Bart had pushed it as far as he could to get them out of there before they recognized him. Could make it worse with more hostility, some sharp-eyed cat along the stick might see something was wrong and sniff around for any profit in it. Profit was a big motivating factor in the Tenderloin, where almost anyone would sell you out for almost anything.
Maybelle felt the music in her throat, her eyes, her body. Fat now, old, heavy legs, varicose veins. But there’d been a time when her sweet man had loved her, roamed her dark flesh with his electric fingers, between them they’d made her Jedediah.
Sleepy Ray had a beckoning hand raised. Bart went down to him, looking at his watch. “You’re gonna be late, Ray.”
“Never mind ’bout that now. You give me another shot an’ lemme lissen to that woman singin’ along with that juke.”
Bart glanced over. Sure enough, what he’d thought was just a record was also Maybelle, singing along in a deep, rich voice.
Sleepy Ray shoved his five across the stick again, said with dignity, “You give those two another beer an’ you tell ’em it’s from Sleepy Ray. An’ you take it outten this here, hear?”
“I hear,” said Bart.
The song was finished. Ken Warren hadn’t heard Maybelle sing in years — not since she’d been told about Jed. Hadn’t seen her looking so happy, either, come to that.
Two fresh beers were set down in front of them.
“From Sleepy Ray — the gent at the end of the bar,” grated the bartender in his atrocious voice.
They raised the new bottles in acknowledgment, and the old black man at the end of the bar raised his shot glass in salute.
“Sleepy Ray!” Maybelle exclaimed. “Sleepy Ray Sykes? That man used to play the meanest blues piano in the Fillmore!”
Suddenly, after all these years, the old piano on the stage started to tinkle. Sleepy Ray had climbed up there, plunked his skinny butt down on the bench, and his hands had begun caressing chords from the keys as if they were birds finally able to sing again.
“Pretty lady,” he called over his vamping, “you know ‘Move It’? Bertha Idaho recorded it back in the twenties.”
He played. Maybelle, not really knowing what or how or why, was singing.
Sleepy Ray did. Maybelle did. They moved it on away out of there. So far that everyone was clapping, while Bart was calling Sleepy Ray in sick to the warehouse. People were drifting in from the night. People hadn’t heard anything like that coming from Mood Indigo for just a whole lot of years.
Chapter Twenty
Morales was getting drunk in a little cantina on 23rd Street where gringos liked to eat Mexican food and drink Mexican cerveza. Three big-brimmed sombreros hung behind the bar, the kind with excessively tall rounded crowns like termite nests and wide round upturned brims where men in high heels were supposed to do their stamping dances to “La Cucaracha” at fiesta time.
Nobody wore hats like that anymore, let alone danced on them; not unless they were performing in the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts. The patrons lining the bar wouldn’t know that: they all had pale faces.
Morales would rather stamp on the cockroaches themselves than on hat brims. Christ knew there were enough cucarachas in the unused kitchen of his apartment. Turn on the lights in the middle of the night, there was the soft rustle of hard, scurrying bodies. When he had money, lots of money...
Which is why he was drinking in a phony-ethnic place he would never drink in. Why he had eaten truly terrible Tex-Mex that he would never normally eat. He had to get drunk somewhere to celebrate the fact that he was going to get a lot of money from Assemblyman Rick Kiely.
This afternoon he had faced Kiely down. Tried to do it in such a way that Kiely would feel it was easier to hire him than to send the wreckers after him. But he could have overplayed his hand; right now cold-eyed men of his race could be gliding through his usual haunts, looking for him. Patient men who had stood at casual labor curbsides for too many years to worry about what they did to make money they could send home to their families in Latin America every Saturday morning.
That’s why Morales was getting cautiously drunk in a place no one would expect him to be. And that’s why Morales would not return home. Tomorrow he would be back working his DKA assignments. One nice thing about being a private investigator, it was damned hard for anyone to put a finger on you.
Quarter to three in the morning, only Heslip left in Mood Indigo. That Maybelle had been something else. Who could have guessed? Heslip stacked the last of the chairs on the tables. Soul. Sleepy Ray, massaging the keyboard as if it were warm flesh and pulsing veins. Maybelle, doing songs and singers Heslip had never heard of, a vocabulary he didn’t have.
But he knew about soul. Look at old George Foreman, after ten years away from the ring working shopping malls and street corners as an itinerant preacher, in his mid-40s training on cheeseburgers and fries to come back and win one of the heavyweight crowns all over again.
Bart’s body, his fists, his reactions, they’d held his soul when he’d been in the ring. Ten, twelve long years ago now, but he was still at fighting weight. Still sparring partner for local headliners two or three nights a week. Still had those pro moves that, once learned, were never quite forgotten.
He swept the floor, hitting combinations in his head.
Being a P.I. gave him the excitement, challenge, sometimes the danger the ring had — without the cauliflower ears or the scrambled syntax. He’d be glad when his vacation was over so he could get back to it.
He cleared and left the till open with a $10 bill in it for any bust-in artists who might otherwise smash up the place in frustration. It was his own idea: he hadn’t seen Charlie Bagnis, the manager, since the day he’d been hired as a vacation-replacement bartender.
Bart put the rest of the money in the office floor safe, bagged the trash, killed the lights. Dark now except for the glow of the juke, which he left on as a night-light — again, his idea. Its soft pastels turned the bottles behind the bar into shadowy soldiers standing at attention in polished livery.
Green plastic trash bag over his shoulder, Bart stepped out into the alley, dark except for the single streetlight down at the corner, pulled shut the door with a crisp click that showed it had caught, closed the shutters and snapped the padlock shut on the hasp. Lifted the garbage pail lid, stuffed in the plastic bag, rattled the lid back into place.
A heavy-booted foot swept out of the shadows to kick his balls up into his teeth. But the kicker gave a grunt of effort, so Bart had time to twist his hips, take the kick on the thigh — Jesus that hurt! — as he let the force of his turn carry the extended and tensed heel of his hand up under the kicker’s nose as the man charged out of the shadows.