He looked around at the steamy, disheveled apartment. He didn't see what he'd expected, but then the place was still dim, even with the opened curtains. "You been drinking, Billy?"
"No," Billy said, "not drink."
Nudger walked over to stand nearer to the old, old man of fifty-two. "I'll speak straight with you," he said.
"You always did, Nudger."
"You look like death not even warmed over. You killing yourself on something, Billy?"
"Maybe." Narrow, bony shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. Billy turned to stare out the window and the slanted morning light fell across his harshly lined thin face. They were not good lines, not laugh lines. "It don't make me no difference, Nudger. Shouldn't make you none."
Which was Billy's way of suggesting that Nudger mind his own business. Which was what Nudger did.
"Ever hear of a piano player named Willy Hollister?" he asked. He looked past Billy out the window. Nice view. A boarded-up store next to an auto body shop that seemed to do most of its work outdoors. Three cars were up on blocks near the sidewalk, missing various fenders, hoods, and wheels.
"I heard of him," Billy said.
A lithe young black man lowered himself onto a wheeled creeper and got himself comfortable on his back, then kicked his way under a car. Nudger waited. Billy's mind was probably in the same sad shape as his hands; he might need time to think.
"White boy, wasn't he? Blond?"
"Sounds like him, Billy."
"He was a helluva player, that boy," Billy said, still staring out the window, not seeming at all interested in what was out there. Not seeming interested in anything. The world was a rundown record.
"When did you last see him, Billy?"
"Oh, about four years or so ago. He did a gig at Rush's, then he moved on someplace."
"Kansas City?"
"Mighta been." Billy slowly shook his head. "Truth is, I disremember, Nudger. But I do recall how that boy played and sang. We used to jam in at Rush's and listen to him. He was a draw in them days, him and Jack Collinsworth and Fat Jack McGee. They all played at Rush's."
Nudger wasn't really surprised. "You know Fat Jack McGee?"
Billy almost smiled. "Sure, ever'body know the fat man. Jazz be a small world, Nudger."
"Who were Hollister's friends while he played in St. Louis?" Nudger asked.
"No friends. Hollister kept to himself by himself. Except for that Jacqui."
"Jacqui?"
"Yeah, spelled it with a q-u-i, said she was some kinda Indian. No chance, the way she looked."
"Do you remember her last name?"
"James. Jacqui James. Not her real name, I suspect. But then neither is Weep my real name."
"Tell me about her, Billy."
"She was a lady in the old true sense, Nudger. She sang a bit, but not much,'cause she knew she didn't have it musically. What she did have was Hollister."
Nudger sat down in an ancient wing chair with perpetually exploding cotton batting and leaned toward Billy. "Where can I find Jacqui James?"
Billy laughed a weak, airless kind of chuckle that was almost a gurgle. He didn't have much lung left. "Ain't nobody can find Jacqui James. She just up and went one day. Nobody ever found out where."
"What about Hollister?"
"What about him? He was heart-an'-soul wrecked by her leavin' like that, Nudger. You could hear the pain of it in his music when he finally admitted to himself that she was gone for good. He played real blues then. The best blues played in them days was at Rush's, but none better than Willy Hollister's blues."
"Then you think he really loved this Jacqui James."
Billy's wide bloodless lips curled up in the cruel light. "Ain't no doubt he loved her, Nudger."
"Do you think he might have had anything to do with her disappearance?" Nudger asked.
Billy shook his head slowly. "Naw, that boy wouldn't have done nothin' to hurt Jacqui. She just up an' gone one day, Nudger. Jacqui was like that. Pretty girl, red hair and green eyes, heart like a cottonwood seed… driftin' here an' away in the easiest wind…
Nudger stood up. He had to get out of there, away from the heat and stench. He wished he could get Billy away, but he knew it was useless to try. He wondered what the frail, used-up jazz man was taking that had eaten him up so from the inside.
"Thanks, Billy," Nudger put his hands in his pockets. "You, uh…?"
"I don't need nothin', Nudger. I thank you, but I don't. Never did. I'll continue on that way, if you please."
Nudger smiled down at him. "Okay. And I was going to offer you an air conditioner for that window."
Billy grinned a toothy, yellow grin at him. "Your ass, you was, Nudger. The landlord here don't allow no air conditioners. Anyways, you could never even afford a down payment on your bar tab."
Nudger spread his arms slightly in a brief, helpless gesture. "That hasn't changed, except from time to time." He moved toward the door. The man under the car across the street began banging a hammer in slow rhythm against metal.
"Poverty's a disease, Nudger, an' you only got the sniffles." Billy waved a misshapen dark hand around in an encompassing gesture. "This here's what you got to look forward to if you don't straighten out your act. Let me warn you, this is what happens to everybody's good old days."
"I'll hold that cheerful thought," Nudger said. "Go easy on yourself, Billy. You deserve it."
"Hey," Billy said feebly, when Nudger had opened the door. "You still got that jazz-record collection of yours?
Nudger shook his head no. "I had to sell most of it. I could only save the best."
"You save any of mine?"
"Sure I did, Billy."
The contorted hand yanked the curtains closed again. "That's right," came the thin voice from the darkness, "you did say the best."
The relentless banging of metal on metal was still coming from beneath the wrecked car as Nudger walked down the street to his Volkswagen and drove away. The hammer bounced once after each blow: BANG-bang! BANG-bang! BANG-bang!… sending up a flat rhythm. The weary, frustrated sound hung over the ghetto like a cold, inhuman heartbeat that Nudger could hear for blocks. A dirge for dead dreams.
He stopped at a hardware store and bought a cheap two- speed box fan and paid extra to have it delivered to Billy Weep's address. It wasn't an air conditioner, but it was all Nudger could afford at the moment and it would help, if Billy took the trouble to switch it on.
Nudger had spent some good hours at Rush's listening to Billy Weep's smooth and plaintive alto sax. It was time he gave something back.
When he left the hardware store he drove east on Olive toward downtown and the Third District police station. On a scrap of paper from the glove compartment, so he wouldn't forget, he scribbled the name Jacqui James.
VIII
I need to know about a Jacqui James," Nudger said to Hammersmith, in Hammersmith's office in the Third District station house. "Spelled with a q-u-i." Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith leaned his obese self back in his comfortable upholstered desk chair and motioned for Nudger to sit in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs before the desk.
"You been gone for two days, Nudge," Hammersmith said, "then you walk in here without even phoning you're coming, and ask me about somebody I never heard of. You in some kind of a rush?"
"Sort of." Nudger sat down. He knew it wouldn't be for long; Hammersmith's visitors' chairs were torture devices designed to keep conversations short and to the point, so the lieutenant would have plenty of time alone for business and smoking his malodorous greenish cigars without anybody complaining or vomiting.