The Devil's Music

by Stephen Mertz

  “Hey Stomp, you out there? Time to go on!

  The first thing Stomper did, upon realizing that TJ couldn’t see him, was to quickly angle away from the corpse as soundlessly as possible so that when he emerged from the darkness into TJ’s line of vision, he was approaching from a completely different angle several yards removed from the body.

  “Okay, okay, I’m here,” said Stomper. “Let’s get down with it.”

  TJ said, “About time. Man, this place is ready to rock!”

  Like most drummers, TJ was a hyped-up sort of personality.

  When he was back inside the club and stepping onto the stage, the energy of the crowd and the moment made it almost seem to Stomper as if he’d dreamt what he just witnessed. Was it a figment of his imagination? Hell, no. He’d just looked down into the face of a dead man. A man with his throat cut ear to ear. It happened, all right. And he couldn’t shake it off.

  He kicked off the last set of the evening with an up-tempo shuffle and went about singing his blues and playing his guitar without missing a beat. Only Olga, seated elegantly as ever at her piano, seemed to notice something lacking in his performance and delivery. Stomper’s band was a tough, tight, rocking little unit. TJ’s propulsive drumming over Shorty Long’s smooth bass walking the blues provided the perfect accompaniment for Stomper’s talent, The dance floor was packed and the energy level high but Stomper found himself unable to summon up the amusing, rhyming patter he sometimes delivered between songs when the spirit was on him.

  He saw no sign of Jenna. The little working girl must have scored herself a live one.

  And throughout their last set, Stomper couldn’t help noticing something–someone–that troubled him. Being on stage all night long playing music, a musician naturally forms an impression of the scene before him. People come and go during the night, sure, but after four hours a club scene takes on a rhythm of its own.

  The man in the black leather, who appeared and stayed on throughout that last set, was hard to miss. He wore a snappy Fedora, which in itself set him apart from other customers as did the fact that he never once took a sip from the bottle of beer he held. He stood at the end of the bar and coolly observed the band. Stomper in particular, sizing Stomper up, which gave Stomper the creeps. The guy kept that up for the whole set until the last number when he vacated his spot and Stomper lost track of him.

  Things began to wind down once the band played their final number. The house lights went up and Leon could be heard advising his patrons from behind the bar, “You don’t have to go home, folks, but you’ve got to leave here. Closing time! Drink up, everybody. That ol’ clock on the wall say it’s time to go.”

  Folks began filtering out, mostly in pairs and small groups. No sign of the guy in the leather jacket. Then came the inevitable wait while Leon went over the night’s receipts before counting the band’s pay.

  Through it all, Stomp couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He paid off his band members. Shorty was giving Olga and TJ a lift home. Olga made no comment about Stomper's performance. After they left and the club was nearly empty, Stomper cornered Leon, who was bidding good night to the pretty barmaids.

  When they were gone and he saw Stomper, Leon came forward and pressed a fifty dollar bill into Stomper’s hand. This happened now and then on a good weekend night.

  “My man!” said Leon. “You was sure enough rockin’ this house tonight. Hey, that little Jenna was looking for you. Did you get yourself some, man?”

  Stomper ignored the question.

  “Leon, come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Leon lost some of his natural good humor.

  “What? You want to show me something now? You want to show me what, where?”

  “Out back in the alley,” said Stomper. “Come on, Leon. Grab yourself a flashlight. It’s something you’ve got to see.”

  Something in his voice convinced Leon to accompany him outside into the dark, dank alley. With a puzzled frown, Leon panned the flashlight’s beam about the alley.

  The crumpled body was exactly where had left it.

  Leon said, “All, blazes. This is trouble, sure ‘nuff.”

  Stomper said. “Let me tell you what happened.” Then he saw, or sensed, a shift in the shadows further along the alley. Alarm flared within Stomper. He shouted, “Leon, look out!”

  He knocked the flashlight from Leon’s grip and took the club owner down forcefully to the ground with him at the exact moment that gunfire erupted.

  Angry saffron flashes speared the night. A handgun barking two, three, four times. Bullets ricocheted from the brick wall before which Stomp and Leon had stood seconds earlier.

  The gunfire stopped, the reports echoing from the walls of the alley. Footfalls could be heard receding into the distance.

  It was several seconds before the men on the ground lifted their heads. Then by unspoken mutual consent they sprinted back into the club. Leon threw the double bolt lock behind them once they were inside.

  They took a few seconds to catch their breath.

  Then Leon said, “Stomper, as your friend I advise you to tell me what the hell is going on. Appears like someone wants you dead.”

  “Sure does look that way,” said Stomper bleakly. “Sure does.”

  Without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Leon said, “Wait a minute, man. Hold on! If someone’s out to get you, where you going to go?”

  He received no reply.

  Stomper was gone.

  1

  1975

  Saddle up my pony,

  Hitch up my brown mare.

  You know my baby’s

  Out in the world somewhere…

  Carl Hensman looked up at me excitedly from the old 45 rpm record spinning on the turntable. He was a thin, studious looking guy with thinning blond hair, in his mid-thirties.

  “No one’s ever been able to sing like that. It’s a voice like no other. And all those years everyone thought he was dead.”

  “Let it play,” I said.

  The pure blues voice was low and sorrowful, but strong enough to ride over the crackling, popping surface noise that buried most of the backing combo. When the record was over, Hensman lifted the tone arm gingerly. He flicked off the stereo and looked back at me, waiting for a reaction.

  We’d met in a jazz bar two years earlier and had been getting together to play records about once a week ever since. It was a Saturday night and this week we were at his place.

  Carl’s tidy, comfortable little apartment was an archive of music on vinyl and in books. There were bookshelves everywhere; encyclopedias of music and biographies of jazz, blues and rock greats. Carl’s record collection covered every available wall space carefully organized and alphabetized. The vinyl collection matched the book collection in range, covering complete collections of well-known artists from the Beatles to Count Basie and included more esoteric niche artists like Smokey Hogg, Slim Harpo and Etta James.

  When I still didn’t say anything, he said, “You know how I klutz things up. A real social magician. I love their music but I’ll be damned if I can relate to the people. The place was closed for business, but I did talk to the owner. He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me a thing. He denied even knowing a Stomper Crawford.”

  “But Carl, how can you be so sure it was Crawford?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, some of the excitement returning. “But isn’t it worth a follow-up? You’re a private detective, Kilroy. Stuff like this is your business. And think of what it could mean if it was him; if you do track him down. I’ve been sitting on that money for three years waiting for the right artist to come along. So I look out of a bus window and who do I see stepping into a bar? Damn! If I could record Stomper Crawford, it would be the blues rediscovery of the century!”

  “Or decade. But it was a moving bus, Carl.”

  Maybe you don’t know any serious record collectors like me and Carl. It gene
rally starts when you’re a kid in high school. You and your classmates are all socializing and living to the sounds of popular music. Some of you may like this sort of music, some of you may like that sort of music, but when you’re that age music is everything from a social lubricant to a philosophical springboard for life, depending on who and what you’re listening to. Most of us leave behind the music of our youth when we set aside childish things and go out into the world. We may listen to tunes on the car radio or when we’re out socializing with friends but it’s pretty much been left behind with the rest of our childish things. Then there are those of us who take our music seriously. We really got into the music we were listening to and we started listening to the artists our favorite musicians were listening to and before you know it, we were record collectors! That too can be left behind as we mature. Or not. The record collector matures just fine, thanks, but never loses that love and intense interest of whatever music means the most. That’s Carl, who worked as an adjuster for an insurance company. And that’s me. I’m doing just fine as an adult, thanks. My one-man agency is doing well. But the music I’ve loved since I was a kid has stayed a part of my life and that’s not about to change.

  What had changed since I’d opened my one-man agency in Denver was the blessing or curse of skepticism. It’s a necessary component of working the private investigation side of the street and it can spill into other areas of your life as well, for better or worse.

  I should explain one more thing about music collectors and fanatics like me and Carl. Most collectors tend to specialize. The high brows, they used to call them longhairs, might go for classical or Avant Grade jazz. Today’s longhairs might go for a complete collection of early Dylan or some ancient Rolling Stones demos. Carl and I were into the blues. Now when I say “the blues,” that covers a lot of territory and means a lot of things to a lot of different listeners. The blues can be uptown. Well dressed and classy. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. The blues could be some white boy banging his guitar and yodeling about how his baby done left him. Caucasian musicians like Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn have gotten a lot of career mileage playing music that originated in the black communities of the rural South and the industrial northern cities like Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis.

  The singers and musicians who forged that music were the ones who caught my interest when I was a teenager, soon as I heard them. These were singers and musicians with names like Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Koko Taylor and BB King. This wasn’t kid’s music. The blues is a music about the truth of experiencing and surviving life through song, dance, and faith. It was the music that turned me on when I was a kid and it stayed with me through Vietnam and the civilian life in LA and Denver.

  Stomper Crawford (I never knew his real name) was a guitar player spawned by the rough and tumble, take no prisoners world of the St. Louis blues scene which was a musical school of hard knocks ruled by giants like Albert King and Chuck Berry and Ike and Tina Turner. In fact, Stomper’s claim to fame was that he had once worked in a band with Chuck Berry’s piano man, Johnnie Johnson, as well as a sideman for some of the more famous blues and R&B stars who passed through St. Louis, accompanied on one-nighters by pickup musicians like Stomper provided by the local promoter.

  Stomper never did make it big. He only laid down a handful of obscure recordings that few people ever heard, or heard of. Those few included a handful of local fans and scattering of hard-core blues enthusiasts and researchers. Eventually Stomper quit St. Louis and moved west where he’d set up shop fronting a band in Denver several years... before he’d apparently vanished from the face of the earth.

  I said, “Stomp Crawford hasn’t recorded since ’65. It’s been longer than that since his last publicity picture. He could look like a different person by now.”

  Carl’s jaw lifted like a pugnacious believer confronting Doubting Thomas.

  “So then I’m wrong, and all we have are our records. Just what we started with. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  There was no way I could argue with one. There was no way I wanted to. Heck, I loved my collection of Stomper Crawford recordings. He never recorded an album. His handful of singles were highly regarded by collectors like Carl and me.

  “Okay,” I said. I got to my feet. Might as well get right on it. “You coming with me?”

  “I’d only cramp your style,” said Carl. “I’d like to, but no, you go. Give it your best, okay?”

  He had something there. Carl worked at a prominent high-rise law firm on 16th St. They kept him undercover and away from the clients where he brilliantly strategized court cases for the firm attorneys who got the headlines. That was Carl. Top-of-the-line when it came to legal minutia and old blues recordings, while the other details of life, like interpersonal relationships, provided him with considerable challenges. But I liked him.

  I said, “The bars in Five Points will be in full swing. That might make things easier.”

  “Be sure to call me as soon as you learn anything,” he mother-henned on the way to the door. “Don’t worry about the hour. And tell him we’ll record him with any sidemen he likes. Any type of material he likes, too. I’d like to re-cut some of the old stuff, but it would be terrific if we had some new songs, too.”

  “What was the name of that bar?”

  “Leon’s. I wasn’t but four minutes behind him but he couldn’t be found.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m on my way. I’ll check the place out.”

  “And remember, Kilroy. Don’t forget to call me when you’ve found him. No matter what the hour.”

  “I’ll remember, Carl.”

  2

  Leon’s was in the heart of what is known in Denver as Five Points, once referred to as the "Harlem of the West" for its jazz history, where many of the greats, including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and more played. The area is mentioned frequently in Jack Kerouac's famous novel, On the Road.

  These days Five Points is considered a rough part of town.

  Leon’s was on the western-most fringe of Five Points, where the shabbiness of the buildings was still evident but the people came in more varieties and races. The steady flow of foot traffic along the sidewalk fronting the bar and crossing the street at either end of the block was a rich ethnic stew: Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and even the sprinkling of a few Caucasians. The pavement radiated the heat of summer’s sun even though it was well past ten p.m.

  The street was alive. Automotive and pedestrian traffic along this secondary artery was steady. Jalopies and low riders passed SAABs and the occasional Porsche. Bright colors and the latest fashions paraded by on the sidewalks to the accompaniment of powerful gunning exhausts and the calls of young men to the ladies.

  I’d worked this neighborhood in the hungry days when I’d first moved to Denver and opened my agency. Bail bondsmen had been my clients in those days and when someone had jumped, it was my job to bring them back. I knew my way around, and I still knew people.

  Leon Miller had saved my life once and we had stayed in touch, though not for a while. His round black face lit up when I took a seat at his bar. He wouldn’t see fifty again but Leon stayed in shape. A few extra pounds around the middle, maybe, but still a hefty, in-shape guy. His nearly bald skull was black and shiny as a cue ball except for a sparse fringe of graying hair.

  The walls, vague beyond the haze of cigarette smoke, throbbed to the pulsating Ohio Players song from the jukebox.

  “Kilroy, my man! Long time no see, brother. I was beginning to think you were either dead or married.”

  “Just busy, Leon. How’ve you been?”

  He chuckled. “They ain’t caught me yet.”

  It was one of his standard comeback lines whenever someone asked how he was doing. We kicked around the conversational ball for a while. Urban renewal was in the air, or so some people said. The Rocky Mountain News was pushing for it as well as a whole bunch of folks and civic leaders in the ‘hood. We talked sports. Everybody
was talking about the Broncos. We talked some about the weather. Leon said business was good, considering.

  He periodically interrupted our conversation to serve up his customers seated at the bar. A waitress was working the half–filled tables. The place had a friendly neighborhood vibe. They were not as busy as I remembered.

  I asked, “No band tonight?”

  He made a face while he wiped down the bar and served me a beer.

  “No band in a while,” he said. “Got to thank disco for that. Just about every band in town is out of work or feeling hard times. All the places that had bands have switched to disco, including me. Man, you’ve got to stay with it, y’know? Got to stay hip with what’s happening. Otherwise folks will find some other place to do their drinking.” He nodded toward the booming jukebox. “I don’t mind, tell you the truth. Musicians can be a real pain in the backside, if you know what I mean. And some of this disco stuff ain’t half bad. Donna Summer, she’s a real fine piece of work. Yes sir, mighty fine.”

  He smacked his lips enthusiastically at the thought before moving down the bar to tend to another thirsty customer.

  It took a while for me to get around to why I was there. Finally, there was a break in the action and we got some time to sit at the end of the bar over a couple beers.

  “A guy came in here this afternoon,” I said. “A white guy. He was looking for Stomper Crawford.”

  Leon’s face clouded in the dimness.

  “Stomp Crawford? Now that goes back, man. Stomp was one of the big ones ‘round here back in the day... before he dropped out of sight.

  “This white guy looks like Woody Allen. Acts like him, too. Says he’s sure he saw Stomper coming in here this afternoon about five. The white guy’s a friend of mine. Name’s Carl. He talked to someone. I guess that was you.”

  “It was me.” He grinned. “That boy looked like his mommy just dropped him off all alone on the wrong end of town. But I told him the truth, Kilroy. Stomper wasn’t in here today. No way.”