Blue Lonesome (2 page)

Name: James Warren Messenger. (“I hope you never bring me any bad news,” a joking client had said to him once, “because then I’d have to kill you. You know—kill the Messenger?”)

Age: 37

Height: 6 feet

Weight: 178 pounds

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Brown

Distinguishing features: None

Distinguishing physical characteristics: None

Background: Born in Ukiah, a small town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. Father owned a hardware store, mother worked in a bakery. Both dead now. Both missed, but not deeply so; it hadn’t been a close-knit family unit. No siblings. Average childhood, but none of his boyhood friendships had survived his moving away to attend college. No high points in those first eighteen years. No low points, either. And therefore few memories and fewer conversation pieces.

Marital status: Divorced. The marriage had lasted seven months seventeen years ago, while he and Doris were students at U.C.–Berkeley. “It just isn’t working, Jimmy,” she’d said to him one night. “I think we’d better end it right now, before things get any worse between us.” Not long after they separated, he found out she’d been sleeping with a prelaw member of the track team for more than three months.

Employment: Certified public accountant with Sitwell & Cobb, Business and Personal Financial Consultants, Income Tax Preparation and Strategy.

Length of employment: 14 years

Annual salary: $42,500

Possibility for advancement: Nil

Interests: Jazz, all kinds, with a slight preference for the old New Orleans style—stomps, rags, cannonballs, blues—of Armstrong, Morton, Ellington, Basie, Kid Ory, Mutt Carey. Reading, broad range of subjects. Old movies on tape. Travel. (He had never been farther east than Salt Lake City, farther north than Seattle, farther south than Tijuana. Someday he hoped to visit Hawaii. And the Far East. And Europe.)

Hobbies: Collecting old jazz records. Building a comprehensive private jazz library.

Activities: Occasional outings to one of the Bay Area jazz clubs, and a long weekend every other year at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Occasional baseball games at Candlestick and the Oakland Coliseum (though the recent greed-based strikes had pretty much destroyed his enthusiasm for the game). Walks on the beach. Running (but he didn’t do that much anymore because of his knees).

Special skills: None

Future prospects: None

Mr. Average. Mr. Below Average.

Mr. Blue Lonesome.

AUGUST MELTED INTO
September. And on the third Sunday of that month, Ms. Lonesome didn’t come to the Harmony for supper.

Messenger waited until a quarter past eight, drinking too much coffee and watching the door. Her failure to show up bothered him much more than it should have. Maybe she was ill; there had been a strain of Asian flu going around the city. Or maybe she’d gotten sidetracked somehow. In any case it was nothing for him to get worked up about, was it?

She didn’t come the next night.

Or the next.

Or the next.

He
was
concerned by then. Relieved and concerned at the same time. He didn’t want her in his life, yet he’d allowed her to become a small part of it—a part that he missed. Eating his supper at the Harmony was not the same without her. In some perverse way her absence made that segment of his day emptier, more lonely.

He wondered if she was ever coming back. For reasons of her own she might have decided to eat her evening meal elsewhere. She might have moved to another part of the city or another city altogether. Suddenly here, suddenly gone … didn’t that hint at a transient existence? Lonely people didn’t always stay in one place. Sometimes need and restlessness turned them peripatetic. She hadn’t seemed to be looking for anything—just vegetating. But maybe he’d misread her and she’d been biding her time, waiting to end her suffering in some other place. Waiting to find a new beginning.

When she didn’t come again on Thursday evening, he left the café at seven-thirty and walked the three blocks to her apartment building. The space on the 2-B mailbox where her name had been Dymo-labeled was now empty. Moved out, then, he thought with a brief, sharp feeling of disappointment. Where? The manager might know; the label on the box marked 1-A—D. & L. Fong—also bore the abbreviation
Mgr
. He hesitated. Did he really want to know where she’d gone?

No, he thought, I don’t.

He rang the Fongs’ bell.

There was no admitting buzz at the door. But after half a minute a thin, middle-aged Asian woman appeared in the lobby and peered out at him through the door glass. His demeanor wouldn’t have alarmed even the most paranoid individual—the woman opened the door almost immediately.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Fong?”

“Yes. The apartment isn’t ready for renting yet. Next week, could be.”

“I’m not here about an apartment. I … well, I’m wondering about Janet Mitchell.”

Mrs. Fong’s eyes narrowed. Her lips pinched together in tight little ridges. “Her? You know her?”

“Yes, I know her,” Messenger lied. “Can you tell me where she went?”

“Where?”

“Or at least why she moved out.”

“Moved out? You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead!”

“Sunday night. Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade.” Mrs. Fong rolled her eyes. “My building—killed herself in
my
building. Terrible. You know how terrible it is to clean up so much blood?”

H
E SAT IN
his living room with the lights off, a glass of brandy warming in his hands. He’d poured the brandy when he first came in, but he hadn’t felt like tasting it yet. He sat watching patterns of light from occasional passing cars flicker across the drawn window curtains. From the stereo turntable, the melodic contours and rhythmic innovations of Ellington and his band swelled and ebbed. One of the Duke’s original thirties recordings, this one. “Perdido,” with Cootie Williams’s trumpet growly sweet and low-down blue.

Perdido. Lost.

Like Janet Mitchell: low-down blue and lost.

Why?

The question throbbed in him to the beat of the music. She’d left no note, Mrs. Fong had told him. Given no warning. And the police had found nothing among her meager effects to hint at a motive. What about her past? he’d asked. Who was she, where did she come from? Mrs. Fong had no idea. Showed up one day five months ago, rented the apartment on a month-to-month basis. Paid two months’ rent in advance, plus a cleaning deposit, all in cash; paid each subsequent month’s rent in cash. Where did she work? Mrs. Fong shrugged. Self-employed, private income—that was what Janet Mitchell had told her and she hadn’t bothered to ask for references. No need for references, not when you were handed several hundred dollars in good green cash in advance and then promptly on the first of every month. Visitors? No visitors, before or after her death. Just him, today. The police hadn’t come back, which meant they’d been satisfied that her death was in fact suicide. They wouldn’t care otherwise; she was another statistic to them. Mrs. Fong didn’t care; to her Janet Mitchell was nothing more than an annoying mess to clean up. Had
anybody
cared that she’d ended her life? A relative—had the authorities found one to claim the body? Mrs. Fong didn’t know about that, either. Mrs. Fong was tired of answering questions. Mrs. Fong politely but firmly shut the door in his face.

He felt dull and empty, sitting here now in the dark—almost the same way he’d felt when first his father and then his mother died. But they’d been his parents; he’d loved them, even if he hadn’t been close to them. It made no sense that he should feel some sense of loss over a woman he had spoken to once in his life, who hadn’t even known he existed.

Or did it?

The blues, he thought. One blue lonesome individual empathizing with the plight of another. But it was more than that. In jazz there were two forms of the blues: a simple, direct, personal sadness, the sadness of remembrances past and of the deep darkness of the unconscious; and the other kind, a deterioration and decline of the personal spirit, a kind of resolution downward to plaintive, desperate resignation. Ms. Lonesome had had the second type. Perdido. Lost. He wondered if maybe he did, too. If this entire business with her was symptomatic of an approaching downward spiral in his own existence. More than just a midlife crisis; a rest-of-his-life crisis, in which he descended gradually into a void of utter passivity.

The possibility worried him, yet he wasn’t frightened by it. Perhaps that too was symptomatic. If you think you might be on the edge of a breakdown, you ought to be terrified of the prospect—and if you’re not terrified, then isn’t that in itself a sign of something clinically wrong? Utter passivity: a synonym for despair. Like the kind of despair Ms. Lonesome had been suffering from?

No. The difference was, he wasn’t suicidal.
Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade.
He simply wasn’t made that way. He could never commit an act of self-destruction.

Maybe she hadn’t believed she could, either. Once.

Why did she do it?

What drove her into the depths?

The Duke’s arrangement of “Blue Serge” was playing now, a piece even more reflective of plaintive resignation than “Perdido.” Messenger listened, let himself be folded into the music for a minute or so—and then popped out again, back into bleak awareness. He sipped some of the brandy. It tasted bitter: bitter heat. He set the snifter down. Outside, a motorcycle raced past with its engine cranked up, momentarily drowning out Ellington’s band. A sudden siren sliced the night, close by; white and then blood-red lights flashed across the curtains and were gone. The room, he realized, was chilly. He ought to get up and put on the furnace. But he didn’t do it. He did nothing except sit, thinking and trying not to think.

After a while, when the record ended and quiet pressed down, he said aloud, “She shouldn’t have been alone. Nobody should have to die that much alone.”

He sat there.

“Lost, wasted life.”

He sat there.

“Ms. Lonesome,” he said to the darkness, “why did you use that goddamn razor blade?”

IT WAS WARM
in the coroner’s office on Bryant Street. Too warm: Messenger could feel the sweat moving on his face and neck. Another of life’s little illusions shattered. He’d always thought places like this would be dank and cold from top to bottom. And a bare, antiseptic white, presided over by sepulchral types in starched uniforms. Maybe it was that way down in the basement, where the morgue and autopsy room were, but up here was a straightforward business office paneled in wood; and the male clerk who waited on him was young and brisk and nattily dressed in a dark blue blazer and gray slacks.

“Janet Mitchell,” the clerk said, and tapped out the name on his computer keyboard. He studied the file that came up on the screen. “Oh, right. The Jane Doe suicide last week.”

“Jane Doe? Does that mean her name
isn’t
Janet Mitchell?”

“Evidently not.”

“Then her body hasn’t been claimed yet.”

“Not yet. It’s still here, in storage.”

“Storage,” Messenger said.

“In cases like this cadavers are frozen immediately after autopsy. Do you think you might be able to identify the deceased? If so, I can arrange a viewing. …”

“There’s no point in it. I knew her as Janet Mitchell.”

“I see.”

“How long will you keep her body here unclaimed?”

“Thirty to sixty days, depending on space available.”

“And then?”

“We’ll make arrangements with the Public Administrator’s Office for cremation or burial. But in this case, at least, the city won’t have to assume the cost.”

“Why is that?”

“She left more than enough money to pay for it.”

“How much money?”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you that information.”

“Can you at least tell me what’s being done to find out her real identity?”

“No, you’ll have to discuss that with the officer in charge of her case.”

“If you’ll give me his name …”

“Inspector Del Carlo,” the clerk said. “Second floor, main building.”

INSPECTOR GEORGE DEL
Carlo was sixtyish, heavyset, with black-olive eyes that seldom blinked. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but still he made Messenger feel uncomfortable, as if he thought his visitor was behaving in a way that was socially if not criminally suspect.

“You say you hardly knew the woman, Mr. Messenger. Then why are you so interested in who she was and why she took her own life?”

“I keep asking myself the same question. I suppose it’s because she was a … solitary person and so am I. I looked at her and I saw myself.”

“Did you have a relationship with her?”

“Relationship?”

“Date her. Sleep with her.”

“No. I told you, I hardly knew her.”

“But you did talk to each other.”

“Only once, for about a minute.”

“Did she tell you anything at all about herself?”

“No. Nothing.”

“You try to find out on your own?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know anybody else who knew her.”

“No.”

“Where she came from, why she was in San Francisco.”

“No.”

“What led her to commit suicide.”

“She was lonely,” Messenger said.

One of Del Carlo’s eyebrows rose. “There’re a lot of lonely people in this city, Mr. Messenger. It’s not much motivation for suicide.”

“It is if you’re cut off from the rest of society, if you exist in a kind of vacuum of despair.”

“Vacuum of despair. Nice phrase. And that’s the way this woman lived?”

“I think so, yes.”

“By choice, or did something drive her to it?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t imagine anyone living that way by simple choice.”

“Running from something or somebody?”

“Either that, or running from herself.”

Del Carlo said, “Uh-huh,” and leaned back in his chair. “Well, there’s not much I can tell you, Mr. Messenger. She didn’t leave a note and there was nothing among her effects to tell us why she did the Dutch. We did find a photograph in the bathtub with her body; must’ve been looking at it before or after she slit her wrists. Too badly water- and blood-damaged to be identifiable, but our lab people say it was of a child.”