Trane Stop wrapped up its set after a mere thirty minutes, leaving the crowd restless. Toby collected his band backstage after they’d set up their gear, running through his finalized lead sheets for “Moanin’” one last time before motioning them out into the lights.
Each man wore a prim gray suit, looking older than old school, almost Basie-esque. The crowd didn’t seem to know what to make of them as they took their places. Toby snapped his fingers to sound the count, on the downbeat a two-stick crack hit the snare, and the band launched hard into Booker Ervin’s “East Dallas Special.” The freight train came alive with the horns: Roderick Coover on trumpet, Ikem Ononuju on alto, Francis on tenor, Toby on trombone. Rounding out the band, the rhythm section—Chubby Jefferson on six-string bass, Penny Tyler on drums, Jimmy Seagraves on Hammond B-3—they drove the horns from underneath, the organ humming, bass and drums kicking hard, testament to their background as a blues trio in the Groove Holmes mold.
Toby sensed a curious distraction in the room, but with the lights in his eyes he could make out nothing. He sent the band into its second tune without a pause—“Sack o’ Woe,” a Cannonball Adderley number. They were hardly through the second chorus before Toby knew he had to change tack or lose the crowd for good.
Instead of the Afro-Cuban treatment of Benny Carter’s “Malibu” he’d planned, he shouted out Stanley Turrentine’s “Sugar.” They didn’t have it in their charts; it was an upbeat head they used for warm-up at practice. Nobody balked. Toby counted it off and the Hammond B-3 howled the intro, driven from behind by a constant
tang-tang-tang
on the crash cymbal. The hook was in the bass line, a two-phrase minor second cadence tripping down from the top, then digging up from the bottom. As the horns chimed in, Toby sensed the bodies welling up from shadow toward the stage, not all of them but more than before—he could feel it, something turning. And yet that same unsettling discord remained in the background. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the rest of the room fell into their hands, to win or lose. He signaled one more solo from Jimmy on organ and Francis on tenor, then one last shout chorus and a fanfare to end.
Toby wasted no time. He called out Monk’s “I Mean You,” and from that point on it was one peak after another: Lee Morgan’s “Speedball,” Horace Silver’s “Filthy McNasty,” and for the Neo-Swing freaks a medley comprised of Basie’s “Topsy,” Ellington’s “Cottontail,” and Charlie Barnet’s “Mother Fuzzy.” They had the crowd firmly in hand when it came time for the set’s finale. Ikem switched to tenor. Francis manned the baritone, took a few short toots to test the reed, then stepped forward to announce that deadly theme.
A hush fell. Toby pictured his father, out in the dark crowd, stunned despite himself. And, on some level, proud. Francis cut the silence with angular minor arpeggios that ended amid a cymbal fanfare, then reannouncement of the theme, a slow horn buildup underneath in minor harmonies with the rhythm building, driven on the backbeat. By the third announcement of the theme, it was time for the horns to do battle, rise and wail, finishing in a raucous, hair-raising dissonance from which Francis emerged alone on baritone to solo.
He hadn’t finished his first full chorus before he had the room in his control. Keeping his lines short and clear, he made up in raw conviction what he lacked in technique. No showboating. It worked. He sold it, building it up, tearing it down to build it right back up again. As Roderick stepped up from the rear to claim the next solo on trumpet, the crowd erupted.
A police officer entered the interview room, bearing several plastic bags with blank labels on them and a kit of some kind. He was Black, rangy but strong, with a stooped gait, a few years older than Toby. His nameplate read:
CARMICHAEL.
From his kit, Officer Carmichael produced a small vial and several cotton swabs. He set them on the metal table, then turned to Toby with a phony smile.
“One of the things we do,” he said, “in a case like this, is try to make sure we’ve done everything we can to prove family members aren’t involved.” He nodded toward the paraphernalia laid out on the table. “The vial, it contains a nitric acid solution. Tests for gunshot residue. The way it works, I swab your hands, tops and palms, thumbs and forefingers, each with a different swab. We send them to the lab. Come back clean, whoever really did the shooting can’t come up and say we didn’t do everything we were supposed to.”
This is a cop, Toby reminded himself, not a pal. “Nitric acid,” he said.
“Doesn’t burn,” Carmichael assured him. “It’s like point-five percent.”
Toby stuck out his hands. “Do it.”
“One at a time.” Carmichael gestured for Toby to pull the left hand back. Wiping down the whole of Toby’s right palm, he placed the swab into a plastic bag, marked the white label with Toby’s name, the date and time, and the words “Right palm,” then moved on to the top of the hand, the thumb, the forefinger, just as he’d said. He repeated with the left, then told Toby as he was labeling the final bag, “You want to wash your hands, I’ve got a towelette for you. Just a minute.”
“This isn’t just to rule me out. It’s to see if I’m my father’s killer.”
Carmichael glanced up—not bothering with the smile this time. He studied Toby’s face, his shoulders, his hands, as though searching out some tic, some flinch, an unconscious flutter of the eye that would signify guilt. Toby felt scared to so much as draw too deep a breath.
“When do I—”
“The detectives are still wrapping things up at the scene.” Carmichael capped and pocketed his pen. “When they’re done, they’ll come down and fill you in.”
He handed Toby the towelette he’d promised. “Just pitch it in the trash can when you’re done.”
The band regrouped in the former storage room where the musicians kicked back between sets. People straggled in and out, smiling, offering congratulations—members from the other bands, hangers-on, the young girls who showed up every Saturday night backstage somewhere. Jimmy, the organist, took out a flask of gin to pass around; they didn’t know the place well enough to fire up a blunt. Toby declined a taste. He was waiting for Nadya and his father to come on back. Players from the other bands made a point now to introduce themselves. Toby smiled and nodded and shook hands and decided not to ask about the unsettling resistance he’d felt coming from the rear of the room.
A commotion came from the doorway. Toby hoped it was his father and Nadya and was halfway to the door before seeing it wasn’t. Jimmy’s twenty-year-old cousin, Javelle, stood there dripping wet, cursing, fresh from the parking lot. He wore a suit to match the band’s, a ploy to attract girls, but now it sagged on him, soaked through from the rain.
Seeing the disappointment on Toby’s face, Javelle barked, “Get that look off me, Tobo!” He pushed his hat back from his face. Droplets fell onto his shoulders. “Damn.”
Toby made way for Javelle to pass, then peered out into the hallway. He checked the lines queued outside the Gents and Ladies, checked the crowd at the pay phone, made a quick reconnoiter out toward the stage. Wandering the dance floor, he accepted handshakes and compliments here and there, searching the faces. Near the back, he began to sense that same odd resistance he’d felt on stage. Inside the bar it got worse. A palpable tension charged the air. People stared at him a little too long, or they made a point of ignoring him. You’re imagining, he told himself. Maybe.
At one end of the bar, an indie promoter who worked for Carmen DiCarlo dabbed at his face with a bloodstained towel. When he glanced up, his eyes met Toby’s with unmistakable hate. Beyond him four guys in a cluster sat grinning. There’d been a fight, Toby realized. He came back to the musicians’ room worried. Francis drifted up, bearing Jimmy’s flask.
“You seen Pops?” Toby passed on the gin again.
Francis shook his head and handed the flask to an approaching Javelle, who, before taking his taste, said, “Fifty dollars for a goddamn jump. You believe that?”
Javelle drove the van that Jimmy used to transport his B-3 and Leslie cabinet.
“Leave your lights on?”
Javelle reached up, snagged the hat off his head, and spanked it against his pant leg. “Walked all the way to the Exxon off the freeway. Got back, you nizzels were done.” He frowned, shaped his hat, and put it back on. “Fifty goddamn dollars.”
The door opened again. Toby turned toward the sound with the last of his hope, but it was the club’s owner, Vanessa. The kind of woman who made every musician who played her room uneasy, she carried herself with a jaded affectation that made her seem doubly cold. Despite the layers of makeup, you could spot at a glance she was well past fifty—dyed red hair, straight as a drapery to her waist, a man’s white T-shirt beneath a suede cowgirl jacket, black leggings, red pumps. She held a cigarette stiffly between two straight fingers. Toby pictured her thirty years younger, saw a woman who made no secret about it:
I Fuck Money.
Careful, he thought. You’re sounding like the old man.
The whole band watched as she approached Toby. She placed the hand holding the cigarette on his shoulder, a certain dead look in her eyes. “Could I speak to you alone for a moment?”
Toby joined her near the door.
“Edgar said we had a little trouble in the bar tonight.”
Toby felt his insides sour. It got worse as she ran down her version of events: Older Black man coming out of nowhere, completely unprovoked, wailing on Grady Bradshaw, Carmen DiCarlo’s indie promo flack. A couple of guys who showed up at the bar from time to time waded in.
“Funny thing about it, these guys, the ones who jumped in, they were booing. But this old guy, he didn’t stomp on them. He headed straight for Grady. And Grady was trying to play the diplomat, get these fools to shut up. I think Grady knows who it was, the old guy who clobbered him, but he’s not saying. Being nice. Anyway, Edgar, my bartender, broke it up. Threw the old guy out. He had a young white woman with him. Tiny, pretty, pale. Ring any bells?”
Toby felt his face grow hot. Don’t blame the messenger, he told himself, but there was something about her eyes that galled him. “This happen during our set?”
Studying him, Vanessa took a long draw from her cigarette and exhaled through the side of her mouth. “In the bar.”
“I thought I heard something going on. But, you know, with the lights in our eyes, and the bar around the corner and all, couldn’t see anything from the stage. But there was something off. I felt it.”
“Have you heard anything? Since you’ve come offstage, I mean.”
“Nope.”
“Any ideas?”
“About?”
“Who it was.”
Toby feigned reflection, shrugged. “Can’t say.”
She nodded and took another drag from her cigarette. “Just so you understand, bar fights are no joke. They cost money. Some loser gets himself kicked out, comes back at me with a lawsuit, doesn’t matter if it’s crap or not, my insurance goes out the window. I have to scratch up surplus lines coverage, and that costs a fucking fortune.”
“Understood,” Toby said, thinking: Loser.
“I like you. I like your band. Be nice to have you back. But I can’t afford trouble.”
Toby realized that was it. They were blackballed. And why not? His old man had clocked the lead act’s promoter. The artery in his neck started throbbing.
Vanessa studied him for a moment. “My son,” she said finally.
“Excuse me?”
“Edgar says the old guy referred to somebody in the band as ‘my son.’ Or ‘my boy.’ Mean anything?”
Toby felt his sour insides grow cold. “Not to me.”
“He’s not related?”
“Who?”
“Stop it,” she said. “The guy we had to eighty-six. He related?”
“Not to me. My old man lives in Denver.”
Vanessa nodded, pretending to believe. She peeked around him, wanting to inquire of the others. Javelle took the bait. He’d been listening in anyway.
“Phrase ‘my boy,’” he said. “Kinda general, don’t you think? He’s Black. We’re Black.” He gestured as though, somehow, this might have escaped her. “His boys?”
“Don’t,” Vanessa cautioned.
“Javelle—”
“It’s a Black thing. One of those famous Black things. Had something about it on the Nature Channel just the other night.”
Vanessa dropped her cigarette on the floor and ground it out with the toe of her red pump. “Don’t start that shit with me. It’s really irritating.”
Toby got Francis to leave with him, drive him back home. The rain had stopped, but a winter wind howled off the bay. The asphalt remained wet, oil slicks shimmering in the headlights on the freeway.
“You mentioned something,” Toby said, “about a friend of yours, New York. Said he might have a lead on some session work, you and me. I know I said I wasn’t interested before, but I’ve got a different take on that now.” His mouth and throat were dry from rage. He licked his lips to get the saliva working. “First, though, I got some serious business with my old man.”
Once beyond the Carquinez Strait, Francis turned west on Columbus Parkway, heading through the hills toward the river, then north into town. Toby looked out at the passing street. Lone figures huddled in shadowed doorways, cigarette ash flaring at their lips. Drab one-story bungalows with barred windows and scant yards receded into darkness off the main drag, the streetlights busted by the corner crews, the better to make trade. Dogs barked somewhere, everywhere.
“I’ll have to talk to Nadya. Rather not just up and run.”
“Sure,” Francis said softly.
Toby could only guess at the humiliation of it, being the one standing there as the old coot went off, drunk most likely, the whole bar watching. And despite Toby’s telling her to just leave him there, turn right around and walk off if he did anything stupid, Nadya hadn’t done that. Just like she’d said, she’d seen it through, got his sorry old ass out of that club and brought him home. Uncanny, he thought, the mettle she had, for being so shy. He wanted to sit with her, apologize, thank her, tell her the plan, ask her to come with him. New York. Please. Do. Come.
Francis studied him a moment. “Kinda wondered just what, you know, it was gonna take.”