Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

“Old jazz song,” she said.

“I gathered as much. What’s it called?”

“‘Who You Been Grapplin’ With?’”

“Catchy title.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Sounds Dixieland.”

“It is. New Orleans club band called the Sweetmeat Five cut a record of it in ’59, but it didn’t get much play until the early sixties, after...” She let the rest of the sentence trail off and said instead, “Pretty much been forgotten since.”

“Where’d you come across it?”

“Internet,” she said. “And a dude I know collects old jazz records.”

She surprised me again, then — twice. First by closing her eyes and starting to sing softly, something else she’d never before done in my presence, and second by the low, smoky, Billie Holiday quality of her voice.

Tamara let out a long sighing breath. “There’re more verses, but those are the only three I remember.”

“I didn’t know you could sing.”

“Yeah, well, mostly in the shower.”

“You ought to do it more often — you have a nice voice.”

The compliment didn’t seem to cheer her much. Her smile was fleeting. “Wish I could get the damn song out of my head.”

“Why? It has a good beat.”

“You think so? Bet the man who wrote it doesn’t anymore.”

“No? Who would he be?”

“Moses Arceneaux.”

“Arceneaux. Related to Charles Brown’s niece?”

“Robin Louise isn’t his niece, she’s his daughter. Charles Anthony Brown’s real name is Moses Arceneaux.”

“Oh,” I said, “so that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“So why did he lie to us? Why the false name?”

“Man’s a fugitive, that’s why,” Tamara said. “Been a fugitive ever since 1963.”

Well, that explained her glumness. “What’s he wanted for?”

“Double homicide. Murdered his wife and her lover, another musician named Dupres.”

She handed me a couple of pages of printout. Her computer skills are exceptional; if there is information on any topic available anywhere online, she’ll find it. What she’d pulled up here were a copy of the fugitive warrant issued by the New Orleans police department in August of 1963 and a brief newspaper account of the crimes. The gist of both was that Moses Arceneaux, jazz trumpeter, songwriter, and member of the Sweetmeat Five, had in cold blood and with malice aforethought shot to death his wife, Lily, the band’s lead singer, and a jazz pianist with another group named Marcus Dupres. He’d done this, it was alleged, in a jealous rage after finding out that the two were having an affair. Two neighbors of Dupres who’d heard the shots had arrived on the scene in time to witness Arceneaux standing over his wife’s body with the murder weapon, a .38 revolver registered to him, in his hand. Arceneaux had immediately dropped the weapon and taken flight. After which he had evidently stopped at his own apartment long enough to gather some cash and a few personal belongings, then fled the city and disappeared without a trace.

The fact that he had continued to evade capture for more than half a century was not as amazing as it might seem. There were other such cases on record — men and women who had changed their identities, maintained a low profile, and done nothing to attract police attention and either were never caught during their lifetimes or for one reason or another were finally found and brought to justice. Still, half a century is a lot of years to be on the run. Moses Arceneaux had beaten long odds. Very long odds.

“Damn,” I said when I returned the printout. “I liked that man.”

“So did I. So what do we do now?”

“You know the answer to that. What we’re bound to do by law — turn him in. There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

“Even though he’s old and sick?”

“The two people he shot never had a chance to grow old.”

“Yeah. But maybe they had it coming to them.”

“Nobody has murder coming to them.”

Tamara knew that as well as I did; she didn’t put up any more argument. “But not with a phone call, okay? He came to us on his own, he’s a client no matter what he did fifty years ago, and he’s dying... can’t treat the man cold that way.”

“No, we can’t and we won’t. I’ll take him in.”

“Right away?”

“Tonight,” I said. “I don’t want to have to go looking for him on the streets, make a public thing out of it.”

“I could go along—”

“What for? Wouldn’t make it any easier.”

“... I guess not.”

“What about Robin Louise?” I asked. “You locate her?”

“No problem with that. She was raised by Jolene and Bobby Franklin, all right — the murdered wife’s sister and her husband. They adopted her, had her last name legally changed to Franklin.”

“Is she still living?”

“In Shreveport. Trained and working now as a physical therapist. Married once to a man named Davis. Two children, both grown. Old Moses doesn’t even know he’s a grandpop.” Tamara’s mouth took on a lemony twist. “Sometimes I hate this damn business.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So do I.”

The Blue Moon Café was on the fringe of Skid Row, in that section below Market Street that used to be called South of the Slot. Much of the old warehouse district farther south had undergone urban renewal, was now home to nightclubs and expensive condos and loft apartments and known locally as SoMa. But the Skid Row pocket remained mostly unchanged, as filled as ever with drunks and drug addicts and hookers and scruffy bars and cheap lodging places, like an ugly piece of the city caught in a time warp. You walked carefully in that neighborhood after dark. I walked carefully even though it was only seven o’clock and just dusk when I got there.

The café was not quite a greasy spoon, though grease was one of the dominant odors along with beer and human effluvium. One long, wide room with a counter along the right-hand wall, booths along another, and several tables in two rows down the middle. The kitchen was at the rear and wrapped partway around behind the counter. An open corridor yawned on its other side.

Business was good at this hour: more than half of the spaces were occupied by a mixed-race and mostly poverty-level clientele. There was the low buzz of conversation, but none of the punctuations of laughter you heard in better restaurants. Eating was serious business here. And not a particularly enjoyable one, judging from the samples of the fare I saw in passing and the expressions worn by the diners.

I found an open spot at the counter, and when a tired-looking Latina waitress got around to me I said I was there to see Charles Anthony Brown. Her expression of surprise indicated he had few if any callers, but she didn’t ask questions. “Down past the johns,” she said, gesturing. “Last door on the left.”

Kitchen and bathroom smells were strong in the dimly lit corridor. The two doors on the left were unmarked. I stopped at the last one, knocked, and pretty soon it opened and he peered out at me. Recognition put a look of hope in the rheumy eyes — and I took it away quick because there was no other, more merciful way to do it.