After Martin walked out on Chester, his remedy had been a wide-ranging search for a red-hot band playing “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” or “King Porter Stomp.” He had started in Midtown at the Roseland and the Hickory House, then gone to Harlem for the Savoy and Minton’s and Monroe’s Uptown House. He had hoped to see Webb behind his drum kit, but the word was that the Little Giant was still in the hospital, playing against the only bandleader he couldn’t beat. In his place, Benny Carter held down the main bandstand, but by the time Martin climbed the stairs to the Savoy, the crowd was spilling out onto Lenox Avenue. Carter had called it a night.
Ten years earlier, Martin had come from Ireland with the dream of being a working musician in New York City, and the dream had come true and then some. Whatever Chester’s faults—and those would take all night to tally—he led one of the city’s most sought-after dance bands. All over Manhattan, well-connected brides-to-be organized their weddings around Chester’s availability, and every August the band headlined a white-jacket tour through Connecticut, the Hamptons, and the finer spots on the Jersey Shore.
But the years had taught Martin that being a musician alone wasn’t enough if you wanted to make it in music. You had to be a salesman, a politician even, to get where you wanted to go. Maybe that wasn’t true for the best of the best, whose chops were so undeniable that one note could vault them to a spot on any bandstand in the city, but Martin knew he wasn’t one of the anointed. Still, while he may not have been great—not Coleman Hawkins–great, or Gene Krupa–great, or Ella Fitzgerald–great—he wasn’t a complete square. He was a hotshot on the piano, a surefire clarinet, and a half-decent alto sax. He had even penned a song, “That’s More Like It,” that had briefly broken through to the Hit Parade for 1937, and for a while it looked like the start of something. Only there hadn’t been a follow-up. He wrote other tunes but no one put them into their sets at the ballrooms, or if they did, they never bothered to record them, or if they did, no one bought the record or played it on the radio or cued it up in a jukebox. One hit, and he had to wonder if there would ever be another.
Now as he stepped off the subway and approached the Grand Concourse, he was light-headed and ready for sleep. By some miracle, his clarinet case was still in his hand. He wouldn’t need to retrace his steps in the morning through every bar and subway car in New York. As much as he loved the electric charge that came from moving in a sea of bodies surging from one place to another—crossing a street in the moment the traffic signal changed, a swell of suit-and-tied men and sway-hipped women, each of them racing to get somewhere that seemed so important—there were times when he wanted to call a stop to it, to slow it all down and not be carried along in anyone’s tide. This was why the early-morning hours were his favorite. Walking a nearly vacant street, with only a couple slouched against each other in the distance, steam drifting lazily from a manhole, a splash of neon thrown into a puddle, an after-hours bar whose last diligent drinkers hunched over their highball glasses—this was the New York he had come seeking. The city in a country hour. A time of deserted lanes and privacy amid the millions.
Not that you were ever entirely alone, not even in the Bronx. At this hour, the subways rumbled and the delivery vans trundled along the side streets and the broad, trolley-tracked avenues. Milk. Eggs. Ice. Bread. Beer. Coal. Newspapers. But it was quieter than in the daytime, more desolate, and Martin felt as if he had slipped through the cracks in time itself. His walk was no more than five or six blocks—a straight shot from the station to the corner occupied by the Bluebird Diner, which in the wee hours shone like a fire in the middle of a dark wood. The Bluebird was a twenty-four-hour joint, its bulbs burning through the street-to-ceiling windows. From a block away he could see the waitress with her fanlike paper hat pouring coffee for the nighthawks at the counter. The counter was L-shaped, so that the backs of some of the men were visible, and the profiles of others. Through these nightly glimpses into the Bluebird, he had come to recognize some of the regulars, though he never knew if they were catching a plate of eggs and hash at the end of their shift or preparing themselves for the start of the day. Among the usual crowd were bus drivers, cabbies, men in the coveralls of utility workers, and always one or two dressed like him—Bronx Beau Brummells on a shoestring budget. They could have been drinkers, carousers, or cardsharps silently totaling the night’s gains and losses, whether financial or physical.
But who was he to comment on the appetites of others, a man who was dragging himself back to his wife and children at six in the morning with a heart full of hot jazz and a head bursting with the news that he had just quit his job? Once he passed the Bluebird, he was three streetlights from his front door. As he did after every long night in the city, he would count them down, one by one, until he was home.
“MR. DEMPSEY! MR. Dempsey!” The landlady’s voice rose in volume as Martin ascended the staircase. “Mr. Dempsey!”
Martin stopped halfway to the top. He had already loosened his tie and opened his collar. His suit jacket was secured over one shoulder by a hooked index finger. There was a window at the top of the stairs through which pink light cast soft shadows on the runner’s faded florals. He cocked his head, offering no more than a profile, to let the landlady know he was listening.
“There was someone looking for you last night,” she said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Fichetti.”
“But don’t you want to know who it was?”
Martin exhaled—not so much a sigh as an admission of defeat. “All right,” he said. “Now, who was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not for the life of me. He came last night ringing the bell to beat the band, and Mrs. Dempsey not at home to answer it. Once he was on his way, I knocked on your door and still didn’t hear a sound.” Mrs. Fichetti throttled a handkerchief between her hands. “You and Mrs. Dempsey aren’t having troubles, are you? Because that would be a terrible shame. You had best go to her and beg—”
“There aren’t any problems,” he said. “Rosemary and the girls spent the night with her parents.”
“But don’t you see? That’s what worries me. When a woman returns to her parents’ house—well, it’s already too late.”
“We’re grand,” Martin said, but he could tell that she was not convinced. The Dempseys on the rocks was a better story to share with her bridge partners than any truth Martin could tell her. “Now, about this man. Did he say what he wanted?”
“He wanted you, but he wouldn’t say what for. And he was a rough-looking one. Hard eyes. A fighter’s nose. Not so big, but beefy—oh, Mr. Dempsey, don’t tell me that you owe money. Are you a horse player? Have you gotten yourself mixed up with bookmakers? I know men have their vices—”