MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It was big money did us in.” He spread his hands to show how big. “A group cuts a disc here, it sells, they get an offer from New York or L.A., and they hop a plane and we never see them again. Which is the stupidest thing in the world, because this is where they got their sound. That don’t come in packages. The riots finished us off. When them windows started busting, the writers lit out, and when they lit out the talent followed them. Then Motown went out to L.A. and died. Those of us that decided to hang on and ride it out got law down our necks and we’re still trying to shake it loose.

  “My old man used to tell me about the Old Country, where you would bring the judge a jug of goat’s milk and win any case. To me, if I put a record out, and the jock is instrumental in putting it over, it’s no different from tipping the waitress a buck for doing a good job. But some jocks got hungry. The government looks into it and fines the pants off me so bad I got to sell out and take this dump outside the limits. You’ll see, though. It’ll turn around. Motown’s back now, and pretty soon it’ll be 1965 all over again. Just wait and see.”

  He cocked his naked pate toward the recording room, where the pianist had switched to a low, lingering blues. “Hear that? That guy’s a Methodist minister, but by the time he gets done fooling around and puts that stuff on wax and we push it in all the right places he’ll have a brand new calling. He’s just the kind of talent we need to get the whole thing rolling again. Just goes to show you don’t have to be black to play good nigger jazz. What’d you say your name was?”

  I gave him my card. He studied it, fingered a corner absently, and consigned it to his shirt pocket. He wore neither jacket nor tie, and his white shirt was dark around the armpits. It wasn’t that hot. The room we occupied was a cavernous hall lit by fluorescent tubes in three long troughs suspended from the ceiling twenty feet above our heads, its dusty cement floor littered with cables and alive with icy drafts that skirled gleefully about our pants legs. The steel door on the north side banged in its casing with each gust off the river.

  “Martha Burns,” he reflected, as if I’d just mentioned the name. “I’m not sure I–”

  “Beryl Garnet said you offered to record her,” I said.

  A sly look came over his features. His expressive face must have been something to see when they had him in court on the payola charge. “She’s marrying money, I bet,” he said. “He’s paying you to look up her past. I bet there’s big dough in it.”

  “Wrong twice. Her father’s looking for her and I’m getting my usual fee. Which is probably less than what you’d slip a deejay to turn a bomb into a hit.”

  “Hell. The way she carried on I thought she had William Clay Ford on the hook at least.”

  “She was here, then. When?”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Depends on what you’ve got to sell.”

  “I got expenses to meet. Rent. Utilities. It’s gonna be a long winter. I’m gonna burn a lot of gas.”

  “Not as much as you’re burning right now, brother.”

  “I need some guarantee I’ll get paid for what I give.”

  “Sorry.”

  He thought about it a minute. The minister had stopped playing in the next room and was scratching something on his sheet music. Zacharias stepped over and pulled shut the soundproof door.

  “It was February,” he said. “Early part. She comes in one morning, tells me she’s taking me up on my offer. I said what offer. I didn’t even know her. She says I told her I could make her a star. Hell, that was New Year’s Eve and I was three sheets to the wind. There’s damn few I don’t say that to when I’m off the express. I say, ‘Okay, let’s hear what you got.’ She sits down at the box. She’s got sheet music in her purse. Something from Broadway, I forget what exactly. I expected to get my eardrums warped, but she surprised me. She was good.”

  “Star material?”

  He shook his head. “Not by ten miles. A good voice I can get by raiding any church choir in town. There are lots of tricks for making a terrific singer sound better, but no amount of backups and echo chambers is gonna put in something that wasn’t there to begin with. Good isn’t good enough.”

  “You tell her that?”

  He started to go sly on me again. I squashed it early. “It might be worth something.”

  “A century?”

  “Trot it out. I don’t buy horseflesh I can’t see.”

  “You wouldn’t trust Jesus with a used rubber.”

  “Jack, you don’t look a bit like him.”

  “All right.” He swiped a hand over his scratchy chin, smoothed it up and over the top of his head as if there were something up there to smooth, let it slide down the back of his neck, and left it there. “I told her I could do something with her, but first she’d have to invest a couple of hundred dollars. I needed the money. My landlord’s halitosis was in my collar and the phone company was gonna shut off my service.”

  “What made you think she had it to invest?”

  “Hell, I saw it. When she hauled out that music the inside of her purse looked like the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. She had a portrait of Madison in there. You know what he’s on?”

  “A thousand-dollar bill.”

  “That’s right! Say, what kind of fee do you charge?”

  “I read a lot. How much she pour down your little rathole?”

  “Watch it, smart mouth! I held up my end. We cut the records, I took out ads, got a jock friend of mine to spin it on the air. I’m not a crook.”

  “We had a president who said that. Okay, you bought a tombstone in the neighborhood shopper and sank a fin to play the disc at five A.M. in between farm reports. How bad you burn her?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  I laughed. “How come you’re not mayor?”

  “She had plenty to spare.” I’d wounded him. “I got one of her singles here if you don’t believe me. Care to hear it?”

  I said sure and followed him into the recording room and across to the door of the engineers’ booth on the other side. The minister didn’t look up from his keyboard as we passed behind him on a wave of ragtime. The booth was deserted. Inside, Zacharias stooped to slide a master disc with a plain label out of a cabinet beneath the gaudy control panel and skimmed it at me. I had to clap it to my chest with both hands to keep it from falling. By the time I had it I was staring into the hole of a .25 automatic in the Greek’s right hand. At that range it might as well have been a Howitzer.

  “Cute, huh?” he said around a grin. “I saw it done once in a movie. Only they used an inner tube.”

  “I guess you didn’t have one handy.”

  “Shut up. I got this baby two years ago after a kid I was training to be an engineer got held up and shot right about where you’re standing. Junkies. He died. They got six dollars off him and some change. Call it River Rouge or Ecorse or Hamtramck or Farmington or Dearborn, it’s all Detroit and it stinks. Now suppose you tell me how much you’re willing to spend to find out what I know. Sight unseen.”

  I was holding the record overhead where I’d raised my hands when the gun came out. I let it drop. It didn’t break. They don’t nowadays, though they scratch when you look at them. It hit on its edge and rolled across the floor toward Zacharias. People are like dogs, attracted by movement. His eyes followed the rolling disc and I reached out and snatched hold of the gun.

  His forearms were as strong as they looked. He held on and we closed and grappled, four hands fighting for a gun that could be concealed in any one of them. There was a loud, sharp rapping sound and a bullet chipped the concrete between my feet and whizzed off to bury itself in the soundproof wall. The recoil, tiny as it was, was unexpected and it made him loosen his grip momentarily. I twisted it out of his grasp and kneed him in the groin in the same movement. He doubled over gasping.

  On the other side of the window the minister was pounding away on the piano. Not a note came through with the microphones turned off. The soundproofing worked as well i
n reverse. I left Zacharias to wait for the pain to tingle up through his stomach and out while I pocketed the little pistol and stepped over to retrieve the record. Martha Burns’ name was scratched on the label in block Magic Marker capitals. Below it was the title: “Body and Soul.” She had a sense of humor. I found a turntable and spiked it and fiddled around until I found the knob that started it turning. Halfway through the vamp I came across the volume, which damn near brought the booth crashing down around me before I got it dialed down. Then I stood back to watch Barney Zacharias and listen.

  She had the kind of voice you find in the better bars, the kind you don’t really hear until you’re three-quarters shellacked and the number you courted the wife by comes up and you poke a dollar into the tip glass and you go home feeling a little sad and wake up the next morning without remembering anything but the drinks and the sadness. It was good enough to hum along with when you weren’t too preoccupied to notice it, but not so good it interrupted the serious drinkers. It was low but not low enough, sultry but shallow. You wouldn’t pay to hear it.

  The small combo Zacharias had hired to back her up was cut from the same bolt. There were a lot of them out there. One out of every hundred thousand made good money for a while, then dropped out of sight and ended up with a tag on his toe and an inch on page twenty-three of a newspaper small enough to take notice: “Johnny Hercules, one-time guitarist with the Winged Wonders vocal group, was found dead on the bathroom floor of his Dearborn Heights home yesterday afternoon. Death is believed to have resulted from drug overdose.” I wondered if Aphrodite Records offered the musicians the same deal as Martha Burns, née Marla Bernstein.

  By the time the record ended, Zacharias was sitting on a stool at the control panel with his head in his hands. I asked him if he was feeling better. He didn’t call me anything I hadn’t been called before.

  “Let’s start with the money,” I said. “Where’d she get it?”

  “Go piss up a rope.” The words were squeezed from his diaphragm. Either I’d kicked him harder than planned or he was faking. I decided to test the second hypothesis.

  I took the little widowmaker out of my pocket, made sure the safety was on, gathered it up in my fist, and, moving so that my back was between him and the window, tapped the bald Greek on the tip of his chin between his supporting hands.

  As an improvement on nature the compact firearm was fully as effective as my own Smith had been on Erskine. His hands sprang apart, his teeth snapped, and his head went back and rapped the fiberboard on the wall behind him. He gasped and shook his head as if to see if I’d knocked anything loose inside. I was sure as hell trying.

  I massaged my knuckles where they’d split open again and stepped in for a second blow. He saw me coming, yelled, and threw his hands up in front of his face. It was like hurling a shotput through morning mist. His nose flattened like so much papier-mâché and blood spurted from his nostrils over his white shirt front.

  “I don’t like people who pull guns,” I explained, through my teeth. “Sooner or later someone’s got to show your brand of punk that a peashooter in your hand doesn’t necessarily mean the world in your pocket. I guess I’m elected.”

  I was proud of myself. I’d been insulted by cops, swiped at with a shiv, frisked, brained, shot at, and threatened, and I was taking it out on a guy half my size with an artificial aid I didn’t need just because he swindled kids who had nothing but hope and a little money and pulled guns he had no intention of using. I was in a league with the brainless slugs at Olympia who sat swilling beer out of paper cups and screaming for one overpaid athlete to splatter another’s gray matter over the manmade ice. The only difference was that I was the one doing the splattering. I spread my feet for another crack.

  “No!” It was a shriek of uncut terror. He had his arms crossed over his swollen and bleeding face and his head was pressed back against the wall so hard it dented the brittle material that covered it. “I don’t know where she got the money! I didn’t ask. She just had it. I swear!”

  “That’ll buy you a ticket to yesterday’s ballgame,” I said. But I backed off. Slowly he lowered his arms. His nose was puffed and still trickling and a dirty bluish patch had begun to spread over his chin and jaw. He’d be living on oatmeal and eggnog for the next week.

  I got out my handkerchief and wound it around my sore right hand. The blood seeped through the white cotton, something else to be added to the expense account I would submit to Ben Morningstar. “Try guessing,” I told him. “She didn’t make that much hooking.”

  “How should I know? Maybe she got it from her boyfriend.”

  “You mentioned that before. Who was he?”

  “Search me. I never even saw the guy. She used to get calls from him in the studio. I overheard enough to know he was loaded. That’s it.”

  “You sure?”

  “No, I’m holding out. I like to do that when somebody’s working me over real good. I’m into S/M.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Sometime around the end of July. We had problems getting a good cut and knocked off around seven. She said she’d be in to try again in the morning. She wasn’t. I haven’t seen her since, and don’t think I didn’t try to find her, a sweet deal like that. No soap. I never even knew where she was staying.”

  I broke the clip from the automatic, jacked the shell out of the chamber, wiped everything off with the end of my handkerchief, and laid the works on the control panel out of his reach.

  “Why’d you air the iron?”

  He had his own handkerchief out and was using it to staunch the flow of blood from his nostrils. If we used the same laundry there were going to be rumors circulating come wash day. “Sooner or later everybody gets to pushing me around,” he complained. “I figured it was time I did some pushing of my own.”

  I left the booth. He scrambled up off the stool. “Hey, what about paying me for the info?”

  “Your turn at the rope,” I said, and left. The minister played on.

  13

  SINCE ANYONE DESPERATE ENOUGH to steal secondhand furniture and magazines old enough for Medicare deserves a break, I leave the door to my outer office unlocked during the day for the convenience of those customers who don’t mind waiting. There was one on the pew behind a copy of Life when I got back.

  “Where’d you park the yellow bomb?” I asked as I drew the door shut. “I didn’t spot it out front.”

  “Around the corner.” Wiley returned the magazine to the coffee table and got up. The more I saw of him the more he looked like an ad for campus fashions. I kept wondering how he got into the business. He didn’t look the type to go the standard dope route, but you never know.

  I got out a cigarette and rolled it around in my fingers. “What can I do you for?”

  “You can start with a full report. You promised Mr. Morningstar you’d check in daily.”

  “That was only fourteen hours ago. The day’s not up yet.”

  “Let’s hear it anyway. I don’t smoke.”

  I’d offered him a Winston. I shrugged and lit mine. “Thanks. I’ll make it to Mr. Morningstar in person.” I waved out the match slowly. He was watching me, not the movement. Well, it didn’t always work. That was good to know for future reference.

  “Come along, then.”

  “Sorry. I’m busy.”

  “He’s an old man,” he said calmly. “That’s why he hires people like Paul Cooke and me to look after his interests. Which includes making sure he isn’t taken by down-at-heels private eyes with friends on newspapers and in the police department. He can holler nigger all he wants and I’ll still do it because that’s what he pays me for. Do we understand each other?”

  “Not quite. I’m down at heels because I’m honest. Some of us are in this business. We’re the guys the slick ops in the sharp tailormades hire at the professional courtesy rate of fifty or a hundred a day to do the work their clients engage them for at three hundred. Your boss may can me and
throw his green into office bars and computers and flashy receptionists with nothing to do all day but answer the telephone and ball the department head, but he’ll still be hiring me or someone like me. He’ll just be shelling out more to the middleman. I may charge whiskey to expenses, but when I do I write it out clear and firm on the accounting sheet. He won’t get that from anyone in a higher tax bracket.”

  He watched me in silence a moment longer. It was hard to believe I’d ever compared his looks with Stevie Wonder’s. “Is that what you want me to tell him?”

  “That and one more thing. Ask him if he was sending Marla any money while she was in finishing school.”

  “I can answer that. He did all his banking here, through me. It was the one link he had with his hometown he wanted to keep. He paid for her board and tuition directly to Esther Brock. Marla never saw a penny. I think it was his way of keeping her mind on her studies and out of trouble.”

  “That seems to have been the popular notion.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’ve got a big mouth. Forget I said it. Tell your boss I’ll call him tonight. Unless, of course, you’ve got orders to take me for a ride or something like that.”

  He grinned. That’s what was missing. It transformed his whole face. “Man,” he said, “you’ve really got to stay away from that late-late show.” Then the bottom dropped out of the grin. “Just keep in mind that fiction is always based on something known.”