The Ragtime Kid (6 page)

Boutell grinned. “Well, son, I got to say, I admire your get-up-and-go. But I got a regular player. He’s just off tonight.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Brun said, thinking he’d never spoken truer words. But he shut up in a hurry when Boutell slid a thick ham sandwich across the bar. “What’d you say your name was again?” the barkeep asked.

“Brun. Brun Campbell.”

“Okay, Brun. You look like you could use a meal.” He pushed the plate with the sandwich right under the boy’s nose, then drew a beer and set it next to the plate. “Like I said, you play all right. But even if I was looking for a piano man, a boy your age…” He stopped just long enough to let on he knew Brun was younger than almost seventeen. “…shouldn’t oughta be playing piano nights in a saloon. He oughta have a right job. Now, I happen to know that Mr. John Stark needs a boy to help with sales in his music store. Over to East Fifth, across from the courthouse.”

Brun couldn’t hold off one second longer. He grabbed up the sandwich and ripped off a huge bite. His mouth filled with saliva, his eyes teared. Boutell talked on. “Mr. Stark will treat you right. I know him well—been coming around for a beer and some talk just about every afternoon after work for, oh, fifteen years. Go to his shop tomorrow, it’s Number 114 Fifth, if I’m not mistaken.” Boutell stopped long enough to watch Brun chew. His eyes softened, and that crooked smile broke out again. “Here, I’ll write it down for you.” He pulled a piece of paper from a small pad, scribbled on it, laid it on the counter next to Brun’s plate. “Tell Mr. Stark that Gaylord Boutell sent you.”

Brun took up the paper, said, “Thank you,” then pointed at the sandwich and the beer. “What do I owe you?”

The saloon-keeper shook his head. “My players get tips
and
food.”

Brimming with food, beer, and his good luck, Brun thanked Boutell again. “I’ll go talk to Mr. Stark in the morning, I definitely will. But can you tell me one more thing? Where can I find Otis Saunders and Scott Joplin?”

Boutell laughed. “Easy enough. Just go to the Maple Leaf Club.” He pointed back over his shoulder. “Down Ohio, the other way from Stark’s, turn on East Main, then one block across. Club’s pretty much closed down for the summer, too damn hot up on that second floor for dancing, even at night. But most days, late in the afternoon, you’ll find your friends there, playing piano. Sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with other colored. Something you oughta know, though…”

“What’s that?”

Boutell chewed at his lip. “Main Street gets pretty rough after dark, Brun. Any kind of action a man wants, he can get it there. Daytime, you got no worries, but down on Main after sunset, you watch what you say and what you do. You watch, period. And north of Main, past the tracks, that’s Lincolnville, where the colored live, so you don’t go beyond Main after dark. Don’t get me wrong, white and colored get on well here, always have. Never been a riot in Sedalia, never one single lynching. But you know how it is. Takes only one bad apple.”

“Thanks,” Brun said. “I’ll be careful. It’s pretty much the same in Arkansas City.”

Boutell raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, I guess. Just one more thing…” The barkeep picked at a fingernail. “I know it ain’t the usual, but seeing you’re as young as you are, I think if you want piano lessons off Scott Joplin, you’ll be smart to call him Mr. Joplin. Not that he’d ever tell you to, no colored’d do that. But if I was you, I wouldn’t go calling him Scott right off. If that wouldn’t bother you.”

“Doesn’t bother me the least,” Brun said. “I sure do appreciate your help.”

Boutell went back to serving customers; Brun went back to his sandwich. But as the boy chewed, he started feeling uneasy. He turned and found himself looking into the face of the man on the stool to his right, the one he’d figured for a drummer. Nice, finely checked suit, ascot tie nice and straight, celluloid collar still stiff, even that late in the day. Not a scuff on his black shoes. A real dandy. But his eyes were gentle, not like most drummers’. “If you don’t mind, young man…Master Campbell, you said?”

His voice was mint juleps and honeysuckle. He looked to be in his middle-forties, not old enough to have fought in the war. But if he had, no question what color he’d have worn. “Yes, sir. Brun Campbell.” He stuck out his hand.

The dapper man swiveled on the stool to face Brun directly, then grasped his hand. “Edward Fitzgerald. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. I gather you’re newly arrived in town?”

“Couldn’t be much newer, sir.” Brun began to wonder and worry just a bit as to just what the man was after.

“You’re a runaway, aren’t you? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Was he a Pinkerton? In town on some other business, a Pink would’ve been glad to pick up a runaway boy, return him to his family, and walk away with his wallet a bit fatter. Brun regretted having told the man his actual name, but seeing he’d already given it to Boutell, he was caught between a rock and a hard place. “No, sir,” Brun said. “Not a runaway. I can’t exactly say my parents liked having me leave, but they knew I was bound and determined to—”

“Take piano lessons from this Mr. Scott Joplin?”

Brun fought a strong inclination to tell Fitzgerald to mind his own damned business. But without knowing just what that business might be, he figured better to play along. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly.

“That’s good,” Fitzgerald said. “I’m glad to hear your parents are not worrying, fearful of what might have happened to you. Though of course they always
will
worry anyway.” He laughed lightly, a gentle breeze off the Swannee River. “I have a son, myself, not nearly as old as you. But I pray he’ll never run off from home, leaving me no idea where he is or what he’s doing. Please do keep in touch with your parents.”

The sadness that appeared in and around Fitzgerald’s eyes gave him the look of a man who’d given up all hope of ever coming face to face with the happiness he’d once expected to find in his life. The boy felt a catch in his throat, quickly took another bite of sandwich, chewed slowly. “I will, sir.”

Fitzgerald took several seconds to look Brun up and down. “I should guess you haven’t been traveling in a passenger coach.”

“No, sir. I might’ve done that, but truth, a couple of ’boes robbed me two nights ago, took every cent in my poke. So I had to make my way here best as I could. Boxcars.”

By the pain in his eyes and the little smile that struggled around the corners of his mouth, Brun thought Fitzgerald looked like he himself was the one who’d been robbed. “Well, Master Campbell, I declare. You
are
a most determined young man.”

Brun put the rest of the sandwich into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “I am that, yes, sir.”

“But nevertheless,” Fitzgerald went on. “You have just arrived in town, and you have no money. Where do you propose to spend the night?”

Uh-oh. All of a sudden Brun thought he might know why Fitzgerald was showing all this interest in him. Just the year before, a man in El Reno had earned himself a tar-and-feather suit and a one-way ticket out of town because of what he did to a boy he’d coaxed into a hotel room. “It’s warm enough, sir,” Brun said. “I can sleep out-of-doors, maybe in a field, or I can find me a barn. At least until I make enough money to get a room in town.”

Fitzgerald threw back the last of his drink, set down the glass, then looked squarely at Brun. Brun glanced at Boutell, but the bartender was talking with a customer. “Y’all come with me,” Fitzgerald said. “The YMCA is just down the block. For a quarter a night, you can get a decent bed there.” He lowered his voice. “And a bath. I’ll see you to a week’s lodging. With your spunk and resolve, I expect by then you’ll be able to attend to your own needs.”

“I couldn’t permit you to do that, sir,” Brun said, talking considerably faster than his usual.

But Fitzgerald waved him off. “I admire your courage.” He pronounced the word coo-rage, and drew it out to several seconds. “If you wish, you may consider it a loan, payable without interest when your circumstances are comfortable. It’s what I’d hope someone might one day do for my own son.” He slid off the stool.

Brun was surprised at how short the man was, not more than five-seven, though he stood very straight. “Let us not discuss it further, Brun. The Y is just a short way down the block. I’ll take you there and get you your room.”

Brun figured if the man tried anything funny, he could handle him. Fitzgerald was not only small, but slender, and clearly not heavily muscled. And behind those fine Southern manners, there was such a tiredness about him. What if the guy really was on the level? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot better to sleep that night in a YMCA bed than in a hayloft, or between rows of corn?

Brun slid off his stool, and said, “Are you local? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Half-hearted chuckle. “One must consider a little turnabout to be fair play, isn’t that so? No, I live in Buffalo, New York. I’m here to investigate certain prospects for my employer.”

“But you don’t hail from New York. Not the way you talk.”

Fitzgerald pulled himself even straighter. “No, of course not. I’m proud to say I hail from Maryland. My family there goes back to the sixteen hundreds.”

And
, he said without actually saying it, every one was a fine and upstanding gentleman, or a noble and gracious lady. Which Brun thought probably went a long way toward explaining his appearance. Trying to live up to that sort of heritage every minute of every day
would
get to be exhausting. Maybe better to have at least a few horse thieves among the heroes in your ancestry.

In the end, Brun’s concern turned out to be unnecessary. His Southern-gentleman benefactor walked him up to the desk at the YMCA, put down a dollar and a half (twenty-five cents off for a week’s payment in advance), then bid him good-bye and wished him good luck. As he left, he pressed three dollar-coins into Brun’s hand. “A young man looking for work needs to eat well,” said Fitzgerald. “You will make a far better impression if you don’t look as if you’re starving. And…” That tired little laugh again. “Your piano teacher just might expect you to pay for your lessons.” Brun watched him out the door, then took the key from the bald, scaly-faced little desk clerk, went up to his room, stripped down, wrapped a towel around himself, and walked down the hall to the bath room.

With some reluctance, Brun admitted to himself that the bath actually did feel good, cold though it was at that hour. And the bed was far more comfortable than the floors of the freight cars he’d stretched out on for the past couple of nights. He fell directly into a heavy sleep, so satisfying that when a bell commenced a terrible clanging, he managed to bury his head under the pillow and put the noise aside. But a while later, a steam whistle showed no mercy whatever, just blasted the boy up and out of bed. The clanging, as Brun shortly found out, was the courthouse bell, which rang six days a week at six in the morning. The whistle came from the MoPac railroad shop, and blew seven.

Brun yawned and stretched, then pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and relieved himself. Too early to go talk to Mr. John Stark, so the boy wandered down to the communal room and sat through morning prayer service, not out of piety or anything resembling sincere interest, but because it was the price of the Y’s egg and pancake breakfast, payment in advance. The boy’s attention wandered; he gazed out the open window at the growing crowd along Ohio Avenue. A man working a slow route on a horse cart called out, “Rags! Old iron! Bottles!” The junkman stopped long enough to say a word to a colored man playing an accordion on a street corner, then dropped a coin in the musician’s cup. Which set Brun to thinking about the change he’d gotten in tips the night before at Boutell’s. He’d never counted it. He reached into his pocket, his fingers touched a little metal object—and his empty stomach lurched. Sitting there on a hardwood bench, half-heartedly joining in “Abide With Me,” he remembered the locket and the money-clip. What with the excitement of playing his way into a meal, hearing about the possibility of a good steady job, and meeting Mr. Fitzgerald and getting the room at the Y, he’d forgotten that strangled woman at the side of the road and her possessions he’d made off with. Now, they burned in his pocket like they’d been heated red-hot in an oven.

He downed his breakfast considerably faster than he’d planned, then ran back to his room, locked the door, and laid his booty on the bed. The money in the clip looked like found treasure, two tens, a five, and three singles. Twenty-eight dollars, not a fortune, but a comfortable cushion until his first payday. He heard his mother’s voice: “A thief never profits from his ill-gotten gains,” but as Brun studied the money-clip, the voice faded. That piece of jewelry interested him no end. It was shaped like a musical lyre, a clever piece of work, about three inches long, half an inch thick. A bit of delicate blue enamel work decorated its base. At first, Brun thought it was gold, but then took notice of the few flecks of gold plating still remaining on the brass body. The boy’s fingers picked up on a small irregularity on the back; he turned the clip over, and saw a tiny winding key, like for a watch. He gave it a tentative turn, and felt the pressure of a spring winding; then he pushed a metal button next to the winding key. A simple little tune began to play.

He’d never seen such a thing. He listened until the music stopped, then turned the key and pushed the button again. His first notion had been what the money-clip might bring from a pawnbroker, but now the possibility of pawning his find went altogether out of his thoughts. Women didn’t carry money-clips, men did. That poor woman must have struggled, and in the fight, the money-clip probably fell out of her killer’s pocket. As musical a city as Sedalia was said to be, the clip could have belonged to any number of people, but since the item would indict its owner as a killer, Brun knew he’d be foolish to pawn it, then have to worry that the wrong person might trace it back to him.

His attention turned to the little gold square, the locket. Brun flipped it open, found himself staring into the wide-set eyes of a blond man with a big round face and a smile that looked forced. The woman’s husband? Brun closed his eyes, tried to remember. Yes, there
was
a plain gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand, the hand he’d been massaging like a fool. Did her own husband kill her?