At the end of the block, I turned onto South Seventh Street. Next to Bob Bandolier's empty house, the Belknaps were drinking Hannah's lemonade and talking to one another on their porch. Hannah was smiling at one of Frank's jokes, and neither of them noticed me driving past. I stopped at Livermore Avenue, turned right on Window Street, parked in an empty spot a block away from the St. Alwyn, and walked past Sinbad's Cavern to the hotel.
The same old man I had seen before sat smoking a cigar in the lobby; the same feeble bulb burned behind its green shade beside the same worn couch; but the lobby seemed bleaker and sadder.
Under the lazy scrutiny of the desk clerk, I walked toward the pay phone and dialed the number on the slip of paper in my wallet. I spoke for a short time to a gruff, familiar voice. George Dubbin, Byron's father, told me that Damrosch had questioned Bob Bandolier—"Sure he did. Bill was a good cop." Then he said, "I wish my kid would go out with women his own age." When the conversation was over, I went across the lobby to the house phone and punched Glenroy Breakstone's room number.
"You again. Tom's friend."
"That's right. I'm down in the lobby. Can I come up for a short talk?"
He sighed. "Tell me the name of the great tenor player in Cab Calloway's band."
"Ike Quebec," I said.
"You know what to get before you come up." He put the phone down.
I went up to the clerk, who had recognized me and was already bending under the desk. He came up with two packs of Luckies and rapped them down on the counter. "Surprised he let you come up. Bad day for old Glenroy, bad day."
"I'll watch my back."
"Better watch your head, because that's what he's gonna mess with." He raised his right hand and shot me with his index finger.
When I knocked on Breakstone's door, loud jazz muffled his voice. "What'd you do, fly? Give me a minute."
Under the music, I heard the sound of wood clicking against wood.
Glenroy opened the door and scowled at me with red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing a thin black sweatshirt that said SANTA FE JAZZ PARTY. "You got 'em?" He held out his hand.
I put the cigarettes in his hand, and he wheeled away from me, jamming one pack into each of his pockets, as if he thought I might try to steal them. He took two steps and stopped, pointing an imperious finger into the air. The music surrounded us, as did a faint trace of marijuana. "You know who that is?"
It was a tenor saxophone player leading a small group, and at first I thought he was playing an old record of his own, one I didn't know. The tune was "I Found a New Baby." Then the saxophone started to solo.
"Same answer as before. Ike Quebec. On Blue Note, with Buck Clayton and Keg Johnson, in 1945."
"I should of thought of a harder question." He lowered his hand and proceeded across the bright rug to the same low table where we had been sitting before. Beside the Krazy Kat mirror and the wooden box sat a round white ashtray crowded with mashed butts, a nearly full pack of Luckies and a black lighter, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, and a highball glass containing an inch of whiskey. Breakstone dropped into a chair and looked at me sourly. I took the other chair without being invited.
"You messed me up," he said. "Ever since you were here, I been thinking about James. I gotta start getting my shit together to go to France, and I can't do anything but remember that boy. He never had his chance. We ought to be sitting up here together right now, talking about what tunes we'll play and the assholes we'll have to play 'em with, but we can't, and that's not right."
"It still affects you so much, after forty years?"
"You don't understand." He picked up his glass and swallowed half of the whiskey. "What he was starting, nobody could finish but him."
I thought of April Ransom and her manuscript.
He was glaring at me with his red eyes. "All of that music he would have made, nobody else can make that. I should have been standing right next to him, listening to the things he would have done. That boy was like my son, you understand? I play with lots of piano players, and some of them are great, but no piano player except James ever grew up right under my wing, you know?" He finished the whiskey in his glass and thumped the glass down on the table. His eyes moved to the wooden box, then back to me. "James played so pretty—but you never heard him, you don't know."
"I wish I had," I said.
"'James was like Hank Jones or Tommy, and nobody heard him except me."
"He was like you, you mean."
The red eyes gave me a deep, deep look. Then he nodded. "I wish I could go to Nice with him. I wish I could see through his eyes again."
He poured another inch of whiskey into his glass, and I looked around the room. Subtle signs of disorder were everywhere—the telescope tilted wildly upward, records and compact discs were spread on the floor in front of the shelves, record sleeves covered the octagonal table. Gray smears of ash dirtied the wrinkled Navaho rugs.
The record came to an end, and he glanced up at the turntable. "If you want to hear something, put it on. I'll be right back."
Glenroy slid the box toward him, and I said, "You can do what you like. It's your place."
He shrugged and swung back the top of the box. Two two-gram bottles, one about half full and the other empty, lay in a rounded groove along one side. A short white straw lay beside them. In the middle of the box was a baggie filled with marijuana buds resting on a layer of loose, crumbled shreds. He had lots of different kinds of rolling paper. Glenroy flipped back the lid of the mirror, took out a vial, unscrewed the top, and used the spoon to dump two fat white piles of powder on the mirror. He pushed them into rough lines with the long spoon attached to the screw top. Then he worked an end of the straw into one of his nostrils and sucked up one of the lines. He did the same thing with the other nostril.
"You get high?"
"Not anymore," I said.
He screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it into the groove in the box. "I been trying to get in touch with Billy, but I can't find him in any of his places. I want to get some for the plane over, you know."
Glenroy wiped his finger over the white smears on the glass, rubbed his gums, and closed the box and the mirror. He gave me the first halfway friendly look of the night and looked at the box again. "Billy better show up before tomorrow, man." He leaned back in his chair, wiping his finger under his nose.
"Does Tom do coke?" I asked.
He grinned derisively at me. "Tom won't hardly do anything at all anymore. That cat hardly even drinks. He acts like he juices all day and all night, but you watch him. He takes one tiny little sip, and that's it. That's that. He's funny, man. He looks like he's half asleep, you know what he's doing? The man is working."
"I noticed that the other night," I said. "He nursed one drink all night long."
"He's a sneaky mother." Breakstone stood up and went to the turntable. He removed the Ike Quebec record, grabbed its plastic inner sleeve from a shelf, and slid it into the sleeve. "Duke, I want some Duke." He moved along the shelves, running his hand over the tops of the albums, and pulled out an Ellington record. With the same rough delicacy, he set the record on the turntable. Then he turned down the volume knob on the amplifier. "I don't suppose you came over here just to listen to my records."