Drumsticks

by Charlotte Carter

  Career decisions. Opportunity knocking. Smart move. Make it happen.

  All phrases that were barely part of my vocabulary. Almost as if they weren’t ordinary English words.

  “God, Roamer, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you’re going home to pack your lacy pants and kiss the boys good-bye, Big Legs.”

  “But am I good enough to cut it—you guys think I am?”

  “You know that old joke, don’t you? Practice, honey, practice.”

  “When do you have to know?”

  “A couple of weeks, I guess. You better think about it, Nan. But not too long.”

  I nodded. It was, not counting the Hollywood star thing, a lot to think about. Something else to think about. That’s what I needed.

  “You look funny,” Roamer said. “If you don’t eat that biscuit, I will.”

  “Help yourself,” I said. “You know what I was just thinking? Do you know anything about the chitlin circuit? You know, the old black vaudeville acts. I don’t mean from way back in the coon show days. I mean like closer to the tail end of that stuff—the fifties and sixties.”

  “Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx, and Nipsey Russell,” he said between bites. “Before they let us into Vegas and all.”

  I knew those names dimly. I also knew who would have been able to give me chapter and verse on all of them: my old love, Andre, who had dedicated his life to chronicling black entertainers. But he wasn’t here. And I probably wouldn’t have need of this conversation if he were. Everything would be different.

  “I guess I mean people like that,” I said. “Anyway, you never heard of a team called Miller and Priest, did you?”

  “Nah. Doesn’t ring a bell. Who are they?”

  “Too long a story.”

  Carl came over to the table then. “Can I hook you up with some more eggs, Nan?”

  “No, thanks. They’re real good, though. I’m just not hungry. Got a big dinner coming up tonight.”

  “Shit,” Roamer snapped. “You’re busy tonight, huh?”

  I didn’t understand why that should annoy him so.

  “I thought you and Carl might go out,” he explained.

  “Thanks for looking out for me,” Carl said, about three times as embarrassed as I was. He busied himself wiping at the table surface.

  “By the way, Roamer, what did you have me bring the horn for? If I dare ask that question.”

  “For Carl. I wanted him to hear you. I told you I was gonna show you off. Besides, I don’t like the jukebox in here. They always start off with Etta James, but before you know it, it’s all the Rolling Stones.”

  “I guess you think you’re pretty irresistible, Roamer.”

  I started with “Trust in Me,” not only one of Etta’s great hits but, according to Roamer, his favorite song.

  CHAPTER 14

  Darn That Dream

  The food was good on our second date, too. Only this time we dined in Brooklyn Heights. And Dan Hinton did the cooking.

  The small talk—weren’t we having luscious cool weather and how attractive his apartment was and didn’t I look ravishing tonight—didn’t take long. We were soon logging quality time kissing our way through cocktails.

  The chicken was superb, not some bachelor fry-up with prepackaged seasonings. The vegetables tasted just-harvested. French bread crisp as a new fifty from the bank. Okay, the napoleons were store-bought, but that didn’t stop them from being wonderful too.

  Dan had opened the second bottle of wine and it was waiting for us out on the little glass-enclosed deck.

  Gorgeous man, gorgeous view, great food and wine, and, if I was any judge, the promise of some memorable sex. Ms. Hayes, semiprofessional hedonist that she is, was a happy girl.

  At least that is what she was telling herself. But it wasn’t true. It just wasn’t true.

  For a while there I was blaming Andre.

  I found Dan desirable, to say the least. And man did he know where all the light switches were on a woman’s body. But he wasn’t Andre.

  It took a while to realize that wasn’t the problem—not all of it, anyway.

  But in the meantime, the two of us in one deck chair, Dan and I were delighting in all the preliminaries you could think up.

  “I can hardly wait for you, Nan,” he said, the lust in his grin outshining the candles on the table nearby. “You are such a nice big girl.”

  Not the least bit insulted, I laughed and asked him why that made him so happy.

  He told me, in detail.

  “Promise,” I said in reply, shivering a little.

  It was marvelous to have a man looking right into my eyes that way, to have a man’s hands on me in that way—I mean with tremendous heat and urgency but also with tenderness and a kind of friendship. The love you make with a one-time guy is just not like that.

  Dan excused himself a few minutes later: To make sure the sheets were clean? Check the condom supply? Look for the Barry White LP? I chuckled, and took the opportunity to smooth out my skirt and indulge in another slab of stinky cheese.

  He took a minute too long.

  For it was while I was waiting for him to return, sipping my wine and looking up at the stars, that I began to realize what was bothering me.

  Damn that Leman Sweet. Damn him twice.

  Dan joined me again, slipped his arm expertly around my waist. “Sky looks incredible tonight, doesn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, it does.”

  A few angel-light kisses on my ears and neck.

  “You do know how to set a mood, don’t you, Dan?”

  “Well, thanks.”

  I wasn’t really paying him a compliment.

  “Do you read everybody this well?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Slowly, slowly, he was retracting his embrace.

  “I mean, you seem to have a gift for giving people what they need. Especially women.” That was no compliment either, but this time he caught on.

  He waited for a few seconds and then repeated in exactly the same tone: “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know, Dan, when I met you that day at Stephens, my father told me how good you were at your job. How all the kids liked and respected you. I made a quick judgment about you, but then I realized how unfair I was being.”

  “What judgment?”

  “That you were a compulsive good guy. That you had to make people like you at any cost. You have to be the perfect cool grown-up for the kids. You have to be the perfect employee and son substitute and odd man at the dinner table for my dad. You have to be the perfect liberated husband, the perfect indulgent bourgeois lover for a wild boho like me.”

  “Well, guess I’m just a beautiful human being,” he said wryly.

  “No, don’t get me wrong. I’m not attacking you for trying to be Mister Wonderful.”

  “What are you attacking me for?”

  “Look, Dan—the thing is, when you’re all things to all people, who are you really?”

  His face went tight. “This is your roundabout way of telling me I’m a phony asshole. Is that it?”

  I shrugged. “You’re right, I am beating around the bush. Are you a phony? Who knows? The word I really mean is ‘liar.’”

  It was a relief, actually, when his temper flared for the first time. Dan Hinton was too even, too unflappable for his own good.

  “Enough of this shit, lady. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about?”

  I faced him squarely. “You fucked Felice Sanders.”

  There. The words were out.

  It was fairly dark out on the deck, just the candles for light. I couldn’t say for sure that his face was burning, but what I could see was the trapped expression in his eyes.

  “You did, didn’t you? You lied to me, didn’t you, Dan?”

  He reached for his wineglass. Well, that sealed it. Guilty as charged.

  He heaved an ugly grunt. “My, my. Look who’s t
urning puritan on me. I thought you were a sophisticated black woman. What about all your casual fucking—your little encounters all over the globe? Or was that just posturing bullshit?”

  “Oh, look, buddy, I don’t even want to hear that. This is not about how many women you’ve been with, and you know it.”

  “What is it about then—Felice being half my age? Are you that provincial?”

  “No! And stop stalling! What this is about—as you very well know—is Felice being a kid—a student of yours, or a patient, or whatever you want to call it—but a kid who was all messed up. And you knew it and you fucked her and you lied about it.”

  No reply to that. He just sucked his top lip under his front teeth.

  “Tell me, Dan. Please. She could be in real danger now. The police are involved. Just tell me.”

  He looked at me, exasperated, angry, and afraid.

  “Please!” I said, feeling those same things. “I told you, I don’t care what you and Felice did together. And I wouldn’t even think about telling my father. Ever.”

  “All right. But first I want it to be clear, I don’t know where she is. I didn’t do anything to harm her and I do not know where she is.”

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  “There’s a place,” he began. “An apartment where—Ah, shit, you know what kind of kids go to Stephens. Worldly. Bright. Precocious. A lot of them from money. A lot of them with parents who don’t look out for them the way they should. One of the boys has folks who spend half the year in Europe, so he lives with relatives. But he has the key to the parents’ apartment in the Village. Sometimes—I—some of the students, the older kids—go there once in a while.”

  Ah. A house to play house in. Every teenager’s dream. No groping at the movies for my pop’s students.

  “And you,” I said, “you went there once in a while too. With Felice.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dan said, knocking back the remaining wine in his glass and then refilling it. “I know it wasn’t the smart thing to do. And I regretted it. But—”

  “How often?”

  “Two—three times.”

  “Before or after Black Hat died?”

  He clammed up.

  “Come on, Dan. You may as well tell me. The truth’s out now.”

  “A couple of times after, in that apartment. A couple of times before, not in the apartment.”

  “Where then? Did you bring her here for the funky cheese and moonlight treatment?”

  “No, of course not. It was—”

  “Where?”

  “At school. At school, okay?”

  “Oh Christ. While you were tutoring her for the SATs, right?”

  “Fuck you, Nan. That isn’t fair.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell. I lied about sleeping with her, but not about anything else. She was depressed and needy. We’d had a couple of nice times together while she was at Stephens; it wasn’t a serious thing for me and it wasn’t a serious thing for her. It was just … just … sex.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Look, it’s a complicated thing when you deal with young people. Especially smart, good-looking ones. They’re looking for approval, looking to seduce you, looking for a father—”

  “Forget that, man. Just get on with it.”

  “All right. After Black Hat died, she was lonely and wanted to be close that way again. Just to be comforted. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “When was the last time? When did you last see her?”

  “A good three or four weeks ago.”

  “But you spoke after that.”

  “Yes. She called me and she was so off the wall I tried to get her to meet me for coffee or something—just so I could calm her down, try to get her to a shrink maybe. But it was no good. She hung up without even telling me where she was currently living. All she said was that she had an older man in her life and things weren’t going well. She said she thought she could trust him when she first met him, but even he had let her down.”

  I shook my head in disgust. Of course Dan thought it was more censure from me. It wasn’t that, though. I was just trying to comb through the tangled threads of lies and double-talk—Dan’s, Dr. Benson’s, Mrs. Benson’s, Ida Williams’s—the whole cast of characters.

  But then, that was nothing like the whole cast. It was only a partial listing of the credits.

  “Are you listening to me at all, Nan?”

  “What?”

  “I said, I don’t care what you think about the stupid thing I did with Felice—I mean, I do care, but that’s not the important thing now. I want you to believe that I haven’t been bullshitting you, playing with you. Or your father. I like and respect Eddie. And I want a chance to be with you. Can you hear that?”

  “Yeah. Fine. But you’ve got it wrong. That’s not the important thing now. The important thing is getting over to that apartment.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “But why? What do you want to go there for? What difference—”

  “I don’t want to get into all that now. Maybe I should have told you from the very beginning what the deal was with trying to find Felice Sanders—how I happened to be looking for her. See, I’m no stranger to lying either. I do it constantly, damn me. But there’s lying—and there’s lying. Anyway, forget that for now. How do I get in that fuck pad of yours?”

  He winced at my vulgar language.

  “Now, Dan!”

  “I’d have to call Rob MacLachlin at home. He’s the student whose parents’ place it is.”

  “Do it.”

  “But I’d have to—I mean, suppose his—It might get him into terrible trouble.”

  “Yeah, I know. He’s going to think you’re really uncool. Move it, buster. Call him.”

  He walked into the apartment and over to the telephone, dragging like a condemned prisoner in leg irons. I watched him as he rustled through the pages of his phone book and then picked up the receiver.

  There was some toadying exchange with what I took to be the kid’s guardian, then Dan began to talk to the boy himself in hushed, urgent tones:

  “Rob, listen, it’s Dan Hinton … Yeah, how are you … Good … Look, I know about your parents’ place on Greenwich … No, forget about that … I know … It doesn’t matter now, Rob. You lent the key to Felice Sanders a couple of times, didn’t you … and gave her the code to the street door … Never mind how I know—I know … Just listen. The last time she was up there, I—I had to go up and talk to her. I left some important papers behind and I’ve got to have them. I have to have them now, understand? You’ve got to get me the key. I have to have that key.”

  His hand cupped over the mouthpiece, he began to relay what Rob MacLachlin was saying to him:

  “He’s scared. He doesn’t want to give me the key. He says he can’t give it to anybody. He’s scared he’ll get cracked. Some neighbors reported seeing a young girl and an old black man coming and going in the building. Sounds like it was Felice. But he doesn’t understand how that could be. He got the key back from her and stopped letting the kids use the place weeks ago.”

  “I don’t care how scared he is,” I told Dan. “Get the key and the code. Tell him if he doesn’t cooperate, he’s going to be a lot scareder than that. Threaten him a little, Dan.”

  Yes, I spat those commands out like a top sergeant, very sure of myself, but to be honest I had gone a little numb in the head. Felice had an elderly black gentleman caller. What was the deal with that? There were two older black men floating around in this mess—Jacob Benson and the man from Ida’s past, Miller. Three, if you counted my father. Which I didn’t—couldn’t.

  But I couldn’t see either Benson or Miller with Felice. Not only was the good doctor the aged father of her dead boyfriend, it sounded like he and Felice hated each other. And as for Ida’s ex-partner, Miller—he and Felice Sanders fit together like I’d fit a
t a Hell’s Angels barbecue.

  Something else was bothering me. Dan had told me earlier about an older man, but he never said he was black. Why hadn’t he supplied that detail? Maybe because Felice had never mentioned the man’s color. I didn’t know. Anyway, the main thing now was to get into that apartment.

  Dan gave me a gruesome smile, hand still over the mouthpiece. “Okay. It’s on.”

  The taxi fare from Brooklyn Heights to Beekman Place was steep indeed. Out of guilt, no doubt, Dan refused to let me pay my half.

  Young Rob MacLachlin, a towhead on the beefy side, was waiting for us on the street. God knows what he told Auntie and Uncle to get out of the apartment. Very likely he’d thought up a Nanette-size whopper to accomplish it.

  I stepped aside to give Dan and the kid a minute’s privacy. I don’t know which of them looked more abashed. The boy soon handed over the key along with a slip of paper, and we left him standing on the sidewalk.

  The MacLachlin place was on Greenwich Street—not busy, touristy Greenwich Avenue, but Greenwich Street, two short blocks from the waterfront—in a renovated manufacturing loft building.

  Dan consulted the slip of paper in his hand and then tapped in the numbers for the code box on the street door. We caught the elevator and went up to seven.

  “Be funny,” he grumbled, “if all this was just your way of trying to find out where Harvey Keitel lives.”

  On another day that would have been funny. I knew what he meant, though. All the New York film people were down in the far West Village/Tribeca nabe now, driving already high prices up into the stratosphere. Here and there on the streets were limos with big-shouldered drivers snoozing behind the wheel.

  Even while he turned the key in the lock, Dan was still protesting my strong-arm methods, and our whole mission, which he thought was stupid. I shushed him violently and pushed him through the door.