The Ragtime Fool (4 page)

“All right. Come by the station a week from now. Maybe we’d even have something by Friday.” He took a business card from his pocket and gave it to Brun. “Detective Bob Magnus. Just ask for me, and they’ll get me out to talk to you.”

Brun nodded. “I appreciate that.”

“No trouble. Can we give you a lift home?”

The old barber shook his head. “Thanks, I’ll walk.”

Chapter Four

Wednesday, April 4
Morning

Dr. Brooks Gervais slipped his stethoscope into the pocket of his white jacket, then sighed. “Brun…”

Looks like a man with bad hemorrhoids, sitting on a slab of cold concrete, Brun thought. “Time for the lecture, huh, Doc? What’s the blood pressure this time?”

Gervais shook his head. “It’s been worse. But one-seventy-two over a hundred’s not good.”

The barber made a face.

“I’m sorry, Brun. I’ve got you on medication, but you need to help yourself, too. If you’d only cut out the whiskey and cigarettes…you smell like an old ashtray. How many packs a day?”

“Two. Three, tops. But I went offa the Camels, I only smoke filtered now. Newports.”

The doctor covered his eyes with a hand. “Brun, for crying out loud. Filters, no filters, it doesn’t matter. And you play piano in those nightclubs till all hours. You’re killing yourself.”

Brun worked his tongue around inside his mouth. “How long you think I got?”

Dr. Gervais held out both hands, palms up. “There’s no way to tell. You could drop in the street tomorrow, or you could go on a while and die slowly in your bed. But when it happens is partly up to you. Keep on the way you’re going—”

“Doc, what the hell’re you saying? I should quit smoking, quit drinking, quit playing piano? What am I supposed to do?” He paused, then went on in a softer voice. “Hey, Doc, I can’t even…you know. I used to think that song was pretty funny, ‘My Handyman Ain’t Handy Any More.’ But I ain’t laughing now.”

The doctor rested a hand on his patient’s shoulder. “You’re sixty-seven, Brun. A lot of men—”

“I ain’t a lot of men, Doc, I’m just one. Ain’t there anything I could take…” His voice faltered as he saw Gervais shake his head sadly.

“Brun, I’m sorry. There’s nothing that works, and some of the stuff people try can do real harm. Is Mrs. Campbell…well, is she unhappy?”

The doctor winced at the bitterness in the old man’s laugh. “Not as she says, anyway. It ain’t something she’ll talk about, but you ask me, she wouldn’t have minded if I got this way twenty years ago.”

Gervais looked at his shoes. How many times had he listened to this same story, practically word for word? The doctor wondered how he’d react when his time came. He raised his eyes. “Look at it this way, Brun. When a man is having relations, his blood pressure goes sky high. Yours would be off the charts. Impotence might be God’s kindness to old men, a sort of protection, so they don’t—”

The barber stamped a foot. “Hey, Doc, cut the crap, okay? If I wanted to hear that kinda stuff, I’d go to church with May on Sundays. If God’s being so all-fired kind to me, he could at least stop me from
wantin’
to do it.” The barber grabbed his shirt off the hook behind the door, threw it on, began buttoning. “Well, at least He ain’t got around to makin’ my fingers go limp, so I’m gonna keep playin’ piano. And I’ll have me a smoke or a shot of whiskey when I feel like it.” He aimed a finger at the doctor. “If sittin’ in a rocker and chewing gum is all I can do, then to hell with it.”

“Fine, Brun. It’s your…” On the point of saying ‘funeral,’ Gervais cut himself off, and said ‘life’ instead. He chuckled. “Maybe you’ve got a point.” He put two prescription notes into the old man’s hand. “At least take your medicine.”

I been taking my medicine for a long time, Brun thought.

As he folded the prescriptions and slipped them into his shirt pocket, he glanced at the calendar on the wall, a Christmas scene, ice skaters on a frozen lake. ‘Wishing You Merry Christmas and a Happy 1951, from the Edgmar Dairy Company, Venice, California.’ Brun inclined his head toward the skaters. “It’s weird to think I might not ever see some of those days up there.”

Dr. Gervais smiled. “Everyone on this planet can say that, Brun.”

***

At twelve o’clock, Brun locked up the shop, then started walking slowly up Venice Boulevard to Pisani Place. Sun had broken through morning fog, and the warmth seemed to loosen the old man’s shoulders. At Amoroso Court, he turned right, went on half a block past Oakwood, up to a small white clapboard house, and knocked at the door.

It took a few minutes for Cal to answer. Brun leaned into his young friend’s face. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Cal shook his head back and forth. “Just writing a story. When I’m writing, I go off into another world.”

Brun chuckled, then his face turned serious. “Well, actually, that’s why I’m here. I got something bothering me, and I thought what with you being a writer, you could help me figure it out.”

Cal turned a hard eye on the old man. “You’re for real?”

“I ain’t whistlin’ Dixie. Come on, let’s go down by Bayless’. I’ll stand you to lunch.”

***

They ordered tuna sandwiches, coffee for Brun, a chocolate shake for Cal. The writer listened carefully to Brun’s account of finding Roscoe on the basement floor, then said, “I’m really sorry to hear that. Roscoe was a good guy.”

“The best. Which is why it bothers me so much to think maybe it wasn’t any accident. Now, suppose you’re writing a story, and the detective finds a guy—”

Cal’s eyes narrowed. “I write science fiction, Brun, not murder mysteries.”

“Same difference. People die, people get killed. Say one of your Martians finds a guy from the moon laying at the foot of the stairs, dead, with a bottle of Jack Daniels in pieces all around him, and his hand on the neck of the bottle. Is that Martian just gonna decide it was an accident, and that’s that?”

Cal considered saying that moon people don’t drink, but decided not to crack wise. “Well, maybe it does sound a little questionable.”

“A little? If you went down a flight of stairs, ass over teakettle, would you be grabbing for the neck of a broken whiskey bottle after you hit?”

“No, of course not. But maybe that’s just the way he fell. His arm could have flown out in front of him, and happened to land on the bottle neck. And if he was badly hurt, he wouldn’t have been thinking awfully straight. Who knows what he might’ve thought that bottle neck was?”

The waitress set their food in front of them. Brun took a savage bite from his sandwich, then talked from the corner of his mouth. “Listen, Cal. What if I say the reason I went over there last night was because Roscoe came by the barber shop in the afternoon, said he had something he needed to talk to me about, and I should be sure and stop by his house later? Would you write that in a story, and then have the guy take an accidental ride down a staircase to a cement floor?”

Cal corrugated his forehead. “I guess not.”

“Okay, then. Now, think about those Beatnik bums for a minute. They always got their eye out for dough they don’t have to work for. Just last week, Roscoe was telling me how a couple of them hit him up for a handout on the street, and when he wouldn’t come across, they got nasty with him. Told him old people’re useless, they’re holding society back and all that, they oughta just lay down and die. I tried telling that to the cops, but they weren’t about to listen. Just gave me a bunch of crap about how I should shut up and wait for the autopsy and the tests.”

Cal paused, then decided to say it. “Brun, if I’m going to be honest with you, I’ve got to say that’s not unreasonable.”

The barber slammed down his coffee cup. Brown liquid sloshed into the saucer. “Come on, Cal, gimme a break. You think I oughta just up and believe whatever the cops try and get past me? Out where I grew up, when a colored guy got killed, ‘less the bozo who did it was standing right there in plain sight, the cops called it an accident. Less work for them. Nowadays, maybe they need to be a little more careful, but I’m betting they still cheat when they can. Who’s gonna complain about some old colored guy, got pushed down a flight of stairs?”

Cal swallowed a mouthful of milk shake. “Outside of you.”

Brun nodded. “That’s it. Okay, then, Writer. What would that Martian do after he found the moon man?” Brun pointed at Cal’s remaining half-sandwich. “There ain’t no free lunches.”

Cal laughed out loud. “Fair enough. I guess if my Martian thought the cops didn’t care about moon men, he’d go around and talk to the moon man’s neighbors. See if the moon man was having trouble with anyone. Or if a neighbor saw anything suspicious yesterday.”

Brun clapped his hands. “Yes! I knew you could help me.” He paused, then added, “Scott Joplin was my friend, just like Roscoe.”

Cal was going to ask what that had to do with the price of fish, but the look on Brun’s face persuaded him to keep his smart mouth shut except to finish his lunch.

***

Forty endless minutes of math class stood between Alan Chandler and the afternoon dismissal bell. It had occurred to the boy to try shifting octaves in the third theme of “Maple Leaf Rag,” and he couldn’t wait to hear how it would sound. He also wanted to see what he could do with the three new pieces he’d bought from Mrs. Selvin during lunch hour. He moved his fingers over an imaginary keyboard on his desk. The teacher’s voice became a soft drone at the farthest reach of his awareness.

The instant the bell rang, Alan was out of his seat, to his locker, and on his way home at a run. He charged through the back door, tossed his books onto the chair next to the telephone table in the hall, hustled into the living room, slid onto the piano bench, and began to play.

He hadn’t gotten past the opening measures when his mother flew into the room, hands plastered to her temples. “Alan, if I hear that tune one minute longer, I am going to scream.”

Without looking up, he muttered, “Ma, I’m trying—”

She grabbed his wrists, pulled them away from the keys. He wrenched free, but before he could hit another note, she slammed down the fallboard, then sat on it and pointed toward the stairs. “Get up to your room…
now
. Get your homework done.”

“Christ Almighty, Ma!” He grabbed at her shoulder, pulled with one hand, shoved with the other, but she gripped the edge of the piano, and held her position. “Take your hands off me,” she spat. “How dare you lay a hand on your mother?”

“All right, I’m sorry. Ma, listen. I just need to try one thing, it’ll take less than two minutes. Then, I’ll—”

“You’re not trying anything, not even for two seconds. I said get, now get. You’ll talk to your father later.”

Alan grabbed his music, leaped off the bench. “You mean, I’ll listen to my father. He talks, everyone else listens.” The boy stomped toward the doorway.

“You’ve got a wise mouth, Mister,” his mother shouted after him. “It’s going to get you into a lot of trouble.”

***

As quickly as Alan sat at the dinner table and reached for a fork, his father fixed a smoldering eye on him. “I hear you’ve been disrespectful to your mother.”

Alan’s throat tightened; he dropped the fork. “
She
was being disrespectful. All I wanted to do—”

“It doesn’t matter what you wanted to do. When your mother tells you to do or not do something, you will obey her. You will not give her backtalk. Do you understand me?”

Alan ground his teeth. Dr. Ronald Chandler, Professor and Chairman of Physics at Hobart State Teachers College, was a man whose every opinion was truth, universal and self-evident, as far beyond dispute as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Professor drew himself full upright in his chair, and glared down his nose at his son. “I don’t hear your answer.”

Alan made a disgusted face. “Yes, I understand you fine. I just don’t agree with you.”

His father’s face tightened. “There’s another matter. How much money have you spent the past two weeks on sheet music and phonograph records?”

“Eighteen dollars and some change.”

Dr. Chandler clapped a hand to his temple. “Eighteen dollars! Young man, there are people who work for seventy-five cents an hour. At eight hours a day, that’s three days’ wages you threw away on rubbish that doctors have proved to be damaging to the developing brain of a young person. Now, hear me and hear me well. From this moment on, you will not spend another penny on ragtime music, and you will not play ragtime music in this house, not ever again. Do I make myself clear?”

Alan tried to hold on, but went over the edge. “It’s my money. I earned it mowing lawns and shoveling snow, and I’ll spend it any way I damn please.”

Dr. Chandler bounded to his feet, stood over his son. He reached toward his belt buckle. “This is not your house,” he barked. “This is my house and your mother’s, and if you’re going to live here, you’ll live by our rules. When you come of age, you can get your own place to live, and then if you want to throw away your money and your life, that will be your business. Do you understand
that
?”

“Yes, I understand. And I still don’t agree.”

His father drew back a fist. Across the table, Alan’s mother said, “Ron!”

Dr. Chandler’s hand seemed to lower against his will. His shoulders rose to obscure his neck; Alan thought he looked like a vulture, ready to descend on a chunk of spoiled meat. “Insolent puppy! You’re going to find yourself trouble you’ll wish you’d never encountered. Now, you will apologize to your mother.”

“For
what
?” Alan slammed his napkin onto the table. “She’s the one who was rude. Let
her
apologize to
me
.”

Blotchy maps spread over Dr. Chandler’s cheeks. “Go to your room, right now,” he roared. “I’ve seen the last of you for this day.”

“Fine with me,” Alan shouted at his father. “I’ve seen more than enough of you for the rest of my goddamn life.”

He ran past his mother, into the hall, took the stairs three at a time, charged into his room, slammed the door, locked it. Fists clenched, he looked around for a moment, then launched a haymaker at the closet door. The wood splintered. The boy pulled back his hand and extracted a fair-sized sliver from his middle knuckle. Gingerly, he flexed his fingers; no pain, and they all seemed to work fine. “Stupid!” a growl. “Should have kicked it.”

He gathered his records and sheet music from the floor and the desk, carried them to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, slid the music under a pile of sweaters. “He finds it there and takes it, I’ll kill him,” the boy muttered.