The right to sing the blues

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As the DC-10 dipped a wing and descended to circle the New Orleans airport, the old man in the seat next to Nudger's, who had kept dozing off and resting his head on Nudger's shoulder, sat up straight and stared past him out the window, entranced by the up-rushing ground lights.

During the flight south, looking out the window at a night salted with wavering bright stars, Nudger had thought about what Hammersmith told him. There was nothing about Billy Weep's death for the law to latch on to. No sign of forced entry, no revealing fingerprints, no blunt instrument that matched the fatal wounds. Nothing but an old black man dead in an old room. Music and memory finally ceased.

Hammersmith thought maybe it was simply a petty robbery. Weep had been a known user, and there had been no money and nothing drugrelated in the apartment. Billy Weep might have been killed for a few grams of cocaine. Every day, people were murdered for less reason than that.

Nudger suddenly felt queasy as the plane dropped steeply for its landing approach. His ears began to pop.

"Fasten your seat belt, young fella," the old man next to him curtly instructed.

Nudger buckled up for safety. He hadn't done enough of that in life. Early the next morning, Nudger was sitting across from Fat Jack McGee in the club owner's second-floor office. Fat Jack loomed behind his desk like a misplaced mountain. He had on that nifty cream-colored sport jacket, a white shirt, and a blue silk tie with a gold tie bar and a diamond stick pin. Gold cuff links and a gold wristwatch and chain bracelet peeked from beneath his spotless jacket sleeves. Protruding from his jacket pocket was a blue silk handkerchief that matched the tie, folded in a neat triangle. Nudger had never been able to fold a pocket handkerchief that way; he had some of the fake ones folded by the manufacturer and stapled on little sheets of cardboard, but he never wore them. He sat watching Fat Jack talk on the desk phone and wondered how the big man could wear all that stone and metal and not seem overdressed. It had to be his sheer bulk.

"Hey, yeah," Fat Jack said into the phone. He gave his flesh-upholstered wide grin and winked at Nudger with a glittering piggish eye. "Hey, lemme get back to you later, okay?" He waited a few minutes, then hung up. "Business that'll keep," he explained to Nudger. He placed his elbows on the desk and laced his sausage-sized fingers. Gold glinted. "You got traveling out of your system, old sleuth?"

"For now," Nudger said. "You remember Billy Weep?"

Fat Jack nodded. "Vaguely. Sax man, ain't he?"

"Dead man," Nudger said. "Somebody beat him to death yesterday in his apartment in St. Louis."

Fat Jack looked concerned. "What was it? Argument, robbery, what?"

"It was probably what," Nudger said. "I'd just been to see him that morning."

"Well, now!" Fat Jack said, frowning with meaty brows. "You think there's some connection?"

"I don't know," Nudger said.

Fat Jack shook his broad head. "Something else to worry about, as if I ain't got enough problems. What else did you find out in your travels, other than that Billy Weep died?"

"I went to musicians' unions, jazz people, clubs where Willy Hollister had played, in four cities."

"Were all those miles and conversations necessary?"

"As it turns out, yes," Nudger said. "I picked up a pattern, sometimes strong, sometimes subtle, but always there, like in a forties Ellington piece."

"So tell me about it," Fat Jack said. "I'm an Ellington fan."

"All the people I talked with, all the old reviews I read, everything pieced together gave me a kind of condensed journal of Willy Hollister's ascending career. He always started strong, but his musical life was checkered with flat spots, lapses, times when there was something missing from his music: the sense of soul and pain that makes a blues man great. During those times, Hollister was just an ordinary performer."

Fat Jack appeared worried, tucked his chin back into folds of flesh, and said, "That explains why he's falling off here."

"But the man is still making great music," Nudger said.

"He's slipping from great to good," Fat Jack said. "Good jazz artists in New Orleans I can hire by the barrelful."

"There's something else about Willy Hollister," Nudger said. "Something that nobody picked up on because it spanned a lot of years and four cities."

Fat Jack looked interested.

"Hollister had a steady girlfriend in each of these cities," Nudger told him. "All four women disappeared."

Fat Jack drew back in his chair. "Whaddya mean, 'disappeared'? Like 'poof?"

"Almost like 'poof.' One day they were there, the next day gone. They were women whose disappearances wouldn't be taken all that seriously by all that many people," Nudger said. "Usually they were performers, or hangers-on at the jazz scene. They were the sort whose jobs or personalities sometimes prompted them to leave town without a lot of prior notice."

"Weren't the police notified of their disappearances?"

"Two of the women were rumored to have left town on their own, and their sudden disappearances weren't reported to Missing Persons. The first woman, in Cleveland, and the third one, in St. Louis, abruptly dropped out of sight, were reported, and are still in the Missing Persons files."

"Whoo, boy!" Fat Jack said. He began to sweat. He pulled his white flag-sized handkerchief from an inside pocket of his neat jacket and mopped his brow, just like Satchmo but without the grin and magic trumpet.

"Sorry," Nudger said. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"Hey, you're doing your job, is all," Fat Jack assured him in a wheezy, quavering voice. "But that's bad information to lay on me, Nudger. Bad, bad, bad. I take it you think Hollister had a lot to do with the disappearances of these women."

Nudger shrugged. He knew better than to snatch at the obvious. "Maybe the women themselves, and not Hollister, had everything to do with why they're gone. We can't discount the fact that they were all the sort who traveled light and often." Nudger gave Fat Jack the women's names. The only one he recognized was Jacqui James, but he'd only met her a few times and didn't know she'd disappeared.

Fat Jack bowed his head and looked melancholy, almost ready to sob.

"Maybe the women actually left town of their own accord," Nudger said. "Maybe for some reason they felt they had to get away from Hollister."

"I wish Ineida would want to get away from the bastard," Fat Jack muttered. Then he realized what he'd said. "But Jeez, not like that. Her old man'd boil me down for axle grease if she just disappeared from here. But then she's not cut from the same bolt as those other girls; she's not what she's trying to be and is strictly local."

"The one thing she and those other women have in common is Willy Hollister."

"Ain't no getting away from that," Fat Jack said. He leaned back. Nudger heard the desk chair creak in weary protest. Nudger, who had been hired to solve a problem, had so far only brought to light the seriousness of that problem. Fat Jack was still between a rock and a hard place, and the rock had become larger, the hard place harder. The big man didn't have to ask "What now?" It was written in capital letters on his face.

"We could tell Ineida about Hollister's missing women," Nudger said. When in doubt, say something.

"She wouldn't listen, Nudger. Wouldn't believe anything bad about Hollister if she did listen. Love leads people into trouble that way."

Nudger figured Fat Jack was right. He should know about such things; that was what the blues were about.

"You could fire Willy Hollister," Nudger said.

Fat Jack shook his head. "Ineida would follow him, and maybe get mad at me and sic her dad on the club."

"And Hollister is still packing customers into the club every night."

"That, too," Fat Jack admitted. Even the loosest businessman could see the profit in Willy Hollister's genius. "For now," he said, "I guess we'll let things slide while you continue to watch Hollister and Ineida." He dabbed at his forehead again with the wadded handkerchief. "It'd be my big finale for sure if anything happened to that girl. Her dad would see to that."

"Hollister doesn't know who I am," Nudger said, "but he knows who I'm not and he's worried. My presence might keep him aboveboard for a while."

"Any amount of time looks pretty valuable to me right now," Fat Jack said.

"Meanwhile," Nudger told him, "I'll keep probing for more information. Maybe I'll come up with something that will cause Ineida to have a change of heart about Hollister."

"Fine, as long as a change of scenery isn't involved. I can't afford to have her wind up like those other women, Nudger."

Or like Billy Weep, Nudger thought, as he stood up from his chair. "I'll phone you if I have any more good news," he said.

Fat Jack mumbled something unintelligible and nodded, lost in his vast interior gloom. Things weren't turning out at all the way he'd hoped, and in the past several prosperous years he'd become unused to disappointment. He didn't look up as Nudger walked from the stifling office.

Nudger had his own apprehensions. He had the feeling he'd delved far enough into this matter to have stirred up waters that wouldn't calm easily. What Hammersmith had told him about David Collins' underworld status had caused Nudger's stomach to issue an uncommonly strong warning. His stomach was seldom wrong; it was growling now, something that sounded like "Get ooout!"

He knew that his future, like Fat Jack's, depended almost exclusively on Ineida Collins' wellbeing. He sure hoped that girl didn't do anything foolish.

If Fat Jack wound up playing his clarinet for nickles on some skid-row street corner, Nudger would probably be the one passing the hat.

That's if they were both lucky.