False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (11 page)

“I think she ended up the same as Mrs. Chase.”

“You don’t listen. My witness saw her alive and well last night.”

“She left home the last time headed for Chicken Bone Beach. No one goes to the beach this time of year, but Suzie Chase was murdered on one just a few miles away.”

“An enterprising newsman, former newsman, would hunt for the Wyatt girl before trying to sell me on his pet theory with nothing to back it up,” Halloran said.

“The body could be buried in the sand, and I missed it. It might have been carried away by a wave, and is riding the tide, or lying in a morgue anywhere on the coast.”

“Where does someone who can’t hold down a reporter’s job come off thinking he knows about criminal investigation?”

“I’ve been reading up on murder, studying it. I learned more than I ever did trailing after your detectives.”

“Have you now, Adam? What text do you use?”

Jordan turned toward the window as a patrolman went by with a summons book in his hand. The officer walked around the Hudson, then unlocked a green DeSoto coupe in the adjacent spot, and drove away.

“One woman is dead on the beach and another is missing after visiting a beach off-season, and I’m supposed to believe the cases are unrelated?”

“Your imagination has let you down again,” Halloran said. “There is no connection between a colored tramp and the young lady who might have become our next Miss America. Don’t take my word for it. Ask your friends with the state police.”

“They’re deliberately blind, same as you. There’s nothing in
it for them if they make headway in one of your cases.”

“The jazz musicians passing through town are Southern Negroes, many of them, scarcely civilized. On the road, without the restraints that keep them in line at home, they become animalistic. One of them could easily have...picked her up.”

Jordan didn’t contradict him. The players he brushed shoulders with were braggarts whose favorite riffs (after stories about marathon jam sessions when they achieved ecstatic breakthroughs with their music that tragically went unrecorded) were wild tales of whiskey-guzzling, smoking reefer and occasionally skin-popping heroin, and of the armies of women who ambushed them at every stop.

“Which is not to say,” Halloran went on, “that we aren’t concerned about the girl. The well-being of each of our citizens, white and colored, is important. If we find the witnesses are mistaken, we’ll speak to the band and the employees at the club, and look into her relationships. But first we need evidence she’s been harmed.”

“Is Satchmo—Louis Armstrong a suspect?”

“I caught his act opening night. A handful of elected officials and police are expected to be on hand when the stars come out. Etta Wyatt was there in the flesh. If you’d seen her, you’d have a better understanding of her popularity with men.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“You have no place to publish the answer.”

Jordan nodded. Halloran hadn’t asked if he was making note of everything and would use it when he could. The detective chief, who did not like being quoted, wouldn’t allow his name in a pulp magazine even if Pelfrey campaigned for him as
Real Detective
’s police officer of the month. “Between you and me.”

“He’s one of the best-liked figures in America,” Halloran said. “You’ve got to hand it to him, a Negro in the public eye who doesn’t have an enemy. It’s to the department’s credit that we won’t let him hide behind his celebrity. The day we have
knowledge that a crime was committed he’ll be interrogated. He hired Etta Wyatt, he put her onstage. Presumably he knows the kind of girl she is, and where her real value to his troupe lay.”

Jordan had mixed feelings about Armstrong. The man was a genius, the greatest trumpet player ever—but his music had been in decline for twenty years. He’d deliberately diminished his art to be assured of steady work, a performer who’d turned himself into a brand name. To younger jazzmen he was an embarrassment who’d sold out musically and on race. “No one Toms like Louis,” Billie Holiday said. “Louis Toms from the heart.”

Jordan was fourteen, a Gene Autry fan, when he discovered Armstrong’s early recordings at a secondhand music shop. He’d worn them out, and never replaced them, but Armstrong remained his idol. Louis Armstrong had made jazz the world’s music. More important, he’d made it Adam Jordan’s. He deserved better than to be dragged into a seamy missing persons case touching on murder. Jordan wanted to talk to him, to get his take on Etta Lee Wyatt, and to warn him to be careful around a cop who would try to bring him down. And, if they hit it off, to ask for an autograph.

At 8:30 he was nursing a beer in the Ruckus Room on Ventnor Avenue. He saw no one he recognized, few people his own age. Armstrong drew a crowd too square to get a handle on the modern jazz that was Jordan’s passion. At the clubs where he went to hear the boppers Jordan was sometimes the only ofay in the house. At the Ruckus Room there were no Negroes. Black audiences, young blacks in particular, had turned their back on Armstrong, whose fans—middle-class, middle-age, frumpy—reminded Jordan of his aunts and uncles. But his aunts and uncles were too hip for the Louis Armstrong of 1953.

The set began with “Back Home Again in Indiana,” the same number Armstrong had opened with when Jordan caught him
at Roseland during the war. Not a jazz tune, or Tin Pan Alley standard, but a cornball jingle with a rah-rah chorus. What could be less cool? More deliberately unhip? Armstrong was stingy with his playing, a minimalist who blew the notes that were the heart of the song and discarded the rest. Jordan surveyed the house. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be clapping and tapping his feet like the squares.

After a slow blues Armstrong waved his dancers out of the wings, three high yellows in satin shorts, halters, and tap shoes. Jordan couldn’t help thinking of the Harlem Globetrotters, but with lousy footwork. The girl in the middle was half a step behind her partners. Jordan figured she’d been called in on short notice to pinch hit for Etta Lee Wyatt.

Armstrong announced “West End Blues,” skipping over the famous cadenza at the start to get to the melody. His playing was uninspired, while his eyes popped and he grinned like an old lecher at the shimmying girls. Billie Holiday told only part of the story. No one tommed like Louis because Louis was a parody of a tomming Negro, a parody of a parody, the joke turned back on itself so many times that the crowd squirmed until a wink and a nod let them know that it was okay to laugh.

Armstrong was happily married, not known to have a wandering eye. The audience howled as he ogled the dancers, brought his horn to his lips, and lowered it to mop his face with a handkerchief. Jordan didn’t think it was funny. The new girl was a klutz. Armstrong, trying to deflect attention to himself, continued to mug while she stumbled. Suddenly he launched into the cadenza, stringing the notes into gorgeous arpeggios fired off like balls of light from a Roman candle, limpid and pure. His sidemen put down their instruments and listened. In his early fifties Armstrong could play as well as ever, a casual genius when an emergency called for it.

The end of the solo was lost in wild clapping. Jordan, snapping his fingers, saw Armstrong frown. If you dig my playing, he
seemed to say, don’t be coy. Jordan banged his bottle against the table, but Armstrong was reaching for a high note and couldn’t be bothered.

The piano took the next solo, then the trombone. The rhythm section kicked in, and when it was the trumpet’s turn again Armstrong had lost interest. Thirty years on the road, Jordan figured, gave him the right to be sloppy. The audience fidgeted, drank more, listened less. The All-Stars closed with “Sleepy Time Down South,” Armstrong mugging shamelessly for the hell of it. As the crowd drifted to the exits, Jordan followed the musicians backstage.

A bouncer with twin anchors on his forearms got in his way. “Band members only, and their families,” he said. “Which are you?”

Jordan turned his pockets inside out for a joint he’d been carrying around since catching Thelonious Monk in Philadelphia. Armstrong was a heavy pot smoker who’d been busted once or twice on minor drug beefs and didn’t let a day go by without spending a large part of it stoned. Jordan held out the reefer like a badge. “I’m with Mary Jane,” he said, “to see Satchmo.”

The bouncer, toying with a lighter, made Jordan feel like an undercover cop in a whorehouse trying to get the goods without taking off his pants. He heard giggling behind a tattered curtain. When finally he was allowed behind it, he looked in on the dancers freshening their makeup in a dressing room the size of a closet. Next door the All-Stars were playing gin rummy for a penny a point as they passed around a short dog bottle. There was a third door in the corridor. Jordan rapped on it, and a familiar voice growled, “Ain’t no need to knock.”

Louis Armstrong, in white socks, patent leather shoes, boxer shorts, and thick glasses, flashed a grin that came from a lifetime of practice. Jordan accepted it as a meaningless souvenir.

“You doing here, boy?” Armstrong said. “Got two more sets to play.”

The skirl of the clarinet came through the wall, the reed man polishing a riff he’d botched earlier. Armstrong peeled off his shirt. He was soft, his big barrel chest swollen from self-indulgence. Jordan was surprised to notice a star of David on a chain around his neck. He folded his trousers over the back of a chair, and sat down careful not to crease them. Jordan was lighting the joint when Armstrong caught his wrist.

“Feeblest reefer I ever seen.”

Several hand-rolled cigarettes came out of his trumpet case as fat as White Owl cigars. He lit up, took the first hit for himself, and then the second, handing over a soggy joint with a grin that stretched the thick callus on his lip till Jordan thought it would tear apart.

“Got something you want to tell Pops ’bout his music, or just stopped by to get ripped on his dope?”

Jordan said, “Big fan—”

“I see you are, son. Still didn’t say which.”

“Don’t get me started. I’m effusive, I mean enthusiastic about both subjects.”

“Nothin’ wrong with ’ffusive,” Armstrong said. “It’s in Mr. Webster’s book.”

Jordan’s cheeks were hot. He blamed it on the marijuana. He needed to explain that he was trying to cut down on two-dollar words even around people who weren’t Southern Negroes. A portable typewriter stood beside its carrying case at the edge of the dressing table. Paper was curled around the platen, and he tried to steal a peek at a couple of paragraphs typed with a red ribbon.

“You a writer?” Armstrong said. “Or natural snoop? Not from the newspaper. Been years since they sent anybody down to talk to me.”

“Some of each,” Jordan said.

“Here to write ’bout Pops?”

Jordan shook his head.

“Won’t be offended, I don’t believe you?”

“I might be,” Jordan said.

“Won’t be offended, I don’t give a damn? People writing ’bout me most of this century, but I know more about me’n they do. Keeping a diary longer’n most of ’em been on earth. Sure you don’t want to talk ’bout music?”

Jordan started to correct him, but caught himself. Louis Armstrong wanted to talk jazz to him, and he was going to shut him up? Was his brain useless? Maybe there was a story for him, and he could sell it to
Downbeat
, and wouldn’t that be a hoot?

“The music got no future,” Armstrong said. “New generation making what they call bebop, lay it on them. That Miles Davis, the Mingus boy, want to rile you. Ain’t it proof they artists, give you a headache. Few years down the road won’t be nobody paying ’ttention to jazz ’cept old folks like you and me, and how many records do we all buy? How many bands we keep on the road? But that ain’t what brings you here, so what does?”

“One of your dancers,” Jordan said.

Armstrong took the last hit, and stubbed out the roach. “Funning with me, boy? Nobody come by ’bout my dancers, ’less you mean you want one for yourself.”

“No, just to talk.”

“Ain’t what to discuss. I can’t keep a girl long enough she learn the steps. They spend a few weeks with the band, go their own way when I move on to the next date. I hire new girls where I find ’em. Want to see good dancing, catch Swan Lake. Like to look at pretty brownskin gals in short pants, you at the right address. Was less bother when I had the orchestra. Folks came to hear us play, didn’t need girls shaking their what-have-you to fill seats.”

Jordan nodded woozily.

“One in particular you here ’bout? All of them? Two out of the three? What?”

“Just the one.”

“Which?”

“She wasn’t onstage tonight,” Jordan said. “Etta Lee Wyatt.”

Armstrong took a fresh joint from the trumpet case, lit up, and looked skeptical when Jordan refused it. Then he turned his back, and Jordan watched in the mirror as he used a toenail clipper to trim the callus on his lip. Armstrong began pruning his lip like it was a hedge, cutting back the mass of dead skin at the edges, and thinning it across the top. The callus was part of his embouchure, the product of decades of contact with the trumpet mouthpiece, an important element contributing to his sound.

“Did you know her well?” Jordan asked him.

“Persistent cuss, ain’t you? Not a cop. Cop wouldn’t be in the confused state you in. Why an amateur snoop interested in my dancer?”

“You know she went missing.”

“Lot of girls missing in action,” Armstrong said. “The way it is, that’s all.”

“This one may be different.”

“Ain’t two cents’ difference ’tween any of ’em. Colored girls in these towns got one kind of future—as a domestic. Band come to play, they want to run off with it, same reason little boys run off with the circus. Look like fun, pay better’n what they got here. They strut their stuff, and we hire the frisky ones, give ’em a paycheck till the excitement wear off and they take a powder. Some of ’em, they sleep ’round, figure
somebody
going to marry ’em, give ’em a comfortable life. Wishful thinking. Jazzman don’t want a girl hanging on him like an anchor. The fellas sleep with ’em, and leave ’em for the next band come through town. Why you making a big deal out of a little deal?”