Leavin' Trunk Blues (24 page)

“I can’t remember. I don’t even remember being there.”

“What about the bar? Who all was there?”

“I don’t know. Like I said. Jimmy . . . Elmore.”

“Why didn’t King testify?”

“Said he didn’t see me that night. Which was a lie.”

“Why would he lie?”

Ruby shrugged.

King, his last piece. Why would he think she’s not guilty? What had driven him to open up that night in New Orleans? Sit there as the rain drummed outside JoJo’s and share his story? He believed Ruby for some reason.

“I need to find him,” he said.

“If King don’t testify for me, what makes you think he’s gonna talk to you?”

“I know him,” Nick said. “He owes me an explanation.”

“Don’t work that way.”

“Was that the last time you two spoke?”

“Elmore came to see me about ten years ago,” she said. “He brought me some things after the trouble with that guard. Said he was real sorry about not speakin’ up for me. I told him to get out of my face, lessen he wanted to help. He just left. Didn’t say nothin’ except he was real sorry. Ain’t that somethin’?”

“He say anything to you that night at the bar?” Nick asked.

“Dude, that was forty years ago,” Ruby said, rubbing her hands together, “I can’t remember every thing that man said. Let’s just say we was both drunk and bitchin’ bout Billy. He tole me not to feel bad ‘bout breakin’ in on the session like that. Said it didn’t affect him none. I tole him I was sorry, just, had somethin’ I needed to get out ‘bout that woman Billy was with.”

“You said you were drunk. How did you get home? Florida?”

“No, she left...” Ruby shook her head: “Dirty Jimmy or Elmore, I guess.”

“C’mon, Ruby.”

“I don’t know.”

Ruby looked at the ceiling and rubbed her hands together as if she were lathering them with soap. “Damn. Damn. Damn,” she muttered to herself.

“Just tell me what happened,” Nick said.

“Been over this a million times,” she said. “Been over this a million times.”

“Let’s hear it again,” Nick said, moving the recorder closer to her. “Where did that blood come from?”

“I went to the Palm Tavern and got drunk. Had me a bottle of whiskey.”

“You and Billy fought again?”

“No,” Ruby said, so low he could barely hear. Something was drawing her eyes inward, pulling some musty file from a far corner of her brain. Something not easily accessible.

“I was drunk. I was drunk.”

“But did you kill him?” Nick asked.

Ruby was shaking now. Not crying. Just rocking and hugging herself. The muscles in her jaws flexed.

“No,” she said softly. “I felt him crawl in bed with me late that night.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know, I was so drunk,” Ruby said. “He knocked over a pitcher I kept on a nightstand. And kicked a clock ‘cross the room.”

“Then what?”

“It was morning. I was in his arms and he was cold. Felt like a piece of steak on me and when I moved I was all wet and kind of stuck to the bed. The sun was up and it covered Billy’s head and body . . . and that’s when I seen it.”

Nick waited. He wanted her to finish but couldn’t speak. The cassette player churned and he felt his hands sweating.

“Billy was all cut up. Blood all around his shirt and head. His face look gray. I just remember screamin’ and tryin’ to just get out of the bed. But the sheets were all tangled around me. All those goddamn sheets tangled all around me. When I got out, that’s when I heard that metal pick clang to the floor. Somebody put it there. Somebody want me to think I killed him.

“I was scared, I couldn’t breathe, I was shaking all over and threw up. I called Florida …”

“She helped you.”

Ruby nodded. “We threw away the sheets and that pick and …” Ruby’s face ran with tears. “We put him in the back of Florida’s Hudson and drove him out to the lake. I was just so scared. I know it wasn’t right. I know it wasn’t right.”

They sat there for what seemed like hours. Finally, she composed herself and spoke again.

“Go home, Dr. Travers. I always wanted to be known. Be remembered. You remember me, okay? But there’s nothing else can be done.”

“Last night, two women tried to kill me,” Nick said. “I think someone wants me to stop asking questions about Billy. And I can’t leave that unfinished.”

Ruby didn’t say a word.

Nick tried to give a reassuring smile. “I always remember what Muddy Waters once said. ‘The only way to defeat trouble is to look it straight in the eye.’”

Halfway to Chicago, Nick turned off the interstate and into a chrome and neon gas station that looked larger than a bus terminal. Place must’ve had fifteen pumps with two fast-food restaurants and a convenience store. He stretched his legs and hooked up the nozzle to the Tic-Tac as some Illinois redneck pulled up in a red truck blaring Elvis’s “Santa Claus Is Back In Town.” Maybe he could stomach some beef jerky and a Coke by now. His stomach started to grumble as he lit a Marlboro.

The redneck combed his hair in a pompadour, watching himself in the rearview mirror.

Nick knew he needed to find a way of turning up the heat on his sources. All of them were holding back. He just had to find what motivated them. What would cause them to turn out secrets buried for forty years? If he could just find Florida. She had to know more about the King Snake circle after Ruby was put away.

Nick thought about her downturned head and slumped shoulders. A blues legend being led down a concrete corridor to be left alone with her thoughts and atrophied experiences in a concrete cage. What did she think about? Was death the last thing that brought her hope? He thought about the confined spaces and not seeing the world since 1959.

As the pump cut off, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He flicked the cigarette onto the ground and smashed it with his foot. A patch of sky had broken free of the snow clouds showing a sliver of sunshine. The cold surrounded Nick like he was at the bottom of a frozen lake as Elvis sang on inside the redneck’s truck.

After he walked inside and paid for some gas and some jerky, he found a pay phone close to the highway. First he called the Palmer House for any messages. Maybe Randy or Doyle had tracked down some more information. Nothing.

Nick hung up the phone and looked at his watch. Two o’clock. JoJo would be setting up for the Saturday night crowd. He’d be closed Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Probably a big show with Loretta, Fats, and the guys. She’d go all out, decking the whole damn bar in that ugly silver tinsel and throwing homemade pralines to the crowd.

He could imagine the old wooden signs creaking in the winter wind under stucco buildings of dark red, green, and blue, the smell of incense leaking through the doors of voodoo shops. JoJo drunk on stage with a Santa’s hat on his head playing harp. His old buddy Jay Medeaux down from the cop shop for his yearly brandy with Felix. Oz down from the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show dressed in full Dr. Frank N. Furter gear, and Hippie Tom from his French Market bong stand with his latest teenage girlfriend. Only in New Orleans.

When Loretta picked up the phone like she didn’t have time for bullshit, it gave him great comfort.

“Loretta?”

“Hey, boy … you home yet?”

“I’m stuck at a gas station ‘bout thirty minutes from Chicago.”

“Ain’t that some shit.”

“Listen, if I don’t talk to you guys I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. Okay?”

“Sure. Sure. You all right, Nicholas? You sound down.”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“How’s Kate?”

“How’d you know I found Kate?”

“I know you.”

“JoJo tell you why I’m here?”

“One of those crazy things you do. Helpin’ out some woman who killed her man.”

“Yeah. The Sweet Black Angel.”

“You’re shittin’ me? She’s still in jail? Lord, that woman could sang. Used to sing a bunch of her songs when I was in Memphis. Had some real pipes. So when you gonna wrap this thing up and come on back home? Or you got other things on your mind?”

Nick laughed and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat. A semi rolled by on the highway blaring its horn.

“It’s hard. Takes a while to put together all the pieces from forty years ago. Ruby’s in jail. The old South Side doesn’t exist, and half her band is dead or isn’t being straight. You get conflicting stories. Everyone remembers things their own way. Same old shit.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re sayin’. Couple of years ago me and the ole fart went back to Memphis for a party with some of the old school. Went back to the studio where I made my records, and Lord, those memories shot out at me like ghosts from an attic. Things I ain’t thought about for years.”

“I’ve found a lot of ghosts but little truth.”

“Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.”

“So do I. Hey, I’ll try to catch you guys on Christmas. Send the old fart my love.”

Loretta cackled.

“And Loretta?”

“Yes?”

“I love you too. You know that, right?”

“Never figured it to be any other way.”

Annie stared out Peetie’s car window at the most foreign landscape she’d ever known. Looked like another freakin’ planet. Woodstock was so damned country that she expected any minute to see some guy in overalls picking a banjo. Kind of like that retard in that movie with Burt Reynolds who had no teeth and fucked-up eyes. Yeah, this wasn’t the kind of place Peetie’s Bug/ Rolls needed to break down. They’d probably tar and feather them or string them up from one of those leafless trees they passed out on the two-lane.

This was serious corn country, with tiny white farmhouses and miles of dead cornstalks that looked like someone’s stubbled haircut. Snow at their roots like a bad case of dandruff.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?” Fannie asked.

“Just about,” Peetie said, driving with one hand. Man was wearing some stupid driving gloves. “King ain’t had me out to the ranch in a few years. Guess I ain’t sharp enough for him no more. Won’t return my calls. Don’t say hello at his club. That’s what happens when you get famous, Miss Fannie. You think yore booty don’t stink.”

Peetie’s little car rolled through a town of fast-food franchises, old-time diners, and shit-hole motels before he wheeled off onto another winding highway. After passing a bent, blue mailbox twice, he turned down the dirt road marked with a sign that read crossroads ranch, with small guitars inlaid on the comers of the sign.

They passed a rotted barn and pulled in front of a big-ass white home with huge columns. Looked like something out of
Gone with the Wind
.

“Where’s Miss Scarlett at?” Fannie asked.

Peetie laughed. “Yeah, King likes to believe he’s still in Alabama. Thinks he’s some kind of cowboy. Always did. Even lectured me one night, sayin’ the movies had it all wrong. Said most of the cowboys back in the day were black. But I said I ain’t never seen but one movie with a black cowboy and that was Sidney Poitier. And man, he had Apaches crawlin’ over his ass like fleas.”

Dozens of cars were parked on the lawn—BMWs, Mercedes, Cadillacs—as the lights burned bright in the huge home. Snow wandered down from the country skies as they stretched out of the car and drank in the whole scene. King had a huge run-down barn about fifty yards from where they parked—red and faded with its door wide open and bales of hay stacked nearby.

Huge stainless-steel troughs were full of beer and soda with rows of crisscrossed white lights hanging overhead. Thick barbecue smoke drifted in the dark air dotted by snowflakes.

Annie caught a flake in her mouth and imagined it was a sugar cookie as they walked past a bunch of idiots with smiles on their faces, wishing a lot of empty Merry Christmases. Peetie tipped his hat at a few ladies. He was having a grand old time in his ugly-ass yellow suit and yellow shoes.

“Man, you look like a banana,” Annie said.

“Ooh well, well. Why don’t you peel me then, baby.”

“I’d rather not,” Annie said, trudging ahead in the snow. “But me and Fannie been talking about your offer. We just want to know the whole plan before we agree to anything. You been awfully cool with Stagger Lee too. You ain’t lookin’ to dick us over to get yourself in good? Are you?”

“Ain’t nothin’ like that. Okay?” Peetie said. “It’s like you gonna rob a house. Right? Who am I talkin’ to? I know you two is the B-and-E experts. So let’s say you got a house you lookin’ at and it look real good. Big ole thing with brick and trim and all that shit. But hey, the family ain’t moved in. Well, Stagger Lee like that house. You know he’s dry as a bone right now. Me? I’m just helpin’ to fill up that house to let y’all do yore job.”

“What job?” Annie said.

Peetie stopped walking and readjusted his bowler hat. He played with the snow with his yellow shoes. The dumb-ass grin disappeared. His ears slipped back and his eyes narrowed. He whispered, “Kill that mean motherfucker. Can y’all do that?”