Free The Right To Sing the Blues by John Lutz

cigar and placed it between even, tobacco-stained teeth. “Each year it’s easier for me to understand why you had to quit the department. You’re not an organization man, Nudge. There is no hole for a peg shaped like you. I assume you want me to check with Missing Persons to see if they have a file on this woman.”
    “Exactly.”
    While he pretended to consider this request, Hammer-smith fired up the cigar, puffed and wheezed, and exhaled a tremendous dense cloud of greenish smoke. Then, cigar still in his mouth, he lifted the desk phone receiver and punched out the number for the main switchboard. “Get me Mishing Pershons,” he said around the cigar.
    Nudger smiled at him. Hammersmith smiled back and blew smoke.
    “It’ll take a few minutes,” Hammersmith said, after hanging up the phone. “If there is an MP file on Jacqui James and it’s in the computer, we can get a printout of it here for you to read.”
    “I appreciate this, Jack.”
    “And so you should.”
    Nudger had never doubted that Hammersmith would let him use police-department files. The two men had a mutual trust and interdependence going back over a decade to when they had been partners in a two-man patrol car. Hammersmith knew why Nudger had quit the department. It was nerves, a stomach that never got used to the everyday stress and occasional violence that was a patrol cop’s lot. In a shoot-out with a burglar in the dark, Nudger had saved Hammersmith’s life, though he might just as easily have killed him with one of his shaky, panicky shots.
    The nerves had become worse after that, and the department had taken Nudger off patrol duty and turned him into Coppy the Clown, a local TV character who taught young children not to be afraid of policemen in our warped society. But a new police chief had decided that a clown wasn’t, after all, the most desirable symbol of the department, and Nudger had resigned rather than return to the grinding stress of patrol duty. He’d become, out of necessity born of knowing no other line of work, a private investigator. It enabled him to pay the bills, more or less, in his journey along life’s perilous streets. His nervous stomach traveled right along with him.
    “What are you working on in New Orleans?” Hammer-smith asked.
    “I’m investigating an employee,” Nudger said vaguely.
    “I won’t ask why the employer didn’t hire a local,” Hammersmith said. “Maybe an investigator with a Louisiana PI license.”
    “My client wanted only me. I came highly recommended by Jeanette Boyington.”
    Hammersmith emitted a foul cloud of greenish smoke and chuckled. “Unpredictable bitch, eh?”
    “Agreed,” Nudger said. “Actually, I’m trying to find out about a man named Hollister, a jazz musician who used to be chummy with Jacqui James.”
    “Why?” Hammersmith asked bluntly.
    “He’s involved with another woman, a fellow employee who’s the daughter of a big-clout guy named Collins.”
    Hammersmith removed the cigar from his mouth and looked over its glowing tip at Nudger. There was cool alarm in his blue eyes. “David Collins?”
    Nudger shifted his weight to his left haunch, uncomfortable in the hard chair. “How do you know Collins?” he asked. His stomach presaged the answer by arranging itself in what felt like a tight coil.
    “I know of Collins,” Hammersmith said, “and that’s as close as I care to get. Mostly what I’ve heard is rumor, but none of it is good rumor. Involvement in a Gulf Coast real estate scam, a series of inflated construction bids and kickbacks when the New Orleans World’s Fair was being put together, whispers of a Collins cut in a big South American drug operation that was drop-shipping in southern Florida. Collins is purported to be more of a financier of crime than an actual participant. He keeps himself at least twice-removed and free from prosecution.”
    “Interesting,” Nudger said, “but how does a police lieutenant in St. Louis happen to know