused glances. The pileup of musical coincidences was getting surreal: just last night we had discovered a cache of old vinyl in the apartment and we’d listened to Getz recorded live at the Au Go Go in 1964.
I related the story to the old gentleman, adding “Sometimes, the world seems a little too small for comfort, Inspector Simard. If you know what I mean.”
French shrug. “But of course.”
“Let me ask you this,” I said to the inspector. “As I told you, we’re sure that Haskins was the man whose picture we found in my aunt’s book. Only she called him Ez.”
“Yes.”
“All right. Number two: Haskins was born in America. This thing about his being an escapee from a chain gang in the South may be true or may be mythological. But suppose—whatever he did or was back in the States—suppose the person who killed him was somebody from his past in America. Could be that he tracked him here. Could have been someone who had no idea Haskins was here, but he finds himself in Paris on business or vacation. And then he discovers that his old enemy Rube is living in Paris and singing at a local club. Whatever wrong Haskins did to this person is still fresh in his mind. So he rents a car—or steals a car—or hires someone—whatever—and kills Rube Haskins and then goes sight-seeing and washes his hands of it. You never find the car that was used to commit the murder. The guy gets away scot free.”
Simard smiled upon me. “All true, mademoiselle. Sound thinking.”
Andre gave my hand a quick, strong squeeze.
“At the time, my thoughts turned in pretty much the same direction,” Simard went on. “But there was a limit to how much could be done about all that. Monsieur Haskins held a Canadian passport, and the authorities there said he had no criminal record and no living relatives. Perhaps he obtained the passport with false documents—who knows? My inquiries to the United States never turned up any record of a Rube or Rubin Haskins as an escaped prisoner. But then, I never knew about this possible alias of his—Ez. And of course it was impossible to check on the whereabouts and background of every American tourist in town at the time of Monsieur Haskins’s death. It was highly frustrating, you see. All those dead ends.”
“And you have no memory of a woman’s name coming up in your inquiries—Vivian Whatever?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Seems like this decent, humble little sharecropping poet covered his tracks very well,” I commented sourly.
“I agree,” said Simard. “And perhaps that helped to guarantee that we would never find his killer. A mystery and a pity, n’est-ce pas?”
“Hmm. Listen, speaking of small worlds,” I said, “I don’t suppose you have an attractive older black woman working in the bakery up the road who might be my aunt Vivian, do you?”
I got my laugh out of him. Then he insisted that we stay and share the lunchtime meal he was preparing.
The inspector asked me to pick a few flowers for the table. While I was doing so, I watched Andre as he played with Monsieur Simard’s two old dogs. Yep, I could see my nearsighted love—who wanted so badly to be a Frenchman—in his gray dreadlocks, a retired professor, walking slowly through the village, lost in his thoughts, a few of the town children greeting him as he passed. Sitting by the fire and flipping through the books and recordings that had made him famous. Playing his violin for relaxation before he turned in. But where am I? Where am I in that silly daydream? Am I ten years dead, like Madame Simard? Did I die tragically in an automobile accident? Or did I simply leave him—or he me—in Paris, while we were still young?
Lunch turned out to be a near-inedible salad made with greens from his vegetable garden. The bread, however, was very good.
CHAPTER 9
Parisian Thoroughfare
“Oh, what a head I have today, children!”
Morris Melon was drinking a fizzy concoction from the stainless steel tumbler of the bar blender.
The old wag-scholar-expatriate was looking ragged, his big bean-shaped head lolling around on his neck.
We all took our places at the long table where the Bricktop staff ate their supper before the doors opened for the dinner crowd.
The potatoes were superb and the steak with onions was fork tender. The collards had an indefinable Parisian spin—piquant but not too spicy. And oh those hot rolls! Taking second or possibly third helpings from the circulating platters, Andre was boarding, as my grandmother used to say of anyone going at his food with gusto.
I got up and refilled the ice pack that Morris Melon had been pressing to the back of his neck.
“Thank you, young girlfriend.” He moaned and buried his face momentarily in the cold. “Oh…Oh, Father, that’s better.”
The meal proceeded—waiters gossiping and grousing, pitchers of lemonade and tea and wine crisscrossing and changing hands. It was the idealized image of restaurant worker camaraderie. A family you choose, rather than the other way around. The kind of thing you see as a lonely teenage nerd and fasten on. It takes actually getting a job as a waitress and standing on your foots seven or eight hours at a time—not to mention the asshole customer factor—to disabuse you of your romantic notions about restaurant work. I lasted about six minutes one summer, trying to make some bucks for the next semester at school.
Old Melon, about halfway back to the land of the living, reti
red to his office to nap, sipping from a glass of tomato juice as he shuffled off.
Gigi Lacroix showed good timing. Andre and I had just finished our set and repaired to the bar when I was called to the telephone. The pickpocket was not just pulling his chain, after all, he said. Gigi was in Les Halles now, and we should come to meet him in the square across from the Centre Pompidou. Martine would join us for a drink.
Oh goody. The four of us back together again. I knew Andre would be overjoyed to hear it.
I snatched my man’s wineglass out of his hand and began tugging at him. “Let’s go.”
He grumbled and fussed the whole ride on the métro. Not only were we going to be rooked out of more money by the fatuous Gigi, he pointed out; we were heading into the nighttime carnival that is Les Halles, which was always pumping with ugly tourists and junkies and panhandlers and runaways and the dreaded wandering mimes in their cheap French sailor shirts and ghostly white makeup.
“Just where I feel like going at the end of a long day,” he spat at me.
I rolled my eyes and endured it. I could endure just about anything. We were closing in on Viv!
It took ten or fifteen minutes to locate Gigi. Lady Martine was the first pointer. I saw her moving toward us, more swiftly than I ever thought possible, considering the height of her heels. I damn near mistook her for one of those mimes; that’s how white her face was. And her red mouth was hanging open in dumb amazement. In fact, even the wetness at the corner of her eye seemed to be frozen there, as if painted on—a comic teardrop.
I put out a hand to stop her, but she brushed right past me, moving even faster. When we began to follow, calling out her name, she became a human rocket. The night swallowed her up.
Andre and I walked back in the direction we’d started out. Gigi sat waiting for us not ten yards away.
A hapless young girl with an ice cream cone, who was about to sit down and rest on the same bench Gigi was occupying, must have seen what we saw at about the same moment. Propped up against the armrest, Gigi was leaking blood from the gaping wound in his side. And those flirty, lying eyes of his: dead, dead, dead.
I caught the glint of a big thick blade on the ground.
I dug my nails into Andre’s flesh so deep he nearly buckled. But we kept silent and kept right on walking.
Plop! went that ice cream. Lord, could that girl scream.
CHAPTER 10
What Is There to Say?
“No, no, no! No you’re not! You’re not going! That’s only your panic talking!”
It seemed to me that he was the one who was panicking. His voice was up in the ether and his body was shaking.
“Damn right, it’s panic talking,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say it’s about time to panic? Somebody just offed Gigi.”
Andre swallowed, hard, and rushed over to the refrigerator. He upended the bottle of Vittel water and didn’t stop drinking until it was empty.
“I’ll tell you what you oughta be doing, my brother,” I said tartly. “You ought to be packing your own stuff and leaving with me.”
“That is not an option, Nanette.” His voice had suddenly taken on that kind of deepness you might hear in an opera, when the baritone is letting somebody know he means business. “End of discussion.”
“Well, okay, fuck you, end of discussion.”
“Okay, okay, let’s try to look at things a little more calmly here, Nanette. Let’s make some tea or something and talk about this.”
“I don’t want any fucking tea!” I screamed.
He slammed the kettle into the wall and bellowed, “Then let’s not fucking have any!”
That settled me down.
He began speaking very slowly, focused, oddly menacing. “What I’m trying to get at here, Nan, is this: something very bad has happened, yes. Gigi is dead, yes. But you didn’t do it, and you didn’t cause it. You’re guilty of nothing—understand? Therefore, you have no reason to run. You have no reason to leave me.”
“I’m leaving Paris, Andre, I’m not leaving you”
“Would you like to explain to me how you can do one without doing the other?”
“Okay, the way I put that was dumb. But you know what I meant. Look, I took on this insane project, to find my aunt, under totally false pretenses. I was bullshitting my mother and bullshitting myself—I admit that now. I thought I could use my Paris smarts to find her. That we’d have a fabulous reunion and I’d give her her money and I’d eat like a king and party like mad and go home happy. Slick little Nan, living by her so-called wits, puts another one over on the grown-ups and lives to tell the tale. I was supposed to rescue her, get it? I never dreamed things were going to turn out like this—so weird—so horrible.
“I’m in over my head now, sweetheart. Don’t you understand? The old Nanette karma has kicked in again. Even when I set out with the best intentions in the world, somebody always ends up with a safe falling on their head. I’m the world’s biggest authority on turning sugar to shit. It’s such a curse that it’s almost like a talent.”
I saw him trying to get in a word, but I wouldn’t let him. “No, no, it’s true, Andre. If I hadn’t hired that oily little guy he’d be alive today.”
“There’s no way on earth for you to know that,” he protested, trying mightily to keep his tone even. “Gigi was a petty criminal. Maybe even not so petty. That’s how he made his living. Who did he associate with: pimps, whores, pickpockets. His death could have had nothing to do with you—I mean us. Hell, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with him. I mean, look where he was hanging out. He could’ve just been mugged and tried to fight back. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time—that’s how it is in every city in the world.”
“Oh, come on, Andre. Do you really believe that?”
“I don’t know what to believe, Nan. I don’t know what happened to him any more than you do. I just know we didn’t kill him. Maybe that bitch of his did it.”
“Martine did not kill that man,” I proclaimed. “You saw her. You saw what she looked like. She came upon him the same way we did. And ran. The same way we did.”
“All right, so she didn’t do it. So she ran away. What do you think she’s going to do now, accuse you? No. She wanted to get as far away from the scene as she could. People like Martine and Gigi don’t go to the police. The police come to them.”
“That’s right! That’s my point. And what’s going to happen when they find her? She’ll tell them about Viv. ‘People like Martine’ don’t just grit their teeth and go off to jail. They start bargaining with the cops. They rat on their cohorts. Vivian and you and I will be implicated.”
“Listen to yourself! We’re not her motherfucking cohorts, Nan. And why should Martine end up in jail if she didn’t kill the guy?”
“Why, why, why? Stop asking me that!” I shouted in frustration. “Why are you being so dense? Why do you refuse to see the connections between Vivian and all the crazy shit that’s happened?”
“Because if there is a connection, it isn’t crazy. There’s a reason for it. And because I don’t believe in karma. I don’t believe in voodoo. I don’t believe in curses. You’re not a curse, Nan.”
I started laughing grimly. “I’m what? A blessing?”
“Yeah. Or something like that. What else do you call it, what’s happened between us?”
“Listen, Andre. I’m never going to be able to sort this out if we don’t keep things separate.”
“Separate?”
“Yes. Vivian. Missing. In trouble. And somehow—we don’t know how, but somehow—mixed up in Gigi’s killing. Rube Haskins a.k.a. Ez Whatever the fuck his name was. Martine. All that shit on one side. And on the other side, you…and me.
“I’m not keeping anything separate, Nan. I’ve had it with being separate. The last person who ‘separated’ from me left me with a lousy insurance policy and my dad’s Al Green records.”
“Please—please—” I jerked away from his embrace. “Let me think!”
/>
“Think of what, more reasons to leave?” He grabbed me again and once again I twisted out of his grip.
He stepped off from me then and removed his spectacles. I stood there in silence watching him as he polished them deliberately, compulsively, finally abandoning them on the table.
“What if I can find her?” he said at last.
“Find who?”
“Vivian. What if I find her for you? Will you stay then?”
“How are you going to do that, Andre? We’ve been jumping through hoops trying to find her.”
“Not the right ones, obviously. We didn’t do it right.”
“I don’t want you going to the police, Andre. Don’t do it. Do you hear me?”
“What if I find Martine? What if I make her talk—tell me who this pickpocket was who saw Vivian?”
I tried to answer him, but he wouldn’t let me. “What if I figure out who killed Rube Haskins? What if I can get the answers to these things—even just one of them—would it be enough to make you stay? Say yes and I’ll leave right now and I will find something for you. Will you give me just one more day and let me try?”
“Jesus Christ, Andre, it’s two in the morning.”
“Will you?”
“But—”
“Will…you…do it?”
“Yes, yes!” I shouted. “All right.”
“All right,” he echoed. “Just don’t pull away from me again. Just don’t, Nan.” He gathered me to him, nearly crushing me.
“Andre, don’t do it. What if something goes wrong?” I said. “If something happens to you, what’ll I do, baby? I’ll go crazy.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong. Just stay here. Just wait. No plane reservations, no packing, no leaving. Wait here for me. Okay?”
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