The Bad Kitty Lounge (18 page)

We parked in a lot next to the building and Terrence led us inside. The barroom was warm and smelled like whiskey. Two men sat apart on stools at the bar. They had gray hair and tired skin. Their clothes hung loose on them. An old bartender stood opposite them, waiting for others to come in and soften their lives with whiskey. The sound system probably cost more than the four walls that surrounded it. It played a high complaining drawl that sang, “All my love in vain” over an acoustic guitar.

The bartender's face brightened when he saw Terrence. “Hey, Terrence, long time,” he said.

“Hey, Dennis.” The men formed fists of their left hands and bounced them off each other's. “How you been?”

“Living, just living,” said the bartender.

“Can't ask for more.”

The bartender peered around Terrence at Lucinda and me. “Who're your friends?”

“Friends is all,” he said. “Thomas around?”

The man's grin faded. “Okay, be that way. He's upstairs.” He gestured toward a door at the other end of the room. The door had a sign that said
STAFF ONLY
.

“How's he doing?” Terrence asked.

The bartender repeated, “He's upstairs,” like that was an answer.

We climbed two flights of stairs in a dusty stairwell. At the top, Terrence knocked on another door. When no one answered, he knocked again.

“What?” said a cracked voice.

“Terrence Messier,” Terrence answered.

A long pause. “What the hell you want?”

“Come for a visit,” Terrence said.

The door opened. A man about my size, plus thirty years, stood in the doorway. He wore loose-fitting gray cotton pants, belted around his middle, and a faded flannel shirt. He held a baseball bat in one hand. His voice erupted, “Don't ever come here unless I invite you.” He glared past Terrence. “And don't ever tell your friends about me. Don't bring them around.” The bat looked like it had hit something sharp and metal. It was stained dark by age or blood or both. He held it like he was thinking of using it on Terrence's head.

Terrence brushed past him into the room. Now the man looked like he might use the bat on Lucinda and me. We stood where we were.

“Well?” he croaked at us.

“Well?” Lucinda answered.

“Well, get the hell inside,” he said.

We stepped through the doorway and the man closed the door behind us. Terrence turned. He had a big grin. The man laughed. He dropped the bat on the floor, and he and Terrence swallowed each other in a hug. “Thomas is the funniest man I know,” Terrence said.

“Yeah, hilarious,” Lucinda mumbled.

“Also the best singer.”

“Once maybe,” the man said, wistful. “Once I could sing.”

The man led us through a hall to a living room. There was an assortment of chairs and couches, a couple of end tables. Three guitars—two electric, one acoustic—rested on guitar stands. They gleamed like the man had spent the morning polishing them. A double window was open to the afternoon breeze, but heat, piping from the steam radiator, made the room hot. The apartment smelled like the whiskey from the bar two floors below. Even with the heat the place was comforting.

Terrence introduced Lucinda and me as private detectives, leaving out our pasts as cops. He introduced the man to us as Thomas Stetler, owner-operator of The Shack and former front man for the most popular Chicago blues band never to cut an album. Stetler went to the kitchen and brought us glasses of iced tea.

We talked about the connection between a dead nun and a family as old and tough as the dirt under the city. Stetler knew
little about Judy Terrano and DuBuclet's son but he grinned when I mentioned the Bad Kitty Lounge.

“Me and the band played in that house a couple of times,” he said. “We played in some wild joints over the years, joints as far from the law as here to St. Louis. But we never played in another joint as wild as the Bad Kitty. You could do anything at all in that place, and excuse me for saying so”—he looked quickly at Lucinda—“when I say anything, I mean anything. You had to love a place like that, but you couldn't live there. At least, I couldn't. Some kids did, though. Black, white, Chinese, Mexican, they all was welcome. I think they had a Sioux Indian there for a while. The place was hot as a wire. I think I've got a picture of it around here somewhere.”

He stood and left the room. Terrence, Lucinda, and I exchanged glances but we said nothing.

Stetler came back with a faded photo album. He sat in a chair and removed two color photographs and handed them to me. The first showed a group of five guys standing with guitars, a trumpet, and a saxophone on the white front steps of a red two-story house. I recognized a much younger Thomas Stetler in the middle of the group, looking as proud and full of sex as a rooster. The steps led to a porch recessed into two side wings, each with large windows. Above the porch was a flat wooden roof and, above and behind the flat roof, an open door that made the roof into a second-story balcony. Pink curtains, which could have been purple before the photograph faded, covered the windows.

The other photograph looked like it was taken inside on the second floor, facing down a hall toward the door to the balcony. The hall carpet was vibrant pink. A very fair-skinned woman with blond hair sat on the carpet, her arms supporting
her from behind, her breasts jutting forward, her blouse unbuttoned but covering her barely, her legs dressed in the shortest of skirts and open like a dirty book.

“That's Louise,” said Stetler. “I ran with her for a while. She was a hot wire, too. Too hot. I had to get away.”

“The Bad Kitty burned down in 1969?” I asked.

“Yeah, summer of '69. Terrible thing. Two young couples was upstairs at the time. They burned with it.”

“How did the fire happen?” Lucinda asked.

“Arson. The whole West Side had burned. The riots, you know? No one would've noticed the fire at the Bad Kitty, except for the dead kids.”

I asked him, “Who would know about Judy Terrano if she hung out there?”

He thought about the question for only a second. “Louise would.”

“She still around?”

“Yeah, lives a few blocks from here. Back then, she got heavy into drugs and went out on the streets. Shit, she's probably still walking them even if it takes a cane. No one's stopping her till she's lying in the ground, if then.”

We finished our iced tea and pried ourselves out of his comfortable chairs. When Stetler showed us to his door he picked up the baseball bat and tapped its sweet spot against his palm. “Come back and see me anytime,” he said.

“SURE, I KNEW JUDY
Terrano,” said the woman. “Couldn't forget her. No one could. Don't know what ever happened to that girl.”

So at least one ex-streetwalker didn't know that Judy Terrano had become the Virginity Nun. “She's dead,” I said.

“Happens to the best of us.” She wore a green cardigan sweater and had an afghan blanket spread across her lap. Her skin looked bad, her hair stringy, but her blue eyes were clear and sharp. A Marlboro hung from her lips. “So why are you investigating a dead old party girl?”

“Family interest. There's a little money involved, and everyone wants to make sure it goes to the right relatives.” One lie was as good as another, I figured, though Louise Johnson's eyes lit up at the mention of money. I added, “I saw a picture of her when she was eighteen or nineteen. She was a knockout.”

Louise Johnson took a deep drag from her cigarette, held it in until the smoke must have burned, and exhaled. “Judy could take her pick. Hell, even if a boy was with another girl, Judy
could walk into the room and he'd climb out of bed and follow her like a puppy. And the girl who was left in bed alone? She'd understand. Half the time she'd get out of bed and go after her like a puppy, too.”

I thought about DuBuclet's son, shot dead in his boxer shorts. “How about Anthony DuBuclet?”

She laughed and she fingered the business card I'd given her. Her fingers looked surprisingly young. She touched my hand with them. “Yeah, Anthony was one of them. He was a good-looking boy. A charmer. Angry and dangerous. Do you know whose bed he got out of so he could chase after Judy?” She gave us a proud smile. “That's right. Louise Johnson's very own.” Her smile fell, and she inhaled a long drag from her cigarette. “But he was no good in bed. Too rough. I hated to see him leave me, and I loved to see him go.”

We sat in her basement apartment at the kitchen table. The apartment looked decorated to offset the life she'd led on the streets. The furniture was plain, a lot of brown and beige. She'd taped newspaper comic strips onto her refrigerator next to old pictures of kids who probably were family members. A coffeepot percolated on the counter. Two bottles of Bacardi Gold, one empty, the other half full, stood next to the coffeepot. There were bread crumbs on the kitchen table. Even an ex-hooker has to make toast.

“Judy fell for Anthony?” Lucinda asked.

“You could say that, yeah. Far as I know, Anthony's the only one she ever did fall for. She fucked with no more sense than I did. Young or old, boy or girl, black, white, or yellow. But when she got together with Anthony, that was it. It was love, or else she just liked banging with a boy that used his dick like a fist.”

“Did you know she was pregnant when Anthony died?” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “No, I didn't know about that. Boy or girl?”

“Boy.”

“Thank God. The world couldn't handle another Judy Terrano. She drove us all wild.” She inhaled from the cigarette again like it was oxygen and she'd spent a long time under water. The cigarette paper glowed orange and burned to the filter. She tamped the butt in an ashtray, then lifted the blanket from her lap. She went to the counter and brought back four coffee cups, the pot of coffee, and the bottle of Bacardi. She poured half a cup of coffee for each of us and topped off one of them with rum. She handed the bottle to Lucinda, who poured half an inch into her cup before handing it to Terrence, who did the same. He offered me the bottle but I waved it away.

Louise looked at me hard. “I never trusted a man that wouldn't drink with me.”

Terrence said, “If he takes one drink, he'll finish your bottle.”

“No problem with that,” she said. She took a long drink of her spiked coffee and gazed at me. “But I'm so fucking lonely I'll talk to anyone. Even you. You know where Judy's boy is now?”

“Yeah, he's with his grandfather,” I said. “Did William DuBuclet ever come around the Bad Kitty?”

She laughed. “Hell, no. Back then William DuBuclet was a fighter, and the Bad Kitty was a place for loving. That man wouldn't've known what to do there. It was a dump building in a dump neighborhood. I guess the owners couldn't rent it or didn't try. But then the kids started to move in and it became everything the rest of the city wasn't. No cops. No limits. If you liked someone you could spend time together. If you wanted to
experiment, you could experiment. If you were curious, you could find out anything you wanted to know. I found out a lot in that place.”

“Yeah,” I said, getting impatient. “Sounds like paradise. Drugs and sex and no bedtime.”

She picked up on the sarcasm but laughed. “Yeah, it was all of that.” She shook another Marlboro from its pack and hung it in her lips.

“How did it get called the Bad Kitty?” Lucinda asked.

She lit the cigarette and took a long deep drag, then looked at me, her blue eyes narrow, and smiled. She answered, “It was a joke. The Black Panthers were big news, and the Bad Kitty was another choice—loving, not shooting.”

“Where exactly was the place?” I asked.

“On Fourteenth, a little west of Halsted. There were a bunch of run-down, empty houses and then the Bad Kitty. Never been another place like it.” You could hear the rum in her voice. “I'd live there still if I could. But it was too much, too much. It's probably good they burned it down. If they hadn't I would've died a long time ago. But I can tell you I would've died smiling.” She took another slug of rum and coffee.

“You say it's good ‘they' burned it down. You mean the rioters?”

“Hell, no. The rioters didn't burn it. The riots happened a year earlier. The man that owned it started the fire. For the insurance money, I think, or because he didn't like the house as a squat, or both. Or maybe he was just mean.”

“What was the man's name?” Lucinda said.

“Been a long time”—she shook her head—“a lot of Bacardi and a lot of faces and names since then.” She drank from her cup, finished it, smiled. “First name was Bartholomew. Don't
remember his last. He was circumcised. His boys, too. I know that for a fact.” She leered at me. “A lot of the girls that hung out at the Bad Kitty knew it. I figure the girls must've kept the building from burning for at least a couple months.”

“How about Judy Terrano?” said Terrence. “Was she screwing the owner?”

Louise Johnson squinted at him. “You need to know this because you're executing a will?”

Terrence smiled like she hadn't challenged him. “Just curiosity.”

She shrugged. “I don't know if she was or wasn't,” she said. “I wasn't paying a lot of attention usually. But let's say, yeah. Why not? Judy was screwing everyone else. The daddy and the boys liked to come by. The daddy didn't like the squatting, but there wasn't much he could do about it. No one there had any money for rent even if they wanted to pay it, and the cops had their hands too full to worry about a house full of kids who were busy fucking each other. So the daddy and his boys made a good thing out of a bad deal.”

“So much for paradise,” said Lucinda.

“Every paradise has got its snakes,” the ex-hooker said. “That's part of what makes it paradise.”