Written in Dead Wax (30 page)

“Here’s the money,” she said proudly. “I’ve got it for you already. I’ve been doing a load of gigs.”

I waved my hands in the air. “Don’t pay me until I’ve actually got hold of the records for you.”

“What’s going on?” said Tinkler.

“She’s hired me to find some records. To collect all of the Hathor originals for her.”

“And he’s found some,” said Ree.

Tinkler leaned forward eagerly. “Really?”

“Well, Ree had two to start with and I’ve found two more.”

“Already?” said Tinkler. “Nice going. How did you find them? Internet?”

“No, Alan at Jazz House had HL-003, the Richie Kamuca, and they’ve got a copy of HL-012, the Pepper Adams, at Jerry’s. I mean at Styli.” I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around Jerry being dead.

“I spoke to them on the phone today.” I glanced at Ree. “I told them we’d pick it up at the shop this weekend.”

“So, do you have a list of these damned records?” said Tinkler. “Maybe I can help you find them.”

Although I doubted that, I pulled out my notebook and showed him the list. We needed all the help we could get.

HL-001 EASY GEARY (PLAYS BURNS HOBARTT)

HL-002 MARTY PAICH

HL-003 RICHIE KAMUCA

HL-004 JOHNNY RICHARDS

HL-005 JERRY FIELDING

HL-006 RUSS GARCIA

HL-007 CY COLEMAN

HL-008 HOWARD ROBERTS

HL-009 RITA MAE POLLINI (SINGS BURNS HOBARTT)

HL-010 RITA MAE POLLINI (SINGS PROFESSOR JELLAWAY)

HL-011 MANNY ALBAM

HL-012 PEPPER ADAMS

HL-013 CONTE CANDOLI

At this point the musicians trooped back to the stage with their pints of beer and took up positions by their instruments. People hurried back in and the doors were closed and they started to play. Ree sat out the first few numbers, then she rejoined the band. As she stepped out onto the stage the crowd responded enthusiastically.

Tinkler clapped like a performing seal.

The set concluded with a hair-raising version of ‘Running from a Spell’. When the song reached a certain point, it seemed strange not to hear a gunshot.

* * *

Ree was sitting in the pub garden on the bench of a green plastic picnic table. The table was dusted with snow and so was the bench. We brushed it off as we sat down.

She said, “Thanks for being here, guys. The electric bass player wants to hit on me. For some reason it’s the electric basses who do that. The acoustic bass players are pretty much always perfect gentlemen.” She took a drag on her cigarette. Snowflakes in her hair sparkled in the glare of the floodlights that lit the garden.

“Maybe that’s because their instruments are bigger,” said Tinkler.

She looked at him.

Tinkler turned bright red. “I mean,” he said, “the acoustic bass players. Maybe they don’t get around quite so much, or with quite such nimbleness because they have to carry around these enormous acoustic basses, you know like a double bass, like an oversized cello, you know?”

I patted him on the shoulder. “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

“Here he is now,” said Ree, nodding towards the pub. A thin man in leather and denim was walking towards us. It was indeed the bass player from the set. He had a rooster’s comb of dark hair shot through with grey. His whippet-like leanness was at odds with the comfortable potbellies of the rest of the band. I wondered if he was a speed freak. That would account for his relative emaciation.

He came and sat with us. “This is Jimmy Genower,” said Ree. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. I noticed he had tattoos that started on his thin hairy wrists and ran thickly back in dark swirls under his shirt sleeves.

After the introductions he proceeded to ignore us, focusing all his attention on Ree. I began to feel bored, and cold. As he leaned hungrily towards Ree, his intent was clear. Equally clear—it seemed to me—was that he didn’t stand a chance and that Ree was making this as obvious as she could, both verbally and physically, in terms of body language, without actually sticking her cigarette in his eye.

“That last number,” he said, “now that was by Professor Jellaway.” He announced this as though it was a startling revelation. “They say he sold his soul to the devil in New Orleans in exchange for his enormous talent.”

He then began a potted history of Professor Jellaway, based on any number of popular accounts with which I was familiar. Jellaway had been a tireless—and tiresome—self-mythologiser and most of the startling and sensational facts that studded his life story simply didn’t check out. Some of it was just harmless ornamentation—like Louis Armstrong pretending he’d invented scat singing when he’d happened to drop the sheet music. And some of it was more than that.

Boasting, or what would more cruelly be called lying, had been part of the weave of life for the early jazz musicians. It also didn’t help that subsequent generations of biographers had felt obliged to add to these tall tales.

In the end, all that was certain about Jellaway was that he had been a genius.

“His life story is a very scary story,” said Jimmy Genower. “He was born at the stroke of midnight on Friday the 13th. In 1917, although he was too young to enlist, he came over to France with the US Army, in Jim Europe’s 369th Infantry Band.” He paused significantly and confided, “Their regimental nickname was the Hellfighters. The
Hellfighters
.”

Tinkler gave me a flabbergasted who-is-this-guy look.

“They say he sold his soul to the devil on the blood-soaked battlefields of World War One, in exchange for his life.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “I thought you said that he sold his soul to the devil in New Orleans in exchange for his enormous talent.”

“Yeah,” piped up Tinkler. “Were there two deals with the devil? Surely that’s not fair.”

I said, “Maybe he renegotiated his first deal.”

Jimmy Genower was glowering at us with disgust. We were spoiling his carefully crafted atmosphere. Ree, on the other hand, was regarding us with barely concealed amusement.

She said, “Do you want to hear the really scary story about Red Jellaway?”

We all said we did, even Genower, whom I’d thought to be incapable of listening to any voice but his own.

Ree said, “Professor Jellaway was a gambler. Always had a lot of paper out there. You know, gambling debts. ‘Markers’ we call them. Anyway, one day two white men who called themselves the Spike brothers bought up all his gambling debts. Which was a lot. And once they did that, once they owned all the markers, they thought they owned him, too.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “The Spike brothers were sharp businessmen. They had the company all set up already. A music company, imaginatively called Spike Brothers Music. They were going into the publishing business and Professor Jellaway was going to be their house slave. He’d write the songs and they’d grow rich on the fruits of his labours.”

She took out another cigarette and lit it. “When he heard what they had in mind, the Professor laughed in their faces. He told them they could have one song. Just one. To pay off all the markers. They turned him down. Said their deal was the only deal on the table.”

She smiled. “But it turned out it wasn’t. Professor Jellaway took that song to another publisher and it was a substantial hit and he used the money to pay off all the debts the Spike brothers had been holding over him.”

She looked at us. “You see, he had a more realistic estimate of his worth than they did. Isn’t that amazing, this guy bred in the ghetto was smarter than these big capitalist jerks who were trying to tie a rope around him.”

“Power to the people!” said Jimmy.

Ree didn’t dignify this with a response. “So, like I say, he paid them off with the one song. But that proved to be a fatal move. Because the Spike brothers now saw his earning potential. They knew what he was really worth. And they weren’t going to let him get away.”

Her gaze met mine. “Besides gambling, Professor Jellaway’s weakness was women. So the Spike brothers got this beautiful prostitute…”

“Beautiful prostitute,” repeated Tinker happily. He looked at us. “I just like saying it.”

“Anyway,” said Ree, “they hired this working girl and they used her as a honey trap. And Professor Jellaway walked right into it. He had this hot weekend with her and the Spike brothers made sure the happy couple were photographed in all the clubs and every joint they visited. On Monday morning Red Jellaway discovered he’d acquired a ‘wife’. This woman was claiming she was married to him. And she had documents to prove it. And she wanted half of the money for anything he’d ever written, or ever would write.”

She took a drag on her cigarette. “The white judge upheld this total fraud—it was Los Angeles in 1924, remember—and so this prostitute ended up owning the rights to half of all his earnings on his songs, which she signed over to Spike Brothers Music.”

“I hate this beautiful prostitute,” said Tinkler. “Which is odd because usually I really like them.”

Ree breathed out a luminous cloud of smoke. “Anyway,” she said. “Sorry if I’m ranting. But to me the really scary story is the one about a musician getting screwed by the suits.”

“Right on, sister,” said Jimmy. We all tried to ignore him and Ree did the best job, just continuing with her account, addressing Tinkler and me.

“It was all a total and shameless scam. If Professor Jellaway was alive today, he could walk in and demand justice and they’d have to rearrange the corporate universe for him. But this was white America in the early twentieth century. And so they had him just where they wanted him. And the Professor couldn’t stand living with this fact. With what the Spike brothers had done to him.”

“I don’t blame him,” I said.

She nodded. “He had to do something about it. And soon a rumour started going around that the Professor had hired some hitmen to kill the brothers.”

She looked at the smoke from her cigarette, rising to meet the snowflakes. “So the brothers decided they had to strike first. The story is they found the Professor in Chicago where he’d gone to ground and beat him to death with baseball bats and threw his body in the river. But the body was never found.”

She sucked on her cigarette and it glowed, a tiny spot of red in the night. “But within a year, both the Spike brothers were dead themselves by violent means.”

I said, “Maybe Professor Jellaway really did hire some hitmen.”

She said, “Or maybe it was what they would have called the coloured community, getting even.”

We looked at each other.

“Or maybe it was the curse,” said Jimmy Genower, trying to get back into the conversation by any means possible. He suddenly spotted Tinkler’s lunchbox. “What’s that, mate? You brought your fucking sandwiches? That’s priceless.”

“Grapes, actually,” said Tinkler.

Jimmy announced that he was going in to get another drink. He offered to buy one for Ree, and rather pointedly not for us, but she declined. As he stood up, she said, “Jimmy’s got something to tell us.”

Jimmy looked blank for a moment and then he said, “Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m going to sell you that record.”

“What record?”

“One of the ones by my grandmother,” said Ree.

“
Rita Mae Pollini Sings Professor Jellaway
,” said Jimmy, grinning.

I said, “Not the original Hathor pressing.”

“Oh yes.”

* * *

We agreed to meet Jimmy Genower at his house—which was near the pub—at lunchtime on Monday. I would have a look at the record and if I gave the go-ahead, which privately I thought was unlikely, Ree would pay the inflated sum Jimmy wanted for it.

And then we’d have secured five of the fourteen albums she needed.

But first we had to collect the record I’d found at Styli.

I’d arranged with the guys at the shop to pick it up on the weekend and I went in on Sunday to collect it. To my astonishment, the shop was shut. That would never have happened when Jerry ran the place. A staunch atheist, he’d been open all day, every Sunday.

On Monday I was at the shop ten minutes after it opened. I would have been there waiting on the doorstep half an hour earlier but Clean Head’s cab had got hopelessly ensnared in traffic around Waterloo. I’d had to get out and catch the Tube, which proved to be equally problematic with three cancelled trains in a row. It probably would have been quicker for me to walk across Hungerford Bridge.

When I got to the shop I raced upstairs to the jazz department. Kempton was behind the counter with Gilbert, the new kid they’d taken on to make up the numbers now that Jerry was gone. Kempton and I waved to each other. He was busy on the phone so I turned to Gilbert. I smiled at him. “I’ve come to collect the Pepper Adams album.”

He stared at me as though I was speaking a different and unrecognisable language. “The one on Hathor,” I said. “Catalogue number HL-012. I phoned about it. You’re holding it for me.”

“No we’re not,” said Gilbert.

I took a deep breath and tried starting again. “It’s by Pepper Adams. He plays baritone sax.”

“I know who he is. I know the record. It’s sold.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “What do you mean, sold?”

“I just sold it. Just five minutes ago.”

“You can’t have sold it,” I said, my voice rising slightly. “You’re holding it for me.”

At this point Kempton hastily concluded his phone call and joined us. “What’s the matter?” he said.

“He says the record is sold.”

“But we were holding it for you,” said Kempton.

“I didn’t know anything about any record being held,” said Gilbert, a whiney, high-pitched don’t-blame-me note entering his voice.

I couldn’t believe this was happening. “I told you I was going to pick it up this weekend.”

“Ah well,” said Gilbert. “It’s not the weekend anymore.” I could have throttled him with my bare hands.

Instead I turned to Kempton and said, “This is unacceptable. It would never have happened under Jerry’s regime.”

Kempton seemed genuinely upset. “Look, I’m sorry. We’re sorry. Here’s a ten per cent coupon. Let’s call it fifteen per cent. As a discount on your next purchase. I mean
off
your next purchase.”