Fiddlers

6.

REGGIE WAS IN the bathtub singing when Charles got back to the hotel at eleven thirty that Thursday night.

‘Everything go all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes, fine,’ he said. ‘You have a nice voice.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘They’re from my cabaret act.’

He looked puzzled.

‘The songs,’ she explained. ‘From when I came east two years ago. Seventeen and full of beans. Well, almost eighteen, I’ll be twenty this September. I had a choice of three places. L.A., Vegas, or here. I figured I’d do best here. But this is one tough town, believe me. Even getting in a booking agent’s door is a monumental task. I was playing little dives out on Sands Spit, ever been out there in January or February? I’m singing about fiddlers fleeing while all I’ve got is a piano player at an upright behind me, and when it was time to pay the bill there were only two or three people in the place.

‘Finally, in one of these joints there was this stand-up comic, good-looking blonde girl in her thirties, had an act where she mostly trashed her ex-husband. We got to talking one night, and she told me the way she made ends meet was to moonlight with an escort agency, though sometimes she wondered which was the moonlighting and which was the act, the stand-up she did in these dives, or the girl who dressed up in flimsy lingerie and went wherever she was sent.

‘Which by the way,’ Reggie said, ‘I haven’t called the agency in more than a week now, they must be wondering what the hell happened to me. I told them I had my period, but how long can that last, am I right? I just hope they don’t send one of their goons looking for me. Annie told me they have these goons, though I’ve never had the pleasure, thank you. Annie is the stand-up comic who first put me in contact with Sophisticates, that’s the agency you called, remember?

‘Anyway, Annie told me everything in life has its side effects. You do one thing, you take one road, it leads someplace, it has its side effects. What if I’d gone to L.A., and landed a good gig in a club on the Strip, and what if a movie director or an agent had spotted me there, I could be a movie star now, am I right? I could have a house in Palm Desert. Would you like to go to Palm Desert sometime? I would love that. You know, I still think of myself as a singer who’s turning tricks on the side so I’ll be able to sing. But maybe it’s the other way around, maybe I’m just a hooker with a good voice, maybe the singing is just a side effect of the hooking, or is it vice versa?’

‘You’re not a hooker, Reg,’ he said.

‘I like that. Reg. Only one who ever called me Reg was my kid brother, who couldn’t pronounce Regina. Which name I hate, by the way. Do you like being called Charles? It sounds so formal. Have you always called yourself Charles?’

‘Well, different names at different times of my life.’

‘What’d they call you in the Army?’

‘Charlie. Though we also called the enemy that. Charlie. The Vietcong. They were Charlie to us.’

‘And other times? Before you went in the Army?’

‘Chuck.’

‘I like that. Come dry my back, Chuck,’ she said, and stepped out of the tub.

‘That was in junior high and high,’ he said, taking a towel from the rack, beginning to work on her back. ‘I should’ve kept it in the Army, huh? Differentiate me from the enemy.’

‘How come you didn’t?’

‘I dunno. In Basic, they just started calling me Charlie. So I accepted it. You accept lots of things in life.’

‘Side effects,’ she said.

‘Yes. I suppose.’

‘What’d they call you when you were a kid?’

‘Carlie.’

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Definitely not.’

‘My mother hung that on me.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Yes.’

He hesitated a moment, and then said, ‘She left when I was eight.’ Hesitated again. ‘I lost track of her.’

‘Left?’

‘My father, the family. She abandoned us. Later married the guy she’d run off with, I didn’t even know his name, my father never talked about it. I was just a kid, my brother and I were just kids when she left. I was still called Carlie then. They only started calling me Chuck in junior high.’

‘Do you still see your brother?’

‘No, he died of cancer twelve years ago. Funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? I was in a war zone, I came out alive. But cancer takes my brother when he’s only forty-eight.’

‘Side effects,’ she said, and nodded. ‘Has anyone ever called you Chaz?’

‘Chaz? No.’

‘May I call you Chaz?’

‘Sure.’

‘Starting right now, okay? That’s your new name. Chaz.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘What do we have planned for tomorrow, Chaz?’

‘I thought I’d let you decide.’

‘Let’s take the Jag out again. I really enjoyed that.’

‘Head upstate maybe.’

‘Yes. Maybe stay overnight at a little bed and breakfast…”

“Well, no, I can’t do that. Not tomorrow night.’

Her face fell.

‘There’s someone I have to see tomorrow night. But it’ll be the last time, I promise. After that, I’m free.’

‘I thought maybe you didn’t like my singing,’ she said.

‘I love your singing.’

‘Shall I sing for you again?’

‘I would love you to sing for me again.’

So now, at close to midnight, she sat up in bed, the sheet below her waist, her cupcake breasts dusted with freckles, and she sang to him about Natchez to Saint Joe and moonlight and music and not knowing if you can find these things and about there was a strange enchanted boy and about it being quarter to three and no one in the place except you and me.

And when she finished singing, she cuddled in his arms again, and said, ‘I love you, Chaz.’

And he said, ‘I love you, too, Reg.’

* * * *

‘Well, well, well,’ Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks said. ‘Another dead priest.’

This as if a dead priest showed up every day of the week. Last one he could remember, in fact, was the one over in the Eight-Seven, years ago, young priest snuffed while he was at vespers. This one was an old priest.

‘Ancient, in fact,’ Detective Monoghan said.

‘Got to be ninety-six in his bare feet,’ Detective Monroe said.

The two Homicide detectives were looking down at the body as though it were a wrapped mummy in one of the city’s museums, instead of a fresh corpse here on the stone floor off the church’s garden. The nun who’d found him was still trembling. She was no spring chicken herself. In her fifties, Ollie guessed, more or less. She’d