The woman was talking about Eastern religion, in particular something called the chakras. Apparently there were seven main ones in your body, invisible wheels of energy you could enliven with proper meditation techniques. It was all gibberish to Ingram but as he lay there sipping cheap whiskey, he did enjoy the music she started playing once she was done talking. It was from an album called Hypnotique by a man named Korla Pandit. He was playing exotic music with a soulful resonance on a Hammond B3 organ, accompanied on a few of the numbers by a guitarist. Ingram knew a secret about the so-called Pandit that Johnny Otis had told him once. Pandit was really a Black man, John Redd. Otis became Black and Redd became the exotic other, both crossing a color line for their own reasons. He chuckled softly, floating along with the melody, not quite awake but not asleep either. Whether he got in touch with one or more of his chakras, he couldn’t say.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An informal repast for Ben Kinslow was held at the Crystal Tea Room. His mother didn’t attend. She and her sister had made prior arrangements, and his body was taken back by rail to Kansas City, where there’d be a service and burial.

  “Mr. Ingram, we want to thank you so much for all you’ve done,” Winnifred Stewart had said to him over the phone two days earlier. She was Kinslow’s aunt.

  “It was the least I could do for him, ma’am.”

  “Yes, I understand you two were in the war together, the same squad. He’d mentioned you more than a little when he was back here visiting. He always was, I don’t know, interested in a lot of things. Like that horn of his. Nobody in our immediate family can play a note yet he’d sit there when he was a kid listening to those jazz musicians. It is a kind of tradition around here, I guess. The jazz, I mean. Anyway, one day I came over and he was sitting in a chair figuring out notes on a secondhand horn Shirley bought him.” She paused, remembering her nephew. “He kept at it until he willed himself to get good.”

  “He was one of a kind, that’s for sure. Did he mention anything to you about this Mr. Hoyt he was driving for?”

  “No,” she drawled on the other end of the line, then added, “oh wait, hold on, will you?” She returned a few moments later, picking up the handset. “I thought I recognized the name when you said it,” she said. “A Winston Hoyt sent a lovely wreath for Ben. I wrote down the names of people who sent flowers to thank them. Do you know him?”

  “No, I don’t. I was just asking is all. Did he have a return address?”

  “He did not. In his case it was through the florist. Did you want to talk to him about Ben?”

  “Just filling in the blanks. It’s not important.” They’d talked for a few more minutes and she’d promised to send him a program from the service before they ended their call. After he hung up he took a moment, glad about this gathering honoring his friend.

  Ingram milled about, the conversations ranging from the three Black men running for City Council to a recent occurrence in which a mixed-race couple had their home shot into in Santa Monica—an incident covered in the Black papers but which got no mention in the L.A. Times, and only a paragraph in the Herald Examiner. Given that those gathered today were Blacks and whites, who not only hung out with each other but in some instances dated across racial lines, what happened in the beach town of Santa Monica was of keen interest.

  Ingram had come early to help set up. Strummer Edwards was there, as he’d known Kinslow through Ingram. Arthur Yarbrough was also in attendance. He’d been in a different company than Ingram and Kinslow, but part of the larger battalion. Ingram had one of his cameras with him, a compact Canon model he could wield effortlessly.

  Several local musicians attended, including Johnny Otis and bass and tuba player Red Callender, who did a goodly amount of studio work. Ingram and a few others had chipped in and there was a spread of light foods and beverages, including wine and beer. Along the walls were candid shots of the various musicians who’d performed at the venue, including the six-foot-six saxophonist Dexter Gordon, an L.A. native, and pianist and singer Carmen McRea. Ingram proudly noted more than one of those pictures had been taken by him.

  “Nice turnout.” Edwards munched on a handful of peanuts.

  “What are those lyrics by Cab Calloway in ‘St. James Infirmary’?” Yarbrough asked. The three sat together at a small table.

  Edwards swallowed. “Something about laying him out with a twenty-dollar gold piece on his watch chain so the boys know he died standing pat.”

  “And a Stetson hat on his head,” Ingram added.

  Yarbrough smiled. “That’s how I want to go, gents. I got one with a red feather. Use that one on my head, okay?” He had two pairs of dark glasses, one set he wore around the store and this pair, the lenses in a more stylish frame, which he wore to occasions such as this.

  Ingram patted his shoulder. “I’ll make sure, Arthur.”

  “You do that.”

  At some point Ingram and Edwards wandered over to where a few of the musicians who’d brought their instruments along were discussing what songs to play at the wake, or whether they should just go for an improvisational set. Yarbrough too was up and talking to a woman in high-waisted toreador pants and pale silk top.

  “Hey, Strummer, in your various travels you ever run across a white man named Winston Hoyt?” Ingram described the man briefly. “Ben was driving for him and he owns a racehorse out there at Hollywood Park. That means he’s got dough.”

  “You know the name of the nag?”

  “No, but I can find out.”

  “Not necessary, just wondering. Let me ask around. Why you interested in this cat?”

  Ingram was reluctant to share his notions about Kinslow possibly having been murdered. Far as he could tell, the police had closed off any further investigation, ruling his death an accident.

  “I could be just barking at the moon, Strummer, but Ben dying so soon after he got back to town, I don’t know.” He lifted a shoulder.

  “Okay, let me see.”

  “Righteous.”

  The afternoon progressed. As the musicians were ready to begin, Ingram asked if he could say a few words.

  “Go on, man.” Edwards clapped him on the back.

  “Yeah, Harry,” Yarbrough added. The woman in the toreador pants stood next to him.

  Ingram breathed in deep, placing his camera atop a built-in shelf.

  “Well, look,” Ingram began, stepping onto the raised stage where the musicians waited. He held several index cards with his notes on them. “I’m nobody’s preacher who can sermonize, sending off the dead properly. I could talk about going to hear Ben wail on his horn at the clubs around here or just having a beer together. But I wanted to talk about how we became friends. Like what me and Arthur there went through”—he indicated the grocer with a nod—“Ben and I didn’t know each other before we were drafted and thrown into the police action, they called it. But once the shooting started, we damn sure had to depend on each other to get out of there with the skin on our backs or”—acknowledging his friend’s blindness—“as whole as we could manage it.”

  The woman touched Yarbrough’s arm.

  “Now that’s not that unusual for a colored man and a white man to know each other, as you all know in here. But we also know in the bigger world, well, a lot of times you got second and third looks. And not just from the ofays,” he said, earning some nervous laughter. “For a whole lot of reasons most of you know, Truman integrated the armed services a couple of years before Korea jumped off. And even then when the fighting started, there were still all-Black units like the Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers going back to the Civil War days.” A few heads nodded among the assembled.

  Ingram paused, studying his cards. “Look, I’m not going to go on about how it was between the Black and white soldiers. Some of you were there even before, in World War II. Hell, a lot of times more blood was spilled in the fighting in the barracks or in the mess hall than on the battlefield.”

  “Tell it,” Edwards said.

  Ingram tucked his index cards away. “The thing is, me and Ben went through the meat grinder and came out the other end. Stuck in the same foxhole or icy trench, crawling on our bellies trying not to freeze up from fear as the shooting went on all around us, you get to know a cat. Hunkered down in the dark together, smoking and talking or running for your life as bullets whizzed by, or eating lousy C rations and waiting for the next blastoff.” He saw Kinslow in uniform, smiling. “It was tooth and nail, baby. We went in strangers and came out as two guys who respected each other as men, as soldiers. I can’t say that’s equality, unless you count the reds as equal opportunity killers. But for us, for then and now it was enough. Here’s to Ben.” Ingram raised his cup.

  “To Ben,” was said in unison, raising their cups too as the gathered toasted the deceased.

  “To the soldiers who sacrificed,” Edwards said, tipping his glass toward Yarbrough.

  “Amen,” Ingram said, also tipping his glass toward the grocer.

  “Way to go, brother,” Johnny Otis said as Ingram came off the stage.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “You knocked it out the park, Harry,” Strummer Edwards told him, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Straight from the heart.”

  “Too bad it ain’t like that the country over,” Yarbrough said.

  “I heard that.”

  After several more congratulations, Ingram stepped outside to light a cigar. People were smoking cigarettes inside, yet he’d found ordinary smokers were often offended by stogies. Imagine that. He stood in front of the club facing Santa Barbara Avenue. Pedestrians and cars and trucks came and went. Ingram began walking, blowing streams of smoke on this warm, clear day. He had a destination in mind, and he went into the Owl drugstore to use the pay phone.

  “Hello,” he said when the line connected. “Is Anita Claire available?” At the party she’d given him both her home number and the one to the Bradley campaign offices. It was only a moment before she came on the line.

  “Hello, Anita, it’s Harry. I hope I didn’t catch you at a busy time.”

  “It’s always busy getting out the vote, Mr. Ingram. You sound upbeat.”

  “Funny that I do. I’m at a sendoff for a buddy of mine from the war.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I feel good even though he’s gone. I think part of it is he was the first white man I got to know as a person, not just some joker staring at me for being Black, about to try and put me in my place, you know?”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Look, I don’t want to hang you up at work. How about dinner Thursday night?”

  “I’d say yes but sometimes they got us on the chain gang late.”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  “Call me around five on Thursday and we’ll figure it out.”

  “For sure. See you soon.”

  “Bye, Harry.”

  She rang off and Ingram got off the seat in the booth, buoyed by the possibility of seeing her again. Maybe there was a hink in his head. A bullet had unknowingly ricocheted off his thick skull back in Korea, short-circuiting his thinking. He should be melancholy at his friend’s wake yet here he was, eager to make time with this dynamite chick. What if, he reasoned as he sauntered back toward the Crystal Tea Room, it was death that made you embrace life so much stronger? You needed to connect to someone to know there was more to you than a few words said over your corpse.

  Ruminating on this, Ingram happened to look across the street, noting the Dodge Polara parked there. He’d seen it on his way into the drugstore but hadn’t paid it any attention other than noting he liked the car’s styling. He’d looked at a used one not too long ago on a lot, thinking about trading in his Belvedere.

  This time, though, he checked out the two white men sitting in the car. The windows were halfway down, and cigarette smoke trailed upward from the interior through the gaps on either side. There were a few smoked butts lying on the ground below the driver’s side door as well. They weren’t no musicians. Cops, he wondered? Yet as he moved past, his instinct was they weren’t cops either. The fancy hat the driver wore had him thinking this. But cops wore nice hats, didn’t they? Was he again fantasizing there was more to Ben’s death than the obvious?

  Whatever, he memorized their license plate and went back inside the club. Onstage the musicians were playing and in the spirit of Ben Kinslow, one of them was taking a trumpet solo. People in the crowd were smiling and bopping their heads.

  “Got a pen?” Ingram said to Edwards, who stood off to the side.

  “Here.” He produced one with a tire company logo on the barrel.

  “Thanks,” Ingram said as he wrote the plate number down on a napkin, tucking it away afterward.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Nothing, maybe.”

  “Man, you getting all Johnny Dollar?”

  “Not sure. Could be chasing my tail.”

  “As long as you don’t catch it. Then you’d really be going in circles.”

  Ingram picked up the camera he’d left on the shelf and headed toward the kitchen, which was closed down for this afternoon, and let himself out the back into a small parking area. His car was here and rummaging in his photographer’s leather bag in the trunk, he got a telescopic lens out and attached it to the Canon. He then walked along the alleyway and came to a break between two buildings. Down this snug passageway he went. As he’d mapped out in his head, he was now back to the avenue a few cars down from where the Polaris was parked.

  He didn’t step out onto the sidewalk as he didn’t want to be seen. He sighted and took several clicks of the two sitting and talking in the car. A dark shape loomed, blocking his shot.

  “What are you up to?” It was an older woman in a sun hat, tugging a cart with groceries in it.

  “Just taking a few snaps is all, ma’am.”

  “Yeah, you a peeping Tom? A pervert? God will judge you, young man.” She wagged a finger at him.

  If this kept up, she was sure to attract attention. “The Lord sent me on this mission,” he blustered. “Pastor’s worried about one of his flock falling in with the wrong company.”

  “What, is that so?” She looked over her shoulder.

  He pointed across the street. “In that window up there, on the second floor.”

  “Is that so?” she said in a hushed tone. She turned around to look where he’d indicated. By the time she turned back he was walking away. “Hey, wait, I can help you. I’ve delivered many a sinner,” she called at his back.

  Ingram returned to the club and got a beer, sat and listened to the music until the repast broke up about forty-five minutes later. “All right, thanks for coming out,” Ingram said as he shook hands with the trumpeter. “Great set.”

  “Man, it’s what he deserved,” the musician said.

  Ingram and Edwards helped put away the folding chairs and straightened up the place before they too went out front. The photographer saw that the Polaris was gone.

  “Okay, Harry, I’ll see what I can find on this guy you asked me about.”

  “Thanks, Strummer. Catch you later, Arthur.”

  “For sure, Harry.” Yarbrough exchanged a good-bye with the woman he’d been talking to. She kissed him on the cheek and walked away.

  Yarbrough left with Edwards. The blind man had his white cane with him but held onto Edwards’s upper arm as the two walked to the Chrysler parked on the next block. The vehicle was a late-model 300G with modest fins, white wall tires and fender skirts. Edwards piloted the dark blue automobile past the Crystal Tea Room, waving at Ingram, who stood out front.

  Ingram remained where he was for several moments, wondering who he might ask to get a name to go with the license plate of the Dodge. He knew a few lawyers. They would probably have to file some sort of paperwork—how would he justify it? Well—he crafted his argument as he got behind the wheel of his car—there were a couple of suspicious ofays out front of this here colored jazz spot and we wanted to know what they was up to, Your Honor. He supposed, as he pulled out into the light traffic, he could go to Motor Vehicles and claim it was a hit-and-run. A bystander had given him the plate number and he was trying to locate the driver for insurance purposes. If he did that, it probably also meant signing a piece of paper.

  He didn’t flinch when it came to putting his camera in a cop’s face or duking it out with chumps like the one he’d served, but once you put your name to some sort of official paperwork, man, that could come back to bite you in the ass—who knew when or how. If it was proved or even suggested he was lying, could be a reason to pull his press credentials and that meant no steak or chops in his freezer. And he’d gotten in the habit of eating what he wanted. No, the more he could do this on the hush-hush, the better, he concluded. Because it could be those were cops in the Dodge, the drug squad looking to bust a few spades with their reefers. The “tea” in the name of the joint did have a double meaning. All this was amusing to consider, Ingram noted as he drove along, but not helpful in getting results.

  Back at his apartment, he developed the shots of the two in the car as well as the ones where the handyman Deets had been confronted by the patrolman. Those he set aside. The photos of the two in the car weren’t anything definitive but did suggest he wasn’t simply inventing all this.

  At his kitchen table he laid out three selected photos of the undercarriage of the Mercury and the new photos of the men staking out the club. He made notes on a pad of paper though nothing materialized as an answer or a lead to anything else. He did, though, have the padlock key he’d gotten at the morgue. He took it out of his pocket and put it on the table. Somewhere in the city there was a lock the key fit. For all he knew Ben might have tucked away old shoes or a magic trumpet. For now it seemed real clues were mirages shimmering in the distance. As he got closer, whatever he imagined it was could well disappear, evaporate like smoke through his fingers. Still, the key was real.