Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [15]
On the second floor, things were winding down. The dining room had closed at midnight, though the bar was still heavily populated, serving booze and sandwiches till 4 a.m., if the menu was to be believed. I was seated at a little table whose round top was smaller than a steering wheel, having another Diet Coke, listening to the vocalist who had finally turned up on stage to keep the pianist company.
A couple of things had become clear about Richard Cornell’s management style, among them that he paid minimum wage, but chiefly that if you weren’t a good-looking young woman, you need not apply for any job that included interacting with the public. The needle on the pulchritude meter at this place was buried, or wanted to be. Till it closed in ’81, the Playboy Club at Lake Geneva had been my favorite home away from home, and the Paddlewheel rivaled their Bunnies with these cornfed cuties.
But the woman on the small stage, perched on a stool, was not cute, nor was she young. I made her for mid-forties, easy. She was a little heavy and she had some years on her, but she blew the cuties away, because she was beautiful. Truly beautiful.
She had reddish blond widow’s-peaked hair that was up off her high forehead but swept down to her bare shoulders. Her wideset eyes were green and so was her eyeshadow, her face a gentle oval nicely disrupted by prominent cheekbones; her lips were full and ripe and glistening red. She wore a bare-shouldered black dress with a full skirt, the top part putting half of an admirable full bosom on display, no push-up bra, though some would argue she could use one—I would argue she’d never lack for a man to push them up for her.
When I sat down, she was singing “What Is This Thing Called Love?” She had a soft, smoky voice that reminded me of Julie London—she reminded me physically of Julie London, too, though the nose was different, small, almost pug. Everything she did was sad but with a lilting, mid-tempo swing feel that was part her and part the deft piano player.
Some people were talking, laughing, at their tables, because for anybody not gambling, it was getting pretty drunk out. But perhaps half of the little crowd of maybe twenty-five at the tiny tables in front of the small stage were paying rapt attention.
I had a feeling she had a following. She might have made it big in another era—she was old enough that she might have tried, before she’d become a throwback, if a goddamn pure one. Anybody else would have been using a drum machine and a synthesizer. Yet somehow she was getting away with just her voice and a piano, right here in the middle of the USA, closer to the Gran’ Ole Opry in Nashville than the Rainbow Room in Manhattan.
She sang “Little White Lies” with a lot of humor and warmth, and then she slowed down “I Got Lost in His Arms” with such a rich, well-earned vibrato that I damn near remembered how to cry.
Rising, she got a nice hand as she smiled and nodded, gestured to her pianist, who was bald and bespectacled and maybe thirty and painfully skinny; then they both got some more applause and came down off the stage.
On impulse, I rose and went over to her. “Excuse me,” I said. “But that was terrific.”
She seemed embarrassed. “Oh. Well. Thank you. Haven’t seen you here before.”
“Passing through.”
She grinned and it was wide and real with plenty of white. “Nobody passes through Haydee’s Port.”
“Passing through River Bluff. Can I buy you a drink?”
The smile tightened, the teeth disappearing. “No. I have one more set in fifteen minutes. I never take a drink till after my last set. But you’re very kind.”
“Coffee, then.”
“Makes me jumpy.”
“Perrier? Not coming on to you. Just liked what I heard.”
The teeth returned.