“YOU SURE DO KNOW how to get in trouble, don’t you, Mr. Carter?” Seraphina chided as we came into the bustling establishment.
“I just wanted to see Big Mouth.”
“You got to be polite to people like John-John,” she said as if she were the elder and I the child.
“I like you, girl.”
“You a fool.”
“You know many men who aren’t?”
The hardest thing I might have done that month was getting Seraphina to grin.
“Why did they give me trouble?” I asked. “I mean, there’s all kindsa people here.”
“John-John an’ them out there to make sure it’s safe for the people,” she said.
“I’m a people.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “But you look like trouble. When you meet Big Mouth, don’t call him Big Mouth. He don’t like that name. His real name is Eddie Jones, but he don’t like people callin’ him that neither.”
“What do
you
call him?”
“Eddie.”
“I see.”
She brought me to a table fit for six behind a half-wall to the left of the crowded bar. There were eight or nine men gathered there but the only one I was interested in was the dolphin-faced black man sitting against the back wall. That, I was sure, was Big Mouth Jones.
“Hi, Eddie,” Seraphina said to Jones. “This here is Mr. Carter. He said he wanted to aks you sumpin’.”
“He your friend or customer?” Big Mouth Jones asked, ignoring me.
“Friend.”
I wondered if it was the tip or the fact that I didn’t want sex that made Seraphina like me. Maybe it was just because I made her almost laugh. My father, for all his left-wing idealism, had often told me,
Leonid, you’ll find as you get older that some women are attracted to trouble.
Whatever it was, Jones rapped his knuckles against the shoulder of a skinny walnut-colored man next to him. This fellow, who looked to be about half my age, stood up without a word and moved off. I pressed my way toward the back of the table, taking the vacant position.
“You heavy?” Jones asked when I was seated.
“No.” I looked around to see Seraphina walking away.
“How you know Seraphine?”
“We talk from time to time.”
Jones’s face was ageless and unfathomable. He could have been mistaken for thirty-five but he was closer to fifty-nine. He smelled of a little too much good cologne and stale cigarette smoke.
I was about to start in on my line of questioning when the houselights went down and a spotlight hit the stage.
“Frank,” Jones said to a blocky man on the other side of the table.
“Yeah?”
“Walk around with some guys and make sure the people quiet down.”
The man nodded and departed into the gloom.
I turned to ask Eddie my question but his attention was glued to the stage.
A brown woman made an entrance. She wore a tight-fitting dress of golden sequins. Her hair was perfect and the body looked as if it had been designed for just that night, just that stage. Without preamble, recorded music came up and she started to sing. It was perfectly good singing, on key, strong, deeply felt. She was singing about a man she’d die for—from the look in his eye, I could tell that Eddie thought that man was him.
“Can I get you something to drink, sir?” a voice whispered from behind my right shoulder.
It was a small white man with a Jimmy Durante nose.
“You got a good brandy?”
“Yes sir. We have a wonderful Armagnac.”
“Bring me a triple shot.”
THE SINGER BELTED out four love songs before taking her bows; the dress was cut so low that I almost looked away. The whole restaurant broke out in applause. I couldn’t help wondering if Big Mouth had anything to do with that.
The lights went up and the woman, who was no more than thirty, came to our table. She moved past me and gave the impresario a deep soul kiss.
“That was beautiful, baby,” Jones said.
She beamed in reply.
“This is my girl, the next Whitney Houston,” Jones said to me, “Brenda Flash.”
I smiled and lied to her. She smiled in my general direction, never asking my name.
Another one of the men left and Ms. Flash settled on the other side of the boss. The table was abuzz for a while about the potential for her career. I listened and sipped.
The waiter was right about the liquor.
“SO WHAT IS IT you wanted to ask me?” Big Mouth said, nearly an hour later.
Brenda had departed, promising to see her man upstairs somewhere when he was through with his business. The restaurant was in full swing.
“I was wondering if you knew a man named Willie Sanderson.”
Jones’s deceivingly benign features took on a sharp, dangerous aspect, bringing to my mind a knife being drawn from its sheath.
“Why?” he asked.
The other seven men at the table were staring at me.
“He tried to murder me.”
“Tried?” Jones asked.
“Yeah. I broke his head for him and so he gave up.”
“You a lyin’ mothahfuckah,” a brutal guy from across the table said. He was bulky from too much weight lifting.
“Would you like me to show you?” I asked the frowning goon.
This man stood up, making a sound that maybe made sense in the hinterlands of Albany. The most memorable things about him were his Caucasian features and coal-black skin.
“Sit down, Sammy,” Jones ordered. And then, “I said sit yo ass down.”
When Sammy did as Sammy was told, Jones turned his attention back to me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know Willie. White dude likes the darker things in life. He used to hang out here. Even sat at this table once or twice. They say he got a wicked temper, but he was calm around black peoples. What you wanna know about him?”
“Anything I can,” I said. “I mean, this Willie tried to slaughter me an’ I ain’t nevah even met the boy.”
Jones looked at me—hard. His smiling dolphin lips seemed to be frowning also.
“Why come to me?”
“You the man.”
I could have died at that table never knowing what happened to my father after he went down to Chile. No one had notified us of his death and I’d made a promise to my mother before she died.
While I was having these final thoughts, Eddie Jones came to a decision.
“Willie killed a bus driver that disrespected him,” the gangster informed me. “But when they brought him to trial the judge said he was what they call chemically insane. His aunt worked for these rich white people and they send him off to the Sunset Sanatorium. Doctors give him some pills an’ say he’s cured and can go home, only he likes it there so takes a job as a orderly. It was a good gig until they figured out that he was sellin’ prescription drugs from their medicine cabinet and buyin’ recreational drugs for the wealthy clients they had.”
At the end of this speech he shrugged and gazed into my eyes.
I silently nixed the thought of asking about Fell because, as far as I knew, the body hadn’t been discovered yet.
“Thank you, Mr. Jones,” I said.
This response surprised him.
“You don’t wanna know nuthin’ else?”
“No. Why?”
“I’on’t know. I thought maybe you heard that Willie was workin’ for me when he was up at the loony bin.”
“Did you send him down to New York to kill me?” I asked.
“No.”
“I just wanted to hear a little about the man tried to kill me. If you don’t have anything to do with that, then I don’t have any more questions.”
Big Mouth’s stare was interminable. He was the master of his world because he paid attention to every detail.
“What you thinka Brenda?” he asked at last. “You know, I’m gonna get her a recordin’ contract.”
“She’s a beautiful woman but . . .”
“But what?”
I stood up.
“But,” I said, “you got a soul singer on your center stage and all the young muscle outside studyin’ how to throw rhymes. And you know the only dis worse than disrespect is the disconnect.”
Big Mouth frowned at me, but I was already moving away.
34
I
called Katrina on my way back to the Minerva.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“Fine. I’m just up here in Albany looking into a few things.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
When I got off the phone I realized that my ire at Katrina was based on events from long ago, events that no longer mattered. I wasn’t mad at her, and she was genuinely concerned about my well-being. But like with Baum’s Tin Man, the only thing missing was a heart.
I SLEPT LONG and hard in the old bed. It was one of the few times I could remember that I didn’t dream about fire or falling. Opaque drapes kept out the summer sunlight, so I didn’t rouse until almost seven. I washed, shaved, and dressed in a different suit that looked just like the one I wore the night before. I ate scrambled eggs and bacon while scouring the
Albany Times Union
for any word on Norman Fell. He was yet to be discovered.
After breakfast I got directions from the concierge and drove my rental southeast of the city about twenty-five miles.
The Sunset Sanatorium was set off from the highway behind a forest of maples. The thirty-foot wrought-iron gate was painted violet-pink, and the road leading to the guard’s kiosk was paved in real cobblestone. The buildings beyond the sentry’s station were made of brick and covered in ivy. It looked more like an Ivy League college campus than a mental institution.
When I pulled up next to the booth a black man in a powder-blue uniform and a dark-blue, black-brimmed cap came out to brace me.
“Can I help you?” he said.
I handed him a business card that said I was Ben Trotter, a private detective working out of Newark.
“Looking for information on a Willie Sanderson,” I said while he read.
“Willie doesn’t work here anymore,” the middle-aged, dark-brown man informed me.
He was short and slight, built for the long haul—the kind of man who could carry half his weight in tobacco or cotton from way out in the fields.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. They got him in a hospital after he tried to kill a man. My client wants to know why.”
The guard had descended, like me and many of our brethren, from a long line of suspicion. He pinched a corner of my card, regarding it with unconscious intensity. I believed that I could read that stare. He was thinking that there was something wrong with my brief explanation. But he was looking beyond the lie, to see if I posed a problem or if I was okay. After a moment he came to the conclusion that I was okay enough.
“Make a left at the end of this road,” he said. “The second building on your right is number four. That’s the human resources office. I don’t know what they can tell you, though.”
“Thanks,” I said and drove on.
I PARKED IN the lot that the guard directed me to but didn’t go into the HR offices. Instead I walked around the other side of the building into a large quad where a couple dozen patients and their handlers were taking the sun.
It was like no other mental institution I’d seen. The staff wore gray-and-white clothes that were uniforms only because of their similarity of color, while the patients dressed for leisure. It might have been a Florida retirement community, except many of the residents were middle-aged, and even young.
I walked around, getting a feel for the place, trying to understand something, anything, about the environment that Willie Sanderson had been immersed in. He was my only living link to the murderous conspiracy.
“Hello, young man,” a white woman said.
She was older, maybe seventy-five, wrapped in a summer frock of swirling emerald and turquoise and holding a pink parasol up against the sun. She was seated on a violet-pink wrought-iron bench.
“Hello,” I said.
“Are you a visitor?”
“I guess so,” I answered, sitting down.
“You don’t know?” She was small with big eyes and lots of red rubbed into her thin lips.
“Well,” I said lightly, “I’m not a patient, and I don’t work here, so what’s left?”
The older woman smiled and then grinned. Her teeth weren’t well maintained but the mirth outshone her bad hygiene.
“Do you know somebody here?” she asked.
“I know somebody who used to be here.”
“Who’s that?”
“A guy named Willie Sanderson.”
“Willie,” she said with wistfulness and wonder in her frail voice. “Yes. He didn’t want to help me with everything, but he brought me dreams when I needed them. But he’s not here anymore. They sent him away. They send all of the good ones away.
“Do you think that an old woman is sick if she wants to be with men?” she asked, changing the subject as if it were a summer’s breeze and she Mother Nature.
“Not at all,” I replied, tacking my sail to her whim. “A woman is a woman until the day she dies.”
“My family doesn’t agree with you,” she said. “There I was, sixty-seven with a husband limp as a popped party balloon—and I was still young in my heart. And not only there.”
Her tone was both suggestive and engaging. I liked her.
“Do you want to get out?” I asked seriously. She seemed sane to me and I was always looking for work, no matter how bad things got.
This question grabbed the old girl’s attention. She heard the earnestness in my tone, just as the guard at the front gate had heard the lie.
“No,” she said. “I’m getting older, and I find it easier to get what I need right here.”
This reply seemed to punctuate the end of something. I took the opportunity of this lull to ask my question.