The Gutter and the Grave (15 page)

I opened the closet door. I braced myself against the wall and took off the pajamas and then began dressing. I could hear the click-clatter of nurses’ heels in the corridor outside. I wondered if Peggy Collins owned two of those heels. There was a sink with a mirror over it in one corner of the room. Fully dressed, I made my way to it and looked at my reflection.

I didn’t look so good.

That is, possibly, an understatement.

They had covered most of my face with either plaster or bandage. They had not covered my right eye because it was not cut. It was however blue and purple and red, the lid swollen to three times its size. A nice hunk of plaster was pasted across the eyebrow, so I figured this was where the pipe or blackjack had landed. The swelling of the eye was only a secondary ailment, so to speak.

I kept studying my face, and then I made my decision.

I was going to crash Hollywood.

But first I had to crash out of the hospital. I went to the door. My legs were beginning to behave as if I had at least a down payment toward ownership on them. I opened the door a crack and looked into the corridor. Clean and white, it stretched to the elevator doors at the end of the building. A closed door in the middle of the hall carried the red sign exit above it. The door across the hall was numbered 407. Four flights down to the lobby. A nurse walked past. She did not see my swollen eye peering through the crack in the door. I listened for new footfalls. The nurse was standing at the elevator, pressing the button. The elevator arrived, the doors opened. She stepped in. I listened again for footfalls. None.

I opened the door and walked quickly to the exit sign in the middle of the hallway. I opened the second door, stepped onto the landing, and closed it rapidly
behind me. I leaned against it then because I felt dizzy again. I waited. Then I started down the steps.

I didn’t stop at the lobby. I went down to the basement garage, opened the door there and walked past an ambulance and a man reading a copy of
Confidential
, his chair tilted back against the fender of the ambulance.

“Hello,” I said.

He barely looked up. “Hi,” he answered, and then got back into bed with one of the movie stars. I walked up the ramp and out into the street. It had cooled off a little, but it was still pretty damned hot. The city seemed quieter. Perhaps it was because one of my ears had a wad of bandage over it.

I wondered where Dave Ryan was.

I decided to find out.

* * *

I bought a pair of sunglasses and a cheap straw hat. Laraine Marsh had laid ten bucks on me the day before and it was going fast. The money, she understood, was a loan. I wouldn’t have taken it otherwise. I believe in panhandling, but not from a woman you’ve bedded with.

I looked up Dave Ryan’s address on the slip of paper where I’d jotted it when Johnny Bridges gave it to me. I took a subway to 116th, and then a cab from there to 120th. The cab ride cost me fifty cents, including the tip. The Ryan apartment was on the ground floor. A hardware-store sign on the door read
SUPERINTENDENT
. I knocked.

The door opened instantly.

An Irish washerwoman type stood in the open doorway. She was not dressed like an Irish washerwoman. Only her face told me that. She was wearing her Sunday best. Her face was flabby, and her lips were badly painted, but she’d managed to preserve her body by adding poundage to it. The dress was too tight and the heels were too high.

“What the hell do you want?” she said.

“Dave Ryan.”

“He ain’t here.”

“Who are you?”

“His mother. I’m on my way to Bingo. Are you one of his musician friends?”

“No.”

“Well, he ain’t here. What do you want?”

“Can you tell me where he is?”

“I don’t know where he goes or what he does. That’s his business. All I know is whenever he’s here he’s blowing that damn horn of his. I’m sorry I ever bought it for him.”

“You have no idea where he might be?”

“None. I have to put on my earrings.”

“May I come in?”

“What for?”

“You seem to be in a hurry, and I didn’t want to hold you up. All I want to know is…”

“I don’t know where Davey is,” she said. “Why don’t you look up his friend?”

“Which one would that be?”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Are you Irish?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Come in. We’ve got time for a drink before I leave.”

I walked into the apartment. The kitchen was painted a bright yellow once. It was now painted with the stains of cooking. Mrs. Ryan took a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and poured two liberal hookers into water tumblers.

“Here’s to the old man,” she said. “May he turn over in his grave.”

I raised my glass and drank.

“My husband,” she explained. “The bastard died two years ago. Left me all alone in the world.” She tossed off the drink and poured another. “I’m a passionate woman,” she explained. “He shouldn’t have died and left me on my own.”

“This friend of Dave’s,” I prodded.

“Yes. Andy is his name. He plays a saxophone or something. The big curved thing with the black part you put in your mouth?”

“A saxophone,” I agreed. “What’s his last name?”

“Beats me,” she said. “You want another drink?”

“All right.”

She poured.

“I hate these damn Bingo games,” she confided. “A bunch of old dames sitting around and hoping to make a killing. Big killing! Twenty-five bucks.” She paused. “I’m a passionate woman, but I hate to go to bars and
hang around. People think you’re waiting to be picked up or something. Do you know what I mean?” She studied me for a minute. “I don’t like to ask,” she said, “but what the hell happened to you?”

“Somebody beat me up,” I said.

“A strong young fellow like you?” she answered unbelievingly. “He must have used a lead pipe.”

“He did.”

“He did?” she said surprised. She made a clucking sound and poured herself another drink.

“Andy’s last name,” I reminded her. “Would you remember?”

“No. I’d remember if I heard it, but I never heard it. He’s just Andy. The tenor man, Dave calls him. Listen, are you in a hurry to go anyplace?”

“I’d like to find Dave,” I said.

“The hell with Dave.” She grinned. “You’ve found his old lady.”

“And a nice old lady, too,” I said, grinning back.

“Let’s kill the bottle and live dangerously,” she said. The smile dropped from her mouth, and her eyes were suddenly pleading, full of loneliness, full of the empty life of a woman who’d once been pretty, the emptiness of Bingo games and pickups in bars and a yellow kitchen stained with cooking grime.

“Don’t tempt me,” I said. “I just got out of the hospital. A woman like you would kill me.”

She chuckled. It was a dirty chuckle. She knew I was lying in my teeth, but she was enjoying it. “You’re Irish, all right, you bastard,” she said. “Have another drink.”

“I’ve got to find this Andy character,” I said.

“That won’t be hard. When he ain’t with Dave, he’s in the candy store on the corner.”

“I hope you win lots of money tonight,” I said, standing.

“I’ve been going since the old man died,” she said, “and I haven’t won a cent yet.” She shrugged. “Come back sometime.”

“I will,” I said. She knew I wouldn’t.

I went out into the street, and I walked to the candy store on the corner. The guy behind the counter looked up when I came in, appraised the face for what it obviously was, and decided from go that I was a pushover.

“I’m looking for a kid named Andy,” I said.

“Yeah?” He moved a toothpick to the opposite side of his mouth. In a booth at the back of the store, four young guys were sitting and listening to the juke.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know him?”

“Andy who?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you was looking for him.”

“I am.”

“And you don’t know his last name, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“This ain’t the Lost and Found Department, Mac.”

“The name is Matt,” I said, “and cut the crap.”

“Huh?” The toothpick was in the center of his mouth now.

“I said cut the crap! I’m asking a legitimate question,
and I don’t need any wise-guy to talk right now.” I put my right hand on the counter. “See that?” I said. “It’s broken. But I’ve still got a left, and I’ll knock you on your ass with it if you make one more wise crack.”

“Tough guy, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. Tough guy.”

“How’d a guy so tough get beat up so bad?”

“Six guys beat me up,” I lied, “and all of them bigger than you and armed with ball bats. You want to take a whirl at it?”

He studied me for a minute. “Tough guy,” was all he said.

“Do you know Andy?”

“I’m Andy,” a voice from the booth said.

“The tenor man?”

“Yeah.” He stepped out of the booth. He was a tall kid with a black crown of hair and long sideburns. He walked with the same hip, side-swinging walk that Dave Ryan used. “What do you want?” he said.

“I’m trying to locate Dave Ryan.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m a friend of Laraine Marsh’s.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” he said slowly. “You been down to rehearsals, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sure, I dig you now. Man, what happened to your face?”

“An accident.”

“Wow!” he said, and then he made a sound like air
escaping from a punctured tire, and then he said “Wow!” again.

“Know where I can find Dave?”

“He said he was going on the earie tonight. Digging the various combos around, you know?”

“Which combos?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Downtown? Places like Birdland? Downbeat?”

“I doubt it. He was broke. Maybe he was heading for a session.”

“Did he have his horn with him?”

“No. But he had his mouthpiece.”

“A session where?”

“Hell, that could be anywhere. Lots of combos, you know, just to ease the drag of rehearsals, they get together in some cat’s pad and just blow for kicks. You can really get the measure of a group when you hear them blowing for kicks. So Dave bounces around on the earie. He’s half-interested in the competition, and he’s half-interested in sitting in when the group is alive. You dig?”

“I dig. Where are the sessions?”

“Mostly West Side. Up on Lenox, around there.”

“Where on Lenox?”

“Oh, man, I don’t know. It’s a homing instinct leads us to these guys.”

“You busy now, Andy?”

“Just drifting.”

“How’d you like to drift up to Lenox Avenue with me?”

He shrugged. I waited. Then he said, “I’d like to stop home for my mouthpiece first.”

“Crazy,” I said, and he blinked, and I could see he was mentally muttering over the imponderables that caused good legitimate musical language to sneak into the vernacular. Argh, what a world!

* * *

The pad on Lenox was jumping.

The musicians ranged from white to tan to brown to black. No one in that room was thinking about anything but music. I sometimes think all racial prejudice in the world would evaporate if everyone were taught to play an instrument and then allowed to join a gigantic international band. I’ve never yet met a musician, black or white, who has let color become any sort of a barrier. And this holds for musicians who come from neighborhoods where racial prejudice is taught from the cradle by well meaning parents preparing their kids for the hard knocks of life. It doesn’t work on musicians. There’s no room for hatred when three men or six men or a dozen men or two dozen men are blowing their separate sheets and making a conglomerate sound. The sound is the thing and music has its own color, blue or red or pale yellow or misty pink.

There was harmony in that room, and it didn’t all come from the horns. The harmony was a thing you could feel in the jiggling feet and the clapping hands, the nodding heads, the wide grins when a man played a particularly good riff or rode a solo into the ground. I felt better the minute I walked in, and I was willing to
bet that not one person in the room would ask me what had happened to my face. My face wasn’t important. The music was.

The music was being made by seven men. Five of them were colored, and the remaining two were white. The other men and women in the room were either musicians or real music lovers. The piano player was obviously leading the combo, lacing intricate treble riffs into a steadily pounding bass, suddenly changing the tempo to a slow lazy blues, then leaping into a South American figure, setting the mood for the other musicians, changing the mood whenever he felt the boys wearying of the pace. One of the musicians clustered around the piano was Dave Ryan.

He blew sometimes in unison with another trumpet player, and sometimes in harmony. They switched back and forth from lead to second trumpet. The men seemed to play incessantly. When one grew just slightly tired, the melody was picked up by another instrument. If someone got really tired, one of the spectator-musicians would go to the piano, take his mouthpiece from his pocket, and pick up the discarded horn. It was a great big chain letter with the piano as its nucleus. I had the feeling they would keep blowing until eternity. I had the feeling that maybe this session had been going on in this apartment since the early days of New York, different musicians sidling in to take their places in a never-ending thing of sound. I had the feeling I was peeking in at perpetual motion.

“Oh, man, they’re swingin’,” Andy said. “I’m going to grab a horn as soon as somebody lets loose.”

A long colored girl with magnificent breasts and splendid legs turned her attention to us. “They been at it since noontime,” she said. “Jocko started fooling around with the ivory and then this guitar player dropped in, and man, the word was out. We’ve had every musician in New York up here today, I swear it. Jocko didn’t even stop for supper. He’s been pounding those keys all day.” She paused. “I’m Clara,” she said.

“I’m Andy.”

“I’m Matt.”

“I sing,” Clara said. “No mike, though, and those cats are blowing too hard for my tiny voice.”

I looked at her. She was sitting right then, but she must have been at least five-eight standing in her stocking feet. I found it hard to picture a tiny voice coming from her long, well-shaped body. She followed my eyes and then smiled, pleased by my open admiration. She didn’t get insulted because I honestly wasn’t trying to insult her. There are ways of looking at a woman, and there are other ways. And you can never fool a woman into thinking you’re flattering her when you’re really insulting her.