Leavin' Trunk Blues (7 page)

“Hello?”

“Hold up. Hold up. Be right with ya.”

A black man in a purple suit with a pair of two-toned shoes in his hand walked out of a small cove. The man’s hair was relaxed like a doo-wop singer and he wore a thin mustache below a large wide-spread nose. His skin was deep black and stretched tight against his skull like Little Richard after his fifth face-lift. Nick could have sworn he noticed a trace of lipstick.

“You Peetie?” Nick asked.

The man placed the shoes on a stand filled with a rainbow assortment of colors. He stopped and returned his eyes. “What’s it to ya?”

“I’m looking for a man called Peetie Wheatstraw.” Nick introduced himself and offered his hand.

The man’s wide grin turned downward as he studied Nick’s face, shaggy hair, and beaten work boots. His eyes rolled up to his arched eyebrows.

“I can tell you ain’t lookin’ for no suit.”

Must be.

“Heard you were Ruby Walker’s agent.”

“If you lookin’ for collectin’, stand in line, boy, ‘cause whole bunch of folks lookin’ for a dime from the Peetster. You hear what I sayin’?”

“I’m not here for a shakedown,” Nick said. “Hate to disappoint you, but I’m just a blues historian.”

“No shit,” Peetie said, his shoulders hunching with laughter. “You know you’re gettin’ old when you become history.”

“I’m lookin’ for anything you remember about the old scene and King Snake Records.”

“Man, make my ole dick hard to hear you askin’. Goddamned, ain’t thought about King Snake in quite the while.”

‘You got time to talk?” Nick said, never hearing a source aroused over his own history.

“Listen, man, I was about to close up. You can go with me if you want. Just down the street. Good greens and corn bread.”

“I could eat,” Nick said. The early-morning biscuit was long gone.

The winter sky had begun to turn black outside and hard wind rattled the front door. Peetie opened the glass case full of hats and pulled out the purple one. He slipped the bowler on his head and grabbed a trenchcoat off the rack.

“Gotten colder than a Minnesota well-digger’s ass,” he said with a giggle. “Where you from, Travers?”

“New Orleans.”

“No shit. I grew up near Rampart Street. Left when I was sixteen … you come all this way to ask about King Snake?”

“Yep.”

“Ooh, well well,” he said, tying the purple trenchcoat around him. “Lets go get down to business.”

--

They followed the iced sidewalk down the block to another storefront, a place called Connie’s. The sign said it was the Best Soul Food on the South Side. That was the interesting thing about Chicago, these pockets that could be right out of the Mississippi Delta. As soon as Nick walked through the door, the smell brought him home.

Peetie dropped his head and the hat fell into his hands. He found a seat by the window to the kitchen and sat down. There was a velvet painting of a black Jesus by the cash register and silver and red tinsel wrapped the serving window. A blackboard listed the specials: oxtail, chitlins, smothered chicken, pork chops, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, field peas, cabbage, corn, and corn bread.

The smell was better than the most expensive perfume. Give Nick a woman that smelled like soul food and he was hooked. Peetie yelled his order to an unseen cook and Nick did the same. He got chicken and greens with sweet tea. Only in the South and on the South Side.

“Love that smell,” Nick said.

“Smell like a fat woman to me. You ever have a fat woman, man? I promise you never go back. I likes them with meat shakin’ on their bones.”

Nick kept on his wool coat. He could feel the cold sweeping in from cracks by the door as he took off his watch cap. “What made you leave New Orleans?”

“Did some things I wasn’t real proud of,” Peetie said. “Made some folks mad and didn’t have much choice. Hard to keep straight down on Rampart in the day. Know what I’m sayin’? Lots of pool halls, women of the evenin’ and the such. Man tried to cut my pecker off before I left. Ain’t that some shit?”

“Man, I’d leave town too.”

Peetie just started laughing.

“You were telling me about Lyons.”

“Blues was nothing but a hobby to him. Man ran numbers, poker dens, hookers. You name it, it had Billy’s finger in it. But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea ‘bout him. Billy was kind of like that English dude, Robin Hood. I mean, he’d give you the last bite of his chicken pie. I seen him down at the YMCA with a suitcase filled with silver dollars handin’ them to folks so country they still had cow shit on their boots.”

“Mind if I take a few notes?” Nick asked. This guy was too much. A little flaky but a real quote machine.

“Shit, man, I know what you’re sayin’. I mean like right now. I’m thinkin’ all about Ruby and Billy and shit, but havin’ a hard time makin’ it happen. It’s like when you watch a movie and really love that bitch. Like I was watchin’ this film with Cary Grant. That thang with the crop duster and all that shit? Anyway, man, I laughed my ass off seein’ him when they poured that booze down his neck and made him drive that car. Aw shit, man, he was mouthin’ off to his mama at jail. Ain’t that some shit?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s some shit, man.”

Peetie’s hands flew around as he talked with rapid-fire emotions. His face contorted with excitement as he jumped from topic to topic.

“Met Ruby today,” Nick said. Two old women in pillbox hats waddled in and took a seat next to the front door. Peetie nodded and laced his hands before him.

“How is Miss Ruby?” Peetie asked, very cool. Smoother than a pig coated in STP.

“Not good.”

“I’ll have to go down and see her one of these days.”

“She said you mishandled her money.”

“Did she?” His eyes got big with phony surprise.

Peetie walked away for a moment and placed his purple hat on the rack. He brushed some imaginary dirt from his pants and stared straight ahead. Nick decided to drop the money issue until later.

Peetie wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it.

They talked a while about some big hits for King Snake and some of their main talent. Some Nick knew. Elmore King and Moses Jordan. And some he didn’t. Peetie remembered some anecdotes about Lyons as a South Side kingpin and Ruby’s first appearance on stage. He said she stood there shaking with fear in the hot stage lights before bursting into a raunchy song.

“What’s this all about, man?” Peetie asked. “Nobody asked me a damned thing about King Snake for thirty years. And nobody sure has asked me ‘bout Billy Lyons. So what’s up with all this?”

“Like I said, I’m a music historian. I’d appreciate anything you know about King Snake and Lyons’s death.”

“Ooh, well, well,” Peetie said. ‘You buyin’?”

“Yep.”

“Connie? Connie, give me two pieces of corn bread,” he yelled. “You want to know why she killed him, right? Let’s slice through the bullshit. That’s why you is here.”

Nick smiled.

“Now who’s gonna know that besides three folks? Billy, Ruby, and God. And two of them folks ain’t talkin’. 1 didn’t talk to Ruby a long time after all this shit went down. Maybe like ten years, but I went to see her at Dwight and ask her if she gettin’ a cut … Fucked up her money? No, sir. Maybe I made some bad investments, but no sir, I was lookin’ out for that woman.”

“What did you invest in?”

“You were just standin’ in it. That store. It gonna turn a profit one of these days.”

“Why would she kill Lyons?” Nick asked.

“Everybody say Billy was foolin’ ‘round, right?”

Nick nodded.

“Maybe that’s true. Maybe it ain’t. That man stone-cold loved that woman. I ain’t lyin’. When he heard her sing his old face would start shakin’ and you’d catch him kind of rubbin’ his eyes. So, he loved her, right?”

“So why?”

“Ruby was down them last few months before she killed him,” Peetie said. “Man, she went down fast. I used to couldn’t book that woman enough. Shit. The whole town wanted her from the South Side up to Rush Street. But when she got hooked on that sweet, sweet cocaine, I couldn’t get her a gig singin’ for supper. Nobody likes an addict. Man, one night she fell off stage. I’m talkin’ headfirst into a table. Blood on her head. That’s sad. Just sad.”

“She was fucked-up when she attacked Billy?”

“Yeah, probably. But it was about cash. She was sleepin’ in alleys again.” Peetie lowered his voice. “Put down that notebook. Let me tell you somethin’. Cool? Between us? I loved that woman. When she sang I could feel my soul smile. But she started whorin’ for cash. One time, I had to beat a man with a baseball bat in some low-rent hotel to get him off her. Some greasy piece of shit was layin’ on top of the Queen of the Blues. Man, made me want to puke ...”

Peetie put his fingers to his mouth and shook his head.

“What?” Nick asked.

“Uh-uh,” Peetie said. A void of expression hung on his face.

Nick stuck the notebook in his pocket and ran his hand over his stubbled jaw.

After a minute Peetie said, “She was robbin’ Billy when she killed him.”

All Nick could say was, “Jesus.”

“She sucked you in, huh?” Peetie asked.

Nick nodded.

A black woman with her hair knotted into a gray bun walked out with two Styrofoam containers and two paper cups. She glared at Peetie. The food steamed up some wonderful smells when Nick opened the top. The woman turned on a soul Christmas tape while she cleaned up. Otis singing “Merry Christmas, Baby.”

“C’mon, man,” Peetie said, leaning close into the table and shaking his head. He ticked his tongue and rubbed his bottom lip over his mustache. He left his food untouched. “Don’t let that old woman confuse you. She just OJin’ on you, man. Prison will do that to a woman, get her mind convinced she didn’t do it. But she got Billy’s blood on her hands. That much I know. Police found Billy’s blood all in her bed.”

Nick dug into the greens. Crisp with small pieces of salty ham. The corn bread melted in his mouth. He listened to Otis sing and sighed. He thought he was on to something. Pretty stupid, he guessed. People were in prison for a reason. He just trusted too easily.

Peetie studied his face. “You all right, man?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Listen, them days weren’t all bad. Man, I remember goin’ out drinkin’ with Ruby after her shows down at the Palm Tavern. Guess that about the time when ‘Blues Highway’ came out. She’d have her driver pick us up and we couldn’t pay for a drink all down Forty-seventh.”

“Must’ve made a good chunk of change to have a driver.”

“Not really. We had to. Ruby couldn’t drive worth a shit. That country girl never learned.”

“You know where I can find some other King Snake folks?”

“Most of ‘em dead, man. Like I said, I been out that loop.”

“No one?”

Peetie shook his head. “Sure don’t, man. Wish I could help. I mean, like I seen Moses Jordan around and stuff but you got to have an engraved invitation to say hello to that fat fucker.”

Nick nodded.

“Ruby really had the thing. Somethin’ that made people just want to be around her. To this day I don’t know what happened. But I guess I blame Billy. When that fell apart, something in Ruby died.”

Nick played with his food, sorting the ham from the greens. He’d lost his appetite looking for something that wasn’t there.

Annie knew her knives. She didn’t care for a bowie or a switchblade. They were all flash for cash. Just give her something that was made for carving a turkey or skinning a carrot and she was in heaven. So simple. The best knives were carbon steel with some nice wood wrapped around the tang. Most people didn’t know what a tang was, but it was the extension of the blade you didn’t see. You have a short tang and you were really screwed. Kind of like a guy with a short dick. She kept a seven-piece wooden block set on her nightstand beside her lava lamp and vibrator.

All her knives were forged, hammered out from a thick piece of steel. She liked the blade hand-ground by a master cutler. Make that edge so sharp it could cut through a tin can like it was butter. She loved them all. Willie was a butcher knife but he had friends like a carving knife, boning knife, cleaver, bread knife, and even her little shearpoint paring knife for those special occasions. One time she hid the paring knife in the crack of her ass to get by some club security. She jabbed a guy good as he sat on the toilet snorting coke.

Dead by the time she and Fannie hit the back door.

She leaned back into her waterbed, the waves making her a little seasick, and used a sharpener to turn the pages of her
Archie
comic. Fannie lay on the floor by the bed painting her toenails green.

“You want to get some coffee? A little latté? Hit the shops?”

“No,” Annie said, bored and staring at Betty and Veronica playing catch at the beach in bikinis. Archie talking Veronica into playing in a Frisbee contest only to get beaten by a dog. Annie giggled. That Ronnie’s so uptight.