Leavin' Trunk Blues (12 page)

Somewhere a car alarm scattered the sounds of the late twentieth century. Where did all the people go? What happened to the black working class? What happened to Chicago, the promised land?

There would be no retracing Ruby’s last steps tonight. No way of knowing how far she would have had to carry the body or the steps she would have to navigate drunk. Those answers had been wiped away by urban renewal, fate, and time.

All he knew was that Ruby lived in a second-floor apartment on this corner. She’d given him the address before he left Dwight. If she killed Lyons in her bed, it would have been a mighty long walk down those steps. Ruby had always been a thin woman. Maybe Big Mama Thornton could have hoisted Billy Lyons like a sack of potatoes, but not Ruby. If she couldn’t drive, she sure as shit would have needed help.

Nick still had a hard time imagining her stabbing Lyons. She told a story involving a gun but everything Nick had read stated Lyons was stabbed seventy-seven times. The number never changed.

The exhaust chugged like an electronic drumbeat. Nick got back into the car, his feet aching in his boots, his eyes heavy, and looped back south. If he couldn’t find Ruby’s home, he could still find her bar. Some things never changed and the Palm Tavern was one of those constants.

--

The Palm was wedged in a low brick building on East Forty-seventh Street down from the Met and the old Regal Theater. The bar was the place for entertainers like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington back in the day. A place once filled with the who’s who of 1950s black society. Businessmen to blues singers. The same owner had run the bar since the late fifties. Gerri Oliver. Nick stomped his boots outside and walked into the past.

The room was sad. Empty.

It was as if Gerri was waiting for all the ghosts to return. As if she never ventured outside her small business to see the Regal was gone, all the businesses closed, and the music that once poured from the taverns on Forty-seventh silent.

But the bar was impeccable. Padded leather booths lit with soft orange lights. A rose kept in a vase on each table. A gentleness and warmness about the place like a well-kept pair of wing tips.

Gerri stood behind the wooden bar, serving an elderly man in a fedora some whiskey in a smooth, rounded glass. Nick found a bar stool a few seats down and took off his jacket. Ella Fitzgerald gave a vocal workout from some hidden speaker. Across from him, silver tinsel snaked through bottles of booze.

Nick noticed a pay phone in the corner. He thought about what JoJo had said about Kate before he left. He had her number in his wallet. All he had to do was call her and ask for forgiveness. See if they could heal the tear he had created. But she’d moved on. You don’t get second chances on major fuckups even though he’d loved her even before they’d met.

When he was taking graduate classes at Tulane, he’d noticed her running along the neutral ground and into Audubon Park. Kate was hard to miss. Dark brown hair in a ponytail swatting her sweaty back. Long tan legs dodging streetcars. He could almost set his watch by her 8:00 A.M. turn into the park.

He remembered one day, he was running late and parked his Jeep by the stone fence at Audubon. She almost ran into him as she gave the most brilliant smile he’d ever known. He felt like someone had plugged him into an amplifier when she said “excuse me” and trotted past. Thick, raspy voice like a jazz singer. Deep brown eyes.

But you don’t follow a girl while she’s jogging. He knew he’d come off like a pervert. Some kind of sex-crazed fool.
Excuse me, miss? I get really excited when you sweat. Can I smell your socks?

So he’d waited. She continued to trot down St. Charles, turning on a dime into Audubon Park every morning, while he drew the last breath from his cigarette and smashed it under his foot. The runner.

The chase went on for months.

Then she stopped jogging. It was late fall and he began to wonder if she’d moved. Another lost opportunity. She was perfect, he thought. It was never meant to be. But one night he was flashing a ten-dollar bill for a bartender at the Columns Hotel when she wriggled beside him fighting for a space. She looked great in a black T-shirt, faded jeans, and Keds. His grin must’ve shown, because she grinned back. The muffled roar of conversation in the dark Edwardian bar was deafening. A yell was a whisper.

He paid for her drink and followed her outside to the antebellum porch. She introduced him to some other Picayune reporters and asked him to sit down. They all got into some crazy two-hour conversation about hidden meanings and metaphors in Scooby Doo while the constant New Orleans rain swept off St. Charles. The olive green streetcars clanged by, their interiors brightly lit in the darkness. After the hours passed, only he and Kate remained.

Their table was a mess of martini glasses and Dixie bottles. She bummed a cigarette from him and admitted she didn’t smoke. Her legs hugged to her chest as she inhaled. He was beginning to feel cocky when she looked at her watch, shook his hand, and darted out into the rain.

But the next day, he called her at the paper and asked her to dinner. After a hard-won twenty-minute conversation, she agreed. They had a date down by Pontchartrain with crawfish boil and a
fais do do
. A great outside venue where the beer came from trash cans filled with ice and the mudbugs were so spicy, they singed your fingers.

“You want a drink?” Gerri asked, breaking him from the memory.

“Just thinkin’ about that,” Nick said, his voice cracking.

Gerri was a light-skinned black women who looked a great deal younger than her seventy-odd years. Her hair was kept neat, white, and natural. Golden disks adorned her ears and she wore a loose-fitting pink shirt. When she smiled, the dark room became brighter.

“Double Jack on the rocks,” Nick said, staring at the multicolored bottles across from him. A couple of unopened boxes of Johnny Walker, and a smooth, wooden African statue. He shook loose a cigarette and listened to Fitzgerald croon. There was a good energy here. Even in the silence and emptiness, you waited to hear the roaring laugher and clinking drinks of years ago.

Nick looked over at the pay phone in the corner of the bar and thought against it. Leave it alone. He introduced himself as Gerri laid down the drink. She was a legend who had been in several documentaries on the South Side. Even featured in a New York Times article on the migration. He believed she’d migrated from Jackson, Mississippi, during the forties.

He told her about his project on Ruby and King Snake Records. She said she remembered Ruby well and shook her head at the mention of Lyons’s murder.

“She was something,” Gerri said. “I miss the days when Ruby was here.”

“A regular?”

“Oh yes,” Gerri said. “This place used to be so packed on a Saturday night that a sardine couldn’t find a place to stand.”

“You remember her agent?”

“Peetie? Oh yes, the man would walk in and say, ‘Gerri, give the room a drink.’ Then he’d slip out the back door.”

The old man at the end of the bar looked at Nick as if the world was out of focus and turned back to his whiskey. The music had stopped, and he could hear the buzzing of the neon sign in the window. The Palm Tavern. Nick laughed and wondered how JoJo was doing. He wondered if Felix was working his acrobatics at the bar and what Loretta cooked up for tonight’s special.

Nick smiled. “When was the last time you saw Ruby?”

“I went to the trial one day. Felt terrible for her. She just let that man drive her crazy. Billy could do that. He was so handsome, sharp as the devil’s tail … You know she was here the night he was killed?”

Nick almost choked on his drink.

“Hold on,” Gerri said, walking down to the end of a bar and picking up a steaming mug. “Herbal tea. Oh yes, I’m sorry.”

“Ruby was in here?”

She closed her eyes as she took a sip of the greenish tea. The old man at the end of the bar studied his reflection in the whiskey glass.

“She must’ve killed him a few hours after she left. She had a whole table that night, with some other folks in her band.”

“You remember who?”

“I’m sorry. That’s been quite a spell ago.”

“Was she drunk?”

“That’s like asking is a swimmer wet. Ruby was always drunk.”

“More than usual. Did she act strangely?”

Gerri shook her head. “No, just normal. Told me, ‘Gerri, keep it comin’.’ Poor, poor Ruby drinkin’ that ole Lord Calvert.”

“Did you know her very well?”

“No more than the other singers. We used to have ‘em all in here. They’d tell me things. Talk to me about their problems and cry on my shoulder.”

“She ever mention her problems with Billy?”

“Oh sure, with his cheatin’ and that type thing. When I heard what she’d done, I remember just crying for them both. It was just so awful.”

“Everybody knew her?”

“Ruby was the queen of the ball. Every man’s head, and I mean every man’s, would turn. She was so beautiful. And folks who just made the trip north really appreciated her songs. She had one. Oh, what was the name of it?”

“‘Lonesome Blues Highway?’”

Gerri nodded. “Yes, people really loved that one. People connected, I guess.”

The Jack flushed a warm glow into Nick’s face. He rubbed his boots together as he listened. He could go to sleep right there. Find one of those empty corner booths and take a nap. Gerri wouldn’t mind.

He looked at his watch.

He’d done his best today.

“You met any of Ruby’s friends?” Gerri asked.

“Peetie,” Nick said and laughed. “Moses Jordan.”

“No, her
friends
. She used to have this gal who was always by her side. Couldn’t go to the bathroom without her following. What was her name? Always wore one of those floppy hats. Not as pretty as Ruby. A little large. Hold on …”

Gerri placed her tea on the counter and walked away again.

She returned holding a brittle wood frame. The bottom left corner of the glass was broken and the black-and-white picture had yellowed. But Nick could still see Ruby sitting among a group of people, drinks hoisted high in their hands.

“That’s Ruby and over there is Billy in the Stetson hat. Never did like to have his picture taken.”

Lyons was the only one with his head twisted away from the camera.

Gerri pointed to an overweight black woman sitting next to Ruby.

“That’s the one I was telling you about. Florida. She and Ruby were real close. Worked to keep the fans away. And handle things. 1 think they both came from the same county back in Mississippi. Haven’t seen her for years.”

Nick stared at Florida’s face. He wondered why Ruby didn’t tell him about her. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she had drifted into time like Ruby’s apartment and King Snake Records.

“You remember her last name?”

Gerri said she didn’t. She walked away as the old man stirred at the end of the bar. The man laid his cash on the table and Gerri helped him into his heavy coat. She walked with him to the door.

An icy breeze shot into the bar as Nick stood and fished into his pockets for some cash.

“You mind if I borrow this?” he asked, pointing to the picture. “I want to make a copy.”

“No, go right ahead. You say you’re trying to help Ruby?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, good luck then,” Gerri said. She looked confused. “We miss her around here. Been a void since she left that I can’t explain.”

“Anything else stick out in your mind?”

“Not really,” she said. “I knew the men in her band a lot better.”

“Who?”

“Oh, Franky Dawkins. Leroy Williams. They were some great people. Makes me sick to think how they died.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “Heard about that. Guess Leroy has some problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Had to be depressed, taking his own life.”

“Who told you that?” Gerri said, plunking down her tea. “Man was murdered.”

“I’m sorry, it’s late. I guess it was Dawkins who killed himself.”

“You gettin’ some bad information, son. Both of ‘em were murdered just after Ruby was put away. People used to say Billy had put some bad mojo on that place. Can you believe two such fine men killed so close to each other?”

Nick toyed with the napkin around the glass of Jack and shook his head.

“Mr. Travers?”

“You’re sure about this?” Nick asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Those men were like family.”

“How’d they die?”

“Both robbed. Cut up awfully bad. They threw Leroy into the river after they finished with him.”

“You mean they were stabbed several times?”

“So many times they looked like a side of meat. Or so I’m told.”

At the Cook County Jail, I gave up the flowered dress, the black high heels, and the ruby necklace Billy had given me. I lived there for months until the trial started in the beginning of 1960. My lawyer wanted me to confess. Said it would be easier that way. Said I wouldn’t have to fear being put to death. But I said the truth would give me freedom.