The Ragtime Fool (6 page)

“Whew.” Brun took off his hat, scratched his forehead, put the hat back on. “Look around this place, Miss Vinson. And you heard what my wife told you. You think I got five thousand dollars just sittin’ around?”

“Maybe you could get it from different people. Get a group together, share the cost and share the profits.”

“Well, then, how about you? You gonna put something toward it?”

She laughed lightly. “I wish. I mean, my first thought when I heard about it was that I’d like to see whether Howard or Fisk University Press would publish it. But there’s no way I can do that. I run a little beauty shop in Santa Monica, and I’ve got a young daughter and no husband. The best I can hope to do is get somebody else interested, someone who doesn’t want to let Rudi Blesh cash in on my father’s work.”

Brun walked slowly to the window, looked out for a moment, then turned and walked back to Bess. “Not that I want to be rude,” he said. “But how is it you know about all this stuff going on in New York, being you’re in Santa Monica with a little beauty shop?”

Bess didn’t miss a beat. “My brother-in-law, my late sister’s husband. He lives in New York, and…will you promise to keep this strictly to yourself? I don’t want him to get in trouble.”

Brun nodded. “Sure.”

“All right, then. You’re on your honor. He’s a janitor at Knopf, the publisher’s, and Monday afternoon, while he was cleaning up outside an editor’s office, he heard Rudi Blesh pitching to the editor. They left the door open…you know how it is, Mr. Campbell.” Sly smile. “A colored man’s invisible. My brother-in-law heard every word. They have to wait for Mr. Knopf to come back from Europe, but the editor sounded pretty sure he’d okay the deal. My brother-in-law plays jazz cornet, so he’d read
They All Played Ragtime
when it first came out. That’s how he knew about you, and why he thought you just might be interested in the journal. So when he got off work, he went over to see Mrs. Joplin, told her he’d heard about Blesh’s offer, and said he could do a lot better for her. Then he got her to let him copy what I just gave you, and called me.” She spread her palms and smiled. “And here I am.”

“And this is all outa the goodness of his heart? Nothing’s in it for him.”

For the first time, Bess looked uncomfortable. “He says he’ll take ten percent for his trouble. Five hundred dollars, that seems fair, doesn’t it? Considering the risk he’s taking?”

“And you, Miss Vinson? How about you?”

She shook her head. “I’d just like to see my father get the recognition he deserves…well, and I’d also love to give that Rudi Blesh a good screwing-over.”

“I sure ain’t about to argue with that. But I’m sorry, Miss Vinson, one thing does bother me. How do I know you’re really who you say you are?”

“I thought you might ask.” Again, Bess opened her purse, pulled out a folded piece of paper and gave it to Brun, who unfolded it. It was a worn document, crisp and yellowed, corners long gone. The barber moved his glasses into reading position. “Certificate of Birth,” he mumbled. “State of Missoura. Louise Bess Joplin. Mother, Belle Jones. Father, Scott Joplin. Date of Birth, December 14, 1902. Hmmm.” He refolded the paper, passed it to Bess; she slid it back into her pocketbook. “How come you never wrote anything about your father, or talked to people about him?”

“What could I say about a father I never knew? And why should I tarnish the reputations of the good man and woman who brought me up. Besides, the person who helped my mother and father get me adopted is still alive. She could go to jail.”

Brun coughed. “You make a fair point. But I still don’t even start to know how I’m ever gonna find five thousand dollars.”

“I’ve got to leave that to you,” said Bess. “But I do hope you can. We’ve got somewhere between one and two weeks.” She pulled out a little pad and a pen from her pocketbook, scribbled on a page, then tore it out. “Here.” She pressed the paper into Brun’s hand. “My phone number. Well, actually, it’s the drug store downstairs. I can’t afford a phone, but they’ll take a message for me. Why don’t you give me your number?”

“Can’t give you something I ain’t got,” said Brun. “I’ll have to call you when I have something to say.”

Bess smiled. “I’m so pleased to meet you, after all I’ve read about you. I do hope you’ll be able to publish my father’s journals.”

Brun sighed. “Can’t do more than try.”

***

Midway through dinner that evening, Brun worked up his nerve, then cleared his throat. May set down her fork and knife. When her husband broke a silence by hawking, he usually had something to say that he knew she wouldn’t appreciate. “Something funny happened at the shop today,” the barber said.

“Oh, really?” May tried to keep her voice level.

“Yes indeed. I had me an interesting visitor. The colored lady who came by here, looking for me.”

While he told the story of Bess and her proposition, May drummed a finger on the table top. Then she said, “Well, I guess that is pretty funny, isn’t it? Asking you for five thousand dollars? She might as well ask for the moon.”

And for what she’s got, I’d
give
her the moon, Brun thought. “May, listen. This ain’t no lark. A whole journal written in Scott Joplin’s own hand? I been thinking, it’s nice they’re going to put a plaque in the high school for him, but that ain’t near good enough. If I had that journal, I bet when I could go out there for the ceremony, I could talk to the mayor and some of the big businessmen—”

“Brun Campbell, what ever are you saying? If I thought you were serious, I’d be calling Dr. Gervais.”

Brun reached to his pocket, then stopped. No point even showing her the page copied from the journal. “Come on, now, May,” a plea. “You got it all wrong. I just want to get Mr. Joplin the reputation he deserves to have. This Rudi Blesh is a johnny-come-lately, but now, all of a sudden he’s the world’s biggest expert on ragtime. He’d take Mr. Joplin’s journal and mess it all up with his big-shot ‘commentary.’”

“Oh, Brun, you try my patience! Playing that awful music in bars at night, writing articles for silly little newsletters, planning schemes, every one of them more foolish than the last. Scott Joplin, Scott Joplin, Scott Joplin. And what’s ever come of it? Only that you’ve got people convinced you’re soft in the head. How do you even know this Bess woman really is who she said she was?”

“She showed me her birth certificate. ‘Louise Bess Joplin’.”

“People can get phony birth certificates these days.”

“Well, it sure looked real to me. Old. And it had Scott Joplin down as father, and Belle Jones, that was his wife’s name before she married him, as mother.”

May sighed extravagantly. “Brun, I’ve given up trying to make you see the light and use a little common sense. If you want to spend the rest of your days hollering ‘Scott Joplin’ at deaf people, I guess you’ll just have to go right ahead. But don’t you even think of doing something like mortgaging our house to pay for this craziness.”

How did she always know what was in his mind? “May, I’d never—”

“Yes, you would. And you’d better forget about it. I’m not going to ask you for a promise, because I know what your promises are worth. But if you put us in debt over this, I will walk out the door and never come back, and you’ll have to figure your own way out of your mess. That’s my final word on the subject.”

“May, come on, you know I wouldn’t do it. I owe a big debt to Mr. Joplin, but I wouldn’t mortgage the house.”

May sighed. He looked like a little boy, caught reaching for the cookie jar up on a high shelf. She pointed at his plate. “Eat your supper, Brun. Cold spaghetti’s pretty bad.”

***

After dinner, Brun told May he was going for a walk. Once outside, he tapped a cigarette from its box, lit up, then walked to Venice Boulevard and into the Rexall drug store. He got the soda jerk to change a fin, took the coins into the phone booth at the front of the store, closed the door, pulled a little notebook from his shirt pocket, and began to dial.

When he came out of the booth, he had thirty-five cents in his pocket and a glum look on his face. After fourteen calls, the kindest reaction he’d gotten was, “I’d like to help, Brun, but I’m hurting right now, myself.”

The old barber trudged out of the pharmacy into the warm spring evening, started to drag his feet homeward, but then stopped. “Yes!” he muttered, pumped a fist into the air, and took off at a codger’s stiff-legged trot, up Amoroso Court to Cal’s tiny cottage, where he banged on the door and called, “Hey, Cal, open on up. I got to talk to you.”

***

They sat on opposite sides of the tiny living room, each with a partially-drunk bottle of beer. For what seemed to Brun like forever, Cal just stared at him, didn’t say a word. Finally, the young man gestured with his bottle. “Let me get this straight. A woman walks into your barber shop, tells you she’s Scott Joplin’s long-lost daughter, and offers you the opportunity of your life. For a mere five thousand dollars, you can own Scott Joplin’s personal journal.”

“You got it,” Brun said. “And I need the dough in about a week.”

“Okay. Now, the first question is, why the hell are you talking to
me
? You don’t really think I’ve got five grand burning a hole in my pocket.”

“No, ‘course not. But I got to start someplace. Maybe you…” His voice wound down as he saw the look on Cal’s face.

“I couldn’t give you even
one
thousand, never mind five,” Cal said. “And not to hurt your feelings, but if I did have anything like that kind of money, just about the last thing I’d do with it is give it to you to publish Scott Joplin’s memoirs. If they really are Scott Joplin’s memoirs. Jesus, Brun—”

Brun pulled the page from his pocket. “Here, wise guy. Take a look at this.”

As the young man read, a twisted smile crept across his face. “Okay, now I get it. ‘The Reminiscences of Scott Joplin…brought your way by the one…the only…ta-da! Brun Campbell.’”

“Jeez-all-Pete, kid. If you didn’t talk so pretty, you could really piss me off.” Brun snatched the paper from Cal’s hand, slipped it back into his pocket. “So, what’s wrong with that? A man lives for as long as I have, he gets to askin’ himself, well, what did I
do
? Scott Joplin was a thing that comes along maybe once in a hundred years, and he put a ton of hope on me. And then I pissed my life away, cutting peoples’ hair when I shoulda been talking up Mr. Joplin’s music every place I could. Now, looky here, I ain’t bughouse. I never thought you could bankroll me. Why I came over was to see if maybe you know some book publisher who’d want to publish Mr. Joplin’s journal, and then the five K would be a…what do you call it again?”

Cal’s face was smeared with doubt. “An advance?”

“Yeah, that’s it. But it looks like you don’t think too much of the idea.”

“Brun, it’s crazy. No, I don’t know a publisher who’d do that. Mine sure wouldn’t. And you say you’ve got only a week or two to beat out Blesh. Any way you cut it, a deal like that would take months. No publisher in his right mind is going to hand you a contract and five thousand dollars without seeing the journal and reading a sample from your book. I’m sorry, Brun, I really am. But there’s no way that’s going to work.”

The barber got to his feet and stretched. “Okay, then. Thanks for listening. And thanks for the beer.” He walked halfway to the door, then looked over his shoulder. “See you at Roscoe’s funeral?”

“Sure,” Cal said. “Friday, ten o’clock, right?”

Brun nodded. “First Baptist Church.”

Chapter Six

Fri, April 6
Early afternoon

There was barely room in the little barber shop for the five men. Brun sat in one barber’s chair, like a king on his throne, while Cal perched between two colored men on the piano bench. A third colored man lounged against the piano. “I say it’s a cryin’ shame,” Brun growled. “A good man like Roscoe dies, and nobody shows up to see him off.”

The man at the side of the piano, a round Negro with no visible neck, spoke in a high voice incongruous with his build. “Hey, Brun, I don’t exactly think I’m nobody.”

“Come on, Charley, you know what I mean,” the barber said. “If Roscoe’d died forty years ago in St. Lou, there’d be more people than the church coulda held. But with everybody out here he did stuff for, all them old ladies, nobody except for the five of us could bother to show up.”

“Most of them old ladies was white,” Charley said. “They ain’t gonna come down and sit in a colored church.”

“Well, why the hell not?” Brun barked. “Sorry, it still don’t seem right to me. Just like how he died don’t seem right.”

“You gonna go on about thinking he was killed?” That from the Negro to Cal’s right on the piano bench. “Man takes a little too much to drink, slips and falls down the stairs onto a cee-ment floor, it sure sounds like an accident to me.”

“I ain’t never seen Roscoe fried,” Brun said. “Sure, he’d have himself a shot or two, but that was it.”

“Just because you ain’t seen it don’t mean it didn’t happen,” the dark man replied.

“Fred, now you cut that out,” Charley piped. “You ain’t supposed to talk bad about the dead.”

“Hey, Charley,” Brun shouted. “Don’t get yourself all worked up, and bust your fat ass through my piano.” The barber turned his attention to the trio on the bench. “Monday afternoon, when Roscoe come in here and said he had to talk to me, he didn’t look like he just wanted to pass a little time. I wish to God I’d took a few minutes to hear him out right then and there.”

“You didn’t have any way to know,” Cal murmured.

The day’s mail slid through the slot in the door below the CLOSED FOR FUNERAL sign, and spread across the floor. Brun walked over, bent laboriously, picked up the envelopes. “Fraternal Order of Eagles, crap.” He tossed the envelope onto the little counter next to the cash register. “Bill for light and power.” That quickly joined the F.O.E. on the counter. The third white envelope sported a red, white, and blue border; the barber waved it at his friends. “Air-mail, from New Jersey. To ‘Brun Recording Company.’”

Cal spoke. “Maybe you’re getting famous, Brun. Could be a big record company wants to give you a contract.”

The colored men snickered.

“Wiseass,” Brun muttered, then took up his barber scissors, slit the top of the envelope, pulled out the letter, unfolded it. He read slowly, moving his lips and following a finger down the page. When he finished, he thrust the sheet of paper into Cal’s hand. “What do you think of this, huh? From a kid all the way ‘cross the country. He musta got my address offa one of my records. Says he heard about me on a New York radio station, and he wants me to tell him how to play ragtime right.”

Cal looked up from the letter. “It’s fan mail, Brun, nice. I get it, too. I write back and say thank you, I’m really glad you liked my book, and that’s that. It’s no big deal.”

The colored man to Cal’s right hauled himself off the piano bench. “I better be gettin’ to work. Mr. Parsons gave me time off for the funeral, but I stay here a lot longer, I ain’t gonna have a job to go back to. He started for the door; the others followed. “See you, Brun,” a chorus.

The shop seemed unnaturally quiet. Brun glanced at the letter in his hand, then walked to the barber chair, sat, read the letter again. “Even if my mother does hate it…” he mouthed. “…They All Played Ragtime…Rudi Blesh…except for Scott Joplin, no one ever played ragtime as well as you…anything you can tell me, I will really appreciate.”

Brun looked toward the door, as if his companions were still in sight. “‘No big deal,’ huh? Just a kid writing a fan letter? Canal water!” The old man jumped to his feet, dashed to the counter, took a lined paper pad and a pencil from a drawer, then went back to the barber chair and began to write:

Brun stopped, chewed at the top of the pencil, then wrote on:

The old barber dropped the pencil into his lap, then looked over what he’d written, all the while absently massaging the fingers of his right hand. Then he nodded sharp satisfaction, and folded the three sheets of paper into the return envelope with the air mail stamp.

***

At five o’clock, Brun locked the shop, walked to the corner, and dropped his letter into the mailbox. Then he backtracked along Venice Boulevard to the police station, paused a moment outside the door, set his chin, and walked inside.

Across the lobby, the ruddy-faced desk sergeant looked up from a ledger. Brun walked over to the man. “Detective Bob Magnus in?”

“What’s the problem?”

Brun pulled a business card from his shirt pocket, laid it on the desk in front of the sergeant. “He said I should come by today. About a murder.”

“Okay. What’d you say was your name?”

“Brun Campbell.”

The sergeant lifted himself out of his chair, and waddled off down a hall to the left. A couple of minutes later, he was back with the detective, who nodded hello to Brun. “What can I do for you, Mr. Campbell?”

“You said come by today and you might have some information about Roscoe Spanner.”

Magnus motioned for Brun to follow him. They walked silently along the hall to the detective’s office, a small room with an institutionally-gray metal desk and chair, and two matching file cabinets. The walls were painted bile-green. On the detective’s desk was a framed photo of a pretty, dark-haired woman with a little girl on her right, a boy on the left. The woman and the girl were smiling, but the boy’s face said he wasn’t giving anything away, smiles included. Brun glanced at Detective Magnus. Chip and block.

The detective gestured with his head toward the chairs across the desk. Brun lit a cigarette, then blew a cloud of smoke as he sat.

Magnus pushed an ashtray across the desk, and cleared his throat. “Not a lot I can tell you so far, Mr. Campbell. Your friend broke his neck, not to mention his shoulder and a leg, going down those stairs. He probably died instantly. Nothing anybody could have done for him.”

“What about your tests for booze?” Brun asked. “In his blood and his stomach?”

Magnus shrugged. “They don’t do those toxicology tests overnight. Probably be several more days.”

Brun wondered whether the detective was feeding him a line, but couldn’t think of any way to ask that wouldn’t get him tossed out on his ear.

“But I do have one thing to tell you.” Magnus leaned across the desk. “We’re trained to do our work, Mr. Campbell, and everything considered, I think we do a decent job. But it usually gets tougher when an amateur tries to give us some help. We got a complaint from a Mr. Horace Randall that you were snooping around there, asking questions. Bothering him.”

“All I did was ask if he saw anybody—”

“That was no help. It might even turn out to be a hindrance. Suppose Randall did see someone. By now, that someone could have a warning. You need to stay out of our way and let us do our job. Police know how to ask questions so as to have the best chance of getting useful answers. Go on home, now, have yourself a drink, and I’ll call you when I’ve got something to say. All right?”

“I already told you, I ain’t got a phone.”

The look on the old man’s face kept Magnus’ angry words in his throat. “That’s right,” the detective said. “Sorry. Why don’t you just come back sometime the middle of next week. Just don’t get your hopes up too high.”

Brun got to his feet. “Mr. Detective, I’m sixty-seven years old, and I learned a long time ago not to have too much in the way of expectations. But damn, that hope is a bitch. I can’t seem to get rid of it altogether.”

Magnus couldn’t keep from smiling.