Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  “You can’t be serious.” Big Bill was looking at a document Eddie had handed him. “You’re telling me that more’n five thousand people’ve already heard the song?”

  “Well, half of it, anyway,” Eddie said. “And it could be two or three times that many. The only thing we can track is the number of times it’s been downloaded from the site. Once it’s downloaded, people can forward it to others who can forward it and on and on. It’s electronic word-of-mouth. So far we’ve left footprints at over two thousand sites on the web,” Eddie said. “Like I said, we can’t track how many of those have started telling others who have told others—”

  “It’s called mushrooming,” Megan said, just to participate.

  Eddie nodded. “Right. But we know that inquiries about the Frances Neagly website have started to pop up independently on search engines and message boards.”

  “That sounds like a good thing.” Big Bill was clueless.

  “It’s fantastic,” Megan said. “It means people are talking about it. Somebody’s even trying to sell it on E-Bay! Can you imagine trying to sell cassettes of half a song?”

  Big Bill nodded knowingly despite not knowing what an E-Bay was. “It sounds like it’s going good.”

  “It’s going great,” Eddie said. “These numbers are unreal. If it keeps up like this. . .” Eddie leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “. . .we’re talkin’ double platinum.”

  Big Bill couldn’t resist the enthusiasm. “Well, then,” he said, suddenly drumming his hands on his belly. “I guess we better produce a goddamn record!” He pushed back from the table and stood up. “Let’s head on down to the studio.” Bill led the way through the cavernous house. “Oh, by the way, Franklin sends his regrets he can’t be here tonight. He had to attend the Class of ‘89 Awards in Atlanta. One of our clients got nominated for Best New Hat Act, but he’ll be here tomorrow. In fact, he’s bringing our newest client with him, kid named Whitney Rankin, real talented songwriter. I think you’ll like him.”

  As they walked down a long hallway, Megan counted the gold records on the wall. “You know, Mr. Herron, I just started working at WCMR FM, and like I told Eddie, when the time’s right I’m going to work on the promotion director about running a ‘Where’s Eddie Long?’ contest or something to increase awareness within the industry.”

  Big Bill allowed as how he thought that was a good idea. “Never hurts having somebody in radio on your side,” he said, turning to Eddie with a nudge. “I’d hang on to her if I were you.” They arrived at a large, heavy door which Big Bill pushed open. They stepped inside the studio. It was warm and smelled faintly of cedar. “You can keep your silicon and copper,” Big Bill said, gesturing at the bank of tubes that pushed his Pulltech midrange EQs and his Teletronix leveling amp. “Iron and gas are the things that connect me to the universe.” He smiled.

  “Wow,” Megan said as she laid her hands on the mixing console. “Is this whole room analog?” She couldn’t believe anyone could be that much of a dinosaur.

  Big Bill nodded. “Damn right, and I don’t care what Don Cook says about all that fancy digital crap. I’ve done blind tests too and, believe me, nothin’ sounds as good as analog, period. End of story.” He showed them around the studio. It was a thing of beauty as well as a technical wonder, though not in the modern Nashville sense. This was a working museum of high-end vintage recording equipment. “That’s an original Marshall eighteen watt combo.” He said this with the sort of pride usually reserved for parents talking about their Harvard graduated children.

  Megan pointed at some equipment. “What are those?”

  “Those, my dear, modern, FM girl, are 1954 Fairchild compressor/limiters that I bought from an AM radio station that went out of business in 1969. The transformers were still in pretty good shape, but I had ‘em refurbished and had all the tubes replaced. Cost a small fortune, but worth every damn cent.” He showed off his API console, his Neve EQs, and his Manly Vox Box. “That’s a five way, class A, piece of gear,” he said.

  Eddie acted impressed, though he wasn’t sure what that meant. “Are those tube mics?”

  “That’s a Neuman U47 and those’re AKG C-12s. Better microphones have yet to be built.” Big Bill put his arm around his client. “Eddie, I’m telling you, this is going to be a helluva record. Nobody in town can reproduce the sound you’re gonna get in these rooms.”

  Behind the main board, the control room floor was elevated and appointed with two plush sofas and matching overstuffed chairs. The lighting was recessed and the bulbs were soothing blues and grays. The main studio was a large room with mic stands and a Steinway D grand off to the side. Surrounding that were five isolation rooms, all with perfect line of sight throughout the studio. Big Bill’s only concession to modern studio design were the acoustic treatments for the walls and ceiling. They were fixed with all manner of fabric wall systems, diffusers, and absorbers. By anyone’s standards, the room had some of the best acoustics in the city. And for the better part of $600,000, it had better.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, the session players began drifting in, greeting Bill, Eddie, and Megan. They were all middle aged men, all members of AFM Local 257, all accomplished pros. They’d all been in earlier in the day to get sound for their instruments. The engineer for the session was a Music City veteran by the name of Ed Simmons who, for reasons even Ed couldn’t articulate, was known as Porky Vic.

  As the session guys were setting up Eddie overheard the pedal steel player complaining to the keyboard guy. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t know anybody in town who’s making any money these days.” It was an oft-repeated phrase and explained why all these guys were here, working ‘off-the-card.’ Not too many years ago they’d all been making double scale along with fancy catered meals and other union negotiated perks. But with the country music industry in its post-Garth tailspin, that sort of gig had dried up for all but a few. And since all these guys still had bills to pay, it was easy to find top-flight players willing to work cheap.

  Megan had expected a bunch of cowboy boot wearing good ole boys, but instead they looked like balding ex-hippies — short pants, baseball caps, Hawaiian shirts, Birkenstocks. Not a cowboy boot in the bunch. Half of them were reasonably trim for guys roughly the age of her own father, the other half could have benefited from some sit ups and a fashion consultant.

  Big Bill was talking to the bass player. They were looking at Bill’s newest piece of old equipment. “It’s got a tube boost with a passive cut. It’s a nice little box,” he said. “You know how piano gets all washed out in the middle?” He pointed at the device. “This thing fills it in, makes it sound like it’s all around you.”

  The bass player nodded solemnly. “Beautiful.”

  Before Nashville entered the digital age, a producer could get in and out of the studio with a complete album in a couple of days. One reason was the playback equipment and the listening environments in the old control rooms weren’t that great, so they couldn’t hear all the blemishes. They recorded their songs then listened to them. If they sounded good, they moved on. But with the equipment available now, producers and artists — and the consumers — could hear even the tiniest mistake. Coupled with the introduction of computerized systems like ProTools which were capable of correcting pitch errors and other flaws, the technology led everyone to believe perfection was attainable. As a result, producers and artists tended to spend more and more time trying to achieve that goal, which in turn ran up the cost of making a record. What used to take a couple of days and a few thousand dollars now took weeks and cost closer to a quarter million, all of which was charged against the artist’s royalties and, whenever possible, cross-collateralized.

  But Big Bill thought he had a way to get around Nashville’s current economic model. His recording plan was as bold as Eddie’s marketing scheme and, if it all played out, Big Bill would rise once again to the top of Nashville’s Power 100. Looking out from the control room, Big Bill felt the time was
right. He nudged Porky Vic then took his seat behind the console and clapped his hands. “Hey now! What say we get this show on the road!”

  As Eddie turned to go into the studio Megan surprised him by taking his hand. She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. “For luck,” she said, lingering close. Eddie breathed in her scent and let her wild red hair brush his face. “Now go make me some music.”

  Like everything else in life, a recording session can go good or it can go bad. When it goes bad, it’s as ugly a thing as exists in nature. But when it goes good, it’s like dreaming out loud. Now, there’s no way to control which way a session goes, otherwise they’d all go smooth as a new stretch of blacktop. It’s all about the chemistry between the people involved. Fortunately, Big Bill had a knack for picking people who would mesh. Earlier in the week Bill had introduced Eddie to the musicians and they’d hit it off. They rehearsed Eddie’s songs and were ready to do it, as Big Bill said, the old fashioned way. Instead of having everyone lay down tracks individually and then putting them together in post production, they would record the songs as a band would perform them live. It was either risky or downright nuts, depending on your point of view, and they could have wasted a lot of time waiting until they got it right, but, as everyone would later agree, the force was with them.

  Before each song, the players huddled around Eddie in the main studio. They each had their sheets with the Nashville Number System notations showing the chord progression for every song. They discussed solos and reminded each other of things that they’d come up with in rehearsals, then they broke their huddle and moved to the isolation booths like flankers to the line of scrimage. Eddie would count ‘em down and they’d do the song, usually without any significant errors. After each take they’d talk it over.

  “Hey, Eddie, let’s switch parts between the first and the second,” the other guitar player said. “You do it up to the do do do’s, then I’ll take it the second time to the do do do’s.”

  “Good idea,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s different anyway.”

  From his throne in the control room, Big Bill nixed some of the ideas and promoted others. He did it all with enough diplomacy to make everyone feel free to toss in their two cents. The result was usually several conversations going on at the same time in everyone’s headsets.

  “Is that a vocal tag?” Porky Vic asked.

  “You want to do that on all three bars?”

  “We’re tagging the second ending.”

  “No, do it at fifteen, eleven.”

  “What key is this in?

  “Boy.”

  “Good. Boy’s good.”

  “Got it. Are we ready?”

  And just like that, they’d do another take, creating the song anew each time, filling out the corners, trimming a bridge or repeating a chorus with a variation on the lyrics. Eddie tapped out the count on the soundboard of his Gibson. “One. . .two. . .uh one. . .two. . .wait a second. . . wait, wait, wait.” Eddie waved his hands until everybody stopped playing. “Sorry guys. I don’t know what made me think about this just now, but does anybody know who said, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture?’” He looked to the control room and saw Megan smile.

  “Yeah,” the bass player said. “I just read that somewhere.” He plucked a few low notes as he thought about it. “That book by Bruce Feiler, I forget the title, but I think he quoted Martin Mull saying that.”

  The pedal steel player disagreed. “No, it was Tom Waits.”

  “I don’t think so,” the piano player said. Tom Waits said, ‘The big print giveth, and the small print taketh away.’” Everybody laughed at that.

  Eddie shrugged then looked to Megan. “What do you think, Martin Mull or Tom Waits?”

  Sitting next to Big Bill, Megan reached over and pushed the mic control button. “I still think it was Zappa,” she said.

  Eddie shrugged again. “Just curious. Sorry to interrupt the flow, guys. Are we ready?” He looked around and got thumbs up from everybody. “Well, all right then.” Eddie pulled his guitar up close. “One. . . two. . . uh, one. . .two. . .three. . .” They launched into one of Eddie’s outlaw country tunes which fit perfectly with the loose, relaxed living room atmosphere of the session. It was an edgy country rocker that could have passed as something co-written by Robbie Fulks and Kinky Friedman. It was about a guy running from the law who was lusting for a girl he’d just met in a bar. “You know what I’m thinking,” Eddie sang, “and you know that it’s true.” He was looking straight at Megan with a devilish smile. “Ain’t no gun in my pocket. . .” the music stopped cold, Eddie paused, then spoke in an exaggerated baritone, “I’m just damn glad to see you.” The drummer hit a rim shot and the rest of the band kicked back in and took it home.

  By two in the morning they had five good songs in the can and a camaraderie that was inescapable. The fiddle player tried to organize an excursion to Estella’s for shrimp plates. Porky Vic and the pedal steel player signed up, but the others reluctantly begged off citing potentially irate spouses and lovers.

  Megan slinked up next to Eddie as he was putting his guitar away. She let out a little sigh.

  “S’matter?” He stopped what he was doing and looked at her.

  “I’ve got a staff meeting tomorrow morning and I really don’t want to drive all the way back out to Brentwood, ‘cause I’m just going to have to turn right around and drive right back into town in a few hours.”

  Eddie snapped the latches on his guitar case, trying not to respond too quickly. “Well it ain’t exactly the Vanderbilt Plaza,” he said, “but you’re welcome to stay at my place. We can stop off and grab you a toothbrush and whatever on the way.”

  Megan moved closer. “Oh, we don’t need to do that,” she said. “I packed an overnight bag.” She pressed her lips against his ear and whispered. “Just in case.”

  34.

  The skinny oddball at the Quitman County Clerk’s office ended up being quite helpful. In addition to showing Jimmy the National Crime Information Center bulletin, he handed over a list of law enforcement contact names and numbers. The next day, droving back to Jackson, Jimmy ran up his cell phone bill talking to various people with the Louisiana State Police as well as investigators in Tuscaloosa. Jimmy learned of a fourth suspicious poisoning death that had occurred several months earlier in Gulfport. The deaths had two things in common, the type of poison used and a certain locally manufactured headache remedy which appeared to be the poison delivery system.

  Jimmy now had ninety minutes to kill as he drove east out of Jackson. He had a two o’clock appointment with a representative from Okatibbee Pharmaceuticals which was based just east of Meridian, near the Alabama border. Oak-pharm, as it was known locally, was the maker of Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder and was once the biggest employer in Lauderdale County. But over time the market for headache powders had shrunk considerably, even in the South. And as their market share dwindled so had the company’s labor force. Once boasting over a thousand employees, Oak Pharm was down to about forty now and looking at more layoffs.

  The drive from Jackson to Meridian was a straight shot east on I-20, a hundred miles of concrete walled on both sides by tall, thin pine trees. Jimmy would have preferred a dangerous winding road, some God-awful weather, or a series of road rage incidents — anything to occupy his mind which was otherwise engaged. He was fixated on what it said about him that Megan could dump him so easily. Was he that uninteresting, that unattractive, that disposable? Maybe, he hoped, it wasn’t him so much as it was Jackson. Maybe Megan was right about moving to a bigger city. Maybe he should move to Nashville too. He could live anywhere and write; it was one of the profession’s few benefits. Come to think of it, a fresh setting was probably what their relationship needed. They were stagnating in Jackson. They needed new friends, new circles in which to circulate, a more exciting social milieu.

  Jimmy didn’t believe that, but it was less humiliating
to blame Jackson than to accept being dumped. But maybe ‘dumped’ was too strong a word for what happened. Sure, Megan had moved to Nashville without saying goodbye, but maybe she hadn’t had time to call. Maybe she was so busy packing and having her phone disconnected. . . Okay, maybe ‘dumped’ was accurate, but couples got back together all the time after one dumped the other, right? Jimmy thought of examples to bolster his argument, but every couple he considered had broken up, one even ended with an attempted manslaughter charge. All right, so those were bad examples.

  Then it hit him. Why do I even care? We weren’t together very long and she never even hinted that she loved me. Why the hell can’t I stop thinking about her? This is nuts. Shouldn’t I hate her? Shouldn’t I at least forget about her? She leaves town without a word, making me look and feel like a fool but I can’t get her out of my mind! Jimmy knew reason had nothing to do with it; emotions always trump intellect. Why do I miss her? How can I miss something I never really had? Am I pathetic or what? Hey, maybe that’s the title of my love song.

  By the time he passed the exit for Pelahatchie, Jimmy realized he was obsessing. He turned on the radio hoping to get Megan off his mind. It didn’t help that Clay Walker was singing that he didn’t know how loved started but he sure knew how it ended. Jimmy tuned to a different station only to run into another familiar song. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before, then it hit him like a punch in a barroom brawl. It was Eddie’s song. Jimmy got honest-to-God goose bumps. He slapped the dashboard and turned up the volume. This could only be good news for Eddie. And anything good for Eddie was good for Jimmy’s book. Eddie’s Internet scheme was obviously working. Jimmy laughed out loud and started humming along. Then, halfway through the refrain, the song stopped cold.

  The disc jockey came on immediately. “I know it’s the name of the song,” he said, “but I just don’t think the song’s supposed to end that way either, but it does. Just that like, ever single time. Now, I been in the radio business for twenty-five years, and I’ve heard a lot of good songs. But I’d put that half a song up against anything I ever liked.” The announcer talked about the Frances Neagley website, the MP3 file, and how no one knew who the artist was. He asked listeners to call and let him know what they thought about the song and to speculate who the mystery singer-songwriter might be. “And don’t worry, we’ll keep playing what we got until we can find the back half of it. Meanwhile, let’s get back to songs with beginnings, middles, and ends. Here’s a little something from S-K-O on Country Mixx 96. . .”