Rhode Island Red (6 page)

“Well, that's just wonderful. But what would I look like taking your whole fee for that work? You're not supporting me, Nanette.”

“It's not my whole fee. It's only half. And I wanted to give it to you now because I'll probably forget your next six birthdays. It's a kind of insurance. And besides, haven't you been talking about repainting the house or something for months now?”

“I want aluminum siding, I said. As if you were listening.”

“Well, that's what I mean. It's yours.”

In the end she did take the money. After pinning me to the wall with a couple of those patented Mom looks. You know, those looks that can mean anything from
who's going to be wearing pajamas at this pajama party?
to
prison is probably too good for you
. I had seen the full panoply of her looks and now, after nearly thirty years, could all but ignore them.

Mom kissed me and put the bills back in her pocket.

She keeps saying that one day she'll take a vacation someplace nice—maybe even go to Europe. But she never will. She keeps promising to visit me and see my apartment, too, at least to meet me midtown for lunch. But I don't count on that one either. I don't think she even remembers the last time she was in Manhattan.

Mom told me all about aluminum siding. We had tea, Lipton's, which is very hard to get wrong.

She asked after Aubrey, and inquired whether she still had “that beautiful mink jacket that she saved up for” out of her earnings as a restaurant hostess. I knew that her suspicions about what Aubrey really did for a living were probably much worse than the reality. A go go dancer isn't a whore, I wanted to tell her. But it was a little late for that. See, the old folks do have a point—once you tell a lie, you have to go on lying; it just works that way.

A few minutes before it was time for me to go, I went into my old room and called Aubrey. I had to confirm the appointment we'd made. I needed someone there with me when I faced Leman Sweet, and Aubrey had agreed to accompany me; to watch my back, so to speak, since I feared Detective Sweet might get physical again when I told him what I'd done. When I told him even
half
of what I'd done.

“So … you really gone do it, huh Nan?” Aubrey asked wearily.

“Yeah, I really am.”

“You be better off taking Walter back.”

We had taken over a corner of the immense lobby of her apartment building and fashioned an island of sofas and glass tables and easy chairs. I took a cigarette from Aubrey's pack. As I was striking the match I noticed Leman Sweet swing in through the plate glass doors. As he barrelled along, he was being dogged by an irate doorman who had not been responded to in the manner to which he was accustomed. Sweet finally wheeled on the man and flipped open his badge. The doorman removed his hat and wiped his forehead.

“
That's
him?” Aubrey stage whispered to me.

“Oh yeah. That is most definitely him.”

“He doesn't look that mean.”

She was right.

It was Leman Sweet, all right, but not the same one who had cursed and assaulted me in my own home. He still had the Fu Manchu moustache but he was now dressed in a dark business suit. High polished Florsheims. Good Presbyterian tie. Good haircut. The quietly competent look. Best of all, he wasn't carrying a musical instrument that might end up smashed to bits against the nearest available surface.

Detective Sweet towered over us like the wish-granting, coal-black genie in my childhood affirmative action story book. I worked up enough courage to meet his eyes.

“Why'd you want to meet here?” he boomed.

“My friend Aubrey lives here,” I responded, a clumsy introduction if ever there was one.

But by then Leman had gotten a good look at Aubrey. He went into a kind of moony paralysis. Which was, as Stevie Wonder said, just like I pictured it.

He sat directly across from Aubrey, his legs spread wide, massive thighs outlined in navy blue gabardine, pinky ring flashing—a real prince of the city. “Well, it's a good thing you wanted to meet uptown,” he said to me—ostensibly to me—while he was eating Aubrey up, “'cause that's where I was today.”

I didn't linger over his non sequitur. No use expecting a smitten man to make sense. Without further ado I merely placed a large, stuffed sweat sock on the little cigarette table in front of him.

“What is that?” he said.

“Money.”

“Whose money?”

That's where Aubrey came in, as planned. “Look like it was your friend's,” she said. “Officer Conlin. He put it in Nan's sax that night before they killed him.”

Sweet, coming reluctantly back to earth, let out a long, low curse.

I allowed Aubrey to go on from there with her narration, describing how, after I'd discovered the money, I was terrified the police—namely Leman—would suspect me of something. How I'd been too scared to report it right away and had come to Aubrey seeking her advice.

At the end of the tale, Sweet took hold of the sock and shook it like a bull terrier with a backyard squirrel. The rolls came tumbling out.

“How much is here?”

“Thirty-five thousand,” I spoke up quickly. “About that.”

Leman looked at me. My body tensed, preparing for a lunge from him.

“What's the matter, Mr. Sweet?” Aubrey asked and leaned toward him solicitously. “You don't look too happy to find your friend's stash.”

“Wasn't
his
stash. Supposed to be the Department's. Goddamn, this ain't good,” he said solemnly. “Not good at all.”

“Why not?”

“There's twenty-five thousand missing.”

“Oh my God! Oh, no!” Aubrey said. “What you figure happened to it, Mr. Sweet?”

Aubrey, crossing and uncrossing her legs, lighting his Newports, playing first the bumpkin and then the slut, got the story out of Leman Sweet. He told us about the failed under cover operation he and Charlie Conlin had been working on: It seems “the Dominicans” were starting to use street musicians and flower vendors to retail stolen tokens, money orders, passports and even lottery tickets. He and Conlin/Sig had been part of a huge sting that had gone bust. The fortune that Conlin left in my sax case was so-called buy money. And Leman didn't know why Charlie had been carrying it around.

We all sat in silence for a few moments. Then Aubrey laughed obscenely. “Look like your partner was deep into something, Sweet.”

He nodded.

“But you know,” she continued, “a fella like that coulda spent sixty thousand just as quick as he spent that missing twenty-five. Your department probably figure the whole sixty already gone, right, Sweet? Right? I mean, ain't they already kissed it good-bye, Sweet?”

He said nothing, just twisted the sock until the contents were secure, and then pocketed it. Sweet leaned back into the sofa and lit another Newport, holding on to the paper match long after its flame had died.

I looked at him while he drooled. I looked at Aubrey looking at him. What a nasty little dance. It would lead nowhere, of course.

I had an absurd vision of Leman Sweet in a tight-fitting French navy uniform, walking all lovey-dovey with Aubrey through Marseilles. Then I cast myself in the female role, hanging onto his arm while I chatted over my shoulder with the odd fishmonger about the novels of Marcel Pagnol. It was almost enough to make me pull out my notebook and dash off a few lines. Needless to say, that poem would have been squarely in the surrealist tradition.

All that aside, I could feel my chest expanding with the sweet rush of a righteous act. I had done what I was supposed to do—give back that money. It may have been a little short, it may have been a little late, but I'd done it! Sweet seemed to buy our version of events. And Sig—in all his incarnations—would be out of my life forever.

Thank the baby Jesus, Leman Sweet left us at last.

Aubrey leaned forward and consulted the mirrored top of the little cigarette table. She freshened her lipstick, all the while shaking her head in bemused contempt.

“What?” I asked.

“Country nigger,” she said low. “Where the fuck he get off hittin' you?”

CHAPTER 6

Misterioso

I stopped dreaming about Leman Sweet and his thunder thighs and his fists like dressed pork roasts. Stopped fearing that he was going to come and beat me up every time I watched TV instead of running scales on the horn; every time I said an unkind word about anyone or failed to sort the recyclables or ignored a phone message.

I threw away the Marseilles pimp poem.

Mom had an appointment with the rip-off contractors who do shit like aluminum siding. They were going to give her an estimate.

And, oh yeah: Walt and I reconciled, in the usual way. The sex was still excellent. And he was for the most part on his best behavior—the upswing of the getting-back-together arc: dinners at those little places where he would take a client he was wooing; a fifty here and there to tide me over; always the movie
I
wanted to see.

He was empathy itself when I recounted the horror story about Sig being murdered in my place, palpably guilty that he hadn't been around to help me, suitably outraged over my treatment at the hands of the police. He did get a bit obnoxious with his jealous insistence on knowing what this long-haired white man was doing in my apartment in the first place. But I managed to make him feel like a petty lowlife for thinking about his dick when my very life had been at stake.

So the sheets were humming and the Con Ed bill was paid. Walt and I were back on solid ground.

Except he didn't move back in this time. He didn't ask. I didn't invite. Despite the good times, there was still a diamond hard core of mistrust between us. I regretted that, wished it weren't true, but there it was. He knew my moods and he knew my body, just as I did his, but there was that vast campground of head and heart where we almost never met. Once again I knew the pleasures of that fevered stripping off of clothes and Walter's gorgeous chest and all the lovely wet stuff, the glass of cold wine and one of his cigarettes just before sleep and the so-long kiss the next morning. But I guess I'm just some kind of pervert when you get right down to it. It seemed I was genuinely happy only when I could nail him on some crap he was trying to pull.

But while my love life had its limitations, my “professional” life was no less than blossoming … leaping … pumping … hot. A highly respected musician who had made a good living in the New York music world for some forty years—a friend of a friend—had accepted me as a student. We were going to start working together in a month or so. Was I excited? No. I was more than excited—I was serious. Practicing my ass off. For the first time in years, I was serious about something other than finding a bargain on red wine.

As a kind of homage to Sig, I kept to that same spot just off Thirty-fourth and Lexington, even though he had told me I could make more money west. After all, while I really was applying myself to my music, I realized, number one, that I was at heart a novelty act—a big girl with long legs and a bald head—and number two, most of the people playing for coins west of Fifth Avenue would have blown me off the sidewalk.

So what if I wasn't ready to play
Body and Soul
? I had my fans nonetheless. The tips in my hat were showing a steady increase, a few fives among the singles. And then, one day, somebody gave me something a lot more thrilling than five bucks.

I was blowing something playful—a 1950s thing called
The Late Show
—pretending that Dakota Staton was singing in my left ear—when I saw a strange looking shadow fall across the pavement. The shape turned out to be a young kid with a bouquet of flowers in his arms. I finished the set and bent to gather up my take. The boy went on standing there, smiling. Then he thrust the wrapped flowers into my hand.

“This is for me?”

“Yeah. With a note,” he said.

I pointed down to my hat. He scooped up two quarters as his tip and was gone.

I undid the wrapping paper.

God! Long stemmed yellow roses. Nine of them. All perfect. A creamy yellow note card too, but nothing written on it. Instead, a twenty dollar bill paperclipped to it.

I looked around in wonderment. I looked up to all the buildings where someone could be standing behind a curtain, pining for me. I looked down the avenue and around the corner and at every doorway. It was such a crazy thing, getting those flowers, so moving and yet so weird, that instead of breaking for lunch I packed up my sax and went home.

The piece I wrote that night about the incident had the nine roses turning into eighteen, and the eighteen into thirty-six, and so on. Multiplying, dividing, transmutating. You know … roses, rose hips, my hips, hips, lips, yellow so yellow it's white hot, its intensity like the sewing needle my mother once used to take a splinter out of my heel.

Next day, it happened again. Only the delivery boy was different. And as for the new batch of roses—those love-some things—they were younger, a trifle smaller, their heads tightly curled back onto themselves and sitting atop pale green leaf collars—the yellow was even deeper. Impossibly deep, hypnotical yellow. I wanted to eat one. Could all but feel that color dripping down the side of my mouth like egg.

I finished out the afternoon, which, without my noticing, had turned to velvet. Blew nothing but ballads. Two hip-looking dykes asked for an encore of
Don't Blame Me
. Finished with
Violets for My Fur
. Sixty-two big ones in the fedora
Ran
home. Found second vase. Unplugged phone. Threw
Lady Day
on the machine. Poured drink. Long bath. No supper. Masturbated. Slept like top.

I decided to clean up my act a little the next day. I put on Monk's all-Ellington album while I pressed a skirt lightly and scared up a clean shirt and made coffee and picked up a little around the apartment. Then dressed and hunted for that Indian fabric out of which I had fashioned a neck strap for the ax. Finally I was ready to leave the house. I'd walked half a block before I realized my telephone was still unplugged. I ran back and reconnected it and the answering machine, and, as long as I was there, put on a pair of earrings.