Night My Friend (5 page)

“Nan! Where are you?”

“Right here in River City. Did you think I was calling from Europe?”

“When did you get back?” Somehow he still couldn’t believe it, after all these years.

“Just yesterday. I tried to call you last night but you were out.”

“I sort of work by night.”

“Can we get together today, Johnny? I’ve so much to tell you.”

“Sure, Nan. I’ve got a lot to tell you, too. Where are you staying?”

“At the River Arms till I can find an apartment. Suppose I meet you in the lobby at eight?”

“Fine, Nan. Eight o’clock.”

He hung up and rolled over in the bed. Nan Stevens! After all these years… Nan Stevens, the girl most likely to succeed. Nan Stevens, a best-selling author at the age of twenty-four. He remembered the first shock of reading her book, a long rambling account of sex and history in fifteenth-century Europe. It wasn’t very different from a dozen other books of the times, except possibly that the sex was more sexy and the history more historical. Nan had always liked history, even during her school days.

He remembered trying to reach her after that first novel, only to learn that she’d gone off to Europe to gather material for a new book. That had been—how long?—three years ago. Three long years.

He rolled over on the bed and closed his eyes once more…
A song for Nancy, whose eyes are like fire; a song for Nancy, after all these years…

“Nocturne!”

He awoke.

“Get up, Nocturne.”

His eyes came open, and he looked up at the stranger standing above his bed. “Who are you?”

“Get up and get dressed. Cotton Cravess wants to see you.”

Cotton Cravess… And suddenly the memories of the previous night were back with him again.

Yes, Cotton Cravess would want to see him.

As they drove downtown toward the penthouse office of Cotton Cravess, Johnny wondered which of them it had been. Harper or Backus? Which had tipped off Cravess to the dying girl’s words? Because he knew one of them had.

One of them.

“We’re here,” the man spoke from the driver’s seat. “I’ll take you up in the elevator.”

“Does Cravess always send goons to break into people’s apartments when he wants to talk with them?”

“Cut out the talk and come on.”

Johnny followed him into the office building that housed the various organizations which made up Cravess Enterprises. He rode on the elevator past the busy editorial rooms of the newspaper, and the silent studios of the radio station. And there were other offices that even he did not know about. It was a long way to the top of Cravess Tower.

But finally he was there.

“This is him, Mister Cravess.”

Cotton Cravess turned toward him in his big swivel chair, smiling widely as if he were posing for a campaign poster. “Well, well. Thank you for coming.”

“Did I have any choice?”

Cotton Cravess ignored the remark and motioned to another man in the room. “I want you to meet Congressman Yorkman. Jim, this is Johnny Nocturne, the great song writer.”

Jim Yorkman stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “Happy to meet you, Johnny.”

Cotton Cravess motioned with a big, waving hand. “Find a chair for Johnny, will you, Jim? We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

A Congressman and a candidate for Governor of the state, talking to him as if he were the deciding vote in the election… Maybe he was.

“Cigar?” Cotton Cravess offered.

“Thanks, but I’ve got some cigarettes.”

“I enjoyed your new song. The one about the park at night.”

“Thanks.”

“Johnny, I understand you were with Officers Harper and Backus last night.”

Now it was coming out in the open. “That’s right.”

“Do you often ride with them?”

“Sometimes. I find the city by night quite stimulating to my songwriting efforts.”

Cotton Cravess smiled like a father. “Yes. And we can certainly see from your work that it pays off. The point is, you were present when they found that dead girl.”

“She wasn’t dead yet when we found her.”

“No, of course not. But she died a moment later, as I understand it.”

Johnny Nocturne nodded. “You received quite a full report.”

The smile stayed on Cotton Cravess as if it were chiselled in stone.

“Ah, yes. But the point is, Johnny, that the election is only days away. You heard what the girl said. You must realize what my political enemies would do with this in the next twenty days.”

“What happened to the girl?”

Cotton Cravess waved his arm. “A heart attack. It could have happened to anyone.”

“Where were her clothes?”

He noticed Jim Yorkman smile slightly at this question, but Cotton Cravess frowned. “Listen, Johnny, I’ll play square with you. I’ll tell you the whole thing, right from the beginning, and leave it up to you to judge me. I’ll throw myself on your mercy.”

Johnny was beginning to feel sick and he averted his eyes. Cotton Cravess was a hard man to take. If he ever won the election, Johnny thought he’d probably move to another state, just on general principles.

Cotton Cravess cleared his throat and continued. “Some of my people got together last night and threw a little party, sort of as a respite from the campaign. Unknown to me, one of my more—well, fun-loving—aides hired some girls to entertain us. Among them was this girl in question, Marie Karling. Apparently she was new in town and didn’t realize… Well, anyway she didn’t realize what was expected of her.”

Jim Yorkman spoke up from the sidelines. “You must understand, Johnny, that none of this was Cotton’s idea. It was a stupid thing to do, from any angle, and the man who hired these girls has been fired.”

“Correct,” Cotton agreed. “But we’d all been drinking pretty heavy, and you know how things get sometimes.”

“I know,” Johnny said.

“Anyway, somebody ripped the girl’s clothes off. She started screaming like the very devil and grabbed a coat and ran out the door. We chased her, but she was too fast for us. I guess the running was too much for her heart. She must have had a heart attack just as you people found her.”

Johnny Nocturne frowned and took out a cigarette. The story had just the right ring of truth about it. A more or less innocent affair that had accidentally killed a girl. Innocent, but the rival political party could easily use it to ruin Cotton Cravess.

“Why did she say your name as she died?”

Cotton Cravess waved his arm again. “I was the only one there that she knew. I do have a reputation in this state, you know.”

Johnny inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Nothing. Simply say nothing about it.”

“How about Harper and Backus?”

“They’ve both agreed that the right thing would be to keep silent.”

Johnny frowned. “What did they get for it?”

The smile returned to the face of Cotton Cravess. “Not money, if that’s what you think. I don’t bribe people. If I offered you money and my political opponents discovered it, I’d really be in a spot.”

“Then what are you offering me?”

“I’ve got a radio station downstairs. One of the best in town as radio goes in these days when everything is television.”

“So?”

“Suppose I were to guarantee that my radio station would play Johnny Nocturne records and songs almost exclusively. It would mean a lot to your sales in River City.”

Johnny laughed. “How to bribe a songwriter! I suppose if I’d been a novelist you’d have suggested your paper run my novel.”

“Take it or leave it.”

Johnny rose from the chair. “It was nice meeting you fellows.”

“Think about it carefully,” the man behind the desk said.

“I will…”

Jim Yorkman joined him at the elevator. “I’ll ride down to the street with you.”

“It’s a free country.”

The elevator dropped through its vertical tunnel, and a few moments later they were in the street.

“Tell me something, Congressman,” Johnny asked, “how did you ever get involved with a character like Cravess? I don’t know much about politics, but from what I hear you’ve got a pretty fair voting record.”

Jim Yorkman thought about it. “Let me buy you a drink and I’ll tell you about it.”

Johnny nodded agreement and followed him into the cocktail lounge of a nearby hotel. They found a dark corner that would be reserved for lovers at some later hour and settled themselves into the foam rubber upholstery and ordered a couple of drinks.

“It’s funny you should ask me that, Johnny,” the congressman replied. “People have been asking me that question for years. My wife, my friends… Sometimes, late at night, I even find myself asking the question. The answer is simply that Cotton Cravess got me elected. He put up the money, he gave me the push I needed. And I was just one of these crazy guys who figured the good I could do in Congress would counteract the evil association with Cravess.”

“It never works that way.”

“No, it never does. But of course I had to learn the hard way. Every time I wanted to vote a certain way, I’d get a long-distance phone call from Cravess. He’d remind me that my first duty was to the people who’d elected me…”

“You still managed to do pretty well.”

“Sometimes things work out.”

“What about the girl, Marie Karling?”

“It was a heart attack all right. Cravess was just unlucky.”

“Did he bribe the two cops?”

“I guess so, somehow. Maybe they’re songwriters, too.”

Johnny laughed. Then he was serious again. “What would you do in my position?”

Jim Yorkman thought about it. “Just wait and see. You’ll make up your mind, one way or the other. These things always work out.”

“You’re a great believer that things work out, aren’t you?”

“They do,” he smiled, downing his drink quickly. “I have to be going now, Johnny. Glad to have met you.”

Johnny shook his hand. “The pleasure was mine.”

He watched Jim Yorkman leave the lounge and after a moment Johnny followed. Outside, he blinked his eyes against the sun and headed back towards his apartment.

But sleep would not come to him now. Back in the apartment, he sat down at the piano and ran over the familiar bars of his first hit song.

It was a lonely kind of song, and now, as the shadows of afternoon began to lengthen, it conveyed to him the feeling it always carried. He closed the blinds and tried to think of the night, and the shadowy places of his mind.

Night… his fingers found the keys automatically and gradually the melody began to form itself… and surge slowly through his body…
Never,
that would be its name…
Never,
a word that did things to you…
Never, when the darkness falls again, never, when we…

The doorbell rang and he was back in the present. He ran his fingers over the keys and went to answer it.

“Hello, Johnny.”

“Nan! It’s not eight o’clock yet, is it?”

“Hardly,” she laughed. “I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop by to see you. After all these years, who wants to wait till eight o’clock?”

“Well come in, by all means!” He held the door wide for her and she entered, all smiles and silk and satin. If anything she looked even better than he last remembered her, tall and slim and very beautiful.

“A lot’s happened in a few years, Johnny.”

“It sure has, Nan. Let me get you a drink.”

She nodded agreeably and took out a cigarette. “You’re a big man now in the music world. They were playing your songs all over Europe.”

He smiled a bit as he poured the drinks. “I’m afraid they’re more popular over there than they are here. I’m far from being rich off them.”

“I know what you mean,” she sipped her drink. “Being a best-selling author isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either. But this next book of mine will set them all back on their heels.”

“Not another sexy historical novel?”

“Not this time. It’s non-fiction. I’ve been gathering material for it for more than a year now.”

“The girl writer in Paris! What the devil did you find to write a book about?”

“Joan of Arc.”

“Oh, God!”

“I know,” she smiled. “There have been thousands of books about Joan of Arc.”

“And plays and movies, too.”

“But not like mine, Johnny. Not like mine.”

“What are you going to do, Nan? Prove that Joan was really a boy?”

“No,” she replied quite seriously. “I’m going to prove she was really a witch…”

Johnny threw up his hands and reached quickly for a drink. “Why must young writers—especially girls—be forever so iconoclastic? Can’t you even let poor Joan rest in peace?”

Nancy shook her head. “You can’t let a lie rest in peace. Joan was a witch, not a saint, and I can prove it.”

Johnny smiled. “Some night I’ll let you convince me.”

The phone buzzed quietly at his elbow and he picked it up. “Johnny Nocturne here.”

“This is Jim Yorkman…”

“Oh, yes, Congressman?”

“Have you seen the evening papers?”

“No…”

“What were the names of those two policemen you were with last night?”

“Harper and Backus. Why?”

“Well, a police officer named Harvey Backus was murdered this morning, shot down right in back of Headquarters…”

Harvey Backus, dead.

Johnny spoke into the phone, with a voice he barely recognized. “Who did it?”

“They don’t know. Someone was apparently waiting in the garage where they park their squad cars. He got clean away. I’ve already called Cravess about it, but he denies knowing a thing about it.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Who is there to believe in this world, Johnny? All of a sudden things don’t seem to be working out any more.”

Johnny sighed. “I’ll try to talk with Tom Harper, the other officer. Then I’ll call you back, probably sometime tonight.”

“Right,” Jim Yorkman said, and hung up.

Nancy Stevens stretched out on the couch. “What was all that about?”

“It’s a long story, Nan. I’m sort of involved in something.”

She smiled up at him. “Same old Johnny. You know, sometimes I think we’re an awful lot alike. We both have a certain artistic talent, and yet, I wonder if in some ways we ever grew up.”