The Green Mill Murder (7 page)

Tintagel Stone arrived on time and dressed in evening costume which was, although a little threadbare, quite correct. Mrs Butler had produced vegetable soup and breaded cutlets, as promised.

‘You look very snazzy,’ Phryne commented, passing the salt.

Tintagel Stone grinned. ‘These are my working clothes,’ he said dismissively. ‘Tell me, Miss Fisher, how is your investigation going?’

‘Mine? I’m only employed to find Charles, and his brother whom Mrs Freeman has just remembered she mislaid some time ago. And I haven’t the faintest where either of them are. Have you seen the police since last night?’

‘Oh, yes, they’ve been through all of our lodgings, even through Iris’s establishment. She was furious! But they haven’t found anything.’

‘What were they looking for?’

‘A knife,’ said Tintagel Stone, looking Phryne in the eye. This was a trait which Phryne had learned to distrust. She instantly concluded that Tintagel had something to hide, but most people had something to hide, and it might have nothing to do with the murder at the Green Mill.

‘And they didn’t find it?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Have some cutlets. I’ve been reading a paper about jazz,’ said Phryne, changing the subject. ‘I can see how it started, but how did it go on? And why New Orleans?’

‘Ah. Interesting place.’ Tintagel paused for long enough to pay silent tribute to Mrs Butler’s skill with cutlets. ‘There was ragtime, that is, ragged time, in the nineties. Then circus bands and such began to play in barns and in towns, and they centred on New Orleans because it was French and had a tradition of popular music, and because Storyville, in New Orleans, had Creoles and Negroes.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Creoles’ve been free longer,’ said Tintagel. His voice had a concise delivery, rather crisp, with only the ghostly remnants of a Cornish burr. ‘The Creoles belonged to the old French planters, and were free long before the Civil War. So the Creoles looked down on the American Negroes, and that created a social friction. Jazz came out of conflict—it’s a fusion of different musics. That’s why, when it goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong. This place called Storyville was, excuse me, a brothel quarter. Brothels always have good music, and cultured Creole music and vital African music got together and we had New Orleans jazz. Then during the Great War the politicians decided that Storyville was a threat to the health of their navy, and closed it down. A lot of the jazz men went to Chicago, where there were white men playing jazz. The old New Orleans style used three instruments as the core of the band—trombone, trumpet, and clarinet—but the white bands were using all sorts of things: piano, violin, banjo. So we had Chicago style.’

‘Which is what your Jazz Makers play.’

‘Only real difference is the offbeat and the solos. Jazz men always want a chance to show off.’

He smiled deprecatingly. Phryne suddenly found him enormously attractive.

‘Where are we going tonight?’ she asked as Mr Butler removed the plates and supplied apple pie and cream.

‘The Jazz Club. It’s a bit . . .’

‘Sordid?’ suggested Phryne, and he laughed.

‘Garish,’ he agreed. ‘And only coffee served. It’s hard to really jazz up a jazz band on coffee.’

‘You manage, in view of the amount of grog you were carrying out of the Green Mill.’

Tintagel flinched, a small flinch which might have gone unnoticed if Phryne had not been watching him so closely.

‘You can’t blow a horn for hours without beer,’ he said defensively. ‘It takes a lot of breath and they lose moisture all the time. Even Iris agrees that beer is all right for the horn and clarinet players.’

‘And how about red wine for the banjo player?’

He grinned again. ‘I don’t like beer. In Paris, the clubs always sold a really rough
vin ordinaire. Trés ordinaire.’

‘Ah, yes, I remember.
Vin du table
made of real table.’

‘I learned a lot of good tunes in Paris. Call it nostalgia. So, you have been looking up jazz, Miss Fisher?’

‘Do call me Phryne. Yes. Fascinating, and not much written. Percy Grainger is of the opinion that it is a new musical idiom.’

‘Never heard of him—what does he play?’

‘Mr Stone, I never know if you’re joking or not.’

‘If I call you Phryne, you must promise to call me Tintagel. Actually most people call me Ten.’

‘How did you get such a name?’

‘My parents were on holiday, and I was conceived on the cliff at Tintagel. It could have been worse. My brother was conceived at Blackpool. Luckily they decided to call him Alexander.’

‘Alexander?’

‘Sandy, after the Sands.’

Phryne chuckled. ‘Well, shall we go?’

‘No, the place doesn’t hot up until eleven. We might play some of your records. Well, well! Race discs, I do declare.’ He turned over a Bessie Smith recording reverently. Phryne sipped her coffee.

‘Blues,’ she explained. ‘I have always liked blues. So I asked a friend in America to buy the Race records for me. They are not on general release—Columbia must have had a failure of nerve. Now that jazz has caught on so well, I expect that they will be released again.’

Mr and Mrs Butler passed, on their way to the pictures. Phryne waved. ‘Have a nice time!’ she called.

The ‘Empty Bed Blues’ wailed from the phonograph. Phryne and Tintagel sat in silence as the gospel singer’s voice lingered on each note, extracting maximum pain.

‘No more, no more,’ said Phryne. ‘Or I’ll get the blues. I’ve got some New Orleans stuff—play that.’

Tintagel wound the gramophone and put on ‘Basin Street Blues’. ‘Dance?’ suggested Tintagel Stone. Phryne moved into his arms.

Prolonged contact with a smoothly muscled body and the scent of soap, starch and male human always had a devastating effect on Phryne’s never-very-good control of her baser emotions. She detached herself reluctantly, and kissed her partner delicately on the mouth. She found that, unlike brass players, whose embouchure produced a callus on the lip, banjo players were delightful to kiss.

‘Come on,’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘We are going to a jazz club, remember?’

‘Oh, yes, the Jazz Club,’ murmured Tintagel Stone without marked enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps another night?’

‘Tonight,’ Phryne insisted, and took his hand.

‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘Your little finger has the callus.’

‘Interesting?’ asked Tintagel. ‘That’s the way I play the banjo. Steel strings, you know.’

‘Strong forearms,’ said Phryne. ‘Hmm. Look, I can’t spend all night surveying your physical perfection.’

‘Can’t you?’ asked Tintagel, sliding a hand down her back.

The Jazz Club was suitably dark, and smelt of coffee. Phryne had left the Hispano-Suiza in Gertrude Street, locked, and had asked the patrolling policeman to keep an eye on it. Tintagel appeared to be well known. Several figures, indistinguishable in the gloom, waved at him to join them. He ignored them and threaded his way through the tables to the front, where a girl in a red dress which appeared to have been moulded onto her body was singing, accompanied by a drum, a bass, and Ben Rodgers on cornet. The blue wailing melody wound its twelve-bar way over and under the brass, jarring and beautiful.

It was the lament of a whore, cheating her customers, exploited by her pimp. ‘It’s all about a man, who kicks me and dogs me ’round,’ sang the red-headed woman in a breathy, overstrained wail. ‘It’s all about a man who kicks me and dogs me ’round, and when I try to kill him . . .’ The cornet soared, the voice dropped into a dark-brown operatic tenor, throbbing with anger and fear, ‘That’s when my love for him come down.’ The audience were listening with open mouths. No one had heard these blues in Melbourne before.

‘She’s amazing! Who is she?’ asked Phryne.

Tintagel sighed. ‘She’s Nerine, Rodger’s girl. God, she can sing like Bessie Smith. If only . . .’

‘If only? Come on, Ten, do tell me.’

‘You can ask her yourself,’ he evaded. ‘If she wants to tell you. But she’s pretty touchy.’

‘I bet she isn’t as touchy as good old Ben. But trumpeters . . .’

‘Are like that. You’re learning.’ Tintagel appeared pleased. ‘They are also crucial, though don’t let the others know I said that. The core of jazz is the trumpet. And Ben can play like the angel Gabriel himself.’

Phryne had always envisaged the angel playing a version of Handel’s ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’
,
but was willing to be convinced. What Ben Rodgers lacked to make him angelic was the temperament. However severe, the angel Gabriel would never have scowled like that.

‘So trumpeters are in great demand.’

‘Yes, especially reliable ones. And Ben is reliable. Not agreeable, but he always turns up when he says he will. That is unusual. And he is my old mate,’ he added. ‘At least he doesn’t insist on singing as well.’

‘Why?’

‘He can’t carry a note and he sounds like he’s singing from the bottom of a deep well.’ Tintagel laughed. A waiter came, and he ordered coffee.

‘You wouldn’t want to drink the tea they serve here,’ he commented. ‘Hey, Nerine! Come and meet a lady who has just become your fan.’

Nerine blinked, patted the trumpeter on the arm, and came down from the stage, carefully. Phryne realised that she was very short-sighted, and was steering by Tintagel’s voice.

‘Nerine, this is Phryne Fisher.’ The singer took the offered wooden chair and picked up Tintagel’s coffee.

‘You like it?’ she asked in a deep, honeyed Georgia voice. ‘I’m glad.’

She then seemed to run out of conversation. Ben Rodgers, stranded on stage in the middle of the next song, glared at Phryne. She smiled her sweetest smile at him. It had no effect.

‘Nerine, I’m looking for someone, and you might be able to help me. I’m a private detective,’ she began. Nerine put down the coffee cup, rummaged in her bag, and took out a pair of spectacles. She donned them. They were very strong, magnifying her brown eyes to Betty Boop dimensions.

‘You are?’ She seemed to reach a decision. ‘All right. I help you if’n you help me. I wanna find my no-good man and I wanna divorce him.’

‘You’re married?’ Tintagel Stone was shocked. ‘Sorry. But I thought that you and Ben . . .’

‘You got the truth, Ten. I wanna marry Ben, but I got hooked when I was sixteen by a low-down hound who left me flat, and where he went I don’t know.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Phryne. ‘You give me all the details and I’ll find him if I can, so you can marry Ben— although, have you reflected that he is a trumpeter?—and you will help me find the person I am looking for.’

‘Deal,’ said the singer. ‘Ten, honey, can you get me some lemonade? Then blow. Me and Miss . . .’

‘Fisher.’

‘Miss Fisher, we got things to talk about.’

Tintagel bore his dismissal well, producing the lemonade and then going off to join one of his invisible cronies somewhere in the smoke.

‘Well, Miss Fisher, the name of that man was Billy Simonds, and we got hitched on the 21st of January 1920, in Melbourne.’

‘What’s your full name?’ asked Phryne, writing busily.

‘Nerine Sinclair. I was born Nerine Mary Rodriguez. My mama liked flowers. That no-good Billy was born here and went to Sydney, I believe. No one’s seen him ’round here since December 1920. Can you find him?’

‘I’ll try. What did he do?’

‘He was a sailor. I always was a sucker when it came to sailors. I love them li’l bitty white hats.’ Nerine smiled reminiscently. ‘But I wanna marry Ben, he’s my man now.’

‘Of course. I’ll find him if I can, but it might take a while. Sailors also have a talent for vanishing.’

‘You do your best for me, honey, I need to find that man. I ain’t all that too sure of my man Ben. Now, who do you wanna find? Seem like us women always longin’ for some man.’

‘Charles Freeman,’ said Phryne.

Nerine choked on her lemonade, coughed, recovered, wiped her eyes and glared at Phryne almost as effectively as Ben Rodgers had done.

‘Why you wanna find him?’ she snapped.

‘Nerine, before I die of curiosity, what did Charles do to you? I wouldn’t ask what seems to be an indelicate question, but I happen to know that debauchery is just not likely.’

Nerine took a deep breath, which had the effect of causing the nearest males to lose theirs, and shook her mass of red hair. ‘You need to know?’ The voice was ragged with outrage.

‘I need to know,’ agreed Phryne.

‘He gave me the rush,’ said Nerine in a voice redolent with fury. ‘Sent me flowers, jewellery; took me out on the town, until I thought, I thought—this was before I decided to marry Ben. One night we were in his flat, the lights were down low and he was sitting beside me, and he said he had a proposition for me. And honey, I been expecting something like that, what with the diamonds and the orchids and all. But then, then . . .’

‘Then?’ asked Phryne breathlessly.

‘He wanted me to sing in a new band! He wanted me to leave Ben flat and go and join this band which a friend of his had! I tol’ him that I give Ten my word to stay with him. He laughed, one of them mean chuckles, and he said that women had no honour.’