Blue Lonesome Read Free

appeared in the lobby and peered out at him through the door glass. His demeanor wouldn’t have alarmed even the most paranoid individual—the woman opened the door almost immediately.
    “Yes?”
    “Mrs. Fong?”
    “Yes. The apartment isn’t ready for renting yet. Next week, could be.”
    “I’m not here about an apartment. I … well, I’m wondering about Janet Mitchell.”
    Mrs. Fong’s eyes narrowed. Her lips pinched together in tight little ridges. “Her? You know her?”
    “Yes, I know her,” Messenger lied. “Can you tell me where she went?”
    “Where?”
    “Or at least why she moved out.”
    “Moved out? You don’t know?”
    “Know what?”
    “She’s dead.”
    “Dead!”
    “Sunday night. Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade.” Mrs. Fong rolled her eyes. “My building—killed herself in my building. Terrible. You know how terrible it is to clean up so much blood?”

2
    H E SAT IN his living room with the lights off, a glass of brandy warming in his hands. He’d poured the brandy when he first came in, but he hadn’t felt like tasting it yet. He sat watching patterns of light from occasional passing cars flicker across the drawn window curtains. From the stereo turntable, the melodic contours and rhythmic innovations of Ellington and his band swelled and ebbed. One of the Duke’s original thirties recordings, this one. “Perdido,” with Cootie Williams’s trumpet growly sweet and low-down blue.
    Perdido. Lost.
    Like Janet Mitchell: low-down blue and lost.
    Why?
    The question throbbed in him to the beat of the music. She’d left no note, Mrs. Fong had told him. Given no warning. And the police had found nothing among her meager effects to hint at a motive. What about her past? he’d asked. Who was she, where did she come from? Mrs. Fong had no idea. Showed up one day five months ago, rented the apartment on a month-to-month basis. Paid two months’ rent in advance, plus a cleaning deposit, all in cash; paid each subsequent month’s rent in cash. Where did she work? Mrs. Fong shrugged. Self-employed, private income—that was what Janet Mitchell had told her and she hadn’t bothered to ask for references. No need for references, not when you were handed several hundred dollars in good green cash in advance and then promptly on the first of every month. Visitors? No visitors, before or after her death. Just him, today. The police hadn’t come back, which meant they’d been satisfied that her death was in fact suicide. They wouldn’t care otherwise; she was another statistic to them. Mrs. Fong didn’t care; to her Janet Mitchell was nothing more than an annoying mess to clean up. Had anybody cared that she’d ended her life? A relative—had the authorities found one to claim the body? Mrs. Fong didn’t know about that, either. Mrs. Fong was tired of answering questions. Mrs. Fong politely but firmly shut the door in his face.
    He felt dull and empty, sitting here now in the dark—almost the same way he’d felt when first his father and then his mother died. But they’d been his parents; he’d loved them, even if he hadn’t been close to them. It made no sense that he should feel some sense of loss over a woman he had spoken to once in his life, who hadn’t even known he existed.
    Or did it?
    The blues, he thought. One blue lonesome individual empathizing with the plight of another. But it was more than that. In jazz there were two forms of the blues: a simple, direct, personal sadness, the sadness of remembrances past and of the deep darkness of the unconscious; and the other kind, a deterioration and decline of the personal spirit, a kind of resolution downward to plaintive, desperate resignation. Ms. Lonesome had had the second type. Perdido. Lost. He wondered if maybe he did, too. If this entire business with her was symptomatic of an approaching downward spiral in his own existence. More than just a midlife crisis; a rest-of-his-life crisis, in which he