The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane

by Rex Weiner

  Fire trucks were roaring up, sprouting ladders, hoses, and shouting firemen. I was on my feet in time to catch a quick glimpse of Sphinx and Pointy. They hustled chubby little Martin Bormann, Jr. into a yellow step van and tore off down the street. The rest of their gang got away as best they could. I could have cared less about the keyboard Kaisers; as long as Bormann’s deadly sheet music was up in smoke, I figured the world was still safe for rock and roll. Unfortunately, all those rare guitars stashed in the loft were also in ashes. But what the hell—it solved the case for me. All I had to do was call my client, tell him the guitar he’d hired me to track down was now destroyed, collect my fee, and get good and drunk.

  Last things first. I was settled in at Club 57 with a couple of shots of bourbon under my belt. Scully was spinning some fine discs and the place was jumping. On the wall, an old Indy 500 film was reeling. Mario Andretti was explaining the finer points of an overhead camshaft. The bourbon was just about reaching my toenails. Everything was hunky-dory—until two plainclothesmen strolled in. You could tell they were cops; they were the only guys in the club with long hair.

  They bellied up to the bar and began bending ears. I figured they were asking about me when Ann the bartender shot me a look that said “scram.” I slipped out the door when the fuzz wasn’t looking.

  A dance party at the St. Marks Bar & Grill was full swing. I was relaxing with a beer in the corner, chatting up a purple-haired sweetie from Jersey who swore she knew Eno personally. The jukebox was pouring out “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. Everything was fine—until two plainclothes dicks ambled into the room. You could tell they were cops; they were the only ones in the crowd wearing real ties. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and ducked out the backdoor.

  Over at the UK Club on the Bowery, Pierce Turner and Larry Kirwan were laboring to explain why they’d changed the name of their group from “Turner and Kirwan of Wexford” to “Major Thinkers.” All I wanted to know was why I was being charged two bucks for a Bud. Copperfield, the owner, said, “Sorry, Ford. But this is an after-hours joint. Look who’s walked in.”

  “You can tell they’re cops,” whispered Pierce. “They’re the only ones with tweed overcoats that fit.”

  I took the backdoor route again. The boys in blue would give me no rest until the murderer of Ike Schmidt was collared. I had to get hold of Shirley and turn her in.

  I dropped in at the Manic Panic. “She’s not here,” said Tish.

  “I haven’t seen her,” said Snooky.

  I poked my head backstage at Trax. “Not here,” said Lydia Lunch. George, tuning up his bass, shook his head likewise.

  “Nada,” said the Romanian ticket taker at Squat. Inside, through the smoke and noise, I found Defunkt’s Joseph Bowie wiping the spit off his horn. No, he hadn’t seen her either.

  “What do you wanna know for?” asked James Chance, his string-bean form folded malignantly into a too-big chair backstage at Hurrah. But he was just bluffing. As I was leaving, Jack the bouncer pulled me aside.

  “There’s someone been axing ’bout you, man.”

  He nodded toward the stairwell. She was standing in the shadows, a vision in skintight-pink spandex and stiletto heels.

  “Hello, Ford,” Shirley purred.

  She looked good, too good. I wanted to grab her and say a lot of things about the moon in June, but it was the middle of March and we were both out in the cold.

  “C’mon,” I growled, taking her by the arm. “You played me for a sap once,” I told her. “This time I’m taking you downtown. You’ve got a date with the DA.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, big tears rolled down her cheeks leaving wide tracks of mascara. I felt sorry for her.

  “Stop your sobbing.”

  “That’s just a song by The Pretenders,” she wept.

  And a remake at that, I thought, searching for something nice to say. I remembered the tough spot she’d gotten me out of.

  “Thanks for slipping me the knife at Sphinx’s loft.”

  “See? I helped you,” she said. “Can’t you help me now? If you turn me in I’ll never get my brother back. Don’t you understand? The whole reason I’ve been hanging around the clubs in New York is to find my poor little brother. He disappeared from Cleveland six months ago. I looked all over for him. Then I heard he was playing in Sphinx’s band, so I came here. He’s too young to be running around the clubs. He hardly knows what’s he’s doing. If I could just see him, talk to him for only a minute—but he’s like a prisoner. Sphinx’s gang won’t let me near poor Fred.”

  “Poor Fred, huh?” I asked, and told her, “Look, sister, we’re traveling downtown.”

  “Oh, Ford, please you’ve got to believe me. If you help me rescue Fred, I promise I’ll turn myself in to the police.”

  “Why shouldn’t I turn you in right now?”

  “Because—because I didn’t kill Ike Schmidt and only my bother Fred knows who the real murderer is.”

  Something in her eyes said she wasn’t fibbing. If her brother really was a material witness, then that might prove one more ace up my sleeve when the DA got around to grilling me on the Schmidt case. I decided to give her one more chance, but this time I’d stick to her like gaffer’s tape.

  We ate dinner at Lucky Linda’s Caribe Café on West Ninety-Fourth in the middle of Little Haiti. Photos of Baby Doc Duvalier stuck full of darts adorned the walls and every seat in the place had a clear shot at the front door.

  “This is kind of romantic,” whispered Shirley.

  “Son of Sam used to eat here all the time,” I schooled her. “Mick Jagger, too.”

  “Wow. Like, it’s so dangerous.”

  “It’s a dangerous decade, baby.”

  And there are all sorts of ways a guy like me takes risks.

  ***

  It was late when we left my hotel. We moseyed down Broadway. Bums begged for quarters. Reggae blared from a storefront. The night settled in on the Upper West Side like a welfare family, all spread out, sullen, and threatening to be permanent.

  A bent character carrying a paste pot, brush, and knapsack full of paper paused on the corner of Eighty-Eighth. It was Flakey Jake, the guy who puts up posters all over town for rock bands. They say he eats too much wheat paste and it’s made him wacko.

  “Who’s playing tonight, Jake?” I asked, reaching for one of the posters in his sack. Jake jumped back a foot and looked menacing.

  “You can’t read the poster until I put it up!” he hissed.

  We watched him slop the poster on the wall with his wet brush, lick the excess paste off, and slink away, muttering darkly.

  “Look!” cried Shirley. “The Fourth Reich is playing the Mudd Club tonight at midnight!”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “That’s Sphinx’s band! We’ve got to go there and rescue Fred!”

  And stop Martin Bormann, Jr. who, no doubt, intended to unleash the Orpheus Scale on the club’s unsuspecting audience this very night. It would be Sphinx’s first step toward world domination. And we had only thirty minutes to get downtown to stop him.

  “What are you doing?” screamed Shirley as I kicked in the window of the nearest parked car.

  “Get inside and shut up,” I ordered.

  Underneath the dashboard, I hot-wired the ignition. The car fired right up. We shot across intersections like Magic Johnson going for a layup. Cabbies swerved out of the way. Bus drivers stomped their brakes. Every pimpmobile in Times Square stopped dead to let us by. Two cop cars at Forty-Second Street blocked the way.

  “Hold on.”

  We rammed them head-on, knocking them out of the way. By the time we reached Herald Square, the city was alive with sirens. I turned left and headed east on Thirty-Fourth, turned right on Park, doubled back on Thirtieth, passed two cops going the other way, and turned south again on Seve
nth Avenue. I guessed they’d be putting up roadblocks at Sheridan Square, but it was a chance we had to take. With six cop cars in back of us and who knows what lay ahead, we had only fifteen minutes to get downtown and prevent the worst disaster since Altamont.

  Chapter 6

  A Sunnyview of Life

  Stop—ooyah! Stop—ooyah!”

  Bullhorn burped warnings. Barricades blocked off the avenue ahead. Cops swarmed across the dirty sidewalk like gnats on an open wound. I checked the speedometer; it was nudging ninety. I checked Shirley. She was nineteen going on thirty-eight. If this didn’t work I could be doing eight-to-ten—or else we’d both be six feet under. A hundred-to-one chance we could get away with it. I looked at the speedometer again. The numbers computed in that slot machine I call a brain. It came up cherries. As Van Morrison says, it’s too late to stop now, so I pushed the girl underneath the dashboard and Evel Knieveled the accelerator.

  Wood shattered. Glass broke. Things flew in the air. The steering wheel lurched with a mind of its own as we hurtled over sidewalks and people, and shotgun blasts ripped into steel. Blind, raging instincts jerked my arm to the right. The vehicle obeyed with a sullen thud, the sound of pavement punching rubber. Blue uniforms scattered. In a moment we were on the riverfront, roaring downtown without a cop in sight.

  Shirley eyed her makeup in the rearview mirror. “Can’t you go any faster?” she asked. “We’ve only got five minutes.”

  On Walker Street we abandoned the car. It would take the police a few minutes to catch up. We crossed the cobbled street past the Baby Doll Lounge with its blinking lights, past the warehouses and loft buildings with their shadowy fronts and co-op signs. Suddenly a shadow moved. It moved from a doorway to the sidewalk and stood there grinning with a knife. It was Sphinx’s henchman, Pointy.

  “Watch out, Ford!” Shirley screamed.

  He came at me with a swipe that went wild. I caught his knife hand but he jerked loose and knocked me to the asphalt. When he lunged for my throat, I grabbed his foot and he went down. I was up in a fraction of a second, came down on his chest with all my weight and both knees. The wind poured out, foul and fetid. He gnashed his decaying teeth. His harelip curled back and he spit

  “Thon of a bitch!”

  The knife came up again. Shirley yelled. The blade sliced through cloth and flesh between my knee and ankle. Wetness soaked my shoe. Shirley handed me a length of lead pipe and I caved the monster’s head in.

  Not a minute to soon, we reached the Mudd Club. A band was audibly tuning up inside. A big crowd was waiting to be allowed in. The guy at the door was, as usual, being picky. We pushed to the front.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Inside.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “But we know Steve Mass.”

  “That’s what they all say.” He grinned at the mention of the owner’s name with all the dumb smugness that growing up rich and bored in the suburbs can give a guy. I gave him my special knuckle sandwich. It was like shoving my hand in a bowl of oatmeal. He crumpled to the sidewalk with a soft thud. We went inside.

  “For our first number,” said a voice over the PA, “here’s a little song called ‘Don’t Play Me.’”

  Martin Bormann, Jr. stood poised at the synthesizer. The band was ready to play that song—the song that would unleash a terrible force on the world and perhaps even end it. Sphinx, the mastermind, was at the foot of the stage. He saw us coming and commanded The Fourth Reich to play. Martin Bormann, Jr., with a wicked gleam in his eye, plunged a fat finger onto the keyboard and at the same time Shirley screamed. “Fred!”

  She rushed to the stage, knocking over amps, tossing mikes across the floor while the musicians tried to stop her. I saw horror write itself in big letters on Sphinx’s face. He saw her lurching toward the keyboards. With her bare hands, the frantic girl ripped cords right out of the sockets, yanked out jacks and wires until they tangled around her body like snakes, hissing with live voltage.

  “Don’t…!” Sphinx started to shout. But it was too late. Two of the writhing snakes kissed. There was a flash of light, a rain of hot sparks, and the room was thrown into screaming mayhem. The lights blinked out. Fists clawed the air. Bottles crashed against the walls. The room reverberated with the sound of heads cracking. I saw Sphinx duck out the back way, and I went after him.

  Up the alley he ran, the dim light throwing his crooked shadow against the dirty walls. A truck was parked at the end of the alley. Sphinx whipped open the door, jumped behind the wheel, and revved the engine. I was trapped. The truck came at me. There was nowhere to go but up—up on the hood. I landed on my stomach on the hood as the truck wheeled down the narrow passage. Sphinx jogged the wheel, trying to shake me loose, but I grasped the windshield wipers. Pulling myself up to the window, I reached into the cab and spun the wheel around. The truck slid against the brick, then emerged onto the street where it plowed into two cop cars and came to a halt. The boys in blue, pistols drawn, surrounded us.

  “What’s going on here?” bellowed the police captain, a thickset red-haired character named Regan. I showed him my PI license.

  “You fool!” hissed Sphinx, in the grip of two burly cops. “I could have ruled the world with my music.”

  “You’re finished.”

  “Sphinx?” said the captain, scrutinizing the noseless man. “Hell, that’s Ernie the Gypper. He’s got a record as long as the BMT. Fraud, counterfeiting, assault and battery, mail theft—you name it.”

  “Hey, Captain. Look at this!”

  The cop was pointing inside the truck. We took a look. Stacked up on neat rows like so much cordwood were three or four thousand electric guitars—the entire city’s worth of swiped axes. I could make out a 1958 Stratocaster with burgundy metallic finish, a 1959 ES Dotmarker Gibson (probably worth over two grand), a 1964 Trini Lopez Custom model with a cherry sunburst finish and a firebird headstock. There was a pink-paisley Telecaster, a 1949 Emperor Varitone with three pick-ups, and a 1964 Sheraton, the kind they don’t make anymore with two Epiphone humbuckers. There were plenty of sharp custom jobs: a blue, silver-sparkle Kawai Moon; a Jeff Levin Sardonyx; a 1968 Intergalactic with four pick-ups and a laser attachment, and a Zemaitis with an engraved metal front that looked exactly like the one Keith Richards played. And there, sitting on top of the whole pile, was the Link Wray lyre–body Danelectro that had gotten me into all this trouble in the first place.

  “Well, Ford. You’ve got what you wanted. So did I.”

  It was Shirley. And Martin Bormann, Jr. She pointed to him and said, “Meet my brother, Fred.”

  “What th—?”

  “Fred escaped six months ago from Sunnyview Farm.”

  “That’s a looney bin,” said Fred matter-of-factly.

  “Right,” said Shirley. “He was once a child prodigy at the piano. But then Fred took LSD and had a bum trip. He became convinced that he was the son of Martin Bormann. He also got hung up on playing the same three chords. So when he came to New York, he joined a group, fell in with Sphinx, and…”

  That explained everything. Almost. “What about Ike Schmidt?”

  Fred brightened up. “Sphinx did it,” he said. “I saw him put a funny powder in a little piece of paper that he put in Ike’s pocket.”

  “He’s not so crazy,” I said. Fred repeated the story to Captain Regan.

  “Guess that lets you off the hook, Fairlane,” said the cop. He clapped the irons on Sphinx. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s a special place for punks like you up in Attica.”

  “Have you heard my new single?” Fred said, handing me a record. It was by The Fourth Reich and titled “Don’t Play Me.” I let him autograph the sleeve before Shirley led him away.

  He went back to the laughing academy. She went back to Cleveland. I stayed out every night at the clubs, drinking her memory away.
I gave Fred’s single to Jim Fouratt who runs Danceteria. I told him about the Orpheus Scale. We both had a good laugh.

  Then, just for a joke, Jim played it one night at the club. Of course, the crowd was crazy about it. That’s how it broke into the charts. All the rock critics wrote about the song’s distinctive hook, a peculiar sequence of three chords. “Almost hypnotic in its effect,” wrote Lester Bangs.

  “Electrifying,” said John Morthland.

  Now I can’t go anywhere without hearing those same, damned three chords. Over and over and over again.

  LOS ANGELES

  Chapter 1

  The Snatch

  The sky over Chinatown was thick and heavy. The air smelled like Tommy Lasorda’s sweat socks. The sweet and pungent pork pawed at my intestines. We made too much noise walking across the empty parking lot. My hatband was too tight. I’d been in LA too long. Ronald Reagan was running for president. Blame it on the bossa nova. Blame what happened that night on a million wrong things.

  Not, however, that I wasn’t doing my job.

  As we walked toward the car, my hand rested on the Ruger in my shoulder holster. I kept the girl in my shadow. A couple of hours ago she was skidding across tables at Madame Wong’s eat-to-the-beatery, knocking over people’s drinks with her mike stand, and hiccupping a fair version of rockabilly. Now, in her leopard-skin leotard and red spiked heels she stepped silently beside me. If the lead singer of Wanda and the Whips was afraid, she wasn’t saying. My job was to get her home from the gig without a scratch and tuck the little blonde punk into bed.