The right to sing the blues

XII

The next morning Nudger drove the same cramped red subcompact, the matchbox the rental agency seemed to hold in reserve just for him, over to Magazine Street. It wasn't the best part of town, hadn't been for years. He found a parking place halfway down a block of tile-roofed, two-story buildings, each with intricately turned iron railings and long, second-floor balconies that looked too rickety to support much weight. There were a lot of potted plants on the balconies, and some outdoor furniture. Small magnolia trees grew from large, round concrete planters placed every fifty feet or so at the curb. Recent renovation and fresh paint tried hard, but couldn't quite mask the fact that not long ago this had been a run-down neighborhood. That, and the liberal sprinkling of antique shops and small restaurants lining each side of the street, indicated that gentrification was underway here, the process by which a seedy neighborhood suddenly acquires character rather than undesirability, becomes trendy, and, eventually, outrageously expensive.

Nudger guessed that right now this block of Magazine Street was peopled by the mix of old, poorer residents afraid of change, and the new, young professional types, marking the area as trendy but not yet prohibitively overpriced. The longtime residents might still outnumber the newcomers. The rest of the Indians had to be run out before the homesteaders would move here in large numbers.

He unfolded from the subcompact, stood on the sidewalk, and stretched the kinks from his spine. He hated little cars. Well, maybe not his comfortably well-worn Volkswagen Beetle back in St. Louis, which at least had head room. He had bumped his head twice crossing railroad tracks in this little torture device on wheels.

From the sagging balcony above, a gray, tiger-striped cat observed him with calm disdain. Nudger clucked his tongue at the cat, which caused the animal to blink twice slowly. Nudger wished he had the cat's composure and handle on life.

He decided to leave his sportjacket in the car, and walked down the sidewalk while rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. It was more muggy than hot this morning, but he figured that by noon the heat would catch up with the humidity and turn the city into the sauna of the South.

He stopped beneath a tall yellow sign that proclaimed the shop beneath it to be GOLDEN OLDENS. Nudger had gathered from the New Orleans phone directory that this shop was the flagship of the four Golden Oldens antique shops, and the logical place to find Max Reckoner. As with Judman, he'd decided against phoning for an appointment; it was seldom enlightening to interview people who'd had a chance to prepare for the conversation.

Nudger pushed open a grained oak door that boasted a leaded glass window and entered the shop.

He was in a large, pleasantly cool room with a glossy bare wood floor. An air conditioner was humming steadily somewhere nearby, and from the high, white ceiling hung four fans with wide, slowly rotating wicker blades, surely moving too lazily to stir the air. The antiques in the place ran heavily to burled walnut, inlaid marble, cut glass, and gleaming Victorian furniture that looked as if just yesterday it had sprung from the gnarled hands of loving craftsmen. Not the kind of antique shop you'd duck into on impulse with ten dollars to shore up your beer-can collection.

Nudger stood enjoying the scent of lemon oil and old wood, while a huge porcelain Chinese dragon with its tongue lolling out leered at him.

A small man with dainty, effeminate features and immaculately styled short blond hair walked around a ten- foot-tall secretary-desk and smiled at Nudger. Apparently the door touched off some sort of signal when a customer entered the shop.

"Yes, sir?" the clerk said. He was wearing a well-cut beige suit with a vest, and incredibly fancy yellow moccasins with white rawhide tassels. There were moccasins and then there were moccasins. If these were made by real Indians, they were rich Indians. This is an expensive place, said his clothes and his bearing.

"Is Max Reckoner in?" Nudger asked, absently resting a hand on the glistening green head of the Chinese dragon. The clerk's large blue eyes flicked reproachfully to the offending hand and Nudger removed it and stuffed it into his pocket as if to punish it.

"I believe he's in his office," the clerk said. His delicate face was stiff and appeared oddly waxy. He wasn't a man who smiled more than a few times a year. "Who shall I say wants him? And what's your business with Mr. Reckoner?"

"My name is Nudger. I'm a private detective. So naturally I'd like to talk to Mr. Reckoner about a private matter."

"Naturally," the clerk said equably, too quick on his tas- seled moccasins to be thrown. "Please wait here." He pivoted like a dancer on his left toe and sashayed down a row of looming, curvaceous furniture, then rounded a corner and was gone. Right back into the nineteenth century. Nudger heard a door open and close down the corridor of time. Or maybe it was the door to Reckoner's office, right here in this century.

He stood quietly waiting, studying a collection of Civil War swords mounted on a wall. The South would never rise again if it had to rearm at these prices. The seconds passed, maybe four score and seven. He got tired of swords and watched the rich and poor and blacks and whites and tourists and young urban pioneers walk back and forth on the street beyond the hanging plants in the Golden Oldens' narrow, yellow-tinted shop windows. There sure were a lot of plants in this neighborhood.

"This way, Mr. Nudger," the clerk said behind him.

Nudger jumped, his attention yanked back inside the shop.

He followed the young clerk down the aisle he'd seen him go down previously, flanked by dark old desks, bookcases, wardrobes, and fancy breakfronts. Everything in the shop other than Nudger and the clerk seemed to have claw feet, and Nudger couldn't be sure about the clerk.

The clerk opened a red-lacquered door and ushered Nudger into a spacious, red-carpeted office dominated by a massive Queen Anne desk. Three of the walls were paneled in rich dark walnut; on a fourth wall were a bank of black file cabinets and a table supporting an IBM personal computer. Max Reasoner sat behind the desk, almost dwarfed by it, though he was a rangy six-footer. His beard looked as if it had just been trimmed, and it matched perfectly the gray of his elegant sport jacket. The curve-stemmed pipe lay propped in an antique glass-and-iron ashtray on the desk. Reckoner stood up smoothly, a middleaged guy in good shape, maybe a jogger, and extended his hand toward Nudger.

As they shook hands, Reckoner said off to the side, "Thank you, Norman," and the clerk left the office on little cat feet and closed the door behind him.

"I believe I saw you at Fat Jack's," Reckoner said amiably. He motioned for Nudger to sit down in one of the deep, leather-upholstered chairs before the desk.

Nudger sat, watching Reckoner lower himself easily into his big desk chair. It was modern, yet somehow looked as if it belonged behind the antique desk. "I guess we're both jazz fans," Nudger said.

Reckoner picked up the curve-stemmed pipe, toyed with it, then placed it back in the ashtray. There was self-assurance even in that gesture. He was quite the sophisticate, but he wore it well; it seemed as natural to him as if he'd been born and raised in a big manor house in antebellum Louisiana. His accent, strangely enough, sounded more British than Southern.

"To the point, Mr. Nudger. I understand you've been asking questions about Ineida Mann."

To the point it would be. "True," Nudger said.

"Why?"

"Do you mean why isn't it any of your concern?"

Reckoner smiled. It was a nice smile, his handsome face seamed with deep laugh lines. A man like this could enhance his reputation as a nice guy even as he was pulling a knife from your back. All in the smile. "It is my concern," he said. "I'm interested in Ineida's career. She's a very sweet, very talented young woman."

He seemed to mean it about the talent, so Nudger decided to leave it alone.

Reckoner leaned slightly forward over the wide expanse of old desk. "You told Norman you're a private detective. I assume someone hired you in regard to Ineida. Would it be contrary to your professional code to reveal the name of your employer?"

"It would without my client's permission," Nudger said.

"Is Ineida in some sort of trouble? She isn't getting rich singing at Fat Jack's; I'm prepared to help her out financially if that has anything to do with her problem."

"She doesn't need financial assistance," Nudger assured Reckoner. "Actually I came here to ask you just what your relationship with her is, and what you think of her relationship with Willy Hollister."

Reckoner shrugged inside the elegant gray jacket. In the way of quality tailoring, it seemed to shrug with him, as if adopting the mood of whoever wore it were part of the bargain. "I just described my relationship with Ineida; she's a fine young person I'd like to help. I have the means to assist her in her singing career, so why shouldn't I do just that?"

"No reason not to," Nudger said. "If that's as far as your interest in her goes."

Reckoner leaned back and smiled, this time sagely and tolerantly. It made Nudger want to punch him. "Are you moralizing, Mr. Nudger?"

"Not at all. Only speculating. A pretty young girl, an older married man…"

"You're miles out of line, Nudger."

"I apologize if I've offended you. My work mostly takes me out of line. Sometimes I go weeks without even seeing the line."

"What would prompt you to suspect some sort of romantic involvement between Ineida and me?"

"At the risk of offending you again," Nudger said, "you must be aware that you have something of a reputation as a philanderer."

Reckoner stiffened, managed to look as indignant as a gray-bearded schnauzer whose food dish had suddenly been snatched away. "Ineida's virtually a child, Nudger. I don't molest children."

"She's a beautiful young woman," Nudger said. "I'll admit that she's naive in some areas, but a twenty-two- year-old girl is no longer a child in the view of a lot of people. Sometimes the wrong kind of people."

"I'm not one of the wrong kind," Reckoner said coldly. He stood up, letting his knuckles rest lightly on the desktop. It seemed the conversation was over.

Nudger also stood and buttoned his sport jacket. "You haven't told me what you think about Ineida seeing Willy Hollister."

"I see no evidence that Hollister is one of the wrong kind of people, either. Ineida's relationship with him is none of my business. Or yours."

Nudger idly picked up a cream-colored glass vase from a corner of the desk.

"Don't drop that," Reckoner said calmly but testily. "It's worth more than you might imagine."

"Looks ordinary enough," Nudger said.

"It's Bristol glass. It looks like ordinary milk glass, but hold it up to the light and you'll see a reddish glow in it."

Nudger held the vase up and tilted it toward the window; the milky glass did take on a transparency and glow a fiery red.

"Only the light shining through it will reveal the fire," Reckoner said.

"Very often," Nudger said, "that's true of people, too."

Reckoner shook his head almost sadly. "I was afraid you'd make that strained analogy."

He sat back down and busied himself with a stack of irregular-sized papers that looked like shipping invoices. His manner suggested that Nudger's presence was no longer important enough to acknowledge; enough time had been wasted on things trivial.

Nudger turned and saw that Norman was standing on the red carpet, holding the door open for him. Not a sound had been made; it was as if he'd been there in the office all the time and just now decided to become visible. He could sure move quietly on those tasseled moccasins. Some spooky guy.

Without speaking, he ushered Nudger through the shop to the street door and back out into the sunlight, noise, exhaust fumes, and heat of the twentieth century.

The sidewalk was heavily peopled by shoppers now; commerce was picking up along the block of small shops and restaurants. As Nudger stepped aside to avoid a determined-looking obese mother lugging a sour-faced infant, he saw that a woman was leaning against his parked car with her arms folded. She was lounging comfortably in a patient, waiting sort of way; if she'd been in uniform, Nudger would have assumed she was a cop waiting to greet him with an official smile, a lecture, and a parking ticket.

He didn't break stride. When he got closer he recognized her. Sandra Reckoner. Max's wife.

Her smile was warmer than a cop's official grimace as she straightened her long body and turned slightly to face him. She was built tall and rangy, like her husband, and was wearing dark slacks with tight cuffs and a crazily printed colorful blouse that had enough material under the arms to make her appear to have folded wings; if she ran fast enough into the wind, she might be able to fly.

She said, "I'm Sandra Reckoner, Mr. Nudger. We have things to talk about."

He shook hands with her lightly, sensing the strength in her long, lean fingers. She was wearing pink nail polish, a bulky antique ring, and a dull-gold bracelet that twined around her wrist like an affectionate snake.

"You've been talking with my husband," she told him. She had coarse, shoulder-length black hair flecked with gray, framing a narrow, bigboned face that should have been horsey-looking but wasn't. Her eyes, greenish-blue and amused, looked out with a candid directness, almost a sensuous dare, above her high cheekbones. This was an attractive woman living at ease with her forty-odd years, and her almost luminous health lent her a sexual vitality that hummed.

Nudger nodded, a bit awkwardly, still gauging the pull of her magnetism, testing the air for trouble. Certain women affected him that way initially. "I just left the antique shop," he confirmed.

"Now it's our turn to chat," Sandra Reckoner said. "I know a place where we can do that."

That sounded interesting to Nudger. He leaned to open the car door for her.

"We can walk," she told him.

He swallowed, nodded again, and followed her. Gee, those long legs moved lazily and smoothly beneath the silky material of her slacks. Rhythm, rhythm. He found it difficult to look away from them.

She paused for a moment at the corner, waiting for traffic to stop for a red light, then forged on ahead.

He almost got run over trying to keep up with her as they crossed the street.