The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [30]
After a song about a summer romance in Amsterdam, Gordon Lurie announced that the next number was dedicated to the memory of Mary Alice Redfield. Then he sang:
“She’s a shopping bag lady who lives on
the sidewalks of Broadway
Wearing all of her clothes and her years
on her back
Toting dead dreams in an old paper sack
Searching the trash cans for something
she lost here on Broadway —
Shopping bag lady …
“You’d never know but she once was an
actress on Broadway
Speaking the words that they stuffed in
her head
Reciting the lines of the life that she led
Thrilling her fans and her friends and her
lovers on Broadway —
Shopping bag lady …
“There are demons who lurk in the corners
of minds and of Broadway
And after the omens and portents and
signs
Came the day she forgot to remember her
lines
Put her life on a leash and took it out
walking on Broadway —
Shopping bag lady …”
There were a couple more verses and the shopping bag lady in the song wound up murdered in a doorway, dying in defense of the “tattered old treasures she mined in the trash cans of Broadway.” The song went over well and got a bigger hand than any of the ones that had preceded it.
I asked Barry who Gordon Lurie was.
“You know very nearly as much as I,” he said. “He started here Tuesday. I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.”
“Mary Alice never spent much time on Broadway. I never saw her more than a block from Ninth Avenue.”
“Poetic license, I’m sure. The song would lack a certain something if you substituted Ninth Avenue for Broadway. As it stands it sounds a little like ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ ”
“Lurie live around here?”
“I don’t know where he lives. I have the feeling he’s Canadian. So many people are nowadays. It used to be that no one was Canadian and now simply everybody is. I’m sure it must be a virus.”
We listened to the rest of Gordon Lurie’s act. Then Barry leaned forward and chatted with the bartender to find out how I could get backstage. I found my way to what passed for a dressing room at Kid Gloves. It must have been a ladies’ lavatory in a prior incarnation.
I went in there thinking I’d made a breakthrough, that Lurie had killed her and now he was dealing with his guilt by singing about her. I don’t think I really believed this but it supplied me with direction and momentum.
I told him my name and that I was interested in his act. He wanted to know if I was from a record company. “Am I on the threshold of a great opportunity? Am I about to become an overnight success after years of travail?”
We got out of the tiny room and left the club through a side door. Three doors down the block we sat in a cramped booth at a coffee shop. He ordered a Greek salad and we both had coffee.
I told him I was interested in his song about the bag lady.
He brightened. “Oh, do you like it? Personally I think it’s the best thing I’ve written. I just wrote it a couple of days ago. I opened next door Tuesday night. I got to New York three weeks ago and I had a two-week booking in the West Village. A place called David’s Table. Do you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Another stop on the K-Y circuit. Either there aren’t any straight people in New York or they don’t go to nightclubs. But I was there two weeks, and then I opened at Kid Gloves, and afterward I was sitting and drinking with some people and somebody was talking about the shopping bag lady and I had had enough Amaretto to be maudlin on the subject. I woke up Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and the first verse of the song buzzing in my splitting head, and I sat up immediately and wrote it down, and as I was writing one verse the next would come bubbling to the surface, and before I knew it I had all six verses.” He took a cigarette, then paused in the act of lighting it to fix his eyes on me. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I don’t remember it.”
“Matthew Scudder.”
“Yes. You’re the person investigating her murder.”
“I’m not sure that’s the right word. I’ve been talking to