Memphis Luck Read online

  The lobby bar in the Peabody Hotel was relatively quiet. Tables on each side of the one where Jimbo Reynolds and Don Condon, the candidate for the public relations job sat were empty, and those within hearing range held a collection of mid-level Memphis management types with the odd attorney or two who were not yet drunk enough to be more boisterous than the average Memphian is by nature habitually.

  “Really?” Don Condon said. “That’s a bit of a surprise, since I know there are other groups parallel to your own. Do none of them pre-date the Big Corral?”

  The more I hear him talk the more I think it’s going to be a good fit, Jimbo Reynolds said to that part of his brain which stood aside always from the moment and told him how he was doing at any given time. That’s what I’ve got that most of them don’t, Jimbo thought, and I owe everything to that little part of my mind that’s always cool and uninvolved. It might not ever let me lose myself completely in anything I’m doing, I grant you. Getting drunk, getting high, pouring the prod to some filly, closing the deal or making a conversion, but by God, it saves me time and again from stepping in sticky doo doo. I’ll take that separation between doing a thing and knowing I’m doing it, no matter if it does have a dampening effect on my immediate fulfillment. It’s worth it. And if I ever lose connection with that part of my brain that holds back and says unh uh, I’m as dead as a thrown horseshoe.

  You got to remember that phrase, that part of Jimbo’s brain which he celebrated whispered to him as he set himself to respond to Don Condon’s question. What I just then thought about the horseshoe. That sucker will preach.

  “Let me give you the scenario, Don,” Jimbo Reynolds said, lifting his eyes to the ceiling of the Peabody lobby bar to consider where to begin. An elaborately carved and painted cornice provided him the answer. The success of every utterance depends on the way in. Jimbo knew that in his bones. How you start does matter, and it matters strongly. How things are held together, not just that they are. That’s the secret to fulfillment.

  “I was into divine laugh worship, Don,” he said. “And had been for some time. Are you familiar with that approach to soul-saving and the financing of the enterprise?”

  “I’ve heard of the phrase, of course,” Don Condon said, “but I don’t know it in any detail.”

  “It was a good way to go for a while there. I picked it up early in the nineties, and it proved to be a winner. It went down very well with the believers of our demographic all during the Clinton years.”

  “Why was that?” Don Condon said and sipped at his drink, a watered Jack Daniel’s the color of weak tea.

  “It was celebratory. It fit the times. Picture this, and you’ll understand, get some flavor of what I mean and where I was coming from.

  “Here I am, up before a congregation of believers of a certain stripe. They’re all employed and making some money. Putting some cash by in many cases. Got a mortgage, got a bass boat, all of them prosperous materially, but broke loose from whatever dispensation they were raised in. You know, apostolic, holy rollers, pentecostals, four-fold overcomers, foot-washers, even some snake caressers of the first water with signs following. And I start to laugh, I start to chuckle, I commence to titter, right there in the pulpit.

  “A few of them venture to cackle a little bit, coming back at me, see. Then I say to them that the Lord loves a cheerful giver, our God is a God who looks on what He’s made and finds it good. And He laughs in joy at the creation of His hands and wit, and He invites us to join Him in divine laughter.

  “Then I get into it for real. I let my voice rise up in my throat, and I laugh loud and hardy, I let my belly loose, I lean over and laugh. I rear back and laugh. I let my backbone slip and I laugh. I cavort and skip and dodge like I’m shucking tacklers on a football field.”

  “And they join in,” Don Condon said. “It’s downright infectious.”

  “Do they join in? They didn’t just wave their hands in the air and chuckle. No, they got down and rolled on the floor. They hugged themselves, they hugged each other, they put their hands on the ones next to them in places they wouldn’t be allowed to out on the public streets and roads. Women screamed like they were having their first orgasm in eight months and it was sopping wet good to them, old folks lost their upper plates, the kids laughed until they scared themselves and started to cry about it and wet their pants.

  Oh, Don, I tell you it was a sight.”

  “The way you tell about it makes me want to laugh right now,” Don Condon said, “sitting here at the Peabody during the cocktail hour.”

  “It was entertaining, I got to say,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “I got to admit, and it paid off like a busted slot machine in Tunica, Mississippi, for a while there.”

  Jimbo stopped to sip at his drink, rattling the ice in the glass as he sat it back on the table, loud enough that one of the waitresses in the Peabody gray and maroon dress was bending over to take an order in less than a minute, showing him a nice expanse of skin in the process.

  “I love freckles,” Jimbo Reynolds said as he lifted two fingers and made a little circle with them.

  “I’ve got them, all right,” the waitress said, “nothing I can do about it. I used to just slather on the foundation and powder, but I just finally gave up and stopped trying to hide them.”

  “God bless you, girl,” Jimbo said, “for accepting the gifts you’ve got and letting the world take a good look at them.”

  After she had left in the direction of the bar, the tail of her skirt twitching like a pendulum, Don Condon said, “But you moved out of that, and you must’ve had a good reason to leave that behind.”

  “Oh, yeah. Too damn good a reason. It’s simple. The laughing thing stopped working. Went gefizzle on me and everybody else working the divine laugh. All the prosperity preachers, even the really big ones, Lon Anthony down in Florida, Jim ‘The Duke’ Lanier in Oklahoma City, Dandy Don Llewellyn over in Nashville, all of them had to chunk it in, and all within a few months of each other. The divine laugh was dead

  as soon as Bush took office – hell, before that, as soon as Justice Scalia delivered – the divine laugh worship gig shut down like you’d welded a faucet shut and dynamited the stream the water come from.”

  “I think I see where you’re going,” Don Condon said. “The atmosphere changed, and I bet 9/11 slipped the final knife to it.”

  “In the whole country, particularly with our demographic. See, with little Bush in charge, it got harder and harder to get our people to bust loose and laugh and loosen up the pocket-book. The ones we depend on are just exactly the bunch likely to be unemployed during an economic downturn, and to get them knuckleheads to laugh when they ain’t got that steady check coming in, well, shoot.”

  “Tell me about it,” Don Condon said. “I heard that.”

  “It’s not that they stop loving the Lord or feeling like they ought to or that they don’t feel guilty enough anymore to know they ought to be paying a little hush-money to make up for the shit they been doing.”

  Jimbo looked back up at the cornice on the Peabody lobby bar ceiling, the one that had taken his eye earlier, and felt the right way into an explanation gathering in his brain. He opened his lips a space for it to come, and the words which carried it did their appointed task. It’s still working, Jimbo said to himself with gratitude, you give it a chance to focus, and the good Lord knows I have learned to do that. Wait on the Lord, and He will answer.

  “It’s a different set of values at large now in the country, Don, and in what makes our demographic tick. It came to me one night when I was channel surfing a TV screen in Marked Tree, Arkansas, where I was still trying to work the divine laugh. And let me tell you, it had done gone flat by then and was not functioning worth a nun’s nipple, and I knew it. It was like an old man remembering what it had been like to be able to look down and it was up and ready to go and it had happened without him having to think or worry about it. He understands that success used to be a by-product, coming uninvited,
but now it’s all he can think about.

  “Hell, you’re a young man yet, but I bet it’s been times already you’ve waited on yourself to be able to do what you want to do with a woman ready and willing and just lying there as open as a book, and you’d had to try to think yourself into getting ready to do what needs to be done. Am I lying, son? Tell the truth now.”

  “No, you’re not,” Don Condon said, “much as I hate to admit it. I’ve had to reason with my dick on more than one occasion. Come on, I’ve had to say. Now do what you’re supposed to do, damn it to Hell.”

  “Anyway, to leave that metaphor behind,” Jimbo said, pleased to see the candidate for the PR position register a response at Jimbo’s use of the word metaphor – surprise, surprise, son, I ain’t no dummy, Jimbo whispered in his mind, I did my time in school, same as you did – “I happened upon a John Wayne movie, see, there on that tube in Marked Tree, one of the old John Ford productions, right in the middle of a scene of a bunch of cowboys with their heads bowed praying about something.

  “That caught my attention, but mainly what impressed me, see, the thing of it was, that bunch of cowboys was in a saloon. Bottles all kind of lined up across the back of the bar, shot glasses sitting on the counter, and all that paraphernalia of needing to get hammered by alcohol, but these old boys in that saloon were seeking divine connection rather than a drink of whiskey.

  “It came to me just then, like a revelation. I’m not talking God speaking to me, don’t get me wrong. But the idea that hit me between the eyes like a well-swung billy club was about our demographic, folks that admire John Wayne and what he stood for.”

  It was coming up in his throat, the catch that arose each time he thought on a thing transcendent, and Jimbo Reynolds paused to swallow it back. Praise Jesus, it still works, he told himself, all these years back down the line, and it’s as strong as it ever was, from right here in the lobby bar of the Peabody all the way back to standing in the side yard of one of those damn shacks in East Texas as a kid, looking up at that empty sky and wanting something. A bicycle, something sweet to eat, a shirt in the pattern everybody else was wearing, something, for Christ’s sake. Praise be to the Lord.

  Don Condon had seen what was happening and was looking away to give his prospective boss a little privacy in his moment of emotion, and Jimbo was glad to see the man had antenna. That’s what I’d be hiring him for, when you get right down to it, for whether he could read a situation. That’s all PR amounts to, and that’s a bunch.

  “It’s like Reagan was,” Jimbo said, his voice strong again, “back when he was himself like before that brain rot eat him up. Or Little Bush’s daddy, climbing up on that submarine after the Japs shot him down, and even Little Bush himself, too, of course, chopping away at those trash cedar trees every time he gets back to his ranch. Cowboy virtues, you understand, that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Damn,” said Don Condon. “What an insight.”

  “Hard work,” Jimbo Reynolds said, “sweat, simplicity, not thinking and worrying about stuff, no putting up with the mindsets of pansies like Montgomery Clift in those old movies, or Bill Clinton feeling everybody’s goddamn pain, or women like Hillary Clinton herself, that whore of Babylon.”

  “Her legs,” Don Condon said, setting his drink down deliberately on the table before him and beginning to move his hands slowly straight up and parallel to each other about six inches apart, “start at her ankles and go right up from there the same exact thickness all the way to her knees. There’s not curve one in her calves, either damn one of them.”

  “Thank God for pantsuits,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Cowboys, I said to myself, there in that Holiday Inn Express motel in Arkansas, cowboys. A church full of cowboys. A cowboy church. That’s what I’ll set up, and that’s what’ll fetch them, and that’s what I’ll preach, the cowboy virtues. And let me tell you, hoss, it has gone like gangbusters from inception right up to this very moment, ten minutes after six in the Peabody Hotel lobby bar with two stiff drinks in me and another one about to be on its way.”

  I got to get me some new clothes,” Don Condon said. “I’m thinking about the proper apparel for a new job.”

  “Memphis, Tennessee will clothe a man in whatever raiment it is he needs to wear,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Why, look what this city did wardrobe-wise for Elvis.”

  THREE

  J.W. and Tyrone

  Two calls had come in at almost the same time, and J.W. Ragsdale and Tyrone Walker were both available, sitting at the two desks in the Midtown station pushed together across from each other. Tyrone had his head down, making notes on a legal pad, and J.W. was staring balefully at the cursor blinking away on the computer terminal before him.

  “I hate this shit,” he said, loud enough for people across the aisle between the two rows of desks to hear, if they had wanted to acknowledge it. Nobody did, not even Tyrone Walker, not over an arm’s length away.

  “I hate it,” J.W. said again, shifting his gaze to Tyrone.

  “I know you do, J.W, and I heard you, and I feel for you. But there it is to deal with.”

  “There it is, all right,” J.W. said, “look at it, saying do something, do something, do something. Blinking like a blind man.”

  “You just reading that into your computer,” Tyrone said. “It doesn’t care one way or the other what you do or don’t do. It does not give a shit.”

  “I do despise cost-cutting measures,” J.W. said. “Whatever happened to secretaries, ranks two and three? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Abolished and superceded,” Tyrone said, “as you know, J.W. All those low-level clerk positions are gone, and the ladies that would’ve been filling them are all in law schools and MBA programs, learning how to kick ass and just dying to do it once they get that piece of paper letting them loose to do it.”

  That’s when both calls had come, the phones on both J.W.’s and Tyrone’s desks ringing at almost the same time. J.W. let Tyrone pick up first, and then he lifted his instrument to his ear. At least it would the voice of a human, if you could call Myra Summers one of the species.

  “Yeah,” J.W. said.

  “You supposed to say your name, then homicide,” the voice in J.W.’s ear said. “Or it’s all right to say ‘Memphis Homicide’ first and then your name and rank. Whichever way you want to go with it. Whatever.”

  J.W. said nothing. The cursor was still blinking and would do that until Memphis fell off its bluff into the river, provided electricity kept getting to the computer. As Tyrone said, it didn’t give a shit.

  “You still there?” Myra said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Two come in, and y’all figure out how you’re going to divide up the goodies, I reckon. You always do. That’s what Major Dalbey says about y’all, anyway.”

  “It’s called multi-tasking, Myra,” J.W. said, “that part of the decision tree is.”

  “It is not. That’s a different thing. Anyway, one is at 2935 Peabody, a woman smothered by a ceiling fan.”

  “Smothered by a fan?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. I don’t know what it means, but the uniformed policeman says it’s a homicide, not no accident, the way it looks to him.”

  “What’s the other one? Somebody mashed by a refrigerator?”

  “It’s at 408 Montgomery, corner of Peach. It ain’t no doubt about it, neither, according to what that officer says.”

  “I’ll take that one,” J.W. said. “Put down Ragsdale on your slip there. And then you put down Walker’s name on the slip for the fan deal on Peabody.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to tell me how to do every little bit. I know how to do, and there ain’t no slips anymore, either. It’s all computerized now, everything is.”

  Myra hung up, and J.W. looked across the desk at Tyrone, who was turning his telephone back and forth as though exercising his wrist.

  “That all right with you, partner?” J.W. said, “me catching the Montgomery Street one?�
�

  “I don’t care,” Tyrone said. “But why’d you pass up that fan deal? Sounds different. Woman smothered by a fan.”

  “I hate a mystery,” J.W. said. “Just keep it simple for me and my computer. I’ll just take some honest blood on the damn walls every time.”

  “No intellectual curiosity, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said, getting up from his desk. “That’s what holds you back in your career in law enforcement here in Memphis.”

  “That ain’t what you singled out last week to explain my shortcomings. You mentioned my Mississippi upbringing then.”

  “Just add this new one to the list,” Tyrone said. “Consider it an update. I’ll see you back here later, J.W.”

  “Nice blazer,” J.W. called after Tyrone as his partner walked away between the row of desks in that part of the Midtown station. “What they call that material? Burlap?”

  “Linen,” Tyrone Walker said. “Linen.”

  ***

  When J.W. pulled up in front of the address on Montgomery Street after taking a right off Poplar just past the old Memphis Tech High School, he could see a couple of uniforms standing on the front porch in the shade out of the direct sunlight. He recognized the female as someone he had noticed before, mainly because of the way she filled out the seat of her regulation blue pants, but the officer she was talking to was a street cop he hadn’t seen before.

  The officer had taken his headgear off and set it on the banister of the porch, and he was running his hand through his headful of dark curls on which he obviously set high store.

  “Howdy, Shaquita,” J.W. said to the woman who had turned to watch him come up the sidewalk to the house. “Hot enough for you?”

  “Yessir, Sergeant Ragsdale,” she said. “It most certainly is.”

  “Put on that headgear, officer,” J.W. said to the other one, looking at his name tag, “and square it up. You’re in the eye of the public, McComick.”

  “Yessir, “ McComick said. “Like you said, it’s hot today. Trying to catch some breeze out here.”