Lady Yesterday (11 page)

“No George Favor,” said the voice. “I got a Partee Favor, that’s two
e
’s in ‘Partee.’ Maybe you want her for the bachelor blowout the night before.”

“Not for this groom. Maybe you misplaced Favor’s card. He was sitting in at the Kitchen as recently as three years ago.”

“Says who?”

“Joe Wooding, for one.”

“Sweet Joe? He should talk.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. I talked out of turn.”

“No, I need to know if he’s any kind of a source.”

“It’s just that they were still using him as a textbook case when I came on here. It’s against union rules to perform free for anything but charity benefits and he was blowing bass and horn gratis all over town. The union yanked his card several times and finally didn’t give it back. Sweet Joe Wooding. You sure he isn’t dead?”

I reassured him. “Maybe he just liked to play.”

“Then he should’ve locked himself in his bedroom and put on a command performance for the wallpaper. You offer your talent for free, pretty soon they think that’s all any musician’s worth. Bad all around.”

“What do you play?”

“Pinochle.”

I gave him that one. “Got anything on a female vocalist named Glen Dexter? She used to sing with Favor.”

He flipped through some more cards. “Dexter, nope.”

“Try Edwina. That’s her niece.”

“No Dexters.”

I stopped talking to him and got out the metropolitan directory. There was only one Edwina Dexter listed in Ypsilanti. I dialed it and got a throaty voice on a recording and a number in Detroit for emergencies. I stretched the definition and tried that. A man answered.

“Sound Management.”

“Edwina Dexter, please.”

“Wye?”

“What makes it your business?”

“No, I mean Wye Dexter.”

“Because that’s her name.”

“Wye’s what we call her,” he said patiently. “Second.”

I waited several. Abbott and Costello would have had fun with the telephone conversations I’d been having lately. The voice came back on.

“She’s recording right now. Can I take a message?”

“Where are you located?”

“East Grand at Mack. Big cinderblock building with the name out front. You can’t miss it.”

I didn’t. It had almost no windows and a small paved parking lot with three cars in it. I banged on a big blank steel door. A man in faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt opened it and looked me over. He had white hair in bangs and glasses on top of his head and was at least thirty years too old for that look.

“I’m here to see Edwina Dexter,” I said.

“Wye?”

I recognized his voice. “You won’t get me with that one again.”

“You’re the one who called. Listen, she’s still in the booth, but she’ll be breaking soon. You can come in and sit if you’re quiet.”

They hadn’t done anything with the place except haul in a lot of electronic equipment and some used furniture to sit on. The walls and floor were bare concrete and nobody was going broke heating the place. I kept on my hat and coat—no one had offered to take them anyway—and followed him between rows of reel recorders and knobbed panels to a sofa with a loose tasseled cover and sat down. Placing a finger to his lips, he walked on thick-soled sneakers to a row of stools at a tilted control board and took one. The others were occupied by a younger man and woman wearing earphones. They all shared the same tailor.

From where I sat I could see them and a partitioned-off room across from them with a big window, behind which a woman sat speaking into the microphone attached to her headset. From time to time she lifted a hand to turn pages in a looseleaf notebook propped on a music stand in front of her. She was broadcasting into the rest of the building in the throaty voice I’d heard on her telephone recording and it took me a few minutes to realize she was reading Dickens. Compared to what I’d been speaking lately it was a foreign language.

After ten minutes or so the aging campus radical at the control board called for a break. The woman in the booth stretched, arching her back, and took off the headset. She had short black hair and wore a man’s denim workshirt with white stitching. From a little distance she might have been a man, but I’d seen her stretch. I got up and went over and tapped on the door.

“It’s open.”

She was lighting a cigarette off a disposable butane lighter. Her legs were long in rose-petal jeans and fringed knee-length buckskin boots hooked under the rung of her stool the way no man can stand to sit for more than thirty seconds. She was about thirty-five and slim, not quite wiry. She would be too tall for wiry. I had her figured for not much under six feet.

“Honk if you see something you like,” she said.

I’d been looking at her for ten seconds. “Sorry. I thought you’d be older.”

“I get that from bartenders. They think asking for my ID puts them halfway home. Who are you?”

“My name’s Walker. I’m a private investigator looking for George Favor. Your aunt knew him.”

“I guess so. He killed her.”

The room contained two stools, an upright piano, the music stand, and a bare yellow oak table with the headset lying on it. I nodded at that. “That live?”

“I unplugged it.” She flicked some ash onto the floor without taking her eyes off me. They were hazel. She had a square jaw and rouge on her cheeks in two stripes as if she’d dipped a thumb in the pot and streaked them on her way out the door. They were already as high as an Indian’s. I hooked the other stool with an ankle and threw a leg over it.

“
Great Expectations
,” she said, tipping her head toward the open notebook on the stand. “Story of my life. I wanted to sing like Aunt Glen, but nobody wants to hear that stuff now and anyway I never had her talent. So I’m reading hacked-up classics for people who are too lazy to turn pages.”

“Isn’t that one narrated by a boy?”

“Someone thought it would go over bigger if it’s read by a woman with a borderline sexy voice. It’ll sell like a brick anyway; no car chases. Is the old man in trouble?”

“Not unless what you said is true.”

“First time I said it out loud. Now that I have I can hear how stupid it is. It’s true, though, in a way.”

I got out a cigarette.

She said, “Aunt Glen had real talent, not like me. She could have been as big as Ella or Doris Day. Things were loosening up in the fifties and it wouldn’t have hurt her that she’d been recording with a black band. But getting hooked up with a black musician was fatal.”

“That what you meant by killing her?”

“No, I meant it literally. Well, sort of. The singing didn’t mean that much to her. Not as much as marrying and raising a family. That was okay then for a woman, nobody sneered at you for it. Times weren’t as enlightened. Anyway they were going to be married, and then they split up. I found out later it was because George refused to give her children.

“Glen was my father’s sister. She spoiled me pretty rotten whenever she came to visit. I can still see her, wearing white cotton gloves and one of those Robin Hood hats with a pheasant feather in it and bringing some expensive present for me, something I’d begged my parents for and been refused. She always knew. She was a beautiful woman and she loved children, I mean
loved
them. I’d see her watching me, and young as I was I could feel her wishing I was hers. When George told her it wasn’t going to happen it destroyed her. She spent the next ten years looking for a man who would give her what she wanted and who she cared for. By the time she found one it was too late. The doctors told her it could be dangerous at her age. Of course she didn’t listen. She had a stroke. Several strokes.”

I put some ash on the floor. I heard it land.

“They tried to save the baby,” she said, “put her on life support until she’d reached full term, but they weren’t as good at that then; they lost it too. It was a boy.” She rubbed her eyes. “Smoke. Well, I’ve hated George ever since, because if she’d had a kid when she first wanted one there wouldn’t have been any problems. Stupid. I didn’t know him at all, went to one or two places with my parents where Aunt Glen was appearing with him and met him once backstage. I remember being fascinated by his shiny trombone. Who hired you to look for him?”

I hesitated. “His daughter.”

She was silent for a long time, looking at me. Then she remembered the cigarette between her fingers and took a long pull. She blew out smoke. “The son of a bitch.”

“By all accounts it wasn’t planned. Chances are he doesn’t even know he’s a father. I was hoping you’d know where he is so I could tell him.”

“I haven’t seen him since I was seven. Who told you about me?”

“L. C. Candy. He said he met you last year at Montreux.”

“I remember. He played ‘Yesterday Blues’ note-for-note the way George used to. It wasn’t the same without Glen singing. I always thought whatever success he had he owed to her.”

“It was a tough life even then.”

“I’d take it. I was pregnant once. I fixed it. Even if having a kid doesn’t kill you straight off it does in the end. As soon as you have one your life is over. Don’t have children and you’ll never die, that’s my philosophy.” She smashed out the butt against the table and let it drop. “Some sense of humor God has. He gave Glen a voice but she wanted to be a mother. He gave me the chance to be one but I wanted to sing. Neither of us got what we wanted. I bet the bastard’s laughing.”

“You ready to go again, Wye?” The white-haired man’s voice sounded deeper over the speaker above the window. He had a microphone in front of him on the control board.

She put on the headset and plugged it in. I got off my stool. I thanked her, but she was looking over the pages on the stand and didn’t hear me, or acted like she didn’t. As I left the building, Pip was making the acquaintance of the convict in the cemetery.

That was the file on Little Georgie Favor as far as I could take it. The rest was filling out Social Security forms and driver’s license replacement applications and waiting for civil service to report back, and unless he drove or collected retirement benefits he was smoke. Detroit is a big city in a big country. Being black and old in Detroit is like being young and homosexual in San Francisco. Even a needle in a haystack glitters.

I fed two dimes to a black bandit on East Grand and punched out a number from memory. Mary M answered. “Hey, karate,” I said.

She hesitated, but only for a second. “This sounds like Mr. Walker.”

I complimented her on her quickness and asked for Iris. When she came on I started in first.

“I haven’t found him. Are you free this morning?”

“I never was.”

“Very funny.”

“I was planning to see the Rivera exhibit at the DIA.”

“Alone?”

“Apparently not.” Her tone was dry.

“A little culture won’t kill me. Twenty minutes okay?”

“Is it about—that thing?”

“Only partly. It’s about Favor too.”

“Twenty’s fine.”

A
SCHIZOPHRENIC STRUCTURE
, the Detroit Institute of Arts, with an arched Italian Renaissance central portion carved from white marble in 1927 and essentially blank gray granite wings stuck on the back forty-four years later. I found Iris upstairs in front of a modern primitive mural, done in pastels and earth tones, of factory workers with tortured faces and straining tendons. Canvases staggered the walls showing colored dandies and sweating trumpet players and naked women peeping through bushes of fat green leaves. They reminded me of Iris. The woman herself was wearing the yellow beret and tan coat over last night’s pants and boots. She had her arm through the strap of a shoulderbag big enough for the gun I knew she had inside it and the Third Armored Division.

“He had strength.” She was looking at the mural.

“Came by it honestly,” I said. “You don’t paint men at hard labor like that out of anatomy class. Were you followed here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you probably were. I like what he does with perspective.” A man in a brown homburg and black coat and flowing white moustache had paused in front of the painting.

When he moved on, Iris said: “What about my father?”

“I just talked to the woman who could have been his niece. That would have made her your cousin, only it didn’t happen that way and so you’re strangers.”

“Am I supposed to understand that?”

“No. I’ve done all that sleuthing can. Now we wait a month or six weeks for the bureaucracy to get back to me. I know he did a little playing at the Kitchen up until about three years ago. After that he drops out the bottom of the picture. Implication is he’s dead. He wasn’t that well.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Okay.”

A short-haired boy and girl in matching camouflage jackets joined us, holding hands. The boy swept his other hand here and there on the painting explaining this and that and the girl listened and then told him he was full of organic fertilizer. They drifted off arguing.

“What makes him alive?” I asked.

“You don’t go twenty years thinking your father’s dead and then find out he wasn’t your father and then start looking for your real father and find out he’s dead too. Keep looking.”

“When you make that much sense it’s hard not to.”

She smiled then. A schoolteacher with orange hair and a gaggle of brats in smelly coats and knit caps started cheeping around the mural and we crossed to one of the long-backed nudes. The teacher would avoid that.

“I can go back and turn over some old ground. It won’t do anything but you never know.”

“I’ll pay you when I have money.”

“Forget money. You’re hung up on money. If you gave me money right now I’d give it to a guard and ask him to clear the culture-soakers out of the place so we can talk. What are you to Sam Mozo?”

“Sam Mozo.” She was looking at the nude.

“Right name Manuel Malviento. Dope and parking garages. A little toad with a big hat and a bodyguard straight out of Sax Rohmer. He said, ‘Tell your girlfriend Sam said Detroit is no place to be in the winter.’ Or any other season. He likes to carve things up. Cars. Coats. Night managers. He’s hard to forget.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t know him.”