Charlie Carson seemed pleased to see me when I arrived a little after five. I think you gonna be happy,’ he said.
He led me through his house to a small brick extension at the back behind the garage. The walls were as filled with folders and papers on shelves as those in his club office had been with photographs.
Carson smiled almost embarrassedly. ‘I kinda keep things. Gladys says I ain’t never thrown nothing away, which ain’t far off the truth. But if I can afford it and I enjoy it, well, where’s the harm?’
We stepped carefully over boxes on the floor to find two chairs at a small desk. Carson pulled out two scrapbooks, and a wages ledger.
‘Daisy Wines, you said.’
‘That’s right.’
He talked as he leafed through one of the scrapbooks. ‘She was a singer. Never real good, because she didn’t draw much money, but on the other hand good enough she worked for my old man more than three years. Probably didn’t work nowhere else, maybe rested two weeks out of four part of the year and worked through other parts. I could figure it all out for you, because I have his wages books.’
He found the scrapbook page he was looking for. ‘There she is.’ He turned the volume for me to see better and pointed to a newspaper clipping from the Star that comprised an advertisement for The Hideout, a club then on West Washington Street. There were three pictures of entertainers ‘performing nightly’, one of whom was ‘that pretty little Miss, Daisy Wines’.
The picture was small, and not terribly clear, but showed a young blonde woman smiling shyly.
‘This book is for 1936. The only other thing I got by way of Daisy Wines is a picture from 1938.’ He opened the other scrapbook and leafed lovingly about a third of the way through. This time he stopped at a black and white photograph of revellers at a club table.
Carson said, ‘I told you before about Ginny, right?’
‘Ginny Tonic,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, this is a picture of Ginny having a drink with my old man.’ He pointed to a man whose stubby, round, rough body sat merely as a pedestal for a compelling face with silent-movie eyes and black, straight hair. The woman with him was full-featured with a wide happy mouth.
‘They was friends, him and Ginny, but she left the circuit – must have been soon after this picture – and never worked around here again.’
‘And?’ I said.
‘Well, see this girl down the table . . .?’
And I could tell, now that he pointed her out, that it was Daisy Wines. Older than in the first photograph, but, if anything, looking even less worldly with a genuine fair complexion and blonde hair.
There was another woman at the table and two other men. I asked whether he knew who they were.
‘No,’ he said. ‘All civilians.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I might be able to work it out if I go through the books looking for them, maybe in other shots. It’s possible.’
‘Would you mind?’
‘I’d like it. Jees, I flick through them a lot anyhow, but it will keep Gladys off my back to be doing it for somebody.’
‘And I would like to borrow the photograph, if I may.’
‘I thought you might want it,’ Carson said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t like to lend these things out or mess up the books.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘You’ll have to sign a receipt and leave me fifty bucks as an incentive, kinda, to bring it back. Sorry, but I won’t be happy otherwise.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I just hope I’ve got the cash on me.’
We settled on thirty-nine fifty. I handled the photograph carefully, putting it inside the hard cover of my notebook as I prepared to go.
Carson looked at me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘That all? Don’t you want something else?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What?’
‘How about Ginny’s address?’
The address was for a tiny board-sided bungalow in a dead-end street off Bethel Avenue, the south-east side of town. It was porchless and painted in faded lavender and sat on a plot of ground which ran to about five feet on each of the four box sides.
I knocked at the door and it was opened immediately by a woman as big and round as the house was small and square. ‘Hi, there,’ she said.
‘Miss Tonic?’
‘Why, I sure am, honey. Even if nobody much knows it these days. Hey, why’n’t you come on in.’ She stepped back and I entered. There were two chairs in the chintzed and laced and frilled sitting room. ‘Sit down, sit down.’
I sat down.
She poured me a drink. After giving it to me she topped up another, already seemingly a double, and sat down facing me. She drank deeply, plumped a cushion at the back of her head and said, ‘Ah, that’s more comfy. I got a call, out of the blue, from Charlie Carson about you. I nearly fell on my backside. He was only a run-around kid when I first met him, you know. God, it brings it back. Anyhow, Charlie said you might be coming around. I didn’t want to start before you, but I tell you, honey, I don’t usually wait for the sun to get this low before I have a little drink, you know?’
‘Many thanks,’ I said and sipped. It was undiluted vodka. ‘Not living up to your name these days, then?’
‘Naw. Don’t mind gin, but the tonic makes me all bubbly inside. So I give it up for Lent. About twenty years ago.’ She laughed loudly.
When she finished she shrugged and said, ‘The flavour kind of gets me down. Vodka’s straighter. You know where you are.’ She sighed. ‘Charlie said you’re looking for Daisy Wines.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Cute little kid.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘God, no. I haven’t seen her for years. I didn’t even know where she lived when I knew her, if you get me. I never did know her very well. Charlie didn’t say I did, did he?’
‘No.’
‘That’s all right. Naw, that was kind of my heyday, you know? Now is more my hay day because I sleep a lot. More and more, and alone, more’s the pity.’ She laughed again easily and tossed her hair from her eyes. Grey now, it had been dark in the photograph and I could see why, if she could sing too, she had enjoyed a popularity.
She said, ‘I knew Daisy only from having her start to sing in The Hideout when I wanted to take some time off. She was a tiny little kid. Not short so much as skinny. No meat on her and if there was anybody who was ever a change from me it was her.’
‘Do you know where she came from?’
‘She lived somewhere in town. Everybody wanted to know if she was old enough to work in a place like The Hideout. She looked maybe thirteen. But I suppose she was sweet sixteen and . . .’ She stopped.
‘Yes?’
‘Now that you mention it, I remember thinking that she sounded like she was fresh off the farm. The way she talked, you get me? I figured her for a real little country gal. Maybe she just up and moved to the big city. Yeah, that was probably it. But she had her a real sweet voice, and not quiet. It was no glass-rattler, but she could sing over the drunks and she got a bit of style as things went on.’
‘Charlie has a picture of her from The Hideout from 1936. Was that when she began?’
‘Yeah,’ she said unhesitatingly.
I smiled.
‘You wonder how come I’m so sure. Well, I had kind of personal reasons to take some time off in ’36. I took a few weeks to St Louis with a guy I thought I had plans with. They didn’t work out but I remember the year ’cause of that.’
‘Sorry things didn’t go well.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Guy got machine-gunned to death, machine-gunned no less, a couple of years later.’ She shivered and drank. ‘So many holes that his blood didn’t know which ones to leave by.’ She leaned back. ‘A year and a bit after I got back from St Lou I went to Texas. I worked down there mostly ever since. Houston in the war and Fort Worth after. I packed it in a few years ago and came back here.’
‘The name you were born with wasn’t Ginny Tonic?’
‘Uh no,’ she said. ‘The Ginny is mine right enough, but they had to force the tonic on me.’
‘So Daisy Wines was unlikely to be the girl’s real name?’
‘Right. Mike – that’s Charlie’s father – he gave us these names. Did Charlie explain?’
‘Yes. But you said you were Ginny already?’
‘Virginia, yeah. Must have been after the state.’
‘Does that mean there would be a good chance that Daisy was the girl’s real name?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really. More likely the kid came in for an audition with a daisy in her hair and Mike was drinking a glass of wine at the time.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m sorry. I never did know her that good, nor nothing much personal about her.’ And she stopped.
‘Something come back?’
‘She had a boyfriend. Well, I mean there were always a lot of guys hanging around club singers then, you know.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And around the dancers. And waitresses. And hat check girls. Jees, just think. Every guy around used to wear a hat. How many hats do you see nowadays?’
I took Charlie Carson’s photograph from my notebook and handed it to her.
She stared at it a long time.
I asked, ‘Is that Daisy’s boyfriend?’
Absently she said, ‘What? Oh. Yeah. I was looking at me. God, that was a long time ago. I wasn’t a bad-looking broad.’
‘You’re not a bad-looking broad now,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said dismissively. Then she looked up. ‘You know I was singing until a few years back?’
‘You said.’
‘I’ve got like I was made out of pink pumpkins since I stopped. I didn’t want to quit, but my voice began to crack and hurt and it’s no good like that. So I packed up and came back where I started. I looked up Mike’s boy. Hell of a guy, Mike. Didn’t forget you. Helped you if he could. If you was a friend. Rough bastard if you wasn’t. But I was. Good kid too, Charlie.’
‘Did you set much money aside?’
‘Not much. Some. I had money, mind you. Oh yeah, a lot of good money passed through my pudgy little fingers. But there are expenses too, to keep things going. Especially later on.’ She pushed up lightly on her cheeks with her finger tips. ‘Like my face. This old thing has been lifted so often it ought to float away like a goddamn helium balloon.’
‘You said the guy in the picture was Daisy’s boyfriend.’
‘Yep.’
‘Which guy?’
She picked the more obscured of the two men who were not Michael Carson. There was little distinguishing about him. In his twenties, dark hair. Smiling less than the others.
‘Do you know who he was?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I’d like to help more. All I know was that he seemed to have plenty of money, that he was crazy about her and wanted to marry her.’
‘Wanted to marry her or to become better acquainted?’ I asked.
‘Marry is what I heard. Though those was definitely the days of the good girls and the bad girls and we was usually considered bad girls. I don’t know. It’s only information I remember hearing kind of sideways since I was more involved with my own . . . engagements, if you get me.’
‘Did you ever hear of Daisy having a child?’
‘A child? Daisy? No. I never heard that. Why?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘As far as I knew Daisy didn’t know what it took to make a baby. Not that there weren’t plenty of fellas around, from the boss on down, willing to help a girl out on that part of her education.’
‘Country girls usually have at least a theoretical knowledge pretty early on,’ I said.
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘But if Daisy knew how she didn’t go in for practising.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I said she had this guy hanging around her all the time.’
‘Yes.’
‘Guy with money.’ She handed the picture back. ‘Not a bad-looking guy. Young. Well, in those days, in the kind of situation we was in, guys like that didn’t show up every day. Not for many of us. Well, all I know is that word was she wouldn’t let him touch her, you know what I mean? And she wouldn’t take nothing off him, no presents. There are some guys who maybe like that, and I couldn’t tell you if in the long run he was one of them. But I can tell you for fact that in those days, around The Hideout, there wasn’t many girls that had the nerve to play it like that for very long.’
‘And Daisy did?’
‘That’s how I recall it.’ She drained her glass. ‘But God, I don’t know if I’m remembering more than I remember, if you get me. Honest, I didn’t know the kid very good.’
‘I know you didn’t know her real name, but does something beginning with “V” ring any bells?’
‘ “V”? Like in victory?’
I nodded.
She shrugged. ‘Hey, I’m going to have another little drink. You keep me company?’
‘I think I would enjoy that,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got to go see some people.’
‘O.K. Yeah.’
‘One last thing.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Do you know where I could find anyone else from those days who knew Daisy?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said positively. ‘Lots of them.’
‘Where?’
‘In the graveyard, honey. I open the papers and I read a name and I remember it just in time to say goodbye. I’m a dying breed. Better ask your questions now.’ And without again inviting me to stay, she rose to refill her glass.