CHAPTER 10

Epistrophy

I wasn’t expecting the NYPD to give me a medal for finding the murderer of an undercover cop. And they didn’t disappoint. I got zip.

Madder fack, as I’d once heard a TV evangelist say, they appeared to be pissed at me for showing that Sig’s death had nothing to do with the investigation he and Leman were part of. The killing of poor Sig/Charlie was motivated by nothing more conspiratorial than unrequited love … jealousy. Diego’s formal confession had stated that he never knew Sig was a cop until the night he killed him, when he’d discovered Sig’s ID taped to his leg holster.

As for the world’s nastiest civil servant, Detective Leman Sweet, he seemed even more eager to get shed of me than I was him. After Diego was behind bars—his room on Rivington Street swept clean of all the sicko bondage magazines and his pitifully inchoate love letters to Inge—I had tried to talk to Sweet about the crazed chain of events that had linked us all. But he was resolutely not interested. The days went by. And the autumn weather turned the leaves to flame. There were no more mystery calls summoning me up blind alleys. No white girls shoving pistols up my nose. And, to be sure, no Henry Valokus.

He and whoever it was he was working with, working for, or running from, had obviously determined I wasn’t a player in their game. For which I had only to be grateful. And so I tried to bury the Rhode Island Red business as deep as the dead leaves of those first yellow roses.

If only I played the sax half as well as I played the fool. Ah, I could only try. Jefferson, my coach, said I was making progress even if I didn’t know it yet. I kept to the street gig, though, and that along with the few bucks coming in from the translation work I did for an avant-garde French publishing house kept me afloat.

Not to mention the help I got from Walt. He never knew what a beacon in the darkness he was for me. Oh, our carnal thing was still in place, but that wasn’t the main thing for me anymore. After all this time, I found out I could sort of talk to Walter about things—sort of. He tried to listen a little when I talked about Verlaine and I tried to listen when he worried aloud about the coming merger at work or bitched about the snotty fag at the tie counter at Barney’s.

I needed a substitute ear these days because, as of late, Aubrey was powerfully distracted. By something I couldn’t blame her for: my girl was in love.

I’d never seen Aubrey goofy before. Up until then, I thought her constitutionally incapable of it. But there she was—acting goofy. It was fifty percent treat and fifty percent pain in the ass. But she had my patience and indulgence coming to her, given all the dumb crushes and mad affaires de cæur she’d nursed me through over the years.

Her man was named Jeremy. He was tall, slender, fall down dead gorgeous, black as night—and British! And every time he dropped a consonant or called her “luv”, she just about came in her jumpsuit.

Jeremy was actually more suitable for me. Yeah, I know how trifling that makes me sound. All I mean is, in a parallel universe, he and I probably would have got down immediately, as if preordained to do so. Jeremy was a working class genius who went to Oxford and now made his living as a music critic—everything from Schoenberg to Hendrix. But his passion was jazz. He was quick and hip and worldly and traveled and charming. He had taken time off from his music magazine job to write a book on Fletcher Henderson and was in New York relaxing after having turned a first draft over to his editor.

Lucky for the lovers, we were in this universe, where Jeremy had walked into the Emporium one night in the company of a friend of his (a drag queen who calls herself Velveeta) and had taken one look at Aubrey and … Well, it makes me rethink who was predestined to be with who. Lord, were they hot together, Aubrey and Jeremy. And it was out there for everybody to see. I was truly happy for her.

One of Jeremy’s paychecks which had been waylaid for weeks finally arrived. He wanted to celebrate. So he invited Walt and me to join him and Aubrey at a posh supper club uptown where a pianist he knew was performing.

Didn’t exactly sound like my scene, a stodgy, rip-off East Side boîte. An ungracious Walter put it best, perhaps: the grub’s gonna stink and we gonna be the stone only niggers in the place.

It didn’t help matters that he and Aubrey did not get along. But I went to work on him; and when the appointed evening rolled around, after he had diddled me nicely in the shower and fought me for a place in front of my full length mirror, Walt was brushing off his latest finery and pestering me to finish my make-up. We were only ten minutes late arriving.

Aubrey had never been a heavy drinker. But she was doing margaritas that night, just to keep pace with Jeremy, who had an apparent fondness for hundred proof Absolut. “Vodka, Nan?” he offered when Walter and I slid into their booth. Only he pronounced it “vodker.”

“Why not, old bean?” I accepted.

I had spent time with Jeremy on two occasions before that night. He and Walter, however, had never met. First off, Walter was floored by the accent. It was almost as if he didn’t believe that was Jeremy’s real voice. No real black man could sound like that, he seemed to believe. But as we all drank and began to relax, the two men seemed to be stumbling their way onto common ground. It was only when Walt starting talking basketball that he lost Jeremy, who sat through Walt’s breathless recitations of Patrick Ewing’s stats in dead silence.

“Never went in much for sports,” Jeremy said finally. “I was a wash at football. Don’t mind skiing once in a while though.”

Walter looked at me in a kind of horror, then at Aubrey, and finally back at Jeremy, who, Walt had plainly decided, was a Martian.

In the quietly tasteful, tastefully quiet room, Aubrey erupted with raucous laughter. Then she turned to her beloved and kissed him on the mouth. “You know, Jeremy, Nan’s a writer too,” she said when that was finished. “They published something she wrote about Remy.”

“Remy? Who’s that, luv?”

“Rimbaud,” I explained. “It was in the world’s littlest little magazine.”

“Smashing. I’ve got a soft spot for the surrealists myself. Mate of mine wrote a book about Robert Desnos, you know—the poet who survived Buchenwald.”

I thought I heard Walter groan just then. But he needn’t have worried. What promised to be a highly effete conversation was cut short when Jeremy’s friend, pianist Brad Weston, took his seat.

The trio led by Weston was good, damn good. I could tell by the crisp solemnity of the chords introducing Maiden Voyage that they would be. There followed a heartbreaking version of I’ll Be Seeing You. And Weston’s solo on My Foolish Heart quite literally made me cry. If his mission was to bum out this crowd, he was succeeding brilliantly.

When the set was over and the applause had abated, the pianist headed over to our table.

“Trriffick set, mate—trrifick!” Jeremy said, standing to greet him. “Wife didn’t leave you or anything, did she?”

Weston smiled a little and shook his head.

Jeremy made the introductions and Walt, Aubrey, and I supplied the compliments. After a few moments of small talk with us, the pianist pushed his scotch aside and removed his eyeglasses in order to massage his temple.

“Headache?” Jeremy asked him.

He shook his head. “No, no, man. I’m just tired. I went to a funeral today and it just wasted me. It was so … terrible … so sad and terrible.”

“Who died?”

“Old cat. He was a trumpeter. Died of a stroke. They collected money at the union hall to bury him. Name was Heywood Tuttle. Ever hear of him?”

Jeremy shook his head. “I can’t place him. The name rings some kind of bell though, however faint.”

“Faint is about right, man. Couldn’t have been more than ten people at the cat’s funeral. It’s like he fell through a hole in life, you know. Good musician. Played most of his life up in Providence. I think he gigged once or twice with Bird, as a matter of fact. But he was on junk a lot of the time. Got busted a lot and spent years in the joint.

“By the time he got to New York he was too old to be a junkie. He was just another wino, I guess. Pitiful. I saw him once in a while around Times Square. He was begging for quarters. Playing a damn harmonica and looking like something from the circus. God, I hated seeing him like that. I gave him ten bucks.

“The guy that collected the bread for the funeral told me Tuttle had been flopping at a tenement over by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. An old man like that stuck in all those fumes. Sick. Choking. Forgotten. Like he never gave a thing to the world. Can you imagine that?”

Yes, I could.

If nobody else could, I could.

He was talking about Wild Bill! Oh Jesus.

So Wild Bill—or Heywood Tuttle—was from Providence. From Rhode Island! New England. Like Henry Valokus and that “family” he was said to be part of.

So Wild Bill had some connection, however fleeting, to Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker was Henry’s raison d’être, or so he had claimed.

So Rhode Island Red wasn’t a thing but a person. Tuttle himself was Rhode Island Red—right? But how was it possible that burned out, bad-tempered little Wild Bill had been the cause of all the death and mayhem?

And then, what had the kidnapping episode been about? Why did those idiots go to such lengths to get me to stop talking about Rhode Island Red? And why hadn’t they killed me if shutting me up was so important?

And what did any of it have to do with Henry Valokus?

I couldn’t answer a single one of those questions—yet.

This had all the elements of a film student’s low budget homage to Godard—a saintly blind girl; a carful of killers; a brutal policeman and a cast of doppelgängers. Everybody had been leading a double life. There were two Sigs, two Wild Bills, two Henrys. I had tried to get them all out of my mind and my heart, but they just would not stay dead for me. Back they came, like a song.

The waste of the whole situation was devastating. Wild Bill, once a good musician, his vitality drained, lost to junk or juice, along with his talent and his pride. Siggy, barely thirty years old, murdered horribly. Diego, friendless and little more than a boy, who’d likely spend the remainder of his life in prison. Henry, who might or might not actually be dead but who was just as lost to me one way as the other.

I must have turned sickly green. Because Aubrey and Jeremy, Brad Weston and Walter were all looking at me with fear and concern. I tried to tell them I was okay, but they hustled me out of there and into a taxi.

No, I couldn’t help thinking about the waste. And I couldn’t help thinking I had to be the one to put a stop to it. But first I had to understand it.