The Devil's Music

by Stephen Mertz

  I winked at Joe.

  “He sure knows how to butter up a guy when he wants something.”

  The DA’s man wasn’t done huffing and puffing.

  “The law will get Mr. Libra. The three of us know that, right? That’s the only way it ends for punks like that unless they’re done in by one of their own kind. And when the law does get our hands on him, we will certainly look favorably upon anyone who helps us.”

  “You mean this is my opportunity to behave like a model citizen?”

  He beamed.

  “Exactly.”

  I said, “I’ve got a better idea.”

  Joe sighed and said under his breath, “Here we go.”

  Dickensheets’ eyes narrowed.

  “What have you got up your sleeve, Kilroy?”

  “Well for starters,” I said, “instead of me helping you, why don’t you help me?”

  “And how do you propose I do that?”

  “You could try forgetting all that silly talk about yanking my PI license. Then you could let me walk out of here so that I can get down to work.” I thought about Isaac Crawford and his neighborhood action group. I said, “I’ve got resources I’m willing to bet you haven’t touched. Let me find Libra. When I do, you can have him and I’ll have earned my retainer.”

  Keep it simple, I told myself. No reason for the DA’s office to know about a missing bluesman recently found and the regrouping of his band.

  The Assistant DA thought about my proposal for all of about twenty-three seconds.

  Then he said, “Just so we understand each other. Granting you this is no mark of my approval for you and your ways.”

  “Duly noted,” I said.

  “Rather,” he continued, “it’s an indication of just how badly we want to get this punk off the street no matter who we have to work with. You’re a cowboy, Kilroy. You laugh at the rules. Too often you think the ends justify the means. Frankly, I consider you the worst sort of vigilante. As I say, just so we understand each other.”

  “We understand each other perfectly,” I said.

  I left them like that.

  Joe wore quiet grin.

  I avoided the daggers Dickensheets was staring at me.

  What I’d wanted more than anything was to avoid being detained. A young girl named Chantel needed to be pulled back from the dark side. A hotshot street savage needed to pay for the sneak punch he’d delivered laid on me. I told Joe and Dickensheets they could have Libra when I found him. I meant they could have what was left of him.

  And there was a band that needed putting together...

  15

  Stomper Crawford had the blues.

  And he was getting drunk.

  I’d found a pay phone and checked in with my answering service after my escape from Joe and the DA’s man. The insurance company was not happy about me turning down their job offer. That was a bridge I’d have to repair at my first opportunity. Turn down too many offers and they stop inviting you altogether. There was also a message from Carl Hensman. In fact, there were four messages from Carl, logged in, the answering service girl told me, in the ten minutes before I called .

  Carl didn’t waste words when I phoned his apartment.

  He said, “Get over here, fast,” before hanging up on me.

  It was a short drive to Capitol Hill, a neighborhood that long time ago had been home to the carriage trade. Stately old homes had become residential rentals interspersed with the occasional small business; a lively Midtown neighborhood of working stiffs and hipsters. You could bicycle into the heart of the city within minutes, or enjoy a pleasant walk along shaded, tree-lined streets.

  I’d given the apartment door a brief knock, and responded to Carl’s, “Come on in, it’s open.”

  When I walked in, Stomper was seated at a small table in the apartment’s kitchenette, a six-pack worth of empty beer cans lined up unevenly before him on the table along with half-full, or more accurately a half-emptied, bottle of Old Granddad.

  His eyelids were heavy. His expression, morose. He sat there like a black Buddha in his cups, staring down at a freshly opened can of beer.

  Profound relief brightened Carl’s demeanor the moment I walked in.

  “Well all right, my man!”

  Easy to tell from that choice of words, not to mention Carl’s intonation which fell just short of racial parody, that he had spent the day, consciously or subconsciously, absorbing and approximating the speech patterns of a certain senior blues singer.

  Stomper took a swig from his can of beer and muttered, “And here comes another white boy who’s going to make ol’ Stomper the next BB King.” He made a rude sound and added, “Shit.”

  Carl was standing before his state-of-the-art stereo system when I came in, tapping his toe and snapping his fingers to the final strains of the last track that was just ending on Side One of a Louis Jordan LP. He went about reversing the LP and replacing it on the turntable, and within moments the joyously upbeat 1940s jitterbug swing of the Timpani Five was again filling the modest domicile.

  Modest in every aspect, that is, except for Carl’s extensive record collection, meticulously arranged by genre and artist, lining a wall of customized shelving. The album collection, and there was also a row of vinyl singles and extended play 45s, encompassed the whole range of popular Twentieth-Century American roots music, from swing like Louis Jordan and Count Basie to down-home blues and country and, of course, rock & roll in its array of manifestations.

  Carl held some sort of routine day job that he never spoke of, while he knew so much about the history and the contemporary scene of popular music, he could easily have been a writer of books and articles on the subject. Carl spoke of little else. Far as I knew, he didn’t have love life. His record collection was his life and breath and was where most of his money and all of his interest went.

  Choosing to play a Louis Jordan CD, with its familiar, relentless and carefree bluesy energy was no doubt my friend’s attempt to lighten up the situation of “our” bluesman presently getting soused at his kitchen table.

  Well, I thought, we’ve got to start somewhere...

  I said, addressing both of them, “So how is your day going? Tell me about Shorty Long.”

  A short silence, each of them waiting for the other to respond.

  Finally, Stomper spoke without lifting his gaze from the beer can before him.

  “There’s only one word throws it down on Shorty. Shorty Long? He’s dead, man. The cat’s deceased, dig? Expired. Left the building. Dead as dead can be.”

  Carl cleared his throat.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said, “doing all the tracking down me and Stomper had to do, and that’s what we came up with. Shorty Long died of lung cancer in a VA hospital three years ago.”

  Stomper’s gaze lifted to meet mine. His hooded eyes were a bleary, glazed red.

  “You hear that, white boy? I been wasting your time, seems like. Been wasting everybody’s time. Ain’t going to be no reunion of the Stomp Crawford band. Can’t happen without my bro, Shorty. Man, we even wrote us some songs together. Shorty done supplied me with the bridge for Stay Gone, Woman, sure ‘nuff, and that there was one of my best songs. People always requested it. Sold me a mess of records around town, yes sir. And my buddy ends up dying by inches in a four-man bay in a VA hospital, just another forgotten old soldier.” Stomper sighed wearily. “Hell, what am I talking ’bout? I didn’t even know Shorty had served in the military! Poor Shorty.”

  He finished with a long draw on his beer.

  “Stomper called his son from here,” Carl told me. “Isaac said he’s on his way over. He asked me if I’d seen you; said he had something he needed to tell you about. I figured you’d want to be here, so I called your answering service.”

  I said, “What about Leon?”

  At the table, Stomper growled like a displeased bear and waved his arm in a wide, belligerent arc.

  “We leave Leon out of this, hear? Maybe, who kn
ows, maybe my boy Isaac can help us get this here train back on its track. Sorry, boys, but way things are going what with folks shooting up the street, still trying to get me... I don’t rightly know who to trust but my own flesh and blood.”

  Another discrete, throat-clearing cough from Carl.

  “Allow me to elaborate,” he said, thankfully reverting to again sounding like a white guy. “Stomper trusts Leon, but he feels that things could get, uh, dicey with the financing if too much goes down that makes Leon nervous. If Leon withdraws his financial backing...”

  “Ain’t nobody withdrawing nothing,” Stomper growled with a more than slight slur to each word. “Isaac, he’ll know what to do. Me, I got me a case of the blues that won’t quit. My grown daughter back east won’t talk to me because I wasn’t the man I should’ve been when her mama died. Shorty Long, he’s gone to his maker all of three years and I didn’t even know about it.” Stomper drained his can of beer and clunked it down upon the tabletop with the others. “Man, you know I’ve damn sure got the blues.”

  Another moment of silence before Carl decided it was time to speak some wisdom.

  “The blues ain’t nothing,” he said, quoting an ancient song lyric, “but a good man feeling bad.”

  Stomper nodded, looking about for a fresh beer. He frowned moodily at the realization that there was not one within easy reach.

  “That’s right,” he said. “But y’know, the blues can be a man’s best friend. The blues don’t ask you where you’re goin’. The blues don’t care where you been.”

  They were speaking to each other in blues lyrics...

  I said, “Stomper, you talk about your music the way a preacher talks about God.”

  Stomper thought about that. He liked the sound of it. He gave me a warm, raspy chuckle.

  “Come to think of it, reckon I do at that, white boy. But I sure could use me another beer.” He reached across the table for the whiskey bottle. “Man, I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me.”

  That’s when Isaac and his girlfriend, Michelle, showed.

  Carl admitted them and I made the introductions since this was Isaac and Carl’s first meeting. Carl offered up his usual limp handshake, polite enough but unable to lose or disguise his nerd personae. For his part, Isaac’s internal reaction toward Carl, if there even was one, remained indecipherable. Isaac was reserved and cool, though he seemed to make eye contact with me longer than the others.

  The only time his manner defrosted was when he introduced Michelle.

  Michelle wore an engagement ring. She was Isaac’s approximate age, which meant she was old enough to be Stomper’s daughter. Well dressed in a smart, stylish summer ensemble that highlighted her shapely, toned figure. She wore her hair short and natural. Her smile was one of those that can light up a room.

  Stomper drew himself upright in his chair with the exaggerated decorum of the inebriated hoping to make a good impression. You didn’t have to be an ace private detective to observe a softening in his demeanor and spirit. But there was a flash of new concern too. There was no escaping the fact that he was drunk.

  “You shouldn’t be here, young lady,” he admonished, but without slurring so many words, assuming the contrite demeanor of one having been caught misbehaving. “You’ve got a bar exam you should be studying for.”

  A personal fondness resonated in his every word.

  She went straight to him.

  “And you’re supposed to be getting yourself together for a new career, not getting soused in the middle of the afternoon.” She spoke in nothing but mutual fondness, and yet with that take-command tone of a self-assured woman. She started picking up beer cans, clearing off the table, saying over her shoulder to Carl, “Do you recycle? Where do these cans go? Let’s get some coffee into Stomper, and lots of it!”

  Her prodding elicited a prompt response from Carl, who hastened to a counter where he began preparing a Mr. Coffee.

  Maybe you know someone like Michelle.

  I’m not talking race here. She could be Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, Black or a combination of any of the above. She could be from any country, I suppose, though in my experience she’s a USA homegrown woman. She has a lively, active intelligence and natural beauty, no matter what her body type may be, in scant need of cosmetics. A self-possessed strength and confidence about her manner that can warm any room the moment she walks in. Oh, she could likely handle herself in a brawl but she’d much, much rather not. She’s a lover, not only in and of romance but in the way the world around her animated her very spirit. Always ready to listen without judgment. A humanist, always there to lend a hand. Her presence always makes things better.

  Michelle. Isaac’s fiancée.

  Studying for her bar exams? Respected by the grizzled old bluesman now seated at Carl’s table. Stomper was even willing to sober up if it would make her happy. This young woman had range, for sure. What was there about her not to like?

  At first, Isaac just stood on the sidelines with me in the living room, observing the kitchenette, on the other side of the low divider, where coffee was percolating while Michelle engaged Stomper in conversation, their voices pitched too low to be heard through Louis Jordan’s music be-bopping from Carl’s stereo speakers.

  Isaac’s gaze never left Michelle. The gaze of a man in love. Again, no degree in detective school was required to arrive at that deduction. Was this the same gang face that had stared me down at Leon’s a few hours ago and sent me off on a hot tip to a crack house? The gangsta edge had given way to the pride of a man enthralled by the beauty of his woman.

  You can tell a lot about a person, man or woman, by the romantic company they keep. A woman with a man fifteen years her junior? She’s a cougar, with something to prove. A woman accompanied by a man twice her age? Gold digger! A librarian dating a biker? There’s one to consider and it happens more often than you might think. Easy to see why Isaac was attracted to her. She was a catch.

  The love of a woman of this quality told me there had to be more of real substance behind the gang face he showed the world. I was seeing that part of Isaac, here in Carl’s apartment, in the presence of Michelle nursing Stomper back to sobriety with the help of Carl.

  I’d been wondering how to work Isaac into what I was doing. He’d already provided the lead that took me to the crack house, but that could have been a strategic move on his part; part of a gang game plan that I didn’t understand. But when I combined his previous help in with my general assessment of the man standing next to me now, watching this woman in action who had given him her heart, I made a decision in my mind.

  He caught my eye. We stood close enough to a stereo speaker for our exchange to be for our ears, below the wailing of Louis’ alto sax boogie.

  Isaac said, “When Pop called me, I could tell we’d start losing him if I didn’t get Michelle over here right quick. This happened at my place once before since he got back to town. She’s good with my dad.”

  “I see that. You’re a lucky man, Isaac. Why did you want to see me? What have you got?”

  “Let’s split. Right now. I think I’ve got something solid on the girl, Chantel.”

  “So tell me. Where is she?”

  He retained his sunny exterior but his eyes and words grew deadly serious.

  “It’s complicated. Come on. We’ve got to split.”

  I sent a parting glance across the divider, into the kitchenette.

  Carl had served up Stomper with his first cup of coffee. Michelle remained at the table with Stomper, by this point holding the old man’s free hand as they spoke, most likely about what a fine fella Shorty Long had been and how Stomper yearned to hear from his daughter. They appeared to have forgotten completely about me and Isaac.

  I said, “Let’s go.”

  16

  When Isaac and I emerged onto the front steps of Carl’s apartment building, the afternoon sun in the western sky was commencing its gradual arc that would culminate with its kissing and
then disappearing behind the mountains west of town.

  There was a tightening of anticipation in my gut. I wanted things to happen. I wanted to get my hands on Libra.

  “What have you got?”

  Isaac walked at my side along the sidewalk toward where I’d parked the Lancia, halfway along the block.

  Isaac said, “Couple of things first.”

  “What?”

  “Me and you. We’ve got to make things true between us.”

  “I thought we had.”

  “So let’s nail it down. Here and now.”

  “Go.”

  “Pop called me at Michelle’s. He knew that’s where he’d find me. I had Michelle drive me over here because one of my boys called me there just before Pop did.”

  “This is going somewhere, right? If you’ve got anything on Chantel, I need to move on it like five minutes ago.”

  “We are moving on it,” he said. “It’s your gig so you’re taking point. That’s cool. But I’m done sitting on the sidelines? From here on out, I’m in on the action with you.”

  “Is there room here for negotiation?”

  “Not even a little. The brothers in my group, we organized to get things done for the betterment of the community. Got that from my mother. She was a good Christian woman, Kilroy. She’s gone now, but if she was here, she’d want me to pitch in and help get Pop back on the rails in this town with his career. My baby sister may have left the fold and turned her back on him, but I’m not going to rest until he’s where we’re trying to get him. That’s what this is about between you and me, Kilroy. I’m taking a hand because I have to be a part of it. If you want what I’ve got on this chick you’re after to make Dad’s dream, then you’re taking me along.”

  I said, “No one takes you anywhere, Isaac. You’re a man who walks where you please in this life. I respect that, and if a woman of Michelle’s caliber thinks you’re worth her time, okay. We work together.”

  We traded a brother handshake.