“Willis gave me your card,” Mack said, using the cane to lever himself to his feet. “R. B. Axton, private investigations. That makes you some kinda detective, right?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“So maybe you oughta try earnin’ your fee. Investigate or whatever. Look, I know it’d be cheaper to just lay the damn money on Horace. He won’t take it. He was a dynamite singer once. And people are still listenin’ to his music. He shouldn’t oughta go out broke like this. It ain’t right.”
“No, sir,” I said, “I suppose it isn’t.”
“All right then,” he said grimly. “You find out who owes the Sultans some money. And you get it. How much don’t matter, but you get Horace somethin’, understand?”
I picked up the envelope, intending to give it back to him. But I didn’t. There was something in his eyes. Dark fire. Anger perhaps, and pain. It cost him a lot just to walk in here. More than money. I put the envelope in my pocket. “I’ll look into it,” I said. “I can’t promise anything.”
“Banks don’t cash promises anyway,” Mack said, turning, and limping slowly toward the door. Step, lean, step, lean. “Call me when you got somethin’.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. He didn’t look back.
Finding a place to start looking wasn’t all that tough. The cassette tray in my car. I did have the Sultans of Soul on tape. “Motor City Mama.” There was no information on the cassette itself. It was a bootleg compilation from Rock ’n Soul Recollections, on south Livernois.
R&S isn’t the usual secondhand record shop with records piled around like orphaned children. The shop’s a renovated theater, complete with bulletproof box office, which, considering its location, is probably prudent. The walls are crammed floor to ceiling with poster art, larger-than-life shots of Michigan music monsters, Smokey Robinson, Bob Seger, The Temps, Stevie Wonder. The bins are immaculate, every last 45 lovingly encased in cellophane, cross-referenced and catalogued like Egyptian antiquities.
All this regimentation is a reflection of the owner/manager, Cal, a wizened little guy with a watermelon paunch and a tarn permanently attached to his oversized pate. I don’t recall his last name, if I ever heard it, but he knows mine. Not just because I’m a good customer, but because he remembers everything about everything. He knows every record he has in stock, and probably every record he’s ever had in stock.
On the downside, he’s compulsive, wears the same outfit every day: green slacks, frayed white shirt, navy cardigan clinched with a safety pin. His hands look like lizard-skin gloves because he washes them forty times a day. Still, if I wanted to know about the Sultans, Cal was the person to ask.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.
“Hey, I should think you’d be flattered. I thought you knew everything about those old groups.”
“I do know about their records,” he said, irritated. “The Sultans cut three forty-fives and one album, all out of print. But as to who owns the rights to their music now? Hell, there were a million penny-ante record labels back then, and the royalty rights were swapped around like baseball cards. Most of the forty-fives were cut in fly-by-night studios owned by the mob—”
“Whoa up. Mob? You mean organized crime?”
“Absolutely. In the fifties and early sixties radio play was still segregated. Damn few stations would air black music, so the only market for it was jukeboxes. And most of the jukes and vending machines in Detroit were mob controlled.”
“Terrific.”
“The bottom line is, if you want to find somebody who might owe the Sultans a few bucks, you’re probably looking for some smalltime hood who once owned a few jukes and a two-bit recording studio and went out of the record business before you were born.”
“But I still hear ‘Motor City Mama’ on the radio sometimes.”
“Local deejays play it because of the title, but Detroit’s probably the only town in the country where it’s aired. Wanna try muscling a few nickels out of Wheelz or WRIF?”
“Fat chance. What label did the Sultans record for?”
“That at least I can tell you,” he said, flipping through a stack of albums. “None of their stuff has been reissued, even on a collection. The Sultans just weren’t big enough... Here we go, the Sultans of Soul, ‘Motor City Mama.’ ”
He passed me the album. The cover photo was a blurred action shot, four black guys in gold lame jackets doing splits behind the lead singer, a beefy stud with conked hair. Mack appeared to be the tall guy on the left, but the picture had faded. So had Mack. I flipped the album over. “Black Catz?” I read. “What can you tell me about it?”
“Not much,” Cal said. “It was a local label, defunct since...” He frowned, then shook his head slowly, his face gradually creasing into a ghost of a smile.
“I knew it,” I said. “You do know something, right?”
“Nothing that’ll help you, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I did come across a Black Catz reissue recently. Not the Sultans though. Millie Jump and the Jacks.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Maybe you don’t remember the Jacks, but you should remember Millicent. Soul singer who had a few hits in the sixties, then tried Hollywood and bombed? The Jacks was her original group, until she dumped ’em to marry the label owner and use his money to go solo.”
“Wait a minute, you mean Millicent’s husband, Sol Katz, was the original owner of Black Catz?”
“That’s right,” Cal said. “You know him?”
“I not only know him, I’ve worked for him.”
“Worked for Sol?” Cal said, squinting at me from beneath his tam. “Doing what? Kneecaps with a baseball bat?”
“Actually I didn’t exactly work for Sol. His daughter, Desirée, was an opening act for Was Not Was at the Auburn Hills Palace. I was her bodyguard.”
“I would have thought Sol had bodyguards to spare.”
“He wanted somebody who knew the local music scene. Most of his guys are from L.A.”
“And it didn’t bother you, working for a hood?”
“I — heard rumors about Sol, but in this business you hear smoke about everybody. Hell, half the guys in the biz pretend to be hoods just to spook the competition.”
“Sol Katz isn’t pretending, Ax, he’s the real thing. His old man was an enforcer for the Purple Gang back in the thirties. Sol took to the family business like The Godfather Part II.”
“I thought he was from L.A.?”
“He went out there awhile after the Purples ran him out of Detroit for marrying Millie. Having a black mistress in those days was one thing, but marriage? Not in his set. Besides, Millie figured she was ready for the bright lights. She was a fair singer, but never quite good enough to make it big, even with Sol’s money. How’s the daughter, whatsername, Desirée?”
“About the same, not bad, not gangbusters. I think Millie and Sol want her to make it more than she wants it herself. They’ve got her cutting an album of classic soul stuff out at the Studio Seven complex. What label was the reissue on?”
“Studio Seven, which means Sol may still own the rights to the Black Catz library. Including the Sultans. Lucky you. You going to try to collect?”
“That’s what I’m being paid for.”
“Hope you’re getting enough to cover hospitalization. By the way, who is paying you? I thought the Sultans were all playing harps these days.”
“They nearly are. Horace DeWitt, the lead singer, is in a rest home and the guy who hired me, Varnell Mack, looks like an AWOL from intensive care.”
“I probably have them mixed up with another group. There were so many in those days,” he said softly, glancing around the displays, filled with CDs, albums, tapes. And raw talent. And Soul. “So many. You know, it might not matter much to world peace, but it’d be nice if you could squeeze a few bucks out of Sol for the Sultans. Just for the damn principle of the thing.”