Leavin' Trunk Blues (31 page)

“I’ll take care of Stagger Lee,” Nick said.

“You don’t know Stagger Lee,” Jimmy said. He threw his hands in the air and began to pace the room. “Don’t matter now. Stagger Lee gets something set in his mind and that’s it.”

Nick shook his head.

“Stagger Lee snuffed them men out like a candle, man. What, you think Leroy Williams like to go swimming in the winter?”

“Why would he target those men?”

Jimmy began to walk the room with a slight limp, like one leg was shorter than the other. He had a kind of a skip-hop motion as he looked out the high windows. “Man, I wish I knew.”

“Do you remember something Billy said or something he did that was strange or out of character that night?” Kate asked.

“Not really,” Jimmy said, sniffing his nose along the arm of her robe. “We finished up ‘round ten. Right? Billy was drunk. King was drunk. We was all drunk, man. Billy paid me cash for the session, and like I said, I went down to the Palm for a drink. Ruby was there all pissed off. King too. He took her home and she killed Billy.”

“What else, Jimmy?” Nick asked.

“That’s it.”

Jimmy stared out into the black night fuzzed with falling snow, his face lit in Kate’s blue Christmas lights. He hobbled back to her sofa and sat down. Bud grunted and jumped into his lap. Jimmy laughed and scratched the dog on his back. The dog’s legs wiggled with pleasure.

“That’s the itch spot, man,” Jimmy said. “You hit that on the dawg and man, he goes crazy.”

“So what now?” Kate asked.

“King’s her alibi. He drove her home. He knows her condition that night. You guys up for some blues?” Nick asked.

“King’s place?” Kate asked.

“Yep.”

“Y’all go on,” Jimmy said. “I can get back to my place. I’m wore out like a catfish who just jumped off a hook.”

Jimmy started to stand.

“Sit down, Jimmy, you’re not going anywhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Jimmy, I don’t know if I want to leave you alone,” Nick said.

“Why not?” Kate asked. “You have to be buzzed through two doors by a security guard. Anything happens and that guard hits a panic switch. Nobody knows where I live. Besides, even if they did, there are dozens of apartments in this building.”

“Jimmy?”

“Man, I just want to lay out. You got cable?”

“Of course,” Kate said.

“Y’all go ahead, I’m goin’ to have a time. We only get one station back at my place. It’s either soap operas or game shows.”

Nick looked at Kate. “How about you, can you handle the second half of the night?”

“Only for Ruby,” she said.

“For Ruby,” Nick said, giving a mock toast with his second Budweiser. “Forty years. Forty years for nothing.”

“Y’all be careful,” Jimmy said.

Nick watched him.

Jimmy dropped his face in his hands. The old man rubbed his temples, sighed, and then after a long pause said:

“Always mad at King for not lettin’ me get my harps that night.” He rubbed the gray hairs on his head. “Used to have a whole string of ‘em in a leather holder like them Mexican gunfighters wear. But when I asked him if he take me back to the studio when we was at the Palm, he gave me a look like I just fucked his cat. Man reached deep into his pocket, gave me fifty dollars . . . fifty dollars, man, and told me to stay away from the studio and forget about harps I’d had almost my whole life. Why you suppose he did that?”

Jimmy polished off another piece and then disappeared back into the bathroom. Nick could hear his singing reverberating off the tiles. Nick picked up the old harmonica he left on the coffee table and ran his thumb over the rough edges.

“You all right?” Kate asked.

“I want to finish this thing,” Nick said. “For once, I want to finish something. Follow through until this thing is over. It’s something I’ve never been able to do. Football. My book on Slim … some shit that happened last year in the Delta.”

“What happened in the Delta?”

Bud jumped up and crawled into her lap. He had his ears down and his face toward the slice in her hands. Some sympathy begging. She threw a bite onto the floor and Bud scrambled for it like he hadn’t eaten in a year.

“If I told you, you’d never believe me.”

A row of icicles dropped like daggers above the window. The blue Christmas lights continued to blink as Bud turned three times on the couch before closing his eyes. Nick could still feel the Delta heat in a rundown motel and a battered train station as pure evil enveloped his life. The greed that took out Willie and Henry. Nick’s inability to change the past, control time, or fate tore at his mind.

Elmore King owned a blues bar just outside the Loop for blues-starved tourists and conventioneers called The Crown Room. The bar was housed in a renovated movie theater that still had the old marquee above the front doors, surrounded by white lights and green neon listing upcoming acts. You couldn’t argue with The Crown Room’s taste in blues; they had the cash to book top national talent. The bar was also an unofficial museum of Chicago blues history: Muddy Waters’s guitar, Sonny Boy’s harp, and most of King’s Grammys.

Every cabbie in the city knew to take tourists to the club. The place was clean, safe, and always promised a good time. Nick paid thirty bucks for their cover at the ticket booth and walked inside over a dizzying blue-and-white checked floor, like an opium-inspired illustration from Alice in Wonderland. Just inside the door was a glass case filled with King’s Grammy Awards and T-shirts and hats with his cartoon likeness. Nearby, a group of German tourists huddled against a glass bar striped with neon.

Nick ambled over and ordered a couple of drinks.

Budweiser for him, a double shot of gin for Kate.

Never hurt to try and get her drunk. Of course, it was a fifty-fifty bet. She would either love him or want to fight with him by the end of the night.

One of King’s guitars was framed in purple neon behind the bar along with photographs of King with various rock stars. Clapton to Keith Richards. One of the Germans pointed to the guitar and took a picture with a flash, straining Nick’s eyes.

The Crown Room was a fine monument to what a broke kid from Alabama could do with a guitar and a little ambition. Nick had met King a few times when he used to play at JoJo’s. But JoJo couldn’t afford him anymore. Like Doyle said, King had signed a contract with a large Los Angeles record label and was now playing duets with rap artists and fifteen-year-old white blues protégés. All in the name of keeping music alive. He hadn’t cut a decent song since his days at Diamond Records with Moses Jordan. King was a part of the West Side school of guitarists, a group of four men born in the South but who only knew a declining Chicago. Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, and Elmore King. Their music spoke of tattered tenement buildings, unemployment, and of the Chicago dream beginning to disintegrate. Their white neighbors refusing to let anyone past the Black Belt.

The West Siders introduced heavier gospel-style singing coupled with the first use of an electric bass. The sound had more in common with B. B. King or T-Bone Walker than with Muddy or Ruby.

They put emphasis on the guitar as the lead instrument with their urgent, fiery style. String bending. Biting notes.

It was when the blues sound grew closer to rock. The men were a wind of change in the late fifties—as biting and angry as the Hawk—in a style that has remained as the Chicago sound until today.

Kate waited by the edge of a dance floor where dozens of tables sat near the stage. She motioned Nick forward as he carried the drinks.

He watched her butt move in her tight Levi’s and heard Junior Wells sing, “I can tell her daddy’s a millionaire just by the way she walks.”

Nick flipped a cafe chair backward and slid the drink over to Kate. She took off her gloves and tucked them in the side of her peacoat before sipping the gin and making a tight face.

“How in the hell do you drink that shit?”

“Same way you drink beer.”

“Beer is like water compared to that,” he said. “That’s like drinking gasoline.”

“I like it.”

“Glad you don’t smoke,” he said.

“You want to try to catch him before he starts his first set?”

“No, let’s wait. Watch the show, and then, when he’s had a few, I’ll get him.”

“Same strategy for me?” she asked.

“What?”

“Thanks for the double, Travers, but you don’t have to get me drunk.”

A smile pursed into the corner of his mouth and she arched an eyebrow. Nick leaned forward and played with the label on his Bud. First time he’d gotten a good look into her eyes. She just watched him. And he watched her. She gave him a little kick under the table.

“Careful what you wish for,” she said.

“I’m always careful.”

“You’re someone my mother warned me about.”

“Me?” he said, still watching her deep brown eyes.

“She warned me.”

“I’m a nice man.”

“You’re the man who ruins a girl’s reputation.”

“And you’re a girl I’d like to ruin.”

Nick smiled. Kate looked away and shook her head. “Not this time, Travers. Not this time.”

The hot lights suddenly blasted the stage and a little white man in glasses gave an intro to the blessing of Elmore King’s presence. The man. The myth. The legend. That kind of crap.

But King was a great guitarist, no matter how big his ego had become.

He strutted onto the stage in a black getup that reminded Nick of a silent movie cowboy. Silk shirt with red roses on the shoulders. He looked deadpan into the crowd and everyone stopped talking. He took a step back in the silence as the drummer hit his sticks and counted down.

A long note hissed like a cobra let loose from a shaken box. The sound bit into the air as the crowd erupted in a jolt of whistles and screams. King smiled, beating his guitar with his pick and making the Telecaster talk, wail, and cry. He stepped to the microphone and tore into an Elmore James classic with his own, wicked spin:

“
You said you were hurtin’,

you almost lost your mind.

‘
Cause the man you love,

he hurts you all the time.

When things go wrong,

go wrong with you,

it hurts me too.”

King let his guitar sing the verse with pain and deep-cut emotion, his instrument rolling over the vocals, his one-string bends underscoring the words:

“
You love him more,

when you should love him less.

Why do you pick up behind him,

and I know, pick up all his mess?

When things go wrong,

go wrong with you,

it hurts me too.”

By the end of the set, King prowled the club with his cordless guitar in the same style as Guitar Slim. He played and gyrated his hips to blushing women, letting a single note hang followed by an explosive cluster. He licked the frets with his tongue and played the guitar behind his back. He ripped into the final, boiling song with his teeth sunk into the strings and the crowd went crazy.

The drumbeat kicked and the stage lights dimmed.

A man tossed King a towel and he wiped it over his face as he walked down the steps. Nick put down his beer and waited by a back door where a bunch of tourists stood with napkins and pens. King signed a few autographs, took a few pictures, and then motioned for a bodyguard to open the door.

“Hey, Elmore!” Nick yelled over some women with sharp elbows. “Elmore!”

King turned around and looked right at Nick. He stopped for a moment and then walked into a back room. A guard locked the door and folded his arms in front of his chest.

The VIP section of The Crown Room rivaled the classiness of Sammy Davis Jr.’s bedroom combined with Elvis’s Jungle Room at Graceland. Really brought “taste” to a new low. The red-and-blue lighting cast a wild glow on the faces of women wearing pounds of makeup and knife-edged heels. There were low, sixties-style chairs, a couple of lava lamps, and a lot of beads separating the corridors to other hallways. It smelled of reefer and incense. Perfume and pig’s feet.

Amazing where fifty bucks slipped to the bartender could get you.

Nick scanned faces in the back maze of small rooms. He heard someone moaning as he passed a room and saw a woman’s head between a fat black man’s legs. The man gave Nick the thumbs-up as he groaned again. In another room, there were four tall, twenty-something women sitting on the floor. A mirror of cocaine sat between them. A gaunt blonde with abnormally large breasts waved him in, her legs spread around the coke.

“Looking for Elmore,” Nick said.

“C’mon over,” the woman slurred, as her shoulder strap dropped. Her chest was covered in freckles. Nick walked over and looked down at the women. “You want to play?”