Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty Read online

  Jack watched as Holley unpacked a compact tape deck and a box of cassettes. There was an eclectic selection of new age music—lots of Windham Hill albums, along with starkly packaged relaxation tapes of wind, storm, sea, rain—and a varied lot of early rock, blues, and country. “Got some scarce stuff here,” said Holley, picking up a handful of what were obviously home-dubbed tapes. “Tiny Bradshaw, Lonnie Johnson, Bill Doggett, King Curtis. Got the better-known stuff too—Roy Orbison, Buddy Knox, Doug Sahm.” He chuckled. “A real Texas collection, those last boys. Also have some George Jones—got a soft spot in my heart for that boy too. Me and my first band played behind him back in ’55 on the Hank Cochran show.”

  “What’s that?” Jack pointed at what seemed to be the only vinyl record in the box of tapes.

  “I’m real proud of that.” Holley held up the 45. “‘Jole Blon.’ Waylon Jennings’s first record. I produced that for him back when he was playin’ with the Crickets.”

  Jack took the record and examined it gingerly, as though looking at a holy relic. “I guess maybe I heard this on WSN.”

  “Yep,” said Holley. “Just about everybody I respect from that era learned about music first from listenin’ to the Grand Ole Opry.”

  Jack set down the 45 of “Jole Blon.” A tremendous lassitude swept across him. He looked at the remains of lunch. Nausea rocked back and forth in his belly. He sat back on the hotel couch and tried to keep his voice steady. “’Fore I came to New York, I listened to the Opry all the time. Once I was here, I found a station out of Virginia dat carried it.”

  “You come from the same place as your niece?” Holley said interestedly.

  Jack nodded.

  “Alligator your totem too?”

  Jack said nothing, trying to control the new pain in his gut.

  “’Gator’s a powerful guardian animal spirit,” said Holley. “I wouldn’t mess with one.”

  Jack doubled up and tried not to whimper.

  Holley was at his side. “Somethin’ wrong?” He ran his hands down Jack’s chest and stomach. His fingers fluttered lightly over the man’s belly. He whistled. “Oh, man, I think you’ve got some trouble here.”

  “I know,” said Jack. He groaned. Any other year he’d be pretty sure he could avoid the flu-type stomach bugs. But Tachyon had briefed him about opportunistic infections. He’d had the instant image of viruses zeroing in on him from every pesthole in the world. “I think maybe it’s just the flu.”

  Holley shook his head. “It’s a heavy-duty power intrusion I’m pickin’ up here.”

  “It’s a bug.”

  “And the bug’s gettin’ through to you because your protection, your personal mantle is screwed.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Jack.

  Holley took his hands away from Jack’s abdomen. “Sorry, nothin’ personal. I don’t know if Cordelia told you, but I—well, I know something about this stuff.” Jack looked back at him bewilderedly. “What you need,” said Holley seriously, “is a traditional treatment. You need to have the intrusion sucked out. I think it’s the only way.”

  Jack couldn’t help himself. He started chuckling, then guffawing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like this. It hurt to laugh, but it helped as well. Buddy Holley looked on, apparently astonished. Finally Jack straightened a bit and said, “Sorry, I just don’t think, uh, sucking an intrusion out of my body would be a real wise idea right now.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Holley. “I’m talkin’ about a psychic thing, pullin’ out the cause of the discomfort usin’ the power of the soul and the mind.”

  “I’m not.” Jack started laughing again. But Dieu, he did feel better.

  By two in the afternoon Cordelia had accessed both the New York Public Library Reference Base and the Public Records DB in Albany. She covered several notebook pages with scrawled numbers and notes. Her task was akin to one of the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles she never had the patience to finish.

  Shrike Music was a wholly owned subsidiary of Monopoly Holdings, a New York corporation. Cordelia had dialed Monopoly’s central Manhattan number and tried for the president. Who she eventually got was the executive vice president for corporate affairs. That man told her the Buddy Holley matter was not his to comment upon, but that she should send a detailed letter to Monopoly’s president, one Connel McCray. But couldn’t Cordelia speak to McCray directly? she inquired. The president was indisposed. It was hard to say when he’d be back in the office.

  Cordelia ascertained from Public Records that Monopoly Holdings was a division of the Infundibulum Corporation, a consortium controlled by CariBank in Nassau. The call to Infundibulum netted her a frustrating twenty minutes holding for an equally unsatisfactory conversation with the CEO’s executive assistant. The long distance call to Nassau got her a heavily accented Bahamian voice claiming complete confusion about this Holley chap.

  After hanging up, Cordelia regarded the frustration the phone represented. “I think I go home now,” she said to herself. A break was in order. She could come back to the office later and work all night.

  Veronica and Cordelia shared a high-rise apartment downtown on Maiden Lane. There wasn’t much of a view—the living room windows looked out on a narrow courtyard with eleventh-floor neighbors only thirty feet away. At first it had been like watching very dull big-screen TV. Cordelia quickly learned to ignore the rest of the building. It was pleasant just having her own small room. Veronica could use the rest of the apartment as she pleased.

  Cordelia had made the maximum use of her room, engaging a Soho carpenter to build an inexpensive frame of two-by-fours to support her bed. Instant sleeping loft. She just had to remember not to roll off the top during the night. The six feet of space beneath the mattress allowed her a closet, book shelves, and space to store her albums. That left her most of the wallspace for prints and posters. One wall was dominated by a color poster of Ayers Rock at dawn. The opposite wall had the common WHEN YOU’RE UP TO YOUR ASS IN ALLIGATORS poster, but with the tired maxim’s payoff amended in black marker to read YOU KNOW YOU’RE HOME.

  Cordelia was slotting a Suzanne Vega tape into the deck when her roommate walked in. Veronica was wearing a slinky white gown, along with a platinum wig and violet contacts. “Masquerade?” Cordelia said.

  “Just a date.” Veronica rolled her eyes. “It’s a guy from Malta with a crush on both Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor.” She changed the subject. “Listen, any good tickets left for Saturday?”

  “At twenty-five hundred dollars a pop, I can’t really comp you,” said Cordelia.

  “No problem. These are for management. Miranda and Ichiko can afford them. They just would like a little consideration about table placement. Close to the stage okay?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Cordelia jotted a note and put her book of Things to Do back in her handbag.

  “So how’s work?” said Veronica innocently.

  Cordelia told her.

  “Sounds like you could use a real detective.”

  “If I knew one, I’d ask. I’m desperate.”

  “Well,” said Veronica. “It just so happens maybe I can help you out.”

  “You want to tell me what you’re talking about?” It would be so good, thought Cordelia, to turn this over to someone else.

  “Not yet,” Veronica said. “Let me work on it. And you can make sure those seats are good ones.”

  “Help me get Buddy Holley in front of the cameras,” said Cordelia, “and I’ll let Miranda and Ichiko sit onstage behind the monitors. They can hold the microphones. Anything their hearts desire.”

  “It’s a deal. Now then,” continued Veronica, “before I go uptown, whose turn is it to buy cat food?”

  The men sat and listened to music and drank. Buddy Holley drank soda. Jack drank dark beer. Room service was accommodating. They talked. Every once in a while Holley would get up to change the tapes. They went through Jimmie Rodgers and Carl Perkins, Hank William
s and Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Conway Twitty. Jack was surprised that the singer had some tapes of newer artists: Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle. “Like the monkey said,” Holley said simply, “you gotta keep up with evolution.”

  They talked about the fifties—about Louisiana bayou country and the dry vastness of West Texas. “Tell you,” said Holley, “it ain’t sayin’ much about Lubbock when about the only place to go on Saturday night is Amarillo. I went back there after the oil boom, and then again after the crash, and nothin’ much had changed either time.”

  “No Buddy Holley Day?” said Jack.

  “Figure I’ll have to die before that happens.”

  They had a lot in common, Jack decided. Except there’d never be a Jack Robicheaux Day in Atelier Parish. Not even after he’d died. He fumbled through the box of cassettes and held up one that was unlabeled except for the word “new.” “What’s this?”

  “Aw, that’s nothin’,” said Holley. “Nothin’ you’d want to hear.”

  There was something about the way he’d protested, Jack thought. When Buddy Holley went into the bathroom, Jack set the mysterious cassette in the deck and punched “play.” The music was simple and unadorned. There was no backup, no double-tracking, no layered sound. The singing was reflective in the first song, exuberant in the second. The lyrics were mature. The characteristic hiccup in the vocal line was there. This was Buddy Holley. Jack had never heard either of these songs before.

  He heard the bathroom door open behind him. Buddy Holley said, “After the plane went down with my family, and Shrike bought all my music, people seemed to think I just wasn’t gonna write anymore. And for a few years, I guess I didn’t.”

  The third song began.

  “All dis is new,” said Jack reverently. “Is it not?”

  Buddy Holley’s voice was soft and powerful. “Just as fresh as resurrection.”

  Tuesday

  The Funhouse was no Carnegie Hall, and as with virtually any other Manhattan club, daylight didn’t become it. This morning the mirrors were streaked and dusty. They’d be polished to a high sheen by Saturday. As Jack looked across toward the stage, what he mostly saw were chairs stacked on tables. The few windows and skylights admitted bars of spring sunlight that contained myriad dancing dust motes. The place smelled stale. The other predominating odor was that of machine lubricant.

  Jack stood beside Buddy Holley. Holley stood beside C.C. Ryder. On the other side of C.C. was Bagabond. It was an unbreakable protocol. Bagabond had chosen to be C.C.’s constant companion and protector. Jack realized he had consciously picked a similar role with Buddy Holley. He genuinely liked the singer, and it wasn’t merely a matter of nostalgia for the fifties and sixties. He felt he was becoming genuine friends with the Texan, though too bad, whispered the nasty voice in his head, you’re not going to be buddies for very long. Jack had seen Dr. Tachyon earlier in the morning. Tachyon had proposed hospitalizing him. “No way,” he’d said. Tachyon appealed to his reason. “Can you really predict what my version of the virus is going to do?” he’d asked. Tachyon admitted that he didn’t truly know. But there were precautions … Jack had shrugged ruefully and left.

  Xavier Desmond, his elephantine trunk seeming to wilt down his chest, watched over the stage preparations. He moved slowly, in the manner of a man knowing the real proximity of death, yet he seemed proud beyond words. For a night the eyes of most of the world would be on his beloved Funhouse.

  The limited space in the club was being further curtailed by the camera tracks laid in front of and to the side of the stage. The tech people had cleverly rigged a superthin Louma boom from the ceiling. “Don’t let it brush the chandelier!” Des said as the remote operator put the mantislike camera mount through its paces.

  Even with the shafts of sun glinting off the mirror balls, the club looked drab.

  Buddy Holley scratched his head. “Shoot, I’ve seen worse stages.”

  C.C. laughed and said, “I’ve played them.”

  “Guess there won’t be no chicken wire around the stage, huh?”

  C.C. shrugged and affected a deep, deep Texas accent. “Joe Ely used to tell me about places so tough, you had to puke three times and show a knife before they’d let you in. And that was if you was singin’.”

  “Des runs a classier dive,” said Jack. “I figure people laying out twenty-five hundred dollars a seat aren’t gonna heave Corona bottles at the band.”

  “Be more real if they did.” Holley glanced at C.C. “I gotta tell you, I’m pretty excited about hearing you sing.”

  “Same here,” said C.C., “though I’m still edgy as a cat. You decided to go on for sure?”

  Holley turned to Jack. “Anything from your niece?”

  Jack shook his head. “I talked to her this morning. I guess things are going slow with Shrike, but she said no sweat. Just bureaucratic runaround.”

  C.C. poked Holley in the ribs. “Listen, man, I will if you will.”

  “A challenge?” Holley slowly grinned. “Think this’ll be as much fun as racin’ for pink slips? What the hell. Okay. I’ll go on first like the Ghost of Charts Past, and if I have to, I’ll cover—oh, Billy Idol.”

  “No!” Bagabond spoke up. “No, you won’t.”

  Things weren’t going terribly well for Cordelia. She had gotten into the office by seven. It was too bad about being so phased that she forgot about the sequence of time zones west. Little Steven’s road manager wasn’t terribly happy about being awakened in his hotel room at a little past four in the morning.

  On the other hand, better news had come in about ten. X rays had determined that The Edge’s fingers were mildly sprained rather than fractured. Even though U2’s performance that night in Seattle was being scrubbed, the guitarist had a good shot at being operational by Saturday.

  Then there was the matter of Shrike Music. Cordelia had a terrific flow chart with lines and arrows indicating the tangled skein owning the music publishing firm. She had lists of CEOs, presidents, vice presidents, and heads of promotion departments. And lawyers—lord, hordes of attorneys. But no one would talk to her. How come? she wondered. Is it my breath? She giggled. Fatigue, she thought. Early burn out. Way too soon. There would be time to collapse after Saturday night. She poured another cup of high-caf Colombian and started thinking seriously about Shrike and its masters, and why everyone was evading as if she were a Congressional investigator out bird-dogging payola charges.

  The phone beeped. Good. Maybe it was one of a dozen executives connected with Shrike or its Byzantine ownership returning her calls.

  “Hi,” said her roommate. “You got the tickets for me?”

  “Have you lined up Spenser, or maybe Sam Spade?”

  “Even better,” said Veronica. “Got somebody here I want you to talk to.”

  “Veronica—” she started to say. Why was everyone playing cloak-and-dagger?

  “This is Croyd,” said an unfamiliar male voice. “You met me. We had a little date, you, me, and Veronica.”

  “I remember,” said Cordelia, “but—”

  “I’m in investigations.” Flatly.

  “I guess I knew that, but I didn’t think—”

  “Just listen,” said Croyd. “This is Veronica’s idea, not mine. Maybe I can help. Maybe not. You want to know something about Shrike Music.”

  “Right. Buddy Holley and I need to find out who really owns his music, so I can get permission for him to sing it, and I can convince him to appear Saturday—”

  “So isn’t Shrike in the phone book?” said Croyd.

  “They’ve been stonewalling me like they were the Mafia or something.”

  She heard a dry chuckle. “Maybe they are.”

  “Anything you can do,” Cordelia said, “I’ll be very—”

  Croyd broke in again. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get back to you.” The connection clicked off.

  Cordelia set the phone down and allowed herself a smile. She crossed her
fingers. Both hands. Then she picked up from the desk the next note begging her attention. This one was simpler. Maybe she could find out in less than an hour exactly why Girls With Guns seemed to be hung up in Cleveland.

  Wednesday

  GF&G had decided that the Funhouse club band would back both C.C. Ryder and Buddy Holley. Actually it was C.C. who approved them; GF&G paid the checks.

  “They’re all sound musicians,” said C.C. to Holley.

  “Good enough for me.” He watched and listened as the two guitarists, drummer, keyboard woman, and sax player tuned.

  Jack observed too. Practice would be long and tedious. But if you were an observer, it was show business in action. It was diverting. Glamorous. It was heaven.

  C.C. led Holley onto the stage. Bagabond sat down at a front table, though the action looked performed under duress. Jack knew that she really did want to follow C.C. on up there.

  “Mind if I sit here?” he said to her, setting his hand on the back of the chair opposite. Bagabond’s dark eyes fixed on him fiercely for just a split second; she shrugged slightly and Jack sat.

  “Okay,” C.C. was saying to the musicians on the stage. “Here’s what I’m gonna want to start with. Or maybe end with. Damned if I know yet. All I really know is that it’s new and it’s part of my twenty minutes.” She jacked in her ebony twelve-string and strummed a chord progression. “We got a whole three days to get in tune. So remember the advantage we have over dudes like the Boss or U2.” Everybody grinned. “Okay, let’s do it. This is called ‘Baby, You Been Dealt a Winning Hand.’ One, two, three, and—”

  The moment C.C. started bto play, she looked stricken. Nervous, Jack thought, was too mild a word for it. There was no crowd. There was no audience save the musicians, the technicians working on sound and lights, and the few odd observers such as Jack and Bagabond. C.C.’s lead went hideously flat. She stopped, looked down at the stage while everyone in the club seemed to hold a collective breath. Then C.C. looked up, and to Jack it seemed the motion was executed with enormous effort. Her fingers caressed the strings of her guitar. “Sorry,” she said. That was all. And then she played.