Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (14 page)

“There’s another wonderful thing about being able to play music,” she said. “It’s something Johnny Mercer told me. He said, ‘When you play songs, you can bring back people’s memories of when they fell in love. That’s where the power lies.’”

On the basis of attendance alone, Emma’s piano bar was an unqualified success. Financially, however, the bar did not do very well. Joe’s inclination to give people free drinks was one reason. In addition to that, many of Joe’s old creditors saw the bar as a chance to recoup some of the money he owed them. They would come in for an hour or so of drinking and then leave without paying. But even so, Emma’s should have made more money than it did. Joe sought the advice of Darlene Poole, who knew the bar business inside out.

Darlene had worked as a barmaid in a number of local saloons and was engaged to the owner of a successful club on the southside. She and Joe sat at a table having a drink. “You got a nice setup here,” she said. “The blue-rinse-and-foxtrot crowd finally have a place to go. Can’t hardly go to the Nightflight, can’t go to Malone’s, can’t go to Studebaker’s. You got ’em all to yourself, honey. Nice going. Plus I see you’ve got Wanda Brooks coming in here. Broads like Wanda are what I call insurance. With her bumping into everybody and knocking drinks over left and right at three bucks a shot, you can’t help but make it work. Now, if you can just keep the freeloaders out and stop
giving away the liquor, you should do all right. Just make sure nobody’s glass stays empty too long.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” said Joe. “Gotta get Moon to pour drinks faster.”

“Moon?!”
Darlene whirled around and looked toward the bar. Then she looked back at Joe. “Shit, Joe, you didn’t tell me you had Moon Tompkins tending bar!” Darlene leaned closer to Joe and lowered her voice. “Moon’s your problem, honey.”

“Why do you say that?” Joe asked. “He seems okay to me. Maybe a little slow.”

“Moon Tompkins has done three years for bank robbery,” said Darlene.

Joe laughed. “Yeah-yeah,” he said.

“And it wasn’t just one bank, either. It was two.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” said Joe. His laugh turned into a curious smile. He looked toward the bar, where Moon Tompkins was pouring vodka into a row of four tall glasses.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought old Moon had it in him.”

“How in hell did you ever let him in here as bartender?” Darlene asked.

“Emma hired him. I guess he didn’t put the bank job on his résumé.”

Darlene lit a cigarette. “I suppose you heard about the armed robbery at the Green Parrot restaurant last week?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Moon did it.”

“Oh, come on!” said Joe. “Are you sure about that?”

“Positive.”

“But wait a minute,” said Joe. “How could you know it was Moon? They haven’t caught the robber yet.”

“I know,” said Darlene. “I drove the getaway car.”

Joe had nothing against convicted bank robbers—or getaway drivers either—but he felt foolish entrusting his cash register to
a dedicated thief. Moon was using the most rudimentary of all scams—making more drinks than he rang up—and when he did ring up drinks, he often propped the check on the cash register so it hid the numbers. “You can bet he’s pushing the No Sale button whenever he does that,” said Darlene, “and slipping twenty bucks in his pocket.”

Joe decided that the wisest thing to do would be to catch Moon in the act, confront him quietly, and allow him to quit without a fuss. He would not tell Emma anything about it, because the idea that she had been in business with a bank robber might give her a heart attack. Joe asked two friends to come to the bar the following night and keep careful count of all the drinks Moon served. During the day, however, word leaked out that later that night Moon Tompkins would be caught with his hand in the till at Emma’s, and by the time the bar opened a festive crowd was clamoring to get in and watch the sting unfold as if it were a sporting event.

“Good gracious, we’re having a lively night,” said Emma. Customers ordered drinks at a furious rate, hoping to encourage Moon to steal more than he had ever stolen before. The more drinks they ordered, the merrier the mood became, and by midnight it seemed that Emma and Moon were the only people in the bar who were unaware of the sting in progress.

The customers called out their orders:

“Hey, Moon! Gimme a
stinger!
Ha-ha! What better drink for a sting than a stinger!”

“I’ll have a
Rob
Roy, Moon!”

A half hour before closing, Moon took the trash barrel out to empty it in the dumpster and never came back. When Joe stepped behind the bar and opened the cash drawer, it was empty. Moon had cleaned it out.

Moon’s disappearance did nothing to dampen spirits at Emma’s. It only served to heighten the level of hilarity. At closing time, there was nothing Joe could do but tell Emma what had happened, that Moon had taken all the money and run.

“My goodness me!” said Emma. “Did he really?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Joe. “And I guess it’s a good thing we’re rid of him, because it seems he’s done this kind of thing before. He’s a bank robber.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” said Emma.

“You
knew?”

“Why, of course,” she said. “Moon told me about it when he first came looking for a job. He didn’t try to hide it, and I told him I admired him for that. I thought he deserved a second chance in life. I think everybody does. Don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Joe.

Emma got into her car and then pulled out onto Bay Street, headed for Statesboro.

As was his custom at this hour of the morning, Joe led a few friends back to his house, where, according to the fire captain’s report later in the day, someone dropped a lighted cigarette into a wastebasket shortly before dawn and caused the fire that nearly gutted the house.

Joe was the first to smell the smoke. He ran through the house rousing people from beds and sofas and herding them into the street.

“Is everyone out?” the fire captain asked.

“Everyone I know about,” said Joe.

“You mean there might be people in your house you don’t know about?”

“Captain,” said Joe, “there have been times when there were people in my
bed
I didn’t know about.”

It was widely assumed that Joe Odom had set his house on fire to collect the insurance money, even though he no longer owned the house. Joe’s landlords asked him to vacate the premises at once, not so much because of the fire but because Joe had never paid them any rent. A week later, Joe took what furnishings he could salvage and moved into a large Federal-style brick townhouse at 101 East Oglethorpe Avenue, a few blocks away. His new next-door neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Bell. Mr. Bell was the retired chairman of the Savannah Bank, former president of the venerable Oglethorpe Club, and a respected historian.
Mrs. Bell was an intellectual and a member of a distinguished Savannah family. In view of his august new neighbors, Joe’s friends anticipated that life at his new home might perforce be a bit more modulated than it had been at 16 East Jones Street.

And perhaps it was. But before long, neighbors began to notice that visitors were passing through the unlocked front door of 101 East Oglethorpe Avenue in a steady stream, that tour buses were pulling up in front at noontime, and that pleasant piano melodies could be heard spilling out of the house day or night but especially at times when the city was otherwise utterly still.

An unnatural calm descended over Jones Street after Joe Odom’s move to Oglethorpe Avenue. No longer could Joe’s sweet serenade be heard floating over the garden walls. In the stillness, it occurred to me that it was time to buy a car. I wanted to see more of the environs of Savannah, but I proceeded carefully in the matter of wheels.

Savannahians drove fast. They also liked to carry their cocktails with them when they drove. According to the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, more than 8 percent of Savannah’s adults were “known alcoholics,” which may have accounted for the disturbing tendency of motorists to run up over the curb and collide with trees. The trunks of all but one of the twenty-seven oaks that lined the edge of Forsyth Park on Whitaker Street, for instance, had deep scars at fender level. One tree had been hit so many times it had a sizable hollow scooped out of its trunk. The hollow was filled with pea-size crystals of headlight glass that glittered like a bowl of diamonds. The palm trees in the center of Victory Drive had the same sort of scars, and so did the oaks on Abercorn.

I had never owned a car. Living in New York I hadn’t needed one, but the idea appealed to me now. If I was going to drive a
car in this environment, though, it would have to be a very big and heavy one. It would probably have fins.

“I’m in the market for an old car,” I said to Joe. “Something big and roomy. Nothing fancy.”

An hour later we stood looking at a 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix. Its metallic-gold body was dented and flecked with rust. The windshield was cracked, the vinyl roof was peeling, the hubcaps were missing, and the engine was well into its second hundred thousand miles. But it ran well enough and it was big. It did not have fins, but its hood was so long it looked like the foredeck of an ocean liner. The man was asking $800.

“It’s perfect,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

Now I was completely mobile. I drove south of Gaston Street (breaking Joe’s second rule). I took excursions into South Carolina. I sailed past the trees with the scars on them and shared the road with drivers who sipped from traveler cups and lurched from lane to lane. I felt perfectly safe in my rolling metal fortress, rusted and dented as it was. Nothing and no one could get to me, and nothing and no one did—with one very notable exception. Her name was Chablis.

When I first laid eyes on her, Chablis was standing by the curb, watching me intently as I parked my car. She had just come out of Dr. Myra Bishop’s office across the street from where I lived. Dr. Bishop was a family practitioner. Most of her patients were conservatively dressed black women. Those whose gaze happened to meet mine usually nodded solemnly and moved on. But not Chablis.