Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“Do that. And one other thing. If you’re serious about putting Mojo Tyrone onstage for your little shindig, there’s something you’d better know. That near fatal stroke he had? It wasn’t just old age and booze. He had it in the middle of a fight after a concert in Flint. Tangled with a kid over a dope deal, beat him nearly to death. If he’d been fit to stand trial he’d have done hard time. The rest home LeVoy mentioned was a mental hospital, and Mojo was there nearly ten years. The old guy isn’t just eccentric, Gary, he’s stone crazy, and he probably always was.”

“Everybody in this business is crazy, one way or another,” Gary shrugged, “why should Mojo be any different?”

“Yeah, right,” Axton snapped, “do me one favor, Turco. If this cockamamie concert of yours comes off, comp me some tickets, will ya? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

And that was that. Ax strode the mile or so back to his apartment, letting the night wind cool him off. He found another job waiting on his answering machine and spent the next ten days in Toledo chasing down a roadie who’d skipped with a soul revue’s equipment. A tricky gig, the guy’d already traded some of the stuff for dope and Ax had to do some hardcase negotiating to get it back. By the time he returned to Detroit, he’d managed to put Linnea Harris completely out of his mind. For nearly twenty minutes at a time.

In Detroit it was harder to forget her because she was so very good at her job. The drumbeat of publicity for the concert was everywhere, carried as hard news in the entertainment sections of both the News and the Free Press. The Chronicle did a week long retrospective on Detroit blues that painted Mojo Tyrone as a folk legend, a blues demigod the equal of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. FM rock stations were giving heavy airplay to the Turks’ earlier albums, hyping the concert with giveaway contests. WLLZ even dug out Mojo’s only album and started playing “Hard Luck Man.”

No one had actually seen Mojo, Gary was keeping him under wraps, no interviews, not even a photo op. And as the concert approached, the press was evenly divided on whether the original Mojo Tyrone really would appear or the whole thing was just a Gary Turco publicity stunt.

The day before the concert, two tickets arrived in Ax’s mail, no note, just the tickets. Perfect. It gave him the chance to call Linnea to say thanks, and perhaps... but he didn’t have to call her. He was in the middle of breakfast at the Greek’s diner across the street from his office when Linnea Harris and Gary Turco walked in, spotted him, and came over.

“Hi, mind if we sit?” Turco said, slumping down into the booth without waiting for an answer. He looked rough, haggard, red-eyed, wired and wary as a wolf. Linnea looked tired too, her auburn hair in disarray, smudges under her eyes, but she still looked better than anybody had a right to that early. He wondered if she always looked—

“We’ve got serious trouble,” Turco said bluntly, “I want to hire you back.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“You name it, we got it. Threatening phone calls, a wrecked studio, a torched car—”

“Hold it, slow down,” Ax said, “run it by me from the top, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Turco nodded, taking a deep breath. “We got the studio up and running a few days after you left—”

“After you fired me,” Ax amended.

“Whatever,” Gary shrugged. “Anyway, we’ve been recording nonstop since, damn near around the clock. It’s been tough. Mojo can’t remember arrangements worth a damn and he’s definitely more’n a little strange to work with, but we still got some great tracks down. Nuts or not, that old man can flat smoke a guitar when he’s in the mood, Ax. Workin’ with him is like, I don’t know, bein’ eighteen again, havin’ it all in front of me. But now it’s — gone. We started getting threatening calls a week or so ago. Then last night somebody broke into the studio after we left, wrecked the place, destroyed the tapes. LeVoy’s car was in the lot, it got torched.”

“You call the cops?”

“Sure, for all the good it did,” Turco flared. “They gave me a case number to give my insurance company and that was it.”

“This is Motown,” Ax said, “the law’s stretched pretty thin. So what do you want me to do?”

“Find out who did this, or at least keep it from happening again. We’ve still got a chance to make this thing pay off if we tape the concert tomorrow night and get enough material to release on an album while Linn’s still got the media pumped up about it. If we don’t, everything we’ve got goes in the toilet. What do you say?”

“Sorry, not interested.”

“Look, if you got another gig I’ll double—”

“It’s not the money,” Ax said. “It’s smoke, Gary. I’m allergic to it, and you’re blowing it. I didn’t hear you mention the Swede in your sad story.”

“The Swede’s got nothing to do with this.”