“Good,” she said.
“You want to arm wrestle?” I asked. “You have great arms.”
“Nope,” she said, going back to twisting the dirty cloth. Some of the soap brushed across her stomach and she raised her tight shirt even more to wipe it away. Her abs were tight with a small waist and perfect rounded hips.
“I was wondering…,” I began.
The dancer with the pearl necklace walked behind the bar laughing to herself like drunk women sometimes do and latched her hands around the bartender. She kissed the nape of the woman’s neck and I felt my face flush with embarrassment.
“What were you wondering?” the bartender asked with a cocked eyebrow. The gesture sort of reminded me of my occasional girlfriend, Kate.
“Nothing,” I said, feeling for the warmth of the cup. “Nothing.”
A few seconds later, I heard a toilet flush over the slow, grinding funk coming from the jukebox and out walked a muscular man with gray hair holding a stack of newspapers. He looked to be in his fifties with the build of an avid weight lifter. His clothes were Italian and tight. Ribbed black T-shirt. Pleated trousers. Tassled loafers. He threw the papers onto the bar and took a seat next to me.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked. His face was craggy with lines around his mouth. His teeth were yellowed and he wore thin oval glasses that were popular with effeminate yuppies back in New Orleans.
“You Cook?”
“No, I’m the fucking Easter bunny,” he said, shaking his head and watching one of the strippers in a Catholic school-girl outfit. “Hell, yes, I’m Cook. So what? April said you wanted to see me.”
“I want to talk to you about Bluff City Records.”
“Sold that in ‘seventy-four,” he said. “I guess you’re shit out of luck.”
The bartender had pried herself away from her friend and was running the blender in between eavesdropping. She poured a pink slushy mixture into a tall beer mug and laid down a handful of pills by Cook.
He swallowed them all and gulped down half the drink.
“Amino acids. Vitamin B, and yohimbi bark. You want the rest of my shake?”
I shook my head.
“April? April?” he yelled. “Shit, go get Lola, would you? Goddamn it. I left her back in my office and she’s probably shittin’ all over everything.”
“Women,” I said, shaking my head again and finishing the last of the coffee.
“So, you gonna tell me what the fuck you want?”
“I’m looking for Clyde James.”
Cook belched. “He’s dead. Shit out of luck again.” He smiled. “You’re oh for two, fella… What are you, one of those crazy collector types? Had this British guy come in here once and offer me two thousand dollars for some of our recording logs. Now, that’s just fucking sick. Or is it sad? April? Goddamn it.”
April walked back to the bar tugging on the leash of a Boston terrier wearing one of those inverted-lampshade looking things that kept them from licking themselves. Didn’t help the dog’s looks any. The dog was just plain ugly with a severe crooked underbite and low-hanging tits.
And damn if she didn’t smell funny when Cook plopped her on the bar and let her lick the glass of his protein shake. She smacked and licked, facing her butt to me until she finally gave a grunt and farted.
“Ain’t she a beaut?” Cook said.
The dog turned and gave a cross-eyed stare at me, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t thing I’ve ever seen a dog like her. Makes Lassie look like a skank.”
When Cook turned away I grimaced at April. She grinned.
“Listen,” I said, watching Cook push the sleeves higher on his Italian T-shirt to show the world his biceps. “I heard you found him.”
“C’mon, podna. What do you want to get into that mess for?”
“I work for Tulane University and I’m working on a project about the last of the soul singers.”
Cook turned back to me with a look like he was just starting to take this conversation seriously. He nodded and crossed his arms and then unfolded them and scratched his dog’s flank. The cross-eyed dog twisted her head when she heard a high-pitched woman begin to sing some tired-ass Chitlin’ Circuit soul ballad.
“He was good,” Cook said. “Best I ever heard.”
“You saw him dead?”
He nodded and cleaned off his glasses.
“When was that?”
“Oh, shit, I don’t know.”
“Months, years, what?”
“I don’t know. Four years maybe.”
“Where was he?”
“Why do you care? You work for who?”
“Tulane University.”
“He’s dead, what the fuck’s the difference?”
“I need to know when and where,” I said. “Did he shoot himself?”
“Goddamn,” Cook said. “Get out of here.”
“C’mon, man, these aren’t hard questions.”
“I said get the fuck out of here.”
“You know Loretta Jackson?”
“Hell, yeah, I do. So what?”
“She sent me.”
“Why don’t you make up your fuckin’ mind why you’re here.”
“She wants to know what happened to her brother.”
“He’s dead.”
“I need some help, man. Give me something.”
“Get out,” Cook said, rising to his feet and puffing up his chest. He was one of those men who believe weight lifting has made them invincible. They have so much testosterone pumping through their body that it messes up their perception of reality.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“Now,” Cook said, his face full of blood and anger.
April shrugged and turned back to her soap opera.
Lola continued licking the last of Cook’s drink.
And I left the bar smiling. For the first time, I knew I’d find the answers that Loretta needed.
Chapter 9
Rain splattered the hood of my Bronco while I waited at an Amoco station across from the Golden Lotus, watching a couple of strippers in black kimonos walking to their cars. To pass the time, I whistled along to Johnnie Taylor’s Wanted: One Soul Singer album and examined a patch of hair I’d missed while shaving and emptied my truck’s lockbox. I found a carton of Bazooka bubble gum, a spent Bic lighter, a dirty Scooby Doo coffee mug, a pair of red lace panties bought at a Clarence Carter concert, numerous cassette tapes, and a copy of Texas Music by Rick Koster. The book still had sauce stains from Stubb’s in Austin.
I’d been waiting on Cook for the past hour and a half. Sure, I could leave, go back to the Peabody and watch reruns of Josie and the Pussycats on Cartoon Network. But what would that accomplish? Maybe Cook had told me to fuck off and said he didn’t know anything. So what? I remembered trying to talk to this old man in Algiers a few years back and getting met at the front door with a shotgun. Man knew something about the death of blues legend Robert Johnson and I’d wanted his story pretty badly.
Getting a gun in the face was a lot worse than some jackass trying to be rude.
Cook had worked with Clyde James in 1968 and was rumored to have claimed the body. He had every answer I needed. So I’d wait it out and harass the son of a bitch until he told me what he knew. Loretta deserved that.
My gaze turned to a high pile of rusted cars in a nearby auto salvage yard and across the highway was a church built in a defunct stand-alone bank. IS THE DEVIL GETTIN’ YOU DOWN? its small billboard read.
I answered under my breath: “Bet your ass.”
I cracked the window to blow out smoke from my Marlboro Light. I’d just started re-examining the spot of hair on my cheek when I saw a purple Cadillac – looked to be brand-new with shiny chrome rims and whitewalls – pull from behind the Golden Lotus and turn north toward the airport. I cranked the Bronco and followed.
I could see the top of Cook’s gray spiky head through his rear window as he took Airways Boulevard north for what seemed like forever past fast-food franchises and pawnshops until the road turned into East Parkway. He cut west by Overton Park on Poplar then down Evergreen to Madison.
The whole way I watched Cook playing with his hair and performing neck exercises by pushing his head against his palm. Cook was so busy working himself out that he didn’t notice the gunmetal-gray truck following his ugly-ass purple Cadillac across Midtown Memphis.