Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (17 page)

“I’m glad you took the rest of the afternoon off,” I said. “That has more than made up for it.” She came closer and rested her head on my chest as I reached around on the floor by the bed, looking for my cigarettes. They didn’t seem to be there. She kissed my chest. I let my fingers walk under the bed and they bumped into something, but it was soft and silky, definitely not a pack of non-filter Camels.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking for my cigarettes. Are they by any chance on that nightstand over there?”

“I thought you quit.”

“I did. But I had a relapse.”

“Why don’t you wait,” she said, her hair tickling me as she swept my bare stomach with it, “till after?”

“That’ll be the second time I skipped.”

“That’s what I mean. See what it’s like.”

It was nice.

&&&

“Did you hear something?” she said.

I opened my eyes. It was dark in the bedroom. We must have dozed off. I got up and peeled the curtain back. No one was outside on the sidewalk, but it sounded like someone was walking down the stairs to the ground level. The shadow made by the two-story complex stretched out across all four rows of the parking lot, meaning the sun had gone almost all the way down.

“I don’t see anything,” I said, “but I’ll bet Michael’s getting hungry. I might be, too.”

She smiled dreamily and stretched. There was something magical about it. “For what?” she teased.

“How ’bout a little Eye-talian?”

“Haven’t you had enough?”

“Not nearly,” I said.

The kid knew how to make a sandwich, didn’t he?

&&&

Redfish Veracruzano, fried plantains, and fresh green beans, steamed with butter and garlic just until the snap was gone. Candlelight, birds of paradise, Billie Holiday, single malt Scotch, Ladonna in a negligee. Afterwards, mocha fudge cheesecake, espresso. A cigarette, some more espresso. Ladonna’s expression looking sated but sly under the candlelight. Her abundance of platinum blond tresses, tangled like a passionate argument, held at bay by a white knotted headband.

Dinner was too late for Michael, who’d given up on us and microwaved a pizza. As compensation, he was allowed to watch
Batman
on the VCR in the living room, eating popcorn, drinking diet soda. Whenever one of us stepped in there to ask if he was OK, he rolled his eyes and said, Yeah, sure, of course I’m OK, why wouldn’t I be OK?

She didn’t want any help with the dishes, so I excused myself and went back in the bedroom to use the telephone. Vick answered right away, still sounding like the hundred grand was tickling his fat stomach. He even called me “pal.”

“Just wanted to see if we could square up tomorrow,” I said. “Sure, Martin, sure,” he said. “I wanna see you play tomorrow night, anyway.”

“Good. I was hoping you weren’t going to be lamming out like you said anytime soon.”

“No, Martin. I don’t know how I could stand to leave this town. You know? I mean, what else do I know?”

“Beats me. I’ll see you, then. Maybe right after the gig.”

“Fine, pal. I’m going over to the Hyatt now, let Carson from IMF buy me some drinks on his expense account.”

I let him go, then called my answering machine. There was a message from Lasko. I called him at home. It wasn’t that important, he said, or then again, maybe it was. “Narcotics Division and I are collaborating on something,” he said. “A load of big black pills are making the rounds, causing a lot of problems. You remember a couple of cute blond gals used to hang out together at Club Foot a few years ago? Everybody called them the Shimmer Twins?”

“Brenda and Suzanne?”

“Yeah. Both dead. Last night. Found a couple of the big blacks in their makeup bags. Prelims from the lab indicate these pills consist of the same stuff that was in your urine sample, Martin.”

“They caused the OD?”

“Yep. Evidently a half of one of these boogers is what most people are taking to party on. Half of one causes people to dive face first in their enchilada dinner, change lanes under a semi, or walk through a glass door. A whole one or at most two is most likely fatal.”

“Damn. I guess I was lucky.”

“Just thought you’d like to know.”

I thanked him as best I could.

I rejoined Ladonna and Michael in the living room. We watched TV together for a couple of hours, then Michael went to bed. I went in with Ladonna as she kissed him good night.

Dark hair, perfect skin, very large eyes looking up at the two of us, he looked like an angel. Ladonna bent over him, holding her negligee together in front so her breasts didn’t spill out, an angel’s mother. I stood back a couple of steps and turned out the light, feeling just a little out of place.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When I stepped out the next morning to get the newspaper, there was a note tacked to the door. Big block letters written in that rubbery purplish-red lipstick of hers spelled out the simple message.

CHICKEN DICK

Why? Was it jealousy? I didn’t think so. Was it because she thought I was laying down on the job, spending time with my girlfriend when I should be out tracking down the guy who tried to murder her friend? I didn’t know what to make of it. All I knew for sure was that Barbra Quiero was still in town, still keeping an eye on me, still full of unresolved weirdness. I didn’t tell Ladonna about it.

We went to Seis Salsas for brunch. I had
huevos borrachos
and Ladonna had a potato-and-eggs breakfast taco. Michael had
huevos rancheros.

The South First Street restaurant was festive and packed as usual. Mexican bric-a-brac and potted flowers abounded inside, and birds and squirrels romped and hopped from branch to branch on the sprawling oaks outside the window. None of it brought me any cheer.

“Twelve hours ago you were a different guy, Martin,” she said. “Don’t be a chump.”

“Chump?”

“You heard me. You’ve done your part. You made a two a.m. extortion payoff. You took someone’s knockout dose and they almost died anyway. If you just have to do something, maybe you should go tell Lasko about the payoff.”

“I just think it’s Vick’s business, not the police’s.”

“Vick’s business,” she said. She shook her head as she dipped a chip in a small cup of chipotle salsa.

“After I drop you guys off,” I said, “I’m going to go talk to the IMF Records guy at the Hyatt. The guy who just paid Vick a hundred grand for his little record label.”

She looked thoughtfully at Michael, then at me, smiling but disapproving. “You know what I like about you?”

“No. Not all the time.”

“You try so hard,” she said, “even when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A & R stands for “artists and repertoire” and is as common an abbreviation in the music business as CEO is on Wall Street. A strange, often slimy breed, A & R reps are the record company men (rarely women) who walk point; the talent scouts who scour the battle zones, back yards, and hinterlands for tomorrow’s platinum-selling artists.

Every week they are expected to sift through hundreds of tapes submitted by anxious bands and dodge phone calls from agents, managers, deejays, record promoters, and disgruntled band members who got the ax just before the deal was signed (“
but we were a
group,
man, and this contract only has the singer’s name on it
”).

Some A & R reps turned out to be genuine music fanatics as well as talented wheeler-dealers, people who happened to have a job doing what they loved doing. Others were not so genuine.

Their careers often hang by a slim, gilded thread: sign the next Madonna and you’re pronounced a wunderkind, sign two overhyped flops in a row and you drive up one morning to see them stenciling a new name on your designated parking slot.

But none of them seemed to go away for long. Jamie over at EMI would look grim-faced one day because the nu-folk band he signed had stiffed, and Michael at MCA would frantically check his Rolex between each bite of sashimi, waiting for the ax to fall after the new Christian rap artist he signed was arrested for selling crack in Washington Park. Next week, Michael would be ensconced in a new office at Polygram and Jamie would be veep at CBS.

Why did they do it? They had to be streetwise and hip enough to elbow their way past the three-hundred-pound ex-con bouncer at an underground club at four a.m. to see Jane’s Addiction, then show up next morning bright-eyed and blow-dried for Messrs. Bottomline, Whatsthedownside, & Faxmethefigures. They had to explain to fashion-victim one-name singers the meaning of “packaging expenses,” and they had to explain to stiff-necked CEOs why LA’s hottest guitar slinger is in jail for giving a fifteen-year-old girl a “pearl necklace” in the band’s dressing room in Bibleville, Alabama.

They had to be obsessive, obstinate, and obstreperous to get the bands and contract concessions they were after. They had to be obtuse and obsequious because it was rarely up to them to say yes, it’s hard to say definitely no, and you never say never. They were the hunters and the hunted. People either wanted to buy them a drink or put a bomb in their car. They spent three-quarters of their waking hours on the phone and were experts at avoiding your phone calls.

By living in Austin and playing in a band that already made a living (most of the time) playing music that never went out of style, I had more or less managed to bypass dealing with A & R men. Over the years I’d met between fifty and a hundred of them as they dropped in on our gigs. They knew us by reputation and not rarely would claim to have several of our indie label discs in their record collections. They gave us their cards, occasionally advice, frequently drinks. Some would pump our hands and ask about the pedigree of our instruments, saying,
You know, this really isn’t my cup of tea
, and others would grin widely, slap us on the back and say,
Keep it up, man, you guys are the real thing
.

It was a compliment I rarely returned.

I had no trouble finding Carson Block. Vick had said he was going to meet him for drinks at the Hyatt the day before. The Hyatt was a favorite stopover for record company people. It turned out that Block was just one of a team of IMF reps who’d come down to deliver the contract and check to Vick, but Block had been the one to initiate the deal and he wanted to personally usher the individual artists into the IMF fold.

He sounded relieved to hear from me when I called. He thought for sure I’d know where he could find Tammy Lynn Johnson, whose R & R Addiction album he was particularly hot on. He wanted to remix a couple of the songs, release them on a three-inch CD for the college market, and send her on tour with a band he’d just signed called Eurotrash. I gave him her number. He was grateful. What could he do for me? I asked him to do me a favor before we met, but I didn’t tell him about my after-brunch conversation with the manager of La Quinta Motor Inn. That little bomb I wanted to drop in person.

&&&

We met in the Foothills bar of the Hyatt. Oddly enough, the Foothills bar is on the seventeenth floor. The bar on the ground floor, complete with a babbling brook, is called something else. From our comer table, you could see Town Lake and downtown. Tinted a rainy gray by the bar windows, billowy white clouds hovered over the city, puffed up like strutting roosters. Down below, there were sailboats, windsurfers, and rafts on the lake, blankets spread on the grassy shores, joggers and bicyclists chugging around the gravel track. Downtown was well scrubbed and inanimate as a freshly embalmed corpse, with the homeless creeping out of the bushes to sit basking on the benches, watching the grackles, glancing up at the tall empty buildings, staring down at their feet, which were often shod with donated exercise shoes from Goodwill or the Salvation Army. The Capitol sat twelve blocks away, a sedate granite statesman taking the weekend off. Just on the other side of the bridge and across the lake, the Sheraton Crest hugged the north shore, keeping Vick’s Vintage in its shadow.

Carson Block had a plane to catch. He’d sent back his breakfast after catching a whiff of animal fat, he hadn’t slept well, and, worse, he’d left his address book back in LA.

“I’m simply lost without it,” he explained. The vice president of A & R for IMF Records wore an unconstructed white summer jacket with a seam down the back and the sleeves rolled up (neatly) nearly to his elbows, a purple knit shirt with no emblem over the pocket, and acid-wash jeans. They went with Nikes like nothing else would.

A diamond stud earring glistened in the lobe of his left ear. His jeans were creased. Two days’ worth of blond stubble made his face look fuzzy and out of focus, not at all like Don Johnson. His hair was parted on the side and just barely touched his shoulders when he tilted his head. When he moved, the jacket folded up or angled oddly, making it look like his torso was in danger of collapsing. This man was a tastemaker, I reminded myself. I felt sorry for the bands he’d just signed.

“So you did what I asked?” I said.

He nodded, chewing one side of his lower lip. This gesture, I found out later, would pass for an emotive response.

“And she didn’t work for you, ever?”

“No,” he said coolly. “And as far as my assistant can determine, she hasn’t applied for a job with the company in the last six months. We usually try to keep applications for that long, but you can imagine how many applicants we get, so . . .” He let it hang, turning his palms up, helpless.