Dead Extra Page 15

  Gertie couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed, chewing on the information Herbert had passed on earlier that afternoon. A midnight cowbell rang through the bungalow. Someone was letting himself in. Gertie reached under her pillow for the pistol Herbert had loaned her. She sat up on the edge of the bed wearing nothing but her flimsy nightgown and felt the weight of the pistol in her hand. Cold, steel death. She’d never fired it and wasn’t at all sure she could fire it at a man. Footsteps clomped across the hardwood floor. This was no thief. Whoever was in the front room was happy to announce himself.

  At least there was only one of them. A lucky shot and Gertie could be in the clear. She looked at the pistol again. She’d seen dandies in the B pictures she worked on wield these things with such ease. She’d held them by the half dozen when carrying them back to a prop bin. But this was no prop. It was a real gun with real bullets in her hand.

  It did have bullets, right? She just pulled the trigger, right? That’s all it would take?

  The footsteps got closer. Gertie told herself, “Act, goddamn it. Do something.”

  She held the gun like the molls in the movies and put her free hand on the switch of the lamp beside the bed. A silhouette emerged in the doorway to the bedroom. Gertie clicked on the lamp. The room flooded with light.

  The man standing in the doorway squinted. Gertie tried to place him. He looked like her brother-in-law Jack: tall frame, slightly hunched shoulders, hands like a couple of baseball mitts at the end of stocky forearms. Only Jack was dead somewhere in Germany and this guy looked like he’d dug himself out of a grave. Instead of Jack’s long, straight nose, this guy’s cartilage had been busted enough to meander and flatten at the end. His hair had long ago gone to gray and his skin was about halfway cured and ready to be made into a handbag. Everywhere Jack had looked kind, this guy looked vicious. All the warmth Jack had projected turned to ice in this goon.

  “I know you,” she said to him. “You’re Jack’s dad.”

  “No shit, Wilma. Put the peashooter down and let’s talk.”

  He took a step forward into the doorway. Gertie raised the gun and followed Herbert’s directions: just point it like it’s your finger. Aim for the chest. It’s a bigger target.

  John Sr. said, “You know how to use that gun, Wilma? You even know how to turn it on?”

  Turn it on? Gertie looked at the gun. Herbert never told her how to turn it on. As soon as the gun was lowered, John Sr. took a couple more steps in her direction. She got wise and raised the gun. John Sr. kept walking toward her. She said, “Take one more step and I’ll shoot.”

  John Sr. cracked a sideways smile. “Sure you will.”

  Gertie exhaled and pulled the trigger. A bullet flew out and went somewhere. John Sr. didn’t even flinch. He kept walking toward her. Gertie fired again and again. Nothing. The shots didn’t even slow the man down. She thought maybe Herbert had given her a gun full of blanks. She paused for just a second to look at the damn thing. John Sr. launched into this pause. He grabbed the gun with one hand and smacked Gertie’s temple with the other. A fireworks display erupted across Gertie’s eyes. Next thing she knew, John Sr. was picking her up off the floor.

  “Come on, you little whore.”

  Gertie squirmed under that meat hook of a hand digging into her upper arm. There was no room to move. She resorted to her second line of defense. “I’m not Wilma,” she said. “I’m her sister. I’m Gertie.”

  “And I was born yesterday.” John Sr. flung Gertie onto the bed face first. He climbed on top of her, digging a knee into her tailbone. The fireworks started again. John Sr. gathered her wrists behind her back and slapped a pair of handcuffs on her.

  “I’m serious,” Gertie said. “You got the wrong girl.”

  John Sr. climbed off and yanked her to her feet. She stumbled, her bare feet slipping across the dusty floor, seeking some kind of purchase there. John Sr. pushed her toward the doorway.

  “Can’t I at least get dressed?”

  John Sr. stuck his meaty hand on her neck and steered her across the bungalow. “You don’t need clothes where we’re going.”

  JACK, 1946

  AL’S CONTINENTAL CLUB looked like it had gone to Germany for the extent of the war and then come back to downtown Los Angeles with the rest of the GIs. The plaster walls had been painted a dark red that wasn’t exactly blood red, but was close enough to camouflage blood should it spill there. The dents and chips of the heavy oak chair rail and paneling told stories of beer bottles broken so the neck could be turned into a weapon, of chairs flying back and whoever had been sitting in them racing away, of men tapping along to the rhythm section with their keys against the wall, and, maybe in the smooth worn sections, of lovers pressing against it in a vain attempt at getting closer than possible. The tables were no better: pockmarked and scarred from high heels dancing on them, bare wood darkened by cigarette ash, legs wobbly from giving out and being haphazardly repaired. This was not what Jack expected.

  Before the war, Al’s had been more upscale. It was never so swell that Jack couldn’t afford to walk in, but it had been clean and bright. The maître d’ had looked right in his tails and tie. The bandstand would boast a seven piece, all union musicians, professionals who played and went home to families after their final sets. Expecting this type of scene, Jack had taken twenty of Leslie Bell’s hundred bucks to a tailor he knew on York and picked up a gray summer suit hanging on a dummy in the window. The wool was so soft and thin it could pass for flannel in indoor lighting.

  Gertie, too, had gotten dressed for the occasion. She wore a blue fit-and-flare dress and a white angora cardigan. She’d been to a stylist who’d tamed her wild curls into something soft and wavy and pulled off her forehead with a blue silk bow the size of the smallest hair combs.

  If they were overdressed when they walked into Al’s Continental, no one seemed to notice. Patrons huddled together at tables. Two waitresses weaved around the joint with trays full of cocktails. A Chesterfield girl peddled smokes. A four piece plucked strings and checked tuning and wet reeds and stocked enough drinks to get them through the set. A lean, dark man at the piano uncapped a milk bottle and poured himself a glass with nothing added. Jack said, “Get a load of this joint.”

  Gertie flashed him a smile. “The ambiance will seduce you.”

  They took a couple of seats near the stage. The waitress caught them before the chairs got warm. Jack ordered a rye for himself and a gimlet for Gertie. The waitress took the order running. Gertie scanned the room and said, “Well, there you go, Jackie. We found Carlotta Bell for you.”

  “Where?”

  Gertie pointed out a woman sitting alone at the table nearest to the piano. She had a candle pulled close to her and was reading a paperback in the flickering light. She wore high-waisted slacks and a flowing cotton shirt with the shoulder pads missing and her muscular arms filling the fabric.

  “That’s her?” Jack asked. “Just like that?”

  “I told you I knew how to find her.”

  Jack nodded. “I just have to decide how to approach her.”

  “Even easier,” Gertie said. She made an “O” of her forefinger and thumb, put it in her mouth, and blew a whistle just loud enough to get the attention of the people at the four or five closest tables. She waved her hand to Carlotta Bell and called, “Yoo-hoo. Lottie. Over here.”

  Lottie closed her paperback. She put it in her purse, hooked the purse in the crook of her arm, picked up a fizzy drink, and walked over to join Jack and Gertie. Jack stood and pulled out a chair for her. She sat in it. Jack sat back in his.

  Gertie introduced them and said, “Lottie, your father gave Jack a hundred bucks to find you. He promised him another hundred to bring you back to Pasadena.”

  Lottie looked at Jack and smiled. “I don’t know. Pasadena’s a long way from downtown. They had to build a new road to get there and everything.”

  “Don’t worry about Jack,” Gertie said. “He grew up in Highland Park. He k
nows all the roads on that side of town.”

  The waitress brought the drinks. He hadn’t ordered a double, but the rye looked to be just about that. Jack paid and dropped a dime on her tray for the effort. The pianist tickled a warm-up riff. Gertie and Lottie kept with the banter.

  Lottie asked, “Has he thought about how he was going to kidnap me and drag me back to my daddy?”

  “I think he brought a club that he bought off a caveman.”

  “Very nice. He could drag me by the hair after he knocks me out.”

  “Every girl likes to be pulled by the hair.”

  Lottie scanned Jack from head to toe and back to the head again. “I don’t know, Gertie. He doesn’t look like much of a caveman.”

  “Wait ’til a few of these ryes settle in. He’ll be dragging his knuckles with the best of ’em.”

  Jack smiled. He led his eyebrows through a little dance, downed his first rye, and raised his empty glass to the waitress. She responded with the slightest of nods.

  Lottie asked, “Has he thought about waiting until I get on the red line home and sitting on my lap so I can’t move until we get to the Pasadena stop?”

  “That’s a capital idea,” Gertie said.

  Jack pulled out his tobacco pouch. He made a canoe of a rolling paper and rolled the first of three cigarettes. “It won’t work,” he said. “Too many transfers between here and Pasadena.”

  “You could slip me a Mickey Finn,” Lottie suggested.

  “You could sweep her up in your arms like what Rhett Butler did to Vivien Leigh.”

  Jack passed two of the newly rolled cigarettes to Lottie and Gertie and kept the last for himself. He struck a match on the scarred table and lit all three. He waited for more kidnapping ideas from the pair. Wilma and Gertie used to razz him like this. They’d had a better rapport than Gertie and Lottie, but that could only be expected. The twins had been working together since they’d shared a womb.

  Before the next kidnapping joke could slip out, the drummer brushed a cymbal. The man at the stand-up bass thumped a rhythm. The saxophone joined in, soft and smooth. Everything nice. Everything predictable. Then the piano started and the whole room was awash. Jack’s memories of Gertie and Wilma were swept up in the notes.

  Christ, he missed being married to her.

  The pianist had a wild style about him. He’d pound along to the rhythm with his left hand, just enough to open up some quiet spaces in the song, then seek to fill those spaces with his right hand. And his right hand was mesmerizing. The fingers would flicker across the keyboard in a blur that seemed too fast to be intentional, too fast to be real, but all the notes were right and in the right place. He’d settle into a catchy little melody, play it two or three times, then fly away again into some kind of dazzling harmonies. It all crashed together into a complex flurry of moods: somber heavy notes followed by some whimsical right-hand twinkling, blending into a happy little rag that would race forward until it got too fast and could only be reined in by the same melody slowing down to settle into a melancholy air.

  The whole room stopped everything to listen to him. He carried the band through all his mood changes, telegraphing just enough to let them know what to do with the tempo, keeping just enough up his sleeve to surprise everyone now and then. The guy was amazing.

  Jack wasn’t a fan.

  He had enough mood swings on his own to deal with. He wallowed too much in melancholy nests. He had enough trouble trying to quiet his mind without this guy throwing him into a pensive place. Where were the simple waltzes? Hell, even a foxtrot would’ve done. It was a Saturday night. He didn’t want to be wowed by a virtuoso. Gertie had her dancing shoes on. Jack would much rather spin the dame than sit here stewing.

  Gertie took her eyes off the pianist’s fluttering fingers and said, “That’s Chester Ellis. He was up at Camarillo with Wilma.”

  “Really?” Jack said.

  Gertie nodded. “Lottie, too. The three of them palled around.”

  Jack looked at Lottie. She watched Chester play like there was only one man in the band, one man in the whole damn room. Chester, for his part, kept spinning that piano through a spectrum of moods.

  When the band’s set ended, Chester refilled his glass of milk and brought it with him into the crowd. A few patrons patted him on the back and shoulders as he crossed the floor. He didn’t turn or talk to any of them. He pulled out the fourth chair and joined Lottie, Gertie, and Jack. Without hellos or introductions, he said to Gertie, “I heard you was dead, Wilma. Glad to see you ain’t.”

  Lottie placed her hand on Chester’s forearm and said, “Uh, Chet.”

  Chester didn’t respond. He said, “You got your ukulele? Want to do a number tonight?”

  Gertie smiled like a schoolteacher. “I’m not Wilma,” she said. “I’m her twin. We met at the funeral, remember?”

  Chester let out a heavy breath. “I must have been pretty high that day.” He sipped his milk. Lottie lifted her hand off his arm. The fabric of his shirt stuck to his sweaty forearm in the shape of Lottie’s hand. “Goddamn, I thought I was looking at a ghost through that whole set. I thought I was playing for a dead woman.” He looked at Jack for the first time. “I don’t think I know you. I’m Chester Ellis.” He stretched out his gifted right hand.

  Jack shook it and said his own name.

  Lottie said, “Chet, this is Wilma’s ex-husband.”

  “The dead one?” Chester asked.

  “Yep,” Jack said.

  Chester shook his head. “Goddamn room full of ghosts. We all just haunting each other.”

  The waitress came by. Jack ordered a second gimlet for Gertie and a fourth rye for himself. Chester still had his lukewarm bottle of milk. Lottie hadn’t touched her soda water since she sat down more than an hour earlier. Jack pieced together a brief biography of the two from the evidence he had at hand. They’d met at the madhouse, probably both there trying to kick a habit. Lottie’s ornamental soda water was nothing more than a signpost to a waitress to leave her alone. This suggested to Jack that she must’ve been a drunk. Chester’s lean physique and the fact that he must spend almost all of his time seated in front of a piano suggested a different habit to Jack. Dope, probably. That would explain the man keeping his sleeves down while he sweated through a set. Jack was willing to bet the farm that Chester’s forearms were decorated with scarred track marks along the veins. The couple must have bonded through a shared history of addiction and madness and all the things that lead up to it, all the things it led them through. Now they were in love and Leslie Bell didn’t like it.

  The fourth rye came along. Another double. Jack took a sip. It wasn’t enough to drop his knuckles all the way to the floor, but if he’d done the math, he’d know that three and a half doubles put him on his seventh drink. His tongue loosened a bit. He pointed back and forth between Lottie and Chester. “This little love affair is what has your rich daddy all upset, huh?”

  Lottie didn’t answer. Chester locked eyes with Jack. He didn’t shoot Jack a glare, exactly. He seemed too tired for that. Still, there was something of a warning behind Chester’s eyes. “It ain’t so little.”

  Jack did the quick math. “So you would’ve met, what? Two, three years ago? Passed those little cafeteria notes that Wilma wrote about in her book. Helped each other out of the bughouse. Got straight. Fell in love. Only thing is, if this candlelight doesn’t deceive me, Mr. Ellis is what we call a Negro, and California Civil Code 60 prohibits the two of you from getting married, if that’s what you want. And even if it weren’t law, old Leslie Bell don’t like it. How close am I to right?”

  Lottie and Chester exchanged glances. Chester said to Jack, “Mister, you got a problem with us?”

  Jack leaned back in his chair. He knew he’d tripped a wire inside Chester and didn’t want anything to explode. He wasn’t sure what to say to keep everything calm, and he didn’t know if he did have a problem with Chester and Lottie. Like every white boy in Highland Park, he’
d grown up to believe that the only things lower than white trash like himself were the Mexicans down in East LA and the blacks who lived alongside the factories south of downtown. A couple of years imprisoned in Nazi Germany made him think hard about everyone who’d taught him about a master race. Losing his wife and then hearing all she’d been up to once she thought she lost him made him think even harder about love. He didn’t know how to add all these things up or how to explain them in a dirty downtown jazz club with a head full of rye. The best he could come up with was, “I’m just being nosy, I guess. Trying to hear a love story.”

  This last comment flew like a zeppelin across the table. No one responded to Jack. They just looked at each other. Jack rubbed the condensation along his new glass of whiskey and ice. He wanted to drink it and also knew that he was the only one drinking at the table and that was part of the problem. Without a band to play and with all the other patrons carrying a low-level din throughout the place, there was nothing to break the stalemate among the four.

  Gertie was the first to speak. She said, “Lottie’s dad offered Jack a hundred bucks to drag Lottie back to Pasadena.”

  “What?” Chester said.

  “It’s true,” Lottie said.

  “But that don’t make sense, honey. You was just out to his house last week.”

  This time, Gertie said, “What?”

  “I only go out there when he’s not around,” Lottie said. She shrugged. “I still like to see my mom.”

  “Wait. So…” Gertie paused. She picked the lime out of her gimlet, twirled it around her fingers, squeezed the juice into her rocks glass. All the while, she mumbled words Jack couldn’t catch. After a few seconds of this, she said, “This smells like a setup, doesn’t it?”