Chapter 4

The neon sign keeps flashing and the rain has stopped. The Veronica Lake look-a like shouts over.

‘Hey Fats, play something for a funeral, there’s a dead man in here.’

‘Dead cop’, I think and straighten my Derby.  I pull it down on my forehead, and oblige with a New Orleans slow march. My fingers flow lightly over the keys. I hope the prosthetics dept. have built a bullet shield into Fats’s force field.

The dancing cop looks Veronica in the eye. ‘Are you gonna shoot all the witnesses? It’s 120 years to life for cop shooting in this state’.

‘Listen Honey, your partner, or should I say ex partner, was as crooked as a tyre wrench, and got what was coming to him. If it wasn’t me it would have any of the honest citizens he was ripping off.’

‘But he was still a cop.’

I up the tempo a bit, this is getting interesting. When you are given an assignment, you don’t know what is going to happen. Some gigs are as boring as a temperance meeting and it’s a relief when it is time to depart. This one is warming up nicely.

Veronica walks over to the cop stepping over his partners body, placing a silver pump onto the boards avoiding the blood. She slips a hand into his pocket and pulls out his shield, and reads his name.

‘Well detective Doil, what now?’ Her hair has fallen over one eye and she looks as sexy as hell. She lowers the gun and drops it to the floor. There will be no prints on the butt as her elbow length gloves won’t leave any, and no powder stains either after the gloves are dumped in the river. Her face is not an inch from his and her body is pushing into him. He steps back but she follows him, I break into a tango.

He pulls her to him with his left arm around her waist, she hooks her left leg around his legs. They tango violently, somehow they stay upright avoiding the bloody bit of the floor.  I finish with a crashing chord. They lean into each other breathing hard.

Then he flings her from him and she falls backwards over the prone cop.

‘Hey missy’, he yells. ‘Bring a cloth and clean this up’ The cook does as he says muttering to herself. Veronica gets up

‘What now?’ she says

‘Now we dump the body. Hey Fats give us a hand to roll him in the rug.’

I place my Derby on the piano and get hold of one end of the rug, Doil the other. We wrap up the dead cop as if we do it every day.

The fainted hooker on the couch groans and sits up, sees the blood and faints again. She wont be no bother, a few greenbacks in her pouch and she’ll stay as stum as a cat with his throat cut.

‘Get him into my car’, says Doil.

I’m paid to play the piano. I don’t want to be mixed up any homicide, no matter how nasty the victim was.

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Nope!’

I do as he says, and he drives off with Veronica riding shot gun. The evening is still young and I’m paid to play for a long night, so I go back up the stoop and sit at the piano. Soon the joint is jumpin’ again. The cook is frying, the punters attracted by my piano through the open window are thirstily glugging at their jugs of red biddy and moonshine and Fats is back.

In the distance is the sound of sirens.