I took a breath of the cold night air and started across the courtyard to the front entrance, walking carefully through the slush. I made it to the lobby without slipping.
Inside the lobby, the little coiled radiator opposite the mailboxes was hissing like a viper. I stared up the stairs with foreboding. It wasn’t just the climb. God only knew who was waiting for me in my apartment this time. And this time, I was virtually helpless. Unarmed. Unmanned. Unable to react.
I climbed the stairs a step at a time. When I got to the landing, I peered down the hall. The wreckage from the afternoon had been cleaned up and someone had nailed a piece of plywood over the hole in the ceiling. I walked slowly down the hall, keeping my eyes fixed on the door to my apartment. There was a note taped to the door.
I thought maybe it was a message from Karen—a goodbye note. But it turned out to be an eviction notice from the management. I crumpled the paper up and shoved it in my coat. The last straw.
It took me a couple of minutes to fish my keys out of my pocket. I fitted them in the lock, turned the handle, and let the door fall open—resigned to anything that was in store.
At least, I thought I was resigned to anything. But when I saw Karen, curled up in my pieced-together armchair, I almost wept. She stirred as I came into the room, stretching her arms and smiling at me sleepily.
“I thought I told you to leave,” I said with a stab at sternness. But my heart wasn’t in it.
“Actually,” I said, hobbling over to the couch and lowering myself in stages to the cushions, “I’ve never been happier to see another person in my life.”
“Christ, what did they do to you?” Karen said as she watched me sit down.
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that.”
Karen got up, walked across the room, and sat down beside me on what was left of the couch. She put a hand to my face and stroked my cheek gently. Her lip trembled as if she was going to cry. I studied her turned-up lip and smiled.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, laying my hand on top of hers.
“Poor bear,” she said softly.
She tried to pull me to her. When I groaned, she jerked her hands away as if she’d burned them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking pained for me. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re here,” I said. “No need to be sorry.”
“Couldn’t leave you in the lurch,” she said with a smile.
“Yes, you could have. You should have—for your own sake. But I’m very glad you didn’t.”
“You need some rest,” she said. She stood up. “Let’s get to the bedroom. I’ve flipped the mattress over. It’s thin, but it’s sleepable.”
“I’m afraid I’m not going to be much fun for a while,” I said with a sigh.
“You’re not going to do anything—for a while,” Karen said, holding out a hand to help me up. “Let Karen do all the work.”
I took her hand in mine. “Thanks,” I said gratefully.
20
PAIN WOKE me up, around nine that Sunday morning. Pain that had circled around the bed all night long, and in the morning light had driven its beak into my back, my shoulder, my leg, my gut. I didn’t know where to reach first. As the sleep left me, the throbbing became even more intense. I bit my lip to keep from groaning out loud and waking Karen, who was still sleeping soundly beside me.
I tried getting out of bed, but for a full minute I simply couldn’t move. I finally managed to push myself upright and swing my legs to the floor. The effort made me break into a sweat. I wondered despairingly how I was going to make it through the day. In the movies, when a guy got beaten up, he was as good as new the next morning, except maybe for a few painted-on bruises and contusions. In real life, the pain stayed with you, like a lesson that was memorized by your body and that was relearned, minute by minute, with every breath you took. In fact, that lesson was the whole point of the beating. Jordan had done a good job.
Just the thought of that vicious, dead-eyed son of a bitch made me start to tremble with anger. As I was falling asleep the night before, he was all I could think about, in spite of Karen. He was all I could think about at that moment. I wanted to pay him back so badly, I could feel it in my flesh, like another bruise.
And at the same time, I knew, in my head, that Jordan was only one of my problems. Fantasies of revenge weren’t going to get me out of the trouble I was in with Bo and his boss or with the police. Only Lonnie could do that. Finding Lonnie was the key. Only Lonnie could tell me what had happened to the lady. With Jenkins dead, only Lonnie could tell the cops that he had registered at that motel using a false name—my name. It was a good thing that Karen had relied on her heart instead of her head the previous afternoon. Without her around to point the way to Lonnie’s old friends, I didn’t know how I would have begun to hunt for him. To be perfectly honest, without her around, I don’t know how I would have gotten through the night.
I stared at Karen, sleeping on the bed—at her long brown hair, her upturned mouth, her tan shoulders, her breasts—and knew that I was falling in love with her. It was that simple. Only it wasn’t quite that simple.
I wanted and needed to protect what I loved. Banged up the way I was, I wasn’t sure I could do that. I wasn’t sure I could be there if Karen needed me, the way she’d been there when I’d desperately needed her. And then there was Lonnie.
I’d wanted to kill him the night before. I still hated him for senselessly involving me in his drug deal. But in the cold light of a winter Sunday morning, I knew that I couldn’t fairly blame him for the beating I’d taken. Nobody had made me hold out on Lewis and Jordan. Nobody had made me a friend to Lonnie. I’d chosen that part myself.
I stared at Karen again and wondered if I was showing loyalty to him to make up for the way I felt about her. If I was, it could lead us both into trouble—following Lonnie’s road to Fire Lake. My guilts could get us both killed.
******
I managed to make it down the hall to the john. I took a couple of muscle relaxants and a double dose of painkiller, then stripped down and stepped into the tub. I stood under the shower head for a long damn time, letting the hot water pour down my back and legs. Gradually the painkillers kicked in, and I didn’t feel so bad anymore—about my aches and pains, about Lonnie, about anything. Then Karen came into the shower and I felt better still.
We switched places under the shower head. She stood facing the shower for a moment. When she turned back to me, her pretty face was beaded with water, her tangled hair was jeweled with it. She smiled her pouty smile and I felt like taking her right there—in spite of my bruises.
We switched again and she picked up a washrag, rubbed soap into it, and began to wash my chest. She washed my arms, carefully avoiding the multicolored bruise on my shoulder. She washed down my stomach, scarcely touching the blood bruises on my chest and gut. When she got to my groin, she held me for a moment. I grew hard in her hand.
“Karen,” I said plaintively, over the hammering noise of the shower. “You’re torturing me.”
She stroked me and sank to her knees. Karen looked up at me, through the spray of the shower. Her blue eyes were dark and drunken-looking. She shut her eyes sleepily and I shut mine.
******
After the shower, Karen fixed coffee, eggs, and toast for us in the kitchen. The place smelled of coffee, browned bread, and butter. Karen found some paper plates and plastic ware, left over from a New Year’s Eve party, and, naked, we ate breakfast on the living room couch. It still felt like the sixties to me, casually eating breakfast across from my naked lover. And the way the room was disarrayed, the patchwork chair, the confetti cushions, the way the winter sunlight lit up the floor and walls, the shivery coolness of the room, only added to that larkish feeling of freshness, of impulsiveness. Except we were grown people, not college kids, and we had a lot more to think about than making love again.
“That was very nice,” I said, sipping the coffee.
“I liked it too,” she said, and her eyes wrinkled up with pleasure.
“You know, I’ve never understood that. I mean, what’s to like?”
“Giving pleasure to someone you care for is...sexy.”
“You’re sexy,” I said.
“I used to think I was,” she said sadly.
“What changed your mind?”
“I had to do some things,” she said, “when Lonnie and I had habits. It kind of turned me off to sex.”
I reached out and touched her leg. “You’ve made a spectacular recovery.”
She laughed. But the sadness stayed with her.
“I wish we’d met a long time ago,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
After a moment, Karen shook off her mood. “Are we going to go look for him today?”
“I am,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” I said, “that I still think you should go home to St. Louis.”
To my surprise, Karen didn’t immediately disagree. Instead, she asked a very sensible question. “What happened yesterday before the police came?”
I told her the whole thing—about Bo, Maurice, and the guy with the shotgun.
“They were looking for cocaine?” she asked when I was done.
I nodded. “My guess is that whoever they work for fronted Lonnie some crack, and he lost it.”
“Who was he supposed to sell it to?”
“I don’t know, Karen. Somebody at that motel, maybe. Maybe the bikers. Jenkins said they dealt dope. They might have beaten Lonnie up and taken him off, with Jenkins’s help.”
“And then he tried to kill himself.”
“It might have seemed like the only thing to do. Look what happened to Jenkins.”
“Poor Lonnie,” Karen said, shaking her head. “He never did have any luck.”
I laughed mordantly. “That’s what he said when I pulled out of the motel. That he had no luck, at all.”
“You think those black men killed the clerk?”
“I’m sure of it,” I said.
“But he didn’t have the crack.”
“No,” I said. “They think Lonnie still has it. That I helped him rip them off.”
“I guess we have to talk to Lonnie to find out what really happened.”
“We?” I said.
She held up her right hand before I could finish objecting. “Harry, I’ve got to stay. The people you want to talk to don’t know you. They barely know me. But they’ll talk to me.”
I thought it over. If I hadn’t been beaten up, if I had more time, I could have managed on my own. I’d have to lean on people, but I could get them to talk. Under the circumstances, however, Karen’s logic was indisputable.
“So, it’s settled?” she said, getting up from the couch and starting down the hall to the bedroom.
I said yes. But she didn’t hear me. She was already in the bedroom, getting dressed.
21
I LOADED my pants pockets with muscle relaxants and painkillers, before making my way slowly down the stairs. I also pulled the Gold Cup and a spare clip out of the drawer of the bureau and stuck them in my pea coat. Karen had gone down ahead of me, to warm up the car. I wasn’t going to be able to drive—at least, not without working up a sweat. Besides, she knew where we were going and I didn’t.
Outside it was a bitterly cold December morning. High clouds chased across the blue sky, giving the daylight the changeable, uneven quality of light before a storm. It would snow before the day was out and long before Karen and I were done with our search. I hobbled past the ice-shagged dogwoods and down the concrete steps to the lot.
By the time I finally made it into the passenger seat of the Pinto, I’d worked up a sweat. I knew I’d loosen up as the day went on, and my muscles warmed up, although bouncing in and out of the cold wasn’t going to do me much good. At that moment I was glad Karen was with me.
I stared at her for a second. She was wearing her tatty fur jacket and blue jeans. With her hair in that bun and her face made up, she looked older and less vulnerable than she had in the apartment. More like the off-duty elementary-school teacher she really was.
“Ready?” she asked cheerfully.
I nodded.
Karen put the car in gear and backed slowly out of the lot onto the side street running parallel to the Delores. She drove up to the corner of Burnett and pulled to a stop.
“Where to first?” I said as we poised there at the corner.
“St. Bernard, I think,” Karen said.
“What’s in St. Bernard?” I asked.
“A music store where Lonnie used to hang out. His old manager, Sy Levy, owns it and a little recording studio behind the store. Lonnie made his first tapes in Sy’s studio.”
“What makes you think Lonnie might have contacted Levy?”
“Before Lonnie got hot and went off to Hollywood, he and Sy were very close.” She ducked her head and added: “Sy was very good to me, too. When Lonnie and I were down-and-out in St. Louis in ‘73, Sy sent me money to keep us going. It wasn’t like he could spare it, either. He runs a shoestring operation.”
“You think Lonnie might have touched him up?” I asked.
“My guess is that Sy would be the first person Lonnie’d run to, if he needed money or a shoulder to cry on. Sy’s a warmhearted man. That’s why his business has never gone anywhere. He always thinks about his musicians before he thinks about himself, and he never forgets an old friend. He’s just the opposite of the kind of sharks Lonnie tied up with in L.A. It took Lonnie a long time to learn the difference. He thought all managers were like Sy, nice men who’d look out for him and do the right thing by him.” She laughed bitterly. “Christ, was he ever wrong.” She glanced over at me. “You want to give Sy a shot?”
“Sounds promising,” I said.
“Then give me some directions,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
I gave her directions to St. Bernard. Karen turned left onto Burnett and we were off.
******
We found Sy Levy’s Music World on Vine Street in the ground floor of a long two-story red-brick apartment building on the southern fringe of the old blue-collar, good Catholic neighborhood of St. Bernard. Karen let me out in front of the store, while she went to find a place to park.
I’d kept an eye on the rearview mirror as we were driving over, just in case we were being tailed. But if Bo and his friends were following us, they were following from a distance. And if Jordan was dogging me, he was in an unmarked car. Still, I didn’t let Karen out of my sight as she pulled around the corner and parked the Pinto in front of an old clapboard KOC hall. When I saw her get out of the car and start walking toward me, I took my first look at Levy’s shop.
From a distance, his store was indistinguishable from the half-dozen other shops lining the block—just one more storefront on the ground floor of the apartment building. To my surprise, there were no instruments hanging in the window—no saxophones dangling like salamis in a butcher shop, no drum sets with their sparkling cheerleader trim and big white bellies. Instead, Levy had hung dozens of old 45’s from wires. They ran in rows from the top of the window to the casement, like a curtain of hot wax.
I examined the titles while I waited for Karen. There was Elvis singing “Mystery Train.” There was Nervous Norvus doing “Ape Call.” There was Fess Parker and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Jerry Lee. Little Richard. Carl Perkins on the Sun label. There were a few artists from the sixties, too. Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave. And a couple of rockers from the seventies. But from the preponderance of the evidence, it was clear that Sy Levy had lost his heart to rock ‘n’ roll about 1956.
I peered through the curtain of records, into the shop itself, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sy. All I could see were peach crates full of records—some of them arranged on tables, with index and artist cards in them, some of them stacked on the worn wooden floors. A few microphones, angling from sta
nds, were scattered among the crates. And a couple of big black Fender amplifiers, with finned horns on the high end, were sitting in opposite corners. There were more 45’s glued to the walls, along with several album covers, including Elvis’s first EP for Sun.
Karen caught me peering through the window. “See anything you like?” she said with a smile.
“Christ,” I said, “it’s like a birth-of-rock ‘n’ roll warehouse. Some of those records are worth a fortune.”
“That’s Sy,” Karen said. “That’s his whole way of life you’re looking at. His whole treasure. Wait till you see the studio.”
She opened the shop door, and a little bell on a spring jingled tunelessly. Karen stepped in and I followed her. There was no one in the shop itself. No one guarding the old NCR register, sitting on a glass display case by the door. I glanced at the display case. It was empty, save for a dozen red plastic inserts for 45’s. The glass panels were clouded over with dust and grease. The whole store smelled of dust, mildewed cardboard, and damp, radiated heat.
“Where is he?” I said, glancing at Karen.
She pointed to a corridor on the far side of the room. “In his studio. Can’t you hear it?”
And all of a sudden I could hear it—a faint tinny sound of music, like the high-pitched buzz you pick up when you pass someone wearing headphones.
Karen smiled nostalgically. The close, dead-end atmosphere of the shop clearly had a different meaning for her than it did for me.
“This is where Lonnie made his first record,” she said, looking a little dreamy. “This is where we had some good times.”
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