I forgot about them and went up to the desk clerk to ask if Glenroy Breakstone was in his room.
"Yeah, Gienroy's up there," he said and pointed to a row of house phones. One old man in a gray suit with fat lapels sat on the long couch in the lobby, smoking a cigar and mumbling to himself. The clerk told me to dial 925.
A thick, raspy voice said, "You have reached Glenroy Breakstone's residence. He is home. If you have a message, now's the time."
"Mr. Breakstone?"
"Didn't I say that? Now it's your turn."
I told him my name and said that I was downstairs in the lobby. I could hear the sound of Nat "King" Cole singing "Blame It on My Youth" in the background. "I was hoping that I could come up to see you."
"You some kind of musician, Tim Underhill?"
"Just a fan," I said. "I've loved your playing for years, and I'd be honored to meet you, but what I wanted to talk about with you was the man who used to be the day manager here in the fifties and sixties."
"You want to talk about Bad Bob Bandolier?" I had surprised him, and he laughed. "Man, nobody wants to talk about Bad Bob anymore. That subject is talked out."
"It has to do with the Blue Rose murders," I said.
There was a long pause. "Are you some kind of reporter?"
"I could probably tell you some things you don't know about those murders. You might be interested, if only for James Treadwell's sake."
Another pause while he considered this. I was afraid that I had gone too far, but he said, "You claim you're a jazz fan?"
I said that I was.
"Tell me who played the tenor solo on Lionel Hampton's 'Flyin' Home,' who played tenor for the Billy Eckstine band with Charlie Parker, and the name of the man who wrote 'Lush Life.' "
"Illinois Jacquet, I think both Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon, and Billy Stray horn."
"I should have asked you some hard questions. What was Ben Webster's birthday?"
"I don't know."
"I don't know, either," he said. "Pick up a pack of Luckies at the desk before you come up."
Before I had taken three steps back toward the desk, the clerk was already holding out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He waved away the bills I offered him. "Glenroy's got an account, but I almost never charge him for cigarettes. What the hell, he's Glenroy Breakstone."
"Don't I know it," I said.
13
On the St. Alwyn's top floor, the dull black door of 925 stood at the end of the long corridor to the right of the elevators. Patterned yellow paper covered the walls. I knocked on the door, and a wiry man of about five-eight with tight, close-cropped white hair and bright, curious eyes opened it and stood before me. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that said LAREN JAZZFEST across its front and loose black trousers. His face was thinner and his cheekbones sharper than when he had recorded Blue Rose. He held out his hand for the cigarettes and smiled with strong white teeth. I could hear Nat Cole singing behind him.
"Get in here, now," he said. "You got me more interested than an old man ought to be." He tossed the pack onto a table and shooed me into the room.
Sun streaming in the big windows at the front of the room fell on a long, colorful Navaho rug, a telescope on a black metal mount, an octagonal table stacked with sheet music, compact discs, and paperback books. Just out of the sunlight, a group of chairs faced a fifteen-foot-long hotel dresser unit flanked with speakers. Two large, framed posters hung on the exposed wall, one for the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice, the other for a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Glenroy Breakstone's name figured prominently on both. Framed photographs were propped against his shelves of records—a younger Breakstone in a dressing room with Duke Ellington, with Benny Carter and Ben Webster, playing side by side on a stage with Phil Woods and Scott Hamilton.
Two tenor saxophone cases sat on the floor like suitcases, and a baritone saxophone and a clarinet capped with mouthpieces stood upright on a stand beside them. The room smelted faintly of cigarette smoke only partially masked by incense.
I turned around to find Glenroy Breakstone smiling at me and knew that he had seen my surprise. "I didn't know you played clarinet and baritone," I said.
"I don't play them anywhere but in this room," he said. "About 1970, I bought a soprano in Paris, but I got so frustrated with the thing I gave it away. Now I'm thinking of getting another one, so I can get frustrated all over again."
"I love Blue Rose," I said. "I was just listening to it last night."
"Yeah, people go for those ballad albums." He looked at me a second, half-amused. "People like you, you ought to go out and get new records instead of playing the old ones over and over. I made one with Tommy Flanagan in Italy last year. We used Tommy's trio—I like that one." He moved toward the bedroom door. "You want fruit juice or something? I got a lot of good juice in here, mango, papaya, passion fruit, all kinds of stuff."
I said I'd have whatever he was having, and he went into the bedroom. I began inspecting the posters and photographs.
He came back carrying two tall glasses and handed me one. He gestured with his own glass toward what I had been looking at. "See, this is how it goes. Everything's overseas. In a week, I go to France for the festivals. When I'm there I'm gonna make a record with Warren Vache, that's all set up, then I spend the rest of the summer in England and Scotland. If I'm lucky, I get on a cruise and do a couple of the jazz parties. It sounds like a lot, but it ain't. I spend a lot of time in this place, practicing my horns and listening to the people I like. Tell you the truth." He smiled again. "I almost always listen to old records, too. You like that juice?" He was waiting for me to tell him what it was.
I sipped it. I had no idea what it was. "Is it mango?"
He gave me a disgusted look. "You don't know much about fruit juice, I guess. What you have there is papaya. See how sweet that is? That's a natural sweetness."
"How long have you been living at the St. Alwyn?"
He nodded. "Long time. First year I moved in here, in '45, I had a room on the third floor. Little tiny room. I was with Basie in those years, hardly ever got home. When I quit to form my own group, they moved me up to the fifth floor, way at the back, because I wanted be able to have rehearsals in my room. In '61, Ralph Ransom said I could have one of the big rooms on the seventh floor, same rent, after the guy who lived there died. Ralph was being good to me, because right around then the music business went to hell, and sometimes I couldn't make the rent. After Ralph sold out, I made a deal with the new people and moved up here and made the place safe."
I asked him what he meant.
"I got the only rooms in the place with new locks."
I remembered someone telling me that the locks in the St. Alwyn were no good. "So someone could keep his key when he checked out, come back a year later and get back into the same room?"
"All I know is, I lost my Balanced Action tenor and a new clarinet, and that ain't gonna happen anymore. The way things are now, you have one of those locks, you can come home, find a body parked in your bed. And if you're a cop in Millhaven, maybe you're even dumb enough to think a boy called Walter Dragonette put her there." He stepped away from the wall and gestured toward the chairs. "I been doing a lot of talking, but I think it's your turn now, Mr. Underhill."
We sat down on two sides of a low square table with an ashtray, a lighter, a pack of Luckies, and a flat black object that looked like a mirror folded into a case. A picture of Krazy Kat was stamped onto the case. Beside it was a flat wooden box with decorative inserts. Breakstone set his glass beside the box and lit a cigarette. "You think you can tell me something new about the Blue Rose murders? I'd be interested in hearing what that would be." He looked at me without a trace of humor. "For James Treadwell's sake."