Call Me Irresponsible
*** October 1993 ***
Lucy threw the dressing room door open hard enough to crack it. “Arrgh!”
Lois pushed her into the room. “Cut it out, Luce! That’s enough!”
Lucy spun and faced her sister. “Christie did that on purpose and you know it! We all told her – every one of us told her – don’t get crazy with the ending! Do it like we rehearsed it! But no, the great Christie Baldwin just can’t be part of the band! She has to be Number One all the time!” She snarled something unrecognizable but nonetheless profane. “‘You Made Me Love You’ was NOT written just so she could show off her vocal dynamics!”
“I know that! But you also know how she is after she does a couple of lines! The coke makes her think she’s Whitney Houston performing at the Grammys!”
“Then why do we put up with her? Why let her bust up the show over and over again? You wanna explain that to me?”
Connie leaned into the doorway. “Hey, you two, keep it down! The customers can hear you yelling at each other.”
Lois huffed. “Sorry, Connie, we just – “
Lucy stepped around her sister to face Connie. “Doesn’t it make you mad that Christie stepped all over your ending? You worked on that line for an hour!”
Connie’s beauty-queen quality smile shifted into a frown. “Of course it bothers me, but what can I do? The management of the Metro Club doesn’t ask the guitar player to coach the featured singer.”
Lucy stomped her feet twice. “We have to do something!”
Tall and broad-shouldered, Shamika Jones breezed past the other two women and bumped Lucy off-balance with one muscular arm. “Shut the freak up, jazz girl! You get fired, you take your stuff with you, and then I gotta go buy me a new drum kit that ain’t as broke in as yours is.”
Lucy turned and glared up into the taller woman’s face. “Yeah? You want me to pick one out for you, rocker woman? Maybe we can start with one of those kiddie sets. They’re cheap, too, and you don’t have to worry about what cymbal to hit on what song ‘cause there’s only one.”
“Ha! Ain’t like I use all them cymbals you got up there anyway.”
“They’re for playing jazz and every one of them sounds great!”
“Great jazz? Is that what they’re callin’ that stuff nowadays?”
“You wouldn’t know a splash from a crash if you dove into it, rocker woman!”
“Oh, yeah, jazz girl? Who was it gave you your first set of Hot Rods ‘cause you playin’ too loud?”
“I’m not the one who blows people off the stage with her twin kick pedals!”
It was an old argument, one which always produced sound and fury but also always signified nothing, and Lois was relieved that it seemed to distract Lucy from her rant about Christie. She took the opportunity to slip out of the dressing room and try to find Toni Taylor, the club’s manager and designated babysitter for Christie Baldwin, self-designated vocalist extraordinaire. She bumped into Ramona Wilcox, the band’s main pianist and business manager. “Hey, Mona. Christie still out there soaking up the applause?”
Ramona tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and snorted. “She’s in the office. Toni is trying to get her calmed down enough to do the next set.”
“Think she’ll make it?”
Ramona sighed. “I don’t think so, but she’s fooled me before. I swear, that girl’s gonna rot both her brain and her liver with all that garbage she ingests. Wouldn’t surprise me if she folded up on stage one night and died hitting a high note.”
Lois nodded in commiseration. “I know. Hey, at least we’d get great reviews for it. ‘Singer gives her life for her art. Film at eleven.’ Wouldn’t that be a great draw?”
Ramona laughed. “Lois, you are too funny. You ought to write ad copy for us. Maybe we’d get more music fans and fewer butt-grabbers in here.”
“Oh, right, that’ll happen. You do know that most of the regulars are mobbed up, don’t you?”
“Ooh, what sharp teeth you have, Grandma! Don’t let Johnny Taylor hear you say stuff like that. You’d be out of here on your bass so fast you wouldn’t have time to tune it.”
“Johnny fires any one of us, he fires all of us. It’s in the contract.”
“Uh-huh. Like any contract that doesn’t have to do with killing people means anything to anybody here.”
“Hey, don’t let Toni hear you say that. And especially not Johnny.”
Ramona chuckled and tapped Lois on the shoulder with her fist. “Okay, I hear you.”
“You should. You said it first.”
“Well, ain’t I the smart one? Come on, we got to get everything lined up for the rock-n-roll set. Connie has to have her effects pedals just so or she can’t find them.”
Lois sighed. “I don’t know why she can’t just get a little fluorescent light to shine on her pedals. That way she could at least see which one is which.”
“I’ve suggested that before. Connie always says it would kill her night vision and make it harder to dodge the drunks and the bottles they throw. But I think she just likes the attention.”
“Maybe so.” Lois chuckled. “At least she’s straight and sober.”
“Yeah, Eric Clapton should be so clean.”
*****
The band members stood to one side of the stage behind the curtain, looking around nervously. Connie and Lucy kept checking their watches.
Lois couldn’t stand it any more. “How long till curtain?”
Lucy sighed. “Two minutes and counting. I swear, if Christie shows up fried at the last minute, I’m gonna go all Pete Townsend on her head with my guitar.”
Connie grinned. “You could just sic George on her.”
“George?” scoffed Lucy. “You mean George McDermott? That nice old man? George is such an old softy he’d fluff her pillow and offer her a chocolate mint.”
“At least her breath would smell nice,” Connie retorted.
Lucy rolled her eyes silently. Shamika leaned closer. “Y’all all tuned up?”
Connie nodded. “Concert pitch, all of us. These guitars and the ones already on stage. How about you?”
“My drums is always in tune,” drawled Shamika.
“Whose drums?” asked Lucy.
“It’s my snare and my floor tom,” said Shamika. “And like I told you already, I don’t use all them cymbals anyhow.”
Ramona’s head snapped around. “Here comes somebody.”
Toni Taylor stepped through the backstage doorway and leaned close. “I’m sorry, ladies, but Christie is too sick to sing. What can we do about this?”
Lucy snorted. “Too sick! Yeah, right.”
Lois leaned closer and all but growled in her ear, “Shut up, Punky!”
Shamika tapped her sticks together twice. “Okay, people, we can handle this. We just got to go to Plan B.”
Ramona nodded. “Right. Toni, we can do this set, but you have to let us put Lois out in front for the ballads and the slower stuff and let Connie and me share the lead vocals on the other tunes.”
Toni frowned. “You know my brother doesn’t want anyone to replace Christie.”
Connie sighed. “We’re not replacing her, we’re substituting for her. Besides, the girl is totally unreliable and you know it. We’ve been ready for this ever since the third day of the gig.”
Toni’s frown flowed into something approaching amusement. “Just putting together a contingency plan, right?”
Connie nodded and grinned impishly. “Absolutely. You never know when your lead singer is going to yell through a screen door and strain her voice.”
Toni quirked one eyebrow upwards. “Okay. I’ll tell him I gave you the go-ahead. Maybe that’ll take the edge off his reaction.” She snapped her fingers once and pointed at each of the musicians in turn. “Knock ‘em dead, girls!”
“Thanks, Toni!” Ramona turned to the others as Toni withdrew. “Okay, we start with ‘China Grove.’ Connie, you got the lead vocal, right?”
“Right. You and Lois and Lucy on backup vocals.”
Lucy piped up. “Lois, you make sure you catch that C-sharp on the hook. I’m still not playing it loud enough to cut through by myself when the rest of you come in.”
“Can’t you just boost your amp’s low end?”
“If I had a Strat, maybe, but I play a Les Paul, remember? Humbucking pickups, fat tone, lots of low end already? I need a short-scale instrument for my lovely petite hands. And my sound gets too muddy if I boost the low on my Marshall any more than it already is.”
“Okay, Luce, fine! Whatever! Ramona, the next song is ‘Sultans of Swing,’ right, with Lucy on lead vocal?”
“If Connie can play it, yeah,” smirked Lucy.
“Just watch me! I’ll play it so good I’ll make Mark Knopfler roll over in his grave!”
“Knopfler isn’t dead, Connie,” replied Ramona.
“Then that’ll be a really neat trick, won’t it?”
Ramona rolled her eyes and sighed theatrically. “Shamika, you lead us into ‘Puppet Man’ next so we can show off our sweet harmonies, and then we slow it down a little. Lois, you got the lead on the soft arrangement of ‘Me And Bobby McGee’ after that, then we’ll stop and introduce ourselves.”
Lois reached into the middle of the group. “We’ll check with you for song cues from then on. Everybody get a hand in!”
Each woman grasped right hands in the middle of the huddle. Lois said, “Tonight we show them that we don’t need Christie Baldwin to sound great. Tonight we strut our stuff. Tonight we show them who the Mountaintops are! ‘Mountaintops’ on three!”
In unison, they chanted, “One-two-three-Mountaintops!”
They carried their guitars on stage as they danced to their marks and plugged in. The curtain came up as Connie stepped to her microphone. “Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Metro Club! We’re the Mountaintops, and we hope you can hang on because it’s gonna be a fun ride! Kick it off, Sham!”
One-two-three-and-four stick taps from Shamika led Lucy and Connie into the opening guitar hook of the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove.” The sound leaped off the stage as Ramona’s nimble piano joined in, followed by Shamika’s drums and Lois’s bass.
The dancing started almost immediately, even before Connie began singing, and the waitresses couldn’t keep the drinks coming fast enough. The club needed another regular bartender, one who wasn’t in jail awaiting trial for six counts of burglary.
They didn’t know it, but the man they needed had just walked in the front door.
*****
Clark winced as the band on stage started their first song. They were good, but they were also loud, and he had to deliberately turn his hearing down to something approaching a normal level. His disguise was effective – he hoped – and no one there would recognize him as an investigative reporter for the Daily Planet.
Toni Taylor leaned close to him and asked, “You said you’re looking for a job, Mr. King?”
Clark nodded. “Call me Charlie. Yeah, I need a job. The freighter I was crewin’ on sailed before I got paid yesterday and I don’t have enough bread to wait around at the post office for my last check. I gotta get some work somewhere, and I’m tired of bein’ out in the weather and all.”
She smiled. “Have you done any bartending?”
“Yeah, some. Not in any place this fancy, but I can make just about anything anybody wants to pour down their gullets.”
She nodded. “What would you do if someone who looked underage came up to the bar?”
He glanced around. “I don’t see no signs sayin’ we gonna card anybody.”
She smiled wider. “Good answer. Since this is a private club, we serve whatever is ordered to whoever orders it. It’s the responsibility of the club members, not the staff, to make sure their – companions – are old enough and sober enough to drink what they ask for. Tell me, Charlie, do you have a place to sleep?”
“I got a cheap motel room not far from here. I can walk here in fifteen minutes if you need me to come in early.”
“How very eager and industrious of you.” She leaned back and looked him over again, then nodded. “You can start tomorrow afternoon at two. You can pick up your uniform then.”
“Thanks. I’ll be here.”
“Wait. Aren’t you going to ask about your pay?”
“Nah. I trust you to be fair, and I know I’ll get good tips in a joint this classy. Besides, it ain’t like I got a lot of options.”
She straightened. “I understand. In that case, why don’t you go back to the kitchen and wash up? I’ll have the cook bring you some dinner.” She pointed to a small unoccupied table beside the kitchen door. “Have a seat there when you’re done. What kind of beer do you like?”
He shrugged. “If I ain’t payin’ for it, I like ‘em all.”
She smiled wide. “Right. I’ll send over something.”
“Thanks, ma’am. You won’t regret this, I promise.”
“You’d best see that I don’t.”
Toni turned to leave, then turned and leaned close again. “What do you think of the band?”
“Them girls up there on stage?” She nodded to him. “They’re pretty good. Great vocal sound, and they play with each other instead of against each other. They the house band?”
“No. They’re the Mountaintops. We brought them in to play behind Christie Baldwin, but she’s sick tonight. They can go on without her if they have to.”
He shrugged. “They sound like they don’t have to have her up there with them.”
“They look pretty good, too, don’t they?”
He looked back at the stage and smiled wide, then he nodded to her again, this time more enthusiastically. “They sure do look good. They look real good. ‘Specially the dark-haired one on bass.”
“Don’t you like blond guitarists?”
“Sure. It’s just – everybody got different tastes, I guess. Yeah, they all look good.”
Her face hardened and she leaned into his personal space. “Understand this: you can look all you want but you don’t touch. Not ever. You got that?”
He backed up a half step. “Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am, I got it.”
“Because if you do, you’ll answer to my brother Johnny. And he’s not the nice one in the family.”
He lifted his hands. “I surrender! Look, Ms. Taylor, I promise. I won’t touch none of them girls! I won’t even talk to ‘em ‘less you give me the high sign!”
She relaxed slightly. “You can talk to them all you want as long as it’s just business. But no guy-girl stuff! We have a strict no-fraternization policy here. Got that?”
“I got it! I promise!”
“Good.” She morphed back into the friendly club manager she’d appeared to be at first. “Then you go get cleaned up and we’ll get some quality food in you. We take good care of our people, Charlie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The band ended their first tune to raucous applause, then swung into the D-minor intro to “Sultans of Swing.” Clark took one last look at the five attractive young women rocking on the stage, their faces alight with the joy of making music. Then he turned and headed for the kitchen and a free meal, dodging dancers and waitresses on his way.
*****
Linda King leaned over his shoulder and put her hands on his upper arms. “So how’d it go at the Metro Club last night, Clark?”
“I start this afternoon as the new bartender.”
She turned him around in his chair, then reached out and stroked his fake beard. “I like it,” she purred. “Too bad it’s not real. Maybe you could grow a real one after this assignment’s over. You’d look even better than you do already.”
He leaned away while trying not to look like he was leaning away. “I’ll think about it, okay, Linda?”
Perry popped out of his office and bellowed, “King! Kent! In here now!”
Clark let Linda go first and closed the door behind them. “What’s up, Perry?”
“Sit down, you two. I want a report on this investigation at the Metro Club.”
Linda looked at Clark and nodded slightly. “I got hired as a replacement bartender. I start today at two o’clock.”
“Good. You got a crummy motel room for cover?”
“Crummiest one the Planet could afford.”
Linda giggled louder than the joke warranted, then trailed off as Perry stared her down. “Okay. Linda, you’re going in as a waitress, right?”
“I’m waiting for a call back, but I think Linda Wannamaker is a shoo-in. They’re short a couple of girls, thanks to the latest police sweep for freelance hookers, and the club’s legitimate business is booming. Besides, they’re suckers for young abandoned wives who can’t find their no-good husbands. There are at least two other waitresses there in that situation. I should be able to leverage them for information pretty easily.”
“Good. Now you two need to learn whatever you can, but you also need to keep your heads down. The Taylors and their buddies play for keeps and they don’t like people nosing around their business. Got that?”
They both nodded. “Okay. Remember, if you feel like you’re in any danger at all, pull out and report back here on the double! I don’t want anyone getting hurt over this.”
Linda frowned. “I don’t want either of us getting hurt either, Chief.”
“Let’s keep it that way. Now get back to work.”
Linda stood but found her way blocked by Clark. “Perry,” he asked, “is there any way to spot this Wanda Detroit character? It would make our job a lot easier if we had someone there who was already on the inside.”
Perry shook his head. “I already told you, I don’t even know who this woman is. I can’t even be sure it is a woman, although that’s how the writer describes herself. She writes stories exposing the gangsters who operate on the East Coast club circuit, includes names and dates and transactions and crimes committed, and sends them to me and a couple of other editors she’s decided to trust. And no, we can’t backtrack the stuff through the mail. It all comes from a post office box in Gotham City, and they get their stuff from several different U-Mail-It places up and down the East Coast. Believe me, if I could bring her in from the cold, I’d do it.”
“You haven’t been able to track her down?”
Perry tilted his head in mild exasperation. “You doubt my abilities, Mr. Kent? Or maybe you doubt my influence? Or is it my age that induces you to suggest that I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“Whoa, Chief, wait a minute! I’m sorry I – “
Perry pulled a handful of manila envelopes out from under another stack on his desk. “These are from Wanda Detroit.” He displayed the address label on the first one. “The return address says it’s from Samantha Clemens in Calavaras County, Missouri. That’s actually my personal favorite.” He dropped it back onto the desk. “This one is from Joe Green in Little Italy, Massachusetts. Italy, Guiseppie Verdi, do you get the pun? ‘Joe Green’ being the translation of Guiseppie Verdi from the Italian?”
“I’m very sorry that I doubted your ability to – “
“This last one is very interesting. It’s allegedly from George Sand in Le Havre, France. And the story that came in this envelope put two contract murderers behind bars for a long, long time.” He slapped it down atop the others. “Assuming Wanda really is a woman, she’s smart and cagey and probably tougher than a fifty-cent steak. No one’s been able to backtrack her for the last two years and change, not even the FBI.”
Clark raised his hands in surrender. “I give up! She’s smarter than all of us put together.”
Perry sighed. “I’m sorry, Kent, but this case is more than a little bit frustrating. I’ve never met her, but I feel like I know her. And I’m worried about her. I don’t even know if she’s anywhere near the Metro Club, but it’s one of the few places in the Northeast she hasn’t written anything about yet. If she’s still in business, she might be taking a look at Johnny Taylor’s business. And that’s not exactly a safe occupation.”
Clark nodded. “I know. I hope she’s still safe too. How long has it been since you’ve heard from her?”
“About three weeks. But she’s done this before, son. She doesn’t keep a regular work schedule like we do. Speaking of which, don’t the two of you have some regular work to finish up here before you go to work?”
Clark smiled. “On it, Chief.”
On their way out the door, Linda bumped him with her elbow and said, “Hey, how about an early lunch before we dive into that den of iniquity this afternoon? My treat.”
Clark sighed. She wouldn’t stop chasing him and he was getting tired of it. In fact, he thought she’d become more aggressive in the past few weeks. She seemed to view his continued refusals as challenges to try harder.
He almost said ‘no,’ but then the thought that she might do better work if she were in a good mood made him change her mind. “Okay. But somewhere on this side of town. We don’t want to compromise our undercover identities.”
She smiled. “Great! You pick the place. And I love it when you talk like J. Edgar Hoover, all that ‘undercover identities’ kind of stuff. It’s so sexy!”
Before he could object to being called ‘sexy’ yet again, she turned and strode to her desk. He sighed and sat down to work on the assignment Perry had given him.
And the assignment was frustrating to him, too, because he was supposed to find out more about the character whom the TV stations had dubbed the “Silent Vigilante.” All Clark had seen or read about the man was that he dressed all in black, wore a ski mask or a watch cap pulled low, and gloves. And he stopped criminals in the act.
The police had no consistent description of the man. His victims and the people whom he rescued had described him as Caucasian or Oriental, between six feet and six feet ten inches tall, with almost superhuman strength and agility and speed, and he never seriously injured the crooks he captured. The man was becoming a folk hero in Metropolis, and for the first time Clark was struck by the similarities between the Silent Vigilante and Wanda Detroit. Both of them worked for justice from behind the scenes, and no one but themselves knew their real identities.
Clark’s frustration with the assignment derived from the fact that he was being asked to report on himself. He couldn’t allow people to be hurt just because he wasn’t a police officer or a fireman. He’d felt stifled at being unable to fight injustice with more than the printed word – although he was becoming more and more adept at it as the days passed – so one night he’d quickly pulled on jeans and a black shirt and a woolen cap and prevented a gang rape near Suicide Slum. The pair of police cruisers had arrived in time to take the unconscious attackers into custody and had escorted the young woman to the hospital for a checkup. It was his bad luck that she’d cornered a TV reporter who was filming a segment for a feature on late-night emergency room use. It was likely that without that exposure, the woman’s story might never have been heard outside her circle of friends and her family.
The story had taken on a life of its own after that, and people had claimed rescue by the Vigilante when Clark had been asleep in bed or on a stakeout for the paper or rescuing someone else. He didn’t consider it a valid choice to allow people to suffer injury or even death if he could prevent it without blowing his cover. And he was afraid that if his identity was in danger of being revealed, he’d have to leave again.
There were even reports of the Vigilante being in more than one place at a time, of using non-lethal weapons, and being described in ways Clark knew he’d never appeared. Maybe there were copycats out there trying to emulate him. Maybe that was an angle he could present to Perry, that people were doing something about crime in their city when they probably should have been dialing 9-1-1 instead. That approach would divert attention from him, but he didn’t know if doing that would encourage more copycats or not. And since the Vigilante was trying to keep people from being hurt, Clark definitely didn’t want to put others in harm’s way just to keep his boss off his back.
He reviewed the few notes he’d taken. Officially, the police department denied his existence and discouraged people from taking on criminals themselves. Public sentiment seemed to be fairly evenly divided between near hero worship or fear that he was planning to set up some kind of criminal empire and was engaged in clearing out the competition. It meant that he had to be even more careful to keep his identity a secret.
And now Perry was asking him to do exactly the opposite, to find the Silent Vigilante and unmask him. Dissected like a frog, indeed. More like being torn in two.
*****
Linda perched on the edge of her chair and began flipping through the file folder in front of her, but her mind wasn’t on her work. She was focused on Clark, and even though she wasn’t looking directly at him she knew where he was and what he was doing.
It was a little scary. Never in her life had she met a man who had the power to bring her to her knees but refused to use that power. No matter how many signals she sent him, he didn’t react. No matter how blatantly she flirted, he never responded. He was, as Perry had described him to her when she’d been hired, the quintessential Boy Scout. And because she didn’t have him, she wanted him desperately.
She grinned as she thought of their first meeting, then wiped her face clean. She couldn’t allow that memory to distract her from her job, even if it was one of her favorites.
He’d been so embarrassed when she’d answered the knock at her apartment door, wrapped in a towel and still wet from her shower. She’d thought he was her blind date to the White Orchid ball, but Morgan had stood her up and she’d cajoled Clark into escorting her before she’d known that Perry had hired him the day before. Clark had come by to ask her about some story notes from a fellow rookie reporter and had gotten more than he’d bargained for.
Whether or not she ever actually got to first base with him – or even into the batter’s box – he was still one of the best writers she’d ever met. Even as a newbie at the Planet herself, as soon as she read his first story, the one on the theatre demolition, she’d known that he could help her professionally, and when they’d met she’d known that he could also help her personally.
But it hadn’t happened, at least not yet. They hadn’t progressed beyond friendly smiles and his gentlemanly ways, but they would. She was sure of it.
They didn’t call her ‘Lucky Linda’ for nothing, and it was a nickname she cherished. She was lucky in love, lucky at cards, and lucky in her chosen profession. At least, she wanted to believe it was luck. If success was due to hard work and talent, then she might one day be unmasked as a fraud, a faker, a con artist of the highest degree with no real talent or ability. The thought terrified her.
So she pretended that it all came easily to her, that all the scholastic honors and the professional awards had simply dropped into her lap as she walked around in a happy daze. She pretended that she never lost sleep over a story, never agonized over a potentially actionable statement, never worried that someone else could do her job better than she could with less effort and for less money. She pretended to herself that she’d never overheard the nerdy little gofer refer to her as ‘Pit Bull King’ that day in the snack room.
Her cell phone rang and she looked at the incoming number display. Her call from the Metro Club was coming in. She stood and sprinted to the ladies’ room to make sure no one on the other end heard anything they shouldn’t from her side of the conversation.
She came out ten minutes later, smiling. She’d been hired and would report for work at four o’clock that day. There was just enough time for her to put a little more pressure on Clark before he had to leave for his new ‘job.’
Lucky again.
