Written in Dead Wax (8 page)

“I’ll fetch it,” I said. “I don’t want you falling down the stairs.” I brought a selection of snack foods back and found that—surprise—Tinkler was building a joint. He looked up at me happily.

“I got a new shipment from Hughie.”

Hughie Mackinaw, known affectionately to us as the Scottish Welshman, had a business manufacturing and restoring turntables in his own factory near Llandrindod Wells in rural Wales. He had rebuilt Tinkler’s Thorens TD 124 and done a nice job. Hughie’s work was pretty good, and his own turntables had their admirers. He also made a state-of-the-art record-cleaning machine. But he didn’t sell quite enough of any of these to make a living, hence his sideline in “shipments” to people like Tinkler.

Concealed behind his rambling, antiquated factory overlooking leafy Rock Park, Hughie had a yard where he’d erected a network of poly tunnels in which, screened by tomato plants, he grew an impressive cannabis crop. He shipped his wares to customers all over the mainland UK in boxes purporting to contain hi-fi equipment. I noticed that there was one of these on the floor now, labelled
PRECISION AUDIO COMPONENT, HANDLE WITH CARE
.

Tinkler had handled it with anything but care when he’d opened it. It looked like a wolverine had torn the box apart. I guess he’d been impatient to get at the goodies inside. He showed me the dope. “Here, have a sniff of this.”

He held open the glassine bag. The rich green foliage inside resembled tiny cabbages, perhaps miniaturised by the experimental ray of a mad scientist. You could see pale crystals of THC on the buds, like minuscule flakes of cake icing. He said, “It’s as if somebody gene spliced Bob Marley and Pepé Le Pew.” The smell was indeed raw, rank and complex. Intoxicating. I looked up at Tinkler. “Go on,” he said. “Try some.”

“No thanks. At some point tonight I’m going to need to remember where my house is.”

Tinkler shrugged and ignited the joint. “Your loss.”

I said, “I found some more stuff from the Unknown Jazz Fan today.”

Tinkler slowly breathed out smoke and examined it as it hung in the air. I was getting a buzz just from being in the same room with the stuff. Hughie evidently knew what he was doing when it came to more things than turntables. Tinkler stared at the far wall of the room, the wall that was almost solid LPs. “Do you know what I think?” he said. “I think that when a record collection reaches a certain complexity it becomes a kind of vortex of possibility, summoning new records in out of the void.”

“You mean like a magnet?”

“Yes, a magnet that attracts the records you’re looking for.”

“Now,
that
is like something out of Borges,” I said.

His eyes slowly focused on me again. “Did you say you’d found some more records from the Unknown Jazz Fan?”

“Yes. Welcome back.”

“Any British rock or R&B?”

“Well, there was an original copy of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers on Deram with the ‘Beano’ cover. It was in mint condition, but they wanted three quid for it, so I left it there.”

“What? You did what? Are you out of your mind?” Tinkler’s eyes were agreeably a-bulge with outrage. Then he realised I’d got him.

“You bastard,” he said.

* * *

I did manage to remember where my house was, but it was well after midnight by the time I got there. As soon as she heard my keys Fanny came out to meet me, emerging from the house through the cat flap, and Turk joined us, bounding in from the outer darkness of the estate and giving a little yelp of triumph as she surmounted the final fence.

We went inside. I turned on the lights and saw the pile of mail, exactly where I’d left it during this afternoon’s drama with Stinky at knifepoint. One envelope jutted out from the pile. It was handwritten, the envelope addressed in a neat italic script, apparently written with a fountain pen. I opened it carefully. Inside were several folded handwritten pages.

I started reading the letter. My stomach did a funny little flip.

It was from Jerry.

It felt very strange to get a letter from a dead man.

Underneath his address and the usual salutations it began:

Forgive me for writing to you in this old-fashioned way, but I find that putting pen to paper helps me to organise my thoughts.

When I got home tonight I realised that if I’m ever going to sort out this behemoth of a record collection that we so recklessly purchased, it’s going to require some concerted effort on my part.

So I’ll be taking a few days off work to stay at home and go through it until it’s finished. I’ve already started and I’ll get the chaps to bring the van around tomorrow to convey the first batch to the shop. (Don’t worry, I’ll see that you get first sniff at the jazz!)

But I know you’re eager to hear the story on Hathor Records. So here we go. I’ve had a good look through my library and I’ve been able to piece together the following.

It was a highly regarded but very short-lived West Coast jazz label that was born and died in the same year, 1955, in Los Angeles. In the space of a few months Hathor released a total of fourteen LPs (catalogue numbers Hathor HL-001 to 014) by the following artists, in order of release: Easy Geary (first of two albums), Marty Paich, Richie Kamuca, Johnny Richards, Jerry Fielding, Russ Garcia, Cy Coleman, Howard Roberts, Rita Mae Pollini (two consecutive albums, 009 and 010), Manny Albam, Pepper Adams, Conte Candoli and of course Easy Geary, second of two albums, with
Easy Come, Easy Go
(HL-014).

You’ll know better than I that there is some top-shelf West Coast jazz in this list (and some from the top drawer of the East, viz New York).

Rita Mae also sings on one track, as you know, on
Easy Come, Easy Go
, and there are other crossovers in terms of personnel too numerous to mention. I’ll photocopy you a complete session discography if you’re interested.

I felt my eyes sting. For a moment the words were too blurred to make out. Jerry wouldn’t be photocopying anything for me, or anyone else. I wiped my eyes and continued to read.

As you can see, Easy Geary bookends Hathor’s history. Which is appropriate, since he determined their fate.

Because, despite their impressive list of talent and strong early sales, Hathor was plagued with bad luck.

Bobby Schoolcraft, the label owner, died a few days after recording HL-013, ominously enough.

And Easy Geary vanished shortly after recording Hathor 14.

As you no doubt know, his disappearance is shrouded in mystery. Some maintain Easy was shot dead in an altercation over a woman, rather in the manner of that famous jazz trumpeter. A genius cut short. Others insist that he didn’t really die at all. Like Elvis.

He meant Lee Morgan. The jazz trumpeter genius whose life was cut short. Fanny was nudging my elbow, so I moved over and allowed her to sit in my lap. She seemed quite content for me to rest the letter on her head, so I did that and went on reading.

Bobby Schoolcraft, as we discussed, was nominally a suicide. But all my sources are in agreement that he was actually hounded to death by a man called Ox.

This is a nickname for a Los Angeles cop called Oliver Xavier. A murderous knucklehead of Irish extraction, Ox was notorious for preying on those elements of society who didn’t abide by his rigid moral criteria, which is to say just about everyone except other Irish-American cops.

He was in the pay of the music companies, who used him as their “hammer man”, or enforcer. If one of their recording artists got out of line or tried to free themselves from an onerous contract, Ox was used to put the fear of god into them.

There was a sudden unearthly screeching outside in the night. Fanny jumped off my lap, alarmed, and stood tensely on the floor. The ghoulish, tortured shrieking came again. It was unmistakably the barking of a fox. This is what we’d have to make do with in London until someone managed to successfully import the jackal.

While Fanny paced nervously back and forth, I went back to the letter.

Easy Geary had the misfortune of awakening the wrath of these people, and of Ox, when he put out his first album for Hathor. Fatefully, it was entitled
Easy Geary Plays Burns Hobartt
.

Jerry then went off on a tangent about the Davenport cousins. “Nasty pieces of work”, he called them. It was a virtual tirade. It was touching to see how angry they made him. They’d evidently been a couple of young hustlers, a man and a woman with a peculiar relationship that, it was rumoured, veered into the incestuous, or whatever you’d call sex between cousins. And they managed to get their hooks into some of the great jazz composers.

And, as was all too often the custom in those days, they got their names on the compositions by these jazz men. It was reminiscent of what had happened with Irving Mills and Duke Ellington. The Duke was a musical genius. Mills was just his business manager. But Mills ended up being credited as co-composer on many of Ellington’s masterpieces, even though he didn’t write a note of the music.

This meant of course that he also ended up with a permanent share of the revenues.

The Davenport cousins, also referred to in Jerry’s letter as “those young parasites”, had performed a similar scam with the music written by another jazz great, Burns Hobartt. They had taken—or if you prefer, stolen—a credit on everything he wrote, for the privilege of publishing his music.

Which meant that whenever anyone recorded a Burns Hobartt composition, it was supposed to be credited as being written by “Hobartt, Davenport and Davenport”, even though the malevolent cousins had nothing to do with it.

The injustice of this had apparently been too much for Easy Geary. On his album of Hobartt classics, the credits just read “Hobartt”. No one else. Just the man who had really written the music.

Which was the strict truth of it.

But the Davenports’ lawyers didn’t see it that way.

Of course, they didn’t deserve any credit, but contractually they were entitled to it. And even though the cousins were long since dead, AMI, the corporate entity that represented them, was still thriving and promptly launched a lawsuit.

And, much worse, they unleashed Ox on the owner of the offending record label, poor Bobby Schoolcraft.

It’s not clear what he did to Bobby Schoolcraft, but in the past Ox had not been above blackmail, beatings and even death threats. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Bobby Schoolcraft took the way out he did. There was evidently a suicide note specifically naming Ox and detailing his campaign of persecution, but it was suppressed by the police.

Fanny ceased her frightened pacing and jumped back up onto the sofa with me. She had provisionally concluded she wasn’t about to be devoured by a large carnivore. She settled against me again, warm and solid, as I resumed my reading.

The last Hathor album, the much sought-after
Easy Come, Easy Go
, was recorded knowing that it would be the last album the company ever released, knowing that Bobby Schoolcraft was dead, and knowing that it was all over.

Perhaps that’s why Geary and Miss Pollini put their autographs in the dead wax when the record was pressed. As a kind of memorial.

There is a legend that Ox stopped by at this recording session to gloat. That apparently didn’t stop it being a stupendous album, musically speaking, by all accounts. If you find a copy perhaps you will play it for me. (I do listen to the occasional bit of jazz!) Good luck in your quest to find it.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll let you know if my research turns up anything further. I’ll pass it along when I next see you in the shop.

I have to go out later tonight and I shall drop this in the postbox on the way.

See you soon.
All the best,
Jerry

I folded the letter up neatly and put it back in the envelope. I was obscurely grateful that I had taken such care opening it. When he had gone out later that night he had met the person who’d killed him. Dropping the letter in the postbox had been just about the last thing Jerry ever did.

I didn’t see Nevada until the following evening.

It was raining when she arrived. Once again she was wearing her white knit hat with the strawberry embroidered on it.

“Nice hat.”

“Oh, get stuffed.”

“No, really, I like it. It looks very fetching.”

She looked at me warily, as if to determine whether I was on the level. “It keeps the rain out.”

We walked to the main road and started looking for a taxi. I said, “What’s happened to Clean Head?”

“Who is Clean Head?”

“Our taxi driver.”

“Why do you call her Clean Head? Her name is Agatha.”

“I rest my case.”

“
Agatha
has taken the night off because she has a hot date.” We both spotted a taxi approaching—from the direction of the Abbey, naturally—and simultaneously began to flag it down. “And I could be on a hot date too, if I wasn’t stuck here in the rain with you.”

“Don’t sulk,” I said. “You’ll be in a nice, warm, dry taxi soon.” The black cab pulled up beside us and I held the door open for her and we hopped in. Nevada had left her shoulder bag on the pavement and when I reached down to pick it up for her, she leaned back out of the cab and snatched it up.

“Well, go on, get in,” she said, looking at me. I climbed in, gave the driver the address and sat down opposite her. The taxi pulled away into the night.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, clutching her bag in her lap, staring out the window at the streetlights flashing past. “I’m going to spend the evening going to a jumble sale.”

“You were moaning that we hadn’t been to one. Now you’re moaning because we’re
going
to one.”

“I could be on a hot date,” she repeated.

“And learning lots about serving coffee.” The taxi was speeding towards the gate to Richmond Park. She looked away from the window, at me, puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you were dating a barista.”

“A
barrister
,” she snarled, then realised she had taken the bait. “Oh, very funny.” She glanced away, but not before I caught a gleam of amusement in those sardonic blue eyes.