An American Dream (12 page)

Then the Negro started up in the other room. I could not see him but now I could certainly hear him. “I don’t want the coffee,” he cried out, “I want some Seagram’s Seven. That’s what you told me I could have, and that’s what I want.”

“Drink your coffee, Goddamn you,” shouted the detective, and through the open door was a glimpse of him walking that big Negro back and forth, and there was a patrolman on the other arm, a hard-faced dull young cop with straight black hair and eyes you see in tabloids on the face of young killers who never miss a Mass until the morning after the night they go berserk, and they were both walking the Negro, they were out of sight now, there was the liquid splattering sound of coffee falling in a large splash and the thump of the mug on the floor, and then there was another splattering sound, the sound of a fist on a face, and the dull thump of a knee in the back, and the Negro groaned, but almost agreeably, as if the beating were his predictable sanity. “Now give me the Seagram’s Seven,” he cried out, “and I’ll sign that paper.”

“Drink coffee,” shouted the detective. “You can’t even see right now.”

“Shee-it on that coffee,” muttered the Negro, and then came the sound of new beating on him, and all three, all with a stumbling grappling hold on each other went out of view, came into view again, went out again, and more sounds of splattering.

“Goddamn you,” cried the detective, “you Goddamn stubborn boogie.”

And a new detective had taken the seat beside me, a younger man, thirty-five perhaps, with an anonymous face and a somewhat gloomy mouth. “Mr. Rojack,” he said, “I just want to tell you that I enjoy your television program very much, and I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.”

“Unnh,” grunted the Negro, “unnh, unnh, unnh,” as the punches went into him, “that’s the way, daddy, unnh, unnh, keep moving, you’re improving all the time.”

“Now, why don’t you drink some coffee,” shouted the detective who was beating him.

I have to confess that at this instant I put my head down and whispered to myself, “Oh, God, give me a sign,” crying it into the deeps of myself as if I possessed all the priorities of a saint, and looked up with conviction and desperation sufficient to command a rainbow, but there was nothing which caught my eye in the room but the long blonde hair of Cherry standing across the floor. She, too, was looking at the room where the beating went on, and there was a clean girl’s look on her face as if she had been watching a horse who had broken his leg and was now simply miserable before the proportions of things. I stood up then and started out with some idea of going to the back room, but the dread lifted even as I stood up and once again I felt a force in my body steering away from that back room, and a voice inside me said, “Go to the girl.”

So instead I walked across the big room and approached Leznicki and Ganooch and Tony and Cherry and Roberts and O’Brien and even a few others, detectives and lawyers, and stopped near Cherry. I had a good look at her now and she was older than I had expected, she was not eighteen or twenty-one as I had thought on the street but twenty-seven perhaps or twenty-eight, and there were pale green circles of chronic exhaustion beneath her eyes. But I still thought her very nice. She had an elusive silvery air as if once there had been a huge disappointment and now a delicate gaiety had formed to cover the pain. She looked a little like a child who has been anointed by the wing of a magical bird. And she also looked wretched just now.

“Tony, can’t you do something about that beating?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Stay out of it, huh?”

Roberts spoke to her. “The boy they got in there tried to beat an old man to death tonight.”

“Yes,” she said, “but that’s not why
they’re
beating on him.”

“What do
you
want?” said Roberts, looking at me.

“Roberts, I think she’s right. I think you ought to call off that detective.”

“Planning to talk about it on your program?” asked Leznicki.

“May I invite you when I do?”

“It’s better to stop these things,” said Uncle Ganooch. “There’s too much friction in the world today.”

“Hey, Red,” Leznicki shouted to the back room, “he’s drunk. Stick him in a cell for the night.”

“He tried to bite me,” Red yelled back.

“Stick him in a cell.”

“Now,” said Uncle Ganooch, “can we finish our business? I’m a very sick man.”

“It’s simple,” smiled Leznicki, “we just need some assurance you’ll show up to honor your subpoena.”

“We’re going over the old ground,” said Ganooch’s lawyer, “I will stand manifest for him.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” asked Leznicki.

“Let’s go back,” said Roberts, looking at me. “I want to talk to you.”

I nodded. And then moved next to the girl. Her friend Tony was standing on her other side and he gave me a look which had power to quiver in my skin. It was a look which said, “Don’t talk to this girl or somebody will break your arm.”

But I was thinking that I might as well take that girl for a sign—she was the only one in sight. So I said to her, and my voice was easy, “I’d like to come and hear you sing.”

“Well, I’d like you to,” she said.

“Where is your place?”

“Down in the Village. Just a little place. Just opened up.” She
looked at Tony, and hesitated, and then gave me the address in a clear voice. Out of the side of my eye I could see the Negro being led out of the big room.

“Let’s go, Rojack,” said Roberts. “We have something new to talk about.”

It must have been three in the morning, but he still looked neat. Once we sat down, he smiled. “There’s no use in asking you for a confession, is there?”

“No.”

“All right, then. We’re going to let you go.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Is it all over?”

“Oh, no. No. It’s not over for you till the coroner brings in a report of suicide.”

“When is that?”

He shrugged. “A day, a week. Don’t leave town till the coroner is heard from.”

“I’m still under suspicion?”

“Oh, come on. We know you did it.”

“But you can’t hold me?”

“Yeah, we could hold you as a material witness. And we could work on you for seventy-two hours, and you would crack. But you’re in luck, you’re in great luck. We have to stick with Ganucci this week. We don’t have time for you.”

“You also have no evidence.”

“The girl talked. We know you’ve been with her.”

“Means nothing.”

“We have some other evidence, but I don’t want to get into it now. We’ll see you in a day or two. Stay away from your wife’s apartment. And stay away from the maid. You wouldn’t want to tamper with a potential witness.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“By the way, no hard feelings.”

“Oh, none.”

“I mean it. You hold up all right. You’re not bad.”

“Thank you.”

“This may interest you. We got the autopsy report. There’s evidence your wife did have cancer. They’re going to make some slides to verify it, but it does look good for you.”

“I see.”

“That’s why we’re letting you go.”

“I see.”

“Don’t relax too much. The autopsy also showed that your wife’s large intestine was in an interesting state.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You’ll get your chance to worry later this week.” He stood up. “Good night, pal.” Then he stopped. “Oh, yes. Forgot to ask you to sign the autopsy papers. Would you sign them now?”

“Your autopsy was illegal?”

“I’d say it was irregular.”

“I don’t know if I want to sign the papers.”

“Suit yourself, pal. If you don’t, we can put you in a cell until the coroner brings back his report.”

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Not that good,” said Roberts. “Just a goof. Here, sign here.”

Which I did.

“Well,” said Roberts, “I’m going home. Can I drop you off?”

“I’ll walk,” I said.

I did walk. I walked for miles through the long drizzle of the early morning, and close to dawn I found myself in the Village outside the after-hours club where Cherry was singing. I had lived through a night, I had come into a morning. It was morning outside on the street; I could think of the sun coming up. But it would rise into a wintry smog, a wet wan morning gray with mist.

The entrance to the joint was a battered metal door which opened at my knock. “I’m a friend of Tony’s,” I said to the man in the hall. He shrugged, and let me by. I walked down a corridor and went through another door. The room had once been the rear of a large basement loft but now it was decorated like a bar in Miami, an after-hours box of leatherette, flame-orange stuffing for the booths, the stools, the face of the bar, some dark burnished midnight of black carpet and purple wine ceiling. There was a man playing the piano, and Cherry was singing. She saw me come in and she smiled on the breath she took and made a little sign to indicate that yes she would have a drink with me as soon as her set was done. Well, if Deborah’s dying had given me a new life, I must be all of eight hours old by now.

I
N FACT
, I was so far into the fevers of fatigue that the bourbon revolved a majestic route down through my chest, the congestions of my lungs, the maze of my belly, those peppered links in my gut. The police were gone and would be back again tomorrow; the newspapers were already being dropped at the early morning stands; in a few hours the details of my daily life would erupt like a house gone mad with the electric dishwasher screaming at the delivery boy, the television studio would be on the phone, and I might have to be on the phone to the university, Deborah’s friends would call, there would be the funeral, God, the funeral, the funeral, and the first in a new thousand to twenty-two thousand lies. But I was like a wrecked mariner in the lull between two storms. Rather I was close to a strong old man dying now of his overwork, passing into death by way of going deeper to
himself. Rich mahoganies of color move in to support his heart and there are tired angels to meet him after work, a tender heaven to approve of how he spent those hard bleak years. I think that shot of bourbon may have been the best single drink I ever had—relaxation came to me on the gift of wings and I swam through some happy mood deeper than air, more perfumed than water. As Cherry sang, I drank her in—my ear for a singer had never been so fine. Which is not to say that she was a great singer: she was not. But I enjoyed her, I was resting on a point of balance kin to one of those little dots of light which used to dance above the printed words on a movie screen when the adults and children were invited to sing on Saturday. She had what was near to a conventional voice—she accepted teachings from others; styles had been borrowed and not quite made her own, but she had a lithe riding beat and odd details were striking. She was singing
Love for sale, love that’s fresh and still unspoiled, love that’s only slightly
 … Then she did something tasty with
soiled
, something rueful as though to show that what had been lost was worse than the dirt. Yes, the voice was only a lift above ordinary, but the experience in the voice was not, and so it brought the people in this room a shift in mood together, and that was an achievement, for they were not near to lovers, not this crowd: an Italian judge with two tarts, a pair of detectives, one light-skinned plump young Negro with a mandarin’s goatee, some old woman with a set of diamond rings whose glow was stolen from the aurora borealis; those north lights were her motto; they moaned: I’m twice a widow and believe in God for that is what young men are—the young man with her was undeniably queer. Finally, at the bar, a party of five, two girls with three men who looked like friends of Tony, for the men were all wearing platinum-white silk ties, white silk shirts and dark blue suits. One of them was a former prizefighter, a very good retired welterweight I recognized on the instant, he had a very bad reputation in the ring. Add a few more and you had the size of the crowd,
nothing very big for a wet dawn, but that little voice of hers was giving me pleasure (the singing voice being considerably smaller than the voice with which she spoke to me on the street), that little voice had something of a clean nerve.

The spotlight was good for her, a pink pearly violet for hue, a good light on a pale blonde since it gave one edge of silver to the shadows in her face and deepened those pale green circles beneath her eyes to hollows of glamor. She did not look in the least like Marlene Dietrich, but the glamor was there, that curious hint of no-man’s-land where one cannot distinguish exhaustion from the shade of espionage. Then the demon, good or ill, of the telepathic powers vaulted with a leap onto her stage, and she began to sing “The Lady Is a Tramp,” but in a harsh groaning strained and curious flat version as if indeed Dietrich had touched a finger to her larynx. “Stop,” I thought to myself, “better to stop,” and Cherry burst into laughter, that false laughter of a singer who is a suspicion too drunk, and then she slapped her thigh, giving a new beat to the pianist (a vigorous muscular beat) while she closed her eyes and laughed merrily.

“Oil it, honey,” cried the prizefighter. And she came back with another voice, belting the same song now, swaying her hips, tough and agreeable and very American as if she were an airline hostess or the television wife of a professional football star. There was another spot on her, an orange spot, Florida beaches, the red-orange tan of an athlete. Now the powder showed on her face and light reflected from it, little lights of perspiration bright as the sun on a wet snow. She was hard now, nightclub hard, an embodiment now
of greed, green-eyed, brown-skinned flaming golden blonde—that was the orange spotlight.
Life without care. I’m broke. It’s oke. Hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp, that’s why the lady is a tramp
, but grinding the words as if they were part of some rich sausage her voice was ready to stuff.