That High White Note

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Every guy, maybe every gal too, who has ever picked up some raw-boned trumpet, some hammered sax, or some runaway trombone, some brass thing, dreams in his deepest dreams, the ones that count, about blowing that high white note. The one that says that guy is one with the instrument. Some guys, some guys like hard-nosed private eye Philip Marlowe, maybe picked up the blow as a kid but could never quite get the hang of it, could never dream about that high white note. And so Marlowe wound up picking up brass of a different sort, empty slug shells from a wayward gun out in the sullen steamy Los Angeles night after some maddened episode that he had no control over either. Still Philip Marlowe, tone deaf to the music grift always loved to listen to The Bill Baxter Be-Bop Hour featuring artists live, guys who would come in on an off-night or after a gig out of WJDA in the high desert night around Riverside midnight until dawn. Loved to listen to see if some guy just for a minute could hit that damn high white note.

John“King” Leonard hit that high white note, hit it a number of times like maybe he owned it or something. Marlowe heard it one night and knew exactly what it meant then when heaven beckoned. Marlowe also heard that the King was to be playing at Jack Reed’s Club Lola over near the Santa Monica Pier for the next several weeks and knew he would make time to catch the King live and in person. Strangely Marlowe got to meet the King in person well before that club date opening although it had nothing to do with high white notes but rather too much noise.

Times, like for everybody else, were hard in the 1937 private eye market and so Marlowe the never work nine- to- five- for- another- guy king had to lower his standards and work the graveyard shift as the house peeper for John Reed’s low rent hotel (a no tell hotel), the Taft (which hadn’t been fixed up since about that fat man’s presidential administration). Since everybody was trying to save dough in 1937 Reed had the King stay in his hotel rather than five-star digs like he expected providing him with plenty of female company. That kind of trade-off appealed to the King because if he craved anything besides seeking that high white note it was diving under those silky sheets with women, lots of women.

The King with his angel- blown horn as a lure had no want for female companionship, lots of it, and no want either of one- night stands and then off to some other twist in some other town. You know the routine. In any case one night, or rather one morning about three o’clock, some of the hotel guests were squawking that the King and his entourage were raising holy hell, loud holy hell and please somebody stop it. And newly-minted graveyard shift house peeper Marlowe was the stopper no questions asked and no quarter given. He unceremoniously booted the King out the door.

Of course a big ego guy like the King squawked to Jake Reed and Marlowe in turn was out on his ear. But that was not the end of Marlowe’s relationship with one King Leonard. See the King had an opening act, a honey his for the asking or so he thought opening act, a torch singer, good too, named Delia Day, who it turned out would not give him the time of day. Nada, nothing. But the King was a hard guy to say no to or to take no for an answer and so he headed to Delia’s digs one night to wait for her to come home after a gig over at the hot spot Café Florian. When Delia got home and went into her bedroom to change there was the King laid out in his splendor on her bed. Laid out and very dead with a couple of slugs through the heart, if he had a heart. Through the heart with her gun that she kept in her night stand for protection. And the King was positioned in such a way that it looked, well, like some lovers’ quarrel, a domestic dispute. Naturally nobody believed that Delia juts walked in and found the King in his very dead condition and so they threw her in the jailhouse to make her sweat out a confession.

Marlowe who had also followed Delia’s career sensed that things did not add up, that somebody or somebodies had the frame fit right around her. So windmill-chasing Marlowe came to the rescue. It didn’t take long for him to figure the whole scheme out though since it had to be the work of amateurs, amateurs with some special grievance up their sleeves. And they did in the persons of two guys who worked at Jack Reed’s hotel. The King liked his women, no question, liked to love them and leave them after he had used them up. The two guys at the hotel happened to be the brothers of one of the King’s used ups, a young woman from the sticks who took what the King said as pure gold and when he dumped her committed suicide according to their story.

These brothers, something out of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, got everything wrong. They assumed that Delia was the one who took the King away from their sister when she in fact hated the King. So they set the frame for her by killing the King in her bedroom. They assumed that the King had abandoned their sister on her word when it was she who walked out on him and was looking to fix him for her own reasons. Her suicide was related to the fact that she was pregnant be another man later who actually had abandoned her. The only thing they got right was their getaway. Marlowe was able to follow them as far as Portland and then lost their trail. They were never found. The King though, the King lived on in his records played over that radio on WJDA . Every once in a while they would play the King on his signature song, Banana Blues, and Marlowe would ponder over the fact that even a rat like the King should go to heaven to blow that high white note that he owned.