Evan Horne [03] The Sound of the Trumpet Read online

  “My last finds,” he says. “Those represent the end of my collecting days. You’re a jazzer, right, a musician? You wouldn’t recognize the groups if I told you. Black Rea, doo-wop guys from the ’50s. When I got the third one, I played it once, put it back in its perfect sleeve, thought about it for a couple of days, then I had—what do you call it?” He snaps his fingers. “An epiphany. No rush. Nothing. The kick was gone.” He takes the glasses off and spins around to the computer, checks something on the blue screen, then turns back to me.

  “That’s when I became a quasi-dealer, broker for other collectors, people just looking for an old favorite. I get a finder’s fee, but I don’t collect anymore myself.”

  “And that’s how you got the name Blackbyrd, because you collected black R&B groups.”

  “You got it. Most outsiders don’t know it. When you called, I knew you had some contact. Who was it, Charles Buffington? Call me Willis. My wife and kids do.”

  “Okay, Willis, I think I like that better.”

  Willis punches a button on his intercom phone, which has several lines, and activates the speaker phone. “Marie, you there?” Marie answers quickly. “How about some iced tea?” He looks at me for approval, and I nod.

  “Five minutes, Willis.” He shuts off the phone, but before he can speak again he’s interrupted by the fax machine, which begins spewing curls of flimsy paper. He watches, scanning the message, rips it off, and drops it in a tray.

  “I’m running an auction for another guy. Closes today at five. Highest bidder gets the record,” Willis says. “They come in day and night, and there’s always one who calls fifteen minutes before we close. If he wants to top the highest bid by ten percent, he gets the prize.”

  “What’s the highest anyone’s paid for a record?”

  “Most I can remember is twelve thousand.”

  “For one single?”

  “Hey, I told you these guys are nuts. The bids they come in with are for weird amounts like one hundred fifty dollars and twenty seven cents or sixty six dollars and forty three cents. They don’t want to tie with anyone.” Willis shakes his head. “Fax, computers; we’ll be on the Internet eventually.”

  “You know another collector, guy named Mojo Boneyard?” It was another of the names Ace had mentioned.

  “Yeah. He’s always out—garage sales, estate sales, Salvation Army thrift stores. Looking for grooving regards in the bone-yard of life, that’s Mojo’s motto. I heard he just made a big buy from a jukebox company. Figures to move the records for three or four bucks apiece, maybe find a gem in there somewhere. It’s all changing now, but you watch. Vinyl will make a big comeback now that everything is on CD.”

  I glance around at all the equipment. I don’t see any signs of an alarm system or heavy locks. “Don’t you worry about break-ins?”

  Willis smiles, shows me white but uneven teeth. He turns his head to the open window and shouts, “Buck, you there, boy?”

  Buck responds with a couple of short, deep barks that bring another smile to Willis. “Good boy! Buck is better than any alarm system. How’d you like to jump over my back wall late at night and say hello to Buck?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Exactly,” says Willis. “Now how can I help you? I didn’t know Ken Perkins well, but he was a straight-up collector. I hope they catch whoever did that to him. Except for that one prank—he paid everybody for the joke—Ken was okay. A collector, but okay.” Willis shakes his head and smiles. “Ken really had them going.”

  “What joke?”

  “Oh, you don’t know about that, huh? Well, nobody wants to admit they were taken. A great story, one of the legends of this business. Got to be known as Vinylgate. Here’s how it went, see.

  “Collectors are nuts, man. What they want is to have something nobody else has. You ever seen a big auction? People paying outrageous prices for dumb stuff. You watch when Jackie O’s stuff gets sold. It’ll bring millions for ordinary household items because they were JFK’s or Jackie’s.”

  “You mean like thousands for a chair or table?”

  “You got it. Not worth it, but to a collector—coins, stamps, books, records, doesn’t matter—it’s something no one else has. Follow me?”

  Willis doesn’t wait for my answer now that he’s launched into the story of Ken’s joke. He clearly enjoys the telling.

  “Okay, Ken knows better than anyone how obsessive collectors are because he’s one himself, so here’s what he does. He gets a friend of his, another collector, to go in on it with him. This friend’s gig is, he’s an exterminator, you know, like the Orkin Man. In people’s houses all day. So they cook up this story. One of the houses on the friend’s route belongs to a guy who was once in the record business. The friend says he comes across a box of records, offers to buy them. The guy says, ‘Hey take them, I was going to throw them out anyway.’ You with me here?”

  “Okay, the friend makes up this story, right?”

  “Right. Hang on.”

  We both look up as Marie arrives with two giant plastic tumblers of iced tea. Willis takes them both. “Thanks, babe.” He hands me mine and sits back down.

  Marie says, “Don’t forget you have to pick up Bobby at three.”

  “No problem, babe. I’ll be there.”

  As Marie leaves, another fax rumbles in. Willis scans it and rips it off the machine, puts it with the other one in the tray. “Japan,” he says, then continues his story.

  “Ken Perkins has some old-time contacts in L.A. Takes a lot of research—you gotta understand the trouble he went to in pulling this off. He finds some ’50s vinyl stock and record-label paper at a now-out-of-business company, finds some singers—two of them actually recorded at one time—and a small band, and even tracks down a saxophone player who made a lot of these dates in the ’50s. Can’t remember the guy’s name, but he used to record with Charles Brown, the blues singer. Then he buys some time at one of those crap studios in Hollywood where they make demos, low-grade stuff, supervises the session himself, and lays down two tracks with this bogus doo-wop group.”

  “And it was that easy?” I could see several problems in something like this. Making the recording sound old, getting the musicians to emulate that style of playing. “How did he keep everybody quiet?”

  Willis shakes his head. “Money. Not easy at all. This took months of planning to pull off, and at the session he got into a big argument with the sax man, who couldn’t remember how he played in those days, playing too modern for what Ken had in mind. Anyway, they finally get it done, and Ken has seven copies made.”

  “Why seven?”

  Willis shrugs. “Who knows? Ken was living in Las Vegas by then, so maybe that was why. Lucky seven? Anyway once they have the copies, they leak the word out about this great find. Ken runs an auction and sells six of them for top money, keeps one himself. I tell you, it was the talk of the trade.”

  “So what’s the punch line?”

  Willis says, “This is the part I love. Ken lets everybody wallow in their glory, thinking they have one of only six copies of this bogus group, for three years. Three years. Think of it. Then at one of the conventions, he takes all six buyers out to dinner and spills the beans, tells the whole story of how he did it, made the whole thing up.”

  What Willis is telling me immediately makes for six murder suspects, but as if he’s reading my mind, he points a finger at me.

  “No, I know what you’re thinking. You can eliminate all six of these guys.”

  “Why?”

  “As soon as Ken told the story, he gave them all their money back plus ten percent, called that the joke interest. Told the buyers to keep the record as a souvenir of their obsession.”

  It’s a good story; I wonder how much it has been embellished over the years of telling and retelling. Like the musician Joe Venuti, who hired fifty bass players and told them to meet him at Hollywood and Vine on Saturday night in a tux just to see what it would look like. Venuti also paid all
the musicians scale.

  “And you’re sure that’s exactly the way it happened.”

  Willis gives me a strange look. “Absolutely.” He smiles and holds out his hands in a gesture that says it all. “I was one of the buyers.”

  Maybe one of the six learned from Ken Perkins, gets some ’50s recording tape, brings in a group, and—no, it is too much of a stretch, and Cross would still have to find the perfect Clifford Brown imitator.

  Between faxes, phone calls, and checking his computer for e-mail, Willis gives me a lot more information about collectors, some of it very interesting, especially when it comes to evaluating records.

  The original Miles Davis Prestige LPs, Relaxin’, Cookin’, Workin’, for example, provided you had the whole set and they were yellow-label copies, the right serial numbers, would bring somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand.

  “They’d have to be in mint-minus condition. Notice I said mint-minus. Mint only applies to untouched, unplayed from the factory. Then there’s VG, very good; VG-minus, and so on.”

  If early Miles was worth that much, then Rick Markham’s offer was not only fair but generous. Clifford Brown’s worldwide reputation, coupled with his relatively meager output of recordings, even after the initial hoopla over the discoveries, would ensure that a new compact disc set would sell for years. Then there was the trumpet.

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Willis, “you have to keep in mind this concept of having something nobody else has. That’s the key. Let’s say a collector came across a box of perfect Miles LPs, say, twenty-five of them. Know what he’d do?”

  I shrug. “I guess keep one for himself, sell the rest.”

  “Wrong,” Willis says. “Half wrong. Sure, he’d keep one for himself, but the other copies? He’d destroy, break them into little pieces. Only way he’d be sure he had the only copy. Want a worse scenario?”

  “It’s hard to imagine one, but go ahead.”

  “Okay, try this on for size, and no, it wasn’t me.

  “A collector wants a copy of this awful doo-wop group, really wants it, determined to get a copy somewhere. He hires a private detective to track down the members of the group. This was a real group, remember. Okay, the PI checks out all the guys, flies all over the country. None of them have a copy of their own record, but one of them thinks his grandmother might have one and agrees to let the PI talk to her. She’s like ninety-three years old at the time.

  “The PI finds her, and guess what? What do you think he tells her?”

  “I don’t know—he offers her money for the record, providing she has one.”

  “He tries,” Willis says, becoming more animated now. “He offers her a fair price and then some. She wavers, but she’s not entirely convinced. See, it’s her grandson’s record, sentimental value, all that. The PI picks right up on this, tells her the collector’s wife is dying of leukemia and her last wish is to hear this song one more time. It was their song.”

  Willis rolls his eyes and almost stops as another fax comes reeling in. He glances at the fax and continues. “Well, the grandmother is touched by this story but not stupid. She relents, lets him have it for twelve hundred. Of course the whole story was bull, the wife never heard of this song or the group. The PI goes back to the collector, gets his bonus for finding the record, plus his fee and all expenses. Cost the collector somewhere around five grand for the whole deal.”

  “And was it worth it?”

  “To the collector, yeah. He had something that nobody else had. The music was nothing, never even a minor hit, terrible sound quality.” Willis shrugs. “That’s collectors for you. That’s the kind of guys you’re asking about. It’s a fucking treasure hunt.”

  While Willis busies himself with logging in faxes and checking his e-mail again, I digest what he’s told me. For people that obsessive, a murder could easily be the next step, and I’m beginning to see some additional motive for killing Perkins, but I’ll have to prove it.

  “Do you know all the people who were taken in by Ken’s practical joke? Besides yourself, I mean.”

  “Oh yeah, everybody in the business knows.”

  “Was Raymond Cross one of them?”

  “You betcha. Ray went down like the rest of us. Mojo too.”

  I only have one more question for Willis. “You were talking about the value of records, tapes. Could you put a ballpark figure on two master tapes of Clifford Brown to a record company?”

  “Are they stolen?”

  “Probably, if they’re genuine.”

  Willis thinks a moment. “If they’re genuine, their value would be to a record company. Auction, take the offer of the highest bidder, but they’d have to be authenticated, record company would be very careful about that. I’d say thirty-five, forty grand wouldn’t be out of line if they were sold to a company like Blue Note, Verve. They’d be drooling over those.”

  “What if there was a trumpet also?”

  “Clifford Brown’s trumpet, the one he actually played on?” Willis leans forward on the desk. “Whoa, I wouldn’t even venture a guess like that. Big, very big bucks. Didn’t Charlie Parker’s horn go big at an auction in Paris sometime back?”

  Before I leave Blackbyrd to his faxes, phone calls, and e-mails, I give him the title of my own album to put out on the network. He takes down the information about the title, label, print run. I watch him type in the information on his computer. If Blackbyrd can’t find a copy, nobody can.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he says.

  “Yeah, maybe we will.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Blackbyrd’s mention of the recording session Ken Perkins organized triggers another idea I’ve already been working on. If that isn’t Clifford Brown on those tapes, it’s some other trumpet player, and it was recorded in the ’50s. All I have to do is find where these recordings were done.

  I spend an hour on the phone in Hollywood, calling recording studios. I go through nearly fifteen listings in the yellow pages till I find what I’m looking for. Only two even remotely know what I’m talking about. The rest were not in business at the time, and none have reported any recent burglaries.

  The last guy is the most helpful. “Try Gladys Cowen at Cosmos Recorders,” he says. “Her husband ran an operation like you’re describing.”

  Even the name sounds right. Cosmos Recorders, and if I remember, it’s near the site of what was once one of the premier jazz clubs in Hollywood—Shelly’s Manne Hole.

  A woman’s voice answers when I finally get through. “What?”

  “Hello, is this Cosmos Recorders? Gladys Cowen?”

  “Well, of course it is.”

  “Okay, well, I’m doing some research on some lost recordings that were done in the ’50s, and I wonder if—”

  “Not now, I’m having lunch. Call back,” she says and hangs up.

  I stand for a moment staring at the pay phone, listening to the dial tone. Okay, I’ll call back. I’m not far from the Musicians Union on Vine Street, so I decide to run down there and talk to Tommy James again, see if he remembers anything about cowboy studios.

  It’s a wasted trip. James is out and won’t be back till later in the afternoon. I’m still waiting to see someone else when I try Cosmos again from a phone outside a rehearsal studio evidently occupied by an ear-splitting rock group.

  “Hello, I called a little while ago about the missing tapes?”

  “I know you did,” the woman’s voice says.

  Her voice has a brittle quality to it. Hopefully she’s old enough to have some memories. I explain what I’m looking for, but before I can finish she cuts in again.

  “Oh, you want to know about the robbery. Well, come on over. I want to talk to someone about it.”

  I pause for just a moment and say, “Yeah, it’s about the robbery, I’m working for—”

  “You can tell me about it when you get here, but hurry up. I’m going home soon.”

  I hang up the phone and sprint for my ca
r. This I want to hear about.

  I squeeze into a parking spot just off Cosmos Alley that I hope is enough out of the way to avoid a parking ticket and walk up the narrow street—really just a passageway—checking the doors of a low pink stucco building. They’re all white with faded and peeling gold lettering. The third one is Cosmos Recorders. I press the buzzer.

  While I wait for an answer, I look around. Across the narrow alley is the back door of what was once Shelly’s Manne Hole. I’ve heard stories about the great drummer’s club that flourished in the ’60s, then finally closed down, ironically, when the recording studio next door complained that noise from the club was leaking into the studio. Shelly reopened the club in Beverly Hills, but it was never the same. Another example of recording technology ending live music. For me, the supreme irony was that I had once recorded at that very studio.

  I turn as the door opens and Gladys Cowen stares at me. “Well, come on in, young man.” She steps aside to let me into a tiny office with a desk, phone, and a TV across the room, on which the credits for a show that’s just ended are rolling.

  Gladys shuts the door, turns off the TV, and sits down at the desk.

  “You caught me during lunch and my soap,” she says, nodding at the TV. “Anybody that knows me knows not to call between noon and one.”

  I sit down opposite her in the only other chair. “Sorry, I didn’t know,” I say. Gladys must be in her seventies: snow-white hair pulled back in a bun, wrinkled face, clear blue eyes. On the desk is a large black plastic ashtray, the kind with slots to hold burning cigarettes. A package of Menthol 100s and a Bic lighter rest nearby.

  “Yeah, that’s right, I smoke,” she says with more than a trace of defiance. She takes it a step further and after wrestling with the childproof catch, lights up. Gladys and I are going to get along fine.