Seaweed on the Street Read online

  “Did she ever sing in a band?”

  “You kidding? She sang. She played piano with me and my orchestra. The RayBeams we called ourselves. Before she came along we were nowhere. Just five guys hustling weekend gigs in taverns, high-school dances. Marcia filled in one night when our regular piano player took sick. Soon as we heard her, the other guy was history. Afterwards, the band took off like a rocket. We were in demand, played all the fancy lounges, the lodges.” Ray smiled, forgetting his arthritis as he remembered old times. “I trimmed the band down to a quartet. Marcia on piano and vocals, me on tenor sax and clarinet, Tubby Brown on drums. Bob Kessler played bass. Yeah, we were a team, all right. Marcia was a dream come true for an old hacker like me, but it was too good to last. If she’d stayed, we could have gone straight to the top, to Hollywood even.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened was that Frank Harkness had this formula for speed,” said the old man bitterly. “He used to brew the stuff in his bathroom and sell it on the street or trade it for smack. Also, he was feeding smack to Marcia.” Ray scowled. “Goddam tragedy. Another Janis Joplin, see? It was cool to be high all the time, and she was also doing this rebellion number on her parents. She got so wired that she couldn’t play straight. What made it worse, she was pregnant. Pretty soon we couldn’t rely on her.”

  The room was full now, crowded with noisy beer drinkers. People were jammed three-deep around the bar. A waitress in a flapper outfit came over and asked us if we’d mind sharing our table.

  I said, “Give me another minute with Mr. Smith first,” and leaned forward, speaking urgently now. “Mr. Smith, if Marcia had a child, it couldn’t lose by meeting its grandfather.”

  “Oh, Marcia had the baby, all right. Little girl, cute as a button. I saw her a few times.”

  “Help her. That child deserves to get what’s rightly hers.”

  “You talking about an inheritance?”

  “Yes. If Marcia doesn’t get it, or that baby, most of her family’s money will go to charity.”

  He looked around the room as if for a portent. “I gave my word, friend. Guy breaks his word, what’s left?”

  “You gave your word to a strung-out woman, 20 years ago. Marcia wasn’t even making sense then. I think it’d be very ethical to help me find her. She and her child will gain by it. You’d gain too. There’s a reward for information.”

  The old man nodded, eyebrows lifted. “Yeah? You may be right. I dunno.”

  His resolve was weakening so I kept pushing. “The other thing is, Marcia could be dead. It’s one thing to get mad at your folks, run away after an argument. Another thing to stay away forever. But Marcia’s child could still be alive.”

  Ray shrugged. “Let me think about it, okay?”

  The band broke into its opening number, “Swanee.” The people who wanted to sit with Ray stood nearby, waiting.

  I got up from the table. “Okay if I check with you later? I’m going back to the bar now.”

  “Sure. Hugh Baines will ask me to play a few numbers after, when the band takes a break. Maybe we can talk then.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The Banjo Club regulars were mostly middle-aged, but they knew how to kick up their heels. They crowded the dance floor all night, doing ’50s jive, ’30s Charleston and fancy two-steps I had never seen before. As Hugh Baines had promised me, the music was loud and the beat was fast. Waitresses served non-stop as the band worked through its Dixie repertoire. After a brief intermission, Baines introduced Ray Smith and some other guest performers, and the regular musicians took a breather. The new band broke into “Melancholy Baby.” Ray was good, squeezing clear sweet notes out of his horn. The crowd, grateful for a slower number, again filled the floor. Somebody turned the house lights down. Watching, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  Barb stood right behind me. “I need a change from pouring drinks. Can you dance, big fella?”

  “You bet.” I took her hand and we went onto the floor. She closed her eyes, rested her cheek against my shoulder, and we held each other close, matching our steps effortlessly as if we’d been dancing together for years. We kept holding even after Ray finished his number. It was there, that old magic. I knew that she felt it too. During the applause her arm tightened around my shoulder for a second before she pulled away.

  “Gotta go.” Her voice was low, husky.

  “One more,” I said, still holding her around the waist.

  “I’m a working girl. They need me at the bar.”

  “I need you here,” I said as Ray, urged on by the enthusiastic crowd, began to play “A Sleepy Lagoon.”

  Barbara smiled; we danced again. I said, “If I let you go now, can we continue this later?”

  She nodded.

  By now it was standing room only. Ray left the stage to loud applause. I ordered a beer. Hot from dancing, I drank half of it before looking around. Ray was not at his table. I crossed to where he had been sitting. People at the table looked up. I said, “What happened to Ray?”

  Somebody said, “Aw, he went home. His rheumatics is acting up. Guy’s great, ain’t he, playing like that with his problems?”

  I didn’t wait to reply. I brushed through the crowd to the exit. The street was empty in every direction. To my left was a row of stores with boarded-up windows, but that direction led into an industrial area. There were more lights and activities the other way, so I sprinted to the corner. Down the street, rock music blared from a tavern. Patrons had spilled outside and were drinking beer on the sidewalk. Ray Smith came into view as he passed through the crowd and turned another corner. I was panting when I caught up with him.

  Ray stopped walking and we gazed at each other across the chasm of age and experience and male loneliness. His eyes were empty, and suddenly, I didn’t have anything to say.

  “I been thinking about that stuff, all that old misery,” he said finally. “I just didn’t want to hassle with it.”

  “You’re the only real lead I’ve got. I guess I’m pushing you too hard.”

  “Yeah, man, I can’t blame you for that. You’ve got a living to make.” Ray switched the clarinet case from one hand to the other. “The thing is, I can’t tell you much about Marcia, even if I wanted to.”

  Ray resumed his walk. I fell into step beside him. “Funny,” he mused. “Stuff that didn’t bother me none when I was younger, it keeps me awake nights now. Conscience. It’s a bastard, ain’t it?”

  “Man does what he thinks is right at the time,” I said. “Looking back, you think about what you could have done better. That stuff can drive you crazy if you dwell on it.”

  “You tell me how a man can stop dwelling on it? I get to tossing and turning with my aches, and the pain in my mind, the pain in my joints, I dunno which is worse.”

  “I tell you something,” I said, and pointed to his clarinet case. “You can play that thing.”

  He smiled at that. “Yeah, I’m starting to get it, after 60 years. It’s in my fingers, the music. I think of the note and there it is.”

  “I used to go to blues clubs in Chicago, years ago,” I said, walking slowly to match the old man’s halting stride. “South Halstead Street. You know it?”

  “Know it? Brother, I lived it. Knowed every one of them rooms. I gigged with B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy. I go way back, man. I sat in with all them dudes.” Ray’s face softened. “Them niggers give you a hard time in Chicago, an Injun guy from Canada?”

  “Nothing serious. They knew I was a music lover.”

  “Man need to be serious, he mess with you,” said Ray, eyeing my shoulders.

  We came to a side-street hotel. Ray stopped walking. It was a roach joint, one step up from a homeless shelter, and it was named The Astoria. To enter you passed through a battered door sandwiched between a taxi office and a newsstand. A sign said: rooms $18. transients welcome. Visible behind a glass panel was a grubby, pint-sized hall and a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  “This is it,” s
aid Ray in a thin voice. “I get tired of crime on tv, I just look through my window, watch the real thing.”

  “Nice meeting you, Ray.” I found a 20 in my billfold and handed it over.

  Ray looked at the money but he didn’t take it. “I got something for you, mister, but not much.”

  He turned his back on the hotel entrance as if hating the sight. “Marcia, the last I seen of her, she was living at Point Matlock. You know where that is?”

  I shook my head.

  “South of town,” he explained. “A little old army fort. Bunch of artillery installations and houses was built for the military, years ago. In them days the government was worried the Russians would come down from Alaska, claim the whole coast. Then when the military stopped being worried of that, they took their guns away but left the houses. Had a nice view, if you like water and seabirds and logs spread out on the beaches.”

  Ray put his clarinet case down and massaged his swollen knuckles absently. “Marcia had this house on the cliffs, her closest neighbour was 200 yards away. Whether she owned the place or just moved in without asking nobody, I don’t know. She made herself at home, her and the baby. From Marcia’s front room you could see the Point Matlock lighthouse. Nighttime, the beams would shine through the windows, through the curtains. Light up the whole place. In the winter, the foghorn, it sounded so loud it like to shake the house foundations. But Marcia loved it there. She musta done, she stayed there for a long time.” He smiled at some memory, then held out his hand horizontally, palm facing down. I took it gently, feeling his knobbly knuckles hot under my fingers.

  Ray said, “I’m busy right now, got things to do, a little business. You want to come back in a couple of days? Get a car, we take a nice drive. I’ll show it to you, Marcia’s house.”

  “Today’s Friday. I can come back any time that suits you.”

  “Lessee.” Ray pondered. “You be along here Monday, not too early, sometime after lunch. Okay?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  A tall man dressed in rags lurched out of an alley and staggered toward us. He walked like somebody crossing uneven ground. His rheumy, streaming eyes, sunk deep in a ruined face, had a vacant look and he carried both arms before him, raised like a sleepwalker’s.

  Ray picked up the clarinet case and watched the rummy pass by. “My neighbour,” he said, with a harsh laugh. “Saving a place for me, a nice soft piece of cobblestone for when I can’t afford the Astoria no more.”

  I said, “Ray, you’re going to help Marcia, and when you think back on this in a few years, you won’t be sorry.” He turned his head and reached for the doorknob.

  Ray tightened his lips. “You got that right, friend. A few years, there won’t be nothing troubling this old turkey. Nothing at all.” He shuffled inside the hotel and laboured painfully up the grubby stairs, out of sight. He hadn’t taken the $20.

  I stood on the sidewalk. What was I going to do now — pick up my bag at the Banjo Club, go home? Or make the moves on Barb Scarb? Maybe she was tired of it. Guys like me coming on non-stop. Lounge hustlers with their wisecracks, on the make, kidding around but hoping for a little sack time at the end of all the kidding. But I remembered how it had been, holding her on the dance floor. She fitted just right, head on my shoulder. Yeah. It would be nice. Wait for the bar to close, go somewhere together for a nightcap. Then what? We take a cab to her place and make love. Afterward I shake her hand, thank her for a lovely evening, go back to Victoria? Barb’s here in Seattle polishing glasses and wondering what’s going on, is he going to call?

  I went back to the Banjo Club and ordered a beer. The band had gone. The only noise came from the chef, still rattling pans in his kitchen. Instead of pouring my drink, Barb pulled her apron off and leaned on the bar. She blushed a little and it made her prettier; our faces were about four inches apart. “There’s this place I know,” she said, in a low voice. “It’s right around the corner from my apartment. They serve Szechuan food.”

  “That I like. I’m not crazy about the atmosphere, though.”

  “You’ll love the Blue Yangtze,” she said. “It’s candlelit, and they’re big on Billie Holiday, Django Reinhardt and the Hot Five. Think you could handle that?”

  I knew I could handle that.

  Over dinner we talked inconsequentially and held hands and were the restaurant’s last customers. The woman who had served us stood smiling in the shadows.

  Barb had a little townhouse on a well-travelled street near Lake Washington. It was toward two in the morning and Seattle’s sidewalks were shiny after a sudden rainstorm. Barb was wearing patent-leather pumps and we stepped carefully under the street lights to avoid puddles. When we entered her place she turned on all the lights, took a bottle of Gewürztraminer from her refrigerator and left it on a side table with two glasses and a corkscrew. While she was in the bathroom I opened the wine and engaged in the usual guessing game. Had I misinterpreted her signs? Were Barb’s hopes and thoughts and intentions similar to mine? I filled the glasses and took a sip.

  She came out of the bathroom and switched on her radio. The radio was tuned to KPLU. Sam Taylor was playing “Harlem Nocturne.” It’s a song of loneliness and despair and Taylor’s rendering of it almost overwhelms me every time I hear it.

  Barb was looking at me now with an expression I couldn’t decipher. But whatever it was, she smiled and picked up her glass and said, “To us.”

  After we drank I took the glass from Barb’s hands and put it with mine on the side table and put my arms around her. She hung her head from some reflexive modesty so I put my hand under her chin and lifted her head. She opened her mouth and I kissed her and somehow the buttons of her blouse came open and there was more of her to taste and feel and touch. She was trembling when I looked into her eyes. She smiled at me and that’s when I knew she felt the same way I did.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I got back to Victoria there was still no word from or about Jimmy Scow. I used my key to let myself into my office, but I suspected Constable Halvorsen had been there before me. I had left the toilet seat up and now it was down. I spent a couple of hours lolling about, ostensibly reading reports and answering e-mails, but what I was actually doing was combatting a vague feeling that I’d let Barb down, behaved badly, taken advantage of somebody decent.

  At ten o’clock I grew tired of twisting knives into my vitals and salting the wounds. In a fit of moral fervour I shoved files and forms and other police bumf aside, took up a sheet of lined paper and a Pilot Fineliner pen and had just written “Dear Barbara” when the phone rang. It was Dr. Cuncliffe.

  He said, “Morning, Silas. How did you make out in Seattle?”

  How did he know I’d been in Seattle?

  I said, “Not bad. I’m making some progress.”

  “Some progress?”

  “Who told you I’d been in Seattle?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. I think Charles Service might have mentioned it.”

  I scratched my head with the wrong end of the pen.

  Dr. Cuncliffe said, “I’d like to get together with you sometime, explore a few ideas. How about coming to my place?”

  “Fine, I’d enjoy that. Today?”

  “Not today. I have hospital rounds at the Royal Jubilee. Maybe tomorrow. Thanks, Silas. I’ll call you.”

  Dr. Cuncliffe hung up.

  My most important priority at that point was finding Jimmy Scow. I wanted him to know that I had reopened the Cuncliffe file. I wanted to ask him to forget about trying to exact personal justice and to give the White man’s law one more chance.

  I stared at Dear Barbara for a couple of minutes, wrestling with troublesome ideas concerning love and death and effigies. Then I had another brainwave. I went out.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Joe McNaught opened the envelope that I had just given him, gazed at the contents and laid it all down on his desk. With a long sigh he swung around in his swivel chair and looked out of his window. McNaught was a
burly man, and when he spoke his voice was slow and suspicious.

  “A thousand dollars?” he said at last in tones of incredulity. “You’re donating $1,000 to my church?”

  “The money isn’t a donation,” I said. “It’s a bribe. You can keep the money if you tell me where I can find Jimmy Scow.”

  “Funny thing, Silas. I never knew you were a Christian.”

  “I’m not a Christian. I’m Salish.”

  “Salish isn’t religion. It’s pagan witch superstition.”

  I don’t mind being kidded, but I wasn’t going to be kidded about that. I didn’t answer him. He swivelled around and stared at me. I still didn’t say anything.

  McNaught pushed a button on his desk. A young volunteer poked his head in at the door. McNaught said, “Ask Jimmy Scow to come in here.”

  The volunteer’s face registered extreme inner confusion. “Jimmy Scow?” he said in a puzzled voice. “I’ve never even heard of him.”

  “Thanks,” McNaught said.

  The volunteer departed. McNaught put both hands on the arms of his chair and heaved himself upright. He gave me a long sideways look. “See? Nobody here knows anything about Jimmy. If you need him, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  “I spoke to a man in the kitchen here, couple of days ago. He knew Jimmy Scow.”

  McNaught shrugged, and I had counted to 10 before he added slyly, “Can I keep the money anyway?”

  “You can’t think of a single thing that’ll help me find Jimmy Scow?”

  McNaught looked at the envelope and sighed. “Well, there might be something. Somebody did say they’d seen him fuelling a boat at the Canoe Cove marina.”

  “When?”

  “It’s a complete blank.”

  “See,” I said. “There’s no telling what a Christian can do when he tries hard. So keep the money, Joe. If you hear anything else, give me a call.”

  “Go with God,” McNaught said. “A thousand dollars, that’s extremely generous. It’ll keep this mission going for two whole days.”