Coq au Vin Page 5

  A loquacious elderly gentleman we took to be the owner, because of the deference being paid him by what appeared to be the regulars, was holding court at a large round table near the back. The drinks were flowing back there and spirits were high. One woman at his table we recognized as an up-and-coming diva from the States—you know, in one meteoric arc she goes from the church choir in Stomach Ache, Mississippi, to rave reviews at the Met. When Andre kept glancing over there, I assumed it was Miss Thing that he was staring at.

  But no, he said, he was looking at the old man. There was something about him—something vaguely familiar—that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “He was probably Eubie Blake’s butler or something—somebody only you would know,” I said mockingly.

  He blushed. At least he had enough perspective to be embarrassed.

  I called for the check.

  What a day it had been. We began the long walk back to the 5th, still talking, confiding in each other the way you do in the early stages of a friendship. Occasionally I’d point out a café or a restaurant or a street corner where I’d dined with friends, met a lover, made a discovery of one sort or another.

  Back at last at the hotel, we were reluctant to say good night. I invited Andre up for a glass of the brandy I’d been smart enough to purchase and lay away in the armoire.

  We set our chairs in front of the open window and went on talking. It wasn’t long before a weird kind of chill went up my back. I knew it wasn’t from the night air. It was a bizarre sensation and I managed to push it away quickly enough, but I had become somewhat distracted.

  “I think I got it!” Andre exclaimed, seemingly out of the blue.

  It was as if his voice were coming at me from the bottom of a well. “What? What did you say?”

  I had been staring, transfixed, over at the top of the bureau.

  “You know that old man—the one who owns Bricktop’s?”

  “Yeah. What about him?”

  “Didn’t someone call him Mr. Melson—or Melons?”

  “I may have heard somebody call him something like that. Why?”

  “I think I know who he is.”

  “Who?”

  “Morris Melon. That’s it. He was a teacher. Anthropology, wasn’t it? Or sociology. Yes, right. He wrote a book—one of those pioneering studies about the black community in Chicago. Or am I thinking of Black Metropolis? It was something like that, anyway. Damn, what was the name of that book? Or was it the study of the Gullah Islands? I should interview him sometime. Find out his story.”

  He went on chattering. I was only half listening. I got up and began to walk around the room slowly, a sense of fear rising steadily inside me.

  Andre had pulled himself out of his compulsive trip down memory lane. “What’s the matter, Nan? What are you doing?”

  I began to open the bureau drawers then, checking, I’m not sure what for. I looked inside my sax case and all seemed well there. I could find nothing missing. But I knew that someone had been looking through my things. I just knew it: earrings placed at the right-hand corner of the bureau instead of the left; a tube of hand lotion set on its side rather than on end; pantyhose rolled up with the toes outside rather than in. But things disturbed so minutely that it was possible I was imagining the changes. I told Andre what I was thinking. Moreover, I said, I think it might have something to do with my aunt.

  “What do you mean? It was probably just the maid.”

  I shook my head. “No. No, something’s…”

  “What? What were you going to say?”

  “Something’s happening.”

  “Like what? What’s happening?”

  I had to shrug my shoulders. I had no idea what I meant.

  He smiled at me and got me settled down again, almost convinced me that it was my imagination. I sat back at the window with him and finished my drink, but that weird feeling never went completely away.

  “I’d better go,” Andre said a while later, his voice low. “You need to get to bed.”

  I nodded. “So do you, friend.”

  He nodded, too.

  A darkness moved across his face then. I didn’t understand it. We stood for a minute in the doorway, saying a final good night, and then he left.

  Seconds later, there was a knock at the door. He had come back.

  “Forget something?” I asked.

  “No. Look—uh…”

  I waited in silence. The darkening in his face was full-blown midnight by now. Something was very wrong.

  He dropped the bomb then:

  “You think I’m a fag, don’t you?”

  “Of course not.” Oh yes, I did.

  I hadn’t known it before, but of course I did. What else could it mean for a handsome young man to be staying chez “one of my profs.”

  “I’m not,” he said, threatening. He reached for my wrist but at the last moment pulled back. “I’m not gay.”

  I caught my breath. I didn’t speak. He was looking at me so intently that I lowered my gaze from his.

  “I’ll come over to have breakfast with you tomorrow—if that’s okay,” he said finally. “We have to do something about your aunt.”

  We have to do something?

  I nodded. “See you in the morning.”

  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t a closet case. But surely there was more to his life story than brilliantly gifted mixed-race kid fights his way out of the ghetto and becomes the toast of Gay Paree. It wasn’t that I suspected what he had told me was untrue; there simply had to be some juicy bits that he’d left out.

  We.

  When he was gone I locked the door and placed my grip in front of it.

  CHAPTER 4

  It Could Happen to You

  I was showered and in street clothes when he arrived.

  He was carrying a white box tied with string.

  “Coffee’s on the way up,” I said. “What’s that?”

  “Decent croissants,” he answered, “and sliced ham and some fresh fruit. I stopped at the market near my place.” He lifted the sack in his other hand. “And the morning paper.”

  He laid out all the items on the bureau. “This is the kind of stuff even I can afford,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, boyfriend,” I said. “You’re going to be rich and famous soon enough.”

  Thank God, last night’s heaviness seemed to have gone from his face, and from the air between us. The tray was delivered a minute later. He sat next to me on the bed and we breakfasted royally.

  I felt good, happy, so much less alone.

  Unfortunately, when I looked down at the headline under the fold of the morning paper, that warm and fuzzy feeling instantly went away.

  AMERICAN WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED

  My heart stopped beating for a moment.

  Andre noticed the headline a second after I did. We began to read frantically, looking for the name of the victim.

  Polk. Mary Polk. A white woman.

  I could breathe again.

  For about two horrible minutes, I had been absolutely convinced that it was Vivian who had been murdered. But now it was just another story in the news. We read on.

  The woman had been bludgeoned to death in the alleyway out back of Le Domino, a seedy bar in Pigalle. She was apparently in France on business, working for a wine wholesaler. She had been registered at a perfectly respectable hotel in the 1st, and was probably indulging some wish to see the wicked side of Paris after dark.

  The article went on to say that another patron of the club, one Guillaume Lacroix, had been detained for questioning but already released. The police said Lacroix (street name Gigi) was a petty thief and one-time pimp with a long record, but there was no evidence linking him to the dead woman. The continuation page of the story showed a mug shot of Lacroix looking like a freeze-dried trout.

  Another possible suspect, unnamed, was being sought. Authorities believed for now that robbery was the motive for the murder: all Mary Polk’s cash, jewelry
, and credit cards were taken.

  In the gruesome crime scene photo Mary Polk lay dead, a bloody tarpaulin over her upper body, exposed from the knees down. There was something lurid, and at the same time touching, about her shapely ankles in the high heels. Also pictured was the murder weapon—a paperweight wrapped in a “blood-soaked kerchief, olive green in color and with a red insignia sewn on the upper left corner,” the news account said.

  Sipping at my coffee, I put the paper aside for a minute. Andre picked it up and continued to read, narrating the rest of the story to me as he did so.

  I was still thinking about my aunt Vivian. Vivian in her disco-going, coke-snorting, party-animal heyday. I had always admired the way she put herself together—stark black, tight-fitting dresses or bell-bottomed jumpsuits in startling colors. She would scour the flea markets for antique hats and jewelry and shoes. And she almost always wore a scarf. Not a flowing chiffon number, but something more like a cowboy bandanna—a kerchief. She said it added just the right element of fun to her outfits, kind of a throwaway. There was one sort she was especially fond of. A Girl Scout kerchief. Her waist was so tiny she could wear one of those as a sash. In fact, she collected them. She must have had a half dozen of those bandannas.

  I grabbed the newspaper from Andre’s hands and stared hard at the bloody scarf wrapped around the lethal paperweight. Of course, it was impossible to make out any details in a photo like that, but—No. No, it was crazy. What I was thinking was crazy. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

  I jumped off the bed, startling Andre.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I must be the stupidest cow who ever lived,” I said, jamming my feet into my boots.

  “What are you talking about? Nan, where are you going?”

  “Reception!” I shouted, fumbling with the door. “I’m going to get her suitcase! I should have looked in her suitcase!”

  Her valise was humongous. I dragged it onto the birdcage elevator, off again, and into my room.

  The case, an old one, was not locked. We hefted it onto the bed and unsnapped the fasteners. It had been packed tight as a drum. All manner of stuff sprang out and onto the coverlet—sweaters, trousers, pantyhose, shampoo—even a photo album.

  “I wonder how long she intended to stay,” said Andre. “There’s a lot of crap in here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you’re right. And look at the kind of crap it is—I mean, the variety of crap.”

  There was an impressive panoply of stuff: hair curlers, an old matchbook from the Brasserie Lipp, a portable radio, light clothes, heavy clothes, a couple of mateless earrings, photographs, an empty perfume bottle. A lot of the things seemed more like mementos than travel necessities.

  “You know what?” I said. “It’s like she grabbed the minimum stuff a person would need to set up housekeeping. Almost like she was going to start a new life.”

  “She wasn’t planning to go home, you mean.”

  “Maybe. The strangest thing of all is why she would leave it all behind.”

  “But you said she skipped on the bill.”

  “Yeah, I know. But if you’re deliberately going to skip on the bill, wouldn’t you find a way to take a few things out, you know, one at a time in a shopping bag on your way out one morning and nobody would think anything of it. If you were really planning to escape without paying the weekly rent, you’d smuggle your clothes out somehow and just leave the empty suitcase—or something.

  “This makes it seem like she left here on the run. Like she hadn’t planned to skip at all.”

  “Could be,” he said, picking up the hefty photo album. “Do you remember this?”

  “No. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. I don’t know what kind of things she would have kept at home—wherever that was.”

  We opened the cover of the album to the first page of photographs.

  “That’s my grandmother!”

  In truth, I had never met my father’s mother. She died young. But I recall this photograph of her; my father had a copy of it that used to adorn the chest of drawers in my parents’ bedroom.

  “God, how strange,” I said. “It’s so weird seeing that picture again after all these years.”

  Andre leafed slowly through the book. “He looks like you. Is that your father?” He was pointing to a tall, serious-looking young man in cap and gown.

  “Yeah. He looks like he’d rather be someplace else, doesn’t he? Like always.”

  “You don’t get along with him?”

  “I don’t know if I’d put it that way. I don’t see him often enough to get along or not get along with him. I was never really sure how Pop felt about me. I was grown up when he left, but it was almost as if when he stopped loving my mother he stopped loving me, too.”

  “I don’t believe it works like that,” he said, lingering another minute before he turned the page. “Wow—is that you?”

  “Where?”

  The little girl in pigtails was wearing a polka-dot playsuit, grinning at the camera.

  Lord, what a geek I was. I took control of the album and turned hurriedly past the next page or two lest we encounter any shots of me accepting spelling bee or good citizenship prizes.

  “There’s Vivian!” I cried.

  She was wearing a white suit and matching pumps, and a bridal veil. A black man I did not recognize was the groom.

  “She’s beautiful,” Andre said. “Who’s the man?”

  “Uncle number one, I suppose. She’s awful young there. I don’t remember him.”

  “Look here,” said Andre. “Looks like another wedding.”

  Yes, it did. I instantly recognized City Hall in Lower Manhattan. Viv, in a scalloped-neck sheath, her hair teased to giddy heights, and a devilishly handsome man—with an Afro as big as the Ritz—holding up a copy of their marriage license on the steps of the courthouse. Him, I had a vague memory of.

  We continued to turn the pages.

  Hubby #3 looked familiar, too. Jerry, that’s what he was called. “The Cracker,” I believe, was my father’s pet name for him. Jerry was a musician from L.A. By the look of things, he and Viv had gone to Venice on their honeymoon. And here they were in swim clothes, on a hotel balcony, the Adriatic like a chip of sapphire behind them.

  We saw Viv in one of those jumpsuits at a table in some bar. A second-level Motown crooner from the sixties was pawing her. Andre put a name to the guy’s face: Chuck Wilson.

  There she was again, in a colorful African hat, receiving an autograph from a nice-looking black man, the chairs and tables of a cabaret visible in the background. “That’s Oscar Brown Jr.,” Andre pronounced.

  “You know, I think you’re right,” I said. “Who’s this?” I pointed to the gentleman in another photo, seated at a Steinway, who was shaking hands with Vivian.

  “I believe it’s Wynton Kelly.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “And what about her?” I said, turning to a snap of Viv in her black evening finery, wineglass raised in salute to a sleepy-eyed lady, also at the piano of some boîte. I slipped the photo out of its cellophane jacket and turned it over, cupping it with my hand so that he could not see what was written there: “Shirley Horn at the Blue Note, 1971.”

  “Shirley Horn,” said Andre.

  “Boy, you are fucking amazing. Who’s this handsome guy—playing the bass?”

  “Ray Brown.”

  Again, I took the snapshot out and looked at the back of it. He was right again. “Damn, you’re good,” I said.

  He shrugged, trying to hide his swelling chest.

  I took out another one and looked at it front and back. “I’m going to stump you on this one, I bet.”

  “Why?” asked Andre. “Let’s see it.”

  This time I handed the photograph to him. Vivian was pictured with a sweet-faced black man no taller than she was, but beautifully built. They stood with their arms around each other’s waist under a sign that read in French EX
OTIC GARDEN—THIS WAY.

  He studied the man’s face for a long time. “Well, I guess you got me,” he admitted. “I can’t identify him. Let’s see who it is.” He turned the photo over.

  “Picnic With Ez, near Èze! (Ha ha)” was written on the back.

  “What does it mean?” Andre asked. “Where is Èze?”

  “On the Riviera. We’ll have dinner and make a night of it in this incredible hotel someday. When we’ve got two thousand dollars to blow.”

  “You mean you’ve been there?”

  “Uh-huh. Once.”

  “Who took you?”

  I gave him a little world-weary sigh. “Oh, you know. Jekyll and Hyde shit. A mistake wearing pants.”

  “He hit you or something?”

  “‘Something.’ Yeah, it was more like ‘something.’ That’s the trouble with guys who know a lot more than you: they know a lot more than you. Anyhow, I guess I come by my occasional bad taste in men honestly. God knows, Viv had her lapses, too.”

  He looked down at the snapshot again. “So maybe this guy Ez turned out to be one of Vivian’s mistakes. But you say you don’t know him?”

  I shook my head. “Never heard of him.”

  We played the game for a few minutes more and then I dived back into the suitcase. More crap, as Andre had called it. But nothing to lead us any closer to Viv. No address books, no airline tickets, no names or phone numbers jotted down on paper napkins. And no Girl Scout bandannas. I guess Viv’s waistline wasn’t what it used to be.

  Finally I came across a fraying denim jacket. I stood up and tried it on. A couple of sizes too small for me and my friends up top. I stuck my hand in one of the chest pockets and pulled out a filthy piece of paper, rolled up tightly like a reefer. I unrolled it. It was, to my astonishment, a hundred dollar bill, U.S. currency.

  Andre and I began a thorough search, turning pockets inside out, feeling along seams, opening jars, and so on, but we could find no more cash.

  “This was her emergency money, I guess,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And from what you told me—her telegram to your mother and everything—she had a real emergency. Why didn’t she spend it?”