Dagger Key and Other Stories

  “He and Jerry got a conflict,” Geno said. “Jerry can’t get this one part down, and Stanky’s on him about it. I keep telling Stanky to quit ragging him. Leave Jerry alone and he’ll stay on it until he can play it backwards. But Stanky, he’s relentless and Jerry’s getting pissed. He don’t love the guy, anyway. Like today, Stanky cracks about we should call the band Stanky and Our Gang.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. But it was cute, you know. Kind of funny. Jerry took it personal, though. He like to got into it with Stanky.”

  “I’ll talk to them. Anything else?”

  “Naw. Stanky’s a geek, but you know me. The music’s right and I’m there.”

  The following day I had lunch scheduled with Andrea. It was also the day that my secretary, Kiwanda, a petite Afro-American woman in her late twenties, came back to work after a leave during which she had been taking care of her grandmother. I needed an afternoon off—I thought I’d visit friends, have a few drinks—so I gave over Stanky into her charge, warning her that he was prone to getting handsy with the ladies.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, sorting through some new orders. “You go have fun.”

  Andrea had staked out one of the high-backed booths at the rear of McGuigan’s and was drinking a martini. She usually ran late, liked sitting at the front, and drank red wine. She had hung her jacket on the hook at the side of the booth and looked fetching in a cream-colored blouse. I nudged the martini glass and asked what was up with the booze.

  “Bad day in court. I had to ask for a continuance. So…” She hoisted the martini. “I’m boozing it up.”

  “Is this that pollution thing?”

  “No, it’s a pro bono case.”

  “Thought you weren’t going to do any pro bono work for a while.”

  She shrugged, drank. “What can I say?”

  “All that class guilt. It must be tough.” I signaled a waitress, pointed to Andrea’s martini and held up two fingers. “I suppose I should be grateful. If you weren’t carrying around that guilt, you would have married Snuffy Huffington the Third or somebody.”

  “Let’s not banter,” Andrea said. “We always banter. Let’s just talk. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  I was good at reading Andrea, but it was strange how well I read her at that moment. Stress showed in her face. Nervousness. Both predictable components. But mainly I saw a profound loneliness and that startled me. I’d never thought of her as being lonely. I told her about Stanky, the good parts, his writing, his musicianship.

  “The guy plays everything,” I said. “Guitar, flute, sax, trumpet. Little piano, little drums. He’s like some kind of mutant they produced in a secret high school band lab. And his voice. It’s the Jim Nabors effect. You know, the guy who played Gomer Pyle? Nobody expected a guy looked that goofy could sing, so when he did, they thought he was great, even though he sounded like he had sinus trouble. It’s the same with Stanky, except his voice really is great.”

  “You’re always picking up these curious strays,” she said. “Remember the high school kid who played bass, the one who fainted every time he was under pressure? Brian Something. You’d come upstairs and say, ‘You should see what Brian did,’ and tell me he laid a bass on its side and played Mozart riffs on it. And I’d go…”

  “Bach,” I said.

  “And I’d go, ‘Yeah, but he faints!’” She laughed. “You always think you can fix them.”

  “You’re coming dangerously close to banter,” I said.

  “You owe me one.” She wiggled her forefinger and grinned. “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a downside to this guy.”

  I told her about Stanky’s downside and, when I reached the part about Mia leaving, Andrea said, “The circus must be in town.”

  “Now you owe me one.”

  “You can’t expect me to be reasonable about Mia.” She half-sang the name, did a little shimmy, made a moue.

  “That’s two you owe me,” I said.

  “Sorry.” She straightened her smile. “You know she’ll come back. She always does.”

  I liked that she was acting flirty and, though I had no resolution in mind, I didn’t want her to stop.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

  “Huh?”

  “So how talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

  “What do you mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

  “Never mind. Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

  “You want me to sing?”

  “You were a singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t do what he does.”

  She sat expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

  “All right,” I said.

  I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

  “There’s a grapevine in heaven,
  There’s a peavine in hell,
  One don’t grow grapes,
  The other don’t grow peas as well…”

  I sailed on through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

  “Devil’s Blues!
  God owes him…”

  A bald guy popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked back down. I heard laughter.

  “That’s enough,” I said to Andrea.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”