A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

“But this is much better proof.”

  “How?”

  “Well.” She lit her cigarette. “You and I both know there was a melody in the room a moment ago. You whistled it; I heard it. It’s gone now, but it did exist. And in some way it still does exist because it’s out in the air, because you whistled it. It exists but no one on earth knows it now. And if that is the case, where does it exist?”

  “I don’t know.” T-Bone turned to face her. “In our memories?”

  “No. You don’t remember it anymore. Neither do I. But it does exist.”

  “Where then?” He sat back down on the bed.

  She handed him her cigarette and said, “In the mind of God.”

  That was Lisa.

  She was the woman in the photograph that I found in my tin box. She was the woman who looked exactly like my mother. She was the reason that a stranger came into my house and killed me.

  5.

  I felt Lucinda touch my face and heard her say, “Fever?”

  I opened my eyes. She was looking at me very anxiously.

  I turned slightly and could see that I was once more in a hospital room—or still in a hospital room. That would be the more accurate phrase, I thought. Skidmore was standing on the other side of the bed opposite from Lucinda. Deputy Melissa Mathews was beside him. She, alone, was smiling; smiling very sweetly at me.

  I was happy to see Melissa there. She brightened the room. Her chestnut hair always seemed just-washed, her eyes were shy but her posture was bold, and her lips were never far away from a smile. She had a great laugh, a sound like water over round rocks in a cold stream. It was music from nature, not a human sound at all. Unfortunately for her, she was one of the world’s shyest women. Dozens of men had courted her. But she was a self-confessed coward where they were concerned. She could be friendly with someone who had no interest in her, but she was terrified of any man who wanted her attention. She had always been very close to Skidmore for that reason, because she knew he was only interested in his wife. But their friendship had led some, in the past, to suspect that her relationship with Skid was more intimate than it actually was. Happily, those rumors had been laid to rest for several years. For some reason I was very comforted by her presence, though I could not have explained it in words.

  “Why is everyone staring at me?” I asked slowly, staring at Melissa’s cheek.

  “You fell asleep in the middle of our conversation,” Lucinda explained, rousing me from my reverie concerning Melissa.

  “I did?” I realized that I wasn’t sitting up anymore, and tried to clear my head.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked quietly.

  “Stacey Chambers came into the room naked.” But as I was saying the words, I realized that they weren’t actually true.

  Stacey appeared behind Lucinda. She was fully clothed.

  “I only do that when I’m sure you’re asleep,” she told me heartily.

  “Sorry.” I might have been blushing. “The last thing I actually remember is Skid’s coming into the room. And then I was dreaming about the 1920s. How long was I gone?”

  “About a half an hour.” Lucinda, I realized, was taking my pulse. “The 1920s?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Look, I guess passing out like that, it’s got to be fairly normal for a coma victim, right?”

  “Yes,” Lucinda confirmed.

  “And you knew I was asleep. As opposed to being back in a coma.”

  “You were talking and snoring,” Lucinda said.

  “I was talking?” I managed to sit up. “What was I talking about?”

  “You said the name Lisa,” Melissa told me.

  “But I’m not jealous or anything.” Lucinda patted my arm.

  “You were also talking in French for a minute there,” Skidmore added.

  “Wait.” I rubbed my face with my hands. I took a few deep breaths. I tried to be completely conscious. “Wait.”

  “What is it?” Melissa leaned over me.

  “I was talking in French.” I tried to get my bearings. “I was dreaming about the 1920s in Paris.”

  “Yes.” Skidmore leaned a little closer. He could read the look on my face.

  “Jesus,” I mumbled.

  “What is it, Fever?” Lucinda asked softly.

  “Skid,” I began, “Stacey said that my house was a mess when you came to look at it—after I was shot.”

  “It was a mess,” he agreed.

  Skidmore didn’t say anything else. No one did. They seemed to know that I was going somewhere with my thoughts.

  “But I had just tidied up that morning. I remember quite clearly.” I blinked several times, concentrating hard on fully waking up. “Lucinda was going to come over the next day, I believe.”

  “Yes,” Lucinda said, “but the place really smelled like alcohol when I got there—after you were shot.”

  “Well I had been drinking that damned pastis that Andrews brought me,” I admitted. “But I didn’t wreck my living room. I was sleepy.”

  “I get sleepy whenever I drink anything,” Melissa chimed in, trying to support me.

  “The point is,” I soldiered on, “that someone else messed up my house. I think the man who shot me was looking for something, and I might know what it is, because I’ve been dreaming about it.”

  “What do you think he was looking for?” Skid asked.

  “A tin box filled with papers and letters and photographs. Did you find anything like that in my living room? Say, behind the clock on the mantel?”

  “I don’t remember anything about a tin box.”

  “He got it,” I snapped. For some unfathomable reason, the thought of that agitated me greatly. “He got the box.”

  “What was in it?” Melissa asked. “Money?”

  “No,” I said. “Family photos and papers and—personal things.”

  “Why would he want to take stuff like that, Fever?” Skid was obviously skeptical—humoring me a little.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “Maybe this man who shot me said something to me about it before he … I’m saying I’ve been dreaming about the people in it, the people in the tin box.”

  “The—the people in the tin box?” Melissa shot a look to Lucinda. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Maybe you’d better lie back down, hon,” Lucinda said sweetly. “You’re not quite awake yet.”

  “I know I’m not making myself clear,” I mumbled.

  “The problem is, Dr. Devilin,” Stacey explained, “that when you come out of a coma like you did, you don’t just wake up and everything’s fine. It takes you a while to completely wake up.”

  “How long?” I asked her. “How long before I’m completely awake?”

  Stacey looked at Lucinda before she answered. Lucinda nodded.

  “Minimum time is usually half as long as you’ve been in the coma,” Stacey told me, very professionally.

  “I see,” I responded quietly. “And what’s the maximum? How long could this go on? How long could I stay in a foggy state, falling asleep in the middle of sentences? When will that be over—maximum?”

  “Well,” she hesitated. “Maximum time is never. Some people never get completely over it.”

  “Never?” I asked weakly.

  “Very often,” Lucinda went on, “coma patients will have hallucinations for the rest of their lives. Some continue to have the kind of narcolepsy that you’ve just exhibited. And sometimes they relapse.”

  “Sometimes people go back into a coma?” I said a little more loudly than I meant to.

  “Yes.” She tried to display no emotion at all.

  I took in a couple of slow, deep breaths. Again, nobody said a thing.

  “All right, well,” I whispered, “I’m just going to ignore that information. Let me start over again. When can I get out of this bed and go home?”

  “You can’t go home, sugar,” Lucinda said. “You’re going to fall back asleep in a minute. You’re going to keep d
oing that for a while. Some people come out of a coma with all kinds of physical or psychological problems. They need lots of taking care of. This is going to be a gradual thing—even for you. For your first few days, you might not be awake but for a few minutes at a time.”

  “A few minutes?” I didn’t believe her. I felt completely awake.

  “It gets better. I believe that sometime this year you’ll get completely back to normal.”

  “Normal.” Skidmore grinned. “Whatever that was.”

  “Sometime this year I might be back to normal,” I repeated to myself. “A year.”

  “Could be a lot sooner,” Lucinda told me.

  “Coma patients usually wake up in a real state of confusion,” Stacey said. “They don’t know where they are or how they got there. I was very surprised you knew who I was right away.”

  “Some patients have acute dysphasia,” Lucinda continued. “At least you don’t have that.”

  “What is it?” Melissa asked.

  “It’s an inability to articulate any speech,” I told her. “You can’t speak correctly. Or you slur your words so badly that no one can understand you.”

  “Oh.” Skid straightened up. He knew how badly I might take a condition like that.

  “So I can’t go home?” I sat back.

  “No,” Lucinda said firmly.

  “Right.” I bit my lower lip. “Then Skid, can you check my living room for that tin box? It’s blue, about this big, and it has a kind of hunting scene on the cover. Lots of papers and photos inside. It’s supposed to be behind the clock on the mantel.”

  “If you think it’s important.” He sighed.

  “I think it’s the reason I was shot,” I insisted. “I just don’t know why that would be the case. I don’t even know the full significance of those items myself. But I know that someone thought that the contents of that box would alter the course of my life permanently. There was a letter.”

  Lucinda tried to tell me something, but the Chicago jazz band in the hallway began playing and I couldn’t hear what she said over their version of “Wolverine Blues.”

  6.

  “Wolverine Blues” was written by Jelly Roll Morton and recorded in Chicago in 1923. Chicago had become the capital of jazz in the early 1920s after the city of New Orleans closed the brothels in Storyville. That was important to my attacker.

  Jelly Roll Morton, to the great consternation of many others, had declared that he invented jazz—on a Tuesday night in 1902. He was one of the musicians who made the move from The Big Easy to the Windy City, around 1914. There he began writing down his compositions, and in 1915 his “Jelly Roll Blues” was, at least according to him, the first jazz composition ever published. It set down on paper the kind of traditional jazz for which New Orleans had already become famous.

  Unknown to Jelly Roll, a Caucasian woman who called herself Eulalie Echo also came to Chicago in 1914. She had worked in one of the brothels in Storyville. She told everyone that Jelly Roll was the father of her son, although there was no way of knowing whether or not that was true. Jelly Roll was famous and everyone wanted to be connected to him. Eulalie drank a lot, and enjoyed prodigious amounts of cocaine, which anyone could legally purchase at the corner pharmacy for about five cents a box. All the girls were using it. It didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that by 1914 Eulalie was living in Chicago and absolutely believed that Jelly Roll Morton was the man who had gotten her pregnant and abandoned her. Her son, Jelly Roll’s son, had seemed an abomination to Eulalie. She had left his upbringing to other women in the brothel. She had dragged him with her to Chicago, for some reason, but then abandoned him on the steps of a Catholic orphanage. She tied a printed note to his hand that said, “This is the bastard son of Jelly Roll Morton. He’s called T-Bone.” A gangly teenager by then, the moniker was relatively descriptive. That note would later be found in a small tin box.

  Eulalie had left T-Bone to the nuns because she had another son whom she loved, an entirely Caucasian child, and two children were too many to support. The father of the second child was a hog butcher to the world, a man with broad shoulders, another customer of hers but a decent Chicago native—a man whose name is lost to history. That second son’s name was Chester. Chester spent his formative years in the worst part of the south side of Chicago. He grew up hearing all about the evils of the man who had raped his mother and invented jazz. Jelly Roll Morton was the devil to Chester Echo. And that wasn’t the worst of it, according to his mother. The worst of it was that Chester had a half brother, a pestilence that ought to have been rubbed out long ago. But by the time Chester was big enough to do anything about it, T-Bone had left the orphanage, vanished. Some said that he had gone to France to fight in the war.

  Closer to the truth was a short note from a Catholic nun who said that T-Bone had gone to Europe hoping to escape racism, fight in the war, and find jobs playing jazz. He heard Sidney Bechet playing the soprano saxophone in Paris and he took up the instrument. When most of the GIs went back home, T-Bone stayed in Paris. Some of his buddies had tried to tell him that he could become a famous musician if he would only come back to Chicago. Chicago was the capital of jazz. But T-Bone had nothing in Chicago, and in Paris he had found music, respect, wine, great food, and the best scrambled eggs in the world. So he stayed. By 1923 he was the toast of the local Paris jazz scene.

  Still, his buddies sent him letters. They tried to coax him home. They told him all about the King of Chicago jazz, Joseph Oliver, born in 1885 in New Orleans. Oliver grew up as a cornet player in the dance bands for the city’s red-light district, Storyville, where T-Bone had been born. Oliver eventually became so popular there that he was able to cross all economic and racial lines. He played everywhere from the roughest working-class black dance halls to the whitest society debutante parties. Then, in 1919, a fight broke out at a dance where Oliver was playing. The police arrived, took a look around, realized that the men who had been fighting were not only white but also rich, and immediately arrested Oliver and his entire band. They said that the music had been the proximate cause of the fight; its rhythms had incited the violence in the decent rich white men at the party.

  The next morning Oliver got out of jail. He packed up everything he had, got the band together, chartered a bus, and left the South forever. They were all gone by noon.

  By 1922, he was called King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band performed almost every night at Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. Everyone in town was talking about the band. Louis Armstrong was the second cornet player in the ensemble; Sidney Bechet sat in whenever he was in town. In fact, the band ended up being a virtual Who’s Who of the new jazz sound, a hybrid of old style Dixieland and the more sophisticated larger dance band.

  King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and so many other superior jazz musicians were a part of the so-called Great Migration. The national press of the day, in fact, credited the popularity of jazz in the urban north to this Great Migration, which was a movement between 1910 and 1930 of some four million African-Americans away from Southern states, mostly to the North and Midwest. The idea was that African-Americans were hoping to escape racism and find jobs, mostly in the industrialized cities. And since there were more African-Americans in these urban areas than ever before, that explained the sudden appearance of jazz in places like Chicago and, later, New York. That was the somewhat confused and convoluted theory.

  But this assessment also included the fact that a great many Caucasians were equal fans of the sound, and did not overlook the contribution of the entirely Caucasian Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke. He was a great cornet player and composer who was born in Iowa, of all places. After Armstrong, Bix was the most influential brass soloist of the 1920s, usually credited with helping to invent the ballad style of jazz. He taught himself to play without benefit of teacher or role model, and so he never learned the correct fingering patterns for the cornet. Some critics credit this incorrect approach to the
instrument with the development of his original sound. Whatever it was, Bix’s sound was timeless. Alas, Bix, the man, liked to drink, and it killed him. He died at the age of twenty-eight.

  And as so often happens, the end of his life was the beginning of his legend. Once he was dead, everyone who cared about jazz had an opinion about Bix Beiderbecke. He was a saint, he was a criminal, he was a martyr in the cause of art. His Pontius Pilate was bourgeois commerce. His salvation was the invention of jazz. There were controversies about everything in his life: his true name, his actual race, his sexual orientation. It was reported that he’d been murdered by a jealous boyfriend. It was reported that he had taken his own life, leaving a note apologizing for stealing jazz from the African-American ethos. It was reported that he wasn’t dead at all, that his death had been faked so that he could escape gambling debts. A story was even told that he’d been a spy in WWII, always disguised as a woman. Bix had supposedly gotten the idea from Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, who had done the same thing in the courtly intrigues of the sixteenth century.

  In life Bix had been a singularly gifted player and composer. In death he had become a hundred men. That is the nature of legend, of course.

  These legends were more than a fascinating digression for me because Bix made a significant contribution to the Devilin family tree.

  On a quiet Tuesday night early in February of 1924, King Oliver’s band was playing at Lincoln Gardens. It was a huge hall, big enough for a thousand dancers. Second cornet was Louis Armstrong. Sitting in on soprano saxophone was T-Bone Morton, newly returned from Paris. It was early, around midnight. Everyone in the place was talking about what was happening in the stock market. Everyone was getting rich, things looked great, and the more gin they drank, the better things were.

  After a rousing rendition of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Wolverine Blues,” who should walk into the place but Bix Beiderbecke. Everyone knew who he was. Everyone was happy to see him. King Oliver invited him up onto the bandstand. No one noticed the three men at a corner table in the shadows. They apparently weren’t there to dance. They only drank and stared at the band.