Honky-Tonk Girl (4 page)

He'd gotten drunk for a week straight then. And when he came off that one, a telegram was waiting from the Coast. They'd lost that good job out there because they had not showed up on time.

He thought he'd lost his band too—but the guys stuck to him. They'd decided to go on to the West Coast anyway and they'd picked up the job in the Honky-Tonk Street saloon. Johnny had hocked most of his good clothes. He was down to a battered secondhand Ford, his horn, his diamond ring and a couple of three-hundred-dollar suits. He couldn't seem to stop drinking. He couldn't forget how Zack had looked the night he keeled over, and he couldn't get over Christine. Then this thing about Miff—

He suddenly took the glittering flamingo pin out of his pocket and tossed it on the table between them. He watched her eyes carefully. Nothing showed there.

“You were with Miff whenever he had a night off. Did you see him Monday night?”

She stared at the pin. “For a little while,” she admitted. “Early in the evening. He sent me away.” Her mouth twisted. “Guess he had a late date. Miff was good for two or three a night.” She touched the pin. “Where did you get this?”

“It was on the floor near him. Ever see it before?”

“Of course not. Why haven't you given it to the police?”

He laughed shortly. Then he pocketed the pin. “I think you know who this belongs to. Furthermore, I think you know more about this whole mess than you're telling. Maybe you didn't kill Miff—but I think you know who did.”

She looked scared for a fleeting second. But then her self-assurance returned. “You're nuts, Johnny Nickles,” she told him flatly.

He finished the beer in one long gulp and put the empty glass down. “Let's go to my room.”

She lowered her eyes. Her fingers around the whiskey glass whitened for a moment and a tiny muscle in her cheek twitched. “Ask me different, Johnny,” she begged softly. “Ask me like a fella asking his best girl for a date.... Maybe it won't cost you anything—”

Johnny looked at her with fleeting amusement. “Okay, honey. How's this—want to come up and see my record collection, dear?”

She swore at him and threw the empty book of paper matches at his face.

Johnny laughed. He bought a fifth of bourbon and they walked to his apartment, a few blocks away.

He went off to the kitchen to hunt glasses and Jean stood in the center of his living room and looked around with interest.

It was a small, cheap three-room flat, typically a bachelor musician's living quarters. The wallpaper was a faded horticultural nightmare of vines and grotesque yellow flowers. A battered studio piano, a tilted horsehair sofa and an overstuffed chair dressed in a frazzled chintz slipcover comprised the furnishings. Loose records and albums were piled around the floor and on straight backed kitchen chairs. Ink-smeared manuscript paper was scattered across a rickety card table. A late copy of
DownBeat
was stuffed under one corner of a portable record player to make it sit level on a chair.

Absently, she dumped a heaping ashtray into a wastepaper basket and straightened some magazines.

When Johnny returned with the drinks, she was perusing the titles of books and record albums stacked on the floor. Most of the books were about music and musicians—Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong—and there was a book by Eddie Condon. The records covered the entire saga of jazz from early King Oliver platters to Satchmo's present combo.

“You weren't kidding, were you, Johnny?”

She took the drink from him and sat on the couch, sipping it and examining an album.

“Johnny Nickles and his Dixieland Band,” she murmured aloud, reading the line across the bottom of the album's cover. She turned the cover and glanced at the printed matter inside. Then she slowly flipped the four inside pockets and read the labels on each record.

When she had finished, she closed the album, laid it flat across her knees and looked at the cover design. It was done in surrealistic art. The scene was a small dingy room furnished only with a battered piano and some rickety chairs. On the floor was a litter of bottles and cigarette stubs. A saxophone strap hung over the back of a chair and a trumpet lay forgotten on the piano. All this faded up into a desolate eerie desert scene, reminiscent of Death Valley, and here rested a grinning skull on a scrap of torn manuscript paper. The penciled music notes on the manuscript were blowing off the paper, whirling away into the dark empty sky.

The Ghost Album.

The girl shuddered.

“It's a hell of a thing,” Johnny said through his teeth. “The bastard who dreamed that up must have been on a diet of bennies and tea for a solid week.”

“It's ghastly, Johnny. It looks so—futile.”

He slumped back in the chintz-covered easy chair. A lock of his unkempt wavy black hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating. He took a long drink from the glass. It trembled a bit in his grasp. “It's supposed to look futile. That's what the sonuvabitch who painted it was aiming for. The futile, unhappy existence of some of the jazz musicians we portray in the album. Jam sessions in a back room till dawn, gin, goof balls, bennies, one night stands...all of it leading to nothing....”

Biederbecke, Oliver, Berrigan, Jelly Roll Morton, Pine Top Smith—all the immortal jazz musicians who were dead now—were depicted in the album, their individual styles faithfully imitated by Johnny and the fellows in his band.

It was the story of jazz from the days of Buddy Bolden and the New Orleans street bands to the Original Dixieland Band that migrated to
Riesenweber's Restaurant
in New York, carrying the exciting new music to the outside world, to the days of flaming Storyville and the riverboats, then the great migration to Chicago—the music that had been followed right up to the present. And half the album was in the present style of Johnny's own band, with Miff Smith's fine drums as good as any that had ever come out of New Orleans, the birthplace of Dixieland jazz.

It was the story of an American era, almost a legend, the birth of an original music form which is the only really pure American music. And when the records played, ghosts came out of the past to listen—fancy ladies from the old bordellos like Mahogany Hall, jazzmen of all ages, creeds and colors, boys from Rampart Street, pretty octoroons and figures bedecked in gaudy Mardi Gras costumes, bartenders, pimps and gangsters, bootleggers and symphony hall conductors. They were all there because they had all played roles in the great legend, though they had long been still and forgotten, some for a decade, some for more than a quarter of a century.

She turned on the record player and put on the disk that had given the set its name of
Ghost Album
. It was
Teegerstrom Struts His Stuff
, the band's tribute to the great Chicago clarinetist, Charlie Teegerstrom, who had met a flaming end in an automobile wreck in the early Thirties, while fleeing the scene of a shooting fracas over another man's wife.

Link Rayl had done a terrific job of copying the great man's style. Jazz critics said it wasn't Link playing that night, it was the ghost of the greatest jazz clarinetist of all times, come back to earth for one night to sit in with the finest guys in the business for a last jam session. And so they'd decided to call the album the
Ghost Album
.

The driving, tortured notes of the clarinet solo hammered at Johnny's ears. He suddenly took the album off the girl's lap and flung it across the room. It tumbled end over end in a fluttering melee like a wounded bird and scattered bits of smashed records when it hit the far wall. Then he ripped the platter off the turntable and threw it after the wreckage.

He stood looking at the shambles and a sob wrenched from his throat. “Hell,” he choked, “I'm going as far off my rocker as the spook who painted the damned thing!

Jean touched his hand and pulled him down beside her. She began to stroke his hand gently. “You gotta let off steam, Johnny,” she said softly. “I guess it hit you pretty hard, losing two guys like Miff and Zack.”

He didn't want to think about it any more. He just sat numbly, not thinking about anything. Slowly his aching body relaxed. The girl talked on in a soothing, meaningless whisper, stroking his hand. Then she trailed her finger tips around his ear and over his lips. She shivered a little when she touched the little hard spot made by his trumpet mouthpiece.

“You remember what I said, Johnny?” she whispered thickly, “about maybe it wouldn't cost you anything...?”

She moved close to him and her body writhed with a sudden involuntary movement.

Johnny hadn't been close to a woman since Christine left him, six months ago. He had felt no need or interest. Now, for the first time since then, he became aware of a familiar quickening of his heartbeat. Jean was a damned good-looking woman, if you didn't allow yourself to think of the hundreds of other men, some fat and sloppy, who had a definite place in her life—and in her arms.

He wondered how many times she had gone through the practiced route of movement and exclamations and moans—and what she thought about as she rented herself out for a price.

“I like you, Johnny,” she murmured thickly. “I like you a hell of a lot. You're damned attractive in a big, rough, dissipated sort of way.”

She leaned over and her blue-black hair brushed his cheek. The silky black satin of her dress fell away from the flawless full curves. It made him wonder how white her skin would be under the dress and if she really were such a brunette.

Johnny reached up and pulled the light chain on the floor lamp. The room was suddenly dark and soft moonlight filtered through the windows.

She snuggled against him. Johnny trailed his fingers along the white curve of her throat. He felt the hot, rapid tempo of a pulse there. This time it was no practiced routine with her, a job to be done skillfully, satisfyingly, but a job to be gotten over with all the same. This time it was different—it was something she wanted—it was her desire to feel his arms around her, his warmth enveloping her—the way every other woman desires her man.

Her fingers and mouth were trembling, exploring, searching. Then she hesitated.

“Johnny...I—please wait a minute,” she panted. “I...have to tell you something first. This isn't like the others with me. Please...believe me. Not like this....” She was crying softly.

A guy who knocked around as much as Johnny wasn't accustomed to gentleness. But he kissed her and said softly, “It's okay, baby. I believe you.”

Then there was no more room for words, only quick, demanding movements, and fiery passionate embrace.

He had wondered about the trickery in her brassiere that had given such a saucy, natural uprightness to her lovely figure. And now he knew. There was no trickery, no illusion. Her dress, he discovered, came apart with the simple opening of a clasp in front. It slid away from her wonderful body like a robe and there was nothing under it. The moonlight reflected off the soft curves of satin-smooth flesh and he saw too that she was a deep rich brunette. Then all the wonderful softness and coolness of her was against him like a silken coverlet.

They were interrupted by the jangle of the telephone.

Johnny swore.

“Don't answer it,” she gasped.

He tried to get up. Her arms around him were like bands of steel. He had to pry himself loose. He stumbled across the room and grabbed up the telephone.

“Johnny Nickles?” a man's voice asked.

“Yeah.”

“Dr. Nathan.”

Johnny's heart flipped a beat. His mouth dried out, “Yeah?”

“The nurse on the Ruth Jordon case told me you phoned several times tonight to inquire about Miss. Jordon's condition. Are you a member of her family?”

“You might say a very good friend.”

“I was wondering. I knew her family was in the East and that she's been alone out here, attending college.”

“Is—is she any better?”

“Yes. I'm glad to say she regained consciousness tonight.”

Johnny's fingers gripped the receiver. “She's completely okay? She talked to you?”

The doctor's voice hesitated. “Yes, she talked to me—to a certain extent.”

“Can she have visitors?”

“That's one reason I called you. Of course, you know the police are in charge here. They have her in protective custody. However she has been asking for you repeatedly and they agreed with me that it may be wise to have you come in. It's long past visiting hours. But we have made special arrangements with the hospital to let you come in now. It might help.”

“Help?” Johnny asked. “I thought you said she was all right.”

“Physically she seems much better except for the powder burns to her cheek, of course, which will take a few days to heal. But I think you'd better know before you come up here that we've run into a mental complication.”

“What do you mean?”

“She's still in a state of shock. I'll explain it more fully when you arrive. But, briefly, the shock of seeing a man killed before her eyes and being made a target of herself, has caused a form of temporary amnesia. At least in regard to the events that took place at the time of the murder. She's confused. She can't recall anything that happened from the time she started up to Smith's apartment until this evening when she regained full consciousness. It's not an unusual consequence in cases of extreme mental shock and emotional stress.”

The telephone was heavy in Johnny's hand. The situation was still no different. The secret of Miff's death was still locked up in the darkness of a girl's numbed mind. And somewhere, an unknown killer stalked his band.

“I'll be over,” Johnny said shortly. Then he hung up.

Jean looked at him from across the room. Her lips were sullen, pouting. Her eyes smoldered with unfulfilled desire.