Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  I stopped when I heard Harry spit out “Mike!” from across the room. I realize my voice could be heard beyond our little corner. I waited for an answer.

  Nothing. She was still the porcelain doll. There was no expression whatever in her eyes. She just shook her head. Her voice was dead calm.

  “I’m sorry. There is no trouble. You were kind to try to help me.”

  That did it. The steam was gone. I knew I was running on empty. I apologized for what had probably been an absurd scene from her point of view and motioned Harry to the door. I put a twenty in her hands for the inconvenience, although at that moment, I felt more inconvenienced than she was. Someone was playing ping-pong with me, and whether it was Red Shoes, Mei-Li, or both, I was fresh out of clues.

  The corridors were empty when we made our way down the stairs. It was a relief. I wasn’t up to the kind of gauntlet we ran coming in. The door creaked open to a gust of fresh snowflakes that had camouflaged the grit of one of Boston’s oldest sections.

  I felt ridiculous thanking Harry for risking his life on a chase for a nonexistent goose, but he understood. We wished each other a happy Thanksgiving, and he headed up toward Harrison. I offered him a cab ride, but he wanted to walk. The streets were deserted, and the snow-flakes actually felt good on the skin.

  It was only a couple of minutes before a cab answered my wave. I gave the driver the address of my apartment on Beacon Street at Berkeley and then remembered that it was Monday, just before midnight. It felt like at least Thursday. I gave the driver a different address higher up on Beacon Street just above Charles. The driver acknowledged, and I started nodding off in the backseat as we headed down Beach Street.

  I was drifting into neutral as I watched Harry’s fresh footprints in the snow. My last impression was of the steamed-up windows of the coffee shop on the corner and the three sets of equally fresh footprints that came from the door.

  8

  IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT when the cab pulled up outside of Daddy’s Club. The cabbie gave me a gentle nudge, and the brisk bite of the snow-carrying wind brought me the rest of the way back to the outskirts of the land of the living. I was fighting the temptation to jump back in the cab and call it a night, but Monday night is Monday night, and there are some things that feed the soul more than rest.

  I passed a couple of departing, slightly lubricated college kids on my way down the narrow cut-back staircase to the below-ground haunt of one of Boston’s great assets. The club draws a spate of yuppies and college types earlier in the evening, but around midnight they begin to dwindle. After the other clubs and restaurants have closed, Daddy’s pulls in jazz musicians from in and out of town, as well as devoted listeners who can handle the late hours. It undoubtedly violates the city’s code of closing times, but the police give it their best benign neglect.

  The whole room is about forty feet by twenty, with a miniscule bandstand at the front and a bar that runs the length of the left side-wall. It is either meticulously clean or filthy enough to drive cockroaches to cleaner surroundings. I have no idea which, because the lighting, or lack of it, would make a mole feel at home.

  I slid up onto a bar stool at the near end of the bar, and every muscle in my body rose up in rebellion for not taking it home. But then, this was Oz, Valhalla, Never-Never Land. When I came through that door, the world out there dried up and blew away.

  One of the most serious elements of my education at Harvard came from a luck-of-the-draw roommate. My first two months with Harry Ortlieb were, if not hell itself, at least a lower ring of purgatory. Harry was a music major with an addictive penchant for modern jazz. In particular, Harry idolized that rebellious cluster of jazz musicians who took the idiom out of the bounds of comfortable, decent harmony and pushed it into the sometimes discordant world of newfound chords. He personally stocked every recording made in the fifties and sixties by the principal emissaries of that assault on the ear and central nervous system called “bebop.”

  For the first two months of our freshman year, I spent every torturous moment in our dorm room at Holworthy House fighting the urge to rip whatever CD by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus, whoever was fouling the air at the moment, out of his state-of-the-art player and tuck it as far up Harry Ortlieb’s ass as the length of my arm would permit. My only regret in my fantasy was that CDs have no sharp corners.

  Then the third month came, and to my own shock and surprise, if not Harry’s, I started to like it. I started asking for particular pieces and actually listening to Harry’s explanation of what they were doing. Life became not only livable, but I started looking forward to our late nightly CD concerts with Harry playing DJ.

  The effect went further than that. My father/guardian, Miles O’Connor, was, among his many other talents, an accomplished piano player. He drew me to the instrument out of sheer admiration for him. It stuck, and I found that at every stage of my life, whatever demons were haunting me could be tamed, or at least sedated, by an hour or two alone at a piano.

  Enter Harry Ortlieb, and every moment I spent at the keys from freshman year on was turned to working out the intricacies such giants as Thelonius Monk had woven around the old standards. And every Monday late night in recent times was spent in that preview of heaven called Daddy’s Club.

  I GAVE A THREE-FINGER SIGN to Marty behind the bar. He understandingly poured three fingers of Famous Grouse Scotch over four ice cubes. He had the maturity and gentility not to adulterate it with water or some twisted snip from a citrus object.

  That first sip of the Grouse awakened taste buds that went right down to my toes. The second sip a minute or two later soothed the wrinkles off the brow and put this wandering soul deep in the proper attitude to hear and appreciate what “Daddy” Hightower on bass and his trio were doing on the bandstand. Sips three, four, and five carried me through the last chorus of a tune written by the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, that had not been done so tastefully since Charlie did it himself.

  When they finished, I moved across to one of the small, empty tables and settled into serious relaxation between sets. I was halfway to the Land of Nod when I felt a hand the size of a boxing glove on my shoulder.

  “Well, ain’t you the picture of piss and hot sauce?”

  Daddy slipped into, or rather consumed, the chair beside me.

  I nodded toward the bandstand. “That was nice.”

  He knew what I meant. He just smiled. Daddy was a piece of work. He stood six feet four in a crouch and weighed something less than the QEII. He actually dwarfed the stand-up acoustic bass. When he hovered over it, it became like an added appendage of his body.

  Daddy had been in the New York scene in Harlem in the late fifties, early sixties, when Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and, of course, Charlie Mingus were showing people that there was more to music than Lawrence Welk. When Daddy got into it on the bass, he played with such power and imagination that he could drive another musician to play six levels above himself. Some of the big ones used Daddy as a sideman on recording sessions. He was truly in his element.

  Then the late sixties and seventies descended. Rock came along like a tidal wave and pushed some real talent into the backwashes. Jazz clubs withered and died, and the recording industry followed the rock thumpers after the money.

  Daddy actually became a bouncer in a club where a group of giftless whambangers packed in an equally tasteless audience of everything from college rowdies to bikers. One night, Daddy waded in to break up a broken-bottle brawl, and they turned on him. It took surgery and six years before he could move his fingers enough to grip a bass.

  Eventually it came back. Mostly. Some of the musicians from the old days backed him enough to open the cellar club on Beacon Street, and no serious jazz musician ever came to town without dropping by Daddy’s, usually with an instrument.

  I looked across the table at that big old smile and the beads of perspiration on that wide ebony forehead.

  “No,
I mean it was really nice.”

  The smile broadened, and he just nodded.

  “She here tonight, Daddy?”

  He leaned back in the chair, which must have held together by sheer willpower.

  “I thought you might get around to that. Earlier. She asked about you.”

  “And?”

  “She said she might be back. She has a gig over the Hilton. All gown and tux for the snappy set.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He nodded toward the piano on the bandstand. “So meantime, you comin’ up, Mickey?”

  Daddy is the only one who ever made “Mickey” sound like a suitable substitute for “Michael.”

  “I’d only slow you down tonight, Daddy.”

  His eyebrows rode halfway up to his bald crest. “You think you can slow Daddy down?”

  It was my turn to grin. “A herd of elephants couldn’t do that.”

  “C’mon. Let’s give that box a massage.”

  Daddy waved Clyde Williams out of the audience. He’d been sitting ringside with his sax assembled, like a rookie hockey player choking his hockey stick waiting for a nod from the coach.

  We followed Daddy onto the stand. I settled into the piano and Clyde loosened up his fingers, while Daddy got comfortable around his bass. It was at moments like this that I said an extra prayer for Miles O’Connor for putting the dimension of music into my life.

  I caught a little grin on Daddy’s sly face when he yelled over to Clyde and me, “Cherokee.” It’s an old Charlie Barnett tune that’s played at about a hundred beats to the bar. I groaned and my head hit the music rest.

  Daddy held up the three-flats sign and launched an avalanche of notes on the bass that I could feel in the pit of my stomach. By the time I waded in, I had adrenalin coming out my ears, and we did it at a full gallop.

  We went through eight choruses of improvisation on the fly, when Daddy finally held up the closed-fist sign for the last chorus. I said a sincere prayer of thanks.

  There was a nice ripple of applause before Daddy laid down a bass introduction to a mercifully slow and sleepy “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” It was like hot-walking a horse after a race.

  Two choruses had me cruising with my eyes shut, when I heard those beautiful lyrics in the clear, sweet voice of one of God’s angels. The voice was right behind me, and I could feel the satin touch of long, tapered fingers on my neck.

  I didn’t want to turn around, or speak, or breathe to break the spell until that last gorgeous line.

  I turned around and saw that face with the auburn hair and the smile that makes everything else in the room background. I couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t, although we’d only met at Daddy’s a few weeks before.

  Lanny Wells did something in Filene’s executive offices during the daytime, but at night her pumpkin turned into a microphone, and she turned into the finest jazz vocalist I’ve heard since Harry Ortlieb’s recordings by Sarah Vaughn.

  When Lanny spoke, it sounded like she was still singing.

  “Daddy said you’d be here tonight.”

  “Hey, it’s Monday night. How was the gig?” I checked out the evening gown. “Must’ve been way uptown.”

  She smiled. “This is way uptown. You look like you had a day.”

  “And a half. I’ll tell you sometime.”

  Daddy leaned over the piano. “Let’s give ‘em ‘Route Sixty-Six.’”

  I swung back into position, and after a driving pacesetter from Daddy, Lanny took us on a tour of my favorite road to California.

  IT WAS JUST AFTER FOUR in the morning when Lanny and I climbed the steps to street level and hailed the last cab in Boston. We were the only car on the snow-dusted street when we pulled up to her apartment house on Commonwealth Avenue.

  I walked Lanny up the six steps to the door.

  “Would you like to come up for coffee? I grind it fresh.”

  “Would the Bruins like to beat the Rangers for the Stanley Cup?”

  I love to throw sports analogies at her because she looks so cute while she’s grasping for a clue as to what I’m talking about.

  “Does that mean ‘yes’?”

  “It means ‘yes,’ but no. I have to be awake enough to play in the big league in about four hours. If I sleep fast, I’ll get three hours.”

  I gave it a second or two before asking a question to which I really did not want to hear a negative answer.

  “How about a real date? Dinner, North Shore?”

  “When?”

  That sounded promising. “Wednesday? I’ll give you a call. Would you like to?”

  “Would Versace like to see Chanel in the red?”

  It was my turn. “Does that mean ‘yes’?”

  She kissed me. “Call and see.”

  9

  IT WAS ABOUT 8:30 AM Tuesday when I stepped off the elevator at Bilson, Dawes. I never made it down the corridor to my office. I was cruising past the cluster of secretaries’ desks with a paper cup of black caffeine, when Julie waved to me from behind a telephone. Her right hand pointed south, and her expression said, “Poor baby.”

  I got the message. Mr. Devlin wanted to see me.

  I parked the coffee on her desk and caught her attention. She held a hand over the mouthpiece and looked up. I reached over and pushed her “hold” button. She looked indignant.

  “Hey, you just cut off a client.”

  “No, I didn’t. That was your lunch date.”

  “You listened!”

  “Of course. Do me a favor. I may not get serious time in my office till Groundhog Day the way this thing is going with Lex.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Oh, ‘Lex,’ is it?”

  “Only out of his hearing. Otherwise it’s ‘Your Excellency.’”

  “You better not get those two confused. You’ll be seeking employment.”

  “Naw, he wouldn’t fire me. That would be small and vindictive. He’d just eat me alive. To finish the thought, I’ll never get to my mail or messages. Go through it all, will you? If anything looks like an emergency, leave a note on my desk. I may get to it by Friday.”

  I headed for the lion’s den. I heard from behind, “What’s an emergency?”

  “Death threats, malpractice actions, my subscription to DownBeat is expiring. I don’t know. I trust your judgment.”

  THE KING WAS IN his throne room, skimming the Globe and inhaling something black and steaming out of a paper cup. I thought of my own, cooling on Julie’s desk, and wished that I had known that it was the breakfast hour.

  He waved me into the chair in front of his desk. I accepted the invitation, beginning to feel like a golden retriever responding to hand signals.

  As he swung around to face me, his blackish blue suitcoat winged open over his barrel chest to a pair of red suspenders. I couldn’t help thinking that on another man they could be an affectation. Not Mr. Devlin. I sized him up as a man who measured himself by his own standards and to hell with anyone else’s. He was reminding me more of Miles O’Connor every time I saw him. I realized that if I didn’t catch myself, I could slip into something akin to hero worship.

  “What have you got for me, sonny?”

  I wasn’t proud of the catch. There was no way to make it look good.

  “I’ve got a witness, elderly Chinese woman, who kills our client with a positive ID. She says she saw him pull the trigger. Why, I don’t know. It’s hard to read her. She’s wound pretty tight, but what really makes it difficult is that she only admits to speaking Chinese.”

  “Could it be she’s telling the truth? I mean about Bradley.”

  My gaze had wandered to the window, but that last question brought me back to eye contact with a snap. I felt caught like a bug under a microscope.

  “I know I should never believe a client in a criminal case. I know they lie to get the best defense out of you. I know that.”

  “Good. Live by that, sonny. Because if you turn this into a crusade to
free a poor innocent defendant, you’ll be worse than useless to me and the client. You’ll be dangerous. You’ll be looking for evidence to back up your theory instead of the truth. That’s the best way to get blindsided.”

  I gave him the agreement-in-principle nod he was looking for, but he knew there was more.

  “So? Give it to me.”

  “I know that. But I talked to him.”

  “That’s why I’m asking. I want to know what I’m working with here.”

  I sucked in an inch of stomach and looked back into those laser beams.

  “It won’t change the way I work, but you might as well know this, Mr. Devlin. If they accused my grandmother of doing the Brink’s job, I’d be more likely to believe it than that this kid’s guilty. It’s not because of his background, the judge and all. It’s just something about the way he says he didn’t do it.”

  I knew what I meant, but it sounded lame. He took a deep breath before swinging back in his chair. I was ready to be told that he could survive without my help. I had taken the case for Judge Bradley, but heaven knew the judge would be delighted to have the great Lex Devlin in substitution.

  There were times the previous night when being back working on pretrial motions for Whitney Caster seemed almost attractive. But this was morning. I’d had a few hours’ sleep, and I realized that I’d grown fond of the big league. I watched him rub his eyes while I waited for the shoe to drop.

  “How’d you find that witness? I thought the police weren’t giving out the names.”

  I spun out the story of my newfound Puerto Rican contact in the police computer section. I might have been grasping at straws, but I thought I caught the slightest trace of a smile softening those Mount Rushmore features. I was cool on the surface, but inside I was sipping champagne.