Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (19 page)

Buh-DOOM, buh-DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM.

Doom-CRACK, doo-doom-doom-CRACK, doom- CRACK, doo-doom-doom-CRACK, bip, bip, bip, buh- DOOM-DOOM-CRACK.

This was not one of those sound checks where we sat and reminisced, jammed, or played pool. Ray was late but Leo was actually drinking a soft drink and behaving himself, and the roadies were working hard. The equalization curve wasn’t set right on the sound system, and Nick was having a hard time figuring out how to adjust it on the new mixing console. The drums sounded good and loud, but there was a gut-wrenching low-frequency ring that would set the woofers roaring with feedback. It was a sound that tickled the soles of my feet, rattled the strings of my bass as it lay across my lap, and made my stomach want to roll over.

This sound check was hell, and the feedback wasn’t the only thing making my stomach turn. Detective Tom Watson was sitting next to me at a table in the back of the club. He’d followed me there in his late model Ford, an unmarked police car—the car I’d seen in my rearview mirror.

Watson had short iron-gray hair and a neatly trimmed regulation straight-line mustache of the same color that accentuated the drooping form of a thin-lipped mouth. His blue eyes gleamed with alertness, and the nostrils on his slightly aquiline nose flared frequently when he talked. His shoulders were broad, his posture perfect. I remembered Lasko’s thumbnail sketch: Abilene native, son of a Texas Ranger, born-again hard- ass. It fit.

He waved another gory 8 x 10 in front of my face. “See these spatter marks down in the comer?” I nodded. “Now look at this,” he said, handing me an X ray of Retha Thomas’s skull.

“See the crushing wound? See the angle? That straight line was caused by the impact of the body of your bass guitar hitting her near straight on. Back of her skull.”

“What does it mean?” I said.

“This was the first blow, son. She had her back turned, standing, when it happened. Maybe she knew the person. After she was hit once, she started to fall and was hit again, in the front of her face, and her chest. The pattern and shape of the droplets on the wall shows that, shows what angle the weapon came down, and so forth.”

He pulled out another 8 x 10. Seen in a black-and-white close-up, the sawtooth-edge droplets looked like black suns. Another photo showed the comer by the door. There the spatters were in the shape of tadpoles, their skinny tails pointing out the direction they had come from. “She curled up in a fetal position here,” he said, “but the perp kept hitting her. The rest of the wounds bear the peculiar outline of the neck of the instrument, with little notch marks made by the frets.”

The next photo was of the bed. The sheets were blotched with blood. Her clothes were wadded up against the headboard. Retha wasn’t in it. These photos were taken after she’d been taken to the hospital.

“We know that she was in bed after the attack, not before,” he said. “And she was in no condition to get there on her own. The perpetrator put her there and ripped off her clothes to make it look like a sex-related crime. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t, but there was no vaginal penetration, no semen in any of her body cavities.”

“I hope she lives,” I said. It was a redundant remark, but I felt obligated to inject some hope into the conversation.

“So do I,” he said. “On the other hand, I know it may sound cold, but we’d know a lot more if she’d been killed, the way it turns out. We can lift fingerprints from a corpse, you know, using superglue fumes, a hair dryer, and orange dye. We can cut open your stomach and determine whether you had lunch at the NightHawk or Threadgill’s. But the doctors and paramedics were concerned with saving her life instead of preserving evidence. That’s how it ought to be, but the crime scene was pretty well trampled, and we have to make do with X rays and doctor’s reports and what you see here in these photos. Plus a little luck and a lot of shoe leather.”

He wrinkled his nose as he looked around the bar. I got the impression that he never set foot inside one unless it was pertinent to his job. “You know anything about murder?” he asked.

“I’ve seen victims up close, and I’ve seen people get shot. Is that what you mean?”

He shook his head, shuffling the photos and putting them back in their folder. “Nah, I’m talking about killing, why and how and when. This is a blunt instrument case. This kind of killing goes all the way back to the day Cain slew Abel. A poker game goes sour and the next thing you know the loser has a table leg in his hand dripping blood and brains. An English professor blows up at his wife for breaking his favorite meerschaum pipe and he picks up the fireplace poker and parts her hair with it. A gun is a whole other matter. You carry a gun, you’ve already got some of the mindset in place to kill, and when you do it, there’s some distance between you and the victim. You can even pretend that it was the gun that did it, that drove you crazy.

“But a blunt instrument is different. You might pick it up and start bashing before you realize what you done. So you gotta be mad, you gotta be in a murderous rage. It’s liable to be messy as hell, and if you’re determined to do the job, it generally takes more than one whack.”

As if to punctuate the remark, a rapid-fire roll of the drums cannoned through the speakers, rattling the ashtray on the table as well as my nerves. Watson scowled at the stage, then at me.

“Lemme see that bass,” he said.

I handed him the Danelectro. “This is a different brand,” I said.

“I know,” he snarled. “The other one was a Fender. Just like your name.” He paused for effect, then turned his attention to the instrument, gripping the neck with both hands, hefting it upside down like a club. “Doesn’t matter. See, this is how the weapon was held for the first couple of blows. Then the perpetrator lost his grip and dropped it or it flew out of his hands.”

He put the bass down on the table, then picked it up by gripping the curved sides of the body, moving it in a short arc. “See,” he said, “the way the neck marks got on her body must have been when the perp held the weapon like
this.
”

It looked awkward and it felt awkward, watching him hold the Danelectro like that, and trying to think about trying to hit someone like that, but still the images came. And they were not pleasant.

He put the bass down and looked at me, poker-faced.

“What does this mean?” I said.

“I don’t know. I just know it happened that way. I don’t know why and I don’t know who, but I know that’s the way it happened. The perp, who was your height, give or take a half a foot, lost his grip and picked it up again by the body. In the meantime, the victim crawled or stumbled across the room. It was lucky, actually, because the firmer grip and better swing he had going with the first couple of blows were offset slightly by the fact the victim was standing, and her head was able to move with the blow. When she was crumpled up on the floor against the wall is when she could’ve really got her brains splattered. Here,” he said, picking up the bass by the neck. I took it and put the strap back on the pegs and slung it over my shoulder.

He looked pleased with the image, as if I’d just put my own noose around my neck.

“He kept hitting her after she was balled up in the comer,” he said. “Another reason for hitting her with this other grip was probably because of the awkward angle there in the comer. And that indicates to me that he knew what he was doing, he wasn’t just mad, he wanted to make sure he got the job done.”

He looked at me like he was daring me to disagree with his conclusions. I said nothing.

“I don’t like you, Fender,” he said. “I don’t like you at all, and I’m under no obligation to treat you kindly. I get the same paycheck whether the crime was committed against a decent person or scum, and more often than not, things like this are perpetrated against people like you. And that’s no coincidence. This is my job and I don’t have to bullshit you.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me, or were you just trying to gross me out with these photos?”

He sucked in his lower lip, making a clucking sound. “You think you’re some kind of wiseass and you pal around with Lasko thinking that gives you some sorta carte blanche, but it doesn’t. You’re an ordinary citizen, not a cop, and what’s more, you’re a sinful heathen. I came here to tell you I don’t want you calling motel managers under false pretenses trying to do my job for me. And I don’t want you hanging around with Bingo Torres. He’s got enough trouble.”

“So you know Retha had a visitor by the name of B. Q. Torres, and she was here on behalf of IMF.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all that. But I don’t think Bingo left his house Sunday night. He’s just about to be indicted by the grand jury and has been under what you might call a watchful eye, you know.”

“Meaning he’s under surveillance and you know for a fact that he didn’t leave home?”

He shook his head slightly, winking his left eye. “I said he
was
under surveillance. The feds have been dragging their feet, and we’ve had a manpower shortage ourselves, so surveillance has been spotty at times. Besides, he’s awfully cagey.”

“You didn’t answer my question about whether he left the house Sunday night. Did he?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t even say if I knew if he did or not. I just said I didn’t
think
he left.”

“And if you knew, you wouldn’t necessarily tell me about it.” He nodded. As far as nonanswers go, he had Carson Block beat. “What about the record company guys?”

“I’m checking them out.” He slid his chair back and got up, hitched up his pants, and buttoned his jacket. Not, however, before giving me a generous glimpse of his shoulder holster and handcuffs. “Lemme tell you something, Fender, and I hope it’s the last time I have to tell you. I got a job to do, and I don’t need your help. You got your own job, scummy as it is.”

“MIKE CHECK, MIKE CHECK, TESTING ONE-TWO,” came Nick’s voice, thundering over the PA. “Martin, are you ready? MARTIN FENDER TO THE BANDSTAND, PLEASE.”

“Looks like they want you,” said Watson.

“Yeah,” I said. I got up and held the neck of the bass up straight so it wouldn’t hit anything as I walked up to the stage.

The next time I looked back he was still standing there, glaring at me. A waitress approached him with a drink tray, but he brushed her off with a cold stare.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The low notes rumbled out of my bass like the growls of an angry dog.

“
Route 66,” “Spoonful,” “Shakin’ All Over,” “Hellhounds on My Trail.”

The strap cut into my shoulder like that angry dog’s leash.

“
Mannish Boy,” “What a Woman,” “Take Me to the River.”

By midnight Antone’s was packed with crinoline skirts and leather jackets and halter tops and pinstripe suits and 501 button flies and wing tips and beaded cocktail dresses. Conk-crowned heads mingled with high flies, Stetsons, stingy brims, gimme caps, and beehives. In other words, the usual eclectic mix in the usual swirls of smoke.

Clifford Antone, godfather of the Austin blues scene, came out of his office, white shirt collar spread open wide over the lapels of his black suit, nodding approval. The long-legged queen of R & B, Lou Ann Barton, stood at his side, nursing a tall cocktail and crushing a cigarette under one stiletto heel.

Ladonna and Michael were there, Lasko and Barbra Quiero were not. A beaming, rotund Vick Travis trundled up in his leather jacket, and a caveman Ed the Head in a white bib shirt and black tux jacket sat next to the mixing board, midway between the dance floor and the front of the club. The halogen lamp over the console sprayed out over Vick’s table, so I was able to keep an eye on him. Like a guard dog.

Billy kept the beat steady and sweaty, a mileage logbook sticking out of his back pocket. Ray blew his horn like a pomade-slick demon from hell, turning a cold shoulder on the other band members, especially Leo. Leo ignored Ray too, and played well despite the cast on his hand. Sometime between sound check and the first song, he’d switched from sodas to Jack Daniel’s. Nadine wobbled on a stool by the dressing room door. She spent more time looking down at the blue drink in her hand than she did looking up at us. The wound was still there, whatever it was. My bass kept growling.

Oh, man. Saturday night and it had been a hell of a week. I felt like I was in a different dimension, standing up there onstage after all that had happened. I felt like a man inside a television. I told myself it was just a combination of mood and too-bright lights in my eyes as I watched the people who were watching us. I told myself it was just an illusion. But it wasn’t.

“
Who Put the Sting on the Honey Bee,”
“Born Lover,” “The Crawl,” “Cadillac Daddy.”

The bass notes shook the room like thunder: Vick would look at Leo and his new guitar, and Leo would look up from it and Vick would look away. Ed the Head looked hard and compact and menacing, a baboon in a tuxedo. People would pass by Vick’s table and he would give a robust laugh, pumping their hands, insisting that he buy them a drink, then erupt again, as if that was the funniest thing in the world. Then he’d look back up at the stage, and I knew. He was watching me. Not just what I played, or my face, or my clothes. But something, some part of me. More than once I checked to see if my fly was down. It was not a healthy feeling.

Bingo Torres came in during the last song before our break. The two cronies I’d seen poolside, Roberto and Nameless, followed in his shadow. Bingo seemed to be looking up toward stage right, Leo’s side. When Leo stepped up to the mike to sing “Trailer Park Babe,” Bingo appeared to shake his head with disgust, elbowing Roberto, pointing. Soon the thrift shop proprietor maneuvered his heavy torso around to see who was standing behind him, and the Payola King appeared to look at him like the sole of a shoe looks at the back of a cockroach.

That was when I knew that there was something to the weird sensation of being a man inside a television set. Some of these characters were watching us, wearing their secrets on their faces, unaware or just not caring that I noticed. I felt like an actor onstage, suddenly realizing that some of the actors in the play were reading from scripts that were different than mine. But as I studied the psychic interplay between Bingo, Vick, and Leo, I had the feeling that I was about to be able to read between the lines.