Page 53 of Hanging and Burning

By the fifth or sixth cup of bad coffee, I called him.

“Son,” he hailed over the line.

“Pops. What you doin’ tonight?”

“Makin’ hog maws and turnip greens with Gert Lample. She’s the one makin’ ’em, but there ain’t no use cookin’ ’less you got somebody to eat it.”

“Wanna hear some jazz instead?”

“Okay,” he said without even a moment of hesitation.

My father had spent many long years in prison. He was innocent but nobody cared, not even me. I couldn’t help but hold it against him that he could have gotten out by incriminating the men who testified against him, but Chief Odin Oliver was no snitch. The time he lost freed him from the chains of everyday rote existence. So when somebody called with an offer of beauty or freedom or just something wild—he might very well say yes, yes, yes.

“But,” Chief Oliver stipulated, “I’m gonna have to bring Gert.”

I called Estelle Person and got her answering service. After leaving her the adjustment to the list of attendees, I dawdled over two more cups of coffee. Then I made my way to the parking structure that held my extra-tiny gray-green Bianchina, the smallest automobile Italia had to offer.

The Crimson King was a few blocks down from Columbus Circle. It was a new place constructed in the cellar of the Brown Hotel. I hadn’t been there, but people said that the brand-new old-school nightclub featured the kind of music that reminded you of why revolution so often went hand-in-hand with religion.

I was late. As was often the case when I was involved with an investigation, my mind wandered. I’d been thinking that finding a woman and telling her that her father, who pretended to be her grandfather, wanted to see her before he died shouldn’t have been a very difficult task. There was no reason to expect that the search would uncover a decades-old murder, or that one of the men suspected of that murder would be coming after me.

Big Billy Broadhurst and his Gang of Nine were playing that night at the Crimson King; that’s what the A-frame sign standing in front of the Brown Hotel said. I ambled down the long stairway to the rounded entrance of the club.

The doorman was an elder but elegant Caucasian gentleman. Tall, with a boy’s slender frame, he wore a shamrock-green suit, a bowler hat of the same color, a yellow shirt, and a maroon tie held in place by a large pink pearl on a golden stickpin.

When I walked up to New York’s version of a gatekeeper to jazz, he asked, “Reservation?”

“Macintosh.”

He looked at me, a question on his face. A question he did not voice. Instead, he opened the broad and brilliant ruby-colored door behind him, allowing a lively clarinet solo to escape into the night air. The ostiary of the Crimson King then gestured for me to enter.

This room was a much larger version of the entranceway. Almost perfectly circular, it was informed by scarlet and shadow, with yellow lights twinkling here and there. The main room had at least two hundred inhabitants seated among the tables, which ranged from small to large. Almost every seat was taken and there were many more customers at the L-shaped bar.

“Claudette,” the doorman in green called.

Out of the kaleidoscope of music, chatter, and dark red light came a strawberry-blond-haired Black woman who, like the doorman, seemed anchored to a place and time that one might walk toward but never really achieve.

“Name?” the deep-voiced woman asked.

The door behind me was closing. This simple fact felt like a sentence to hell, leaving me with the question, Is this really such a bad thing?

“Name?” Claudette asked again.

She reminded me of a poem that cast a brown man in the role of a river, an old man. But, I thought, maybe it was really Claudette, here in hell, who was the deliverance of sinners like me.

“It’s some place, huh?” she said, forgiving me, with these words, for not answering.

“Yeah,” I said with emphasis.

Now that she had my attention: “What name is the reservation under?”

“Macintosh.”

“Oh,” she said, delighted. “Miss Mara.”

Claudette was wearing a red full-length and close-fitting gown that shimmered even in the low light of the performance venue. She turned away and walked, expecting me to follow.

And I did play the role of her shadow. We wound our way between the tables, which accommodated anywhere from two to ten revelers. I was moving among the many pairs of young and not so young lovers and larger groups of hopeful souls, people who, I thought, might never know each other if it wasn’t for the river of music rolling over them.