“Excellent. I think I hear her coming now. Call two taxis, will you?”
The door from the bedroom had indeed opened, and sailing through, dressed for her morning activities, came the lovely woman of a certain age who had shared the prime minister’s night. He gazed at her appreciatively: splendid figure, regal carriage, gorgeous clothes and hat. Odd to think of her as granddaughter of that dumpy little woman. She, like him, would from now be caught up in the great public events of the time. He saw the reddish-brown tip of a hatpin poking through the too-small evening bag: typical of her and her kind always to be prepared for an emergency!
“I’ve just had a call from the manager,” he said. “The emergency’s over. The police have gone.”
“Excellent,” she said. “I have a very full morning of engagements. Civil of him to let you know.”
“Naturally he did,” said Mr. Lloyd-George, swelling to his full adiposity. “I advised him how to go about things.”
“I do love a clever man.”
“And I am the Prime Minister of Great Britain.”
She paused before disappearing through the door.
“And I am Marie of Romania.”
The Sultans of Soul
by Doug Allyn
There could hardly be a better chronicler of the world of popular music than Doug Allyn, who has been touring with bands in northern Michigan for more than twenty-five years. This tale of a gumshoe hired to collect unpaid royalties takes us to the heart of the record industry and the early days of the Motown sound...
Papa Henry’s Hickory Hut serves the best barbeque in the city of Detroit, bar none. Ribs to die for. The Hut is just a storefront diner, booths along one wall, a scarred Formica counter and backless chrome stools. Ah, but behind the counter, shielded by a spattered Plexiglas screen, is an honest to Jesus barbeque pit. You can watch your order revolve on the rotisserie, kissed by flames and hickory smoke, while homebaked hoecakes warm on the grill. High cholesterol? Probably. But since the Hut’s on the rough side of Eight Mile, keeping your veins intact is a more pressing worry than having them clogged.
I’d ordered a late breakfast at Papa’s, and was sipping coffee, waiting, when a white Cadillac limo ghosted to the curb out front. The chauffeur, a uniformed black the size of a small building, popped an umbrella against the April drizzle, and opened the back door. An elderly black gentleman eased slowly out. The chauffeur watched, wooden, offering no help.
The old man looked exotic, like a Nigerian diplomat. An orange patterned kente-cloth cap, a Kuppenheimer’s continental-cut black suit, hand-tailored to a tee. He had café au lait skin, a spray of coppery freckles across the bridge of his nose, a metallic gray Malcolm X goatee. Dark, intense hawk’s eyes.
He’d have stood six feet plus upright, but he was pain-hunched into a question mark, using a silver-headed bamboo cane for support. I guessed him to be fiftyish. Fifty isn’t old for most people. It was for this guy.
He moved like he’d been wounded at Gettysburg. Step, lean, step, lean. The gait was familiar. Sickle cell anemia, very late in the game. I grew up around it down home. This old man had lasted longer than most. But it was coming for him now. And he was coming for me, sizing me up all the way. I was easy enough to spot! As usual, I was the only white face in the Hut.
It took him a month to limp the dozen paces back to my booth. He stopped in front of my table, leaning on the cane, wobbly as a foundered horse. “You’d be Axton, right? From the detective agency up the street?” he asked, his voice a low rasp. Black velvet.
“Yes, sir. Something I can do for you?”
“For openers, you can speak up. I don’t hear too well. My name’s Mack, Varnell Mack.”
“R. B. Axton,” I said, offering my hand. He ignored it. “Would you care to sit down, Mr. Mack?”
“No thanks, too damn hard to get up again, and I won’t be here long. I’m into a few things around Detroit, mostly real estate, own some rental units. Willis Tyrone, the guy that owns them pawns down in the ward? Willis tells me you’re good at collectin’ money folks ain’t altogether sure they owe.”
“I make collections sometimes,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t do evictions.”
“Neither do I,” Mack said, “that’s the problem.” A spasm took his breath for a moment. His knuckles locked on the cane and a faint sheen of moisture beaded on his forehead. “I believe I will sit down after all,” he said, swallowing. He drew a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, flicked the dust off the bench across from me, then casually replaced the handkerchief in his pocket with a flip of his wrist. A perfect fleur-de-lis. I was impressed. I can barely manage to knot a necktie.
“See, I had this old gentleman livin’ in one of my buildin’s,” Mack said, easing into the booth. “Used to be a helluva singer ’round Detroit back in the fifties, early sixties, even cut a few records. Horace DeWitt. Ever hear of him?”
“Can’t say I have, but I’m not from Detroit originally.”
“Knew that the minute you opened your mouth. Where you from, boy? Alabama?”
“No, sir, Mississippi. A little town called Noxapater.”
“They teach you to call blacks ‘sir’ down there, did they?”
“They taught me to be polite to my elders,” I said evenly. “And to watch my mouth around strangers. You were saying about Mr. DeWitt?”
“I used to write tunes, sing backup in Horace’s group. Called ourselves the Sultans of Soul.”
“No kidding? I remember the group. From when I was a kid, down home. I’ve still got one of your songs on an oldies tape. ‘Motor City... something?”
“ ‘Motor City Mama.’ I wrote that one. Our last single. Cracked the top twenty on the race charts in sixty-one. Never made no money off it, record company folded right after, but it got us a name so we could make a few bucks doin’ shows. Then things petered out, the group busted up. I went into real estate, did all right for myself. Helped out Horace some, last few years, with rent and such. He had a stroke a few months back, had to move to a rest home. One of them welfare places. I offered to help, but he wouldn’t take it. He’s flat busted, cain’t even afford a TV in his room.”
“Sorry to hear it,” I said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be,” Mack said. “Might be somethin’ in it for you. Thing is, I still hear ‘Motor City Mama’ on the radio sometimes. So I figure somebody must owe the Sultans some money. I want you to collect it.”
“Collect it?” I echoed.
“That’s what you do, ain’t it?”
“I, ahm... Look, Mr. Mack, what I do is skip-traces mostly. People who light out owing other people money. I hunt ’em up, talk ’em into doin’ the right thing.”
“So?”
“So, for openers, who do you expect me to collect from?”
“That’s your problem. If I knew who owed Horace, I wouldn’t hafta hire you. I’d see to it myself.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Boy, I never joke about money.”
“All right then, straight up. Even if I could find somebody who’d admit to owing the Sultans some royalties or whatever, it probably wouldn’t amount to beans. And I don’t work cheap.”
“Two-fifty a day, Willis told me,” Mack said, snaking an envelope out of an inner pocket, tossing it on the table. “Here’s a week in advance. Fifteen hundred. You need more, my number’s on the envelope. But I expect to see some results.”
I left the envelope where it was. “Mr. Mack, I really don’t think I can help you. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”