Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (7 page)

And then Ray sauntered in, cocky and sharp as Dick Tracy’s jaw—straw racetrack hat, houndstooth suit, wing tips, black- and-white thick and thin socks. Every hair in place, his mustache actually looking as if it were drawn with a fine tip felt pen. His saxophone case was at his side and Kate was behind him, on high heels in a Chanel-esque suit and pillbox hat and tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, cigarette smoldering at a right angle between two black-gloved fingers, around her neck a round patent leather purse on a chain big enough to hold one large pill or maybe a silver dollar, but not both.

He put the case down, pointed to a chair out of camera range for Kate, and wrinkled his nose as if it had just detected a trace of drugstore cologne. He looked at the cameras and techs, then me. “Are you off the hook yet, Martin?”

“Any minute now,” I said. “Once they get the lab results . . I let it trail off. Ray was smirking with amusement at Billy’s casual green rayon shirt, the usual pack of Kools showing through the translucent material. As Billy rapped his snare like a judge banging a gavel, Ray gave him a wink, then glanced toward Leo, who was turning around from his amp, tuning up. When he saw the cast on Leo’s hand, the perpetual sneer seemed to freeze in place, his lip quivering slightly, as if he were having a stroke.

“Leo,” I said.

“Let’s just get on with it,” snapped Ray, obviously irritated beyond any reason that I could see.

“We waited for you, Ray,” I said. “You think we could wait for Leo to tune up?”

He regarded me coldly. “What you do with your time is your business. Right now it’s my time, and no one’s going to waste it, especially, you know.” He paused and gave me a strange look. “Where’s your bass, Martin?”

We finally got started. Stupid, stressed-out me: My P-bass was at police headquarters, a realization that was awful in both its timing and implications. The band members groaned a bit, but they were pretty understanding. Lasko had questioned each of them since yesterday. I had a spare, a Danelectro, but it was at home and we were already late. It turned out that one of the studio interns had a Gibson EBO-1 in the trunk of his car and he loaned it to me. Whereas a Fender Precision represents perfection in style and function, an EBO does not. Either burpy and muddy at best or muted and untrue at worst, it would have to do.

We decided on a song and proceeded to come up with an eighty-second segment that would work. We were a blues band and not a radio jingle band, so it took some doing. We never knew the length of any of our songs until they appeared on the local records we put out and we saw the times on the labels, but we never played them the same way again anyway. The song we picked for this spot, “Who Put the Sting on the Honey Bee,” was a hard-charging song with enigmatic lyrics that Leo drawled out of the side of his mouth, letting the inflections he used on the words reveal their true meaning. Like when he sang, “When I’m out of
luck,
late at night, the way you
touch,
treats me right ...” the word
touch
sounded nastier than a word that rhymed exactly with
luck.
Not that he was above singing lyrics that left little to the imagination.

The song was in F# minor arranged around a slight deviation of the usual
I-IV-V
twelve-bar pattern, and the crew was grooving to it, laughing, tapping their toes, miming applause when we wound it up. But when I botched the announcement at the end by saying, “Get off your
band
tonight, go see a
couch,”
no one laughed or clapped. They laughed the first couple of times, but not the fourth.

“We could do a voice-over,” suggested the producer. “You’re playing at Antone’s Saturday night, right? We’ll just tag that on the end. You guys just smile at the camera, or look tough, or whatever, after you hit the last chord. How about that?”

“That might do,” said Ray. “Or Leo can do it. We don’t want Martin telling people to come see us at Antone’s,
blome
of the
hues.”

A voice-over would be fine, we decided. Just before we did another take, Billy summoned me over to his kit. “Martin . . .” he said, and counted off the song, then played the beat, emphasizing the feel by elongating the spaces before the snare beat. He played a couple of bars, staring at me, bobbing his head along with it. “You see?” he said. “Like that. I know you’ve got something else on your mind. Just try, man, and we’ll get out of here.”

Leo came over and slapped me on the back. Ray was busy adjusting his reed. We tried it again.

Billy was right about other things being on my mind. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the bass. It sure wasn’t the music. I’d played the song hundreds of times and played songs just like it thousands of times. The riffs were a part of me, the different modes and nuances being no different than words in a conversation. But when I glanced down at my hand around the neck, it looked like a fist holding a club. Someone had held my bass like a club and clubbed Retha Thomas almost to death with it. And that wasn’t all they did. She was a girl I’d just met. A girl who, well, I’d thought was pretty good-looking at the time, hadn’t I? Maybe I hadn’t planned on going back to the motel with her, but I was just off the road and half crazy from it, maybe subconsciously I’d been thinking I’d just play it by ear, see what happened . . . That’s not a crime. After all, Ladonna and I weren’t married. But if I was just going to see what happened, then I got a hold of a drink that had been spiked, then what? Casual sex being OK, what about casual murder?

“Martin . . .” It was Billy.

Everyone else had stopped playing.

“You missed the change,” said Leo.

My face burned red. “Sorry. One more time.”

I put the thoughts out of my mind. Only the song, only the song would be on my mind this time. Billy gave a four-count and off we went. A crunching, sleazy beat. Greasy. Smell of barbecue, sounds of horns honking on South Congress on a hot afternoon. Guitar clank, saxophone growl. Billy kept it on that East Side cruise mode, and rumbles came from the bass in my hands, hands that I would not look down at. Leo sang, snarling . . .

It’s Saturday night and I got a right

to a cocktail and a smoke

the way she did that walk on me

got to be a running joke

money talks but love can sing

every ache and every sting

there’s a lump in my throat

and it’s got a name

I’d call her up but I’m ashamed

guess you know that girl put my heart in a sling

Who put the I in satisfy Who put the oooh in the foo-ooo-ool

Who put the flame in the three-alarm fire

Who put the boo in the boo hoo hoo

Who’d put a hex on a guy like me

Who put the sting on the honey bee . . .

And just beyond the too bright lights, Lasko walked in. I recognized his dark silhouette—the gimme cap, curly hair, beard, beer gut. Gun sticking out under a Hawaiian shirt, rocking back and forth on his cowboy boots. Then his hand came up, giving the OK sign. The rocking back on his boots, I knew, was for the music. The OK sign was from the lab.

I nearly blew the tempo as I sighed with relief, but jumped back on track before it was noticeable, and we climbed up to the high note, chugged it, then clanged the last chord, letting it die out until all you could hear was the buzzing of the tube amplifiers under the lights.

“All right, all right, all right,” said the producer. “That’s it. That’s a wrap.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Given all the questions in the world that begged for answers now, even after getting a few of the most pertinent ones answered, why did I have to decide how I really felt about Michael Jackson?

Michael DiMascio wanted to know. And he didn’t know about any of the other questions, only his own.

We sat together on Ladonna’s soft sofa. She relaxed in the recliner. She’d had a hard day at work, and her time with me this evening had been no picnic. Michael had his mother’s dark eyes and fair skin but his late father’s dark hair, cut in a Beatle cut. On an inquisitive eight-year-old, it looked just right.

“Ronnie Gilroy says Michael Jackson is a fag,” said Michael.

That was a tough one, too. I looked at Ladonna. She nodded at me, meaning that she wasn’t going to offer any help. “Well, Michael, I doubt that Ronnie Gilroy knows that. Is Ronnie one of your school chums?” Michael nodded. “Well, like I said, I doubt if Ronnie would know that. Michael Jackson is very secretive about his private life.”

He just sat there for a bit, knocking his Converse All Stars together. He looked from one side of the room to the other without moving his head. Then he said, “What’s a fag?”

I looked at Ladonna. She thought I was doing fine. I said, “It’s a guy who likes other guys. You know, instead of girls. They, uh, like to sleep together, but . . .

“You mean they have sex together? They do it? Guys and guys? I thought only guys and girls could.”

This was tough. “You already know about this stuff?” Ladonna was nodding.

So was Michael. “Ronnie Gilroy told me at school last year. He wrote
f-u-c-k
on the bathroom wall and I asked him what it meant. Then I came home and told Mom because I didn’t know if she knew about it or not, because I never heard her talk about it. But she already knew.”

Ladonna was stifling a laugh, in spite of herself. Too bad. It would have been the first time in at least a day.

Michael went on. “At first Mom was mad. Then she went and bought some books about it and told me all about that stuff. But I never heard about fags before today.”

“Well,” I said, “you probably shouldn’t use that word, anyway, Michael.”

“Why not?”

“Because, because it’s a word that gets misused. You know how they say ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me’?” He nodded. “Well, that’s only partially true, because sometimes people use words to hurt people. And a rock doesn’t hurt anything, if it’s just lying there, and a word doesn’t hurt anybody if it doesn’t get used in a bad way. But when people are, you know, sensitive, and they yell things at each other . . .”

“OK, I get it.” He was nodding, leaning back on the couch with his hands locked behind his head. “You mean like how you and Mom were yelling at each other when you first got here tonight?”

Ladonna stood up. It was time for Michael to go to bed. He got the message and slid off the couch. “I’ll come tell you good night in a minute,” said Ladonna.

“Michael,” I said, “I like Michael Jackson. But I think his last album was better than this one.”

“Me too,” he said, hands in his pockets, walking to his bedroom, a small man. Before he shut his door we heard him say, “Roland Gift is a better singer.” Then the door shut, and we were alone. Sort of.

&&&

Her body was perfect.

She sat on the bed, arms locked around her knees, bathed in dim light from a lamp with a perforated black shade that cast protozoan designs on everything in the room, including us. She’d taken off her clothes and was going to take a shower before going to bed, but when she saw how I was looking at her she was faced with a decision: should he stay or should he go?

So I sat on the other side of the bed, and the satiny topography of the dimly lit sheets might as well have represented the Sahara Desert. Or the Antarctic. I felt that far from her. And it wasn’t fair that she had to sit there so quietly with her feelings, so naked and beautiful and perfect.

And by perfect I don’t mean to imply that she was some sort of human mannequin, either. Aerobics and an almost bottomless well of energy kept her firm and trim, but there were small traces of stretch marks on her breasts from having Michael, there was a vaccination mark on her arm, there was a little brown mole somewhere. But they just made her more appealing. Like tiny flaws in Michelangelo’s marble. And knowing that I knew where they were and that I might not ever caress them with my callused bass player’s fingers again, was causing me pain.

“So there was no semen in her,” she said abruptly. “But there was a trace of someone’s blood under her fingernails. What type was that?”

“O positive.”

“And yours is B positive.”

“Right. And it had a cocktail of Librium, Dalmane, Percodan, Demerol, Seconal, and PCP swimming around in it. Just like hers did, although I got most of the dose.”

“And she gave it to you.”

“Well, I don’t think ...”

“How long did you know her? An hour? An hour and a half?”

“Yeah. About an hour and a half.” I didn’t add that that didn’t include whatever time elapsed after I drank the drink and before the time that she was attacked.

“So how could you know if she gave you the drink on purpose or not? Or did you know her before? Did you maybe go out in the parking lot for a blow job, a musician’s handshake?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know damn well what I mean. I’ve heard your pals say it millions of times.” Acidly sarcastic, she said, “ ‘To some girls sex is like a handshake.’ ” And pointing to her crotch, “ ‘Put her there, pal.’ ”

“I can’t believe you’d even ask.”

“I can’t believe you’d answer with a bullshit response like that. Indignation is the first defense of a liar.”

“Maybe so. But the answer is still no, and it happens to be the truth.”

“But you’d lie to keep from hurting me. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And maybe you think you’d spare us both a lot of hurt if you were able to just gloss over the whole thing and pretend that whatever happened didn’t have anything to do with you. But you can’t remember, so you can’t say for sure. Even though they didn’t find your semen inside her and someone else’s blood was under her fingernails, you were with her. What about fingerprints? They didn’t find your fingerprints in her room?”