Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (8 page)

“They haven’t been able to do anything with the smudges and partial prints they have, except to determine that none of them belong to me. I don’t think I went to her room.”

“You went to a party with her.”

“I’m not denying that.”

“Good.” She folded her arms and looked at the wall. “Bastard. I trusted you. What about all those other nights?”

“I was faithful. For eighteen weeks I was faithful. I called you every few days, I sent you flowers. Last night I was tired and frustrated and a little drunk. You didn’t have time for me so I went to a party with a girl. Something happened to her. I’m trying to find out what.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I won’t give you up without a fight. If you don’t want to try to work this out, if you don’t think it’s worth it . . .”

A big tear rolled down her cheek. Her eyes were all squinched shut, crow’s feet forming in her smooth skin. She shook, all of her. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t taken her then and put my arms around her and not let go. If I wouldn’t have squeezed her tight, nestling her cheek next to mine, letting her bury her protests in the collar of my shirt. And I’m human.

We stayed together until my clothes were damp with sweat, her body warm and tender and still trembling just a bit, but yielding. She sighed.

“I’m sorry, Martin. I know I’ve been beating you up with this, holding it over your head, treating you like a suspect just because you were hanging around with her. I’m not worried that you would have hurt her. But I am jealous and angry and generally sickened that you’re in this situation, and I just can’t forgive you for it yet.”

“I kind of figured that.”

“It’s been a long hot day, Martin,” she said finally. “I’m going to take a shower. You’d better hang those clothes up or you’ll never get the wrinkles out of them. I think you picked up all the clothes you had over here before you went on the road. Let me get you a couple of coat hangers.”

“But that means I’ll have to take them off.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

She got in the shower and I undressed. I toyed with my cigarette pack for a while, thinking. Then the phone rang. I answered it.

“Martin?” said a tentatively aggressive voice. “This is Vick. Vick Travis.”

“What do you want? Who gave you this number?”

“Your pal the cop.”

“Even pals make mistakes. Good-bye.”

“Now hold on. Hear me out. I figured he owed me since you tried to sick him on me this afternoon. Yeah, you hear right. I know you told him that gal was asking around about me. But I’m innocent as the goddamn pope. My blood type is A negative.”

“OK. So maybe you didn’t do it. Is that why you called?”

“Nope. I wanna hire you. Your boss at the collection agency tells me you got a nose for trouble.”

“It usually seems to find me. I’ve had mixed results when I go looking for it.”

“Come on, man, I’m serious. Dead serious. I got trouble and I can’t afford a detective. Blackmail. Interested?”

“I’ll call you back. I’m busy.”

“Well . . .”

I hung up on him.

And then Ladonna came in the room and turned off the lamp. Her body was coolly damp. But warm. She trembled under my touch. We kissed. It was nice, but it didn’t last long enough. “Who called?” she asked softly.

“Vick Travis.”

She pulled away. I kept our legs locked together.

“What did he want?”

“He wants me to do some work for him. He’s being blackmailed.”

“Blackmail?” She shivered. I could feel the bed shake. “He’s gross, Martin. He’s weird. Why doesn’t he go to the police?”

“Why don’t most people who get blackmailed go to the police? I don’t know what it’s about. I hung up on him.”

“Sounds like you talked for a bit, though.”

“Long enough,” I said. I got on top of her. We kissed some more. She was quiet again, making soft low sounds, trembling a bit more under my touch, especially when I touched her breasts or her flat belly, and then she stiffened again.

“What are you going to do, Martin?” she said.

“What do you mean? Am I going to meet him, see what’s up? I don’t know.”

“Martin. He’s weird.”

“I know. Can we forget about him?”

“No. And still, I keep thinking about the other thing.”

“The girl.”

“Yes.”

“Try not to.”

“I can’t help it. Your touch, Martin, your body. It’s so nice. It’s so nice to feel it again, wanting it. But I can’t help thinking, she probably wanted it too. And she might die thinking about it. It’s not fair, Martin. It’s a nightmare and I don’t know if it’s a real nightmare or just a thing, a thing that didn’t happen. It’s not fair.”

“I know.” I fell back on the bed, and she didn’t cling. She laid there. I laid there. Vick Travis just loomed, a bloated presence there in the darkness, above the bed, above Ladonna’s fragrance, above my guilt. Like the Goodyear blimp hovering over a game that the home team is losing.

“Did you kiss her?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, you asshole.”

I felt my face flush as I remembered that kiss. It was the kind of kiss that makes promises. It was even possible that part of me regretted not following through. If I would have, maybe she wouldn’t be in a coma now. Possibilities came at me from left and right, none that would do us any good.

“Maybe I should just go. Get it over with.”

She didn’t answer right away. But then she said, “Yeah. Maybe you should.”

“Goddamn it. I told you I wasn’t going to give up easy.”

“You’ve fought pretty hard tonight. You’re pretty hard to resist, actually. But the other thing . . . It’s big. It’s really big. But I’m trying, I really am. The thing is, I have to work tomorrow. I know that sounds trivial, especially to a musician, but I don’t see this getting any more resolved tonight. I’m tired and it’s hard to think. Maybe you should go. Especially if you think it could help.”

We kissed good-bye.

CHAPTER SIX

We sat on folding chairs on either side of a card table in a dusty little cubicle that was heavy with cigarette smoke. A single bright bulb hung from a greasy cord. Bugs fluttered around it. There was a small wooden desk shoved in the corner with invoices, notes, and returned checks pinned to the wall. Keith Richard was nodding out in a poster tacked up by the door leading out to the guitar room. Vick Travis belched, then squelched it with another swig of Carta Blanca beer. He almost looked like he was going to say excuse me but didn’t. It would have seemed too trivial.

I drank my beer and watched him smoke his fat, aromatic French cigarettes. It was time to get to the point.

“Maybe the girl was part of it, I don’t know,” he said. “But these guys, there seems to be two of them, they want twenty grand, and they want it damn quick.”

“They going to burn your store down if you don’t pay up, or what?” I said.

“Well, it’s simple. It’s kinda funny, the way it worked out. First of all, you know about these records?” He pulled a half dozen albums and EPs off the desk and plopped them down on the table.

I fanned them out. Big Bad Wolf and the Blues Gig, Live.

Tammy Lynn Johnson. The Backstabbers. Cloud 19. A.
couple of others. All either Austin groups or from the general area. All of them were on the R & R Addiction label, released locally in the late ’70s or early ’80s.

“R & R Addiction is my private label, Martin. You know that.”

“Sure. Tammy Lynn’s getting some action on the college charts now, isn’t she?”

He nodded. “So are the Backstabbers, and they played Cloud 19’s ‘Solo Bolo’ on ‘David Letterman’ the other night.”

“Congratulations. ”

“The big congratulations are coming from IMF Records in LA. A hundred grand worth of congratulations. They’re buying the label, and they wanna put out the catalog on CD.”

“They’re buying you out?”

“Yep. The copyrights, the masters, everything, lock, stock, and barrel. Besides the CD deal, they figure to recut some of the songs, repackage and do a rerelease, nationally. Whatever. I don’t give a damn. They can do whatever they damn well please for a hundred grand. They can melt down all the stock and stick it up their butt, all I care.”

“So how does that get you blackmailed?”

“Well, that’s one side of the record—I’ve tried to keep the deal a secret, but this is a small town when you’re dealing with the music scene, so evidently these boys, whoever they are, know I’m getting the money. The flip side of the record is this ...” He flipped over the Backstabbers record and pointed to some fine white print.

“Danny Cortez, Executive Producer,” I read aloud. “That’s what you wanted me to see?” He nodded. “The title ‘executive producer’ means he put up the cash for making the record, right?” He nodded again. “And that name sounds familiar. Would that be Bingo Torres’s old stage name, back when he was playing the teen canteens?”

“Yep,” said Vick. “Bingo Torres, South Texas Payola King. Currently about a cunt hair away from federal indictment on the payola statute. He’ll do time, too. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

“What’s your connection?”

He shrugged, then spread his hands out expansively. “I’ve known him a long time, man. Like I know everybody, except this New Wave crowd. Back in the ’60s he used to come in the Jade Room over on the East Side, peddling thirteen-year-old girls so he could afford to keep that band of his going. Wanted to be the brown James Brown. Ran peyote out of Matamoros for a while in hollowed-out Bibles. Then his uncle died and left him a radio station. You know how they got records played back in the ’60s, man. It was the good old boy network, and we had a lot of Texas hits. Remember Mouse and the Traps, the Zachary Thaks? Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Chains, Freddy Fender, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Playboys of Edinburg, Sir Douglas Quintet? Tons of ’em. Hell yes. Well, Bingo got to know one of the indie record promoters, checked out his territory, how he did his job. What Bingo did, he found out what all these deejays liked, you know, as tokens of appreciation. It wasn’t always nose candy or cash. One it would be a certain brand of whiskey, a single malt Scotch, real expensive, especially by the case. One liked black girls with real small tits. Another one had to have a new car every year. Bingo tallied up exactly how much money he’d need for six months’ worth of juice, got a loan for that amount, and then went to the record labels and said, Hey, I can do this cheaper and better than you been paying these other guys to do it. They gave him a chance, and within a couple of years he’d built himself a regular empire. Not off those groups I just mentioned. They really were popular; they didn’t need juice to get their records played. It was acts from the coasts, one-hit wonders looking for a comeback and lame, mob-backed artists that really needed him.

“You know, after Alan Freed got busted they passed some laws and everybody acted real shocked that stuff like that was going on in the music business, you know, like they thought that the reason something got played on the radio was because everybody liked it. Yeah, real funny. These things go in cycles. So Bingo saw the cycle coming and got out of the promo biz and went into real estate for a few years, made a pile of money, then got out before the oil glut knocked the bottom out of the real estate boom. He jumped
back
into record promotion, and he also paid for the pressing of a couple of my records here, using his old stage name. But those records flopped, and Bingo ‘Danny Cortez’ Torres don’t give me the time of day anymore. Let’s talk modern history. You familiar with a record promoter named Mike Sigor?”

I nodded. “I think I met him once.”

“Well, the feds probably got a picture of you shaking his hand in their files. They been dogging him for three years and they haven’t been able to make a case, but last October they got lots closer than they been. What they did, they nailed a couple of smaller fry, a couple of indie promoters—Ray Ash out of New York and Craig Wilson out of Nashville. Both pleaded guilty to payola and criminal tax charges, but they’re not gonna have to serve any time. Both used to work with Mikey Sigor, you see, and you can bet your ass that they ratted him out.”

“You think they ratted on Bingo, too?”

He shrugged carelessly. “Who knows? It doesn’t matter. Payola is the system, man. It’s the only promotional system the record companies know. Once in a while somebody is gonna get thrown to the lions. But here’s the feds, with the first two convictions on the payola statute in thirty years, and another one on the way. They’ve hit the East Coast and Nashville, and they’re about to score on the West Coast with Mikey Sigor. I guess they figured they might as well get one in the Southwest market. Their blood is up, they come here, and they find Bingo.”

“Bingo.”

“See, Bingo had got out of the promo business while the getting out was good, before he got caught with his finger up a deejay’s ass. Just like how he got out of the real estate biz. But when he jumped back into the promo gig, he wasn’t hip to the new, ’80s way of doing things, and his good old boy approach stuck out like a sore thumb. They nailed him with the help of this DJ in San Antone who had IRS problems and offered to cooperate. He wore a wire and let ’em videotape Bingo personally handing him five grand in cash to play the shit out of a couple of new records. They say he’s a little paranoid about Bingo. I heard he wants to go into the witness protection program, and that’s one of the things that has slowed up the indictment. But the word is the case is solid, and Bingo’s looking at doing a dime in the pen.”