Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [72]
Mr. Levy and I were released on five hundred dollars’ bail apiece, and that night I went on at Café Society. It was a couple of weeks before I was indicted by a grand jury under the state law. The charge against Levy was dismissed.
They believed this stuff was mine, just like I knew they would. They split Mr. Levy out of there so fast he didn’t know what was happening, just like I told him they would. The clincher was I had a record. But what I didn’t know then and do know now was that he had a record too. If they’d known about that they might never have let him off. Or they might have. In view of what went down later, who can say?
After Levy left, I moved out of the hotel and went to stay with a doctor and his wife in San Francisco, who were friends of mine. They were wonderful to me and trying to help. One day he took me to a friend of his, a real estate lawyer. He never handled criminal stuff, but he was a dear friend of these friends of mine, and we got to talking about the trial.
Then someone had a bright idea. Why not have me check into a sanatorium, let them watch me, examine me, give me the tests? In twelve hours they can tell whether I’m lying or not. If I’m clean, I’ll be all right. If I’m not, I’ll get sick as a dog, start throwing up at both ends, and this would prove I’m a damn liar. It would be better than all the affidavits in the world. I could swear on a stack of Bibles, but who would believe me? If a doctor or a psychiatrist came in and said they watched me for a few days and never saw me sick, this would prove I was clean.
So I did it. It cost me almost a thousand dollars to pay the doctors to watch me and supervise me down to the last minute so they could go to court and make a statement. I stayed there four days; and when I left, everyone in the place was ready to swear on a stack of Bibles that I was clean.
That’s what is so unfair about the police handling of stuff like this. If you are on and they arrest you, search you, and find nothing, they can always throw you in jail on some trumped-up charge. After they hold you there twelve hours, you’ll plead guilty or sign anything to get a shot.
But this is a one-way street. If someone plants something on you and you’re innocent, you have no way in the world to prove it. You can beg them to throw you in solitary confinement and throw away the key so you can prove it by not being sick, that you’re clean. But they don’t care. The law is the law. Technically, using drugs is not against the law; only having them is. This is a setup which encourages frame-ups, informers, and all sorts of dirty work.
After the indictment came down, Mr. Ehrlich called me to his office for a meeting. He had seen the record of the testimony against me before the grand jury. The man in charge of the raid was the famous Colonel George H. White, an ex-OSS man, supposedly the “ace” investigator of the Narcotics Squad. I had heard of him.
Ehrlich asked me if I had ever seen him before.
“Sure,” I told him.
“Where?” he asked.
“At Café Society Uptown, sitting at a table with John Levy.”
Ehrlich flipped. I don’t think he believed me at first. I told him I could prove it. John was the type of man who couldn’t resist having his picture taken with any big shot who came around. I was sure the chick who took pictures at the club must have one of him and Colonel White together. Erhlich checked. And there it was. Colonel White and Mr. Levy sitting there having a drink together, big as life. Obviously the colonel wouldn’t waste his time with Levy unless he was getting information.
I guess Mr. Ehrlich figured this would bring me to my senses about John Levy, and it did. Unless Colonel White was wrong, John Levy was an informer on other people and bragged about it. What was there to stop him from informing on me? He