Lady Yesterday (2 page)

“You too. Older.”

“You always said I looked older than I was.”

“It’s still true. I sent you a card one Christmas.”

“I never answer them. Pretty soon you’re trading cards with Andy and Mabel in Milwaukee and you never met them or anyone who knew them. It can make you crazy.”

A waitress came around finally. Iris wasn’t eating. I ordered a steak sandwich and fries and another drink for myself and the girl wrote it all down, pink tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, checked her spelling, and bounced off. She had a little white scar on the inside of her left thigh. The pale brunette was still watching me and my cold cigarette and now she’d directed her companion’s attention my way. He had a graying brush cut and square black glasses and a spare chin folded over the maroon satin knot of his necktie. He looked at me, then at the food on his plate, then at me again out of the side of his glasses. He was hovering between hoping his date would forget about me and hoping I would go away.

“Lady at the piano says you want to see the owner,” I said to Iris.

“She’s laying him. You can always tell.”

“Shame on them. Fornicating this close to Detroit.”

Iris refilled her cup from the stainless steel pot on the table. “Women know what I am. What I was. I can’t hide it. They get protective.”

“Not that woman.”

“Maybe not. Sometimes I think I might as well be wearing a scarlet letter.”

“Hawthorne didn’t know anything about women.”

“My father worked here four years back,” she said. “It was a pancake house then.”

“I thought your father died a long time ago.”

“My mother’s husband died when I was eleven. My father’s still breathing, or was four years ago when he washed dishes here.”

“Huh.”

“I found my mother’s wedding license and my birth certificate in an old letter box where she kept her papers. Who looks at their birth certificate until they need it? It seems I was born four months after they were married. The name wasn’t my father’s; not the name of the man I always thought was my father.”

“Why are you looking for him?”

“Who said I was?”

I grinned. It got another smile out of her.

“Okay, I want to know what came before. Maybe I wouldn’t have if I found out while my mother was still alive. Now it’s important, don’t ask me why. Beginnings and endings, they go together. I want to know what sort of man he was and why he didn’t marry my mother.”

“Maybe he didn’t know.”

“I want to hear him say it.”

“How’d you know to look here?”

She reached inside her purse and laid a color photograph in front of me, printed on glazed paper. It showed a black man who looked a lot like Nat King Cole, straightened hair and neon grin, with one arm around the waist of a good-looking young black woman in a yellow dress standing in front of a cement block building with the letters OOL showing on a sign over the door. The first part of the sign wasn’t in the picture. The man had on a white sack coat over black pants and a green bow tie on a pink shirt and he was holding a slide trombone with his free hand, the instrument resting along his forearm. I saw the family resemblance in the woman’s face. She looked happy, the way people look happy in pictures taken more than thirty years ago and somehow don’t in pictures taken last week. The man and woman were the same height.

“You didn’t get your looks from your father.”

“That’s a compliment. My mother was a beautiful woman. The picture was taken in front of the old Piano Stool in Kingston. All the greats played there, Louis and Miles and Thelonius and the Duke and the Count. They tore it down when I was little to put up a roller rink. But the man who owned the Piano Stool is still alive and I showed him the picture and he said he didn’t need to see it, he remembered Little Georgie Favor and his Moonlighters. He booked them out of Detroit for a weekend and held them over six weeks.”

“George Favor was his name?”

“It’s the name on my birth certificate. They probably met in the club. My mother used to sing a little. Her voice didn’t match her looks so she got out. Videos hadn’t been invented then.” She drank some tea. “The old guy saw them together but he didn’t mix in with performers’ lives. He didn’t know nothing about Favor’s past or where he went after he left the island.”

“Try the Chord Progression?”

“First place I checked when I got back here. They didn’t know from Georgie Favor. They’re into fusion now and he was Chicago Style. But someone there referred me to Josephus Wooding. He was a headliner there for a dozen years back in the fifties and early sixties.”

“Joe Wooding, sure,” I said. “He’s alive?”

“If you can call it that. He’s sick and living in a trailer behind his house in Westland. Closed the place up when his wife left him two years ago and hasn’t set foot inside it since. He didn’t want to talk to me, but Favor’s name got me in. He said he saw my father coming out the back door of this place about four years back. Took Wooding a minute to recognize him, he’d aged that much since they shared a bill. They talked a little, told each other what they were doing, promised to get together and never did. That’s as much as he knew, or was willing to tell. He shut down when I pressed him. I don’t think he trusts women these days, or anyone else, but especially he doesn’t trust women. He’s a bitter man. Sits there all day long with a big pistol next to him. He was broken into not too long ago, they slapped him around and tied him up and took his TV and fiddle.”

“What’s his address in Westland?”

She gave me a number on Venoy. I got out my notebook and wrote it down. My steak sandwich came and Iris waited until the girl went away.

“I can’t afford to hire you. Burying my mother and coming here took almost my last cent. If I don’t find paying work soon it’s back to the business bed for me.”

“Welcome home present. Where are you staying?”

“Place called Mary M’s on St. Antoine. It’s a halfway house for working girls looking to quit. A friend of mine runs it.”

I wrote it down and flipped shut the book. “You got paper on that iron in your purse? CCW is a thirty-day pop mandatory in this town.”

She made as if to touch the clasp, then let her hand drop. “Eight hundred murders here last year, Mr. Detective. I’d rather face the bench than a slab.”

“It’s not my business unless you say it is.”

“Then I guess it’s not your business.”

“Would the ring be?”

She glanced down at the little diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. It was mounted in a plain spider-thin gold setting. “He’s a good man. He runs a one-boat charter fishing business out of Port Royal. We’re going to be married in May.”

“He can’t help out with money?”

“I wouldn’t ask him. He thinks I’m here visiting relatives. Which I guess I am if I find one.”

“I’m glad he’s a good man.”

“They’re a long time between.”

I didn’t chase it. I parked the cigarette behind my right ear and constructed the sandwich from the tomato slices and lettuce on the side. The pale brunette lunged across the table she shared with the brush cut, mouth moving, and the brush cut tossed down his napkin and got up and came over. He was bigger and harder than he looked sitting down. The fat was just inertia.

“Excuse me, but are you planning to smoke that cigarette?”

I sat back, looking up at him. “Eventually.”

“Could I borrow one? I left mine at home.”

After a pause I produced the pack and tapped one partway out and held it up for him to take. I struck a match and he leaned down for me to light it.

“Nonsmokers,” he said, straightening. “We don’t interrupt their meals asking them to not smoke.”

“You’d think outliving us would be enough.”

He moved his big shoulders and nodded to Iris and returned to his table trailing clouds. The brunette left shortly afterward. The brush cut put out the smoke then and finished his meal at a leisurely pace.

W
ESTLAND IS A WORNGMAN’S
community, functional if it’s nothing else, and nothing else is exactly what it is. No restaurants of note, liquor stores with iron bars that fold over the windows at closing, pool tables and shuffleboard games in bars where the customers wear Hawaiian shirts and knock back boilermakers and play Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard on the jukeboxes. Bleak streets lined with bleak houses spreading out from the General Motors assembly plant, making a town as flat and gray as a concrete slab. We had had a lot of snow that month and it lay in rusty piles against the curbs under a battleship sky. In that season it looked like the kind of place where laid-off line workers massacre their whole families and then shoot themselves.

I had offered Iris a ride home the night before, but she had borrowed a car, and I had caught my first full night’s sleep in a while and showered and shaved as if I were going someplace where they noticed such things. These days I was driving a new two-tone blue Chevy Cavalier, thanks to a bonus from a downtown legal firm whose client I’d cleared of a manslaughter charge. The interior still smelled like a plastic raincoat but the fuel injection and front-wheel drive were pleasant surprises. I hoped they lasted as long as the payments.

Sweet Joe Wooding, as he was billed in the days when the Chord Progression on Livernois presented Harry James and Benny Carter to standing-room-only crowds in dinner jackets and pink chiffon, lived, or had lived, in a one-story yellow brick house on Venoy with attached garage and overgrown hedges on either side and a paved driveway he shared with his neighbor to the right. The place had a vacant look now, like an idiot’s face, and paint was curling away like dead skin from the wooden window frames. I parked in the shoveled driveway next to an exhausted-looking AMC Pacer belonging to the house next door. Some kids were building a snowman in that yard, making plenty of noise, and on the other side a fat boy in glasses and a red snowsuit was trying to coax some momentum out of an orange plastic saucer on a fifteen-degree slope. He bounced up and down and the saucer just sat there and flapped. His cheeks were as bright as Christmas bulbs.

I peered through the dusty window into Wooding’s garage. No car. From the way the tools and junk were distributed on the concrete floor there hadn’t been a car for some time. I didn’t go to the door of the house. Instead I followed a shoveled path around to the back, where an old black man in a Russian hat and a dirty gray quilted coat was removing snow from in front of a sixteen-foot robin’s-egg-blue house trailer with a television antenna on the roof.

I hesitated. It all reminded me of something. I thought of a big shaven-headed black man standing with a snow shovel in front of a house on John R, where I’d first met Iris. I thought of a house trailer in another place where Iris and I had gotten better acquainted. I was doing a lot of remembering lately. I resumed walking.

“Josephus Wooding?”

He went on shoveling with his back to me. I said it louder.

“I hears you.” He got a medium load on the blade and put his back into it and threw it two feet to the side. He paused to rest.

“My name’s Amos Walker. I’m looking for Little Georgie Favor. His daughter hired me.”

“Man’s name was George. You call him Little Georgie he go upside your head with his horn case. That shit was just for the bill.”

“Like Sweet Joe?”

“No, my first wife called me that.” He threw some more snow and turned around to face me, leaning on the handle. His complexion was deepwater-black under a skin of sweat and his features were laid in rectangular blocks, the forehead resting horizontally on the vertical pillars of his cheeks with the lower jaw providing a footing and the flat nose doing keystone duty. He had a thin moustache that looked dyed and his eyes were white under the irises so that he seemed to be looking up from under his fur hat. “George’s girl sent you?”

I held out a card.

He went on looking at me. “Man, anyone can get one of them printed.”

I produced the folder with my picture ID and the county buzzer I wasn’t supposed to have. They were a little harder to get, but not very much. Anyway he nodded.

“Now I’m waiting on a reason I got anything more to say to you than I said to the girl.”

“Maybe because her father left her mother like your last wife left you,” I said, “and you both want to know why.”

The shovel blade came up very fast and knocked my hat crooked while I was getting under it. I kept going and grasped the handle in both hands and twirled it out of his grip while he was still following through. He sat down in the snow.

I stuck out my hand and he looked at it a moment, breathing heavily, before he took it. He came up more easily than I was braced for. He didn’t weigh a whole lot more than the shovel. I gave it back to him to lean on.

I said, “My wife left me after three years. For a long time I thought it was my fault.”

“It
was
my fault.”

He was still panting when he turned his back on me and started toward the trailer, using the shovel like a cane. After a moment I followed.

He stood the shovel in the snow next to a set of wooden steps and we climbed them into a living room setup with an orange recliner-rocker gone grimy on the arms and a blue vinyl child’s-size sofa with metallic tape smoothed over the places where the vinyl had split and a new oval rug and a small painted bookcase containing magazines and a few thumb-smeared paperbacks. There were a sink and a two-burner stove with a built-in refrigerator at one end of the trailer and a heavy russet curtain at the other, behind which would be a bed and tub and toilet. The place was old-bachelor neat without pictures or anything to indicate that the man living there was a musician, retired or otherwise.

Except for the marijuana smell that permeated the place like disinfectant in a public restroom.

The air inside felt chillier than outdoors. He took off his hat and coat and hung them on a peg next to the door and kicked a tin furnace set into the wall near the curtain. It cut in with a wheeze and a clatter of bent fan blades.

Without his coat, the architectural effect was lost. He was thin to emaciation. He was several sizes too small tor his colorless shirt and old striped suitpants and the end of his narrow belt turned out, as if he’d had to make a new hole farther in. By contrast, his head with its thinning coil of black hair—it had to be dyed—looked huge. Whatever was killing him hadn’t wasted its way up past his neck. Nor had it affected his balance, or the big Ruger he wore hung on his right hip would have pulled him over when he kicked the furnace. It had a six-inch barrel in a stiff black leather clip and a slick walnut handle with indentations for the fingers and had to have set him back a month’s Social Security.