Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“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.”

“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?”