Out of the Blues Page 17

  “Are you sure you don’t want to eat?”

  “I’m still thirsty,” she said, looking for the waiter.

  “Melissa, do you, did you know John Spangler?” Salt began.

  Melissa slumped down in the booth. “That was a long time ago.”

  “But you knew who he was? Dan and I saw him outside the Blue Room right before Dan was shot.”

  “I knew Spangler. Okay. He was Mike’s dealer.” Melissa tipped her glass to Salt. “Happy?” she said, and then lowered it to the table with a thunk. “I was a dumb kid back then.”

  A siren made its way through the city toward the hotel. “You were already performing?”

  “Yeah, I was sitting in with different bands when I could. I’m a singer. I don’t like the way you say ‘performer.’”

  “Was Mike encouraging? Did he help you get gigs?”

  “Most of the time I wasn’t even sure if he knew I was there. It was like he’d look around and say, ‘Hey, Melissa’s here.’ He got more sex from the guitar than me. And if one of his blues buddies came around, I ceased to exist. And then there was the coke and heroin.”

  Salt saw lights from an ambulance reflecting off the building across the street before the ambulance actually arrived. “Did you and Dan score from Spangler?”

  “I didn’t use. Dan would only snort occasionally if there was free stuff, like at a party. It’s never really been his thing.”

  “Did either Mike or Dan say anything about Spangler being angry with Mike around the time of Mike’s death?” The ambulance pulled up right next to the café window.

  “Look, Mike didn’t talk to me about his using and I didn’t ask. After he died, Dan and I didn’t talk about Mike or anything to do with Mike. We wanted to forget.”

  Salt pushed back the café curtain. The paramedics were strapping the old man who’d been at the window onto a gurney. She let the curtain drop. “I know this is a bad time for you. But I’m getting the sense that you either don’t want to answer or genuinely don’t know much about the two men who have been the primary love interests of your life. Of course, I’m presuming you were in love with them.”

  “They were there when I needed them. Love to me is like Santa Claus, Detective. I stopped believing in that shit long before I met either Mike or Dan.” Melissa slightly slurred her s’s. “But I can fake it like a mother.” She stood up and was stumbling, trying to get out of the booth. “Adios, Detective. I hope you catch the son of a bitch.” Melissa swayed toward the hotel lobby.

  “Will there be anything else?” the waiter asked, putting the check on the table.

  “Did you see the ambulance?” she asked while she got out her wallet.

  “Yeah, it’s sad really,” said the young man. “That old guy comes around all the time. Homeless. I think he has heart problems.”

  “Not as bad as some folks,” Salt said. She could still see Melissa’s red hair as she made her way up the lobby escalator.

  —

  DAN SLOWLY curved the fingers of his left hand to form chords on the edge of the sheet. The fingers of his right hand strummed an imagined Gibson, E minor 7, A minor 7, B 7. Something was wrong with his throat. He reached for the A minor again and his fingers wouldn’t remember. When he woke again, he thought of nothing but the chord changes. He tried to open his eyes the next time, but the lights from the machine in the dim room hurt.

  He came to again and realized there was a tube in his throat. “There’s no safe life,” he thought. “No need to hedge your bets.” E minor 7, A minor 7, B 7. The hospital room with no window was in perpetual timelessness. Then Melissa was there, her red hair backlit by the bright lights outside the room. He tried to catch her scent but couldn’t due to some kind of disinfectant and a plastic odor from the tube. Melissa was there and then she wasn’t.

  This time he could smell the green of the detective’s fragrance, mixed with a furry scent. “How had she gotten that dog in here?” He thought he said things out loud but then realized he hadn’t. “Muddy, Bailey, Howlin’ Wolf, Mike. Never played it safe. I won’t sleep again.” He nodded off.

  He moved, feeling the catheter against his legs. “I’m all in. It’s not worth it unless you’re all in. It’s all good, Ranger. This just something to get through. I’ll play this song for sure.” E minor 7, A minor 7, B 7.

  —

  DAN BLINKED, opening his eyes wide, then squeezing them tight, as though he was trying to see through a blur. “Da,” it sounded like he said.

  Salt leaned closer. “You’re not going to die. The doctor says you’ll make it.” She felt some relief now that he was no longer intubated.

  Dan moved his head slowly from left to right. “Do-og” came out in two long syllables.

  Salt looked down at his hands moving on the sheet, at the wired patches on his chest, then up at the blue numbers on the monitor above. “Dog?” she repeated, while a red line on the black screen rippled with a blip sound. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, Dan. You stopped a bullet that may have been meant for me. I hope—” She turned her head away from him, looked around at the small bedside table, the empty portable tray against the wall. “Water. I’ll get you some water. Be right back,” she said, barely escaping, just to the wall outside the ICU room, leaning there with her face in her hands. “Damnit. Pull it together.” She pinched her fists against her cheeks. “What do you hope? It is crazy. He’s still talking about that dog.” She realized she’d said the last words out loud.

  A passing nurse asked if she needed something. Salt checked with her to be sure Dan could have ice and water. She returned to the room with both and put them on the tray.

  Dan opened his eyes and shook his head. Salt put the straw to his cracked lips. When he had sipped, he tilted his chin up, asking her to lean down. “Dance,” he repeated. Then in a hoarse voice, he said slowly, “Save another dance for me.”

  —

  SALT WAS back at her desk sorting out copies of the band’s statements, as well as those of other witnesses, all of whom seemed to have seen nothing of the shooter at the Blue Room. She looked up to find Wills standing there wearing his jacket, having just come in.

  She put down the paper.

  “Sarah,” Wills said. “I’m sorry.”

  Salt stood up to look across the cubicles to make sure there was no one to overhear. “We’re fine, Wills. We’ll work it out.” She touched his elbow. “We’ll be fine,” she reassured him.

  Wills closed his eyes for a half second. “Sarah.” He looked at her. “Dan Pyne went into cardiac arrest. He died about a half hour ago.”

  MAGIC GIRLS

  Smoking the once-in-a-blue-moon cigarette, with the metal grate of the fire escape landing growing hard and cold on her rear, Salt lifted herself on her haunches and pulled her jacket against the cool damp air. The street below was a noir avenue, not much bigger than an alley, four-story brick buildings enclosing a narrow, undivided, unmarked two-way. The building she was using was vacant. Decrepit fire escape landings at each level were joined with black metal ladders that only went close enough to the sidewalk to satisfy old safety codes.

  Less and less frequently the double doors of Magic Girls, the high rollers’ strip club across the street, would unseal and a din of noise accompanied by a dominant bass rhythm would erupt from the pink-lit interior, drowning out the rest of the dying sounds of the city and the drifting notes from a street saxophonist whose solo echoed for blocks.

  Three in the morning now. Rain fell sporadically, splattering in standing water and causing ripples to shine with streetlight reflections. The view from her perch seemed intimate. The shimmering dark, a black-blue diamond light, was unpolluted by traffic exhaust, noise, or hurrying people. The only sounds were water notes, drips and splashes against the white noise and muted chords of the city that began somewhere down the street. Music could bend around blocks, and the s
ax man had a wail with a will, even when he’d walked farther downtown; as long as the doors to the club stayed shut, Salt could catch bits of his brass notes against the muffled sounds of Atlanta pulling up her covers.

  She stepped back through the large wood-frame window just as moonlight broke through the clouds over the buildings across to the northwest. An old, large mottled mirror between the windows caught the reflection of her eyes, wide-open, dilated, moonshine-flecked, and unblinking.

  Salt thought how it might have been for Pearl; how hard it had been for women in the blues, the prostitutes, the dancers, the singers, those who performed double duties in order to survive and to keep on with their blues. She knew a stripper who called herself “Miss Atlanta,” good name for a stripper. Some of the young girls that she’d watched grow up in The Homes, only a few miles to the south, had gone in the front doors of these clubs as dancers and come out the back broken and full of dope. Women and the blues had a history.

  Magic Girls’ pink-and-gold neon marquee poked up into the night sky, letters almost as tall as the building. Catering to an almost exclusively black clientele, it was the flashiest, biggest money club in the city. The parking lot was full of flash: Hummers, Jags, tricked-out vintage sedans, some with rims costing more than the cars, pimped-out SUVs, all of which shone under the lights as they arrived. But while parked they lost the shine to the dust kicked up from the cheap, gravel-covered lot.

  She focused her binoculars to pull into view the faces of people leaving the club, not that she’d likely miss the white face she was looking for. In this town people tended toward separate but equal in looking for God and sex.

  Atlanta had billed itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate” during the civil rights movement of the ’60s. Salt thought that was close to right; closer might have been to reveal what folks were doing that kept them so busy—lots of backslapping and hand-holding, under tables and behind doors, doors not unlike the one she was surveilling across the street.

  The street was still beautiful, even with the colors of Magic Girls’ neon bleeding into the reflections. All around, like a Romare Bearden collage, in every direction, around the Zero Milepost, where things came together at the end of the line, the churches that Sherman had spared, incongruously close to the titty bars and jail down the street.

  There were only a few cars left in the parking lot when the marquee shut off, leaving only the light above the front door of the club illuminating a small space underneath and the street right in front. The door opened with a split of pink from inside and two men appeared, Spangler and Sandy Madison.

  Madison, smoking a cigarette, was wearing fatigue pants and a pistol strapped to his thigh. A sweatshirt covered his uniform insignia and badge. He looked up and down the street, then up at the light overhead. Salt blew out a long breath. Madison’s face looked greasy, Spangler’s chalky white. They spoke, but their voices drifted up in muted monosyllables that she strained to catch. The two men, walking close and side by side, moved to the darkened parking lot on the side of the building.

  She’d dressed in a dark T-shirt and black jeans. But now she sensed she’d let herself get careless, carried away with the night. She shouldn’t have smoked the cigarette on the landing. Something in the way Madison didn’t look up her way made her think he’d already seen her. She had dismissed him, underestimated his connections: Madison. Reverend Midas Prince. Spangler. And he might be a fool in many ways, but as far as surveillance, he was sure to know his stuff.

  There was enough street light coming in the old windows for her to make her way through the vacant rooms and down the hall to the stairwell. She winced at the sound of the rusty door opening to the pitch-black hollowness of the stairs and switched on the penlight from her key ring. All she could do now was to focus on the steps in front of her.

  Opening the side exterior door from the building, she stood flush against the brick wall that still held warmth from the day and allowed her breath to even out. She considered the best route to get to her car, parked a block over in a spot where she’d doubted anyone would notice the beat-up Honda, a more covert vehicle than the tip-off Taurus. The side of the building was dark, but there was a bit of ambient light from the moon and a few made-to-look-old gas streetlights. Hugging the wall, she made her way to the back corner of the building, quick-peeked to be sure it was clear, then lengthened her stride as she crossed the narrow strip of broken asphalt to a retaining wall above the adjacent lot. Five or so junk trees, mimosas in varying heights, had grown up in the margin of dirt between the cracked pavement and the brick barrier. Salt sat down, swung her legs over the wall, lowered herself, and dropped to the open alleyway below.

  “Pretty girl like you—why doncha just call for backup?” Madison was leaning against a corner of a building ten yards away. He was picking his nails with the tip end of a matte-black buck knife. There was another drop-off in front of Salt and a dead end to her left. “I see you got your radio on your belt, but I doubt you have it on. Word is you’re a loner; you go after them bad guys all by yourself—a tough girl. Anybody know you’re up there spyin’ on me?” He straightened out of his lean. “Bet not.”

  “Madison, I had no idea you worked this EJ. I’m investigating ties between the club scene now and people who knew Mike Anderson from the clubs back then. It’s none of my business if you work strip clubs on your own time.” She caught a glimpse of her lone car across the lot below and estimated the drop.

  “You come after me, snooping ’round my EJs, you likely to get a whole lot of guys out of their jobs, too. They work for me, talk to me. I’d be doin’ all them a favor by discouraging you, tough girl. Besides, I think you ain’t so tough.” Madison sheathed the knife and stuck it inside his right waistband. “You think you’re tough, huh? Let’s see.”

  He started coming toward her, doing the swagger for which he was mocked. “I wouldn’t go to no titty bars if I had somebody like you to wrestle me. You like to wrestle? I heard you and that black guy, Pepper? I heard you wrestle with him.” He stopped and stood looking down at her. “What kind of white girl goes with black guys?” He reached out and levered his right arm around her neck, pulling her into his chest and locking her into a hold with his left arm. She felt his chest rise as he drew in a deep breath. “But you shore do smell good.”

  Salt put her arms around his middle, as if appreciating his girth, and moved her palms back to his sides and under the sweatshirt. “Aikido,” she whispered, turning her mouth up to his ear.

  “What’s that?” He tipped his chin down and back, still tugging her in with his arms locked.

  The back of her hand touched the handle of the knife and he reacted, pitching his pelvis backward. But Salt was already drawing it out and lowering herself into a squat while flinging the knife away barely an instant before he was on her. Using his own momentum, Salt lifted him, keeping him in motion as he continued over her back. She heard only his heavy scrambling as she sprinted down the alley, around the corner, and to her car, where she found the passenger-side window smashed. The glove box had been rifled, though there had been nothing in it but some of the cassette tapes. They were all still there.

  “Mothafuck,” she said. “That’ll teach me.” She slammed the door, threw the Honda in gear, and tore out of the city’s metered parking space.

  WONDER AND WILLS

  As was often the case when Salt woke, Wonder was asleep with his back to her, lengthwise facing the open window. Early-morning light played with the breeze on the hydrangea bush outside. She lay still for a bit watching the tips of the dog’s ears quiver and the embroidered half curtains flutter in the breeze. She reached with her index finger and touched the knob at the top of Wonder’s head, his cue to roll on his back. He splayed his hind legs and folded his front legs in total acquiescence. This early-morning ritual was the only time or place he was off duty enough to bare his belly. “Breathe on me, breath of dog.”

 
He cut his eyes as if to say, “That’s not what you usually say.”

  She ran her finger through the spot at the bottom of each ear where his fur sometimes tangled. She rubbed the nicks, scratched his scars, and then buried her face in the soft fur under his chin, inhaling his light musky realness. “Dog breath.” She ruffled his fur and rolled him over, and he bowed his down-dog stretch and hopped from the bed, waving his tail in anticipation as she got into running shorts and sneakers.

  —

  TO COOL DOWN from the three-mile run Salt walked the last fifty yards from the county road in front of her property and up the gravel drive, appreciating the beginnings of the new fence. She visualized how it might look once completed and painted white and began to think about all the trees, shrubs, bushes, and flowers and the vegetable garden that she might plant once she had the sheep taking care of the mowing. In the back at the chest-high paddock she slid back the bolt to let the sheep into the orchard. where they kept the grasses and weeds under control while enjoying the pecans when they fell in season. She barely had to supplement their feed.

  The tree was twenty or so yards back, one of the more than thirty pecan trees on the property. The only thing that distinguished it now was the footboards she’d nailed to the trunk. Winding down from the run, she broke into a sweat that gathered and ran down her legs, painting muddy tracks along her dusty calves. Still breathing hard, hands on her hips, Wonder panting at her side, she walked to the tree and looked up the trunk to where the footboards ended at the branch. Without stopping to think, she took hold of one of the head-high boards and stepped up on the bottom rung. Hand over hand she climbed to the last rung and with an easy motion swung her arms around the branch above, settling her rear on the smooth scoop of her old childhood haunt. The warm wind tousled the limbs, branches, and leaves, waving them in the morning sun, scattering the light and bouncing it all around her. “Ranger. I remember. Ranger.”