And then Henry Hiram Henshaw abruptly stopped paying any attention to me at all. I took him by the shirt front and he dropped the cigar, but he did not seem to notice. I shook him but all he did was turn his head. He shuddered, and then two wet tears trickled out from under the hubcaps he wore for glasses.

“Ah,” he said softly then, “alas, poor Leedsie. Last night the Hawes sheets, this morning the cold, cold shaft.”

CHAPTER 16

I was at a window which faced the street. Everything was bright and sharply etched in the sun, and I watched a woman come out of one of the brownstones across the way, smartly dressed in a conservative aqua summer suit and leading a small boy by the hand. The boy was blond as snow, six or seven at most, and they made a lovely picture together. At the bottom of the steps the boy stopped and said something and the woman gave him a belt across the ear which would have felled a first-growth spruce. I turned back to Henshaw.

Brannigan was standing over him. It left me cold. Leeds, the thing on the fence, anonymous as a side of cheap beef. I’d wanted a live one. I’d wanted one with a face I could put a fist into. I wanted a cigarette also, but I didn’t have any. I chewed on a match.

“All of it,” Brannigan was saying. “In plain, simple, ordinary American English, Henshaw. When did you see the Hawes girl here?”

“Okay, dads, okay. But give a cat room, stand back, you’re fogging my spectacles. I’ll reconstruct, I’ll come on strong in all details. But like allow me room to stroll my thoughts, huh, man?”

Brannigan took a deep breath. “From the beginning, Henshaw. The name of the joint on Second Street. Everything from the time you left there.”

“I’m recalling, man. The handle on the house is indisputable. I mean unless they sold out shop this morning, like. Handleman’s Happy Hour. They even got my picture out front — under glass, you know? The Bird blew there once, man. Charley Parker in the flesh. You cats dig jazz, incidentally? Or am I cast awash on an alien shore, like?”

“You’ll be awash someplace if you don’t get to it,” Brannigan said. “You finished a performance at one o’clock. Leeds was nervous about the heroin so you canceled the next show. Then what? Where’d you go? Who was with you?”

“Awash, I am awash at that. So I will feed it to you straight, like, sans rhythm, sans melody, sans life! Ah, lackaday!” Henshaw sighed dejectedly. Brannigan took a quick step toward him and the small man made a protective gesture with his free hand. “No, man, like no! All, I’ll tell all. One, yes, one o’clock. Here, man, we lit out for here. To this very pad.”

“Just you and Leeds?”

“You dig me, your highness.”

“Damn it, and then what?”

“Bliss, man, bliss. An exclusive cutting of a new Charley Mills disc. Private, unreleased, for our own hip ears alone. Man, if that Mills ain’t the coolest with the longhair stuff, if that cat ain’t the sole last living genius in Greenwich Village, I’m—”

“Henshaw, you want me to hook that bracelet higher up on that pipe? You want to tell this hanging by your wrist from the ceiling?”

“Well, man, man, ain’t I coming on? Am I obfuscating, like? Like you requested, in detail. In detail, I, H. H. Henshaw, and the late lamented A. Leeds, repaired from the pad known as Handleman’s Happy Hour to this here pad known as where we are now in session, solo and by ourselves, to soothe our savage breasts by paying profound heed to a rendition of something très cool, très far out, by that yet unrecognized master, C. Mills. We listened and then I kid you not, we listened anew. And then the chick made an entrance/*

“Catherine Hawes?”

“Well now, dads, get with it, huh? Who else? Edna St. Vincent Millay? Bess Truman? The siblings Bronte, maybe? The Hawes chick, man. But, yes, oh, yes.”

“What time?”

“Give or take a chorus, the little hand was at the two and the big hand was breathing down the neck of the four. Like two-eighteen, maybe.”

Brannigan was sitting across from him. He stared at his right fist, then covered it with his other hand. “And?” he said patiently.

“And Henshaw departed. I mean, sugar, man, like I could share a cat’s coin, or borrow his pad, or even, when my straits are dire, might I sip the last ounce of Grade A in the big white box. But a cat’s mouse, never! Anyhow he told me to fly. The chick was coming on real queer, like maybe she put butane in her syringe by mistake, and I am not one to mix unnecessarily in troubles. I debouched.”

Brannigan glanced at me. “No needle marks,” he said. “She wasn’t on anything.” He turned back to Henshaw. “Could she have been just scared?”

Henshaw shrugged, gesturing. The cuffs rattled when he did. “I write them like I see them, dads. He was an old man, like, and he got hung up looking for big fish down there in the Gulf Stream, you know? But like he wasn’t hooking them, and so he dreamed of Joe DiMaggio. You read that book? Man, she could have been scared. She could have had hepatitis like, too. If I’d been cognizant of the fact that I’d be contending for a Nobel Prize like this, I’d have done a biopsy and penned a report in pure iambic, you dig me?”

“All right, all right. What did she say when she got here? What next?”

“Like who listened? Like she whispered to him a minute, and then she gave him a gander at something she had in this reticule. That’s a sack, Jack. And then Leedsie gives me the nod. I’m all bugged up for home-fried potatoes anyhow, had the things on my mind all day. Like you know how you get bugged that way sometimes, man? So I amble up the square to Kirker’s and get me a double order. Which is when I espy the chick again. When I’m satiated with home-fries, that is. I’m strolling home, back past this pad here again, when I see the chick make for her heap like Leedsie blew the wrong riff, you know? Those forty-one rouge MG’s you cats are all shook up over, she had one of those. That heap came on like Louis himself, I josh you not. You get all forty-one of those fiddles jamming together on one block sans mufflers that way, you couldn’t dig that sound with a shovel.”

“Damn it, Henshaw, what in hell are you talking about? You had two orders of French-fries and then you saw the Hawes girl beat it out of here in the MG?”

“Home-fries, man, like h-o-m-e-fries!”

“She still have the sack with her?”

“Pressed to her bosom like it wouldn’t grow tooth number-one for lo, these many months yet.”

“What about Leeds? You see Leeds again?”

“Man, how can I blow this tune if you keep standing on the score? Like sure, I saw Leeds again. But, man, I ain’t come to that part yet. Chapter three, book sixty-four, verse nineteen, brought to you by Welch’s Grape Juice. You know? Like I say, first she blasts off in this MG bomb. I’m maybe five pads up the block, and I’m debating. If Leedsie flubbed the dub with the chick, maybe we can dig that Mills record one more time. I’m still giving the matter considerable ratiocination when he bounces out the front door like some cat set fire to the joint and who’s got the gauze, you know? He’s got his Dodge across the road and zoom, he’s oiflFIike a tall bird. And I am alone in the still night!”

“He go in the same direction she did?”

“There were stars above, man. I paused to dig the stars. I saw no more.”

Brannigan was looking across at me with his tongue pressed into his cheek. He stood up, put his hands into his pockets, paced two strides, took them out again. “Arthur Leeds,” he said then.

“Two-twenty,” I said. “Make it two-thirty after Henshaw here had his meal. Even two-forty. It wouldn’t take her that long to get to my place, Nate.”

Brannigan grunted, turning toward Henshaw. “What time is it now?” he asked him.

“I dig the big hand approaching nine and the small hand touching one.”