The right to sing the blues

II

The flight to New Orleans took a little over an hour in a sky as uniformly blue and unmarred as the inside of a fine china bowl.

Nudger rented a car-a cheap subcompact, since he didn't know if he'd take this job and have his expenses cov- ered-at New Orleans International Airport and drove toward the city. Louisiana was just as hot as Missouri, only here Spanish moss drooped from the roadside trees like gloomy black Christmas tinsel somebody had forgotten to take down. Just looking at the graceful yet oppressive stuff made the heat seem fiercer and stickier. Nudger reached out and switched the little red car's air conditioner on high. Dust and debris blew up into his face with the sudden blast of cold air, then settled back down rearranged.

New Orleans is an old city of pastel stucco, ornate black wrought iron, colorful clinging bougainvillea, white-and- gray tropical-weight clothing, French-Cajun cooking, and black music. The Hotel Majestueux fit right into that scene, an old ten-story building with a fake but weathered stucco facade. There was a gold awning out over the sidewalk in front of the entrance, with the name of the hotel lettered in delicate white script along the sides. A uniformed doorman stood in the deep shade beneath the awning, studiously reading a folded newspaper.

Nudger parked the subcompact half a block down, climbed from the tiny bucket seat, and checked to make sure his limbs would still extend to their fullest. Subcompactness could be catching. He unlocked the car's miniature trunk and got out his luggage.

As he carried his single brown nylon suitcase toward the hotel, he looked over the neighborhood. It was old, gone a measure to seed, but not all that bad. The Chamber of Commerce would describe it as colorful. Tourists would agree, but would spend their money on Bourbon Street and at the Superdome.

"Carry that for you, sir?" the doorman asked, when it became apparent that Nudger was about to enter the lobby with his suitcase.

Nudger declined by shaking his head no and walked on past. Up close, the doorman's ornate uniform had the same genteel seediness about it as the neighborhood. He was an elderly black man, wiry and stooped. It was a racing form he'd been studying, Nudger noted, as he pushed open the glass doors. The doorman didn't look as if he had an eye for winners.

The Majestueux lobby was large, carpeted in red, and furnished in a kind of hotel French provincial that lent an air of hominess. There was plenty of aged oak paneling, setting off large potted ferns and flowering plants that looked real. A fancy brass clock and elaborate brass floor indicators were built into rich paneling above the elevator doors. Behind the polished wood desk loomed a seven-foot-tall, narrow, gray-haired man. A bellman was on the far side of the lobby doing something to a stuck window to make it go either farther up or farther down. With a kind of condescending nobility, a tall Creole beauty dressed in the manner of a restaurant hostess stood with her arms crossed in the doorway of the hotel coffee shop and idly watched the bellman's efforts. Another bellman was behind her, looking out over her shoulder. Nobody here rushed to take Nudger's luggage.

The human tower behind the desk checked and said sure enough, there was a reservation in Nudger's name. Nudger produced his VISA card, wondering if he had enough credit left on it to impress the desk clerk if it became necessary.

But there was no need for clout here. The clerk shook his cadaverous narrow head and said, "Room's been prepaid, Mr. Nudger."

While Nudger returned the credit card to his wallet, the tall guy slapped a big old-fashioned desk bell. It had too beautiful and resonating a ring to serve such a mundane purpose. The clerk yelled, "Front," in a brisk, commanding voice, and the bellman by the window tore himself away from his handyman puttering and started to walk across the lobby toward the desk.

"Three-oh-four, Larry," the desk clerk said from on high.

Larry took the key from him and picked up Nudger's suitcase. He was a chunky, medium-height man with thick raven-black hair and a mottled complexion like heavily creamed coffee that hadn't been stirred. Pausing to avoid a young couple with the self-involved look of honeymooners, he stepped nimbly around them into the elevator, punched a floor button, and moved back to make room for Nudger.

The third-floor room was large, on the verge of needing redecorating, but on the whole very pleasant. It was done in shades of blue, with thick draperies that matched the bedspread. The headboard, dresser, and writing desk didn't match and were of heavy walnut construction, not the usual mass-produced hotel furnishings. Larry smoothly showed Nudger that the color TV worked, introduced him to the white-tiled bathroom but not the small roach that scurried behind the washbasin, then handed over the room key.

Larry had black, intense eyes. He hadn't said a word, and maybe he couldn't talk, but he was a hell of a watcher. Nudger tipped him two dollars, eager to be rid of his presence. Larry grunted as he pocketed the bills, shot a mechanical smile in Nudger's direction, and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him. Nudger walked over and slid the bolt home, locking the door from the inside.

He unpacked hurriedly, then turned down the thermostat on the window air conditioner and removed his sport coat. From an inside pocket of the coat he drew the envelope Fat Jack McGee had sent him, then draped the coat on the back of the desk chair. With the envelope's contents spread before him on the bed, he reread the letter. Then he picked up the Touch-Tone phone from the bedside table and with his forefinger pecked out the office number printed on Fat Jack McGee's thick white business card. It was time to arrange that meeting the rotund jazz legend wanted so badly. "There's this that you need to know about jazz," Fat Jack told Nudger an hour later. "You don't need to know a thing about it to enjoy it, and that's all you need to know." He tossed back his huge head, jowls quivering, and drained the final sip of brandy from his crystal snifter. "It's feel," he said across the table to Nudger, using a white napkin to dab at his lips with a very fat man's peculiar delicacy. "Jazz is pure feel."

"Does Willy Hollister have the feel?" Nudger asked. He pushed his plate away, feeling full to the point of being bloated. The only portion of the gourmet lunch Fat Jack had bought him that remained untouched was the grits, which Nudger didn't think belonged on the plate to begin with. Fat Jack had told him it was Hollister who was troubling him, but he hadn't said how or why.

"Willy Hollister," Fat Jack said, with the unmistakable reverence one consummate artist feels for the work of another, "plays ultrafine piano."

A white-vested waiter appeared like a jungle native from around a potted palm, carrying chicory coffee on a silver tray, and deftly placed cups before Nudger and Fat Jack with a gingerness that suggested the dark liquid might explode if spilled.

"Then what's your problem with Hollister?" Nudger asked, sipping the thick, rich brew. He rated it delicious simply on the basis of the aroma, but the taste didn't disappoint. "Didn't you hire him to play his best piano at your club?"

"Hey, there's no problem with his music," Fat Jack said hastily. "Before I go into any detail, Nudger, I gotta know if you'll hang around New Orleans till you can clear up this matter for old Fat Jack." Fat Jack's tiny pinkish eyes glittered with mean humor. "For a fat fee, of course."

Nudger was suspicious of people who referred to themselves in the third person, but he also knew the fee would be generous. Fat Jack had an equally obese bank account, and he had in fact paid a sizable sum for air fare and hotel expenses just for Nudger to travel to New Orleans and sit in the Magnolia Blossom restaurant over lunch and listen to Fat Jack talk. The question Nudger now voiced was, "Why me?"

Fat Jack gave him a broad, flesh-padded grin. "Ain't that the big one of all the whys? The universal question?"

"It is in my universe," Nudger said.

Fat Jack repeated the salient query for Nudger. "Why you? Because I know a lady named Jeanette Boyington from your fair city. Jeanette says you're tops at your job; she don't say that about many."

Nudger almost spilled his coffee. Jeanette Boyington continued to astound, even months after he'd last seen her. And yet he shouldn't have been surprised that the woman who'd tried to dupe him into being her accomplice in murder, who had been virtually destroyed by where their relationship had led him, would recommend him. That was the essential Jeanette Boyington; she was a gamefish who admired persistence above all else. Even from her room in the State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Nudger wondered if Fat Jack McGee knew Jeanette Boyington's present address.

"And because of your collection," Fat Jack added. An ebony dribble of coffee dangled in tenuous liquid suspension from his triple chin, glittering as he talked. "I mean, I heard you collect old jazz records."

"I used to," Nudger said a bit wistfully, realizing that Fat Jack must have checked him out with some thoroughness. "I had Willie the Lion. Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams from their Kansas City days. Bessie Smith. Art Tatum."

"How come 'had'?" Fat Jack asked.

"I sold most of the collection," Nudger said, "to pay the rent one dark month." He gazed beyond green palm fronds, out the window and through filigreed black wrought iron, at the tourists half a block away on Bourbon Street, at the odd combination of French and Spanish architecture and black America and white suits and broiling half-tropical sun that was New Orleans, where jazz lived as in no other place. "Damned rent," he muttered.

"Amen," Fat Jack said solemnly, kidding not even himself. He hadn't worried about paying the rent in years. The drop of coffee released its tremulous grip on his chin, plummeted, and stained his pure white shirtfront like a sacrilege.

Nudger looked away from the stain, back out at Bourbon Street. It had become run down and attracted some of the wrong element-or rather, the wrong wrong element- since Nudger had last seen it, but it was still Bourbon Street and like no other street. High notes and low notes; topless and bottomless dancers-male and female; tourists and true jazz lovers. All in a grand and gaudy mix that ran through the heart-that was the heart-of the French Quarter. The relatively few violent ones couldn't change that. Tradition had a certain resilience.

"So will you stay around awhile?" Fat Jack was asking.

Nudger nodded. His social and business calendars weren't quite booked solid.

"It's not Hollister himself who worries me," Fat Jack said. "It's Ineida Collins. She's singing at the club now, and if she keeps practicing, someday she'll be mediocre. Hey, I'm not digging at her, Nudger; that's simply an honest assessment of her talent. And talent is a commodity I can judge better than most."

"Then why did you hire her?"

"Because of David Collins. He owns a lot of the French Quarter and a piece of the highly successful restaurant in which we now sit. In every parish in New Orleans, he has more clout than a ton of charge cards. And he's as skinny and ornery as I am fat and nice."

Nudger took another sip of the pungent coffee. "And he asked you to hire Ineida Collins?"

"You're on to it, Nudger. Ineida is his daughter. She wants to make it big as a singer. And she will, even if Daddy has to pay double the fair price for a recording studio. Since David Collins owns the building my club is in, not to mention twelve-and-a-half-percent interest in the business, I thought I'd acquiesce when his daughter auditioned for a job on his recommendation. And Ineida isn't really so bad that she embarrasses anyone but herself, so I call it diplomacy."

"I thought you were calling it trouble," Nudger said. "I thought that was why you hired me."

Fat Jack nodded, ample jowls spilling over his white collar. "So it became," he said. "Hollister is a handsome young dude, and within the first week Ineida was at the club he put some moves on her and they became fast friends, then soon progressed beyond mere friendship."

"You figure he's attracted to Daddy's money?"

"Nothing like that," Fat Jack said. "That'd be too simple. Part of the deal when I hired Ineida was that I keep her identity a secret-David Collins insisted on it. She wants to stand or fall alone; all that making-it-on-her-own bullshit. So she sings under the stage name of Ineida Mann, which most likely is a gem from her dad's advertising department. It doesn't make it any easier for me to be her guardian angel."

"I still don't see your problem," Nudger said.

"Hollister doesn't set right with me, and I don't know exactly why. I do know that if he messes up Ineida in some way, David Collins will see to it that I'm playing jazz at clubs on the Butte, Boise, Anchorage circuit."

"Nice cities in their fashion," Nudger remarked, "but not jazz towns. I see your problem."

"So find out about Willy Hollister for me," Fat Jack implored. "Check him out, declare him pass or fail, but put my mind at ease either way. Hey, that's all I want, an easeful mind."

"Even we tough private eye guys want that," Nudger said.

Fat Jack removed his napkin from his lap and raised a languid plump hand. A waiter who had been born just to respond to that signal scampered over with the check. Fat Jack accepted a tiny ballpoint pen and signed for the meal with a ponderous yet elegant flourish. Nudger watched him help himself to a mint. It was like watching the grace and dexterity of an elephant picking up a peanut. Huge as Fat Jack was, he moved as if he weighed no more than ten or twelve pounds.

"I gotta get back, Nudger, do some paperwork, count some money." He stood up, surprisingly tall in his tan slacks and white linen sport coat. Nudger thought it was a sharp- looking coat; he decided he might buy one and wear it winter and summer. "Drop around the club about eight o'clock tonight," Fat Jack said. "I'll fill you in on whatever else you need to know, and I'll point out Willy Hollister and Ineida. Maybe you'll get to hear her sing."

"While she's singing," Nudger said, "maybe we can discuss my fee."

Fat Jack grinned, his vast jowls defying gravity grandly. "Hey, you and me'll get along fine." He winked and moved away among the tables, tacking toward the door.

The waiter refilled Nudger's coffee cup, and he sat sipping chicory brew and watching Fat Jack McGee move along the sunny sidewalk toward Bourbon Street. He sure had a bouncy, jaunty kind of walk for a fat man.

Nudger wasn't as anxious about the fee as Fat Jack thought. Well, not quite as anxious; he knew he'd be paid for his work. The reason he'd jumped at the case wasn't totally because of the fee, even though he desperately needed something to toss to Eileen and the various wolves queued up at his door. Years ago, at the Odds Against lounge in St. Louis, Nudger had heard Fat Jack McGee play clarinet in the manner that had made him a jazz legend, and he'd never forgotten. Fat Jack's was the kind of music that lingered in the mind, that you thought of at odd moments: while you were waiting in a doorway for the rain to stop, or sitting on the edge of the bed tying your shoe. It was music that permeated dreams, that hooked real jazz fans forever.

Nudger needed the money, sure. But he also needed to hear that clarinet again.