Right before they took a break, the piano player, a gaunt black man with horn-rimmed glasses and a precisely trimmed goatee, announced that they’d play themselves off with a song about a French girl in En-gland who was famous for her callipygian charms. “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment, ‘London Derriere.’ ” There were chuckles here and there, bafflement everywhere else.
He was goofing on “Londonderry Air,” of course, the old name of the tune that most people know as “Danny Boy,” and it’s one of the world’s most beautiful melodies but not often thought of as a good vehicle for jazz. They’d chosen it as a tip of the hat to Danny Boy Bell, who managed to look flattered and put upon at the same time. The tenor man played one chorus absolutely straight, and it was enough to break your heart, and then they took it up-tempo and worked changes on it, and it sounded okay to me, but it was essentially a novelty number. Except for the first tenor solo, which a man could listen to the whole night through, especially if he had a glass in his hand.
They wrapped it up, acknowledged the applause, and got off the stage. The piano player came over and told Danny Boy he hoped he 120
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didn’t mind, and Danny said of course not, and that they should hang on to the tenor man. “I wish,” the pianist said. “He’s here until a week from Thursday and then he’s on a plane to Stockholm.” Danny Boy asked what the hell he was going to do in Stockholm. “Eat blonde pussy,” the pianist said, and then he realized there were two women at our table and got all flustered, apologized profusely, and got out of there as quickly as possible.
Danny had some vodka and said, “Christ, how I always hated that fucking song.”
“It’s such a beautiful tune,” Elaine said.
“And the lyric’s a lovely thing, too,” he told her. “ ‘The summer’s gone, the roses all are fallen.’ But I heard it all the time when I was a little kid, I was fucking taunted with it.”
“Because of your name.”
“I was going to get taunted anyway,” he said, “because I was the funniest-looking kid anybody ever saw, this white-haired white-faced little pickaninny who couldn’t play sports and had to wear sunglasses and, on top of everything, was about ten times as bright as anyone else in the school, including the teachers. ‘Yo, Danny Boy! The pipes is callin’!’ ”
“But you kept the nickname,” Jodie said.
“It wasn’t a nickname. Daniel Boyd Bell is what I was christened.
That was my mother’s maiden name, Boyd, B-O-Y-D, like a Green-pointer trying to say Bird. I answered to Danny Boyd from the time I was old enough to answer to anything, and the D just got lost because people didn’t hear it, they assumed it was Danny Boy, B-O-Y, like the song.”
He frowned. “You know,” he said, “with all the people I know who got cornholed by their fathers and the crap kicked out of them by their mothers, I guess I got a pretty good deal. When you think about it.” We caught one more set, and Danny wouldn’t let me pay. “You had two Coca-Colas and one glass of soda water with a piece of lime in it,” he said. “I think I can cover it.” I said something about the cover charge, All the Flowers Are Dying
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and he said nobody at his table ever had to pay a cover charge. “They want to keep my business,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.” Something made me pull out the photo of the elusive David Thompson. I showed it to Danny and asked him if it rang any kind of a bell.
He shook his head. “Should it?”
“Probably not. He has a private mailbox a couple of blocks from here, so I thought he might have come in.”
“He’s got a face that would be easy to miss,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. You want to make copies and I’ll show it around?”
“I don’t think it’s worth it.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. Who is he, anyway?”
“Either his name’s David Thompson,” I said, “or it isn’t.”
“Ah,” he said. “You know, the same can be said for almost everybody.” When we got home Elaine said, “You’re a genius, you know that? You took a sad evening and turned it around. Did you ever think you’d live to hear the same person in the course of a single night describe himself as an albino pickaninny and an alter kocker?”
“Now that you mention it, no.”
“And, but for you, we’d have missed that. You know what you’re gonna get, big boy?”
“What?”
“Lucky,” she said. “But I think you should get lucky with somebody who’s clean and smells nice, so I’ll go freshen up. And you might want to shave.”
“And shower.”
“And shower. So why don’t you meet me in the bedroom in a half an hour or so?”
That was around twelve-thirty, and it must have been close to one-thirty when she said, “See? What did I tell you. You got lucky.”
“The luckiest I ever got was the day I met you,” I said.
“Sweet old bear. Oh, wow.”
“Wow?”
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“I was just thinking. And you know, there’s not a soul I know in the business, so I couldn’t even go and ask somebody.”
“Ask somebody what?”
“Well, I was just wondering what the impact of Viagra’s been on working girls. I mean, it would have to have a major effect, wouldn’t you think?”
“I think you’re a fruitcake.”
“What? A fruitcake? How can you say that?”
“A fruitcake’s not a bad thing. Good night. I love you.” So it turned out to be a good night, a wonderful night. What I didn’t know was that there weren’t going to be any more of them.
15
I woke up to the smell of coffee, and when I got to the kitchen Elaine had a cup poured for me, and an English muffin in the toaster. The TV
was on, tuned to the Today show, and Katie Couric was trying to be reasonably cheerful while her guest talked about his new book on the genocide in the Sudan.
Elaine said, “That poor schnook. He’s on national television, he’s got a book out on a serious subject, and all anybody’s going to notice is that he’s wearing a rug.”
“And not a very good one, either.”
“If it was a good one,” she said, “we wouldn’t spot it so easily. And imagine how hot it must be under those studio lights with that thing clinging to your scalp like a dead muskrat.” She had a cup of coffee, but no breakfast. She was on her way to the yoga class she took two or three times a week, and felt it was more effective if she did it on an empty stomach. She was out the door and on her way by a quarter after eight, and that was something to be grateful for, as it turned out.
Because she wasn’t around when they broke for the local news at 8:25. I was half listening to it, and just enough got through to engage my attention. A woman had been killed in Manhattan, although they didn’t say who or where. That’s not rare, it’s a big city and a hard world, but something made me change the channel to New York One, where 124
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they give you a steady diet of local news around the clock, and I waited through a pronouncement by the mayor and an optimistic weather report and a couple of commercials, and then an off-camera reporter was talking about the savage torture-murder of an unmarried Manhattan woman, and I got a sinking feeling.
Then a shot of the building she lived in filled the screen, and that didn’t mean it had to be her, she wasn’t the building’s only tenant, and probably not the only single woman. It didn’t have to be her. It could have been someone else who’d been found nude in her bedroom, stabbed to death after what the reporter grimly described as “an apparent marathon session of torture and abuse.” But I knew it was her.