Five Fortunes (34 page)

And he heard about what happened to Shanti. So he knew about that.”

“And one night, he stops for a fare, he looks in the rearview mirror, and there she is sitting in the backseat.”

“Delia Amos,” said the minister.

Carter nodded her head slowly. She was picturing the scene, looking for all the blanks in the information that she needed to fill in.

“So what we wanted to ask you…” said the minister, and then stalled.

“We wanted to know if you know how to…”

“Or could you help us…”

“Find her. Of course,” said Carter. And she went for a pen and a pad of paper.

The musician’s name was Sidney James, and he went by Sid. He didn’t have a phone at the moment but there was a club where he often played, and his friend Bo said the bartender there would take messages for him. Did they know the name of the cab company he worked for? They didn’t. It did not seem that it was a Yellow Cab.

They assented that it was most likely a gypsy cab. Had Sidney told Delia that her sister was dead? He had tried to. He had said to his fare that she was Delia Amos and she’d said her name was Penny.

He had

266 / Beth Gutcheon

said her sister, Shanti, was dead. And the fare had looked stunned, and then she said she’d changed her mind about going to work, she had to see a friend, and demanded to be let out of the cab.

When they had told Carter all they knew, they sat and looked at each other.

“I’ll do the best I can,” said Carter after a while.

“Thank you.”

“That’s all you can do,” said her visitors. “We thank you for just the trying.”

“Just to know,” said the minister.

“Just to be sure that she knows…” said Aunt Sallie.

There was another silence.

“While you’re here,” said Carter finally, the sense of dread returning, “would you like to see the baby?”

Of course they would. It had obviously been on their minds since the minute they’d arrived. How was this giant white woman, who certainly was not a churchgoer nor much of a housekeeper, managing to take care of Shanti’s baby?

Flora was just waking up from her nap when Carter sat down beside her on the bed to wake her up. “Hello, baby. Did you sleep well?”

Flora nodded, bleary-eyed.

“You have some visitors. Friends of your mommy. They came to see you.”

J
ill was reading Simone Weil in her dorm room when the phone rang. (Talk about someone who carried dieting too far.)

“Hello, is this the Voice of Reason?”

“Auntie Carter! Do you need to be told you are Only a Woman?”

“No, I don’t. I just had a visitation from all the Baptists in South Central, and they managed to tell me that without saying a word about it.” She described her afternoon. “I guess I’ll be coming to New York.”

“Hooray! Will you bring Flora?”

“That’s the tricky part. I can’t imagine leaving her, but you don’t really see a lot of private investigators taking their toddlers along on jobs.”

“It’s too bad Mom isn’t here—she’s great with babies,” Jill said.

Carter thought she sounded wistful. “But I could help.”

“Have you heard of this jazz joint, though?”

“Tell me again?”

“Carla’s. Sidney James gets his phone calls there. I’m guessing it’s uptown, the way the story was told.”

“What kind of person gets their phone calls at a bar?”

“Good question. Might be just living hand to mouth, but many times a person who gets his messages at a bar is a person with a tendency to get a snootful and call Buenos Aires at three in the morning if he has his own phone.”

267

268 / Beth Gutcheon

“You should be a detective.”

“It’s just a guess. But if he’s driving an unlicensed cab it could mean his driving record’s a tiny bit spotty. It would fit, anyway.

Musician’s a hard life. All the ones I know drink like fishes.”

“I’m pawing through the wastebasket as we speak to see if I have an entertainment listing. That part of the paper. No…I left most of it in the library. But I know what I’ll do. You know my e-mail friend Colleen? She’s a jazz nut.”

“Is she in New York?”

“Yes, her e-mail name is Sweet2 after Sweet Basil, the club in the Village.”

“Will you ask her?”

“Hold on, now I’m looking in the phone book. Carla’s Bunnycuts, Haircare for Children, you probably don’t want that one. Carla’s, 505 West Fiftieth…”

“Where is that?”

“I guess Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Is that as bad as it sounds?”

“I don’t really know. It’s probably some trendoid fern bar yuppie suburb by now.”

“Is it a club?”

“I can’t tell, all I have are the white pages. It just says Carla’s. I’ll ask Colleen.”

Jill had met Colleen in a modern music chat room when she was writing a paper about Charles Ives, and they had, figuratively, fallen into each other’s arms. Colleen was a senior at City College. She lived at home with her mother and brother and was a hilarious letter writer. She was, apparently, a night owl; it had become one of the pleasures of the winter for Jill to send a funny note into the void to her last thing before she went to bed, and then pick up Colleen’s answer first thing in the morning. She was an Econ major and was probably going to try to go to work on Wall Street, though what she wanted to do was sing.

Five Fortunes / 269

Jill wrote:

Greetings! Do you know anything about a jazz club, or a bar
with jazz, called Carla’s?

XXX Jill

She sent the letter, then poked around among the Arts and Entertainment section looking for chat rooms for people who liked jazz.

Finally she found one that wasn’t full, and posted:
Is anyone here from New York? Have you heard of a jazz club
called Carla’s?

In return she got a lot of ????? from people who were not from New York. BeBob recommended Carla’s rib joint in Brownsville, Texas, very highly. Cool234 said:

My husband’s from Brooklyn; hold on, I’ll ask.

Jill waited in the chat room while others argued about Gerry Mulligan. Then Cool234 posted again:

Carla’s is on the west side. Was very hip fifteen years ago.

Jill thanked her and was about to sign off when the computer voice, full of brainless joy, exclaimed, “You’ve got mail!”

She found her return from Colleen.

I heard Dave Lahm at Carla’s. Magic time. Why?

Happy, Jill sent back Instant Mail.

My friend is looking for a reed player called Sidney James
who’s supposed to hang out there. Does that sound like the
right place?

In a moment, back came:

Never heard of him, but it could be.

270 / Beth Gutcheon

Jill answered:

I’d like to go see. Want to go with me?

This felt like a very bold thing to say. Jill knew that Colleen would probably be disappointed when she met her, that she was so young and so fat. But…what the hell. Time to come out of the closet.

The message came back.

Love to. When?

Tomorrow?

It’ll be closed Monday.

Forgot what day it was. Tuesday?

What time?

Six?

She was thinking it would still be light then, in case the neighborhood was dicey. They could have a drink together or a coffee, and if they liked each other in person, as they did on-line, go for dinner.

Great

came the answer.

I’ll be wearing the famous silver Coke bottle coat, of which
you have heard so much.

Thank God. I was afraid I was never going to get to see it.

XXX Colleen

J
ill wore her famous Christmas coat, although the weather had turned suddenly warm. There were still patches of gray snow in places, but the damp earth smell of spring was everywhere. She took the subway to Fiftieth Street and started to walk west, enjoying the soft light of early evening. Ahead of her, the sky had the peculiar airy emptiness of light over water. She was heading for the river.

She walked past long rows of tenement buildings, and a grim-looking school building, its blacktop playground surrounded by hurricane fencing. The blocks were long and empty. She watched the building numbers and calculated the blocks still to go, and mentally measured as well the amount of light left to the evening.

At least an hour, she thought. Somewhere above her in a room with an open window, John Lennon was singing “Revolution.”

She had a small spiral notebook in her capacious coat pocket, and a paperback copy of
Jazz
by Toni Morrison, so she’d have something to read if she was early or Colleen was late. She tried as she walked to remember everything she passed so she could report to Carter.

There were a couple of working girls on the corner of Ninth Avenue. They wore skirts so short they barely covered their underpants (assuming underwear was part of their equipment). One, a beautiful yellowish girl with big purple lips and copper-colored shoulder-length hair, wore fishnet stockings and spiked heels. The other had masses of black hair and scarlet lips. Her skirt was gold and her shoes were leopard skin. Both of them gave Jill the eye as she trotted 271

272 / Beth Gutcheon

across the street toward them in her long coat and flat-heeled boots.

The second one lit a cigarette with long-fingered hands, flashing endless scarlet nails. As Jill scurried past them, glancing sideways at the strongly muscled bare thighs beneath the gold skirt, she knew suddenly that neither one of them was a girl at all.

(Shoes size eleven at least, she mentally noted for Carter’s benefit, along with details of coiffeur and costume.) She checked the house numbers and thought to herself that Carla’s ought to be on this block.

And indeed, down on the corner she could see a neon sign hanging out over the sidewalk with a neon martini glass that danced from one angle to another, back and forth on the rim of its round foot.

The door to the club was set into the squared-off corner of the building. There was a glass case on the outside wall with a light inside it to illuminate the night’s program.

Jill stopped to read the sign. It had “Carla’s” printed in red script diagonally across the corner. Typed in the middle of the page were the date, and “Cabaret Night.” The light was on inside the case in spite of the almost full daylight.

Looking through the window, she saw a dark-paneled room with a long bar at one side. There were round tables and lots of bentwood chairs, and a small stage at the far end of the room. The bartender, a young white guy with earrings in both ears, was rapidly cutting up limes into half wedges and setting them out with the rest of his fruit in white china bowls. His only customer sat at one end of the bar drinking a glass of beer and reading
The Village Voice
.

Jill pushed the door open. The bartender looked up briefly. A couple at a table, students by the look of them, were leaning toward each other, talking quietly. At the edge of the table were two coffee cups, a full ashtray, and a plate of what had been chicken wings.

There was no one in the place who could be Colleen. Jill took a seat at a table near the door. The room was warm, and she thought of hanging her coat up but decided against that; it was by the coat Colleen would know her.

A waitress with red hair in a near crew cut came to her carrying a menu.

Five Fortunes / 273

“I’m meeting a friend,” said Jill.

“Something while you wait?”

“No, I’ll just…”

“Water?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

The waitress brought her a glass of water, and left her alone. Jill took out her notebook and her novel. She wrote down things she thought a detective would want to know in her little book, and she watched the door, and she watched the clock, and she watched the bartender. A couple came in and took a table across from her. The bartender turned on a television above the bar. The waitress brought bowls of chili con carne to the new couple, who said something, looking apologetic. The waitress went to the bar and the TV was turned off again. The sound system came to life, playing Eartha Kitt.

The couple looked happier, and began to eat their chili.

A man in a leather jacket and a Mets cap came in and took a table.

A pair of women in matching black jeans came in and ordered tequila. The waitress came to Jill again, and Jill asked for iced tea.

She tried to concentrate on her book. I’ll wait until 6:35, she thought. More people came in.

I’ll wait for the door to open two more times, she decided.

Almost at once it swung open, and a man carrying a cello case entered and went straight through the room and out again through a door in the back.

The room was filled with smells of food now. The women in the black jeans were eating quesadillas. The light outside was beginning to shade toward violet gray.

The door finally opened again at five of seven and a group of four came in. They looked like Jill’s parents; like her mother, anyway.

Middle-aged, well-fed, looking for fun. From the way one of the men examined the silverware she gathered they were slumming.

Jill got up from her table and went to the bar.

“Excuse me…”

“’Can I getchou?”

“Nothing, thanks, I have to go, but…”

274 / Beth Gutcheon

The bartender cocked his head back. He was a portrait of punk cool.

“I’m looking for Sidney James. I was told he comes in here.”

“Not at
this
hour.”

“Oh, sorry…”

“Sidney be in, two, three in the morning.” He looked at Jill. “You’re welcome ’a come back then.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

The bartender smiled too.

“If it happens I don’t get back…”

“Yeah?”

Yeah, indeed. What? What exactly did she want? Just to look at Sidney James, so she could report. “Is there any other way to reach him?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Does he live near here?”

“I guess he must.”

“So this is his local.”

The bartender smiled.