Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (4 page)

“I’ll try to remember.”

“Well you do that, then.” He sighed hard. “Hell, I know you weren’t trying to pick this girl up. Not consciously, anyhow. I know you and Ladonna got a good thing going. But maybe Retha Thomas didn’t know that.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know, man. Girls just seem to bend over backward for musicians, that’s all. And you getting so whacked out of your mind isn’t helping matters any. You start doing dope on the road or something?”

“Hell no. I never touch the stuff. You know that.”

“Well, maybe I do. You do like your Scotch, though.”

“Scotch never did this to me. Give me a urinalysis.”

“What for?”

“I think I was drugged.”

“Oh, come on, Martin.”

“You want to solve this, or not?”

He just scowled and looked away.

“Lasko, look. I told you that I drank her drink. That’s one of the last things I remember. She said she was a detective. Maybe she found out something she wasn’t supposed to find out. Maybe I ended up with the Mickey Finn that someone intended for her—”

“Or maybe you were s’pose to get it and this is all a big frame-up. Aw, come on. They already tried doing a remake of
D.O.A.
Filmed it here in town. Even with Dennis Quaid, it was a bomb. It ain’t gonna go over any better now.”

“You can’t rule it out. She said she was—”

“She was unemployed. Hadn’t had a job in three months. Before that she worked for a record store in LA, Tower Records. We checked with the people at La Quinta Motor Inn where she was staying and it doesn’t appear she even knew anybody in town. Just here for a vacation, apparently.”

“If she dies and the autopsy turns up a drug and you keep me down here much longer your chance of finding out if it’s in my system goes down the drain. As a matter of fact—”

“All right, all right. Might as well let you piss in a bottle. Least that way we get
something
out of you.”

&&&

And that was how we ended up over at Brackenridge Hospital, looking at Retha Thomas in a coma. Lasko had hoped that she would have regained consciousness and would be able to vouch for me. No such luck. Also, after my urine sample was sent down to the lab, Lasko wanted to personally talk to the lab people at Brackenridge to make sure everything was coordinated properly. Retha had had at least a sip of that margarita.

It was a waiting game. Her parents were flying in from LA. The doctors were waiting for a change. They said she could go either way. The DA was waiting, too. If Retha came to, they could ask her if I was the one who beat her up and ripped her clothes off. If she died, I was a murder suspect. The stakes would be higher. They could hold me for several days without bail while they gathered evidence and decided what degree of murder charge to file.

I wanted to get out of there before her parents arrived. I wanted her to live, I wanted to know what happened after I drank that margarita, and I wanted someone to pay for what they did to her.

I was almost as annoyed with Martin Fender as Lasko and the Lieutenant were. I felt dumb, numb, and guilty. Maybe it was the hangover talking, but whatever it was, it nipped and nagged at me until it became a nagging chorus with another thing that had been bugging me for eighteen weeks, something I hadn’t done anything about.

CHAPTER THREE

It was almost eight o’clock when Ladonna’s black Ford Escort pulled up in front of the hospital. As I walked down the steps, I couldn’t see her face, only one porcelain white arm and shoulder, a charm bracelet on a slim wrist, and long red nails tapping the steering wheel. I could still hear Lasko’s words.

“Aside from your bass being the weapon and her blood being on your shirt, it’s circumstantial evidence. But pretty heavy circumstantial evidence that might get one hell of a lot heavier between now and tomorrow. Thing is, you’re a well-known character about town. That gets you in free to all the clubs. It gets you a bit of recognition on the street, gets you strange women wanting to give you a ride to parties. For chrissakes, you been around the music scene forever, you ought to get something out of it. But the Lieutenant doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that, it’s less than circumstantial. You can’t put it in the bank, you can’t take it to court. Might be the only thing it gets you is one last free night . . .”

They said her skull was cracked up like an egg, and there were internal injuries, too. Things didn’t look good. Ladonna knew it. I could see that. Feel it too.

She wore a Day-Glo green tank top and white Capri pants with a wide black patent leather belt and sling-back shoes. With her hair combed off to one side, you could see that she had better bone structure than Madonna. But that face bore a stem look now, modulated by a slightly quivering chin.

“Welcome home,” she said as she whipped the car out into traffic, cutting across a couple of lanes of 7th Street to get on the interstate. She hadn’t kissed me, hadn’t even touched me. And I didn’t press the matter. “Billy dropped off your bags. I’m taking you to your place. I can’t leave Michael alone for very long.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Of
course
he doesn’t know,” she snapped. “By the way, he said to tell you again that you were really good last night. I had a hard time getting him out of the club. It was good. But he can’t be out all night, and even though things are usually pretty slow at the real estate office with the economy the way it is around here, I have to work, you know. If only I would have stayed, and . . . oh,
Christ
...”

She jerked the steering wheel, lurching the car onto the off ramp. She took the serpentine curves of Riverside Drive even faster than usual, sailing through the amber light on South 1st, going left, up the hill and into my driveway. She parked under a big oak tree, set the brake, cut the ignition, and hunched over the wheel, crying.

To my surprise, she didn’t push me away when I tried to do something about it. She still sobbed, chewing on the knuckles of a slim hand knotted into a fist. Without looking up she said, “I guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself. All I know is I’m trying to decide whether I should paint the bathroom in the condo pink and I get a call from Lasko making you sound like a dangerous criminal and he’s making me promise that I won’t let you do anything else stupid and all I can think is I’m almost thirty and I don’t need this shit.”

“Nobody does,” I said. “Paint the bathroom pink and you can hang that velvet Elvis Presley in there. I’ll do it for you. Let’s go talk.”

It was awkward. Even making drinks was awkward when it should have been a normal thing. A couple of Scotches on the rocks can be the most normal thing in the world, but the world had changed an awful lot between now and that last margarita.

And the drinks helped only in the telling of the tale, not in accepting it. When I was done, she leaned back and looked stunned. “I can’t believe it, but I’m taking this personally,” she said. “You’ve been in trouble before, but so many times it was because you were trying to help someone out, or you were hanging around with some of your weird friends and some of their troubles became your troubles. But this time, Martin, this time it really seems like you did it to yourself.”

“Why? How? All I did was go to a party with a semi-stranger. Maybe my troubles are connected with that decision, but I can’t imagine how my decision is connected with what happened to her. And why is it that Lasko thinks he can trust me, but you want to blame me?”

“She was beat up with your bass, Martin. Maybe Lasko thinks he knows you, but I know you well enough to know that you don’t leave your instrument in strange places. You’re very careful with that thing. But I suppose if you were messed up enough to be careless with that thing, then maybe . . . Oh, God, I hate this.”

“Ladonna . . .”

“I mean, hell, you took a ride with her. If your bass was in her room, then
you
must have been, and . . .”

“I’m not sure if you’re more worried that I might have almost killed her or that I might have had sex with her.”

Her face went red. Every muscle in her body seemed rigid. I moved a little closer to her on the couch, and when I reached out to touch her, she shot straight up. “Don’t touch me
,
" she hissed.

“They’re doing tests.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. Her voice was icy, hard.

The building shook when she slammed the door.

I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I just wanted witnesses. Almost as bad as I wanted a cigarette. I mean, I wanted one bad
.

It was stupid. Suddenly my decades-long addiction to smoking was foremost on my mind. It seemed to symbolize the whole situation. Everything seemed cloaked in a blue smoke haze. The road trip. Being back in town. Being a musician.

Three weeks into the road trip I got a scratchy throat that turned into a stubborn throat infection. I thought about cancer, I thought about mortality, I thought about getting older. I thought about the possibility that I might not get much older if I didn’t give up cigarettes. And my singing voice, never much to begin with, was getting hoarser. Giving up cigarettes seemed like the right thing to do. So I did.

Right away I became less tolerant. Sound checks that dragged on longer than they should became a supreme irritation, rather than just one of those things. Brain dead promoters struck me as candidates for flogging. Critics, whom I’d never had much patience for, got less and less of my time. And Leo. I had to wonder if his antics had gotten worse, or I’d just gotten less tolerant of them.

Maybe it was my age. I didn’t worry about smoking six years ago, when I was almost that many years away from being past thirty. Maybe I was just older, and less tolerant, period.

Cigarettes still seemed like a good idea. The situation I was in would be so much easier to sort out with an ashtray, a lighter, and a cloud of smoke in the room. Cigarettes give you attitude, atmosphere. And cancer.

My throat felt fine again. But I was losing my mind.

I was just headed out the door to buy a pack when I saw Nick walking down the hall. He was shaking his head, roadie’s flashlight stuck in the pocket of his motorcycle jacket, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

Nick had blond hair down to his shoulders and the heavyset, blockish build common to a lot of roadies. When he was bent over, hooking things up, the back of his jeans usually drooped low enough to show the elastic band on his underwear. “You wanna know what the hell happened?” he said gruffly. “I’ll tell you what happened. We got fucking held up by a couple of Latina biker chicks is what happened.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard this one before,” I said.

“Go ahead, laugh if you want. They said they’d give us a ride down to the club if we’d get them in free. Said their bikes were parked back in the alley behind one of the new discos off Red River and Sixth. I swear there’s a dozen new ones opened since we left town.

“So we follow them back to the alley and that’s when one of them pulls a .357 Magnum and says free up your cash. We did, then they made us strip so we wouldn’t chase ’em.”

“But you did anyway.”

“Damn right. They were a couple of tough babies. But we chased after them when they headed back for Sixth Street. Hell, we didn’t think they’d shoot us in front of all those people cruising the strip. We would’ve caught those bitches, too, but a couple of beat cops nabbed us right outside of Raven’s. We had to spend the night in jail. I called you, man. How come you didn’t come down and bail us out? Haven’t you checked your answering machine?”

“I’ve had problems of my own.” I told him about them. The knockout cocktail, the girl in a coma, the circumstantial evidence . . .

“Damn,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. Anything I can do?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Sure thing,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Say, I was wondering if me and Steve could get an advance on the next gig. I know we missed last night but it wasn’t our fault ...”

I gave him a couple of twenties out of the Continental Club pay. “Try to stay out of trouble, OK?”

He started out the door and gave me a funny look. “You’d better talk to Leo, Martin. I really think he’s losing it.”

&&&

After Nick left, I sat down with my thoughts for a while. Leo had always been a little zany. Up until this last road trip he’d seemed, if anything, slightly manic depressive. Sometimes he’d brood for days inside his house, not venturing outdoors unless it was for a gig. Then he’d play guitar like a house on fire. I didn’t worry about him then.

Politicians have to be a little crazy, comedians have to be a little crazy. So do musicians. Leo and I had discussed this at length late one night as we drove from Columbus, Ohio, to New York City. Driving such a long distance between one- nighters makes irony a constant companion. Philosophy comes easy. Because what were rock and blues and jazz after all? What was music to us was always noise to someone else. You dedicate your life to something that is basically noise. Is that crazy or what?

The people I played with were fanatics for the blues. The blues had evolved more or less directly from traditional African music, the call-and-response chants of slaves in the fields, and the gospel singing of the poorest of the poor black cornfield workers in the Mississippi Delta. It was the legacy of black Americans, but we were hooked on it, too. The guys in this particular band may have been white, but we didn’t identify with white bread America either. Being born white and middle class didn’t mean we had the keys to the castle, and although we stood more chance of ending up with jobs on Wall Street than a kid from the ghetto, it was just as unlikely.

So there we were, making a living making noise, arranging that noise in patterns that were the heritage of another race. Thus were our obsessions and our occupations intertwined. We knew we were a little crazy, and we knew we weren’t getting rich, not any time soon. But we liked our work, and there was nothing else we’d rather do. It was, as the song goes, nice work if you can get it.