Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  Afterwards, when they were lying in each other’s arms, he told her all about it; falling in with the needle fiends. She listened with her head on his chest and afterward, he felt like some great burden had been lifted, and he realized it was the first time he’d ever told anyone his story, all of it. And when he’d finished she’d said nothing, just turned her head and kissed him and they’d fallen silent.

  As he lay with his arm around her, he suddenly thought of Olivia, and waves of guilt rushed through him so forcefully he flinched. He’d slept with plenty of women since his wife had died, had even gotten close to some of them. But Loretta was Olivia’s best friend and suddenly a sense that he had tainted all their shared memories ran through him, a sense of betrayal, of pollution.

  ‘What is it?’ Loretta asked, turning to look at him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, knowing not to bring up the subject.

  ‘You’re thinking about Olivia,’ she said flatly, and Dante saw the tears in her eyes.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  She turned away from him again, and they lay there, each staring at nothing.

  ‘Maybe it ain’t too bad,’ she said, after a while. ‘She’d want us to be happy.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said listlessly.

  ‘You got a girl back in New York?’

  Dante stayed silent for a moment, trying to think of a way to lighten the mood.

  ‘Sure. I got lots of girls. Safety in numbers.’

  He smiled and she rolled her eyes.

  ‘Nah, I ain’t got any girls back in New York,’ he said more solemnly. ‘I ain’t got nothing much at all back in New York.’

  ‘And I ain’t got much here in Chicago neither,’ she said, and Dante didn’t reply, and they stayed like that, seeking refuge in each other, and the dark hours collapsed.

  43

  In the golden light of dawn, a group of men in rumpled suits, carrying musical instruments in cases, looking tired and a little the worse for wear, stumbled into Okeh Records’ Chicago studio to begin a day-long recording session. The men recorded under the moniker Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, even though there were six of them. They had all played in Carol Dickerson’s Orchestra at the Savoy the previous night, and had gone for Chinese food and drinks after the nightclub had closed, and had come straight from the restaurant to the studio without having slept, leaving them fuzzy-headed and contemplative, none more so than Louis, who had been mulling over recent events more than he knew he should have.

  As the recording room was being readied, and the others in the band joked about, Louis sat on a chair in a corner, took his trumpet from its case and assembled it, and as he did so, he thought about the death of his mother the previous year, the death of his first wife, the death of his marriage to Lil.

  He remembered the hope he’d had in him when he’d first arrived in the city, when he ‘d gotten off the train from New Orleans and turned up at the Lincoln Gardens and felt he was witnessing the dawn of a new day. He wondered how all that hope had ended up in slumming parties and buffet flats and go-betweens and exploitation and the people in charge of the city trying their best to destroy the jazz clubs and the musicians who worked in them.

  ‘Be ready in a bit,’ said one of the technicians as he dashed past Louis on his way to the recording booth carrying a cardboard box full of equipment.

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ said Louis, not really bothered by the wait. He looked at the trumpet in his hand, then at the studio as it bustled with his band-mates setting up music stands and arranging sheets, and tuning their instruments, and his mind drifted back to the first time he’d ever entered a recording studio, a year after he’d arrived in Chicago, when he was still playing second cornet for Joe Oliver.

  His old mentor had arranged for the band to go on a whistle-stop tour of dance halls across Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The endeavor was a dangerous one considering the hatred there was festering in the dusty old towns that were on their route. If they passed through a settlement and didn’t see a black face, they carried on going, knowing from bitter experience that to stop and ask where they might buy some food in a whites-only burg could well lead to them getting run out of town, or beaten, or lynched. So much of the journey was spent on the hop, hungry, looking for black people and food.

  Louis whiled away most of the trip staring out of the windows of trains and buses and vans, watching the vast inland ocean of the prairies crawl past. The landscapes were mostly empty, fields with an occasional silo or barn perched here or there, stooping lines of telegraph poles limping their way forlornly across the hinterland, as if they knew their attempt to cross such an endless expanse was inevitably doomed.

  It was boring, especially for a twenty-two-year-old, even if Lil – on whom Louis had developed a crush – was traveling with them. But when they got to Indiana, with its quarter of a million Klansmen and its blanket of racial hate, and they made it to Richmond, they stopped off at the home of the Gennett brothers’ recording company, and Louis entered a studio for the very first time.

  It was a low-rent affair, situated on the grounds of a piano factory, where the brothers signed up whichever musicians happened to be passing through and recorded them then and there. The studio was jerry-built, with rugs and draperies and sawdust shoved into the walls to keep the place soundproofed, mostly; recording sessions still had to be halted whenever a train rattled past on the tracks outside.

  The recording equipment itself consisted of a great conical horn that was connected via tubes to a needle in another room that etched sound vibrations onto a wax cylinder. It was such a primitive and sensitive set-up that any instrument with punch made the needle skip and ruined the recording. So Baby Dodds had to swap his drums for woodblocks, and Bill Johnson had to swap his double bass for a banjo, and Louis was exiled all the way to the very back of the room as his cornet so overpowered Joe’s. And on top of all that the room had to be kept at a steady eighty-five degrees to keep the wax soft and so they had to sweat it out, hour after hour, on the verge of fainting from the heat.

  The recording sessions proved to be the undoing of the band: Joe Oliver stiffed them on their royalty checks, and the Dodds brothers threatened to attack Oliver if he didn’t pay up, and Oliver bought a gun to keep them at bay. The band split, and Lil convinced Louis to go it alone, and five years on, Louis had his own band and they were all getting paid a packet to record in a state-of-the-art studio, equipped with Bell’s Western Electric recording technology. There were no Klansmen outside, no trains rattling past, no boiling heat to contend with, no band leader stealing their money, and blessedly, they’d be recording into a microphone, rather than an inverted megaphone.

  Still, he missed those early days, even though he knew nostalgia was foolish, it being nothing more than homesickness for a place you couldn’t revisit.

  ‘Louis, you all right?’ asked Earl from where he was sitting behind the piano. Louis looked up at him and smiled.

  Even though the rest of them looked like they’d been dragged through a hedge, Earl didn’t have a thread loose. He was perched on his stool with his suit immaculate and his trademark bowler hat and walking cane propped up against the wall to his side. Earl was always the best-dressed musician in Chicago. He’d come up in Pittsburgh, where employers picked up musicians off the street, so looking well-dressed and respectable often meant the difference between paying the rent or not.

  ‘I’m all good,’ said Louis.

  They settled down and spent the morning laying down sides of ‘Don’t Jive Me’, then after lunch they went to the back of the building to smoke some reefers, and then they returned to the studio and set about recording a song called ‘West End Blues’. It was a Joe Oliver number, Louis’ mentor having first recorded it earlier that month in New York with the Dixie Syncopators. Earl and Louis had been practicing their own version of it round at the Ranch all week. The lyrics, which they weren’t recording that day, told the story of a woman angered by a che
ating man, drunk on gin, grabbing a gun and heading to New Orleans’s pleasure district, the West End, to find her man and his side woman and shoot them down. Louis had wondered on those lyrics, whether the woman ever did get hold of her man, really did shoot him down; whether the song, as well as being the wail of a wronged woman, was also a dead man’s blues.

  They ran through the arrangement until they all had it fresh in their heads and were ready to record, then Louis opened the spit valve on his trumpet and cleared the condensation from it. He looked at each player in turn and they nodded they were set, so he turned to the technician who got the wax going, and when he got the signal back, Louis turned to the mic, lifted his trumpet to his lips, and then, for a moment, there was silence.

  He blasted out a flourish to start the tune, a cadenza, a quick, chromatic fanfare that spun and vaulted through the air, and after twelve seconds of rhythmic elasticity, the rest of the band were tumbling along in his wake, at ninety beats a minute, slow by their standards, but fitting to the song and its hazy, shifting arrangement, making it feel like a rhapsody rather than the blues suggested by its title and lyrics. The wistfulness of it was carried in Louis’ trumpet and wordless vocals, in Fred Robinson’s trombone, in Zutty’s shuffle beat, in the tremolos on the piano courtesy of Earl.

  After the cadenza and the first chorus came a duet, then a solo, then a second and a third chorus, then a gap for improvisation, and then a final chorus and then there was the coda, rounding it all off.

  Three minutes after they’d started, they were looking at each other, grinning and high, washed in the song’s beautiful calm, knowing they’d recorded something worthy of their talents, something that would stand the test of time.

  Until Zutty mistimed the cymbal clop that was supposed to bring the song to an end and the whole recording was ruined, bringing everything to a crashing halt, sucking the energy out of the room. Everyone looked up in silence, as if they’d all been shaken from a trance, some sultry dream the song had hypnotized them with.

  As they realized what had happened, one by one they turned to glare at Zutty, and Zutty shrugged. Then they turned to look at each other, wondering wordlessly what the hell had just happened, how close they’d come to capturing that perfect thing they all knew was out there.

  Then it was Earl of all people who started laughing and shaking his head, and the rest of them sighed and Louis rubbed his temples and everyone cursed Zutty and called him a fool in an outpouring of exasperation and Zutty grinned embarrassedly.

  In the room adjoining, the technician loaded up a new piece of wax, and they all set themselves up once more, ready to record again, to try and recapture the perfection they’d almost caught just a few minutes before.

  ‘Okay, let’s try it again,’ said Louis, trying to sound bright, and he nodded at the technician and they all started again. And on the second attempt they were halfway through the tune when Zutty messed up once more.

  ‘These things happen,’ he said, in response to the curses being hurled his way. ‘All the time.’

  So they set up again, and tried to compose themselves, knowing they were on the verge of something great, something timeless, and they had to get it right.

  And on the third attempt, they did.

  44

  Stanley Taylor, the go-between’s brother, was still in semi-official custody in the Federal Building on Adams Street, but he had managed to get through to his runaway sibling and they had arranged a meeting – Ida and Michael were to go to a chop-suey joint near Cottage Grove, where they’d meet with the missing go-between, and if he told Ida and Michael all they wanted to know, Stanley would be released from the holding cell he was in.

  When Ida and Michael received the details, they put the other cases they’d been assigned on hold, booked out a car from the pool and headed south for the meeting. As they drove through mid-afternoon traffic, Ida got the sense they were being followed and, not sure if the bombing was still rattling her nerves or not, she kept checking the rearview and side mirrors, catching glimpses of a grey sedan a half a block behind them.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Michael.

  ‘The grey sedan in the left lane about five cars back.’

  Michael looked in the rearview. ‘Should we make a loop?’

  ‘No, let’s pull over after the next intersection, get a look at them.’

  Michael nodded and drove through the next junction and waited till the sedan had passed through it, too, so there was nowhere for it to turn off, and then he pulled over to the sidewalk. The sedan drove past them and they caught a glimpse of two men inside it – one in his thirties, mustachioed, with a brown bowler hat on, and another, the driver, younger and clean-shaven, wearing a shirt and waistcoat.

  ‘Recognize them?’ asked Michael after they’d driven past, and Ida shook her head.

  ‘You get the license plate?’ he asked.

  Ida nodded.

  They continued their journey, parked up off 63rd Street, and crossed a block to a crumbling old building with a neon sign outside it: Chu Gow Noodle Parlor – Authentic Mandarinic Cuisine.

  The place had dozens of tables positioned in a neat grid, and dim lighting, and red velvet coverings all over the walls, making it feel furtive somehow, mysterious. They picked a table with a view to the door and waited. Ida lit a cigarette and peered at the paintings on the walls; Chinese gods and wise men and beautiful women in flowing gowns, and dragons curling through banks of clouds.

  Then the front door opened and a man stepped in off the street, tall, young, good-looking, light-skinned. He scanned the faces of the people at all the tables, looking for someone.

  ‘I think that’s our man,’ Ida said, and Michael nodded.

  He spotted them and Michael raised a hand, and the man wandered over.

  ‘You the two Pinks?’ he asked, and they nodded. He glared at them, and sat.

  ‘I’m Randall Taylor. Y’all got my brother arrested?’

  ‘He hasn’t been charged with anything,’ said Michael. ‘And he won’t be if you tell us what we want to know.’

  The man stared at them a moment longer, taking them in, and Ida looked him over and could see how he would make a good go-between; with his light skin and straightened hair, he was the good-looking, non-threatening type of Negro who would be trusted by Gold Coasters going on safari in the Southside.

  The waitress brought them over the bill of fare and Ida and Michael waved it away, but Randall took a copy and scanned the dishes.

  ‘This on you?’ he asked, and Michael nodded, and Randall ordered barbecued pork and rice, and a side of greens in oyster sauce, and beers for all of them. Ida could tell the food order wasn’t just for show – the man was hungry, looked like he hadn’t eaten in days.

  ‘Where you from?’ he said to Michael, picking up on the accent.

  ‘We’re both from New Orleans.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he said, staring from Michael to Ida. ‘So what you wanna know that’s so important you done locked up Stanley?’

  ‘We’re looking for Gwendolyn,’ said Ida softly. ‘We’ve been hired by her mother. We heard you saw her on the day she disappeared.’

  ‘Gwen’s disappeared? When?’

  ‘The twenty-seventh. The day she came to Bronzeville to meet you, looking for Coulton. No one’s seen her since.’

  Ida filled Randall in on the events that had happened that evening, culminating in Gwen’s probable abduction from outside the train station. Randall listened to it all, and his anger seemed to dim, and Ida could see that he cared for Gwendolyn and was upset by what had happened to her.

  ‘She called me up the day before,’ he said, when Ida had finished speaking. ‘Said she was looking for Chuck, that she needed to speak to him, said she wanted to meet me to find out where he was.’

  ‘Why did she think you’d know?’

  ‘No idea. I didn’t have a clue where he was.’

  ‘But you met with her anyway?’

  ‘I liked t
he girl,’ Randall said. ‘I wanted to help her out. Chuck had told me about her. You know she tried to kill herself a few times, right? I was worried she might try again, that’s why I came to meet her. She was telling me she was finally going to break it off with Chuck. That she didn’t care what her parents thought anymore.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ida. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘So we talked a bit and I calmed her down, and then she went on her way.’

  ‘Went on her way where?’

  Here Randall let out an exasperated sigh, as if Ida had asked the one question he didn’t want to answer. Then the waitress arrived with their drinks. She put down a blue-and-white china teapot and three tiny matching cups and headed back to the bar. Michael picked up the teapot and Ida watched as he poured beer from it into the cups.

  ‘She asked me if I knew where Chuck might be,’ Randall continued. ‘See, Chuck and Lloyd had a buffet flat they rented in Bronzeville, a crash-pad, but a few months ago they let the lease slide on the place, and then they rented a new one they didn’t tell anyone about, except me. They didn’t want their names on no leases so they paid me to use mine. Gwen had been down to the old flat, found out they weren’t renting it no more, and figured I’d know where the new flat might be. So I gave her the address of the new place and let her get on her way.’

  Randall took a sip from his beer, and Ida eyed him. She knew he was telling the truth, but still his story didn’t make sense.

  ‘So you gave Gwen the address, she went there, saw them involved in some blood-soaked crime and they abducted her. And now she’s missing. You know what it was they were doing there?’ asked Ida.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know where the flat is?’

  ‘Sure. Back o’ Yards.’

  Ida frowned and turned to look at Michael; the Back of Yards was not the neighborhood for the crash-pad of a man about town.

  ‘Why there and not Bronzeville?’

  ‘Chuck and Lloyd said they wanted somewhere a little more private.’ He smiled as he said it, and there was something twisted to his expression, as if a screw had been turned in his cheek, and his lips had lifted into place with a sinister automation. Ida looked at him once more – the approachable-looking man who made money selling the urban black experience to privileged whites – and something about him seemed off, and she wasn’t sure if it was just the man who was making her feel that way or if the bombing was still making her jump at shadows.