Won't be long ...
Lawdy, Mama,
Be it right or be it wrong ...
Gonna hafta someday
Sing my song.
Blue Bottle Bill Beady could sing the blues like no man I had ever met before him. He stayed at The Pink Flamingo Hotel for a couple of months while he was playing a gig at Jimmy's Casino out on the highway. I caught his act more than once, but always his early set, because I had to be back at The Pink Flamingo by around ten o'clock to work as the bouncer in the Corner Pocket Lounge.
It was early fall, and traffic on the Interstate had thinned out. So the hotel was all but vacant. The usual truckers dropped by, grabbed a bite in The Palms, the hotel's restaurant, but they slept in the parking lot in their cabs for a small fee. The rooms of hotel itself were near empty.
Every night, at around 2:00 am, Blue Bottle Bill Beady's red '59 Cadillac would pull into the parking lot, and Blue Bottle Bill would step into the Corner Pocket Lounge for a beer or two. He'd sit in the same corner booth, all by himself, and he liked it that way. The first night he showed up, he even asked me to keep the girls and the "tourists," as he called them, as far away from him as possible. So I made it a point to let everyone and anyone know that the man was to be left alone.
I have to admit that some nights he worried me to no end. He'd be sitting in his booth and mumbling to himself. Not in a quiet kind of way. More like a loud growl. Then he'd start making exaggerated hand gestures. Some of the girls said his goings-on made them nervous, and one girl, Désirée Langlois, said he kept humming some song, rambling on about a girl called Josephine, and calling her "Daddy's li'l honey bee."
Ricardo, the midget who ran the front desk at night, said he thought Blue Bottle Bill was into some kind of voodoo. He swore he was going to enter his room some night to see if the old guy had some kind of altar set up. If he did, I didn't hear about it. Maybe there was nothing to report.
It wasn't long into Bill Beady's stay before the mysterious Josephine showed up. She was a young girl, no more than 14 years of age, and had the complexion of a penny blackened in a campfire. She was thin and wispy, and she wore micro-skirts atop her long legs that never seemed to end. She moved right in to Bill Beady's room, and Ricardo was having fits about her being so young and staying with a guy probably three times her age.
"She might be his kid," I suggested to Ricardo one evening. "Probably nothing too suspicious going on."
"She ain't his kid," the midget growled, "nossir, she ain't his kid. She's his Lolita is all. It's downright disgusting is all. He's a pedo, and sure as hell we're gonna get busted for underage sex. Child exploitation. Mark my words."
"Relax, Ric," I implored, "I'll look into it."
And I did.
It was on a Sunday night, when things were perilously slow in the Corner Pocket, and I snuck away to see what was up.
I can't say I'm much of a detective, but I did hover for a time outside the door of Room 308, where Blue Bottle Bill was staying. Sure enough, there was some kind of commotion going on behind that door, a grunting and groaning, a hissing and yelping that I figured could only mean one thing. I didn't reckon there was any voodoo going on in there, but I knew what I knew. Blue Bottle Bill and the young Josephine weren't playing Parcheesi.
Muddy Waters ♫ Honey Bee
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