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FROM THE OUTSIDE, the Charleston Club didn’t particularly stand out. A vertical sign spelled out Charleston in white neon letters, and Club ran horizontally across the bottom in smaller blue letters. The building was situated in an area where most shops and businesses were owned by whites but the patrons were predominantly Negro. Originally, the area had been dubbed Jewtown, because if you weren’t jewed down on a price, you weren’t breathing. The coloreds put their own stamp on the neighborhood. Between the two great wars and into the booming fifties, wave after wave of musicians, migrating from the South in search of a better life, hit town and infused Maxwell Street with the downhome notes of pure Delta blues.
Inside the club, cigarette smoke and candlelight infused the room with a sultry moodiness that took you out of the ordinary and placed you into the extraordinary. Music thrummed with a rhythm you heard with your ears but felt in your soul. The postage-stamp bandstand accommodated a singer, an upright piano, a drum set, and a few other musicians. The venue was intended for an intimate gathering, less of a saloon and more of an overcrowded living room filled with like-minded folk who appreciated blues, jazz, ragtime, and swing. Indispensable was the presence of a talented set of pipes, usually in the form of a pretty songstress. Tables ringed the stage in a random semi-circular arrangement. A dance floor had been roped off to the left. A bar with stools and standing room was tucked inside an alcove where a bartender dressed in white shirt and bowtie served up high-octane fuel. Even with ceiling fans whirring, the club was sweltering. Only a few white faces were sprinkled among the black ones, but race pretty much melted into the background and nobody felt out of place since everyone came for the music.
The club was jamming to the velvet-throated voice of Ella Fitzgerald, an exclusive two-nights-only engagement by a performer who had gotten her start in clubs just like this one. Even if everyone bought her records and paid top dollar to see her perform at ritzy hotels and posh theater venues, she often went back to her roots, those small dives and intimate clubs where it all began. Outfitted in a floor-length sequined affair that accentuated the deep color of her skin but made her pop out of the shadows like a beacon, she was belting out her latest hit, I Can’t Give You Anything but Love Baby. A piano player tickled the ivories with a fluid touch. Improvising with dissonant B-flats and C-sharps that seemed to be in perfect harmony, Ella swung her arm to the beat and snapped her fingers in synch with the driving notes of the bass fiddler.
I squinted through the indigo atmosphere and searched for a familiar face. Starr sidled beside me. He was the one familiar face I didn’t care to see. “Following me?”
“Don’t have to. I can read you like a roadmap.” One thought came to mind. If he was here, the sting wasn’t coming down tonight, just as I figured. Maybe tomorrow night. Or maybe never.
I spotted the magnolia blossom at a table upfront and waved. Elvis flagged me to join the party. A bevy of broads with shapely legs and ruby lips made nice with him and his band members. Most notable was another individual I hadn’t expected to see here. She was gay, bubbly, vivacious, scantily dressed, and pleasingly plump.
Suspicious, I gazed up at Starr. “Who invited her here? You?”
He tugged at his fedora, obscuring the pale green eyes that were already unreadable. “Couldn’t, since you didn’t invite me.”
Decked out in a silvery-gray suit and tieless white shirt, Elvis untangled himself from the bodacious redhead lassoed around his neck and stood up. “Glad you could make it, ma’am.”
“Name’s Iris.”
“Iris,” he said, and brushed a welcoming kiss across my cheek.
“Bet you didn’t know Iris Grenadine is really a man in drag,” Monica Seagraves said, her words slurry and eyes unfocused.
Ignoring her, I introduced my sidekick. “This is Richard Starr.”
“Her father’s John Grenadine,” Monica went on. “You know ... the Mafia lawyer.”
“Elvis Presley, sir.” He signaled a cocktail waitress, motioned for everyone to sit, and held out a chair for me.
As I sat with graceful ease, Monica’s chair inexplicably went out from under her. She squawked like a duck. Scotty helped her to her feet. She was a lot of woman to handle, made worse my flailing arms and a rotten disposition. Ignoring her antics, I crutched chin on fist and dreamily stared into Elvis’s seductive eyes. “I’d love to hear you sing.”
Starr pantomimed a gag. My backhanded thump knocked the wind out of him.
Monica reclaimed her chair and hiccupped. “Don’t think I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t think everybody at the paper doesn’t know why they hired John Grenadine’s daughter.”
“As soon as Miss Fitzgerald finishes up, we’ll be spelling her awhile,” Elvis said.
Ella sang the last note of the final chorus and took her bows to jubilant applause.
“To keep Arezzo’s name out of the headlines,” Monica said. The table jolted and a drink spilled into her lap. She yelped and sprang to her feet. “Fucking bitch! Did you see what she just did?”
Hisses spewed our way. Elvis signaled his boys.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get your hands off me!” Scotty and D.J. suffered more than a couple of smacks and slaps before turning over their obstreperous charge to the club bouncer. With little further ado plus a hiccup, the tipsy broad was ushered outside and hopefully thrown in the gutter, but more likely bundled into the back seat of a jitney and sent on her way.
Ella took her second bow. As the applause wound down, she spoke into the microphone. “I’d like everybody to give a warm welcome to a newcomer. His name is Elvis Presley. He’s a talented kid with a bright future. So let’s hear a round of applause for Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys!”
The foursome took up their instruments and hustled onstage. The applause was tepid and the welcome unenthusiastic. The guys looked toward each other for support. It was now or never. Elvis grabbed the microphone and started to speak. An ear-splitting shriek from the feedback loop bounced off the walls. Everybody covered their ears and rolled their eyes. Amateur hour. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, his voice booming over the mic. After positioning an acoustic guitar over his hips, he picked out a riff, tested the mic, and spoke in dulcet tones. “This is from our new record on the Sun label. Hope you like it. And it goes like this ....” He nodded toward the boys once, twice, three times. On the downstroke of his guitar strings, Elvis began to sing That’s All Right, Mama. On the same beat, the guys jumped in.
Miss Fitzgerald wended her way through the press of fans, bestowing autographs and kisses. She stopped at our table. “Mind if I join you?”
“Please, Miss Fitzgerald,” I said. “We’re big fans.”
She pointed her finger between Starr and me. “You’re not monkeys, either of you? Music critics? Sees no, hears no, digs no music?”
“Oh no, never, not us,” I assured her.
Elvis caressed the microphone, his voice tentative, his vocal chords warbling, his manner shy. He gazed down at the stage, fearful of looking directly out at a sea of boredom. Chairs scraped. Glasses clinked. Knives and forks clanked. Patrons talked and laughed among themselves.
Ella moved her body back and forth, snapping her fingers to the beat.
Several bars into the song, Elvis found confidence. His lips pouted, his nose flared, his body shook. He strummed the guitar with his body and not just his fingers. He jiggled his torso and swiveled his hips. The beat of the drums played up his gyrations. Incapable of restraining himself, he put every drop of energy into the music. The crowd began to respond. When his legs jittered, the women went wild.
“Ooh,” Ella said, swaying to the rhythm. “I like.”
By the middle of the song, Elvis had won over the audience. His voice found strength. His tremolos vibrated with urgency. The room stilled, all eyes fixed on him. They were witnessing the emergence of a new star. One woman pretended to swoon amid laughter from her friends. When Elvis finished, whistles and applause chased him back to the table.
Ella attacked him with a buxom hug. “On which railroad track did you learn to move like that, honey?”
“Move like what, ma’am?” he said, fingering sweat from his brow. He had reverted into the homespun boy of his upbringing, self-effacing and modest.
She imitated him, throwing out her hips. “Like that, sugar.”
“I was so scared, ma’am, just about peed in my pants.”
Starr feigned a yawn and stretched. “Sorry to be a party pooper.” Over protests, he shook hands all around.
My radar went up. I watched him make his way out of the club. Then I scraped my chair back and made my excuses. Elvis thanked me for coming and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. Ella grabbed my hands, exclaimed how pretty I was, and begged me to come back tomorrow night. I promised I would try.
When I finally got away and burst outside, Starr was gone. There was only reason I could think of for him to make such a hasty exit—the sting that wasn’t supposed to happen tonight—or so I assumed. Pennyroyal. He would know. Or someone down at the precinct. The stationhouse was only five minutes away. If I broke a few traffic laws, I could be there in three minutes flat.
