Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

Blues for Julie and Diz by Michael C. Norton

©1998 by Michael C. Norton

Bay City, Michigan resident Michael C. Norton writes of what he knows in portraying the Michigan music scene, for he was for many years a musician himself, playing jazz drums before turning to his second love — literature. The author is now a part-time faculty member in the department of English Literature at Delta College and also manages the college bookstore. He is the author of two horror novels, and of one previous story in this colorful series.

I was standing at the coffin, minding my own business, when Detroit Homicide Detective Vincent DeGarmo tags my shoulder, half spins me to face him.

“DeGarmo. Such a pleasure to see you.” I waxed sarcastic, talking out of the side of my mouth like I’d seen good old Boston Blackie do so many times on the TV screens of my black-and-white youth. “You paying your respects to my pal Dizzy Joe Lester?”

“Didn’t know the poor slob, Dyer. But from what I’ve heard, he could cut you in a sax showdown in the first five notes.” DeGarmo pushed up the knot on his already perfect money-green tie.

“If I thought you capable of even the smallest appreciation of jazz sax, I’d be wounded. I admit Diz was special, but I can hold my own since I quit the sauce.”

“YOU quit drinking? Does the liquor commission know? The state’s gonna have to raise the damn sin tax or the schools will shut down!”

The detective and I had a tenuous, antagonistic relationship at the best of times. “Step off, DeGarmo, or get to the point.”

He ran a flat, broad hand over his crewcut. “I’m here to do you a favor, Mr. Scotty Dyer.”

I grabbed the lapels of my beat-up tweed sports jacket, squared it on my less-than-square shoulders. “I doubt there are any favors you can do me. I’m doing fine. I’ve even got a steady gig now that I’m off the sauce.”

DeGarmo laughed, a dirty little chuckling creature moving in his throat. “I’m a for-real cop, remember Dyer? Not a booze-sotted, has-been saxman who likes to pretend he’s some TV super-sleuth. Your steady gig consists of you backing a girl singer with a pickup band in a Roseville American Legion Hall on Saturday nights. You clear two C-notes a week.” He moved in close, his chiseled face inches from mine. “What I know, you’d pay a month’s take to hear.”

“I’m on pins and needles, Detective,” I said.

His hand, near the casket, made an eloquent gesture toward my departed friend, poor old, stiff old Dizzy Joe Lester, whose burnished ebony face suddenly seemed to be smiling knowingly up at the ceiling.

“Diz? What about him? He had a freakin’ heart attack.”

“No, he didn’t. He OD’ed.”

DeGarmo was smoothing Diz’s lapel, like he cared, which I figured he didn’t. I slapped his hand away. “Give me a break, man! Diz didn’t use drugs, didn’t even drink or smoke. He lived for his music.”

“Dyer, the coroner says the tox level on this guy was something to behold.”

I blinked at DeGarmo, rubbed at the stubble of my jazz beard, looked down at Diz again, who just lay there, and smiled, smiled, smiled. “And you’re telling me this because...?”

“Because my captain doesn’t think it’s important enough to sacrifice manpower on it, and I do. Not enough to use up my free time, but I figured since he was your friend... well, that’s the favor. Somebody ought to find out what’s going down, and since you’ve got this thing about crime and detection...”

“And this falls to me because Diz had chemicals in his blood you couldn’t recognize? You ever consider he may have just drunk too much Detroit tap water?”

“Not funny, Dyer. And your friend was not alone. He came into County Hospital with vital signs off the charts. That triggered the drug screen, but he croaked before they could get the breakdown back from pathology. Guy in the path lab thought the compounds looked familiar, checked his records. Same chemicals, in astronomical dosages, in a number of other stiffs, all within a few months: a young lawyer from a big downtown firm, a million-dollar-club real-estate lady, a stock analyst, and fifteen — count ’em, Dyer — fifteen musicians of varying ages, most of them jazz players like Diz, like you.”

“Tell me: What kinda drugs, if not crack, coke, et cetera?”

“Mood elevators, Dyer, ain’t that something? Like Prozac or Zoloft — except different.”

“You’re tellin’ me my friend Diz happy-ed himself to death?”

“I wish I knew. But my captain’s tied my hands. Only you can find out.”

Three A.M. found me in my Cass Corridor flat communing with Fred, my sax, the faithful companion who’s seen the highs and lows of my life, and helped me express them to others. Right now, Fred was talkin’ blues. The BLUES, with capital letters. Blues for Diz, a mentor, a friend. A role model, fallen. The fact that he had such chops, such great musical imagination, without the use of drugs was almost unheard of. Fred was telling ’bout Coltrane, Bird, Lester “Prez” Young. Miles. Krupa. Zoot. The list of users and abusers was longer than the one that named the clean ones, and even they were heavy alkies for the most part. Which had been my drug of choice, living on The Cass, this stretch of hell between Tiger Stadium and the Renaissance Center, Michigan Avenue north to eternity. Fred the sax told me alcohol had made my hands shake, robbed me of the dexterity and facility being a good jazz saxman demanded. Some of it was coming back since I’d met Julie, but it was too slow. Fred said be patient, but when Julie wasn’t near me, it was hard to remember why I wanted to go to the trouble. And now, my booze-free, drug-free role model, Diz, was fallen, dead because of drugs. It made it even harder to remember why, why, why I was trying to be straight.

Fred reminded me: for Julie Paris, the girl singer with the smoky voice, an angel’s face, and a body that looked just too damned fine in a sparkly sheath dress under blue-red stage lights. The girl singer who had helped me come up out of the bottle with the whisper of a sentence. “Scotty,” she had said, “you’re too good to waste it this way.” That simple. She helped me past the worst of it, held me in her arms, a mewling lost soul, then got me the gig backing her up.

We had a practice scheduled, Julie, me, Fred, and the band, for five P.M. I couldn’t wait. I knew I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to hit the bars, the after-hours joints, the blind pigs that dot Detroit like loud, raucous measles. Not to drink, no, but to go dig out the truth about Diz.

Downtown Detroit is next to deserted at three A.M. A few homeless folk trying to catch some sleep between rousts by the boys in blue. Cops and urban nomads, that’s about it.

The blind pig known as Papa John’s — because it was owned and operated by Papa John — was a block off Grand Circus, second floor, above a wig shop and a used-record store. Just a knocked-out joint, open space and tables, a “beat” bar — a place where people could get high after other bars closed, a place to do the slap and tickle to dirty R & B, or lose your butt gambling at poker and dice.

Papa John’s face had Nigerian blackness, pure Africanness without white-devil taint. It was almost four A.M. when I made my way into his blind pig. The crowd was sparse, a salt-and-pepper mix, uptowns and downtowns with a few suburbanites thrown in.

“Whatchoo need, Scotty-man?” Papa John growled from behind the bar. His veined eyes glinted in the bare bulb near the ancient filigreed, hand-crank cash register.

“Info, John, ’bout Diz. You weren’t at his funeral.”

Papa John shrugged huge shoulders. “No relation of mine. Liked his sax better’n him, you know?”

“But you knew him. He gambled here regularly.”

“Still no call to go to his funeral.”

“Guess not. Forget that. Not my point, anyway.”

“Then get to it, dawn’s coming, and I got thirsty customers.”

“You knew him well enough to know if he was a stoner. Diz was my friend. I thought he was a straight arrow. Cops and chemists say different. Tell me what you know, Papa, okay? For Diz?”

Papa shrugged. “He was straight. Then a few days ago, he told me he had a line on becoming the best saxman ever. Seemed nervous, cranked. I asked him if he was doing the drug thing, you know. He laughed. Said his drugs came from a doctor, an’ they were gonna make him look to Coltrane like God to Baby Jesus. He took his sax out of the case and blew tenor like human ears ain’t never heard before. Then two days later, he dead, Scotty-man. You figure it. That’s all I know.”

“But he said a doctor gave him the stuff?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Everett Blaine, of Grosse Isle: Detroit Yacht Club, board of directors of the Cranbrook Institute, acquisitions advisor for the Detroit Institute of Art, on and on, Scotty-man, like the society columns say.”

“Damn.”

There was no way I was going to get to see a muckety-muck like Dr. Everett Blaine of blah, blah, and blah, so I was stuck on the lead from Papa John. I let the slow dawn sun push me to Millinery Square, to the posh downtown townhouse of one Julie Paris, my heroine, my goddess of booze-free salvation. She was beautiful, even at seven A.M.

I, on the other hand, must not have looked my spiffy best. I knew this because her pretty little jaw dropped three feet when she saw me at her door.

“Dark circles again, Scotty! What have you been doing?” she mothered, ushering me into the clean-smelling morning brightness of her living room, the room of a nonsmoker, a nondrinker, and as near as I could tell, a non-sinner in the classic sense.

“Late night, is all. Diz’s funeral. Took it harder than I thought.”

“Well, I guess!” Her doe-eyes darted over me, beacons of worry. She was trying so hard to make a man out of me, and I wasn’t cooperating. “You get out of those clothes, take a long, hot bath, and then get some sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time for our practice. Okay, Scotty-babe?”

“Sure,” I agreed. It was easy to agree with Julie.

I couldn’t get the idea of Dizzy Joe Lester doing drugs out of my head the whole practice, even though I had the music I loved, played on Fred, the sax I loved, behind the smoky voice of Julie, the woman I loved. Diz was dead, same as eighteen other folks. What could I do, how could I help? I’d grown up watching TV detectives; why couldn’t I think of some cutesy, TV-script-like answer that would wrap it up?

“I’m waiting, Scotty. Do you have a light or not?” Julie. Cigarette between soft red lips, quirky smile at the corners of a generous mouth.

“Sorry. Dead brain cells of an ex-alky.” I flipped open the Zippo from my pocket, lit one for her and another for myself. Her one vice, so far as I knew: She smoked at gigs and practices only. A controlled addiction.

She absently twirled a new-penny-colored curl of hair on her forehead while soft eyes watched smoke spiral up to the flat-black ceiling rafters. “So what’s up, Scotty? I’m trying to help you, but if you keep your troubles all locked up in here—” she laid a flattened palm on the heartbeat in my chest — “I can’t help at all, now can I?”

“No. No, I guess you can’t. But I’m not sure this is something you want to know about. Or should know about, if I could or wanted to tell.”

She shook her head, penny-bright curls dancing, lilting little-girl laugh. “What are you talking about? That made no sense.”

“That’s just the way it is with me sometimes. You ought to know that by now.” If there was anybody who could help me with this, it sure wasn’t squeaky-clean Julie Paris. Maybe the drummer. Drummers are incredibly savvy about what’s hip and what isn’t. If there was some new drug fad on the streets, maybe our drummer would have a line on it.

His name was Tommy Ryan. I caught up with him later at the no-name bar I used to frequent as a heavy boozer. Now I just went there out of habit; there were no expectations at this bar. A door on a corner of The Cass, a door to darkness and alcohol-blunted desperation for its habitues.

Ryan was young, somewhere between eighteen and middle-aged — it was difficult to nail down. Not really an “X-er,” or “Slacker,” as the media liked to label his generation. He seemed trapped between the baby boomers of the sixties and the Cybernet addicts of the nineties. He was drinking Canada Dry as if it were a quadruple scotch. I gestured to the barkeep to bring me the same. I sat down and Ryan acknowledged my presence with only a slight tip of the rim of his dirty glass.

“Say, Tommy.”

“Back at you, Scotty.”

“What’s up?”

“Same old. What can I say?”

The barkeep brought my pale ginger ale and waved away my groping for cash.

This wasn’t going to be easy. “Did you know Diz? The saxman who just died?”

“By rep, mostly. I never caught his act. I hear that’s my loss. People say he was freakin’ good.”

“People are right about that. But I hear he was into some sort of drug thing.”

Tommy shrugged. His eyes rolled back as he swilled ginger ale.

“Antidepressants. Some new kick. Massive quantities.”

Tommy nodded. “It’s going ’round. People say if you hit this side of OD with ’em, sometimes you get better.”

“Better?”

“Yeah. At whatever you do. Makes corporate execs real go-getters. College students pull four-point averages. People say it gives musicians chops you never dreamed possible. Average trumpet men blow like Miles, average sax dudes play like Coltrane, Hawkins or Stitt. Drummers can do the Buddy Rich thing. That’s what people say.”

“People say that, but can you say that?”

His eyes rolled, he drained the glass, shrugged. “Tried it. Made me jumpy, made the sticks slippery. Didn’t sleep for a week. Massive damn headaches, man. So I laid off. Figure if I’m meant to be a mediocre jazz drummer, so be it.”

“How’d you get the stuff, Tommy? Isn’t it hard to get?”

“Your average street pusher don’t handle it. But psychiatrists get free samples by the truckload. Somebody gave me a name, I went to see him, told ’im I was, like, majorly depressed, and I left his office with all the tiny plastic bottles I could stuff in my pockets and carry in two hands.”

“And the doc’s name was...?”

“Blaine. Dr. Everett Blaine. But he didn’t give me a ’scrip. I woulda had to go back for that. Way that stuff made me feel, I wasn’t going back.”

I stood, drank my ginger ale dry on the way up, set the glass on the chipped and water-ringed formica table. “Tommy, what did you do with the leftover drugs you got from Blaine?”

He looked up at me with a steady gaze, swiping long blondish hair out of his eyes with a rock-steady hand. “Gave it all to our lady of the sacred song, dude. Gave it all to Julie Paris.”

That night at the Legion Hall in Roseville, it was hard. When Julie walked in with that in-charge strut, long legs swishing open the slit in her ankle-length, red-glittery sheath, high heels clicking confidently across the polished checkerboard vinyl-asbestos toward the stage, it was all I could do to keep from grabbing her, shaking her, asking her just why the hell she was taking mood-altering drugs for recreation. How the hell could she, after dragging me bodily out of a Jim Beam bottle?

But I didn’t. I reached down and helped her up on the stage. Were her eyes a bit too bright, was she a bit too pumped? Had there been a tremor in her too-warm hand? Before I could reach any conclusions, she whirled to the mike, counted off a hot tempo, and began belting a fast bluesy rendition of “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues.” Tommy Ryan fell right in, and for a while, it was just her and him before us older guys got the tempo and caught the chorus. It sounded like we had planned it that way, and the crowd, stiff as it was at the Legion Hall, applauded at the end as if Billie Holiday had been miraculously resurrected, backed by one of Duke Ellington’s small combo units. I was even feeling pretty proud of myself until she turned from the mike and whispered: “A little off on the second solo, lover. Can you pick it up a bit?”

Crucial: I was crushed. She walked back, pointy toes of her spike heels nosed up to the front skin of Tommy’s bass drum, and snapped off an even quicker intro. Tommy beat it on his sticks and mouthed, “ ‘The Man I Love’ ” to the rest of us. Particularly to me. We did a version close to what Illinois Jacquet laid down in the classic Jimmy Smith set at Newport in New York in ’72. That meant I was up first with a long-winded, wild, honking double chorus. Miffed about Julie, I was hardly up for it, but I did my best. When she picked up the quickly articulated vocal riff into the bridge, there was a frown line for me between her perfect brows. Sorry, Julie love.

It was a long night. We shared a cab back to Millinery Square, wordless.

Inside, in the too-bright light of her kitchen, she tossed her glittery red clutch purse on the bar and sashayed out of the room, taking pins out of the French twist, letting her coppery hair fall free.

I opened the purse. Inside were three plastic bottles. Samples. Xanax, Depakote, Zoloft. I lined them up like good little soldiers on the breakfast bar. When she came back into the room, hair loose about her shoulders, dressed only in a jade-green silk wrapper, I simply gestured at the parade-dress line of mood elevators, mind alterers. Gestured grandly — accusing and questioning simultaneously.

She blanched.

“So you know. If I explain, you won’t get it. And even if you do, you’ll still think I cheated you. I made you stop destroying yourself with alcohol, but here I am a druggie. Well, you’d just better go.”

“I don’t want to. I can’t. I have to hear it.”

She bit her full lower lip, looking from me to the bottles and back again. Then she turned away, leaving the white kitchen light. She returned, a black book in her hand. Julie laid it carefully before me, hands trembling more than a little.

“Open it. Pick a page. Read.”

I did as she instructed. I wished I hadn’t.

Julie paced the white kitchen as I flipped to new pages.

I flipped another page.

One more page.

I stopped reading and closed the book. I couldn’t look right at her, afraid of what I might see in her pretty eyes, the eyes she made me see out of as she helped me stop drinking. Now I knew her vision had been forced, something she concocted out of her own pain, just to help me. If this lady didn’t love me more than life itself, there was no meaning to that four-letter word at all.

“I... I’ve had these problems all my life, with my emotions. My parents said I was high-strung. They said I was too self-involved, only considering my own needs. That wasn’t true, Scotty, I just couldn’t get past the demon. I was always afraid of other people, unfamiliar places, situations I couldn’t script out in my head in advance. Oh, I knew I was crazy. Crazy! But it’s only recently that doctor’s have decided many emotional and mental sicknesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain that drugs can help re-balance. And that’s why I have the drugs.”

“But if a doctor finally diagnosed you, found the drugs that would do the do, why no ’scrips?”

She laughed, a nervous little sound. “You think I can afford this place on the money I make at the gigs? My dear daddy pays for it. But doctors and drugs for a chemical imbalance? Do you know what these drugs cost? A hundred, hundred fifty a month, minimum. No way would Daddy pay. His generation is only a step removed from locking mental cases in an attic for life!”

I found a way to meet her pretty eyes. They weren’t so pretty now. Scared, man, just scared.

“No insurance?”

“No. Nothing. So I got free samples from Dr. Blaine.”

Now that name stopped me cold. Chilly. And then it got worse.

“At least I did, until even he said I couldn’t have any more free stuff. Then his supplier, some pharmaceutical guy from Flat Rock named Abe Jacobstein, called me on the phone when I stopped going to Blaine. He only charges me about ten dollars a month for the stuff. It seems a little stronger, and sometimes I get a little woozy, like maybe the dosages are off, but it’s still better than not having the drugs at all.”

“This is not good news, doll. Let me tell you why.” I told her all I knew, about good old Diz, about DeGarmo stepping off and leaving me, junior shamus of the month, to find out about the drugs that were killing people.

The fear magnified in her pretty eyes and she rushed to me, fell to the floor clutching arms around my legs, begging me not to let her die. No one had ever needed me, not ever, but sweet Julie needed me now. I knew what I had to do.

It took some work. I contacted a physician’s assistant I knew only as Johnny K. He worked The Cass on his own time, whenever he was off duty from the Jefferson Avenue clinic where he put in sixteen-hour days, six, seven days a week. His was the only medical attention some of the street people on The Cass ever got, even if he was seeing them illegally.

He met me by the water, and we talked, as the murky Detroit River lapped against its concrete banks next to the Renaissance Center at the night-deserted Hart Plaza.

“Even sample bottles have batch-code numbers on them from the manufacturer. So you can check your lady friend’s bottles for stamped numbers on the bottom, and the cops ought to be able to track them to the pharmaceutical house that gave them to Blaine. My bet is they all went through Jacobstein’s house, but the contents — well, they’re obviously not kosher.” He pushed up his John Lennon moon glasses. “Street dope dealers don’t touch these kinds of drugs because they’re dirt cheap.”

“That’s not what Julie says, man.”

“Well, most of these drugs are manufactured for pennies, then marked up big-time to the pharmaceutical houses, who take a markup before they sell to pharmacies, where the maximum retail prices are determined by insurance-company co-pays. So the big money goes to the manufacturers, who justify the costs by calling it marketing outlays. Read that as free samples to doctors. The distribution houses keep records of samples. The doctors are only really accountable for the prescriptions they write, since the FDA doesn’t have enough field agents to keep close tabs. Even so, psychiatrists aren’t gonna chance an audit ’cause they can lose their license if caught without their records up to date. Because of the nature of this ‘free samples to doctors’ game, the pharmaceutical houses are sometimes more difficult to track.”

“So, man, I’m lost. If the good Dr. Blaine isn’t the instrument of death for the eighteen stiffs, who is?”

“Your ladyfriend said the drugs she’s getting from Jacobstein differ in dosage. Jacobstein, back in the sixties, was a chemistry major at U. of M., same time I was there, before Uncle Sam said my grades weren’t good enough to keep me out of a prepaid trip to ’Nam. Abe was a follower of Dr. Tim Leary. You know, tune in, turn on, drop out? Jacobstein was busted for cooking LSD on a large scale. And unlike some of the other chemists of that era who gave their product away as a part of the glorious flower-power revolution, he sold his for a sizeable profit.”

“How does a guy busted for that manage to become legit a few decades later?”

“The FDA can’t cover everything.”

I lit a cigarette, the only drug I still allowed myself, since Julie. I was trying to piece it all together, and my P.A. friend waited patiently. “So this Jacobstein guy has found some way to make a profit on drugs too relatively inexpensive for the usual street pusher to make money on.”

“Considering this guy’s past, he’s probably brewing his own brand of antidepressants in a home lab, substituting the fakes for the real drugs. Not to the doctors, but to the patients, through direct contact somehow.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got to get back, Scotty. Sorry I couldn’t help you more. But if this guy is home-brewing things, and the molecular chains are a bit off, or they dissolve too quickly... there’s a whole range of things that can make any drug potentially lethal.”

“And... my Julie is sucking down these home-brewed drugs?”

“That would be my guess, Dyer.”

Sometimes I’m slow, slow, slow, man, from the brain cells I murdered with bourbon all those years, but one thing was crystal. Julie wasn’t a recreational drug user, and not even like Diz, a musician seeking peak performance, sharpening her acumen with overdoses of mood-elevating drugs. She needed ’em to function. To kill the demon. How many other people in society would be better off with a good shrink and drugs to kill the demon? Not a question I was qualified to answer. But also irrelevant. My job now was to get to the bottom of this so that I could help my sweet Julie, just as she’d helped me.

The cab ride to Flat Rock broke me. Not even enough left to tip the driver, who pulled away squealing tires, cursing in whatever language was native to him.

Jacobstein’s address was a cinder-block building with high windows all around, blacked out by a sloppy paint job. I circled it: a locked door in front, a locked door in the back alley, another much bigger cinder-block building on the opposite side of the alley, a door opposite the back door of the smaller building.

It was the pit of night’s belly in Flat Rock and hard to see. I had come right from my meeting with Johnny K., having decided it was time for action, no matter how misguided. I was a private citizen playing detective: Warrants and sound reasoning meant nothing to me. And given my shaky past, neither did breaking and entering.

I forced the alley door on the back side of the smaller building. I flipped on the lights, not caring if I was discovered in my little felony.

An office, in a disarray that suggested massive disorganization. I looked at scraps of paper, discovering nothing. In the midst of the jumble sat an enormous computer.

I am not conversant with the electronic revolution; I’m still the owner of a cherry acoustic tenor sax, not some hopped-up amplified piece of— Well, I believe my position on music and electronics is apparent, man. Nor do I have skill one when it comes to computers. Luckily, this one was on, the little cursor-thingy flashing. I punched the Enter key a few times, past menus, finding one titled “Contact Files,” and whose name should appear at the top but good old Doc Blaine’s. Tapping the sum total of my computer knowledge, I hit a key that said Scroll, and got an eyeful. The list would have been more meaningful to DeGarmo, the county coroner, or that dork who writes the society column for the Free Press, but even a musician like myself could recognize a few names. Like Diz. And Julie.

I was seething over the discovery, back of my neck getting hot, when a ring of icy steel halted that sensation.

“What the hell are you doing in my computer files?” a voice behind the ring of metal asked, none too friendly.

“Mr. Jacobstein, I presume,” I said without turning.

The pressure of the steel circle at the base of my skull increased. “I oughta blow your brains out, right now.”

“Not a good business move, dude. And the way I see it, you are a businessman, right? Profit above all else.”

“I can say you were a burglar, here to steal drugs, a dangerous junkie, and I feared for my life. Justifiable homicide.”

“Maybe. But then the cops might stumble on this file, might want to look into some of your more unexplainable distribution deals, don’t you think?”

“Not if I do you in the factory instead of my office. Let’s take a little trip across the alley. Over to where a dangerous junkie would more likely be scrounging for drugs.”

“Won’t work, Jacobstein. I haven’t got the particulars mapped out, but there’s some scam you have going with switching the real sample drugs, out of the sample bottles, with some half-assed home concoctions that you are not too particular about when it comes to dosage accuracy.”

“You’re a real smart boy, aren’t you? Come on, move!” Hands yanked me out of the chair, forced me to the rear door, shoved me out into the dank night air, across the alley. In the darkness, the hand not holding the enormous Magnum fumbled with keys, but not long enough for me to run. The one overhead mercury-vapor light showed me little of my captor other than a tall, narrow frame and wisping white hair on a balding head. The factory was blacker than the night by many degrees, as Jacobstein shoved me inside. I stumbled over boxes, heard pill bottles crush and clatter and roll away like mice on tiny little rollerblades. I used the darkness blindly, rose and ran.

“You son of a—!” Jacobstein’s voice rang out, loud, then the Magnum spoke, louder. A streak of super-heated air whined at my left ear. I dove into cardboard cartons, more mice skated away on the ice of a new day, actually little pills in little plastic bottles, but in the dark, imagination can make anything out of anything.

I could hear Jacobstein crashing around, like me, and I wondered crazily why he didn’t just turn on the lights. After all, he had the gun; I was just a scared-ass saxman stumbling in the dark.

Like a kid in bed who suddenly becomes aware, knows for sure, that those monsters he has always imagined living under the bed are real, I became aware that there was something big and breathing right next to me.

Then Jacobstein found the breaker box. Lights blazed, and I leaped away from the panting creature near me, a yelp of fear escaping my lips. Jacobstein’s Magnum exploded, a cold fist shattering my left shoulder, and the monster next to me roared. Across the warehouse expanse of boxed and bottled drugs, Jacobstein collapsed with a shriek.

I rolled over to meet my final doom at the hands of the panting monster, and DeGarmo stood there, the barrel of his Glock ten-millimeter smoking from the single shot that had leveled Jacobstein.

“You okay, Dyer? Good thing I didn’t trust you to get through this without me keeping an eye on you. You know you’re bleeding, you jerk.”

“I still don’t understand why,” Julie said.

My shoulder hurt like hell: not surprising with a .44-Magnum hole in it, but Johnny K. said it would heal... at least ninety percent or so. I adjusted my position in my sweet Julie’s arms. “My friend Johnny beat the medical grapevine and came up with most of the info. Dr. Blaine didn’t know what Jacobstein was up to until he noticed many of his patients weren’t coming back for scheduled appointments. He moaned about it when Jacobstein was in for one of his sales visits. Jacobstein hinted that the doc’s patients might be getting help elsewhere. The doc didn’t get the picture. Jacobstein began needling the doc about partnering with him, asking for large infusions of cash to convert Jacobstein’s distribution house into a lab. Remember, most profit in prescription drugs goes to manufacturing labs. The doc said no. So Jacobstein devised this plan of manufacturing knock-off drugs, substituting them in the sample bottles, giving the real drugs to Blaine in Baggies. He accessed the doc’s computer files by hacking the Internet, got the doc’s list of patients, contacted them directly, offered them drugs for a fraction of the cost, no need for pesky office visits.

“Jacobstein knew the drugs were badly made, even knew they were possibly lethal. This not only did not bother Jacobstein, it struck him as a way to further strong-arm Blaine. Particularly when people began croaking from the drugs in sample bottles batch-numbered as being distributed to Blaine, according to Jacobstein’s records. Even before the cops could make the connection to Blaine via the patient list, or the batch numbers on the sample bottles, Jacobstein was at Blaine’s doorstep, pushing hard, threatening, blackmailing.”

I could feel Julie’s shudder. The movement made my shattered clavicle feel like a live electrode stirring in a bowl of gritty mush. I ignored the pain, turned in her arms enough to reach up and kiss her lips. Her eyes were pretty again, if now more sadly vulnerable.

Just like all those old times when I lived on the desolate, crying-out-with-pain Cass Corridor, I still often find myself down by the Detroit River, Hart Plaza, day or night, rain, smoke, smog, or shine, playing solo riffs on Fred, my sax, my faithful companion. Talking through him about the pain and death and suffering... and now, sometimes, the joy — now that I’ve moved in with Julie. I helped her find a caring shrink, one who has helped her get the medication she needs. Daddy is helping with the costs, though I’m sure he still doesn’t approve or acknowledge that his daughter needs medication to keep her brain straight. Julie gets what she needs from her doc, her singing, and me, but what she and the world of people like her need most is understanding, man. A change in attitude. Like that dude Thoreau said, lives of quiet desperation. It doesn’t have to be like that. Fred the sax just wailed out a solid arpeggio to the gulls and the lapping night river that says a change is gonna come. Especially for me and my sweet Julie.