Coq au Vin (16 page)

“Well, thank you so much, Andre. I'm an incompetent, right? And an egomaniac along with it.”

“I give up.” He dismissed me with a gesture of disgust.

“What—I'm supposed to talk to the hand now?”

He turned his back on me and snapped on the stereo with a violent push of the button. I guess he just wanted to tune me out. A minute later I heard what he was tuning in: the whiny twang of a solo guitar. Startled by the deafening volume, I jumped.

Andre was playing the Rube Haskins cassette he had thrown across the room early that morning. That was some twelve or thirteen hours ago. The morning seemed like a lifetime ago.

I went over to the refrigerator and began searching for food I knew damn well we didn't have.

Plunk plunk splunk! Plunk plunk splunk! went the insistent guitar. I heard Little Rube's voice then. A dusty, pain-filled tremolo telling about the blood-drenched beauty of the South, and how writing these songs had been his way of surviving it. There followed some familiar-sounding blues licks, and then his slave's wail. No doubt he was now performing Martine's fave: “The Field Hand's Prayer.”

“Turn it down just a little,” I said in the middle of a lively walking blues with barbed lyrics about King Cotton.

Andre was making no move to adjust the earsplitting level.

“Hey, man, did you hear what I said?” I asked belligerently. “Turn that down!”

Andre did not heed me and did not answer. Still furious at me, I supposed.

Halfway through the next selection, he ran over to me and grabbed my elbow. “Listen!” he exhorted, eyes blazing.

“No,” I said wearily. “No more talking, no more fighting. I can't stand it anymore. Just give me a minute before I sic the dogs on Vivian. I'll call that cop, okay? I'll turn her in. Will that make you happy, Andre?”

“No no no! Not that.
Listen!”

I did, for another ten minutes. It was just more of the same.

Haskins talking for a few minutes about the horrors of life on the chain gang, telling a hair-raising anecdote about the circumstances that led him to write one song or another. Then another tune. Some nice fretwork here and there. A good voice but hardly a riveting delivery. It was true that I didn't have a trained ear for the blues or folk music. I thought the world of Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, Bobby Blue Bland and Charles Brown and quite a few others, but didn't fancy myself as any kind of expert about the bedrock blues. I worshiped the bebop deities and their inheritors, and so to that extent I knew the blues.

To me, Rube Haskins just wasn't that special. He sounded like a competent musician showing off his stuff. But without any defining style.

In addition to that, the background noises—after all, this was an amateur, bootleg tape—were driving me crazy.

I sighed loudly and then began literally to plead with Andre to turn the tape off.

After he complied, he gave out with an eerie cry of triumph. “I knew it!” he shouted. “I knew it!”

“Excuse me?”

“Nan, Little Rube Haskins is Little Rube Nothing.”

“Well, that's a little cold, Andre. I don't think he's so bad.”

“No, of course he's not. He isn't bad. He's nothing.”

“Explain, please, Professor. You've lost me here.”

“You must have been asleep that day in class. That day when the music teacher lectured about the various trips the scholars made down south to record indigenous blues artists. It started even before the twenties, and people did it on and off for the next half century. Most of the stuff on this tape has been lifted from the old cylinders those researchers made. Half the famous blues artists who ever existed were first recorded on those field trips. The Library of Congress gathered hundreds of hours of it. There were even some commercial records issued.”

“What!”

“Yes, yes. I'm telling you, Rube Haskins did not write that stuff. He stole it—or coopted it—or whatever you want to call it. I recognize some of the protest stuff this guy Gellert recorded in the thirties. Some of the words have been switched around. Some of the dialect has been cleaned up. But that's what this is. Don't you remember? John and Alan Lomax, these two Southerners—father and son—”

“Oh my Lord—yes! And the venerable Zora Neale Hurston took part in it, too,” I interrupted. “I'm remembering it now. And for your information, I might have dozed off once in a while in ethnic studies, but I never fell asleep in music class, mister.”

Andre was almost drooling by that time. “If I ever have the misfortune of seeing that lowlife bitch Martine again, her ass is mine,” he said.

If I was remembering the story right, they would sometimes go into the prisons and record these black men singing their chain gang blues. Unbidden, the image of a rickety jail-house in the Mississippi sun sprang into my head. What Andre had said about the future blues stars first being recorded as part of an anthropological study might be true. But what about all those anonymous men and women—musicians—nobody had ever heard of before, and never heard of again? Rube Haskins had ripped them off. The sweet country boy who didn't know shit from Shinola knew enough to do that. I found I was oddly disappointed in Little Rube. I must have needed to believe in his purity. I was truly shocked that he was turning out to be as dishonest as Vivian was.

“You know that's how Leadbelly was discovered, don't you?” Andre was saying. “Terry and McGhee, too.”

“Right, right,” I answered, distracted, fretting.

Andre was giving me the capsule version of the life of Sippie Wallace now. I liked her, too, but I wasn't concentrating. I began to pace furiously while he alternately pontificated and sadistically, scatologically set out what he'd liked to do to Martine and every condescending, ignorant black-music manqué like her.

“Andre?”

“Huh?”

“Shut up.”

“Huh?”

“I've got to make a call.”

“Inspector Simard? It's Nan Hayes.”

“Oui
. What has happened? Did you see my young friend from the prefecture?”

“I'll tell you about that in a minute,” I said. “First of all, Andre is safe. He's here, with me.”

“I am relieved.”

“Yes. Me, too. Now I have to ask you something else. I know it sounds strange, but please just tell me. It's important.”

“If I can, young one. What is it?”

“Do you recall, Inspector, when you were working the Rube Haskins case, if there was ever any mention of the name Jerry Brainard?”

There was a long silence. When at last he answered
non
, it seemed to be with great hesitation; that one-word answer was heavy with meaning.

“Why did you say it that way, Monsieur Simard? Please tell me. Do you recognize the name or not?”

“Actually, yes, I do.”

“You mean he was questioned in the murder investigation?”

“No, never. I know that name for quite a different reason. Brainard was well known to the police. He was suspected of counterfeiting as well as several other crimes, large and small. But we were unable to put him away. He associated with a host of known criminals, but we were never able to catch him at anything. He cut a path between America and Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles for years. But he was uncommonly careful. Tell me why you are asking about this man.”

“Because my aunt—because Andre and I know now that he was my aunt's husband. Vivian and Brainard scammed Haskins out of all the money he had. Then Brainard deserted her. And listen to this: he's the one who killed Rube Haskins.”

“Comment?
He did what?”

“It's true, Inspector. And now we've got to do something before he ruins another life—causes another death.”

“But how did you…Are you certain about this?” Simard asked doubtfully.

“Well, yes. And no. I mean—please tell me, what are you holding back?”

“Mademoiselle Hayes, Brainard escaped punishment for many years. But I don't see how he could cause ruin to anyone at this time, or ever again. He was murdered only last month.”

Another one! How many blows to the head was I expected to sustain in one twenty-four-hour period?

“But that can't be,” I insisted. “It can't.”

I was convinced he had made a mistake. Vivian had just told us she'd been in Paris for a couple of months. If that was true, she had to know Jerry had been murdered. How could she not know? She had distinctly said she knew where Jerry Brainard was right now—that she was going to get him as soon as she obtained a weapon. It meant she was chasing a dead man. Taking her revenge on a dead man.

“Are you sure it was the same Jerry Brainard who was killed?” I asked.

The inspector answered huffily, “I am no longer with the department, but I can still read the newspapers. It was there for anyone to see.”

I hung on to the receiver a long time, trying to digest this latest news, my mind racing as it grabbed hold and then let go of one slippery fact after another; as I tried to sort out the sane from the insane; figure out who was crazy and who was merely a liar.

“What's he saying?
What's he saying?”

I batted Andre away from me.

“Hello—Mademoiselle?” the inspector called.

“Yes, yes,” I snapped, rude as could be. “I have to go now.”

“Ne quittez pas, mademoiselle!
Don't hang up yet! Have you seen my friend from the department? If you know anything about this murder, you must tell him.”

“Yes, yes, yes. I'm going to see him right now,” I said and hung up.

“What do you mean, you feel like a drink?”

“Just that, Andre. Let's go get a drink. Please, let's just go
now!
”

“Nanette, you must have caught something from Vivian. She's talking about killing a man she must know is already dead. And you—with the French police looking for us and Vivian out there with a weapon—you want to go have a nice drink somewhere.”

“You got it. No more questions now, lamb-pie. Move it.”

CHAPTER 15

Wham Bebop Boom Bam

“I don't get it,” I muttered, looking around. “Where is everybody?”

Jacques waved at us. He was the assistant manager at Bricktop's.

“Ca va?”
he asked.

“Oui
, I'm fine, Jacques. How come the place is so empty tonight?”

“It's Tuesday,” he explained.

“Yeah, so what?”

“Everyone goes to Parker's on Tuesday. Even Monsieur Melon. Tuesday is new talent night over there. Monsieur Melon never misses new talent night at Parker's. He finds the best young musicians there and asks them to perform here. Just like you and Andre.”

“You need help, Nan. You've lost your mind, do you know that?”

Andre was speaking through a mouthful of the chestnut crepe that he had grabbed on the run from Bricktop's to the métro.

Parker's was back in the 5th, not ten minutes away from our place on the rue Christine.

“I can't explain it yet,” I kept telling Andre. Not
all
of it. Because a couple of pieces were still missing. And without those pieces, the rest was—well, inexplicable. The important thing was to get to Parker's right away, to act now, before something irreversible happened.

When we strode through the double doors of the impeccably smoky, low-lit club, I may have looked sure of myself. I wasn't. In truth, I didn't know what was going to happen—or even
if
. Maybe Andre was right and I was loco, tripping again. But what if the evil if's stirring around up there in my brain were all true? I had to do something. This was my last chance.

A girl singer in Carmen McRae capri pants and button-down white shirt was just finishing the last chorus of “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”

The emcee announced intermission and a curtain of conversational babble descended, almost covering the taped music (Wayne Shorter, live, 1964) they had begun to pipe in. The voguing, profiling, and table-hopping started then. Folks moving around, floating through the place like minnows. Black-clad Euros, white Yanks with black ladies, black Yanks with blondies, and a healthy measure of prosperous Japanese in drop-dead designer clothes. Not a bad-looking crowd.

With the flummoxed Andre trailing behind me, still regarding me as if he thought I needed electroshock therapy, I made my way across the packed room to the brass-railed bar. I began to scan the crowd. If there had been any doubt before, now I knew Andre was freaked out, off his game, because I spotted the celebrated American jazz musician at a table near the stage before he did.

“What are you looking at, Nan?”

“Not ‘at.' ‘For.'”

“Okay. What are you looking for?”

“I'm not sure. Let's get a drink.”

We ordered and I continued to look around.

“Comfortable now?” Andre was patronizing me, attempting to push me down on a barstool, a controlling hand in the small of my back.

I didn't bother to answer. I just nodded, craning my neck to take in every corner of the room.

“Boy oh boy, I hope Satchmo answers my letter,” Andre said, testing me to see whether I was paying any attention to him.

I laughed and took his hand and kissed it quickly, then returned it to him.

“Who's this on the tape now,” I asked, “doing ‘High Fly'?”

“Jaki Byard. Like you don't know.”

Andre downed a good half of his wine along with a fistful of cashews. “I never liked that guy, you know?” he said in a confessional tone, nodding discreetly toward the famous musician. “I always felt bad about it, not liking him, I mean. But I just don't. He's a smug little prick.”

“Right,” I said. “I'll tell you later what David Murray said about him.”

Well, this was good. Andre was getting distracted from what he considered my mental breakdown. He was also getting a little drunk. Understandable, since he hadn't eaten in days. I was fighting a hunger headache of my own. He polished off the nuts and then dug in on the basket of pretzels.