“And you got away with it.”
Very clearly, my uncle’s voice came to me out of the darkness, “He’s a John Doe in a public cemetery in Florida. I guess nobody ever reported him missing. I rented a room for cash in a flophouse in Miami. He met me there.”
“Did you guys talk?”
“Not much.”
“What did he say?”
“Enough for me to know.” He stopped with a tight sound in his throat.
I knew I must ask now or never. “How did you do it?”
Expressionlessly, he said, “With a piece of iron.”
I couldn’t speak.
“I took his wallet,” Uncle Guff continued, “and threw it away later. I kept one thing to prove to you I’d done it. I thought you’d find it in my things, you know, when the time came. You might not know what it was. I brought it along today, thinking we might have this talk.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out something that jingled. He handed it over to me.
It was a chain with a pair of metal dog tags on it. I couldn’t read the stamped letters in the dark, but I didn’t have to.
25
Blind Lonnie was kicking off one of his specialties, an indigo version of “Younger Than Springtime,” when I walked up. I waited until he finished, then set down my mandolin case on the sidewalk and clapped.
“Lillian!” At the gladness in his voice I almost burst into tears. Listeners dropped money into his case and moved on.
I held my voice steady. “How are you, Lonnie?”
“Fine. So very fine this evening.” His fingers wandered over his guitar, chording and plucking lightly. He tilted his broad, pleasant face toward me. “I just been warming up.” His stout archtop Guild rested easy on his thigh.
It was Friday night and Greektown was coming alive. I breathed it in: the food and spices, the toasty brown coffee, the cigarette smoke and the cologne and the aftershave.
Lonnie’s playing, and those familiar smells, cut through my numbness.
“By the sound of you,” he said, “you’ve had a long week.”
“Let’s just play,” I said.
“Name one.”
“Ah, how about ‘You’re the Top’?” It was the first cheerful tune that came to me.
“All right.”
We tuned, and Lonnie let me plink an intro. Then he threw down a rhythm and played some lead, ran the melody just once, then gave it the throttle, so to speak. He played it hard, with a driving beat, and people stopped to listen. He lifted his thigh and clomped his heavy shoe on the pavement. The people on the street were arrested by the joy pouring out of him, held there by the curious beauty of a familiar song moving from major to minor and back again. He handed it to me once in the middle, and I decided to drop the tempo and unleash some Mediterranean tremolo. That got him laughing. I boosted the tempo and gave it back to him. Lonnie’s music challenged any indifference a passerby might be feeling that night.
When we finished the song we sighed in unison.
Next we played “Minor Swing,” “It’s Magic,” and the goofy “Cleopatterer,” a throwaway Jerome Kern song resuscitated on a recording by Joan Morris and William Bolcomb in Lonnie’s collection. I sang a couple of verses, trying to mimic Morris’s agile mezzo-soprano. But as had happened the last time I played with Lonnie, my music felt awkward. I felt a barrier between me and the kind of free improvisation I longed to master. Still, it was so pleasant being with Lonnie and listening to his sure playing.
“Oh, Lonnie, I needed some fun,” I said, feeling so much better.
A quartet of middle-aged suburbanites on a double date passed by; Royal Oak, I judged, or Huntington Woods. Good clothes, but hairstyles that were just a bit too self-conscious. One stooped and dropped some change into Lonnie’s case even though we were on break.
“Thank you!” Lonnie called. “Next time, for you, it’ll be free!”
He played softly, moving around in G minor. “Your friend was by here,” he said.
“My friend?”
“Your friend named Duane.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Lonnie drummed his fingertips on the glossy top of his guitar in a scat rhythm. “Last week you told Lonnie you were going to Las Vegas.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Well, did you win or lose?”
I considered the question. I said, “Every loser is a winner in Las Vegas.”
Lonnie liked that.
I said, “Well, the state of my life tonight is that I did what I intended to do in Las Vegas, and I found out what I wanted to know. Then I came home and found out the rest.”
“The answer was right at home?” Lonnie asked.
“Essentially, yes. And like Dorothy, I had to leave home first to find it. Unlike Dorothy, my answer is a secret. A secret that I didn’t know better than to pursue.”
Lonnie said, “Well, maybe that secret is not such a bad one. Think of the alternatives.”
We played more songs, and I gazed at the passing cars, and up to the black sky. I couldn’t meet the eyes of any listeners who stopped.
I played chords and thought about my parents. They had lived and they had died. They had gotten me off to a reasonably good start in life before it was over for them. What difference might Uncle Guff’s vengeance have made to them? Where they out there somewhere? I didn’t think so, had never believed they’d hung around in the ozone to look after me. I’d always had the feeling they’d moved on that night, moved firmly on without looking back. I was the one who’d needed to look back. Now that was over. Farewell, beloved parents. Someday I too hope to rest in peace.
Lonnie and I continued to play, and my thoughts turned to Uncle Guff.
As he and I stowed our rods and tackle that night, I asked, “Does Aunt Rosalie know?”
“No,” he grunted as he swung our bucket of fish onto the dock.
He never would have told her. Aunt Rosalie’s constitution, while not as delicate as she liked to think, could never withstand the possession of such knowledge.
Now Uncle Guff and I had a secret from the whole world.
I had avoided Duane in the last few days. How could he not guess it, seeing my face? How could this secret not be seen in me by everyone? Looking in the mirror, I could see it myself, there in the lines around my eyes, that terrible secret.
Uncle Guff’s hands were bloody.
It was not innocent blood. Is that what he had protected me from, when he did what he did? My whole body went icy when I thought of that. I pictured myself, with my newfound fierceness, confronting an aging, stupid, selfish Bill Sechrist. What would I have done? How much was I capable of? Could I have tempted myself to pick up an iron bar? What excuses might I have made? Uncle Guff had spared me learning the answers.
Sechrist hadn’t intended for my parents to die. If my father hadn’t agreed to give him the insurance money, my father and mother wouldn’t have died. What, exactly, went wrong? That, I’d never know.
Juanita Sechrist was marked for death days, weeks, months before that night. What of Duane? What was he marked for?
What was I supposed to do now?
I had taken Todd to the veterinarian on Thursday. He looked him over, checked his blood, and did an X-ray.
“Todd here is all right,” said the doctor at last. “He’s just getting old.” Todd looked from the doctor to me with his black shining eyes.
I cried all the way home.
Later that day Minerva summoned me to the Ritz. Of course she told me that her associates were coming up empty on Bill Sechrist. I felt terribly uncomfortable. She wanted in on me.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“I feel—I feel tired.”
She encircled me with her arms. “Of course you do. What a strain all this is for you. I should get Tillie to come and look after you. She gives marvelous back rubs.”
I made no response. Shall I resign myself to her wants?
“Well, how about a nice lu
nch?” she urged. “I’ll order us something. Or we could go out somewhere. Me, I’m feeling better and better.”
She was catering to me. She wanted to appease and charm me, so that I would cooperate with her on the story she was determined to write. She tried to hide her determination from me, but the more she tried, the more I saw it.
I couldn’t prevent her from writing, from working. She was catching up with her life, for God’s sake. She’d suffered so much—a year in a coma! Lingering disabilities!—all because of me. How could I begrudge her what she wanted from me?
When Uncle Guff dies, I’ll have to keep the secret all by myself.
It occurred to me that I could cooperate with Minerva, up to that particular boundary. It was a boundary she need never discover. Maybe I could do that.
_____
I played simple two-note chords and single-note rhythms behind Lonnie. I focused my attention on the music but continued to feel disappointed with my playing. My sound remained constricted somehow, as if my hands had stiffened as I stood there, thinking and playing and trying. Lonnie kicked off “Steeplechase,” and I made an effort to concentrate, breathe, relax. It was a struggle.
A startlingly familiar figure appeared before me in the small crowd of listeners that had gathered, as if someone had suddenly held a crazy mirror up to me.
It was Duane, dressed in the jeans and T-shirt I’d lent him days ago. Could he possibly be as haunted as I was? But he smiled at me. He stood there lounging vertically, as it were, smoking one of his Marlboros. He looked tougher and happier than I’d ever seen him.
Lonnie stepped on the tempo and I followed. People began to clap along, Duane too. His smile grew broader. Lonnie and I pounded out our ending, Lonnie’s last sharp chord ringing in the city night air.
Duane came over to me, took my arm, and said to Lonnie, “Can I borrow her for a minute?”
Lonnie ignored him.
I said, “Sure, Duane.”
We walked together down the sidewalk and stopped in front of the glass window of New Hellas. People inside were eating their dinners. A waiter poured wine. He must have told a joke as he did it, because the people laughed.
Duane said, “I thought I’d find you here. Lillian, I have something to tell you. I quit my job.”
“You did? How come? Gimme a cigarette.”
“Here.” He cupped his hands around a match, and I touched his warm hand as I took the light. He said, “Last night I had a very dark night. A dark night of the soul, Saint John style.”
The both of us had read far too much hagiography growing up. Fortunately, we interspersed it with forbidden texts like Valley of the Dolls and Mad magazine.
“I was home,” he went on, “alone, trying to be honest with myself, for a change.”
I smiled nervously and took a hit from the Marlboro. Its cutting smoke punished my lungs.
Duane said, “I realized that I’ve been adrift without knowing it. Lillian, I finally came to terms with it. I said to myself, Yes, Duane, your mother is dead. Lillian told you the truth. She’s at rest. Mama is at rest.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. He grasped for my hand and brought it down in both of his. “And Lillian, I know…Something told me that now it’s time to move to the next step.” He looked up at me suspensefully, from beneath his floppy hair.
I said, “Yeah? What step is that?”
“I need to find my dad.”
I let out a chuffing, desperate stream of smoke.
Duane said, “I want to tell you, my good friend, that I’m on board with your…with your obsession. It’s the right thing to do. We’ll both find peace, I know, if we can find my dad. And Lillian—are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine.” I summoned all my strength to look at him with a clear and even expression.
“Lillian, I want to talk to you about forgiveness. I…last night I forgave my dad. Can you believe it? And now, I want nothing more than to tell him that.”
“Oh, Duane.”
“It must come as a shock to you, I know. Well, you’ve got your own feelings about it. I wish you could somehow get to the place in your heart where you can forgive him too.”
“Dear Jesus Christ.”
Do I need to tell you? I didn’t know whether to shit green or go blind.
“Lillian, I’m going to devote myself full-time to this quest. I’m going to sell my house, maybe I’ll get twenty or thirty thousand profit out of it. That’ll hold me for a little while. It’ll hold us for a little while. We’ll start in Florida just like you said. Minerva LeBlanc’s working on it, right? Well, how can we fail?”
I concentrated on not fainting. Inside the restaurant the waiter approached the table with a sizzling serving of saganaki. Holding the plate aloft, he flashed a butane lighter over the alcohol fumes hovering there. “Opa!” Oily yellow flames leaped up to the blackened ceiling. The waiter quenched them with a fist of lemon, and the diners, having made their wish, fell to eating.
Duane said, “I rejected all that Catholic stuff when we were growing up. I rejected it all for a long time. We both did.”
I nodded.
His eyes brimmed with gentle feeling. “Forgiveness was the hardest part for me. But you know how I feel right now? Free, Lillian. I feel incredibly free.”
“I’m glad, Duane.”
“Well, you look kind of shook up. You probably need to let this sink in. You probably were ready to write me off.” He laughed joyfully. “But now the new Duane!”
What the hell am I going to do now? I could not let my friend wear himself to tatters trying to find the unfindable. I’ll think of something. I’ll make something up. It would have to be convincing. It would have to sound genuine.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll call you in a couple of days, OK?”
Lonnie kicked off “Me and My Shadow” in the deep bass register, and I joined in, plucking a sixteenth-note line over the top.
The notes flew out and upward from our instruments, in an arc of sound toward the people on the street. We played a string of variations. My hands began to loosen.
A woman threaded her way through the dozen people who had stopped to listen. An alert, intelligent woman, quietly sexy, whose very slightly uneven footsteps suggested a life lived not in safety. Yes, it was plainly a woman who accepted a measure of risk as a matter of course. Minerva LeBlanc, smiling, dropped a piece of folded money into Blind Lonnie’s case and stepped to the edge of the crowd.
“Thank you, lovely lady,” said Lonnie, thumping out his bass notes. Lonnie was right about everything.
Minerva settled her weight evenly on her feet, folded her arms, and listened. She watched my hands as I played.
And just then, on that street corner, my improvisation skills took a sudden leap. A barrier was gone. I found myself able to invent, embellish, juggle, and modify as never before. Blind Lonnie smiled, he poured it on, he shouted with happiness. “Go, Lily!” He handed me the melody.
I dove into it, bending the tune, drawing newness from it, hiding the melody, revealing it, hiding it again. The notes I’d played in the past were not completely gone—my mistakes and my little successes—and I understood then that each note determined the past the instant it was played. The future was nothing but notes waiting to be released. I stood on the nighttime city street and played on and on, better and better, pleased to find it now all so effortless.
__________
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Here is the beginning of the fourth book in the Lillian Byrd Crime Series, Easy Street.
1
I always like a good thick ham sandwich, so I was delighted to find a whole baked ham, flanked by a pot of Polish horseradish and a stack of rye bread, on the buffet table. It was an admirably loaded table: no dainties, just solid cop-fantasy food—you know, the kind of food cops talk about when they’re trying to stay awake on an overnight surveillance. Besides the ham, there was a grill-your-own steak station with a guy to ensure you didn’t ruin yours, a cauldron of Bolognese sauce with a platter of meatballs the size of fists, a dune of steaming pasta to ladle the stuff over, and a handsome green salad. There were boiled sausages and oven-baked chickens, mashed potatoes with some kind of wonderful-smelling cheesy thing mixed in, and the obligatory steamed vegetable medley, touched only by one or two of the younger cops who didn’t know any better.
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 63
