Drumsticks

by Charlotte Carter

  That smarmy feeling was coming back. Dr. Benson was sagging, on the verge of weeping. I was ripping open a wound. Maybe more than one wound—I could just as easily write in my head the dialogue for the arguments he must have had with Black Hat over young Felice. I had to think of something to turn Benson in a different direction.

  “I wonder,” I said suddenly, “if I could have a glass of water.”

  “Yes, surely.”

  It took a couple of tries before he could rise from his seat. He winced from what were surely arthritis pains in his limbs, and used his hand to brace his back as he walked toward the kitchen.

  As soon as he rounded the corner, I hurried over to the fireplace. In addition to the ones in the display case, there must have been twelve dolls artfully arranged at the corner of the mantelpiece, the Dilsey and Mama Lou duplicates among them. Ida didn’t sign her work, but I didn’t see how these could have been made by anyone else. All the models I had seen on her folding table in Union Square were represented here.

  There was also a sweet photo of Black Hat, arms around his mother, in a silver frame.

  I was back in my chair when Dr. Benson returned. He handed me the water tumbler and I dutifully drained it.

  “I was just admiring those figures above the fireplace,” I told him. “They’re charming. Where do they come from?”

  He glanced over at the dolls. “I’m not sure. My wife buys them from a seamstress she knows, I believe.” He nearly laughed then. “She has a mania for them, as you can see. They’re everywhere you look in the apartment.”

  “They’re so lovely. Do you think she’d mind if I asked her for the lady’s name?”

  “Lenore is out tonight.”

  “Do you expect her back soon?”

  “Not for some time.”

  “I see. Well, actually I think that takes care of the questions I had for you, Dr. Benson. I’d just like to add my condolences for your loss. I’m sorry about Kevin.”

  “Thank you, Detective Hayes. I wish you would—”

  He stopped there.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The girl’s mother—she must be suffering over what’s happened. I know she must be. I’d like to … Would you … if you speak to her—”

  “Yes, I will, Dr. Benson. I’ll tell her you’re sorry to hear about Felice.”

  I waited a few minutes out in the hall before calling the elevator. Don’t have kids is what I was thinking. Don’t ever open yourself up to the unimaginable grief the Bensons, or for that matter Felice Sanders’s mother, must be dealing with.

  Downstairs, Mike folded the magazine he was reading so I couldn’t see the cover. I was betting it was some sex maniac crap.

  I didn’t give him time to take up where he left off with me. I said good night on the fly and was through the revolving door before he could speak. But then I stepped back inside the lobby, and caught Blue Eyes reaching for the magazine.

  “You’ve come to your senses,” he said. “I knew you’d be back.”

  I borrowed a phrase from Leman. “You’re not too dumb, are you?”

  He flashed a killer smile.

  “And yes, it is Miss. Now, let me ask you a couple of questions, Mike.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you ever meet Kevin’s girlfriend? Ever see him with a young woman at all?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I see. One other thing: the Bensons must have been real shaken up when they lost their son.”

  He nodded grimly. “I feel sorry for them. They’re decent people.”

  “What does Lenore Benson do with her days—surf Fifty-seventh Street?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You know, shopping. I mean, she doesn’t seem to spend much time at home. Am I right?”

  “Not lately she doesn’t. But she’s not out shopping. That’s for sure.”

  “You mean you know where she is?”

  “Yes. I got a cab for them—that day.”

  “What day?”

  He took a quick survey of the lobby before answering, “The day she lost it.”

  “Lost it? What did she lose?”

  “‘It.’ You know. He carried her out one day. She was stiff as a board and talking … crazy.”

  “You mean crazy for real.”

  He nodded. “Like I said, I whistled up a taxi. I heard him tell the cabbie they were going to Payne-Whitney. She hasn’t been back since.”

  Payne-Whitney. That wasn’t a chic new women’s boutique. Nor was it an investment house. It was a famous, very expensive psychiatric facility with a view of the East River just as impressive as the one from the Bensons’ living room.

  CHAPTER 12

  Deep in a Dream

  She crossed her legs exactly the way a woman should.

  Lenore Benson looked fabulous.

  She also looked fifteen to twenty years younger than her husband.

  The exquisite dove gray frock and luminous pearl necklace didn’t hurt, but I had the feeling she would look fabulous in a flour sack. She was an immensely beautiful woman.

  One look told me why the oh-so-proper Jacob Benson chose her to be the woman on his arm at the Wealthy Negroes Ball. And the hostess for those important dinner parties with his medical colleagues. And the mother of his child.

  My guess was that Lenore Benson was a transplant from the South—one of those unreal black belles whose remarkable grace was an ironic legacy from the example-setting white belles who had trained and owned their ancestors, and sometimes blithely sent them to their deaths.

  Very likely the salespeople at Bergdorf’s greeted Mrs. B by name. Very likely she could identify a cold meat fork at thirty paces. But she also headed literacy campaigns, ran a birth control clinic, and knew how long ham hocks should cook.

  “Oh yeah. She’s nuts all right.”

  Leman Sweet’s words sounded crass, insensitive, true.

  Whatever Mrs. Benson had been, wherever she was from, she was somewhere else now. Her statue-like placidity and the checked-out expression in her eyes told me so.

  Sweet and I were watching her through the doors of the dayroom. We were waiting for her psychiatrist to join us.

  “Why do you think Benson lied?” I asked. “Well, not exactly lied. He just implied she was only out for the evening.”

  “Probably ’cause he thought it was none of your business,” Leman said. “This headshrinker feels the same way. He won’t say much and the law says he don’t have to. But he can’t stop the police from investigating a crime. We got a right to talk to anybody no matter how crazy they are, if they might know something about a missing kid.”

  “Or a murder,” I added.

  “Yeah. Or a murder. Anyway, this doc says we can ask her a couple of questions, for all the good it’s going to do. She’s on a lot of cool-out medicine and sometimes she won’t even talk to him.”

  A small white man with silver hair walked swiftly through a set of doors at the other end of the hall, heading toward us. The headshrinker, as Sweet called him, greeted us civilly enough. He would remain in the room, he informed us, while we questioned his patient. But we had to realize how profoundly unresponsive Mrs. Benson had been lately. Her son’s death had sent her spiraling into the kind of depression she might never come out of.

  He held the door for me. Only when he placed his hand on my back and began guiding me into the sunny, tranquil blue room did I realize how hesitant I was to step inside. I had to admit, the “quiet room” gave me the willies.

  But when Mrs. Benson looked up at us in that kindly grande dame way, I felt much better, almost at ease, almost normal.

  At Leman’s encouragement, once again I took the lead in talking to “her kind.”

  “Mrs. Benson, how do you do. I’m Nanette Hayes. This is Sergeant Sweet from the city police. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

  “More oranges?” she said. “You’re too kind.”

  For the next five
minutes or so she made no responses at all, not even one of the enigmatic variety we had just heard. But then something I said seemed to strike a chord.

  “We’re worried about something, Mrs. Benson. It’s Felice Sanders. No one has heard from her for a long time. We thought maybe you could help. Do you remember when you last spoke with Felice?”

  “Yes. A lovely girl,” she said. “Lovely prostitute. Oh dear, what did I say? I meant ‘posture.’”

  “What did she say when you spoke to her?”

  “It couldn’t be helped.”

  “What was it that couldn’t be helped?”

  “Unsuitable, completely unsuitable.”

  I looked up at the psychiatrist, whose face was unreadable.

  “Please,” I said to him, “we know you’re here to help Mrs. Benson, not us. But you do know this girl’s missing, don’t you? Detective Sweet told you the police are looking everywhere for her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m asking you—did she really talk to Felice Sanders? Do you think Mrs. Benson knows what happened to the girl?”

  His impassive face softened and finally he shook his head. “I really don’t know.”

  When Sweet refused to stop staring at the doctor, he repeated his disclaimer: “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  “I saw the beautiful collection of dolls you have at home,” I said to Lenore Benson. “Could you tell me where to buy one?”

  “Yes. She’s a lovely woman. Very talented. Someone to talk to.”

  “Who is that?” I asked. “Do you mean Ida Williams?”

  “All of them. There’re so many to choose from.”

  “So many dolls, you mean?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  She reached out convulsively then, as if trying to catch one of those oranges she had mentioned a while ago. It was then that I noticed the hatch marks across her wrists. Leman saw them too. Just as quickly as she had made the gesture, her hand was back in her lap and she was once again the picture of unearthly composure.

  Leman spoke then: “Mrs. Benson, I have a photograph I’d like you to look at. Do you know who this man is?”

  He placed the copy of Miller’s photo into her hands.

  “Julian! Good heavens, it’s Julian. And doesn’t he look well?”

  “You’re identifying this man, Mrs. Benson?” Leman asked skeptically.

  “I should think I’d recognize Julian Bond when I see him, young man. He’s sat at my table often enough.” She handed the sheet back to Leman with a gracious smile.

  “Mrs. Benson, do you know a man by the name of Miller?” I asked.

  When I got no answer, I added, “Or Lyle Corwin?”

  “I’m sure his name is Julian, dear,” she said, her flinty tone providing a hint of the immovable steel magnolia she must have once been.

  “I think we ought to wrap this up now, don’t you?” I asked Sweet.

  He nodded agreement, but then said, “Just a minute.” Sweet took pains to make eye contact with her. “Mrs. Benson, is Dan Hinton a friend of yours?”

  I looked piercingly at him but said nothing.

  I offered my hand to Lenore Benson and thanked her for speaking with us. She delivered her greatest line in reply to that.

  She said, “In the end, we all do … don’t we?”

  It had not gone especially well, to use the kind of delicate euphemism Lenore Benson herself might employ.

  I was the one who had talked Sweet into this visit to Payne-Whitney. He had said all along that it wouldn’t pay—the shrink had told him on the phone the kind of shape Mrs. Benson was in. The sergeant was in a pretty foul mood now.

  I wasn’t so bouncy myself.

  “Dan Hinton?” I said to him angrily when we were out on the street again. “What do you mean pulling his name out of your ass like that? What have you got against him, huh?”

  “Look, Cueball, we don’t rule out anybody. I could have asked her about your fancy daddy, too, you know.”

  I wasn’t going to rise to his class-baiting this time. “You could have asked her about Julius Fucking Caesar for all I care. What difference would it make? She probably knows him, too.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It’s Always You

  I picked up the ringing telephone just before the machine kicked in.

  “Big Legs? Is that you?”

  “Roamer?”

  Of course it was Roamer McQueen, my very short-lived colleague from the Omega gig. Even if I couldn’t place their voices immediately, I could always keep my male acquaintances straight by their pet names for me.

  “How’re you keeping these days, Big Legs?”

  “So-so, Roamer. You know.”

  “You know how to cook, girl?”

  The question threw me for a minute. Where was this heading? “No complaints that I recall,” I said at last.

  “You know how to fix red beans and rice?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Yeah, I thought as much. Why don’t you come out and have something to eat with me.”

  “Thanks, but not today.”

  “Oh, come on, Nan. It’ll make you feel better. I want to take you somewhere and show you off. Down at this place where my nephew cooks.”

  I paused before declining a second time. I thought I heard something in his voice, something that made me suspect this invitation wasn’t just about home cooking.

  “You want to tell me something, am I right?” I said.

  “Yeah. We’ll talk about it. Keep me company while I get something to eat.”

  “All right. Not for too long, though. I gotta get back home.”

  “Okay. And bring your horn.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Great Jones Street. Off Broadway. That was the where. The what was called Texaco, a Southern-style restaurant I had never heard of before.

  A black man in an expensive-looking gray raincoat stepped up quickly from behind and held the restaurant door open, cruising me like mad as we both walked in. He was my dad’s age or older, but his glance was distinctly unfatherly. Why should I be surprised, though, given my current status as male magnet?

  I returned the appraising look. He might have been up there in years, but the man had great skin and mesmerizing eyes. And he used them to hold mine for a while. I swear I felt a little erotic kick.

  No, I don’t have a jones for senior citizens. It’s just that, for me, flirtation doesn’t have to lead anywhere; it’s all about finesse; all about the moment. I mean, I am French—sort of. Experience counts for a lot in a man, n’est-ce pas? That, and self confidence, which he seemed to have plenty of. It showed in his smile.

  The thing that ended our moment was that belted raincoat. Once I got a good look at that, I was through. I don’t care how much the thing cost, it always bums me when a man ties the belt on his raincoat that way—tight. I never met a guy who did that who was worth a damn.

  “Eating by yourself today?” he asked.

  I chuckled. “Not on your life, James Bond.”

  Texaco was one of those places desperate to replicate the ambience of a Louisiana lean-to way off Bourbon Street. Big Mama Thornton, Fats Domino, Johnny Ace on the jukebox. Old ads for Dixie Beer and beef jerky. Elvis memorabilia. Irma Thomas’s training bra. Shit like that.

  Only a few people were eating at tables, but the bar was full. Whole lot of smoking Marlboros and knocking back shots of Wild Turkey was going on. Baskets of hush puppies substituted for the usual free pretzels deal.

  I figured Roamer’s nephew would be straight out of central casting, too: big around the belly, white apron stained with hot sauce, and regulation gold tooth.

  Lost that bet, except for the apron. I was introduced to Carl, who was willowy and rather ethereal looking, with perfectly normal incisors. His belly, incidentally, looked just fine to me. He set me up with some scrambled eggs while Roamer dug into his down-home vittles.

  “You getting back on your feet, after that lady was shot like that?” Ro
amer asked.

  “I’m trying. Looks like the story was deeper than even I figured. A cop I know was supposed to help me find out what really happened. But I got pulled into all kinds of crazy stuff. At this point I don’t know who’s helping who to find out what. It’s all kind of fucked up.”

  “What are you doing running around trying to play with the cops anyway? That’s no job for you.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about—jobs.”

  “You mean playing?”

  “Yes. I guess I’m going to have to be the bearer of bad news.”

  “Oh no.” I put the square of cornbread I was about to butter back into the basket. “What is it?”

  “The Omega gig is over. We’re history.”

  “Damn. I knew it. Something told me you were going to say that.”

  “Yeah. They’re closing. Brubeck says between the protection money and the taxes and the loans and now this killing, he’s had it.”

  All I could do was snort. “Mama Lou strikes again. Any idea how you murder a doll, Roamer?”

  “Murder a who?”

  “Skip it. What are you going to do? You and Hank.”

  “That’s the other thing I want to tell you. Hank and me are going out west for a couple of months. Cat we used to know is doing good with a little club in L.A. He asked us to come out there. It could turn into something permanent. I don’t know.”

  “Oh, that’s great, Roamer. You must be so happy.”

  “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “So have you got your passport in order?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. Why don’t you come on with us?”

  I was so moved I could barely answer him. “I’m incredibly flattered. But what about Gene?”

  Surely Hank and Roamer were not going to drop their longtime friend Gene Price in favor of me.

  “He’ll come out when he gets well. The doctor and his old lady have laid down the law to him. He ain’t going anywhere just now. See, we figured you’d go on taking Gene’s spot. It couldn’t hurt you to get a rep out on the west coast. You’re unusual enough, being a girl sax and all, maybe it’ll bring in the crowds even more. By the time Gene gets out there, you could be doing something else, have your own thing going. Shit, you could be one of them movie stars this time next year. Lots of things could happen for you. Who knows?”