A lot of people started off talking about the bag lady and wound up talking about themselves. I guess most conversations work out that way.
A nurse from Roosevelt said she never saw a shopping bag lady without hearing an inner voice say There but for the grace of God. And she was not the only woman who confessed she worried about ending up that way. I guess it’s a specter that haunts women who live alone, just as the vision of the Bowery derelict clouds the peripheral vision of hard-drinking men.
Genevieve Strom turned up at Armstrong’s one night. We talked briefly about the bag lady. Two nights later she came back again and we took turns spending our inheritances on rounds of drinks. The drinks hit her with some force and a little past midnight she decided it was time to go. I said I’d see her home. At the corner of Fifty-seventh Street she stopped in her tracks and said, “No men in the room. That’s one of Mrs. Larkin’s rules.”
“Old-fashioned, isn’t she?”
“She runs a daycent establishment.” Her mock-Irish accent was heavier than the landlady’s. Her eyes, hard to read in the lamplight, raised to meet mine. “Take me someplace.”
I took her to my hotel, a less decent establishment than Mrs. Larkin’s. We did each other little good but no harm, and it beat being alone.
Another night I ran into Barry Mosedale at Polly’s Cage. He told me there was a singer at Kid Gloves who was doing a number about the bag lady. “I can find out how you can reach him,” he offered.
“Is he there now?”
He nodded and checked his watch. “He goes on in fifteen minutes. But you don’t want to go there, do you?”
“Why not?”
“Hardly your sort of crowd, Matt.”
“Cops go anywhere.”
“Indeed they do, and they’re welcome wherever they go, aren’t they? Just let me drink this and I’ll accompany you, if that’s all right. You need someone to lend you immoral support.”
Kid Gloves is a gay bar on Fifty-sixth west of Ninth. The decor is just a little aggressively gay lib. There’s a small raised stage, a scattering of tables, a piano, a loud jukebox. Barry Mosedale and I stood at the bar. I’d been there before and knew better than to order their coffee. I had straight bourbon. Barry had his on ice with a splash of soda.
Halfway through the drink Gordon Lurie was introduced. He wore tight jeans and a flowered shirt, sat on stage on a folding chair, sang ballads he’d written himself with his own guitar for accompaniment. I don’t know if he was any good or not. It sounded to me as though all the songs had the same melody, but that may just have been a similarity of style. I don’t have much of an ear.
After a song about a summer romance in Amsterdam, Gordon Lurie announced that the next number was dedicated to the memory of Mary Alice Redfield. Then he sang:
There were a couple more verses and the shopping bag lady in the song wound up murdered in a doorway, dying in defense of the “tattered old treasures she mined in the trash cans of Broadway.” The song went over well and got a bigger hand than any of the ones that had preceded it.
I asked Barry who Gordon Lurie was.
“You know very nearly as much as I,” he said. “He started here Tuesday. I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.”
“Mary Alice never spent much time on Broadway. I never saw her more than a block from Ninth Avenue.”
“Poetic license, I’m sure. The song would lack a certain something if you substituted Ninth Avenue for Broadway. As it stands it sounds a little like ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ ”
“Lurie live around here?”
“I don’t know where he lives. I have the feeling he’s Canadian. So many people are nowadays. It used to be that no one was Canadian and now simply everybody is. I’m sure it must be a virus.”
We listened to the rest of Gordon Lurie’s act. Then Barry leaned forward and chatted with the bartender to find out how I could get backstage. I found my way to what passed for a dressing room at Kid Gloves. It must have been a ladies’ lavatory in a prior incarnation.
I went in there thinking I’d made a breakthrough, that Lurie had killed her and now he was dealing with his guilt by singing about her. I don’t think I really believed this but it supplied me with direction and momentum.
I told him my name and that I was interested in his act. He wanted to know if I was from a record company. “Am I on the threshold of a great opportunity? Am I about to become an overnight success after years of travail?”
We got out of the tiny room and left the club through a side door. Three doors down the block we sat in a cramped booth at a coffee shop. He ordered a Greek salad and we both had coffee.
I told him I was interested in his song about the bag lady.
He brightened. “Oh, do you like it? Personally I think it’s the best thing I’ve written. I just wrote it a couple of days ago. I opened next door Tuesday night. I got to New York three weeks ago and I had a two-week booking in the West Village. A place called David’s Table. Do you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Another stop on the K-Y circuit. Either there aren’t any straight people in New York or they don’t go to nightclubs. But I was there two weeks, and then I opened at Kid Gloves, and afterward I was sitting and drinking with some people and somebody was talking about the shopping bag lady and I had had enough Amaretto to be maudlin on the subject. I woke up Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and the first verse of the song buzzing in my splitting head, and I sat up immediately and wrote it down, and as I was writing one verse the next would come bubbling to the surface, and before I knew it I had all six verses.” He took a cigarette, then paused in the act of lighting it to fix his eyes on me. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I don’t remember it.”
“Matthew Scudder.”
“Yes. You’re the person investigating her murder.”
“I’m not sure that’s the right word. I’ve been talking to people, seeing what I can come up with. Did you know her before she was killed?”
He shook his head. “I was never even in this neighborhood before. Oh. I’m not a suspect, am I? Because I haven’t been in New York since the fall. I haven’t bothered to figure out where I was when she was killed but I was in California at Christmastime and I’d gotten as far east as Chicago in early March, so I do have a fairly solid alibi.”
“I never really suspected you. I think I just wanted to hear your song.” I sipped some coffee. “Where did you get the facts of her life? Was she an actress?”