Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (2 page)

Chapter 2

O
n the evening two days before I started to fall in love with Sally Oldfield, a young lady named Roxanne and I had indulged in a foolish amount of red wine, unleavened by a loaf of bread but accompanied by plenty of thou. We had reached the delicate point at which our relationship was about to change gears when the phone rang. That was the first time I’d ever talked to Ambrose Harker. In my eagerness to get back to the clutch, I’d made a few perfunctory notes and promised to meet him in a Hollywood restaurant the next day.

The headache that accompanied me into Nickodell’s at about one the following day was not improved by the sight of several of L.A.’s best-known disc jockeys sucking up the suds on their break from the radio station next door. There was one man who, I knew from one of his ex-girlfriends, was a permanently vitalized speed-freak whose idea of a black-tie evening was drinking fourteen quarts of beer and then urinating on her in the bathtub. Another one, a guy whose hair looked like something you’d pay, but not much, to gawk at on the grounds of Lion Country Safari, was on my D.J. hate-list without the benefit of personal details: he dropped G’s like they weighed three pounds each to make him sound folksy and emitted wolf howls at calculated intervals. Just a regular, everyday, white-loafered werewolf to whom some misguided radio executive had given a microphone and a forty-thousand-watt signal. In Hollywood he made ninety thousand a year. In my neighborhood he’d have been wearing his tongue for a necktie.

“Mr. Ambrose,” I’d said to the sour-looking man who flipped fastidiously through the reservation book. Upon receiving a stare of well-paid incomprehension, I’d given the memory an energetic toss or two and come up with another name. “Mr. Harker. Twelve-thirty. Table for two, or something.”

The maître d’ gave me a reproving look. “He’s been here for quite a while,” he said. It was only twelve-fifty.

“Lucky him,” I said. “All this atmosphere. You want to take me to the table, or do you want me to wander around with my hand out?”

He looked at my clothes. Up to then, I’d felt well-dressed. Then the schmuck snapped his fingers. A waiter materialized at his side. “Table twelve,” the schmuck said.

“Are you sure you weren’t a disc jockey in a former life?” I asked him as I followed the waiter.

“Don’ worry, sir,” the waiter said in the best uptown Spanglish. “Him, he’s like that wi’ everyone.”

“God, I’m glad,” I said. “I thought it was my breath.”

“You breath is okay,” he said graciously, giving me another reason to be thankful for Hispanics. “His breath, is—it’s … like the message from the grave, you know?
El día de los muertos
.”

“
Es verdad
.
Como se llama usted
?”

“Roberto. You’ Spanish is very good.”

“Hangover Spanish,” I said. “And this must be Mr. Ambrose.”

“Harker,” he said, without getting up. “And you’re late.”

“That’s already been brought home to me in two languages,” I said. “Whatever happened to L.A. time? It was such a comfortable convention.”

He toyed with the glass in front of him. He’d made a number of rings on the table with it already, linking some of them into watery Olympic symbols. “Los Angeles time is an excuse for imprecise behavior.”

“I’d love to sit down,” I said. “Thanks for asking.
Muchas gracias
, Roberto.”

“
De nada
,
señor
.” He went back toward the door.

“Greasers,” Ambrose Harker said, pulling a complicated Swiss Army knife out of his jacket pocket and paring his nails with it. “You want to know what’s wrong with this city? Greasers.”

“It’s been a terrific lunch,” I said, getting up again. “I’ll send you a bill for the mileage.”

“Sit down,” Harker said, still working on his nails.

I stood above him. “I didn’t like you on the phone,” I said. “I don’t like you in person. Why on God’s green earth would I want to eat lunch with you?”

“Money,” Harker said, dangling the Swiss Army knife back and forth like a hypnotist. “Money, money, money.”

I didn’t sit down, but I didn’t leave either. One of the reasons I was pretending to look for Mrs. Yount’s cat was that I was uncomfortably short on the rent. “How much money?”

“Enough to overcome your scruples.”

“Scruple you,” I said. “It’s going to be a nice sunset if the clouds clear.”

“They won’t. You’ve driven all the way from Topadoa or wherever the hell it is. It’s going to rain on you going back. You’ve got a hangover. Wouldn’t you like a beer?”

I took a breath. “Well,” I said, sliding back into the booth, “since you put it that way.”

Harker rubbed a hand across his chin and I heard whiskers bristle. He gestured for a waiter and I ordered a Beck’s; they didn’t have Singha. While we waited for my medication, I looked at him.

He looked like a cop: in fact, more than anything else in my fractured frame of reference he conjured up William Burroughs’ Thought Police. Thirty-five to thirty-eight, spare and snaky thin, a taut, high-boned face, skin drawn tighter than a snare drum, clear blue eyes, and a jutting chin. He had a bony, possibly broken nose, an angular Adam’s apple, a flat-top, and thin, muscular wrists that stuck out from cuffs that were half an inch too short. He seemed big somehow, although I had the feeling that he was shorter than I was. For a man who looked as though his nails might usually be dirty, he sure put a lot of effort into them. He’d started on his left hand.

A burst of disc-jockey laughter, hearty, abandoned, and insincere, greeted a disc-jockey joke at the bar as Roberto put a cold bottle of Beck’s in front of me. I waved away the glass, asked for another beer in three minutes, and upended the green bottle into my mouth. Harker watched with something that would have passed for envy in a less abstemious man, put the red knife down, and sipped at his half-empty club soda. It had a crushed wedge of lime floating on top of it.

“I wonder what they used to do with all those limes,” I said after I’d knocked back half the beer. “It’s like mesquite.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s like mesquite?”

“Before people stopped drinking. Now everybody has a lime in his bubble water. Look around. Half the poor souls in this room are kicking the DT’s with lime and carbonation.” He took a gulp from his. “What did they do with all those limes before?”

“What’s that got to do with mesquite? Mesquite’s a wood, isn’t it?”

“It’s
the
wood,” I said. “Try to get a piece of fish that hasn’t been cooked over mesquite. Thank you, Roberto,” I said, as Roberto plunked another Beck’s in front of me. “
Momentito
.” I drained the first and handed it to him. “If half the mesquite-grilled food we eat in L. A. is really cooked on mesquite, there must be acres of mesquite, forests of mesquite, hundreds of thousands of square miles of mesquite somewhere. Have you ever been in a mesquite forest?”

“No,” he said shortly.

“Neither have I. Neither, I’d be willing to bet, has anyone else in this appalling room. So where’s it all come from?”

He took a disapproving sip of his club soda. “Do you really think this is interesting?” he said.

“It’ll do until you say something that is.”

He smiled wolfishly and I could hear spit bubbles popping in his mouth. He reached into a pocket and his clothes rustled. That was why he seemed big: all his sounds were amplified. He tossed a photo on the tabletop and it made a plopping sound. His blue eyes bored into mine.

“Sally Oldfield,” he said. “I want you to follow her.”

I picked up the photograph. “Nice face. A fine, inviting overbite. What’s she done? And have you got any identification?”

Crisp rustling this time, as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. He dropped it, with predictably ear-splitting results, next to my bottle. Ambrose Harker, it read, chief of security, Monument records. Then some phone numbers.

“She’s stealing money,” he said. “And she’s leaking our release schedule to the competition. We also believe she’s helping other labels get in touch with our talent.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“To steal them. To sign them, to take them away from us. Do you know what I mean?”

The phrase had sharpened my headache and refreshed my memory. It had run through our phone conversation like an operatic recitative.

“You ask that more often than anyone I’ve ever met. I’ll bet you make the waitress show you her order pad before she goes to the kitchen.”

“Understanding is important,” he said, as though he were reciting dogma. Dogma silences me: what can you say to someone who’s just told you that, in essence, he’s signed away his free will? Fortunately, I was spared the necessity of thinking of anything to say by the sight of Roberto, standing above us with pad in hand. Harker ordered first with the air of someone who usually orders first. He said, very slowly and clearly, and more loudly than was strictly necessary, that he wanted a chef’s salad, making absolutely sure that Roberto understood he didn’t want any ham, and I ordered a burger.

“Onions,
si
or no?” Roberto said.

“Si, and then
si
again,” I said.

“You mean two onions?” Harker said.

“Let it rest,” I said. “And another beer.”

“On the way,” Roberto said cheerfully, already heading for the kitchen.

“You’re going to get two slices of onion,” Harker predicted gloomily. “You just watch.”

“I’ve faced more compelling crises. If I do get two, I’ll give you one.”

“You certainly take a careless approach to life.”

“Mr. Harker,” I said, “it’s my life. I’ll be careful with yours, okay?”

“Just don’t be careless with Sally Oldfield.”

My beer looked very good all of a sudden and I drained it. Harker passed a hand over the back of his neck. His hair crackled. “You have to stay with her,” he said. “I don’t tolerate slip-ups.”

“Yipes,” I said. There was a long pause. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

“She’s in A&R,” he said.

“Here’s your big chance. I don’t understand.”

“Artists and repertoire. The people at a label whose job it is to look for talent. She was hired because she had a good background in underground music,” he said distastefully. “The kind of bands that play in the little clubs.”

“Head-banging,” I said. “Heavy metal, mohawks, chain saws, and G-strings.”

He didn’t ask me what I meant this time. “Exactly,” he said. “It’s important in music to be, um, current. If bands that play heads of cabbage are what sells, you look for bands that play heads of cabbage.” Roberto or somebody put another beer on the table and I picked it up.

“You drink too much,” he said.

“But my heart is pure. So what’s she doing wrong?”

He eyed the beer and hefted his own glass. It was empty. No one scurried to refresh it. He put it down again and sipped a bit dolefully from a glass of water. ”A lot of money, cash money, flows through A&R,” he said. “These kids in these shit bands, they’ve never seen a buck. Let’s say someone from Monument shows up at one of these places and hands them a thousand bucks not to sign with anyone else. They don’t. Or maybe they do.”

“And if they do, the money sets up housekeeping in the debit column.”

“There’s virtually no way to recover it. These musicians, they’re using drugs and, um, drinking. If you confront them they say they’ve never seen anyone from Monument, and who can prove the contrary?”

“Who indeed? How much money do you think?”

“More than thirty-one thousand dollars of Monument’s operating capital.” He lifted his arm, and a moment later Roberto slapped another beer on the table.

“For
me
,” Harker said, turning a shade of red that would have interested a cardiologist. He picked up the Swiss Army knife and slammed it onto the table. ‘Perrier for me, okay? Do you understand?”

“Comin’ up,” Roberto said, and disappeared forever.

“What about the rest of it? Release schedules and all that?” I shoved my water across the table at him as a pacifier.

“Schedules are everything,” he said, taking a dour sip. “You can sell two million copies of an album by putting it on the market at the right time, or half a million by doing it wrong. Let’s say you’ve got an album by a middle-selling band, someone like, oh, who knows, the Dranos. Put it out in a week when nobody else is releasing, and you’ll do okay, maybe a few million units. Put the Dranos out against Michael Jackson, you’re looking at returns. And the label behind Michael Jackson picks up most of the few million units you were counting on.”

“Big bucks,” I said.

“Five or six million dollars. As you would say, big bucks.”

A waiter we’d never seen before put some food down in front of us. Harker waved his glass ineffectually at the waiter’s retreating back and then glanced down at my plate. “See?” he said, by way of revenge, “no onion at all. You have to be more precise.”

“Who gave you my name?” I asked.

The blue eyes came up to meet mine. “What’s the difference?” he said.

“I like to know who my friends are. Or my acquaintances, at any rate. Why? Is that a hard question?”

“Sally Oldfield, that’s your only business.” His eyes wrestled mine to the mat, won, and came up for more.

“Not until I say it is,” I said without looking away. “And while we’re at it, why don’t you go to low beams?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s considered polite to dim your headlights when approaching an oncoming vehicle. Anyway, if you want me to remember anything you’re saying, you’ve got to stop trying to outstare me. It makes me feel like I’m arm-wrestling.”

The waiter reappeared with a plate covered by a silver dome. He put it down on my right and whisked the dome off to reveal about seventy-five slices of onion.

“Hah,” Harker said in a vindicated voice.

The waiter winked at me and ignored Harker’s waving hand.