“Naturally.” Oh, boy, was I tired. One of the things I was tired of was lawyers who kept on lying in spite of everything. When folks from down South talk, one of the things they do is make lawyers and liars sound the same. Damned if they don’t have something there.

  “Good day, Mister Mitchell.” Victor Howe hung up on me. He’d done it before. If we had to talk to each other some more, I figured he’d do it again. Or I’d do it to him. We hadn’t quite taken to each other. No, not quite.

  I hoped Wally Baker would squeeze O’Flannery and Muldoon and US Rubber till their corporate eyeballs popped. That was mostly because Frank Jethroe deserved every dime he could get, and ten times more besides. And—I won’t turn myself into a liar or lawyer here—I wouldn’t have minded at all if I saw a little of the money that fell out of the sky for him.

  Of course, the people who really deserved to pay Jethroe piles of loot were the sons of bitches who’d run PERSONAL ASSISTANCE, PERSONAL ASSISTANTS. Zombie dealers are bad enough any old time. When they’re zombie dealers mixed up with those ancient Assyrian things …

  I wondered whether the dealers and wizards who’d worked at that joint were still able to look down at the grass. As opposed to looking up at it, I mean. If they just happened to be in with the zombies when the salamander did its bit, how would anybody sort out what was left of them from what was left of their clients?

  Oh, I suppose a forensic necromancer might be able to use the laws of similarity and contagion to establish whether they’d been there. A good one, a really, really good one, because the dealers’ presence would have been in that room whether they were there when it went up in flames or not. The other thing I wondered was whether anybody would have the will to make that kind of investigation. Dead men tell no tales, which is why some men wind up dead.

  I looked at Old Man Mose. “How come Siameses and tabbies don’t fight each other all the time, or Persians start a war against Russian Blues?”

  His yawn showed off those needle teeth. “How come you think we’re stupid like people?”

  Well, he had me there. Cats are stupid all kinds of ways. A lot of those ways make us laugh, which helps keep us from going after cats with shotguns more often. But cats aren’t stupid like people.

  Saturday night. Central Avenue was cooking, let me tell you. Dora and I did our best to add to the shine, if that’s how you want to put it. I still hadn’t got many glad rags to replace the ones that burned in my apartment, but it didn’t matter as long as she was on my arm.

  She looked so good, I didn’t even have to tip the maître d’ at the Hotel Dunbar to get into the show. So much good music, all on that one block—the Dunbar, Club Alabam, the Last Word, other joints, too. But I wasn’t going anywhere else then, not for anything. Lady Day was there. No chance I’d miss that, not if I could get in.

  Yes, she’d had her troubles. Yes, she drank like a fish. Yes, she was a junkie with a monkey the size of a gorilla on her back. I knew all that. Anybody who paid the least little attention to the world couldn’t help knowing it. But dear sweet Jesus God, she could sing.

  When she came out, she said, “I got some old stuff for you, an’ I got some new stuff, too.”

  If you think I didn’t bang my palms together when I heard that, you better think again. Some people don’t like anything but what they already know. I’m not like that. I don’t understand those folks. If they only like the old stuff, how’d they ever listen to anything to begin with?

  Before she sang “Strange Fruit,” she waved the room to quiet. Some of us knew what that meant. The ones who didn’t found out. She wanted that number heard. The only light in the place was a tight spot on her face. It got tighter and tighter and dimmer and dimmer, and went out when the song ended. For fifteen seconds, maybe half a minute, the place was as dark as the tomb, and as silent.

  Then the lights came up. The cheers came with them, and damn near—damn near—tore off the roof. “Strange Fruit” hit too close to home for too many people in there.

  “She knows pain,” Dora said, in the tones of a connoisseur. Which she was, I suppose. But Lady Day was a Negro woman born in the United States. How could she not know pain? And she was a genius, which let her show other people what hurt and why.

  I’ll tell you something else, too, something I didn’t know then. The fellow who wrote that song billed himself as Lewis Allan. For years, I thought he had to be a black man. Nope. His real name was Abel Meeropol. His folks were Jews who got out of Russia. You never can tell.

  And Abel raised some Cain, yes he did. He likely had people who got hanged from trees in his family, too. The shit end of the stick is the shit end of the stick, no matter who gets hit with it. He made the world see that.

  Which is its own kind of genius, I suppose.

  I wondered what Lady Day could possibly go on with. She waited a minute, till things calmed down some. Then she said, “I don’t reckon you’ll have heard this one before. I call it ‘The Vepratoga Blues.’ ”

  Dora and I stared at each other. One of her sidemen set down the viola he’d been playing till then. He picked up an electric guitar. The jagged chords he struck from it couldn’t have come from any other instrument on earth. That voice couldn’t have come from any other throat.

  “I’ve used horse, and it’s a gas,” Lady Day sang, “but the happy, it just leaves too fast. I’ve tried coke—now coke’s okay—but the happy, it just goes away. I’ve smoked reefer and guzzled booze. Got me now them vepratoga blues.”

  She went on from there. If you look at it a certain way, she didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard from Dr. Berkowitz the first time we had lunch at that tiny Mexican place near County General. But Izzy was talking to my brain. Lady Day went after my heart and my guts and my balls. And what Lady Day went after, she got.

  A gal at the table table next to the one where Dora and I were sitting turned to her boyfriend and asked, “What’s that stuff she’s singin’ about?”

  He shrugged. They were both years younger than I am, even if he’d grown himself a thin little mustache. “I dunno. Some kind o’ dope,” he said, which wasn’t wrong but wasn’t helpful, either.

  The hand she got wasn’t as big as the one she thought she rated. You could tell. Probably more than half the people in the room were like the couple by us: they didn’t know what she was talking about. If you did, though …. If you did, oh, my.

  Again, I wondered if the LAPD would come down on the Dunbar and haul away everybody who’d heard Lady Day sing the secret word. The cops stayed away. With so many of their big wheels in trouble for this, that, or the other, they were in disarray themselves.

  She cut her set short. I wasn’t the only one who noticed; there was grumbling when they started clearing the house. I wondered if she was miffed because the new stuff hadn’t gone over the way she wanted. I’d heard she had a temper. Of course, you hear that about four musicians out of five. Maybe this time it was true.

  As we spilled out onto Central, I asked Dora, “Want to see what’s going on at Deacon’s?” She nodded, so we went on over there and worked our way forward along the boardwalk.

  Deacon Washington smiled when he took our cover charge. “You’re in luck. I’ve got something special for folks tonight,” he told me. That big, deep, rich voice sounded as if it should’ve been pouring out of a radio speaker, same as always.

  We found places to sit and ordered drinks. Acolyte Adams glided by, so we said hello. The house combo played background music. Jonas Schmitt was back on piano. Maybe the cat with the konk drank too damn much to stick. I decided I wasn’t going to let Schmitt chase me out this time. The Deacon didn’t say special unless he meant special.

  And I didn’t see Marianne Smalls there. Didn’t miss her, either. I was still a long way from proud of that little bit of business, no matter how well it paid.

  Some lights went up. Some went down. The gauzy curtains swung and shifted so most people got a better view of the stage. Deacon Washington seemed to materialize there. Even though he was a great big man, he had that gift for popping out of nowhere.

  “Hello, friends!” he boomed. “Hello!” No mike, but he boomed anyway. “It is a privilege, a great, great privilege, for me to be able to tell you my little place here has been honored by a visit from the one, the only, the sublime—Lady Day!”

  This gig had to be part of the reason she’d clipped her appearance at the Dunbar. She’d come straight over; she was still wearing the same green silk dress she’d had on there. I don’t know how many times she’d played the hotel. Not a few, I’m sure. She seemed more at home here, though.

  She did more new things at Deacon’s. The only old ones I remember were “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” Dora listened to that without flinching much—as before, it wasn’t aimed at her. This time, “The Vepratoga Blues” tore up the place. Well, it deserved to. I don’t think she sang it any better than she had at the Dunbar. She just had a better crowd.

  After she took her bows and went offstage, Deacon Washington brought her over and introduced Dora and me to her. I stammered like a kid; I’d never met royalty before. She had a big tumbler full of whiskey and a bit of ice, but she was royalty anyhow. And she could be gracious as a queen when it suited her—and when she wasn’t loaded.

  She wasn’t now, or wasn’t yet. “The Deacon says you know about vepratoga,” she said to me.

  “About it, a little. I know some people who’ve had trouble with it,” I answered. “Never tried it myself, though.”

  “Oh.” That made her lose interest in me in a hurry. She swung toward Dora. “How about you, sweetheart?” I wondered how she meant that. If you kept your ear to the ground, you heard things about her switch-hitting.

  Evenly, Dora replied, “One of the people Jack talked about is my half brother.”

  “Oh,” Lady Day said again. “I like the stuff myself.” She went off to find someone else to talk with. And that was my brush with fame.

  Dora and I looked at each other. We both said, “Should I be jealous?” at the same time. And we both laughed and laughed. If you’re going to be with somebody, be with somebody you can laugh with. Believe me.

  ​XVII

  I hadn’t been in my office longer than ten minutes before somebody knocked on the door. “Come in,” I said, wondering if it was Dora. Twilight lingered in the sky, but the sun had set.

  The door opened. It wasn’t Dora. It was Clarice Jethroe. “Hello!” I said. “How are you doing? How’s Frank? It’s good to see you.”

  “Frank is doin’ fine,” she answered. Just like her to think about her husband, talk about him, before she worried about herself. She went on, “He got himself a new job at the Goodyear plant. He didn’t want to go back to US Rubber, not after what happened, an’ the new one’s way closer an’ pays better anyways.”

  “That’s great!” I said. “I wouldn’t go back to US Rubber on a bet, not me.” While Patrick Brannegan was still in the hospital with “food poisoning,” the County DA had arrested him on some kind of illegal-sorcery charge. He was out on bail at the moment, if I remembered straight.

  “I told him the same thing,” Clarice said. “An’ I wanted you to know we’re both mighty grateful for everything you did for us.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” And I was, even if gratitude was worth its weight in gold.

  “Did that lawyer fella you found for us tell you he made a settlement with O’Flannery and Muldoon?” she asked.

  “No, Wally hasn’t said a word about it,” I answered. He might not have got around to it, or he might not have figured it was any of my business. You never can tell with Wally.

  “Well, he did. He got us twenty thousand dollars for what they did to poor Frank workin’ up on the freeway. Part o’ the deal is, we can’t ever say anything to anybody about what happened, but I reckon it’s okay to talk to you on account o’ you already know.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

  “We don’t get to keep all of it ourselves. Mister Baker, he tol’ us right from the start he was gonna take his cut off the top o’ whatever the builders finally coughed up.” Clarice gave a wry shrug. “That still leaves us fifteen thousand. Pretty good. Enough so maybe we can buy ourselves a nicer place, move outa the old rat trap we been livin’ in.”

  “You can sure do that,” I said. The price of houses has gone through the roof here, same as it has everywhere else, but fifteen grand will still get you something pretty good.

  It also occurred to me that Wally might not have told me he’d settled with O’Flannery and Muldoon because he didn’t want me to know he’d made five thousand bucks from something where I did the hard, dangerous part and got paid fees and expenses. Yes, that just might have been on his mind.

  Clarice hadn’t finished, though. “Frank an’ me, we been talkin’,” she said. “We both reckon you oughta have more than what we gave you so far. So I’ve got this here for you.” She took an envelope out of her handbag and set it on my desk.

  It was a nice, fat envelope. I didn’t even look to see what was inside it. “Thank you very much. You didn’t have to do that,” I said. I knew damn well most people would’ve kept every last nickel for themselves. If I’d got that kind of settlement, I probably would have myself.

  “We didn’t do it ’cause we had to. We did it ’cause we wanted to. I wanted to,” Clarice said, and that told me more than I needed to know about what all she and Frank had been talking about. She went on, “I purely love that man, an’ you got him back for me. This here’s only money, but it’s what I can do.”

  “Thanks,” I said one more time, and looked down at the new green blotter on my desk so she wouldn’t see my face till I could pull it straight. Would anybody ever say anything like that about me? The way things looked, odds were against it.

  “God bless you, Mister Mitchell. I better get on home now.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. She just turned around and walked out. Good thing, too, because I have no idea what I would have said.

  My bottom desk drawer had a new bottle of Wild Turkey in it. I took the level down some—a little, not a lot. I haven’t drunk because I was embarrassed very often, but I did then.

  After that, I opened the envelope. Inside were fifteen crisp, new fifties, so fresh they might’ve come straight from the bank. Folded around them was a sheet of paper with Thank you! written on it. I would have bet the whole stack it was her handwriting, not his.

  I could picture them arguing after their girls had gone to bed. We’ve got to give the detective somethin’. No, we don’t. Yes, we do. And she would’ve wanted to let me have a grand, and he would’ve come up maybe a hundred at a time to five hundred, and they would’ve stuck there for a while. And finally he would’ve thrown his hands in the air and gone, Hell, let’s split the difference an’ forget it. And she did love him and had to live with him, so she would’ve said okay.

  No, I can’t prove it happened that way, but it looks like that to me.

  You bastard! I rescued you from being a zombie and you screwed me out of two hundred fifty bucks! I thought. I was laughing when I did, though, honest. If you don’t laugh sometimes, you’ve got to start screaming instead.

  I was sure Wally was laughing, too, laughing all the way to the bank. Even with the money the Jethroes didn’t have to give me, he was still raking in better than four times as much from their troubles as I was.

  He’s told me himself I don’t know anything about money. He’s right, too. Those new fifties there, they’d help me get as close to out of debt as I’d been since I took off Uncle Sam’s uniform and started trying to make like a grownup all by myself.

  Old Man Mose came in through the cat door. He knew about making like a grownup all by himself … except for sponging off me, anyway. His pink nose twitched. Sniff! Sniff! “A real live female, not your friend from the boneyard,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. Dora loves you, too,” I said.

  His lip curled. I know, I know—cats don’t really have lips. His curled all the same. “You gonna get in trouble for hanging around with this one?”

  “No, it’s business.” I tapped the envelope with my finger. “Some of this will keep you in canned tuna for a while.”

  If I don’t understand anything about money, cats really don’t understand anything about money. “Why don’t you just steal things when you need them?” Mose asked.

  He would have made a good politician. Or an LAPD cop. “There are laws,” I said sadly. He did that impossible lip-curling thing again. I tried my best to explain: “You know how sometimes you can’t steal something you want because whoever’s got it also has a big, mean dog with sharp teeth?”

  His tail had been up. It went down. Old Man Mose doesn’t understand laws, but he thinks dogs should be illegal.

  I went on, “People use laws the same way they use dogs. If laws have sharp teeth, people have to do what they say.”

  “Till they do what they want while the laws aren’t looking.” Yes, Mose definitely should have joined the LAPD. He’d be an assistant chief by now, and too rich to hang around with the likes of me.

  Or maybe he’s already an assistant chief, and just hasn’t shown me his badge yet. Why would he deign to shed on my worn-out sofa, then? Either because he likes slumming or because he’s gathering evidence for when the department lands on me with both feet. LAPD is snafu enough, neither would surprise me one bit.

  The Saturday night after that, Dora and I were coming back from Deacon’s … which means it really would have been Sunday morning. Sunday morning for sure, since the eastern sky was starting to get the color that isn’t any color at all, the color that will turn to red and orange and gold and eventually to sunrise, which she would never watch again without finishing.