"As in Charlie?"

"Yes. Of course."

"You're telling me you're obsessed with Charlie Parker?"

"Yes. It is true."

"And you want me to help you understand?"

He nodded.

This time I couldn't hold it back. Before long, I was doubled over with laughter. Racism is a st.i.tch, ain't it? White people think you're either a half wit, genetically determined criminal or an extraterrestrial with some kind of pipeline to the spirit.

Oh well. There didn't seem to be much point in going out on this weird guy, Valokus, whose face had again clouded over with pain and incomprehension. Besides, what was he asking of me, essentially? To talk to him about music. What was so bad about that? It wasn't as though he was asking me to clean his place or suck his d.i.c.k.

So I pulled myself together and took another sip of my cognac. Charlie Parker wasn't no G.o.dd.a.m.n mystic, he was a musical genius-for some, the musical genius-f.u.c.ked up behind heroin and being an American Negro-so what else is new? But instead of saying that to Henry, I reached over and patted his hand a little.

In turn, he took mine and kissed it lingeringly. Then he called for the bottle of Remy and poured me a really big drink.

Valokus took me back to my corner and left me there with the paper container of cappuccino he had purchased at the new cafe in the neighborhood. He was going uptown now, he said, because he'd heard Colony Records had a new shipment of some live recordings of Bird club dates.

Just the tiniest bit unsteady on my feet, I watched him walk up the block and disappear around the corner.

Pity I'm not a true wh.o.r.e, I thought. I could take this fool for a real ride.

Henry wasn't kidding. His apartment, which I visited after our third lunch date, was a shrine to Charlie Parker.

Everywhere you looked there was a piece of Bird memorabilia: poster size blow ups of old black and white photos of Parker, "Bird Lives" calendars, back issue jazz magazines, an unpublished PhD thesis, books, postcards.

And then there was the music itself: records, ca.s.settes, CDs.

I was speechless. This time it didn't occur to me to laugh at Henry's Birdmania Something happened on that first visit to his shrine that made me a little less high handed about his obsession. A sudden shock of recognition, I guess. I realized that my feeling for France may not have been so different from Henry's Birdaholism.

France was hardly my home. Yet I kept fleeing there. It was where I felt safe, the most alive, the most understood, the most welcome. French was not my mother tongue. Yet if I had my way every school child would start studying it at age six. I tried to write in that language. I loved the way it felt in my mouth. I was positively turned on just hearing it on the radio. But that was all romantic c.r.a.p. I'm not French. And no power on earth could make it otherwise. I'm as colored and American as Charlie Parker. That moment of recognition and empathy with Henry Valokus was a turning point in my att.i.tude toward him. His Bird thing was no longer just silly; it had become endearing.

We talked quite animatedly that afternoon about our shared disappointment with the film they'd made about Parker's life, though we both loved the actors who'd played Bird and Chan. We chose five tunes and dug through all the music in the apartment, comparing live versions of those songs to studio recorded ones; early recordings to late ones; those done in New York to those recorded in Boston to those recorded in California. Before long we were hungry again. Henry ordered in Indian food from a grand place on Fifty-sixth Street and champagne from the liquor store and the talk fest continued.

It wasn't until he'd closed the cab door after me that night and the driver pulled away from the curb that it occurred to me: Henry had not tried to make me. Not once.

So, after dinner a few days later, I seduced him.

On the elevator up to his place, I wanted him so much I thought I was going to detonate. The wanting was like a noose around my neck. But I was cool. And remained so through both sides of the Parker with Strings ca.s.sette we'd picked up from a street vendor in the Village. I was wearing the world's shortest suede skirt, absolutely sure I was sending out telegrams of s.e.xual funk, and pretty sure he was answering the door. He put on the smokiest ballads in the house, and while I sat eating a seckle pear, he took off his tie. Then, out of the blue, he asked me to dance with him!

Which I did, for about sixty seconds, just long enough for the first extended kiss. And then I knocked him down.

His mouth on my nipple sent chain lightning through me. As he rolled down my tights and began to stroke me I gripped him, scratched him, as if I were trying to mark him for my own. I came and came back again, came and came back again. I tore him out of his pants there in the lamplight and took him. We f.u.c.ked on top of a Nat Hentoff essay. We did it standing up under a framed photo of the Birdland marquee. I couldn't get enough of him, couldn't feel enough of him inside me-thick, strange, hungry. And when he had no more to give me, when he was lost in his own frantic shivering, I opened my mouth, mercilessly and bit into him like a cannibal.

CHAPTER 7.

Trinkle tinkle I had two lovers. Two men do not a s.l.u.t make. But, still and all, two ain't one.

Aubrey thought it was funny.

Walter didn't.

No, I didn't tell him. I didn't have to. He noticed.

He had just come out of the shower that morning. I was making coffee. By the time he was dressed for work, Walter had turned sullen. He took a seat across from me in the kitchen, ignoring the plate in front of him.

"Just so you don't think you're getting away with something, Nan, I know you're f.u.c.king around."

I didn't answer.

"Skeevy b.i.t.c.h."

"Cut it out, Walter."

"Cut what out? You're d.o.g.g.i.ng around and you know it."

"Walter, you sound like a tired housewife. I'm not your G.o.dd.a.m.n property. You never slept with anybody else while we were together?"

Things took the predictable elevator up from there, ending with his wordless, self-righteous departure for the office. He didn't slam the front door. Matter of fact, he didn't even bother to close it.

I sat alone for a while, feeling tired and torn-and guilty-until I decided I'd better hit the streets and make some money.

It was hard to shake the bad mood. After an hour of playing I repaired to a busy coffee place on Thirty-fourth Street. The jelly donuts were tops, and I needed a shot of sugar, bad. The guy sitting next to me finished his chocolate croissant (I had tried one once-too oily) and walked out. I picked up the Daily News he'd left behind and started flipping through it.

Page three was where I stopped flipping.

BRAVE POOCH DIES DEFENDING BLIND MISTRESS.

One of the grainy photos accompanying the story showed a hulking, lifeless animal lying on its side. "Seeing eye dog and mistress both stabbed to death" was the caption. Next to that was a picture of a young woman three-quarters covered by an EMS blanket.

"f.u.c.k," I said aloud.

It was Inge-Mrs. Sig, the musician. And that graceless seeing eye dog of hers-Bruno.

I forced myself to read on. The young woman and her dog, the article said, were both dead when police arrived on the scene. She has been identified as Inge Carlson. No witnesses had, as yet, come forward. Police said the motive for the killings was not known, but of course they had not ruled out the possibility that the girl and her canine companion had walked in on a robbery in progress.

I stared dumbly at the photo of that silly dog. Somehow I couldn't bring myself to look at Inge's face again. I wondered if her sightless eyes shone any brighter in death, but I was too scared to look, too sickened.

In my dumba.s.s attempts to do right, I'd managed to cut a pretty wide swath through the endless possibilities of wrong. Sig, the undercover cop I'd taken in off the street, was dead because I'd made him sleep in the other room.

As for Walter, we'd been through the best and the worst together. I gladly took his money when I needed it, and his time, and his s.e.x, and even, once in a while, his advice. In his own weird way, he loved me, I think. But I was f.u.c.king around on him, just as he'd said. Even if I was genuinely in love with the eccentric and gallant Henry Valokus-and I was-I was still cuckolding old Walt.

And now this, the latest grotesquerie. There was no doubt in my mind that the blind girl and her dog were dead because of that twenty thousand dollars I'd given her-her inheritance from Sig. I thought I was doing the right thing, the compa.s.sionate thing, the correct thing. Following the gospel according to Ernestine.

"f.u.c.k!" I kept repeating through the tears I fought to keep in my throat.

There was a phone in the back of the coffee shop. I fumbled through my wallet and found Leman Sweet's card.

I left my name and the number of the coffee shop pay-phone on his voice mail. "It's urgent," I added. Then I took a seat near the phone and waited.

It took about twenty minutes for him to call back.

"What can I do for you?" he began, grudgingly civil. I guess I was still riding for free on his feelings for Aubrey.

"I just read the paper," I said. "Do you have anything to do with that blind girl thing? The one who was murdered?"

Sweet didn't answer for a minute.

"What's that to you?" he finally said.

"Do you?"

"You figure it out, college girl. You saw me with the f.u.c.king guitar. I explained the undercover gig to you, with the street musicians. She was a street musician. I was supposed to be a street musician. What do you think?"

"The paper didn't say anything about the musician angle."

"Paper didn't say a lot of things. How dumb are you?"

Actually, I could have answered that one. But I refrained. This was no time for self pity.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"I'm still here," I said.

"What's this all about, college? Do you know something about that chick?"

"Yeah."

"What have you done, girl?"

"I gave her twenty thousand dollars-the money that was missing from Charlie Conlin's socks."

"f.u.c.k."

"Yeah, I know."

"Are you saying you been in that apartment where she was killed?"

"Yeah. That's what I'm saying."

"Where are you?" he boomed into the receiver.

I'd used up every bit of the goodwill Aubrey had built for me with Leman Sweet. He was back to hating me. But I'd made up my mind that if he so much as breathed on me this time I was going to pick up a bottle and kill him with it.

I was waiting on the street when he pulled up to the coffee shop in his standard issue, plain clothes car. He reached over and opened the pa.s.senger door, barely looking at me.

"Since you like to meddle with police business so much, I'm taking you to the scene of the crime," he said when I'd slammed the door closed.

I had deliberately placed the sax case between us on the front seat. I kept my eyes fixed on the busy streets, on the people walking free, living, happy-not trapped like me, not hurtling toward some dark unknown, like me.

"Start talking," Sweet commanded.

"What do you want me to say?"

"How did you know Inge Carlson?"

"I didn't know her. I found her."

"How?"

"I asked around the street. Sig-I mean Conlin-had told me about her."

"And where did you get the bright idea to give away twenty grand of New York City Police money to a blind wh.o.r.e?"

"I didn't know it was your money, Mr. Sweet. I figured Conlin got it from someplace pretty bad, that he'd done whatever he had to do to get it, but it was his. If she was his lady, then some of it should go to her. Any kind of a man would want that."

Sweet's mouth pulled back unattractively from his big teeth. "I wonder," he said, "if you learned your line of bulls.h.i.t in school or whether you're just a born liar."

"I'm not lying."

"Yeah, sure. And that blind girl ain't dead."

One good thing had happened: Sweet's power over me-his ability to terrify me-was dwindling rapidly. His contempt and scorn were fast becoming a bore.

"Okay," I said quietly. "I'm the world's biggest liar. Let's move on to something else. Why are you taking me to her apartment?"

"I want you to show me exactly what happened when you gave that money away."

"Nothing 'happened.' I just gave it to her."

"There's a potential witness been turned up too. I want him to take a look at you. A good look."

"Just in case I gave her the money and then came back and stole it from her-and then killed her-right?"

"You irritate the s.h.i.t outta me, you know that?"

"I'd gathered."

"We gonna see how smart you are later, when I take your a.s.s to the station ... little miss genius."