by Bill Moody
“No, I just got in. Why?”
“Turn it on, quick, Channel 36.”
I walk over and switch on the television. It’s one of those tabloid entertainment-type things. I see a backdrop photo of Clifford Brown behind the boy-girl anchor team. I recognize the photo from a lot of old jazz histories.
“You see it?” Natalie says.
“Yeah, jazz on E.T., and it’s not Kenny G.” I usually keep a tape on standby, for anything interesting that comes up I might want to see again. I press the record button and lean back on the couch.
“Well, Rick,” the woman says, “here’s a story for John Tesh.” She has a blinding, Chiclets-like smile, and of course, perfect blond hair.
“Legendary jazz trumpet man Clifford Brown left a small legacy of recordings before his tragic death in an automobile accident in 1956. But now it seems there’s more to come. Our own Steve Dunning has this exclusive inside look on the story.”
I’m always amazed at how quickly television can get things together. A politician or movie star dies in the morning, and by the evening news, they’ve put together a mini-documentary complete with clips and interviews.
There’s some real Clifford Brown playing in the background while the camera zooms in on the reporter, who stands in front of a white building with the Pacific Records logo behind him. I would have chosen the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach.
“He was known as Brownie to his fellow jazz men, but it seems there was at least one wild jam Clifford Brown made that no one knew about until now. We spoke to Pacific Records executive Barry Hastings earlier this afternoon.”
“Wild jam?” Natalie says into the phone. “Please.”
The camera pulls back to reveal Hastings, still in his surfer uniform, Ray-Bans on top of his head, smiling at the reporter.
“Tell me, Barry, how did you come into these recordings?”
“Well,” Hastings says, gazing into the camera. “I can’t reveal the source, but I’ve been assured by a prominent musician these are genuine Clifford Brown recordings, made some time just before his tragic accident”
“And what happens to the tapes now, Barry?”
“They’ll be remastered and issued on CD.” Barry pauses for a moment and assumes an air of solemnity before continuing. “Clifford Brown was one of the jazz greats, and Pacific Records is proud to be a part of jazz history.”
There’s a few more seconds of Brownie, then they’re back to the studio. “No release date has been set for these lost recordings,” the anchor says, “and Pacific’s head honcho, Rick Markham, had no comment.”
The woman anchor turns to her partner and flashes her smile once again. “How about that, Rick?”
“Sounds like a swinging deal to me,” Rick says. “When we come back—”
I push the mute button. This is better than I expected, and a lot faster. I haven’t played in over a year, and I’m a prominent musician.
Natalie says, “Is he talking about you?”
“Could be, or it could be Quincy Jones, Max Roach.”
“They don’t know about the tapes, do they?”
“They do now, or somebody will call them.”
Barry bought in all the way. His little performance will set a lot of things in motion.
“Listen,” I say to Natalie. “I’ve got to make a couple of calls. Talk to you in a few minutes, okay?”
“Sure. I’ll do a little channel surfing, see if anybody else picked it up.”
I dig through my book and call Rick Markham’s private cell phone number.
“Rick? Evan Horne.”
“The prominent musician? Barry’s been fired,” Markham says. There’s a pause from both of us that lasts several moments before Markham speaks again. “I think—no, I know—you set us up, Evan. At least Barry.”
“And I think you knew I was doing it.” What had Markham said? I’ll handle Barry just the way you want me to. “I didn’t tell either of you the tapes were genuine.”
“No, you didn’t, but this is going to cause Pacific some slight embarrassment, you know.”
“You’ll survive. Trust me, Rick, you’ll come out a hero on this.”
“I’d better. I’d like to talk more about this. I’m having a few people over Friday night. Maybe you could come, bring a friend?”
“We’ll see. I’ll call you.”
“Bye, Evan.”
I hang up and sit for a minute, a million thoughts racing through my mind before I call Natalie back
“Rick Markham. Isn’t he the guy you told me about that was involved in the Lonnie Cole thing?” When I don’t answer she says, “You going to tell me about this, and the car that was following us last night?”
“You will be a good lawyer. Okay, I wasn’t sure it would work, but I was going to ask Markham to help. With this Hastings character, I didn’t need to. Hastings was too eager to make a name for himself. I played the tape for both of them, said I was representing someone who had the originals, and wanted to know what they would be worth to a record company.”
“And since nobody can find this Raymond Cross, who you think is the killer, publicity like this might draw him out.”
“My, but you’re clever. It’s a possibility.”
Natalie ignores that. “It might also make you a target.”
“No, I don’t think so. Cross knows I can’t identify him, or I would have already. He wants the tape, which the Las Vegas police have and he’ll never get, and the trumpet, which I have, is in a safe place. I think he’ll just wait till I lead him to one or the other.”
Natalie is silent for a moment.
“God, I wish your hand would get better so you could go back to just playing piano. Evan, this is—” There’s a long pause. I know Natalie is trying to decide whether to talk me out of things or not. Not evidently wins.
“What’s next?” she asks, the resignation heavy in her voice.
“Believe it or not, I’ve got to try and find a guy known as Mojo Boneyard.”
“Good night,” Natalie says.
I get the numbers from Blackbyrd. Mojo has a home phone with an answering machine, a fax, two beepers, and a cellular phone.
“Despite all the numbers, he’s sometimes hard to track down,” Blackbyrd says. “Mojo is always on the move.”
“Any luck on finding Arrival?” I’m still hoping a copy of my own album will turn up somewhere in the collector’s world.
“Not yet, but I’ve got the word out. If there’s one out there, it’ll turn up. Good luck with Mojo.”
“Thanks, I’ll probably need it.”
“One other thing,” Blackbyrd says.
“Yeah.”
“The story I told you about the collector who hired a PI.”
“Sure, I remember. What about it?”
“The collector was Ray Cross.”
I leave messages on both beepers and the answering machine, then try the cell phone number. What do I call him? Mojo? Mr. Boneyard? While I’m deciding, he answers.
“Yo, Mojo. Talk to me.”
“Mojo Boneyard?”
“No, it’s American Express. Who’s this?”
“My name is Evan Horne, Mojo. I’m trying to locate something.”
“We all are, man, that’s the name of the game. Do I know you?”
“Blackbyrd told me you might be able to help me. He gave me your numbers.”
“Blackbyrd, huh. You a collector?”
“No, I’m trying to track down the source of a tape and locate a trumpet. I think both might be valuable.”
“I’m only talking to you because you mentioned Blackbyrd, but I got to check that out. Give me your number.” He seems surprised that I have only one to give him.
He calls back in five minutes. “Blackbyrd says you’re okay, and I don’t mind helping if this has something to do with Ken Perkins’s murder.”
“It does.”
“Okay, I don’t know what I know until you ask me. There’s a coffee shop in Brentwo
od, on San Vicente. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Look for a blue van.”
Mojo is gone before I can agree, but when I get to Brentwood, he’s right where he said, parked on the street near a Starbucks. The van’s sliding side door is open and Mojo is sitting on the runner, drinking coffee from a paper cup, when I walk up.
“Mojo? Evan Horne.”
He nods, stands up, and reaches in the van, comes out with a coffee for me.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the coffee, Mojo is dressed in running shoes, a light sweater, a windbreaker, and jeans held up with a wide black web belt to which are clipped two beepers and a holster that holds a small cell phone. Even though it’s overcast, he wears mirrored sunglasses. His face is weathered, tanned dark, like he spends a good deal of time on a boat. His hair closely resembles a style I’ve seen in pictures of Albert Einstein.
I glance inside the van as I join him on the runner, but he’s up, pacing back and forth, pausing only to drink from his coffee cup.
“Looks like you collect lots of things.” Inside the van, there are boxes of records, books, magazines, a snare drum, and a tuba.
“Records are my serious thing, but old instruments are fun. I run across a lot of interesting stuff” He tells me this almost reluctantly, regarding me warily, as if I’m going to try and talk him out of something.
“I’m waiting for a call now on an estate sale. Might be some heavy stuff there, and I just made a deal with a jukebox company. Sixty thousand records sitting around a warehouse that need a home.”
“Sixty thousand?”
“Yeah.” Mojo shrugs as if this were a minor purchase. “I can turn them over for two or three bucks apiece and maybe find something really fine and rare that will make the whole deal worthwhile.” He smiles as if he knows something I don’t. “Mojo is always lucky.”
“Just out of curiosity, what’s your real name?”
He takes out a large wallet from a zippered pocket in his jacket. It’s stuffed with credit cards. He shuffles through one thick stack, pulls out an American Express corporate card, and points at the name: Mojo Boneyard.
“That gets a lot of laughs at the airlines, but it’s not my real name.” He takes off the glasses and rubs his eyes. They’re dark brown and bloodshot. “Arthur Klein,” he says softly, “but legends aren’t made on a name like that. On Mojo Boneyard they are.”
I think back to when Ace first told me about collectors and how different they are. “I’m trying to locate the source of a trumpet I’ve come into. Seems old, might be worth something. Actually, I’m trying to prove it’s not worth something, at least to a collector.”
Mojo studies me for a moment, I guess to see if I’m serious or if he’s heard right.
“Let me get this straight. You have this trumpet. You want to know where it came from. You think it might be valuable, but you don’t want it to be.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“That’s a strange concept, one that’s alien to collectors. Well, that’s what I do. Buy and sell, collect until someone else who collects wants to buy and pay more than I did. Then I sell. Hey, it’s just like the stock market.”
He reaches in the van and taps his fingers on the snare drum. It’s a metal shell, the top head smudged with black marks from endless playing with wire brushes. He nods at the tuba.
“I bought that from John Philip Sousa’s great-grandson. That’ll be big.”
I look at the tuba, then at Mojo, see that he enjoys the surprised expression on my face.
“I bought a trumpet a while back. It was old. Beat up case and horn. Hadn’t even decided what to do with it—strictly an impulse buy, but you never know. Guess what? Guy comes along, pays me four times what I paid. You see, Mojo is always lucky.”
“Did you look in the case?”
“Yeah, saw a trumpet. What else was there to see?”
I take the bottle of Slick Stuff out of my pocket. “This was inside, in that little compartment where the mouthpiece is kept.”
Mojo takes the bottle, turns it over in his hand, holds it up to the light, then hands it back to me. “You’re not going to tell me what’s in that bottle is worth more than the trumpet.”
“No, but they go together to help establish some other things. Do you remember who you sold the trumpet to?”
“Yeah.” Mojo suddenly looks thoughtful.
“What?”
“Nothing, I just thought it was funny at the time, and now with Ken Perkins getting whacked, I don’t know. I sold it to Bernie Dalton, small-time collector, but he deals a lot for Ray Cross. I wondered why Ray wanted a trumpet. Now Ray is really plugged in, but he never deals in anything but records.”
I can’t see his eyes behind the mirrored shades, but Mojo looks over my shoulder, somewhere in the distance.
“Blackbyrd tell you about the scam Ken Perkins pulled off, the bogus record?”
“Yeah, he did. Pretty elaborate for a practical joke.”
“Ray took it pretty bad when Ken took the wool away. Didn’t think it was funny at all. Still”—Mojo shrugs—“murder is something else, man, and besides, Ray Cross has one of the best collections. When he goes, Mojo will be right there with the best offer.”
“Did Dalton say he was buying the trumpet for Cross?”
“In a roundabout way.”
“But you didn’t ask about it?”
Mojo looks at me. “Doesn’t matter where it comes from and who it goes to as long as the deal is cool. That trumpet you’re talking about, I bought that at a garage sale for twenty-five bucks.”
I finish my coffee without looking at Mojo. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it might have been worth twenty five thousand.
Back home, my answering machine has been getting a workout. I don’t know how these people got my number, but there are messages from Max Roach, Quincy Jones, two entertainment news shows reporters, a very furious Tim Shaw from Blue Note magazine, and John Trask. Nothing from Raymond Cross. I listen first to Max Roach. I had tried him earlier, but he had never returned my call.
“Clifford Brown never recorded anything I didn’t know about. These tapes, if they exist, are fraudulent.” No greeting, no good-bye, end of story. Thank you, Max.
Quincy Jones says, “Please call me in regard to the Clifford Brown tapes.” He at least leaves his agent’s number. I’ll just let that one go.
Tim Shaw doesn’t even say please. “Goddamnit, Horne, you promised me you’d keep me up to date, and I had exclusive rights to this story. Call me now.” I do.
“Tim? Evan Horne.”
“Listen, you promised me. If you think—”
“Wait a minute. You are talking about the TV story, I take it. I didn’t give them anything. They, Barry Hastings at least, presumed, as it turned out, way too much. I was trying to get an idea of the tapes’ value if they were genuine.” That silences Tim for the moment.
“You mean there are no tapes?”
“I mean there are tapes, but they are not, at least I’m pretty sure, Clifford Brown.”
“Pretty sure? When will you know?”
“Very soon. Look, Tim, this is part of a murder investigation, and we are definitely off the record here, but I promise I’ll give you the whole story when it all goes down.”
“Murder? Jesus, I thought it was just about undiscovered recordings.”
“Yeah, me too. I’ll be in touch.”
There’s nothing for me to tell Quincy Jones or the TV reporters. I hesitate before calling Trask. I want to talk to Coop first, but in person.
I drive down to Santa Monica Police Headquarters and find him in his usual position at his desk: feet up, ankles crossed, telephone to his ear, drinking out of a bottle of Gatorade. He waves me in, motions me to the chair in front of his desk.
He says “Right” two or three times into the phone, scribbles something down on a pad, and finally says, “Got it.” He looks at me expectantly, as if I’m about to tell him something.
“Wha
t?”
“I hear you were mentioned on TV last night.”
“Not by name. I’m so well known, all they have to say is ‘prominent musician’ and everybody knows it’s me.”
Coop snorts, gets to his feet, and stretches. “Nothing on Raymond Cross. No priors, no record, not even a parking ticket. A model employee of the city of Santa Monica.”
“I’m not surprised. I think he just went over the edge on this deal. Some people don’t take much pushing.’
I tell Coop about my revenge theory, how Cross was one of the victims of Ken Perkins’s practical joke.
“Add to that the standard collectors’ obsession, and well, isn’t it possible Cross just acted impulsively?”
“Sure,” Coop says. “I never said it was premeditated. It’s also possible he might act impulsively again—if it was him.”
“If? What do you mean?”
“I mean we’ve got a solid citizen here with nothing to indicate he’d be capable of something like this.”
“But how can somebody just disappear like this? Can’t you check him out, bring him in?”
“People disappear every day. It’s not that hard to do. You think he’s just sitting out at his condo in Malibu? All we have is the theory of a piano player who thinks Cross might be responsible. We have to have some probable cause for a warrant, we have nothing concrete to charge him with, and you can’t positively identify him. No go, sport.”
Before I can come up with a counterargument, Coop’s phone rings again. “Hi, John. As a matter of fact, he’s sitting right here. Hold on.” Coop hands me the phone. “Lieutenant Trask.”
“Hello.”
“Guess what my wife saw on TV last night? She never misses those shows, watches them all. Somebody talking about some Clifford Brown tapes. I wonder who that could be? Are you thinking about selling the tapes on your own? Don’t forget, we have the other one.”
“No, nothing like that. That was just some digging on my part that got out of hand, blown out of proportion by the record company.”
“Cooper gave me everything on Cross. A court reporter. Who would have guessed that? He hasn’t tried to contact you?”