The Right To Sing the Blues Read Free Page A

would recommend him. That was the essential Jeanette Boyington; she was a gamefish who admired persistence above all else. Even from her room in the State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Nudger wondered if Fat Jack McGee knew Jeanette Boyington’s present address.
    “And because of your collection,” Fat Jack added. An ebony dribble of coffee dangled in tenuous liquid suspension from his triple chin, glittering as he talked. “I mean, I heard you collect old jazz records.”
    “I used to,” Nudger said a bit wistfully, realizing that Fat Jack must have checked him out with some thoroughness. “I had Willie the Lion. Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams from their Kansas City days. Bessie Smith. Art Tatum.”
    “How come ‘had’?” Fat Jack asked.
    “I sold most of the collection,” Nudger said, “to pay the rent one dark month.” He gazed beyond green palm fronds, out the window and through filigreed black wrought iron, at the tourists half a block away on Bourbon Street, at the odd combination of French and Spanish architecture and black America and white suits and broiling half-tropical sun that was New Orleans, where jazz lived as in no other place. “Damned rent,” he muttered.
    “Amen,” Fat Jack said solemnly, kidding not even himself. He hadn’t worried about paying the rent in years. The drop of coffee released its tremulous grip on his chin, plummeted, and stained his pure white shirtfront like a sacrilege.
    Nudger looked away from the stain, back out at Bourbon Street. It had become run down and attracted some of the wrong element—or rather, the wrong wrong element— since Nudger had last seen it, but it was still Bourbon Street and like no other street. High notes and low notes; topless and bottomless dancers—male and female; tourists and true jazz lovers. All in a grand and gaudy mix that ran through the heart—that was the heart—of the French Quarter. The relatively few violent ones couldn’t change that. Tradition had a certain resilience.
    “So will you stay around awhile?” Fat Jack was asking.
    Nudger nodded. His social and business calendars weren’t quite booked solid.
    “It’s not Hollister himself who worries me,” Fat Jack said. “It’s Ineida Collins. She’s singing at the club now, and if she keeps practicing, someday she’ll be mediocre. Hey, I’m not digging at her, Nudger; that’s simply an honest assessment of her talent. And talent is a commodity I can judge better than most.”
    “Then why did you hire her?”
    “Because of David Collins. He owns a lot of the French Quarter and a piece of the highly successful restaurant in which we now sit. In every parish in New Orleans, he has more clout than a ton of charge cards. And he’s as skinny and ornery as I am fat and nice.”
    Nudger took another sip of the pungent coffee. “And he asked you to hire Ineida Collins?”
    “You’re on to it, Nudger. Ineida is his daughter. She wants to make it big as a singer. And she will, even if Daddy has to pay double the fair price for a recording studio. Since David Collins owns the building my club is in, not to mention twelve-and-a-half-percent interest in the business, I thought I’d acquiesce when his daughter auditioned for a job on his recommendation. And Ineida isn’t really so bad that she embarrasses anyone but herself, so I call it diplomacy.”
    “I thought you were calling it trouble,” Nudger said. “I thought that was why you hired me.”
    Fat Jack nodded, ample jowls spilling over his white collar. “So it became,” he said. “Hollister is a handsome young dude, and within the first week Ineida was at the club he put some moves on her and they became fast friends, then soon progressed beyond mere friendship.”
    “You figure he’s attracted to Daddy’s money?”
    “Nothing like that,” Fat Jack said. “That’d be too simple. Part of the deal when I hired Ineida was that I keep her identity a secret—David Collins insisted on it. She